At this point, the scholar of these past events would be forgiven for thinking that this whole matter should be considered closed.

Shu Bao, despite his eminent status, was just another young noble without much impression except for his family name, and no amount of proselytizing on Shu Bao’s behalf by his supporters ever really changed that. Song Jia on the other hand had been locally renowned, especially in the place of her birth, Burning Tiger Province. Her rise and her Core had been held up as a reflection of the hopes and dreams of a generation who wanted to believe that you could come from nothing and reach great heights on your own merits.

Later propaganda has sought to obfuscate this narrative significantly, with some commentators even suggesting that the Shu clan or Shu Bao were responsible for her forming the very Core she lost; however, the depth of sentiment and the general suspicion surrounding the events never really vanished. Unfortunately, Song Jia was exiled and her prospects ruined, Shu Bao was diplomatically moved offside and those looking on barely had time to process matters before it had all transpired. This, however, is to overlook the salient point in all this, the objective of so many factions’ desires, Song Jia’s Good Fortune Core.

At the time, many did buy the narrative that her Core was destroyed by self-sabotage, fully believing that there was no way that the Shu clan would let another retain that Core. However, no secret in a sect with serious politics ever remains truly buried. The undoing of the whole obfuscation had its roots in what was, it has to be said, a truly banal incident at the Shu Pavilion’s annual tournament the following year.

During a preliminary round the disciple of one of the older ancestors, not part of the Elder Hall, was defeated in somewhat embarrassing fashion by one of Shu Bao’s associates while his fiancé was in attendance. Humiliated, he went to his senior brothers who, not at all impressed with Shu Bao in any event, were quite thorough, and in the process Shu Bao’s associate admitted that Shu Bao had made all his companions swear a heavenly oath. The seniors forced him to forswear that oath as penalty for humiliating their junior and in the process discovered that Song Jia, who was someone they had all had a great admiration for… had indeed been wronged in some capacity by Shu Bao’s actions.

The result, of course, was that Shu Bao’s actions were re-examined, and with the majority of those sympathetic to him now travelling with him on his honeymoon, many other elders who held grudges over this – including Shu Bao’s own former master who had been humiliated by the events – found that Shu Bao had used Song Jia’s Core as a gambling stake and lost it to a junior from the Din clan.

The senior ancestors, realising that a junior’s vices and the Elder Hall’s politics had cheated their sect out of a Good Fortune Core, directly enriching their biggest geopolitical rivals in the process, were infuriated. Given Shu Bao’s political status, and the fact that he had already, rather conveniently, departed on his honeymoon, there was little chance of him seeing any serious punishment – his sworn companions in the sect were not so lucky.

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

~ By Kung Quan

~ Cang Di – Udrasa Nights ~

“TWO INGOTS OF MANA-IRON!”

“Three high quality beast cores!”

“100 gold talismans!”

“60 orichalcum talismans!”

Sitting at a private table on the upper level of what passed for an exclusive inn – by Ur’Vash standards – Cang Di watched the bidding for a rather unhappy-looking serpent unfold—

“If you got it, flaunt it!”

“Flaunt!?! If I flaunt any more—”

“Look over there, you see them?”

Fighting a mental sigh, he tried to tune out their bickering conversation and focus on his divination art and their immediate surroundings... then made the mistake of looking in the vague direction Alalia had indicated.

“She is naked, that is not clothing!”

“Yes, be thankful you are my apprentice, or you would have to dress like that to not stand out!”

“…”

“That ugly merchant wanted to buy me earlier!” Qing Dongmei hissed, changing topic.

It was a battle for focus that circumstances, rather than his concentration, were winning it had to be said.

The ‘inn’ they were ‘staying’ at, one picked by Alalia, was hosting what he could only describe as an auction, mostly focusing on rare beasts and the occasional ‘treasure’, near as he could tell. So far, the only things of interest had been a few artefacts that had clearly been looted from cultivators.

“He wanted to marry you,” Alalia corrected her, though she still sounded far too amused. “With your assets, nobody—”

“My... assets?” Qing Dongmei retorted, still clearly unhappy at the rather scandalous garb she was stuck wearing, though she still leant back a bit more as she downed another cup of the wine and tried to look like she was keeping half an eye on the auction below, which had moved on from the serpent and was showing a beast egg or something like it.

“You have good tits, accept it,” Alalia sniggered, helping herself to a bit of fried meat from one of the plates on the table before her, making no such pretence of paying attention to events in the auction.

“…”

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Qing Dongmei sigh and stare into her wine cup, swirling its contents in restrained annoyance.

“Good hips as well,” Alalia added, clearly enjoying herself. "That offer to marry you for a fishing village was a good deal!"

Qing Dongmei opened her mouth then just took a deep drink of the wine, presumably to avoid saying something on that.

Staring up at the ceiling, he tried not to laugh because that would just make things worse.

Their trip into madness, at the instruction of the talisman, had revealed three things to him so far.

The first was that Qing Dongmei had ‘opinions’ about her attire and despite being… well she was eighteen in her heart, he supposed and that was what mattered at this point.

The second was that ‘they’ – the collective cultivator – had been absolute idiots to think that the Ur’Vash were a pot that could be kicked over. That idea had truthfully expired while they were running away from Ajara but here, in a town of 50,000 Ur’Vash with multiple Dao Immortals and at least one Dao Lord, the idea was so buried it was planning ancestral celebrations and raising money for a shrine.

The third was that, removed from the oppression of mysterious old seniors the Spirit Elf, Alalia, was… hard to place. She was clearly a ‘senior’ by the standards of Eastern Azure, but her manner and attitude were… well, she was hard to place – that was the best he could do.

Originally, their intention had been to infiltrate a settlement or two, locate and steal the relevant materials and get out; however, that had quickly been cut down by Alalia who pointed out that while ‘Orichalcum’, as she called the metal a lot of the weapons were made out of, was in some circulation, actual ingots of the stuff were tightly controlled and it was very hard to rework the metal after it had been cast once. That meant they had to come to a big town… and stealing things from a big town required some sideways thinking.

That was how they had eventually arrived at Uldara… which was an absolute cesspit of vice and inequity that would have made even the worst towns on the Northern Continent embarrassed on behalf of their good name.

Alalia was now using an identity she had apparently possessed in the past, that of a reclusive ‘Sorceress’ called Erishkira. Qing Dongmei was now Meyla, her ‘apprentice’ and he was their bodyguard ‘Kang’. Well, she had said he would be introduced as their ‘companion’, but the way she had smirked at him when she said it suggested that there were other connotations to that term he wasn’t going to dwell on, especially not with both women walking around in sheer silken gowns so provocative that actual nudity might be less suggestive.

His own garb was… functional: sandals and a loose knee-length skirt in a style many mercenaries he had seen were wearing, accented by a few bits of armour for his arms and shins that Alalia had had him scavenge from a smaller fort that had been washed out by the flood. That apparel, combined with a bunch of red-black and white patterns she had painted on him, basically made him look like an Ur’Vash mercenary. Even his spear didn’t particularly stand out, he had discovered.

“—Would the esteemed Sorceress Erishkira require any additional hospitality?”

He relinquished ‘Shatterpoint’ again and glanced up to find an Ur’Vash lad, wearing the garb he had come to associate with ‘servants’ in this place, had walked over to their more private table and was waiting at a respectful distance.

A few boring variations of the next minute flickered through his head as he re-initialised it with a thought.

“We will take another course of what we had,” he said smoothly, in the local tongue, noting that for all their discussion and Qing Dongmei’s complaining over her attire, both had nearly eaten and drunk all the food on offer.

The serving boy nodded, his glance only lingering ever so slightly on the ‘assets’ of Qing Dongmei and Alalia, before giving him a look that clearly said ‘you’re a lucky bastard’.

-The worst part is that Alalia is not wrong, he reflected with somewhat amused resignation. Nobody looks at their faces or gives me a second glance, except to think how ‘lucky’ I am or similar to be travelling with such a pair.

“Anything… else?” the youth asked, again looking at the two.

The youth was basically asking if he wanted any slaves to wait on them… personally, given they were eminent private guests of the establishment.

“No, that will be all,” he replied blandly. “Just make sure the food is spicy and the wine is cold.”

He watched the serving youth depart with a certain spring in his step and swirled the wine in his own cup.

-Not to mention that’s the fourth different serving youth we have had in an hour…

“Hey beauties! Wanna come have—?”

Before the gaggle of quite well dressed, but clearly drunk, Ur’Vash youths could endanger their young lives by wandering into their part of the upper floor he glared at them, his Martial Intent bringing all of them up short and even sobering one or two up entirely.

With some amusement, he watched them walk on by in a hurry, sweating in a way that had nothing to do with the humidity or the atmosphere of the raucous lower level.

Behind him, Alalia’s laugh followed the pair like a beautiful curse, causing one to look back a bit wistfully, though his compatriots wisely dragged him on without so much as missing a step.

“If he asks for ‘other’ things again, tell him we will take a musical girl,” Alalia added absently.

“…”

“We don’t want to stand out,” she said softly.

“Ah…” looking around, he could see her point there. Most of the other ‘private’ areas, which were half screened off by diaphanous curtains, had some servants in permanent attendance, either dancing girls or the odd musician.

Compared to most of the establishments this place was rather high class… in that the dancing girls currently distracting the patrons were wearing gold rather than bronze and that the drink was… not bad. The most disconcerting part was that much of it would not be out of place in some of the more mountainous central provinces of the Western or Northern Continents, especially in a dark auction or similar.

Nodding his head, he initialised ‘Shatterpoint’ again.

Normally, he didn’t use it anywhere near this much, simply because like all divination arts it was possible to overuse it. However, ever since he had acquired those fortuitous comprehensions in Severing Law during the Earth Dragon’s tribulation, he had been exploring how that law interacted with ‘Shatterpoint’… and the results had been… disconcertingly good.

Even with the crude grasp of the edges of law that he had, it made it much, much easier to initialise the art without using any qi at all. Using ‘Shatterpoint’ was also feeding back into his understanding of the various interactions of the Law as well, particularly in places like the moments of ‘stillness’ between things. It was a reminder that ‘Severing’ was a very esoteric concept at times. For example, just the act of picking up a cup, pouring wine, drinking from it and then… waiting, involved aspects of ‘Severing Law’, encapsulated in the ‘stillness’ between action and consequence.

That was a fundamental element of many aspects of Martial Techniques as well, one he was intimately familiar with, but it also stretched to things like ‘action’ and ‘cessation’ in divination arts. Already, he could use ‘Shatterpoint’ much more cleanly in rapid succession than he had ever believed would be possible.

Exhaling, he watched the shadows of people interacting play out, watched the serpent get taken away in its cage, the afterimages of dancing girls shimmer in place, the different variations of their dances and the choices they might make from one moment to the next as they reacted to their patrons in various ways…

Everything slid back together and the minute – less than a second in his mind’s eye – passed, the events he had seen a moment before starting to play out in their various ways.

“Is there anything else we need to be wary of?” he asked at last, turning back to their table again as the next item on the auction was brought out – a statue of a squat, bearded figure with an erect penis as long as its arm, cast out of some kind of bronze-like metal.

“Hmmm…” Alalia mused. “These things have a veneer of civility that is almost cloying, at least as I recall them. Wealthy old villains buying and selling the hopes and dreams of others as if they were their own, denigrating humans and elves but neither managing the depravity of the former or the arrogance of the latter.”

“So, just like a dark auction back home,” Qing Dongmei grumbled. “Got it.”

“Really, as I said before, just stick to your roles and you will not stand out exceptionally,” Alalia said, pouring herself more wine.

Qing Dongmei sighed and took another bit of the fried fish, crunching it down with a certain degree of venom. Most of the ‘obvious’ questions had already been hashed out anyway. Their main concern was that they be outed as invaders, but Alalia was fairly unconcerned about that, stating that the patterns she had painted on them both would disguise almost all such investigations.

“And if, after all this, it does go wrong?” Qing Dongmei muttered around her piece of fish.

“Then everything Uldara has built will fall,” Alalia retorted with an eye roll.

“That wasn’t what I meant,” Qing Dongmei said, glancing at him, clearly thinking more about the second stage of their plan, which was the bit that involved actual theft… probably.

“I have means, although it would be awkward to have to obliterate a whole town,” he muttered.

“I wonder,” Qing Dongmei sniffed, flicking her hair back and glaring at another group of passing Ur’Vash youths who had been ogling her unobtrusively.

“You would rather slaughter thousands than have these poor souls blessed with the sight of your tits and ass?” Alalia asked with mock incredulity, following her gaze and giving the retreating group a smirk.

“…”

Qing Dongmei stared at her for a long moment then took an even more vicious chomp out of her piece of fried fish, which just made Alalia laugh again.

They sat in silence for several minutes, waiting for more food to arrive; however, when it did, it came with four other figures, including the owner of the whole establishment who was sweating profusely and bowing to the three figures – a matronly woman in a red gown and two armed youths with oiled beards – accompanying the server.

“Ah, here we are,” Alalia said, sitting back and putting her arms on the back of the couch to stare at the three.

The servant put the food down with practised ease, marred only by the uneasy looks they kept shooting at both Alalia and the red-robed woman.

“Esteemed Sorceress Erishkira,” the red-robed woman said with a deep bow. “Many years has it been since your name was spoken in these lands. The Master of Uldara and his esteemed guests, Honoured are they by Quazam, rejoice that you have blessed our town, arriving as you have like a fair omen in blue skies with the new day! Not even fair Wujai or valiant Ezajara can outshine your luminary reputation beyond the borders of our Great Udrasa, resounding as it does through the ages. They sincerely hope you would be willing to attend their personal little gathering…”

-Which is to say they just learned she was here now, he reflected, rather amused at how certain interactions just didn’t change, no matter the culture. And that they don’t know why.

“Yes, yes,” Alalia pouted, waving a hand absently. “Are you going to proclaim here all night, like the slaves you are, or are you going to escort us?”

“Sorceress is wise and sees brightly, please follow me,” the woman said, not looking up.

…

…

“Esteemed Sorceress Erishkira! Many years has it been since your elusive beauty graced our great city!”

Standing just behind Alalia, the ‘Esteemed Sorceress Erishkira’, with a somewhat stony-faced Qing Dongmei, Cang Di had to admit, once again, that their original plan of ‘sneak in and steal what was needed’ would have been doomed to die without a corpse.

“Master… Kazdrad!” Alalia barely hesitated in nodding politely to the paunchy Ur’Vash who had stood up to greet them on their entrance to the upper layer of the large courtyard they were now in. “—I must admit, I have not been to Uldara since… Ah… Master Mazular held your post.”

“Ah… hmmm,” the Master paused, managing to look a bit shifty even with a full face mask on. “What happened to Mazular was very… unfortunate.”

“I understand that Mayumi of the Hundred Ghosts is still at large as well!” Alalia said with aplomb. “This must be very difficult for you all. I have as many regrets as you do, I am sure, concerning the esteemed Master’s death.”

“Ah… yes, much lamented, much lamented, if a bit before my time,” Master Kazdrad said politely, looking at both him and Qing Dongmei.

-Which is to say, neither was very sad to see this Mazular die, his inner ‘this is the way seniors throw shade’ sense supplied.

“This is my apprentice,” Alalia said, waving Qing Dongmei forward.

Qing Dongmei managed to hide her grimace and stepped forward, bowing politely in the way she had been instructed to, drawing many ‘admiring’ looks from those near the Master.

“A beauty! Your apprentice is every bit as alluring as you, Esteemed Sorceress!” one of the Uldara nobles declared, his eyes not leaving Qing Dongmei’s body.

“A worthy successor!”

“Marvellous!”

“…”

Qing Dongmei, who had already spent quite a lot of her time to this point grumbling about the sheer gown that hid nothing, kept her expression somewhat detached. It didn’t help that most of those ‘admiring’ her were in fact stronger than she was, at least in general terms.

The average strength of those present on this exclusive balcony was close to Golden Immortal while some of the guards and the Master himself were Ancient Immortals nearly as strong as he was… and that didn’t even get him started on the ‘inscrutables’, of which there were a good dozen among the various groups watching the auction from various spots around the hall. Four – an old Ur’Vash in a mask and yellow robe, a beautiful female Ur’Vash reclining on a chair, a bearded muscular warrior in a orichalcum scale skirt leaning on the balcony and a rather ethereal looking Ur’Vash woman in a translucent red gown and silver mask – were all on the balcony with them as well.

“A talent to be sure!”

“GREAT MASTER!”

Various lesser nobles nearby all bowed as the yellow-robed old Ur’Vash wearing the golden-copper mask, with long, spider-like fingers, stood up from his seat and walked over with deceptive speed to stand before Qing Dongmei and Alalia.

“Indeed… a great talent… such possibilities… perhaps she might dance for us later, Sorceress Erishkira?”

“…”

“Are you trying to steal away my disciple, ‘Great Master’?” Alalia purred, stepping forward to actually stand over the hunched old Ur’Vash, who somehow seemed not quite so imposing when placed next to her.

“Of course not, Sorceress Erishkira, though perhaps some agreement might be reached?” the old Ur’Vash chuckled, cupping Qing Dongmei’s chin in his fingers and not really appearing particularly intimidated by Alalia. “I am sure there are things in my possession that you will find of great interest…?”

He was glad he had a lot of experience in suppressing his emotions and schooling himself in front of seniors, as did Qing Dongmei, because the aura from the old Ur’Vash was truly unsettling and the allusion was… despicable, truthfully.

Alalia smoothly moved Qing Dongmei back a step and smiled serenely at the old Ur’Vash and the other ‘inscrutables’.

“It is customary for each participant in such a gathering to present an interesting curio for the consideration of others. That is not my disciple,” Alalia said with a faint edge to her tone.

Without any preamble, she drew out a handful of beast cores, his and Dongmei’s actually, which included several pristine twelve-star grade cores from Dao Immortal qi beasts dispatched in the Yin Eclipse Mountains before all the chaos with the collapse.

The old Ur’Vash took one of the cores and considered it, nodding with clear interest.

“Superlative, superlative thing…” he declared at last, passing it back to Alalia. “Almost as beautiful as this girl…”

“…”

Qing Dongmei bowed politely: wisely, perhaps, choosing to say nothing.

“—Who is your male companion, he is most exceptional,” a bejewelled woman – also inscrutable – wearing a very sheer gown, who was sitting opposite where the Master of Uldara had been, interjected, looking at him with clear… and rather disturbing interest in her eyes.

-Yep, if we had tried to infiltrate a place like this it would have turned bad very quickly, he thought glumly, still not entirely certain it would not anyway, despite Alalia’s assurances.

“A travelling companion,” Alalia said with aplomb. “Kang is a Hunter of some capability and talent who has impressed me in various ways since we crossed paths.”

“Interesting… very interesting… how exotic, he has the rugged charm of a barbarian… certainly. Perhaps you might part with him for a while?” the veiled woman purred, sounding… even more eager.

“Uh…” he fought hard not to look too quickly at Alalia, but she just rolled her eyes.

“Can I have him then?” Alalia pointed to a youth standing near the woman.

“…”

He stared at her, then at the muscular youth with an oiled beard and hair and slightly pointy ears she had just singled out who was also now frozen, drink halfway to mouth. He was one of those who had been staring quite openly at Qing Dongmei a moment before. Now, however, all that interest was gone and he was looking very uncertainly back and forth between the bejewelled woman and Alalia.

“You… want to trade my son for… him?”

“I’ll trade you your son for an hour with my companion,” Alalia giggled. “The presumption was yours after all.”

“…”

The woman stared at Alalia and then at the youth… then at him, in thoroughly ominous, considering silence.

“…”

Abruptly, the woman threw back her head and started to laugh, as if this was a huge joke.

The others nearby also started to laugh, though her son was sweating visibly, his cup shaking slightly in his hand as he grinned in a way that was entirely forced.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Qing Dongmei looking at him with slightly judging eyes that said – ‘so how do you like it?’

“Sorceress Erishkira, Sorceress…”

“—Meyla,” Qing Dongmei supplied politely.

“—please, sit with us,” the Master finished smoothly, as two servants hurriedly brought another divan to sit at his other side, opposite the woman who had just spoken and in a spot with an excellent view down to the lower level of the sprawling courtyard they were overlooking.

Alalia and Dongmei both walked over and sat down, accepting wine from a servant girl…

He stared at the girl dully, realising she was in fact a cultivator, of all things, her ankles, wrists and neck bound by thin silver bands.

“You like my servants?” the Master chuckled, noticing his gaze.

He bowed slightly in apology and moved quickly to stand beside Qing Dongmei.

“She is certainly interesting,” Alalia deadpanned, waving for the cultivator to walk over to her. “Not from the riverlands at any rate.”

“No… you have no doubt heard of this warband that the savages to the south had such trouble with?” Kazdrad said smoothly. “We… have had no such issues with them.”

“Some will even be on display today…” a tall, bearded Ur’Vash nearby said with a broad grin. “Quite exceptional specimens with real… fire. They show a lot of potential once they are properly instructed, but they certainly need instruction as to their place in the great order of things.”

“…”

He stared at the young woman, who had slightly hopeless eyes, as she stood there, appearing to be little more than a puppet in her own body.

-How many others like her are caught in this hell? he thought, caught somewhere between anger and sorrow.

“Her magical talent is certainly something,” Alalia agreed, standing up and walking around her.

“You had more of these… you said?”

“First Wujai, now you,” another, rotund noble grumbled.

“Wujai has shown interest?” Alalia mused, finishing her circuit.

“She offered the Master of Ulquan 500 Agrond for twenty two—” the bearded Ur’Vash said with a calculating expression, his remark getting impressed gasps from those nearby.

“—I am sure she didn’t pay that much,” Alalia chuckled, sitting down again and crossing her legs, still staring at the woman.

“Ah…” the old man looked a bit awkward, which got more laughter.

He glanced across at Qing Dongmei, who had a calm, dispassionate look on her face that he recognised as being her ‘I must have no view on this’ expression.

Her eyes caught his, reflecting an unspoken sentiment that was effectively ‘I didn’t think I could actually hate this place any more, but I do’.

“So, what is it you hope to acquire from our august little exchange?” the wizened old masked Ur’Vash asked, sitting down as well.

“It is said that Uldara is a place where the wealth of the rivers and the peoples meet…” Alalia said, adjusting herself slightly.

“Indeed, in Uldara all things can be purchased for a price,” the Master of Uldara agreed with a slightly hungry smile that was mirrored by others looking at both him and Qing Dongmei.

“I am sure we can provide all the things your esteemed person—”

“I am interested in some resources that are a little uncommon,” Alalia continued, cutting off the bearded Ur’Vash who had just spoken up. “Duraminium ore, untreated Ildrium and real Orichalcum, along with a few other sundries…”

“…”

As she listed off the various materials he saw a few expressions slipping among the group, even among the inscrutables.

“If you have any Soul Gold that hasn’t been fucked about with I can give a good price for that as well, but I am not interested in any recycled stuff,” she added, swirling the wine in her cup.

“…”

“Some of those things can be provided by our illustrious group,” the Master of Uldara recovered well from his moment of shock, but the hesitancy did not go unmarked to him. “—but it will cost you much more than those cores.”

“Those cores are just my offering to the proceedings at large,” Alalia said blandly. “If you can produce the things I want, you will not be disappointed.”

“…”

The various Ur’Vash nobles all eyed her with interest, a few still casting sideways glances at Qing Dongmei, who had moved just a shade closer to Alalia. The woman on the other side of the now once again seated Master Kazdrad was also looking at him again, with eyes that suggested her earlier interest had not been cooled by Alalia’s comments.

“These cores are freshly slain,” one of the younger noblewomen, a dark-haired woman with a very voluptuous figure remarked, turning one of the eleven-star spider cores over in her hands.

“Indeed, Kang here was the one who slew them,” Alalia said, glancing at him with a half-smile.

Eyes turned back to him again and he had to work hard to resist the urge to grimace, again glad he had a lot of experience standing around looking attentive in the presence of seniors.

-Half the Ur’Vash on this balcony here have to be Ancient Immortals, a part of him shuddered.

The really scary part though, was that most of the nobles themselves were not even a century old. A few of the clearly senior ones were fairly old, he could feel the pressure of years off them, but even then, it was only a matter of a century or two.

Two of the women, including the dark-haired one who had just asked the question, were close to Qing Dongmei in the purity of their qi and were barely in their thirties. Their foundations were not the best, he could tell that from their middling grasp of ‘Intent’, but it was still a foundation born of a Supreme World and built off their privileged access to its resources through their social status, even if they likely had not focused strongly on the martial aspects of it.

-I should have asked her for more information about their cultivation systems… he complained in his heart, vowing to do so when the first opportunity arose. With this kind of strength half of these ‘nobles’ could walk into any sect in Eastern Azure and become talents of a generation.

“You did?” the dark-haired noblewoman asked with clear interest, looking him over and not bothering to hide the desire in her eyes as she leant forward in a very enticing manner.

“There were some circumstances,” he said carefully, trying to ignore the slightly unclean feeling her gaze carried as it swept over him.

Soul sense was restricted but he was fairly sure there could be serious caveats in that restriction if required. No ruler of a place like this was going to give up an advantage like that, and that meant that lying or obfuscation in front of others was likely a dangerous game.

“I am not at all familiar with the beasts either…” a muscular man with gold bands on his arms, who was standing beside the inscrutable, bearded martial expert wearing the orichalcum scale skirt, mused, examining another of the cores.

“They came from near… Krista Tonnitrue,” he answered, recalling thankfully the ‘local’ name for ‘Thunder Crest’, the mountain near where they had all appeared.

“From the jungles, how terrifying…” another woman with brown curly hair and several rather distracting piercings sighed. “I hear the savage tribes there are so unruly that they even eat their own…”

“They do,” another older Ur’Vash chuckled. “Cannibals and devil worshippers, their women even mate with beasts and such… I had a captured slave from one of those tribes once… he ate his opponents when I had him fight in the arena.”

“Devils and cannibals, a savage land,” the buxom, dark-haired Ur’Vash noblewoman murmured breathily.

“But very vigorous… if you like that kind of thing,” another giggled.

Quite a few other women laughed and the gazes on him got even more unsettling, to the point where he wondered if Alalia was actually doing this on purpose just to annoy him, like she kept needling Qing Dongmei over her dislike of her sheer clothing.

“Killing spiders and centipedes is not especially glamorous,” he answered respectfully.

“The tribes up there rear such beasts… do they not?” one of the other nobles asked him.

“I much prefer serpents,” the brown-haired noblewoman giggled.

“So I am led to believe,” he replied, glancing again at Alalia, who was just sipping her wine now and letting the conversation flow.

“But to fight and kill such beasts that are clearly Eighth Advancement… did you do so alone?” the older woman who had first spoken asked, leaning forward eagerly.

“Not as such,” he replied carefully, “Though we were a small group and the fight was challenging.”

“Perhaps you will show us such prowess later…” another younger woman giggled. “There is to be some competition, is there not?”

“There is indeed,” the Master of Uldara agreed, looking at him and also Alalia with a calculating eye.

He nearly cursed them in his mind then and there, but considering some of their realms quashed the urge and said nothing.

“I am sure many here would also be very interested to see the prowess of such a talent worthy of becoming your apprentice, Erishkira,” the yellow-robed old Ur’Vash added.

That also got quite a few nods.

“Well, we will see what is what later,” Alalia said, finishing her cup and holding it out for the enslaved cultivator to refill. “Are we going to sit here yakking until the sun actually rises before we get to see these amazing treasures?”

That got a few nervous laughs from those nearby until Master Kazdrad also laughed and clapped his hands.

“Quite, Most Radiant Sorceress, LET US COMMENCE!”

With the Master’s command, most of those focused on them moved to either side, clearing space for them to see the courtyard below clearly again. The middle had now been cleared and the raised area, brightly lit by lanterns beneath the pre-dawn sky with its still-visible stars and ever-present full moon, was surrounded by rather heavily armed guards whose Martial Intent were comparable to some of the more elite Ur’Vash he had seen in the battle – the ones who had shown up towards the end and done quite a bit of mopping up once all the danger was dealt with.

“Why don’t you mingle, Kang, there are a few people not of this group who may have the things I require,” Alalia murmured, taking several of the cooked meats from a tray that a second servant… also a female cultivator, he noticed with an inner grimace, was holding.

He bowed politely to her and then to the other dignitaries, who were mostly ignoring him now as they focused on the various figures on the platform below. The first ‘treasure’ was actually a cage that held a hunched lizard about a metre long with a long snout and rather nasty claws.

Seeing that nobody objected openly to his departure, he backed away and then walked down the stairs to the slightly lower portion of the upper veranda of the courtyard.

Here, the groups were equally opulent but much more varied in their attire, being presumably parties who had come from further away or who perhaps had been stuck in the town and were now interested to see what was what.

“BEHOLD A GREAT LIZARD OF OLD!” the announcer below called out. “CAPTURED ON THE EDGE OF THE BADLANDS, THIS DREAD BEAST SLEW NINE ELITE HUNTERS IN A MINUTE BEFORE IT WAS RESTRAINED!”

“TEN WAR SLAVES!” someone called from the far side of the hall as he glanced across again at the centre of the courtyard.

“AN HEIRLOOM ORICHALCUM WEAPON!” another voice called from further down the hall.

He accepted a cup of wine from a passing slave, noting she was not a cultivator, just a normal Ur’Vash – not that that made her plight any less pitiable really.

{Shatterpoint}

Focusing quietly on the art in the back of his mind he considered his surroundings and the various possibilities as he sipped his wine. Without using qi it was somewhat less effective in terms of the vivid clarity of the ‘moments’ it could predict but it was still exceptionally useful in focused circumstances in spite of that. The immediate response was that he was still being tacitly observed by several nobles from up above.

In his mind’s eye, the darker-haired young noblewoman came down and talked to him for a few moments then invited him to come share tales of his ‘exploits’ with some of her other friends further down the hall. Focusing on the extremity of the projected ‘minute’ he saw that that was vaguely auspicious and sighed a bit glumly.

Three more uses of the art in rapid succession showed him a few other variations of the same general series of events, though none were as auspicious as the first version he had looked at and one seemed to nudge him towards something rather problematic even if the intuitive warning against talking to the young, dark-haired woman alone was somewhat odd. He supposed it was because someone would come pick a fight with him, or he might be led to have to make some display in the courtyard later.

“Hunter Kang!” he glanced over to find the aforementioned dark-haired young noblewoman approaching with a broad smile on her face.

“They are so very stuffy, are they not,” she sighed, taking his arm with a bright smile. “As a man of action, such political things must be very boring, I am sure?”

He smiled as best he could and politely untangled his arm.

“You honour me with your attention, Lady…”

“Oh, I did not introduce myself,” she said with a smirk, brushing a long lock of her dark hair aside. “I am Quaruna.”

-And your father is Kazdrad, he thought glumly, though you don’t tell me that unless I really screw this up.

“I would just love to hear more of your exploits!” she almost purred, leaning into him rather suggestively. “Perhaps we might go somewhere a little more… intimate?”

He laughed politely and glanced back up at the upper balcony, sweating inside.

“I do owe the Esteemed Sorceress a certain gratitude,” he said carefully. “We have a certain arrangement—”

“I could command it,” she smirked, cutting him off and running a hand down his chest.

“…”

“I am joking, joking,” she said with a slightly sultry smile that suggested she was… maybe not as she patted her hand against his chest. “Why don’t you come join me and some of my dear friends, the exploits of such a valiant hunter must be worth a few smiles… or more…”

He exhaled mentally as he passed by the ‘dangerous’ moment he had seen with ‘Shatterpoint’, where she had dragged him off and one of the other nobles on this side had seen them leave.

~ Juni – New Day on the River ~

“I swear, today has proven that your headaches can get headaches,” Ling grumbled from where she was sitting on the purple-splattered deck of the boat, poking at a bubbling crab-shell pot of pulverized reed rhizome and lotus seed porridge.

It was impossible to disagree with that, Juni had to concede. The night had been… stressful was the best way to put it she supposed. There were other adjectives she could use to describe it, but in deference to the others there, she was happy to go with ‘stressful’ and leave it at that. They had gotten past Udrasa and Ulquan at least… only barely, but it was behind them if not yet comfortably distant, and that was what was important.

-Sharvasus really wants to get us…

“I will be very pleased to be done with this place,” she sighed, tasting a bit of the porridge which, while a bit muddy-tasting, turned out to be perfectly edible.

“Uhuh,” Chunhua groaned from where she was leaning against the side of the boat, staring at the stars.

The only others up on deck, as the boat drifted in a flooded field, were Uarz and Kreva and Naakos. The rowers were knackered and the rest were either resting, or still concealing themselves—

Almost on cue a shimmering distortion swept across the lake, barely detectable to her except as a subtle disturbance in the way things ‘could’ be, courtesy of ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’.

None of them focused on it, pretending to be a bunch of sailors making breakfast in a calm mooring spot.

The soul sense swept past a second time, more slowly, lingering near the edges of the reed beds, then passed away.

She still counted to fifty before breathing out and being satisfied it had passed.

“They really suspect something,” Chunhua grumbled, casting a distant glance towards the shadow on the horizon that was Ulquan.

“I don’t think it’s just us,” she mused, thinking back on their grim passage through the straights.

It wouldn’t do to dwell too much on the night that had passed, but a part of her was really glad that her inner paranoia regarding the lengths that Sharvasus – or Udrasa in general – might have gone to regarding their ‘captives’ had driven her to take as many precautions as she had. The seeds of that suspicion had been planted after discussing at length with Qing Yao and Kai Manshu about their experiences with that accursed lantern she had destroyed and thoroughly sprouted as the various forces looked far too earnestly for them in the straights during the night.

Without the formation that Ling had used, without the gestalt belief that had slowly blossomed in the hearts of the crew as they fervently hoped they would not be spotted and without those talismans they had carved for everyone who had been a prisoner, she was sure they would have been found and captured.

“Again,” Ling murmured, glancing up.

Another sweeping breath of soul sense swept across the reed beds, almost mimicking the wind this time. Different in almost every way to what had just come a minute before, except in the depths of its insidious subtlety.

They sat there in silence, watching the stars slowly fade until that sweep passed as well, which took far longer than the previous one had.

“This is going to be a problem soon,” Kreva muttered to Uarz nearby.

“Uhuh,” Uarz didn’t quite look at them, but he was clearly rattled.

“These wards resisted that Jotnar,” Ling signed, “I am a lot stronger now and those senses are not that powerful.”

She could only nod at that. It was also surprisingly good training for her use of her principle as it was turning out, not to mention her growing comprehensions regarding the divination charms supplied by the talisman. Those were interesting for another reason as well, because there were clear similarities between her talismans and what Ling had done with the enlarged ‘One with What Is’ formation.

“I don’t know that I want to bet against the idea that they have some other means at their disposal,” she pointed out.

The problem there, was that ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ was beyond ambivalent on that point and her gut instinct told her that it wasn’t because it was an undecided thing. Rather, she suspected that those hunting for Ling, or perhaps their group in general at this point, had means beyond her grasp and she was running into some of the soft limits of what the art was capable of with her current comprehensions. Whether that was because she was not framing the things she was trying to divine properly, or because they legitimately had some means to obfuscate it, she couldn’t say though.

“…”

Ling shook her head and just sighed, stirring the porridge so it didn’t turn lumpy.

None of them stated the obvious, that the longer they stayed here the more chance there was of problems, but at this point it was all simply about balancing risk.

“How long?” she asked Uarz.

“Until they recover?” the navigator sighed, sounding as drained as he looked and not glancing into the lower deck where half the rowers were just lying like dying fish at this point. “Food will help, but this night was grim.”

“It was,” she agreed.

“Up above…” Chunhua sighed.

“Above?” Uarz frowned.

She looked up at the sky and saw what Chunhua had picked out. A few birds circling high, high above.

“Oh…” Kreva saw them and sighed deeply as well.

“Well outside of arrow range, or any kind of easy art that isn’t a lightning bolt,” Ling judged.

“Or an opportunistic yell,” she signed.

Ling just nodded, giving the porridge another stir.

Even at this distance, it was clear that the birds were not moving entirely ‘naturally’. To the casual observer they would not stand out especially, but all of them had principles that touched on aspects of the harmony of the natural world and just with ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’, never mind ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’, she could feel something slightly off about the way the three circled. What they could do about it, she couldn’t really say. It might be possible for them to snipe them with a soul sense attack, but that would immediately clue whoever was controlling them onto the fact that someone had noted it.

“I guess we just finish up breakfast, then start onwards,” she suggested, sweeping her gaze back across the reed beds so as not to make it appear that she was focused too much on the sky above.

“There is another problem,” Uarz said with a sigh.

“…”

“The damage to the mast?” she guessed.

Both Uarz and Kreva nodded.

“Avarz is checking it out,” Uarz agreed. “It will be okay for a while but that kind of weakness is not ideal, even if we are not putting an especially great amount of duress on the keel. However, it will slowly get worse anyway, just from the flex and twist of the vessel in the water. Here in the shallower waters it is okay, but with the swell at night…”

“—it will not have helped,” she finished.

“It will not,” Uarz nodded again. “Some can be fixed with mana reinforcement, but if we have to travel for a long time on the river the risk will get exponentially greater.”

“—and we cannot use mana reinforcement a lot if we are trying to evade notice,” Kreva added a bit more tersely.

-No, we cannot, she thought with an inner sigh.

“So, what do you suggest?” Chunhua asked.

“—Stealing another boat,” Avarz interjected, hauling himself up onto the main deck a few paces away.

“That bad?” Uarz groaned.

“There are two cracks in the keel, we can patch them but we will be rowing against the current… we have already been rowing against the current for over a day and the line of the keel was damaged even before that from the flood and the beaching,” Avarz elaborated.

“Stealing a vessel with a sail would help,” Ling agreed.

“The question there,” Chunhua pointed out, “is where, by the Maker’s name, do we find a boat that isn’t wrecked?”

“—that doesn’t require us to go back to Ulquan,” she added, because that was out.

“Mmmmm, yes,” Avarz grumbled, sitting down and massaging his arms.

Any question of not avoiding Ulquan had been quashed by the fate of the three other vessels their size that they had seen in the night. Two had been stormed and their crews actually thrown overboard by forces from Ulquan, while a third had been hit by an art and then towed back to shore, all its occupants sealed. Several other smaller ones had equally been seized and escorted back to the harbour as well. Whether it was because someone like Sharvasus was searching for them, or if it was just more general paranoia, she had no idea, but she also had no intention of risking going anywhere close enough to find out.

“Navigating the back channels, through the pagoda forest, will be dangerous as well,” Uarz noted.

-That must be the way we came before, she mused to herself, thinking about the towering ruins and their shrouds of yellow banners – which given what I now know, are not at all ominous…

“The other side has its share of unpleasantness as well,” Naakos added, from where he was seated on the edge of the vessel, fishing.

“It does,” Uarz agreed even more glumly, though neither elaborated.

-I will have to ask Naakos later what he means by that, she noted mentally.

“This is mostly ready,” Ling interjected, scooping up some of the porridge. “Unless you have fish to add?”

“A few,” Naakos used his spare rod to scoot the basket down to them, which held about a dozen mid-sized river fish.

Taking the basket, Ling eyed the contents, then passed it to her and Chunhua with an eye roll.

“…”

Chunhua scowled slightly but pulled out a fish, picked up a knife and put it on the deck, skilfully slicing it down the belly and gutting it in three swift motions, putting the remains into a pot. Compared to the mess that the admittedly keen Shi Tenfei and Shu Feilong had made gutting the fish the previous day... it was almost embarrassing to compare them.

“You could eat these raw,” Chunhua mused, plucking the three-star core out of it and rolling it in her fingers.

Picking one up, she considered the stunned fish and nodded. Raw fish was a bit of a delicacy back home, though somewhat limited in a place like West Flower Picking as the water in the river was not that clean, with lots of alchemical contamination and herb processing by-products. If you went to Blue Water City though, high end restaurants prided themselves on those kind of luxury dishes that proclaimed both the skill of their chefs and their ability to procure valuable spirit fish for such consumption.

Filleting a second, she turned it inside out and sliced it cleanly off the skin, set the meat to the side and then frowned.

“Ling, can you heat one of these bowls up really hot?” she asked.

“Sure,” Ling grabbed a stone bowl and pushed a thread of her principle into it until the air around it started to shimmer.

Taking it, she winced slightly; the temperature was not too much for her to bear given her current cultivation realm, but any mortal grabbing it would have had deep regrets for a lifetime. Tossing the skin and remaining flesh into it, she watched it sizzle and char rapidly. Grabbing a few spirit herbs she tossed them over it and then started on the second fish.

By the time she and Chunhua were done with the fish, which took a short ten minutes, they had a bowl full of cooked-through offcuts, heavily seasoned and fried to the point where even the scaly skin was edible and a decent stack of fresh fish meat to provide a contrast to the rather plain porridge. It probably wouldn’t be to everyone’s taste, but the key thing was to preserve the replenishing vitality in the food.

It was tempting to toss a few of the cores into the porridge as well, but she held off on that. The three of them could refine them without any issues, but the cultivators would be wary about beast cores, even as they currently were, she was pretty sure. None of them would want to incur a deviation from impure or inauspiciously aligned qi.

“Why don’t you show me the damage to the keel?” she said to Avarz at last, pushing the bowl away to let it cool down.

“—show you?” he asked, looking a bit puzzled.

“I admit I know little about boats, but if it is seeing how likely it is to fail in the next few hours, that I can do,” she said with a faint smile, swinging her legs of the edge of the deck.

“Ah, yes,” Uarz understood what she meant quite readily, which again reminded her that he at least was really quite savvy.

-Thankfully, with the contrast provided by the five we just hauled off the boat, we look positively native, she thought, landing down on the lower deck.

Avarz followed a moment later.

“How are things?” Feiwu Shen immediately asked.

“Breakfast is how things are,” she replied.

“…”

There were a few groans from nearby, but it had escaped basically nobody that it was breakfast time.

“I mean—” Feiwu Shen tried to recover his question, but she just waved a hand to cut him off.

“Dangerous,” she said more seriously, moving across to the gaps that led down to the lowest level of the vessel, which was mostly filled with mossy rocks and a somewhat concerning amount of water. “Eat breakfast and start taking lessons from the others on how to row this vessel.”

“We are being pursued?” Kai Manshu asked.

“Not openly, but we are close enough to Ulquan and Udrasa that we don’t want to be caught in whatever is happening—”

The vessel shook slightly as something hit the side with the familiar *thud* of an arrow exploding.

There was cursing from up above as everyone else looked around with varying degrees of wariness.

“What is it?” she called up, unsurprised that her ability to use soul sense had just evaporated like the rather ethereal morning mists.

“Archer… several small boats from the reeds,” Ling called down. “Maybe two dozen, mostly armed with bows and fishing spears, looking very rag-tag.”

“…”

“And they have yellow-painted arrows?” she asked. “Not to mention a soul sense ward…”

“No… actually—” Whatever Chunhua said in reply was lost amid two more arrows hitting the side of the vessel near the waterline.

“Unstable beast cores,” Avarz, crouching nearby, said. “Likely some local scavengers. They can see the boat is crippled and are trying to put cracks in the hull so we cannot easily escape.”

“There will be a lot of desperate people around I suppose,” Qing Yao grumbled.

“Aye,” Avarz agreed, shaking his head, to try to dislodge the ringing in his ears she supposed. “That they have a ward is not that surprising, most villages have a few such objects to protect fields and fight off big snakes.”

“Do we run, or fight?” Shi Tengfei asked her in Easten, looking concerned.

Glancing at the half-empty rowing benches, she turned back to Avarz.

“Is it worth them helping row?” she asked him, gesturing to everyone seated near the middle of the vessel.

“…”

The older Ur’Vash looked at the groups and shook his head. “Rowing in this kind of vessel needs experience and coordination, especially in a gnarly environment like this. They can help patch up the damage and defend, if it comes to it.”

“In that case, checking the damage will have to wait,” she sighed, shaking her head. “Lashaan, Teshek, could you please bring down the food? Their attack is probably timed to try and catch us off guard.”

“Aye,” Avarz agreed, grimacing and hauling himself back up to the deck.

Teshek and Lashaan followed him back up, as did she, crouching down in case more arrows arrived.

“One lot are in the reeds about 50 metres away,” Ling said from where she was still seated, next to the crab-shell pot.

“Mostly it’s small boats,” Chunhua added, not looking up from where she was sorting through arrows. “Hard to tell without using soul sense, but that’s out of the question here and now.”

“It is,” she agreed, picking up her own bow from nearby.

They had sorted out quite a few arrows early on, stashing them in some bundles along with other useful elements while leaving Ulmaz, mostly so they wouldn’t be marked too openly for having a spatial container. Those were not common, at least not in that scope. The boat they were on actually had two – one holding drinking water and a second full of preserved reed-rhizome flour, but neither were close to what they had and only seemed to hold a single type of material.

In fact, the only proper storage device she had seen in the hands of an Ur’Vash was the ring Quavez had had, and she had left that on the wreck. Sure, it would have been valuable and useful, but her attempt at the time to divine it had scattered off it like water off a duck’s back, holding only things she projected at it. Knowing what she did about the means and methods of keeping track of stolen storage rings, she was not going to fall for something like that.

“Another boat, skirting to our right,” Chunhua observed. “Two archers on it… aiming…”

A moment later, three arrows thudded into the boat near the waterline and exploded, making the whole vessel judder slightly. Several water birds scattered into the air, shrieking in anger.

“Shall we start?” Ling asked.

“I guess,” she sighed, picking up a white-fletched arrow and smearing a blue line down one side before dunking the point in the small pot of yellow dye.

Nocking the arrow, she sighted briefly on the farthest boat’s approximate location and then aimed the arrow up in the sky and let it fly.

It arced down into the reeds and—

The distant explosion kicked water, reeds, most of a rowing boat and five unfortunate Ur’Vash into the air in a rather impressive plume of debris.

“Ah…” Uarz was staring at her with his mouth slightly open.

Exhaling, she again marvelled at how the ‘logic’ behind the ‘Ur Gestalt’, as she had come to think of it, worked. Belief was the driving factor and weirdly, a night of evasion from all sorts of horrors on the river had instilled a lot of it in the crew. Purple had worked, because they desperately didn’t want to get caught by Udrasa…

Naakos raised an eyebrow, which she found amusing, because he knew they were not Ur’Vash, or Ur’Inan.

The other boats had realised their mistake now and were rapidly scattering back into the reed beds around the flooded field—

*KRUMP*

Chunhua’s arrow hit one of the nearest boats at the front and flipped it over, scattering screaming would-be pirates through the air.

Kreva just shook her head and picked up an arrow, red and gold, aiming at a third boat—

That arrow took an archer in the head, who rippled under the force of the impact and then exploded in a cloud of red gore, sending two others over the side and killing a third outright after they were impaled through the head by a shattered rib.

~ Shi Tengfei – Even Breakfast is not Sacred ~

Trying not to flinch at the sound of creaking timber as another arrow exploded against the side of the boat, Shi Tengfei found himself again wondering if he was just cursed. The crew around them were already starting at their oars, manoeuvring the vessel back into motion with grim determination.

“If they attack us, we might be in—”

Whatever Shu Feilong had been about to say was lost in the roar of a shockwave that made his teeth rattle and the whole boat judder faintly.

“What the fates was that?” Ao Meicheng gasped.

Turning to look out the boat on the right side, he saw bits of reed and water drifting down in the distance, telling him that it had not originated with the attackers, unless they had self-sabotaged somehow—

The front of one of the nearest vessels moving forward on that side pitched upwards in a cloud of splinters, the unlucky occupants hurled screaming into the water.

“…”

Watching slightly slack-jawed, he tried to work out what had just happened.

*Thud*

*Thud*

Two more arrows exploded against the left side of their boat, flares of unstable qi in his peripheral senses that made the superstructure shake yet again. The explosion he had just witnessed, by comparison had nothing like that. As far as he could see the yellow-coloured arrow had just hit the boat and then exploded with enough force to flip the whole thing over.

“Some kind of—”

They all ducked as an arrow landed on the deck above and exploded, sending splinters down.

“Some kind of Martial Intent?” Kei Zhanfeng half suggested, half stated.

“Here, eat,” he blinked as Teshek shoved a bowl of… beige soup at him.

“…”

“Don’t worry,” Teshek added with a nasty grin, “These idiots not know what totem they kicking.”

-Totem they are kicking? It took him a second to work out that that was, in fact, a local variation on the ‘kick an iron board’ saying.

Accepting the bowl, he saw the other woman, Lashaan, had gotten back down as well, carrying two more bowls… which turned out to be full of uncooked fish and… fried fish?

“Oh… tasty,” one of the younger demon women grabbed a slice of the fresh fish and ate it without any particular concern for the chaos outside.

Looking at the soup, stew… whatever it was, he had to admit it didn’t look particularly… appetising, but that was probably not the point. Everyone here was tired and drained of their qi, apart from them, so probably what it lacked in appearance it made up for in nutrition, given the demons seemed to use spirit food rather than things like medicines for such recovery.

He took a spoonful and glanced back outside, in time to see a red and yellow arrow hit an unfortunate attacker in the head—

“…”

It took a supreme effort not to spit out what turned out to be somewhat muddy tasting meal stew as he saw the distant and very unfortunate target of the arrow lose control of their qi and explode from a terminal qi deviation, taking out most of their boat with them. The really shocking thing was that the demon in question had been roughly comparable to a weak Nascent Soul cultivator, near as he could tell.

Looking sideways, he saw that Kei Zhanfeng and Ao Meicheng had also seen the same thing.

“You never seen southern archers fight?” Teshek chuckled.

“Uh… it’s a bit…” he managed in Easten, swallowing down the mouthful.

“Here, you forget old ways, forget strength of heart, strength of roots, old gods… we do not forget, this is why we are Ur’Inan,” the other male demon from that group, who had said very little for the most part, added with a nasty grin.

He didn’t know what to say to that.

-The arrow was just red and yellow, as far as I could see it had no special properties…

-And yet it exploded with enough force to tear apart a Nascent Soul expert somehow and did so instantly.

Looking around, he realised that some of the crew of the boat were… well they were not unsurprised, he supposed, but there was a definite edge to their mood all of a sudden.

“They look uneasy,” Shu Feilong muttered, as the rowers started to take the boat across the water towards the reed beds.

“Easy, easy, slow strokes!” the demon directing them hissed. “Those crappy arrows can’t do shit to this boat in the short term.”

*Thruooom*

*Thud*

As if to try and test that assertion, two more arrows hissed down onto the deck above, near the ruined mast, exploding with enough force to make his ears ring.

“They know where they are aiming though,” one of the rowers muttered.

They did know where they were aiming, that was true. There was another explosion out in the reed beds followed by screaming and distant curses in the local tongue.

Three more arrows hit the deck of the boat, but only two exploded. The third was grabbed by Lynn, tossed over the side he thought. A moment after that, the restriction on his soul sense faded away again.

“We really need to find some way to learn a bit of their language,” Bai Ruli muttered, turning her head this way and that as several rapid-fire conversations broke out among the rowers and the other demons.

“We do,” he agreed, looking around.

“Well, that was bracing!” Junee landed right beside them, soundlessly enough that he nearly flinched. “Everyone okay?”

There were various replies in the local tongue that he assumed were affirmative as she swept her gaze around.

“You are all okay as well,” she noted to him, speaking again in Easten.

“We are,” he agreed.

“In that case, you should eat up, because it’s likely to be a long day,” Junee said with a grin.

“…”

Staring back at the crab shell of muddy reed stew he had to concede it was not the worst thing he had ever eaten, though it was a bit over-peppery.

“If you don’t like the porridge, there is fish,” she pointed out, looking rather amused.

Shaking his head, he took some of the fried fish and nibbled it, finding to his surprise that it was far tastier than it looked. A bit more warily, he took the fresh fish and took a bite. Raw fish was a delicacy back home, but usually it was prepared by top chefs in very auspicious ways. To his surprise, however, the quality was such that it nearly melted on the tongue and still held a quite surprising amount of qi that could be refined.

“This is good,” he remarked, honestly surprised.

“Of course it is,” Yao, who was nearby, said with a rather haughty sniff, taking a whole piece and starting to eat herself. “I bet you only ever tasted fancy stuff with no substance.”

“…”

To avoid feeling awkward suddenly, he took another large bite, because in a way she was perhaps right, even though she could have no way of knowing it.

Junee shook her head again and then swung down into the lower level, landing in the water with a faint splash.

“It is good,” Ao Meicheng agreed, having just been made to eat some of the fish by Ruli.

Kei Zhanfeng and Shu Feilong both started to help themselves to their share, thankfully not asking him any more questions. It wasn’t that he disliked being the translator, but having to constantly answer idiotic, rather obvious questions was starting to take its toll on his patience he had to admit. Instead, he peered down into the lower level to see what Junee was up to.

“She is checking the mast,” he turned to find the young demon who had been helping him before had come over.

“Ah…” peering down again, at where Junee was now kneeling in the dark water running her hands around the fractured slab of wood and occasionally muttering to herself in the local language, he nodded. “It would not do to have the keel break.”

“You know about boats?” the youth asked.

“A bid… bit,” he corrected, swallowing down another mouthful of the fried fish. “But nothing this—” He was about to say… small, because by the standards of any decent-sized vessel back home, this was small, but that would probably cause more question than was healthy, so instead he went with “—this big.”

The youth nodded, clearly not catching or caring about his slight omission, but it still made him sigh inwardly and again wonder why he felt the younger man… demon, was oddly familiar.

-Is it something about his qi?

“Do you want more of that?” he looked up to find Kei Zhanfeng was eyeing his fish.

Moving the plate away, he took another obvious bite and grinned.

Kei Zhanfeng scowled, as Bai Ruli and Ao Meicheng both laughed.

“If you offer to help fish you can probably have more,” he suggested after taking another mouthful.

Kei Zhanfeng rolled his eyes and sighed, sitting back and finally asking, “I wonder who it was who attacked?”

“Do we know who attacked?” he asked Yao as politely as he could.

“Bunch of enterprising scavengers in all likelihood,” Yao replied, before trailing off as there was some shouting and the rowers on the left stopped rowing suddenly.

“Shallow mud bank, far more dangerous than a bunch of idiots in boats,” she added with an eye roll, noting his quizzical gaze.

-She absolutely still holds a grudge, a part of him groaned mentally.

“How much longer do we need to stay down here?” Shu Feilong added, grimacing.

Glancing over at his junior brother, who was serving as a pertinent reminder that certain afflictions could be a problem for you even after you had a foundation, he sighed. One such problem, as it turned out, was becoming sick on boats. Had he been able to use his qi a lot more, Shu Feilong would probably have been fine, but stuck down in the hold as they were he was looking decidedly pale.

“He seems unwell?” Yao asked blandly.

“He doesn’t do boats well,” he apologized.

“He looked okay yesterday,” she noted.

“That was up, above deck,” he pointed out. “When we were held prisoner they used it to torment him, which didn’t help either.”

“Ah…” she nodded.

“In any case, he asked how long we are likely to be stuck down here, hiding away,” he explained.

“Ah… until It is safe,” she replied with a shrug. “Or we leave the vessel. Don’t ask me how long that will be, I don’t know.”

“Well?” Shu Feilong asked.

“…”

“We are here for the foreseeable future,” he said after a long silence.

“Fates get buggered,” Shu Feilong groaned, sitting back and staring out of one of the openings.

~ Juni – River’s Progress ~

“Bugger,” crouching down in the bottom of the vessel, hands pressed against the mast, focusing on ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’, Juni couldn’t help but swear under her breath.

Sighing, she removed her hands and made her way further back, tracing the keel between the sacks of ballast. There were leaks as well, though not many. The worst had been patched already and no doubt Uarz would send someone down after her to fix the others when she told him. Overall though, the auspice for the integrity of the vessel was… not good.

The cracks in the mast mounting appeared fairly superficial, but her divination art told her quite a bit about how they were really not. The explosions and the rowing into the current had not helped either – not with the mast damage or the wider issues with the hull. Their attackers had certainly known what they were at, in terms of trying to damage the vessel further. Most of it was basically impossible to fix as well, near as she could tell. There were two slow fractures slowly spreading across two of the ribs where the mast had twisted and damaged where they joined, and another that was working its way bit by bit into the keel itself.

Reaching the limits of her progress, she slid back down the other side and hauled herself out of the aft opening to sit on the edge.

“Well?” Uarz asked, peering down from above.

“Do you want to know the good news, or the bad news?” she shot back.

“Bad, first,” Uarz chuckled.

“The boat is crocked,” she said. “There are two fractures down the keel and one of the ribs is splintering from the inside out. The mast step is also badly damaged and still leaking.”

“That’s about what I expected,” Uarz sighed. “—and the good?”

“We won’t sink for a few hours,” she said with a dark chuckle. “Though if we meet anyone capable of doing more than pinging Second and Third Advancement cores at us we will be in trouble.”

Uarz sighed, as did Omurz who was nearby and Avarz who was now helping row.

“There are a few small leaks elsewhere that need someone to go fix them as well,” she added.

“That’s easy enough to do,” Avarz nodded, before calling down the vessel. “Shovak, five minute break, grab some stuff and go check the leaks in the bottom.”

The singled-out crewman groaned but nodded, pulling his oar in and slipping off his bench.

Looking down the vessel at the rest of the passengers, she noted that most of the Ur’Inan were watching the rowers, presumably familiarizing themselves with the various tasks involved in case they did have to row. The two groups of cultivators were basically keeping an eye on each other, with Qing Yao and Kai Manshu also keeping half an eye on the rowing, in the expectation that they too might be asked to do that at some point if things got bad.

Satisfied that there was nothing stupid happening there – the cultivators they had freed from the wreck were just talking quietly about their recovery or, in the case of Shu Feilong, sitting there looking queasy – she climbed back up to the main deck.

“So, we don’t sink this hour,” Ling noted with a wry grin.

“We do not, not unless one of us shoots the boat,” she agreed. “Anything suspicious out there?”

“Some distant, angry Ur’Vash, but we have left them well behind,” Chunhua mused.

Standing up, she shaded her eyes and scanned the horizon. The good thing about it being so flat out here – and the water level being at least two metres over its previous height – was that nothing bigger than a low rowing boat was hidden by the reeds.

There was, in fact, a village or something rather like it on a slight rise about two miles away across the reed beds. Off to their right, she could also see the distant shadows of a few of the pagodas the others had talked about passing on their way to free her from Ulquan. Ulquan itself was still just visible as a lumpy shadow on the horizon, about 6 miles behind them.

-Still far too close for comfort, a part of her muttered.

“Mud bank left!” Eruuna, who had gone up to the front, called out.

“If it was a smaller vessel you could pole it,” Naakos grimaced, peering over the side into the swaying reed tops.

“Yeah,” she grimaced as well, looking back the way they had come, watching the swaying reed beds to see if there was any sign of them being followed.

“If they have any sense, they will have run away,” Naakos remarked, noticing her distant gaze.

“It’s those words ‘any sense’ that bother me,” Ling muttered from where she was checking on the various wards and fixing the ones that had been inadvertently damaged by the arrows.

“Hah, true,” Naakos agreed.

“Desperate times make for desperate folk,” Uarz sighed. “This flood has ruined the entire river region, if the state of Udrasa and Ulquan was anything to go by.”

-They probably had it coming, at least the rulers did, she couldn’t help but think, though she didn’t say it out loud.

“Keep left Maker take you!” Eruuna yelled again, peering over the side at the front.

“Port, keep port,” Uarz corrected her.

“Whatever,” Eruuna grunted, waving her hand to the left-hand side of the boat. “Go that way unless you want to be sucking mud for an hour.”

“…”

“Perhaps I should swap with her,” Naakos muttered.

“Probably a bad idea,” she remarked. “The others are feeling twitchy enough as it is, giving people things to do will help with that.”

Naakos looked at her and sighed, but did nod in agreement.

Walking over to the side of the vessel, she looked out at the reed beds again.

The sun was just peeking over the horizon now, casting a faint, pink glow across everything, reminding her of all sorts of rhymes about the colour of the sun and inauspicious mornings. Every society that had agriculture had one and she was sure that even the Ur’Vash here did. Probably the flood and the chaos her tribulation had unleashed would spawn a few new ones as well.

On the other side of the vessel, Ling was already sweeping the reed beds, while Chunhua had taken the rear, her bow close at hand.

“If this route keeps up, we are going to be passing almost through that village,” Uarz noted at last after they had travelled for another few hundred metres through the reed beds.

Following his pointing arm, she had to agree, the channel seemed to be taking them closer to the raised ground than she was comfortable with.

“Those boats were small and had to have come from somewhere,” Uarz added.

That was the problem, she had to concede. They had not been particularly big and those on themwere rather rag-tag. It was possible they were opportunists from somewhere like Ulquan, but she really doubted that and in fact…

She closed her eyes for a moment, focusing on ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’, trying not to let her preconceived notions cloud her judgement. Asking if they came from Ulquan was a dead end, so instead she tried to scope out whether the village was auspicious or inauspicious… and sighed softly at what she got back.

“Problem?” Ling signed.

“The village is somewhat auspicious for our purposes,” she signed back.

The series of intuitive nudges she had gotten neatly encapsulated everything that made your head hurt about trying to read divinations about such things. There was danger there, not particularly big danger, going there would benefit them more than not… but at the same time their arrival there would be both auspicious and inauspicious for the village.

“Ah...” Ling sighed as well, understanding the potential nuance in that statement without her having to elaborate much.

“It seems they probably did come from the flooded village,” she supplied to the others.

“…”

Kreva rolled her eyes off to the side, as if this was somewhat obvious, but didn’t say anything. Uarz just nodded.

By the time they had gotten within 500 metres of the flooded village, however, it was obvious that the boats had originated from there, if only because there were several more hauled up on the muddy slope, similar in style and decoration.

At that point, their progress and approach had been clearly marked with several figures standing on rooftops pointing in their general direction, all of them armed.

“That’s quite a well-armed village,” Chunhua remarked after they had observed matters for a minute, drifting in the reeds.

“It is,” Naakos agreed, glancing at Uarz.

“This close to Ulquan you would expect it to have some forces, a watch post or something, but yes, I agree that’s a lot of orichalcum for a small village,” Uarz mused, shading his eyes to see through the glare of sun on water.

“The channel will basically take us within spitting distance of the shore,” Ling, who had stood up on the edge of the vessel, remarked.

Looking the other way, over the mostly regular shaped beds of reeds and the swathes of water between them, she was fairly sure she knew why that was. The village probably had a canal for river access, allowing them to get crop harvests out, or even take them directly through the marsh to Ulquan.

“How long until we are in range?” Avarz asked.

“Not long,” she judged, looking at the elevation of the village. “The bigger question is why we are not already under a perception ward.”

“Perhaps we destroyed the only one they had?” Omurz, who had also come up on deck now, interjected, though even he didn’t sound that confident.

“Yeah, and I have a lifelong promise of service from the Siren of Udram to sell you,” Uarz retorted, before glancing at her and asking: “So how do you want to handle this, Hunter Junee?”

“Anyone who can’t take a hit goes below,” she mused, surveying the village, looking for obvious threats. “They will certainly know that their other boats came to grief. If they leave us alone, we can take it from there—”

“If they leave us alone I’ll dance naked in the next tavern we go to,” Kreva muttered.

“Hah!” Avarz snorted with laughter at her comment.

“What do you reckon?” Chunhua signed to her.

“Does your… principle give you anything?” she returned, curious.

“Bad vibes, faint sense of disruption, but I don’t have a fancy art like you,” Chunhua signed back with an eye roll.

“In other circumstances we could go clear that out quickly on our own,” Ling signed.

“Not now though,” she signed back. “If only because I don’t want the five below getting ideas that might be problematic.”

“You think they might run?” Chunhua frowned.

“If you were in their position, what would you do?” she pointed out.

Chunhua made a face and nodded.

She wanted to trust the five, or at least trust their good judgement, but in the back of her head, even without relying on the divination art, she knew that they were certainly just biding their time, looking reasonable, recovering their strength. All of them had been through brutal captivity and suffered at the very least some serious humiliations and mistreatment and didn’t have the advantage of seeing what Qing Yao and the others had.

If Kei Zhanfeng had not been an Immortal, which they had incautiously given away through their unguarded conversations in Imperial Common, she was sure they might have been more likely to just go with the flow. As it was, she was sure their strategy was to play along and wait for either them to lower their guard or for him to recover enough to trust to his superior realm. That made leaving them alone on the boat a bad idea, period.

“Well, we must make do with what we have,” she added, quickly flicking through the quiver of arrows she had stashed near to hand to see that there was not anything weird in it.

They slowly made their way onwards down the channel, the village growing more and more prominent in their field of view. The rise it was on was not that much, clearly artificial, built up over the centuries probably, if not longer. There were a few trees left standing, probably someone’s orchard and the wall, such as it was, was in the process of being repaired, but most of the buildings had been badly hit by the flood. What stood out, however, was that most of those standing guard did not look like villagers… nor did they really look like Udrasa guards, or what passed for them.

“Ah, those are probably a bunch of mercenaries,” Uarz observed as they got within 200 metres of the village.

“They do have that look,” she tacitly agreed, observing three figures who were standing in loose-fitting leather armour carrying bows on top of the tallest building, looking in their general direction.

“And still no wards… nor any attempt to check us out with perception,” Omurz muttered.

“That just demonstrates they know what they are at,” Kreva, who was crouched down low now, pointed out.

-Or they have someone good enough that we haven’t noticed, or some other trick, she thought silently.

“Two boats, off to the right,” Chunhua murmured.

Glancing in that direction, it took her a moment to pick them out, because they had actually disguised them, cut reeds propped upright in clumps to make them less obvious as they moved. Both held a few figures, crouching low. Again, though there was no ‘soul sense’ some of the watchers had fairly uncontrolled ‘Martial Intent’ which, even as she scanned the reeds, was disturbing her own Martial Intent and principle in subtle ways.

“They are Fifth Advancement,” Kreva muttered, clearly catching that as well. “Very brash, probably a lot of killing but not much good at hunting.”

“Yeah, you walk around with that hate eye, your quarry is going to walk the other way somewhere around Udrasa,” Avarz chuckled.

“Or walk up behind you and tear your face off,” Ling added.

“Probably that,” Avarz agreed.

Looking at the lay of the land, she turned over the larger strategy in her mind, the one that she had been thinking of ever since she started worrying earlier in the day about trails and being followed.

There were issues that couldn’t be addressed, certainly, at least not in ways she was willing to consider – like the potential that the Ur’Vash had done something with that lantern to the other captives… or the two crew caught up in it. That was a lingering doubt regarding the other four as well, at this point. The chances of her being marked were fairly slim, she figured, given what she had just been through, but even that she wasn’t willing to entirely discount.

Putting those problems aside though, the key thing was that they get a better boat and distance themselves from any potential observance from earlier. To do that required someone to ambush them with a soul sense ward, because that should, she was fairly sure, obfuscate matters enough that someone would have to come look in person, buying them further time.

The final element was just to not leave any obvious traces that could link them back to anything someone affiliated with Sharvasus, or Sharvasus himself, might have witnessed. The hydra qi… was what it was, unfortunately, however that also precluded Ling doing anything especially spectacular, because there were certainly not many beings like her around.

“If possible, just rely on Martial Intent and the Ur Gestalt,” she signed to the others, watching the village come closer.

“You want to limit our imprint on the fight,” Chunhua signed back.

“Yes,” she signed in reply. “We will struggle to leave a false trail, but we can certainly give anyone trying to follow us a headache.”

“…”

“Right,” she turned to the others. “We have a plan. We need a new vessel, at least in the short term, so if this place has a boat with a mast that can take us, we are stealing it.”

“Will be a pity to see this old boat go,” Avarz sighed.

“My apologies,” she said with a grimace.

“No… she is on her way out,” Uarz sighed. “Even if we took her back, she would be completely rebuilt.”

“The second thing is to ensure that we get clear of whatever is going on around here,” she said decisively. “You all saw what the patrols around Ulquan were like, I for one want none of that anywhere near me.”

The others all nodded, even a few down below who were listening now.

“If it’s mercenaries they may force the whole village to fight, if they are pirates it could be worse,” Uarz pointed out.

“A plan is a plan, until stuff happens,” Naakos observed.

“It is,” she agreed, watching the group on the roof pointing and having a discussion in her peripheral vision. “Ideally, we would wait until they trigger the perception ward—”

“That they have not done so, means they are confident that they have the upper hand,” Avarz interjected.

“—Indeed,” she agreed, regaining the thread of the conversation. “However, such arts are not that common, so perhaps they are just being lax. After all, we are not a bunch of angry serpents.”

“Hah ha—!” Ling chortled.

“Want to go explain the rules of engagement to the lot below?” she said to Ling, who nodded and swung her legs off the main deck and dropped down to the rowing deck.

They watched in silence as the village came closer.

And closer…

And closer.

Finally, when they were barely 50 metres away from it, a voice, infused with some qi boomed out.

“Surrender and we will spare you, turn over all the women, your ship and your cargo and you and your crew can go free, Ragvaz!”

“They recognise you,” she remarked drolly to Uarz, who just grimaced.

“You ain’t fleein’!” another voice yelled out. “Not in that crocked wreck!”

“You should reply,” she murmured.

“YOU AREN’T SAILING IN HER EITHER!” Uarz yelled back.

“THAT’S FOR US TO WORRY ABOUT!” one of the archers on the nearest roof called, his remark accompanied by distant laughter.

“Know who they are?” she asked.

“Could be any number of crews,” Uarz sighed.

“Something about this doesn’t quite add up,” Chunhua pointed out. “If this lot want to capture the boat, then why were the others trying to sink it?”

“Those arrows were just designed to exacerbate the damage and slow us down. Their goal is the cargo and…”

“Us?” she finished helpfully.

“Well, I doubt that specifically,” Uarz frowned.

“This doesn’t bode well for us wanting to get a boat out of them,” Ling pointed out, climbing back up.

“LAST WARNING!” one of the archers on the roof yelled down.

{Bright Heart Shifting Steps}

Sighing, she focused on the art and in that moment got all kinds of inauspicious intuitions that had not been there in the moments before as her qi plummeted.

Uarz just made an obscene symbol in their general direction, which was reply enough.

“Shit,” she snatched up her bow, grabbed a yellow, blue and red arrow and sighted on the archers on the roof in her mind’s eye.

“AH WELL, IN THAT CASE… RELEASE THE TOA—!

Even as the others ducked for cover, she was already a step ahead of circumstances; her arrow, one of the orichalcum-tipped ones, hit the speaker on the roof straight on, sending them tumbling off—

{MASS HOLD LIVING}

A swirling formation reflected in the sky above half the village, including their boat, and she immediately felt like her arms were caught in thick mud—

*THUMP*

Her arrow exploded with enough force to send bits of building raining down into the nearby swamp. The restriction, unfortunately, didn’t vanish and the boat just kept moving forward, with all of them restrained roughly where they were.

-Shit, nameless, fate-thrashed monkeyshit! She snarled in her heart, cursing herself for trying to be too smart.

Below deck there was the sound of wood and bodies crashing into each other as the rowers were all held in place as the boat moved, hitting oars and even breaking a few by the sounds of it. Already she could feel the restriction of the art or whatever it had been fading, whoever had triggered it presumably only having the qi… or mana to keep it channelled for a few moments. However the damage was already done as their vessel twisted in the water and its prow travelled into the shallows and beached itself thoroughly—

An arrow hit Avarz in the arm, making him shake, veins standing out on his face as his body instinctively fought the restriction to try and scream as she saw the golden-bronze sticking out of his flesh.

Pushing herself to move, her limbs still feeling like she was moving through mud, she barely evaded another arrow that would have caught her in the shoulder, making bow use rather… difficult in the short term.

Another volley of arrows hissed down, barely missing her, Ling, Chunhua and Uarz.

Five figures covered in mud scrambled over the side of the vessel, all holding clubs studded in golden-bronze spikes and ropes—

“Quick, before the restriction vanishes!” one of them snarled, pulling out a net that gave her a rather ominous feeling and tossing it at her and Chunhua.

Exhaling, she unleashed the full force of her principle at the same time Ling and Chunhua did. All five flinched, their attacks foundering as three separate Martial Intents assailed them, followed abruptly by two more – Kreva and Naakos.

“AHIIIIEEEEEEEEEGH!”

One of them managed to scream an inarticulate war cry and threw himself… backwards off the boat in terror. The constriction on them vanished and she managed to scramble back, swatting the net away with her bow—

Three more attackers scrambled up over the side, nearly jumping on top of her. She caught the arm of the nearest one as they swung their club down at her and they both rolled across the deck for a moment—

{Blossoming Lotus Seizes All}

Her palm landed in his chest and he physically spat blood as she sent a wicked pulse of Martial Intent and her principle into his body, ruining what passed for meridians in the Ur’Vash.

Nearby, Uarz, who had shaken off her rather indiscriminate attack, snarled and did something with his hands that made another attacker stumble and then cough up a probably lethal amount of blood.

The last attacker lunched for Chunhua who caught him by the neck and spun, smashing him down straight onto the edge of the rail with a rather wet *crack*—

With a groan, their vessel pitched sideways as it settled on the bank, sending all of them rolling to the right as it did so. There were various screams and curses from below deck in a variety of languages as the unhappy occupants of the lower deck were sent tumbling again.

“Shit…” Kreva groaned, pushing herself up.

“…”

Before she could say anything, ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ tugged at her mind, warning her again that something very inauspicious was—

Three arrows hit the boat, all of them with strange symbols carved on them. Two more landed nearby in the mud and a final one hissed over the top…

“Oh Maker go fuck himself,” Uarz snarled, diving for the nearest arrow.

Ling grabbed one and it smoked for a second then burst into flames.

Scooping up her bow, she nocked another arrow and picked an archer at random, sending an arrow hissing up into the air as she scrambled down off the boat. The archer saw it coming and dived for cover, only for her arrow to hit a rampart, smash in two and the point impale them through the leg anyway—

*BOOM*

The explosion sent bits of Ur’Vash flying everywhere as her target’s qi destabilized catastrophically.

*Thock*

*Thock*

*Thock*

Three arrows hissed down to hit the boat near her—

Ducking down into the shallow water she grimaced as the beast core arrowheads exploded with enough force to make her skin itch.

“SHOW PENITENCE TO QUAZAM FOR YOUR CRIMES AND BOW DOWN!”

The words echoed across the village, carrying with them a strange, rather unsettling edge. Scrambling up, she saw that Uarz and quite a few of the crew, not to mention most of the cultivators, were literally bowing, their limbs shaking as they tried to fight off the inherent command.

“Oh come on!” Ling scowled, standing up nearby.

“It is how they recapture escaped slaves,” Kreva growled, pulling herself up out of the mud where she had also been thrown by the explosion.

“Probably being opportunistic in the off chance that anyone has a record. This does pose a problem though.”

“You don’t say,” she grimaced, spitting out a mouthful of muddy water.

“Well, it means that this lot have a proclamation of authority from the Masters,” Kreva muttered.

“So they are pirates but they work for the Masters,” Chunhua grumbled, casting about for her own weapon.

“Yep,” Kreva sighed. “They are officially sanctioned robbers.”

Nocking another arrow, she swept the buildings for any more targets but saw none, the others having learned their lesson at this point.

-Well, they think they have learned their lesson, she sneered inwardly.

Aiming up in the air, she let ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ shimmer in her mind’s eye until she got a faintly auspicious nudge and then unleashed the arrow.

Not bothering to look where it went, she infused Martial Intent into the next one, also painted yellow, and aimed it at a random building, unleashing it.

The side of the building she hit vanished in a hail of mud brick and timber. A moment later, Chunhua shot a second arrow into the building, which took the roof off—

Forewarned by the nudge in her head, she was looking in the right direction to see the greenish ball of fire swirl out of the village in their general direction with deceptive speed. Chunhua actually beat her to the shot, sending an arrow into it that somehow destabilized the ball and made it explode like a miniature firework, raining green flames down over two buildings and a fair bit of the slope.

“We need to deal with that mage,” Uarz groaned, pushing himself up from where he had taken cover, having shaken off the impulse to ‘bow down’.

Looking around, she saw that Qing Yao, Avarz, Kai Manshu and… Wei Chu had all managed to collect themselves, shaking off the varying degrees of restraint that the command had put on them. Wei Chu was helping Feiwu Shen, while Kai Manshu was checking the other cultivators who were sweating, their muscles corded, looking very unhappy, as she supposed they might in the circumstances.

“…”

Taking another blue arrow, she drew her bow and focused on that, trying to let her principle and ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ guide her as best they could.

*Boom*

Another arrow, this time from Ling, exploded a building on the far side of the village and abruptly she got a flicker of… something.

~ Vazago, Pirate and Pillager – Ruqu Village ~

“By the TAKER’S COCK! This was a terrible idea!” Wez, one of his subordinates, screamed, scrambling clear of the ruined building that had just been demolished by an arrow.

-Yep, it was, Vazago thought, scrambling back. We should have just rounded up the promising ones into the scout sloop and sailed for Uldara!

Villagers, pressed into service, were cowering everywhere with no idea which way to run.

“You know how you said Ragvaz was a coward with as much spine as a mud worm?” he snarled over at his captain, Mugvar, who was kneeling nearby.

“Shut up,” Mugvar snarled, looking alternately at the sky and their mage, Xakvor.

“Xakvor, how is the next spell, we need something here!” Mugvar called over at the mage, a rotund, balding man in a now very muddy pale blue cloth robe.

“Like a blocked shit!” Xakvor snapped back. “If you can’t keep—”

An arrow scythed down out of the sky and narrowly missed Xakvor courtesy of him turning to look at Mugvar.

They all stared at the completely blue arrow, sweating.

“Oh Maker take me by the balls and strangle me,” Mugvar hissed.

-Blue arrows… he gawked, then recalled that Ragvaz had at least one barbarian mercenary in his crew, a rather sullen woman called Kreva who had had difficulties with the Hundred Legs tribe out west…

-Did he hire more or capture a few war-slaves?

“Barbarian mercs…” Xakvor snarled, snatching up the arrow then tossing it down. “Fuck! My price just doubled you—”

Half the building behind them vanished in an expanding cloud of mud brick and reeds.

He hit the far side of the street feeling like he had just been hit in the stomach by the world’s meanest hammer, the mana in his body chaotic.

Xakvor, who had been rather closer than him, was protected by a shimmering veil of runes but looked pale and drained. A second orb of green fire, probably cast by one of his two female mana-slave ‘apprentices’ Akuja or Xayak, barely cleared the collapsed village wall before it was disrupted and again scattered green fire everywhere.

-Don’t tell me Ragvaz got enough money from somewhere to hire a Maker-cursed shaman? he complained in his heart.

“Vazago… help!” pushing himself up he saw Uvar, one of their rowers, trying to crawl out of the wreckage of the building that had just been shot.

“You, drag him out!” he commanded a cowering villager who was holding his fishing spear over his head like a shield.

“…”

The villager stared at him then at Uvar, then threw down his spear and fled down the street.

“Fucking trash,” Mugvar reached out a hand and grabbed the luckless coward, dragging them back and breaking their legs in two smooth motions. “You see him?” Mugvar called. “If you—!”

The captain’s words were lost as another building nearby detonated in three separate explosions.

“Fucking hell, they have more than one?” Xakvor spat, pressing his back to the collapsed wall of their cover as mud bricks rained down at random amid the billowing dust.

“Then get another restriction spell down so we can capture them! Do you know how much they go for as slaves?” Mugvar shot back.

“I know how hard as—”

This time, he saw the arrow come down, not that there was anything to be done about it because it somehow defied his ability to properly focus on it beyond registering the colours, yellow and blue.

It hit the ground, burying itself halfway to the fletching, which by design told him the arrow was from Ajara… and didn’t explode.

“It didn’t explo—?”

The question, from one of the villagers cowering nearby, was cut off by the arrow exploding.

He hit the wall of the building behind him and felt his ribs creak in very unpleasant ways.

Shaking his head, he tried to banish the purple splotches from his eyes and saw that two of their crew were dead and three of the villagers rather unpleasantly wounded.

Uvar had staggered up and was looking around with the confused look of someone hit too hard in the head.

Xakvor had rolled away and was pushing himself up, while Mugvar had mostly weathered the explosion from his natural durability and status as a Sixth Advancement expert.

The other villagers still near them were all lying in the dirt, shaking in terror or trying to play dead.

“Where is that Changer-accursed toad?” Mugvar snarled, looking down the street towards the edge of the village.

“No idea, boss, Ujumu was over the other side, near where the first explosions hit,” another rower, Zetak, who was lucky enough to be still conscious and un-stunned rasped from nearby.

“Okay, here is what we do—”

Mugvar was cut off as an arrow passed through the wall of the building and hit Uvar in the chest with enough force to impale him against the far wall.

“…”

They all stared at the fist-sized hole in the wall… then at the unfortunate and very dead Uvar, who was still twitching slightly from the force of the impact, his wound smoking unpleasantly.

Instinctively he had ducked low, as had most of the others, but there was no explosion.

“—Gather up these wretched trash and just mob them!” Mugvar snarled, gesturing at two cowering groups of villagers who had scrambled out of a nearby building and were now frozen in terror. “Xakvor, get another restriction ready and use it when I say.”

“The villagers won’t do it,” he pointed out, looking at their shaking legs and piss-stained garments. “At this point they can’t even shit straight, let alone run at an enemy.”

“Fuck what they want, they do it or we take them to Uldara and sell them so they can be useful in life,” Mugvar sneered, looking around. “YOU HEAR THAT YOU MUD FUCKERS! YOU GET OUT THERE AND TAKE THAT BOAT OR YOU’RE ON THE NEXT BOAT TO ULDARA!”

“YOU TELL ‘EM, BOSS!”

“GET OUT THERE!”

“STOP COWERING LIKE CRABS!”

“RUN BOYS! RUN!”

Various crew from around the village hooted and jeered, their actions accompanied by the curses of the remaining villagers as quite a few were forced unceremoniously out of the places they had been hiding. Shaking his head, he pushed the two who were skulking sullenly in the ruin of the house next to him further down the street, even as he took count of the rest of their actual crew still in the vicinity.

They had had about sixty two left in their crew when they landed here yesterday evening, which meant that they would have been rather outnumbered here, but most of those in the village were not fighters, just farmers and the odd hunter, and this close to Ulquan the guards had mostly been lazy. Now, however, they probably had half that number as far as he knew. If the villagers had had any spine at all they might have been in trouble, but again, this close to Ulquan they were soft and useless. Even if they sold them all as slaves he supposed they would barely cover half the losses just staying here had incurred.

“Go with them,” Mugvar snapped at him.

“Go with…?” he repeated dully.

-Fuck you, you rabid old orc, he grumbled inwardly. We could have let this boat just go on by, but you wanted to make some fucking money…

“Are you disobeying?” Mugvar sneered.

He stared at Mugvar then spat on the ground and waved to the other two crew nearby to follow him.

-If I have to go into this mess, you lot are as well, he glowered.

Both stared at Mugvar, but the captain was already heading over towards Xakvor, giving them no further mind.

-I could just stab him with an orichalcum blade and run now… take a few of the women, the boat will hold some… he thought with a scowl, but quashed that thought almost as it emerged.

“What are you waiting for,” he snapped at the two rowers, Zetak and Quoz, pointing up the street. “Start rounding up this rabble!”

Quoz spat on the ground, but Zetak just sighed and scrambled over his wall, grabbing two cowering fishermen on the other side and shoving them forward.

Grumbling inwardly, he grabbed another villager who was pretending to be dead, sent them stumbling with a kick and headed after the two rowers for the edge of the village.

They got four more rounded up, and one more rower by the time they arrived at the collapsed wall and the buildings that it was built through.

“What are we doing!” Kutz, one of his deputies – an actual experienced crewman, not a useless rower – called over, scrambling out of the ruin of what was probably a fish drying shed, pushing four more muddy villagers with fishing spears ahead of him.

“Mugvar wants us to send them in,” he scowled, waving at the cowering villagers who were trying to stay as low as possible. “Then Xakvor is gonna lock ‘em out again…”

“Apparently,” Quoz, who was also crouching down low against a building, glowered.

“That’s a shit plan,” Kutz remarked, grabbing another villager, a woman who had been holding back, and shoving her out of the building as well. “This trash are gonna run at the first arrow unless we bind them.”

“You tell that to Mugvar,” he spat, warily peering around the corner.

The vessel, Ragvaz’s Pride, was beached in the channel, offering precious little cover to those who had been on the deck. The issue, however, was that the archers on it, savage barbarian scum, had scattered into the reeds and would just snipe them until they either ran out of arrows or decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

“Any sign of them?” he asked another crewman who had just scrambled up.

“None, we sent a few villagers forward but they don’t attack unless—”

The arrow hit the building they were crouching beside, making the ground shake under the force of the detonation.

“How the fuck are their stupid arrows this strong?” Katz snarled, shaking his head. “Nobody does that hoodo shit out here.”

“One of ‘em must be a shaman,” Zetak spat from where he was also crouching.

“Fuck! This is like raiding villages towards Ajara!” Katz complained.

“…”

“More to the point, what went wrong with the group who were meant to grab the boat when they were all caught by the first spell?” he muttered, carefully looking over the rubble at the distant boat again.

“Perhaps we should put up the ward?” one of the villagers, an older Ur’Vash, suggested.

Katz hit them for daring to speak out of turn, which was a bit wasteful, but everyone was on edge. They probably should have put up the ward, but Mugvar and Xakvor were both Sixth Advancement and Xakvor had complained that it interfered with his ability to control the toad.

“Speaking of… Where is the toad?” he asked Katz.

“Yeah…” Quoz muttered, looking around uneasily. “Don’t like the idea of not knowing where that thing is.”

“Fucked if I know,” Katz grumbled. “It was over by the ruined buildings on the west side. They intended to use it to make doubly sure when we approached, but clearly that hasn’t gone to plan…”

“If it’s died Mugvar is going to sell half of you to cover the cost of it,” he pointed out.

“If it’s died I might just kill Mug—”

He stared as the arrow, blue, yellow and red with an orichalcum tip, pierced Katz through the back, pinning him to the ground—

The explosion was silent, flipping him, the two other crew and half a dozen villagers cowering nearby in every direction.

He hit the ground a moment before something hit him in the chest. Rolling away he saw that it was Katz’s head and a bit of his upper torso, eyes replaced by smoking holes, his face a rictus of shock and horror.

Nearby, he saw a second arrow hiss out of nowhere and narrowly miss Zetak—

When he recovered his sight, his whole body hurt… mainly, as it became clear, because a part of a building had fallen on him. Pushing the bricks aside he didn’t stand – that was a sure-fire way to get hit – and tried to see what the state of their surroundings was. The building they had been in was levelled, in fact it was a crater now, half its cellar exposed to the world, crates of the disgusting reed roots slowly smouldering away.

“This is insane!” an arm grabbed him and he was dragged out of the rubble by Wez, of all people, who was also bleeding badly.

“Tell me about it,” he gasped, moving each of his limbs in turn, relieved to find he had broken nothing.

{MASS HOLD LIVING}

The words echoed in the swirling mana of their surroundings as Xakvor got the spell off and he sighed with relief.

“At last!” Wez exclaimed, looking around. “RIGHT YOU LOT GET OUT THERE AND SUBDUE THEM!”

There was some groaning but, backed up by the threats already presented to them, some twenty or so villagers, mostly holding hunting bows and fishing spears scrambled out, chased along by half a dozen of their crew—

The arrow hissed out of nowhere, barely visible, and took Wez straight through the chest, passed through the wall of the building behind them both and exploded with enough force to make his vision distort again.

-What the fuck!

He tried to curse, but found that he couldn’t hear his own voice. Struggling to get to cover, he saw two more of the rowers collapse, orichalcum-tipped arrows sticking out of their heads. Villagers caught in the open scattered, screaming and cursing, as he tried to see where the arrows had come from. The one that had hit Wez had caught him while he was turning and he had barely seen the arrow before it hit.

“THE TOAD HAS ESCAPED!” a woman screamed in panic from further down the edge of the village.

Those words nearly made him just hit his head off the dirt in annoyance.

“Fuck!” Quoz, who was also somehow still alive cursed from nearby, echoing his sentiments quite succinctly.

“This is absolutely what the barbarians mean by ‘having an orange day’,” he groaned, looking out at the reddish-tinted waters in the early morning sun.

“ARE YOU GONNA BE BEAT BY SOME FUCKING BARBARIANS!?!”

Mugvar’s voice roared from deeper in the village.

“RAGVAZ! I AM GONNA TEAR YOUR SPINE OUT AND TURN YOU INTO A BANNER!”

Shaking his head, he rolled the last of the way out of the rubble and back into what was left of the crude street beside the collapsed wall. Nearby, several villagers who had been part of Wez’s ill-fated attempt to advance were still cowering in bits of cover. He considered ordering them to do something, but it was pointless, at this point only elites would be able to do anything meaningful and the archer or archers they were up against were not so inaccurate that body shields would do much.

Scrambling along the street he heard another scream off to his right and saw another of the crew, a mercenary they had hired in Ulquan only a few days ago, collapse, thrashing with an orichalcum arrow straight through his heart.

-Shit, again! he cursed himself for having not paid attention to which way they were standing because the source of the arrows was… aggravating—

The building across from him, which had been the guards’ watch post a few days prior, was hit by two arrows that didn’t explode.

-They can even fake them out…?

“Agggggggrh!” he snarled under his breath and kept low, scrambling around the rubble, and stopped.

In the middle of the clearing… was the ‘Toad’… and its handler, both killed by a single arrow that had punched through the dog-sized critter’s head and through the mage apprentice’s heart.

-Wait… that voice that said the toad had…

He dived back into cover even as he saw the dark-haired, tattooed woman crouching on the roof, still enough that she was next to invisible unless you were looking right at her. Even then, his gaze slid off her in disturbing ways…

She stared right at him and he felt the strength drain out of his limbs. He tried to stumble back around the corner, but something about her just made his reactions sluggish and clumsy. His mind screamed at him, even as he saw her select a blue, red and yellow arrow from her quiver and level it at him—

He staggered back and inadvertently tripped. The arrow went right past his face and exploded less than a foot away from him. He was pitched up and landed hard on some rubble, the breath knocked out of him as he grasped at his face. Forcing his eyes open, he found he could still see.

-Shit… I am still out in the open! A voice in his head screamed at him, even as bits of dirt rained down around him.

“GET HER!”

{LUGMAZ’S FURIOUS FIRE BOLT}

Never had he been more pleased to see Xakvor as the rotund mage, accompanied by Mugvar and four other elites of the crew, rushed into the small square, the mage already casting the spell.

The archer fled from the roof, which vanished in a small cloud of green fire-bursts.

“AHIEEEEEE—!”

A guard standing right beside Mugvar was hit in the chest by an arrow from an almost impossible angle, falling to the ground with a yell. Mugvar spun and lashed out with a slingshot he had been holding rather innocuously, lobbing a glittering orb of death through the air.

The explosion of the beast core their captain had used for ammo levelled a building on the far side—

With a rippling shield of mana, Xakvor blocked an arrow that dropped almost vertically and would have hit him in the head.

“These fucking archers!” the mage snarled at the group around them. “Can you wastes not get even one?”

“…”

As much as he could understand Xakvor’s frustration, the obvious problem was that, with the exception of the woman just now, they had not so much as laid eyes on one.

“These are clearly hunters from the plains… perhaps they were getting transport on Ragvaz’s boat…” Temvor, one of the elite guards, muttered, staring around warily and keeping his shield up.

“Perhaps… but they killed my Toad,” Mugvar spat, “For that alone I will capture them and sell them all as dock chattel in Uld—”

Mugvar broke off his curse and spun, blocking an arrow with the blade at his waist, the speed of the movement a reminder that for all that he was a loud-mouthed bastard, Mugvar was still a formidable Sixth Advancement fighter who could walk into an important position in most settlements across the riverlands.

“I have heard of you,” a male voice chuckled, making them all turn.

He stared at the old Ur’Vash, who was basically topless and carrying a simple hunting spear.

“You are Mugvar, the Child Stealer,” the bearded old Ur’Vash said jovially.

“And who are you?” Mugvar sneered.

“Naakos.”

“Naakos.” Mugvar repeated, incredulously.

The other guards and even Xakvor looked equally incredulous, as they might.

“Naakos…” Mugvar repeated, barely holding back his laughter. “Old Ur’Vash, you need to think of better jokes to make before you—”

“Who says the best jokes, let us leave to the ancestors to decide,” the old Ur’Vash chuckled, walking forward. “What does not change is that there are many who would rejoice to know your long walk is ended, Mugvar.”

“Capture him,” Mugvar commanded.

Staggering up, he watched as Ulutz, Kemvar, Tebor and Fengal all advanced on the old Ur’Vash who simply spun his spear idly… and stabbed Fengal straight through the head as if he was a block of wood.

“...”

The others all scattered, however the old Ur’Vash effortlessly caught Kemvar, swiped his legs out from under him—

{LOCKING CIRCLE}

Xakvor’s spell caught the old man square in the chest and he froze.

Ulutz and Tebor both lashed out at the old Ur’Vash with their orichalcum-studded clubs... and he stared as the Old Ur’Vash caught them effortlessly, spinning both attackers like they were dolls and throwing them down.

Kemvar surged up, tackling the old Ur’Vash—

He barely saw the movement as Kemvar was kicked into the building.

“Bast—AAIGGSDSSHHAHAAAGGHH!” An arrow took Ulutz through the crotch, sending him screaming to the ground before he could even get back to his feet.

Spinning, he looked around for the archer but saw nobody—

“Looking for me?” she stepped out of the shadows of the building, dressed in a nondescript robe like any poor village woman might wear, another arrow already set in her bow, trained on him.

In desperation, Xakvor held up the proclamation that they had been granted that allowed them to act as auxiliary military forces under the banner of Great Master Mazadus.

"BOW BEFORE—

The arrow appeared almost lazily, dropping out of the air like a ghostly shadow, and pierced Xakvor through the neck. It was not an immediately lethal blow, Xakvor was a mage after all… however it did cut off the attempt at deploying the prestige of the proclamation.

Spitting, Mugvar turned, already spinning his sling—

The old Ur’Vash arrived beside him, grabbed Mugvar’s arm and tossed him down like he was a child, effortlessly disarming him.

“You–!”

He stared dully as the old Ur’Vash spun his spear and slammed it straight through Mugvar’s face, killing him in one go.

Backing away, he tried to find strength in his limbs as the old demon pulled the spear out and rounded on Xakvor who was rasping on the ground. Finally finding strength, he scrambled backwards and found… the archer standing not twenty yards away, her bow already drawn, her dark hair swirling in the morning breeze.

She half smiled and released the arrow. He spun, trying to dodge, but his limbs were unable to work properly again—

~ Juni — Ruins of Ruqu ~

“What was that about a plan?” Ling muttered, watching the last of the distant pirates leading the charge out of the village get dispatched by Qing Yao and Lashaan, who had gone with Naakos to deal with the accursed ‘mage’.

“Something, something first contact,” she sighed, looking up at the tilted vessel behind them and the ‘purple’ camouflage that was having a surprising impact on how many attacks actually found them.

“What do we do if they don’t have a replacement boat?” Kai Manshu asked, from where he was crouched nearby in the shadow of the reeds, sorting through arrows.

“Cry?” she suggested, only half joking.

“If you had told me this morning that we would run in to Mugvar’s Marauders, of all the Changer-accursed bastards who could be wrecked on this stretch of river, I would have thought you were drinking,” Uarz complained.

Nodding, she took another orichalcum-tipped arrow she had painted blue and sighted on the village fifty-odd metres away, then focused on ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’. This time it took her a few breaths to find a target, at which point she broke the angle of sight, aimed up into the sky and loosed the arrow.

The action would have seemed utterly casual to the average onlooker, but she had close to 30 years of experience with Martial Archery, even if her practical strength had been unable to make the most of that knowledge until very recently. With ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ and her principle working together she could almost game the unpredictability of the ‘blue’ and ‘orange’ at this point. Not every arrow hit, but most did something.

In this case, the arrow missed in the first instance but spun off a fallen bit of stone foundation and the ricochet slashed the pirate across the legs, sending them sprawling, screaming in agony as the orichalcum did its thing.

The others were not being quite as indirect. Ling’s next arrow hit an archer who had somehow evaded earlier sniping in the head, killing them instantly. Chunhua’s landed further back, exploding on the roof of a building.

“I feel kind of bad that we are blowing up their village,” she pointed out, watching the unfortunate villagers, hostages to fortune between them and the pirates, cowering in cover. “It has to really suck making a living out here.”

“If they had caught us, you wouldn’t be saying that,” Uarz muttered. “Mugvar is in tight with some nasty folks in Uldara up the river, the threat of being sold as slaves there would see this lot flay and eat us if it meant avoiding that.”

“So you said before,” she noted, taking in the rather more ruined edge of the village.

“These charms are disgustingly good,” Wei Chu added, lowering her own bow and selecting another arrow.

“Yeah,” Kai Manshu agreed, sighting down an arrow and unleashing it.

She watched as his arrow hit a distant building with a puff of mud brick and punched straight through it, nodding. She had painted versions of the divination talismans on all of them, which was turning out to be interesting in its own right, because while she was not really using any qi, the faint imprint of her principle gave her an awareness of where the others, like Qing Yao, were, and also the sense of feedback from how they used the charms was slowly improving her own understanding of just how… utilitarian the comprehensions within it could be.

On a distant rooftop, behind the collapsed wall, she saw Qing Yao wave in her direction, giving the arranged sign that they had finally finished off the mage who had used the restrictive art.

“Thank the… Maker for that,” Wei Chu muttered, remembering to use a local oath.

“Indeed,” Uarz grimaced.

“Took him long enough,” Naakai grumbled, making her presence known as she slid out of the boat to stand in the knee-deep water a few paces away from them.

“How are the others?” she asked her.

“They have headaches. It was somewhat unexpected that these bastards would have a genuine mark of command,” Naakai spat, her scowl of annoyance mirrored by all the Ur’Vash that had managed to shake it off so far. “The worst affected are the five we hauled off the wreck and your crew.”

Uarz grimaced at her comment but didn’t say anything.

“The ones hit by arrows will survive as well,” Naakai added. “Most of the damage is flesh wounds, and nobody got hit on a bone or anything.”

“That’s something at least,” Kreva remarked, lowering her bow, having just shot another of the pirates.

“How many do you reckon are left?” Chunhua asked, counting her arrows.

“Well, Mugvar’s Marauders were a fairly big band, about 100 strong usually,” Kreva mused. “I’ve killed nine of their crew since we started.”

“Eleven,” Ling said, loosing another arrow that shot into a building in the distance but didn’t explode.

“Eight,” Chunhua grunted, glancing at her. “That I have seen.”

“At least ten,” she replied, after a moment’s reflection, “That I’ve seen.”

“I would not put it past the survivors to hide among the villagers,” Uarz added.

“Oh fates, my soul hurts so bad,” she didn’t glance around as Shu Feilong half scrambled, half rolled out of the boat, followed by Ao Meicheng and then the others, all of them looking pale and drained.

“What the fates even was that?” Kei Zhanfeng groaned, rubbing his neck. “Ask them if they have any idea—”

“What happened?” Shi Tengfei asked, cutting off his compatriot’s question.

Weirdly, that gave her a nudge towards the inauspicious with ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ as he asked the question…

“One of them had a special artefact,” she said after a moment’s thought and the inauspicious feeling receded again.

-Odd… she mused, pondering why that might be.

It actually took her a good ten seconds to work out why, at which point she nearly face-palmed, because it was a very cultivator thing.

If she had said what she was going to – that it was a means for Udrasa to hunt down prisoners – probably they would have thought they were marked… which they probably were in that manner, truth be told. Likely one of them would have checked with soul sense despite her earlier command not to use any, because having yourself be marked like that was bad. However, that didn’t explain fully why she…

“They must have a mage still alive,” she muttered, staring back towards the village.

“The one chucking green fire maybe?” Chunhua suggested drily.

“Probably,” she agreed, again scanning the reed beds.

In a way, apart from the initial ambush, which she had miscalculated on, they had barely suffered much in the way of direct attacks at all. Part of that was certainly the wards painted onto the boat… and the fact that a lot of the deck was purple. It was a bit weird that that actually worked in this context, but she suspected it was as much down to their group’s fervent desire to either not get recaptured or not get captured by the apparently quite infamous pirate band.

“Hundred metres, beyond the wall,” Chunhua remarked, already sighting down an arrow.

She nocked an arrow as well and aimed in that direction, spotting the figure with a faint hint of sweeping soul sense even as Chunhua’s first arrow went just wide and exploded in the reeds beyond her target with a puff of disintegrating vegetation. The lucky mage ducked back into the ruins and she aimed up with her arrow, tracking the success of it with ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’…

As she watched, it arced up into the sky and dropped lazily out of sight. Intuitively she knew she had missed, but that wasn’t the point. The mage would be wary… there was a flash of green fire from within the village, silhouetted against the rising sun, followed by a second then a third in rapid succession.

She aimed a yellow arrow into the vicinity, watching it arc down and explode, scattering bits of building into the air.

In the end, it took another ten minutes for things to calm down enough for them to abandon the boat and move into what was left of the village. The villagers mostly stared at them with a dull-eyed apprehension that made her feel quite bad inside, but circumstances were what they were, she told herself. Remarkably few of them had died, despite the devastation, but almost all of Mugvar’s Marauders had been done in. The few who had tried to blend in rather than flee had been easy enough to pick out in the end simply because they were really bad at controlling their killing intent.

There were six living prisoners, including the weaker mage who Qing Yao had caught quite easily in the end, and who rather surprisingly turned out to be female. The others were crew and one of the leaders of the band, a pirate called Kemvar who had apparently been buried under a building by Naakos. All the other leaders of the band had been killed, their bodies piled up in the square, recovered under directions from Naakos by the few villagers not hiding in dark corners.

The critical issue, was, rather annoyingly, that the Marauders had no boat. That was the reason they were in this village, called Ruqu it transpired, according to the new village chief. The old village chief had been executed by the Marauders, apparently for objecting to his daughters entertaining the crew the previous night. The Marauders had apparently shown up hours after the flood, furious and bedraggled, and effectively occupied the village, intending to seize the next usable vessel that passed them so they could transport their ‘cargo’ upriver… cargo that was now sitting across from them all, looking very afraid.

“Seriously, we are cursed I tell you,” Ling sighed, staring at the three naked cultivators.

Looking at the two men and a woman, it was hard to disagree with that point. They had been clearly mistreated and the only reason, she was sure, that they had not already run was the restriction bands on them. The presence of the three was also, she suspected, why her divination art had told her that this place was ‘auspicious’.

“Yeah…” she agreed, staring at the three in turn, who were glaring at everyone in equal measure until…

“What sect do you belong to?” Kei Zhanfeng asked, promptly enough that she was tempted to kick him in the shin.

“You’re a…?” the middle youth mumbled, looking rather confused.

“Look… we are cultivators,” Kei Zhanfeng confirmed redoubling the determination in her heart to give him a good kick in the ass. “If you just play along this lot will at least not treat you too bad…”

Not for the first time she was glad that her mantra helped her keep a blank face.

“The Imperial School!” the youth said eagerly.

“Ah…”

She was amused to see Kei Zhanfeng, who belonged to a sect not particularly aligned to the Imperial Court paradigm, immediately regret asking.

“In the current circumstances we are certainly brothers and sisters in the struggle!” Shi Tengfei interjected somewhat more smoothly. “I am from the Green Dawn Dragon Sect—”

“What are you asking them?” she said in Easten, cutting through the chatter before things could get really out of hand.

“…”

Both the woman and the other man who hadn’t spoken twitched at the sound of her speaking Easten, suggesting they at least had some understanding of it.

“At this point we are going to be outnumbered,” Qing Yao muttered.

“At this rate I am going to suffer a mental deviation,” she grumbled.

“We asked them who they are,” Shi Tengfei replied, somewhat diplomatically.

“That was a lot of chatter for ‘where are you from’,” she said, ‘mimicking’ Imperial Common very ‘badly’.

“You…” Shi Tengfei opened and shut his mouth.

“We speak many languages here, tribes speak this way, that way, one extra way is not hard to puzzle out,” she said. “Especially when you talk so much.”

“…”

“Ahem,” Shi Tengfei nodded, looking more contrite.

“We just tried to assuage them that nothing bad would happen.”

“…”

Behind him, she saw Chunhua make a derisive hand sign.

“Ask them if their captors really don’t have a boat,” she said.

“Were you brought here on a boat?” Shi Tengfei asked.

All three nodded, shooting sideways looks at her again.

“It’s wrecked though,” the woman said after a long moment. “Properly, it got capsized in the river about a mile from here.”

-Great! She groaned internally.

“She said that their boat got capsized about a mile from here and was… abandoned?” Shi Tengfei translated a moment later, his comment being met with weary groans from Uarz’s crew.

“…”

“Well, in that case, grab these three, recover what arrows you can and let’s see if we can get our lump of wood back in the water,” she said, not bothering to hide her own annoyance.

“What do we do about the prisoners?” Uarz asked.

She stared at the six surviving bound and gagged pirates and then at the villagers and the new chief.

“Old man, even if you kill us, our boss will still track you down,” Kemvar spat around his gag. “If we die, all your village is dead, this ragtag bunch of cowards hiding behind barbarian tits are dead… these wenches will be enslaved as dock chattle—”

Naakos hit the surviving ‘leader’ in the back with the butt of his spear, sending him sprawling face-first in the dirt.

“This scum have terrorized the rivers west of here for years,” Naakos remarked, spinning the weapon absently and putting the blade against Kemvar’s neck.

“My ghost will fuck your daughters every—”

Without even letting him finish his insult, Naakos stabbed the spear through Kemvar’s neck and wrenched it sideways, half decapitating the Ur’Vash, who twitched a few times beneath the old Ur’Inan’s foot before falling still.

“Far too good an end for one like that,” one of the village women hissed, spitting on the ground.

“Dead is dead,” Naakos grunted, looking at the other five, who were much less… bullish.

She watched as Naakos passed the spear off to Lashaan and took a short blade from her, then walked down the line, stabbing each gagged prisoner before finally getting to the mage who had been struggling the whole time.

“Wait… WAIT!” the female mage gasped, managing to spit aside her gag. “I am a slave too!”

“…”

Naakos pulled her head back and stared at something under her matted hair and nodded, but didn’t remove the blade from her neck.

“And that excuses you for the horrors you inflicted?” he asked, forcing the mage to look at the angry villagers.

“No! But… I had no choice… I can’t even die!” the Ur’Vash woman gasped. “You must know what they are like!?”

“So… what?” another of the villagers spat.

“Yeah, fucking scum, hiding behind your stolen status!”

“No respect for Quazam!” another yelled.

“Kill her!”

“She is a mage ain’t she, maybe one of us can get a spark off her!” one of the younger male Ur’Vash added.

“…”

“J-just take me to the edge of the river… a-and… l-l-let me go! You will never see me again! I swear!” the mage stammered. “I was bought by that monster Xakvor as… as a mana battery, b-both of us were…”

“It’s not uncommon,” Uarz noted, his arms crossed

“Both?” she quietly asked Lashaan, who was also standing nearby.

“Not sure, this one and the male one are all I’ve seen,” Lashaan murmured. “Maybe Yao shot the other one?”

“…”

“Slave mages are a valuable resource in war around here,” Uarz continued, ignoring their side conversation. “Folks don’t like having unpredictable elements on their boats but slaves can be trained and control can be… forced. Even some wealthier villages keep them, because they are useful.”

“I’ll swear to the Maker! By the Maker’s Daughters,” the mage pleaded, looking this way and that.

“You can swear by the Golden Flowers and Blue Sky of Bright Fortune—” she said after a moment’s consideration.

“—I swear!” the mage nodded rapidly, actually cutting her off “I, Akuja, do swear by the Goddess of Golden Heart and Blue Destiny to do you no ill and be of use… just don’t kill me or give me over to these villagers!”

She watched as golden flowers appeared around the mage, Akuja, who flinched slightly – but only slightly – at their appearance. By comparison, some of the villagers actually squeaked in shock and a few scrambled backwards, looking a bit wild-eyed. Even Uarz’s crew made auspicious hand signs in an unobtrusive fashion. In the back of her mind, her connection to the Ur Gestalt strengthened ever so slightly again.

Off to the side, Chunhua glanced quickly at her, the glimmer of surprise in her eyes suggesting she too had felt that renewed connection. Ling just rolled her eyes.

“This has to be the most mismatched alchemical bomb I have ever laid eyes on,” her friend signed.

The three cultivators, who were also still staring at the afterimages of the golden flowers, did not look at all enamoured at the mage being spared she noted, but probably it would look weirder if they did kill her.

Naakos sighed and pulled off the gag, pushing her over towards Uarz and the others.

The villagers didn’t look hugely enthused either, but again she supposed that was more down to the general circumstances.

“You can do as you wish with the bodies of the dead,” she said to the village chief. “Such notorious pirates might be worth an interesting bounty if you handled matters cautiously.”

“Uh… we do have a vessel, by the way,” Akuja said, clearly determined to be very helpful.

“You do?” she frowned.

“The ‘Might of Mugvar’ was wrecked but one of the two sloops survived and is on the far side of the village, in the reed beds,” Akuja explained quickly. “It was the one normally used for scouting and raiding where they don’t want to be noticed.”

“And how big is it?” she asked.

“Enough for twenty… thirty if you are a bit cramped,” the mage answered.

Looking at the wretched woman, she didn’t seem to be lying, which made the earlier assertions by the others that there was no boat…

“And why does no one else know about this?” she asked, looking around at the villagers and the three cultivators.

“The sloop was not part of our group, it parted ways before we abandoned the wreck of the Might of Mugvar,” Akuja said hurriedly.

“Then how do you know it hasn’t already fled?” Chunhua interjected.

“Because I was on it and most of the crew are now dead here,” Akuja muttered. “There were two guards left, but they… will not be able to row away a forty-foot boat which needs a new mast.”

“It needs a new mast?” Uarz asked with some distaste, “So it is damaged?”

“Only in the sense that the mast was unstepped when the flood capsized it,” Akuja said hurriedly. “The mountings and the rest of the boat are all fine, it just needs a new mast.”

“Well, it’s better than nothing,” Omurz grumbled. “Though I don’t particularly want to be mistaken for Mugvar’s horrid lot.”

“It’s unmarked,” Akuja muttered. “People tend to run away otherwise.”

“Right…” she drawled, rolling her eyes before turning to Naakos. “In that case… Naakos?”

“Sure, we can go get it,” Naakos agreed, before turning back to the mage. “How far away is it?”

“Not far. We beached it on the bank to the north of the village, near where some fish processing huts were,” Akuja answered hurriedly. “I can go if you like?”

“Not necessary,” Naakos grinned, waving to Lashaan and Teshek, who followed him at a trot out of the square.

She watched them depart, then turned back to the trio of ‘new’ cultivators, trying not to sigh… again. They had been watching the discussions with some concern and the deep anger in their eyes had not faded in the slightest.

“Why didn’t they take the village’s boats and make for Ulquan?” Chunhua asked.

“We… just left Ulquan, Mugvar bought those three… and got into a bit of an altercation with some influential folks over them,” Akuja said helpfully.

“He did?” she asked warily, looking at them.

“Yes,” Akuja answered respectfully. “He outbid a Great Shamaness from the headwaters on the middle youth there.”

Frowning, she looked at the three again, wondering if it was the same Great Shamaness Wujai she had seen. Forcing herself to recall those memories, she looked at the three again, trying to match any of them against those in the hall. There had been… sixteen women, not including herself, Qing Yao and Wei Chu and only five men… Kai Manshu and Feiwu Shen had not been there… nor had any of the other five they rescued… As she recalled of those five men, two had been missing arms, one was blind… one had been unharmed and one had a…

She stared at the right-hand youth who had three scars over his heart…

“I guess Wujai didn’t get all of them for 500 Agrond after all,” she muttered under her breath.

“…”

Qing Yao, standing nearby, blinked at that comment and looked again at the three with a raised eyebrow. Thankfully, no one else seemed to notice her slip.

“Is Mugvar’s body around here somewhere?” she asked suddenly, recalling the two others who had come after Wujai.

“Oh, yeah, over there,” Uarz waved a hand towards several bodies tumbled in a heap.

Walking over to them, she looked at the faces and found that one of them was indeed vaguely familiar, though death and a severe beating didn’t help matters.

-That does raise the question of how strong they are… she sighed inwardly, looking back at the three.

“Were all three of them bought together?” she asked Shi Tengfei, who started at having been brought into the conversation.

“Were you all… together?” Shi Tengfei asked the three.

“Yes…” the middle youth muttered. “Brother Lan here cannot speak, they did experiments on him, cut out his tongue with a strange knife… cut out his heart as well, they wanted to know why our souls were strange.”

-Well that explains a lot, she thought glumly, glad her mantra allowed her to hide her outer discomfort at that.

The other cultivators, especially the five new additions, all looked very annoyed though.

“Also, how are they called?” she asked Shi Tengfei.

“She… Hunter Junee wants to know your names,” Shi Tengfei repeated.

“You… how are you with them though?” the woman asked instead.

“We… were freed, by them,” Shi Tengfei waved in her general direction. “They are not the same demons.”

“You are from the Green Dawn Dragon Sect?” the woman added.

“I am,” Shi Tengfei acknowledged. “Are you also from the Imperial School?”

“Myriad Herb Association,” the woman said more quietly.

“Well?” she asked, interrupting the conversation again.

“Ah… sorry,” Shi Tengfei looked a bit awkward for having gotten caught up in the conversation. “I think so?”

“And their names?” she repeated.

“Oh…” Shi Tengfei grimaced.

“She wants to know what to call you,” he said looking at the three.

None of them replied, which made her sign mentally. After a moment’s consideration she just decided to let it be for now. In any case, she had learned most of what she needed from their discourse… except for what influence ‘Brother Lan’ was from and what realm they were…

“…”

Shi Tengfei looked at her a bit awkwardly but she just patted him on the shoulder.

“It’s fine,” she mused. “One thing at a time.”

“Rather, if they are mages… how strong are they?” Chunhua asked from the side.

“They are all Fifth Advancement,” Akuja answered promptly.

“They are?” she blinked, somewhat surprised at the prompt answer as much as at who provided it.

“Xakvor wanted the woman as another mana battery and Mugvar bought the other two to be additional combat mages,” Akuja deferentially explained. “He didn’t want any who were so strong that they might cause issues and a Fifth Circle, Fifth Advancement mage can be nurtured and developed much more easily than a Sixth or a Seventh one that has already been fully bound.”

“Ah. How delightful,” she said, not bothering to hide her distaste.

“Yeah…” Chunhua agreed with a grimace.

“Well, it makes sense,” Ling mused. “This lot don’t seem big on having things they cannot control.”

“What do you know about the Imperial School?” she signed to the other two.

“Not much,” Ling signed back. “Probably less than you.”

“They are the rival to the Seven Sovereigns Imperial School,” Chunhua signed. “They are a very broad pagoda though – close to being a confederation of sects within a bigger sect.”

“Don’t they have some connection to South Grove?” she signed, trying to recall what she knew of the big imperial influences.

“Oh, in theory, yeah,” Chunhua nodded. “The Chrysanthemum Hall is where most of our taxes go… have gone ever since the Lin…”

Chunhua trailed off, the rest not really needing be said as she connected the big influence to the lesser in her head. The Imperial Princes had been a rather distant benefactor of the ruin of the Lin School and the Teng School was in effect the personal property of the Second Imperial Prince by all accounts. Unfortunately, that didn’t tell her much about this youth’s particular politics and she had no way to ask – yet anyway.

-I guess we just have to keep our ears open, she thought, already regretting her early admission of knowing a ‘few’ words of Imperial Common.

“Can they be freed?” Shi Tengfei asked her, distracting her from those musings.

“…”

She looked at him with her best ‘what do you think, seriously?’ look, and he winced.

“If they do not do anything stupid, there is no reason why a similar arrangement to yours cannot be reached,” she said carefully. “Are they friends of yours?”

“Ah…” Shi Tengfei opened and shut his mouth, no doubt trying to work out how to pitch this in a way that wasn’t either an outright lie or so vague as to be pointless.

“What I mean, is can you guarantee they won’t do something that causes a mess?” she said, eyeing him pensively.

Shi Tengfei did an admirable job of hiding the awkward grimace her question elicited, but wasn’t quite as successful as he perhaps thought.

“You freed the mage,” he said.

“She was a slave and is still a slave,” she pointed out. “She also swore a strong oath and is being closely watched.”

“…”

Shi Tengfei nodded, looking a bit embarrassed. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the woman from the Myriad Herb Association looking at her unobtrusively.

-I guess she is another one to keep an eye on, she thought glumly. If any of them know Easten fluently it will be her.

The Herb Association would certainly have a lot of older documents in Easten, simply because of the influence of Yin Eclipse on the study of spirit herbs if nothing else.

That raised another bothersome spectre as well. The woman might know some of the sign language associated with the Hunter Bureau, not to mention its divination arts. The Herb Associations across the ocean, especially in Meng City and Pill Sovereigns City, snapped up Bureau leavers wherever they could.

She was mulling that over when Naakos, Lashaan and Teshek returned, a bit muddy but in good spirits.

“We have a boat, it’s big enough and it’s not going to sink,” Lashaan said with a weary grin, before she could ask anything.

“And the guards?” Uarz frowned.

“Not a problem.” Naakos shrugged.

“How many will it take to get it around?” she asked.

“Half a dozen,” Naakos replied. “We could have done it ourselves but it would take a while punting it so we came back after dragging it closer to the village.”

“Please, let us help you move it,” the village chief interjected somewhat deferentially.

“…”

“By all means,” she said, acknowledging his help.

Immediately, a dozen villagers from among those looking on trotted off after Naakos, Lashaan and Teshek.

“I’ll go as well,” Uarz said after a moment’s consideration.

She watched Uarz go after them and nodded to Qing Yao to go as well.

“I’ll go keep an eye on things,” Chunhua murmured.

“Okay,” she nodded.

Watching Chunhua and Qing Yao both hurry after the others, she again looked around and tried not to sigh too deeply. The village really was in a terrible state, no matter how you looked at it. Between Mugvar’s Marauders, the flood and their barrage of arrows, most of the buildings were barely standing.

“Right,” she said, clapping her hands to get the remainders’ attention. “Shall we recover what arrows we can and start sorting out the rest of these bodies?”

“Huh…”

She glanced over at Ling, who was looking around with a frown.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I am not… sure,” Ling mused, turning in a circle while staring at the buildings. “There is something here that feels faintly familiar in some way, but I can’t really place it, nor can the… well it just doesn’t seem to want to place.”

“Did someone shoot one of the poisoned arrows?” she asked, frowning as well.

They had sorted all the yang blood arrows out as far as she knew.

“No…” Ling muttered, shaking her head. “It’s not like that…”

She watched as the younger woman turned in a circle again, looking at the buildings with narrowed eyes.

“What was… over there?” Ling asked after a few moments of turning back and forth, pointing to a slightly larger, tumbled-down building that might have had a stumpy tower at one point.

“That was the guard post, where the Envoy from Ulquan lived,” the village chief replied.

“…”

Ling walked over with her following, properly curious now. The new village chief also followed along, likely to check that nothing was going to cause him any more problems.

The building was a ruin of ruins, the inside gutted and the tower appearing to have been burnt out.

“The marauders did this,” the village chief explained, spitting in the general direction of the corpses lying on the ground.

“I see,” she mused, stepping through the gateway into the courtyard.

“This is where the defensive wards are, I assume?” she asked the chief.

“They are,” he nodded a bit more glumly.

“You didn’t use them in the defence of the town though,” she noted, watching Ling as she wandered around, poking at the rubble with narrowed eyes.

“Apparently they interfered with the marauders’ pet,” the chief said, spitting again and making an inauspicious sign.

“The toad,” she agreed, nodding. “Nasty things.”

“Very,” the chief agreed.

“If it is useful, you can keep the body,” she added, by way of offering them something in recompense for their woes. “I am sure there will be some parts of it that are useful to you all.”

“That… is very generous,” the chief muttered, “however a little place like ours will not be…”

“Nobody has to know,” she chuckled. “We are leaving Ulquan, not going to it.”

The chief stared at her for a long moment, then nodded.

“Anything?” she asked Ling.

“Yes…” Ling frowned, pointing to the room beside the collapsed tower. “This room?”

“It was the personal quarters of the Envoy…” the chief explained.

“What happened to all their bodies?” she asked, looking around at the signs of fighting.

“The mage burned them to ash and the pirates took their hearts and their gear,” the chief said with a gloomy sigh. “There were only half a dozen guards, all from our village here, and the Envoy and his wife. With the flood and the damage to the ward there was nothing to be done.”

“Well?” she asked Ling.

“…”

Ling frowned, squatting down and putting her hand on the scorched floor.

“It is old… faint, maybe days old,” Ling mused. “The flood has interfered with it… and the mana has faded.”

“Was there anything of note here before the flood?” she asked the chief.

“I… do not know,” he muttered, looking awkward, but surprisingly not lying.

“Chief… the late village leader Jabaza’s eldest daughter was married to the Envoy from Ulquan… so they were very close. My father was just an elder on the council before Mugvar showed up,” the chief muttered. “I know nothing of what their personal business might be. There was a ship that came through, I think, the day before the flood? It didn’t stop for long, there were some officials from Ulquan heading up river?”

“...”

She stared around the burnt-out room pensively, as did Ling.

In the back of her mind, ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ gave her a faint nudge to not get drawn into that line of discussion with the chief.

“Ah well,” Ling said, standing up and looking over at her. “It’s clearly not what I thought. It probably relates to something from before the flood hit.”

“Fair enough,” she said smoothly. “The main thing is that it’s nothing to do with that Maker-cursed mage!”

“Ah…” the chief gulped, catching her suggested meaning as she changed the topic and looking around nervously. “You are… certain?”

“Quite,” Ling said more decisively, looking around again. “It was the fire that confused me. However, we should be certain… The core of the ward is in this compound as well, is it not?”

“It is, I can show you?” the chief said, a bit more enthusiastically than he had before.

“Probably for the best,” she agreed, waving for him to lead on.

“What was it?” she signed to Ling.

“It’s odd,” Ling signed, walking slowly after the chief. “The signature is old, it’s been obfuscated by the flood, the fire used by the mage, and just the passage of time…”

“So?” she signed back.

“I…” Ling shook her head. “Its… just odd, I really can’t place it, and it’s not the blood. That’s obvious.”

She looked at Ling deeply, but the younger woman just looked a bit perplexed, really.

Focusing on ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ she tried to see if it got her anything, but all she got were some faintly auspicious nudges, totally in line with what she had gotten before regarding this village.

“And yet it’s familiar?” she signed.

“Yes,” Ling signed back, with more frustration evident in the force of the gesture. “There was some object here that had some resonance… with the memories I suppose?”

“Here…” she signed, looking around dubiously. “In the middle of nowhere a few miles from Ulquan?”

“Yeah…” Ling returned, looking even more frustrated. “I know.”

“The core is in here,” the chief said, cutting through their signed conversation as they walked after him, stopping by the door to the base of the ruined tower.

“Well, let’s at least check that they didn’t leave any other surprises,” Ling muttered, peering inside the ruined lower story.

“Yeah,” she agreed, glancing at the chief, who now had the slightly hopeful glint in his eye of someone who was seeing the potential for an expensive problem for his village being fixed for nothing if he played his cards right.