Out of the dark she came, out of the North.

Amid the storms howling, black wings to break the day.

Upon that final shore our stand was made,

Our shining spears, our dark shields arrayed.

With golden hair and twisted words,

Our Lords deceived, our counsel bereaved.

Her kith and kin, the daughters of wild blades,

Our noble scions, with their bright pennants waylaid.

Out of the east she came, red hair blazing at the gate of day,

Lady of hearth, cattle and crops, sovereign of that fertile plain.

Between land and sea we made our stand.

Our hopes and dreams held up to match her blood-drenched hand,

Until at the last we were betrayed.

Within our midst, that cruellest dark-haired maid displayed,

She who delights in frenzy and the havoc of the blade.

Our ranks she flayed, our hopes unmade.

With a single cry, we saw our hundred heroes die.

There at last, we saw once more,

In truth, her throne upon that windswept shore.

For as their pipes and drums did play,

So was the nightmare of our broken dreams remade.

Our fate cast low, our hearts unsound,

The doom of men, in bloody ruin bound.

The shadow of death, our lord cast down,

That Nightmare Queen, returned once more.

The Matter of Mortal Solace

~ Original Authors unknown – text preserved in the Enkellion Vault, Evergrove.

~ Ruo Han – Savanah Dawn ~

“You know, you don’t actually have to sit watch with us?”

Sighing, he turned back to the fire from where he was stood, in the shadow of a rock at the edge of the hill their part of the camp was on, and shook his head.

“What else is there to do?” Jin Chen muttered from his vantage point looking out over the shadowy grey-brown grassland, even though the question had been directed to Liao Ying.

The person who had spoken, a youth in beige robes from the Shen clan called Shen Cui Tao, glanced at Jin Chen and just about managed to hide a grimace.

“We must all do our bit,” Liao Ying replied, with a faint but polite smile, poking at the fire.

-And in any case, sleep is impossible with this accursed sky, and all of us are getting enough weird looks anyway, he didn’t add.

“Well… yes…” Shen Cui agreed solicitously.

“More eyes are better,” Bai Jing, a disciple of the Verdant Flowers Valley, who was the last member of their group, shrugged, cutting off discussion. “And they volunteered, which is more than can be said for almost anyone else.”

“…”

Shen Cui Tao didn’t quite wince at that, but his expression did go a bit stiff.

-So presumably he was volunteered by someone else?

In a way, that was rather amusing, but it was also a testament to how… awkward things were, he was coming to realise. The previous day had been traumatically educational, even if all he had to do was walk in a straight line and not eat anything.

That was the real reason he was standing watch, because the accursed seal he had been left with was a gnawing torment that left him feeling hollow inside. Meditation was impossible and doing nothing just made him feel worse… so all he could do was find things to do, and participating in the camp watches provided that sense of purpose.

His thoughts trailed off, as above them the first rays of sun peeked over the horizon… and the world turned red, like the sky was bleeding. The dogs stopped howling, instantly, and such was the intensity of it, he nearly thought he was having some kind of deviation, except, based on the shocked faces of everyone there, he was not the only person seeing it.

Around him, the grass hissed with a wind that had not been there, while the tree overshadowing their camp was…

He stared, because it looked dark and gloomy, its deep green leaves now red black, and for a brief second he could swear there were bloody rags and severed heads of cultivators, tied by their hair, pale, lifeless faces, staring at him accusingly… their blood dripping onto the rocks… running off the grass…

Wet droplets hit his face… and fell all around them, bouncing off rock, leaf and person alike, while the ground seemed to shake faintly…

Almost as swiftly as it came, it had already vanished, leaving only a breath of whispering wind through the land around them, carrying with it the faint sense of distant flutes and a faint thrum of drums as it swept forth from the north, rustling the grass in strange ways.

“…”

Finally managing to tear his eyes away from the tree with its bloody rags and severed heads grinning at him with cold, cruel eyes, he looked again at the sunrise. While the dawn was red, and bled purple across the horizon, all sense of abnormality had passed… and the tree beside their watch site was back to normal again, two small black birds sitting on a branch chittering away.

-Did I just imagine that? Is this place getting to me that much? He hugged his arms around himself, suddenly feeling an unnatural chill, and looked around at the others…

Liao Ying’s face was pale, her hands shaking as she stared into the fire, while Jin Chen was shivering, staring around a little wild-eyed…

“…”

Shen Cui’s groan as he stood, looked around and stretched broke the final, lingering oddness of the moment. “Uggh, red sky at dawn… what a bad omen. Anyway, that’s our watch done, so I’m off back to the main camp. Fairy Jing… Fairy Ying…”

“…”

Bai Jing gave him a long look, then jerked her head with a nod to say he could leave.

“What just…?” Jin Chen muttered, watching Shen Cui depart without a backward glance or acknowledgement of either of them.

In the distance, the dogs were howling again, much more vigorously than before…

“Stupid dogs, do they never shut up?” he grumbled, using them to cover his own moment of discombobulation and casting another glance up at the tree, which was very normal once again.

“Did you also see… that?” he signed subtly to Liao Ying, who just nodded, still staring at the fire with glassy eyes.

“…”

As much to distract himself, he looked out at the grassland again, with its occasional trees and grass. There was no breeze again; however, the mist was heavier that he had noticed before, and the rocks around him had a faint hint of moisture…

Other clusters of tents and fires were also stirring… and given the lack of uproar…

-Neither Shen Cui nor Bai Jing seemed to notice… or was it just that I happened to be looking at the sky…?

It was weird, no matter how he thought about it… and unnerving…

-Not to mention, Liao Ying was looking at the fire, yet she also saw something…

“Senior Quan asked to see you.” He glanced to see that one of the Pill Sovereign disciples, looking a bit drained in the face, had appeared.

Bai Jing nodded her head and Liao Ying signed that it would be okay.

Giving one final look at the first sliver of the sun, he shook his head and followed after the disciple, who had already turned and started walking back down the hill.

Senior Quan Dingxiang, of the Pill Sovereigns Sect, had taken something of an interest in him, which he wasn’t… well, he wasn’t sure how to take. The alchemist, who appeared to have picked up an injury of his own, was a fairly famous figure… as were several of the other prominent members of their group, like Zi Min, the Shadowless Sabre of the Thunder Phoenix Gate… and Fairy Liling Mei of the Dewdrop Sage Sect, so he supposed he should feel gratified that such a figure was interested in his recovery…

Shaking his head, he resisted sighing again, and instead swept an eye across the dozen or so clusters of shelters, fires… and several awkwardly prominent tents… and then did a double take…

“Did more people arrive?” he asked, because the camp did seem bigger.

“Yeah…” the disciple said with a shrug. “Two groups, in the night, one chased by those dogs and the other about an hour ago.”

-And we saw nothing, he sighed.

“…”

“I thought we were hiding our trail?”

The disciple just grunted and said nothing, clearly not interested in conversation.

Unbidden, he cast another look around their camp, which was really a story of thirds. One third they were in, which was heavily warded and fairly business-like, with a few rather utilitarian shelters, well-hidden fires… and quite a few guards once you started looking. Another third, where they were heading, was for various communal tasks, some more tents and an area that had been taken over for alchemy and a sort of exchange market… And the last third was dominated by a shimmering barrier from some treasure, protecting several sprawling clusters of colourful tents where people were milling around fairly openly.

There was a defensive barrier around everything as well, but it was a thing of detection and deterrence, intended to keep away things like the pack of carnivorous dogs that had circled the camp for half the night, charging at the wards non-stop.

It was a weird group… and not one with a healthy dynamic, he had come to realise. Ostensibly, it was two groups, travelling together, with the Nine Auspicious Moons and a few other experts bringing them, Han Shu and the other freed prisoners along… and a second, numerically larger group of people who wanted either safety… or, he suspected, were unwilling to let the first group walk off into the plains with whatever the Jade Gate Court had had… namely the three of them and Han Shu.

“You know where Senior Quan’s tent is…” the disciple said, stopping by the main fire and waving him on.

“I do…” he nodded politely, glancing at the ad-hoc shelter thrown up on the far side where several alchemists were crouched down, sorting through a large sheet of scattered spirit herbs, debating something.

“In that case, don’t keep Senior Quan waiting,” the disciple retorted, turning and walking over towards where a group were carving the last of the useful flesh off two butchered black and white coloured cow-like beasts that had been caught the day before.

Sighing, he nodded. Senior Quan really only wanted to see him to check on the ‘seal’ again, he was sure. It was somewhat flattering to have the interest of such an eminent person, and yet… a part of him was also sure that it was only because of his association with Han Shu.

Walking over, he coughed, catching the attention of an alchemist, who looked blankly at him for a moment, before recollecting who he was and pointed inwards.

“Senior Quan?” he called politely.

“Ah, Han… I can call you that, can’t I?” the Ancient Immortal alchemist glanced out of the inner tent, where he was pouring over several unusual spirit herbs that had been recovered from somewhere, including what appeared to be a lingzhe of all things.

“Of… course, Senior Quan,” he said respectfully, making his way in.

“Dingxiang, please,” the alchemist said magnanimously, waving for him to sit.

“…”

“So, has there been much change overnight in the seal?” Quan Dingxiang asked, sitting back and looking him over.

“Somewhat,” he conceded. “I’ve been trying not do much that might interfere with it… and just occupy myself.”

“Hmm… probably a good idea, given how tricky it is,” Quan Dingxiang agreed. “Better to let it just unravel itself, given how stressed your meridians are. Now, shall we try some basic tests? I’ve had time to think a bit about the Hao clan’s methods…”

~ Cang Di & Qing Dongmei – Near Ajara ~

The sun, when it rose, was blood red, drenching the grassland before them in a way that made it look like every blade of grass briefly dripped blood. The cloudless, purple sky resounded to distant thunder that came from no clouds, nor manifested any lightning and it sank into his bones, whispering to him as rain fell from the cloudless sky.

Everywhere the yang strength of the world thrummed in ways that a Natural Dao should not, and with its passing, he felt the ground shaking as if a vast herd of horses ran, just beyond their sight.

It passed within mere moments, as if just travelling by, but in that same, brief instant, a whispering wave of wind, carrying with it the music of an ethereal flute, swept forth from the north, rustling the grass in strange ways.

Shatterpoint’s compass within his Sea of Knowledge spun wildly, losing all sense of direction then unerringly settling on a point to their west, telling him on no uncertain terms that that way lay ‘glory’, for the briefest, soul-twisting moment. The certainty of its divination made his hair stand on end, because the darkness of that ‘glory’ approached what he had briefly felt in the depths of the golden blooms that followed the dragon girl’s tribulation.

“Brother Di?” Qing Dongmei was looking at him weirdly, he realised, having just stirred from her own meditative recovery.

“Uh… did you just…?”

He trailed off and stared again in the direction of the rising sun. In the distance, birds took flight, squawking. Holding out his hand to catch a few scattered drops, he found them cool to the touch.

“Did I just…?” she asked, clearly confused.

“Rain?” he looked around to find that even it had stopped, the dampness lying heavy on the ground.

The sun was still casting rays that turned the grassland red. It did not have the same ominous, majestic strength, and the rain was already gone, just glittering droplets on the grass.

“What rain?” she looked about puzzled. “The dew has settled a bit heavily I must admit…”

He stared again in the direction of the rising sun, which was still casting rays of red across the horizon, even if it was normal again, and shuddered, because it almost felt like he had imagined it, such was the briefness of the passing, right at the moment of dawn’s first rise.

The only real difference, if he discounted his newly acquired and very rudimentary grasp of Severing Law, was…

{Your intuition is good. Holding this does carry that kind of tangential ‘benefit’.}

He squeaked in shock, because already slightly unnerved as he was, hearing the talisman make another comment was…

“Are you okay?” Qing Dongmei had come over beside him and was actually holding her hand to his forehead, looking concerned now.

“Uh… yes…” he nodded, gently removing it and trying not to feel a bit embarrassed for his overreaction given how he had just yelled out loud.

-What was that? He asked the talisman, taking a deep breath.

“Some troublemakers, travelling to the scene of a crime,” the talisman’s voice actually modulated in his mind slightly, sounding more talkative and less majestically grand manner. He almost thought he caught a hint of amusement?

-Uhhh?

He wasn’t sure how to take that – the implication was a bit concerning.

“This flower garden is not without its share of very poisonous plants… although I think you maybe got ‘that’ message already,” the talisman added, with rather sour bent, he thought.

Before he could make any further comment though, its voice vanished again, as if it had never been.

“Are you okay?” Qing Dongmei reiterated.

“…”

“Yes, sorry, I was just distracted by some thoughts,” he grimaced, dusting himself off.

“So… what are we going to do now?” she asked.

“Well, if yesterday was anything to go by, we are disturbingly close to the heartland of a local power,” he joked a bit bitterly.

“…”

She stared at him with a faintly dark expression. They had been lucky to run away the previous day, given that the leader of the town had been at least a Dao Lord if he was any judge. She and three others had pursued them for half a day before giving up and it was only because he had powerful stealth talismans and good illusion barriers that they had suffered only a dent to their pride.

The bigger problem in a way was that the town was between them and the battlefield, and beyond the town his soul sense told him occupation was widespread.

“I am amazed we missed so much of this,” Qing Dongmei grumbled as she stood up.

“Well, they were using a very good compass,” he observed of the Jade Gate Court’s efforts.

“That at least is a bright spark to come out of this,” Dongmei agreed.

She was still pleased that their own divination compass had broken due to trying to mess with the tribulation. He wasn’t so sure it was the only card they had, given what Din Ouyeng had been able to display, but her spirits were already dented enough that he just let her savour that small victory.

“Can you follow after your friend and the others from the sect?” he asked hopefully.

“Somewhat,” she grimaced.

“Well, I guess that is the direction we go,” he mused, pointing somewhat north.

“Why that way? They are further west I think?” she frowned.

“I get the impression that going back towards the scene of the battle’s direction might be a bad idea,” he noted wryly – the way that whatever had happened over there tried to twist things so he was drawn to it so insidiously still unnerved him, not that he could necessarily tell her that straight up. “Probably better to head north, parallel to this whole mess with the goal of circumventing it?”

She looked pensive for a moment, before nodding.

“Lead on then, great Tian!” Qing Dongmei said with a diffident wave of her hand, hiding her smirk behind her fan.

“…”

He rolled his eyes, happy that she was recovering some semblance of normalcy after being taken captive for that short while.

Suppressing his qi, he masked his soul sense as well, to look somewhat like an Ur’Vash, and set out, wrapping his grass cloak around him. Qing Dongmei, now in grey and brown travelling robes, put her dark cloth over her head and followed after him.

~ Dun Lian Jing – Ruined Town ~

“Well?” Gan Jiao, who was sat on the town wall, watching the distant flashes of lightning on the horizon, asked.

“She is required,” the masked diviner, one of the newer arrivals, said, bowing slightly to Gan Jiao and then glancing at her, the voice sounding strangely neutral.

“Bah,” Gan Jiao sighed and waved for her to stop dancing, which she did.

“We can send her back afterwards,” the diviner shrugged, but Gan Jiao just shook his head, looking bored.

She didn’t even have the mental energy to sigh now – the degradation was a curse on her emotions as much as her cultivation she had to consider – as she walked after the diviner, who didn’t even give her a second glance.

-Ah, a woman, she realised, catching a glimpse of her curves through her robe.

There were a few in the group now, not counting the misfortunate female cultivators, who now numbered 14 in total, who had been captured from various ‘unfriendly’ influences and were basically entertainment… or stress relief.

It was a disgusting thing, shaming, and that was the point she was sure: a show of control. On the face of it, all of them were ‘pretty’ or had the odd ‘useful treasure’ or ‘quirk’ – like a suitable spirit root – but in truth all of them were influences who had a certain stake in the Western or Northern continents of Eastern Azure, places where the Huang Gan were not popular due to the fallout of ancient history from the Huang-Mo wars. Quite a few had been willing as well, which just made it worse – unwilling to even die with honour as she had tried to.

She shuddered, forcing those thoughts aside as best she could.

Because she was ‘Huang Hao’s’, she was protected in a way, but that didn’t mean she was not forced to certain things – by Yan Ju and others – who thought it amusing to have a ‘princess’ debase herself in various ways.

Once, she would have been all sorts of things over that, but the truth, which was no less cruel, was that pain was just pain after a while and the darkness that came with it, which should have seen her screaming in her own head, was something she was… almost numb to.

That was horrible in a different, empty way. Her emotional state so broken by whatever their seal was slowly doing to her as her cultivation corroded away that she was a dissociated mess inside her own head, hollowed out almost – unless it had amused someone to force her not to be.

That, thankfully, had stopped – forcing her to engage with the destruction of her own Soul Foundation, talk to the voices in her head, relive childhood moments or random bits of past memories like a play with herself for the amusement of others had radically exacerbated the damage done by the spores – but it was mostly because Gan Renshu had pointed out that while it was not a problem if her cultivation fell, delivering a drooling idiot who couldn’t even look straight to ‘Young Noble Hao’ would not go down well.

That said, they refused to let her hide in the darkness of her own head now either, where she’d lose herself in the destruction of her own dantian and thus force anyone commanding her to really waste time and effort to do so, so as they finished walking down the steps, she was forced to also see the devastation all around.

It was the kind of scene they glossed over in all kinds of tales. In military reports, it would just be a number: ’20,000 dead, great victory for the Emperor’. In a tale, they would just talk about how the valiant heroes had cleverly crushed vicious demons and delivered ‘justice’ to their dark forces, hiding horror in euphemism and flowery words if mentioned at all.

As it was, over 20,000 demons of all ages lay dead, scattered around the ruins of their town, which was itself built on ruins – the very source of their downfall.

The battle had surely not gone as they expected, if most ever knew they were in a battle at all – even for those who had, it had only gone as she predicted in her heart.

The group had divined that this place held some aspect of the key they were searching for, and upon arriving and finding it was a very well-defended town, with wards and watchtowers and a small standing army, they had just set up a formation and ruined it with a single move.

She wanted to feel sorry for them, but that was forbidden – only feelings of ‘glory’ and ‘satisfaction’ for her, at the fate of these ‘terrible demons’.

Nine Dao Immortals, of the 23 they now had at their disposal, had arranged the formation and, in a single move, killed every being below the Immortal realm. Those wards against soul sense had done nothing, for they performed the formation from outside their range, ringing the entire settlement once it was scouted and sealing away any watchers in illusions and finishing them off afterwards.

The consequences of wielding Yin Life Laws in such a fashion were voided as well, as each formation point was chained to captured sacrifices with bad karma – who died screaming in sin-fire and white lightning. That, as well, had been put to a double stratagem, even if few realised it. Those early captives had been bound and their identities lost to all but Gan Renshu and the original group, but they came from big sects of the central continent who were loyal supporters of the Imperial Throne but more closely affiliated with the Empress, who came from the Huang Wuli branch, or the Jade Gate Court, associated with various imperial advisors and the Kong clan. To any errant searchers blame would fall on them, not the Red Sovereigns.

A few hundred demons had survived that attack, and they had fought hard, but were no match for their force, nearly 100 strong now, which moved in with martial and geomantic formations while others buried them in talismans until their defences fell. Those unlucky few that survived the assault had been sealed up – just another resource to be used at the opportune time as other unfortunate captives had been here.

They had still been exploring the town, looking for whatever it was the diviners from the Gan clan were sure was here, when the chaos to the west had unfolded – a huge tribulation that she would not have believed had she not seen it.

Quite a few of the hangers-on had been so fired up that they wanted to go take a closer look. Even the Heavenly Solace disciples, and those from off-world from the Huang Gan, had been impressed, advocating in favour of that once the aura of ‘dragons’ appeared towards the end, in case it was some rare treasure or peerless opportunity.

Still, it had been merely a diversion to the matter at hand, and Gan Renshu had overruled any such desires, as had the diviners for that matter.

Picking her way through the street, she was again led to fruitlessly curse the fact that they forced her to experience all the functions of being a ‘mortal’, bar sleep – and even the cursing was a kind of punishment, because she was well aware of how hollow it was. The smell of death and decay all around her was stifling, even in the pre-dawn darkness. It did not help that this hour was deeply inauspicious anyway. Here and now, her skin crawled as she walked through the deathly quiet streets, abandoned even by scavengers. It was a feeling that far eclipsed all the other humiliations and discomforts and a reminder that killing that many people in such a way led to ‘bad’ things happening.

“It would have been better if they just paralyzed everything here and sent the rabble in to slaughter everything in person,” the diviner leading her muttered in her strange, neutral tone, clearly sharing her distaste for the aftermath.

She had to agree, even that would be better, to have just killed them one by one.

As she watched, the woman also avoided the deepest shadows before the sun rose as they walked. She was probably not the only one to feel uneasy, among those here.

“What took you so long? Did she have to stop and piss or something?”

-And yet there are always some to whom any disaster is just a lark or a laughing matter…

She was made to smile prettily and blow Yan Ju a kiss as she passed into the central area, even as she cursed him in her heart. Yet even that was repressed, causing further pain of a different kind. She was allowed to curse them, but it forced her to acknowledge it only abstractly, so it was thoroughly unfulfilling.

The diviner just shook her head and they walked on, past several other groups who were still poring over the various warehouses or harvesting the dead being brought into the square by various captives for cores.

“Show us your titties! Princess!”

“DANCE!”

“Yeah, DANCE!”

“Shake it! Shake it!”

“…”

The diviner shot them a look and the commands aborted even as her limbs moved of their own accord to try and fulfil the ‘suggestions’. That action put the woman leading her as at least a… a…

She sighed inwardly as the various other restrictions kicked in, preventing her from even consciously acknowledging the realm of any of the new arrivals and diviners. For all that they were very unguarded around her, there was a reason for that as well. They were also very confident in the chains binding her.

Few of those now tormenting her were even among the original group. No, these were latecomers, allies or just opportunists who wanted to humiliate a person who had been of much higher status, who thought it funny she was a ‘princess’, if they knew, or who just thought her some slightly more important captive.

That said, the ‘control’ over the means to ‘command’ her beyond embarrassing or demeaning suggestions had also been sold a few times as well though, before Gan Renshu put a stop to it.

The source of that was certainly the Heavenly Solace group, who had no care for Eastern Azure at all and just saw those people as disposable peons; however, they had ‘power’ in their connections, effectively here to facilitate the alliance between Gan Hao and their ‘Society’ which was still formidable in excess of any other influence here, even if the Heavenly Solace starfield was a forbidden topic of conversation, owing to the circumstances of its ‘ruin’. Such was their… there…

“Gah…!” She sighed in her heart again, because after using that knowledge to annoy a few of them, she was forbidden from even thinking about the rumoured tales and events even if it was ancient history like the Huang Mo war.

Leaving their laughter behind, she was led into the large, circular stone building on the far side of the square.

Here the four guards just looked at them in the darkness, their eyes scouring her for a second in a way that was far more unsettling than any number of insults or crass actions. She knew what they were checking her for – to see if she was doing the impossible and finding a way to fight back.

“They are waiting below. You’re already late, Fera,” Gan Tai, who was possibly taking a break, said from nearby.

“…”

The diviner just shook her head again and without stopping they went into the next room, and then down a set of stairs, now illuminated by spirit jades, that wound down into the ground for almost 100 metres she guessed. Emerging from them, she found herself standing in a room with a circle of 12 stones, a central dais, and on it a plinth of blue-grey rock in the middle that just screamed ‘seal’.

The hall itself was maybe 30 metres across, open to the sky, and with a broad opening on the eastern side, which afforded a good view out over the plains. The twelve stones each held a strange constellation-like pattern.

As she was led to walk towards the dais, she observed that there were three large flat stones set at equal points in the floor around it, each engraved with swirling patterns to match the shifting scenes of the natural world on the hall's walls. Stepping across the threshold of those slabs on the floor, she immediately felt a faint and disturbing ‘pull’ from the dais on the ‘physique’ within her body, carrying her forward almost beyond the compulsion of her instruction to follow, until she stood before the stone plinth, next to ‘Fera’, while Gan Renshu and the various others stared at the dais pensively.

The plinth itself was about a metre high. On each of the four sides was carved a symbol, inlaid with different materials – the west had a blue-black raven, the north a white jade deer, the south a black and green jade spiral with three arms and the east a cinnabar and rising sun. On the top was a familiar golden flower, set into a circle of blue lapis lazuli and surrounded by a circle of seven silver stars. The patterns out of the seven stars swirled around the whole plinth, joining the other scenes together in strange and hard-to-follow ways.

“You are certain, Diviner Wan?” Gan Renshu was asking the two diviners.

“Little is… certain, Lord Renshu,” ‘Diviner Wan’, a severe-looking man who had been among the large group they met up with after leaving the jungles, replied, sighing deeply.

“…”

“What Diviner Wan means to say, Lord Renshu, is that we know some things, but we must learn more to give you a clear answer,” the second ‘Diviner’ present, who she knew as Gan Ulang, said smoothly.

“Her blood will help though,” the third ‘Diviner’ Kung Tuo added, looking at her with a calculating expression.

“She is not disposable, and the more you use…” Gan Bao, one of the Gan clan’s Dao Immortals standing guard nearby, scowled.

“Who is the diviner here?” Kung Tuo, who was definitely ‘not’ a junior, scowled back. “I am as aware of the stakes here as you are, more so in fact – but we cannot say-”

“Yes, we cannot say the nature of the lock until you have tried the key, you have said so several times already, Tuo,” Gan Sheng, another of the Gan clan core disciples, interjected flatly.

“…”

The three diviners looked at him and said nothing. Renshu was nominally the leader, even if the ‘Heavenly Solace’ society lot barely followed orders. The currents of politics in the group were strange like that. However, even within the Gan clan there appeared to be some more ‘influential’ than him – like Gan Sheng – who were core disciples or inheriting disciples of different elders who at times almost acted like they were the ones in charge, not him.

That they were now hiding their ‘outer’ status and mostly all pretending to be a large band of ‘rogue cultivators’ to many of the later arrivals just confused matters further. She was sure it was mostly because she was being displayed openly. Many of those who were outside ‘disliked’ the Imperial Court, or were sympathetic to the Azure Astral Authority – the idea that they had fallen in with a group who captured her was very appealing. Those others they had captured all came from influential sects in their own right, and the result was, she was sure, that they were trying to just plant everyone in the aftermath.

“What of the other matter?” Renshu asked after a moment’s contemplation.

“The flowers that bloomed after the tribulation are definitely associated. They did not mark us,” Gan Ulang mused. “We have wards against such truths of course, but some here were touched and from that we have confirmed as much.”

“It is just a truth?” Gan Sheng added rather sharply.

“It does appear as such, Young Master Sheng,” Gan Wan said diffidently.

“…”

“So the question is then, how do they relate?” Gan Renshu said.

“As I said… we cannot say for sure until…” Kung Tuo muttered. “And the longer we wait the more this auspicious moment for such a test recedes!”

“Not to mention the greater divination was quite clear that now is the most auspicious moment available…” Gan Wan sighed.

“…”

Gan Renshu stared at her deeply for several seconds.

“Put your hand upon it,” the command sank into her head from Gan Renshu.

She walked over to the plinth, a prisoner in her own body, and placed her hand on the flower as the instinctual pull told her to-

“Ahh-!” she was forced to feel pain, more than was doubtlessly necessary, as blood flowed out of her hand like serpents, directed by Kung Tuo.

It flowed through the golden flower, which turned cool to the-

{Righteous THING, WE SEAL YOU HERE TO Slumber, Strength OF MEN! BE UNBOUND, FORGOTTEN, SERVANT OF THE Light! ABANDONED TO Dark AND Death ITSELF}

For a split second, she saw five shadows standing in a circle around her. Five female figures, each one was decadently beautiful, lascivious even, with a cruel and terrible manner. Each was draped in gold and silver, flowing robes that hid little and suggested everything woven of priceless materials, matching the colour of their ‘symbols’, which shimmered upon their foreheads.

The white-haired woman held the darkness of the devouring mountains, cold and cruel. The dark-haired one, the cruel chaos of war that men could not escape. The red-haired one, the strength of a Tyrant, bloody hands robbing away toil beneath the embers of a dying sun. The last two were both blonde. One held the ruin of dark waters and twisting shadows, devouring eyes greedy for things they could not have. The final one held stolen fortune and prosperity, the endeavours of righteous men plundered by mendacious means.

In her mind’s eye, the five had sealed a great treasure of the rightful people of this land, barred it from its chosen ones, stolen its power and distributed it between themselves. Here, was one of the maps to its location, or so her blood seemed to tell her, a key to returning that strength to her people from whom it had once so cruelly been wrested away.

She staggered back, panting and feeling flushed as strange strength flowed through her. The plinth beneath was icy cold now, to the point where her feet almost felt like they were frozen to it-

A hand grasped her, dragged her back, leading to her screaming in anguish as her legs shattered. Her hand that had been placed upon the stone was dissolving, red blood turning black as it flowed into her arm, worming away-

…

When she recovered consciousness, she was lying on the cold stone near the plinth, which was as it had been. The stone beneath her was cool and wet, and the first rays of sun, which was disturbingly red given her momentary vision, were kissing the floor of the hall.

“I told you she was not disposable!” Gan Sheng was saying rather forcefully to Kung Tuo, who was doing his best to ignore the youth nearly spitting in his face.

Gan Bo and some of the others were standing around looking rather unhappy as well. She felt unnaturally flattered that they were ‘concerned’ for her.

“That was… ill-judged,” Gan Renshu added, casting a look in her direction.

“She is fine. The damage is mostly superficial,” the youth kneeling beside her said with a grimace.

“Yes - However, because of that Gan Deng we are not made of those pills,” Gan Renshu scowled.

“This is true, but at least we have divined the nature of our problem,” Diviner Wan sighed.

“The question is can it be easily remedied?” Gan Renshu grumbled.

“That depends on how much effort you want to put in,” Diviner Ulang mused, from where he was pacing back and forth.

“…”

“Speak plainly, or not at all,” Gan Bo growled.

“Well, strictly speaking, this is a supreme world, but the forces binding that are merely aspected truths. We need to loosen the grip…”

“Are you saying we need to exorcise a Venerate’s Truth from the world to unseal this accursed box?” Renshu said dully.

“As I said, it depends on how much effort you want to put in…” Ulang muttered. “There are other ways we can try, and more divinations yet to do.”

“But what you are talking about is suicide,” Diviner Fera said grimly. “I agreed to help Young Noble Hao, not damn myself to staring at a cave wall for the next hundred thousand years while I cultivate in the basement of our Huang clan’s supreme world to avoid some vengeful venerable!”

“What she said is true,” Diviner Wan said with a grim expression. “This is a lock that exceeds expectations.”

“So what do you suggest?” Gan Sheng asked, not sounding enthused.

“Well, some of the aspects are more extant than others…” Kung Tuo pointed out. “Venerables can die after all, and this is a shattered world – all we can say for certain is that five Truths are associated with the hiding of what is held within.”

“She is also a destined key, forged by heaven to deliver a way. A path will exist; it is just a matter of finding it,” Gan Tai added from the doorway where he was now standing, looking at her with an amused expression. “I say we start by interrogating the surviving leaders of this place.”

Gan Renshu looked again at the altar, then at the twelve stones, which were each carved with a constellation-like animal and nodded grimly, before stalking out of the hall.

~ Juni, Ling and Chunhua – Daybreak in the Savannah ~

In the instant that the first rays of dawn peeked over the horizon, the world became drenched in red. Seated as she was, in the shade of a rock, looking out across the hill they had stopped on, Juni had to wonder for a moment if she was having some kind of deviation or if she had arrived at a tribulation unawares, such was the sense of unease that blanketed everything.

Tinkling, chiming tones swirled around her, a phantasmal reedy flute that made her skin prickle with unease.

The grasses hissed in a wind that had not been there moments earlier.

The thorn trees across from them on the hill were suddenly festooned with rags of red, dripping with dark blood onto the rocks…

Rain fell from the clear sky, hitting grass, rock and leaf alike like little chimes.

The vestiges of the golden peony flower shimmered faintly.

The ground thrummed, as if a vast herd of horses were stampeding unseen all around her.

The sky above shook faintly, reverberating like the skin of a drum, and something approaching the shadow of lightning passed. With her Bright Lotus Eyes, which she had been practicing, for a brief moment she swore she saw the qi of the world itself swirl, as if disturbed by the passing of something she could not, or should not perceive.

The moment passed. The sun’s rays, still red, cast strange shadows and the ground was wet with the rain, but there was no other trace of what she had just witnessed beyond the disturbing, unnatural shifts in her divination art, telling her that the sensation drawing her away to the ‘west’ was not something she should follow – it was auspicious, but in the same way the dark waters beyond the golden flowers had been. Different, yes, but with the same dark promise at its heart.

“…”

“…”

She stared at Teng Chunhua and Lin Ling, and the expressions on their faces robbed her of any idea that she might have just hallucinated the scene of her own accord.

Teng Chunhua looked shocked, a bit fearful, staring at the two thorn trees opposite them, which were now normal again.

Lin Ling was pale and shaking, her hands clasping her head, her eyes scrunched tight, mumbling to herself.

“Not here… not here… not here…”

“Ling?” she scrambled to help her, arriving beside the other girl-

“NOT HERE!”

With a groan she sat up, finding herself at the bottom of the hill, nursing her ribs and trying to swallow the blood back down as her body healed itself, or tried to, because her qi was half dispersed and what remained was in mild turmoil. The force with which Lin Ling had thrown her was… not as much as it could have been, she reflected with a grimace, but there had been no warning and the dissociation was vicious.

Making the mistake of looking at the sky in her disorientation, she had to close her eyes as ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’ continued to be unusable as the ambient qi of the world surged strangely for a heartbeat too long.

“You okay?” Teng Chunhua arrived beside her, followed by Lin Ling who was pale and shaking.

“Sorry…” the other girl mumbled. “I tried to stop them but…”

“The memories ran out of control?” she frowned, thinking that that had stopped since her breakthrough to Dao Seeking.

“The… younger memories went berserk…” Lin Ling grimaced, looking very uneasy. “Berserk with terror, they nearly seized control of my body of their own accord to try and flee, which was why they… hit you, shouted at you.”

She recalled belatedly that there had been a sensation of sound in there beyond the flutes, a sort of frenzied howl that held no actual noise, just the sensation of ‘away’.

Inhaling, she grimaced again as the itching of her mending ribs intensified, her mantra pulling qi out of the air with the help of her symbol and ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ to intensify the healing of the damage.

“You okay now?” she asked, accepting Teng Chunhua’s hand up.

“I… yeah…” Lin Ling exhaled.

“What… was that?” Teng Chunhua asked with a shudder. “It came with the first ray of dawn’s light and was gone with its passing, but I felt like I was just standing in the shadow of…”

“…”

Lin Ling seemed to stare at nothing for a long moment before shaking her head.

“It was real…” she muttered, staring at the crystal clear water glistening on the grass all around them.

“Just normal water though,” Teng Chunhua added pensively, running her fingers carefully along the flat of an edge of the razor sharp grass. “The trees don’t have the cloths on them either.”

“Was that… like the golden peony flowers?” she asked, watching as the sun continued to rise as they made their way back up to the top of the hill. Beyond it, there were a few pockets of mist swirling, which struck her as odd – not just because there had been little in the way of morning mist before…

-Because it was almost more rock than grass in this season?

“Somewhat…” Lin Ling was still distracted it seemed.

As she watched, they were already dissipating, but within them… some in the hollow almost looked like the mists swirling in her dantian?

“Those mists…?” she said, pointing to them, even as she looked around for others and saw… very little, already what was there was fading fast.

“Hmmmmm, this isn’t the place you would expect to see mist like that,” Chunhua agreed, looking back in the direction they came. “Is it because of the dew from that strange phenomenon?”

She focused on them with ‘Heart Shifting Steps’, which gave her no obvious signals of issue.

“What do you think?” she queried Lin Ling, who still looked shaken.

“I can’t see anything untoward… nor does there seem to be anything weird I can pick out. The memories’ instincts are… not reliable right now though…”

Frowning, she trotted over, because already the sun was rising obviously and the rays were burning away the mists elsewhere. It still took her a few minutes to get there, the other two following curiously after her, on account of all of them having thoroughly scrambled qi from Lin Ling’s cry.

It was rather innocuous when all was said and done. The last mists were slowly dissolving away, and only that which was shadowed by the slight rise lingered on. Staring at it with Bright Lotus Eyes, she saw nothing untoward in the plant life, and also nothing to suggest any sense of accumulating qi in the landscape itself.

“Well that’s a bit anticlimactic…” Chunhua frowned, crouching down and staring at their surroundings.

She nodded, continuing to look around carefully at the grass. It was normal razor grass, not quite in flower.

{Heart Shifting Steps}

Strolling through it idly using her movement art she didn’t get any inauspicious suggestions…

-But there are no auspicious nudges? Everything is ‘just okay’?

It was as she stared around carefully, pondering how ‘odd’ that was, that she saw the few ephemeral droplets of liquid on the grass nearby, running slowly down the blade leaf of the grass towards the ground. It was the last remnants of that rain, she was sure, but most of it had vanished as soon as it landed, leaving only the dampness in the air and the freshness that came with it. As she watched, crouching down beside it, she had the strange, slightly inexplicable feeling that the droplet was being… drawn down?

-That should happen? She nodded to herself, about to dismiss it and look elsewhere, but…?

-Sure, that should happen, a part of her observed, but that fast?

She carefully plucked the leaf of grass and turned it upside down. The ‘water droplet’ didn’t fall off it, but now ran the other direction down the leaf, around the edge, in a strange way, clearly being drawn to the ground again.

{Bright Lotus Eyes}

She stared at it with her oracular art, but it remained aggressively a normal water drop, no different from all the other normal water drops. ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ gave her nothing either, no signal associated with any kind of divination…

She nearly put it down, but her instincts refused to let it sit. The fact that ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ was giving her such neutral readings… a part of her told her something was absolutely off here.

In the end, she had to concede that it was probably luck, the reflecting rays of sunlight over the ridge, something like that, that allowed her to notice the tiny wisp in its interior. It was almost like a mirage, not even there, just a facet of light that reflected bizarrely.

-Bah, just a reflection, she sighed and nearly put the leaf down…

Something abruptly ‘set’ and ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ finally gave her a nudge, not even a nudge but an outright pull, telling her this was a good thing.

A really good thing.

In that instant, she partially grasped what had maybe happened –

-Is this such a good thing that the natural alignments of the land here are deliberately obfuscating it so the natural world itself can claim the droplet?

It was not an unknown phenomenon, even if it was rare – she had run into spirit herbs capable of such tricks, after all. It was why high realm ginseng and some esoteric orchid and lotus species were utterly vile to try and capture.

Exhaling, she stared at the dewdrop and decisively put her finger on it, absorbing it.

As soon as it entered her meridians she wondered if she had just been led to make a terrible mistake. The paltry little wisp became a furious rampaging serpent of elemental destruction, trying to rend apart her meridian gates and exit her body through her life gate with the clear intention of killing or crippling her in the process!

{Bright Lotus Earthly Scripture}

For the first time in a good while she stimulated her cultivation law directly, pairing it to the symbol to redouble its efficacy at the cost of her outer awareness to aid in absorbing and containing the qi.

{Heart Shifting Steps}

The divination art was also turned inwards, supporting her as she sought to find the most auspicious ways to grasp a manner of control, or at least guide it in ways that would not see her crippled.

‘Devoted, Path, Lotus, Body, Bestowal’

When that also failed to fully contain the possible calamity she had just unleashed for herself, she also focused her mantra on it, sending towards it the idea of ‘absorption’ as best she could, letting each phrase act on it in their own way according to that instruction.

The battle in her meridians only lasted a few seconds, but those few seconds felt like an eternity as the tumultuous mist swept through them entirely, trying to devour her qi even as it was devoured in turn before the sheer attrition of the different means within her grasp won out – marginally.

She was sweating hard by the time she succeeded in taming the wisp and dragging it into her dantian where it roiled and lashed, making the expanding pool of viscous qi that had been coalescing to form her core distort crazily even as the entire force of her body’s cultivation foundation worked to push it down-

Heart Shifting Steps and her Cultivation Law then did a ‘weird thing’, or perhaps the mist did, because in the next instant, the pressure exerted on the mysterious qi she absorbed vanished and it slipped through her dantian like a thing of phantasmal fog. However, rather than escaping her body, it twisted into the deepest depths where, almost by inertia it seemed, borne by the pressure of everything else that had been bearing down on it, it flowed towards her sprit root, drawing on the very force trying to oppress it to slip into that space-

Agony.

Pain.

Torment unlike anything she had experienced since that moment when she fought Sheng Zhao wracked her.

She realised she was screaming now, thrashing on the ground, bent over, vomiting black blood as ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ twisted the mist and the terrible intent within it into her spirit root, dragging her qi with it, dragging vital qi from bones, supplied disturbingly willingly by her mantra by some means outside her grasp.

Even though she had no awareness of her spirit root given her realm, she knew where it was located, in the heart of her core, below her dantian. It was one of the few real, foundational differences between male and female spiritual cultivators – in a man, the spirit root was associated with the Root Gate but had no real physical anchor, while in a woman it was directly associated with the womb as much as the Root Gate.

It was a thing which, when you considered how frequently they were associated with a woman’s purity, had always struck her as a deeply insulting insinuation to make when it was claimed your ‘spirit root was impure’ or ‘poor quality’.

Her spirit root, which she had always known was not very good, an insinuation that had always bitten deeply for several reasons, shifted negligibly and then collapsed, simultaneously shedding its form in a strange, unquantifiable way.

In that agonizing instance, she realised that a very great deal of what she had been told of spirit roots was a terrible simplification. Their cultivation methods back home put a lot of emphasis on its quality, its attribute, its affinities, tying them to laws and such, using them to grade future prospects, but to most, it was just associated with a certain part of the body until you formed a Golden Core anchored to it.

It was widely accepted and understood that at a very low realm, if your root, especially a woman’s root, was damaged or stolen, the effect would be physical as much as spiritual. For men, it was a purely spiritual injury. Now that she was experiencing this, she realised that had been only half the truth.

The ‘teaching’, widely disseminated by most core methods, was that the spirit root was intrinsically opposite in its state to your nature – for men it was ‘intangible’ because they were born ‘yang’, while for women, it was ‘tangible’ because they were born ‘yin’. Except, right here and now, she was, through the auspice of Heart Shifting Steps, very clear that her spirit root was completely an intangible, metaphysical crystallisation of her body’s innate potential that just happened to be focused where it was.

Rippling multi-coloured drops of qi that had been mixing with the pool of her qi in her dantian from her use of ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ were now also flowing into that point as well, warping it and further diffusing. After it followed all the ‘Golden Peony Qi’ from the tribulation.

The shattering change likely only took moments between her root being invaded, breaking apart and reforming, but as a process it felt like it took a small eternity. An eternity wracked with a pain she had never known, and suspected she likely never would again. When it was done, she was slicked with black ichor and shaking with shock, because her awareness of her spirit root was now total, visualisable in just the same way that she could perceive her dantian.

It was a twisting geometric spark, beautiful, lustrous gold, like the peonies, with a hint of iridescence held within. The pattern was rippling across her bones as well now, changing in accordance with her mantra, while her meridians had become almost translucent, with a gentle suppleness and durability to them that belied their new, almost ethereal appearance.

“What in the fates…” Chunhua and Ling had come scrambling over, she realised, as she became aware of her surroundings again.

“What happened?” Lin Ling was looking shocked and paler still compared to how she had before.

“I… I’m fine,” she rasped once she finished hacking up black ichor. “F-find the dewdrops on the grass, with mist inside…”

They stared at her dully.

“They… can purify your… spirit root somehow. If you miss-”

Even before she finished saying ‘this opportunity you will regret it for a lifetime’, both of them were scouring the area with their soul senses.

“Nothing?” Teng Chunhua frowned, looking… concerned.

Lin Ling was also staring around, eyes narrowed.

She sighed, because it was clear they found nothing. Pushing herself up, she used ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ and ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’ again. It took a moment, but she found one – mere centimetres above the ground and about two metres away from her-

As fast and as warily as she could, she shot for it, plucking it carefully as they arrived beside her. Lin Ling stared at the wisp in the dew drops on the leaf for a short moment with a hissed intake of breath.

“Chunhua should absorb this. I see why I couldn’t find them before,” Lin Ling muttered, immediately turning away, carefully scouring leaves as she went.

Without further comment, she passed it to Teng Chunhua, who took the leaf rather apprehensively and stared at it, then her, then Lin Ling.

“What should I…?” Chunhua started to ask-

“Use your mantra and Nascent Soul-” she had to pause to cough up another lungful of black gunk that had accumulated very rapidly and stopped her speaking briefly. “Use them to suppress the mist. I should be able to help you with my divination art…”

Looking apprehensive, Chunhua absorbed the dewdrop and looked perplexed for about half a second before spasming like a stuck fish.

{Heart Shifting Steps}

{Bright Lotus Eyes}

She exerted the full strength of both arts to help the other woman. The idea of using ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ directly on others was talked about in the talisman, but in truth, such opportunities had arisen rarely, if at all. She had used it on that one Ur’Vash in the battle, and somewhat on Teng Chunhua before her tribulation, but neither time had been particularly planned. Examining her condition, she was relieved to see it was not as bad as she expected.

She had mostly recovered from the experience already, and although her qi was lacking in volume it was a small magnitude purer. She watched the qi shift around Chunhua as she groaned, collapsing into a ball holding her stomach. Black drops were slowly condensing on her skin as impurities ran out of her body.

“Accursed fates… You… you bitch… I hate so much that I… ever met you… both of you…” Chunhua sobbed, clawing at the ground as she curled up in a hunched bundle of agony.

If she hadn’t experienced the pain herself first, she might have thought that a rather unfair accusation, even if the other woman had undergone rather a lot since crossing their path. As she helped the process along with ‘Heart Shifting Steps’, watching carefully how it interacted with Chunhua’s qi flow, the woman’s cursing got significantly more inventive, until it devolved into wretched sobs as she vomited up black ichor as well.

After a few moments Chunhua recovered, sitting there panting and coughing alternatively.

“What… is… that…” she rasped and gagged, looking very wide-eyed.

“Etheric Dew,” Lin Ling said, arriving back beside them with seven more grass stems in a bowl.

“…”

“And I have wonderfully wretched news for you both – you are going to want to do that again, because now that I know what it is, the older memories, which can now make themselves heard since the stupid ones are still terrified to silence, are very effusive on its ‘benefits’. It’s also rare as anything and only forms on specifically auspicious moments in the half dawn, with the heavens in very specific alignments.

“Its natural state is ‘unifying with the core’ so when it occurs in nature it will always try to run to the ground and purify the ground it forms on, and its auspice is good enough that the natural world will twist its alignments to capitalize on it directly.”

“I noticed,” she replied, then choked again, wiping her mouth and wincing.

“Etheric dew,” Chunhua coughed. “Weird name?”

“It might have a name in our world, but the memories have no idea of any other name.” she shrugged. “It’s also next to impossible to store in its most auspicious form.”

“How long does that give us?” she asked looking around.

“Until the sun gets over that hill?” Lin Ling said with a grimace, looking up at the ridge and the dwindling band of shadow. “It will disperse on contact with any form of natural yang energy, purifying it. I can only hold these grass stems because these bowls are made of that rock.”

“So about ten minutes then,” she grimaced, looking at Chunhua. “You got first then… I can use my art on you-”

“No!” Lin Ling cut her off, shaking her head. “You take all of that, Juni. There is more out here. I’ll get it for Chunhua. When you’re done, use your… art on her.”

“…”

She cut off her retort and sighed, nodding, realising her desire to do well by the others had actually gotten ahead of her common sense for a moment. She could see the logic in what Lin Ling said – her root was by far the worst of the three of them, and while it had changed, she intuitively knew, as she looked at it again now, that it could get ‘better’.

Grimacing, she sat down cross-legged and, taking the bowl from Lin Ling, absorbed another drop as the other two rapidly started looking for more.

The repeat process was just as vile, but the ‘Etheric Dew’ struggled a lot less this time – or at least its struggles were much less due to the new suppleness in her meridians. On a hunch, she took out a Soul Foundation Core they had harvested from some scavengers the previous evening and also started to absorb qi from it as she did the refinement.

The first drop took an agonizing minute to refine, as did the second and the third.

By the fifth drop however, she was able to do it without screaming – mostly.

With the seventh and last she was left with the strange, and rather disorientating feeling that she needed ‘one more drop’.

Fortunately, Ling and Chunhua managed to find almost 20 more drops between them, so a ninth drop was no imposition in the grand scheme of things.

When it was refined, however, she was left staring at her strange, new spiritual root, wondering if you could even call this a spiritual root?

It was a twisting, ephemeral little fire, shedding sparks that resembled multi-coloured petals – petals not just of peonies now, but of other flowers. There were Azaleas, Peach Blossoms, Water Lotuses, Narcissuses, Chrysanthemums, Orchids… even Bamboo?

Standing, trying not to shake too much, she looked at the top of the hill and the shrinking area of shadow they were in, before the dew they had naturally dissipated.

“Don’t worry about me…” Lin Ling shook her head and sitting down. “They won’t have as big an effect on me, and my principle, while not as good as your… art, in a pound for pound sense, is up to this. Just focus on Chunhua.”

Before she could argue at all, Lin Ling took a stem and absorbed it directly, grimacing as she did so. Not wasting any more time, she sat down opposite Chunhua, who apprehensively took another stem and absorbed the drop on it. As she observed and aided that process, she noted that it went almost as hers had done.

The second refinement, while torturous, was mercifully nowhere near as bad. By the fifth, as she got more used to using ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ on the other woman, she had to acknowledge that for whatever reason Chunhua was adjusting to it much better than she had. In the end Chunhua absorbed twelve of the droplets before reaching the same point she had.

Lin Ling took six before declaring that they held no further use for her at her current cultivation stage.

In the end, at their insistence, she took the last one – it was a struggle to absorb, almost as hard as the first one, or so it felt. However, when it was done and she watched it melt away into her reformed spirit root, it seemed to make the flames and the flower petals slightly over-vivid.

In a way, she could only sigh with regret that they had no means to store them, because such a treasure would undoubtedly be useful for when they caught up to the others.

The worst part was getting cleaned off. Because the black ichor was vile, and refused any attempt at using qi to remove it. They scraped off the worst of it, using her spear blade in the end, taking care not to cut each other, then resolved to move as fast as they could towards the nearest water source.

That, weirdly enough, turned out to be another job for her more than the other two. The landscape was pretty, in a sort of brutal way once you started looking at it closely, and absolutely chock-full of things that would kill you as soon as sit on, by, near or far from them. Her skill with plant identification sort of helped, but remarkably her slowly developing qi ‘vision’ with ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’ was able to faintly intuit the innate nature of vegetation when she worked to combine it with ‘Heart Shifting Steps’.

That was not just in terms of whether it was ‘Yin’ or ‘Yang’ affinity, because both could be equal opportunity killers in her experience, but also their ‘Intent’. It allowed her to work out, for example, that the thorn trees that had turned red earlier had a solid ‘yang wood’ affinity, but carried ‘yin water’ in their trunks, drawn up through deep roots and had an aspect of ‘yin fire’ associated with their leaves and thorns.

Lin Ling had good instincts, but by comparison, could basically get only that the wood would be green and the leaves unpleasant to eat. She could direct them towards good ‘edibles’ including ‘edible water’ – suitable plants with high water content. She could even, she said, direct them vaguely towards water – it came with the way her soul sense worked in relation to the yang strength of the land – but it was no more than an ‘it’s that kind of way’ feeling.

She, on the other hand, could tell that the defences of the spirit vegetation trees was ‘passive.’ If she were to compare that to some of the other low-lying thorn scrub, which had much the same ‘affinity’ and ‘alignment’ distribution, she could see that they had a powerful ‘active’ yin intent in their sap and yin wood in their leaves.

She had reached this point the previous day, having finally mastered the basics of the ocular art, and through the night had gained a much better idea of the nuance of how it was developing, which was turning out to be even more useful than she hoped.

Thus, as they made their way onwards, searching for water, just ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’ on its own gave her a series of loosely translated dull hazes around various plants that were ‘dangerous’ based on their qi, while ones that were not had a sort of sheen to them in general.

“There is a tree about 200 metres to our west,” she said eventually after they crested the third hill, everyone trying hard not to grumble at how rotten they felt, half-covered in the horrid black stuff.

The tree in question had a faint ‘sheen’ to it and a faint resonance of yang water within its trunk. More importantly, ‘Heart Shifting Steps’, which she was now getting much better at melding with ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’, told her that the currents of yang were upwelling and auspicious.

“If nothing else pans out, your future as a proper feng shui expert is settled at this point,” Lin Ling chuckled drily as they made their way towards the distant tree.

“…”

Chunhua just shook her head and looked a bit amused, walking onwards and staring this way and that, looking for ambush threats.

“You say that like I was not already one,” she sniffed, pretending to be offended even if she understood what Lin Ling meant.

The path of the cultivators they were following was weird – gnarly and prone to odd hops where it vanished for miles at a time. Without her rapid – and occasionally rather torturous – advancement of ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’ allowing her to grasp the faint natures of the natural tides of qi and how they interacted with the shifting current of qi that made the trail they were following, they would have lost it half a dozen times throughout the previous day and never found it again, even with Lin Ling’s own land sense and Chunhua helping out with her soul sense.

That ability alone was quite shocking, and had she attained nothing else in here than that, she would, she self-acknowledged, probably have left very happy indeed.

It didn’t take long to find the tree – it was rather obvious within a sheltered hollow between two of the rolling, stone pavement rises that passed for ‘hills’ in this area. It was not especially big, but it held a vibrancy that other things around it did not.

It did take rather longer to ‘find’ the water through – the heat of the land kept the water table low, but having found it approximately, in terms of depth, Lin Ling and Teng Chunhua were able to use their soul senses to warily scan the surroundings and identify that there was a canyon about two miles further along.

“Their trail ran near here as well,” she noted after they had gone two hills over, threading through areas of rock pavement and avoiding much of the poisonous thorn scrub that, between her vision and Lin Ling’s memories, they were able to identify.

“That’s convenient at least,” Chunhua sighed, pulling out a cloth and binding it across her eyes to protect her vision in the absence of her mask.

She nodded, casting about for its edge as they followed onwards after Lin Ling who had now taken over the lead again. With all the stone around them, the yang energies reflecting with the light were only getting fiercer and with ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’ she could almost see the other two growing in qi strength as they walked and she searched for the tell-tale edges of what she had come to think of as ‘the rolling wave’.

For Lin Ling who was so thoroughly attuned to ‘yang’ at this point, simply existing here was enough to nourish her foundation as they walked. If her friend ‘focused’ she could visibly put pressure on the ambient qi of any place she stood for more than a few minutes.

Chunhua, who cultivated a hybrid law focused on wood/fire, was also doing well here. She had swapped out the manual she had been practicing for her core, which was apparently a decent, if unspectacular, Golden Core Formation manual obtained via contribution points with the Teng School, but for her Nascent Soul she focused on one called the ‘Treejade Red Manual’, which originated from an old family inheritance. The result had been that before her spirit root was purified she had nearly doubled her cultivation efficacy – after it, as she watched Chunhua walk ahead of her, she was sure the other woman’s gains had reached nearly four times what they had been before.

In comparison, her own cultivation was nowhere near as straightforward, she was coming to realise. The fortuitous opportunity they had just experienced was only highlighting this further as well. Her cultivation had, in effect, advanced far too fast compared to the actual arts the talisman told her in no uncertain terms were vital for her Core Formation.

She had made good progress with the first set of the ‘Eighteen Earthly Palms’; however, ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’ she had neglected, somewhat out of circumstantial necessity. She had also not focused as much on the second stage of ‘Heart Shifting Steps’, ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ for similar reasons. The talisman set it as the internal cog between ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’ and ‘Eighteen Earthly Palms’ but to her, it had been more useful as a divination art than a qi-intensive and frequently unusable movement art.

The end result was that since the battlefield, when she had started to focus more on ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’, it had just been a continual struggle to use. The signals she was getting from it were muted, or trended chaotic, even though she used it as instructed. It was also oddly draining and didn’t feel harmonious while she was using ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’ either.

The issue was not intractable, she was sure. Her best guess at this point was that she had spent too long thinking of the three aspects as independent things, rather than facets of a greater whole. Looking at the shifting currents of qi in the landscape in detail and how they moved with her ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’ had helped her determine that the issue lay to various degrees in her ability to interpret the signs the various divination aspects of the arts she was using provided.

Those that came with ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’ were actually the easiest at this point. If nothing else, as Lin Ling joked, she could make an excellent living as a feng shui expert on that alone if they ever got out of here. She also had little issue with the qi vision side of things, beyond occasional bouts of sensory overload and the risk of meridian stress.

The different aspects of the ‘Eighteen Earthly Palms’ Martial Form, beyond the individual arts, were very upfront about finding opportune places to land blows for maximum effect with minimum effort. She had already noted its synergy for archery in that regard and their occasional skirmishes with scavengers also showed little issue there and it integrated easily enough with Eighteen Earthly Palms.

The cultivation aspects were also comprehensively explained. Not all of it related to ‘Good Fortune’ and ‘auspicious aspects’ of the world around her, but much of the preparation for Core Formation itself did.

By comparison, she had learned ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ early, learned the focused divination part of it, then basically found her own way with it, because the movement art aspects were qi-intensive and unreliable in the jungle where their cultivation had come and gone like strange shadows in the night thanks to the ruins and anomalies.

She had hoped it was just a matter of spending time to match what ‘she’ knew with what the ‘talisman’ told her of the various signatures when the movement art and ocular art worked together; however, even when used explicitly as suggested and instructed, it was oddly draining and regularly felt inharmonious, leaving her with the feeling she was trying to juggle balls, see what was written on them and also bounce them on her head as well.

So, as they made their way onward, she spent her time looking for both the much-desired water source and also other unusual aspects of qi around her to train her grasp of those ‘intuitions’. In the process, she found that she was starting to become aware, slowly, that they were almost tracking shifting currents of qi in the soil below as they followed the trail. Unfortunately, the problem with her divination readings continued to persist even as her control got better. If anything, it started to get worse as more and more frequently her ‘known’, intuitive interpretations fit both arts, usually in different, jarring ways.

By the time Lin Ling waved from ahead and signed for them to come over, she had a terrible headache, and meridian stress again. She had, however, managed to make a few small inroads in perceiving the more cyclical aspects – the trees were just a part of a much greater cycle, linking earth, air and sky.

The interesting part there was that the trail they were following also seemed to be riding one of these flows – like a never-ending wave, surging across a vast ocean. She was picking up, had been picking up… was still mostly picking up, its trail where it was visible at the ‘crests’, but the ‘depths’ were truncated, only visible through the flowing ripple through the ground that displaced other qi – a slight absence and distortion of the natural path as it flowed.

“Are you okay?” Chunhua glanced at her with mild concern, presumably noting that her eyes were a bit bloodshot.

“Yeah, it’s just a strain pushing my arts so I am not going to suffer at Golden Core,” she replied.

She could keep up that pace of use for maybe an hour – a notable advance on before, thanks to the purification of her spirit root – before the accumulated meridian stress became too much, depending on how much the qi of the natural landscape undulated, which seemed to also have an impact on how obtuse the readings she got were. The strange ‘Red Phenomenon’ had not helped there, either, also working to mute the divinations that trended too far away from ‘chaotic oddness’.

“…”

Chunhua looked at her a trifle dubiously and she resisted sighing – complaining about divination arts was almost always self-defeating.

The water turned out to be a shallow pool in the back of a shallow fissure cave at the base of the broad cliff-edged fault they had arrived at. It was protected from the heat of the day by some sheltering vegetation above it and fed by several small streams flowing out of the rock.

It didn’t take long to clean up. However, it did take a while to return to looking vaguely like Ur’Vash. They had not encountered much of any forces, but there had been evidence of small trails both around this place and leading through various parts of the rock pavement grassland they were crossing.

“I guess we had so many impurities because we were relying on those pills to advance quickly?” Teng Chunhua mused as they sat in the entrance of the shallow cave.

She nodded, agreeing as she let herself unfocus for a few moments from wielding the two arts in succession, while trying not to look like she was genuinely jaded.

“How does your purified root work with your new…?” she hesitated for a moment. “You swapped out your law.”

“…”

“I am surprised you noticed,” Teng Chunhua said, not quite showing her surprise, but clearly she was a little.

“It shows in the efficiency of how qi moves around you,” she commented – there was little point in hiding that.

“Are we ready to move on?” Lin Ling asked, staring around the gully with a frown.

She nodded, standing up, thankful the headache had passed at least, with sitting and just letting her qi settle.

“Is something off?” she asked, watching as Lin Ling peered around again dubiously.

“I am not sure,” the younger woman frowned again. “I’ve been feeling a bit odd since this morning… I guess it might just be the aftereffects of that phenomenon.”

“It was rather unnerving,” she agreed.

{Bright Lotus Eyes}

Ignoring ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ and its second version, she looked around just with her qi-enhanced vision, watching the way the world shifted faintly. In the shadow of the cave, it was much easier to pick out motion and stillness. Quite a lot of things that hunted openly at night were opportunistic predators by day, and it occurred to her that this place has ‘serpents’ written all over it.

“See anything?” Lin Ling signed.

She looked a second time, the shook her head. Her qi vision allowed her to track both Lin Ling and Teng Chunhua’s presence even when they were suppressing their qi entirely, they had worked out the previous day. Only when Lin Ling used her vocal art was her ‘ability’ to see the younger woman finally blocked to the point where she could truly hide.

Near as they could tell, the reason for that was because her vision showed her disturbances to the ambient qi made by their physical presence – Lin Ling had said that the memories called it ‘Mana Sight’ and that while some species had it innately, it was uncommon to have it as a learnable method.

Chunhua could hide from her in the absolute peak of the midday sun, if she was absolutely motionless. They worked out that was because she had experienced some minor mutation of her Golden Core, where the ‘One with What Is’ symbol had partially imprinted itself onto her during her breakthrough. She was thus able to mask herself in yin fire qi in such a way as to erode the ‘sense’ of qi around her, making her form a blurry haze amid blurry yang haze.

After a third sweep, they headed off, leaving the shelter behind and returning to the rising heat of the morning sun to re-find the trail.

They pushed on until just after noon, when they took another break, because even Teng Chunhua was finding the ordeal faintly punishing. For herself, she just wanted to bury her head in ice after several on and off hours of wrestling with all the conflicting factors pressing down on her.

Their progress had slowed yet again in any case, because while the alignments were calming down from whatever happened in the morning, the trail they were following was being further diffused in the process. She had to focus a great deal on the minutiae of the details around her to pick up the distortions that marked the ‘absence’ of the trail where it periodically surfaced. Divinations by compass were next to useless as well, because the compass just tried to pull them either east or west, almost at random.

If there was a benefit, she reflected as she sat beneath a shaded tree by some rocks, sipping a bit of the cool water from a jar they had, it was that the enforced stress of the observations was shifting the way her body recognised qi patterns. It was brutal, but the more progress she made, particularly since her spirit root was transformed, the faster her body was able to absorb qi from her surroundings at least.

By contrast the movement art…

“Faugh…” she exhaled and stared randomly at the trail behind her and, for a brief moment, saw two serpents watching them quietly from about 200 metres distant.

She looked away as if she had seen nothing, and refocused on the world without using ‘Bright Lotus Eye’ or ‘Heart Shifting Steps’, grimacing at the sunglare as she did so. There was no sign of the serpents.

{Bright Lotus Eyes}

She quietly triggered it again and saw them still there, having not really moved from the shadow of the rocks they were hiding on the bright side of.

“There are two serpents behind us,” she signed at the same time as she stood up and sighed, saying, “Shall we get moving?”

Lin Ling narrowed her eyes, looking ‘randomly’ about, before looking in the general direction she had unobtrusively signalled.

“…”

Teng Chunhua also looked around, making a show of diligently scouting before they left, but also likely looking for them.

“They really can hide their soul presences almost as well as we can…” Lin Ling grimaced.

“I’m pretty sure they hunt in the same way that I can see stuff at this point,” she shrugged glumly. “No idea what realm or star grade they are, but they aren’t multi-headed and are only a few meters long based on the qi distortions around them.”

“What colour?” Lin Ling asked.

“Impossible to say with my qi vision at this distance in this landscape,” she grimaced, “but they didn’t even pause when the distortion from your soul sense just swept over them.”

“…”

“I still find it weird that you can actually see the passage of soul sense faintly, even if you can’t detect it at all,” Chunhua signed, giving her a sideways look.

“It has to do with the arts I got, I guess,” she said. That was the best explanation she could give really, because the talisman didn’t explain anything about that. “It still doesn’t help a lot, now that we know the limits of ‘One with What Is’.”

“True,” Chunhua grimaced, while Lin Ling just looked at them both sideways.

“So where?” Lin Ling signed.

“200 metres out, by the rocks. I’ll signal when they strike, because I don’t think we will get anywhere chasing them,” she explained.

They stared around for a short while longer, but the serpents made no move until they started off again across the undulating landscape. Now she really did get a headache quickly, because not only was she tracking the forward trail, but she had to grow eyes in the back of her head to watch the two serpents.

If she really pushed it, ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’ could double as a straight up perception bubble that allowed her to grasp everything in a full circle around her, but only at a distance of maybe 30 metres or so. It was also hideously qi-intensive, to the point where she found herself constantly consuming spirit herbs like she was some addict to keep her qi topped off. Even then, she was fairly sure she could not maintain it for long, maybe 20-25 minutes.

After another 20 minutes of walking the serpents finally decided that the auspicious time to attack them was now and both shot forward… for her, of course, at a speed that made her rapidly judge them to be at least Nascent Soul, if not higher.

Diving for the nearest rock was all the warning the other two needed as the serpents, both coloured somewhere between deep-grey and purple-black shot out of the grass at her, fangs extended.

{Kun Overturns the Waters}

She tried to sweep one out of the way with the swordstaff, but it just flowed effortlessly around her use of the art, lunging for her neck—

“Stop!”

The soft shout from Lin Ling made it freeze in mid-air. Capitalising on the opening, she cut at its head directly, straining against the resistance of her surroundings. She was sure Ling had tried to exclude her, but even so, it felt like pushing through thick mud. She could see its reaction as well, following her strike as it slowly slid out of the way, resisting the constraining power within whatever Ling had done.

{Kun Overturns the Waves}

She adjusted her aim subtly, shifting from sword-staff form to spear form and after a few seconds finally connected the blade to the serpent’s side, pushing it through as she shifted back in a cutting motion with her whole body.

{Kun Splits the Waves}

Tearing the blade up, fighting the resistance every bit of the way, she twisted into a vicious downward cut with the blade, half decapitating the second one.

{Kun Breaks-

Before she could finish spinning the blade over to attack the one she had sliced open initially, the pressure they were putting on the freezing power finally overwhelmed it and the serpent she had just beheaded hit her with its tail so fast she never even saw it move.

She hit the rocky ground 20 metres away, feeling her shattered ribs reform under the healing strength of her mantra, even as the beheaded serpent twisted on the spot to face her and grew a new head—

It was a fraction too slow getting out of the way, because Lin Ling arrived like a ghost, stamping down on its head, flattening it to the ground while lashing out at the other with a blue-stone blade she had looted from a corpse on the battlefield where they found this trail.

The serpent spun away and, at the same time, the serpent trapped by Ling twisted bizarrely and its head somehow became its tail as its tail now turned into its head, snapping not at her but at the potentially softer target of Teng Chunhua, who had also drawn a blade of red and black jasper and was also striking for it.

Inhaling, she rolled to her feet just in time to find the second serpent shooting towards her, travelling across the top of the grass somehow. She skipped back, cursing yet again the strange, twisted and inauspicious feeling ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ now seemed to be perpetually stuck with that was interfering with everything-

The third serpent struck from behind in that instant of her inner distraction, even as she wondered how she could ‘see’ it but ‘not’ at the same time, even though it was coming straight for her…?

-Qi distortion?

She cancelled ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’ entirely and both serpents in her vision ‘shifted’ position slightly in her view. Swinging the butt of her spear up directly just as she tried to intuit through ‘Heart Shifting steps’ what might be going-

“STOP!”

This yell from Lin Ling was much louder.

In that instant she had been about to use her ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ to go backwards…

Frozen as she was, she was afforded a disturbingly long period of time to consider again that the faint nudge she got from it was both muted and wasn’t quite as it should be.

Barely able to turn her head, she looked behind her and caught a shadow of a fourth serpent, frozen in space about two metres behind her, her vision seeing strange double signatures now as she tried to re-focus on them with ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’, finding that the third and fourth serpents were there and not at the same time.

Looking back, the serpent attacking Lin Ling and Chunhua was there, as was the one that had flicked her over to the side in the first instant… but both forms were weird.

Turning her head back, she stared at the ones attacking her and it clicked, as she managed to cycle ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’ again. The ‘real’ bodies were attacking her, while phantasmal bodies were going after Lin Ling and Teng Chunhua. The confusing point was that the real bodies were invisible to her ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’, had no qi and appeared to have nothing like a ‘soul signature’.

-Are they using some sort of distorting camouflage that affects their real bodies but not the illusionary ones?

Replaying the battle while she remained frozen as Lin Ling did something her perception was unable to track, she felt a chill in her heart.

-They manipulated this whole ambush just to separate me from Ling and Chunhua?

-Because I could see their ‘clones’ while they snuck up on us?

That was far more predatory strategizing than she was comfortable with in qi beasts out for their blood. As a strategy it was a good one too – Lin Ling and Teng Chunhua were fighting what amounted to indestructible clones as near as she could see, because they had no soul to injure and were just regenerating physical manifestations of qi.

She tried to move a bit more, but found she was thoroughly stuck now. Whatever exclusion Ling had used before was no longer in effect. The serpents had effectively made her waste that opportunity then promptly separated her from the others. As she watched now, the slow-motion combat continued to unfold as two snake-shaped holes in the world moved towards her, while another bit at Teng Chunhua who was apparently unaware of it and the other was preparing to strike Lin Ling-

The stopping sensation vanished and she immediately threw herself forward, before darting to the side as the motion around her sped up rapidly and a tail hissed through the space she had just been.

{Bright Heart Shifting Steps}

She tried to dart to the right side, using the movement art and again got a weird, inauspicious resistance as the combined art-

-Left? Again there was a sort of twisting.

-Backwards?

-Nothing?

In that split second she gambled and felt something blur past her, narrowly missing-

She darted forward, and again got a twisted feeling. She went right and now felt something drawing her in, which was almost as strange… She went left again and got ‘nothing’, only muted confusion.

Grimacing, she picked left—

Her own paranoia made her go right, rather than left, and was bizarrely vindicated when the serpent appeared almost from nowhere snapping on thin air where her head would have been. It did at least clear up what she was ‘experiencing’ with the inauspicious and auspicious feelings though – it was somehow feeding her information about the best direction to move at any one time.

‘Heart Shifting Steps’ had done that before, but that had been couched much more as a form of walking divination, requiring interpretation and leading you along threads that joined one to another in the process. This was a reduction down to bare basics, no continuity, just singular, opaque bursts of shifting intuition. They did not have the framing of ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ or the visual acuity of what came from ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’ and when combined with the fuzz on all her divinations, it made the output hard enough to read in the current circumstances that it might actually anger her to death before a serpent killed her.

Her hunch was that there was also another layer in there, but she didn’t have time to go back and stare at its rather esoteric second chapter, which was very light on explicit explanation compared to anything else in the talisman she had yet seen.

She picked right again, and didn’t complain this time as an invisible snake barely missed her arm, all the while Lin Ling and Teng Chunhua battled it out with two ‘fakes’.

“Those aren’t real!” she yelled to them, only to find that she could make no sound.

-Although the trouble I might be in if I ever get out of here is, she thought grimly, having a ‘hunch’ now about why this art was so truculent. These kinds of divination arts, with aspects of ‘active foresight’ are among the most sought-after there are.

The sort of visible serpents in her Bright Lotus Eyes, which was now putting enough strain on her meridians that she was concerned it would cause a deviation, given the sustained use she had put on the three arts, showed her that their absent forms were making strange rhythmic flickering motions…

-Their tails?

Both those invisible shadows were circling her, even as the ‘visible’ ones all now piled on Lin Ling and Teng Chunhua. With some concern, she saw that their passage did not disturb a single blade of grass in an unnatural way.

As soon as one passed out of her field of view, she thought about which way to dodge, got nothing and wondered if it was...

-Crouch or jump?

-This is going to get me killed just having to think about movements before I do them, she complained inwardly as she got a marginally better feeling from ‘crouch’.

{Bright Lotus Eyes: Field of Vision}

Both lashed at her simultaneously and, rather disturbingly, she noted that they didn’t aim to ‘hit’ her when they missed.

-Because that would make me behave in a way that draws the attention of the others?

Both Ling and Chunhua were still battling the very ‘real’ yet absolutely ‘unreal’ snakes some 20 metres away.

-Why are they not even looking in this direction?

With that ominous thought, she focused more thoroughly on the qi field from ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’, wincing as her qi continued to haemorrhage out from her, only to find that a second version of her was standing there shooting arrows at the illusionary serpents and doing various things to contribute that she would have typically done – even her arrows held a sort of crude copy of the way ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ helped their aim.

-They are capable of illusions and obfuscation of this calibre? She sweated.

Reaching for her spear, she found it not in her storage talisman and suddenly wanted to scream in anger as she saw it lying some 20 metres beyond where the serpents were blocking her. Presumably that was where it had landed when she was knocked flying.

Grimacing, she pulled a core from her talisman to try to recover some qi as she watched the snakes circle, feinting again and again, trying to bamboozle her even more. Abruptly, one shot in with immense speed, fast to the point where it was quicker than her thoughts, aiming right for her arm-

-Right! It passed a hair’s breath from her—

She barely managed to throw herself flat as it went sideways in mid-air without any sensation of ‘turning’, as if the planes of motion were not a thing it needed to adhere to.

The other serpent went for her, but she was already thinking about the directions this time and went forwards, closing off the angle between her and it, evading both its strike and the strike from the other that shot in from behind.

The serpents swung their heads in the air and, before her tormented eyes, the distortions intensified, making it hard for her to focus on them as her gaze slid away. In the same instant, the qi inside whatever was isolating her from the others turned sluggish, further hampering her in that illusionary silence.

-Spear, need spear! She cursed, noting it was still 20 metres away.

Both serpents were absolutely working to stay between her, Lin and Chunhua as well. That distance had opened up to almost 30 metres now, abetted by the illusionary her which had drawn illusionary blood on the unreal serpent, which was feigning injury now and retreating, widening the gap even more.

She saw Lin Ling call to her illusionary clone that they were blocking soul sense somehow. Her illusionary clone affirmed back somehow, which made her sweat even harder,

-Just how good at illusions are these nameless-sent serpents?

She evaded again, grimacing at how much qi it took. This time she was almost too slow as well, as the miniscule, chaotic warnings of bad directions played with her cruelly.

-Talismans? She considered what she had, but she barely had the spare mental space to devote to it.

She pulled a cheap one out, even as Lin Ling destroyed half a serpent’s body with a flash of yang qi only for it to reform from the other half and redouble its efforts, otherwise unfazed by the ‘injury’.

Dodging again, she tried to use the talisman only to find the serpents actually double baited her, forcing her off from three angles then hitting her sideways with contemptuous ease, obliterating the ‘talisman’ in the same attack-

She rolled over the other one, ignoring the bad ‘good’ feeling she got and screamed in silence as a serpent bit her in the right arm, clearly aiming for her talisman.

The venom was horrifying: it burned her flesh and tried to sear her meridians. She pushed her mantra to try to fight against it, even as her qi resisted, but there was nothing she could do, she realised as an alien strength that slipped past everything carried the yin fire qi deep into her core like there were no obstacles.

-Burn in sin-fire, nine-generations damned thing! She wailed in her heart as she realised, with mounting terror, that the venom held a ‘Principle’.

Within it, or maybe using it as a vehicle, came a vicious, active soul attack.

{One with What Is}

She had sort of been using the visualisation method all along, but now she called that up directly, making it more prominent within her body. Between that, her mantra and the symbol, the soul intent within the venom was blunted, barely.

In that instant, she used her mantra to puppet her body to a degree, accepting the pain and diving for her spear. The two serpents, which had backed off after biting her, actually stood there in shock for a second she fancied.

-Hah, Yama-blind things! You probably expected me to just keel over in agony? This daughter has been poisoned by that yang blood, she sneered in her heart.

The two serpents recovered and shot after her, easily catching up before she had made it even half the distance.

She darted left and then right, arriving within 10 meters, at which point the only ‘auspicious’ direction was backwards, away from the weapon.

Snarling with anger, she dodged forwards and was rewarded with a second bite… well, two bites actually – on both legs no less. One even managed to connect with one of her outer meridian channels, directly injecting a stream of paralytic white-hot Yin Fire qi into her.

Only sheer bloody-mindedness and the fact that she had endured her share of such horrible pain before kept her going forward. Even so, her mantra pulsed, drawing vital qi from her bones to fight the venom directly somehow.

{Bright Heart Shifting Steps}

Screaming silently, she pushed much of her remaining qi into the movement art and threw herself across the last 5 metres.

Both snakes were still biting her, no longer injecting venom, instead using all their formidable strength to just lock her in place. Unfortunately for them, they didn’t have much in the way of teeth other than their fangs, which weren’t locked around bone, so she actually tore free due to the unleashed inertia, leaving bloody rents in her legs and tattered flesh in their mouths, grasping the spear.

They arrived beside her moments later, mouths agape, trying to dislodge a disturbingly large portion of her left thigh and right calf from their mouths.

Weighing up her options, she found she could barely stand now – her qi was finally losing the fight against the venom and she had no time to find the right pill in her storage talisman to try to counteract it either. Grabbing a spirit-mending pill, she ate that instead, wincing as the surging vitality interacted badly with the venom even as it bolstered her draining qi.

-A curse on the pills all being less useful! she complained in her heart, swallowing down the rest of the bottle to give her a bit of extra qi as its restorative effect bolstered her meridian channels, giving her precious few extra moments of movement before she ruptured a meridian.

-Even with the purification, she grimaced as the nearest serpent shook her flesh free of its fangs and lunged for her.

For a brief moment, she considered aiming for it with the spear, then changed her mind as those ‘intuitions’ all went very weird, almost as if they had just been made too prominent. Instead, she changed tack completely and with a single bound, carried herself past the two serpents and then threw the spear straight at Lin Ling’s head with as much intention to hit her as she could muster.

All she could do now was trust to the nature of Lin Ling’s Principle…

The serpents tried to hit her with their coils as they moved; however, they were now left with an awkward problem: abandon her to get the spear and let her move freely, or stop her moving freely and let Lin Ling realise something was very wrong, because the illusionary her shooting arrows from the other side of them happily had ‘recovered’ her spear a while ago.

In the end, they decided to kill her, likely trusting to their strength to overwhelm Ling and Chunhua’s ability to respond, while the nearest illusionary serpent wavered and shot over towards the blade-

Lin Ling vanished and reappeared beside the swordstaff, grasping it in the same moment they turned on her.

Both attacked her with their jaws, arriving around her in a snaring web of coils and fangs, even as she continued to dash towards Lin and Chunhua-

Lin Ling, seeing everything now, didn’t even bother to cut with the sword-staff; she simply howled something – words that made the world turn to frosted glass and the shatter into a million shards.

Everything except Lin Ling was suddenly locked in place, Juni noted, frozen as if she was welded to the shattered fragments of the world around her.

As she watched, Lin Ling stalked through the silence of the frozen space, warping the destroyed barrier, arriving in the region of their combat. As she went, the younger woman plucked the sword-staff out of the air and impaled the first ‘invisible’ serpent through the head, half destroying it and plucking a core with a faint lustre of stars straight out from the bloody mess at the base of its skull. Turning, she then decapitated the second with a backhand slash and also recovered that core, which held the same strange lustre.

The illusions twitched, shimmered and warped, dissipating abruptly after Lin Ling did something to the first core.

-Not illusions… materialized Immortal Souls?!?! She stared dully at the core, which was certainly either a quasi-8th grade or a genuine 8th grade Immortal core.

That meant that their perceived indestructibility was in fact just an artefact of their humongous qi pools.

The world stilled, the fractured glass texture of ruined reality around her melted away, and she collapsed to the ground, breathing hard, bleeding badly and desperately fighting the Yin Poison.

“Easy…” Lin Ling crouched down beside her, passing her a bottle of high grade poison-neutralising pills for Yin Fire.

She took them with shaking hands and swallowed down a good half dozen, gagging slightly as they ravaged her insides and neutralised the remains of the poison forcibly.

A quick inspection of her body made her wince, even if the damage was not as bad as it appeared.

Her meridians had not properly ruptured, a thing she could only attribute to the earlier good fortune of purifying them. They were, however, badly bruised.

She had a splitting headache and the numbness around her face that told her that her ocular meridians were going to be on strike. She could still see, but using ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’ for a while was going to be impossible.

Her physical body was testing the limits of what a physical cultivator could endure – she was bleeding badly, both within and without. Her mantra was limiting the damage from organ shock, but she was having to focus on supplying qi to repair the soft tissue damage in both legs.

She was still considering that when the direct effects of her deliberate overdose of the purification pills kicked in and she rolled over, vomiting them and quite a lot of horrid coloured blood and stomach lining out onto the ground.

“I’ve changed my mind…” she rasped. “Those sludge rocks are not the most obnoxious qi beast I have ever encountered.”

“Yeah…” Lin Ling nodded grimly, helping her up.

“Were… those Immortal manifestations?” Teng Chuhhua, who had come over, was looking at the cores in Lin Ling’s hand.

“Yep, or something very close to it,” she nodded weakly.

“Immortal soul manifestation,” Teng Chunhua stared at the serpents again and then kicked one viciously.

She would have laughed, or joined her, were she able. In truth, now, all she could do was lie on the ground staring up at the sky, breathing shallowly and trying to think happy pleasant thoughts as her mantra did its thing and her body recovered. It was slow, relatively speaking, and really quite painful. The ‘poison’ had been neutralised, but the serpents’ qi, of an Immortal realm monster or close to it, was still trying to ruin her body.

“Do you want a mending pill?” Lin Ling asked her, looking worried.

“No…” she shook her head. “My meridians are badly dented.”

Lin Ling just nodded, before again looking at the cores in her hand. “I think they were using some kind of suppressing principle?”

She nodded again. “They were able to eliminate sound around me, and you said something about soul sense?”

“Ambush predators,” Lin Ling sighed, sitting down as Teng Chunhua started to carefully take the skin off the first serpent with one of the green-red stone knives she had picked up from one of the battlefields.

“In any case,” she noted, managing to sit up as the numbness eased, “that’s not the kind of intelligence of strength of principle I’m comfortable with in a snake type qi beast out here.”

“Preach that Dao,” Teng Chunhua muttered.

“Uh… Ling?” she asked after a moment… “Did you teleport?”

“…”

Teng Chunhua nodded. “I was just going to ask that…”

Lin Ling looked… pensive. “Kind of. Very short range blinks are all I can do, and that is because the memories have certain comprehensions and can show me how to move my qi. I also have to consume the unrefined yang blood, because my comprehensions of spatial intent and principles is non-existent.”

“How?” Teng Chunhua frowned.

“The memories have spatial attainments,” Lin Ling shrugged. “Not to mention the words I can use do as well in a few cases. However, it costs a vast quantity of my qi. I think I used nearly a third of all I had to travel those 10 metres …”

“Oh….” Chunhua stared at her dully. “Wait… you can teleport but we can’t fly?”

“Yes…” Lin Ling nodded. “At least not as you are thinking of ‘flight’. In truth I’d doubt teleportation without talismans had I not seen the Ur’Vash do their trick.”

She nodded in agreement, as did Chunhua – that had been impressive, also very disturbing, but certainly impressive.

“In any case, the serpents here were basically Immortal realm qi beasts,” Lin Ling sighed, considering the cores again. “That snake… when it really went for you at the end, was faster than my fastest speed now. That was why I risked teleporting when you threw the blade.”

“Yeah…” she nodded, still sweating a bit over that speed and their effortless evasion and toying with her divination art.

-Who am I kidding, she added bitterly in her own head, I’m not even Golden Core and complaining about an Immortal realm monster?

“They toyed with me,” she sighed disconsolately. “I am not even sure how I survived, even if I did manage to work out a bit of how the second chapter works on that movement art from the talisman. Had they not decided to play with their food for some reason, I’d be dead right now.”

It was a very sobering thought.

-How long were they following us? Was the other even more sobering one. Certainly long enough to know our attack patterns and be able to mimic me well enough…

“I’ve been meaning to ask you that, actually…” Lin Ling frowned. “Especially since it could see through what I did very crudely with the ancient tongue to hide myself that time, which frankly is more impressive than teleporting in its own way…”

Chunhua nodded. “You have been muttering away about something ever since the second battlefield…”

She grimaced, feeling awkward suddenly, but also just… tired. “I’ll show you, but it will have to wait until my meridians no longer feel like they want to walk off and become another person.”

“Hah!” Lin Ling nodded, running a hand through her blonde hair and twisting it for a moment.

“I can explain it…” she trailed off, looking at both of them who had expressions of interested concern. “But if I am right, if someone outside here gets a grip on what I think this movement art actually is…? We are probably all dead without knowing what killed us.”

“That could be said for several things we seem to have acquired,” Chunhua pointed out. “Starting with ‘One with What Is’.

“Oh… this is worse,” she sighed.

“That visualisation technique was hiding us from Golden Immortals…” Teng Chunhua pointed out, which was quite reasonable.

She wondered how to explain it in easy terms. ‘One with What Is’ was valuable, yes, but somehow she was sure it was not as valuable as what ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ represented, because surely she had only scratched the surface of it.

“Well… this art just kept me alive with those two quasi-Immortal realm snakes,” she pointed out. “Yes, I had other advantages, but basically, this is a movement art with predictive properties that would let a Qi Refinement cultivator run away from a Dao Seeking one so long as they had qi to do so – and that’s with my comprehensions of it after a few weeks. You tell me that’s not something any sect, clan or even rogue cultivator would not go monkey balls over.”

“When you put it like that...” Lin Ling nodded pensively. “By the way, did you ever say what the talisman’s ‘cultivation’ art was called? I don’t have a recollection of it.”

“I don’t think so,” she frowned as well, thinking back. “I did talk about it, but no… I’ve never referred to it by name… ‘Bright Lotus Earthly Scripture’.”

“…”

Lin Ling’s slightly weird expression told her immediately that the memories she had ‘knew’ at least something of the cultivation art at least.

“I, Lin Ling, swear an oath upon the five elders of the first day never to divulge any secret of Kun Juni’s cultivation arts to anyone without her express, unduplicitous and fully willing permission,” Lin Ling said softly after a further moment’s pause.

“…”

Before Lin Ling could even turn to her, Teng Chunhua also sighed and nodded, then repeated the oath.

As they both did so, suddenly 5 flowers bloomed in a circle around each of them: a golden Peony, a 5 coloured Lotus, a Purple Chrysanthemum, a pink and gold Cherry Blossom and a white and black Lily-like flower. The flowers dispersed into motes of light and flowed into all three of them.

“Your memories were that concise huh?” she said, trying not to be surprised. “What did the memories show you?”

“Enough…” Lin Ling said a trifle cryptically. “This ‘movement’ art, is it called Bright Heart Shifting Steps?”

“….”

Now she really did stare before nodding.

“Well, let’s get this crap cleaned up,” Lin Ling sighed, looking at the serpent corpses, “We can talk about it as we do that – unless either of you feel like eating snake kebab for the next ten weeks, I can use the flesh to replenish the supply of yang blood.”

Shaking herself, she nodded again, more slowly, and pulled herself to her feet, still wondering what Lin Ling had been shown or told. It was kind of unnerving and she could see that Teng Chunhua felt the same way.

“Fair enough,” she agreed, wincing with lingering pain as they started to tidy up the corpses.

Teng Chunhua had already mostly skinned one, and it didn’t take her long to get the majority of the skin off the other. With their cores removed, the corpses themselves would have stored in her talisman, even if she started to run into issues with the way its space was organised.

“I’d almost forgotten that the bureau talismans are developed to make storing corpses hard,” she grumbled, as she started to chop up her one with the sword-staff and put the chunks in one of the large jars for Lin Ling.

“That’s why I have a storage ring,” Teng Chunhua sighed. “I am surprised neither of you two do.”

“Family politics,” Lin Ling grunted.

“…”

She just nodded – she should have had one, but the person within the clan who handled such things supported her cousin, who had taken over the mantle of ‘successor’ within this generation of the Kun clan when it was revealed that her spirit root was insufficient for the clan’s ‘destiny’.

-I wonder what they would say if they saw what I have now…

“They were not willing to fork out for a soul-bound one before I hit Nascent Soul,” Lin Ling added.

“Same,” she agreed. “The politics of successors is never inwardly polite. I have been looking for one since we got here, but most of those pre-Nascent Soul storage rings that they give wealthy scions early on are bound by sects and even the normal ones from higher realm cultivators we might use in the future at Soul Foundation are bound securely – not as much as the Bureau’s talismans, but still such that I don’t know if I’d want to risk looting one.”

“To change the topic slightly,” Lin Ling said, adding one of the remaining jars of yang blood, which Teng Chunhua had had for arrows, to a pot of the snake meat. “Chunhua, you have a fire-wood root, don’t you?”

“I do…” Chunhua acknowledged. “It’s a bit weird now though, after the purification from that etheric dew as you called it.”

“I won’t ask what your mantra is… but when ‘One with What Is’ associated itself with your core, did your mantra mutate?”

~ Teng Chunhua – A Day of Adjustment ~

She stared at the younger woman, glad that her mantra had indeed shifted, although calling it a mutation was perhaps an exaggeration, because the mnemonics themselves had not changed, still reading ‘Sweet. Bloom. Red. Blossom. Jade.’

It was an awkwardly personal question as well, although Lin Ling had prefaced it by acknowledging she wasn’t asking about her mantra mnemonics explicitly.

“Sort of?” she hazarded after a long pause. “Its attunement to my vital qi shifted somewhat and the markings associated with it-”

“Did they form a wave lattice or an eye-like lattice?” Lin Ling asked, turning to look at her.

“…”

-How by the nameless fates do you know to ask!?! she wanted to ask, but really, in her heart she suspected that the answer would just be ‘memories’.

Recovering her inner composure, she also had to acknowledge that she got the visualisation art from Lin Ling in the first place, so clearly the younger woman would know some things regarding it…

-Although she made no mention of anything like it before, she reflected.

“Eye-like lattice,” she said after a further pause, mostly because she was staring at the strange symbols criss-crossing her slightly mutated core to see.

They were also reflected on her bones, merging with the other patterns that formed naturally, of leaves and flowers. The lattice was also in her Sea of Knowledge, the mnemonics for ‘One with What Is’ starting to merge into it thanks to the changes wrought by the parasol qi.

“My mantra has a closer link to Yin Qi,” she added after a moment’s further thought.

The attunement changes were a trifle unnerving, truth be told – mutation of a word in your mantra could happen around the point when you moved from Mantra Seed to Soul Meridians. The text that her family had acquired long ago regarding that, associated with their own mantra, talked a bit about the common mutations of words and also other mutations that might occur – attunement mutation was more common in acquired mantras rather than inherited ones, but usually it was slight, focused on an element or a specific intent. For her to get a flat shift towards yin… was, according to what she knew, very uncommon.

-Did Lin Ling get a flat shift towards Yang? she wondered suddenly.

“…”

Lin Ling stared at her long enough to make her feel slightly uneasy, before then asking. “What grade is your core?”

She frowned, not so much because the question bothered her, although it was a bit personal, if inconsequential compared to prying about her mantra, but because she was wondering where this was going now.

“Uh… sorry, that was rude,” Lin Ling looked apologetic suddenly, and she realised her long silence had been taken as displeasure over the question. “What I am getting at is that the memories have a bunch of ways to advance… improve aspects of cultivation, like mantras and mana cores, and make use of them,” Lin Ling explained. “I should have started with that. The uh… never mind, sorry, it was rude.”

She waved away the apology, accepting it, because that acknowledgement was… she hesitated to say surprising, that sort of undersold it really.

“The methods depend on the quality of your… core,” Lin Ling frowned. “The higher the quality, the harder it is to shift its quality.”

“…”

-You know methods to shift the quality of qi cores? she echoed dully in her own head, again very glad she had her mantra to help mask her emotional shock over that.

To her left, Juni, who was also watching, appeared equally shocked. The other woman was a different kind of enigma.

Turning her gaze inwards, she considered her core, spinning in her dantian, linking through her Nascent Soul and her Sea of Knowledge – more so than she had expected in fact, because the mutation from ‘One with What Is’ had actually helped there. It had somehow provided a means for the Spiritual Cultivation and her Physical Cultivation to further synchronise. Her child-like Nascent Soul now had a robe that reflected that eye-like pattern as well.

“My core is mid-grade,” she said after another long pause as she dumped a bunch of butchered snake meat into the large pot. “It was silver-gold, and with the influence of the parasol qi, gained a hint of green to go with the red and umber corona it had before.”

“Ah yes, there was that,” Lin Ling frowned. “You both got caught up in that?”

“Yep,” Juni grimaced. “I didn’t get any weird mutations from it.”

She considered her dantian again, which still had lingering traces of the parasol qi lurking in it. The qi mists occasionally manifested little golden parasol flowers in the spiral of her refinement between her qi core, her Nascent Soul and the swirling sea of liquid qi in her dantian. They had also integrated with the purification of her spirit root earlier, which was why she had been able to take more drops than Juni, she guessed.

“Done!” Juni said a bit wearily, putting the last of her serpent into the pot and distracting them both from that matter.

Looking around the battlefield, all that remained was the bloody stain and the bones.

“What about the bones?” she added.

“…”

“Store them,” Lin Ling mused after a moment. “When the blood saturates we can add them and it will help."

In the end, that fell to her, and her storage ring gained a pile of bloody serpent bones. Afterwards, Lin Ling burned the area with some yang qi, almost making it look like the serpents had died from a tribulation, and they set off again.

They walked on for about ten minutes, searching this way and that for the trail of the group they were following, before Lin Ling finally spoke again.

“Do either of you have a blank jade slip?” the younger woman managed to look both annoyed and apologetic at the same time, adding, “A certain bastard threw all mine down a bottomless pit.”

Juni sighed and shook her head. “I only have a scrip, which I take it isn’t what you need.”

“It is not,” Lin Ling agreed.

She did, in fact, have several – they were useful for recording things from missions or making maps. It had been a toss-up between getting a storage ring and getting a scrip for her, and the storage ring had been cheaper thanks to the willingness of the Teng School to subvert the pavilion’s influence by supplying such artefacts to affiliated pavilion hunters who also worked with the school.

“I have a few,” she spoke up, passing her a small, palm-sized piece of specially prepared jade.

“Thanks!” Ling smiled and took the jade slip. The other girl’s bright smile made her feel… weird, happy, and thankful and also projected a certain confidence.

A reminder, as if she needed one, that the younger woman was still getting used to her ‘principle’ and that the manner in which she had formed it meant that her control was… variable.

As they walked on again, Juni staring at the landscape as if it had offended her nine generations, she watched for a bit as Lin Ling started to push her qi and some soul sense into the jade, before turning her own attention back to the surroundings.

Of the three, she was the only one who had to rely on ‘normal’ means: qi perception and soul sense. Lin Ling being better was a reflection of her superior realm, and the girl had already had terrifying senses when she was a Mantra Seed cultivator, that she had come to accept, in a weird way. However, the fact that Juni, who was now two whole realms below her, had, in her own way, better senses than she did was occasionally weird.

That was especially true for how the other woman seemed able to feel ‘Soul Intent’, the foundation of soul sense at her current realm. It occasionally led her to wonder if Juni had grasped some element of ‘Soul Intent’ somehow, using her Mantra. She was sure the other woman was also at Mantra Seed, but Juni had never actually acknowledged it, as Lin Ling had, and in a way she was even harder to read than Lin Ling was.

There was a faint shadow of depth to the qi around Juni that now that she had seen those golden flowers, been touched by them as well, just as the other two had, she was starting to wonder if the other woman’s cultivation art was also somehow associated with the origins of those flowers as well.

-We did find that strange shrine behind the waterfall… she mused, sweeping her soul sense carefully through the grass behind them to complement Lin Ling’s occasional sweeps as she continued to work on the jade slip.

They walked on in near silence for another hour like that. Conversation was not easy anyway, given Lin Ling was concentrating on the slip and sweeping with her soul sense, Juni had to devote a vast amount of concentration to following the ‘trail’ and she was… left to fill in the gaps, basically.

It wasn’t a role she begrudged, although it was a strange one to find herself in, more used as she was to being the one leading rather than led. Juni seemed to have the same issue, although she again hid it very well, being supportive of Lin Ling, who was certainly the least experienced of any of them.

The landscape around them also started to change again, the scrub-strewn rock pavement with its rolling upheavals giving way to proper grassland again. They encountered no more serpents, thankfully. She could only assume that the fierce glare and heat of the zenith of the day was too much for them. The three of them were only doing as well as they were due to their mantras, she was sure, and the degree of acclimatisation afforded by years working in the valleys and the west shadow forest.

“The trail is going vague again,” Juni stopped on a shallow rise, looking weary again.

She stared around, looking for the edges of it and basically got nothing. There was a faint shifting aura of disturbance here and there, but if she didn’t know that it was the cultivators, she would have thought it an animal trail for a small pack of the horned jaguar or something.

Looking up, she was glad she had taken to binding a cloth across her face, because the noonday sun was somehow even more vicious than usual.

“Maybe we can find somewhere to stop for an hour and recuperate?” she suggested, shifting her bow from one shoulder to the other. “It’s near mid-day after all; it’s doubtful any large band of cultivators is going to make any kind of time in this climate.”

“Yeah,” Lin Ling grimaced, looking to the west again for some reason.

“Sounds… good,” Juni agreed, putting her hand to her forehead in the manner of someone very unhappy with their headache.

“I should have this jade slip done by the time we prepare something,” Lin Ling added, going over to sit by a rock.

She considered the other two and sighed inwardly. Juni was poking around for somewhere to make a small, smokeless fire, so she sat on a rock to sort out some spirit herbs and a few scavenged bits of meat to cook on it, along with some very crude energising tea. The resources they had from the various Ur’Vash settlements were surprisingly varied in that regard – the Grass Stalkers had, however, been quite big on hallucinogenic plants and making tea out of them was not really something she wanted to do by accident out here.

By the time she had dealt with that, in-between keeping a periodic eye on their surroundings, Juni had made the fire in a hidden, sheltered area between two sets of rocks and even cleared some space for them to sit.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked, because the other woman looked like death, literally. Her face was tired and a bit drawn and her eyes had a slightly glassy look.

“Yeah… it’s just hard work,” Juni sighed, pouring herself a cup of water then passing her the jug.

She took it, noting it had several water attribute cores from Ajara in the bottom, and poured herself cup, taking small sips to refresh herself.

“The trail keeps coming and going, and on this rock pavement the residual traces are rapidly dispersed given how… hostile it is to retaining qi,” Juni went on.

“It is,” she agreed.

She had noted that property a while back. It came and went, but the weathered grey-blue stone was very resistant to outside qi, to the point where she would have to properly focus to make her qi permeate even a small pebble.

“It looks like it’s the same kind of rock that they made those ruins on the battlefield out of.”

“It’s not quite the same,” Lin Ling sighed, coming over and sitting down, passing her the jade. “However, they have a common origin.”

“You will want to read that carefully, then use the various methods within,” Lin Ling said to her, as she gratefully accepted the water jug. “As for the vocabulary… I’ve tried to make it align with Eastern Azure’s, but my knowledge of the specifics of spiritual cultivation above Golden Core is not that good.”

Nodding, she swept her sense into the slip and then just stared…

“This is…” she looked back at Lin Ling dully.

“It’s the best I could do,” Lin Ling smiled faintly.

“Now you’re just messing with me,” she scowled, watching the faint traces of the younger girl’s principle shift.

“Drat, my control is still lacking,” Lin Ling giggled.

“…”

She shook her head and stared back at the knowledge in the slip, which was beyond anything she had expected. There were three main ‘sections’ – the one relating to mantras was surprising enough, because it held a few things only ‘inheritors’ should know, and Lin Ling was certainly not one, but it was the bits on ‘Mystic Meridians’ and ‘Mana Cores’ that really held her attention.

There was also a smaller summary of information about ‘Etheric Dew’. Skimming that, she hissed out loud and looked back at Lin Ling.

“This is nearly priceless you know that?” she said at last.

“I suppose to us on Eastern Azure it is,” Lin Ling agreed. “However, to the memories this is just acquired knowledge, nothing at all mysterious about it."

“…”

“Yes I agree, their view of the world is a bit weird at times,” Lin Ling agreed with a chuckle.

She nodded wholeheartedly with that assessment, before turning back to consider what was written there, and what changes had occurred in her body of late. Her spirit root had been a pretty good fire-wood hybrid one, even before the ‘Etheric Dew’ got involved. Her ability to marginally perceive her spirit root was the most obvious change it had brought about, but the text now sitting in her mind’s eye actually allowed her to comprehend just how much the quality had changed.

The short term effects were still settling it seemed, but the purity of her qi as it now existed was largely down to her upgraded spirit root.

Her innate affinity towards natural qi had been transformed, allowing her to draw in more fundamental aspects per cycle and more easily refine and incorporate the sympathetic ones into her body. When combined with the mantra it was an almost farcically huge increase in her body’s ability to refine and catalyse qi, even beyond what she had originally thought.

It also explained her own headaches, so to speak, although they were not anywhere near as frustrating as what Juni seemed to be experiencing following the trail. Juni had, she noticed, actually gone to lie down on a rock, her eyes shut, arms out-stretched, a damp cloth covering her face. The purity of her qi was forcing her to re-think a few aspects of how she used arts. She had not been untalented before, by the standards of both her family, the Teng School, and the Teng clan, to which she was only very, very distantly related, despite holding the same name.

She had, however, like most others, been forced to make do with what she could acquire. Her family had some, but they were not wealthy compared to their status or well-connected and with older and more talented cousins and a younger sibling with a better root she was mostly forced by circumstances to acquire things through her own means and methods lest they be ‘pooled’ by the family at large.

Arts came from contribution points to the school or the pavilion, a few had been bought via auction houses or traded for spirit herbs, but like many others she relied on talismans to shore up the gaps while she built up her own strength and comprehensions towards arts – support talismans and basic elemental ones for attacks were cheap and could be recharged if you were careful.

As such, many of the more martial techniques she had were either lower realm or ones gotten because they were ‘just good enough’. Now that her qi was much purer, the way many of them behaved and the ways they were activated would need adjusting she was sure.

That took her to the other major component: how to upgrade her core, and she found what the slip called a ‘Mystic Meridian’. The use of the word ‘meridian’ confused her for a moment, until she read the short explanatory text by Lin Ling and then re-read it.

“This Mystic Meridian?” she asked dully.

“It’s what you need to form,” Lin Ling nodded seriously. “What you want to do is follow those instructions and use the Parasol Qi in the jade slip along with what you have in your body to form one. You need to do it before you break through to Dao Seeking as well.”

“…”

“You know how crazy that sounds?” she pointed out.

“You know how pure the qi of this world is?” Lin Ling chuckled.

“That’s what I meant!” she said with mock exasperation. Jokey, bright Lin Ling was in some ways much harder to deal with than dour, angry at the world Lin Ling, she was starting to realise.

“Before, because you had a mantra, there was a chance in this place, if you got the right opportunities, to form one anyway,” Lin Ling explained. “However, after finding that Etheric Dew, and this parasol qi being so conveniently dropped on us, you can make use of both to nearly guarantee the formation of one.”

“What are they though?” she asked, again. “You call it a meridian, but…”

Lin Ling focused and a swirling pattern formed before her.

{Yang Bearing Shield}

It was a strange, rippling symbol, incorporating the fundamental strength of yang in all sorts of ways, yet also projecting it outwards, using it like a cloak. The comprehensions within it were such that it made her gaze slide off it and the whole was not perceivable to her at all, even with her soul intent.

“This is a Mystic Meridian – they are the root of a ‘Physique’,” Lin Ling said, before dispersing the strange thing. “They are a meridian formed of the natural alignments in your body and attuned to various opportunities. You can think of it like a kind of… compass, or maybe a seal. Once you form it, it will work like your mantra does.”

“…”

“It’s a thing of this world?” she asked dully.

“Nope, not at all, they exist on Eastern Azure, but they are called a bunch of other names. Connate Constitutions being the most common one. Heavenly Bodies are also ones with a Mystic Meridian of a ‘heavenly’ grade. They can be inborn, acquired, even learned – most bloodlines have one, or the vestiges of one associated with them.”

Shaking her head, she tried to process that. There were two Connate Constitutions within the Teng School that she knew of. Both were inner disciples and personal disciples of influential old elders.

“So that is what you got from the blood?” she finally asked.

“It is,” Lin Ling nodded. “With the help of my mantra and a few other bits of good fortune along the way. With the aid of the parasol qi and your spirit root, you should be able to form one to take full advantage of the good fortune given by the Etheric Dew – the baptism of the golden flowers will also help.”

“Why are you…?”

“Why am I telling you this?” Lin Ling laughed lightly. “Because for better or worse, you are one of us. Secrets are necessary, but unnecessary secrets are tiresome – you landed in this mess the same way we did to a lesser extent. And it’s not like we’d benefit from leaving you weaker off just because we decided to hoard non-essential secrets to ourselves.”

“…”

She stared at Lin Ling, not sure if she was being serious or messing with her – the way the other woman’s principle worked, it was quite hard to tell.

“We want to get Han Shu back and the others if we can. Perhaps if some of this had been shared earlier… things might have gone differently… not that I really believe that now,” Lin Ling sighed.

“And for better or worse, I am bound to this,” she sighed, not sure whether to laugh or weep.

“Yes,” Lin Ling replied, tilting her head to the side and giving her another amused look.

“I, Teng Chunhua, can only thank you for the gratitude shown,” she saluted Lin Ling deeply three times.

“Unnecessary,” Lin Ling murmured, although she did accept the three bows.

“It is necessary,” she muttered. “I swore that oath earlier, but do you know what this knowledge would spark if it got into the hands of someone like that Hao Tai? Even the others with me… Hao Jun, may his soul rest with the ancestors…”

“I do,” Lin Ling grinned nastily, “but this place has thorns people don’t realise.”

“And to think that Hao Tai was obsessing over the spear,” she sighed, suddenly amused at how small that now seemed.

-Unless?

“The spear is just a normal, mundane weapon, albeit for a place with exceptional standards,” Lin Ling giggled.

“True,” she agreed.

They both looked over at Juni, who was still lying on her rock in silence, staring at the sky.

“In any case, I’ll leave you to consider the parasol qi – if we get ambushed by snakes twice in one day I will really cry,” Lin Ling sighed, standing up.

She watched the younger woman depart humming a strange tune, snaring a bow and quiver as she went, before just shaking her head and turning her attention inwards.

~ Kun Juni – Recuperation over lunch ~

Lying on the rock, with a cloth over her face, Juni tried not to think about her terrible headache. The morning’s travails after the fight with the serpents had made her feel like she was wading through invisible mud. The landscape was almost tailored to obfuscating the trail they were following and she had suffered periodic discombobulations by whatever was occurring off to the west. Those jarring, disorientating tugs and furious twisting of the divination signals from ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ had left her in a situation where using more than a tiny portion of her qi made her feel like she had a spirit hitting her head with a hammer.

It took about two hours in the end – an hour longer than they had intended for ‘lunch’ but she guessed Lin Ling and Teng Chunhua had just decided to let her recover – for the headache to finally go away.

In the meantime Lin Ling had spent most of the time talking quietly to Teng Chunhua about whatever she had put on the jade slip and periodically patrolling the perimeter while the other woman sat and meditated on it.

She was rather curious about what exactly Lin Ling had given her. The ‘memories’ as a nebulous source of ‘oddity’ and knowledge clearly had a lot of weird things in them, kind of bizarre when she considered how Ling had come across them…

-That said, the price we paid is more than sufficient for our current circumstances, she complained inwardly.

The terror of the dark and the insanity… the encounter with Di Ji and the second bout of near doom afterward, not to mention the narrow avoidance of death they had saved Han Shu from and the experience in the anomaly….

-Is it because of the twisting earlier?

-The darkness was ‘different’, but no less dark and chaotic than the shadows that grasped us below.

“The heavens balance good and bad for all things,” she murmured, letting the emptiness of the blue sky above continue to settle into her mind.

It was a saying of her grandfather, although she also recalled that he had tended to add ‘The trick is living long enough beneath their gaze’ when her mother and aunts were not within hearing.

She found herself returning somehow to ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’. Even lying still as she currently was... it was possible to ‘use’ it, just like the first chapter ‘Heart Shifting Steps’. However, she found it didn’t work for anything that didn’t engage in a decisive action.

There was nothing ‘inauspicious’ about whether she sat or stood, moved left, right and so on…

She got impressions of what would happen, but it was in a very uninteresting fashion. If she went right, she went right, if she went left, she went left. It just was what it was and it blended with the thought of just doing it.

The more she focused, the more she got those ‘impressions’, but it was impossible to get anything more than that.

Getting nowhere other than a headache that had nothing to do with qi use for once, she turned towards thinking about how it had worked in the combat. There it had given… intuitions, however brief and frequently confused they were.

For a brief moment she again wondered if she had actually gained an art that focused on martial foresight, given its roots as a ‘movement art’, but certainly she was not seeing the ‘future’ or anything so fantastical.

She stopped and sighed deeply, going back to looking at the world and the way qi moved through everything. Even that was… it wasn’t that she could ‘see’ qi, she was coming to realise. Qi vision did allow you to see how qi illuminated things, but it was not the actual vision of ‘qi’, the fundamental energy, as it showed up in the mists and swirling water of her dantian.

-That would be ridiculously powerful for the realm I am, she reflected wryly.

Instead, she was finding that what ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’ was giving her was the ‘reflection of qi’s intent on the world itself’. It was an idea she had sort of arrived at before by a sideways means, but the fight with the serpents, who had been invisible, along with the way the land twisted the trail here was cementing that interpretation of how it worked.

Staring at the trees and sky, the point of the movement art surfaced in her mind silently – names did have meanings, even for weird cultivation arts.

The manifestation of her ‘symbol’ that Lin Ling had shown to Teng Chunhua was like that – ‘Yang as a shield’. It was not named by her directly, but the name came about as a result of the comprehensions she had arrived at, or so Lin Ling had told her before when they discussed it.

“Bright Heart Shifting Steps…”

She thought again about how it had nudged her to make moves… Her interpretation had been a bit off there, she realised.

-Reflection.

“A bright heart reflects the soul,” she muttered, sitting up and repeating that particular homily that those back home liked to espouse.

“I am an idiot,” she added for good measure.

Looking around, she saw that Teng Chunhua was still absorbed in the slip Lin Ling had given her, and Lin Ling was seated on a rock, looking west again.

Slipping off the rock, she stood there, staring at nothing much for a few seconds.

{Bright Heart Shifting Steps}

She channelled the movement art and, shutting her eyes, started to walk randomly around the camp, without using any qi, perception, intent, anything, just letting it sit in her mind’s eye. After a few paces she got a ‘tug’ and stopped.

Opening her eyes she looked down and found she was about to stand on an ankle thistle.

It hadn’t told her there was a thistle there, just suggested that going there would be a bit inauspicious.

It took her several more minutes of randomly wandering around with her eyes shut to get a proper clarification for her initial intuitive understanding.

It was indeed a divination art incorporated into a movement art. Heart Shifting Steps was already exceptional in that, but ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ was… different.

She tried twice more, getting the same results.

As far as she could tell, ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’’s divination aspect actually required active intent being directed in qi towards her. Anything that would cause her ‘harm’, it registered as ‘inauspicious’, but it wasn’t like a divination’s sense of ‘inauspicious’. It was more like intuitively knowing not to put your hand in fire, but without ever having had to experience the ‘hand in fire’ bit to know that that would be bad – or that standing on a poisonous thistle that would easily put 5cm long spines through her foot and make her leg swell up like a puffer-fish was a very bad idea.

That at least explained the initial issues she had had with parts of it, because her mentality had been wrong. She had been too certain of her own knowledge of divinations and accepting of how accommodating Heart Shifting Steps had been in that regard.

It took her almost another 20 minutes of wandering about to quash that initial, inherently self-imposed limitation. It didn’t matter if she ‘knew’ it would cause her harm; so long as ‘harm’ was actively possible from continuing a specific movement, it would be pointed out to her. The greater the danger, the more obvious the nudge, and the more qi she used, the more… ephemeral the threat that it would register.

That latter point, lost in the nuance of the art’s explanations, was what had compounded her trouble. In fact, it was also causing subtle problems for ‘Heart Shifting Steps’, she realised after a while, and even ‘Bright Lotus Eye’.

“I am a real idiot,” she mused, closing her eyes and exhaling.

The ‘problem’ had been that her qi was too pure, and had been getting purer, so she had been subtly overusing it in all aspects. The fuzz of disorientation was still there, but she had been forcing things subconsciously. The vast jump in purity from her spirit root being transformed thanks to the ‘Etheric Dew’ had been the final nail in a way.

That also meant, though, that her first guess about the art had been surprisingly spot on. She wondered if she should find Lin Ling and maybe try to kick her – if the girl had known the nature of her art and not said it… making her endure a morning of torment?

She quashed that slightly irrational thought, and decided to err in Lin Ling’s favour.

In any case, taking her earlier thoughts to their local conclusion, her ‘movement arts’ – Heart Shifting Steps and Bright Heart Shifting Steps – were less movement arts and more a passive form of geomancy relating to her own movement through the world and how it reacted with her.

“…”

She stared at the talisman in her head, wondering why it hadn’t told her this outright.

-Unless that is the point? she sighed mentally.

-In using the art, I have to arrive at the understanding myself? If I had just been told and taken it for granted, it would be like the compasses you buy that just tell you what all the readings mean?

-It would have made the art itself less effective?

“Uggh, this is why people hate Feng Shui manuals!” she muttered to the world at large.

As she made her way back to the rock, considering the depth such an art could actually plumb, she tried ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’ again, merging it into ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ and immediately winced as it gave her a clear…

-Oh…

“Oh…”

It didn’t just work on any threat; it worked on any threat that might do her harm, even herself.

She stood there carefully adjusting the flow of qi through her ocular meridians in accordance with the instincts of ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ and hissed in shock.

She could see now the places where she had been… if not wrong, vague… or maybe unsure?

Some of it was old habits; a lot of it seemed to stem from her manually pushing qi into her ocular meridians in the darkness of the depths to help with her vision – from forcing it so hard and not questioning at the time in spite of knowing the ‘warnings’.

None of the mistakes were too bad, thankfully, but they were still, cumulatively, enough to make the use of qi in her ocular meridians do her a tiny little bit of damage every now and then, something like trapping a nerve or grinding cartilage. That was why she had been getting the sensory overloads, as her control slipped due to the tiny accumulations of errors and hidden damage.

She considered the implications and found she was immensely glad she had worked this out now.

“Isn’t this basically a geomancy compass for my whole body and how everything interacts with it?” she mumbled dully, as she finally grasped why the talisman was so clear on its importance for Core Formation while being uncharacteristically vague about the specifics.

-Is it possible to use this art to optimise the flow of qi in principal meridians to my dantian to get the best rest results when purifying it?

She had already done something similar with the pills, but the idea of turning it on the qi of the natural world had seemed preposterous at the time, given her realm. The qi in pills was already refined and purified, tamed in essence. The raw qi of the natural world, absorbed in unconstrained ways, could potentially cause all sorts of problems. The refinement of the Etheric Dew had highlighted that.

“You’re recovered?” Lin Ling arrived beside her.

“Yes,” she nodded.

She was tempted to ask if Lin Ling knew the nature of ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’, but again quashed her curiosity – the answer would do her no good now anyway.

“Chunhua!” Lin Ling called over and the other woman sighed and stood.

“Coming,” she called over, collecting the few other scattered bits and pieces and dispersing the fire.

“Let’s see if we can actually gain some ground or find one of their camps before sundown,” Lin Ling mused, scanning the grassy horizon ahead of them.

“Some concrete confirmation would be nice,” she agreed.

…

As they set out once more, she started to try using the two arts in conjunction much more… coherently.

Unfortunately, the fogged distortion on all divination in general continued; however, the results of using ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’ and ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ no longer gave her a nasty headache after a while, which was a huge bonus if nothing else.

While the result was subtle, she found that when combined, the two actually guided her slightly in accordance with the things she was looking at and what she wanted done with them. That also resolved the issue of why it was only giving her intuitions on singular things. It considered the whole scope of an action.

Take a step and stand on a thistle – single action.

Walk over to rocks safely? Also a single action, even though it had multiple elements to it.

The result was also that the qi costs of using it could be very haphazard, as she discovered by accident quite early on when she looked down a hill at a small mirage-like lake fed by a spring in a rocky cliff and thought it looked kind of nice. ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ nearly gave her a small deviation in the same instance as it initially tried to use every shred of her qi to tell her if the action would allow her to get there without experiencing any threats and then promptly refused because it would be an egregious act of self-harm.

It had taken several minutes of sitting there with her eyes shut, focusing on nothing to recover her inner equilibrium. Lin Ling had thought it hilarious when she was finally composed enough to explain what she had done by accident, but the episode held an important lesson and demonstrated that the art had clear limits at her current realm.

The annoyance, though, was that the art didn’t work well for the trail.

She could only assume it was because the aspects making it were too profound for her cultivation realm that as a result she couldn’t interpret them in any way at all.

It was, she suspected, much like how she hadn’t interpreted the qi of the serpent clones as their Immortal Souls or the threat they posed while using the art right up until Lin Ling hauled the cores out and it became retroactively clear to her. It was slightly annoying to trip over such a limitation after thinking she had really found a good thing, but still, as they continued to feel their way along the blurred edge of the trail as afternoon edged towards evening they were already lucky enough as it was to be in the position to complain about it in the first instance.

As Chunhua had said earlier, it really was hilarious that those other cultivators had been frothing over her spear, which was simply a plain, if rather sharp and durable spear, when the ruin contained among its other treasures a cultivatable geomancy compass that she had only found, courtesy of the squirrel, because a bunch of cultivators tried to kill them.

They would – hopefully – never know how close they came to a genuine treasure.

The rest of the day passed largely uneventfully, until they walked over a rise and almost fell into the arms of an Ur’Vash Hunting party.

None of them had spotted the group, due to a combination of factors – their camp was well-hidden, they had some kind of soul sense camouflage over it and it was getting towards dusk so the smoke from the fires was lost in the haze. Looking over it, she could see a dozen or so Ur’Vash bustling around, setting up after a reasonably profitable days hunting, along with several sentries on the rocks above, who were almost as surprised as they were.

Thankfully, they were no longer dressed like ‘Maker’s Dancers’ and instead just ordinary Ur’Vash hunters like they had been when they infiltrated the town of Ajara.

“Greetings to the camp!” Lin Ling called down in Easten.

“Greetings hunters!” one of the tattooed Ur’Vash called back.

“Do we go down?” Chunhua frowned.

“The strongest ones in the camp are weaker than me,” Lin Ling shrugged. “We can maybe get some information and none of us are likely to have a breakthrough overnight?”

“…”

She shot Lin Ling a sour look and shook her head.

Walking down the slope, she saw several children squatting down near a dead horned jaguar, being shown how to disembowel it. It was a grisly scene, but the fact that they had children in the camp at least meant it was unlikely they had just found bandits.

“Is rare to see people this far out,” the old hunter who had welcomed them, said, offering each of them a cup of water.

She accepted it and drank – it was a hospitality gesture, Lin Ling signed. She watched as the girl put down her ‘pack’ and ostensibly pulled out a few slabs of the meat of the snakes they had butchered which she then handed over.

“You killed a black shadow,” the old hunter nodded, accepting them happily and appearing not to notice Lin Ling’s sleight of hand. “Big skill for a young woman.”

“It had blunter teeth than it thought,” Lin Ling snickered, which got a laugh from a few others nearby.

“You travel from the south?” the female Ur’Vash tending the fire asked.

They all nodded, and as they walked past the fire, she realised that Lin Ling’s features were subtly different in the light, looking more like an Ur’Vash, although it was mainly because her ears were now slightly pointed.

-Body manipulation, she realised with a start.

“See the thunder? Very powerful, a great momentum,” the other old Ur’Vash sat with a haunch of roasted meat remarked.

“Yes, big battle. We saw the aftermath, shot a few arrows,” Lin Ling said. “Flowers of gold bloomed.”

“Flowers of gold huh…” the old Ur’Vash nodded pensively.

“Ajara fought against a new warband,” Lin Ling shrugged. “It scattered widely so some may come this direction.”

“We saw passage of some. Others to the east of us also reported by eagle that hunting parties there do not return,” the old hunter nodded.

“And yet you are far out?” she asked.

“We returned from the grass sea, catching beasts amid its waves. You cannot plan for such events,” the woman shrugged. “Fortune favour that we arrive home beneath blue sky with red meat to golden crops.”

Lin Ling nodded at what was clearly a homily of some kind.

“Where are you bound?” the old Ur’Vash asked, bidding them to sit.

“North,” she supplied as Teng Chunhua picked the spot furthest from any other Ur’Vash.

“Rare to see three women travel alone,” the Ur’Vash by the fire said passing her a bowl of soup.

“When your family is lost, you can only make your own name,” Lin Ling shrugged, as if this was quite normal.

“Woman and hunter able to kill black shadow snake welcome in many places,” the old Ur’Vash nodded.

Lin Ling nodded again, drinking her soup. “We like travelling, seeing new things.”

“This is as it should be,” another hunter, also a woman, grinned, coming to sit by the fire as well. “Too easily they forget when they live beneath wood and clay that the sky is our mother just as much as the earth.”

“That is why they are Vash, and we are Inan,” the old hunter chuckled. “We do not fear the darkness, for we conquered it.”