Out of the Dark, it came,

Out of the Long Night,

A Dread shadow across the face of day.

All that beheld it fell still.

Heroes wept before it.

Kings crumbled to it.

Gods cowered to it.

The fires of our greed died to it.

And there, at the last, within the ashes of that era, we knew it.

In its silence, beheld the grave of light, life and hope.

The truth of our great achievement laid bare,

That we, too, could be the masters of this place,

The death of the golden dream.

And when it passed, we, too… passed with it.

Inscription on a stone during excavations of the Forum Romanum 1921, Rome.

~ Author unknown.

~ Cornelia – Solaneum Grand Concourse ~

“…”

“So… none of them have any idea how they died?” she asked at last, staring around at the second group of dead barbarians she had just briefly brought back.

All the awakened shook their heads awkwardly, from young to old.

Burying her annoyance, she turned and stared out through the mist towards Caeracht again, frowning, turning over the different pieces in her head.

All the barbarians had been stripped of their garments, or they had been burned away. Someone, or someones, had dumped them here then set them on fire… but hadn’t known that trying to set things on fire, here of all places, was like spitting on a bonfire. That meant the invaders were very much not local, and not familiar with this place.

Their memories had also been eroded, as none of them could recall where they died… or how they died – some couldn’t even recall who they were in the first instance – which spoke to the perpetrators not wanting the specifics of this too clearly known either.

“Did you not pass through there?” she asked Rhanis at last, who was sitting on a carved block drumming her fingers on her drum, looking pensively around.

“Nope, we are hunting the lizard boys,” Rhanis shrugged apologetically. “And there is a sense of dissociation about Caeracht anyway. They built it to stop folk like us going in there.”

“Ah, yes, it’s easy to forget that Grimvak and several of those around her have been around almost since the heroic age,” she agreed. “Which begs the question – where is Grimvak?”

“Not here?” Rhanis unhelpfully added.

“Do any of them know where Grimvak is?” she asked the assembled, possessed corpses.

“Battle, to the west… maybe south...” one, an older barbarian, replied at last. “Expedition, new Warchief of big alliance… position insecure, problems with Grass Scorpions, got augury that Blood Eclipse would rise—”

“Blood Eclipse…”

“…”

The corpses shuffled awkwardly. They knew, or the spirits possessing them did anyway. Many of those condemned to be bound here by their oaths and then the various other manipulations on this place had, like her, been around a long time, and the Blood Eclipse had existed in her time, been one of the powers who sacked Portam Aurorae, even if they only became notorious later.

“Is there any other old evil skulking around here?” she asked, a bit more witheringly than intended, truthfully, “the Yellow Prophet’s ilk, the Blood Eclipse… you lot…?”

“I think that depends who you ask,” Rhanis chuckled. “They would say that old scorpion or the Rulani watchers would count as well as… you… and us!”

“True, it probably does,” she agreed, looking back through the mist towards the shadows of the acropolis, then back over the assembled, briefly arisen bodies, the appearance of which was still bugging her…

“…”

“You!” she waved at one, an old barbarian, who walked over to her.

She considered him… what remained of him, turning his head this way and that, then walking around him, seeing what remained of his tattoos – they spoke of war, achievement, and also told her that he had been a guard for the town.

“…”

All the evidence pointed to whoever had killed them not wanting others to know who had done it…

“Duh!” she slapped her forehead, realising what it was, as it had literally been staring her in the face.

There was a near total cross section of a barbarian settlement standing around her. Children, women, craftsmen, soldiers, hunters, rich and poor, young and old, different families, all from different…

“These folk are from all over Caeracht,” she mused. “The question then is… is this a solitary incident, with an outlying settlement someone has tried to cover up, or… are there others?” she asked Rhanis, turning to her.

“Ummm… I’ll go look,” Rhanis murmured, looking around and then skipping off into the darkness.

Looking at the awakened corpses, she sighed softly and waved her hand, watching as they collapsed back to the ground like broken puppets, the spirits bound to them sinking back into the ground and the mist. If they had been much less obviously ‘dead’, she might have considered sending a few out to scout… but in their current condition it was hardly worth it in exchange for the lost element of surprise.

Rhanis didn’t take long to return, appearing back out of the mist like a phantom, skipping across walls and rocks.

“There are two more groups further down this street, dumped into ruined buildings, then a third beyond the bounds of this place,” the Okeanid informed her.

“The same as these?” she asked, slipping off the block.

“Looks like,” Rhanis nodded.

“Let’s go to the biggest group,” she replied. “If I am right, I suspect I am going to be having another face to face with that barbarian bitch soon.”

As they walked, the mist continued to swirl, dense enough that you could nearly scoop it up with your hands. By day, it would look like a shadow, a haze, a faint gloom that distorted awareness subtly, made things less obvious, less pronounced, especially the ruins, but by night, it was usually like this, a physical manifestation of the distortions caused by the Stygian corruption of the land and amplified by the seals themselves to turn that concealment inwards. In this instance, it was also not helped by the tidal wave of actual mist that had been pushed out of the river lands by whatever was going on there, according to Rhanis. An effort by a power that had drawn out the yellow prophet’s lizards to push away dangerous threats, like Artemis’s handmaidens.

A few minutes of walking and another round of questions later, her suspicions were indeed proven right, as she looked over two smoking piles of corpses that between them had to hold maybe 1500 barbarians, again from all walks of life, including those she might have expected to be around Caeracht. Close to the edge of the Stygian field it was also easier to see traces of their deaths in the presence that the whole thing exuded.

When you considered the darkness, the pain and the dissociation, along with the fact that there was something close to 2500 barbarians dumped into the mass graves on the edge of the old city, and that they did come from all walks of life, it painted, to her at least, a tragedy of two words.

“Fated execution,” she sighed at last, looking around at the sorry barbarians and putting down one body she had picked up in order to examine their clan markings.

“Someone killed the whole town?” Rhanis mused.

“If they are attacking the seal and there is not a colossal battle being waged across the river, then yes, they did,” she confirmed, a bit more grimly. “And are likely now messing with—”

Involuntarily, she put her hand to her breast as another cold, twisting pain shifted through her. The feeling this time held a deeper, creeping gloom within it, like something unclean was seeping into the connection.

“The other question is what kind of force can do that, because any individual capable would not have bothered to dispose of corpses like this…”

“…”

“I can try to… go…”

Rhanis trailed off at the same time she also felt the distortion.

It was in the air, in the mist and in her breast as that cold, twisting ache – the connection between the dagger, the ritual, the seal and her constricting in accordance to it. It ran through everything, not dissimilar to an insect hitting a spider’s web, except this web was the ancient seal put on this land by the old powers and re-attenuated by Grimvak and her apprentices to keep the strength of this land in abeyance.

“The suppression is shifting,” Rhanis observed, even before she could comment.

“…”

Wordlessly, she started to walk across the grassland, between the tangled drifts of stones, overgrown by vegetation, heading towards the edge of the outer city, where the Stygian field remained unsuppressed. The limit on her travelling beyond the field itself was not, in fact, one put on her by the Empress of the Isles, but a core property of the earlier seal originating with Laurentius, locking them all to this little shard of man-made hell. The Queens’ twist on it had been to radically shrink and compress the active area of the field, reinforcing the cage in the process.

With every step she took, the mist grew thicker, more personal, and the sense of erosion exerted on her grew more and more, until at last she stopped by a barely visible wall that she knew to be the remains of the old watch post of the Clymerian bridge across the river, unable to take another step forward. If she went any further, the seal would begin to unravel her body and drop her right back in front of the acropolis main hall where she would then be promptly flayed apart, that body also becoming a further sacrifice to reinforce the seal over the whole place, as determined by the ritual the five old bitches had used on it, her and everything else.

Grimvak had made a few tweaks there as well, somehow, so that her proximity to any of the seals would also have that effect, so any attempt at leaving or getting at the seals would mean all she got for her efforts was being stuck waiting twice over on her body to reform itself.

The bitch had then used several very aggravating treasures to repeatedly murder her until all the damage dealt to the seal by her theft had been recovered as well.

“So that is how the clay pot mage did it,” the Okeanid observed, looking up at her.

“Styx to bind, Lethe to bar,” she replied, nodding. “Not to mention that I am already held in harmony with this place, just as Neron Appius’s body and Laurentius are… and Arella was until Grimvak took her to act as the focal point of the moved seal.”

“How did a clay pot mage manage that?” Rhanis mused.

“Stolen gifts…” she chuckled darkly.

“Boooo,” the young-looking Okeanid crossed her arms and looked up at her, judgingly.

“What? You old folks do it all the time, yet I cannot?” she grimaced.

“…”

Rhanis looked around behind her, clearly pretending ‘not’ to be one of the ‘old folks’, making her roll her eyes.

Shaking her head, she was about to turn away, when another stabbing pain twisted through her, making her limbs tingle as the bindings of the Sempronius dagger’s blade bit into her a little more. All around them, the mist darkened, becoming even more unpleasant, the timelessness in it taking on an even more distinctly avaricious aura as it did so.

“You said you were hunting the Sar’Katush?” she asked, stepping the conversation back a bit as she turned various ideas over in her head. “And that you got forced out of the river lands?”

“Oh… yes, they originate from the insanity up north,” Rhanis confirmed. “The Ten Masters captured some humans… very odd humans actually, not that dissimilar to you in some ways.”

“Go on?” she prodded, starting to walk back the way they had come.

“Well, one has the blood lineage of an ancient Drakon, from before the first era – powerful blood, actually, as she was able to take the form of a drakania,” Rhanis mused. “Another had a facet of an inheritance from the Bright Mother… and the last was on the way to becoming like our sisters of hill and vale. All of them blessed by Arianrhod as well.”

“That sounds like the start of a bad joke,” she pointed out. “A drakania, a prophetess and a dryad walk into a taverna…”

“As far as the Ten Masters are concerned, yes,” Rhanis giggled. “A very bad joke indeed!”

“So they are implicated by this divination, presumably like I was and you were… but how does that match with the Sar’Katush?” she mused, watching the mists thin out fractionally as they walked and taking care not to accidentally get turned around and walk out of them again. “Unless…”

“Yeah, there it gets hazy,” Rhanis sighed. “The mortals have all these ways to get stronger, eat this, fuck that, pray to this, kill with that… They fought a beast from one of the ten masters, a hydra, and got tricked by Sharvasus.”

“Sharvasus… Sharvasus…” she turned the name over, trying to recall if anyone had actually invaded here with a hydra… since the collapse.

“Probably didn’t ever come to bother you,” Rhanis remarked. “The hydra tried to devour them, but you know how drakania are, I assume.”

“Difficult,” she chuckled darkly.

“Yes,” Rhanis agreed. “In any case, the hydra managed to trick her somewhat, putting her in a position where she ended up absorbing some of its cores, presumably trusting to her blood strength. At that point, to avoid being consumed from within by the hydra, the drakania used its power to help her comrades get stronger… at which point”—Rhanis waved her hands at the mist, them and the world generally—“all this bollocks happened.”

“Ah,” she nodded, understanding now. “Whoever had been breaking the seal here had needed an inroad into the Empress of the Silver Wheel’s strength – which thanks to Aniya is the key to it – and this group just happened to…”

She trailed off, staring up at the opaque, dark sky and the swirling darkness on darkness that drenched everything. In many ways that made sense, but at the same time, when you considered the conveniently moving parts it was awfully like her own experience regarding the Cult of Solace that led to her getting captured by Laurentius and his bunch… on the face of it, just a few fortunate coincidences, but…

“Someone led them to it,” she concluded.

“Or something,” Rhanis agreed. “The lizard boys are big on that kind of thing and they are unequivocally the…”

For the second time, Rhanis trailed off, and she stopped, not because of further distortion, but because a faint tremor had just run through their surroundings, rapidly followed by another.

Moments later, four humans, three men and a woman, scrambled out of a door that would have led into the upper story of one of the estates on the street, their faces pale and shaking. The woman, as they watched, turned and pointed, muttering a spell of some sort and then casting a votive offering, which collapsed into glimmering lights and shot into the doorway.

A second later, it detonated in a flash of heat and light that sent many-coloured refractions through the swirling mist and made the ground shudder again. Before she could do much of anything, a fifth figure, a youth dressed in grey robes, with long, dishevelled and lank black hair shot out of the ruin after them, crashing into the ground, his skin burning away and his face locked into a hungry snarl.

“…”

The group scrambled back, one of them yelling something in a language that she didn’t recognise, though the intent was pretty clear – a plea to a companion to recover himself.

The figure, however, didn’t immediately attack them, but instead turned to look at her, the dark light in its eyes reflecting boundless hatred, and also a lot of greed. With its change in focus, the others also noticed them – or her probably, because Rhanis, in the mist, now standing unobtrusively behind her, had no aura at all to speak of.

“Defiled witch…” the figure rasped, in accented High Latin, reflecting the language of the nobility of the early ducal period. “I will send you to hell so you can pleasure your dark lord there!”

-Great, it’s one of the mad spirits from below, she sighed inwardly, even as it leapt for her with a speed well above that of the average mortal, cutting for her neck with the sword the unfortunate, living corpse had owned in life.

She stepped to the side, catching her attacker’s wrist and landing a solid punch into their side, followed by a kick to the leg, shattering both ribs and leg effortlessly. Long gone were the days when ‘normal’ things could easily kill her by mortal means, even if she would never be an unstoppable juggernaut like Achilles, impervious to all mortal harm.

Twisting the arm of her unfortunate attacker, she disarmed him, taking the sword. In turn, the possessing spirit tried to blur backwards—

Even though it was fast, she was faster, catching up to him and kicking her opponent in the stomach, sending him crashing into a wall near where the whole group had emerged. The broken body recoiled, the damage she had dealt to the way pneuma – what they later termed ‘mana’ – flowed through it, impeding the spirit’s possession to the point where it was no longer able to retain its grasp—

The sword blade hissed past her, slicing off a few strands of hair as she deflected the new attacker’s arm.

In that moment of distraction, she saw the spirit, that of a minor noble who had likely been part of the first attempts to reconquer the city after the Elvish Queens sacked it and sealed her, shoot out of the body towards the other three with Rhanis in pursuit.

“Evil thing, for my family I shall send you back to that malign hell!”

Her new attacker, dressed in a green robe, wet with water and covered in mud and blood, snarled as he recovered from his miss, the attack really not suited to the narrow sword he was currently wielding and cut down at her a second time.

She deflected the blade up with her own and lunged—

The blast sent her into the wall beside her, making her bones rattle and reminding her that unlike barbarians, almost every human adventurer thought they were a fucking wizard and that ‘battle mages’ had always been a pain, especially in later years, when people stopped trying to reclaim Solaneum and instead just started looting it.

She kicked him in the stomach, sending him flying into the ruined building jutting out of the hill on the far side of the street, at which point the lightning bolt hit her full on, between the breasts—

…

Icy pain twisted her body and the sense of the stabbing pain in her breast intensified radically as the lightning tore through her body, trying to obliterate her body and soul. In terms of strength it was very close to a ninth circle spell, she judged as her flesh smoked and her bones charred.

Her awareness of her circumstances wavered and she was partially drawn back, not to the Styx, because the seals and the sword stopped that, but into the shattered after-moment where her last body that had held that connection lingered – the one that had had the Sempronius dagger stuck in it until Grimvak took that.

It basically amounted to the same thing, unless she tried to leave the Stygian field, but that always left her feeling hollow, and with a slight headache.

…

—She opened her eyes to the sound of wretched screaming as Rhanis, herself sparking with lightning still, brutally dismantled the misfortunate source of the lightning bolt on her behalf, one of the three survivors who had just been grasped by the Solaneum noble’s spirit.

The two surviving members of the group were shivering in terror as she sat up out of the smoking crater, rubbing her breast and trying to ignore the unscratchable cold itch again—

Intuition made her press herself to the ground as almost a hundred square metres of ground between her and Rhanis vanished in a whirlwind of torn grass and psyche-infused pneuma, which in her time had already started to be identified as the various forms of mana.

It would have been somewhat dangerous, outside here, but manipulation of natural forces in underworld gates was a chthonic thing, not an etheric thing. The only reason the lightning bolt had been that effective was because it was a lightning bolt, and it likely originated from a scroll or something similar – the purity of its mana was far greater than that of her attacker, as were the comprehensions reflected through it.

Picking herself up, she looked for the source and saw another body, a grey-robed youth with a sallow face and black hair, yet again, had scrambled out of the ruin and was now heading towards the two remaining survivors, the shadow in his eyes telling her that he too, was also possessed.

Without much preamble, she jumped onto the nearest bit of exposed masonry and vaulted for her target, landing on him with enough force to deform the ground slightly beneath them both. The body spat blood and twitched as its vital flow was terminally disrupted, the spirit puppeting it snarling and dissipating, though only temporarily.

The two survivors, a youth with slicked, long dark hair that was now undone from its style, was pale and shaking, while the woman looked close to fainting herself—

A second lightning bolt hit her, sending her flying—

“Motherfu—!”

Rhanis caught her, just in time, by the hair it had to be said, smashing her into the ground as the lightning curled around them both.

“Why is it always fucking mages?” she groaned, pushing herself up and spitting translucent plasma. The seals put on her by the five also stopped her from bleeding, to ensure that she and Arella at least could never be used that way again while it endured.

-I can feel my ‘prestige’ as some old monster weakening by the second.

Voices shouted off to her right, in the direction she had come from—

As fast as she could, she shot for the nearest ruin, getting walls between her and potential trouble. As it was, that turned out to be rather prescient, because a shimmering golden fireball landed close to where she had been a moment earlier and knocked her flat. Exhaling, and brushing a few golden flames off her skin, she peered around the wall and saw almost a dozen figures now congregated around the survivors, at least two groups having an extensive argument it seemed, while looking around warily, presumably for her.

The mist swirled, aggressively, twisting oppressively.

There was a second wretched scream, as Rhanis, already vanished, did what Okeanids tended to do when you poked them aggressively.

Poke you back.

The cute and childlike handmaidens of Artemis were only that if you were not considered prey… and their definition of that could vary quite a bit, depending on their mood. Every nymph was one bad interaction away from moonlighting as an Avernale.

“Bloody mages,” Rhanis appeared like a ghost beside her. “You survived…”

“Of course,” she grunted. “I may be sealed, but I’ve been marinating in the dispersive fog of near Stygian waters for a… for a very long time!” she settled on at last.

Rhanis rolled her eyes behind her mask. “In any case, it seems there are a lot of them. Based on their discussions, there is something going wrong with their ritual and people sent to explore here have been going missing.”

“If they are poking around here, I’ll bet,” she sneered, thinking of the restless spirits.

The original Stygian wave had washed over much of the old city, but had been limited to street level. Now, a combination of Grimvak’s suppression and the burial of the old land surface meant that few would venture up here without help, although it was not unknown – and also why the local barbarian tribes cremated their dead.

However, if people were messing with the seal or poking around in the actual ruins of old Solaneum incautiously, in truth it would be rather remarkable if the hapless explorers didn’t start attracting the more covetous and vengeful ones.

“…”

Warily sticking her head around the wall again, she saw that the new arrivals were having a discussion with the survivors, seemingly unhappy about those who had died, or about…

The darkness shifted and the mists shivered again, the gloom turning properly turgid for a few seconds as the alignments of the land shook and warped under the influence of some disruption.

“That’s… not good,” Rhanis muttered grimly.

“…”

She didn’t need to be told what was not good, because she could already see, and feel it for herself. The spider web of Stygian influence, of which she was a core piece, was shimmering again, the suppression put down from the daggers weakening again, another fractional amount.

Three different exclamations, from a second group who had just run out of the mist, pointed directly at her. All of them were clearly possessed, at least to her eyes, though they spoke in the language of these incursors, not high Latin or common Hibric. However, this time, rather than attack, a barrier shimmered around both of them, held in place by a teal paper scroll that another produced.

“…”

It was hard not to sigh, because sometimes, she wondered if the spirits had left all their common sense with their old corpses. They were tricky, scheming, villainous and greedy – covetous of life, light and all things they saw as having been denied from them – but they were mainly people who had been living in Solaneum when it all went to hell, or died afterward.

The number who actually knew of her beyond reputation was pathetically small, and she had long bound away the ones who really knew anything about her in ways that no mere spirit was going to break.

Though Rhanis had not joked when she said that their patrons were tied for the hats they wore, everyone seemed to forget that while she was good at the Chthonic arts, she was not a ‘necromancer’. Everything Aphrodite touched though, was related to passion. Passion for life, for looks, for love, lust, sex, war… even death. Her strength was that it drove people wild, robbed them of their senses in pursuit of those things.

As such, she looked at the groups, quickly turned over the options in her head and, even as Rhanis made herself less obvious, not a hard feat for a cloud nymph in this mist, murmured a word.

"Morpho..."

~ Ching Fei – Ruins near the city ~

“Over there!”

“That’s her!”

“The one responsible!”

Running along behind the first group, Ching Fei found herself cursing her seniors who just kept rushing from one problem to the next – especially the three leaders of their group of patrolling scouts, Senior Gu, Senior Quang and Senior Roshun. It wasn’t that their instincts were bad – in fact, they had made great gains on this trip, far in excess of any previous delve into these and other ruins around the city and its seal – it was just…

The mist clawed at them. The humidity made it like you were walking through a dark waterfall and no amount of qi armour kept it out. As an Immortal cultivator, she had made her peace with that, but here, it was, since they had emerged, even more oppressive somehow…

“Left,” someone, her junior brother Zhu, grabbed her arm and pointed, as two more undead corpses appeared like ghosts in the night.

One was bisected immediately. The other leapt with shocking speed, far faster than an Immortal, and crashed into the side of their second group, nearly killing a third person before it too was also put down, impaled by three other cultivators from the Argent Hall with spears.

Ahead of her, the others had sealed someone, or something, in a barrier, whatever they were shouting about.

“What is going on?” Zhu panted, the ambience clearly getting to him.

“You ask me, but who do I ask, them?” she scowled, helping him up from where he had slipped.

“…”

That was a bit of a cruel reply, but it was a fair one, because all the leaders of their groups – Senior Gu from the Jade Gate Court, Senior Quang from the Argent Hall and Senior Roshun from the Four Peacocks Court – were not in the business of explaining things. Their group was a hodgepodge alliance, brought together by those three, who knew each other before they came to this trial as far as she was aware.

“Are you sure?” a fourth figure, in a muddy grey robe, not from the Argent Hall but from the Dusk Sky Pagoda, a Shu clan influence, was saying to the three as they finally caught up.

“Of course, our divination is absolutely correct: this demoness is responsible for these undead and the attacks,” Senior Roshun said flatly.

“…”

The woman in question, naked, muddy and dishevelled, did not look to her, nor it seemed anyone else, like ‘the perpetrator’, truth be told. She was maybe eighteen years old, her dark golden blonde hair lank with damp and mud, her expression pale and her eyes panicked. She was also… she realised… with a jolt, absolutely beautiful.

Looking around, that had also not escaped the attention of their predominantly male group, though not in the way she might have cynically expected.

“Senior… are you sure…? She looks like the survivor of another group?” one of the others along with them muttered.

“Yes, how can someone who is not even at Dao Seeking be the perpetrator here? I know it is stressful seniors, but…”

“Seniors… do not make a mistake here. I know you are angry about Senior Brother Fushan…”

“We should take her back, seniors…”

“Give her some clothes…”

“Do you need a medicine, Junior Sister?”

Their words were filled with almost brotherly concern as others offered help or support.

“…”

“Back!” Senior Quang, an Ancient Immortal, snapped, forcing everyone except two of the other group who had come up to retreat a few paces.

“Do not be beguiled by her ways,” Senior Roshun scowled.

“What is there to be beguiled about?” someone else pointed out from the back.

“…”

“She did just shrug off a lightning bolt,” one of the new arrivals muttered.

“See!” Roshun remonstrated. “She is not simple…”

“So what? You just want us to kill a random woman here, who is clearly not a corpse, and pretend like it was all her fault?” another senior from the Dusk Sky pagoda snapped.

As they argued, the woman took a robe offered by another female disciple with shaking hands and wrapped it around herself, before flinching back from the angry gesture of Senior Gu.

“Do any of you recognise her?” another senior asked, looking around.

There was much shaking of heads, including herself. The woman was beautiful, to the point where her presence would surely have been remarked upon, she had to admit – unless she was one of the few who always wore veils or a mask, though none of the groups from the Pure Sisters of Xia or the Gentle Stars Society had that dark blonde hair that she recalled.

“So, nobody recognises her?” Roshun nodded, taking their widespread denials for more confirmation of whatever they were accusing her of.

“And she has no storage ring,” Gu added.

“She is also here, naked, alone and mute, in the middle of the night, when people have been going missing for hours. There has been no report from Senior Wentian’s group, nor Senior Feidao’s group since before midnight!” someone else pointed out.

“Indeed,” another dissenter added. “Who is to say that she is not part of a late arrival either? Three bands have come in today.”

“Are you part of another group?” Roshun scowled, turning back on the woman, who just looked at him blankly.

“Clearly, she doesn’t understand you,” the senior from the Dusk Sky Pagoda said with some amusement.

“So she is either a demon, or… something else?” Gu nodded triumphantly.

“This doesn’t feel right,” Zhu muttered beside her, looking around.

“You don’t say,” she agreed, looking around.

There had been sounds of fighting from this direction, presumably whoever the Dusk Sky pagoda had been…

“I agree with Senior Gu!” another new arrival, a youth in a deep blue and grey dragon robe, interjected, stalking forward, and pushing others aside.

“Senior Hushan,” all four ‘leaders’ saluted to varying degrees.

“Someone just killed several of my junior brothers and was hit by a lightning bolt, from a Kong Kun Dividing Sky talisman no less, and this woman here is eminently suspicious in that regard.”

“Um… there is no way someone at her realm shrugs off a Dao Immortal grade talisman,” someone from the Dusk Sky Pagoda pointed out, very reasonably.

“Shut up,” Senior Hushan said flatly to them, his voice like a slap in the face.

“Our Imperial School will take over this matter, with your support, Brothers Gu, Roshun, Quang?”

“Senior Brother Hushan is wise,” the three murmured, casting sideways looks at the group from the Dusk Sky Pagoda who were gritting their teeth in annoyance now.

“Do you actually have any proof, other than circumstantial evidence about this?” the leader of the Dusk Sky Pagoda scowled.

“…”

“Rather, are you not just trying to cause a problem because of your seniors falling out of the princess’s favour?” Roshun muttered.

“…”

The sudden change in direction of the whole thing seemed to catch people off guard. However, someone did add, a moment later, “What does this have to do with that? Are you justifying murder because someone else was disgraced?”

“Our eyes have been widened,” another disciple muttered behind her.

“How righteous…” someone else noted a bit too loudly in the mist behind her.

As various other mutterings also drifted through the 30 or so cultivators, she noted the three and a few others close to them were staring back at them in a way that was rather… unnerving. They were all members of the ‘righteous faction’, although it could be said that the Argent Hall’s reputation was somewhat ambiguous, but the expressions of those around the woman and child were those of people, who to her, were doing mental math and coming to the conclusion that seniors or no, dealing with this as it was… would not work out well if they persisted with their current line…

-Something is absolutely off here, she groaned inwardly. They were arrogant before, but this is… well perhaps it wasn’t necessarily out of character, given she didn’t exactly know their ‘character’, but it was certainly out of line with their sects’ reputations, stressful circumstance or no…

“…”

Her worrying train of thought was interrupted by Senior Hushan, who had been conferring with several fairly nondescript cultivators wearing broad hats and white robes.

“We will take her along. Junior brothers, if you would?”

Two of the white-robed cultivators nodded and stepped forward, then unceremoniously tried to haul the woman up, only to have her flinch away visibly, backing into the tumbled-down bit of ruin she had been half-hidden in, clearly traumatised in some way.

Looking left and right, she could still see others looking on pensively, or shaking their heads. In truth, it was hard not to put herself in the other woman’s situation: the rest of their group wiped out perhaps, surviving who knew what… to think you were saved and then be mistreated like…

“Mama!” a second voice yelled, and one of those who had just reached over to grasp the woman a second time recoiled as a blade very narrowly managed to pierce his arm.

He hissed, striking out, only for the woman to block the blow with her body and stagger, gasping.

“Mama is not a demon! Mother was brave!”

It took her, and everyone else, a second to realise that the woman had been protecting a second, crouched figure: a girl, maybe eight years old, with sandy blonde hair and the same eyes as the shaking woman. The girl’s accusatory face was… haunting, as she desperately, defiantly stared down the various seniors and the others, who were also entirely caught out by the unexpected revelation that the woman before them was actually a mother here with her child somehow.

The cultivator who had tried to hit her twitched, just barely stopping from following up on his first strike, presumably mindful of the onlookers, and instead simply grabbed the girl, dragging her forward by the arm and taking care to disarm her of the copper-gold blade she had been wielding.

“Interesting,” he muttered, eyeing the scratch on his arm, then passed it over to Senior Hushan, who took it curiously.

“To think a child like this had such a treasure…” Hushan murmured, turning it over in his hands then staring hard at both mother and daughter.

“Big sister’s knife!” the girl yelled, trying to make a grab for the knife and failing. “To chop you up with!”

“…”

A few cultivators laughed, but only a few. Given there was no older girl, and the child’s face was a twisted rictus of sorrow and rage… anyone with half a brain knew what had likely happened to the ‘big sister’, given how dangerous this land seemed to be.

“You speak the Eastern tongue,” Senior Gu said, looking at the woman, who, held between the two, was now staring at them a bit more defiantly.

“I do,” she said after a moment, in a clipped, almost regal accent very different from any she had heard.

“Who are you?”

“…”

The woman said nothing, clearly not interested in talking now that she was clearly a ‘captive’.

“Cowards,” the girl spat at the four seniors. “You’re all cowards, can only bully women and children!”

“For a girl, you have a big mouth,” the cultivator holding her scowled, to which the girl just spat at him again.

“Stop that, or I’ll hit you.”

“Coward! Bully! Evil man!” the girl spat at him again.

In truth, this was really not a good look, especially given all those here were from righteous sects who had basically come to help because it was the good and proper thing to do… and were now stuck here, following commands from seniors who were not exactly putting their best feet forward, even before this.

“How did a mother and child even get here, though?” Senior Gu muttered.

“We… there big explosion, blinding light, we arrived here, can only wander and make do!” the girl scowled.

“We got caught in a disaster,” the woman said a bit more self-assuredly now and glaring at one of her captors who had just pushed her forward by putting his hand on her buttock…

“Caught in a disaster?” someone muttered.

When she turned it over, that was… actually surprisingly likely. Nobody had any idea how far the collapse that put them in here had extended, and apparently there were parts of the route between the Teng School and Blue Water City that passed into the suppression zone. Had random travellers on roads or outlying villages also landed in here?

Looking around, she could see that same conclusion being drawn on quite a few faces now, along with more silent judging of the actions of those above them and perhaps wondering…

-What if that was us, or our parents, caught up, surviving all this, finally finding cultivators and now getting mistreated like this?

“Enough!” Hushan snapped, his presence as a quasi-Dao Immortal cutting through the rather ambivalent mood of the crowd. “We are here to do a job, and it is not this. Now we must meet up with…”

A shadow shot out of the mist, crashing into the side of back line of cultivators with no warning at all, then another, and then another, and in the next instant she spotted manic, snarling figures, their half-burned bodies barely holding together, emerging from the chaos. In seconds, tens of the demons were swarming over their group, tearing at cultivators, punching them, ripping at them and screaming inarticulately in languages she had never heard before.

Spinning, she drew her own weapons, a pair of chakrams, and slung them into the crowd of attackers, severing arms and splitting heads before Zhu’s yell warned her of others.

Two massive detonations tore across the attacking line, eaten up in the mist, the sound muted bizarrely. Even more bizarre, to her eyes, was that the attack, originating from a Golden Immortal, should have devastated the onslaught, and yet, here, it barely had the impetus of a Qi Refinement disciple’s attack.

“What is this?!” someone screamed as white mist boiled out of a burned corpse, which deflated like a bladder after sustaining too many injuries, even making a sad, sorrowing sigh of escaping air as it did so.

Two she had hit were also dissipating like that, while a third, which Zhu had stabbed, was leaking mist faintly from its sword wound.

“The ones from before… were not…” Zhu gasped, tearing at his sword, then just planting a talisman on the body that was grappling with him and kicking it away, to explode a moment later.

“No… they were—” she narrowly dodged an arm, thrown like a chakram itself, from a cultivator and ducked down, dragging Zhu with her.

The mist was thickening radically now, to the point where it was nearly impossible to make out those fighting a few paces away, and the sounds of combat were nothing more than mute echoes and the occasional scream.

A corpse scrambled over a block and landed beside them—

Reflexively, she hit it, using the chakram to decapitate it, and then flinched back to see the child’s head looking up at her, the sadly greyish skin and slightly pointed ears the only real difference between it and a seven or eight year old girl.

“Why are there…?” Zhu muttered, reminding her that for all that he was an Immortal, he was barely 25 years old and had grown up in their sect, unlike her, who was close to 40 and had entered it as an outer disciple.

Two more corpses skidded down the slope from above, crashing down near them and then launching themselves forward with unnatural speed as she pressed herself back into the rock, trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. Both had been old, grey-bearded and, in terms of strength, unknowable to her. Chosen Immortal realm corpses, recently dead as well.

“They said the ruins were abandoned,” Zhu muttered.

“…”

She was about to comment that that was… when he kept speaking and her skin suddenly went clammy.

“They said that the prophetess was dead… sealed away…”

“Ummm… Brother Zhu?”

Her friend was pale and trembling, his eyes unfocused as… shadowed hands, barely visible in the mist, touched his head and…

She slashed at them with her sword only to find they went right through them, as Zhu started to shiver.

“Darkness… the Darkness lives… The elves didn’t seal it away… They bound it here to torment us…” Zhu was mumbling now, as the hands continued to gently massage his temples.

Grimacing, she grasped the front of his robe and bodily hauled him up… to find that a shadowy form was crouched behind him, whispering in his ear. A youth, maybe their age, his eyes dark and lost, the colour slightly faded from his strange attire. Abruptly, he focused on her, and she felt her limbs grow cold, the soul attack washing through her like a dark wave, dragging her down, robbing her of strength even as she struggled to fight against it.

“Cannot fight it…” the youth mumbled.

“Cannot…”

“She cannot die…”

“Over and over… we killed her…”

“Over and over and over…”

“And she always came back… always… and we died…”

“Died… and died… and died…”

She tried to back away, dragging Zhu, as the spirit, for that was clearly what it was, against all the odds, crawled towards her.

“We could not fight it… but you can…” the youth rasped, suddenly, lunging forward towards them.

“Your strengths… give it to me… so I can fight her—!”

She pulled out a talisman, a thunder-based one, and tossed it at the spirit.

{Xhong Xiao’s Celestial Bolt}

At this distance, she was picked up and thrown halfway across the hill, still holding the barely conscious Zhu, while the spirit, consumed by the red-gold bolt, dispersed like mist, his enraged, pleading, desperate words… all spoken in Easten, vanished into the mist as if they never were.

Dragging herself up, she looked around at the thinning mist and cursed, because there was next to no sign of anyone else from their group.

“What you were saying?” she hissed, helping her junior brother up. “What was that… spirit?”

“I… I…” Zhu was pale-faced and shaking, his qi chaotic. “I saw something of it. It didn’t expect me to have a Nascent Soul, I think. This place… it was a city.”

“I think we get that,” she grimaced, recalling how deep…

“No… you don’t understand,” Zhu shook his head. “Those ruins we went into before, when we went down… 4… 6 layers… that was street level… This city goes from the hills in the east, to the far side of the river, to the hills behind us, was as big as Meng City, or Blue Water City…”

She paused, to stare at him, because that was shocking, except it implied something else…

“This place, it was ruined, broken, buried. I saw it in the connection with that spirit. In its time, the old city here was a land of the dead, a cursed place where a prophetess of a dark cult overthrew the rightful rulers.”

“I… see…” she frowned.

“No… you don’t,” Zhu whispered and she screamed, as a sword slammed through her stomach, the blow sending her flying down the slope.

“You don’t see, Senior Sister… All of this…! We have to use everything… to kill her…! She is an abomination… a dark devil crawled out of hell!”

Staggering up, she tried to stem the injury and cursed, because the qi that came with it was cold and grasping, whispering almost, as Zhu walked down the slope much more confidently now towards her.

“You… the spirit…”

“Your junior brother was strong, little Heaven’s Path heretic,” the thing in Zhu’s body said with a grin, “but in the end he was just a little heretic, unable to match me.”

“No… no…!”

She pulled out a talisman and cast it at Zhu.

{Thunder Light Spea—

Zhu moved fast, as fast as an unsuppressed Immortal, his hand closing around hers, crushing the talisman before it could activate—

{Moon Blossom Crescent}

The second form of her martial form sheered through his body, splitting it in two and scattering gore all over the place; however, the spirit just ignored that and surged forward, revealing its form fully, a youth with curly brown hair, oddly vivid in the gloom yet without the light in his features ever really extending beyond him.

Mustering what qi she could, she tried to dodge, only for it to feel like everything was slowing down around her, even as he kept moving at the same speed, arriving before her, even as she cut through him a second time—

A hand grasped her shoulder, slinging her away like a rag doll and a tall, stunningly beautiful woman in a short white robe, carrying a broad bladed spear and a bronze shield, smashed into the spirit, who recoiled backwards, screaming in shock.

The youth rolled up and then shot backwards into the mist so fast all she saw was an afterimage of it fading into the rippling darkness.

“…”

Gasping, she fumbled for a healing pill and ate it, trying to stem off the injury that had somehow been done, the cold grasping chill that was consuming her from the inside out now.

-Got to get out of here…!

That was the overriding thought in her mind now, as the mist swirled down, ever more oppressive. The distant conflict was now silent, visible only from the flashes of lightning and iridescent fire reflecting through the water droplets ahead…

-Run or fight…

-Run or…

She exhaled, and turned back towards the lightning, pausing only to store what remained of her junior brother in her storage ring. Strangely enough, the deciding factor had been the determined face of the young mother and daughter trying to protect each other out here.

~ Fuan Hao – within the Acropolis of Solaneum ~

Making his way across the edge of the great hall, Fuan Hao found himself wishing, again, yet again, that he really had just got them all to turn back at the first shrine, somehow… although it likely wouldn’t have helped with the unfortunate fates of Qin Su and Yu Hei…

-Might even have seen us all die, caught even more unawares, a nasty part of his mind suggested.

The problem was that space here was… at a word, crocked. None of them were weak; the lowest realm cultivator among them was actually Li Dongsha, and he was above average as a Golden Immortal. The rest of them were all Golden Immortals, with the exception of him, who was a Quasi-Ancient Immortal, and Shu Wentian, who had been an Ancient Immortal for a few decades already. All of them knew what broken space looked like, and this was very broken.

“How is Yuang?” he asked Feng Dian, who was the one carrying him now.

Feng just shook his head.

“There are no friezes here… or paintings…” Li muttered, moving behind him, helping the injured Shu Wentian.

“Hardly needs it. The statues say enough for lifetimes…” Wentian grimaced.

That was true. The statue shrine, set up as the centrepiece of the great, ruined hall, was pretty clear. The woman, Aphrodite, had fought the hero and this other demon-like figure, and it seemed that both had perished, though that didn’t explain the seals that were now shimmering and clearly visible, circling—

“They changed again,” Li muttered, pointing his free arm at the seal as they continued to make their way forward as fast as they could.

It took them ten minutes, all told, to walk across a hall to a grand distance of maybe 20 metres, keeping as close to the wall as they could and warily watching for the distortions that had come frequently. Half a heartbeat later, the distortion settled through the air, making the hall become even gloomier somehow.

On the shrine, at the front, which could now be made out, an entire section had been torn out, the threads now swirling back across it, forming a phantasmal afterimage of 5 interlocking symbols: a golden flower, a white deer, a red sun, a three-armed spiral and a black bird. With that last distortion, the raven, the spiral and the red sun were fading away on the seal, even as the golden flower looked more and more broken, as if the power sustaining it was being damaged somehow.

“We need to get out of here and tell them that this is a terrible mistake,” Feng muttered, recomposing himself and wiping sweat off his brow.

“You don’t say? Nothing in what we saw of the woman’s pictures or the heroes depicted that demon, and somehow I rather suspect that there is a very good reason for that,” he agreed.

“Or we just didn’t find those halls,” Wentian added, which was true. “There were plenty of closed off routes.”

“More to the point,” Li added, “that seal in the town appears to have come from here. Why would someone tear it out and move a bit of it?”

“…”

That was the prescient point, actually. The reason given for trying to open it was that this was all for a treasure of the ancient Huang clan, which was perhaps plausible… but his gut instinct said that something here was crooked.

-And we are potentially standing right beside whatever ‘it’ might be.

They struggled on in silence for a few more minutes until at last they made it to the corner of the central portion of the building closest to the shrine. At this point, he had taken over helping Wentian, who was still barely recovered, while Li now carried Yuang and Feng got a rest, relatively speaking.

“You know, the seals look like they are hidden in the shrine?” Feng observed, pointing over to the whole edifice, now no more than 20 metres away.

Looking where Feng was pointing, he found that that was indeed the case, the damage dealt by the removal of one of the five seals clearly showed two shrines, an inner and an outer one. The outer, clad in white stone, was very much all about showing the prestige and glory of the hero in the many carvings on it. The inner one, however, was just a mess of swirling lines and abstract patterns that shifted bizarrely if you looked at it for too long, and which had a faint reddish hue.

“Someone came along and built another shrine over it, to hide it?” he guessed – that was not uncommon even back home, ruins built on ruins, secrets hiding secrets, or simply redecoration, because the new wife of the sect master didn’t like the lines on it.

“…”

“We can worry about it if we get out of here,” Wentian hissed, pushing himself up. “Let’s get moving. There looks to be a door down this wall.”

Looking ahead, between the pillars, there were indeed a few doors down the hall, all of them shut, but much smaller than the ones down below. There also appeared to be giant doors at the end of the hall, ahead of them, but they were firmly shut.

It took a few minutes of struggling, his qi continuing to rather rapidly drain away, to reach the first door, which turned out to be inaccessible. The door itself was open slightly, but it was blocked beyond by a buckled floor and none of them were able to slip through a gap as wide as your hand.

The second door, though, did turn out to be accessible, and, with a bit of straining, was levered open by the four of them to the point where it was possible to check inside. Beyond it was a long hall, stretching into the gloom with more rooms off the far side. After scrambling in, it was possible to see that the previous door had led into a different hall that was also accessible from this corridor, but also totally ruined, its interior open to the sky and tangled vines clawing their way down.

Poking one of the vines, Wentian sighed and shook his head, sitting down against the wall.

“Poisonous?” he guessed.

“Very,” Wentian agreed. “Not a spirit herb, but possibly the highest grade bit of spirit vegetation I’ve ever laid eyes on for all that it looks like a common weed.”

“Figures,” Feng sighed.

“So… what do we do now?”

“Look for a way out?” he suggested.

“I mean beyond that – you don’t seriously think that they will stop this ritual of theirs for anything we say?” Feng grumbled.

“Probably not,” Wentian agreed, wearily.

He was about say something more, when something caught his eye in the gloom ahead of them. It was hard to say what it was, a sort of oddity in the shadows perhaps. At first he thought it was a statue, but there were no statues in the hall, which was fairly utilitarian… which meant…

Wordlessly, he poked both Li and Feng and nodded down the hall.

“…”

“What?” Li murmured.

He focused on that point and hissed inwardly, because it was indeed gone. He looked carefully all along the hall, column by column, but got…

“Shit!” he hissed under his breath and spun around, to find nothing behind them—

For a brief second he swore there was a presence right behind him, recalling that the other spirits had been somewhat unable to do anything about the doors, he spun again and put his back to it.

“What’s…?” Wentian and the others were looking at him very oddly, but the sense of creeping inevitability was almost overpowering now, all his instincts screaming at him that something was staring at them in some way.

“I think we should go back into the hall,” he murmured.

“…”

Wentian looked down the corridor, at the dark doors and the gloom, and nodded.

Feng grabbed Yuang and Li, still staring around, warily turned—

He froze, as he saw the shadow standing right behind Li, like a grinning shadow, its face sunken and cruel, avaricious eyes and a faint, sinister smile eating up all awareness of the surroundings.

{Storm Star}

The bolts of molten iridescent light hung in the air beside the petrified Li, who could only stand still as they sank through the broken space, scattering the shadow into darkness. The multiplying bolts of light seared down the corridor for almost 30 metres before the gloom and the ambience sapped them of all their momentum and they faded away.

“Out!” he snapped, shoving the still stunned Li through the door back into the hall.

Wentian scrambled out after him, his face pale enough to imply that he had also just seen whatever it once was, while Feng dragged Yuang alongside him.

{Su Teng’s Sealing Box}

The talisman triggered, the immutable wall of transformed space it summoned hitting the door, barely managing to slam it shut behind them.

“What by the nameless hells was that?” Wentian hissed, as the dull echoing of the door being sealed faded away.

“So you saw it as well,” he grimaced. “Probably something like what got Qin and Yu.”

“I…”

Li was looking… odd, suddenly, staring down at the ground…

“I…” they followed his gaze to see that Li’s shadow was grinning back at him, with a haunting, familiar smirk.

“Run…!” Li gasped, staggering backwards away from them suddenly.

“What?” Feng blinked. “No!”

“You… don’t…! It’s… I… can’t…” Li’s expression was becoming twisted, his qi chaotic. “Please… run…!”

“No!” Wentian snapped, pulling out a talisman. However, before they could do anything, Li pulled one of his own out, a barrier, and set it on himself directly and the area around him.

The shadow moved, but a moment too slow, and he saw shadowed arms sliding around Li’s body, twisting his limbs like they were strips of paper—

There was a sense of distortion, a flare of anti-colour, and the barrier around Li turned pure white.

“…”

They stood there, silent… in shock, as it faded away to reveal the last remnants of a shadowy being fading away into mist and the last broken remnants of Li Dongsha’s spirit foundation melting away into varicoloured mist.

If he closed his eyes, he fancied he could still see Li Dongsha standing there, reluctance and determination at war on his face amid a halo of white death.

A faint clatter and cracking sound shook him out of his reverie as his sect brother’s twisted storage ring fell to the ground. He nearly made a move to pick it up, but then stopped, thinking about twisted—

With a snarl of rage, the spirit shot out of the ruined storage ring, collapsing it completely, and shot towards Yuang.

{Formless Dao Cage}

Fortunately, Feng was ready and a second barrier caught it, just barely, leaving it frozen in the air before them, with its form properly revealed. It was a human, probably a tall, thin man with a clean face and braided hair and a cruel sneer on his face. His clothing was pale white with a golden cross on it, somehow coloured, yet the sense of those colours came in spite of the shadows covering him somehow.

Wordlessly, they all backed away, watching as the talisman in Feng’s hand started to distort at the edges and degrade.

“What realm even was that thing in life?” Feng goggled, staring as the barrier, which should have held a Dao Immortal fairly securely, started growing fuzzy around the edges.

There were no more obviously open doors, not that he thought that likely made a lot of difference at this point, given the previous one was already unworkable to shut properly. The next few minutes were like a different form of torture, as they slowly made their way onwards, backing away from the barrier and trying to keep a degree of vigilance in every direction while avoiding the shadows, while all the while the frozen shadow inside the Dao Cage shuddered faintly, until abruptly it scattered like smoke and vanished.

“…”

“Do you reckon it ran out of qi?” he asked hopefully, recalling how those barriers worked.

“We can but hope,” Feng grimaced. “Shall I cancel it?”

“…”

“Do you have any more?” Wentian asked.

“One,” Feng muttered. “Not as effective though.”

“Recall it,” Wentian said after a long pause.

Feng pursed his lips and then nodded slowly, deactivating the talisman.

They all stared at the darkness, but no grinning shadow appeared. He wanted to exhale, to be relieved, but it was impossible, and clearly the others also agreed, because they continued to walk, step by step, vigilantly looking around, supporting Yuang.

A second door, which they did manage to close, came and went, and then they finally reached the end of the cross around the shrine, a vaulted gate within the building, carved with tens of valorous-looking figures, most missing their heads. Those heads, it turned out, someone had stacked in a pile before the gate, like they were sacrificial skulls, and drenched in a red substance that was likely paint.

Making their way through, and around the statue head pile, the second part of the hall was much the same as the first, but with a vast series of friezes picking their way around it. These were statues, mercifully, but beneath a lot of them, someone had painted additional text, and in quite a few places heads and faces were also missing.

“This… is the same as the story down below,” Wentian pointed out after a few minutes.

“In what—?”

Wentian cut him off. “It shows the same kind of events, but in all of these the hero is thwarting the woman, exposing her deeds and finally…”

“Capturing her,” Feng, who was looking back behind them, commented.

Turning, he looked up quickly and saw what Feng meant. The scene was one of the few not vandalized, weirdly enough, and showed the woman held in chains with a ruin in the background and a group of soldiers bowing to priests, the hero standing to one side with his companions. However, they were missing the masked woman and the tattooed one – those two were replaced with a robed man in a tall funny hat and a man in heavy armour. Also, in counterpoint to the party below, the green-robed youth was present.

“You note, there were four statues, but two back there were rather generic?” Feng said, a bit distantly.

He nodded – just giving him a pat on the arm. The woman was already objected to, and the tattooed man… seemed like a member of the group that was shown being persecuted a lot in some of Aphrodite’s scenes…

“I would guess whoever made this didn’t want them remembered?” he guessed.

“There is certainly something missing—”

Wentian’s words were cut off as the darkness and the oppression physically twisted and the sense of being watched he had had in the corridor returned with vengeance. Spinning, he saw two… three… four… five… He stopped counting at ten odd bits where things might be hiding in darker gloom where before there had been none.

This time, none of them waited for him. Feng, carrying Yuang, was already sprinting for the dark colonnades at the end of the hall, Wentian moving a fraction faster. He brought up the rear, tracking as many as he could as the four of them moved agonisingly slowly past rows of scattered stone benches, overturned and cracked.

Minute by minute, stride by stride, they raced down the hall, cursing as it slowly moved around them. The shadows didn’t really pursue so much as keep pace, with ever more joining them, until it was like the very shadows themselves were walking after them and slowly growing.

“What do we do when we get to the end?” he asked.

“…”

There was silence from Feng and Wentian, mirroring, agonizingly, his own uncertainties. Certainly, the shadows were just keeping pace because there would already be these strange, untouchable ghosts down there anyway.

“I… have a thing we might be able to use,” Wentian said grimly at last.

~ Ching Fei – Ruins near the city ~

It wasn’t hard to stay off to the side once they got back to the group, lurking near the Dusk Sky Pagoda disciples on the grounds that they were the largest organized group that didn’t seem totally dubious. Hushan led them on rapidly, cutting through two more large groups of risen demons who frenetically tried to tear them down until at last they were forced to stop at the base of the largest hill, to take stock and recuperate a bit. In the process, she noted that several of their extended group had actually started storing not just their own, but also the bodies of demons brought down in storage rings, which was a smart move truth be told – what rose once might rise again after all – and made her wish she had done that herself.

“Where is Brother Zhu?”

She turned to find the accusatory face of one of her junior sisters, Mu Xiufan.

“…”

It was hard to even qualify it with an answer, given that when she closed her eyes she could still see his rapid descent into insanity and death by her hands… twice, thanks to that accursed spirit.

“Where is Zhu?” Xiufan reiterated.

“Sister Xiu,” one of her friends muttered, “don’t bother Senior Ching…”

“He died,” she said flatly.

“He…” the girl stepped back as if slapped, even though his lack of presence here would surely be all the confirmation needed there.

“How… did he die and you live?” the girl hissed.

“…”

“Life is shit. This place is shit,” she replied, not really knowing what else to say, because her own heart was numb over it as well…

“How—?”

She cut Xiufan off, actually put a hand over her mouth. They were both Immortals, but there was a gap in age and strength, and if not personal status, certainly status in the sect.

“He died because a ghost killed him,” she said flatly. “I tried to save him, but I couldn’t.”

“You… how could—?”

“WE MOVE OUT!” Hushan’s voice echoed through the dark haze, which, even though it had to be nearly dawn, was still obnoxiously dark.

“…”

Xiufan opened and shut her mouth, her momentum disrupted the inconsiderate interruption.

“Now is not the time,” she said flatly.

The two other junior sisters with Xiufan nodded and dragged the girl, who was just looking lost now, away. It made her feel bad, but if the other girl had liked Zhu, she was the one who had been set to mentor him in the sect. That he was dead was in a way her responsibility, but life was also cruel.

Shaking her head, she moved up, following after the Dusk Sky Pagoda group again, waving for the others with her to come after, which they did, clustering up warily in case another enraged band of corpses piled out of the mist.

In the end, though, it wasn’t another wave of corpses, but two dishevelled cultivators who scrambled out of the mist to meet them, just as they reached the top of the hill, and the tumbled down, slightly overgrown gate into the ruin that Hushan and the others were leading them to.

“Brother Qin?” someone called after a moment, from among the Dusk Sky group ahead of her.

“And Brother Yu!” someone else called out.

“Brother Wentian…”

“Brother Fuan?”

Other calls echoed over as their formation collapsed in on itself, except for the group accompanying the woman and her daughter.

Pushing forward herself, she got close enough to hear.

“—found a shrine, unfortunately Brother Wentian wanted to explore… and we barely escaped,” Brother Qin mumbled.

“Yes… we got split up. There was a weird shrine, in a really creepy hall…”

“Creepy hall—” Brother Gu asked, frowning.

“A weird shrine?” Hushan cut him off.

“Yes… down below, but we found a second while exploring, up here… through those halls,” Brother Yu pointed up into the ruins.

“I see…” Hushan nodded.

“Senior Hushan, why don’t I take some disciples with Brother Yu and check this out?” Brother Roshun said, stepping forward.

“…”

“Okay,” Hushan nodded. “Take… eight. If it is interesting, come back quickly.”

“You, you… you… you… you… and you!” she blinked as Roshun pointed at Xiufan and then her in quick succession.

Only half of those pointed to actually moved with any alacrity, because, as she noted, many of them had been among the most vociferous complainers about how the woman had been pressed regarding her circumstances. The exceptions there were the deputy from the Dusk Sky pagoda, her and Xiufan.

“What are you waiting for, come on!” Roshun said flatly. “Or are you disobeying Senior Hushan?”

“Senior Hushan is not in the Dusk Sky Pagoda,” the selected disciple pointed out.

“Fine, you,” Roshun pointed at an independent cultivator, who bowed, clearly happy to be given the chance.

Xiufan took a step forward, but she reached out and stopped her.

“What are you—?” the younger woman said.

“Don’t,” she murmured.

“Don’t? This is clearly an opportunity. We were picked—”

“All those picked are the ones who mouthed off earlier. We are the odd ones out,” she hissed. “I know you’re unhappy about Junior Zhu, but the group these two were with was led by an Ancient Immortal… Do you see Shu Wentian here?”

“…”

Xiufan opened and shut her small mouth, then frowned. “What are you saying?”

“I am saying,” she hissed, “that your fellow junior died in a way that was very suspicious. We should stick together.”

“You two… from the Green Peacock Sect,” Roshun addressed them.

“Sorry, senior, for your kind offer, but both of us are injured from the fighting. We would only hold you back,” she said swiftly, bowing in apology. “My junior sister has also suffered personal loss, so I ask you to be understanding…”

“…”

Roshun stared at her, and she wondered if he was going to insist, given that their Green Peacock Sect was in a way a branch of the Four Peacocks Court.

“Disappointing,” Roshun sighed. “I will speak to your seniors about this.”

“…”

-Be my guest, she grumbled inwardly, still holding onto Xiufan’s arm.

“If Senior is willing, we will go,” two male disciples from the Golden Mystery Peak, another Four Peacocks subsidiary, stepped forward, looking sideways at them.

“Okay,” Roshun nodded, turning on his heel and leading the others away into the mist with Brother Yu.

“What if they actually find something?” one of her junior brothers, Ji, muttered.

“…”

She just looked at him silently until he bowed his head, before replying. “So far, here, have we found anything?”

“We might have…”

“If you believe that, I have a special talisman to sell you, very big momentum, make you Dao Ascendant in one lick,” she scowled, getting a few nervous laughs even from the disciple in question.

That laughter was cut off though, by a sudden, abrupt shift in the aura of the land all around them. The enveloping mist almost seemed to grow eyes, visibility dropping even more profoundly, and accompanying it was a very faint sense of inauspicious potential that had definitely not been there before.

“Seems they are making progress with the seal,” Brother Ji muttered.

“Yeah, if this is progress I don’t like it,” another disciple from a different sect near them muttered.

“Stop lingering back there!” one of the group heads called back to them,

“Who is lingering?” she muttered, picking up the pace.

The ruined gate was huge, and not for the first time, it made her wonder exactly how this place had mostly escaped notice during the day, when the land around here had seemed very unremarkable… The best guess she had was that it was somehow related to the seal, but that was not that comforting a thought, because it implied that someone had sealed up this place.

‘We cannot kill her… Over and over… she always came back… and we died… all died… We could not fight…’ those words, mumbled by Zhu and also by the ghost who had possessed him, were still rattling around in her head.

That other members of their group were likely possessed was, she was sure, very likely, given that Zhu had barely appeared odd until…

Involuntarily, she looked up at the woman and her daughter, being led along by the two masked cultivators in whitish grey robes, and the others nearby.

“Your strengths… give it to me… so I can fight her—”

They had come chasing over here, led by the three seniors… who had been determined that this woman was the cause of… this. At the time, it had been easy to assume that that was somehow related to the mist or the undead, but now that she thought about it… if the ghosts here wanted her dead, was it somehow… related to the seal they were trying to undo?

And yet… looking at her now, the blonde-haired woman was clearly out of her depth, unwilling to be here, and always making sure she kept her daughter right by her, looking this way and that with a kind of ferocity that made her heart hurt a little bit.

Even when you looked at it objectively, her story was plausible, and also… nobody liked the idea of killing children, or mothers, and she had been pitiable yet not begged, her strength and endurance had been… well, it was clear to see, and the entire momentum of the group had shifted with that argument. Even now, others were inquiring if she needed help. She was still clutching the robe given around her, and her daughter was holding her hand, looking this way and that with a brave face that made you want to hug her almost involuntarily…

It was drawing those nervous souls here, herself included, in a weird way, together, and yet…

And yet…

-Fates-damn-it! she cursed. This whole wretched place is making me suspect everything now.

“What even is this place?” one of the disciples near her muttered, staring up at the arch as they walked through it.

That was a good question, because, looking at it now, she could see how the tangled vegetation, the grass, the slumping, misshapen rocks and more had led to this place being a lot less visible than it might have been. The carvings on it were of a style with those they had seen in their forays below, but the scenes depicted…

Before she could get a good look, they were pushed on through, those behind unwilling to linger in case more undead came through, but that was secondary, anyway, to the scene before her, because as soon as she looked around the courtyard they were in, she realised why Hushan and the others were so keen to get in here and do it while the majority of the most influential folks were tied up with the last steps of the divination. The ruin, from the inside, was not ruined.

Oh, there were tumbled-down bits, and trees growing out of things, and leaves thick enough that it made her wonder where the surface actually was, looking back at the gate. There were three stories to most buildings here, a large complex of column-fronted buildings to her right facing away from the town, two large, sprawling estates on the left, including one with an open door, and the steps before them led up the rock outcropping to what was clearly an even larger, vegetation-draped ruin and another square.

In short, if there was anywhere here likely to have actual treasure, a place like this was probably it…

And yet…

With a deep breath, she ruthlessly quashed that thought, just as she could see quite a few others doing as well. It was one thing to want to find cool stuff, but you had to be alive to enjoy it, and in a place like this, anything worthwhile was going to go to the Hushans, Roshuns and Quangs of this group, not her or Xiufan… or her junior brother Zhu.

“So… no treasure,” Brother Ji looked sideways at her.

“The better question is why, if that town was full of demons, were they living there, not here?” she shot back.

She had a pretty good thought on that, after how Zhu had died and how this was going, but the problem there was…

-How do I find a moment to run away that doesn’t immediately see me in deep trouble now…?

-And why did I let my stupidity override my desire to get the hells out of here!?

-Oh… Because the first ghost you might have met could have done you in? a rebellious voice in her head added, very reasonably.

“Maybe they didn’t have our…” Brother Ji trailed off.

She did as well, as the world around them shifted subtly, the mist slowly sliding out of focus and becoming a sort of shadowy pall. As it did so, the surroundings seemed to become a bit less majestic and a bit more dilapidated; however, the mist didn’t vanish entirely, merely becoming real, pre-dawn mist with the dark sky just about visible above the haze.

“Well?” the group around Hushan were consulting what appeared to be a compass, having shaken off their surprise at the rapid change in ambience with the dawn.

“It is here, but the readings are very weird,” the one holding the compass frowned.

Looking around, she focused for a second… because it suddenly felt like their group had more people than…

-Did I just miss some in the mist?

“Weird? How so?” Hushan asked, before realising others were looking at him, and frowned.

“…”

The others around the compass, in nondescript travelling robes, were also looking up, as if surprised that everyone else was able to see them as well.

-Apparently not, she thought, her heart sinking suddenly.

Turning, she saw two more, commonly garbed cultivators leaning against the gateway, who then also… looked surprised to have been spotted.

“What exactly is…?” the question, asked by one of the Dusk Sky Pagoda disciples, was lost as the entire northern sky erupted.

That was the only way to describe it. A vast, dark shadow erupted across it, lightning flickering everywhere, like black cracks, peeling away the dawn for a split second and dimming the world, as the whole sky seemed to cave upwards for several vision-distorting seconds then snap back.

“Tribulation?” someone nearby echoed her own thoughts dully.

“What kind of tribulation is…?”

“It seems they were successful!” the one holding the compass exclaimed. “The connection is here, all around us… probably in the ruin at the top of the hill.”

Hushan turned to stare at him, and he then looked around at the rest of them… and for the second time in as many minutes she suddenly got the impression that they had not been meant to hear that.

“Right,” Hushan said briskly. “Everyone, the princess has just sent a communication! The divination has succeeded in opening the seal, so now we need to do our part. We will set up a focusing array here, while you are to go up to the temple with Diviner Beilong here and do as he… instructs.”

“What about her?” Senior Quang pointed to the woman and her child, still under guard.

“…”

“She has cultivation. Take her. She can be useful and the girl can stay here with us.”

“Mother…” the child scowled, refusing to let go of her hand.

The guard just shook his head and pulled the two apart, directly shoving the woman forward to the group as she glowered at them.

“Ah… she was saved by us, so at least see nothing untoward happens to her. That would reflect badly on Sir JiLao and the Princess,” Hushan added, after a momentary conferral.

Diviner Beilong nodded, staring at the rest of them, before adding, “Get moving, or do you all not give Princess Lian any face, like you wouldn’t Sir Roshun from the Four Peacocks Court?”

“…”

There was silence, but as reluctant as she was at this point, none of them were easily able to say that that was the case – to tell someone from the Four Peacocks Court, barely an Ancient Immortal, to ‘go take a hike’ was one thing, but to offend an Imperial Princess… that was the kind of thing sect elders got shirty about.

That said, the way it was framed was… she hesitated to say it was off, because he was right, they were here because their sects’ seniors had agreed to help the Princess Lian and Sir Huang; however, those words from Zhu and the ghost still kept gnawing at her, making her wonder.

Unfortunately though, Seniors Quang and Gu were already climbing, the members of the Jade Gate Court and Argent Hall casting dismissive and superior looks behind them as they followed after. The woman was also being led up by two of those in white robes from the sect she didn’t recognise, looking apprehensive. Finally, with a sigh, the leaders from the Dusk Sky Pagoda also started to climb, along with Senior Qin, the inner disciple from the Eastern Fire Wind Pagoda, at which point most of the others not selected to stay also started to climb.

“Do we?” Brother Ji asked her.

“…”

Looking around, she realised she was the most senior disciple from their Green Peacock Sect here…

It was undeniable that some aspect of this was crooked; she just couldn’t see what, which was mildly infuriating and not just a bit worrying. It was like having an itch you couldn’t scratch. Her intuition hinted that Roshun was likely the one who had been grasped by a ghost, which made her pray in her heart for those who had gone with him, but that was that. However, this…

-To go or not to go… If we don’t, we offend basically everyone…

-And yet… we are five Immortals from a small regional sect, in a bunch almost 40 strong, at least half of whom are Golden Immortals… We are basically prestige numbers…

Looking at their faces, though, she could see as well, that this was this and that was that. They were horrified at the death of Zhu, but barring Xiufen… they had not really been close to him… and they wanted to contribute. To earn favour with an Imperial Princess, even if it was only to say they were here when whatever great achievement was made…

-And we can’t go our own way. If those spirits have grasped others… if we alienate everyone and split off, or try to go back… ‘we’ will never walk back out of here.

“…”

“Fine, we go, but stay on your guards against any unexpected trouble and be careful,” she sighed, starting to walk forward.

The others breathed out, almost looking relieved, which didn’t really help her mood.

Zhu, Shun, Kai and Hua had died for face, basically. That was all it was, and in a way it disgusted her, because their little sect would get nothing out of it, except a mention of ‘oh, the Green Peacock Pagoda was also there’, or something like it.

It didn’t take long to climb the steps either, and it also didn’t help that, despite the strange shadow, the view was rather good. She could see why the ancient builders of this place put a building like this here. It also deepened her suspicions about why the demons had built their fortress city on the other hill…

At the top, there was a broad plaza, more space than she had expected actually, with the odd tree pushing through cracked slabs and vines and trees slowly overgrowing the main building from the south facing side. The groups had spread out, looking through a few of the buildings around it, while by the front of the great building, Beilong, Hushan and some dozen others were discussing something in low tones with Senior Qin and a few others nearby, keeping an eye on the golden-haired woman.

She now stood still, accompanied by the white-robed pair who came with Hushan, staring around as if the whole place had offended her – which, given how she had wound up here, was not an unreasonable view to take – with narrowed eyes.

“It’s huge…” Brother Ji muttered, staring up at it with something approaching awe.

“Definitely something weird going on with it,” someone else added from nearby. “How could we not notice something like this?”

“…”

It was hard to disagree there. The building itself was even more impressive up close, truth be told – a vast edifice of pale stone, and remarkably intact for the sense of age it gave her. The front was dominated by a broad colonnade, an upper story above supported by pillars nearly as thick as trees. Beyond that, the entrance was dominated by four huge metal doors, worn by age and climate to a dark greenish colour.

Quang and a bunch from the Argent Hall were already working on getting a smaller door within the main one open.

“Probably because of the trees and the fact that the roof is half overgrown,” another onlooker pointed out.

Looking back in the direction of the city, recalling the perspective, she had to agree there. The trees, the creeping vegetation around it, the swirling mists and haze all did a remarkable job of merging together to make the place look much less than it was. It was helped somewhat by the optical illusion of the lower plaza and overgrown buildings making the hill look smaller than it was.

“Um… Diviner Sir Beilong!” one of those standing near the steps suddenly called over to those by the door.

“What?” Beilong asked, turning around.

“We need to hurry up. Something is not right,” the disciple, who was also holding a compass, she noted, said, pointing out to the north.

“Not right…?” Beilong frowned, then followed the disciple’s pointing hand, not to the compass but to the northern horizon beyond the city.

She, along with others, also turned, and saw that the shadows of the distant tribulation cast across the horizon were twisting, casting strange distortions across the sky and the clouds, which were perpetually welling up like a vast storm front now that the night had given way and it was possible to see them clearly.

Counting rapidly, she found she had to do a recount, and then someone else beat her to it.

“Four-layered?” a disciple from the Dusk Sky Pagoda asked, sounding strangled.

That alone was shocking… However, what was unnerving her, and she was certain others, was that it looked like the whole thing had a shadowy double… and even at this distance even she could feel something off—

The vast swirling gyre on the horizon abruptly collapsed upwards, and in the same instant a second sun appeared in the north, a silver orb of annihilation that dropped through the firmament, scattering extermination fire. The world rippled, and she felt the alignments distorting under the impact of whatever had just happened…

“GET THAT DAMN DOOR OPEN!” Beilong roared, urging Quang and Gu along with the others to pry it open with several polearms.

There was a grinding echo and slowly it pried itself—

A gout of dark gold fire sliced out of a crack in the open door the very second that a gap appeared, two of the disciples tumbling away as it ate into their robes while Gu and Quang stumbled back cursing.

{MU’S MANIFOLD MOUNTAIN}

The array spell echoed in her mind, even as she felt herself physically lifted off the ground and sent sprawling by the shockwave as the door exploded out and two figures staggered out, dragging two more. All of them looked like absolute shit. That was the kindest thing she could say, as they stared blankly at the group. Their robes were from the Eastern Fire Wind Pagoda, but their complexions were sallow and drained, their vitality clearly harmed by the link to a burning, golden talisman that hung between them, radiating a profoundly holy aura—

Even though she had just pushed herself up, she threw herself flat again, dragging Ji and Xiufen down with her, as one of the cultivators, his expression a rictus of fury, sent a talisman blast, a line of fracturing space, straight at Disciple Qin, who was only saved by fortuitous proximity to Diviner Beilong – who blocked it with his fan.

“What is the meaning of this?” the diviner said with a scowl, closing the fan artefact he had used.

“See, Senior Beilong?” Qin gasped. “I told you they were…!”

However, the four had stopped focusing on him, and were now, she realised, staring at the woman who had come along with them… Their expressions slipping from shock… to… terror… and with it, her own heart sank.

“You are…” the leader, a tall lanky youth, was staring at the woman.

~ Fuan Hao – Within the Acropolis ~

The spirits hungered… pushed in from all sides, slowly eroding the talisman, which was all they had left… a desperate gamble, all to buy time while they worked desperately on the door to try and get it open.

“Golden Heaven, the Jewel at the Heart of the Lotus!”

“Golden Heaven, the Jewel at the Heart of the Lotus!”

“Golden Heaven, the Jewel at the Heart of the Lotus!”

“Golden Heaven, the Jewel at the Heart of the Lotus!”

All of them chanted – or, rather, their Immortal Souls chanted – supporting the talisman. How Wentian even had one, he had no idea, because True Dharma relics were rare things, and Dharma Mantra Relics were things you struggled to pry out of the goodwill of old ancestors for any price. Each one was precious, and the Chant of Heaven Gold was a thing that probably should not exist outside of the Shu Pavilion’s most reclusive old freaks.

Even so, it was keeping them alive, even if their accumulations were burning to sustain it. Even Yuang, barely conscious, was mumbling it as he sat cross-legged against the metal door, shivering as the darkness hunted for them.

And yet, as time went on, he and the door resolutely refused to move… For any of them, it was hard not to…

Push all your hopes into the jewel, attain the heart of the lotus, attainment like heavenly gold…

“Golden Heaven, the Jewel at the Heart of the Lotus!”

The words echoed around them, forcing the spirits into abeyance as they pressed ever in. It drowned out their hunger, their pain, their fury, their hate, their sadness, their confusion… barely. In the hands of an actual Dharma Cultivator this tool alone might have been enough to see them through, but as four Spiritual Cultivators, even with their attainments as they were, it was barely enough, and unsustainable. It wasn’t that the path was divergent, because everyone could find that realm in the Lotus heart, or so the saying went; it was just that you needed faith to do it, and spiritual cultivators didn’t really do faith, not in the same way Dharma ones did.

“Dammit!” Feng snarled, smashing his fist against the door and then shoving the halberd back into the thread wide crack.

All around them, golden fire surged, fed by their frustrations, their fears, their pain, the suffering… Li dying, Qin and Yu dying… turning all of it into purifying golden fire to hold back the darkness.

Another spirit screamed and fell back. Another replaced it, and whispered words, dark and corrosive, trying to drown out the chant, attacking it with terrible accumulation of their own—

The door behind them shifted abruptly, a crack of light slicing through, drowned out by a gout of Soul Fire.

{MU’S MANIFOLD MOUNTAIN}

Without pausing the chant, he emptied his qi into the talisman drawing out a whole handful of Heavenly Jades, not that they counted for much here, to supplement it, as did Feng and Wentian. The door smashed open and he grabbed Wentian at the same time Feng grabbed Yuang and shot out, after it, casting down the barrier behind them to prevent pursuit…

Stumbling out, he found, not an empty courtyard, but the hazy light of dawn… and a veritable crowd of cultivators of all sorts of sects sent sprawling under the impact of a talisman powered by what amounted to two Ancient Immortals not pulling punches. It was a miracle none of them were… dead.

He stared at Qin, whose body was looking back at them with a slightly blank expression.

-Oh monkey balls! He cursed in his heart, a horrible thought suddenly surfacing.

At about the same instant Feng also saw Qin Su and without hesitating drew a talisman.

{Shatter Lance}

The cracking line of spatial death split the firmament between them and Qin Su’s body, only to be blocked by a man wearing diviner’s robes in the style of the Grand Astrology Bureau.

“What is the meaning of this?” the diviner snapped, turning his cultivation on them and making him stagger.

Qin Su’s possessor also staggered and looked pale. “See, Senior Beilong! I told you they were…!”

“Um…” Wentian, who was lying on the ground, pulled his leg and pointed silently.

Confused, he turned to see who he was drawing attention to and his mind went blank. Her hair was muddy blond, and she looked like she had rolled in a puddle, but even so, her face in reality was every bit as haunting as it had been on every statue, almost more so in fact. Seeing her in the flesh as well, was…

“You are…” he managed to mumble.

“Ah…” she frowned, staring at the hall behind them with the look of someone who has just thought of a series of events and perhaps not liked them.

Wentian opened his mouth then shut it again, saying nothing, as did he, presumably struck by the same thought.

The woman appeared to be held captive… yet they had seen this kind of situation on so many of those paintings. Feng was also staring between her and the body of Qin Su. Weirdly, it seemed like nobody else really noticed her gaze flicker, and before anyone else could say anything, the diviner stepped between them.

“Now do you see? They want to silence the only witnesses!” Qin Su’s expression was pale and sweating, looking this way and that.

“…”

The reactions of the others, though, were rather interesting. He noticed that the Dusk Sky Pagoda, who were also a Shu influence like they were, was looking rather discontented, as were several of their compatriot ‘seniors’, he supposed, Quang Lu from the Argent Hall and Gu Wenpei from the Jade Gate Court.

Everyone else, though, was looking uneasily at the door behind them, with its dense shadows, clearly drawing conclusions about how the four of them had come out fighting and looked very drained.

“You three, scout inside,” Quang Lu said flatly, pointing to three peak Golden Immortals who were part of a mixed group to his right.

“Wait…!” he rasped. “Don’t, there are evil… spirits in there.”

“Evil spirits…” Qin Su scoffed. “You are just trying to hide what you found, like when you tried to block me and Brother Yu in that accursed hall!”

“…”

The Golden Immortals looked at their ragged group, at the door which was very uninviting and at Quang Lu… but made no move.

Quang Lu scowled then looked around; however, before he had even said anything, three cultivators from the Jade Gate Court started forward, looking dismissively at both them and the cultivators who had not wanted to go explore. As they passed, he caught several comments about the Shu clan ‘only being so much’, before they vanished into the open doorway.

“…”

They sat there in silence, watching and waiting, as did quite a few others. In his heart he was sure that those three, if they came out, would be just like Qin Su… claimed by whatever had killed Li Dongsha and their bodies controlled, but in the end, there was only so much he could do, he supposed.

To buy time, he took out a bunch of pills and then grunted as a sense of grasping strength coiled around him, originating from the diviner.

“What are you—?” he grimaced, pushing against it.

“Until it’s clear what has happened here, I would ask you not to do anything… difficult,” Diviner Beilong, who was apparently leading everything, said simply.

“We will take custodianship over them,” Gu Wenpei said with a bow, waving four more of the Jade Gate Court disciples in their deep green robes and white masks forward.

“No,” the leader of the Dusk Sky Pagoda said flatly, stepping forward and casting them a sideways look. “This is an internal matter of our Shu clan’s influences.”

“Is your Shu clan unwilling to show respect to the princess and the discipline gate?” Gu Wenpei scowled.

“Brother Gu, your offer is timely. Please help us look after them while we sort out our assigned task,” Diviner Beilong said with a wave of his fan. “We are already short on—”

He trailed off, as did everyone else, as something intangible changed in their surroundings. Between one second and the next, there was a sense of the whole world seeming to settle faintly.

The grass growing between the paving stones shifted…

Trees on buildings swayed gently.

The dawn-tinted clouds above, vaguely visible in the mist, drifted.

The blue sky beyond deepened.

Shadows shifted oddly… and, almost in passing, he noticed that some… did not, which, sweeping his gaze around, made his blood run cold.

Through all of it, a faint sense of oddness, which he had never really marked in the world up until that point, because, he realised, it had always been with him, vanished, notable only in his awareness by disappearance.

Everyone was frozen, shocked to silence within the frozen moment, even the possessed, until at last a noise stirred them.

*crack*

*crackle*

*Skitch*

The compass, held in the hands of a diviner nearby, suddenly shattered across both axes.

“Wha—?”

Another expert, who had been holding a similar white jade compass next to Beilong, coughed blood and staggered backwards, looking shocked, while his own compass seemed to grow dead before their eyes, as if its alignments had just been fractured.

Quite a few others also looked perplexed, a few also coughing up blood, though none, he noticed, among those who had been seized by shadows.

“What is—?” one of the disciples from the Dusk Sky Pagoda held up a divination talisman—

The bolt of pitch black lightning edged in silver didn’t hit him; it hit one of the other diviners associated with those helping the princess, leaving his body a frozen afterimage of ash. In the same instant, dozens more black bolts had landed all across the landscape, including three more in the courtyard below, a few across the ruins below and a rather large number focused on the distant city.

Some scattered, including one down below, but the majority seemed to hit true, as they had for the luckless diviner up here.

“…”

“Impossible…!” one of the white-garbed and masked figures muttered, pulling out a talisman.

“You say impossible but it’s just fate-thrashed—!” Beilong also coughed up another mouthful of blood and put his hand against the pillar beside him.

“Senior!” one of the other acolytes said with concern.

“Ah, you return!” Quang Lu interjected, as the three disciples exited the doorway looking a bit pale. “Well?”

“There is a shrine inside, and various other things,” one of them said. “The aura is a bit creepy, but that is all.”

“See?” Qin Su sneered. “I told you that these four were trying to hide things.”

“What is wrong with the divination talismans?” Beilong ignored Qin Su and the others, still staring at the paper in his hand.

“They… don’t work… or at least almost none of them work now,” one of the diviners muttered.

“One works?” Beilong frowned.

“Yes, Sir Beilong, the one from, uh… the Princess and Sir Huang,” the Diviner hesitated barely a moment before replying and passing over a worn white and gold jade circle to him.

“All the Eastern Azure ones… Is it possible that the divination did…?” Beilong’s expression was a bit sickly suddenly.

“Did what?” one of the others asked.

“Never mind, it just means things will take a bit longer, so long as the seal has been—”

“Sees Sir Shu Fanshan!”

Various shouts echoed from the side and he turned to see… Yu Hei, and an Ancient Immortal he thought was called Roshun, leading a large group up the side steps from a lower hall, a group that was also being led by Shu Fanshan…

Shu Fanshan swept his gaze across the group, flitted past Qin Su, found them and suddenly his heart dropped as the second most senior member of the Shu clan along in this whole endeavour barked.

“DISSOLUTE! BETRAYING THE CLAN AND STEALING TREASURES!”

The pressure pushed down on them, making him grimace. Shu Fanshan wasn’t from their sect, but rather the Shu clan proper, which was their backing influence. As such, it was somewhat improper for him to make that allegation regarding his sect’s matters actually, but his rank exceeded Shu Wentian’s and it would likely take Shu Erwei to fix any misunderstanding… especially since Yu Hei also had influential family connections to the Shu clan, as he recalled. Whatever had possessed Yu Hei had been able to almost flawlessly act as him, so presumably it had leveraged that information to bend Shu Fanshan’s ear…

-Or Shu Fanshan is also possessed?

Unbidden, from the corner of his eye, as he struggled not to fall over completely, he saw a few of the Immortals and even one or two of the Dusk Sky Pagoda group edging away from those near them, as if…

-They also suspect?

He managed to get Wentian’s attention in that moment, who nodded grimly.

However, before they could do anything, or even act, the world… dimmed.

That was the only way to describe it. It was like the sun had just gone behind clouds, or you had been standing on a sunny plaza and now clouds suddenly rolled over. The sky itself was still…

There was a scream, of horror, from a diviner standing behind Beilong, as a hand grasped him and dragged him behind the pillar somehow.

Another grasped for Beilong, and then dozens surged out of the shadows… except the shadows themselves were somehow turning darker as well… the hands recoiling…

The mist that had receded to a faint haze since they got out, seemed to become more turgid and slide into focus.

The shadows all around them grew greyer…

A terrible sense of impending crisis crept over him.

A crippling inability to do anything weighted him down.

Fear, failure… standing there unable to do anything as Li died…

Their agreement to let Qin and Yu scout ahead in those halls while they stared at statues…

Agreeing that this whole endeavour was a good idea…

All around them, people were suddenly staggering, grasping their heads, shadows blurring around them.

Fighting it, he tried to look up, but the sky was somehow like an endless chasm, dark… yet not… and yet… hidden within it was a terrifying—

It was beyond terrifying.

It came, like a shadow to all shadows.

It rolled back the dawn like a veil of darkness.

Like a vast bird, its wings blotting out the sky.

Out of the north…

From the source of the tribulation…

“What… did you subvert—?!” he managed to scream at Beilong, as the air all around them stagnated amid a sensation that was akin to a boundless, heaven-shaking cry of some primordial eagle.

Beilong’s mouth moved, even as the whole world shivered around them, but he never got a chance to hear it, because the darkness arrived, like the talons of some dreadful bird, and everything went black.

~ Cornelia – Upon the Acrosolaneum ~

“DISSOLUTE! BETRAYING THE SECT AND STEALING TREASURES!”

Having wondered exactly how many mortal idiots had walked into the jaws of ancient, covetous greed in this place, Cornelia found herself reminiscing that though the times might change, and the faces, even the names, one truth stood absolute concerning places like this: If there is a spooky ruin… they will come.

The new group were entirely possessed, now putting the numbers of those not claimed by a spirit firmly at a disadvantage.

Their plan, she was pretty sure at this point, was to toss her into the hall then use the disruption caused to sweep up all the corpses they could in the city and take advantage of the broken seal and whatever they could find to likely try and break the second seal entirely, freeing them all from imprisonment here, while still keeping her and the others sealed up, so they had a nice wellspring of chthonic energies to draw off without any fear of an actual chthonic god coming to ask what was going on.

It was a stupid plan, but the enraged, covetous, slightly defiler-touched spirits that had come to haunt this land were not among unearth’s greatest thinkers, so this was already at a stage bordering on spiritual enlightenment. It was also, unfortunately, despite it being a profoundly stupid plan, a plan that, thanks to a very stupid barbarian bitch, had a lot of short term merit.

It was also a much more minor problem, compared to the one that had finally reared its ugly head to her as she quietly took stock of the circumstances here. The mortals were absolutely after the damn daggers, and the group here were trying to get at the shrine inside… presumably because they wanted her body to go with Arella. Ironic, there, of course, because she was standing right here, but that revelation would come too late for them to do anything about in any case.

As such, she was pondering what was the best way to clean up both groups with one move, beyond using ‘Melainis’ or ‘Anosia’, when a sudden sense of creeping and familiar oppression slid down the back of her neck and made her turn to the northern horizon.

“You—”

She ignored the guard who had grabbed her, shaking his arm off, and stared up at the sky, which was cast with a formless shadow, like a veil of ominous intent that swept across the world. It could be compared to many things, to a shadow of rain, to clouds over the sun, a shift in the wind to make it more chill, but she… who had been to that place more times than even some Avernale, knew why it was familiar to her. She had felt it in a way, every time she went to the banks of the Styx.

The prestige… of the original, eternal… night.

It swept over the sky, out of the north, like a terrible bird, grasping with its claws—

She stared down, surprised to find a blade shoved through her.

“If we are doomed, so are you!” the ghost possessing the leader of the group sneered, grasping her by the throat even as everyone else screamed and collapsed wretchedly to the ground, afflicted by the oppression of being shown their worldly doom.

Three of them grabbed her at once, hurling her into the open door, barely observed by those around—

All of them crashed over upturned benches, finally stopping near the pile of shattered statue heads she had stacked up on a whim at one point—

Rolling up, she saw the three already fleeing, and had to laugh in truth.

“Idiots… you think you can outrun this?”

She had no idea what had caused it, but this was absolutely a judgement, likely related somehow to what had been done to the…

“…”

She stared blankly as the roof of the church above her shattered upwards and a dark bird descended, jagged, shattered space caught in its claws, passing into the shrine directly.

The seals on the altar blazed, flared, desperately trying to resist; however, despite the fearful comprehensions behind those who had made it, the dark fire was unstoppable, flowing through everything, drowning out all the threads one after another…

There was a moment of portentous nothing, and then white shadows consumed everything.

…

…

Her body unravelled, drawn away into the seal, but those that had been bound there were already burnt away, and the seal, unable to sustain itself, was already collapsing…

…

…

She opened her eyes and found herself in the frozen moment of her last body… except it was not.

The dark fire tore through the void, untouched by the harmonious constraints within it, and unmade what Laurentius had done in the blink of an eye.

Her frozen body collapsed into Stygian river water and…

…

…

She hit the water, hard. It tasted turgid, like ten day old bath water reheated… and somehow it was almost like ambrosia.

Staggering to her feet, she started to laugh, manically.

“You are in a good mood,” a voice said behind her.

“…”

She turned, because it was not who she was expecting. The woman who sat there was as peerless a beauty as Aphrodite, but her hair was dark and her figure more sultry somehow. Wordlessly, the woman hopped into the water and waded over to pick up a familiar white stone sword which had been snapped into two halves and stuck them back together again.

“That is my rock…” Aphrodite pouted, appearing like a ghost out of the Elysian night.

“You… look well…” the woman said.

“So… I have you to thank for my chosen being extricated?” Aphrodite sighed, seeming resigned.

“My mother, actually,” the woman chuckled, “though she would hit me with another lightning bolt if I actually call her that to her face.”

“She… actually intervened?” Aphrodite said blankly.

“I asked her nicely,” the dark-haired goddess giggled. “I was going to get little sis to do the honours, but people have been annoying all of us of late.”

“…”

Aphrodite stared at the dark-haired woman for a long few seconds, before inclining her head… barely. “Well… thank you…”

“Though I still think you’re a cheating bitch,” Aphrodite continued.

“And you’re a terrible slut,” the woman said with a smirk, then danced back as Aphrodite tossed the little amphora of wine she had been carrying at her.

“Hey… you break that, she is going to break you!” the dark-haired woman protested, catching the jar deftly with one hand and passing it back to Aphrodite, who did now wince.

“Uh…?” she waved a hand warily.

“…”

Both quarrelling goddesses seemed to recall she was there and adjusted themselves. Aphrodite coughed, and produced three cups from somewhere, then poured the wine, which possessed a shining golden hue, into it and passed one to her.

“…”

“It’s ambrosia. Drink it,” the dark-haired woman giggled, chugging hers back without much care.

Wordlessly, she drank it, feeling a strange warmth suffuse her body as she did so.

“So um…?” She found herself wondering if she could or even should actually ask her next question… before just sighing and going for it. “So… what happens now?”

“Hmm… good question,” the dark-haired woman nodded. “Do you want to do a favour for me?”

“Oi…” Aphrodite pouted, waving a hand to shoo the other woman away. “Stop trying to steal others’ helpers!”

“How are you a good boss?” the dark-haired woman sniffed. “She doesn’t even get to sleep with you as a side benefit for dying lots.”

“…”

“Not everything I do involves sleeping with people,” Aphrodite scowled at the dark-haired woman, before turning back to her. “The nature of the curse on you is still in effect, but you are no longer bound as you were…”

“So I will come back here?” she nodded, understanding – her current circumstance was basically a return to her previous condition before Solaneum fell.

“There are a few other perks though,” the dark-haired woman chuckled, glancing at Aphrodite. “Why don’t we send her back, because I have something else to talk to you about…”

“Um…” she interjected again. “Can I… have a bit more of the ambrosia?”

“…?”

“Not for me… for Arella,” she said hastily.

“Don’t lose it,” Aphrodite said, tossing her the jar.

She caught it and bowed respectfully to both of them, then closed her eyes.

“Awaken, My Dawn Immortal!” Aphrodite’s words echoed in her ears as the roaring of the waters swirled around her again, followed by the other woman’s: “—and when you get back, you can use what’s there. Better that you have that bit of it.”

…

…

She opened her eyes and stared up through the turgid waters of the pool at the surface, having reappeared at the bottom of it – a reminder that they had raised the entire level of the temple up a floor between the death of Neron Appius and the Elvish Sack of Solaneum to accommodate the seal.

Three things stood out.

First, there was no sign of either Neron Appius’s corpse or Laurentius.

Second… there was only half the white sword blade, the bit that had been stabbed through her body… Grimacing, she pulled it out.

Third… the pool was not as deep as it should have been, and given she had been back here quite a few times, she was very familiar with it. The whole temple had been raised about 3 metres as she recalled, yet if she stood now, her head would actually break the water… which was drifting upwards slowly anyway.

“…”

“Shit, how long was I out?” she grimaced, twisting in the water and looking around her in the first instance to check that it wasn’t draining out from below… which it wasn’t.

“For all their faults, they knew how to build,” she sighed, staring upwards again.

The obvious culprits were those outside, assuming they hadn’t been obliterated by the blast. However, she suspected that the building reinforcement on a church of this calibre was up to one such lightning bolt at least. If it wasn’t, the church would not have lasted that long in its wars, and she had seen comparable buildings withstand 13th circle Atmos bolts in the second siege of Solaneum some 1500 years after the elves sealed her.

-It also survived the collapse, and has been steeping in Stygian mist for uncounted millennia.

“…”

She stared upwards again for a few seconds, watching the water recede slowly upwards, definitely being drawn away by something.

"OURANIA"

The word echoed in the water, flowing outwards through the world. It was the second strongest such command she had grasped, one of the principal forms of her patron, the celestial, advocate of pure, spiritual love and desire… in this case, embodying the desire of all the pneuma in the world around her to find a moment of peace.

The waters above collapsed back into the pool and she pushed upwards, emerging to stand on the water surface and then jump out… into chaos.

Some dozen invaders, most of those who had survived, were scattered about or recoiling. There were also a few others she didn’t recognise, but based on their condition, she had only been out maybe a few minutes since the bolt landed, because their qi was still chaotic and showed traces of its presence.

Laurentius was slumped to one side, looking pale and drawn, being tended to by two of the invaders; however, when he saw her, he recoiled in shock and staggered up.

“You… how!”

“I’m hard to kill,” she scowled. “I see the church gave you some insurance.”

“I am the Hero of Light,” he scowled, before gesturing to the others there. “All of you, fall back! This vampire woman is not to be trifled with!”

The diviner, Beilong, however, was still just staring at her blankly, as were quite a few others.

“Harmonious Reformation!” Laurentius declared, holding out the hilt of the sword.

“…”

Nothing happened, which was about what she expected, given that the goddess who owned it had reclaimed its essence and told her she could use it.

“…”

Laurentius stared at the blade dully, then repeated the phrase, again to no effect.

“Rhanis?” she asked experimentally, looking around.

“Is that the name of the girl?” Hushan chuckled, getting his qi back under control and asking her in rather bad Latin, apparently having not noticed Laurentius staring at the sword he had mostly come to view as ‘his’, since Asuraerleth ‘bequeathed’ it to him, in quiet panic.

“She ran off, fled… I don’t know who you are, but you should just submit now…”

“…”

She could almost cry tears of laughter at that… though Laurentius took the opportunity from her by leaping forward so fast that the others nearly seemed to flow backwards with the momentum of his strike…

He lashed out with the lower half of the weapon, the hilt and half the blade, decisively aiming for her neck—

And yet he was still slower than her – or perhaps she was even faster than she had been. Pondering that, she stepped to the side and deflected the strike, following it up with a punch to his left side, sending him sprawling, though he did manage to protect the weapon and avoid being disarmed.

“You—!”

The Hero of Light rolled up, wiping blood from his mouth and looking pale as he stared at her in shock.

“What? You fought me once, when I was young, barely… 40, then you fought me again,” she retorted with a sniff, advancing on him, “after I had been chained in the Cult of Solace’s dungeons for weeks, tormented to within a breath of death over and over… Now things are different.”

The others were backing up now as well, grasping talismans, waiting for the distortions to fade and the worldly strength to be controllable once more.

“Just how much time has passed?” Laurentius stared around, taking in the ruin and also the changes since their time, an edge creeping into his voice that had not been there before.

She nearly just answered him, but caught herself, recalling that Laurentius had been taught extensively by Menacanthus, mentored even…

-Shit, I made a mistake, right off the front foot, she groaned inwardly.

She had intended to try and disillusion him a bit with the futility of the whole thing from his end, but thinking it through, that would just make him angry in all likelihood. The Hero of Light had been given a lot of advantages, blessings, baptisms by various figures… Things to give him an edge, defend his mental state, project his strength at others and so on, close to divine boons or favour like she had, although artificial in many ways.

-It’s been so long that I nearly forgot. This idiot is like a magnet for drawing other people out and provoking mistakes… All I can do is try to lull him into thinking it will play out rather like before, get the other half of the sword off him and then finish it quickly.

The sword hilt was the problem, because while it was not attuned to him now, its passive influence alone would neuter nearly anything she put in his way, due to the nature of ‘Harmony’ innate to it, reducing this to a game of cat and mouse purely focused on martial skill and mindset…

"Peitho"

She murmured the word under her breath, invoking the persuasive auspices of her patron into her actions before continuing, “My body was sealed away as well… so why don’t you tell me? Although clearly the church that was here is long gone, given the state of this place, so why do you even want to continue this?”

“…”

“How… long?” Laurentius repeated, maintaining his guard with the broken sword as he stood, just scowling at her offer.

“You are an expert from then… like him?” Beilong interrupted, his expression flickering nervously now.

“You… do you even know what you have unsealed here?” she grimaced, looking at him. “Well, you will learn soon enough, because if you serve who I think, you will not leave here.”

“What of Amelliana?” Laurentius demanded, striking for her again. “Arleth, Caecillius… Akaton, Sharaz…?”

“How should I know?” she shrugged, waving at the four ruined statues which were tumbled down. Two were recognisably Amelliana and Caecillius, by the heads, but there were only four and the other two had been replaced with generic figures. “However, the people who built your statue clearly didn’t care to memorialize them here. That much is certain…”

Narrowing his eyes, he feinted, this time a flicker of something… she blocked the silvery shadow that came with the sword, scattering it with her own half of the blade.

The two halves of the same weapon rebounded, forcing them back a pace each.

“I don’t believe you,” Laurentius said flatly, which made her sigh inwardly. “I know the reputation you had before. You said—”

“Truths that people didn’t want to hear,” she retorted. “In any case, with this place apparently a ruin and Solaneum seemingly long dead, why do you want to prolong this? You didn’t want to before.”

“I saw the evil you wrought!” Laurentius scowled. “And even now, you are trying to use those dark arts…”

“You saw what Menacanthus wanted you to see!” she pushed back. “What of what Amelliana’s family wrought—?”

She cut herself off, grimacing inwardly, because his attempt to get at her state of mind had nearly been successful… A reminder that he was a bad match-up for her, given Aphrodite’s auspice. Trying to draw anger out, to use it and deflect it back… was one of his strengths, as she recalled.

One well-suited to an idiot like him as well, because once people stopped thinking, everything told to them just made sense, and Menacanthus had been very good at making pawns like that – it had gotten him a seat at the Church’s highest table in the end and informed a doctrine of chaos that she had encountered several times thereafter with other ‘Heroes’ like Laurentius who had come back to try their luck at the scene of this great crime.

“…”

“That is not the same,” Laurentius retorted, dodging her strike. “You hold her responsible for what her distant family did?”

“Hardly distant,” she retorted.“They all but made me, and yet you welcomed the support of Amelliana’s family and Caecillius’s. What they were doing—”

“To overcome you, to overcome the defiled, sacrifices—” Laurentius added, and she could almost feel the charisma oozing off him now, as he tried to push her own rather curated ‘frustrations’ back at her, slashing again for her right arm.

“Had to be made?” she leant into the bitterness a bit, even as she deliberately blocked a little more hastily. “Your conceits of justice always played favourites, overlooking the many crimes of this city, or blaming them on others, yet more than happy to direct that full wrath against whomsoever Menacanthus directed you against. Those you held as heinous sinners deserving whatever judgment he demanded!”

She let the strength of ‘Peitho’, the gift of persuasion that belonged to her patron, try to work its bit, emulating frustration at that ‘injustice’, slashing forward in turn now, acting a little more impetuous, on the back of her words, playing into what he expected—

Laurentius dodged, slashing for her leading arm—

Again, she blocked ‘at the last minute’.

Back then, he would have been the consummate swordsman, much better than she was. However, he was still treating her like that, unaware of the chasm of experience now between them… and thankfully he still hadn’t used any of the really obnoxious boons he could deploy, relying on the sword more than he should perhaps.

-Finish it in one strike…

She feinted again, stabbing for his head, and forced him to evade as he again warded with the ‘War Master’s’ art focused through it to make up for the broken length of the blade.

With an exhaled breath, he lunged for her, and this time two treasure blades shot at her from the other experts. Without blinking, she cut one sword, watching it break effortlessly on the white stone, then swatted the other away similarly. As she had hoped, he finally struck, having ‘gotten the measure of her’, at least in his own mind, cutting for her upper arm.

This time, rather than parry late, she stepped straight inside his guard, leveraging her superior speed and memories of clashing with several other excellent swordsmen in the millennia since to check his movement aggressively.

Deflecting the broken blade with her own piece, she elbowed him in the throat and then spun, pressing herself against his chest, turning with him and grasping his sword hand with her right and snapping the two pieces of the blade together.

Realising at the last moment what she was likely after, his eyes widened, if only a fraction too late, and he moved with her, trying to get her in a position where he could stab her with the blade, as they spun.

She could feel him trigger his blessing of strength as well, seeking an extra edge. However, she just went with it, guiding his arm up and pivoting, and grasped the back of his neck for good measure. Faced with the possibility of either giving up the blade to her entirely or being stabbed in the face, he let go and tried to shove her over.

Turning on the spot, she promptly swept one of his legs out and stabbed the blade at him—

Laurentius’ expression shifted from anger to horror in the matter of a moment and he cast out his hand—

{Bindings of Elohim!}

The spell snared her body, shining golden chains holding a purifying light trying to bind her in place—

{Ruin of Hong Meng}

A golden beam of light smashed into her, only to melt away as the bindings scattered and she waved the sword through it, sighing in admiration at the blade as she easily stabbed him through the chest—

The explosion of silver fire sent her sprawling, even if the sword and the ambrosia in her body protected her from the worst, as a silver feather with a dark, malevolent eye hung in the air above him for a second and his body reformed.

-Shit… they actually gave him a thing like that? she cursed, rolling up and deflecting another treasure weapon as it cut for her.

“It… you… how?”

Laurentius expression twisted in anger and shock, as well it might, given that the Church of Augustus Pius in the East had basically viewed the ‘Blade of Harmony’ as their holy relic in kind for the years it had been in their possession, first with a Bishop Emarus, then Asuraerleth, and finally with Laurentius.

“Harmonious Restoration!”

The sword didn’t so much as flicker in her hand…

“How?” he snarled, backing up. “What did you do… you deceiving—”

“Nothing,” she grinned nastily, blocking a second pulse from the talisman directly. “The owner wanted it back, and then she said I could use it.”

“She…?” Laurentius looked at her, uncomprehending, clearly having some trouble adapting, though in part that was her also turning the full strength of her enticement on him now.

{Cage of Ten Thousand Daos}

A rippling, translucent barrier appeared around her, triggered by Hushan. It held her for all of a second before she swiped the blade through it, watching the barrier melt away as it returned to harmony with the surroundings, the natural state of ten thousand daos being free.

Everyone stared blankly at her, then three lightning bolts and two more scything beams of iridescent fire cut towards her. She didn’t bother to block them, just fell backwards into the Stygian pool and muttered:

"Melainis"

Rising back to the surface, she pulled herself back out smoothly, watching as the faintly turgid air of the hall began shimmering ominously as haggard, insane soldiers, screaming in eternal damnation, grasped for targets, cutting, stabbing and clawing in equal measure.

Rhanis had also appeared, she noted, sitting on a block of masonry two metres above Laurentius, who was struggling with three experts, one of whom was bleeding white mist in evidence of their miserable and probably deserved fate if they were working for the Cult of Solace or any of its successor influences.

A barrier shattered around the Hushan robed youth, who lunged for Laurentius, and they, along with the three mist-grasped figures, vanished in a flash of shattering space. None of the others were so lucky, but were instead dragged down and stabbed by the shadowy soldiers in a frenzy before they dissipated, leaving only a few, shivering survivors whom she had marked as being largely along for the ride or as the lucky ones who had made it through the temple earlier, though none of those were in great shape.

Looking around, she sighed and then walked over to the diviner, Beilong, who was staring at her with stunned, glassy eyes, as if not quite believing he had died that easily.

“I see you got a lucky break?” Rhanis chuckled, hopping down, changing into her more adult form and stabbing one of those still not quite dead as she walked over to arrive beside her.

They both stared down at the luckless fool’s body and she shook her head wryly, then reached down and touched his forehead, leaving a dot of her blood on it.

"Ambologera, Kerimandras"

The youth twitched and opened his eyes.

“How… odd… you have not called on this old man in a long time,” the old scholar mumbled, sitting up.

“Some deserve rest,” she sighed. “Who are they and what are they after here… really? Few were better at the theorems of the mind than you, back then.”

“I am honoured that you would recall my talent as such,” the old man murmured.

“It is bound, but his memory is hollow. I cannot say what they seek, but I can see their ploy to seek it. They ruined this place to claim what was sealed away, knowing it would lead them to another treasure, the one they seek.”

“They did not come here looking for Laurentius?” she asked.

“…”

“They did not… though the thing they seek is associated with him… That is not barred in his mind, or even accounted for in truth.”

“Huaaaaaa,” she turned away, pinching her nose. “I am just unlucky… and Laurentius runs away like that…”

“I know where he has gone. It’s not far,” Rhanis said. “The strength of this place is undiminished. Shall I go chase after?”

“You want to hunt a saint?” she asked.

“Maybe, if he is worthy,” Rhanis smirked.

“Fine,” she nodded, watching as Rhanis turned and vanished like a shadow into the haze, before turning back to Kerimandras. “Can you see what faction… clan?”

Kerimandras was silent for a while then shook his head.

“What of the rest of you?” she asked the remainder of the survivors, looking at them a bit less sternly and trying to let ‘Peitho’ pick up a bit of the slack. “Anyone want to do a good turn and tell me who is responsible for all this mess?”

“…”

There were dull stares back, etched with fear or uncertainty as she looked over them, before finally settling on the four who had crawled out of this hell. Their reluctance was not that unsurprising truthfully, especially given they had just witnessed dark spectres summoned by her kill all the ring leaders bar one.

“You… walked through the tunnels below the acropolis… Saw the halls there?” she asked.

“We… did…” one of them mumbled, trying not to meet her eyes.

“Saw the paintings?” she added.

“Saw the shrine…” one mumbled in crude Latin, with haunted eyes.

“…”

“We… just came here to help. We didn’t know it was like this…” he added at last, her silence almost leading him to say something more.

“You focused on the seal in the barbarian’s city… so why come here?” she mused.

“We don’t know,” he answered honestly, finally finding some confidence. “We were sent here by our senior to investigate because he got annoyed with those in the city being pushy and wanted to see what else was here.”

“And the rest of you were just exploring then got drawn together to come here by that diviner and the one who ran away,” she asked, turning to the others, who all nodded frantically… and again honestly.

The ghostly pain in her chest was still there as well, the sensation of it tugging at her, telling her that that link had not dissipated, somewhat concerningly. Focusing on it, on the feeling of cold in her breast, the link between her two bodies got her… a street… three… four figures, two male, two female…

“Arella…”

Her gaze narrowed, staring out at the distant city.

“Kerimandras, do you know any experts in theurgy with teleport?”

“There are a few…” he shrugged apologetically, and she nodded. Most of those fled with the betrayers.

“How to… how to… Ah!”

Looking up at the sky, she smirked nastily, then focused in her mind’s eye, recalling that they had fed quite a things her flesh, initially for amusement and then to test her limits during her captivity – not to mention nurture the early evil works of the Longevity Cult.

“You,” she pointed to one of the survivors, who flinched. “You stored bodies, so the spirits couldn’t raise them.”

“…”

He blinked, then nodded frantically, before unstoring a stack of maybe 50 barbarian bodies, badly burnt, from one of the mass graves they had passed on the way up here.

Walking over to the pile, ignoring the very worried looks from the survivors, she put a hand to the top of one barbarian’s head and muttered.

"Ambologera, Aulios"

Before her, a shadow, vast and spectral, twisted up out of the mist, slowly drawing it in to form a grypus, one of the great wings and feathered beasts with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle that had fallen in the last desperate hours of Portam Aurorae’s existence.

"Morpho"

The Stygian energies of the place flowed through its shape, devouring corpses to reform its physical body. Within moments most of the pile was gone and she was looking up at a fully formed grypus, nearly three metres tall, with a wingspan of 15, resplendent in grey, white and red-brown plumage.

“Go… follow Rhanis, support her!” she commanded the grypus, which took off with a shriek into the air, rising rapidly.

“Right,” she said turning back to Kerimandras, “Let us work out how we really screw over these invaders. I don’t want to have to do this twice.”

~ Dun Lian Jing – Solaneum Capitoline ~

She awoke, screaming, haunted by a sense of profound loss, a seed of pain that no amount of manipulation could overwhelm, as the abiding memory of what had just transpired, and found herself caught in a rapidly expanding maelstrom of dark water. Before she could adjust, however, reality took hold somehow and she hit ground with a bone-jarring crunch, aware of a second body hitting the ground beside her and someone screaming or shouting at her.

“Get out of the water!”

“Get. Out. Of. The. Water!”

The commands tore at her, and yet, in the maelstrom, some aspect of it had no hold on her, even though the pain that was causing to her body was excruciating—

A hand, a woman’s hand, grasped her and hauled her up, and she found herself staring at a naked, tanned woman with matted brown-blonde hair and blue eyes who was in the process of pulling a dagger out of her chest, straining against something to do so…

The resonance from the dagger with the cage that held her was almost overpowering this close, and yet… the water still kept it away somehow, as if the two had forgotten slightly, how they could touch in some critical way.

“GET. OUT. OF. THE. WA—”

The last of Gan Renshu’s roared command was lost as jagged, celestial death descended – not for her, because it bent away from the water naturally, but the remaining diviners and others who were trying to escape the ritual chamber in terror now.

Like she was in a dream state, she saw two of them get caught by the black and silver cracks that slipped through the world, leaving only mirages as the judgement of the world turned on them and obliterated them.

A third deflected a bolt, which scythed through a dozen stunned cultivators, reducing them to ash and burning blood in the blink of an eye—

Two more exploded directly, forcing Gan Renshu to dodge back as well, cursing silently, before pulling out a jade token and activating it, only for it to crack straight down the middle as silver lightning sizzled all over it, making him drop it.

Off to her right, another three bolts found their mark, circling down the inside of the wall like predatory serpents to surge through diviners and those supporting them alike, while the flare of lightning from outside told her of yet more unfortunates as whatever was done recoiled on them—

Colour suddenly drained out of the world, something profound and deeply unsettling creeping with it, like a dark eye shifting across the sky above. Everything around them seemed to grow stagnant and immobile, and then there was a gut-wrenching sense of distortion that shook the whole city and probably more.

…

She opened her eyes, and found herself being dragged, bodily, somewhere. It took her a second to realise it wasn’t Gan Renshu, but the woman who had been in the water with her, who was cursing under her breath and occasionally slipping as she staggered along.

“W…wait…” she gasped, pushing herself up, only to fall over again, because her legs were like jelly.

“No,” the woman shook her head and dragged her up properly, heaving her over her shoulder. “You are to—”

…

“That was a close one, princess…” a nastily familiar voice intruded into her pain.

“Can’t have you doing a runner after all this, can we?” Gan Arhai was kneeling beside her, on her, in fact.

“Dunno how you managed to shake free, must be a property of that water, but it’s all good now… all good.”

“May young noble… Hao… be… raped by…”

“…”

Nothing happened, except that Gan Arhai laughed, a little bitterly actually.

“Stupid bitch, that won’t work now, but won’t save you anyway…”

She inhaled, focusing on the words her mother had taught her, and to her surprise a modicum of control returned. Turning her head, she spat the mouthful of the water into his face.

He screamed and tumbled back, even as an immense force smashed down on her, flattening her to the paving stones—

…

She recovered consciousness, only to find that she was fleeing, or rather Gan Renshu was fleeing, and she was somehow running after him while another person was carrying the unconscious Gan Arhai as the woman from before ran ahead, not quite seeming to move normally. Near as she could tell, the town around her was in anarchy.

Cultivators were fleeing everywhere, pursued by what appeared to be actual yin ghosts or something like it. There were hundreds of them, though all of them ignored them, almost certainly thanks to the pair of daggers, gold and silver hilted, that Gan Renshu was currently holding.

“—the resonance with the other shard of metal is where the giant lightning bolt landed…” the other, who it turned out was Gan Ulang, was saying.

“…”

Renshu glanced back at her, his face thunderous, then into the distance, then at Gan Jiao.

“We got what we came here for. All we need to do is sow a few more seeds of dissension and we can depart before we outlive our welcome.”

“A wise choice,” the diviner nodded. “External divination tools no longer work, but the new compass I made shows that as we stay here longer there is an exponentially greater chance of us dying horribly.”

Gan Renshu glanced at Gan Arhai, scowling again.

They turned a corner and suddenly there were ghosts everywhere, recoiling from them as Gan Renshu pushed qi into the daggers, turning them away.

“It seems that the gold dagger actually controls them in some way,” Gan Ulang noted.

“Silver repels them or makes them ambivalent. Seems to have something to do with the water.”

“Which is the most dangerous thing I have ever seen!” Gan Ulang added, as they dashed on. “It shouldn’t be the yellow springs’ water, but the properties of forgetfulness in it exceed the level of natural laws. It’s barely containable in the treasure gourd your father lent you and even that may not hold it.”

“We can always use it as a weapon of last resort,” Gan Renshu grunted. “I’ve burned enough of those today already… and there is still no word from Yan Fu or Gan Beilong.”

“What the hell do we do now?” another ragged figure, surrounded by a wheel of talismans, shot out of a side street and found them revealing himself to be Gan Jiao, whom she had rather hoped might have gotten hit by a lightning bolt, more was the pity.

“We got what we need, and this can sort itself out,” Gan Renshu grunted.

“But we lost…” Gan Jiao scowled.

“I know… but we have gotten what we need and tools are there to be used!” Gan Renshu snapped, “and now we have a second useful thing to work with, which was not expected.”

“There was a communication from Gan Beilong and Yan Fu,” Gan Jaio added, “however, they said they would send a follow-up… and it has been…”

“They can handle themselves,” Gan Renshu turned again and they darted down another street and turned a corner—

“JiLao! Ignore them!” her voice imperiously spoke as they rushed straight past a group from the Imperial Court and the Shu clan who were just about holding off the spirits as they tried to fight forwards… towards the position of the ritual core.

Gan Renshu as ‘Huang JiLao’ glanced at the beleaguered group, who just stared after them blankly.

Inside, she felt her stomach twist, and, almost in desperation, fed that deeply unpleasant feeling of sorrow at the words she had recalled… and to her surprise she found that they allowed her to push back, just a fractional, tiny bit.

They fled down another street as a vast wave of shimmering silver fire enveloped the street around them, blocked by the barriers they were wearing. A dozen cultivators in the robes of a minor sect crashed down ahead of them, shooting forward, weapons drawn. Gan Renshu waved a talisman—

{Merging of Harmonious Yin}

The possessed bodies dissolved into black ash and the street around them corroded. The spirits inside them vanished with shrieks into the hazy mist a second later.

“Do they actually die?” Gan Jiao grunted.

“No idea, not staying to—”

He was cut off, as behind them, a vast, ominous sensation suddenly swirled over the city, not originating from within it, but beyond it. The first rays of dawn seemed to intensify as the surging intent swept through the city behind them, as if searching for…

“Dammit!” Gan Renshu cursed and pulled out a talisman bound with what appeared to be a Dao Jade, grabbing her, Jiao and the mysterious woman who was being controlled through the dagger, and stopped.

“Senior Huang!” The cultivators who had been mustering in the square, trying to resist the tide of possessed corpses, spirits and the regular subversion of their own, spotted them within moments.

“Princess Lian!”

“The princess is still alive!”

“Let us—”

“Dun stands—”

“The Imperial Se—”

Space warped and the three of them vanished, the praise and salutations still hanging in the air.

They hit the ground hard and she tasted dirt in her mouth, which might as well have been shit. Hundreds of people had seen the Imperial Princess run away in the middle of a fight, with the damn artefacts, without a second thought, leaving everyone there to their fates… and there was nothing she could do about it.

“Where are the others?!” a panicked voice echoed.

“This is it,” Gan Renshu grimaced. “Who is this?”

“Someone we… uh… rescued, who seems related to our goal here,” Yan Fu sounded a bit embarrassed.

“And those?”

She stood, to see Gan Ulquan pointing at three ragged bags of flesh that the rather haggard group at the waiting point appeared to have killed.

“Uh… demons,” one of the mercenary experts muttered. “Some mist thing possessed them.”

“We need to leave, now!” the tall, lanky youth said, in clipped Easten. “You don’t understand how dangerous she is…”

“I told you, Lau Ren Tius,” Yan Fu said a bit exasperatedly, “we have more than enough…”

“KUAAAAAAAAAAA!”

A vast, paralysing shriek split the sky and a shadow dropped straight out of the void, onto the ruin, like a thunderbolt, crushing two Ancient Immortals from the Red Sovereigns sect before they could even recover their awareness.

A vast qi beast, half lion, half eagle, smashed through two more as everyone scattered drawing weapons, and then… as she stared in shock, pounced forward and caught a Dao Immortal called Hu Feishi in its jaws, eating half of him in a single gulp.

Moments later, a blonde-haired woman, dressed in a short white robe and wielding a coppery-metal spear and shield, appeared in the camp like a ghost, stabbing another cultivator through the head and smashing a second back as she blocked a startled swipe from a sword, her golden hair swirling in the early morning mists which were rapidly thickening.

The beast spun instantly and smashed another unlucky mercenary into the ground as the others scattered, cursing and shouting.

Two barriers hit the beast, which effortlessly smashed them both, crashing into another cultivator who was too slow to escape and ripping him apart, scattering the remains bloodily across the camp.

“Give me a—!”

The youth who was with Yan Fu was interrupted as the blonde-haired woman arrived before him like a shadow, smashing her shield into him and sending him sprawling, then stabbing for him directly as he rolled away desperately.

After the third roll, he managed to grab a weapon of a fallen cultivator and struck back at the beast, barely blocking another blow, but failed to slow it in the slightest.

With a snarl of rage, Gan Renshu also charged at the beast, a spear materialising in his hands, only to find his blow deflected by the beast’s tail, nearly causing him to lose his spear. The Martial Intent he had directed at it scattered off its hide like water off a rock.

“What is this?!” Yan Fu shouted.

“A war beast, a grypus! They are—” the lanky youth yelled, barely dodging again, “—were used… by shock troops. The Auxilliae Evokati of the Eternal City rode them into battle—”

His explanation was cut off as the woman with the spear and shield arrived before him again, having effortlessly ghosted past three different people moving to intercept her, bloodily eviscerating one and smashing a second into a wall hard enough to collapse it before smashing through a red haze-like barrier conjured by Gan Jiao, she thought, forcing him to use his movement art to barely avoid getting skewered in her lunge for the youth.

“Nameless fates curse you!” Gan Renshu snarled, drawing a talisman and casting at the beast,

{Fu Huang’s Shadowless Razor}

The beast shot straight up into the air, evading it, even as the others trying to circle it scattered to avoid the talisman’s area of effect. It then dropped like a thunderbolt a moment later, smashing another wall apart and making everyone dive for cover.

“AVOID GETTING HURT!”

The command sank into her, and she found herself dashing for cover of her own accord, even as the beast scattered rocks at all of them. Two hit a barrier conjured by those likely trying to activate the teleport point… and smashed it like it was rotten wood, obliterating a luckless cultivator behind it.

{Hammer of Huang}

{Starblast}

{Fire Surge Thunder}

“Stars of Seris!”

Three different Dao Immortal grade lightning talismans, and a strange art from the youth, scoured the creature to almost no effect, except to enrage it further as it spun and pounced and caught a cultivator, even as the woman continued to press the companion of Yan Fu viciously.

Gan Ulquan cursed and also drew a talisman, which transformed into a series of white chains and shot at the beast as well, only to find half of them deflected by the woman.

“KUAAAAAAAAA!”

The beast shrieked again and she felt her vision grow dim and her limbs chill.

“The Bright Star shines, becomes the Bridge between our Hearts, how Enchanting…”

She desperately repeated the words in her heart, finding that they provided just enough lift for her to not fall properly unconscious to its soul attack. The air around them had grown hazy with the scream, she realised, her qi becoming more chaotic and harder to control… reminiscent, in fact, of the water from the seal.

“Motherless Fates… this is—?”

Gan Renshu’s curse was cut off by the need to dodge a strike from the beast, but based on how gloomy his face was, he had also noticed, she guessed.

“Buy me a moment!” he yelled, even as he danced back from a second strike from the giant half-eagle, half-lion creature, which feinted towards him—

Gan Arhai screamed miserably as it changed direction at the last minute and caught him with a glancing blow, pinning him to the ground and crushing half his body as he desperately hacked at the offending limb.

{Huang’s Three Truths!}

Gan Jiao activated an art himself, casting three treasure swords at it, to buy time she guessed; however, they barely managed to draw blood before being repelled.

Gan Renshu snarled and cast a jade slip on the ground as they scattered again. It shimmered, and the old man who she had seen before appeared.

{Talisman Clone: Huang Yung}

“Sir Yung, we must trouble you!” Gan Renshu gasped, looking pale from activating it.

“…”

The old man stared at the beast then clapped his hands together sternly.

{HUANG BRINGS PEACE}

The words he spoke melded into the clap and then the world around them shattered outwards, tearing through the body of the beast, which finally showed some actual damage, albeit not anywhere near what anyone seemed to expect.

“What…?” one of the ragged survivors, from the Red Sovereigns sect, gawped.

“What realm is it?” a Gan clan diviner wailed, before being hit in the head by Gan Ulquan to make him focus on whatever it was they were doing while trying to evade the golden-haired woman.

The beast spun almost on cue, ignoring the old man and leaping for Gan Ulquan and the five with him. Huang Yuan’s clone instead found himself face to face with the woman, who grinned nastily and yelled some kind of challenge in a language she didn’t know.

{HUANG DEMANDS SUBMISSION}

The old man held up a hand imperiously as the words rang gloriously and everything became subdued, the strength of the world itself bleeding away from everything—

The woman was the only thing, as it turned out, that did not become subdued. Instead, she charged forward and met the palm with her shield, the collision sending his body, as well as the talisman inside it, skidding backwards, spitting multi-coloured mist.

Neither she nor anyone else, however, had time to be shocked at that, because the woman’s onslaught only intensified, her spear shearing the air with a hideous shriek that made her vision go red for a second before the talisman clone managed to block it.

He deflected three more of her strikes with thunderous cracks, even stopping her shield briefly as she hammered it into him again, before reaching out with both hands towards her and snarling, finally blunting her forward momentum, at which point the Grypus arrived right behind him, casually obliterating another cultivator as if they were just some mortal warrior—

{HUANG RULES WAR}

The old man grew multiple arms, smashing them into the beast, grasping at it and tearing off a wing at last, leaving black cracks in the air as he did so. The creature collapsed back with a snarl, and the old man stepped forward, grasping with his right hand.

{HUANG PLUCKS STARS}

The beast screamed as the hand caught its other wing and halfway smashed it, scattering it away; however, while that was occurring, the other woman had shot back towards the lanky youth.

{Dreaming of the Silent—

Yan Fu tried to use some sword art on her only to have her just smash her shield strength into his blade, breaking his movement and sending him flying back.

The lanky youth deflected two strikes then gasped as her spear sank into his side, tearing sideways and leaving a vicious wound, before she kicked him back a second time.

“Fuck all your mothers!” the usually calm and collected leader of the Gan group snarled, looking around, at which point the world went hazy and distorted as space twisted all around them—

She hit the ground, hard, gasping, and tried to get up.

“No, no fleeing!” a voice, Gan Jiao’s, snapped nearby, making her scream in fury as her limbs locked up.

“Senior Renshu!”

“Success!”

“Did you get what we needed?” Yan Ju’s voice cut through the hubbub.

“Where are the others?”

“ENOUGH!” Gan Renshu roared, even as she was dragged up to her feet, looking around at the main camp, some fifteen miles away from the city, also located in a ruin, one that had been turned into the place for those not involved in ‘opening the seal’, to wait. “Everyone get moving! We are leaving, immediately!”

“Do we not wait for Beilong?” one of the survivors of their terrible, and rather cathartic, encounter with the qi beast asked.

“Senior Beilong and a few others are already here,” Gan Sheng cut in.

“Ah, Brother Renshu, you are safe…” right on cue, Gan Beilong hurried over, looking rather ragged, before glancing at Yan Fu and adding, “and Brother Yan… I am glad to see you are okay…”

There was a bit of awkward shuffling, but Yan Fu scowled right back. “How did you get away?”

“Expensively,” Gan Beilong shot back with a gloomy expression that was mirrored by those with him.

“What of the woman?” Yan Fu followed up, clearly trying to compensate for having maybe bailed on them, she guessed.

“She ran, after we managed to suppress that innate art she used,” Beilong grimaced. “What of the youth who you escaped with… that Laur… entius?”

“…”

She was amused to see more awkward shuffling by Yan Fu and a few others around them as he looked towards the badly bleeding and unconscious youth, who was being tended to nervously.

“…”

Gan Beilong scowled, then looked at her and the other woman, who had also arrived… then frowned. “Who… are you to that other woman?”

“Who…?” the woman laughed, rather nastily, before glancing at Laurentius. “You will find out soon enough, I am sure.”