Memories of the Fall

Such terror those immortals wage; such horrors rend

The world's vast concave, when the eternal thrones contend.

First the misty-eyed Huntress took the plain,

Against the Lord of Light, sovereign of the land.

The Master of War his bright blade display'd,

Opposed to the Mercenary, war’s triumphant maid.

Against old Karolan marched the Dancer of Blades,

The scepter’d Daughter, sister of the day,

The Bridge Lord, keeper of the eternal gate,

All three did duel upon that field of Mars.

The Emperor, majesty of heaven, defied.

With that most Dread and August Queen, at last in battle stands

Lamentation her name with those of heavenly birth,

But called Midnight by the sons of earth.

The sacred flood that rolls on silver sands;

Those dark rivers and fields of gold we saw once more.

Such calamity they wrought that day.

‘Vae Victus’, Book VII

By Aeros of the Eternal City

~ Cang Di – Conversations by a Pond ~

Trying to push to the back of his mind the cost of the obnoxiously expensive and very rare ‘Seven Celestial Shifts’ talisman he had just used to break the ‘Eternal Shadowless Cage’ barrier that Jiong Jiaying had used on him before running away, he considered the ‘pair’ in their own barriers. The nature of the barriers he was unclear on, although probably they were not as strong in the first instance as the one he had been hit with.

-Ironic, that for all their previous determinations to see me dead, they really did not want to be the ones to put that knife in personally, he sneered.

In another circumstance it would have almost been darkly funny, but as it now stood, he could only muster contempt for them, and barely even that.

-Should I even attempt to free the dragon? That was the other question rattling around in his head.

His intuition was trying to lead him towards the idea that that was ‘bad’ but he was certain now that Din Ouyeng had been doing ‘something’ to force matters. The dragon had also seen through it and done… what she had done.

-Given they ran immediately, I probably owe it to her to at least try, he sighed inwardly…

-Except those bastards ran off with everything else and if they get back to the others things will get really problematic. I already showed them most of my hand as it is, beyond the talismans that will get me into problems if I so much as own up to possessing them and don’t kill them all with the first attempt.

-I can always return. She isn’t going…

“Wait!” the dragon managed to actually call out, which was impressive, given the nature of the barrier.

“…”

“Is Han Shu alive?”

-And for one heavenly jade, the question I did not expect, he frowned.

“You know his name?”

“I travelled with him,” the dragon snapped, also staring at him hard.

Walking forward, he paused abruptly, and stared with narrowed eyes at the space for maybe twenty metres around her barrier, and to a lesser extent the Ur’Vash’s. It was a seething field of barely detectable yang energy that was rich in laws. Considering how thoroughly inauspicious the alignments here now were courtesy of whatever she had done, the area around the barrier was, for now, a death trap to anyone but the dragon in all likelihood.

-No wonder they ran, he sighed again. Even someone like Jiong Jiaying, who is close to me in strength, would struggle with this.

“They bound him prisoner, so their elders can interrogate him about ‘treasure’ I assume,” he added, by way of explanation. “Also, I… probably can’t get you out of that.”

Her lack of surprise at that latter point, basically confirmed for him that she already knew as much. In truth, the longer he stared at it, the more certain he became that this whole mess was spawned by the Jade Gate Court wanting their priceless pill and eating it.

“You tried to kill him,” she added, staring at him impassively.

“…”

It was hard to say what surprised him more, that she knew that, or that she said it without so much as a flicker of uncertainty.

-What kind of monstrous principle did she grasp? He pondered staring at her.

Even with the barrier…

Even though he could roughly grasp her strength—something approaching a genuine Quasi-Immortal…

Even though he had three whole realms on her, or close enough…

Even with 9000 odd years of experience and perceptive nous to try and fall back on…

Even with ‘Shatterpoint’ and a bunch of other useful divination related arts…

Even with all that, she was close to inscrutable.

-There is yang… and some aspect of obfuscation… Shit, don’t tell me she’s actually someone from the Seven Sovereigns?

That he had met the pair from the ‘Beautiful Skies Walking Society’ back then, and the use of the Parasol Talisman by someone… She had all but insinuated a connection to the Meng clan with her recognition of the talisman as well…

-She isn’t ‘actually’ some prodigal junior from the Vast Obscurity Grove… is she? That really was a terrifying thought. Was she part of a group that got caught up in the shift…? She talked about running into…

Thinking things over quickly while he tried to keep a mark on those fleeing, who were now tied up by the Ur’Vash, he asked, “So it really was you in the forest?”

“…”

Her look was as close to ‘I ask questions here, not you,’ as he had ever seen in a junior, but considering her possible backing, he sighed mentally and explained further, if only because that whole series of events still left him feeling uneasy. “I did, but only to call their bluff. They hid theft behind righteousness, framing him with the circumstances of wider politics regarding this trial.”

“And you didn’t try to prove his innocence?” she interjected.

“I did, but they used various heavenly oaths and have silver tongues,” he sighed, reminded that he was still no closer to solving the riddle there, although his intuition regarding the parasol talisman had been somehow tweaked there… “Most wanted someone else to blame for this whole mess anyway, so the allegations took easily.”

“I see,” she said impassively, but that time he did catch a barest flicker of… sadness?

Behind him, his soul sense, which was being roundly obfuscated now by Kong Bo and Jiong Jiaying while they covered for Jiao Den who was fighting with some Ur’Vash who were even more fanatical than the ones who had…

-Nameless sons of dogs, he grimaced, seeing the formation being reformed after whatever had happened there in the aftermath of the tribulation being ended.

-I guess I’ll have to go and deal with that first…?

He nearly made his excuses, and then paused, because his intuition was…

{Shatterpoint}

He closed his eyes for a moment, letting the spider web of ‘moments’ shift through his consciousness. There were several ways to ‘use’ the art, beyond as a short term means of clairvoyance. That he was unwilling to do, even if he thought it would work here, which it probably wouldn’t given how profound the dragon girl’s principle was.

So instead he considered the fracture points themselves, and what the art helped him grasp about their ‘importance’.

“…”

Unequivocally, the result came back that he would gain more by hearing her out right now, compared to chasing after them and returning, which was strange to the point where he wondered for a moment if Din Ouyeng, or one of the others was deliberately messing with him just to slow him down, before rejecting it.

That left…

-Her? he turned back to stare at her, working hard to school his expression. Does her principle have a geomantic aspect?

Given her yang strength and draconic nature as a ‘Land Dragon’ he was pretty sure suddenly that was the case.

While he pondered that, he continued to narrate his explanation from earlier. “They took him into custody claiming he was a criminal that deserved death in the eyes of heaven, so I tried to kill him to force them to stop me and expose their ‘justice on behalf of heaven’ for self-serving, empty words.

“You saw how a fight against nine of them went; all I could do was resort to that method. He also has a graciousness with my sect. The sword Hao Tai had was with him as well… I intend to make good on that.”

“The sword is just a hollow thing now,” she replied, making him blink in surprise.

The way she said it so offhandedly, without any hint of uncertainty…

“If it were not,” she went on, “anyone without its acknowledgement, who harbors greed towards treasures, would die the moment they tried to lift it.”

“…”

Shatterpoint ‘clicked’ in his mind, even as her remarkably simple explanation confirmed beyond any lingering doubt in his mind that they had tried to kill him with the sword. There was hidden nuance in her words there as well, in the way she phrased ‘harbors greed towards treasures’, implying that simply the act of picking it up in a possessive manner might be enough?

-That kind of weapon, is it basically a cursed artefact? He complained inwardly.

“You know about the sword?” he asked, as much to see how much more she might elaborate on, like its possible origins and why the night sky was still faintly angry, and why the talisman, which was… back to its silent, fuming self… was?

“Some things. How badly do you not want to sleep at night?” she grinned wanly, eyeing him a bit like someone who suspected they had just been scoped out.

-Aren’t your instincts just way too good!?! He complained inwardly, not sure whether to laugh or cry.

Thankfully, she didn’t seem to want to make a big deal of it, beyond…

She walked over to the nearest point to him, sighing. “Just understand this—for what was done to Han Shu… If he dies, I will hunt down and offer the lives of every cultivator remotely responsible that I can find as offerings for his passage to the next life.”

“…”

-I take that back, he corrected himself. That had been a very open ended declaration.

Curious, he decided to risk asking her. “You have a grudge with Din Ouyeng as well?”

“He is a person who makes grudges widely I suspect, although they seem hard to make stick. Those he wronged had not the strength to even think of touching his shadow. I… can do something about that, so I have,” she replied, which was about what he expected.

He got the impression that there was actually more to it than that, but ‘what’ he guessed would be dangerous to try and pry out of her…

“Well, I suppose I can tell you something useful,” she added, looking pensive suddenly, even as Shatterpoint ‘set’ for the second time in as many minutes, making him sweat mentally. “Two things actually.”

“What Han Shu told you was certainly the truth.”

“…” He stared at her, because that singular statement was… impressive in the amount of ‘faith’ in conveyed in whatever Han Shu had said.

Sighing, he nodded, agreeing. “I suspected so. However, Din Ouyeng still swore Heavenly Oaths…”

“He led the framing?” she asked, looking at him with narrowed eyes for a moment.

“Hao Tai, actually,” he mused, thinking back through the events, “but he was also involved, yes.”

“I see,” she mused, and Shatterpoint shifted for a third time.

“…”

“What I said before, regarding those events Han Shu was party to is the truth. Ji Tantai was Din Ouyeng’s companion and stated he was Di Ji, then later also identified himself as Kong Di Ji—This truth I offer to the golden peonies that bloomed here.”

“…”

He stared dully at her, then at the ground around her as a small ring of golden peonies blossomed in the knee length grass around her, carrying with them a remarkable sense of manifest strength. He continued to stare until they vanished.

-That was an oath… and it took and she didn’t perjure herself either?

The manner in which she said it was remarkably genuine as well—although her principle made him want to spit blood again, because it absolutely held some innate aspect of Yang Geomancy.

Looking back at her, at her principle doing whatever it was doing, he remembered to ask, “And the second thing?”

“You said they swore oaths to your heavens?” she asked.

“…”

“Yes,” he nodded, not even surprised when Shatterpoint set itself again. “That was what swayed the masses in the end…”

“Oaths to the heavens outside this place are not worth the words spoken in here,” she replied.

“…”

“They are not?” he asked involuntarily as he stared at her blankly, resisting the urge to take out his talisman and look at it.

“They are not,” she nodded, looking serious. “Doubly so after what has happened here I suspect.”

“…”

He stared up at the sky, thinking of the tribulation and particularly how it had ended.

“That is quite… concerning…” he muttered, because her words again carried hidden depth.

Apparently, she took his silence as denial, because she continued, with an amused expression on her face, adding, “You thought this world weak? This is but a shard, but it is a supreme shard. You are attuned to it, so you should know that, surely?”

“…”

Shatterpoint didn’t really ‘set’ that time, but that was unsurprising, because he had already grasped as much in truth. He was tempted to correct her, to say that he was shocked because of the other thing, and the ramifications of it…

He, perhaps more so even than most other juniors, was aware of the depth of accumulation on Eastern Azure. For all that it was a great world, it was one that had strategic importance. Shan Lai was a raised world in comparison, a Mortal World refined to a throne by the Shan Emperor, but of the four Azures, only Southern Azure and Eastern Azure had given birth to experts you could genuinely call ‘peerless beyond heaven’.

-Given this is just a shard, what kind of apex did those beings reach that left their traces here?

“Do not underestimate the things that left traces on this land when it was in full bloom,” she added, looking a bit awed herself.

“I… see,” as a reply, he had to admit it was thoroughly lacking, but he was still somewhat shocked inside, on two counts.

Firstly, that Heavenly Oaths in the usual fashion were potentially worthless—it was hard to take that at face value, even though he was intuitively sure she was on the mark. Secondly, the revelation about Ji Tantai and Di Ji, which she had successfully sworn an oath regarding, was important. Perhaps more than she realised. There were a lot of grudges regarding Di Ji and even with him ‘dead’ they had refused to really go away, continuing to haunt the discourse of their generation in unpredictable ways.

That he might not be dead, and it was all a ruse by the Jade Gate Court, that somehow also tied in an inheritance disciple from an arch rival and was foregrounded in the sort of manoeuvring he had been witnessing, made him wonder suddenly if the Din clan or someone in the Kong clan wasn’t trying to play some other game here.

He bowed, saluting her, before she mistook his inaction for rudeness.

“Thank you for being so forthright. If I can, and you have not gotten free, I will return once I have dealt with those wretches and helped those it seems I must. That Jiong will certainly have a means to unseal your barrier.”

She was the best bet, given that she was the third ‘hidden’ Ancient Immortal here, one of the few female Ancient Immortals among the younger generation and one almost as close to becoming a Dao Immortal as he was, which told him that someone had wanted Din Ouyeng either kept an eye on or kept safe.

-Well, at the very least some old elder is going to spit blood when they realise how high a profile their pet project just got, he sighed as he took his leave.

Behind him, the dragon just sat down on a rock, staring pensively at the old Ur’Vash. Throughout all of that, the old Ur’Vash in the robe had just sat there in silence, watching them. He didn’t doubt that old thing also had the means to talk through the barrier either.

Rapidly making his way to the top of the ridge again, he swept out his soul sense and buried a scowl. The situation was about as he had expected. The Ur’Vash had thoroughly splintered up the camp into about five different groups, but in doing so had basically dropped a brick on their own foot.

Together, most had been content to hide behind others, letting him, Dongmei, Xin Dai and others do the heavy lifting. Now, they all had to fight for themselves, and many of the groups were remarkably fresh in comparison to the Ur’Vash who had been pushing forward constantly. What was more concerning was that the Ur’Vash were still focusing the softer targets, whittling down their strength. Jade Gate Court and their attendant ‘allies’, probably the single largest block of resistance, were thus being flanked but not really pressured.

Din Ouyeng and the others had made it to the lake shore, which was not that far, truth be told, but they had left a small trail of devastation in their wake and swept by the main camp as well, which pretty much accounted for the delay.

{Shatterpoint}

{Stepping Across Ten Thousand Peaks}

With how messed up the alignments were, and how much torture the spatial fabric of the area had sustained he didn’t get more than two hundred metres with a single step, but it was enough that he arrived on the ridge overlooking them within ten seconds-

{Longing for Solace}

“Your mother!” he snarled as Shatterpoint warned him of the attack a heartbeat before it triggered all around him.

The formation was part barrier, part illusion and wholly annoying. Jiong Jiaying’s real strength lay in things like this and she was a master of soul-based attacks, more so than most others in the junior generation.

-Why did they send a monster like her along, he grumbled. Kong Bo I sort of understand, because he always liked making waves, but she is someone who rarely bothered with these things? Is it because Din Ouyeng really is a hidden piece?

Exhaling, he shifted his qi and then stopped again and instead focused on the very crude grasp of ‘Severing Law’ he had managed to make manifest. It helped that the manifestation of that ancient cultivator’s truth had used a spear; he could copy her movement, just about.

Spinning the spear in his hand, he stabbed it out, sending his martial intent forward while visualising the same strike. Space around him twisted and flowed away, the Severing Law drawing on the prodigious yang strength still surging in the land to split a hole right out of the formation, whereupon it hit a… a barrier.

“Seriously?” he complained and sent a second strike out, which made the barrier distort slightly.

-Is their plan really to just leave me sealed up here?

It was kind of funny, but Jiong Jiaying was not an idiot like the others, even if she was covering for them. Nor, really, were Kong Bo or Jiao Den. They understood much more clearly than people like Din Ouyeng or Hao Tai that ‘killing’ him personally was something their sect might be able to melt, but they themselves would reap no benefits, being long dead either at their own sect’s hands or his senior brothers and sisters.

-Maybe not Din Ouyeng… given he clearly has links to Di Ji, but the others will not want those consequences haunting them.

Rather than waste talismans, he pulled out a bronze axe and hefted it speculatively then threw it at the barrier. The breaking treasure ruptured it effortlessly and was then immediately seized by a ‘Promised Riches’ talisman.

Shaking his head, he arrived in front of the disciple who was holding it, looking shocked and surprised and just grasped it straight back out of their hand.

“You… what?” they managed before he swept the haft of his spear into them, sending their body flying away like a small meteor.

Two talismans exploded around him, both seeking to cause qi distortions—a good choice against a higher realm cultivator, but their use betrayed his opponent’s inexperience.

“Senior Cang, this is improper! Why are you interfering with our court now!” one of them yelled, outraged.

“Ask Din Ouyeng,” he sneered, blocking two more strikes.

“SENIOR CANG!” a voice roared from the next camp. “ARE YOU SIDING WITH THIEVES WHO VALUE TREASURE OVER RIGHTEOUSNESS?”

-Ah, so they did indeed grab them, he nodded with satisfaction. And that explains why they are throwing barriers at me: I am a distraction now their prize has fled and they don’t want to be judged fairly for killing me…

{Rolling Thunder from the Mountains}

He stomped on the ground and the shockwave of martial intent sent everyone around him flying.

“YOU WOULD NOT GIVE ME FACE BEFORE, AND NOW YOU WANT ME TO STEP ASIDE AFTER DIN OUYENG TRIED TO INJURE ME AND STEAL MY TREASURES?” he roared back.

Looking across the lake, he aimed as best he could and sent out another strike, this one infused with both his grasp of Spear Law and also what he could of Severing law.

{Wind and Rain Upon the Heights}

The whole lake surged as his strike crashed into the edge of the retreating forces of the Jade Gate Court, breaking several of the lesser barriers and making a few disciples keel over from meridian shock.

“SOPHISTRY!” another of the camp leaders, who he thought might be associated with the Glittering Dragon bunch, added. “STEP ASIDE OR WE WILL FORCE YOU TO RECEIVE JUSTICE!”

“ARE YOU EVEN CAPABLE OF DELIVERING JUSTICE?” he yelled, infusing his annoyance with the circumstances into it and executing the next step of the combination art.

{Whispers amid the Bamboo Forest}

The swirling intent amplified itself, making their barriers shake—his teacher had been clear that this series of moves was best if one had a grasp of a law of each element. As it was, he could only rely on the stolen ephemera of the Parasol Tree to support him.

{Mysterious Light within the Night}

The strength of yang surged and the whole area round the formation slowed, finally forcing a reaction from the central groups, but it was too late now. The entire area around the Jade Gate Courts force was starting to become a focus of the latent yang energies, lured by his intent, and began to manifest into tens of flowing flames that were resonating with his spear, earth and crude severing law comprehensions.

{Echoes of the Oldest Mountains}

The whole sequence set and his martial intent coalesced, drawing in the boundless strength of yang and forming a vast, shadowy spear that struck down on the camp.

The five attacks merged as one, weakened in truth because he had only three laws that were his own to leverage with them, but it was still a vast avalanche of destruction that made their barriers crack and shift as the qi they were pushing into them proved to be utterly inadequate to the task.

“YOU DARE!” an old voice thundered and a white jade sword cut down from the void, aiming for him.

-No shit I dare, you old freak, he grumbled, tossing the bronze axe upwards again.

The two treasures collided and the entire lake bent outwards for a second before normality restored itself. The durability of the land was really quite something, he had to acknowledge. His strike would have been enough to break the defences of a decent rural town, and the treasure used by the court was not much worse.

{Calling Thunder—

“Oh may you be tormented by devil monkeys!” he sighed and cut off the activation as two groups that had been flanking activated talismans locking him in another barrier.

“Why are they even?” he frowned, considering the groups.

There in the distance, he could just make out Jiong and Kong Bo arguing with a third figure he had never seen before, dressed in travelling robes.

-Great, just how many Ancient Immortals do they have skulking here? he wondered.

Sweeping the rest as best he could, given how limited soul sense was with all the barriers and obfuscation, he finally found that Din Ouyeng and the others were recovering nearby right in the eye of the formation that the hundred or so disciples were wielding as well. There was no sign of Han Shu though, which made him hopeful that Dongmei had actually succeeded in that gambit once the battle became chaotic.

-I should have told her that, he realised with a scowl. That was an idiotic mistake, made because he was more concerned about other things. I can always go back afterwards…and speaking of idiotic things…

{Shatterpoint}

This time, he used the art to consider the barrier. It was a Dao Sovereign grade one, but probably it wouldn’t hold up to that kind of punishment, just because it was being channelled as well as supported by spirit jade scrolls. That meant that it had a few weaknesses he could exploit, and they really were not used to fighting powerful Martial Immortals, that much was clear. He had barely used any qi at all, just enough to manifest intent as required.

Abruptly, a silver arrow sliced down and obliterated one of the groups maintaining the barrier. On the far ridgeline, he could see two archers in white robes—Qing Dongmei… and Bai Shuili? He had to do a double take, before recalling that talismanic avatars were a thing others could possess, not just him.

-Of course her senior sister would also give her something for the road, he nodded, feeling relieved. Bai Shuili was a Martial Dao Lord, so her avatar would be at least an Ancient Immortal.

Making good on the opportunity, he struck twice as the barrier briefly destabilised and rent a hole in it wide enough to pass through, descending immediately onto another of the groups-

{Echoes of the Oldest Mountains}

At this point, it was almost embarrassing, half of them died without even really understanding what hit them as the refrain of the earth law infused attack swept through the world as he landed, supported with the severing law. The more he used that, the more he had to admire what was a priceless gift that had dropped on him out of the sky in effect.

Two sent treasures after him—

Shatterpoint ‘set’ jarringly and he abandoned the idea of dodging and instead put down the ‘Dao Cage’ Talisman, having enough experience with the art to know when it was telling him he was in big trouble.

A moment later, five white blades smashed down on his location, each one carrying a sense of infused laws of jade and swords.

-Why didn’t you use these accursed things on the Ur’Vash? he complained, wondering if he was going to be forced to use his teacher’s own talismanic avatar just to preserve his life at this point. Sorry, miss dragon, it looks like it will take a while to deal with this after all.

~ Juni and Teng Chunhua – Camps and Aftermath. ~

Surveying the scattered remnants of the camp, Juni tried to resist the urge to kick something and failed. The innocent piece of stone soared away and bounce off a slumped pile of rock that might have been a building once.

“Well, this sucks,” Teng Chunhua spat, from where she was crouched in the lee of a nearby rock.

She nodded, peeking around the edge of her own rock again and sighed, before daubing a rock blue and yellow and randomly throwing it. It bounced three times and hit a concealed ward which exploded in a ten metre wide spiral of green fire that made her skin prickle unpleasantly—thirty metres away.

Off to her left, a group of Ur’Vash daubed in golden flowers were advancing on one of the still defended camps as cultivators there retreated. To her right, the formations of Ur’Vash were still besieging the-

“Down!” she snapped, crouching as low as she could.

Teng Chunhua followed suit as a twisting silver arrow crashed into one of the Jade Gate’s formations, scattering rays of lethal yin energy everywhere.

“Shit, at this rate they might actually be dead by accident before we ever get to them!” Teng Chunhua snarled, standing up and shooting an arrow at the formation that had deflected the worst of the arrow. “And what is with the insane durability of these scattered ruins anyway? There is barely a rock out of place!”

That… was true. She had a suspicion there, regarding what she had seen in the middle of the camp and ‘twisted good fortune’, but that was kind of concerning in its own way.

“Be thankful for it. It’s keeping us and many others alive,” she signed back, which just got a shake of the head from Teng Chunhua.

“I am also concerned about—”

She trailed off as a massive, and familiar eruption of yang-attributed energy washed over everything, making grass smoke and rocks wobble. The formations ahead of them twisted and spun, but before the five white swords could realign in that direction, she saw a figure wielding a blade leap over a camp and crash down into one of them, obliterating the disciples in green robes in a shockwave of some kind of fire principle that fed off the yang energy.

“Was that Lin Ling?” Teng Chunhua asked, frowning.

“Yes,” she nodded, grimly.

“…”

She was torn about going back, but realistically that scale off…

A second flare of yang energy erupted like a small sun, intensifying the wave of distortion that had just swept over everything, followed in the same instant by a shadow like manifestation of a spear that made her break out in a cold sweat.

“And Cang Di?” Teng Chunhua added, looking back in that direction.

“Apparently—”

Four figures shot over the hilltop to their right, moving so fast they were nearly blurs, two more came after, a woman in a green robe with dark hair and a man in a green robe holding a sword and shield.

The group crashed down near the main formation which turned to attack—

“Oh come on!” she groaned as her divination art told her in no uncertain terms that here was a very bad place to be a second from now.

Not even bothering to point, she fled across the edge of the point, moments before a vast white sword crashed down onto the hill behind them, forcing ‘Cang Di’ to also evade using some kind of barrier. When the shockwaves subsided, she checked and breathed a sigh of relief to see Teng Chunhua had made it behind the same bit of tumbled down wall she had…

Turning, she paused, because there were four terrified cultivators, three women and a man in grey and blue robes crouching beneath a barrier in the lee of the wall, staring at them with talismans in shaking hands.

“…”

“All stronger than us,” Teng Chunhua signed, making her grimace. “Although…”

“D…demons,” the youth, who she could see was clearly suffering from some kind of deviation related injury, pointed his treasure sword at them both, even as another shockwave from a sword crashed down, making everything shake.

“All injured,” she noted, narrowing her eyes and looking at them.

“Still, they are stronger than me,” Teng Chunhua said grimly.

“Di-”

She pulled out her metal spear and shot forward, deciding to just seize the advantage. The youth blocked the strike, only to stagger back because she was still empowered by the shared connection to the Ur’Vash.

“Senior brother!” one of the woman screamed, casting a talisman, which cracked and somehow missed her by a matter of a few centimetres, leaving a scored, melting hole in a rock to her right.

In that instant she blocked two more blows, barely, which told her that her opponent was about equivalent to that Sheng Zhao in strength, and not very good at martial combat.

{Echoes of the Mountain Lotus}

Between one footfall and the next, she triggered the technique, sending a destabilizing shockwave through the ground, even as Teng Chunhua grappled with one of the women, barely able to restrain her before managing to bind her with a talisman.

After that, the fight went surprisingly easily, she guessed that all of them were about Dao Seeking—how they had survived here was anyone’s guess, but she kicked the youth twice in the stomach as she parried blows that were strong and fast, but lacked any real capability beyond that. It was enough to make her arms shake, but not so much that she couldn’t compensate with technique, which almost made her feel sorry for her opponent, until she recalled in the moment that his age probably wasn’t much more than hers and few cultivators bothered learning how to hit things with a sword after Golden Core. In day to day life there was just no need when arts would suffice.

Another sword crashed down into the hillside behind them, however, nearly sending her sprawling. It did send her opponents tumbling though, and one of the women coughed blood, even as Teng Chunhua continued to press her advantage as an attuned physical cultivator to try to keep her tied up.

“You… fight well…” the youth panted, in Imperial Common, as they tumbled down in the dirt “but you’re still just a—”

{Blossoming Lotus Seizes All}

She punched him the face, drawing away a surprising amount of his qi in the process, and stopped him in his tracks.

{Blossoming Lotus Seizes All}

{Blossoming Lotus Seizes All}

{Blossoming Lotus Seizes All}

Three additional rapid executions of the same technique left him stunned to the point where he could do little to nothing with his remaining qi, such as it was.

“Watch-!”

{Returning Lotus Gate}

Teng Chunhua’s voice made her reflexively use the defensive technique, just in time for her to be sent sprawling, her qi chaotic and her bones shaking from the impact.

“You… you…” the girl, who was barely older than Lin Ling, had managed to worm away from Teng Chunhua and cast a metal element talisman at her. “You stay away from Senior Fei!”

“Ah, screw it!” Teng Chunhua pulled out a talisman, only for it to turn out to be unnecessary when another shockwave sent them all sprawling and the girl coughed up black blood, a sure sign her deviation had just worsened.

“You, where are the prisoners?” she snapped in Easten, hoping that they might understand.

“Relict?” The woman who Teng Chunhua had managed to bind looked shocked.

-Ah, it is called the ‘Relict Tongue’ in the south. Are they from Nine Rivers or Yuan Gateway province?

“Where are the prisoners!” she pressed, even as Teng Chunhua used her last binding talisman on the girl who was looking lost now.

“They…” the woman frowned.

“Don’t tell them!” the second woman grimaced.

“Or what? This is all because of those motherless monkey-sons in the Jade Gate Court!” the older woman snapped. “If we tell you, can you guarantee we won’t… be defiled?”

“…”

The younger woman just scowled, but the middle woman flinched.

Just what do you take us for? she thought… Unless?

“You met the tribes in the forests, beyond the Badlands?” she murmured, recalling the banners she had seen.

Focusing on ‘Heart Shifting Steps’, she looked at their faces. The middle one did indeed betray a small flicker of genuine fear. The male disciple just frowned.

“We are not such savages, nor the demons you claim to call us,” she said at last, watching them with narrowed eyes.

“…”

“So you say, but what words do you have that can convince us?”

She was half tempted to swear a heavenly oath, but her earlier intuition about those from when she got the talisman had only solidified, especially after the unholy mess made of this place with all the manipulations of tribulations.

-What can I swear by?

-The woman I saw was clearly something… and that shrine was likely to her… Not to mention the resonance with the talisman? … and the flowers?

-The flowers?

She wasn’t sure why she thought that, but as soon as she did, Heart Shifting Steps told her that she could indeed make that kind of oath.

“We are not the savages of the forests and mountains. We will not flay you or turn you into those macabre banners,” she repeated. “This I swear upon the golden flowers that bloomed here?”

As she spoke the words, hoping her intuition wasn’t being messed with, a small circle of golden flowers swirled around them, and with it a faint sense of ‘settling’ that held a profundity it was hard to ignore.

“That good enough?” she murmured.

“…”

All four, and Teng Chunhua for that matter, stared at her with shock and something approaching genuine uncertainty in their eyes.

“Now, where are they?” she pressed, watching in a more concerted manner to see if they were going to reply and whether she could pick out any lies while they were still a bit shocked by that.

“The demons were taken somewhere else, beyond the lake…" the older woman muttered. "The female ones anyway, the male ones—”

“The other prisoners, your kind,” she cut the woman off.

“…”

They looked at her dully, clearly not expecting her be more interested in the Bureau prisoners.

“The green robes took some important things,” she sneered. “We are here for that.”

“Motherless sons of inveterate monkeys,” the youth spat, struggling up. It was unclear if he was cursing them or the Jade Gate Court though. She decided it was the latter to be charitable for now.

“They caused a big problem,” she grinned. “Tell us where they keep the other prisoners: A woman with dark brown hair, three males from ‘silver law’ and a younger one who had a black sword before one of those from the silver law took it.”

“Silver law?” the woman asked, looking confused.

“They call themselves silver law when we encountered them in ruins before and tried to rob us,” she added.

“…”

“Is all this because some fate-accursed Jade Gate Court disciple robbed the wrong… demon?” the older woman scowled.

“You can’t talk about them like that, junior sister—the Jade Gate Court are righteous cultivators!” the second woman from before mumbled. “They helped us… have been protecting us.”

She peered at her carefully like she was some manner of strange fish.

“Protect you?” Teng Chunhua muttered a bit derisively. “All I have seen in this battle is a bunch of cowards…”

“You… the Jade Gate Court protected us from your arrows and your heretical arts,” the middle woman, clearly quite invested in their righteousness, pressed.

“You call them righteous,” she asked with a degree of amusement, shifted to curiosity, “but do you even understand what those words mean? Your forces have acted like bandits—you robbed and killed hundreds, destroyed fields, livelihoods, villages.”

“They attacked your own side’s Warleader in battle…” Teng Chunhua added. “Hid behind others like a turtle in its shell?”

“Indeed, and now they run away, leaving folk like you to face the retribution their actions have wrought? Is this righteousness in your land?” she asked, adding a hint of incredulousness to her voice as she did so.

The woman was stunned and fell silent, chagrined.

Teng Chunhua, who had been checking their surroundings quickly, waved for her to hurry up.

“Simply put? Yes, they robbed the wrong people and their backing is not that good,” she said a bit more forcefully. “If you really want to live you should understand what is what, right? You do not wear their robes? Are you married to their tribe?”

“What… no!” the woman looked scandalized.

“Then what do you owe them?” she pressed again. “They landed you in this mess and now they are running away and leaving you here?”

“…”

“They had a bunch of other prisoners in the tents near the tree,” the youth suddenly volunteered. “They kept them there, never letting them out of their sight, but if you were after them, you will be out of luck.”

“Go on,” she asked, frowning behind her mask.

“The Jade Gate Court attempted to lead them away and were attacked by the Nine Auspicious Moons and…”

“Those names will mean nothing, just let me speak,” the older woman grumbled, ignoring the nasty looks from the other two women. “Several of the prisoners got taken by another group, not the green robes. That is all we can tell you, all that we saw before it all went to nameless accursed chaos when they killed Senior Mei Jongha during his fortunate tribulation to keep the barrier intact."

“Taken by another group?”

“Yes,” the woman nodded. “A sandy-haired woman with scars on her face. She was helped by the ones in white robes. Probably she was after the sealed one, the criminal that Senior Cang was also interested in?”

“Senior Cang?” she asked, already knowing, but having to follow that through and ask the right questions.

“Our… ‘Warleader’ as you put it,” the youth said a bit proudly. “The one fighting them… over by the lake probably.”

“Hurry up, there are several other cultivators coming!” Teng Chunhua signed, even as another sword attempted to hit Cang Di, who had been forced to retreat again she guessed.

“I see,” she nodded, glancing at Teng Chunhua and nodding.

“Yes, she was helped by the ones in white robes—there was a disagreement over treasure before; they accused the green-robed ones of being more interested in treasure than justice…”

“A preposterous—”

“Go on,” she snapped.

“Sorry, yes, they likely wanted whatever the green-robed ones were trying to get from him, and took those with him for extra information,” the woman said, ignoring the other two who were glaring at her.

“…”

-Great, so a different bunch of cultivators have run off with Han Shu and the others? She groaned inwardly. Those with white robes… the woman I think I saw, she was wielding two swords and likely as strong as Cang Di?

Looking at them, she sighed and withdrew her sword-staff. They were not lying, at least. Waving to Teng Chunhua, they both rapidly retreated, which was, she was certain, not the choice the group likely expected them to make.

Still, it was only pure luck, she was sure, that saw them remain unspotted as she saw the bearded youth with nasty scars, dressed in travelling robes, before he saw them. Dropping down behind the bit of a tent that had obscured them, Teng Chunhua followed suit.

{One with What Is}

A heartbeat later, the sweep of soul sense washed over them both as they lay still amid the ruins of the tent. It no doubt helped that there were quite a few Ur’Vash corpses nearby and they were both covered in enough blood at this point to pass for dead bodies. She stilled her heart and held her breath, focusing intently on playing dead, thinking of nothing as a second sweep covered the whole area.

As she watched, taking care to focus on nothing, the bearded youth checked the group, easily broke the bindings Teng Chunhua had used and fed them some scavenged spirit herbs.

“Senior Ran, there were just two…” the girl muttered.

‘Senior Ran’ looked around again, with narrowed eyes, sweeping a third time, before shaking his head.

“Whoever was here is gone, or very good at hiding,” the youth sighed, before blocking a shockwave that came from the battle between Cang Di and the formation.

“…”

“It was weird. They were asking about the prisoners…” the older woman frowned.

“The demons?”

“No… the Bureau prisoners, specifically the youth with the sword,” the youth grimaced.

“Were they now…” Senior Ran frowned. “Well that makes this whole thing more… explainable I guess.”

“It does?” the girl frowned.

“While this kind of force might have come here for that ruined village, the Jade Court having pilfered...”

“SENIOR CANG!” a voice raged from near the lake. “ARE YOU SIDING WITH THIEVES WHO VALUE TREASURE OVER RIGHTEOUSNESS?”

“YOU WOULD NOT GIVE ME FACE BEFORE, AND NOW YOU WANT ME TO STEP ASIDE AFTER DIN OUYENG TRIED TO INJURE ME AND STEAL MY TREASURES?” another voice thundered back, making everyone, even Senior Ran wince as he used his soul strength to protect the other cultivators.

“SOPHISTRY! STEP ASIDE OR WE WILL FORCE YOU TO RECEIVE JUSTICE!” another voice howled.

“ARE YOU EVEN CAPABLE OF DELIVERING JUSTICE?” Cang Di’s voice held a sense of derision that was accompanied by a strange, twisting intent that felt to her like the dark whispers of wind of the heights of East Fury.

The pressure that came after though, made her skin itch and her mind grow blank as something tugged at her, even as she hid behind her mantra and ‘One with What Is’.

-These… experts and their accursed attacks, she complained.

By the time she raised her head again, the cultivators were beating a hasty retreat, still protected by Senior Ran. A dozen Ur’Vash, not painted with yellow flowers, but wearing carapace armour, had also rushed over the ridge and were advancing on them. She watched as Senior Ran pointed along the ridge, and the group retreated.

A moment later, a suppressing wave of soul sense crushed down the whole area, making the new group of Ur’Vash stagger—

{Rolling Thunder Spear}

The thrust, made by Senior Ran, swept over the attacking group, even as two larger groups, many painted with golden flowers, scrambled over the ridge and slid down towards the group. The spear art obliterated most of the first group before he was forced to block two arrows with his spear, waving for the group to fall back quicker.

She watched them hastily vanish through the swirling dust and sighed, pushing herself up, she quickly weighted up her options and then pointed to the inner ring of the camp, guided mainly by ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ now.

“What do you make of that?” Teng Chunhua signed as they skidded down in the shadow of a small pile of rocks, peering through the drifting dust that was rolling over everything from the ongoing battle to their right.

“They didn’t seem to be lying,” she signed back, vaulting over another ruined wall and sweeping her gaze about warily.

{Echoes of the Oldest Mountains}

A vast, rippling shockwave tore across the lake, making both of them duck behind a wall for some cover as the battle on that side of the camp… intensified abruptly. The aftershocks of the art, which seemed to continue for a disturbingly long time, made her qi nearly flow out of her body, even with the sheltering strength of the rocks, which she realised now were made of the same qi-repelling stone from the depths, now worn to an attractive blue-grey.

Elsewhere, the battle had mainly moved back to the far side of the camp—the cultivators had rapidly abandoned the area around the ‘tree’ and its rock. The aura of inauspicious disjunction around there was so strong it gave her a headache just looking at it and things near there behaved ‘oddly’. Even now, several arrows that had fallen out of the sky were balancing inexplicably on their points in a straight line along one of the walls.

“It would really suck if, after all this, all we achieved was having to run after them again,” Teng Chunhua signed with a resigned shrug.

“It would,” she nodded, pausing to sweep the… “Did they leave nothing untrapped?” she scowled even as they both ducked as another of the shining white swords crashed down across the lake, met a moment later by-

{Grand Unity Dao Bolt}

A twisting bolt of five coloured lightning made her vision waver even though she looked in the opposite direction. Even at that distance she had the intention of the art impressed into her mind like a hammer blow a moment later.

“Somewhere an Ur’Vash strategist is feeling inadequate I hope,” Teng Chunhua groaned, pushing herself up.

“Never mind that, I think this lot have used more than the yearly budget of West Flower Picking town in talismans at this point,” she complained finally getting a register with ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ on a place where there might have once stood a tent.

Without comment, she kicked a rock over, bouncing it off a nearby rock and watched it turn into dust amid a crack of green sparks.

“Apparently not,” Teng Chunhua observed, following up her earlier comment about traps.

“Fortunately, we don’t have to go near it,” she nodded, then ducked again as a huge conflagration of green fire, the second in as many minutes swallowed up a nearby hilltop that held one of the Jade Gate Court’s formations.

By the time small, meteors of fire stopped raining down and they could come out from the handy cover of a series of slumped stone slabs that might have once been a wall, the battle had split even further, from what she could hear.

They only made it about ten paces though, before a sweep of something—soul sense perhaps, it gave her a familiar chill prickle, at least—swept out across the camp.

They scrambled up a small rise, aiming to get a better, if concealed, view of the rolling grassland beyond, when she got a sudden, abrupt pull from ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ that something deeply inauspicious was nearby.

Grabbing Teng Chunhua, who had taken the lead, she retreated a few paces and looked left and right, carefully.

-Ah, this is the direction I saw the white-robed women and the various other cultivators fleeing in? she realised.

Teng Chunhua looking at her quizzically.

“Nasty trap, or something like-”

She was cut off as a wave of silver fire swept over the ridge like a small tidal wave, forcing them both to throw themselves down flat as it scattered over them, hoping that luck was on their side.

It was, as it seemed to be quite frequently, she couldn’t help but notice, since the tribulation ended. In the distance, a small, twisting gyre had formed, she noted, about the size of Teng Chunhua’s tribulation or a bit less. Purple bolts pulsing down rapidly.

“That’s what, the fifth tribulation?” Chunhua muttered, as they made their way along a scattered line of rocks in the tall grass.

“At least,” she agreed—she hadn’t been counting in any case, given how many bolts had been flying around earlier.

It took a few minutes, but they managed to get around to the far side of the camp, on the northern edge. Several groups were fighting fierce, rear guard retreats, being pursued by mobs of Ur’Vash and the odd, scavenged formation. Off to the west, there were various flares of multi-coloured fire near the trees beyond that lake. Also in that direction, she saw another larger group of Ur’Vash forming up, including what looked like cavalry riding Horned Jaguars.

Narrowing her eyes, she focused on the other art the talisman was telling her she should be cultivating now.

{Bright Lotus Eye}

{Heart Shifting Steps)

The world around her blurred slightly as all sorts of shifting signatures of qi bombarded her, rather unpleasantly, truth be told. It was the main reason she had not really touched it, the sensory overload made it hard to use and when used in conjunction with ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ it put enough pressure on her oracular meridians that she could not sustain it for more than 10 seconds at a time as she currently was.

Her vision swam as she struggled to filter out the excess distortion from all the different sources of qi drifting about and squinted at the first of the two groups fighting. The cultivators were some 40 strong, a few in white robes, some in purple, grey-blue and a few others, working-

{Lanterns of Lunar Sorrow}

A silver arrow from the heart of that group shot high into the sky and split into nine silver suns. The little balls of blazing yin death swirled in a spiral downward onto the encroaching forces of Ur’Vash massing along the length of the distant ridge line, forcing her to abandon the art or be temporarily blinded.

Even having turned away, the flashes of the detonations as they were blocked by something was-

A second arrow, from a group fighting in the middle distance nearly made her limbs grow cold, even at the distance of over a mile. It streaked across and smashed into the combat on the lake shore next to the camp.

{Twelve Righteous Blades of the Court}

A moment later, a volley of green swords spiralled out across the grassland, scything through Ur’Vash who were advancing towards both combats before crashing into and mostly destroying a series of barriers that the white-robed cultivators had put up.

{Lance of the Jade Sovereign}

A second attack followed hot on its heels even as she tried to use ‘Bright Lotus Eye’ again to see if anyone she recognised was in that group, making her wince and look away. In the process, she saw a second column of Ur’Vash had somehow cut around the edge and was trying to make its way across the ridgeline they had abandoned earlier.

The column was clearly using some kind of formation or mass art, because they rushed very aggressively straight for the camp, likely to try to flank the group by the lake, and in the process ran straight into the traps set by the fleeing cultivators.

“…”

“I am very glad we didn’t go over that,” Teng Chunhua said eventually, as they watched the Ur’Vash band, who had shields, spears and centipede armour rather like those they had seen in the forest, had to beat a hasty retreat.

She nodded, watching the other battle as well from the corner of her eye. It was not outside the realm of possibility that Han Shu and the others were still with the Jade Gate Court, in spite of what those cultivators had claimed. Their scattered formations though, seemed to contain quite a few being ‘protected’.

-Arrrrgh, she groaned inwardly, still unsure what to actually do.

It was beyond infuriating in truth.

“Lin Ling, I really want to make you clean up your mess,” she grumbled, kicking another rock into the smoking long grass.

Off to their right, the battle between the Jade Gate Court, Cang Di and two new formations of Ur’Vash was also ongoing. Both sides also seemed more interested in fighting with Cang Di as well. Sighing, she focused both arts again, steeling herself.

{Bright Lotus Eye}

{Heart Shifting Steps)

Again, she had to fight for several seconds with the sensory overload and the flares of qi that swept this way and that, hoping the nosebleed she now had was not as copious as it felt.

“What kind of art is that?” Teng Chunhua muttered.

“An annoying one, hard to use,” she grimaced, wiping her hand across her nose and ignoring how much red was on it.

The few seconds she got were thankfully enough to tell her that the nearest groups at least were all fighting Cang Di, while the two further groups, each numbering in the dozens, were a rather mixed bunch of cultivators from various sects that were being shepherded by the Jade Gate Court while some of their injured were being seen to. She saw no sign of-

{Moon Slaying Eye}

The sheet of yin fire that lanced out nearly made her ocular meridians rupture, such was the feedback she got.

{Jade Slaughter Lance}

The counter strike, which landed about a mile distant from them, took the form of a black bolt of lightning in the form of a spear with a blazing green edge. Even though she was prepared for the impact, the rolling shockwave still physically lifted her off the ground for a moment before sending her crashing into the ground again with a groan. Her qi had nearly been dispersed so many times in the last few hours she was getting numb to the feeling she realised. In the aftermath, she could make out a swirling vortex of subsidiary bolts that were calling their own…

A dozen golden-green bolts twisted out of the clear sky, but rather than going where they were presumably intended, they scattered everywhere.

Four actually went back towards the Jade Gate Court, obliterating two of the defensive barriers. Three more twisted off in the general direction of the tribulation epicentre, perhaps drawn by the distant yang miasma that was still swirling. The others set a few trees on fire, but otherwise did remarkably little damage from what she could see.

“Have they no shame!” Teng Chunhua complained, echoing her own thoughts on the matter as they sat up, waiting for the ringing in their ears to vanish.

In the aftermath, she was found she was seeing strange ‘empty’ distortions, like voids around the edge of her vision, for a few seconds with the lingering effects of ‘Bright Lotus Eye’ that were, she realised, absences of qi.

“Well, it didn’t look like that lot had any prisoners in it either,” she sighed, using her mantra to quell the worst of it so she could use the art again. “What is the range on your soul sense like?”

“Paltry, maybe two or three miles?” Teng Chunhua grimaced. “But that would be under optimal conditions. As it is, weak senses are getting targeted by them aggressively.”

She nodded, again considering their options a further time. Heart Shifting Steps was silent on such things, but she had come to recognise that was likely because the alignments here were still twisted into the kinds of artisanal knots you would expect of a cursed ground, which in many respects it was, if you weren’t a ‘golden flower tribe’ adherent. Those Ur’Vash had scattered widely at this point, pursuing various targets of opportunity even as the other, more organized forces that had been on the edge or the flanks continued to sweep around.

Peering back in the direction of the epicentre of the tribulation, which was now largely abandoned, she realised she hadn’t seen the other groups who had gone that way return and it had been basically untouched since Cang Di started attacking the Jade Gate Court.…

“Perhaps we should go look for Lin Ling?” she muttered, lifting her head, then suppressing a flinch as another massive explosion of green fire burst across a nearby hilltop.

“There has been no fighting in that direction for a while,” Teng Chunhua nodded, sounding uneasy.

Given that they had only worked their way across a distance of about a mile as the bird might have flown to get around the camp, it took them rather longer than she would have liked to return to the vicinity of the tribulation’s epicentre. It was easy to avoid the Ur’Vash, but to her surprise there were two other groups of cultivators lurking in the vicinity—a group in gold and brown robes that she was sure she had seen somewhere before, and another group in travelling robes and masks.

Both were sweeping everywhere with qi sense and soul sense, and also looking like they might head in the general direction of the epicentre. Fortunately, they were skirmishing with the golden flower painted survivors of the tribulation and another band of the grass-burning, axe-wielding Ur’Vash she was sure were from Ajara. As such, they were able to thread their way stealthily around perimeter of the various sub camps, pausing only when required to hide from soul sense sweeps and to investigate a few of the abandoned clusters where tents and such had been long enough to determine that most of it was now heavily trapped with talismans.

Arriving at the top of the ridge on the south side of the camp, however, she could only stop to stare. The transformation of the land around here was something she had just accepted as ‘being what it was’ for now; however, the appearance of a pond, or what remained of one was… unexpected. On the far side of it, Lin Ling was sat, looking very bored within a flickering barrier surrounded by a slowly dissipating miasma of yang qi.

Nearby was an old Ur’Vash who she didn’t really recognise, but had the ‘look’ of an old elder, stuck in a similar looking barrier. Scanning around, she could read the traces of the battle, but there was no real sign of anyone else… and an empty barrier.

“Well… that’s both convenient and not…” she muttered, considering the barriers from the hilltop.

“Quite,” Chunhua agreed. “What do we do about the old Ur’Vash?”

“I’m going to guess that if they could escape they would have already. The cultivators were presumably responsible for that. But…”

She trailed off and considered the area before them.

“You reckon that Cang Di was in the third barrier?” Teng Chunhua mused, looking at it.

“That... is possible,” she nodded, thinking about how he had been attacking the Jade Gate Court. “More to the point, what do we do about that miasma of yang qi?”

Just looking at it made her skin itch, even at this distance, and it also reminded her of another problem.

-My cultivation is advancing too quickly…

The talisman was quite clear on the things she needed to do ‘before’ she formed a core and the amount of qi she had acquired during the battle, between the Parasol Tree infused talisman and the various brushes with heavenly lightning, had given her far more qi and then refined it than she actually wanted in the circumstances. The idea of absorbing a bunch more, especially yang qi, didn’t appeal until she had had a chance to look at the other art she needed to ‘grasp’—both of which were almost as strange as the ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ in their own way.

‘Bright Lotus Eye’, which worked in a similar way, but did so as a proper perception art and would, according to the talisman, help her master the qi flow within her body more thoroughly. She had barely used it though, because of the aforementioned disorientation. The talisman itself suggested starting to practice it once liquid qi began forming in her dantian, a point which she had arrived at in the last few days and then blown right past in the course of them.

It was also horrendously qi-intensive and caused issues with her qi circulation if she overused it, much like Heart Shifting Steps had when starting out.

Walking carefully around the muddy mess that was the pond, they stopped about ten metres from the barriers. At this point, she was surprised to find that her earlier exposure to the blood and whatever adaption she had acquired from being buried was quite helpful, but not to the point she was confident in getting much closer. She was still a good few metres ahead of Teng Chunhua as well, who had stopped near the shore and was looking a bit flushed.

The old Ur’Vash just stared at her… at them, in fact, as if he wasn’t quite sure what he was seeing, which was concerning. However, he made no other move or comment, so she turned to Lin Ling.

“Ling?” she called out, trying to attract her attention and hoping that she could in fact make her presence felt through the barrier.

Lin Ling opened her eyes and looked at them both. In that instant, she felt a sense of unnerving depth to her friend that had not been there before. Something about her eyes was also odd, the blue-green had a hint of red-gold fire around the iris… The main thing, however, was just…

-Do I comment? Or do I just ignore it, she wondered, considering Lin Ling, who looked like she was now eighteen and much more adult in appearance.

-Ignore it, until she comments, she decided with an inward grimace and a moment’s reflection.

In any case, the overall effect, along with the strange sense of opaqueness she got and the depths, was… disconcerting. That really was the best way to describe it.

Lin Ling said something, then frowned, and signed. “Glad to see you’re okay, I hope one of the spears can break the barrier.”

“Spears…” she glanced back at Teng Chunhua, who sighed.

“I threw the black one at a cultivator who was trying to muck up Teng Chunhua’s breakthrough, yours as well,” she grimaced. “It went to a good cause.”

“Ah… that’s unfortunate,” Lin Ling signed and looked a bit annoyed. “We will have to hope your swordstaff was made good enough.”

“And if that doesn’t work?” she asked.

“Then we are sat here until Cang Di comes back… if he comes back,” Lin Ling signed, managing to put a faintly sardonic intent into. “Or you get to chase after him and get Han Shu’s sword back.

“Why do I feel that all our paths are just leading to running after more people?” Teng Chunhua sighed. “It would be nice for something to just… go as planned for once?”

She could only nod to that, while Lin Ling had the good grace to at least look mildly put out, even if it was still a bit too close to ‘vexingly innocent’ for her liking.

“Any luck with the prisoners?” Lin Ling signed.

“Well, they probably aren’t dead, but one of the other groups of cultivators grabbed them from the Jade Gate Court,” she signed, trying not to look as frustrated as she felt.

“They want the sword, or something related to it,” Lin Ling nodded.

“…”

“How?” Teng Chunhua signed, before just shaking her head.

“Cang Di told me the gist of what happened, before apologizing and saying he couldn’t free me because of the swirling miasma of yang energy,” Lin Ling explained. “Given they think he has some other treasure…”

She was glad she had a lot of practice at schooling her expression, because she was fairly clear that Han Shu had something similar to her in many ways. She was under no illusions at this point as to how valuable what she had was, and the idea that they would be trying to get it out of him did not bode well. He had a mantra, but it was not one that was strong with the soul as far as she knew, nor was he very high realm, none of them were, although they were much better off for whatever reason than most of those.

“In any case, progress through the battlefield was basically a bust…”

She trailed off as another explosion and a shadow of that cutting absence echoed then truncated abruptly, followed by a flare of green fire that blossomed like a second sun for a brief moment.

“Right…” Lin Ling sighed.

“They also unsealed soul sense,” Teng Chunhua added, “and even with our ability to hide, it’s next to impossible to go near the cultivators now.”

She nodded in agreement, still nursing her annoyance there and continued to consider if she could, or should risk getting anywhere close to the barrier. While Teng Chunhua looked on, she picked her way forward another metre, before stopping and grimacing. Already, it was starting to blister her skin. Closing her eyes for a moment, she pushed her mantra to the limit and walked forward again. In the end, she had to stop about five metres away and then retreat.

“That’s no good,” she sighed, annoyed.

“Yeah,” Lin Ling grimaced. “If I could get out I could absorb it—the lightning from before already weakened it a bunch, but it will take hours to dissipate naturally.”

“Which is not optimal,” she agreed, looking sideways at the old Ur’Vash who was sat watching them in silence.

“I can only try,” she said, unslinging the swordstaff.

Compared to Han Shu’s sword, it was probably lacking, but it had managed to nick the black bone of the other spear with no obvious damage to itself. Given its strange, almost mystically preposterous origin though, she guessed that was fair. Who was going to believe she was actually handed a spear staff in an anomaly like that and then able to carry it out afterward.

{Heart Shifting Steps}

“…”

She stared at what she felt and shook her head, stepping back.

“Not possible?” Teng Chunhua sighed.

“The energies in there are… unpredictable,” she replied, in Easten.

“If I was out there, I could refine a bit of it using parasol qi…” Lin Ling signed looking annoyed again.

“…”

She turned to look at Teng Chunhua, who just looked resigned.

“Fine, I’ll try,” the other woman muttered. “If for no other reason than it might actually resolve the poisoning issue if the two can neutralise each other out.”

She watched Chunhua sit down and do something strange with her mantra, grasping the qi out of the air with it in a way that was rather like what she had done a few times with her aura. Curious, she took care not to look at the yang energies and activated ‘Bright Lotus Eye’ again.

{Bright Lotus Eye}

This time, she could see a fuzzy and strange, devouring nihility, which she had to guess was the mantra drawing misty swirls and strange blurry little glittering points of yang qi out of the air. Releasing the art, she looked at the same place and saw basically nothing beyond a bit of wavering distortion.

“…”

“I had wondered about the weird rumours within the force that they saw Maker’s Dancers…” the old Ur’Vash in the other cage finally spoke, staring at Teng Chunhua then her. “But it turns out to just be two human bitches playing sacrilegious games.”

She stared at him, glad that her mask hid her expression.

“I wonder what to do with you both, perhaps I should turn you both into breeding slaves for your arrogance. Maybe if you please me and those I favour for a hundred years I will let you die with honour.”

“…”

-Great, so he knows we are not Ur’Vash, she sighed, wondering if there was a way to kill him.

“Wonderful,” Teng Chunhua sighed sarcastically. “Is being an obnoxious cock a pre-requisite for being an old elder, I wonder?”

“Probably,” she signed back as she sneered behind her mask.

Lin Ling was, she noted now staring at the old Ur’Vash again, looking pensive. She had been doing that quite a bit to be honest. Certainly, leaving him alive was not an option in any case—if he knew their secret that was tantamount to signing orders for their own deaths… or maybe worse.

-Wait… I was forgetting about that connection, she sighed, focusing on it as best she could.

Whatever that was still lingered within her, although dulled now by distance to the vast, scattered majority. She was still hunting for it, and how it connected to this old Ur’Vash when Lin Ling spoke up again.

“You should be careful with your words, old orc,” her expression was almost conciliatory, but the venom in the way she pitched it was quite exquisite. “Things might not go as you expect—symbols have power remember, and belief works in weird and rather unpredictable ways…”

She frowned as she felt the connection get stronger. Lin Ling had always had that kind of side to her, but the words were… odd. Maybe it was the way they were pitched, but they held a conviction that tugged at her faintly. The symbol in her mind’s eye shifted a bit, breaking what was done… what had been trying to change her perception of what had been said in some slight way, however she ignored that.

Instead, she stood there, eyes shut now, thinking about what Lin Ling had just said. Attempting to get a better idea of that feeling of power and the connection to… the strength… power, that the Ur’Vash had been sharing somehow, when they were fighting the cultivators.

It had gotten stronger the more pressured they got?

It was also connected to the yellow flowers that had bloomed; even an idiot could work that out.

-Symbols have… power?

Opening her eyes, she flipped the spear in her hands and considered the distance. The energy was flowing though her now, helped in part by her mantra, to her surprise, and also Heart Shifting Steps. Inhaling and exhaling a few times, she also blanked out the sneering visage of the old Ur’Vash and let the ‘energy’ roll out through her strike towards the barrier, pushing her own qi after it.

{Echoes of the Mountain Lotus}

The martial art from the talisman wasn’t really meant to be used with a weapon like this, but she had the Kun Martial Manual to somewhat bridge the gap. The strike, feeding off of the yang energies and the strange strength of the Ur’Vash hit the barrier and made it ripple even before her momentum carried her right to it, the blade stabbing into the point where Heart Shifting Steps drew her-

The recoil made the barrier twist on itself and sent her flying back almost thirty metres. The swordstaff also spun away to land in the soil quivering. She sat up and shook her head, using her mantra to help with the numbness in her arms from the recoiled impact.

The barrier itself, where the spear had stabbed, also manifested a tiny sliver of a crack that mended itself in a matter of moments.

The old Ur’Vash stared at her slack-jawed.

“That is impossible…” he said flatly. “You are not Ur’Vash.”

Lin Ling just laughed, then grinned nastily at the old Ur’Vash and waved a hand in the direction of the distant combat. “You know that, but do ‘they’ know it?”

“…”

“They have eyes. They can see,” the old Ur’Vash snapped.

“I wonder, maybe it is your eyes that are broken,” Lin Ling giggled, turning her gaze back to them. “What do they see? They see mythical tattoos in purple and blue that only those who know of your old shrines would use as they are. They see the earthen skin, that they are female and they have no soul strength to measure, no soul intent to easily touch them? They can vanish and appear in plain sight if you don’t look at them straight, they wear masks of wood, carved with patterns of clouds and water and carry metal weapons of ancient design no orc or invader could?”

“…”

The old Ur’Vash continued to scowl nastily at all of them.

“Are you going to tell them?” Lin Ling added with a grin. “How will you do that? You are stuck in there, neither of us can send soul sense out and talking is only possible because of our intent. Will some orcs come here?

“And when they do, I ask again, what will you tell them at this juncture?”

“You…” the old mage hissed, narrowing his eyes.

“Will you tell them that their talismanic symbols of one of their most mystical and important old gods are false? After everything that has happened here, with the tribulation, when the Peonies of Bright Fortune blossomed? And even if you do convince them that these two are false, can you convince them that everyone who carries those symbols is false? You seem to know things, so what happens if one of their old kin appears, an original, dancing through the days, singing to the night sky, walking as she wills between heaven and earth? Will you shoulder that calamity? Accept the condemnation of your people for misguiding them when really it is your hatred of humans that is poisoning everything?”

“Pretty words, human girl. If I did not know you for what you are, a human, I might almost be swayed, but your words are worthless.”

“A cute sentiment, but it is not their worth to you that matters,” Lin Ling pointed out with a rather odd smirk, she felt.

“…”

The old Ur’Vash looked conflicted for a second, but recovered well she thought.

“Symbols are Power,” Lin Ling went on, grinning broadly. “If you pick up a rock and draw a yellow moon and a white bell to represent the ‘Breaker’. A green square with a flame in it for the ‘Taker’, is the rock the Breaker? Or the Taker for that matter, or are you going to denounce it as false just because it is not the original thing? Can only you adjudicate what is such a thing? I can only bow to you, who is a god that I did not see!”

The old Ur’Vash scowled at her. “You pretend to know some words.”

Lin Ling grinned broadly. “You say that I am human and humans honour no oaths, that they cannot be Maker’s Dancers because of that… Well, can you swear that on the golden flowers that bloomed here?”

“…”

The old Ur’Vash actually opened and shut his mouth for a moment, veins standing out on his face.

“Words are power, are they not?” she added, “Or will you deny even that? Hypocritical old thing, are you even of the Ur?”

“You…” the old Ur’Vash snarled, angry at last. “You have a nasty mouth on you brat.”

“What pretence was it?” Lin Ling smirked? “Have I said any lies?”

“…”

“You…” the old Ur’Vash hissed again.

“Knowledge is power,” she responded contritely. “It is beholden upon us to use it well.”

The two of them watched this exchange dully. It was possible for her to see the old Lin Ling in this new one, and it was the ‘old’ Lin Ling, from back in West Flower Picking town—who had a smart mouth and a talent for fast-talking people.

This new… older Lin Ling was… it was hard not to be impressed in truth. She had delivered that whole spiel with just the right mix of condescension, abrasion, informative authority and amusement, right down to her manner and with a straight face to sell it to the old Ur’Vash completely and in doing so thoroughly enraged him for some reason.

She was very glad she was wearing the mask and the Ur’Vash couldn’t, apparently use his soul power or qi, or principle outside the barrier to catch their disbelief. As it was, Teng Chunhua was studiously still working on attempting to weaken the yang qi.

“If you can damage it to that extent, we can do this,” Lin Ling said abruptly, standing up. “I will strike it from the inside, you, from the outside.”

In that moment, she suddenly grasped why Lin Ling had been making the Ur’Vash angry, because that anger was filtering through to her, subtly becoming her anger as well, which she was able to fuel… Nodding, she stood and set herself again, channelling the power of that strength that she represented in the Ur’Vash around here, and merged it with her qi, intent and mantra as best she could.

{Echoes of the Mountain Lotus}

She struck out, at the same instant that she connected with the barrier Lin Ling pushed her hand against the same point and roared a word that she barely grasped the intent of.

“Sunder”

The barrier recoiled between them, ripping open a hole about a metre across even as she was thrown back. Lin Ling blurred out through it in the instant before it collapsed, rolling in the grass with the momentum she had used.

Sitting up, she shuddered, recovering her sword-staff and checking it for damage. The Ur’Vash had an expression like he had just eaten dog shit, so probably he understood what she had just done as well.

“That was, unpleasant…” Lin Ling muttered, shaking her head. “That was almost as bad as using the other one…”

Wondering what she meant by that, presumably it was concerning another of those ‘cries’, she was relieved to see that there was no damage to the blade or haft, even though it was utterly mundane in every way as far as she could determine.

“How does a girl like you have an Aduminium-bladed spear...” the Ur’Vash in the barrier hissed. His eyes, however, betrayed glimmers of greed now as well.

-Oh you are sooo dead if we can manage it, she scowled inwardly.

“I earned it,” she said flatly. “In the depths.”

“So what now?” Teng Chunhua asked, standing up and retreating back from the edge of the rapidly receding field of yang energy.

“We go find Han Shu, and see about getting his sword back,” Lin Ling said with a sigh.

“What about him?” she asked, pointing at the Ur’Vash. “He threatened to capture us and rape us for 100 years a few moments ago…”

“Not to mention he admitted he knew we were not Ur’Vash.”

“Did he now?” Lin Ling narrowed her eyes.

“…”

“You didn’t hear that?”

“With his realm, he can pick and choose who hears what,” Lin Ling frowned. “However…”

“Now you look here, brat,” the Ur’Vash snarled, standing up at last.

“…”

“And you said your apprentice was the one who lacked control?” the younger girl snickered, before turning back to the pair of them. “Unfortunately, he is not something we can actually kill that easily. The Cultivators sealed him up within moments of appearing in a barrier and he is a Dao Immortal.”

“Oh…”

Teng Chunhua looked uneasy and she nodded grimly. That was… not an opponent they could do anything about.

“So... What do we do about this old one?” she asked.

Lin ling stared back at him with an annoyed expression. “There is no way he will swear an oath, at least not one he won’t be able to break…”

“You know,” Teng Chunhua frowned, lapsing back into formal Imperial Common, “I recall the other ones with the drum, and that female one throwing green fire… and also the one in red, but I didn’t see this old Ur’Vash do anything?”

“…”

Now that Chunhua mentioned it, that was an excellent point, she realised. If he was a ‘Dao Immortal’ and fully attuned, he should have been able to handle most of the battle by himself, with no need for all of the loss of life on the Ur’Vash’s side.

“True, and he is clearly not someone with scruples…” she added, glaring at the old Ur’Vash who was getting more annoyed by the second now.

“…”

Lin Ling, who had also been staring at him again, frowning now, as if listening to something… else?

“That is actually? Huh… I see… so… it’s like that,” she sighed suddenly.

“What do you mean?”

“He isn’t really here,” Lin Ling said simply.

“He… isn’t here?” she was confused now, as was Teng Chunhua.

“Well, there are a few things he could be, but a clone… that’s not likely, or a projection of intent, but that’s also rather unlikely it seems,” Lin Ling mused, walking over to the barrier and considering the Ur’Vash who was scowling even more furiously now.

“There are a bunch of 7th and 8th circle arts and spells that can do that. Some lower realmed ones as well, but those have disadvantages and he was able to cast that damn lightning serpent which had 5 heads… that should be a reflection of his power.”

“Seventh? Eighth?” Teng Chunhua signed.

Lin Ling signed absently that that was just what Golden, Ancient and Dao Immortal were called here.

“Anyway, the first proper clone spell is in the 7th Circle, the advanced simulacrum and projections are 8th and 9th respectively,” she continued, staring through the barrier.

As they watched, she pushed her hand against the barrier and it rippled faintly, almost trying to pull her in.

“So that’s how that works,” Lin Ling nodded, retreating back to them.

“You’re not going to go in there, are you?” she asked dully.

“What if he does something to you?” Chunhua added.

“Hah. If it were so simple, everyone would do it,” Lin Ling sighed.

The old Ur’Vash nodded sourly, “Indeed, your knowledge is surprisingly robust, for a human girl. If it were so simple it would be a lot more common. But now you know the truth. What good will it do you?”

Narrowing his eyes, the old Ur’Vash added with a sneer, “or do you plan to come in here and play with this old fellow?”

“Longevity Lingzhe please,” Lin Ling signed, even as she replied, “Knowledge is power, remember?”

She passed off a handful of hundred year old Lingzhe to Lin Ling who somehow absorbed them directly then walked towards the barrier that contained the old Ur’Vash. As they watched, she walked right into it… passing through it to stand in the same space as the Ur’Vash.

The Ur’Vash laughed, “Girl… you are brave!”

“Brand of-”

“Bond Break.”

Even before she had fully stepped through the barrier, the words Lin Ling had spoken connected with the old Ur’Vash somehow and he staggered as if punched.

“I-Impossible… what did you?”

“I broke the bond between you and the one you are possessing!” Lin Ling explained with a cheerful smile. “Your shard of consciousness and everything it knows is sealed in this space—your soul sense can’t leave either. If you could get out, your main body would be a problem, certainly…”

Grinning, she walked forward, even as the Ur’Vash snarled and suddenly leapt for her. She stared as dully as Teng Chunhua as Lin Ling easily caught him and smashed him into the barrier. “A 6th advancement sacrifice. I suppose it has to have a principle and something approaching an immortal foundation to withstand the strain of suppression. You were able to project your strength through the link to fool others, but with the link gone, you’re stuck with the soul power of this body you are possessing.”

The old Ur’Vash roared in rage and gathered qi around him. As they both watched, Lin Ling abruptly blurred at him and grabbed him by the throat again, staring at him with amusement.

“On the other hand…”

“Devour Vitality”

The old Ur’Vash’s scream was oddly silent as the words in the weird shifting language she couldn’t quite grasp, sank into him.

His body withered visibly and a heartbeat later the blurred form of a very wizened old Ur’Vash made of shifting white mist swirled out of the husk, its maw stretching bizarrely, forming misty tentacles within it. As they looked on though, the terrible withering seemed to drag the misty, screaming form back into the body after a moment, which continued to thrash and blur bizarrely for a full half a minute longer.

Lin Ling smashed it into the barrier twice, turning most of it to dust in the process and dislodging a glittering, translucent core that was still full of qi which she shoved into her storage talisman.

“How anticlimactic,” Lin Ling sighed, staring at the remains. “If Din Ouyeng realised he spent such an expensive talisman on sealing up a paper tiger, he would likely spit blood."

After a moment, she gave them a mocking salute. “On the bright side, Sir Mage, I almost replenished my soul power and your longevity and that of this poor Ur’Vash were much more reasonable than those idiots.”

As they watched dully, Lin Ling absorbed the entire corpse and the robe into the talisman, leaving no trace it had ever been there. She shook her head and realised she had been staring.

“Are you going to stand there like an idiot? Or can you help me get out of here?” Lin Ling deadpanned.

“Are you really Lin Ling…?” she asked dubiously.

“…”

Lin Ling rolled her eyes. “I thought we got that question out of the way when we tried to kick bits out of each other in the darkness and I poured yang blood all over you, while you tried to beat me half to death with a stone bowl.”

“…”

“You make a fair point…” she sighed theatrically, not looking at Teng Chunhua.

“That said, I’m still trying to get a handle on how my principle behaves,” Lin Ling sighed, looking apologetic. “It’s… a bit unpredictable at times.”

-That’s underselling it, she shuddered. I’d have gone with intimidatingly scary and inscrutable.

She didn’t say that out loud though, and instead got her spear and repeated the process. Now the old Ur’Vash was no longer among the ‘living’ her connection to the other Ur’Vash around here was much stronger she realised with some surprise. Lin Ling was also able to tear a much bigger hole through the barrier, as well, rather than doing a weird hoop jumping trick.

“What do we do about these?” Chunhua asked, looking at the three empty barriers.

“You ask me, but who do I ask?” Lin Ling shot back, then face-palmed at talking herself into a very obvious joke.

Looking at them as well, she suddenly laughed. “We can just leave them here, and let them pose a reasonably concerning riddle for the Ur’Vash who come to clean things up.”

While Lin Ling spent a few minutes transforming back into a ‘Maker’s Dancer’ with the help of Teng Chunhua, she scavenged the nearby battlefield for gear—arrows mainly. Annoyingly, there were next to no corpses of cultivators, and of those that were there, all had been thoroughly looted of everything valuable, especially storage rings.

After a while, Lin Ling and Teng Chunhua also joined her and they managed to amass about 60 arrows that had black bone points on them and a few other spare weapons and other oddments. During this time, the battles in the distance continued to rage back and forth, but now they had moved at least two miles away and were clearly split into three fronts.

“I wonder why nobody is trying to flee this way?” Lin Ling frowned after a while.

“Because the camp and that defensive line are trapped to the Avici hells and back,” she observed wryly, tossing another broken bow away.

She was just about to add that they could go check things out, when there was a twisting wave of spatial distortion that made her vision waver for a few seconds.

“Teleportation?” Lin Ling muttered, staring around at the twisting, distorted landscape with a grim expression.

~ Cang Di – Aftermath near the Camps ~

Suppressing his inner rage, he retreated rapidly from the swirling maelstrom of spatial qi that was manifesting around the Jade Gate Court’s group. It wasn’t teleportation, not for them anyway, but it was absolutely aimed at screwing everyone else over. Two groups of attacking Ur’Vash had already been ripped apart by the destabilizing space caused by the huge geomantic formation. He, who was stuck in another barrier, at least temporarily making that the eighth such attack, was pretty sure their goal at this point was to leave him here to get mobbed to death by the Ur’Vash.

Pulling out another ‘Breaker’ Talisman, he used it to tear through it and shot straight for the camp where the source of his anger was—Jiong Jiaying saw him coming and immediately retreated. The two other Ancient Immortals with her, who had ganged up to ‘deal’ with Qing Dongmei, were not so lucky.

He impaled the first one with a wave of severing-infused Spear Law and then sighed inwardly as the entire camp was isolated inside another barrier, a ‘Sovereign’ Dao Cage, effectively shutting everyone else inside with him. After that, it took him one attack to clean up the trash and grab the Ancient Immortal and Qing Dongmei.

“You… think you will…” the man, who had a beard and was clearly ‘not’ a junior, for his bone age was well over 9000, rasped.

He didn’t bother to give the man time to finish, sending a withering pulse of qi through his body. It didn’t destroy his foundation… and discovered it was a talismanic avatar.

“…”

Shaking his head, he turned to the other one, only for them to also vanish in a haze of qi, the child talisman of the avatar burning away to ash.

The barrier itself was draining his qi away at a quite impressive rate as well. Walking over to Qing Dongmei, he dispelled the bindings on her, helped her up and passed her a spare robe without comment.

“Sorry…” she grimaced, massaging her temples, having recovered her modesty.

Looking at her, he could see that the injury she had suffered, from the Jade Gate Court forcibly trying to implicate her in a tribulation no less, was unpleasant but not life-threatening in the short term.

“It’s fine, they have been revealing all sorts of interesting tricks,” he scowled, wondering how many more barriers they had. Certainly he was going to run out of breaker talismans and such before they did if it kept up like this.

“So I have noticed,” she said sourly. “We did manage to steal away the prisoners. My… travelling companion agreed to do that.”

“Ah, so that is some good news at last,” he sighed again, in relief and sat down on a handy rock. “Travelling companion being the one who used Wave Law?” he added, thinking of the sandy haired woman with the scars and wondering if that was who she meant.

Qing Dongmei looked conflicted for a moment, then nodded. “She is someone capable, and she agreed to do her best to look after Liao Ying and the others… but she doesn’t like others prying.”

Stood there in the barrier, he watched as the Jade Gate Court rapidly retreated using the full strength of the geomantic formation to…

“…”

They both stared as something within the local alignments abruptly gave like a pinging thread and the entire alignment shattered. A vast wave of distorting qi rolled over the world as the spatial laws in the area collapsed outwards briefly before resetting themselves. The Dao Cage shattered like glass and the area around him distorted, even as he grabbed Qing Dongmei.

When he finally felt capable of moving, he sat up and grimaced, because the piece of grassland they were sat in was not the same as before. Sweeping out his soul sense, he found nothing and groaned inwardly, because they were stuck inside another of the wardings that blocked it, it appeared.

“Uh….” Qing Dongmei, sitting up and looking in the opposite direction, was decidedly pale in the face.

Turning, he resisted the urge to spit blood—barely. About two miles distant was a settlement with three sets of walls and various tall towers, set on a hill and surrounded by a very large swathe of agriculture and canals. Already, they had been spotted from the walls, because he could see archers pointing in their direction and hear distant warning bells. The banners on some of the towers were also familiar… having been carried or daubed on various Ur’Vash in the battle.

“How many demons do you reckon there are in there?” he asked dully, doing a quick count in his head that suggested maybe 15-20,000 at a bare minimum.

“…”

“Far too many,” she grimaced, then immediately ducked as an arrow slashed through the air and hit a nearby tree.

~ Kun Juni, Lin Ling and Teng Chunhua – Aftermath of the Camps ~

It took the distortion some ten minutes to dissipate to a level where she could take a few steps without wanting to vomit. All they could do was sit there in silence, focusing on keeping their qi in order and not doing anything particularly complex with it.

Finally, it was Lin Ling who spoke, looking a bit pale in the face.

“Did they just try to teleport and have it explode in their faces?” Lin Ling muttered.

“…”

She could only nod, as did Teng Chunhua, because that was really what it looked like, even to her inexpert eyes.

“That said, it appears to have thoroughly ruined their traps within the camp,” Teng Chunhua observed, a bit wanly, pointing over in that direction.

“It’s also scattered them quite widely,” she noted with a shudder.

“…”

The other two nodded grimly. All over the hollow there were shimmering, shifting wards that had been displaced outwards. The spatial disruption had, it seemed, thoroughly warped all of the surroundings a second time and the sense of inauspicious disorganisation was quite disturbing.

“I guess we can only wait for it to stabilize,” she said after a long moment, looking this way and that and really not fancying any attempt at going anywhere.

“Uhuh,” Lin Ling sighed, and started to nibble on a mushroom she had purloined off Teng Chunhua presumably.

That process took less time than she expected—it was only mid-afternoon by the time the last of the wards dissipated, consumed by the distorted alignments somehow, which were also restoring themselves with remarkable speed. Even so, it was mid-afternoon before she felt confident that they could walk up the shallow slope and not step in something lethally unpleasant.

Arriving at the area overlooking the battlefield, she saw with ‘Bright Lotus Eye’ what could only be described as chaos. Twisting currents of nearly invisible qi were still surging everywhere, with ghostly shadows locked within them seeming to reflect other ‘scenes’ or locations somehow. The sense of inauspicious landscape disorganisation was also really quite profound.

They stood in silence, looking at the mess. The point of whatever had happened was…

“They are actually running away,” Lin Ling spoke up, pointing off to their right.

She squinted in that direction and saw that yes, the large majority of what looked like the Jade Gate Court were indeed still retreating, being harried by the combined forces of several groups of Ur’Vash based on the distant flashes of explosions.

“Well, that’s a pity,” Teng Chunhua grumbled. “I’d hoped they might have turned themselves into fish or something.”

“We should be so lucky,” she agreed, thinking back on that infamous incident with one of the Blue Water City Gates where a maintenance on it had been botched somehow and 600 people had been temporarily turned into carp.

Looking elsewhere, she could see that the battle was mostly finished in the other directions. All around them, carrion scavengers were starting to arrive, likely lured by the glut of free food. Quite a few of the corpses were beginning to emit death qi as well.

The Ur’Vash were starting to return as well, two bands were gathering up dead in the distance by the lake and another few were on the next hill, collecting things like arrows.

“It didn’t look like the prisoners were with the Jade Gate Court, between what was being yelled earlier and what those cultivators said, but even so…” she sighed, turning to Lin Ling.

“They don’t appear to be,” the other woman mused, still squinting into the distance.

“Is your eyesight that good?” she blinked.

“Yes, and they are suppressing soul sense over them now; see those two banners off to the right, and the third on the plains beyond the lake?” Lin Ling added.

She looked in that direction and saw what Lin Ling meant. There were several groups of robed figures with mobile altars that were guarded by several elite bow-wielding Ur’Vash.

“Then how are you…?” Teng Chunhua asked, looking confused.

“I can see at a reasonable distance,” Lin Ling shrugged. “There is nobody there that looks like Han Shu, Ruo Han, Liao Ying or Jin Chen… or Hao Jun for that matter. I guess they could be disguising them, but based on what you said earlier about them being ‘grasped’ by another faction…”

“I still think we should check,” she grimaced, hating herself for saying it, but it was better to do so while they were close and pressured than find that they were fooled later.

“…”

“Fair enough,” Lin Ling nodded, not really contesting matters too much.

It didn’t take them long to catch up to the battle, and with soul sense suppressed it was quite easy to sneak through, compared to how it had been before. Most of those here, she noted, were not wearing golden flowers, which was an interesting distinction in its own right. She guessed they were later arrivals or reinforcements.

The Jade Gate Court and their other allied forces were a scattered hodgepodge of formations, many the worse for wear. In the end, the answer fell into their lap, because two groups did get captured and it was easy for them to snag two prisoners, already bound, and question them. Lin Ling did that, using a strange symbol, and they did further confirm that the leaders were enraged that the various prisoners had been spirited away by the ‘bitches’ from the Nine Auspicious Moons—the women in white—and another cultivator who was clearly after treasures and such. That was a familiar refrain, she was finding.

Leaving the two cultivators to their fate, she retraced their steps and in doing so found two more branching trails of fleeing cultivators on the outskirts of the battlefield and scattered evidence of combat, but no corpses and little blood.

What was clear, though, was that the groups appeared to be somewhat reconverging. Three sets of trails were all heading off due east while another two went north east and two north.

The portion of the battlefield beyond the camps, between the two lakes, held several more scattered ruins and much evidence of the ferocity of the fight, but had also been picked clean. Groups of Ur’Vash were moving here and there, collecting corpses, scavenging weapons and generally clearing up. On the far hill, there were several sets of fires burning where the dead were being cremated.

“It’s impressive how fast that has gone up,” she observed regarding a shrine-like tower of rocks on the hill.

“Fervour is a remarkable thing,” Lin Ling replied, a bit sadly she thought.

Teng Chunhua just nodded in silence.

They stood and watched for a while as the Ur’Vash there daubed golden flowers on the rocks of the tower. The skulls of the fallen were being painted with golden flowers, post cremation she saw, and being reverentially placed within the towers of stone. The ashes were mixed into the yellow ochre or just scattered around the towers themselves. All around, Ur’Vash wearing golden flowers and blue spirals were dancing and chanting.

To their left, she could see another being erected and another set of funeral pyres. There as well Ur’Vash were dancing and drumming, singing gutturally.

Most of the Ur’Vash who had fought in the early part of the battle now sported golden flowers, and, as she watched a few, were getting very shirty with others who appeared to be later arrivals who were also painting them on.

They watched until someone actually spotted them, which was rather odd. Ur’Vash fell silent in almost every direction, a few actually bowed down and wept, while others just daubed even more golden war paint on—around their eyes mainly, as if simply the act of seeing them was important.

“So… symbols are important huh…” Teng Chunhua muttered, shivering slightly.

She nodded, understanding what the other woman meant, because she could ‘feel’ strength in the connection with the Ur’Vash, the reverence, the awe and the wonder. It was like being stared at by small children, or somehow people whose lives you had just remade with a gift or something.

“Hold up your weapon,” Lin Ling said drily. “Then plant it in the ground.”

Frowning, she did so, while Teng Chunhua and Lin Ling unslung spears from their backs. All around the Ur’Vash roared, almost as one, and stamped their feet.

“Stupid old orc, he deserves this misfortune!” Lin Ling snickered, then turned and shot off into the grass, leaving the ridgeline.

Nodding, she followed, as did Teng Chunhua. Behind them, the chanting and the drumming intensified.