Everything felt wrong to Yoshika’s senses as she tumbled through nothingness. Space felt twisted, there was no light but it strained her eyes to look at anything, there was no air but her movements were sluggish, and at the edge of her soul she felt a strange uncomfortable tug, akin to a stray branch catching on the collar of her robes.

Then, without warning, she suddenly found herself standing in the middle of an endless field of tall golden grass. Wheat? Some of the stalks nearly came up to her shoulders.

She quickly took stock of her surroundings. The tall grass extended as far as she could see in every direction, and the sky was a cloudless expanse of blue without any sign of a sun or moon. Despite the lack of a visible light source, it was nevertheless as bright as a summer noon.

Jia and Eui were together, but Yoshika didn’t see any sign of the others—neither her allies nor her rivals. She tried to cast her domain out over her surroundings, but if the area outside the tomb had been oppressive, what she experienced now was a new level entirely. The essence in the atmosphere weighed down on her—squeezing from every direction too forcefully for her domain to reach more than a few meters away from her.

It was like she’d only just awakened again. Even back then, her domain had been able to sense further away.

She elected to keep trying anyway. There was nobody around to bother with her domain, and perhaps it would make for good training. Back at the academy, she had often trained domain control by testing her domain against that of Rika or Yue. This was no different.

Jia crossed her arms and pouted.

“Now what?”

Eui shrugged.

“Pick a direction, I guess? Isn’t that supposed to be your specialty?”

“Yeah, when I was still a vagrant hopping from city to city. It didn’t exactly work for us last time we got lost.”

“That’s debatable. We got a lot of good training out of it, and when we did finally arrive back in civilization, it was right near where our friends just happened to be nearby and headed in the direction we needed to go. The system works!”

Jia rolled her eyes and sighed, closing her eyes for a moment to meditate. To her surprise, the normally vague sensation of her intuition was practically screaming at her. Something about the heavy essence in the air carried intentions and concepts more vividly than usual. It reminded her of a spirit trying to communicate, if that spirit was the entire world.

Within her soulscape, Heian stirred, intrigued by the new sensations.

“It’s so noisy!”

Jia cocked her head at Heian’s observation. It wasn’t quite how she’d describe it, but Heian had a different understanding of the world.

“What do you mean by noisy?”

“Mana is normally quiet. It doesn’t say anything. This mana is loud! It won’t stop talking.”

“Do you know what it’s saying?”

As vivid as the mana around her felt, Jia was having a much harder time divining anything from it.

“No. Too much noise. Too many voices at once. Can’t sleep.”

Jia smiled sympathetically and shook her head.

“Sorry honey. I think we’re stuck here for a while.”

Heian grimaced mentally, but didn’t have anything else to add. Jia opened her eyes and frowned. There was no need to explain anything to Eui—she’d have felt everything.

“I think that’s a dead end. Any other ideas?”

Eui plucked a stalk of wheat from the ground and scowled at it.

“Other than just picking a random direction? Think we can track Yue through our bond?”

“Worth a try. It worked for Jianmo, but that connection was designed for it.”

Yoshika closed her eyes again and focused on her bonds of family and friendship. She frowned at the mild discomfort that brought her. Many of her bonds were extremely strained, feeling stretched out and far away. The common thread was obvious—the only ones that didn’t feel impossibly distant were Yue and Ja Yun. In other words, wherever she was now represented a profound distance from everyone who hadn’t joined her.

It went beyond just physical distance, too. She was certain that she could have journeyed out across the stars without feeling so distant. The mysteries of Sovereign Chou’s Tomb grew by the moment, and she’d only barely set foot in the entrance.

“This way maybe?”

Jia pointed in the direction that felt the most right and Eui flicked the wheat stalk aside.

“Works for me. It can’t be worse than just standing around.”

As they walked, Jia took in her surroundings—such as they were. The landscape was hopelessly monotonous, but most remarkable in what it was lacking.

“I can’t help but notice that there’s no way out.”

Eui nodded.

“Yeah, that’s bugging me too. For now, let’s just worry about trying to understand the place. We can figure out an escape plan later.”

Jia sighed miserably. Not that she’d been especially eager for the tomb expedition in the first place, but she’d expected something more exciting than an endless plain of grass.

“At least we won’t starve to death.”

She kicked a bit of wheat aside as she grumbled and Eui snorted.

“Figures you’d be thinking about food right now.”

Jia stuck her tongue out.

“Misun made me get rid of my stock! Feels like kind of a waste, now.”

“I wouldn’t be too quick to let your guard down. I bet we’ve barely scratched the surface of what this realm is hiding.”

Jia nodded slowly, and the two of them continued on for a while in companionable silence until Jia’s ears twitched.

“Do you hear that?”

“If you hear it, I hear it, dummy. Sounds like voices—an argument?”

They picked up the pace, the voices steadily growing louder until they could finally pick out the figures among the golden stalks. The others had apparently already managed to find each other, and the situation was tense.

“We have to crush the monsters now, before they have a chance to stab us in the back!”

Zheng Long’s voice was easy to pick out, but Jia hadn’t heard the one responding. It looked like Ruiling, the dragonoid woman from before.

“Who are you calling monsters?! We’re people just like you!”

Nearby, the demon woman scoffed.

“Speak for yourself. I am a monster, and I’ll happily kill any of you given the chance.”

Ruiling groaned with exasperation.

“That’s not helping!”

“It wasn’t meant to.”

While they bickered, Yan Yue grabbed Zheng Long’s sleeve.

“Zheng, this isn’t the time to be picking fights! We have no idea what kind of dangers might be lurking here.”

He tore his arm away from her and sneered.

“All the more reason to cull the dangers now. We can’t trust them!”

Ruiling’s wings fluttered as she tried to plead with the Qin cultivators.

“Look, I get not trusting the demons—I don’t either—if you want to join forces against them, fine, but leave us out of it!”

The demon woman nodded, an amused smile playing across her inhuman features.

“Good plan. That’s what I’d do if I were you.”

Ruiling gave her an incredulous look, but Bai Lin interrupted.

“You monsters are all the same to me. I say we string them all up—the lion girl too. Their cores might be useful.”

Yoshika felt her blood boiling from Bai Lin’s words—she hadn’t forgotten her grudge. Zheng Long pinched the bridge of his nose and grimaced.

“Lin, please don’t let your prejudice pit us against even our allies.”

Bai Lin scoffed, throwing a derisive glare at Ja Yun, who tried to make herself disappear behind Yan Yue.

“What? We outnumber them, even if that traitorous bitch tries to protect her pet. This is our best chance to act before—”

Yoshika had heard enough. She was close enough, and though nobody seemed to have noticed her approach, she decided it was time to intervene. She spoke in Eui’s voice, freely expressing her anger.

“Before what, Bai Lin? Before someone can hold you accountable for your actions? And where did you learn to count, anyway? I see nine Qin spiritualists—not counting ‘that traitorous bitch’—and an equal number on the other side.”

Yan Yue sighed in relief and smiled.

“Yoshika, thank the emperor you’re both alright. Perhaps Lady Bai failed to account for little Iseul. She is, after all, still only a first stage elemental.”

Yoshika shook her head.

“As if numbers even matter in a fight among cultivators anyway. I’d take Iseul over half of those sorry excuses for ‘unified’ cultivators.”

Han Yu, who’d been mostly quiet so far crossed his arms and huffed.

“I’ll have you know these are some of the Awakening Dragon Sect’s finest—”

“Oh, bullshit. They’re cannon fodder. You know it, I know it, they know it. You—what’s your name?”

The boy Yoshika pointed out blinked, taken aback.

“Eh, um, Yu Xiang, inner disciple of the Great Awakening Dragon Sect, miss.”

“Yu Xiang, in your honest estimation, how would you fare in a duel with anyone else present? Is there a single person here you’d expect to defeat?”

He started to sweat, looking around at the gathering, his nerves growing until he settled on Ja Yun.

“Uh, p-perhaps the mage?”

“Wrong! Ja Yun’s a trained combatant, a unified cultivator, and heavily equipped. I’ve seen her fight, and I’ve sparred with her myself. You wouldn’t stand a chance.”

Yu Xiang hung his head in shame, but Zheng Long stepped up to defend him.

“Our cultivators work best as a team, Miss Yoshika—what is your point?”

“My point is that instead of wasting time picking fights with each other, we should save our strength and if not work together, then at least just go our separate ways.”

The demon woman snickered, bringing everyone’s attention down on her, which only made her laugh even harder. Zheng Long scowled at her.

“And what do you find so funny?”

The demoness—Chong, Yoshika recalled—just gave him a toothy grin.

“You should listen to her.”

“Dare I even ask why?”

Chong giggled, her smile growing wide and manic.

“Because that’s how it works, stupid. The weak follow the strong, and they’re the strongest ones here. For all your bluster, I was planning to eat you the second you turned your back, but those two? I’m not fucking with them.”

Even Yoshika was taken aback by how frank she was being.

“Um, thanks? I’m not trying to take command or be the leader here—I just don’t want to waste our energy fighting each other.”

Chong snorted.

“Well, in case you didn’t notice, we all hate each other. So if you don’t want us to fight, you’re going to have to make us stop. If you don’t establish a pecking order, then the cock over there will keep preening to establish dominance.”

Zheng Long sputtered indignantly.

“How dare you?!”

She didn’t respond except to gesture rudely at him.

Yoshika rubbed her temples and scowled. Chong was already proving to be more trouble than she was worth, but she was also the one that Yoshika was most concerned about. If it came down to a fight, the demoness was powerful enough to cause a lot of damage.

“How about this—Zheng Long, is our truce still on?”

He crossed his arms and frowned, trying to ignore Chong’s continued provocations.

“I seem to recall you denying my offer.”

“And I seem to recall you saying it was open. Cut the bullshit, are we cooperating or not?”

“Tsk, fine. Yes—mutual non-interference, even cooperation if you’re amenable.”

Bai Lin grimaced and stepped forward to interject, but Zheng Long shut her down with a glare.

Yoshika nodded.

“Good, and you—Ruiling, was it?”

The dragonoid woman looked up with a start.

“Wh—yes? How’d you know my name?”

“Do Hye said it before. Do you speak for the other fiends?”

Ruiling spread her wings out and held her head high.

“Yes, of course! And you would do well to remember my full name—Long Ruiling, of the esteemed dragon clan.”

The other fiends had interesting reactions to her proclamation. The one with a humanoid upper body and a chimera lower half rolled his eyes and sighed in exasperation, while the other two wasp-like fiends giggled in eerie unison.

“Hehehe, Lingling...”

Long Ruiling blushed and whirled on them.

“Would you two shut up?! You’re making me look bad.”

Yoshika wasn’t sure what that was about, but tried to spare the poor girl’s pride.

“Nice to meet you, Long Ruiling. I’d like to extend the same offer to you—we won’t interfere with you as long as you promise the same for us. Maybe we can even help each other.”

Zheng Long interjected before Ruiling could respond.

“Hold on, I didn’t agree to this!”

“You don’t have to! This is between her and me—you can handle your own diplomacy!”

“And what happens if you ally with both of us and a fight breaks out?”

Yoshika smiled sweetly.

“Then I’ll just side against whoever struck the first blow.”

Long Ruiling’s eyes widened.

“We’re in! We’ll work with you!”

Zheng Long scowled, but didn’t protest any further. Yoshika let out a sigh of relief—she was a little suspicious of how enthusiastically Long Ruiling had agreed, but things were going well so far.

“Then that just leaves Chong. Same—”

“No.”

Yoshika blinked at Chong’s sudden rejection.

“Pardon?”

“It’s Xiao Chong, not Chong. Don’t ever call me that again or I’ll kill you. And no, I’m not agreeing to your stupid little promise.”

“Weren’t you the one who was just advocating for me to take a leadership position?”

Xiao Chong shook her head.

“No, I was advocating for you to show us who’s boss. I see what you’re doing, and it’s cute, but you can’t control people like that. They’ll take advantage of you the second you show weakness—undermine you as much as you’ll allow. You want us to respect your strength, you need to show us. Watch—”

She turned around, and without warning plunged her hand straight into the toothy maw of the demon boy behind her. He bit down hard on her arm and tried to push her away, but her grip was firm. With a dark expression, she tore her arm free and pulled away his core, leaving his body to flop lifelessly to the floor.

With her arm still dripping blood, she crushed the core in her hand and absorbed the soul residing within. Yoshika stared at her in horror.

“What—why—?”

Xiao Chong ignored her, turning to the other demon, who took a terrified step back as she advanced.

“Give me your core.”

The other demon shook his head slightly, and she grimaced.

“I wasn’t asking. Give me your core or I’ll take it.”

The demon didn’t try to run or fight. He just dropped to his knees, tears streaming from beneath the horns that had replaced his eyes. With trembling hands, he reached up for the smooth core between his brows.

“Stop!”

Yoshika leapt forward and put Eui between Xiao Chong and the demon. She knew that they had to have killed a lot of people to become what they were, but she wasn’t about to stand idly by and watch such a sadistic display.

“Enough, Xiao Chong. You’ve made your point—leave him alone.”

The demoness glanced over her shoulder to where Jia was maneuvering around to flank her and smirked.

“Why don’t you make me?”