—Keen not to cross an eminent figure like Lord Fei, the old ancestors who wanted closer ties with the current heavens for various reasons pushed for a match between Shu Bao and Kong Meixiao, against the advice of many, including, it had to be said, Shu Bao’s own master. Thus, Song Jia, who had been convinced into agreeing to what was in effect a very lucrative marriage contract with Shu Bao, now found herself relegated to first concubine.

At this stage, it must be stated that there were factions within the Shu Pavilion and the wider Shu clan on Eastern Azure who were deeply frustrated with this state of affairs, including Shu Bao’s master and the local Pavilion Master. Together, they directly petitioned Shu Bao’s father, stating that these matters were not auspicious and that Song Jia should be cut loose entirely, or just taken in as a disciple and the matter forgotten.

Song Jia, for her part, also petitioned Shu Bao’s master, then various sect elders who had advocated for her and treated her well, citing that she wished to withdraw from the agreement. Her belief was that the Pavilion would act with decorum and respect the change in circumstances. She even returned all the gifts given and kowtowed six times before Shu Bao’s master in public, acknowledging her unworthiness for the match as a gesture of goodwill towards the face of the Shu clan.

Unfortunately, she underestimated the shameless iron core of those around Shu Bao, who were under no illusions as to how ‘useful’ she would be to their scion’s future prospects and Shu Bao’s father stepped in in person. Those influential elders supporting Shu Bao, being well aware that he still desired Song Jia – despite being infatuated with the miss from the Kong clan – refused to consider an annulment or the proposals put forward, still wishing to curry favour with Lord Fei’s household. Song Jia’s rejection was painted as a personal rejection of Shu Bao and she was accused of having ‘unrealistic expectations’.

Shu Bao’s parents, unwilling to disadvantage their most talented son and see such a rare core claimed by others, aligned with those elders and, left with no voice, Song Jia was forced to ‘honour’ the agreement she had been induced to acquiesce to and accompany Shu Bao.

To add insult to injury, those elders, now emboldened and not wanting to pay out such advantages if Song Jia was not to be principal partner, took what they could back from the agreement, claiming that she had given them willingly, and so used her gesture of goodwill shamelessly against her, stating that as things currently stood, because Song Jia would not act as the suitable ‘tie’ to Shu Bao, it was not worth the sect’s investment.

Most of the preparations for Song Jia’s wedding were repurposed by Lady Wenquian, Shu Bao’s mother and the bride’s grandmother, Lady Kong Fei Ling, and it was agreed that Song Jia would marry Shu Bao as a concubine when he exchanged vows with the miss from the Kong clan.

Excerpt from: ‘The Politics of the Heavenly Hundred. Volume 16 – Eastern Azure’

~ By Kung Quan

~ Ruo Han – Return to the Plains ~

Ruo Han sat in the shade of the rock with Liao Ying next to him trying to both escape from the mid-afternoon sun and, rather more grimly, recover what strength he could. The day since they had teleported into the edge of the plains had been… miserable; there was no other way to describe it.

Jin Chen had finally re-awoken, but had had to be sedated again in fairly short order. His friend’s psyche, already seriously injured by the bastards who teleported away, had finally been tipped over the edge. He hallucinated frequently, talking to Xiaoli and another disciple whom he had been close with.

His own condition was not exactly improving either but, as if to compensate, it seemed he had basically acclimatized to this place. As such, even with his cultivation foundation badly bruised and his meridians one bad qi cycle away from an actual deviation, he was still doing better than some entirely healthy but unadjusted people. Liao Ying, however, was not so fortunate. Her own slow slide into cultivation deviation had been somewhat halted by Quan Dingxiang’s medical prowess but her condition was not going to get any better and she was little better off in this landscape than a slightly more durable mortal now.

The compounding factor on all of this, of course, was the punishing pace set by Jia Ying and the others leading them. Gone was the ‘gentle and tolerating’ approach to leadership. That had apparently died with the assault by the Ur’Vash archers – something that had only happened because various parties had been trying to slow things down. Nobody had been openly punished for it, but there was a clear sense that the seniors were just waiting for somebody to step out of line. Nobody had enjoyed getting shot at with arrows that dealt nasty soul injuries.

“BREAK IS OVER!”

There were groans nearby as others stood up or sat up.

“Can’t they just let us rest for a bit?” someone nearby grumbled.

“You want to get shot with one of those arrows?” another voice sneered.

“It was your sect who was dragging their heels. How dare you blame us—?”

“How dare—!”

“Everyone knows you imperial dogs—!”

At the sound of cracking vegetation he turned, to find two groups of disciples a few metres away had just started a brawl. Two disciples from the Four Feathers Court were trying to attack a bearded youth while two more on both sides held them back.

“Stop it!” one of them snapped.

“Enough.”

The word cut through the hubbub like ice as Yan Fei appeared like a ghost beside the two brawling groups.

“If you have energy to do this, you have energy to carry the injured. All of you, report to the Pill Sovereigns group immediately.”

“You don’t—” one of the Four Feathers disciples spat on the ground only to be cut off by Yan Fei grabbing them by the throat and physically lifting them off the ground.

“Or you can become one of the injured,” Yan Fei added with deceptive coolness as the disciple clawed at his arm rather futilely. “Though I suspect whoever ends up carrying you will not be best pleased…”

“…”

There was some shuffling as others tried to back away.

“Now.”

This time, the words were a proper command – a reminder, if any were needed, that a lot of the wariness of those who had personal strength but not followers in this mess was fading, as they were no longer quite so concerned with the ‘thoughts’ and ‘feelings’ of some of their better equipped juniors.

Jia Ying had been very unimpressed by the groups who nearly lost a star water lotus.

A few of those outspoken ones had actually been relieved of their storage rings already, the contents redistributed to the whole group as punishment for their parts in endangering everyone else. They had even been made to kowtow six times to everyone else at the first stop, a few hours ago.

“If you had to make a stratagem for how to really screw up the dynamics of a group like this… I rather suspect this is what it would look like,” he muttered to Liao Ying as they checked they had left nothing where they were seated.

Liao Ying just sniffed, adjusting her hat.

He supposed if there was one upside to this mess, from their perspective at least, it was that nobody cared about leaving them behind anymore. What Quan Dingxiang had said before about that turned out to be very true: the troublemakers were only willing to piss freely if the wind wasn’t blowing straight back at them.

Sighing, he took a swig of water and knelt down beside Jin Chen, who was basically semi-comatose, hauling him up.

“Uaaa….”

Jin Chen mumbled something inarticulate under his breath as Liao Ying grabbed his other arm and they started off.

“Dog cripples… wasting good medicine…”

He turned to see a group of cultivators nearby looking at them with derision and sighed again. They were one of the groups who had been ‘party’ to the delays. They had also, by dint of not being in the square at the start of the ambush, mostly escaped getting shot at by those arrows that left soul injuries.

“Your self-awareness does you credit!” Liao Ying ‘praised’ them loudly.

“…”

The leader’s expression twisted in annoyance but the four made no move to follow after them as they headed over towards the central group.

“That was probably not advisable,” he said with a half-smile.

“Something about them annoyed me,” Liao Ying grunted.

“I am telling you, these idiots who can’t take care of themselves are just slowing us all down!”

The second youth in that group added a bit more loudly.

“Cry louder, little boy…” someone else heckled from behind them. “I want to be the one to bounce your empty head off every rock in this landscape!”

“Goodness! The shit in their brains might land on other people!” a woman, one of the Verdant Flowers disciples, giggled, hiding her face half behind a fan as she walked past the other way. “Have some thfought for others, please!”

“…”

Her comment was met with raucous laughter from several other Verdant Flowers and Nine Moons disciples walking nearby.

“If someone isn’t stabbed before the day is out, it will be a miracle,” he muttered under his breath.

-Let’s just hope it’s not us… a voice in the back of his head added rebelliously.

“Sorry…” Liao Ying muttered. “I’m just so sick of the…”

“Don’t be,” he said, giving her shoulder a squeeze across Jin Chen’s back. “They deserve to have their legs broken and be left out here in the brush for the serpents, just for never shutting up if nothing else…”

“Hah!” she managed half a laugh at that, even though it wasn’t really a joke.

That said, for a while after that they had no opportunity for talk, because navigating the terrain they were in was not something you could do while conducting a conversation on the side. It made him long for the rocky grassland of before, where the worst you might risk was tripping over a rock you didn’t see in the tall grass.

Here, the grass reached about chest height and was not one species but half a dozen, many of which had razor sharp leaves or random barbs on them. Catching them got you dozens of little fibres in the unfortunate bit of exposed skin and a mild case of qi poisoning. It wasn’t even that you could go around it, either. The whole grassland here was just an unending sea of the stuff, stretching in every direction, broken up by the odd rise and occasional stands of twisted, drought resistant trees perched around rocky outcroppings like the one they had just taken a break beside.

Even with the recovering herb hunters, the Pill Sovereign disciples and a few other miscellaneous experts in alchemy, there were not enough medicines to go around.

In a weird way, though, that was also why he was less concerned about himself and the other two. Their experience helping Juni and Ling prepare various herbs when leaving the jungle had actually stood both of them in rather good stead, in that they could at least sit there and follow instructions on how to prepare the basic ingredients. It again made him appreciate how competent the trio and Chunhua had been.

Just thinking of them made him sigh.

“Ah, there you are!”

He glanced around to find one of the disciples from the Nine Auspicious Moons hurrying over.

“Senior Ming Hua,” he bowed politely.

“He still isn’t any better?” she asked, glancing at the delirious Jin Chen.

“He is not, sadly. Thank you for asking though,” he murmured. “What do you need us for?”

“Weng wants to see you when it’s convenient,” she replied. “Oh… and Senior Quan said something about speaking to some of those who were rescued?”

“Oh…” he nodded, recalling that that was why Quan Dingxiang had sought him out initially. With all the chaos that had transpired after, that had never happened.

“What are they like?” he asked her.

“Their physical condition is not, in fact, that bad. Mostly it’s just shock and confusion, now compounded by how inherently dysfunctional this bunch are,” Ming Hua said with a resigned eye roll.

“Do they want us immediately?” Liao Ying asked. “Or when we next stop?”

“Weng seemed to want to see you sooner rather than later, but the other group is going nowhere until we stop for the night,” Ming Hua replied.

They nodded again, watching her as she made her way onwards, clearly looking for some others as well, presumably having been tasked with running messages in person given how paranoid Song Jia and the other leaders now were about qi and soul sense use.

“Ah, watch out,” Liao Ying softly alerted, hauling them both up short.

Grimacing, he glanced down and saw that he had almost trodden on one of the thorny scrub bushes that were tangled in amidst the grass. They had thorns about half as long as his arm and some kind of mildly qi repelling property that made them go through qi armour like a knife through butter. He had barely seen three of the things in the whole day up to that point.

“Thanks…” he replied with a tired scowl, taking the opportunity to have another sip of water.

“Fate-accursed things,” he added, stepping around it warily and waving an arm in the air to warn anyone else coming immediately behind them of the potential danger.

In the following few minutes, as they made their way somewhat towards the heart of their travelling band, he nearly trod on two more which was, he felt, pushing some kind of short term record.

Finally… mercifully, they caught up to the largest group though, and found Official Weng, along with several other herb hunters and two experts in geomancy.

“You wanted to see us?” he asked.

“Ah, yes…” Weng nodded, waving for the others to go about their business. “There is a shortage of people who know how to recognise several of the more useful herbs. You travelled with that group before, so you at least have an eye for it…”

They walked on for a few seconds, then Weng passed him a jar of pills unobtrusively. “These will help; they are to enhance qi-sight, allowing you to pick out spirit herbs from vegetation more reliably.”

“For Jin Chen,” the older man signed, so only he could see. “Don’t let others know. There are too many eyes watching.”

“We will keep a look out,” he said smoothly, accepting the pills and putting them in the satchel he was carrying. “Which herbs do you want us to focus on?”

“These,” Official Weng passed him three picked herbs which did, admittedly, look very grass-like, with the exception of a few tell-tale signs of difference. “The one with speckles on the reverse of the leaves likes shade and is a key component in the compound antidote to the mind yang poison present in most of the grass here.

“The one with slightly reddish leaves similarly helps restore vitality and recover energy levels. It’s not as good as some of the alternatives, but it’s not that uncommon—”

“And this one I recognise,” he said, holding up the third which had a flower head on it that looked faintly reed-like.

Kun Juni and Han Shu had had quite a bit of it in their storage talismans as he recalled.

“It works as a neutralizing agent, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” Weng nodded in agreement. “It also has mildly calming properties if you nibble the fresh shoots. I don’t recommend eating ones that are flowering though, unless you want to have a very hazy recollection of the rest of the day—”

“AAHHIIIIIIEEEEGH—!”

“Ahhhhiiiigh—!”

“Senior—Aiiiiiiiiggh!”

He flinched as three agonized screams echoed out from the far side of their group nearly in unison.

“Someone got stung,” Weng grunted as the whole procession ground to a halt.

“No barriers!” Jia Ying’s voice hissed through the surroundings like a malevolent—

Off to his left, a flickering halo of distorting space appeared almost before her words had passed them by.

“I SAID NO BARRIERS, YOU IDIOTS!”

This time the words were like a shadowy eye, opening in his mind for a fraction of a second before passing on. A few people nearby staggered, but clearly it was not targeted at them, so that was the worst that occurred.

Official Weng sighed and collected himself, heading in the direction of the scream. Curious, they followed after, him taking Jin Chen entirely now and slinging the younger man over his shoulder.

It didn’t take long to reach the sight of the ‘incident’. Three disciples, two from the Shen clan and one from the Deng clan, it seemed, were lying unconscious. Two more, in the robes of the Imperial School, surrounded by the barrier, were tending to another who was pallid, his arm swelling up rather unpleasantly.

The barrier rippled under Jia Ying’s touch then shattered, making one of the disciples cough blood.

“Was I not clear?” Jia Ying snapped.

“You… Senior Shupei is injured! We don’t—”

He never even saw her move, the blow had already landed by the time his vision caught up, the disciple hitting the ground hard enough to make the grass around them bend away slightly.

“Weng?” Jia Ying said curtly, waving to the Beast Hunter.

Official Weng warily walked over and checked the youth’s – Shupei’s – pulse, then looked at the other two.

“There are four people here, only three screams…” Liling Mei, who had also arrived, observed.

“…”

Weng moved over to the other three and rapidly poked each one.

“The Deng girl, Deng Changfei, fainted from the shock,” Weng pronounced after a moment.

“What did this?” Liao Ying asked, looking around warily.

Official Weng frowned, casting his eyes about.

“UAAAAAAAAgh!”

A further scream sounded, making them all turn towards the next group in time to see three disciples from the Shen clan scattering from something, drawing their weapons—

Jia Ying vanished like a ghost and there was a dull aftershock that made the grass all around them tremble. A moment later, she reappeared, holding a dull beige spider about the size of his head with very long forelimbs that had swirling protrusions on them that looked remarkably like fancy spirit grass.

“An ambush spider,” Weng mused, looking at it as it twitched in Jia Ying’s grip.

“A surprisingly high realm one as well,” Liling Mei observed with a somewhat dubious expression. “This is close to Dao Seeking.”

“It tried to flee after creating a distraction with its Nascent Soul,” Jia Ying agreed.

“It has a Nascent Soul?” a disciple from the Four Peacocks court muttered.

To his eyes, it looked remarkably like a variant of the ones he had seen the Ur’Vash in the mountains riding.

Weng knelt down next to the four victims as the fifth, a youth from the Shen clan he only vaguely knew, was brought over.

“Everyone be careful. This should go without saying, but do not poke at pretty flowers here,” Weng said.

“How is the venom?” Liling Mei asked.

“The good news is that the venom is mostly a paralytic,” Weng, who had gone back to examining the injured disciple from the Deng clan, remarked.

“Both Wenfei and Huan are Immortals though…” a more senior disciple from the Imperial School muttered.

“It’s an ambush predator. Its venom outstrips its realm by several stages,” Weng explained. “This little thing has enough potency to stun a Chosen Immortal. Might even give a Golden Immortal a few headaches… Notice it was quite targeted and yet easily got away from that barrier as well.”

Jia Ying stared around at their surroundings and sighed.

“If this keeps up, we might have to resort to a cart…” Liling Mei grimaced.

“…”

Jia Ying shook her head and turned back to look at the rest of the group, who had now mostly converged on their immediate surroundings.

“Why are we pushing so hard?” someone spoke up at last. “There has been no sign of pursuit…”

“—and yet, a million little things are occurring to slow us down,” Jia Ying mused. “People standing on thistles, people getting stung by insects, bitten by spiders, cut on grass…”

“Could that not just be attrition? We are in a hurry and this landscape is dangerous?” Yan Fei frowned.

“Want to check it with a compass?” Jia Ying asked, rather disarmingly.

“…”

“But talismans that do that kind of thing—”

“Talismans this… talismans that!” Jia Ying cut off the speaker from the crowd with a wave of her hand. “Can you lot only think in terms of the power bequeathed to you by your fate-thrashed seniors?”

“Divination talismans and the like stopping working just means that all the people who were hiding their skills don’t need to anymore,” Quan Dingxiang, who had also caught up, having been part of the vanguard group, remarked. “If a bunch as motley as you lot can find evidence at the first sign of meddling, why bother?”

“Quite,” Jia Ying muttered, scrunching up her shoulders for a moment then sighing, before turning back to Weng. “Can they be brought around?”

“We have the critter in question, so yes,” Weng mused. “It will take a few minutes though, and I will need the help of an alchemist.”

“Fu, Bei,” Quan Dingxiang waved a hand and two bearded youths who looked more like physical labourers than alchemists, wearing rather ragged Pill Sovereigns’ robes, saluted.

“Help Official Weng with everything he needs.”

“Of course, Senior Quan.”

Both alchemists saluted politely and then immediately went to kneel down beside Weng, who started to murmur instructions. As he watched, Fu pulled out some acupuncture needles of all things and began inserting them into what were probably the girl’s meridian gates.

“What about the ones who just used a barrier?” Liling Mei asked, eyeing the unconscious disciple and his compatriot.

“What’s done is done,” Jia Ying muttered, eyeing the remaining conscious disciple from the Imperial School who flinched back, looking pale.

“Why can’t we use them?” someone finally asked.

“…”

“Am I honestly going to have to explain to you all about harmonious alignments and qi signatures?” Jia Ying asked, sounding equally amused and disgusted. “Did they teach you nothing on the way to arriving at your meagre foundations?”

“Probably not that,” Quan Dingxiang chuckled. “There are no talisman makers here… only spoiled youths who grew up wearing silk pants.”

“That is true,” Jia Ying agreed. “Well, basically, those barrier talismans that are such useful life-saving treasures are all, by and large, the work of high realm cultivators, seniors or elders in your sects or ones you purchased from expert workshops. They carry maker’s signatures and anyone tracking us just has to look for those isolated echoes. You can’t mask them simply because they are locked to the talismans. They are not the same as arts where you can modulate the various elements to make the traces less obvious. Also, because I expect that many of you are using powerful talismans well in excess of the realm required – made by higher realm cultivators – nothing in your possession short of a more powerful geomancy talisman or special compass will obfuscate the signatures…”

“Almost all of which have stopped working as of yesterday…” Quan Dingxiang concluded.

“—Thus! Any expert at Ancient Immortal or higher with the slightest grasp of natural laws will be able to follow us like we left a signposted trail with fate-thrashed lanterns…” Jia Ying added.

“…”

There was some awkward shifting around that suggested to him that a great many people here had known that already, but simply hadn’t cared, or chosen to ignore it because it had not been stated out loud.

-Why didn’t she tell them all explicitly before now though…? a part of him wondered.

“We could start setting false trails…?” Yan Fei mused.

~ Kai Manshu – Riverlands ~

“I know you were slightly joking when you talked about tribulations earlier,” Kai Manshu, disciple of the Erudite Sage of Qin Pagoda, muttered, passing a spirit fruit to Qing Yao, who was sitting next to him. “However, this is…”

“…”

Qing Yao glanced sideways at him and said nothing, just taking the fruit and taking a slightly vicious bite out of it.

They had refined the qi from the hydra, what remained of it anyway, until nearly midday, before being forced to stop. Not because any of the four of them had broken through, but because one of the Ur’Inan, the young woman called Saruuna, had.

Saruuna, Senior Ling and the other Ur’Inan woman, Lashaan, were the only ones still out there. Everyone else had retreated to a relatively safe distance around the courtyard to watch.

“It’s not what I expected…” Senior Chunhua, who was crouching nearby, mused. “Compared to the other advancements—”

“You have seen ‘advancements’ before?” Naakos, who was also sitting nearby watching, interjected.

“In the battle, before we crossed paths. Those involved lightning though,” Senior Chunhua mused.

“Oh… Those kinds of advancements,” Naakos nodded. “Similar to what you overcame.”

“There are different ways to advance?” he asked, curious as to what she was implying.

“…”

Naakos looked sideways at him and shrugged. “Different paths lead to different advancements—”

His words were lost as another rippling shockwave twisted the flooded courtyard, disturbing the swirling maelstrom of qi that was focused on Saruuna. For a split second he was sure he saw a shadow version of the young Ur’Inan woman facing off against her, like a mirror image…

The swirling waters twisted again and it was gone—

The bolt of black lightning left afterimages in his vision. Were it not for the echoing thunder that lingered after its passing, he would have thought it a visual hallucination.

“—and we are done,” Naakos nodded, seeming satisfied.

Shaking his head, he looked at Saruuna and realised with shock that the old Ur’Inan was right. She had completed her breakthrough, the pressure of the qi radiating off the young woman close to that of a Dao Seeking cultivator.

“What realm does that equate to?” he asked Naakos.

“She is Fifth Advancement now,” Naakos said with a further shrug, “though that is less important than the fact that she has overcome the Test of Will.”

“That is… what that tribulation is called?” Qing Yao asked, also clearly curious.

“Only getting one lightning bolt seems a bit…” Senior Chunhua almost seemed put out, which he found inwardly amusing, but would never dare to state to her face.

“If she makes such momentum as you do, I would be worried gods are playing tricks…” Naakos chuckled. “If Lashaan or Caanar were to break through, that would be a different matter.”

“Congratulations!” Senior Juni called out from further up the ruin where she had gone to stand, presumably to keep watch.

She landed in the water a moment later, barely leaving a splash as she did so.

“Well, that was certainly interesting to observe,” she mused. “I guess we keep going; that way she can consolidate her gains?”

Checking his own condition, he had to acknowledge that the pressure from refining the qi was still producing remarkable benefits. It would certainly be the same for the others as well. Feiwu Shen and Wei Chu especially were continuing to make remarkable progress, in no small part thanks to the rather remarkable divination talismans Senior Juni had made.

“—How is the second batch of talisman paper coming on?” Senior Juni glanced over at him apologetically.

“Ah…”

Reminded of the task they had nominally returned to, he looked over at the three solidifying slabs of fibrous reed scroll laid out on a nearby rock, being pressed by two salvaged floor tiles and some heavy weights.

The method for making paper from reeds was one of those useless scholarly things you learned in a sect that devoted a depressing amount of its time to those kind of things. Usually, making spirit paper scrolls was a thing outer disciples handled. He only knew a method because his teacher in the sect had insisted he prepare his own materials for study.

Reaching over, he sent a pulse of qi through it, checking its state.

“Seems done, though it could maybe use a bit more qi reinforcement,” he observed. “Usually this method has to take a day or so. To be forcing it in an hour is…”

“Undesirable, I understand,” she sighed. “In any case, I will need some more before everyone else can start refining again, unless you want to start without a talisman…”

-Is the failure rate that high? he wondered inwardly. They had made two sheets already, forcing the process such that two serviceable small rolls of paper had been made in under an hour.

“…”

“It’s not an easy talisman to make, sorry,” she shrugged, looking a bit embarrassed.

Something about his expression must have clued her in to his inner thoughts, because she pulled out nearly two dozen talismans painted onto strips of the previous ‘paper’ they had made and passed them over to him.

“Oh…”

He didn’t need to do more than flick through them to see what the problem was. It wasn’t that she was failing them; it was that she was only using the ones that came out absolutely right.

“It’s like divination,” she added with a further apologetic half smile. “You have to make sure all the conditions are good and even then…”

“There is a chance that some small thing might throw it off…” Qing Yao agreed, looking at the ones in his hand.

Looking at the ones in his hand again, he could see that Qing Yao was correct.

“—and the qi I was using was a little unstable,” Juni added, not looking at him.

-Of course it would be the paper being impure, he sighed, feeling a bit embarrassed, even though it was expected really, given the corners they were cutting.

That was also why they needed more. The talismans were basically only good for a single use and once you broke the connection the medium, their hastily made paper, collapsed.

“My apologies, Senior,” he grimaced.

“It’s fine,” Senior Juni said.

“Once we get going, we can gather some more suitably attuned spirit vegetation and make more,” Senior Chunhua interjected. “These are not really designed for this kind of talisman anyway.”

“Your help in providing the method to make them is already—”

“Please, Senior Juni,” he waved a hand, refusing to accept Senior Juni’s apology. “It is our good fortune to be able to help. Your generosity in aiding us to refine this qi is already more than enough. In any case, providing support like this is the least we can do.”

“…”

Senior Juni eyed him somewhat dubiously for a moment, and again he suddenly felt like she was staring through him in some weird way. It was really quite uncanny, and not a little bit disconcerting.

“Fine,” she nodded after a short pause. “In any case, this time it will take quite a few less to achieve the same result, so hopefully the results will go further.”

He watched as she lifted off one of the rocks and sent a pulse of her own qi into the slightly coarse paper, created of woven fibrous strips of cut reeds. The paper smoked faintly as it dried, then steamed as she did something with water qi to it before drying it a second time.

It was impossible not to wince as she lifted the sheet off and bent it, hoping it wouldn’t just snap or fall into dust, but against all the odds it actually rolled up in her hands.

“This is certainly better than the last lot…” she noted.

“Practice makes perfect,” he shrugged, looking the other way.

Senior Juni laughed softly and, taking a metal knife, started to cut the paper into palm-sized rectangles. When she was done with that, she sat down cross-legged by the flat rock and without further comment started to draw on one with a brush that she appeared to have carved from a short piece of spirit bamboo.

Curious, he watched her start to draw the design. When she had done so before he had been more worried about finishing up the batch of paper, so had not had the opportunity. However, there was very little he could gain from watching her, he realised fairly quickly. Her principle was esoteric enough that anything relating to it was just a sort of oppressive haze when he looked at it and the fluidity with which she drew the pattern itself almost seemed designed to obfuscate the exact motions, not that he had any intention of copying her.

Qing Yao, sitting beside him, just shook her head, then paused and pulled out a talisman from her clothing.

“Huh…”

She stared at it, frowning, then pushed some qi into it.

“How odd…”

“A talisman?” he blinked in surprise, wondering where she had gotten it from, given they had lost all their gear…

“What’s wrong?” Wei Chu and Senior Chunhua both asked basically at the same time.

“Well, I just got a ping on my sect’s talisman… but it’s not by any ‘conventional’ means.”

-Ah, it’s a soul-bound talisman…

“Someone not from your sect trying to use it?” Senior Chunhua frowned.

“…” Qing Yao paused contemplatively.

That comment momentarily turned his thoughts back to his own sect mates and the other captives left behind. He sighed. It had been easy to forget about others with all the insanity of the previous two days, but their fates still weighed on him.

-Will we get an opportunity to try to go back for them?

The three seniors had been ambivalent about it before, perhaps understandably. It had been a ludicrous quirk of fate that saw him and Feiwu Shen freed alongside Qing Yao and Wei Chu, he knew that in his heart. In fact, the simple act of ending up in the same cell as Senior Juni had been a bit of heavenly good fortune for them.…

“I am not sure…” Qing Yao’s words cut through his thoughts. She was still frowning, turning the piece of white jade, carved with a moon. “Only the parent talismans can outright provide paths to the child talismans and there are only two such in this trial. One with Senior Dongmei and one with Senior Jia. Senior Dongmei possesses our soul jades in any case.”

“Could it be Senior Jia?” Wei Chu asked. “If there are issues with items refined using… well…”

“Possibly?” Qing Yao sighed.

“Could you divine our location using that?” Senior Chunhua mused.

“…”

“Possibly?” Qing Yao looked unhappy now. “I doubt I could, and it would require real talent with divination. I didn’t interact with the pulse that came through it in any case…”

Senior Juni, who had continued drawing the talisman she was working on without getting distracted, set it aside at last and held out her hand.

Qing Yao stared at her for a moment, before realising what she was after and passing her the talisman.

“…”

They watched in silence as Senior Juni stared at the talisman, her aura as she did so growing ever more esoteric as she presumably did something using her principle.

“Well?” Senior Chunhua asked after some thirty seconds had passed.

“Very odd,” Senior Juni shook her head and passed the talisman to Senior Chunhua. “I don’t get anything that says it poses a problem to our remaining here in the short term, but it’s not very clear… I’ll have to do some more divinations, it seems.”

“Mmm…”

Senior Chunhua turned the talisman over a few times then passed it back to Qing Yao with a soft sigh.

“What I do get from it, though, is a faint pull that suggests it can move us closer to what we are seeking…” Senior Juni went on. “However, I am not entirely sure I believe that, given the wider circumstances of how we ended up in this mess…”

“You think someone might still be poking around the edges of the tribulation?” Senior Chunhua frowned.

“Someone would do that?” he asked, finally re-joining the conversation.

“Well…” Senior Juni sighed. “I want to say I have a higher opinion of our peers than that… but really I can’t.”

“It came just after Saruuna broke through…” Senior Chunhua mused.

“There is a risk of seeing links where there are none…” Senior Juni muttered, staring up at the blue morning sky. “When you have this much interference in the alignments of a place and its worldly harmony, patterns start to emerge from chaos where there really are none…”

“That seems…?” Senior Chunhua frowned.

“Something my father once warned me about,” Senior Juni said with a shrug. “The more you stare at a thing, the more the circumstances start to look like a thing. Which is not to say that coincidences are not equally dangerous, but this is why doing too many divinations at once is dangerous.”

“Divinations start to tell you what you want to see, rather than what you need to?” Qing Yao muttered.

“You’re familiar with the problem,” Senior Juni said.

“Most compasses are built to filter that out,” Feiwu Shen added.

“Except now, most compasses are broken,” he concluded.

“Yes,” Qing Yao agreed.

“…”

Senior Juni, who had been staring off into the blue sky, suddenly clapped a hand to her head. “Wait… we are looking at this the wrong way around!”

“We are?” Senior Chunhua asked.

“Really?” Qing Yao frowned.

“Yes,” Juni confirmed, nodding again as she passed the first talisman she had made to him. “That said, we still need to sort out the hydra’s qi first.”

He accepted the talisman with a polite nod and stood up. She was probably correct there, that qi would leave an awkward trail for anyone to pick up if it remained unrefined. That it was being processed as fast as it was by all parties was fairly remarkable really. Outside here, he was sure that even what was left would last a small group of Immortals a month or more, if they did nothing else.

Nodding to Qing Yao and the others, he started across the courtyard, back to the epicentre around Senior Ling where she was now seemingly re-working some aspect of the formation helping her focus the qi. Saruuna and Lashaan were now sitting opposite each other, muttering a chant of some kind in a language he didn’t recognise.

“Ah, you’re all done discussing how fast we need to get this over with?” Senior Ling asked, noting his approach.

He nodded, sat down on the block he had been assigned earlier and pushed some of his qi into the talisman. The way they worked was quite ingenious really. He had to push a bit of qi through it initially, linking it to his own qi cycle, whereupon any qi that was acquired through it was naturally pacified in a fashion using Senior Juni’s principle as the guiding element.

“Ready?” she asked him.

Nodding again, he pushed aside the thoughts of how remarkable the whole thing was and focused on what was to come.

Moments later, surging, devouring hydra qi swept out into the surroundings. Calming his mind, he inhaled and started into the next cycle, noting as he did so that the qi was starting to contain a surprising amount of orphaned soul strength as well.

~ Juni – Riverlands, Ruined Fort ~

Watching Kai Manshu head over to where Lin Ling was seated, Juni sighed inwardly and resisted the urge to rub her temples.

“Problem?” Chunhua signed unobtrusively.

“…”

She stared up at the sky, not quite sure how to answer that. That was the problem with divinations, somewhat ironically: the more you started to rely on them, the more problems they attracted and the less ‘clear’ they tended to become, which just fed into there being more ‘problems’. The ‘problem’ here and now, though, was that no particular divination stood out in that regard.

Her earlier divinations that it was ‘auspicious’ for their future prospects to stay here and refine the hydra’s qi were still as they had been. However, the last five minutes had served as a reminder, not that she needed it, that ‘auspicious’ could mean many things… and that it did not necessarily mean ‘trouble free’.

“Maybe…” she signed back.

“We leave?”

She shook her head at that, which just made Chunhua sigh.

“I’ll go keep a lookout…” Chunhua added.

“I can do that,” Naakos chuckled, standing up. “You should focus on refining this.”

“…”

Chunhua scowled at him, but nodded and stood up.

“As good as it is to want to give others opportunities, it will only take so long before Udrasa starts to investigate,” Naakos mused. “A shady old bastard like Sharvasus will not let this go.”

Offering a half-smile, half-grimace by way of agreement, she again considered the talisman papers she had and picked another that was on the higher end of their quality spectrum.

Drawing them was not that difficult really, though up until this point her experience with making talismans had largely been in regards to supplying raw materials for the inks used on them. In that regard, it was a bit unfair to Kai Manshu to say that their ‘inconsistent quality’ was what was slowing things down. Rather, it was their alignment neutrality that was the real issue, mostly brought about by how rapidly they had had to make it she supposed.

Pushing qi into her blood and infusing her principle into both blood and paper, she envisaged the set of symbols she needed to draw and started again.

With each one she did, she also got a bit faster at imprinting the set of symbols, though she was not really showing that openly. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust the four cultivators themselves… It was more that they had already made something of an ‘impression’ on them and the last thing she wanted was some offhand comments to draw the interest of some distant senior or elder down the line who might well be nowhere near as upstanding.

-The Jade Gate Court is already targeting Han Shu…

“…”

That errant thought made her inadvertently instil a flaw into the talisman.

“Shit,” she sighed, scrunching that one up directly.

There was no point in keeping one that had a flitting inauspicious thought about their current circumstances in it, especially if it was intended for a precision task like supporting someone in refining qi.

Shaking her head, she picked another talisman and cleared her head using her mantra this time, before starting again.

In the end, it took her almost twenty minutes to draw talismans for everyone who needed them. Once they had all settled back into the rhythm of refining the remaining qi, after the eventful interlude of Saruuna’s advancement, the only ones not refining it were her, Naakos, Naakai and Caanar. Naakos and Caanar were both keeping watch, while Naakai was reading through the various bits and pieces on formations they had supplied the Ur’Inan with.

Like that, and rather surprisingly in her mind, most of the rest of the day passed in a fairly uneventful fashion. Eruuna also broke through to Fifth Advancement as well in the early afternoon, but the closest to anything genuinely problematic occurring was Wei Chu finally reaching the threshold of ‘Severing Origins’ about an hour after that. The younger woman had stopped, thankfully, though she had to admit she was slightly curious to see what a remotely ‘normal’ tribulation for a spiritual cultivator was like here, especially now that many of the strings of influence from outside seemed to be cut.

“This place is almost tolerable without the mist,” she observed to Naakos who had been replaced by Caanar as the lookout from the top of the remaining tower of the fortress.

“It’s relative,” the old Ur’Inan sighed, looking up from the reed roots he was peeling.

“True,” she conceded, looking around at the endless sea of swaying reeds, split only by occasional stands of mangrove-like trees that disrupted the horizon.

“The mist keeps other things at bay…” Naakos mused.

“Will it return, do you think?” she asked, still considering the ever-swaying reeds.

“Undoubtedly. Even if the Hunters do not renew it, there are other beasts out here that will draw it out and nurture it once the landscape starts to return to its harmonious state,” Naakos explained. “Hydras, for starters… though there are some other beasts like the Maker-accursed toads that also benefit from it.”

“Toads?” she frowned.

Currently, she could hear frogs and insects chirping away along with the odd water bird calling in the middle distance. Now that she thought about it, there were not as many of the beasts as she would have expected for a wetland this size.

“Those Hunters… hunted, and Udrasa keeps its borders clear,” Naakos said, no doubt seeing her pensive expression.

“Ah… The wards.”

She realised she had momentarily forgotten about the soul sense wards that were everywhere.

“Yes, the wards are a large part of it,” Naakos agreed. “This flood will have done quite a bit of damage to them. That is likely why we have not been disturbed so far.”

“Eventually someone will come to see why this fort has vanished though…” she mused, looking around at the devastation.

“Certainly,” Naakos agreed.

“Anyway, you said toads?” she returned to that topic.

“Uggh… they are worse than the serpents,” Naakai grumbled coming over to join them. “If you ever see a toad about this size”—she held her hands out to mime something the size of a large goat—“that is beige and purple-brown with forward facing eyes, don’t look at it. Just kill it immediately… or failing that, run away.”

“What do they do?” she asked, curious now.

“Empathic control and psionics,” Naakos muttered then spat into the water in disgust. “All the psionics…”

“Psionics?” she asked, turning the unfamiliar word over.

“Mind control, perceptive manipulation via ‘Intent’ and so on,” Naakos elaborated. “They also secrete reaction-dulling pheromones that make you more receptive to their control. The secretions from their skin to keep predators at bay are almost implausibly toxic as well, as is their flesh, even their blood. Historically, some tribes actually used the secretions from ‘captive’ ones as poison for their weapons.”

“They sound thoroughly charming,” she muttered, adding it to the ever growing list of things out here she never wanted to meet.

“That’s the problem,” Naakai grunted. “They are thoroughly charming. If one spots you and thinks you will be useful to its future prospects, you will have a loving toad for a pet for all eternity.

“Or until you have the strength of will to reject it… though that rarely happens,” Naakos added. “They are very persuasive and once they gain the upper hand, they will force anything that might be a threat to their dominance to kill themselves.”

“So what keeps them from overrunning everything?” she asked.

“Low birth rate mainly,” Naakai sighed. “And most influences controlling large parts of this region take steps to deal with infestations. Not to mention most travellers aren’t offering prospects favourable enough for the blighted things to wish to leave with them instead of cultivating here in their native environment.”

“Indeed,” Naakos agreed. “While they are dangerous, they are also physically weak – their main protection being the poison and their pheromones. All you have to do is prevent them from seeing you before—” he made a twisting motion with his hands. “Shoot them with orichalcum arrows and they die like anything else.”

Listening to that, she had to admit she was quietly relieved. There were beasts like that back home, but the way the valleys corralled things in Yin Eclipse meant that they rarely spread. The most obvious equivalent she could think of were the eponymous blood ling trees of the Red Pit… or the eldritch moon mushrooms.

“They are ambush predators mainly. The wards in the towns are as much to keep them away as the serpents,” Naakai added. “The Udrasa tribe have certainly warded out the habitats that they would thrive in. Mostly they are a danger on the far side of the Vashada Badlands, towards Menacarus and the coastal plain.”

“That’s the ruined city on the far side of this place?” she asked, changing the topic slightly.

“It is… not that much of it remains,” Naakai replied.

“—It never had a ‘cursed former occupants’ problem,” Naakos added.

“Speaking of cursed former occupants,” she mused, glancing back in the direction of the ‘prison hall’…

“If you don’t want to kill them, just leave them,” Naakos grunted, following her gaze.

“…”

That was not really the answer she wanted, but really, there was very little they could seemingly do about those held there. It preyed on her mind a bit, even with the knowledge that probably any other person from their world, in their situation, would likely kill them without qualm. She, on the other hand, having been held captive by Udrasa, found that while she probably could bring herself to execute them all, it would not be a decision she was at all comfortable with in her heart going forward.

Naakai just shot her a sideways glance and sighed.

“They just seem kind of pitiable,” she muttered, standing up. “Well, so long as we leave here with enough of a head start it will hopefully not be an issue.”

“Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like they will be done before nightfall,” Naakos mused.

“No… it does not,” she agreed, looking at the circle of cultivators and Ur’Inan steadily devouring what remained of the hydra’s qi.

“You do not want to refine more?” Naakai added.

She shook her head, looking around pensively. “I could, but it will not change much. In any case, I am better serving everyone else by keeping an eye on things.”

What she didn’t say was that she didn’t need to be seated over there to refine the qi anyway. The talismans the others were using were all linked to her and what she needed to advance now was not qi in any case, but comprehensions. Experiencing a shadow of the flow of qi into each person there, feeling how it interacted with her own principle, with the world around them, with the dispersing remnants of the hydra’s soul… all of that was just as useful, if not more so.

-The first thing I really need to do is focus on soul-binding my swordstaff in any case, she mused inwardly.

Her Nascent Soul was now handling all of the parsing of the talisman’s texts and steadily feeding her critical bits of knowledge as it did so.

Mostly, that had been focused on the talismans, allowing her to re-examine instructions on how to draw them, even as she did them, but for the last few hours it had been interrogating the various texts about advancement through the realms leading up to her current state.

Soul Foundation and Nascent Soul were largely what she expected. Severing Origins, however, did not exist as a major realm in the talisman’s progression, but was instead set as the peak of Nascent Soul. After that, Dao Seeking was effectively split into two as Unity Realm, which focused on merging all the aspects of your foundation to form a Principle, and then Seeking Principle where you honed your interpretation of it to advance into the Immortal Unification realm.

Having never expected to enter the Immortal realm as a junior, she had never really looked into Eastern Azure’s fundamentals of Immortal Ascension.

Now, she was wondering if that was a blessing or a curse, because the details set down in the talisman were nothing if not sketchy. Most of the breakthroughs prior to that point had come with fairly detailed instructions on the specifics required. Certainly the ones for Golden Core, Soul Foundation and Nascent Soul. Advancing to Immortal Unification, however… that basically came with a rather cryptic series of instructions talking about ‘Acknowledgement’ and ‘Proof’, followed by a checklist of things the talisman considered somewhat optimal for her to look into and the equivalent of a mental ‘do your best, yeah?’ gesture.

There was further nuance in there, as well; however, even after re-reading the relevant sections some dozen times with her Nascent Soul, mostly regarding the benefits she had reaped for that strange meeting that had taken the place of the silver bolt when she crossed to Dao Seeking, the hints were cryptic at best.

She was fairly sure that ‘meeting’, strange as it was, was what the talisman meant when it talked about ‘Acknowledgement’… but even with that, she was only somewhat sure because she had already experienced it. Nothing she could find gave any real explanation of what exactly arriving at ‘proof of her principle’ entailed, there were just some vague bits of advice and a few between the lines warnings that almost felt like they had been included as an afterthought, to cover the blushes of the person writing it.

The biggest one… or perhaps most obvious one, seemed to imply that if she gave up on ‘Proving’ what she had, at this point, she could only ‘Acknowledge’ the path given… which, in this case, she supposed was related to the woman who had interceded with her at the end of her tribulation.

Having gone to all the effort she had, she didn’t need the between the lines hints from the talisman to feel that that would be more than a bit of a cop-out.

-Seriously? She grumbled to her Nascent Soul. I am standing here complaining to myself about the ‘limitations’ of a path that any person on Eastern Azure would sell their own mother for?

-That said… her Nascent Soul’s eye roll was fairly quaint as it pointed her back to the texts…

She reviewed the text again and sighed.

Within those warnings was also a rather veiled hint that Mortal Principles were somewhat different from physiques and could be grasped, even if the Mortal Physiques themselves could not…

-I wonder why that is? she mused, mulling over the inner logic of what it was saying, wondering if she missed something.

That was the hidden sting, the warning behind the other warnings as far as she could see. Certainly, there was nothing to stop another trying to steal away her hard-gotten gains, but in doing so, as she currently was, their effort would just see them end up with ash and tears – a sort of petty vengeance for breaking her own path she supposed, but it did her no good.

She wished that the talisman talked a bit more about physiques and their grades, because her personal hunch was that it had something to do with the symbols and Mystic Meridians. However, they basically treated physiques as simply physiques as far as she could see, as if the person writing it had known about them, but somehow not cared a whole lot to differentiate them.

-Wait…

Narrowing her eyes, she went back and skimmed the different sections, removing in her head all the overt mentions to them…

-Did someone rewrite this text or adapt it from an earlier one, inserting the later logic?

Her Nascent Soul shrugged and sent back a ‘you ask me but who do I ask, you? You are me…’ that just made her sigh, not sure whether to be amused or annoyed at the inner manifestation of her own frustrations on that topic.

The way her Nascent Soul and her psyche interacted was… odd occasionally. They were the same entity, but there was a sort of parallel dissociation that manifested at times… like it had just now. It somewhat put her in mind of the voices she had had in her head long ago, but in this instant not in a bad way.

The idea, however, refused to retreat once it was there. There was no doubt in her mind that the talisman was a composite effort by someone, an attempt – and a very good one in truth – to link a bunch of associated and harmoniously aligned arts and methods together.

-Am I just surprised to arrive at the realisation that the joins are obvious in such a place? she pondered.

The problem of ‘naming’ things was not a quandary unknown to her. As someone who had administered the bulk of a major regional pavilion’s procurement branch for several years before ending up in here, she knew full well the headaches caused by people changing terminology for things like spirit herbs to suit their own preconceived notions. That it happened with cultivation texts did not surprise her either…

-So why am I so caught out by it? she self-examined. Is it just because this is so holistic in most other senses?

Sadly, no immediate answer was forthcoming.

What was certain, at the very least, was that the talisman texts were all subtly pushing her towards ‘Acknowledgement’ and ‘Proof’. It was also that, she supposed, that made her so put out that the talisman then said basically nothing about the actual process of crossing Immortal Unification itself.

-Is it implying that I have to take the sum of these pieces and work out how to put them together myself? Into a ‘whole’ that is mine and mine alone?

-Is that some kind of final ‘test’?

Shaking her head, she turned that sliver of inner attention back to her surroundings once again. She had never really stopped monitoring everything while she thought about that, but it was difficult to engage in both in a focused way…

-If only I could actually have my Nascent Soul step out of my body…? She mused.

“…”

“Is there a reason why we cannot manifest our souls outside our bodies?” she asked Naakai, who was still sitting nearby processing reed roots.

“Hmmm…” Naakai eyed her dubiously.

“You are speaking of Auric Manifestation or Spiritual Manifestation?”

“Yes?” she replied, not knowing the difference.

“Ha…” Naakai rolled her eyes.

“Without knowing the method, it is hard to say. For us, we must be at the Sixth Advancement and have attained some understanding of the nature of the ‘Soul’ as you put it, before we can even begin to project it outwards. Even then, it requires gifts and suitable comprehensions. Maybe one in a thousand could do so and most who can are Shamans or Mages.

“Here, it is likely because the laws regarding such things are strong. Perhaps much stronger than your home. That would also be a limiting factor.”

-Except I have basically advanced from nothing here… she pondered. The Immortals we fought back in the mountains were able to do it… Does that mean that only those with an Immortal Soul are able to properly manifest them?

-Or were the rules up there different…?

That last thought had been gnawing at her for a good while, truthfully.

Frowning, she focused on herself and tried to leave her body with her Nascent Soul. There was a sense of pressure and a kind of misty resistance for a few seconds then she had to stop, because it was taxing in a most disorienting way.

-I guess I can only ask Ling if she has any idea… she thought inwardly.

“For most Ur’Vash and Ur’Inan, our method of advancement does not focus overly on the soul…” Naakai added.

“They focus on Martial methods and Body Refinement,” she replied.

“I suppose that is a good way to look at it, yes,” Naakai agreed.

“…”

Caanar waved from the top of the tower to get their attention, cutting the conversation short.

She was about to call up, when she thought better of it. Had it been something mundane, Caanar would have called down to them or just said nothing. That he was being silent suggested a problem.

“I’ll go see what it is,” she said to Naakai by way of apology for cutting short their conversation.

Naakai just nodded and waved for her to get going, turning back to the large stack of roots.

Scrambling up the tower, it didn’t take long to arrive at Caanar’s perch on the second highest floor, which offered a good view in every direction but without the exposure of the half collapsed section at the top.

“What is it?” she asked, once she was kneeling down in the shadow of the wall.

“A boat, about a mile to our east, no mast or lights,” Caanar explained, pointing carefully.

She followed his gaze and saw… barely, what he had. A reed and wood vessel, between 25 and 30 metres long and some 5 metres wide, just about visible through the afternoon haze.

“It’s only thanks to the higher water that they even could be seen,” Caanar muttered.

“Yeah,” she agreed, sweeping it and its surroundings carefully, looking for signs of Ur’Vash and finding none.

“How long has it been there?” she asked.

“Not long… I think,” Caanar replied a bit unhappily. “I noticed it just now, but that was mostly because the shift in the light has made the glare of the distant water less diffuse… and mana-sight—”

“—doesn’t work well out here with all the disruption,” she concluded.

“Indeed,” the Ur’Inan agreed.

Sweeping the distant reed beds, she noted several swathes of the mangrove-like trees beyond, which would be tall enough to disguise a slow moving, carefully navigated vessel. Caanar had spotted it maybe a hundred metres beyond that point…

She narrowed her eyes and watched it carefully, trying to see if it was moving significantly. There were no obvious channels anymore, courtesy of the flooding. The water level was still almost two metres higher than it had been, and given this was the epicentre of the flood, near enough, it would take quite a while to disperse.

“It isn’t moving forward visibly,” she concluded after a few moments of watching them in reference to other landmarks.

“And there is no sign of anyone on it either,” Caanar sighed.

“Unfortunately, the boat looks a bit too substantial to be simple fishermen either,” she mused, thinking back to what she had seen of fishing vessels in the various places they had been through on their way to here.

“It doesn’t have that look, I agree,” Caanar murmured.

“Well, it was expected that we would not remain here alone for that long,” she mused. “I presume their plan is to approach slowly with smaller vessels under cover of dusk, then investigate once it gets dark?”

“That would be the reasonable deduction,” Caanar agreed. “Assuming that the vessel has not simply drifted out of the mangrove trees and run aground.”

“Possibly, but let us assume the worst,” she smiled wryly.

“Indeed, better to be pleasantly surprised than the opposite,” Caanar replied.

“Keep an eye on it,” she added, swinging her legs back over the edge of the tower, on the far side from the boat. “I’ll go tell the others.”

“It will be difficult to escape here effectively without a boat,” Caanar added.

“We can always make rafts from reeds if really pushed,” she mused. “And there is enough timber in this place to salvage some frames.”

“I was thinking more of capturing that boat,” Caanar said with a chuckle.

“I know,” she agreed. “However, we need to get to it first and not everyone is either in a fit state or able to run on the water for extended periods of time.”

“True,” he conceded.

Without any further discussion, she dropped down the side of the tower and landed with a crunch in the debris-strewn square at the base. The force of the impact made her legs jar a bit, but there was no real damage done.

“Well?” Naakai asked.

“A boat, arrived fairly recently, but it’s hard to say how long it may have been lurking a bit further away given how broken up the sight lines are,” she explained. “Best case, it was drifting from the flood and has just conveniently run aground. Worst case…”

“—a group from one of the local settlements are coming here in canoes to check the ruined fort, using the dusk as cover?” Naakai mused.

“Yes,” she agreed. “My guess is the latter, honestly.”

“The soul sense wards here are also broken, so that means they will approach cautiously and probably bring a portable totem,” Naakai went on, crossing her arms. “That at least will give us some warning.”

“How are the injured?” she asked.

“Caanar as you can see is recovering well, but a sustained fight would do him no good,” Naakai replied. “Teshek is better, as is Lashaan while Eruuna and Saruuna have both broken through recently so their physical condition will have improved somewhat.”

{Bright Heart Shifting Steps}

Focusing on the question of ‘the vessel’, she got an immediate, if admittedly rather inconclusive, twinge, her qi in her dantian draining away surprisingly rapidly for the rather lacklustre return.

“Huaaa…” she exhaled, turning that result over in her mind as her qi rapidly replenished itself.

“How long?” she called over to Lin Ling.

“Hours…” Ling called back. “Why?”

It took her only a few moments to arrive in the middle of the array, beside where Lin Ling was seated.

“We have a boat, potentially scouts incoming,” she explained.

“Took them long enough,” Teng Chunhua murmured.

“A boat… or something bigger?” Lin Ling asked.

“…”

“It’s nearly 30 metres long, maybe 5 wide… no mast, appeared to be grounded but Caanar didn’t spot it between the reed-beds, haze and the mangrove-like trees until a few minutes ago,” she elaborated.

“What does… your art suggest?” Lin Ling asked after a moment’s pause to digest what she had just said.

The other cultivators were frowning, looking uneasy, not that she could blame them. Their previous experiences with dealing with the local Ur’Vash would have done nothing for their confidence… and the only reason the three of them had done so well was in large part because of Lin Ling.

“Inconclusive, but it burned a lot of qi to tell me that,” she muttered, running her left hand through the hair at the back of her neck.

“If it is just some scouts coming to check on the fort that is one thing, but if it’s related to this ‘Sharvasus’ and the hydra…” Chunhua mused.

“—then we likely have a problem,” she finished for Chunhua.

“We are stronger than before…”

“Well… you are,” Lin Ling chuckled darkly. “If Sharvasus comes it will still be me doing all the heavy lifting.”

“Way to make a girl feel like she made progress,” Chunhua grumbled.

She glanced sideways at the four cultivators. In truth, they would also give a much better showing now than they had before, given the degree of their attunements.

“There is a way to work out if it’s a group of scouts or something more…” she said.

“If it’s something more, we want to bait a soul ward out of them for starters,” Chunhua nodded.

“Bait a soul ward…?” Qing Yao frowned.

“The main danger from higher realm experts is their soul attacks…” Lin Ling said with an eye roll.

“Yes… obviously,” Feiwu Shen muttered.

“Well, the soul sense wards are not selective. The Ur’Vash rely on them because they are frequently fighting things stronger than them,” she explained. “It evens the odds, especially when combined with their weapons that can innately do soul damage… and their gestalt effects and use of colour… feng shui, I suppose… mean they can do remarkable quantities of damage to things that are realms higher.”

“Oh…” Kai Manshu frowned.

“Colour feng shui?” Wei Chu asked, apparently not getting the reference, though the other three did somewhat, based on their pensive nods.

“What do you mean by—?”

“That’s a big hole in their strategy,” Kai Manshu added, inadvertently talking over Wei Chu.

“They don’t have a lot of experts like us,” Lin Ling said with an eye roll.

“And if they don’t put one of these soul wards down?” Wei Chu asked, looking nervous.

“Then that either means they didn’t buy the threat we just set them, or they don’t have one in all likelihood,” Lin Ling shrugged.

“The question then is which of us has the best control over their soul sense?” Chunhua mused.

“Me,” Lin Ling retorted, rolling her eyes again.

“…”

“Well?” shaking her head, she stared at Lin Ling.

“What?” Ling asked.

“Well, how many attackers are there?”

Lin Ling gave her a slightly sour look.

“None that I can detect. The reeds are all spirit vegetation, or did you forget that?”

“…”

Not for the first time she wondered if Lin Ling would bounce if kicked.

She had forgotten… not that she intended to admit that openly here and now. Her excuse, to herself as much as anything, was that she had been focusing on not drawing attention to their presence, so she had held back from doing more with her own soul sense than just checking the courtyard in case the buildings collapsed.

At least the others seemed to be in a similar situation, she saw, from their slightly shifty looks at Lin Ling’s comment.

-What a fine group we make, she thought wryly. All these people with soul sense and everyone is actually being responsible and not waving it around like a flag…

Putting aside that embarrassing moment, she swept her gaze around the ruined fort again.

“So, how do we go about this?”

“The Ur’Inan hide, along with you and Chunhua,” Lin Ling mused, also looking around. “The five of us will be bait.”

“We are the bait?” Kai Manshu muttered, looking a bit put out.

“Yes,” Lin Ling nodded, glancing at the four of them. “Along with me. I am the strongest person here and you cannot ‘hide’ particularly well.”

“Oh…” Qing Yao nodded.

“…”

“So, we will sit here and see how these new arrivals take our presence, then work it out from there?” Qing Yao mused.

“Basically? Yes,” Ling affirmed.

“Would it not have been better for us to hide and them to be the bait?” Feiwu Shen muttered, glancing at the Ur’Inan.

“…”

Lashaan and Eruuna kept their faces impassive, but his comment was a subtle reminder that circumstances died hard and their captivity had not been easy on any of the four in their own ways.

“Maybe, but this throws off expectations slightly,” Lin Ling explained. “Our group composition was theoretically known to several influential parties around here. Five cultivators recovering in the middle of a ruined fort, four of whom are escaped prisoners—”

“—is different enough that someone not immediately familiar with all circumstances would not make the connection?” Kai Manshu interjected.

Looking from around the group, she could see Lin Ling’s logic… however, there was no evidence to suggest that they had been spotted…

She nearly used ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ to check, before catching herself.

-It is not good to rely on that kind of thing too much, is it? she sighed.

“—We all should hide… except maybe Ling,” she interjected.

“Ohh?” it was Lin Ling’s turn to look quizzical now.

“Well, the aura is dwindling,” she said, looking around again. “If there is a group coming here, they are going to find a ruined fortress… a lot of flooding… and traces of hydra qi infused into everything.”

“And the array here…” Chunhua pointed out.

Running through the scenario and its potential variables in her head, she nodded absently.

“Yes, that’s why Ling stays in the open.”

“Oh… so it’s just me as bait…” Lin Ling pouted.

“But we still have a hall full of prisoners who will be found pretty quick,” Kai Manshu pointed out.

“It isn’t that big a fort… and soul sense is not restricted.”

“Indeed,” she mused, “however, they were also sealed up by Ling…”

“So, the best case scenario is that this is just a bunch of lost people? In which case, faced with obvious traces of hydra qi… the fact that the whole fort is slightly ‘melted’ and we have Ling here focused on refining something…” Chunhua mused.

“—they will promptly turn around and run away?” Qing Yao added.

Feiwu Shen and Wei Chu looked at Qing Yao somewhat dubiously for that comment, but it was quite a fair assessment really. In a swapped situation she would run away as well.

“Or we chase them off,” she suggested, looking at Lin Ling. “Either way, it provides an opportunity to use up a bit more of that qi without leaving a trail.”

“True…” Ling conceded.

~ Uarz – Riverlands ~

“This is not a good idea,” Uarz muttered, disentangling his salvaged oar-turned-paddle from the reeds and trying not to splash.

“Our vessel is ruined, half our crew are lost somewhere in the swamps, the mast was taken off and half our cargo is somewhere in the river,” Omurz, the former second in command, now… theoretically captain of their trading vessel, hissed, pushing reeds away on his own side. “At this point, it can hardly get much worse.”

“Mist could come ba—” the muttered comment from one of the other crew members was cut off as the person next to him stopped him from saying something incriminating.

“There is no telling that this fort will even have survived,” another crewman grumbled.

“Full of cheery thoughts—”

Avarz, their main guard, who was directing their path from the front of the boat, held up a hand, cutting off all further discussion.

“What is it?” he hissed, digging the paddle into the water quietly to slow their already slow traverse through the reeds in the shallow boarding vessel.

“My perception just picked up an oddity… strange mana.”

“Strange mana?” he closed his eyes and focused his own perception on it.

His gifts were limited in that regard, but still enough to get somewhere with the ancestors-damned obfuscating vegetation.

“Could be related to the fort?” the other surviving guard, and only woman left among their crew, Kreva, suggested.

“Could be… or a passing beast,” the pessimistic rower grumbled.

“Please don’t speak of such things,” Omurz muttered. “It was only by the Maker’s mercy that we spotted that damn toad.”

Tuning out their thoughts, he tried to see what Avarz was referring to.

“There are no restrictions on manifestation…” a crewman behind him muttered.

“…”

Ignoring that obvious comment, he kept looking. The aura of the calamity was everywhere here, the chaos of whatever had unfolded in the heart of the swamps etched into the landscape. Beyond that, it was possible to find the ambient mana, much more obvious currently given the almost miraculous vanishing of the deathly mists.

“You sure there is something else?” he asked Avarz.

“It’s odd,” the older Ur’Vash grumbled. “Familiar as well, in a way, but that doesn’t mean much honestly.”

“Drift us forward a hundred yards then,” Omurz commanded. “Quietly.”

“If we go too quietly the fort might blast us thinking we are a serpent,” Kreva pointed out.

“…”

Everyone else on the boat, excluding Avarz… and he himself glared at her.

“It’s possible…” she grumbled. “Think about it, we are worryingly close to the epicentre of this… whatever that was.”

Nobody else spoke for a few moments, the boat gliding quietly through the reeds as they all presumably grappled with their inner interpretations of what had transpired earlier in the day… and all of last night. It was one thing to swear by gods… to curse by them, to blame or revere them. It was quite another to get a shipside seat as they took umbrage at something personally. That was all he could couch it as.

He had never considered himself a particularly spiritual Ur’Vash, having seen far too much of chaos near and far over the years to really believe any higher power cared enough about this place to bother any of them. You paid lip service to the Masters of course. That was just good business. Quazam was… enigmatic and the tribes towards Ajara were almost primitively superstitious so you dealt with them on their level and remembered to daub a bit of colour on. Today was the first time since he was six that he had genuinely felt ‘blue’… and it was a deeply unnerving feeling.

“It is somewhat serpentine?” he mused, his perception finally latching onto something different in the mid-afternoon haze.

“Could be,” Avarz mused, scanning the reeds. “Taker-cursed glare…”

That was a fair curse; the glare off the water and the haze in the afternoon was unpleasant. It didn’t help that the flooding had churned everything so the haze was as much bugs as the mirages caused by scattering light off mana upwelling from the reeds.

“Ah, there’s the tower!” one of the front rowers pointed.

“Looks kinda…” Omurz trailed off.

“Dented?” he finished, just about able to make it out.

“I’d have said melted,” Kreva muttered.

“…”

“I swear, Kreva, if you are not more positive I will kick you overboard,” Omurz grumbled.

Kreva scowled at him and the two others near her flinched backwards. Female Ur’Vash rarely travelled in Udrasa and Kreva was not a native to the region but rather from the tribal lands to the west, from the territory of the Hundred Legs tribe if he recalled right, though she rarely spoke of her reasons for leaving the plains behind. The important takeaway there though, was that she was probably the strongest combatant here. Avarz had seniority for his years, but Kreva was the one who would do the killing if it was required. That also made Omurz’s threat ring slightly hollow, truth be told.

“Then I will enjoy jumping in to fish you out of the water, I suppose,” Kreva snickered.

Avarz waved a hand to shut the pair up.

They drifted on in silence, bar a few stealthy pulls through the water to keep them moving, watching the distant fortress of Ulmaz fade into view. The obvious problem though, was that the more of it he saw, the less… welcoming it appeared.

Stylistically, Udrasa made their forts to a blueprint of sorts. These minor outposts tended to have four towers and a middle complex of buildings surrounded by either an outer wall, if not on an island, or smaller watch towers if it was. Ulmaz had one tower… and it really did look like someone had tried to melt it, so misshapen was its outline.

“It is melted…” a rower muttered, making the sign of the Maker.

More worryingly though, the sense of oddity with the ambient mana was only increasing.

“This mana isn’t right,” Avarz muttered.

“Something died here?” Kreva muttered, standing up and picking up her bow.

“…”

He was about to agree, when their boat hit something with a clunk and they all jerked forwards.

“We hit something?” Omurz scowled, sitting up again.

“Seems like a block of masonry,” Avarz, who was now peering over the front of the boat, poking at the murky water with an oar, observed.

“A block of masonry?” he frowned. “All the way out here?”

“Could be a scattered cargo?” Avarz shrugged. “Or a rubbish tip. The water level is nearly a fathom higher than it should be.”

Fortunately, it didn’t take long to get them off the rock and moving again; however, that turned out to be just the first of a number of obstacles they encountered until he realised they were traversing the ruins of the outer settlement around the fort.

The walls were still standing, but they looked, to his eyes at least, just as misshapen as the solitary tower. The odd sensation of the distorted mana was only growing stronger as well.

“Where are the guards?” Omurz asked at last, as they stared at the gap in the walls some thirty yards away. “We should have been spotted by now?”

-That is the question, he mused grimly, glancing across at Kreva and then Avarz, who were both looking rather uneasy now. A place like this should have a few hundred people in it and yet it’s silent as the grave, bar the wildlife.

Listening to the bird calls, it was almost idyllic – at least until you recalled that even the birds out here could be territorial and dangerous.

“Maybe they just got flooded so bad they are taking stock?” one of the crew suggested.

“Without any sentries or effort to secure the perimeter?” Kreva scoffed.

“I say we turn around and go back to the ship, try to re-float it and punt our way back upriver,” he said.

“Now who is making wishes in the Changer’s name?” Omurz muttered, which got several laughs, albeit nervous ones, from the other crewmembers.

It was wishful thinking. Their best bet was to take this boat and head back upriver, while the mist stayed away, heading back towards Ulquan and Udrasa… while certainly avoiding the latter so there would not be awkward questions about cargo. It was certainly not travelling further into the Vashada Badlands, where something had in all likelihood recently evoked enough attention from the Mother of Sky to make her put the boot in… personally.

-Not to mention wasn’t there some pitched battle with those golden flower rebels out this direction not a week ago?

The news on that had been hazy, when they were in Ulquan several days prior, except that Umaja, the major fortress on the tributary beyond Ulquan, had been devastated rather recently in that battle.

The boat slowly moved closer, everyone now looking warily at the carnage around them. The flood had really done a number on the fort by the looks of it. Rather than repair it, he supposed that the taskforce that would come here would likely just knock it down and start over again, probably using the ruins of the old for foundations.

The problem though… was the mana…

Its familiarity gnawed at him, telling him he had felt something like it somewhere before. Sensed some aspect of it fairly recently in fact.

“I know what this mana is…” Avarz muttered suddenly.

“You do?” Omurz frowned.

He blinked, turning to Avarz.

“A hydra…” Avarz hissed.

“A hydra?” Omurz repeated, sounding equal parts sceptical and worried.

“…”

-Kind of? his own intuition didn’t really like that for some reason, but without being clear on why he wasn’t going to sow difficulties for Avarz.

-It does kind of feel like a hydra’s qi…

Certainly, the devouring aspect was there… there was a whole lot of that now they were closer to the fort, but the other elements of it really didn’t feel at all like a hydra in the first instance… or not just a hydra.

Abruptly, he realised all the others were looking at him.

-Ah, as the ‘navigator’ and ‘person with actual magical talent’, I am expected to have an opinion, he sighed inwardly.

“They might have fought one off?” he said without thinking.

-Oh… battle.

The thought emerged almost at the same time as he said it somewhat flippantly.

“That would explain the rather turbulent mana,” Avarz mused.

“But not why the survivors aren’t keeping an eagle watch for it,” Kreva pointed out.

“Maybe they killed it?” one of the crew suggested.

“Yeah… could be refining it or something?” another mused.

“—or they are all too injured…” Avarz pointed out. “A hydra with mana this potent is no easy target, even for an entire fortress backed up by a mage.”

“So, do we stay or go?” he asked Omurz, who scowled at him, not appreciating being put on the spot.

-It’s what you get for wanting to be ‘leader’, he thought with an inward eye roll.

“…”

“There may be opportunities either way…” Omurz muttered.

“Certainly this place will have enough lumber to fix the boat,” Avarz helpfully added.

“If there are some remnants of the hydra, we can sell them for a profit as well,” Omurz went on, latching onto that idea.

“I still think we should just go back,” he interjected.

Somewhat surprisingly, Kreva nodded at that, but didn’t actually speak up.

-Does she also sense something odd in the mana? he wondered.

Again, he tried to sweep out his perception, but got nowhere really. The mana was so turbulent, nearly seeming to swirl in on itself, that it got him next to nothing. The devouring strength lurking within didn’t help either. He was only at the peak of 5th Advancement… Fifth Circle in magical terms, and whatever it was that had made it was certainly stronger than that.

Kreva and Avarz were both sixth, having crossed the ‘Threshold of Will’ and honed their own unique strength born of it. That both of them were wary and couldn’t see through matters suggested that the party responsible for the chaos was at least in the Sixth Circle. Whatever had incurred the vast judgement was likely much, much higher than that – assuming it had survived.

-I really hope it hasn’t, a small voice in the back of his head shuddered.

“If anything, perception is getting harder to use here rather than easier,” Kreva muttered, spitting over the side of the boat.

“That likely means that the ancestor totems are still somewhat in effect,” Omurz suggested, rather hopefully.

“Maybe…” he mused, looking around again, particularly at the devastation of the three towers, not really believing it.

-Could a battle between a mage and a hydra have wiped out the whole fortress?

The mess at Umaja they had heard about, while docked in Ulquan, kept returning to his mind for some reason.

They made their way onwards, drifting between the ruined buildings until they finally got to the wall and the gate. Crossing through it, he was again struck by how uniformly melted everything seemed. All the detail and sharpness in the architecture had been blunted somehow…

-It’s only getting more pronounced as we go in as well.

“This damage is very strange,” one of the crew muttered, brushing a hand across the stonework.

“Poke more, Teff!” the rower beside him scowled. “I too want too want to die from something ‘strange’.”

Kreva glared at both of them and they shut up, though the nervous tension of the rest of the group led to a few chuckles despite that.

“We can’t take the boat much further,” Avarz murmured, cutting through their unease. “Too many rocks in the water.”

Peering over the side, he saw that was indeed the case. The water level here was maybe a metre above the ground, but everywhere you looked you could see faint ripples of barely submerged bits of fallen masonry.

“Teff, Okal, Munz,” Avarz singled out three crewmen. “Stay with the boat and don’t get into trouble.”

The three nodded, looking somewhat relieved.

Sighing, he stood sat on the side of the boat, considering the water below before carefully slipping in. It rose up to his midriff, which was shallower than expected. Avarz hopped off onto the nearest rock, landing without a splash, followed by Kreva and then Omurz. The remaining six crewmembers bailed out after them, holding scavenged weapons nervously.

“Where first?” he asked.

“Should we see if we can’t find any survivors, then maybe we’ll take stock?” Avarz suggested, glancing at Omurz.

Happily biting on the suggestion, Omurz nodded in agreement. “Let’s look for survivors by the main courtyard, then see about the wards and what can be scavenged.”

-Why did you even want to be captain? a part of him grumbled.

To his side, Kreva just rolled her eyes at the exchange.

It didn’t take long to make their way through the first courtyard, despite it being flooded. What stood out was that the buildings did not show much evidence of battle damage… beyond the corrosive erosion that had afflicted everything. Even the ground beneath his feet felt rough…

“The damage occurred before the flood?” he mused, looking up at the two nearest collapsed towers.

“Those towers look like they were hit by spells though,” Avarz noted.

“Most of the damage is to roofs and the odd wall as well…” one of the crewmen added, pointing across to the collapsed hall on the far side.

Focusing on the strange permutations in the mana once again, he tried to further distinguish what was what as they continued on. The sense of devouring dissociation was only getting stronger, as were the scattered hints of hydra qi, it had to be admitted.

“This is definitely from a hydra,” Avarz muttered, scooping a handful of water up and letting it splash back down.

“There is definitely something else though,” he interjected. “The hydra qi is weak… diffuse even, as if it is being dispersed…”

“If they had killed it you would expect there to be more—” Omurz was cut off by Kreva who held up her hand, training her bow on the roof line across from the nearest tower.

“What is it?” Avarz asked.

“Something else is here,” Kreva murmured. “I just felt something like a sweep from something’s perception…”

“Animal or person?” Omurz hissed.

“Get some talent and tell me yourself,” the older woman scowled.

Staring at the rooftop, he searched carefully for any sign of oddity as well. His perception could reach there, but only really make headway with what was within his line of sigh.

“Kaw-Kaw-Kaww—!”

The sound of dislodging stonework and a truncated birdcall made him spin, only to find that the culprit was one of their own. One of the crew, Ladrak, had shot a bird that surprised them on the ridge of the nearby building.

They watched the arrow pierced bird tumble down and splash into the water some ten yards away.

“…”

“Sorry,” Ladrak muttered, looking thoroughly embarrassed now that he was being pierced by gloomy looks from both Kreva and Avarz.

Off to the far side, another bit of roof tile slid down and splashed into the water.

“Well, go grab it,” he muttered, waving to Ladrak to pick up his ‘prize’. “It will do for dinner.”

Still looking a bit embarrassed, Ladrak waded over and picked up the marsh bird, recovering the arrow and shoving it in his pack.

Eyeing the nervous expressions of the rest of the remaining crew, he sighed.

“The mana turbulence here is messing with your state of mind,” he explained.

-Not that they can be blamed, really. It was silly to talk about hydra earlier. If there was one here we would not even leave behind corpses…

“The main storehouses should be across the main square of the fort, towards the harbour,” Avarz said, attempting to turn the group focus back to more relevant things.

Nodding, he waded on, following after Avarz as he reached the far side of the flooded courtyard. The gate into the inner one was much as the previous one had been, he noted as they warily walked through it. Again, there was no evidence of the defenders nor, rather disturbingly, any evidence of a fight.

-Did the flood catch them completely flat-footed?

“Were they caught completely unawares by the flood?” Omurz gave voice to what he had just been thinking.

“Nobody sleeps on the ground level in these places,” he pointed out, looking at the two doors within the gate passage, both of which were swept open, water swirling down the corridor inside.

“Indeed,” Avarz muttered, tightening his grip on his spear.

Stepping out into the inner courtyard, he had to shade his eyes from the glare for a moment, such was the angle of the sun. It was broad and open, with several tumbled piles of masonry. One of the towers appeared to have collapsed and the roof of the main fortress building with its formal hall appeared to have fallen in. In truth, it looked like the place had been hit by a localized earthquake.

The mana in the air was almost cloying, forming a faint haze across the water, which was still about waist-deep as he swept his gaze across the courtyard, still following after Avarz and Omurz and they walked forward. Something about it was bugging him though. The sense of devouring… and the dissociative drift within the mana itself that was messing with his perception almost felt like it was focused on… here…

“Wait…” he held up a hand… then froze as his gaze almost lazily drifted past the young woman sitting in the middle of the courtyard.

Nobody else seemed to have seen her, he realised, except…

Beside him, Kreva lifted her bow, her face pale.

Avarz stopped as well suddenly, then focused on the middle of the courtyard.

“Your senses are surprisingly good…” the young woman suddenly snapped into focus, the obfuscating sensation in the mana around them all but forcing him to have eyes only for her.

In other circumstances, that would not have been a problem, given she was exotically beautiful for an Ur’folk, with long golden hair, deep blue eyes and tanned skin. She had spoken in flawless Lataan as well, he realised. There was a slight accent, but not enough to denote her tribe or origin.

-Except there is something… off about her… a panicked part of his mind hissed.

The other crew with them all had their weapons drawn now, pointing them with slightly shaking arms at her.

-Put them down! he wanted to say, but the way her gaze held his… his mouth simply refused to work properly.

“W-where are the p-people o-of the f…f-fort?” Omurz managed to stammer out.

“A monster got them,” she replied, putting her chin on her hands and staring at him in a way that made his skin crawl.

“Why are you here?”

“W-we just… wanted… to… repair—”

“Repair the vessel…”

“—just get supplies…”

“Repair the boat…”

“Get… food…”

“To repair… the… vessel…”

“—our… vessel…” the words were his own, he realised, but they were also not just his own. Half the crew had answered simultaneously and in stilted, slightly confused fashion. The simple act of answering her… honestly brought him a flush of relief, even as a part of his might fought against her presence.

-She’s… Sixth Circle… at least! a part of his mind wailed at him.

Only Kreva had managed to resist speaking, a part of him noticed. She was still pale and sweating though, as if somehow afflicted by the woman’s stifling presence even more than he was.

“I see…” she nodded, standing up.

-Did she do… all this?

“Did… you do… this?” he managed to gasp out.

“This?” she waved a hand around at the devastation looking a bit amused. “No. No, I did not.”

Surprisingly, there was conviction in her language that was in no way false he realised. Not to mention, a sort of formal appropriateness of tone…

-She is speaking in Lataan… the ancient tongue of diplomacy… another part of him pointed out. The language of spells and magic, of the old faiths…

Trying to instil some control over his own thoughts, he finally noticed that she was dressed in simple clothes in a vaguely local style.

-Except the Masters of Udrasa and all their officials wear masks to denote their rank…

“Where… are the people?” Avarz managed to ask.

“…”

The woman stared at them, still looking amused.

-Does that mean she is one of those guarding here… or— His worried musing was cut off, as out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kreva was not looking at the woman…

“…”

With great effort, he managed to tear a part of his focus away from her and his heart sank. There were others here… crouched in the shadow of the buildings, on the tower, watching them. All of them were armed and dressed in local apparel. Quite a few had bows as well as various close combat weapons.

-And none of them look inexperienced either… he grimaced inwardly. I knew this was a bad idea…

“We arrived here for much the same purpose as you,” the woman mused, walking forward, inexorably drawing his focus back to her as she moved.

-Ah… his mind spun, trying to connect circumstances, assuming she was not lying… though she didn’t seem to be.

“—Seeking succour and respite. The flood ruined this place, as did the disaster in the sky. As to the occupants, there was a battle between a hydra and some mages, most who survived took cover. Those who are fit to move you mostly see here.”

Again, as she spoke, he could feel no untruths in what she was saying, which was somewhat… disconcerting. It was like standing before one of those powerful shamans or magi who commanded the rule of the world in some subtle way, or who had attained the favour of the ancestors.

-That implies that there are others… Those on the rooftop perhaps? But if they were survivors, why hide…?

“We… don’t want to fight…” Avarz muttered. “We just… wanted supplies and to repair our vessel.”

Her gaze fell on their weapons and involuntarily he felt an impulse to drop his blade in the water then and there. Around him, a few splashes told him that many of the crew were not so strong-willed.

-Is she someone who was here and survived…?

-But if she is here and there is no sign of the fort’s garrison at all?

His thoughts spun, stress and worry giving them voice where he really didn’t want to hear what they had to say.

-Could I get a spell off? a part of him wondered.

-Don’t be an idiot! he cursed inwardly, dismissing that idea right out of hand.

“What… happened to the… the?” Omurz, still apparently thinking about the hydra, mumbled.

“Hydra?” she smirked, still walking forward slowly. “It died.”

Something about the way she was walking was also nagging at his mind, an odd thing… something about the water?

Barely, he managed to focus on her in a more general sense, and his mouth went dry, about the same time as his limbs felt chill in the water.

-She is walking on the water!

In this chaotic turbulence and disruptive mana, that was a feat nobody under the Sixth Circle should be able to manage he was sure. She was obviously over the threshold of ‘Will’.

-It died? That part of what she had spoken finally reached the front of his mind.

His thoughts spun and refused to gain any traction as if something within the obfuscation of the mana around them had jumped across and was now interfering with him directly.

“What will you do now?” her question was almost like a caress, gently taking him by the hand and offering to guide him out of all the difficult questions.

“We just want to fix our boat…” Avarz mumbled.

“We don’t want any trouble…” Kreva gasped.

“We… don’t want to die…” Omurz managed to rasp.

Her gaze found him… again, even as the others all mumbled out their answers.

“We really don’t want any trouble—” he managed to say, and the weight on his body vanished.

The feeling was akin to being slapped in the face with a cold cloth. Clarity of a sort flowed back into his mind as the woman stopped doing whatever she had been.

“See, that wasn’t so hard,” she said with a light laugh.

What didn’t vanish in the slightest, he also noticed, was the shifting, devouring shadow within the ambient qi – nor did the turgid maelstrom of hydra qi. If anything, their effects became more pronounced.

Gasping for breath, he looked around and counted ten others arrayed around the courtyard, almost all armed in some way, watching them. At least half of them were thoroughly inscrutable.

Counting in his head again, he realised with some concern that only three of them were clearly below Fifth Advancement as well.

Noise behind them made him turn to find three more, two women with dark hair wearing similar garb to the blonde-haired one and a man in loose-fitting cloth robes with a beard, carrying the unconscious forms of the three guards they had left at the boat.

“This seems to be all of them,” the bearded man mused, looking around at their group with piercing eyes.

-Maker curse this! He’s almost as strong as the blonde woman, he grimaced inwardly.

“The question is what they hoped to achieve here,” the younger woman next to him with dark hair asked.

“They wanted to scavenge for their boat,” the blonde woman said matter-of-factly. “It seems their vessel out in the waterways is damaged.”

“…”

Omurz flinched at her comment, while Avarz just sighed softly. Kreva seemed to have recovered her composure, just standing in the water with her arms folded now, her weapons set on a rock next to her, in full view.

-So, they saw us all the way out there? he sighed inwardly. Or she is bluffing, it’s not hard to guess.

“If they have a boat, we are no longer stuck here…”

He flinched, as a brown-haired woman carrying a metal spear appeared almost like a mirage to stand near the blonde woman. A quick interrogation of his memories of the last few seconds did, in fact, show her approaching, but somehow he had not marked her at all until she spoke.

-What terrifying stealth skills…

“So, what do we do with them?” a third, dark-haired woman carrying a bow appeared a moment later, jumping off the nearby roof and walking across the water like it was solid ground.

“We… mean you no harm or inconvenience!” he said hurriedly in Lataan, making a formal sign of greeting as his eye swept across the others, again looking for obvious marks of identification. “Maker sees that all have suffered these last days.”

He didn’t doubt that Omurz would capitulate fairly rapidly, but there was always the risk of something being misunderstood. In any case, his memories of trading upriver towards Krista Tonnitrue and several years’ association with Kreva told him that the three who had just rounded up Teff, Okal and Munz were plains Ur’Vash, probably a group of mercenaries.

-Where is the fort garrison?

That thought kept coming back, along with some rather unpleasant thoughts he didn’t want to dwell on. Worst case scenario, this group had already cleaned out the fort and had just been waiting for others to show up so they could make an escape with boats and their scavenged loot.

Both blonde and brown-haired women eyed him pensively…

“Taker knows, this is true,” the blonde woman remarked after a moment, while the others just shook their heads, seeming amused…

Unbidden, he caught the eye of the brown-haired woman and suddenly his skin went clammy as her eyes seemed to see right through him. There was a subtle devouring strength in her gaze that made his heart palpitate even as the mana coursing through his body became marginally more unstable.

-The devouring strength here is hers!

He was pleased that he didn’t actually gasp out loud; he did, however, clench his fists by his side and try to calm his heart rate. Based on that brief look, his intuition was telling him that if anything, she might be stronger even than the blonde woman who had been standing in the courtyard when they first entered.

“You said the hydra… died?” he asked.

“Yes,” the brown-haired woman nodded. “Its mana is making the surroundings a bit chaotic though.”

-A bit chaotic? a part of him complained. That’s like saying that a raging storm is a ‘bit brisk’.

Kreva caught his eye and shook her head imperceptibly for some reason.

-Is she saying not to pry?

“Are there more of you?”

The question caught him slightly off guard, given it was directed at him, not Avarz or Omurz.

The other surviving crewmembers and even Omurz were already shaking their heads.

“No,” he answered, “we had little in the way of cargo when we were caught up and didn’t want to split up too much.”

“Wise, out here,” the brown haired woman nodded pensively, looking around. “There are unseen dangers everywhere.”

-You don’t say, a part of him muttered.

He banished it, ruthlessly. The last thing he needed here and now was the tangential thoughts arising from the stress here to start harmonizing with the chaotic mana and becoming actual inner voices. Those sensitive to mana had many advantages… but there were also unpleasant perils you had to watch out for.

“The damage here is really something…” Omurz added, seemingly having rallied a bit of his previous manner.

“Yes, the flood really did a number on it,” the brown-haired woman agreed. “It must have been rough out there in a vessel, we were lucky to have been here.”

“It was,” Omurz replied, before he could step in. “Half our crew were lost along with most of the cargo… The mast got broken and our vessel ran aground after being swept out of the channel…”

“I trust the cargo lost wasn’t too valuable?” she mused, walking over to him.

“A bit of this and that…” Omurz shrugged. “Some war-captives… a few crates of local goods and such…

“War captives?”

Kreva, out of the corner of his eye, was looking really uneasy now… and for some reason he couldn’t work out why.

He had been against that cargo as well, not that the navigator got a huge say in that side of things. A wealthy client from Ulquan had paid their former captain handsomely to transport several war-captives and a group of guards upriver towards Udravar, one of the fortresses near the border with Katum. They had been held back almost three days after something happened in Ulquan which nobody had been willing to talk about and the harbour was locked down as a result. Thus, they had only been on the water for a few hours when the Changer-spawned flood occurred.

“From the battles south-west of the riverlands?” the brown haired woman mused. “I heard there was good money to be made and a lot of interest in some of those captured from this so called warband of ‘crazy mages’.”

“…”

Almost oblivious, Omurz shook his head. “We are just some small time merchants… no way we would transport a dangerous cargo like captive mages…”

The other crewmembers were all nodding earnestly now, though Kreva and Avarz were both sweating in a way that had nothing to do with the humidity. He was also starting to get a bad vibe about where this might be going.

She was being very polite… and the overwhelming urge to answer her because she was being so reasonable and engaging was…

Was…

Was…

His mustered reluctance floundered even as she swept her gaze back across them, falling away like a faded memory. He only realised what was happening because of his own training with mana-sense and because it was not uncommon for unscrupulous clients to bring a mage with some mind magic to important negotiations… This, however, was…

“So, just some normal prisoners?” she asked, sounding curious now.

“You don’t ask questions,” Omurz muttered. “Was the old captain’s thing, but he’s dead now anyway, along with the first mate, half the crew, the guards and probably those prisoners and most of our cargo. Swept away in the flood who knows where…”

“We were shocked to find we ended up this far south of Ulquan,” Ladrak added. “That huge wave caught us right in open water and by the time everything settled we were all the way out here.”

“That must have been dreadful,” she sighed, sounding genuinely sorry. “It was terrifying enough here… to experience all that chaos without shelter…”

The other crewmembers nodded as did he, to the concern of a small, but rather worried part of his mind.

“I would have expected a place like this to handle it better though,” Omurz added. “We are fairly close to the Vashada Badlands…”

“…”

-Idiot Omurz and his loose mouth…

The pair eyed Omurz dubiously, then looked across the rest of the group, even as he sweated mentally as well as physically now.

The longer this went on, the more certain a small part of his mind became that somehow this group were responsible for… if not the state of the fort itself… then possibly the lack of guards.

“What is wrong with your vessel?” the brown-haired woman asked abruptly.

“Uh…”

That was, yet again, not the question he expected.

“It ran aground on the channel about a mile from here?” Omurz volunteered. “We need to re-float it… and also repair as much of the damage as we can… the mast got lost.”

“We hoped that the fort might provide the manpower… for suitable remuneration—”

“If we help you fix your vessel, you can give us passage back upriver,” the brown-haired woman half stated, half asked.

“…”

“That… won’t be a problem,” he agreed, even as the other crewmembers nodded hurriedly.

“What do you need in that regard?” the blonde-haired woman mused.

“Wood mainly…” Ladrak muttered.

“The harbour here must have supplies for boat building in its storehouse…” Avarz added.

“…”

“And you have a craft to take it back…” the brown-haired woman mused, her blue eyes shining slightly.

“There is no telling how long that will take though, and it is certainly the wrong end of the day,” Omurz’s words made him groan inwardly.

-Is he just trying to cause problems?

That said, he was not wrong. It would take a while to scavenge what they needed, assuming the warehouses were even still there of course. They would then have to get it back to the boat, re-float it somehow and then presumably navigate it around to…

His working out of the logistics trailed off as he realised that somehow, in his head, the ‘idea’ of helping this other group was thoroughly entrenched now… as if that had never been in doubt.

-Changer curse us all… this strength of will is terrifying.

The worst part there was that it was impossible to say which of the pair it originated with… Even being aware it was happening was oddly disconcerting, because he was certain he should be more…

-And there is still the question of the… hydra? a rebellious voice in his head chipped in.

“…”

Groaning inwardly, he tried to push the regular refrains of ‘What about the hydra?’ and ‘What about the people from the fort?’ away more firmly. It was right to be suspicious… to an extent. But similarly, in the face of this kind of power, their best strategy, having walked right into the problem, was certainly to nod politely, be co-operative and not ask any difficult questions that might lead to regretful…

-Something IS off here, though! the rebellious, mana poisoning fuelled voices in his head hissed.

-If there is something off here, I want nothing to do with it… he shot back mentally… then realised that both women were staring at him with rather… concerning expressions.

-Did I just say that out… loud?

Feeling his sweat run cold, he self-examined and found to his relief that he had not. Kreva and Avarz were both looking like they had eaten something unpleasant though.

“How long do you think it will take to get your vessel fixed up?” the brown-haired one asked again, her blue-green eyes shining slightly and her smile somehow putting his heart a little bit at ease.

-Damn… you could sell that smile as a balm for tired hearts… a voice in his head mumbled.

“Uh…”

“It’s run aground, so we need to sort that and also check for damage… cracks and such to the timbers and damage to the keel…” he answered, trying to bury that last thought.

“In that case, we can surely spare a few bodies to help,” the blonde woman nodded.

~ Kai Manshu — Ruined Fort of Ulmaz ~

Watching from the rooftop by the main hall as the group of Ur’Vash tried to adjust to their ‘capture’ and shake off the lingering effects of Senior Ling’s focused principle and intent, Kai Manshu found it was hard not to feel a slight twinge of sympathy, having inadvertently been on the receiving end of something similar if much less focused earlier.

Part of him was quietly disappointed though, because it had been a group not that dissimilar to this one that aided in capturing and transporting him and several other prisoners. It was an irrational thought, he knew. It was much better not to have to fight it out… and only three of those who had come to explore the ruined fort were of a realm to put up any kind of fight and none of them had elected to do so in any case, so overwhelmed were they by Senior Ling’s presence.

Still, the problem was… well, he didn’t know what to make of it really.

Sighing, he looked sideways at Feiwu Shen, who was scowling unhappily.

Cooperating with the Ur’Inan was one thing. It was easy enough to rationalise that it was a big world with lots of competing interests, and they had not been particularly fazed by their identities…

This group, though, despite appearing to be depressingly reasonable and having effectively surrendered…

-Would they have reacted like this if it wasn’t for Senior Ling?

Wei Chu and Qing Yao, a bit further along, were also kneeling, watching with inscrutable expressions. He sighed again and shook his head, glad he didn’t have to be down there.

The… plan, once the ‘nature’ of the invaders became clear, had changed rather rapidly in that sense. Rather than fight them or chase them away, they had decided that they would basically use the Ur’Vash and their vessel to leave here and head back along the river…

The problem was, he had to acknowledge, that now everything had calmed down, it felt bad to leave the other prisoners behind.

The trio hadn’t said it in so many words, but clearly they had their own objective. Rescuing them had been a stroke of good fortune. He shuddered to think what their fate might have been had it not been for that… and that didn’t help, particularly for Feiwu Shen, who did have ‘Seniors’ among that group.

-The real problem is that we probably know too much about Senior Ling, Senior Juni and Senior Chunhua for them to feel comfortable letting us out of their sight, oaths or no…

“What do you think will happen now?” Feiwu Shen asked at last, in Easten.

“They don’t want to leave until… matters here are sorted, I suppose,” he replied.

Certainly Senior Ling was deeply unwilling to move from here until the ‘hydra issue’ was dealt with, though how that would play out now… he had no idea.

Their part also made him wish, slightly ironically, that they had gone with the original plan… to be bait. Currently they were disguised as soldiers from the fort, with Qing Yao and Wei Chu as a pair of Udrasa women from the village outside. The Ur’Inan were just as they were, while the three Seniors were also posing as part of the Ur’Inan group.

Being disguised as the people who had imprisoned him made him feel unclean somehow. Doubly so, in all likelihood, for Qing Yao and Wei Chu. It was irrational, he knew, but sometimes you just had problems like that. It was a matter of the principle of the thing…

Somewhat surprisingly though, it was only Feiwu Shen who had really grumbled… and then only about cutting his hair. Despite not being a ‘Taoist’ in any strict sense and the matter of growing your hair as respect to your parents not being a particular tradition with any weight where he came from on the Imperial Continent, he had also been somewhat ambivalent over it. Qing Yao and Wei Chu, however, who were both now wearing rather scandalously thin garments, had disguised themselves without comment with the help of the Ur’Inan, making any complaints he might have levied in the process seem kind of petty really.

“We could ask about it I suppose,” he murmured to Feiwu Shen, thinking about the other prisoners again, but keeping what he said somewhat vague. “Perhaps there might be some opportunity…?”

Feiwu Shen nodded, clearly believing it as much as he did. The three were powerful, but probably not that powerful. There, their best chance lay with meeting up with Qing Yao’s seniors… although whether they would care enough about the fate of what was largely a group of no-name disciples from sects on the Imperial Continent was another matter entirely. While both the Nine Auspicious Moons and Verdant Flower Valley were righteous sects, they were frequent and actually quite bitter rivals with a few of the imperial court factions and, without serious incentive, unlikely to risk life and limb.

-By the nameless fate, we came here to explore, not to get mired up in a drunken weaver’s web of politics, backstabbing and misfortune… he complained under his breath.

Below them, the two groups were still talking. It was just about possible to lip read some of it – talk about their boat near as he could tell – but they had been told strictly to just sit here and look menacing and do nothing else unless it all went south.

Abruptly, he saw Senior Chunhua wave to Lashaan and Naakos and start discussing something with them while Seniors Juni and Ling continued to talk with the leaders of the group.

“What do you reckon they are deciding?” Feiwu Shen asked after a moment.

“I am sure we will find out soon enough,” he replied with a shrug.

Down below, Senior Juni glanced up at them, then pointed to him and waved for him to come down.

Frowning behind his mask, he hopped down and landed with barely a splash, wondering why she had singled him out.

“—Manshu will go with you as well.”

“…”

He caught Senior Juni’s words as he approached and for a moment wondered if it was because of something as arbitrary as the way his name sounded when spoken in Easten.

“Ah, so you are one of the fort’s elite guards…” one of the Ur’Vash said brightly. “Maker's condolences to the disaster we have all endured.”

They had been given a quick run-down of the basic etiquette of the Ur’Vash earlier… which told him enough about the surprising complexities of their society and societal interactions to suspect that nobody impersonating them would get very far without that knowledge.

“Maker’s condolences,” he echoed in his best approximation of the locally accented Easten.

Juni shot him a slightly sideways look and he sighed inwardly.

-Yes, I know… but I can’t be mute the whole time, can I? he grumbled to himself. You did tell us these things, you know…

Senior Chunhua’s expression was inscrutable, but the faint flickers he got off her suggested… amusement somehow.

“See what can be salvaged from the warehouses and then go back with them to check the vessel,” Senior Juni said.

“What if they are concealing something? There are many unscrupulous people in Udrasa?” Senior Chunhua muttered.

“…”

The various Ur’Vash standing around flinched at her words, a few of them actually bowing. Again, it raised somewhat conflicting emotions in him, because on the one hand, a part of him was quite happy to see them suffer a bit, but on the other, it was becoming harder and harder to not see them as akin to just some random cultivators back home.

“Then you can deal with them appropriately,” Senior Ling said with a shrug, eyeing the sweating Ur’Vash one after another. “However, I think we have an understanding, don’t we?”

“Of course… of course!” one of them, the leader he presumed, mumbled, bowing, most of the others following suit.

“What of them?” he asked, pointing at the three unconscious ones, getting the accent right this time.

“They can stay here, no harm will come to them,” Senior Juni said. “They were stunned after they tried to run away is all.”

One or two of the Ur’Vash looked like they were about to complain then, rather wisely he had to admit, clearly thought better of it.

…

Despite his expectations to the contrary, the next few hours were very, very boring indeed. They guided the majority of the Ur’Vash through the ruined fort and eventually found the warehouse with its small harbour amidst the flooded ruin on that side of the whole complex.

The harbour itself was dominated by the ruin of two vessels, both destroyed by the flood. One was capsized and half sunk, and the other had had its stern broken off and was lodged into one of the warehouses.

Luckily, they had not really looted much in the way of materials from anything here – largely, he suspected, because there was nothing present that would help the three Seniors with their cultivation or refining the hydra qi.

The two warehouses they looked through before finding the one for the vessels themselves were ruined, their goods largely comprised of bales of reeds and various supplies for the fort itself. The one relating to the vessels had also been turned upside down, flooded to a rather inconvenient degree. Most of the contents had been chaotically re-deposited around the place in a tangle of ropes, wood and ruined sails.

He had to admit, he was glad his ‘role’ was just to stand around and look like a guard. While the Erudite Sage of Qin Pagoda was on the coast, most cultivators had nothing at all to do with ‘boats’ and even if they did, you were using a special treasure where someone else had done all the hard work for you. The most he could recognise were spare masts, oars and a few sails. Of all the other stuff, he knew next to nothing, though thankfully the Ur’Vash seemed happy enough to sort through things with their general cooperation.

“Manshu?” he turned from surveying the devastation and watching for anything dangerous in the water, to find one of the crewmembers, Uarz, the one who actually had a bit of cultivation talent, or what passed for it, had come over.

The… problem, really was that they were still curious about the fate of the rest of the fort.

“Yes?” he asked, somewhat perfunctorily.

“Could you give us a hand moving this?” Uarz pointed somewhat apologetically at the two rather awkward bits of carved lumber they were trying to disentangle.

“…”

He glanced at Senior Chunhua, who was working to disentangle the various bits on the other side of the warehouse, and she nodded slightly.

“Okay,” he grunted, having found that being ‘taciturn and silent’ was ‘the way’ when it came to pretending to be a guard.

Wading over, he could have walked on the water but they had rapidly established that such feats would be considered somewhat odd for Ur’Vash. The tangle of materials was wedged rather awkwardly he noted, eyeing it critically.

Speculatively, he reached under the water and tried to lift one of the beams that had swept from the upper layer.

“Ah, careful!” Uarz called, waving not at him but at the two crewmen further along, before adding something in their local tongue. While Senior Juni had provided them with a jade of comprehensions regarding Easten, they hadn’t thought to do so for the local language, which looking at it now was somewhat remiss he couldn’t help but feel. He could probably pick it up in time, simply by reading their ‘Intent’, but in the meantime…

Grimacing slightly, he looked at what they were having issues with, glad that his foundation gave him quite a few advantages in reading people.

-Ah, it’s tangled… do they not want to damage the carved wood below?

Moving down, he grabbed the topmost timber and hauled it sideways, pushing a bit of his qi through his limbs as he did so.

It shifted, barely, but that still got appreciative nods from the three crewmen helping. All of them were roughly Soul Foundation, which he had noticed seemed to be the baseline for most of their realms. If he had not had the experience of being taken captive, he might have thought the standard in foundations was similar to rural Eastern Azure.

It took a few minutes of exertion and some careful strategizing to remove the worst of the debris, revealing what he realised at last had to be a rudder or steering oar.

“Wonder what happened to the dock workers…” Uarz muttered, looking around as they sat on the second level of the warehouse, taking stock.

Senior Chunhua said something in their local tongue that seemed to imply that they were no longer here, which got a few laughs from the other crew but just made Uarz frown.

-We should be careful of that one, a part of him mused. His foundation seems to make him less susceptible to suggestion.

Watching matters unfold, he had to admit that there his horizons had been rather broadened. The three would be chaos incarnate on any group of cultivators, of that he was sure. The question of how effective their principles would be on a genuine Immortal was open to debate, but he suspected anyone underestimating any of them would be in for a nasty surprise. Even Senior Chunhua, who was the least assuming of the three, had hidden fangs…

With a shudder, he recalled the presence of her principle, which she was keeping rather tightly under wrap. It was nearly as insidious in its own way as Senior Ling’s, but had a much stronger association with Natural Harmony, akin to Senior Juni’s.

“In the chaos of the fort being attacked, it is hard to say what happened,” Senior Chunhua said with a sigh.

“The Hydra was defeated in the end, but by that point most of the defenders were scattered. We subdued what was left, but it was a fairly close run thing. Those that were able re-grouped here… but as you can see that was not many.”

Listening to her talk, he was glad that being in a scholarly sect with a lot of debating gave you plenty of opportunities to master the valuable Dao of ‘keeping a straight face’. Nothing she was saying was a lie, shockingly, but the way it was framed was…

“What happened to the body?” one of the other crew, Avarz he thought his name was asked. “Hydra are pretty large and this mana is… dense.”

“Destroyed,” Senior Chunhua shrugged. “It got caught up in some of the chaos above…”

For emphasis she pointed to the sky, and shuddered.

“It got hit by lightning?” Uarz mused.

“It got hit by something,” Senior Chunhua muttered. “You saw the way the fort looks now… Its core broke at any rate and the mana swept out everywhere. We have been able to refine a bit, but it will fade away in a few hours I suppose.”

“The swamps are always hungry,” Uarz agreed, looking pensively around.

~ Teng Chunhua – Ruined Harbour of Ulmaz ~

-I don’t think I have ever told this many half-truths in one go, Chunhua thought a bit sourly, watching the Ur’Vash eat up the carefully curated ‘sequence’ of events.

Without the combined force of Juni’s divination art and whatever the fates it was that Lin Ling was able to effect with her own principle, she still wasn’t clear on that, this whole thing would have ended badly long ago, she was fairly sure. The main concern now was that Kai Manshu didn’t scupper the whole thing by speaking Easten in a way that came across as odd.

On the plains it was one thing, where people moved around and communities were somewhat insular, but this group had clearly travelled widely based on the low key chatter between the different crewmen.

The fall-back plan in any case was fairly straightforward. If it all went to the nameless fates they were to just stun everyone and dump them in the hall with all the other prisoners. There had been some debate as to whether they should be used to leverage the ‘reality’ that most of the fort was eliminated, but in the end, Juni had discarded the idea, much to her own personal relief.

The main reason to do so, really, was that it just introduced far, far too many further complications to an already somewhat tenuous deception. Overcomplicating plans was always where they came apart in her experience.

If this group, for example, decided they didn’t want to leave the majority behind, or they ended up leaving them somewhere else, it would not take long before someone talked. If they took them to Ulquan or worse yet, Udrasa, Lin Ling’s qi might be detected and then they would have a very unpleasant enemy right on their back again.

She was just mulling that over, when one of the group who had been working with Lashaan near the far end called out.

“Over here!”

“We got a body!”

-Ah, shit… she sighed mentally, standing up.

Heading down the hall with the others in tow, Manshu thankfully didn’t hold back, but instead hurried forward, his mannerisms presenting a degree of professional concern that would be expected from one of the lucky few survivors.

“Alive?” she queried, knowing the answer already.

The Ur’Vash shook their head.

“Looks like they were stabbed to death.”

Avarz and Uarz both looked sideways at her.

“Perception-based attacks?” she shrugged, evaluating the victim’s realm. “It was very chaotic. The Hydra lost its body.”

“Ah…” Avarz grimaced, thankfully reading between the lines of what she was implying.

“Nasty business…”

Manshu just nodded, his silence being taken for reminiscence, she supposed.

“How did you even defeat such a thing?” Uarz asked.

“At great cost,” Manshu muttered.

There had not been a great many bodies recovered, truthfully. They had disposed of the ones in the main compound but the outer portions had mostly been left alone as they were where those living around the fort had been sequestered. The unfortunate before them appeared to be a soldier from one of the ships, likely tasked to guard the warehouse.

“Ah, another one…” she observed, her gaze catching another misshapen form trapped in the murky water.

Wading over, she hauled up the ruined bit of the second layer, over-emphasising the exertion a bit to keep up a degree of the façade, to reveal that figure and a third.

“Some of the warehouse guards… they seem to have turned on each other,” she mused in the local tongue.

She had been taking care to speak in that where appropriate as it further reinforced the illusion that they were all Ur’Vash… or at the very least definitely ‘not’ a bunch of the ‘crazy mages’ from the ‘bloodthirsty’ warband. That that narrative had spread even here was both impressive and a bit worrying.

Kai Manshu just shook his head.

In a way, she supposed, looking at the various Ur’Vash and their reactions, the fortuitous discovery actually helped. Their overriding question had been ‘where is everyone else’, even if they were being tactful in how it was asked. To find proper bodies and clear evidence that the fort had gone crazy was thus helpful as it explained why there were not obviously more. The flood was also a convenient excuse in that regard and certainly any in the more open water would have been claimed rapidly by local wildlife.

“Put them over there,” she pointed to an area out of the water. “Let’s get on with this. The last thing we need is local wildlife getting interested.”

Uarz and Avarz both nodded wearily. Omurz, who was, as far as she could see, their current leader, even if he seemed to largely defer to the pair of them, waved for four of the other Ur’Vash to carry them away.

“What else do we need?” she asked in the local language.

“We have a replacement rudder…” Avarz mused.

“No point in worrying about the mast really,” Uarz added, sounding resigned. “None of us are boat builders and the foundation for it will be damaged.”

“Better to just reinforce it and row,” another Ur’Vash agreed.

“So, spare reinforcing material and then just whatever is valuable, I suppose?” a second voice suggested.

Uarz and Avarz both looked at that Ur’Vash dubiously.

“What? It’s clear that this place is basically ruined if everyone is dead or scattered and the boats are…” the crewman muttered.

“True, true,” Avarz agreed.

“It’s more of a waste to not use it. Not to mention…” the Ur’Vash trailed off, looking at her.

She was sure he was implying that they could sell some of this to make up for their lost cargo, but didn’t want to suggest it openly in front of her, in case she disagreed.

-How amusing…

“We can hardly do anything with it,” she replied with a shrug. “Do as you like—” the crew brightened up at that, at least until she added: “—We can discuss remuneration later…”

“…”

Uarz and Avarz both chuckled at that, as if it was expected, which made her a bit relieved.

-So they expect us to be mercenary… but not too mercenary.

Certainly, there was no way this lot saw the three of them as being members of the fort itself. She was sure that the female warrior with them had also recognised a few of the Ur’Inan as Ur’Inan, based on her manner and the fact that Naakai, Teshek and Eruuna had remained in that guise deliberately.

“Anyway, let’s get a move on,” she added with a bit more purpose. “It will be rather unpleasant doing this in the dusk… The bugs are miserable.”

~ Uarz – Ruined Harbour of Ulmaz ~

Standing on a stone block, looking at the small ruined harbour of the former fortress of Ulmaz – and it was very much a ‘former fortress’, he could see that now – Uarz tried to work out how he felt about the discovery of the various bodies and what that suggested about the death of this place.

On the one hand, it… made sense. There were plenty of dangerous beasts out here that could ruin a place… The problem was that this all seemed to imply that the fortress was destroyed in spite of the ancestral totems limiting the direct manifestation of ‘will’. The idea that it was a ‘hydra’ fit… but it was a rare hydra that used such attacks and the wards would be well attuned to keep such things far away from here.

“You are overthinking…” Avarz muttered, coming to sit beside him. “It is not good. In this heat and humidity, it will make your brain rot…”

“It isn’t,” he agreed, looking around to check that none of those from the fort were within earshot. “However… my intuition is telling me…”

“Telling you what? If they obliterated this fort what can we do?” Avarz murmured. “They seem disinterested in killing us, so let’s keep it that way. It’s bad enough that Omurz just likes to talk and appreciates female company that wants to hear what he has to say.”

“…”

Running a hand through his short hair he picked a few bits of reed root out of them and sighed. It was hard to disagree with what Avarz was saying.

“Likely, these three are beast hunters who happened to be here.”

“Mercenaries,” he mused.

“Yes… some of the others are of the nomadic Inan, according to Kreva.”

“…”

“So that is why their markings looked familiar,” he mused, finally placing the strange different style of tattoos on the old woman and the younger pair with her.

-What if the others are also like them and this is all a ploy to throw us off guard? A part of him shuddered.

The tales about the Ur’Inan were… dubious, it had to be said, but if the folk towards Krista Tonnitrue were considered a bit backward and traditional, then some Ur’Inan bands were known to be about as reasonable as the jungle savages… or Maker forbid, some of the war bands. The Grass Scorpions were infamous far and wide, but others like the Face Takers and the Ruin Stalkers were not much better.

“Or this warband of crazy mages…?”

Avarz stared at him, making him realise he had said that last bit out loud.

“Shit, the mana is getting to me…” he groaned.

“It’s getting to everyone,” Avarz grunted. “Corpses might start rising soon if there are more about.”

“The local mana tide should keep that in check, no?” he pointed out. “The river is an anathema to the lingering dead…”

Avarz shrugged. “With the way things are at the moment, with the Deathless stirring to the south and the rumours of worse besides, who can—”

“AHOY!”

A call from the far side drew his attention as the group who had gone to get the smaller boat finally made their return – along with them came several more of the survivors.

“With this we might actually get the boat off that mud bank,” Avarz mused, changing topic.

“Hopefully,” he agreed. “Although I doubt it will be that easy.”

Avarz scowled at him but he ignored the look, instead standing up to point the group leading the boat in towards the channel.

It took a few minutes for them to arrive, splashing out of the boat and tying it up, but once everyone was assembled things began to move surprisingly quickly. The crew knew roughly what to do anyway, and even if Omurz could be a little bit talkative, he was good at sorting out logistics issues. The only issue, of sorts, was that the one group who didn’t seem to much care for being ordered around were the survivors of the fort.

They didn’t tell him to push off… not overtly, but it didn’t take long before he eventually stepped in and ‘volunteered’ himself for some delegation of responsibility. The last thing they needed, for example, was Omurz saying a stupid thing to one of the women and getting stabbed for it.

Kreva and two of the others had headed back to the boat apparently, to check it was okay. By his calculation that meant that just the survivors of the fort were left around here, but there wasn’t much he could ask openly about that.

-Maybe it’s as Avarz said and overthinking things IS making me paranoid, he reflected glumly. Mana poisoning can do things like that…

“How are we going to move the rudder?” Ladrak eventually asked, once they had loaded up a reasonable amount of the smaller stuff onto the vessel.

“Rather… how are we all going to get there if you load up the boat with crap?” one of the women, Saruuna if he recalled right, interjected. “Do you expect us to swim?”

“…”

Mentally, he took back his earlier acknowledgement that Omurz was good at managing people. He was good at managing those who were obviously subordinate to him… and probably had intended to be one of those riding on the boat…

“There is lots of wood. Make some extra rafts and some buoyancy,” the dark-haired woman, who was technically leading them, instructed, before adding: “Any other suggestions?”

“There should be some spare canoes on those sunken vessels…” one of the crew helpfully volunteered.

“…”

-Oh come on… he complained in his heart, already seeing where this was likely to be heading.

The dark-haired woman eyed them and then nodded, before adding the words he both expected and dreaded. “Then go see if you can find them.”

“There might be stuff in the water…” another muttered.

“Then why did you suggest it if you weren’t willing to act on it,” the woman chuckled. “Go. Water. Now.”

They looked at Omurz, but Omurz was studiously hurrying with Ladrak and a few others towards the warehouse, splashing enough that he could claim not to have heard that. He looked the other way, while Avarz was just scowling.

“…”

“What if there is something down there?” they suggested.

“If there was, it would have probably come out to bother us by now,” she pointed out.

With clear reticence, the pair splashed into the water and started swimming over to the capsized vessel. Somewhat in contravention to his expectation they arrived entirely unmolested, and after several minutes’ diving did indeed find a canoe that was mostly undamaged, which they dragged to the surface.

“Well, we can use that to balance it,” Lashaan mused, watching the pair struggle back over with it.

“Will still need rafts though,” the dark haired woman mused.

Before she could send them off to gather reeds, he hurried after Omurz, Avarz following after him.

In the end, it still took almost an hour to get all the stuff out of the warehouse and put on the boat or some scavenged rafts in such a way that it was both transportable and not a total headache to manoeuvre through the reed beds. In the course of that work they also found a further four bodies, all guards from the docks whose bodies had been swept away after they died. Nobody made any real comment about them, not openly anyway, though he thought a few of the other crew did mutter to Omurz about rites.

They did pose a bit of a puzzle though, because really he would have expected there to be quite a few other dead – fishermen, dock-workers and such – and yet near as he could see, the guards had all killed each other and there was no sign of anyone else. Twice he nearly asked, but his own intuition and a sour look from Avarz, reminding him of their earlier conversation, made him hold his tongue.

The older boat guard was right there, better that they just get their vessel fixed and depart. Leave the riddle of this place to whoever came to rebuild it or seek answers to its ruin.

-So long as they don’t appear while we are here…

That ominous thought had occurred a few times in the last hour or so. It was one thing to seek help from a fort, but if the local town suspected they were looting their property then this could go to the mountains very quickly indeed.

“—we will need lights soon,” Ladrak was saying as they caught up to the rest by the cleared entrance to the warehouse.

Almost on cue, as if referring to such things could summon them, a large dragonfly nearly a foot long drifted across the water, past the warehouse, its fangs clear for all to see.

“…”

“—only if you can find some herbs to burn that keep the bugs away,” he cut in, pointing to it. “Or do you want to be the unfortunate target of every insect within a mile of here?”

“…”

“You think?” Omurz frowned. “There are really not very many… less than expected.”

“Which is something we should be grateful for,” he agreed, watching the large bug drift away.

If he closed his eyes and listened there was a slow buzz rising. The mana density was keeping them at bay, somewhat, but that was only a temporary thing he was sure. Occurring because none of them were really drawing attention to themselves. If they put out some light source here they would be rapidly swarmed, he was sure.

“Better that we get this on the boat and get going.”

“Honestly, I’d rather stay the night here…” Omurz muttered.

“The problem there is that the ones here clearly do not…” he pointed out.

“True, with the ancestral wards down things could get a bit difficult here if things come scavenging. That hydra qi will be tempting to a lot of creatures…” Avarz agreed. “Do you want to be facing off some elder toad, or another hydra?”

There was a lot of shaking of heads.

-Damn right we don’t, he thought glumly.

~ Juni – Ruined Fort ~

“I really hope this doesn’t backfire,” Lin Ling signed from where she was seated, continuing to refine the hydra qi.

“It shouldn’t,” Juni signed back, projecting a bit more certainty than she felt, truth be told.

Dusk had fallen and the group with Chunhua directing it had already set off for the boat with a new rudder. Everyone here bar them, Qing Yao, Wei Chu, Feiwu Shen and Caanar had gone to help re-float the boat. She would have gone as well, but her presence here directly refining hydra qi – the main complication in this whole plan – greatly sped everything up and that was the critical thing to resolve really.

As a stratagem, it was rather last minute, not to mention fairly brutalist in its moving parts. It was that simplicity that gave her hope it would just work as planned. They would help the Ur’Vash repair their boat and then depart. Ideally they would be finished refining what remained of Lin Ling’s hydra qi before the point where the vessel was fixed and could then leave, with this bunch of Ur’Vash never finding out that there was a sealed hall full of comatose Ur’Vash from the actual fort.

“Given you were all for impersonating this and that, I find your reticence now… amusing,” she signed back.

“Boo…” Lin Ling scowled. “The only reason this is working is because we are stupefying half of them and the other half just don’t want to die.”

“And yet it works,” she pointed out. “And it’s doing wonders for our control.”

“That Uarz is still too sharp,” Lin Ling signed with a sigh. “He was paranoid from the get go and is still looking for the ‘thing that’s off’ or something like it.”

“I would be more concerned if none of them showed some signs of worry,” she pointed out. “If they are questioning, it means that they are not sure… and that means they are less likely to be hiding any hidden agendas.”

“True, true,” Lin Ling agreed, exhaling a haze of dissociated qi that swirled away into the evening air.

She finished her own cycle and exhaled as well. Compared to Lin Ling, her losses were non-existent. What qi entered her body never really left, all of it was purified except for some very esoteric shards and even those were few and far between. The efficiency was quite shocking really. It made her a bit annoyed inside, because had she been a bit more selfish earlier on, she could have cleaned up most of the remnant hydra qi herself.

-I suppose this does work out for the better though, she conceded to herself, starting a new cycle and watching qi flow from Lin Ling, pass through the formation, meld with their surroundings then get acquired by her own devouring refinement.

Looking across, she could see Qing Yao was also making substantial strides. Near as she could tell, the woman’s method gained in efficiency at times when the moon rose… which made sense given her sect was literally called ‘The Nine Auspicious Moons’.

“The bugs are starting to encroach as well,” Lin Ling mused, watching several luminous mayfly-like critters twist in the currents of mana at the edge of the courtyard.

“Unsurprising. I assume it’s been our presence keeping them at bay?”

“Mostly, yes,” Lin Ling agreed. “Though in part it’s because of the parasol qi. Its presence is a natural deterrent to such creatures. When you combine that with my yang strength and your devouring intent very little wants anything to do with this part of the fort.”

“All that effort, just to become a mobile ward against insects,” she muttered, which drew a small laugh from Qing Yao as well.

“How is your progress?” she asked the other woman.

“Faster than it was,” she said with a half-smile. “Even faster now that you are helping us…”

“The rest of you?” she asked the others.

“I’m close to a bottleneck,” Feiwu Shen replied with a sigh.

“I should be fine,” Wei Chu added.

“Same,” Caanar, who was sitting off to one side using the qi to help his recovery, agreed.

“Well, this cycle I’m going to take a lot more,” she warned them.

They all looked a bit curious at that, which just made her roll her eyes inwardly.

Inhaling gently, she started to draw in hydra qi from Ling, focusing on ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ and her ‘Kun Lotus’ Principle as she did so.

Almost immediately, she felt the qi in the area surge, flowing towards her as if she had just pulled out the support on a great weight. It flowed into her body, surged through her tempered meridians and boiled like fog into her dantian, swirling above her mirror-smooth qi lake, which was fast on the way to becoming a sea really, scattering showers of multi-coloured droplets. Everywhere they hit the water, tiny lotus blossoms bloomed for a moment and sometimes, within the shadows of the currents, she fancied she saw forms coalesce that slightly resembled fish.

She watched the qi roll into her like her body was a bottomless pit, because it wasn’t just her dantian that was eating up qi without limit. Her mantra was singing faintly in the background of all of that qi cycle, working in tandem with ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ to feed qi in various auspicious ways all throughout her body, tempering her in different ways before finally depositing what was purified into the depths of her bones.

Again and again she watched the cycle, through the eyes of her Nascent Soul, familiarising herself with it while Lin Ling kept shovelling hydra qi in her general direction.

Throughout this, she was faintly aware of the others as well – they were perfectly visible of course; she was not focusing inwards to the point that her awareness of the outside world was at all compromised – their qi presences like shimmering eyes of various size and intensity. Curious, she focused more firmly on ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ and tried to see if she could, with the help of her principle, infuse it into the area around her.

It took a few attempts, but to her mild surprise she found that it was possible and that it did indeed help the others.

-So, I no longer need to be touching someone to do this? Just being connected to me by qi, or within range of my principle, is enough?

She watched the shift in the others’ efficacy for a few cycles considering how the art, her principle and the qi cycles of the others worked together. While their laws were fairly opaque to her, she could see elements of the potential variance within them as time flowed by. Wei Chu was in fact the most skilled, at least as far as harmonizing with her qi flow went. Qing Yao was not far behind her, but the nature of the law she was using seemed to be much more profound. Feiwu Shen was no slouch either, she had to acknowledge; however, the harmony between his law, his focus and his surroundings was somewhat lacking in comparison.

Curious, she nudged the qi flow a bit, guiding it in slightly more auspicious ways towards him, to see what would happen.

“…”

“Um…” Feiwu Shen finally spoke after a few cycles, looking slightly wan.

“Sorry… it’s too much?” she asked, wondering if she had overstepped the mark and pushed him a bit too far in her effort to ensure everyone here got the most out of the hydra qi.

“N-no… not at all… Senior Juni…” Feiwu Shen looked almost embarrassed.

-Ah… drat, did I show him up or something? She groaned inwardly.

“Thank you,” he muttered.

“Oh.”

Belatedly, she realised that the problem was that he had wanted to offer her thanks but didn’t want to give them away.

“Not at all,” she waved her hand absently, staring up at the faint stars in the sky.

All around them, the hum of the swamplands at night was intensifying. Mostly it was insects, but amidst all that she could just hear the odd splash of water or the rustle of reeds that wasn’t quite in harmony with the faint evening breeze.

It was idyllic… almost disarmingly so after the stress of the previous few days.

“How much longer will it take to get rid of the last of the qi?” she asked.

“An hour or two?” Ling replied.

“Any way to speed it up? I’d like to look like we are ready to depart when they come back with the boat…”

Ling sighed and stared up at the sky as well. “It’s not easy to use what’s left for any arts. The fractured soul strength within it is rather ironically a hindrance now, as much as it was an unexpected bounty at first.”

“It’s not like I can even expel it from my body, not without doing a serious number on the integrity of my foundation,” she signed. “I need to wait for the last remnants of the cores to dissipate and they are annoyingly tenacious.”

Rather than reply, she just nodded.

“Well, let’s focus on speeding this up as much as we can.”

~ Uarz – Riverlands ~

Gritting his teeth, Uarz focused several threads of mana under his direct control into the water and mud of the bank, timing the surges of mana he was pushing out with the efforts of the crewmen physically working around the bow of their vessel.

“One! TWO! THREE!”

“HEAVE!”

Omurz’s exhortations maybe helped, at least to coordinate the crew, but at the same time every yell made him wince at the noise. Unfortunately, it was somewhat unavoidable. Without the survivors from the fort this would have been impossible anyway, but they were still short on mages. Four or five could have raised the water high enough to float their vessel off directly. Or sapped the earth.

“HEAVE!”

“Shout louder maybe,” Kreva muttered from nearby, where she was taking a break and also keeping watch in case the serpent that had interrupted them earlier, biting Teff and another crewman, had friends. “Maybe they will hear us in Ulquan and take pity.”

“Hah…” he couldn’t help but laugh bitterly at that as he stopped trying to move the mana of their surroundings again.

“Okay, Omurz! Stop!” he called over. “Let’s take stock!”

With some relief, the crew who were straining with ropes and leverage, digging, pushing and pulling in equal measure, stepped back, making space.

“We are back…”

He turned to see Lashaan and the dark-haired woman, whose name turned out to be Khunua, reappear like ghosts out of the reeds, holding a red and white serpent about three metres long pierced with several arrows.

“We pushed it back about two yards,” he supplied as she walked over to the side of the boat and considered their efforts.

“So I see,” she mused, experimentally pushing the side of the boat. “It’s more deeply wedged than it initially looked.”

“It was almost impossible to navigate the channels…” he sighed, sitting back and trying not to look like his brain wanted to run out of his ears. “In the end, we ran up here and, well…”

“And you can’t put the new rudder on until it’s floated,” she added, looking back along the vessel.

“Given the current angle, no,” he agreed. “The issue is as much to do with purchase as it is strength. The ground here is just mud.”

“You don’t say,” she replied drily, making him wince.

“…”

“Here,” Khunua passed him a clay jar.

Taking it, he found it had what appeared to be herbal pellets in it, painted red and black.

“They will help you replenish your strength a bit quicker,” she supplied.

He did well not to look too surprised, he thought; however, he took one and crunched it down…

“…”

Mana shifted in his body as the medicine did something strange and slightly inexplicable to it as it flowed through the channels in his body.

“Everyone take one…” Khunua said, taking the pot back and passing it on. “It will help a bit at any rate.”

Nodding, he breathed in and out a few times. The effect was potent. He could feel the mana in his body surging now, attracting more mana somehow as it did so. His limbs felt itchy and his skin a bit flushed in the evening air. Whatever the medicine had done was invigorating… in a very disconcerting way.

“What does it do?” he asked, watching the effect on the others as they took it.

“Stimulates the mana in your body, makes it harmonize better with your physical form. You don’t want to overdose on it,” she explained, looking amused.

Thinking about what his body might feel like if he doubled the effect, he shuddered mentally.

“Okay, give it a minute for your body to calm down, then let’s see if we can’t move it two metres!” she said brightly.

The crew and the other survivors, who had been straining for some 30 minutes on and off while Khunua and Lashaan hunted down the errant serpent, looked a bit dubious but everyone was too knackered to complain, he supposed.

While they waited, he watched the dark-haired woman continue to walk around the vessel, considering it. The faint sense of pressure off her was steadily growing he realised. It had not been anywhere near as noticeable before, but in terms of strength she was not that far behind the other two, the blonde and brown haired hunters. He had come to the conclusion at this point that they had to be mercenary hunters, a wandering group who fought monsters for favour, coin and reputation who just so happened to be in Ulmaz when it was attacked.

-Or were they there because of the hydra?

In a weird way that made sense. Perhaps such a beast had just picked that moment to attack the outpost… or they had been sent there to capture one and it had escaped in the chaos? He had intended to try to ask some of the others but no convenient opportunity had arisen, rather vexingly.

“Right!” Khunua said abruptly. “Let’s see how this goes.”

With weary groans the crew got up and took positions again. Focusing, he reached out with his mana control, focusing on the water—

“Can you imbue it into the mud, solidify it?” Khunua asked.

“Solidify?” he blinked.

“Yes, around me, so I can have some purchase to push,” she nodded.

“…”

“You can’t do it?” she asked, looking a bit resigned.

“Ah… no,” he shook his head. “I mean I can,” he corrected hurriedly.

She gave him a long look, then just shook her head.

-Idiot, he remonstrated with himself.

Focusing on the ground around her, he forced mana into it, rapidly drying the mud as she watched the others take up positions. Within a few moments he felt something else also settling into the air around her… her own mana, he realised with a jolt of shock.

“Okay, on three!” she called out.

There was some minor scramble as the last of them got into place.

“Count us in…”

He realised she had been talking to him and nodded.

“One…”

“Two…”

“Three…”

Focusing again on the ground around the crew, he watched pensively as…

“…”

The vessel groaned, its timbers flexing slightly, and then almost improbably it moved slowly backwards. It didn’t move two metres, but it definitely moved further than they had managed on any single effort since they started.

“Okay, so this will work…” Khunua mused, barely looking out of breath he realised.

“Again.”

This time, her words held a faint sense of command to them, seeming to sink into the surroundings and almost compel him to agree.

For a brief moment, her presence seemed to forcibly draw the eye as she breathed in and out—

Putting her hands back to the vessel, she watched the others get back in position and start to push… then she leant against the front.

If he hadn’t been looking at her… seen the faint trace of exertion ripple across her body, he would have thought it somewhat exaggerated; however, as he watched, she took a full step forward, the boat groaning faintly as it moved reluctantly.

After a few moments’ break, they tried again… and again… and again.

Each time the vessel shifted half a yard or so and while it was clearly a group effort… and the medicine certainly helped, a part of him could only wonder if she was not able to move the boat completely on her own and was just saving their blushes.

In the end, it still took almost an hour, but the boat was fully off the mud bank and floating freely again in the channel.

Getting back on board, he surveyed the damage to the superstructure of the vessel as the others poked around, checking for leaks and such.

“It seems in fairly good shape,” Khunua mused, coming to stand at the rudder where he was.

“The main worry was that the keel might be cracked, but thankfully that isn’t the case,” he replied. “We can fix up the leaks and sort the ballast and then it will at least get us all back upriver.”

“Good,” she nodded, staring out across the swaying reed beds, now looking like an endless sea of shifting shadow in the twilight. “I assume you will be heading back to Ulquan?”

“…”

He pondered that question carefully. In truth, he was not at all keen on the idea of going back to Ulquan. The question of their captain’s shady dealing over those war-prisoners was weighing on his mind now for some reason. It had been a rather abrupt thing… and high paying… though very little of it had been up front. He rather suspected that if they went back now, the client, whoever it was, might not be all that understanding.

“Only if required,” he replied at last.

“Everything seems good!” Ladrak reported to Omurz, who was leaning on the rail overlooking the main deck.

“We are not taking in water?” he asked.

“No more than usual,” Ladrak chuckled.

Rolling his eyes, he waved for Ladrak to come over.

“Omurz, we should get going?” he half prompted the ‘captain’.

“Ah… yes,” Omurz sighed, stopping leaning on the raining.

“For navigation we should take two and get the small boat, they can go ahead, checking the depth.”

“What about lights?” Ladrak asked.

“Unnecessary,” Khunua said. “I can guide you from the front.”

“Who goes in the boat?” Ladrak asked Omurz.

“Kreva and—” Omurz said, gaining a sour look from Kreva who was leaning on the side rail, scanning the reed beds.

“—I’ll go,” the old bearded survivor chuckled, ambling over and cutting Omurz off.

~ Juni – Ruins of Ulmaz ~

The moon was well risen by the time Lin Ling finally exhaled and punched the ground softly. The quantity of hydra qi in their surroundings had been diffusing for a while, but it was by no means gone.

“Success?” she asked.

“Success,” Ling replied with a sigh of relief.

Qing Yao, Wei Chu and Feiwu Shen all exhaled as well, sitting back. All of them were sweating hard, looking exhausted. In fairness, that exhaustion was not undeserved. She had all but forced qi down their throats for the previous few hours. Very harmoniously of course, but it was still an unrelenting torrent of tempering energy that they had had to deal with, not to mention there had been markedly more shards of soul strength in it as time went on.

“Sorry, if I had just sat down and done that this morning we might be done by now,” she said with a certain degree of embarrassment.

“It’s fine. Likely we wouldn’t have a boat right now if you had,” Lin Ling giggled.

“Speaking of the boat, they are taking quite a while…” Qing Yao interjected.

“It was some 30 metres long,” she pointed out. “Likely it suffered some damage as well. Chunhua has to be reasonably subtle about things.”

“Still, between Senior Chunhua and Brother Kai it shouldn’t be that hard to get it off a mud bank,” Wei Chu pointed out.

“Well, before they get back, let’s clean up,” she said, standing up and looking around, before turning back to Lin Ling. “I assume you can destroy most of this formation and such?”

“…”

Ling made cat’s eyes at her and then put a hand on the central block, making it vanish.

Sighing, she shook her head and stored the block she was sitting on in her talisman.

“You get used to nothing storing and then when finally it does…” she grumbled, jumping over to the next one.

Qing Yao had to put a hand over her mouth to make it look like she wasn’t laughing. Feiwu Shen and Wei Chu were both studiously looking elsewhere.

-Oh, live it up, revenge will come, she muttered to herself.

With that ‘issue’ resolved, it took next to no time to clear away all the remaining traces of their presence.

The only other examples of Lin Ling’s formations outside those used to seal away the prisoners were all in the subsidiary hall where the cultivators and Ur’Inan had taken refuge from the tribulation, so while Lin Ling continued to sort out the formation in the square she went to deal with that.

After a quick check around that hall, she stored all those away in her talisman with the intention of dumping them somewhere random and very unrelated.

Returning to the main courtyard, she found Lin Ling had cleared out the other remaining pieces and was talking quietly with the others.

“What do we do about the prisoners?” she asked, looking in the direction of that hall.

“The ‘nightmare’ they are trapped in will wear off eventually,” Lin Ling replied, looking pensive.

“It would be kind of awkward to go to all this effort just to have them be revealed to the others,” she sighed. “However, I dislike the idea of leaving an obvious trace to link anyone other than Sharvasus’s qi beast to this mess.”

“They will take a while to wake up, so I can get rid of all that when the boat is almost here,” Ling mused.

Based on Feiwu Shen’s conflicted expression nearby, she could guess what their ‘regretful’ choice might be. Still, having not killed them up to this point, she had no desire to do so now, especially not when they were themselves harmless for the most part.

“Fair enough,” she agreed, looking up at the tower. “I’ll go see if I can spot them.”

“What should we do then?” Feiwu Shen asked.

“Wait here,” she said with an eye roll. “Luxuriate in a few moments of not having to refine qi as if your life depended on it!”

Leaving Lin Ling and Qing Yao’s laughter behind her, she turned and jumped up to the lowest level of the tower, scrambling rapidly up it to reach a convenient vantage point.

Thanks to ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’ her night vision, while not as good as Lin Ling’s, was certainly more than up to the task of spotting the boat… or so she had thought.

As it turned out, they had decided not to use lights, which was eminently wise she had to admit, but made finding it in the dark, with the shifting reeds and the strange reflections of the moonlight on the visible stretches of water, something of a pain.

To her relief, though, once she did find the vessel, they had floated it again and were slowly navigating it towards the fort itself.

“Well?”

She glanced over to see that Lin Ling had joined her.

“It’s over to our north-east, I suppose. Based on where they are, it might actually be better for us to go to them,” she suggested, pointing to its general location.

“Hmmm… yes,” Ling nodded. “In that case I’ll go deal with that now and you set out with the others?”

“Better we all stick together,” she mused. “In any case, we still need to decide what we do next.”

“Next?” Ling frowned.

“You haven’t noticed the discontent from Feiwu Shen and Kai Manshu?” she asked, frowning.

“Oh… their desire to go rescue their seniors,” Ling sighed as she peered over the edge of the tower. “In terms of rescuing a bunch of other cultivators… I can see all sorts of ways that backfires on us.”

“Yep,” she agreed, “I don’t need a divination art to see where that might lead. Gratitude is only worth so much and a bunch of Immortals or Chosen Immortals are not going to take any guidance from us. At worst they might actually try to rob us, even if they think we are part of some big influence.”

“Mostly that seems to be Feiwu Shen and Kai Manshu,” she noted. “Qing Yao and Wei Chu seem mostly content to try to rendezvous with their own seniors.”

“One of whom shot at me quite concertedly in the battle,” Ling pouted.

“She did?” she asked.

“Yeah, Qing Yao has images of all her seniors on that talisman,” Ling sighed. “I recognise both Jia Ying and Qing Dongmei. Qing Dongmei was the archer in white who was supporting Tian Cang Di.”

“Ah…” she recalled that Ling had been knocked about a bit by them.

“The Ur’Inan seem happy to go with us at this point, but the cultivators are sort of here by happenstance and already chafing a bit… in principled ways.”

“It was amusing to see them grumble about disguising themselves,” Ling agreed.

Rolling her eyes, she slipped off the edge and skidded down the wall, stopping herself on the lower level with an outstretched hand for a second before hopping down the remaining distance.

Ling landed a moment later with a slight splash that sent ripples across the water.

“We are going to meet the boat,” she informed the others.

The trio nodded, following after both of them as they headed for that hall without spoken comment.

It didn’t take long to remove all evidence of the arrays and leave the slumped forms unconscious in the hall. They would, according to Ling, awaken with a serious headache and a very bad case of collective amnesia, fuelled by some very lurid nightmares. Because most of them had seen nothing at all in any case, even if someone did manage to undo what had been done, by the time that occurred their trail should be so cold as to be untraceable, or at least that was the hope.

With that done, they closed the door again and rapidly left the fort, heading into the harbour along the line she had fixed in her mind’s eye that would lead them pretty much straight to the boat.

The journey through the reed beds in the dark was not particularly pleasant, but Qing Yao was attuned enough to run on the water for short bursts and it was easy enough for her and Ling to carry Feiwu Shen and Wei Chu, so their progress was swift, if not uneventful. They got ambushed twice by small water snakes, largely, she was sure, because she and Ling were keeping their presences totally repressed with their mantras. They also disturbed some kind of crab that was foraging in the reeds that spat bubbles at them which cut the reeds they passed through.

Finally, though, she caught sight of the boat, mostly because it was fairly noisy, and called them to a stop.

Focusing her intent a bit, she made a hooting call that imitated a tree-bill, a bird Chunhua would certainly recognise. A moment later a second hoot came back, completely identical in every way, which Ling then returned.

“Let me carry you for a minute,” she said, turning to Qing Yao.

“No need to give too much away,” Qing Yao agreed, allowing her to lift her by the waist.

Pushing on, they arrived at the edge of the waterway to find the boat a few metres out from it, the Ur’Vash crew looking nervous and rather heavily armed. Chunhua spotted them almost immediately from where she was standing on the prow and waved.

Waving back, she crouched and jumped the distance to the boat, landing on the edge with barely a sound and putting Wei Chu and Qing Yao down on the deck. Ling followed a moment later with Feiwu Shen.

“Well, at least this saves us navigating that ship trap of a harbour,” Uarz muttered.

“Yes, it’s not very amenable in the dark,” she agreed. “Glad to see this floats with all the effort invested.”

“We are too,” Omurz muttered, then waved to the Ur’Vash rowing. “Start turning us!”

There were several affirmative groans and the vessel started to slowly turn on the spot, the splash of oars nearby identifying the location of the small boat scouting the channel.

“We figured we should come meet you,” she said to Chunhua and the others.

“Cleaned up everything,” she signed unobtrusively.

“Probably not a bad idea given how hard it is to keep track of these channels, even with good night vision.” Chunhua agreed, nodding to acknowledge the signed message. “I honestly don’t think having lanterns would help in the slightest.”

“Any trouble getting it repaired?” she asked.

“A large water serpent bit two of the crew, but they will survive,” Lashaan replied from nearby.

“We met a few on the way,” she mused. “And a very obnoxious crab that I swear had some kind of spatial… mana in its bubbles.”

“Uggh… they are the worst,” the female boat guard, Kreva, who was also nearby muttered. “They hide in the mud, utterly undetectable, and then spit bubbles in the water that can take your leg off—”

“—or worse,” one of the rowers beside them interjected. “Knew a guy who lost his little friend to one…”

“—without any warning…” Kreva finished.

“Did you kill it?” another asked.

“Do I look like I have it on me?” she said with a half-hearted smile.

“Ah, buggers do like to run, burrow faster than near anything,” another of the crew said with a scowl.

Lashaan, who knew full well she had a spatial storage device, was looking the other way now.

As they were talking, the vessel completed its turn and started back down the waterway towards the main river channel. Looking around, she had to acknowledge that it was a bit strange to be on one in this situation. The vessels she had been on before had been a bit larger, but the layout was mostly the same, bar a second level at the rear. This one was also more geared towards transport of goods, she could see that immediately given that a large portion of the middle of it was empty, presumably to fit cargo either side of the mast. Now, all that was stashed there were a few bales of reeds and the leftovers from fixing up the boat.

“What do we do now?” Chunhua asked quietly.

“A moment.”

Closing her eyes, she put her hands on the rail at the side and focused on her divination art.

{Bright Heart Shifting Steps}

The first question she fed it was concerning Han Shu, which just gave her a faint tug that this track was somewhat auspicious. Curiously, when she followed it up with a question about the cultivators’ seniors, that sense of harmony almost overlaid itself.

Thinking about that, ignoring the others around her, she found it made sense with the added bit of information about Qing Yao’s ‘seniors’. Qing’s talisman was designed to help her rendezvous with the other Nine Auspicious Moons disciples… and while she hadn’t asked, she was pretty sure Qing Yao had some sort of relationship to Qing Dongmei. The Qing clan were themselves something of an important force on the Imperial Continent, though rather like the Ling clan on Yin Eclipse, one somewhat adrift from the major powerbrokers.

-Have to remember to ask her about that, she mused.

More relevant though, Han Shu’s body and the others, assuming they were still okay… were pretty much the only prize worth having from the whole mess of a battle. The group they had been following before had been fairly large and her intuition there was that the group Qing Yao had been aiming to join back up with was the same one. They wouldn’t know for sure until they got closer, but she was willing to bet at least some spirit stones they would not be that far off.

The interesting part, though, was that the divination art also gave her a sort of harmonious sense concerning that and… if not the vessel they were now on… something relating to it in some way…

Exhaling, she opened her eyes and grimaced, because just that short moment had nearly bottomed out the qi in her dantian.

“Well?” Chunhua asked.

“We take the boat upriver. I’ll think about it some more in the meantime,” she murmured, looking around again.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Uarz looking at her pensively and sighed inwardly.