Memories of the Fall

Unbidden, I see the bright land where parasols bloom, the extremity of the Chronogram.

There, riding upon the mist, I wander to that lofty peak, wreathed in the whirling wind and cloud.

The Lady Supreme, Primordial Sovereign, lives there.

Queen Mother, who resides in a palace of blue-green jade.

Around her a celestial crowd, favoured children of heaven, sing and dance.

Theirs are songs of sun, sea, forest and cloud…

How I dream that one day my own child will be welcomed to that place…

Excerpt from ‘Ascent to the Peacock Palace’

~Folk tale, author unknown.

~ Lin Ling – Within the ruins of Umaja ~

Not bothering immediately about which way the serpent itself had gone in the roiling maelstrom of unstable mist, she instead turned on the fleeing orc forces to the north of the now-ruined fort and used her tail to catapult several large pieces of building in their general direction. Her main goal here was to basically make this the worst day in living memory for the orcs of Udrasa and then find Juni. In that regard, moving the fight away from here…

-Wait…

-Chunhua!

With a snarl, she rolled over the crumbling wall and grunted as she ran smack into the stone foundations of the ruin beneath the fort itself.

All around her, the surging mists clawed at her, melding with the…

-Where have all the other serpents gone?

Twisting over the wall as adroitly as her heavily armoured form could, her soul tried to sweep around her, to little avail as the miasma from the serpent’s art also impeded that, it appeared.

-Cunning predators. If it were just us, it would have to come to us, the turtle acknowledged, a touch grimly she thought.

-But it isn’t just ‘us’, she shot back, and their lack of interest in me—

She had to break off as a shadow shot at her out of the mist.

“SCATTER!”

Her snarl dispersed everything around her, twisting the mist and the mud brick foundations in equal measure into an expanding cloud of destruction. The shadow turned out to be just that, but carried with it a barb-like manifestation of soul sense that held a clear intent to mark her.

-What if I misjudged this? What if, discounting Juni, I am actually the less important one to this Sharvasus between me and Chunhua?

Crashing through another wall, she ran smack into an invisible barrier built into it. It didn’t show up to her soul sense, which passed right through it, or even her qi, which could also pass through. However, her physical body was clearly blocked. Looking left, she found the gate, and ran for that, only to again find her passage blocked, even if it was…

“SERVANTS OF UM’AJAH, THE GREAT MOTHER CALLS TO YOU!”

{ARISE}

Sharvasus appeared on top of one of the towers, his words hanging in the air. All around her, the ‘dead’ remnants of the orcs, both those killed by her and those dead to the mist, stood up, grasping their weapons, their bodies reforming out of mud and dirt.

“HONOUR TO QUAZAM, GREAT MOTHER TO THE MASTERS!”

She swept her tail out and battered two dozen away, even as their massed war cry echoed through the ruined fort.

{BINDING OF UM’AJAH}

“…”

The howled command from the yellow-robed mage sank into all those around her. Those who had already fallen stayed down, but two she had crushed just as the art was used now got up, their wounds recovering with the help of the ground.

-Originally shaped from clay… eh? she asked the memories sourly, already sure of the answer.

There was a lot of what passed for awkward mental shuffling from the otherwise complaining rage gallery.

-Stolen gifts?

“Aagggggggrerrrrhhhh!”

She funnelled her frustration at that response to her mantra and exhaled a sheet of yang fire that baked the bodies into statues.

Spinning back, she smashed into the wall again, focusing all her strength and even the energy of her Yang Laws at it, but not only did the pale blue-grey stonework beneath not budge, the intangible barrier woven through it remained resolutely unharmed.

-The docks… this must be some ancient fortification?

Turning back, she rolled over and flattened an entire formation of massing orcs into the ground, splintering their weapons. Quite a few Orichalcum blades still found their mark, however, showing her why they were so useful. The cuts to her physical body healed, but the lacerations were mirrored on her Nascent Soul, where they did not… permanently damaging her vitality just a tiny fraction. In the short term it was manageable, but if it kept up for a long time, she would eventually be worn down. The various cores she was using to support her transformation would also not last for a long time, an hour or two at most if she was conservative, much sooner if she was not.

“You have prepared for this well,” she snarled up at the mage, who was still standing on the tower, watching her.

“Of course!” he laughed, his intent echoing through it, discolouring the world faintly. “We are Udrasa, the Seat of the Great Mother Quazam, Mother to the Masters!”

“STRENGTH TO QUAZAM! MOTHER TO THE MASTERS!”

The roar from those fighting around her again reverberated within the link, carrying with it the odd, unsettling secondary tone she had detected before.

“BE BURNED!”

Her roar ignited the space between her and Sharvasus, but when the flames subsided there was no—

{HAMMER OF HADAD}

The lightning bolt from the turbulent skies, darkened by the serpent’s art, pierced right through her body, melting her flesh and searing bone. It wormed into her meridians, ravaging them with a strength not incomparable to the lightning of her tribulation. All around her, orcs hurled spears at her, aiming for weak spots as she tried to shake off the aftereffects, feeding the pain and the frustration into her mantra.

“DIVIDE!”

She turned it all outwards, her intent encapsulating the idea of splitting all the forces of the world that were harming her away. Qi vanished from the world, so did soul strength and now, even the unnatural life of the orcs assailing her. Hundreds if not thousands collapsed into mud, even as her vitality also drained away with them.

“So that is how that acolyte died,” the Sharvasus reappeared, on a different tower. “You are surprisingly fluent for a child of your years. Your connection with the blood you have consumed is strong. However, that is a double edged sword, is it not?”

“BE BROKEN!”

The snarled words shook everything within earshot, including Sharvasus, whose masked body tumbled with the ruins of the tower to its presumed doom.

-No way that was that easy, she grimaced, watching the field shrink away around her.

Experimentally, she slammed her clawed fist into the ground, using the shockwave to stagger many of those rushing back at her, before tearing a boulder-sized chunk of mud brick wall up and hurling it ahead of her. Orcs scattered, formations strategically breaking to avoid the worst of it, but tens were still hit, tumbling away.

Watching as she rushed towards the ruined tower, those she hit seemed to stay down, which made her sigh in relief—

Nine of the ‘corpses’ abruptly grasped her as she closed on the tower, blades desperately stabbing into her flanks or trying to further exacerbate the wounds already dealt. Snarling in annoyance, mostly in regards to her optimism, she rolled over, lashing left and right with limbs and tail as the formations on either side scattered, orcs taking cover behind ruin walls or deflecting scattering masonry with their shields.

Arriving at the tower, she scattered much of what was there with a sweep of her tail, easily exposing the broken and tattered body of ‘Sharvasus’. Grabbing it was out of the question – the memories were already feeding her all sorts of bad news stories about ‘powerful sorcerers’ and the like, but just from looking at it, she could see that her earlier fears were born out. The corpse was that of an Immortal Realm orc in a tattered yellow robe, wearing a mask that was just brass with a thin layer of Orichalcum on its exterior.

-So the same kind of art that that other mage was using…

-Or was that other mage this Sharvasus?

That thought had been lurking for a while, truth be told. The longer she dwelt on it, the more plausible it became, given the circumstances. That mage should not have known what happened to it after entering the barrier, but that was not to say that others from this faction might not have been there. Based on the rumours, forces from Udrasa had been ‘reinforcing’ that battle and probably saw some of the aftermath at least. Cultivators had come through this region, even if there was no sign of them this far in.

With that in mind, it was not too far-fetched to think that a powerful mage could put a few things together and decide they were worth targeting.

“…”

She considered the ‘corpse’ briefly, as another volley of arrows hit her, making her Nascent Soul suffer more marginal attrition from the wounds, before turning back to the forces arraigned against her. The orcs had reinforced again – those she had injured moments before now fully recovered, while more spears and archers were moving through the gate from the town itself.

“JUST BURN!”

Her yell this time drew much more substantially on her mantra than had the previous attempts. Every orc within earshot, which was several hundred at least, exploded into flames as their qi was overwhelmed by the strength of Yang Laws that resonated within it. Watching as they collapsed, many screaming or flailing, it was hard not to feel satisfi—

The soul attack crashed into her mind, carrying with it a vast yin intent that obliterated the rather conservatively judged projection of yang laws she had incorporated. The devouring principle within it, encapsulated by the mists themselves, entangled her limbs in shadows, trying to worm its way into her Sea of Knowledge through the open wounds and the damage done to her Nascent Soul by the Orichalcum.

Hoping that neither Juni nor Chunhua were too close, she shrugged off the worst of it, formulated the words in her mind and replied in kind.

“Soul Break”

The orcs around her staggered as her mantra helped her project a facet of the attack directly at the gestalt links between them, trying to overwhelm that.

“STRENGTH TO QUAZAM! MOTHER TO THE MASTERS!”

The howled counterattack from thousands of orcs, all moving in concert, flowed back at her. Snarling, she blocked it directly, having seen from the memories what could happen if she tried to take it and turn it back. It was possible to project the gestalt link, just like a mantra… In fact, the more she saw of it, dwelt in the reflections of the memories’ combat as she fought here, the more she started to think that the two… ‘methods’ might share more commonalities than were immediately apparent.

-Where are the damned serpents… and where is that accursed mage!?

Gritting her teeth, she focused her qi into her surroundings, dragging up the shattered ground around her.

“TAKE FORM!”

The roar, infused with her intent and principle, twisted the qi-infused ground into a second version of her, smaller but made purely out of qi and sent forward with a singular purpose: to tie up as many orcs as possible.

It was a pale facsimile of what Alexios had achieved in her battle with the other orcs, back in that valley, but it was the best she could do without surrendering control to the memories. Based on how this was going, and how she was feeling now, like she was being led along by the nose and tail, she was pretty sure that was a bad idea. The older memories agreed, though the younger ones just raged or insulted her for it.

-You can take the beast out of the blood, but apparently you cannot take the blood out of the beast, she complained inwardly as she pulled more qi around her, infusing it with her ‘Yang as a shield’ principle and knitting earthen armour over her form—

The blast of lightning, shrieking out of the shadows of the misty maelstrom roiling around Umaja, coiled around her like a phantasmal serpent in its own right. The heat melted the dirt directly, nearly encasing half of her right-hand side in glass—

{INA QITRUB TAHAZI SA’UMAJAH}

The strange words rearranged themselves to become ‘Onslaught of Battle known to Umaja ’ in her mind, even as the orcs all around her howled in fury and seemed to grow in stature, the qi in their bodies surging as they charged forward again.

“SCATTER!”

Her roar washed over them, returned to full effectiveness now that the last remnants of the ‘division field’ had gone. The lightning serpent dissipated and those nearest to her had all the qi in their bodies totally obliterated, their ruined forms drifting backwards as broken mirages of bone and gore.

Looking at the amount of qi remaining in the various cores, she resisted sighing. As a strategy, it was an excellent one, one that played smoothly off of her lack of abilities in martial intent and a disturbing awareness of how glass-like her strength really was. The serpent could hide, the mage could attack from distance and she, surrounded by thousands of orcs and whatever was holding the accursed walls up, was inadvertently trapped in Umaja…

Another surge of lightning came, from a distant tower on the far side of Umaja this time. It punched through her, crackling around her and trying to scatter more of the qi within her body by worming into the hundreds of very minor flesh wounds from the Orichalcum that just didn’t heal.

Her Nascent Soul snarled at it and moved directly this time. ‘Blessing’ and ‘Path’ met the invading energy directly. ‘Lotus’ subsumed it, playing off the fact that nothing could subsume the mantra itself.

“ABSORB”

‘Body’ and ‘Gift’ worked in concert with her snarled command, pulling what had just been orphaned from the attack within her own body into the heart of her dantian where her Nascent Soul, with the help of the ‘Yang as a Shield’ symbol, managed to hold it in some kind of abeyance.

“EMERGE, STORM!”

Her howl, projected with the help of the mantra and embodying much of her frustration with her current circumstances, shattered the hissing gloom of the sky about her, with its grey turbulent clouds, in a single instant. The orphaned lightning rolled out of her, making a momentary bridge between heaven and earth, dissipating across the boiling maelstrom in an effervescent sheet of sparks.

It took much less of her qi than she had anticipated, which was good, because she had burned through well over half of what she had stored in the Immortal Cores so far.

Above her, clouds rumbled ominously and the twisting gyre of yin natural forces pressing in on her shook as the serpent’s control over them had to start competing with the distortions of the natural world her cry had incurred.

Three lightning bolts earthed themselves around her, making her qi turn chaotic and her skin flush with the incredible heat embodied within them. Natural lightning, born of the laws of a world like this, was dangerous to everything here, especially in this wet, yin-rich environment. Two more bolts fell, hitting towers on the far side, then another in the swamp, briefly outlining a three-headed silhouette amid the chaos, moving towards the edge of the swamplands.

-Yep, definitely heading for Chunhua, she thought grimly.

Another bolt hit her, making her physical form scream in pain, even as her Nascent Soul again drew in the yang attributes of that strength and claimed some natural strength from them with the help of the mantra.

At the same time, she noted, a bolt split a second tower, then a third, charred bricks raining.

{GREAT DEVOURING MIRE!}

The entire courtyard around her twisted, the ground warping and deforming as her form started to sink into it.

A fourth bolt hit the tower right above her, and she caught a faint glimpse of an orc in a silver mask wearing a smoking red and yellow robe, before he vanished in a haze of mist and breaking space.

-Definitely possessing bodies then, she hissed.

The grasping hands of mud continued to twist, even as orcs, pushed to frenzy by the previous art, continued to attack her as best they could and avoid the blows of the crude clone of dirt that was still tearing through the formations.

Focusing qi into her limbs, she charged forward, tearing herself free of the swamp, which had also started to acquire aspects of ‘draining’ now, and again smashed into the invisible wall that surrounded Umaja.

-How can we get out of this? she snarled at the memories, head-butting it for a second time, to little appreciable effect.

As far as she could see, there were probably only two serious options, both risky. The first was to abandon this transformation entirely and hope that she could escape it either as a Nascent Soul, or with her normal body. The second was to sacrifice a vast portion of her longevity to repeat the same trick she had in the tribulation, only to a lesser extent, and use it to get out of the barrier afterwards.

Neither was appealing in the circumstances. The former would make her very vulnerable to the mage, who was at least an entire great step above her, she was sure, if not an actual Dao Immortal. The latter would put her at a huge disadvantage when it came to fighting the serpent and also probably play into the hands of the mage and the functionally unkillable horde of orcs.

-How long does that last anyway? She grimaced, smashing into the barrier in the gate a third time.

Looking around, orcs were still arriving from the inner courtyard. Those she had scattered had long since gotten back up as well, their forms flowing back together from the smeared remains.

The only other option… was to try and remove the main source of the threat, the Orichalcum itself?

Her fire attack before had not really targeted the town, instead focusing on the serpent. The problem there, though, was that the momentum of the land had thoroughly shifted at this point. ‘Day Break’, which she had used to scatter the mists, had been overwhelmed by the serpent, who was now using its own intent to supplement the natural environment. The yang strength of the land here was deeply buried and obscure, held in the persistence of its nature rather than the fierce heat of the sun and the age of the rocks.

It might be possible to repeat the feat that she had done when under the influence of the Blood Rage in the jungle, but the rocks there had been ancient and the trees had possessed strong yang vitality. Here, it was no doubt beyond her own meagre grasp, unless she relinquished control to the memories thoroughly.

{HAMMER OF HADAD}

Lightning hit another tower, scattering its upper portion as the orc mage, Sharvasus, cast another of the bolts at her. Her Nascent Soul and the mantra again managed to blunt the worst of it, and she noticed that the body that Sharvasus was using also looked rather wizened now as well.

-So he is limited by the quality of the host? Much like I am limited by what the transformation can support. That was a somewhat ironic thought, she had to acknowledge. Though I will certainly run out of qi as it stands long before he runs out of bodies of orcs, I suspect.

That later point was not a nice thought.

-Really, they are good at this, the cultivator in her had to acknowledge as she backed away from the wall and crashed through a massing formation, trying her best to ensure that the bone plates blocked the worst of the incidental damage from the weapons.

Outside, the serpent got hit again by an errant bolt from the storm above, its enraged scream merging with the swirling mist. She could only guess that it was fighting the Okeanides. If that was the case, perhaps there was some good fortune to be gained from this, in that those beings were absolutely not simple to deal with.

“Do you understand now, little girl?” the mage appeared on the ground with a *shuft* of rippling space. “You might have been able to deal with those fools from Ajara easily, but they are just savage barbarians, lacking in wisdom. I wonder, how did one of the Ur like you fall in with those two?”

-So he thinks I am one of the Ur?

-Oh, my spirit root was totally replaced and the primary strength that rebuilt my vitality was my blood. I looked like one of the Ur folk…

“…”

-But the other mage knew I was human?

-Is he playing games with me, or is he really not the same mage?

-Or… has he never seen me outside of the soul-suppressing wards and now… I am like this?

The thoughts raced through her mind, none with any real, easy answers, it had to be said.

“So, how long will you keep this up?” Sharvasus chuckled, placing his hands behind his back as the other forces massed again reforming their formations. “Can you afford to be so cautious here?”

“…”

-No, probably not, she thought, wondering why he had come down now, rather than just keep attacking from distance.

-Any ideas? she again asked the various memories.

“…”

The responses back were about what she expected. A mix of impotent rage, fury, dismissal at how weak she was and then, from the older memories, a somewhat helpless conclusion that their more recent…

-Wait… I severed much of the ‘beast’, she frowned. So why do I feel like it has been creeping back into prominence ever since I stepped into this land? And why does this old bastard want me… but seems to be aiming for Chunhua first?

Wordlessly she stared up at the sky, lightning skittering across it as the mists still swirled in a great gyre around Umaja.

Exhaling, she again set to wondering about the connection between the mantra and the gestalt. Her intuition told her that that was probably the key to moving this mess in a way more beneficial to her.

“The longer you mess around with me, the more danger those other two are in…” the mage added with a mocking laugh, before waving at the massed soldiers again. “Attack her, make her bleed, show this girl the supremacy of Udrasa.”

“HONOUR TO THE GREAT MOTHER, MOTHER TO THE MASTERS!”

The soldiers roared, smashing weapons against shields, and started to advance again. She shook her body, deflecting quite a few of the arrows that came hissing over from behind, and again wondered if the best way to get out of this mess was to abandon the transformation, in truth.

The issue was still the mage though… Looking to her left, she saw a second silver-masked figure was directing troops through the gate, but making no move to move up. The whole thing seemed odd… The mage was clearly putting himself front and centre, drawing her attention, and yet the…

-Oh… I am an idiot, she sighed softly, understanding at last what was going on.

She had overlooked it, because of the way the mage had been fighting, being strategic, however…

-He is possessing bodies, but when the bodies run out of mana, he can’t discard them easily? So when I kill them, he can swap to another… Does that mean he is out of mana?

Buying herself some time to think, she lashed her tail into a formation and scattered a few orcs into a nearby wall, then head-butted two more who came to the front, sending them flying away.

More arrows hammered into her, even as those advancing smashed their weapons into their shields again.

“BOW BEFORE QUAZAM!”

“Great Mother to the Masters…”

“BOW BEFORE THE GREAT MOTHER!”

“Mother to the Masters…”

“SUBMIT!”

“SUBMIT!”

“SUBMIT!”

The echoes of the shouts again resonated strangely, again tugging at the edge of the gestalt consciousness and the link to it that the mantra provided. In the first instance, that subversion seemed fairly straightforward, but the longer she fought with the mage, the more certain she was becoming that there was more to that act as well. The orcs knew exactly what they were doing – however, the denigration of those later memories in her blood, from the times when orcs were active and hunting ‘their kind’, for such ‘paltry’ methods meant she could get nothing out of them. Even though those ‘methods’ had worked and clearly been effective, a combination of arrogance and denial was her worst enemy really.

-Or is there something deeper going on? That thought had occurred a few times already at this point. Even though I severed the beast, was that all that dragged them down?

“…”

The mage was looking at her, face impassive now, as she rampaged into another line, smashing a few orcs to pulp with her tail and impaling two more with a side sweep.

-Presumably there are other criteria as well, she mused, turning back to the more immediate issue. Those he possesses need to be of a sufficient realm? Immortals perhaps?

She punched the ground, letting her strength do the damage, noting more orcs just kept running through the gateway from the town to take up the fight as others fell. Most of those who fell were still recovering as well.

-Just a different kind of tarpit, she complained. One made with orc lives rather than some manifestation of a serpent’s strength.

Narrowing her eyes, she swept out with her soul sense. It was greatly pressured and diffused by the turbulence of the mist and the law comprehensions of the serpent… In fact, her soul sense was in many ways the weakest of the tools she had available, because it was still mostly at Dao Seeking. Unless she surrendered control to the memories, she could not really draw on their strength…

-Is that why they haven’t suppressed it?

-Hmmmmm, that way of thinking is flawed, the old amphibian suddenly mused.

-Soul is difficult, means many things. Back then, we did not ‘know’ it, the turtle added, suddenly. Just that all things had a spark that lived and then did not, a thing that propelled us beyond… so we fed it, nurtured it and it became more.

-Useless old things, the chiming, bird-like voice sighed.

-Hah… the old amphibian nodded, apparently agreeing.

Listening to their words, she again turned back to the mage—

Outside the barrier, the serpent roared, the greedy triumph in its voice visible.

The faint smirk in the mage’s eyes seemed to bore into her.

“SUBMIT TO THE GREAT MOTHER!”

“Mother to the Masters…”

“SUBMIT!”

“SUBMIT!”

“SUBMIT!”

Again, the echoes of their call pushed against the gestalt link, trying to drag her down with the overwhelming momentum of thousands of minds pushing against her one.

The mage was certainly the key…

-How can I get out of this…? Fighting him is pointless; I need to get to the serpents…

It was hard to say what made the various little things slot into her mind in such a way that hinted at the idea of what she could do. Certainly it didn’t really come from the memories, although it was rooted in observations they had made.

Her hunch was that she was unable to pass the barrier because it behaved rather like the one that had caged her before, but this one easily allowed soul sense to cross it, and the only thing it seemed to prevent was her. That meant it was either attuned to her, or in some way related to the beast… or in some way tied to the ruin itself, so either she had to discard herself, risk undoing the transformation… or get out of the ruin by some other means…

She rolled backwards, crashing into the invisible barrier in the gateway again, and, in the same instant, unleashed the shout she had decided to gamble everything on.

“BE DIVIDED!”

The inclusion of the second syllable emptied qi out of her like her body was a holed bucket, even if she merely whispered it. Her intent, as best she could muster with the move, however, was not to attack those around her, but to weaken, for a brief moment, the woven fabric of the place around her with the barrier itself.

The backlash made one of the Immortal Cores shatter like glass. For a brief moment she saw… several places: an empty swamp, a squat, fortified ruin built by settlers who set up a trading post near the key river channel… a sprawling town… ruins of a battlefield… Umaja as it was thousands of years ago, as it was now. All blended through each other in separate ways…

She focused desperately on that first one and the field around her twisted.

“What…?” the mage stared blankly at her as they stood in a phantasmal land of sedges and strange fern-like trees.

It took all her effort to move, pushing her form in what was something like a chaotic quagmire of blended space across the now barely visible wall that was preventing her passage. It was only two steps, less even, a controlled slump and a roll, propelled by her initial momentum as much as anything. Her passage left a bleeding afterimage of qi in her wake, as even the immense durability of the Ankalderon’s ancient form found itself unable to weather what was essentially an act that was close to suicidal for anyone below the Dao Step, she was sure.

The second core crumbled and her own refined qi started to rapidly drain away as she finally rolled all the way through, a distance of maybe three metres that had cost her nearly everything she possessed—

Reality snapped back into focus and the wall, ruined gate and blue-grey stones were back as they had been.

“…”

Sneering inwardly, she turned and, massing her qi, charged straight for the last location she had seen Chunhua. The grasping mist clawed at her as the mage screamed something she didn’t really catch behind her. Soldiers charged out of the gate after her, not impeded in the slightest by whatever it was that had stopped her.

She had covered maybe a hundred metres when a serpent exploded out of the crop fields, scales flaring on its neck into a pseudo hood as it tried to gore her with its horn. The impact stopped her forward rush, even as she rolled sideways to travel with it, her claws raking down its body.

“Notssss escape…”

The words hammered into her, the soul strength encapsulated in them rocking her psyche to a degree that made her question if what the serpent had done before was even considered a soul attack by its standards.

“Blood Betrayer!”

Her response, which was a soul attack of sorts, was mostly informed by what the memories had been supplying her by turns about such serpents. There were certainly schisms within their points of view – the older memories in particular were quite unamused by the rather willing role some of their descendants had taken to becoming subservient to others.

“Strength… is… supreme!”

The words the serpent snarled back, trying to manoeuvre to the point where it could bite her without breaking its teeth on her armour, made its own qi surge and the devouring claws of the mist all around her deepen their effect in subtle ways.

“Your blood… will become mine…”

Another assailing soul attack clawed at her as a second horned serpent surged out of the reeds ahead of her, maw already opening—

She spun over, her tail lashing upwards, catching it a glancing blow as it swerved to avoid her, staggering with a furious hiss.

“SHATTER!”

Her snarl reverberated in the air around them as she head butted the first serpent again, stunning it momentarily as the strength of the world focused on it, augmenting her blow. Rolling up, she twisted for the second serpent and charged for it, even as it was recoiling itself to strike again.

“JUST DIE ALREADY!”

The enraged shout wasn’t really any kind of ‘technique’, but it still served to augment her attack again as they crashed back into the edge of the reed beds, scattering mud, reeds and the remains of a small building into the air. She got two solid punches on it, before the third serpent slunk out of the mist some twenty metres away and exhaled a huge sheet of corrosive mist at her.

“SCATTER!”

Her howl met the cloud and the two forces blew each other apart. It didn’t solve the problem, but the strength of yin corrosion in the venom was not what she wanted to deal with as an area denial strategy when she was already low on qi.

Twisting around, she charged for the first serpent to attack her, who had reared up, its hood flaring again. It gave a rather human widening of its maw to reveal its fangs and lunged at her in turn.

-Can’t let them recombine, at least until I grievously injure at least one of them, she grimaced.

She had nothing to gain by extending this fight at this point. The longer she lingered on this, the more time the mage would have to pose some problem, her instincts warned her. The size of the serpent, according to the memories, likely put it at the peak of the 6th circle. Their guess was that the mage wanted to use this fight, her and Chunhua as the catalyst for it forming a 4th head, pushing it into the 7th circle.

-Their cores are just behind the base of the skull in their divided forms, Ochirioptrix hissed as instinctual predatory information that no Ankalderon would have possessed back in their heyday blurred into her consciousness with the words. It is protected by the armoured crest of their hoods and the bone plates that run back from the horn, impossible to get from the top.

The second serpent shot towards her, flicking its tail out to strike her. She deflected the strike with her armour plates, rolling with the attack, lashing her own tail down like a whip at the first serpent, who had simultaneously dodged around her. The serpent evaded, which she expected, but the shockwave of her tail’s impact in the swamp still caught it. Her new target, the second serpent, charged for her, seeking the moment of weakness before she righted herself.

Rolling out of it, the fourth serpent’s head struck straight from below, aiming for her less armoured lower neck as the other three all reared and struck for her.

“BE STOPPED”

She nearly bottomed out on longevity and qi using the auric shout in desperation as the auras of all the serpents took a direct step upwards. Not peak sixth circle… peak seventh circle. In that instant, she had been influenced by the instinctual action to defend herself with everything she had, and those words… words that reverberated in her surroundings like a dread bell, were what had appeared like phantoms from the various memories.

Everything froze.

Colour faded away, leaving only the sky shifting between red and blue as she spun.

She reared up and shoved her clawed limb down the frozen, fourth serpent’s throat, ripping open the soft roof of the mouth, grasping for the spine, trying to ignore the unnatural chill seeping into her limbs, turning the qi in her body sluggish.

The eyes of the other serpents were already glassy and dull, much different compared to how it had been when she used ‘Stop’ before. She was aware she had done something that might well stun her dead, when the effects wore off, if she didn’t now bet everything on this one moment. She needed to turn the singular moment of panicked miscalculation when the idiot later memories had flinched and she had flinched with them, into a moment of opportunity.

Her clawed hand sank into the area where its core should be, mercifully finding it as the memories from Ochirioptrix and others had told her she would. Grasping it, she fought the resistance of broken time and space around her and tore it free of the body. The spirit within it was frozen as well.

-Hurry. You will die if you run out of longevity here… the amphibian snarled, its rage not directed at her, but at the panicked aspects of the blood memories themselves.

She had to agree. She knew what law that cry had touched.

It was not an ability any Dao Seeking cultivator, however blessed, should be able to dream of touching. Not an ability a 5th circle Ankalderon should be able to use under normal circumstances. Even the 7th circle serpent could not do this. This was a thing of the 9th circle, pure and simple, requiring a unified understanding of two fundamental laws.

Even imperfect as it was, when this ended, her body was going to be ruined and if the aftershock didn’t kill her, the remaining serpents or the mage might.

Grimly, she consumed the core, letting her mantra, the yang laws of the blood and her physique symbol start to work on it, even as she turned, fighting the strain of frozen space.

Approaching the second serpent, she started to feel longevity returning bit by bit, even if the chill was not really fading. It was a matter of moments to repeat the grizzly task; all their mouths were half-open, ready to strike at her, exposing weakness to the cores within – the fortune of the moment really.

In her mind’s eye, her awareness of the field of temporal nihility was already shrinking fast as she lunged for the third serpent, which had breathed the venom and had quite a bit more soul strength left.

By the time she reached it, the field was half its previous size and the serpents were starting to show signs of movement. She howled mentally and pushed the mantra to its limit, making it feed off the pain and suffering to heal her crumbling form as she tore the core from its spinal column and again swallowed it whole.

Space started to break around the last neonate head as it regained some cognisance of its surroundings, turning incrementally to look at her, serpentine eyes reflecting a flicker of terror as it slowly closed its mouth.

Snarling, all she could do was tackle it and tear at the soft area under its chin with her own mouth, which was not adapted to tearing open the throats of serpents.

Her claws and teeth slid on the scales, splintering them.

Blood flowed around her, an unnatural taste in her mouth.

Desperate, she dug into its neck, ripping flesh, and finally found the core with both clawed limbs… aware that the field was nearly gone.

“SUNDER”

All she could do was risk a second shout. With it, all her longevity gains flowed away, thousands of years… hundreds of years… tens of years left…

The core came away from its Immortal form and she stuffed it into her mouth.

“Devour Vitality”

Energy from it flowed into her, even as the space around them finally shattered and the field ended.

The four serpents howled and thrashed. They would not die from losing their cores and having them devoured. In fact, with their devouring principle and possession of 4 heads, they wouldn’t die even if their cores were refined by her and the souls within them dispersed.

The expected backlash arrived in the same instant and her body was ripped apart, twisted to tattered ribbons, as the frozen moment, grasped through strength not really her own, rebounded upon her even as she discarded the fleshly body she had and instead rebuilt her old body from the ruin around her.

It was the same trick she had used in the tribulation, only now she had to rely on the cores she had stolen instead of the tribulation lightning to sustain her.

Blessing, Path, Lotus, Body, Gift

Returned to her original form, her mantra surged, pulling as much vitality and qi as remained from the flesh. It was disturbing to know that she had basically just committed suicide and survived on a technicality brought about by the nature of her breakthrough.

“Impossible…” One of the horned serpents, who had recovered its awareness to speak, was staring at her with milky eyes.

The other three twisted and flailed, and then, as she watched, two of them touched tails and their bodies abruptly flowed through each other. The third followed suit a moment later and then they all merged with the fourth head, their form warping disturbingly in the mists.

In her own body, the cores in her dantian, which were now twisting the qi there disturbingly, had finally provided enough qi to replenish her vitality that she no longer felt like she was at death’s door. She had gone from some 25,000 years of lifespan to maybe 3 or 4 in an instant, just using that one shout. Now, it was already somewhere back around a thousand. The idea of lifespan as an expendable resource below the Immortal threshold was something only possible because of her principle and physique she was pretty sure.

-Though now I have the opposite problem, she groaned.

Her current form was not suited to hold the qi of one Ancient Immortal Core, let alone four. The soul power alone that was bleeding out of them was sufficiently dangerous that if it got any purchase, she would be in all sorts of trouble. She also had no way to remove them; they were a part of the new body she had formed. Truly scattering her body and ejecting them was basically impossible now. Not only were they associated with her dantian, but even though her Nascent Soul itself was untouched, removing the cores would also immediately remove the cores from the suppression of the yang laws and result in the four serpents reforming from the remains of her own body and blood in all likelihood.

Grimacing, she envisaged the change in form once more. However, this time, she responded according to the memories’ suggestions and shifted back into the half-serpent, half-human form. As it was, she was still maybe four times the size of a normal human, and the armour from the Ankalderon extended across much of her upper body in a facsimile of actual armour.

Just in time as well, because the writhing hydra also finished merging its form, the various bodies fully recombining and its four heads fanning out, focusing on her. They just had one core now, she could vaguely grasp that… through the connection with the cores inside her, she realised grimly.

-Not really a true core… more like the meridians in your Nascent Soul, the link to its root, an old serpent in her memories who had to be some originator hydra, she was sure at this point, hissed.

-It cannot re-divide now though… another added.

-The four cores in you are the ‘physical’ ones, the serpent added.

-Some good news there at least, she grimaced, looking around in case the mage had decided to show up.

The loss of the four cores should be like someone carving out the dantian from a dual path cultivator who focused on both the spiritual and physical paths in some form.

-Its longevity is unhindered though, very hard to kill, came the rather less helpful coda.

“…”

Watching it, she could see that as well. The serpent was haemorrhaging qi… but its strength was largely as it was and it still had soul strength… and…

-That’s not right…

She stared up at the sky, suddenly feeling very very nervous.

The serpents started to laugh, their four heads hissing as one, making no move to attack her.

“Foolish little thief… you screwed up.”

She stared at the cores… then at her own body… then back at them, sweating suddenly.

-Advancement tribulation?

Above her, the storm clouds were darkening rapidly. The cores were all brimming with qi, and her own reformed body had made a small but subtle step towards unification between her physique and her principle.

-I was reasonably close to the Immortal threshold, but not that close? Is it because of the cores…?

“We thought to use the human girl for this…” one snarled, its tongue flickering greedily.

“Reclaim fortune from misfortune…” another laughed, a disturbing hissing sound.

“Now we just have to wait for you to fall to the advancement…” the mist-breathing head murmured greedily.

“Live or die, we will seize the power of your blood…”

“Take those memories a wretched little creature like you claimed as ours…”

“Recover what was stolen from us before…”

With a snarl, she used her movement art to shoot forward at them, qi armour erupting out of her half-serpentine form to become a ghostly Ankalderon around her. The half-mythical form did have better qi capacity, that was clear – it was also much easier for her to control, having a sort of root closer to her own.

Caught by surprise, the hydra went sprawling as the vengeful intent in the clouds above continued to build in a disturbing fashion.

“Stupid thing… we see your realm now…” one of the heads hissed.

The other two breathed mist and venom over her, while the last tried to head-butt her away.

“HOLD!”

Her words locked it down for the barest second, buying her time to lash her tail around its body and effectively bind them together. The head that had tried to butt her now sank its fangs into her qi armour, directly trying to devour it, even as she replenished it as quickly as it was destroyed.

They rolled through another pool, water splashing everywhere, the hydra screaming at her and spewing venom and mist all over. The damage it was doing was prodigious, but she didn’t care, instead just burning qi without heed. She was well aware, on an instinctual level, what the issue was. She either had to get her old lifespan back, or the induced tribulation would destroy her body in the very best case and make her a False Immortal.

She didn’t need the memories to tell her that that would be… distinctly sub-optimal… especially after everything she had been through to this point.

“Devour Vitality”

She wielded the Duraminium spear like a dagger, using it to open up rents in the armour, even as her roar dragged energy out of its body towards her. Her one advantage here was that while its longevity was intact, without a manifest soul, which was tied up with the four physical cores, it had no way to ‘grasp’ the qi in its body – or its vital force, for that matter – and stop others seizing it.

It had soul strength still, but without the cores, it was without any ability to manipulate its principle or intent, at least until its spectral core became a physical one. The memories told her that could happen very quickly if it burnt its longevity to supplement the process though, so now their contest became a ridiculous battle to see who could rob the most life-force from the other before their various circumstances caught up with them.

“HOW DARE YOU!”

“JUST ACCEPT YOUR FATE!”

The heads screamed at her, while two expelled a dense sheet of devouring mist around her.

-Can still use laws, she pointed out accusingly.

-It has the same advantages you do, the turtle grumbled.

“…”

Above her, the sky was dimming at an alarming rate now, the clouds billowing out unnaturally in a way that was disturbingly reminiscent of what she recalled from the start of her own tribulation. Redoubling her efforts, she stabbed the sword-staff deep into its neck again, wishing it was bigger. It was excellent as a weapon, but much like the spears…

“Spears!”

She actually exclaimed that out loud, which led to the slightly hilarious side-effect of the hydra being hit by several targeted spikes of water from the swamp as reality twisted to her call.

Storing the Duraminium spear, she broke off her attack as the hydra wrestled with the stabbing water surface and shot through the swamp as fast as she was able, crashing into a surprised and very unfortunate group of orcs who were advancing out of the fort. Their combat had taken them almost a mile from it, she realised, having ceased paying much attention to the distance travelled once she started rolling around with the hydra.

It was a matter of moments to sweep up two long, bladed spears and store a few more as she reduced the group to a pile of crumbled corpses, devouring what little longevity they had with a few targeted uses of ‘Absorb’.

Behind her, the Hydra had recovered from the unexpected attack and turned to see what she was at. It reared up to exhale—

“STOP!”

Her roar cost her an a few hundred years of life, but it was much less impactful than the full effect she had manifested before. In the bought span of time, she shot back across the marshland, scattering water and reeds in a shockwave-like wake, finishing her charge by ramming one of the spears deep into its body where the heads joined.

Thunder rumbled ominously and the cloud formation, which had continued to blossom outwards, started to acquire a third layer. Hissing with anger, she rammed another Orichalcum spear deep into its body, pleased to see that it did have a visible impact on the hydra’s ability to control what remains of its own soul intent.

“Devour Vitality”

She used the devouring roar a second time, bringing her back to ~3,000 years of lifespan.

“Nowhere near enough!” she snarled, even as one of the heads managed to get through her qi armour and inject ice-cold venom into her flesh through a scrape across her back.

One of the horns on a head hit her stomach, helped by a second one devouring the cloak of qi around her, using what had to be some kind of inborn devouring strength. She had assumed it was its principle, but if it was born with it… was it more like a physique?

-It’s forming its core too fast, Ochirioptrix helpfully supplied.

“…”

She grimaced, able only to agree, and considered the options available through the memories as fast as she could as they continued to thrash in an insane melee of flailing tails, biting heads and her stabbing it repeatedly in the necks as they became available while avoiding getting her own head torn off.

“SUNDER VITALITY”

The attack ate almost all her accrued lifespan, a risk in the circumstances, but it did what it needed to do. She breathed a mental sigh of relief as the vital strength of the hydra’s body recoiled under her furious assault.

“HOW?!”

“WHAT ARE YOU?!”

“IMPOSSIBLE!”

“SHARVASUS!”

The 4 heads howled in disbelief, the last one more concerning than the others.

“Devour Vitality”

“Devour Vitality”

“Devour Vitality”

“Devour Vitality”

“Devour Vitality”

Sneering, she reaped in the dispersed life force as the creature screamed and thrashed in her grasp, fundamentally weakened now. Qi and longevity flooded into her physical body, undoing much of the trauma of the battle in several swift moments.

The layers of cloud overhead formed a fifth layer… and, with a thunderous boom, finally unleashed their vengeance. 11 black pillars of death descended, forming 11 serpents of different forms, their power fluctuating in ways that made her skin grow cold and her qi sluggish.

Watching them coil down, she could feel an absence in them that spoke to her of strength beyond mere principle – laws… laws in black lightning.

In the nearest hydra head’s eyes there were glimmers of terror now. She could feel its body working desperately to escape her, but now they were on an even footing in many ways and she had an advantage it did not – arms.

She rolled in the shattered swamp with it and used its body to shield her from the bolts…

“Devour Vitality”

For good measure she dug the metaphorical knife in with a final attack. The hydra, placed in the way of all the bolts and with its vitality already cruelly shattered, barely survived; however, its life force was almost completely dispersed.

Above them, thirty three white lotus blossoms descended in a spiral from the black sky. On each one was seated a six-armed celestial being with the head of a beast, surrounded by an auspicious halo. They carried scenes of mortals… humans, elves… even Ur folk, being executed in various terrible ways for bring misfortunes to others.

Unlike the last tribulation, or stage, this one was definitely targeted on her.

-Shit… is it because of the cores?

“Haaa… The heavennssss… have… eyessss…” the hydra heads managed to hiss at her in unison.

“Experience seems to suggest otherwise,” she reflected sourly, “but to their eternal misfortune, and yours… they do have ears it seems.”

“BE BROKEN”

Her cry shattered the sky and dispersed the lotus blossoms, discarding the platforms of the celestial beings, which all turned into terrible white serpents, arriving before her all at once.

All she could do was shatter the momentum… a Dao Step tribulation was not something she could weather in any way shape or form… she instinctively knew that if they actually connected with her…

“Stop”

It was about as loud as she could manage in the circumstances, but the cracks froze around her long enough for her to push her principle out at them, but before they could ever reach her, the lightning also encompassed the hydra.

“Noooo…..”

“Sharvasssss…”

Its final scream, before its flesh was consumed and its bones disintegrated, lingered in the air like an inauspicious curse. Before her, the white lightning sizzled ominously, straining in the field of stopped space until the very last of the clouds above had vanished and the sky returned to a dusky, evening pall.

She lay their blankly for a few moments, sweating hard in the terrible heat and humidity of the swamp, trying to process the ludicrous oddity of what had just happened. The hydra had triggered its own breakthrough to try and kill her and then refine her.

However, upon reflection, that didn’t seem quite right?

-When it first showed up, there were only three heads…

She thought rapidly back through events and realised, with a chill, that while the tribulation clouds had started to descend as soon as she grasped all the cores, the exact moment had been when the four serpents began to re-join into one four-headed form.

‘We thought to use the human girl for this…’

‘We reclaim fortune from misfortune…’

‘Now we just have to wait for you to fall to the advancement…’

The three statements they had made, mocking… eager, greedy, clicked as she felt a chill run through her and looked around warily. They had absolutely intended to draw out a tribulation one way or another, of that she was sure now. Sharvasus wearing her down, trying to pressure her, the serpents going after Chunhua first, presumably for her parasol qi…

Putting a hand to her breast, she grimaced – the four cores were still here, inside her… the original shards of the hydra’s soul with them. So the failed tribulation was not really ‘failed’, just delayed indefinitely because the hydra’s form was now destroyed, so long as the yang laws in her blood and bones, her mantra and her principle were all working with the symbol in her body to slowly wear them down. If she tried to remove them, likely their bodies would immediately reform and the tribulation would initialize again…

“Have I just been plotted by a bunch of stupid snakes and that bastard of a mage?” she sighed grimly.

~ Teng Chunhua – Taking refuge within a ruin ~

Teng Chunhua crawled out of the muddy pool within the small ruin of collapsed blue-grey stones they had taken refuge in and looked around grimly. The vast, oppressive black cloud had vanished. It had been hard to count the layers before the black lightning came down, but it had certainly been the start of a tribulation. There were, thankfully, no more of the unkillable serpents at least and the mist had lost the hideous devouring strength as well; however, the silence of the swamp was no less eerie in its own way than the chaos of the battle between Lin Ling and… everything… pretty much.

“By blessed Mothers of Earth, Sky and Water, we have survived…” Lashaan groaned, pulling herself out of the water and slumping down on the bank after checking for serpents.

“Somehow…” Naakos agreed, pushing himself up out of the mud nearby.

“Did we lose anyone?” she asked, looking around at the other Ur’Inan in their group who were starting to crawl out of the ruin of the landscape.

“…”

Lashaan, sitting down on the muddy bank, just sighed.

There had been six in this group, not counting her and Lashaan who had been dragged to join the other group: Naakai, Naakos, Eruuna, Caanar, Teshek and Saruuna.

“We all seem to be here,” Eruuna muttered, wiping mud and blood off her face and checking Caanar who was slumped beside her. “Caanar though…”

Naakai pulled herself over and knelt down beside the hunter, considering him grimly.

The Ur’Inan hunter had been bitten several times by the serpents, compounding the injury done to him by the two Ur’Inan Masters. His qi was chaotic and his vitality damaged from the venom. In a cultivator she would have readily diagnosed it as a serious deviation, but her grasp of how the Ur’Inan advanced was somewhat opaque, so she could offer little help there, beyond pills perhaps.

“Those snakes were vile,” Saruuna mumbled, still staring around warily.

“Summoned manifestations, from some kind of artefact,” she nodded, agreeing as she swept through her storage ring to see if she had anything suitable left.

The serpents had been beyond dangerous. She was pretty sure they had been part of some massive tarpit artefact designed to deny control over a huge area of swamp and presumably force them out towards the fortress. It was only when Lin Ling started her brawl with the hydra that the snakes had vanished like they were made of mist itself.

Just thinking about that made her heart have palpitations.

That it had not caught them had been down to sheer fluke, and then the quite concerted anger of the ‘Daughters of the Ocean’.

They had fled as soon as she saw Lin Ling move to attack the fortress, rushing along the edge of the swamp area, hidden from view by the dyke until the soul sense wards went and the hydra arrived. That there had been a collapsed set of ruins of the same blue-grey stone as had been in the last battlefield was almost too much good fortune for her to credit, but they had run right into them moments after, and then hid in the mostly submerged lower story of what had once presumably been a building.

The serpent had come looking for her almost immediately, sweeping the surroundings furiously with soul sense. Without ‘One with What Is’ she would not have hidden for as long as she did, even with the strange, diffusing properties of the ruins themselves; however, it had still found them, except it was already being harried by the ‘Daughters of the Ocean’ at that point, eventually splitting into three serpents to escape their arrows as they harried it like a flock of birds.

“What now?” Teshek grimaced, peering through the reeds in the direction of the fort, which was visible with a large pall of smoke over it now, in the thinning mist.

“Here,” she finally found what she was looking for and passed a jar of high-grade qi purification pills to Eruuna, from her storage talisman.

“What are these?” the Ur’Inan woman asked, taking the small stone pot carefully.

“Purification medicine. It will help with Caanar’s poison, and anyone else that was bitten,” she explained, glancing around. “It’s not as effective as it should be, but it will help.”

She flinched, spinning suddenly as she felt a shift in the ambient qi nearby—

“Relax, it’s just me,” a familiar voice, Lin Ling’s, preceded the younger woman walking out of a reed bed, looking…

She managed not to look surprised, because Lin Ling looked as healthy and radiant as she had ever seen the younger woman. In fact, there was a faint oppression that lingered around her that made her own soul sense distort.

“Did you break through?” she asked coming forward.

“No… though that might have been better,” Lin Ling grimaced. “I got played by that damn hydra and the mage that came with it.”

“A mage?” Naakos frowned.

“Yes, called himself Sharvasus,” Lin Ling nodded, looking around.

“Shar…”

She saw Lashaan flinch, and Naakai also looked grim.

“Who is that?” she asked.

“A powerful mage, one of the so-called ‘Ten Masters of Udrasa,” Naakai replied grimly, looking at Lin Ling.

“Did…?”

“Did I kill him?” Lin Ling sighed and shook her head. “I sort of dealt with the Hydra, but it’s a temporary…”

The other girl trailed off, and clenched her fist before putting a hand out to steady herself against the wall. Lin Ling had put on the loose gown she had before, but underneath it, she could see rippling shadows beneath the younger woman’s skin, like a web of cracks, or shadows cast by lightning in cloud.

“What is wrong?” she asked, reaching out to help Lin Ling, who flinched back and shook her head.

“Don’t. I had to do a very dumb thing to deal with that Hydra. Right now I have four peak Ancient Immortal beast cores stuck in my body.”

“F…four?” she saw no point in trying to hide her shock with her mantra.

“Four?” Naakos echoed dully.

“It’s… complicated,” Lin Ling grimaced, clearly not willing to explain fully. “The Hydra’s soul is still present in those cores in some capacity though, and there is no question of me hiding from anyone… They also haven’t put up the soul sense wards again, which doesn’t bode well.”

“Could be they were destroyed when you demolished half the fort?” she asked.

“It seems to be so, but past experience with them tells me that putting them back…”

“Is harder than you might think, if the harmony of the land was damaged,” Naakai said with a frown.

“In that case, that could be it,” Lin Ling nodded, not sounding convinced.

“You think it’s deliberate?” she mused.

“I think this whole fates-accursed thing is deliberate,” Lin Ling spat. “They have Orichalcum weapons, and that mage knew far too much about how to effectively neutralise me. He kept trying to force me to the limits, baiting me with the state of you and Juni…”

“Speaking of Juni?” she cut in, worried about her as well.

“No idea, pretty sure she’s not dead though,” Lin Ling grimaced. “I think she was being moved towards the harbour. I found her talisman on the bank near where our boat was ruined but no sign of her.”

“In that case, your friend…” Naakai frowned.

“Is not dead,” Lin Ling shook her head categorically. “A talisman with her soul signature still retains its link.”

That was a good, if vague, way of not explaining about storage talismans, she guessed.

“If you didn’t break through, what was with that tribulation?” she finally asked, as Lashaan and Eruuna handed around the purification pills.

“The hydra,” Lin Ling spat. “That’s why I know I got played by them… You as well, perhaps.”

“Me?” she blinked, recalling how the serpent had come for…

“My parasol qi?” she guessed.

“Yep, I can’t quite piece it together fully, but I am pretty sure that the mage wanted us both captured to help the hydra break through some threshold to Dao Immortal… and become a five-headed Hydra,” Lin Ling muttered, again clenching and unclenching her fist with a grimace.

“Your blood, my qi,” she nodded, thinking it through and nodding in agreement.

“I’d ask how they reached that conclusion… but I am going to guess that they found out something about the battle and somehow put two and two together?” she mused, thinking back through how chaotic things had been.

There had been several forces at the battle… but the one that stood out was…

“The mage sealed in the other barrier?” she asked after a moment’s further consideration, as that seemed the most likely culprit.

“I thought so, but now I am not so sure,” Lin Ling sighed. “He knew… more than that Sharvasus seemed to.”

“So what now?” she asked, looking around. “You, as you are, have no way to hide, I am guessing?”

“I do not,” Lin Ling nodded grimly. “My arts will hide me from soul sense to an extent, and I am using a crude charm to disguise the worst of the qi bleed, but the quantity of qi in my body makes it a bit like putting a curtain around a bonfire.”

“Uhuh,” Naakos nodded in agreement. “I think blind child in cradle could taste the mana that comes off you at the moment.”

“First, let’s see if we can find anything about Juni, or the others,” Lin Ling said. “Everyone come stand next to me and hold hands.”

“Uhhh?” Teshek looked dubious.

“Just do it,” Lin Ling sighed. “Unless you enjoy walking through swamps?”

“…”

The Ur’Inan made their way over, Eruuna and Lashaan carrying Caanar and Naakai helping Naakos, who also had a leg wound, she saw.

Lin Ling frowned, then sighed and shook her head suddenly. “Seems I can only do this two at a time, though it’s fine, because I have lots of qi to burn.”

“Do wha—?”

Lin Ling grabbed her and Saruuna and the landscape twisted around her twice in rapid succession. She stumbled and would probably have vomited from the disorientation had she actually had any food in her stomach to do so…

‘Sweet. Bloom. Red. Blossom. Jade’

She buried her discomfort with her mantra, though she still ended up dry-retching slightly. Saruuna, next to her, was not so fortunate, falling to her knees gasping and vomiting stomach bile.

Looking around, she saw they were standing on the riverbank… the shattered hull of a boat that was upturned about 100 metres up channel, while a second was lying broken in the shallows in the other direction. A third, smaller one was barely visible by the prow in the water.

“I’ll be back in a moment,” Lin Ling said, vanishing again with a shifting blur.

She looked around warily, as Lin Ling made three more trips in rapid succession, depositing all the other slightly stunned Ur’Inan on the riverbank in rapid succession.

“How… far did we just come?” she asked, trying to think how far they had moved since the whole mess started.

“About two miles,” Lin Ling frowned, looking around, before pointing up the river, back in the direction of the Umaja. “Juni went that way…”

“How do you gather?” she asked, then shook her head because it was a silly question.

“My qi is in that direction and I’ve never been to the harbour side of Umaja. I ran into a small army in the town and nearly got planned by that damn mage and whatever strange barrier they had preventing me from leaving.”

“That…”

Naakos stared at Lin Ling dully for a second, then nodded as if that confirmed many things.

Lin Ling gave him a long look and sighed. “Yes, I have the ‘blood of serpents’ if you wish to call it so. What do you know of those barriers? It was a huge nuisance to escape.”

“Little,” Naakos sighed, looking apologetic, as they started to walk along the bank. “Simply that the forts in these swamps are all usually built on old ruins that have them and that they usually have a great stone that allows a powerful mage to put up barriers to prevent passage of beasts in and out. It is how Udrasa holds these places…”

“That and the Orichalcum weapons,” Lin Ling noted with a scowl.

“Yes, that and their Orichalcum mine,” Naakos agreed, spitting on the ground, then pausing to help Teshek up, who was looking very green in the face.

Looking around, she saw that most of the other Ur’Inan were also looking rather ragged.

“We will need to walk for a bit, I think,” she said, turning to Lin Ling.

The other girl nodded, still looking around pensively.

“They have a mine?” she asked, turning back to that topic, as much to distract herself from the lingering effects of the transportation on her own body.

“Yes, their territory extends north of the river somewhat, into the escarpments on the edge of the Great Darklands, as they are known,” Naakos explained.

“Darklands?” Lin Ling asked, glancing over.

“They were so called in ancient times because they were almost impossible to navigate. It is 2,000 miles of grass and rocks with little water, and land alignments that make reliable traversal very challenging. It was easier to go around, along the river to the coast and north, or inland and then up to the Khell pass and the Dark Veils,” Naakai explained. “Nobody goes much past the pass though; that is the northern extremity of the Vashlagh and beyond that the Dark Veils are every bit as bad as the jungles to the south, by reputation at least.”

“Sounds charming,” she agreed, watching the water warily as they started to walk down along the bank.

“Quite,” Naakos grunted. “The last of our people who ventured there were in my grandfather’s time and many died to beasts and the curse on that land.”

They continued like that for a few minutes, until they had arrived at the second vessel a few hundred metres up the winding river bank.

As they went, they searched for other survivors, but found little of anything beyond some scattered spears and broken fixtures from the boats. The thinning of the reeds told her that the serpents had appeared here as well, so likely anything around here was consumed by them or forced into the water and swept away by the current.

“If everyone is recovered, we will jump again,” Lin Ling sighed at last, as all the Ur’Inan arrived beside them, Teshek and Saruuna looking notably forlorn.

“…”

There was some shuffling, but nobody objected audibly, to their credit, given how unpleasant the experience was, and, looking around, it was clear that there were none of their compatriots in the immediate vicinity.

This time she went with the second group, landing on a similar-looking riverbank, overlooking a broad lagoon almost in the shadow of Umaja. On the far side, she could see Ur’Vash scrambling about the docks. Four capsized boats were visible in the harbour and two more were sunk in the river, one still burning with golden fire from the braziers on it.

Lin Ling appeared a moment later, with Caanar and Lashaan.

“Where is your qi signature?” she asked.

“Near here,” Lin Ling mused, looking around with narrowed eyes before lighting on one of the capsized boats.

“That boat?” she guessed.

“Yes,” Lin Ling agreed. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

They watched in silence as Lin Ling vanished in a ripple of space and reappeared on the top of the boat hull some 200 metres away. Watching the whole process, she was sure it wasn’t ‘proper’ teleportation, just a really inefficient shift of their surroundings. Dao Seeking cultivators could teleport, but usually it required some preparation and could not be done for very long distances. Likely, Lin Ling was doing this deliberately to burn qi, not that it seemed to have much effect.

“How can she hold that much mana in her body?” Lashaan muttered from nearby.

“She has a blood gift,” Naakai mused. “A powerful one as well, given she can transform into a beast. Such people become shamans more often than mages.”

A few moments later, Lin Ling reappeared on the shore and then staggered, spitting a mouthful of something red and faintly horrid into the water which hissed disturbingly.

“You can’t do many more of those,” she pointed out. “Your meridians will not withstand the strain.”

“I know,” Lin Ling sighed. “Maybe six or seven more, then I have to find something else to spend qi on.”

“So where is Juni?” she asked.

“Hard to say. She was on that boat, but the pull of what remains of my qi associated with her as well as the link from her talisman comes from the north.”

“We were within sight of it before?” she frowned, looking around again, because something about this was bugging her persistently now.

“It is deceptive. If you go by river, yes,” Naakai nodded. “However, from this side, you must pass through Ulquan, on the other side of the managed lands here.”

“Great, so we not only lost Shu, now we lost Juni,” she sighed.

“…”

Lin Ling said nothing, but rather looked back towards the town, frowning again.

“There were six boats in the harbour when it all went to shit,” she noted, “three at the dock, three retreating to open water.”

“There are six here,” she noted.

“Yes,” Lin Ling nodded. “And the mist is much thicker to the north, towards… Ulquan, as you called it?”

~ Juni – Again in a mysterious place ~

Juni opened her eyes and found herself surprised that she was not back in the strange place with Quazam. She was, however, lying on the floor of a room with warm stone walls and a ceiling, about three metres wide.

“You are awake,” a weary voice muttered from nearby, in Imperial Common no less.

She pushed herself up to find two other people were in the room with her, one sat against a wall, the other lying on the ground, breathing raggedly. Both were women, about her age, dark-haired and just as naked as she was.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“No idea, some savage prison,” the other woman sighed glumly. “I am Qing Yao, and this is Wei Chu. I am from the Nine Auspicious Moons; she is from Verdant Flowers Valley.”

“…”

She exhaled in relief, because that put them on the more neutral end of the ‘righteous’ spectrum and not factions associated with the Jade Gate Court or Argent Imperial Hall by any stretch.

“How did you come to be captured?” she asked, looking around again.

“We… were following after our main group, and teleported straight into a scout group. They killed the three others with us, disciples from the Burning Tiger Sect. They had some strange binding art that they used to seal up our qi before we could flee. There are a few others held here though, all women as far as I know.”

“…”

Nodding, she stood and then grimaced, discovering that someone had put bands of some metal on her wrists and ankles. Looking at the others, she saw that they had similar bands as well. Seeing her gaze travelling to them, Qing Yao sighed again, shifting against the wall where she was sat.

“Yes, the bracelets are what keep us here. With them on we cannot manipulate any qi or soul power.”

She turned her own attention inwards and found that was indeed the case. What was strange was that without looking at the bracelet, she would have never even known it was there. It had next to no weight and no ‘sensation’ against her skin.

“No, that’s not right…”

“What?” she repeated blankly, as her inner thoughts were ‘spoken’.

“Oh, yeah, they do that as well,” Qing Yao spat. “No inner thoughts, you have to say everything out loud or say nothing at all.”

“What an odd thing,” she agreed, before adding. “Any idea how that works?”

“It seems to be some property of the metal. It interferes with your Sea of Knowledge in some way,” Qing Yao sighed. “You can think more abstractly, but any concerted attempt at internalising an art or something, or just insulting someone in your head, is impossible to hide, it seems.”

“So it’s a tool designed to help keep people like us captive,” she sighed, staring at the bracelets on her limbs.

{Heart Shifting Steps}

She focused on using it just as a ‘mortal’ divination, considering the bracelets. As expected, she got nothing much of anything. It was wrong to say it had no weight; it was, instead, that she could perceive almost nothing about it in a positive sense. Even brushing it with her fingers felt strange. Clearly some aspect of it deliberately obfuscated any kind of sense or sensation relating to it except for its visual presence, as far as she could tell. All she could say was that it seemed like the same metal that the guards on the boat with Zazuus had carried.

“What is your realm?” Qing Yao asked, interrupting her contemplation of their ‘chains’.

“Low enough to make these being used to keep me captive a bit of a farce,” she grimaced, not caring to answer directly.

She had no reason to distrust the other two… except her previous conversation with Quazam was weighting on her mind once again.

“Does it stop…?” she cut off, shaking her head.

“Does it stop what?” the other woman asked curiously.

She sighed, but said nothing and instead focused on her mantra for a moment.

“Devoted…”

The mnemonic rang in the air of the room like a bell, making her stop and scrunch up her face in anger.

“…”

Qing Yao blinked, clearly confused now, staring around.

“What did you just do?”

“Discover the extent of what these bands do,” she scowled.

What was more annoying, if anything, was that she had discovered that it worked… Her mantra would allow her some crude control over her qi, via its own workings, that the bracelets and anklets didn’t really interfere with. There was resistance there, certainly, but it was not unsurmountable, and with it, she could use ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’.

“…”

The issue was that using the mantra mnemonics would expose them. She didn’t expect that someone would recognise the modified version, least of all two cultivators from other continents on Eastern Azure, however…

She sighed and stared at the window in the cell; it was dusk, near as she could tell.

“Wait…”

“…”

“It’s hard to get used to,” Qing Yao sighed, staring at her sympathetically.

“It is,” she nodded, thinking more obliquely about her mantra and that one time it had sounded like an actual mantra.

That had come from ‘Bright Lotus Earthly Scripture’, when she had been trying to refine the lightning in the battlefield.

Frowning, she moved over to the wall, then sat down cross-legged and considered the basic exercises from the talisman – the breathing ones, the visualisation ones and about that moment, when the ‘scripture’ had flowed in harmony with the mantra.

“Devoted, I walk the Path of the Lotus, my Body Bestowed of the Gift of the Path…”

She trailed off as the mnemonic flowed, faintly influenced by Bright Heart Shifting Steps. It was nowhere near as fluid as it had been before, but it did work, she did gain qi and it was refined in various auspicious ways.

“…”

“You cultivate a Dharma scripture?” Qing Yao blinked.

“…”

“Something like that, I guess,” she nodded, carefully.

“Did it work?” Qing Yao added, looking more engaged suddenly.

“Somewhat,” she conceded.

“How curious,” Qing Yao frowned, staring at the bracelets on her own wrists.

She nodded in agreement, considering the ‘verse’ that had sort of flowed together. The odd thing was that while the mantra involved ‘five’ mnemonics, she had had no trouble with seven there… except…

It was a struggle not to say it out loud. There was probably no reason not to, but it was impossible to shake the idea that that function was deliberate in some way as well and that their captors, the Ur’Vash of Udrasa certainly, intended to make good use of it.

Exhaling, she smiled apologetically at Qing Yao and tried again.

“Devoted Scion who walks the Path of the Lotus,” that was four mnemonics.

“Lotus Gift born of and Bestowed to the Body,” that was also four.

“Devoted Path of the Lotus Body, Bestowed,” that was four and one, which made her sigh, because it was nearly right, she felt, but the cadence and the harmony felt a bit off thanks to ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’.

“…”

She sat there for the next several hours, trying to be as quiet as possible as she just worked over combinations of the ‘long form’ mantra as she decided to call it. The curious point was that even the most meagre versions had given her a remarkable boost to the efficacy of her cultivation.

Using ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ to help guide her, she eventually came to the conclusion that it was the long form flow that was more important to the overall efficacy than trying to match sets of five in harmonious ways. The latter was certainly effective, but no two sets behaved in quite the same way, given how the flow of her cultivation cycles naturally shifted a little each time.

The result was that after a while she just went with it and so, by the time dawn had rolled around, she had not only recovered most of her qi in spite of her bindings, but thanks to them, her control over what she had and how her mantra worked when looking inwards had taken another small step forwards.

None of their captors appeared until it was almost evening of that day, when a silver masked figure garbed in a red and yellow robe emblazoned with a symbol in the Ur’Vash language that read as 'Ulquan' came and just looked at the three of them for a few minutes through the door, accompanied by two guards carrying the weapons made of a silvery metal she had seen before.

She was fairly sure that the bracelets restricted their soul sense, but it was an open question as to whether the prison itself had wards against it. She suspected it did, but neither Qing Yao nor Wei Chu, who had barely spoken ten words, knew, beyond it always having been restricted. They had apparently recovered consciousness on a boat, already bound after being stunned during capture, and never been outside a soul sense ward since.

The official departed, having said nothing, and they were again left to their own devices, alone in the cell.

“Does that happen a lot?” she asked, thinking of their earlier experiences where they had been made to stand in the courtyards and such.

“Yes,” Qing Yao nodded. “Though sometimes we were taken out to serve at banquets and such. Mostly they just made us wait on officials or answer questions about ‘being human’, whatever that means.”

“Nameless cursed savages,” Wei Chu cut in from her repose on the floor, staring at the ceiling.

They both nodded at that.

“That was how we learned there were other prisoners here,” Qing Yao sighed.

“Do you know how many?”

“At least eight… I think, counting us, nine now you’re here,” Qing Yao replied, turning to look at her. “There might be more. There are a good dozen such rooms as this in this estate, but I’ve never seen them opened when we were led anywhere from here.”

“Have they… done… anything?” she asked carefully.

“You mean have they abused us?” Qing Yao sniffed. “No, just made us watch other demon captives entertain guests at the banquet. We seem to be held with some status, though what, I don’t know. Their language is impossible to pick up, beyond the few crude words in what sound akin to the old Eastern tongues, which they use when talking to visitors.”

“…”

She nodded again, as Qing Yao trailed off into silence, apparently happy to return to her own silent thoughts.

Why they were staying here, she was pretty sure she knew, even if it was difficult to see much from the window. What she could see, however, told her that there was always a faint fog in the air and the persistent smell of the acridly aromatic torches day and night told the rest of the tale.

“Was there much fog when you arrived here?” she asked at last.

“Hmmmmm, not really,” Qing Yao mused. “There was a lot on the rivers, they were very worried about it as I recall, and a few people seemed to go missing from scout boats, but that was about it, from what we saw when we were being transported.”

Her silence, beyond nodding, clearly piqued Qing Yao’s interest because she followed up by asking, “Why do you ask?”

“They were very worried about it before I got here. We stopped at various places and they wouldn’t travel on the water at night,” she explained. “I, ah… saw why in the end.”

“They talked about some kind of mist demons?” Qing Yao mused.

“Yes, that is a very accurate way to describe it, I suppose,” she conceded. “There are some kind of mist spirits that abduct Ur’Vash and replace them with clones that murder others.”

“May they murder many more,” Qing Yao muttered.

“If Heaven wills it,” Wei Chu echoed.

They sat there in silence again after that, beyond her murmuring her ‘long form’ mantra under her breath until it was close to midday the next day, whereupon she was shaken from her cultivation by the door opening and six guards coming in. All three of them were unceremoniously hauled up and escorted through several corridors and up some winding steps into a long spartan room.

Sixteen other female cultivators and five male ones were already standing there, in various states of health, all naked, restrained by the silver bands. The five male ones were easily the worst off: two missing an arm, one had three scars healing over on his heart, while the last had no eyes. The women showed little beyond bruises and rigid expressions, a few looking in their direction as they entered, but that was it.

They stood there for almost an hour before a voice echoed through the hall.

“ALL KNEEL FOR THE GREAT SHAMANESS OF WUJAI!”

The command twisted the air pushing down on her forcibly, manipulating her limbs to make her go down on both knees. The other cultivators all fought as well, nobody willing to bend in the slightest, as the pressure ratcheted up and up.

“Such disrespect,” a harsh voice hissed through the hall, lashing across everyone and basically sending them all sprawling.

“They have spirit,” the second giggled, speaking in the local tongue.

Barely managing to turn her head, she saw the group who had entered. Six robed figures with silver masks, led by the ‘official’ and a female Ur’Vash dressed in an actual silk robe, golden jewellery and piercings adorning her whole body. She seemed old, but, much like cultivators, that antiquity was mostly in her ‘eyes’ and the way she looked at things. Visually, she looked to be similar to Naakai, in her early sixties.

“To think we would go thousands of years without any humans showing up, and now a whole bunch more arrive,” the shamaness sighed, walking down the row.

“STAND. BE SEEN. IT IS DISRESPECTFUL TO NOT SHOW YOUR BEST TO THE SHAMANESS!” the six robed figures barked in unison.

She felt the pull of the command through the ‘Body’ mnemonic of her mantra as well as through the pure ‘Intent’ of it, as they were all hauled up to their feet like puppets.

“You have quite a haul,” the shamaness mused in Easten, before swapping to the local tongue. “Times must be hard that you are willing to part with them… or are they too hot for you to keep I wonder?”

“…”

“Udrasa is the power of these lands. These are from a warband that had an alteration with the savage frontier to the south. They gave Ajara a—”

“If Ezajara hears that her home is being called a ‘savage frontier’ your Udrasa may have to accept some losses,” Wujai snickered, swapping back into Easten for that comment, interestingly.

“…”

“The Great Shamaness knows many things,” the official bowed respectfully.

“Indeed she does,” the shamaness smirked, continuing in Easten. “I’ll give you five hundred ingots of Agrond for the lot.”

“Ah… we can sell you any six for that…” the official replied with a frown.

“Five hundred. For all of them,” the shamaness reiterated with a faint smile that never reached her eyes. “I am not an idiot. You could have sold this lot to Kutum or Okshan or even Menav to the north, yet you came to me, who is right on the border with the Dark Veils, about as far up the river as your contacts go… You want to put distance between you and this lot, meaning they attract trouble. Five hundred Agrond ingots and your problems vanish.”

“I will have to consult with the Master,” the official replied, a bit stiffly.

“Well, do not consult too long,” Wujai chuckled. “Goods like these only depreciate and I heard that that warband had several hundred. Perhaps I should just take some of my acolytes and round a few up myself… free of charge.”

“…”

The official flinched, she was somewhat amused to see. She had no idea what realm this Wujai was, but she clearly didn’t hold Udrasa in much esteem, given the implication that she would just go get them herself.

“I am also the only person who can teleport them that distance,” Wujai added with a smirk, in the common tongue of the Ur’Vash now. “With your mist problems as they are, I expect your Master will be willing to reach some... additional accommodations…”

“I will relay your interest,” the official said, a bit less happily.

Two more figures came after Wujai, but the conversations were basically the same and they offered even less or only wanted to know information on where they had been captured. None of it was particularly reassuring, but in the end, they were escorted back to the cells and the door closed with some venom.

~ Teng Chunhua – Near Ulquan ~

“This is… less than optimal,” Chunhua found herself observing, as both she and Lin Ling stood on top of a ruined pagoda, the mists swirling around them, staring at the distant lights of Ulquan, glimmering in the pre-dawn light. Contrary to her expectations, it had taken them two days to get here, not because they were slow, but because, as it turned out, there was a reason everyone navigated by water. Spatial distance inside the swamplands was absolutely inconsistent and only exacerbated by the mist, which was close to ever-present at this point.

“Yeah,” Lin Ling sighed. “However, we have little in the way of easy solutions.”

It had not proven too difficult to ‘track’ Juni in the end, because, as Naakai had explained, there really was only one route you could take from Umaja to Ulquan and then the principal town of Udrasa some few miles beyond it on the other side of the broad river straits. Only about a mile and a half of open water and a few small scattered river islands separated Ulquan and Udrasa, but it was far enough that immediate reinforcement would probably be difficult.

That, however, was not really the issue. The issue was that Ulquan was only approachable by a causeway and Lin Ling was sure that the walls had the same protections on them that the ones at Umaja had had. As such, the only way they were getting in there was with Lin Ling in normal form, or they had to wait until Juni was taken out again, which would certainly be by boat… and hard to interdict.

-Absolutely not optimal, she sighed inwardly, looking at Lin Ling with concern.

The younger woman hid it well, but the situation with her cultivation was only getting worse. She had teleported, wasted qi on every such thing, including risking detection several times to impressively destroy a few passing river boats, but it was of little overall effect.

Sharing qi was something that had been mooted as well, but the issue there was Lin Ling’s own reticence. Apparently the cores infused much of the qi with soul strength, continually trying to erode her even as she refined them as best she could. Unless Lin Ling sat with someone who absorbed the qi, there was no easy way to manage it. She had, at last, given a bit to Naakos, at his urging, after both Canaar and Teshek had volunteered to try to help her, but after Naakos had refined some for a few minutes, he had finally concluded that none of the others could stomach it and that had been the end of that.

That also meant that with Lin Ling as she was, sneaking in was also next to impossible. Soul sense was restricted, but anyone in close proximity to Lin Ling would notice her at the very least.

That left two options, really, both potentially very very dangerous. The first, they could try to sneak in, find Juni, free her and sneak out again. The second was that they try with what utility talismans she had and Lin Ling’s grasp of various methods to set up a short range gate and teleport in. In truth, despite the dangers involved, she was actually in favour of the former. The idea of attempting crude teleportation in a place where space was clearly not functioning properly did not appeal.

“So, what do you think?” she asked at last.

“We can only try sneaking in,” Lin Ling muttered at last. “So long as I do not transform it should be okay.”

“If we have to fight our way out…” she pointed out, before Naakos, who was also on the roof, cut her off.

“This close to Udrasa, it should not be as hard as you expect. Umaja was the main defensive fort on this approach. Here, Ulquan is the port gateway to Udrasa, the staging post this side of the water and more of a market and trade hub than anything else.”

“It looks intimidating because it has a lot of wealth,” she realised.

“Yes,” Naakos nodded. “Its main defence is that if you piss in its harbour they will smell it in Udrasa before it hits the water.”

“Hah…” Lin Ling sneered.

“Well, we can only try,” she added, surveying the long causeway again. “I don’t suppose we have any idea where she might be?”

“If they took her by boat and she is an important prisoner, in the fort, by the port. That is also where the slave market is,” Naakos spat.

“There was mention of them taking slaves ‘across the river’ in those rumours you heard,” she mused, glancing at Lin Ling.

“Yes,” Lin Ling nodded. “Though this is not quite what I think that meant.”

“Any other time, you could probably just go in on a fishing boat,” Naakos sighed, “but now…”

“The fog has killed off all that and anyone walking out of it is going to get stabbed before questions are asked,” she sighed.

“Indeed,” Naakos agreed, looking around at it with a shiver.

In the two days they had travelled, the fog had been thick and ever-present, yet there had been no sign at all of the ‘Daughters of the Ocean’ – Okeanides, as Lin Ling had called them. Still, she was under no illusions there. They were almost certainly still out there, a paranoia shared by almost every sign of ‘civilisation’ they had passed on the way, given how boarded-up and fortified the small settlements in the marsh and on the river banks had been.

“Ah, there,” Lin Ling pointed to the edge of the mist on the water.

It took her a moment to find what the other was pointing at. It was a rather familiar boat, about half a mile off shore, looking like it had come from up-river, rather than out of the marsh by the channels they had eventually followed.

“Is that Zashral’s vessel?” she muttered, managing to make out the painted designs on it and not bothering to hide her shock.

“It does look it,” Lin Ling mused.

They watched the boat, which was barely visible in the swirling mists, courtesy of the blazing golden lanterns that festooned it, slowly inch its way towards the dock, through the rolling banks of river mist.

“…”

“I guess opportunities do come if you wait long enough,” she mused, absolutely willing to bet spirit stones that the boat was fishy.

“If you’re planning to use the status of people that Udrasa will not easily stick a spear through to get in, someone like Zashral would be a candidate,” Naakos chuckled darkly.

“Didn’t bother Kozrak,” she observed, compelled to point that out at this point.

“Kozrak is actually quite important,” Naakos grunted. “More important than whoever runs Ulquan certainly. That Ashaal as well.”

“I suppose that Udrasa is a bigger town,” she agreed.

“More strategic as well. Ulquan is just an island fort that has a good location given the geography of the river. The Udrasa we arrived at is the gateway to this whole region,” Naakos explained. “All the ‘Udrasa’s are controlled by people in the Udrasa clan that have real status. That was also why that waste Azuum was so keen to get involved with them.”

“All the Ur’Inan and others have to go through there?” she asked.

“Or you have to take a big detour, though many do, truth be told. Ajara is quite reasonable, as is Lavang in the Blue Serpent territory. Crude and primitive, sure, but they have rules that they keep to and they hold the old ways much closer.”

“I have noticed that the sacred colours are much less… prominent here,” she observed tactfully.

“You sure know some stuff, though that’s not surprising. I still can’t help but wonder if that Quazam was just spouting wild dog shit,” Naakos muttered, looking at them sideways.

…

In the end, it took about an hour to cobble together suitable disguises, and another hour for the three of them, her, Lin Ling and Naakos, to go across the causeway. The others wanted to come as well, but Naakai basically put her foot down and said that the fewer the better. In any case, all three of them were, in different ways, best equipped for it. Naakos was the strongest person in the whole Ur’Inan band, near as she could tell, and they both had enough resources to call upon that Ulquan would get a very bloody nose before they had to jump in the river to escape.

The passage across was uneventful. They just joined the trail of people departing the slum-like quarter on the landward side of the small island that Ulquan itself was on, blending in as they passed through check points and wordlessly accepting as the guards made them draw blood with an Orichalcum blade to prove they were not mist people.

Entry to the town itself cost a bunch of talismans, but they had no shortage of those, having cleaned up several groups of Ur’Vash on the way. Once inside, however, they had to admit that their problems had only just begun. The other Ur’Vash towns had been quite lax about security; however, Ulquan made a cultivator sect’s inner security appear lacking as they walked around.

The market area on the landward side and the docks were the only places any visitor could travel to without some kind of privilege or contacts, as it turned out.

The inner markets, various residential districts and the ‘Masters’ Quarter’ as the large fortified area was called, all required you to both pay money and ‘know’ people. It was also forbidden to stay overnight in the town unless you were a resident, she quickly learned, after commenting on the apparent lack of inns and the like in the ‘open quarter’.

“So, what do we do?” she signed to Lin Ling as the three of them stood there, looking at the gateway to the dock.

“…”

She watched as Lin Ling took out Juni’s storage talisman from her pocket and considered the compass she had made and considered them both pensively for a few moments.

“She is in the Masters’ Quarter, but the readings are utterly obnoxious,” the younger woman sighed after a moment.

“Obnoxious meaning bad?” she asked, looking at the compass to see what she could get from it.

“Opaque, obscure, obfuscated, twisted, non-committal, indecisive,” Lin Ling sighed, passing her the compass.

She tried the divination herself and stared at the twisting, directionless readings, then at the talisman, which pulled faintly in that direction, as Lin Ling had noted.

“I’d have said it was the mist, but this feels different,” she concluded.

“Not to mention the torches keep that at bay,” Lin Ling added, frowning.

~ Juni – Ulquan Masters’ Quarter ~

The official returned around mid-morning on the second day of her sojourn, and all three of them were escorted out of the cell again. This time, rather than go to the hall they had visited before, they were escorted through the corridors and taken to a broad courtyard, brightly illuminated even in the day by its burning golden torches. The lower story was just flat walls, but the upper story had various open verandas, all of which held various groups of Ur’Vash.

“BOW TO THE MASTER OF ULQUAN!”

This time, the command was just a hammer blow, pushing all of them down to the ground, brooking no complaint or resistance.

“HONOUR TO THE MASTER OF ULQUAN, FAVOURED OF QUAZAM!”

“GREAT MOTHER TO THE MASTERS…”

The refrain echoed from maybe half of the balconies up above.

They knelt there for almost a minute, before the same force bodily hauled them up and she found herself wondering if she was hallucinating for a moment. The central balcony had half a dozen figures standing on it and among them was Zashral. Also there was the shamaness she had seen yesterday, Wujai, along with the other two, and several other robed or expensively garbed Ur’Vash in leathers, hides or silks. Wujai, she noted, looked rather displeased with proceedings from where she was seated.

“Accursed savages,” one of the male cultivators blurted out, which drew some derisive looks from up above, before a masked man in a golden robe seated in the middle waved a hand.

She watched the cultivator dragged up and then pushed down face first on the ground for his disrespect.

“…”

“My offer of 500 Agrond still stands,” Wujai said flatly, after a moment’s consideration.

“…”

The others looked at her, frowning.

“You think they are trying to organise this to impress us?” Wujai sneered, glancing at the ‘Master’, then the other guests. “They know this lot are trouble, if they are even humans at all. They look more like Sea Peoples to me.”

One of the others spat, staring at the group.

“Honoured guests, these are certainly humans. It has been verified by a Divination by the Ten Great Masters,” the official who had brought them there stated.

“The Sea Peoples do not roam our lands anyway, Wujai,” another of the guests chuckled, before adding, “I’ll give you 500 Illdrium talismans from Undrehallen for all the females.”

“…”

“Katum is interested only in those who can fight,” Zashral mused, looking at the group, his eyes alighting on a few others, before finally landing on her. “I will give you a rare and precious artefact for the two dark-haired ones, the brown-haired one and the males who are not crippled.”

“An artefact?” the Master glanced over at Katum.

“Yes,” Zashral smirked, stepping forward and handing him a ring.

“…”

The Master stared at it, frowning for a long moment, then nodded conclusively.

“This is acceptable. Those indicated are sold to Young Warleader Zashra—”

“Unacceptable,” another familiar voice cut through the hubbub.

“Ah… Master Ashaal…” the Master of Ulquan frowned.

“Ashaal…” Zashral frowned as well.

She looked from one to the other, trying to work out what in the nameless fates was actually going on here.

“I do not care about the others, but the brown-haired one belongs to Ash’Udrasa. She is to go to the Ten Masters,” Ashaal said flatly.

“This is not Udrasa by the Badlands,” one of the other masked figures near the leader of Ulquan scowled at her.

“And you are not the Master of Udrasa. Do you have words to back up your claim, Ashaal?” another of the presumed nobles pointed out, amused disdain dripping from his words.

“Nor is this Uicar, to do as you please…” another snickered.

“Go ask the Ten,” Ashaal snapped, walking along the upper terrace now.

“Go ask the Honoured Ten, she says,” another noble sneered.

“Lord Sharvasus, perhaps you might render verdict on this?” the Master of Ulquan frowned, looking to his side.

“I have no recollection,” a voice echoed from a curtained balcony to the left.

“…”

Even Ashaal looked surprised at that, as she might, given that what the masked Ur’Vash had said was the truth, disturbing as it was.

“In that case, I will acquiesce to Great Master Sharvasus,” the Master of Ulquan said, with a deep bow. “Those selected are now the things of Young Warleader Zashral.”

“…”

Ashaal stopped, her scowl truly thunderous now, while Zashral just shot her a look that was close to a smirk.

“I will depart with them immediately, to make the best passage across to Yom Udrasa,” Zashral said with one nod to the Master and another to the place where ‘Sharvasus’ was.

Still trying to work out what the nameless fates was actually happening, while constrained by the limitations of the bracelets, she, Qing Yao, Wei Chu and the two male cultivators were escorted out of the hall by the guards, leaving the other cultivators behind. Near as she could suppose, through slightly sideways thoughts, someone had been annoyed at what Ashaal had done to the Master of Uicar, and Zashral clearly had friends here. That Zashral had appeared rather than Kozrak spoke to who had likely won that fight in the end as well.

“What now?” Qing Yao muttered, looking worried.

She exhaled, wondering if it was possible for them to get out of here. Her divination art told her that there should be an opportunity, but it was hard to tell whether it was like the ones she had seen in the mist, just bait for someone else to try and draw something out of her, or a real thing.

“They can be both,” she complained, then hit her head off the wall in annoyance for forgetting.

“They can both be what?” Qing Yao blinked.

“Opportunity to escape,” she sighed. “Can be a real thing and also a trap.”

“Oh… yes,” the other woman nodded.

“…”

Her cultivation had mostly recovered at this point, though she was mostly hiding it courtesy of her mantra and ‘One with What Is’. The question was, could she get out of here, with a bunch of weak prisoners, without getting caught? Lin Ling would likely be able to follow her, given she had used enough of the Yang Qi on arrows at this point that it must have marked her, never mind Lin Ling occasionally sharing qi with her to help refine the parasol qi.

She was still pondering that, however, when the door opened and guards walked in. They were escorted out of the cell and escorted through the fort, across two bridges and then into the upper level of the main building, eventually arriving at an opulent veranda, now well-lit by torches with the same acrid scent. Lounging on cushions were three figures, along with various guards. Zashral and the Master she recognised, but the third…

Involuntarily, she flinched backwards at the sight of the familiar figure in his dark golden robes, golden mask like a grinning man.

“We meet again, little one,” the figure who had reached out to touch her in the strange interaction with Quazam chuckled, staring at her intently from where he was seated.

“…”

She tried to open her mouth, to say something, but it was dry and she realised she was sweating in a way that had nothing to do with the heat and humidity.

“I trust we have an agreement then, Zashral?” Sharvasus turned back to the young Warleader, who looked a bit put out but was nodding pensively.

“Your promise of support is enough… but you are asking me to give up…”

“I backed you with Ashaal,” Sharvasus chuckled. “You killed her brother. When she discovers that, you will need friends here.”

Zashral scowled. “I could just kill Ashaal as well…”

“You could, but this way we both get what we want,” Sharvasus mused.

“And what do you want?” Zashral muttered.

“If you and Ashaal fight, we will have a problem regarding Ash’Udrasa in the west. If you give me that brown-haired girl, all your problems go away. We, the Ten Masters get what we want, you, Zashral will have made friends for Katum in the heart of Yom-Udrasa and perhaps Ash’Udrasa becomes a place Katum can have as favourable a relationship in as it did Master Uicar’s town.”

She listened, trying to mask her fear now, as they talked in the common Ur’Vash tongue. The ploy was pretty clear, and much as she had expected, but it did her no good. The others just sat there, looking befuddled.

“Okay,” Zashral nodded. “I will accept your support in this, Master Sharvasus. Katum looks forward to a closer relationship with the Yom-Udrasa.”

“Good lad, much smarter than some of the others,” Sharvasus chuckled, before turning back to look at the five of them again.

“Do you also wish for the other two females?” Zashral asked, hiding his grimace well, she thought.

“Not at all,” Sharvasus laughed again, crossing his arms and sitting back. “I was just admiring beauty.”

Qing Yao scowled, though Wei Chu looked inscrutable. The two male cultivators, whose identities she knew next to nothing about, both had expressions that looked like cold masks at this point.

“What of the others I expressed an interest in?” Sharvasus asked, turning to the Master again.

“I am surprised you knew to ask, a few fitting that description have entered today, but they have done nothing untoward,” the Master said with respectful bow from his own seat.

“…”

“I will see to it myself, then,” Sharvasus mused, before turning his masked face back to look at her and chuckling unpleasantly and asking in Easten. “You are confused?”

“…”

“Of course you are,” the old Ur’Vash chuckled, continuing on. “That Ashaal is talented but unpredictable. We do not need a war with Katum now over a brat as favoured as Zashral, so it is better she loses some ground and her support erodes. For Ash’Udrasa to change hands is no bad thing either and in not handing you over, she will lose even more influence!”

Zashral laughed at that, but looked a bit affronted at being called a brat. She couldn’t help but feel that there was something off about this whole affair though, especially Zashral. Compared to his previous, enraged actions and almost spiteful manner, the person sitting before her was composed and calculating.

“Take them back to the cell,” the Master said with a wave of his hand.

The departed again, under escort, as her mind spun. She was under no illusions that being taken across the river, as was apparently what was intended, was nothing short of bad. The meeting with Quazam had been unnerving enough, but the ten robed figures gave her visceral reactions of dread in a way she couldn’t account for. That had not been present on the ‘Sharvasus’ she had just met, but she was almost certain he was the same person. The manner of speech was the same at any rate, and the symbol on his robe.

They had gone down two corridors and crossed out into a third, stepping onto one of the colonnaded bridges over a waterway, when she decisively made her decision. ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ played some role in that, but really, the bridge was the only place deserted enough that she could ambush the guards and then easily dispose of the bodies, so it was what it was, really.

“The Body receives the Gift, Bestowal of the Path, Devoted.”

She focused all of her feelings of fury and discomfort up to this point into the mnemonics and let it wash over everything, interfacing her mantra with the Gestalt through ‘Body’ as she did so.

The guards didn’t even scream as the darkness in her own heart devoured their minds, shredding their consciousness and overwhelming them.

“…”

Qing Yao stared at her dully, as did the three others.

Without comment, she grasped Qing Yao’s hand and pushed her qi into her divination art.

{Bright Heart Shifting Steps}

{Bright Lotus Eyes}

The twin divination arts shimmered in her mind, their prestige echoing in the now-deserted bridge as she stared at the other woman’s bracelet on her wrist. It took her longer than she would have liked, because the sensory aspect on them was obnoxious, but in the end she found the way to disable it and pushed her qi into that one portion that was a tiny shade different in the way it felt as she considered it.

The bracelet uncoiled, becoming a ten centimetre long spike in her hand. Once she got the first one, it was an easy matter to get the others and in a matter of ten seconds she had freed Qing Yao, who exhaled, staring at her with a shocked expression, flexing her hands.

Without any prompting, one of the male cultivators stepped forward and held out his hands. Shaking her head, she quickly undid his, then the others, her heart racing as she turned over in her mind what they could do next.

“Hide all your qi,” she hissed to the others.

“No fear there,” one youth grimaced, “I have none.”

She rolled her eyes and nodded.

“So how do we get out?” Qing Yao hissed.

“We should try to free the others,” the second youth muttered.

“…”

She, and the other four, all stared to look at him.

“My senior brother and sister are still captive,” he muttered.

“Do you want to fight a whole fortress? I’ve seen what kind of strength this place has,” she hissed.

“You have?” Qing Yao frowned.

“Dao Immortals, at least one,” she nodded grimly. “All three of the ones in that room were Ancient Immortals.”

“A…Ancient?” the first youth she had freed gawped. “Are you sure?”

“Did you see the battle?” She hissed, looking back the way they came.

“Battle?” the youth frowned, “We arrived here on some plains and wandered around fighting monsters for weeks on end, then got captured by a band of these savages using this soul-suppressing formation after we were ambushed by some neonate serpent thing.”

“…”

She stared at him, her mind spinning for a second, but could only nod.

“So, how do we get out?” Qing Yao frowned.

She closed her eyes, then looked at the four guards.

“You two, dress up in their armour,” she pointed to the male cultivators.

“I’m Feiwu Shen,” the youth muttered, “from the Green Dawn Dragon sect,”

“Kai Manshu, from the Erudite Sage of Qin Pagoda,” the one who had wanted to rescue his senior brother and sister hissed, already pulling on the gear from a body.

“We are already acquainted,” Qing Yao frowned, “but what do we do for a disguise? I’ve seen no female guards.”

Her mind spun, then she put some qi into the bodies to make them heavy and quickly pushed them into the canal, watching them sink from view, then waved for them to follow her.

-We don’t have long before someone notices a problem, she thought grimly.

{Bright Heart Shifting Steps}

Looking both directions she focused on the idea of stores and resources and got a slightly better tug from the right. Leading them that way for a corridor, she sighed as peeking around a door, she saw more guards.

“Wait here,” she hissed to the two, Yao and Chu, then looked at the two male cultivators. “Escort me to that door, just act like the guards, I only need to get within a metre or two without them raising the alarm.”

They looked at her, but nodded and escorted her towards the door.

“You, why are you here?” one of the guards asked, looking up from where he was squatting.

-They must not see much trouble in here, she guessed.

“I am here to collect some things for the Honoured Master,” she bowed deeply.

“Faugh,” the other guard nodded, waving them through.

They got to within a metre, before the first guard frowned, staring not at her but at Kai Manshu behind her, but by that point it was too late.

“The Body receives the Gift, Bestowal of the Path, Devoted.”

The two guards collapsed stricken, much like the last two. She caught both of them and pulled them into the room behind, which was a broad atrium in which three rather stunned Ur’Vash in robes were staring at her.

{Bright Heart Shifting Steps}

She shot for the nearest one without any hesitation, again sending out a vicious pulse of her own manifest fury to overwhelm her target and the second servant near her through the gestalt link. She was sure it was the same kind of trick that the ‘Honour to Quazam’ thing achieved, just at a much lesser scale. What surprised her was how easy it was compared to before. Some of it she was sure was down to her own advances, but at the same time…

-Their mindset is more fragile somehow?

It was something to consider for later.

“You… wha—?!” one of last Ur’Vash women half shouted, stumbling back, but she had already arrived before her, using Bright Lotus Eyes to strike directly at the woman’s Heart Gate.

It wasn’t an art, not as she knew it, but with sufficient martial intent, and the right comprehensions, it was possible to hit meridian focal points directly. With Bright Lotus Eyes still active, it was almost pathetically easy as a surprise attack.

Looking around, she saw that Qing Yao and Wei Chu had already come up and were helping the other two drag in the guards.

“You two, go stand at the door. Look vaguely official. Nobody is likely to check immediately, but an unguarded door will draw eyes,” she hissed at them.

“What now?” Qing Yao asked her.

“Now, we disguise ourselves,” she said grimly, checking the first room.

“Will that work?” Wei Chu muttered, following after her.

“Yes,” she nodded. “So long as the soul sense wards are active and they can’t see your face.”

“Only those with real status wear masks though,” Qing Yao observed. “It seems likely that they have some way…?”

“Certainly,” she nodded, before adding, “We are not going to use masks. I don’t suppose you can disguise your features at all to look a bit more like an Ur’Vash?”

“…”

“I only have a qi-based art,” Qing Yao sighed, “and physical transformation is difficult, even for a Dao Seeking cultivator like myself.”

“I am only at Nascent Soul,” Wei Chu muttered.

“…”

She nodded, surprised they were that low a realm in truth. It took her about five minutes of rapid searching to find what she needed, pots of dye and pigment used for drawing the various designs. It helped that not a lot of Ur’Vash here seemed to have many tattoos, not among the women anyway. The male guards wore gold and red mainly with a bit of black.

Waving the pair over, she quickly had them strip and then painted the markings over them in accordance with what she had seen of the various forces so far. Copying those exactly would be a bad idea, she guessed, but she had seen enough now to know what was what, so after a few minutes they both could pass for guards at distance and maybe even up close so long as they didn’t open their mouths.

After that, she dyed her own hair darker and put a few suitable markings on herself and the other two to disguise her features.

“If only we had our storage rings,” Kai Manshu sighed, looking around.

She sighed a trifle wistfully, before shaking her head. “Better to live long than die rich.”

“Hah…” Qing Yao nodded.

“How is your qi recovery?” she asked Kai and Feiwu.

“It will take me a while. My Nascent Soul got damaged,” Feiwu sighed.

“You’re also at Nascent Soul?” she asked Kai.

“Quasi-Immortal!” he shot back a bit reproachfully.

“Apologies, it’s impossible to tell,” she replied with a weak smile.

“Mmmmm, yes,” he nodded, eyeing her.

“I suffered a major loss to my cultivation a month ago, in the jungles to the south,” she remarked.

-That wasn’t a lie by any means, so read into that what you will, she sighed to herself.

“Do you think we can free the others?”

“You want to elicit a prison break under the eyes of fates-know-what, with maybe three Ancient Immortals a single badly judged half brick away?” Qing Yao muttered to Kai.

“What is going on here?” a voice from the entrance called.

She turned to see a female Ur’Vash wearing a diaphanous robe and a mask over her face standing in the door way.

“I thought I told you, no playing with the slaves!” she snapped to the two male cultivators, who had the presence of mind to just scowl behind their half face helmets.

“Get back to your posts,” the woman sighed and scowled, departing.

“…”

They stared in silence, watching until she departed, then exhaled.

“Too close,” Qing Yao sighed.

“Yes,” she nodded in agreement. “Let’s get going.”

Thankfully, Kai Manshu didn’t raise any further questions about rescuing the others. It was something she would have liked to do, but in the first instance she suspected they were all scattered now anyway, and walking back into the middle of that mess just screamed disaster.

Getting out of the upper fort turned out to be surprisingly easy after a bit of observation. While there was a lot of security, almost all of it was outwardly facing – a sure sign that it was more about projecting power than actual security in her eyes. What was striking as well was that while they used metal weapons and some armour, not much of it was of the metal that the guards had used out in the swamp.

-Do they not see a lot of danger here compared to some other places?

Looking at the wealth of the courts they hurried through, looking purposeful, she could only guess that that was the case. The town itself did seem more like a trading hub than an actual fortress.

“This is disturbingly easy,” Qing Yao muttered after a while, as they stood near one of the gates observing for a moment the passage in and out.

She nodded, agreeing with that, in principle at least. It did seem easy, and that bothered her; however, she had a keen intuition that right now they were running along a thin rope. If they stopped, they would be met with disaster, but if they kept running, there was a small chance to get off the accursed rope and onto something more…

Her gaze roved over a group of three figures, a man and two female Ur’Vash, who had just entered the court. What clued her in was the male Ur’Vash, who was certainly Naakos – he had the same gait that the hunter had had, even if he was now dressed like a local and wearing a silver mask, escorting two robed… slaves with dark hair.

-No way it’s actually that fortuitous… she frowned.

“What’s wrong?” Qing Yao hissed, following her gaze.

“Nothing… maybe,” she shook herself. “Wait here a second.”

She walked out, suppressing her presence thoroughly and bumped into the path of Naakos as if she had not seen him.

~ Teng Chunhua – Ulquan inner estate ~

“YOU IS DISGRACE OF SLAVE! I MAKE YOU SUFFER TEN THOUSAND BEATINGS!” Naakos berated the dark-haired slave woman who had stumbled across their path, largely ignored by those around them.

-There is no way this was that easy, she muttered inwardly, staring at the woman, who was absolutely Juni with her hair dyed darker.

As she watched, Naakos dragged Juni up and stalked over towards the side of the court, to where two guards were watching with two more slaves.

“I am… ver… sowwy…” Juni was mumbling, affecting to look genuinely terrified.

“Myriad apologies, honoured guards,” Naakos muttered to them.

“Is there a problem here?” the leader of the gate guards had sauntered over now, looking kind of bored.

“No, just a minor matter of this slave…” Naakos shoved a foot into Juni’s side. “This slave doing stupid things.”

“Do you know her owner?” the guard frowned, looking at the two guards.

“Yes,” Naakos nodded. “I sent here to look for her. She late with task to drop off important thing for our household.”

“Fine, see you’re not disturbing others,” the guard grunted, stalking back to the gateway.

“We leave now,” Juni signed. “There is an orc in there who is looking for you, called… Sh-arv-as-us.”

Juni had to sign out the name, but as soon as Juni did, she felt her heart chill.

“Who are…?” the woman beside Juni asked in Imperial Common, looking at the three of them with apprehension.

“Comrades,” she murmured quietly.

Juni also nodded surreptitiously and signalled for the others to just go along with it.

“That bastard is tricky. We leave now. Juni is right. He is absolutely a Dao Immortal and he will certainly hold a grudge over his pet hydra,” Lin Ling signed.

“…”

She was very glad of her mantra’s ability to keep her emotions in check as they walked back out of the ‘Masters’ Markets’, as that quarter of the city, right below the palatial fort on the hill, seemed to be called. However, the palpable apprehension and wariness of the others, who were all clearly cultivators, she was certain at this point, actually seemed to help, though the way the two male cultivators disguised as guards kept warily looking everywhere was a potential problem. Thankfully, with Naakos walking ahead, snarling obscenities under his breath, followed by Lin Ling, it likely came across as them being uneasy over him.

Eventually, they wound up in a shaded courtyard near the causeway and finally in a position to consider their options. The cultivators were all from an interesting cross section of sects, mostly from the central and southern continents, and part of a larger group who had been grasped, from what Juni relayed.

Once everyone was on the same page, they swapped out their garments for the normal robes of common folk who could not afford to stay in Ulquan overnight, hiding all that they had worn in her storage ring. As a final touch, Lin Ling trotted off and returned from a nearby market with a couple of jugs of alcohol and a hand cart, explaining that with all the inns outside, heading back out as ‘day traders’ was probably their best bet.

Having seen a fair few such carts on the way in, she could only agree there, and while they did have to pay a nasty surcharge on the goods when leaving, which Naakos needed no help grumbling about, they crossed back over the causeway without incident. Thirty minutes later saw them in the misty ruins of the pagoda, five very confused cultivators in tow.

As far as first reactions went, she supposed she should be glad that the cultivators were mostly still too shocked, and also mostly without qi, to really process the circumstances. Having just been rescued, in rather… odd fashion from what she could gather, they seemed to hold enough gratitude to Juni to not immediately revolt at the fact that they were now seated in a ruin, opposite their number in ‘Ur’Inan’.

“Um…” Qing Yao finally broke the silence, because the Ur’Inan were basically unfazed at this point.

“How are you travelling with…?”

“They are not the same group,” Juni said smoothly. “As you might have guessed already, there are quite a few… influences of people here.”

“Yep,” she nodded sourly. “This is not the deserted resource-rich treasure paradise we were sold by those scammers in the Imperial Court.”

“That’s… a bit…” Kai Manshu muttered.

“It’s pretty accurate,” Qing Yao sighed, “as much as I hate to say it. Unless they meant ‘purge this generation with fire’ by ‘define the soul of this generation’.”

“Hah,” Wei Chu chuckled wryly.

“So… this group are helping you?” Feiwu asked at last, looking at the Ur’Inan who were sitting around the fire, considering the new arrivals and talking softly in their own tongue.

Mostly, it was Naakos explaining the strengths of the others and relating their escapade in the town, truth be told. Nothing at all demeaning or even remotely insulting; however, it was clearly making the four uneasy, so she scooted over to Naakos.

“You should talk in Easten. They will understand that, and it does us no good to have them jumpy.”

“…”

“Ah, yes,” Naakos sighed as Naakai came over and clipped him on the back of the head, then turned to the four rescues.

“I apologise for my brother chattering here like a bird. Do you speak Laatan? Easten as Juni, Chunhua and Ling here call it.”

“A… bit?” Qing Yao managed.

“I can,” Feiwu Shen replied. “But how is it a known language here?”

“…”

She shot him a sideways glance and he winced, realising he had been rude for answering her apology with an immediate question.

-So, rather well-mannered as well. The sect he came from is a scholarly one as I recall, she mused.

That was true for all those here, in one way or another. Nine Auspicious Moons and Verdant Flowers were big powers, but they were not like the Jade Gate Court or Argent Hall, preferring to focus widely on many things and building a reputation for soft power more than smashing things with a big stick.

The other two sects were smaller, but in many ways more focused on non-martial endeavour. The ‘Pagoda of the Erudite Sage of Qin’ was founded by a scammer of a historian called Qin Qiu, but was, in spite of its founder, well-regarded. The ‘Green Dawn Dragon’ sect was a refinement and alchemy one on the east coast of the central continent, similar to the Blue Gate School, but not so mired in difficult regional politics.

“There have been quite a few surprising links,” Juni sighed, giving them a wry shake of her head.

“Easten is the language of history and laws,” Naakai said simply. “You are welcome at our fire, as guests of our saviours. If you are hungry, eat, if you are thirsty, drink, the protection of the honoured five is before you.”

It was a different kind of hospitality greeting to what came before, but the formal way she said it seemed to help the four, who looked a bit less uneasy. It presumably helped that you had three cultivators who clearly knew what they were at, and that Juni had saved them as well though.

“There is no way that should have worked,” Naakos muttered eventually, staring at the distant lights of the town through the mist.

“Sometimes, against all the odds, plans do work,” Lin Ling said with a wan smile.

“Yes, however here and now, I think it’s right to be sceptical,” she agreed, to which Naakos also nodded.

“I know,” Lin Ling grimaced and clenched her fist again as shadows suddenly shimmered under her skin. “I was just trying to be optimistic. Nobody here is probably clearer than me how dangerous that Sharvasus is.”

“Are you okay?” she asked.

Lin Ling exhaled. “No, I am not… I had to work hard to keep things under check in there. My body is turning into one of those special pill furnaces that cook things on pressure.”

“What happened?” Juni asked, kneeling down beside Lin Ling.

“I ate something I shouldn’t have,” the younger woman muttered sourly, then paused staring around. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear…?” she trailed off, listening to the mist… and, sure enough, heard the faint sound of ethereal laughter.

“Well, that might work in our favour,” she mused, recalling the spirit-like beings attacking the Ur’Vash from Umaja but largely ignoring them.

“Yeah… maybe,” Naakos nodded. “At any rate, their presence means few will dare chase us.”

“Our departure has to have been marked by now,” Juni agreed, again looking at Lin Ling with concern.

“Certainly,” Naakos nodded in agreement. “Quazam being involved in this means that there is no way they let this go.”

“Who is the Quazam?” Juni asked, suddenly.

“Who is…?” Naakos frowned, then sighed. “Truthfully? Nobody knows. The commonly held view beyond Udrasa is that she is the figurehead of the Udrasa clan, the title inherited by a suitable candidate, much like a Great Shaman or a Warchief is. However…”

“She is certainly more than that,” Juni said softly.

“Before this trip into madness I had never set eyes on her,” Naakos went on, casting Juni a sideways look. “And I have lived for over a century.”

Juni just nodded again.

“What I can tell you is that the Ten Great Masters are old,” Naakos concluded. “They are the real power in the eyes of many. That one you named, Sharvasus, is among the older as well – by the measure of such little information as is known about them. Even in the old tales, when it was called Yom Shadras, and when the re-settled Vashada was the seat of all the Vashlagh, back in the very early years of this era, it was purportedly ruled by a circle of mages, famous for it in fact.”

“So all of them could be Dao Immortals?” she shuddered, doing the math on that.

“I am unfamiliar with that…”

Naakos was interrupted by Lin Ling who clarified. “Early 8th Circle.”

“Ah, hmm… yes, that is likely,” Naakos agreed.

“I—” Lin Ling had to stop and clench her teeth.

“Look, you really need to do something about that,” Juni grimaced, before glancing at the other cultivators, who were sitting around the sheltered fire below them, eating some spirit food that Lashaan had cooked and talking quietly among themselves.

“There are a few things…” Lin Ling grimaced then shook her head.

“You should give us some of the qi,” Juni went on. “It won’t count for much, given our capacities, but it should help a bit?”

“It is…”

Juni shook her head and cut Lin Ling off. “It won’t be worse than the Etheric Dew, surely? I can use my geomancy art and the mantra together now, so it should be a bit easier if anything.”

“…”

She turned the idea over in her mind, thinking about the parasol qi in her own body that Lin Ling was helping her refine. Unlike Lin Ling, the swamp here was weirdly good for her cultivation at this point. Her root was life and fire, the swamp itself fed both those by varying degrees and her Nascent Soul law was also compatible with the environment to an extent that Lin Ling’s own Yang energies were not, at least… in any straightforward sense.

As much as she was sure she would regret agreeing with Juni, the qi would probably be beneficial to her and speed up her advancement.

“Chunhua?” Lin Ling turned to her.

“Well, the qi here does seem to be suitable for me to a degree, and it will likely help with the parasol qi… so I suppose we can only try… carefully?”

Juni nodded, though Lin Ling still appeared uncertain.

“The main thing,” she pointed out, looking around, “is do we try it here, or go further into the swamp?”

“Once the others have recovered, getting some distance on this place is certainly a good idea,” Lin Ling nodded.

To that, all of them could only nod once again in agreement.

“The question is which way do we go?” Juni asked looking through the swirling mists around them.

“And what do we do next?”

That was the question really. Near as she could tell, as any of them could tell in fact, Yom-Udrasa was vaguely north, between the two largest channels of the Great Buranuna, which flowed east to west. Her own first instinct was to head somewhat east, away from Vashada, away from potential crazy mages and people out to do unspeakable things to them for strange reasons.

Juni was also of that opinion; however, Naakos and Lin Ling both suggested going west instead, towards Vashada. The logic there was twisted, and rather concerning, but it was in a way hard to deny it. The swamps there were dangerous, full of ancient ruins and lost things, but they were also difficult to penetrate according to Naakos, and if you went by small boat, no large craft would easily follow you.

The deciding factor, in the end, was that teleportation was apparently almost impossible there, due to the bent alignments of the land, a sign many took as evidence of the truth of the ancient tale that ‘Yogo Shada’ had been stolen away by the vile humans in the previous era.

By the time the sun set, the others had recovered and they made their way down the tower to give the joyful news to their new travelling companions.

“Go west?” Qing Yao grimaced, looking into the mist rather cautiously after they had explained what the options were.

“The options are not great,” Juni conceded, before glancing at Naakos and Naakai and asking, “What about the other Ur’Inan?”

“Hmmmmm…” Naakai sighed deeply and stared distantly at the sky. “Some will have escaped, but thanks to Azuum and Uaazar, our tribe is broken.

“If we are scattered, usually we would continue to the next known place, in this case, one of the border towns with the territory of Katum…”

“We can go back and look for them?” she added.

“We looked before,” Lashaan sighed.

They had, on the way, doing a full circuit of Umaja, confirming Juni was not somehow there, amid the ruins. They had found two of the hunters dead in a pool, killed and half-devoured by the serpents, but no others. Her own instinct was that anyone unlucky enough to have been alone in that hellish reed bed would have been very lucky to survive.

“We did,” she agreed, patting the Ur’Inan on the shoulder.

“If they have died, they have gone to the Mother of Dark Waters,” Teshek murmured, making a holy sign. “They will wait for us, with the Dark Brother, if only to give an accounting to those scum with Azuum.”

Caanar nodded and spat into the fire, as did Eruuna. Saruuna just stared emptily at the flames, saying nothing.

“In any case,” Naakos spoke. “We must preserve our lives long enough first. Avoid pursuit from the town without running into anything horrible. For now, our paths continue, I think.”

That got a lot of nods.

“And we have a better chance of doing that by walking into the ruin-infested swamp than out of it?” Kai Manshu murmured in Imperial Common, which she rapidly translated for the Ur’Inan.

“It is a radical idea, one that could work,” Feiwu Shen agreed, also looking at Juni appreciatively.

Both of them had been almost hanging on her every word, Wei Chu as well for that matter. Their respect was quite genuine as well, which made for a pleasant change. While Manshu was worried about his seniors who were still captive, it was undeniable that Juni had basically turned on her heel and somehow picked the most opportune moment to walk four other cultivators out of an enemy stronghold and only had to kill or incapacitate nine people to do it.

-I wonder what they would say if they knew she was really only at pseudo-Core Formation and not some injured treasure disciple she thought wryly.

It was fortunate in a way that Lin Ling was the strongest person here, legitimately, with no funny re-categorising. Both she and Kai Manshu were Quasi Immortals, though Lin Ling didn’t like the term for some reason. Qing Yao was also Dao Seeking, but had apparently only arrived there a few years ago. That most of them were of an age, or younger than her and Juni was… depressing in a way. The other two, Feiwu Shen and Wei Chu, were both Nascent Soul cultivators and close to her in strength. In that regard, they were of a realm with most of the Ur’Inan who were still with them, except for Naakos and Naakai, who she still had no clear marker on.

To have rescued a bunch of other cultivators and gotten immediately embroiled in some group power struggle would have really sucked, she considered as she watched them talk it over quietly.

“All we can do is accompany you,” Qing Yao said with a long sigh at last. “We have lost our storage rings and such, but we have our arts and our spirits, and you have rescued us from that hell, so we should try to escape here together.”

“Indeed,” Feiwu Shen nodded seriously.

“The issue is we don’t even have our contribution talismans anymore,” Wei Chu sighed.

“And your contributions were so amazing that you care, Sister Chu?” Qing Yao chuckled darkly.

“I know…” Wei Chu pouted.

“Fairy Dongmei had my life jade,” Qing Yao added. “If we can escape this strange soul sense distorting ward, perhaps she will register something is amiss?”

-Dongmei? She was one of the ones in the battle.

She shot a sideways look at Juni and Lin Ling, both of whom gave unobtrusive shrugs.

-So much for their opinions on that, she sighed inwardly, though she only knew of ‘Fairy Dongmei’ by reputation as well.

“Well, at the very least we need to get distance from here,” Juni declared at last. “I, for one, do not fancy a second extended foray in Udrasa’s ‘wonderful hospitality’.”

“Fuck no,” Kai Manshu grumbled. “Though I do worry about Senior Diosheng and Senior Rua.”

“Really, you should worry for yourself, Brother Manshu,” Feiwu Shen muttered.

“If we can get out of this soul suppression, perhaps there is an opportunity to call for reinforcements?” Wei Chu suggested. “Fairy Dongmei will not stand to see this… and she has a close relationship with Hero Cang, who is also partaking in this trial and was part of our group before they set off to peruse whatever stratagem transpired around that horrible ruin.”

“…”

Kai Manshu just sighed, nodding his head. She wasn’t sure what to say really, beyond that waiting for backup was probably a very solid plan to go with. It was hard not to be sympathetic to his plight, but at the same time, she really would sooner taunt that hydra to its face than walk back into Ulquan at this point. The death would be infinitely more pleasant. That sentiment was clearly shared by everyone else, though nobody said it out loud, and she was sure it was even shared by Kai Manshu, having no doubt spent some time in captivity.

After that, they waited until night had properly fallen and set out. Lin Ling was able to teleport them for brief spurts, which got no end of admiration from the other cultivators, who insisted on calling her ‘Senior Ling’ thereafter.

Aside from a few errant qi beasts, they encountered nothing of note beyond the sheer impenetrability of the mists themselves for much of the night. That, on its own, was more than enough though, because it held both an aspect of sensory obfuscation and a faint natural drain in places as they walked through it. Those places they detoured around, to the complaint of no one, until after several hours of walking they found themselves at another river channel and, in a rather unpleasant surprise, a small fort, which they nearly walked out of the reed beds and right into.

“What do we do now?” Qing Yao asked, peering through the reeds at it.

“We could try to go downstream?” Feiwu suggested, glancing at them. “Maybe there are islands we can…”

“Seriously,” Lin Ling sighed, standing up suddenly. “I’ll be back in five minutes.”

“What are?” she trailed off as she saw silvery black shadows shimmer under Lin Ling skin, as if her meridians were being illuminated by lightning for a moment.

They watched her walk off into the gloom in the direction of the fort, the four cultivators looking apprehensive.

“Will Senior Ling be okay?” Wei Chu frowned, turning to Juni, who had sat down and was focusing on her cultivation again.

“Yes,” Juni nodded.

“No… I ____ _____ ____”

Whatever Wei Chu had been about to say was lost amid the eruption of a silent roar from the direction of the fort-like outpost. The humidity of the night swamp intensified rapidly, as did the sweltering heat. The mist shimmered disturbingly and she fancied for a moment she could see mirages in it.

The four cultivators sat there, sweating uneasily, their eyes wide. Even the Ur’Inan, who had seen something similar a few times now, looked a bit uneasy under the oppressive strength of whatever Lin Ling had done.

Within a few minutes the distortion faded away and Lin Ling returned, looking as she had, but without the rather disturbing illumination of the qi overburden in her meridians visibly manifesting.

“Done. We can go in,” Lin Ling said.

“All dead?” Juni asked.

“Mostly,” Lin Ling nodded. “It was a watch outpost, so mainly soldiers and a few slaves and hangers on. The soldiers are dead, and everyone else is now trapped in a nightmare.”

Inside the small fort, there were the after-effects of mayhem everywhere. Mostly, the soldiers appeared to have killed themselves, induced into madness by whatever Lin Ling had done, most likely. There was a small storeroom full of various oddments from which she took everything remotely useful in the way of cultivation resources to share about. There was also a dock, with a smallish boat, which it turned out was just too large for any of them to store.

After they had finished checking that there were no lingering threats or other unpleasant surprises – like the fort being built on an ancient ruin made of blue-stone with weird runes all over it – they reconvened back in the main courtyard to consider their next step.

As a place to hole up for a while, the fort was by no means a bad place. The soul sense wards were still in effect, though Lin Ling had located them so they knew that to remove them, and the symbols on the lowest floor of each of the four towers had to be fed qi in a particular pattern now. It also had a dock, and the aforementioned boat.

“As far as places go, here is really as good as any to try sharing some of this qi out,” Lin Ling eventually declared, looking around the courtyard, then up at the swirling mists above them and the faint halo of the full moon in the northern sky.

“So, how do we do this?” she asked, looking around for herself.

The Ur’Inan had cleaned out the courtyard, scavenging what they could, and all the bodies had been dumped in a shallow pit by the dock without much ceremony. The slaves, all still unconscious, had been confined to the soldiers’ barracks and sealed in for now. It was not ideal, but while killing the soldiers was not something she had any issue with now, none of them fancied killing fellow victims of Udrasa who had not been so fortunate as they.

“Should be quite easy,” Juni frowned. “There is a charm from the talisman that I can draw on you both that will help I think. After that, Ling, you can just distribute qi to us both as we sit here?”

“Okay,” Lin Ling nodded. “We will try it carefully and see how it goes, but if that damn hydra starts playing up…”

“Stop immediately,” Juni nodded as did she.

She stood and waited as Juni drew something on her back in her own blood, then traced it around so it was over her heart… before guiding it down to her dantian and then out to her arms. Juni then repeated the same on Lin Ling, before sitting down opposite her and holding her hands out.

“Put your right palm over mine, your left palm under. Lin Ling will send qi straight into our heart gates, so we will sit opposite each other,” Juni instructed her, holding out her hands.

She did as instructed, modulating her breathing and trying not wonder if she was somehow making a terrible mistake.

~ Juni – Ruined Fortress ~

-Please don’t let this be a terrible mistake, Juni prayed to herself as Lin Ling sat down between them and put her hand on her back and Chunhua’s.

All of them had stripped at this point – modesty, the casualty of many circumstances here already, was rather secondary to the concern of having their only good garments potentially obliterated by qi, so it was what it was. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the other cultivators and the Ur’Inan were watching from the steps of the main hall of the fort, curious mainly about what was going on.

“…”

Lin Ling sighed, and she felt a riotous wave of qi exit her friend’s palm and flow into her body.

{Bright Heart Shifting Steps}

{Bright Lotus Eyes}

She opened herself up to it and pushed everything she had at it, focusing both divination arts on the howling torrent.

“Devoted, I walk the Path of the Lotus, Bestowed upon the Body…”

Her mantra echoed in the air around all of them, projecting outwards, enveloping and resonating through the qi.

{Bright Lotus Earthly Scripture}

The scripture, synergising with the symbol in her mind’s eye at the barest hint of impetus from her, also shifted and melded with her mantra. Within moments, everything had aligned as she regulated it with the harmonious words of the long form versions of the mantra’s mnemonics.

“Bestowed, the Path of the Lotus upon the Body, Devoted to the Gift the Body and the Lotus become the Path…”

Her qi capacity filled within moments and then just kept filling as she took as much as she was physically able to pull through Lin Ling’s touch, inadvertently finding one of the precious ‘five word’ phrases as she had come to think of them in the process. With that qi, however, also came an all-encompassing, devouring rage, a vestige of the hydra she had never seen. Bizarrely, the Geomancy Arts let it flow straight through her somehow, while her mantra shimmered and moved in conjunction with the symbol, the phrases flowing together in ways that focused on protecting her bones and her vital qi.

It took her a moment to understand the rationale, but when she did, she could only agree with what it was guiding her to do. The realm of the qi was too high, so she had to hide behind walls that ‘realm’ could not touch, such as the strength of the mnemonics to protect her vital accumulation itself.

The hydra qi rampaged through her meridians, attempting to tear at everything it could to devour her from the inside out. It tore through her gates, making them ripple and actually put lesions on her dantian’s outer wall as it carelessly tore its way in diving straight for her spirit root.

She groaned, wondering if she had made a horrible mistake as the uncontrollable intent guided by what was surely some glimmering vestige of its soul arrived in the depths of her dantian, taking the form of a hissing, horned serpent. In that instant, she saw the horrible trap it had laid, as its soul form ran through all her meridians, her organs, coiled around her dantian…

“Nooo…” she managed to gasp, trying to divert her mantra back to deal with it, rather than protect her.

Even as she struggled desperately, trying to push it back, it twisted and, with delighted eyes, punched through the ‘shell’ around that strange hidden place and, in a single effort, swallowed her spirit root in a gulp.

There was a terrible pause as something briefly interrupted all the flow of qi through her body, then, with a perplexed convulsion, the malevolent spirit of the serpent ruptured along its length into a sea of multi-coloured fiery sparks that swept through her body like a new year’s firecracker.

“…”

In a way she was shocked, and also quietly relieved, that the purity of her spirit root had utterly overwhelmed the hydra’s attempt at devouring it.

Ethereal fire, scattering flames like thousands of flower blossoms, blazed across the surface of her own dantian now, decimating the invading qi as her spirit root’s purity directly overwhelmed it and, more importantly, the continuous surge of malevolent devouring strength that came with it.

With a different kind of desperation, she suddenly found herself fighting with the rampaging, orphaned qi as it swept in typhoon-like waves through her body, pouring out around them. Chunhua wasn’t faring much better either, she realised – the other woman had looping flower petals and shield like leaves of qi scattering out of her body, even as it seemed to break apart from the inside out. As she watched, rapt with horror, even in her dissociated state, those scattering flowers settled down all around them, rapidly pushing out small sprouts and then golden flowers of their own.

Tearing herself away from the sight of the small parasol plants and back to her own concerns, she focused again on the serpent which had started to reform in her dantian and was now warring directly against that fire, but already it was beginning to once again get bright gold cracks in its ‘body’ that bled sparks that now, as she watched, turned into flower petals, merging with the sea of multi-coloured fire.

“…Devoted to the Path of the Bestowed Lotus Body, the Scion walks the Gifted Path of the Devoted Body, Bestowed Gift of the Path becomes the Lotus Body…”

Her mantra echoed, over and over, as the chant within it melded into Bright Lotus Earthly Scripture, just as it had during the tribulation, drawing more and more qi in from Lin Ling, pushing her to the point where all she could do was focus on refining qi as fast as she could.

~ Teng Chunhua – Ruined Fortress ~

Chunhua wanted to scream, but found that she really had no words at this point; the battle between the Parasol Qi that Lin Ling had given her along with the strange array to inscribe in her Sea of Knowledge and the invading qi and spiritual sense of the hydra was horrible.

Agony…

Torture…

Soul destroying?

None of these did it any kind of justice, frankly.

She was the flotsam stuck in the storm, along for the ride and hoping that the ocean of combative rage around her wouldn’t consume her before she got enough control over it. Her Nascent Soul was growing visibly in size and maturity as she fought inside her dantian against the serpent’s own soul form. Even weakened and suppressed by the Parasol Qi, which was forming some kind of tree-like structure with her core nestled below it, the horrific devouring intent was fundamentally unstoppable.

Again and again it shattered the roots of the tree, until the very foundations of her Qi Sea started to crumble under the sustained onslaught of the hydra as it battered at the connection between her Sea of Knowledge and her Nascent Soul. In any other circumstance, she knew she would have been left dead and broken, were the hydra not almost entirely focused on the war with the parasol tree’s own intent.

‘~Sweet - Bloom, Red, Blossom - Jade~’

All she could do, at the heart of it, sitting cross-legged over her core, was focus on using her own mantra, letting the turbulent emotions of her own helpless position find an outlet through it, turning misfortune into fortune, fear into hope, panic into conviction. Juni’s own mantra manifestation also rang in the air around her, elevated to a level she had never seen before, or even believed possible.

That it was Juni, rather than Lin Ling, who arrived at that unspoken secret was surprising… or maybe it wasn’t, given she was now experiencing first-hand how remarkable the divination art Juni was using really was. Her use of her mantra was crude compared to what she could feel both Lin Ling and Juni achieving through their link, but with every cycle she was getting better and better at it, finding more ways to harmonise her mantra, the parasol qi and the nascent law to combat the raging torrent of the Hydra’s unleashed qi.

It was ad hoc, but in a weird way, what they were doing now was, in effect, a kind of ‘Dual Cultivation’ – not in the sense it was frequently used, which carried as many negative connotations as good, but that the three of them were all slowly harmonising in their struggle. The question was, would it be enough?

To her side, she was dimly aware of Juni, wreathed in a golden flame that was properly devouring her body now, flowers of Good Fortune blooming around the other woman and various heavenly ephemera manifesting as whatever spirit root she had purified interacted with her mantra to chain the qi trying to break her body down.

Lin Ling wasn’t faring any better, still shouldering two of the cores presumably. Flares of Yang Intent were rolling off her, permeating the space around them, as black lines of lightning sizzled through her body, illuminating her meridians in strange and inauspicious ways. Their connection to Lin Ling herself was the only thing keeping her safe from being incinerated as the devouring law of the hydra and the yang law of whatever beast lurked in Lin Ling’s blood fought it out in the space between them.

Cycles flowed by, each one a tumultuous battle against devouring annihilation. Each probably only took seconds given the torrents of qi, but they felt like hours, and with each one, her dantian slowly expanded, mostly, it had to be said, because of the unstoppable pressure of the unrefined qi that the serpent was drawing upon to assail her.

-In any other circumstance, I would have exploded into a red mist fireball already, she shuddered, even as she caught the attempt by the serpent to ‘devour’ an aspect of her resolve.

-Cunning thing!

She pushed that thought and the whole train that followed after it into her mantra, letting ‘Red’ and ‘Jade’ purify the dark thoughts and ‘Blossom’ and ‘Bloom’ return them to her as reinvigorated strength, ‘Sweet’ lessening the impact of the whole process on her body and perpetually augmenting the gains of ‘Blossom’ and ‘Bloom’.

Sometimes mantras could be very weird, and right now, she had to acknowledge that hers was converting that fear and dread over her probable… possible fate into… something. It was absolutely beneficial, but the manifestations around her were becoming so esoteric that she was starting to wonder if her subconscious was actually some kind of idiot savant when it came to this, or she was just so out of…

She forced that thought back into the mantra as well, and redoubled her assault on the serpent, who screamed at her, making all the qi in her body twist in the process.

-Don’t question, just endure! Accept what is given… make it your own…

Those had been the advice her grandfather passed on regarding the emotion-devouring aspects of the mantra… and the mantra in general actually.

-Don’t question what is keeping you alive, idiot, she groaned.

‘~Sweet, Bloom, Red, Blossom, Jade~’

She shifted it again as the rhythm of the cycle shifted.

And again.

And again.

And again.

Dimly, she was aware that night was overturning itself and becoming dawn, its first rays seeping through the swirling mists above her. The shifting mists seemed to dance and sing themselves, swirling and cavorting into strange shapes, probably influenced by the maelstrom of qi bleeding off of all three of them in truth.

Juni’s divination art was rolling around them in uncontrollable waves now, as well. She could actually feel it tugging on her qi externally as well as from the imparted form that came with the formation Juni had put on her.

It had been showing her new paths to guide both her mantra and her law for a while now, even beyond what Lin Ling’s imparted knowledge from the tablet had pointed her towards, but as the mist spiralled up above them, and the sky slowly grew less and less dark, she felt, in that moment, something else, drawn towards her with that rising dawn.

The Parasol Qi shifted abruptly, flowing through her meridians and making a link to Juni directly, just as the Yang Intent from Lin Ling managed the same thing…

Suddenly, their own ephemera were flowing in a vast circle, orbiting all three of them as external and internal harmony found an inexplicable point of synchronisation.

The idea that this was similar to ‘dual cultivation’ slid back into her mind’s eye at the same moment, because functionally, there were no barriers between all three of them now. Their qis were rolling in a continuous cycle, warring with the hydra on three different fronts, but at the same time encompassing it now, encircling it as the world around them was subsumed into a strange quasi-reality.

The maelstrom of mist above swirled and swirled as the sky grew paler and paler…

The first ray of sun scythed through everything, washing over the three of them, and everyone else who was watching in the courtyard she presumed. The qi that came with it was different, and words, strange and ethereal, echoed through it.

They came from Lin Ling, but it was not really of Lin Ling, she realised.

They also came from the flower in Juni…

Even the parasol tree growing in her own dantian…

“BRIGHT AURIGA…”

“BEARING AURORA OF THE ROSY FINGERS!”

“DAUGHTER OF THE SUN”

“PROSPERITY’S QUEEN!”

“HAIL TO THEE, GODDESS OF DAWN”

“WHO HERALDS EVERY SUNRISE!”

Twelve figures danced in the mist above them, skipping and singing with hypnotic fervour, their pipes and drums merging with the sighing of the wind and the rustling of the reeds to form a natural chorus as the mist paled.

The words held a tone that resonated within the qi, within the mists, within the moment itself, with the auspicious moment of the new day emerging.

The parasol qi within her uttered a piercing cry that seemed to travel through the landscape around them. Vigour blossomed out of it somehow, the cry resonating with the array that Lin Ling had had her set up as a second visualisation in her Sea of Knowledge, imprinting it directly into her psyche somehow.

She felt her bones warp and her flesh twist as her mantra somehow settled even deeper within them as the sound shook the world in her mind’s eye… yet was strangely unheard. Under the force of its great momentum, the different qis in her body shimmered and blurred into each other, rapidly turning into a deep azure as the cry gained momentum, continuing to rise.

It flowed through her soul, twisting it as well, even as the hydra soul attacking the tree itself recoiled and cowered, trying to retreat from her body entirely, pulling its soul power back so fast she nearly missed the opportunity to chase after it. Unwilling to lose what was clearly a peerless opportunity, she charged after it, her Nascent Soul engulfed in an azure-blue shroud as she tried to exert as much of a toll on it in as possible.

The parasol seedling in her soul, however, had other ideas.

She watched as, under the light of the day’s first sun, the little buds on its branches abruptly bloomed with a clarion cry that made the previous call seem like the tinkling of a child with a cow bell.

The pressure set every shred of the qi remaining in her body on fire.

She was suddenly wreathed in azure fire that scorched her meridians and was dragged into her core, which was now rapidly shifted from a red-brown with gold flames to a deep azure blue, shimmering with golden sunlight and flowing with clouds and ephemeral flames across its surface as the spirit root associated with it twisted—

The core shattered like glass, rupturing every meridian in her body.

The qi around and within her became a blizzard of burning Blue Yin Fire and Petals of the Parasol Tree infused with a deep, endless Yang Wood intent.

For several terrible, agonizing seconds she was sure she was dead, then the threads of vitality in the tone somehow settled with her mantra and changed.

‘Gentle. Leaf. Vast. Blossom. Jade’

Her body collapsed and reformed in the same instant, a strange, spiralling symbol slowly appearing in her Sea of Knowledge as it did so.

The power of the hydra inside her was drawn into the vortex-like implosion that she momentarily became, ripping qi out of both Lin Ling and Juni so fast they spat blood as the hydra’s qi didn’t just flow towards her from the connection between the three of them but out of every pore in their bodies. Most of it came from Lin Ling, and as it did, she was dimly aware of the slight diminishing of four malevolent glimmering stars fused to the other’s body.

Everything snapped back together even as the link between the three of them ripped under a desperate, sustained attack from the vestigial strength of the hydra, seeking any way to break the cycle of refinement flowing between the three of them…

In the sky above, her cry flowed upwards, carried by the swirling mists and the twelve dancing figures who were still chanting the praises of the dawn. It combined with that shimmering first ray of dawn and with it, the sky twisted, clouds turning shades of golden green, blue then purple as it illuminated a vast, phantasmal mountain high above them.

It was not Yin Eclipse. She knew that immediately, but somehow, an even greater mountain, set apart from the mundane world and throughly above it. The last shades of the night sky rippled like an ocean around it, while above it, nine stars shone like celestial jewels. Upon its heights, amid misty clouds, were forests of blooming trees, resplendent with bird song and the faint sound of chimes and music.

Beautiful singing whispered through the clouds, transcending even the strange song of the twelve spirits, who themselves now seemed far grander and much less childlike, more akin to the forms she had seen them take when repelling the Ur’Vash directly. The gentle melody drew her in, even as her soul burned and her body wavered between life and death, calming her, reinvigorating her and instilling in her a deep sense of nourishing warmth.

Unbidden, the words of a fanciful retelling of an ancient classic emerged in her mind… a story she had read as a child, of adventures in mythological lands she had convinced her mother to buy her…

'Unbidden, I see the bright land where parasols bloom, the extremity of the Chronogram.

There, riding upon the mist, I wander to that lofty peak, wreathed in the whirling wind and mist.

The Lady Supreme, Primordial Sovereign, lives there.

Queen Mother, who resides in a palace of blue-green jade.

Around her a celestial crowd, favoured children of heaven, sing and dance.

Theirs are songs of sun, sea, forest and cloud…

How I dream that one day my own child will be welcomed to that place…'

The mountain faded, but an aspect of it was somehow preserved in the symbol in her soul, now fully formed and carved out as a new meridian within her, linking her Soul Meridians with her Nascent Soul and the Mantra in her body…

{Parasol Luan True Physique}

Her spirit root finished its warped change in the ruins of her core, pulling qi back together around her. Before, it had changed into a weird little flower-fire thing, but now it held a deep yin fire blaze that flickered like a tiny blue bird with five tails and a single, myriad-coloured line on its breast. It nestled in a bloom of flowers that looked awfully like those from the parasol tree, forming a sort of pseudo nest. The twin patterns of feather-like leaves and swirling clouds like little flowers swept through her body and soul, melting into every portion of her being.

Above her, a single bolt of silver lightning crashed down at her; however, it was ripped apart amid the resonating cry that still lingered, and greedily devoured by the parasol tree before it ever reached her.

Her dantian reformed, and her meridians recoalesced around her physical body as the frozen body-shaped implosion cracked like a shell and scattered away, dragging disturbing strands of black that had been seeping into it, unbeknownst to her, which burned away in the field of purifying Yang around them.

The hydra’s soul was still there… shockingly. It screamed in rage and tried to assail her as if she were some ancient primordial foe. Considering what she knew of Blue Luan as Legendary Spiritual Beasts, that was probably true, but right now she was going to take it without any questions.