“Tian… Who?”

“Come on, now you’re just pulling my leg. Tian Feng? One eye gold, one silver? Face all uncanny looking from overzealous magical beautification? Has a hate-boner for the Three?”

“...Xiān Dì,” Zelsys piped up. “You mean Xiān Dì, the Divine Emperor of Pateiria. He brought about the Three Kings’ downfall and attempted to erase everyone and everything who had gone against him.”

“Still is trying, more like…” Zefaris seethed.

“Ah, so he did win his war!” the Smoke Witch beamed, as if she’d just heard good news of a friend’s exploits. She placed the kettle along five similar black-and-gold cups on a platter made from a charred horizontal slide of wood, bringing it to the table and sitting down. Curiosity in her eyes and a somewhat unsettling grin on her face, she turned her burning stare towards Zelsys. “Tell me, what’s the state of cultivation on the outside? He mentioned something about wanting to change things, something about getting rid of all the chaos and constant sect wars.”

“Er… Well, all of Ikesia fell into feudalism for two or three centuries once he moved west to found his empire, and due to his efforts, the most prominent form of cultivation has been Azoth Stone Cultivation for… How long was it?” Zel thought aloud, looking to Zefaris to fill in this gap in her knowledge.

“It’s thought to have become popular in the late forty-second century, so around four centuries and some change. Other such dead-end methods also spread around, just recently we passed through a town whose ruling family and knight order both used draconic mutagens of some sort. Such practices were relegated to noble families with the money to fund them, but they’ve mostly wiped eachother out in the War of Fog...”

The white-haired immortal went aghast, her eyes widening as innumerable scenarios played out in her head, each more horrendous than the last.

“A-a-azoth Stone Cultivation? Did… Did that mongrel really turn most of the continent’s cultivators onto THE PATH OF UNLIMITED SIN?!” the immortal proclaimed, indignant fury spilling out of her. She rose from her seat, and with a bestial howl, spiked her cup right into the floor. It bounced about the room like a bullet, somehow not striking anything fragile. Before it could stop, the Smoke Witch caught the cup in her hand and sat back down, slamming the seemingly unharmed cup on the table and pouring it full with tea again. With a sip of the scalding fluid and a deep sigh, she was tranquil again. No, not just tranquil, but downright despondent.

“To think I helped him with the Third Circle Breakthrough and gave him copies of my scrolls on the Walking Way of Five Elements…” she dropped her head, holding it in her hands. A moment later, she looked up, realization plastered on her face: “Wait, so what’s cultivation like on the outside for those who aren’t degenerate False Pathers?"

“Scattered,” Zefaris interjected. “Since a good eight-tenths of the Azoth Stone cultivator population is gone, smooth-brained mongrels that the lot were, practitioners of methods that don’t rot your brain have been able to begin filling the power vacuum. As such, cultivation is, I would like to think, improving, but rediscovering old knowledge and filling in the holes has been an arduous process to say the least.”

“We barely have more than four or five disciples who practice the same method in our sect, and finding documentation on a third of them beyond what the practitioners know is all but impossible. We’re stuck working things out for ourselves, but it’s worked so far,” Zel added, pride evident in her tone.

The Smoke Witch’s eyebrows shot halfway up her forehead and she leaned forward, looking back and forth between the four of them as she asked: “Huh? So you’re… Members of a proper sect?”

“I took over the old Black Horse Family compound in Willowdale and founded my own, the Newman Sect,” Zel answered again, positively beaming with pride now, a smug, self-satisfied grin on her face.

“Oho…” came an utterance from the witch. She raised her hand, fingers in an OK sign, the sigil of an eye formed from embers and smoke swirling between them. Then, she pressed it against her own eye, the smoke visible flowing over its surface. Her burning gaze became quite literally so as she stared right into each of them in turn, the sensation unpleasant at best.

“Say, how advanced are you lot by this era’s standards? I’ll admit, Mrs. Braids here has some very interesting things going on, a foundation like a damn tectonic plate and what looks like a mosaic soul, not the least among them, but… Sect Elder? Not just that, sect founder? And using the grounds of a major sect’s branch no less? I find that hard to believe, even if I can tell that you’re not lying.”

Zel exchanged glances with Zef and Jorfr.

Jorfr was the one to speak: “The damage Xiān Dì has done to cultivation on the continent can not be overstated. We in Borea have all but stagnated for the last millennium because of the Great Clans’ secrecy and overreliance on tradition, and I would still say that we are leagues ahead of where Ikesian cultivation stands at the moment. Kargarians, who have not stagnated, are scarcely even comparable. Only the Newman Sect and the Willowdale region at large can be considered on even footing with Borea in terms of cultivation.”

“A state of affairs I hope to remedy by bringing smaller schools and sects into our fold, but… Enough talk of my achievements in the past few months,” Zel said, making no effort to constrain the smugness which spilled out of her with the second sentence. “I think it only fair that you answer a few of our questions in return for information on the outside world, no?”

“Y’know I’d incinerate you for that but you look like a really fucked up backwards Immortal Beast and I’d rather not destroy a specimen like this…” the Smoke Witch uttered absent-mindedly and with no real intent behind her words, staring through her fingers right at Zel’s stomach. Then, she pulled her hand away and looked up at the beast-slayer, explaining herself: “On the inside, I mean; your internal organs and nervous system are completely wrong. You’re like body cultivator outsider art, you’ve moved shit around in ways nobody with any real education would think of doing, yet there’s a savant-like logic to it all. You changed your own pressure points to screw with gentle-fist type martial arts, yeah? And those silver conduits beneath your skin. All humans have them, you know; yours are just overgrown to the point of grotesquery."