Memories of the Fall

Fighting Undren underground is a nightmare, and as you are aware, our current tactical doctrine advises that you never do it if you can help it. However, in your case, I understand the wider strategic implications of the guidance you are requesting so hopefully this missive will be helpful in that regard.

As I said, they are a nightmare to deal with. Even if your opponents are limited to the Fourth Circle, the abilities they can draw from weapons blessed with the signs of their ancestral totems are, without exception, dangerous even to those of higher circles. When you add in their fanatical devotion to those icons and the nigh unbreakable morale their veneration instils, be it in defence or offence against their forces, you should expect them to give no quarter and fight to the death without a second thought.

As such, our current doctrine regarding their outposts is as follows: attack with overwhelming force, squads of Evocati, led by Spectrum Commandos and Decapitare. They scout with rats, and do things with fungus that make even Ghoblan look on with respect, so burn everything, use mass slaying spells and never close to melee range except as a last resort.

Strategic missive.

~from Tribune Gaius Telk to Commander Teller of the Dark Veils expeditionary unit.

~ Sana & Arai, Ruined City Plaza ~

After acquiring the art from the Pagoda, Sana found herself sat on the edge of the plaza sifting through the knowledge that had been imparted. What had started as a spear form was now ‘Maelstrom Heaven’s Scripture’ that held four fundamental arts: a spear form -‘Heavenly Maelstrom Spear’, a movement art –‘Maelstrom Shifting Steps’, a combined Cultivation and Combat Art -‘Harmonious Maelstrom Manual’ and a refinement art -‘Myriad Maelstrom Primordial Cauldron’.

The refinement art seemed to have preconditions suggesting she needed to have opened her Sea of Knowledge at the very least, so she put that aside for now.

The spear form required, rather obviously, a spear to make any particular progress so that was also set aside.

That left the movement art and the cultivation and combat art. She started with the cultivation art and found it to be… esoteric. It had no preconditions on starting realm that she could see at least but she suspected that cultivating it prior to Golden Core would be… tricky as it required all three sets of bodily meridians to be open and fully integrated. If that requirement was fulfilled, it demanded that the user move their qi through their meridians in a specific way while visualising certain symbols in order to imbue qi with Intent all the while matching this to a rather complex breathing pattern. It took her several hours to grasp the most basic steps. However, once she did and completed a whole cycle she had to admit that this technique was fearsome.

The qi it drew in and circulated in her meridians took on a wild and transformative aspect. When it arrived in her dantian and integrated with the mists orbiting her core they also started to roil and become noticeably more energetic. After several further cycles she observed that the precipitating qi from the roiling clouds was also acquiring this wild and changeable aspect. Her previously rather calm qi-reservoir now rippled and twisted, swirling within itself. Soon the Qi Lake in her dantian had a proper swell and currents while the mists above were swirling out in a disc with her Golden Core and the little pagoda at its heart. The upward flow swirling around in small gyres of shimmering qi while droplets fell like shimmering sheets of rain from the mists above.

The process also tempered her already remarkably sturdy meridians yet further. After a dozen cycles of following this she also started to see further changes in her dantian itself. The qi in her lake was starting to form little vortices that rose up and connected with the now much expanded and energetic clouds of misty, unrefined qi. The whole process was also incrementally enlarging the overall size of the Qi Lake.

Soon it had reached the point where the whole system just passively sustained itself, making her exert a continuous, passive agitation on the stability of the qi in the area immediately around her. As she looked at this phenomenon, the knowledge from Harmonious Maelstrom Manual told her that this would make her much harder to damage and also start to act as a form of passive perception the more she practiced it.

In contrast, Maelstrom Shifting Steps was… hard. Much harder in fact. It also devoured qi in a way that made her eyes bug out a bit. Of her 220 ‘core units’ that she roughly calculated she possessed at the moment, using the movement art for ten seconds and keeping her speed to a bare minimum cost her an entire core unit. When she compared it to her old movement art, which barely registered after dashing back and forth as fast as she could for almost 10 minutes, she was a bit speechless. On the other hand, using it also promoted the refinement speed of the Harmonious Maelstrom Manual and had some subtle benefits towards her understanding of the swirling distortion of qi she now radiated.

In the meantime, Arai was mostly just sat there in silent meditation, presumably focused on the thread that she had absorbed.

After a few hours of her own testing she went up to the top of one of the higher towers because cultivating the manual up there was, to her mild surprise, actually more efficient. Sitting in the gusting wind, and with period sheets of rain washing over the island city, she had an excellent panoramic view of the roiling ocean and weather all around them, which seemed to help with the parts of the manual that talked about Maelstrom Intent.

The next week passed largely in that manner. She focused on her gains from the pagoda while her sister sat there in silent meditation or practiced the sword forms to cultivate.

Most of her own time was spent getting comfortable using the footwork of the different forms. They also broke up the monotony with a few short forays into the surrounding neighbourhoods to loot weapons, soon building up a small mound of spears, javelins, blades and axes. Unfortunately, none of them were remotely capable of sustaining their qi and they exhausted the entire pile, turning them into ruined bits within half a day’s practice with them.

The spear for its part remained silent. She found herself wondering if it was because manifesting those treasures had taken a lot of qi, or if it was simply that having said ‘farewell’ and wished them good luck, it considered that talking to them after that would just lead to another somewhat more… awkward farewell.

They eventually started training together, focusing on chasing each other around to get a better grasp of the forms within the movement arts. Mostly those became games of tag around the plaza or through buildings in the inner city, getting a better grip of the speed and power they now had at their disposal. The spear had not been exaggerating when it stated that the teachings from the thread and the pagoda complemented each other despite being quite different.

The unarmed combat art itself, though, turned out to be nowhere near as easy to grasp. Her initial impressions when she looked at it a week earlier were spot on. To get anywhere with it she judged that she was going to need a notably deeper knowledge of how the nascent Intent interacted with her qi than she possessed after only a solitary week of practice. It was what their father would have called a scroll painted exemple of ‘simple but not at all easy’.

The moves in the art itself were simple enough but the underlying emphasis, of transforming situations and controlling the space and movement of multiple opponents, was both difficult to visualise and even harder to practice with just her sister for a partner. In comparison Arai had it a lot easier as she just had to find rocks and practice trying to cut them and the island city had no shortage of rocks, or disposable swords.

The best she managed, in the end, was increasing her familiarity with the aspects of the unarmed form that boosted her passive defences with the twisting, disruption of the qi around her. Some experimentation with Arai’s help and interrogation of the details of the methods in her mind’s eye also showed her how to limit its impact on others near her or focus it marginally. Practicing the forms themselves for cultivation did at least provide her insight into the ‘harmony’ within the art as a whole, much like the martial form Arai was practicing did with ideas of movement and directness.

The goal there seemed to be to keep the qi gathered using the art in balance with the qi expelled by the strikes. The manual helpfully told her that this would, when mastered, create a field of perpetually shifting Maelstrom Intent around her that inflicted sustained, debilitating damage on anything attacking her while also providing superior defence and protection at the same time. As it was, she was just about able to slow her sister’s movement and direct her strikes away, but direct manifestation of the Intent itself was utterly rudimentary and largely uncontrolled even after another week had passed.

She encouraged herself largely by repeating over and over that this was a formidable set of arts and she had barely been at Golden Core for three weeks. Expecting to just start using something that was clearly not a basic form of Intent was clearly preposterous and she should just do what she could. Even so, it was a bit depressing when her sister had at least graduated to putting lines in rocks in exchange for shattering stone swords into dust in the process. That was a clear improvement over exploding stone swords into fragments as she made no marks on rocks at all. In comparison, the best she got was tripping Arai up while chasing her and getting a tiny bit of qi back from strikes that hit her to make her own unarmed strikes stronger. It was progress, albeit not as she might have liked it.

Eventually, mid-way through the fourth week, she found herself sat on a rooftop, in the middle of a howling rainstorm when her sister skipped up onto the roof and waved at her to get her attention.

“What’s up?” she said, turning around and slipping off the battlement she had been perched on.

“The spear wants to speak to us,” Arai said.

“Huh, I thought it had gone silent,” she asked as they both hopped off the roof and skipped down to the plaza.

“I am mildly surprised you didn’t immediately hare off,” the spear’s voice held a faint echoing quality that caught her by surprise.

“Uh… we figured we should focus on stabilising our cultivations,” she replied.

“A wise choice, given your strength, but unfortunately circumstances are overtaking you. The death of this place has started to attract proper notice,” the spear said, sounding worried.

“Attract notice?” she said, with a suddenly chill as her sister’s face also turned worried.

“The creature you encountered before, another has arrived in the waters around here, called by eyes from afar who are suspicious of the demise of this place,” the spear stated. “There have also been two faint brushes on the edge of my perception from the distant west, probably seeking for me, should they arrive here they will take you without any hesitation.”

“Oh…” Arai shuddered.

“They… can be controlled?” she asked, looking out towards the distant rain clouds.

“They are… complicated things. Yes, they can be controlled after a fashion. One of those controlling abominations, an unnatural homunculus born of dark alchemy, was what laid waste to this place after seizing control of the ruler of this island city,” the spear clarified.

She didn’t ask what that was. It seemed self-explanatory anyway, having spent those hours running away from it.

“In any case, your presence here has not been registered… yet,” the spear continued. “However, these waters, especially to the west, are dangerous. The Sar’Katush were a power that stood apart and they held this strategic location since the time I was sealed. The Undren who came were likely an advance force, seeking to opportunistically claim a secure foothold here.”

“So more Undren are coming?” she said, frowning.

“Not yet. They are, as far as I can perceive, still reforming after their battle with that Spider Queen. What may come will come from across the water, from the west, and it is not something you should stand against or something I can shield you from.”

“So… we just run for the tunnels and head east?” Arai asked, casting her eye around the plaza.

“Not immediately,” the spear mused. “First you need to do something for me, below.”

“The spirit pond,” she guessed.

“Yes,” the spear agreed. “Destroying it is unnecessary, and probably beyond your means in any case. Instead what you must do is empty it out, then add another array to each of those you carved down there. This array.”

She gasped as knowledge of how to form a certain three symbol array appeared in her mind’s eye. The symbol shifted faintly and made no objection to the knowledge arriving.

“What does it do?” Arai asked, just as curious as she was it seemed.

“It provides a direct link between the arrays I control and yours. In effect it is transferring the ‘ownership’ of those arrays over to the controls built deep into this place. That will stop its remarkable purity from standing out significantly. It is toxic to most common things, but there are beings out there that would be able to shoulder it just as you can.”

“How long do we have?” she asked the spear.

“A few days, but you should not tarry,” the spear mused. “However, you will know if those powers from the west arrive here. The only way you would miss it is if you are dead or long departed.”

That didn’t sound at all ominous.

“How... does it compare to the things deep in the depths?” Arai asked, frowning in concern.

“The things that will come here, to seek out the truth of why the Sar’Katush died are at least comparable in passive strength to those large colonies of the Eldritch Spore Plague, or the mightiest denizens of the deep tunnels below. I say again, do not entertain any idea of resisting them. You cannot, even with the strength you acquired above.”

The symbol in her mind shifted, suggesting that it did indeed have limits and that the Moon Mushrooms were a somewhat unique context.

Leaving the spear behind, they both went over to the building in question and pried open the section of floor that sealed their exit point from the depths below.

“……”

She stared dully at the swirling mists of Myriad Elements Qi that welled up out of it, faintly distorting the area around them.

“Well, that’s certainly a step up from when we left it…” her sister muttered, peering into the shaft, which was a swirling mass of misty qi.

Just being in the room with it was not exactly unpleasant, but it was unsettling. As they descended however, the pressure welling up from below turned to unpleasant and then to properly stifling. Arriving in the halls themselves, she found herself staring speechlessly around the shimmering grotto.

“This… is quite something,” Arai murmured softly, from where she was squatting on the stack of rocks they had landed in.

“It is… isn’t it,” she agreed, faintly looking around.

The chapter was filled with a shifting mass of varicoloured mists. In the areas where they had opened up the qi-repelling rock, glittering crystalline frosting was covering everything, obscuring the form of the arrays they had inscribed into the rock. The water was almost up to the top of the rocks. Not because of outside flooding, but because the exits they had sealed up with stone and packed with rock dust and loam from elsewhere were now properly sealed by more crystalline frosting. The faint gaps in the qi-repelling stone were also showing glittering outlines she noted, while within the waters the various cores they had left had become the focal points of little lodes of crystals in various colours, each with their own shimmering inner lights.

“What in the fates are these crystals?” she murmured, looking around, still not really believing what she was seeing.

Arai shook her head in bewilderment, sharing her confusion.

Running her hand across some of the frosting she got a faint tingle in her fingertips as the faint distortions around her were drawn towards them faintly.

“I guess they are some kind of crystalline condensation of qi?” she mused.

“They don’t seem like qi crystals though…” Arai mused, walking across the walkway they made to their old cultivation spots.

“Those do, mind,” she said, waving a hand towards the side of the hall where the Nascent Soul spider cores were scattered, along with the slime one which they had left well alone.

They both stared at the varicoloured water, which was now about forty centimetres deep and with a perpetual aurora of qi haze shimmering across it in silence. Just looking at it gave her a strange sense of longing, but at the same time a lingering sense that she would not like the experience of sticking her hand in it. It had a similar look to the qi that was swirling in her Qi Lake, within her dantian, but at the purity it was…

Shaking her head, she turned her attention back to the arrays in the carved alcoves and carefully tried to brush away some of the frosting only to wince as it nearly lacerated her palm instead.

“Do we refine this or use the array that the spear provided first?” she wondered out loud.

As she watched, her sister waved her hand through the mist, and she observed it visibly push back against her motion.

“I think we refine as much as we can, then amend the arrays, then worry about anything else,” Arai suggested, which was fine by her really.

Hopping over onto her familiar rock, she sat down and settled into the cultivation method from the Harmonious Maelstrom Manual; however, after she had completed a single cycle they both stopped.

“That is…” Arai mumbled dully, staring at her.

“Hmmm, this might be a problem,” she conceded.

Exhaling, she focused on the cycle again, much more carefully. That first time she had let it run as she had been doing above, only to discover that her ability to absorb qi was now close to double that of her sister in this enclosed space. She could, she realised, probably empty it entirely within a mere two hundred cycles if she so chose. It was a rate of absorption that was frankly ludicrous, setting aside the much more important aspect that it would do Arai, who was much more in need of it, no good at all as she would barely get a quarter of it.

“Let’s try that again,” she said, with an embarrassed look on her face. “This time I’ll match my absorption rate to yours.”

“Yes… let’s…” Arai muttered, giving her a sideways look.

She settled back into the cycle, struggling with the resurgent feelings of guilt over not being able to share the pagoda with her sister. She had tried to transmit some of the teachings from it, but there was some kind of restraint on them that made them entirely opaque to Arai when they linked together with the symbol. In retrospect she had to acknowledge that it made sense: the arts were likely only learnable or transmittable if she had the acknowledgement of the pagoda or that stele to do so. The best she had been able to do in the end was trade observations on her own comprehensions from them, slight as they were.

So she focused and tried her best to match Arai’s absorption and increase her own control. To her surprise, this effort of limiting the absorption of qi to keep in harmony with her sister also turned out to have benefits towards her own cultivation. As she watched cycle after cycle flow by, she began see the deeper connections between what she was doing and the instructions in the manual warning against the crude use of power. It wasn’t that she had been using it in that manner before. It was simply that she had, she realised, misunderstood the nature of the guidance somewhat, especially in relation to the Maelstrom Intent.

At first she thought it was just coincidence, but within a dozen cycles she observed that the innate Maelstrom Intent that her refinement of ambient qi was stirring up was gradually infusing into her blood, seeping into her flesh and bones, tempering them synchronously with the more controlled cycles of her qi. The more she focused on control and her surroundings, the more incrementally efficient that process became. She realised she had been approaching the situation wrong. Practicing these early portions of the law itself would provide and attune naturally manifested Maelstrom Intent over time. In the meantime, her task was not to unpick how it came about or even understand why; that would come later.

What she had been doing above was entirely correct, but if she had continued in that vein her gains would have taken a lot longer before she made the leap that became apparent when working to harmonise with Arai’s own efforts. Truly the scripture was a remarkable thing in its entirety. Even more gratifyingly, now that she had made that intuitive step forward in its practice, she found that focusing more directly on these processes was, little by little, cycle by cycle, also improving the synergy between the Maelstrom Scripture and the Formless Permutations symbol.

It took them 190 cycles apiece, barely two hours, to empty the rooms of almost all the swirling, varicoloured qi mists in the end. The qi mist in her body was now a dense soup and her whole body felt a bit overstuffed if anything, although nowhere close to how it had been with the Spider Queen. The whole exercise was testament to how much qi their cores were able to effortlessly consume, she thought. The qi itself kept refining yet further in her Dantian, each cycle condensing and compressing and then expanding the Qi Lake through the swirling maelstroms that shifted a bit like a second, very subtle heartbeat.

Curiously, and a little vexingly given their next task, their refinement of all the swirling mists didn’t seem to hinder the growth of the crystals at all, or even draw much qi away from them. If anything it seemed to do the opposite as she observed the way the natural energies in the room interacted.

“So how are we going to go about this, clear them off with the leaf?” She asked, sitting there in the shimmering gloom staring at the nearest wall.

“I think so, yeah,” Arai mused. “I don’t think it matters which we start with. They are largely unlinked and relying on their natural synergy as it is.”

“True… I still wish I understood better what the second application of the transform symbol in its array was for,” she mused out loud as she made her way over to the nearest of the alcoves.

“Yeah, the core symbol clearly links to the spear in some way; I can feel its Intent within it. The other one does something cunning that is beyond my understanding regarding the outward emission of the transformed qi, but that transform symbol just looks odd,” Arai agreed, before sighing. “Well, we can only do it and see I suppose. It’s a three symbol array so I think I can imprint it directly…”

She nodded and, carefully unsheathing the leaf from its current scabbard, started to scrape off the crystal before pausing and sighing. Envisaging the array in her mind, she found the nearest point of the array beneath the frosting and joining the two in her mind’s eye tried imprinting the additional sub array without clearing any space. Her qi went… wibbly. That was the only way to describe it, in all honesty, as the attempt at imprinting the array unravelled, cost her a rather embarrassing amount of qi in the process.

“What was that?” Arai asked, a hint of dubiousness creeping into her tone.

“Just testing if we actually need to scrape off the frosting of crystals. It seems we do,” she replied, with a slightly resigned sigh.

“Oh, yeah, I hadn’t thought to check that,” Arai bonked her own head humorously.

With that extra task thrown in, it took them almost another hour to amend all the arrays. After they were done, her sister also scrambled through the gap into the next room, leading down to the slime pit, and closed off the water trap arrays. They were no longer feeding these halls anyway, so there was no reason for them to remain active. While Arai did that, she went to check on the other end of those rooms, where they had blocked off the halls leading to the spider pit as best as they were able. It was a little bit risky to get there without stepping in the water, but she was able to confirm that that exit had also frosted over and the crystals were slowly expanding out across the surface of the qi-repelling stone in those other halls.

Returning to the original hall, she found her sister endeavouring to dislodge some of the cores out of the water with a staff cut from the bedrock. She had collected three already which were sat on a rock slab next to her.

“You want to get them all?” she asked, looking at them flickering in the water.

“Some of them at least,” Arai shrugged. “This place is refining them apparently, and it looks nowhere near done with that either. They are also helping to catalyse the qi crystals I think.”

Picking up one of the cores, she examined it curiously. It had been a Nascent Soul spider’s core from what she could tell. The qi within it was now fabulously pure and the crystals were in fact growing out of cracks from inside of it. The lack of a storage talisman was, frankly, a fate-thrashed pain in the ass. If she still had hers, and assuming the crystal could be stored in it, she would have taken as many of the cores and crystals as she could…

Curious, she focused her qi on it to see how much she could get from it now, in comparison to the earlier Nascent Soul spider core she had refined. To her frustration though, none of the qi within it responded to her attempt to refine the crystal. Frowning, she focused a bit more forcefully, trying to lure some of the Maelstrom Intent out of her… dantian.

She thought of the pagoda… sat in her dantian.

Carefully she focused on the core and focused on the ‘idea’ of trying to bring it into her dantian.

Nothing happened, which was entirely to be expected really.

“Of course the pagoda is special,” she muttered under her breath.

She was just about to put the core back down, when there was a faint flicker from within her mind’s eye, a distinct impression of her symbol rolling metaphysical eyes at her, and then it did something utterly obscure. A passage from the refinement scripture shifted into focus in her mind’s eye. She stared at the passage and face-palmed mentally. Closing her eyes, she focused again on her Golden Core in the manner the passage suggested and watched as the Maelstrom Intent that was swirling around it leveraged the core’s rotation to somehow pull the core into her body. It was deposited directly into her dantian, where it dropped into the Qi Lake and became something like little greenish yellow star drifting in it.

Thinking about it, she felt very stupid all of a sudden.

“We can absorb the cores and crystals using our Golden Cores,” she said, turning to her sister with a half embarrassed, half foolish grin on her face.

“…”

Arai stared at her for a full ten seconds before face palming herself.

“How the fates did we forget about that,” she said with a resigned sign. “Well, it’s not exactly… I mean you can refine treasures at Golden Core, but…”

On one level, she did feel really dumb right now. However, she defended in her own mind, she had been a pure Physique Law cultivator up until they arrived in this place, never expecting to have a dantian, ever, pretty much. As such, she told herself a bit lamely, it wasn’t entirely her fault she had forgotten exactly how much of a threshold Core Formation was for most spiritual cultivators.

-Of course spiritual law Golden Core cultivators had that kind of ability, she thought with another audible sigh.

In terms of the standard cultivation practice and realms, Golden Core formation was a proper ‘threshold’. Perhaps the most important one before opening your immortal meridians according to the conventional wisdom that drifted through society. Quickly, she interrogated her distant memories of what was held to be ‘conventional’ wisdom about Golden Core cultivators.

-Qi Lake? – check.

-Limited ability to store things in your dantian? – check.

-Intent manifestation? – check…

She couldn't find anything else that sprung to mind thankfully….

-Oh, rather limited capability for treasure refinement.

However, that was kind of moot because she hadn’t found anything else worth trying to refine beyond the bone spear haft up above, which was basically just a tool for stabbing things in the face real good.

Arai, meanwhile, had picked up one of the other cores and was turning it over in her hands with a ferocious scowl on her face. She was just about to speak up, when the core twisted in her grip and seemed to fold in on itself inexplicably, vanishing from sight.

“I can't believe we forgot about that,” Arai exclaimed.

“In fairness...” she started to speak and just trained off with another sigh because, really, there was nothing worth saying at this point.

In her dantian, the spider’s core was slowly being drawn around in her Qi Lake, not being obviously refined, but that wasn’t necessarily that surprising either given how dense and pure the qi in it was. She focused on it with the symbol, curious as to whether it could or would do anything. It sank its intent into her dantian and considered the core for a few moments before directing her qi into it somehow along with her mantra. She watched as the crystal creaked and then slowly started to crack apart, turning into fragments which dispersed more widely through her Qi Lake. Focusing on one, she observed her own qi slowly working at its newly fractured surface drawing away small, if very pure droplets in the process.

Eyeing the remaining three cores and then the crystals that were forming in some of the alcoves, she picked up the leaf and hopped over to the nearest one.

“You take the cores,” she suggested to Arai as she cut half of one of the crystals away.

Her sister looked at her for a moment then shook her head with a wry smile she was pretty sure she wasn’t meant to notice before absorbing the other three that were lying on the rock and taking up the staff to work on a forth.

“What about the waters?” she said pensively, eyeing the pool.

They both stared in silence at the millpond calm water with its multi-coloured corona. It gave her a faintly oppressive feeling. They had scrupulously avoided standing in it or touching it so far.

“It’s basically melted the slime bones,” Arai observed dubiously, gesturing to the warped set of golden crystal accretions near the door that had been the skeleton within the slime. “I am sure it’s a good thing, but it’s also faintly tarnishing the stone of this staff.”

To emphasise the point, Arai held up the staff to show the cut marks on it were now melted.

“I guess we should check,” she said warily kneeling down and moving her hand towards the water surface, palm out.

The aurora flickered across her fingers, leaving a faint tingling. She got within half a fingers distance of the surface before stopping because the water was exerting a faint tug on the unrefined qi within her body. Moving incrementally closer she focused on trying to absorb the water only to find that it started drawing away her vitality as well as her qi, the faint breath of Absolute Yin caressing her skin like a barely detectable spectre of death.

Withdrawing her hand she shuddered. “I think it should be possible, but as we are at the moment this is far too pure… “

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” her sister nodded in agreement as she pried off another core.

It was a pity in some ways, but it was what it was, so she started to focus on the things they could gain, the crystals that were forming in the alcoves. Unlike the core, they broke up into glittering fragments as they arrived in her dantian, swirling through her Qi Lake in the same manner as the much denser fragments of the core were. That whole process took another twenty minutes, after which they blocked up the remaining gaps in the doorway to the slime room as best they could and then made their way back up the shaft, cutting several new platforms and dropping the rocks laterally to prevent the mist permeating as far up the shaft as it had before.

Arriving back in the plaza, it was still raining and there was no sign of anything untoward, which was a relief.

“What should we do about the crate of books?” she asked the spear.

“Take it and shove it in a random building,” the spear suggested.

Nodding, they grabbed it and lugged it off to the other side of the plaza and put it in the basement of a building that had been used by the lizards to store things.

“I know the spear said these were largely useless if we already knew the arrays,” she muttered, looking at the collection that amounted to almost a dozen books by this point. “Still… I guess we should see if some of them will record on a scrip?”

“That is true,” she mused. “You can't say what might be useful in some other context, just look at the stuff we recorded before.”

By way of experiment, she tried to put one of the spell books into her dantian, but as she expected, it was rejected. Arai tried as well, with similar results. In the end they concluded that the books themselves, having survived so long here and having not succumbed to whatever qi-depleting effect the sealing stele had exerted, were likely too complex. The other possibility that occurred to her, by the by, was that they had been able to absorb the crystals primarily because of the Myriad Elements Qi.

There were times, like this, when she really wished she had a Sea of Knowledge, as they currently were, direct memorisation would be both problematic for their mental state given the quantity of knowledge ‘held’ within them, and also because their comprehensions on them would then be fixed or potentially flawed.

With those avenues excluded, copying the contents into their scrips directly turned out to be somewhat laborious, taking several more hours and a lot of messing about with their scrips. Rather than simply imprinting the pages and what was on them, they had to spend a lot of time messing about and basically ‘recording’ them in a very constrained manner. The problem points turned out not to be the large, page-sized arrays, but the explanation pages themselves which had some sort of protection on them that made any imprint a jumble of fuzzy confusion.

Returning to the plaza after that task was successfully completed, they gathered up the remainder of the tools they had scattered around and took stock of what they had. After some consideration she put a point on either end of the stone staff and decided to use that as a spear. Arai collected up the daggers made of qi-repelling stone and some other swords, binding them as best she could. By way of some experimentation she tried to store the bone spear shaft she had sharpened and been using, but as she expected it refused to budge.

A quick check of a random selection of other items, including her stone staff, showed that only the cores and the crystals seemed to be placeable within her dantian.

“We really need to do something about the lack of anything substantial to hold gear in,” Arai sighed, observing her failures.

“We do,” she agreed glumly, considering their very light packs.

Hers was basically a waist-slung set of several small jars bound together with a sinew cord she had recovered by luck off an Undren corpse.

They had some armour made of bones and the gauntlets with slabs of qi-repelling stone, rounding it out with what amounted to half a skirt each of luss cloth that was barely intact and had made it this far because it was binding their scrips as much as anything. It all amounted to a vague selection of modesty rags at best when put together, but she had long since stopped caring seriously about it. Wearing as little as possible in this perpetually damp, humid, hot environment was much more comfortable anyway and both of them had taken to cutting their hair to shoulder length and plaiting it back tightly weeks ago in any case.

“All we need is some war paint and we can look like proper barbarian savages!” Arai giggled, looking her over.

Considering their current appearances she shook her head and swept her hand across her thigh length half-skirt. “If we get out of this I am so getting a dozen sets of Luss cloth clothing. It’s about the only fabric we have that’s miraculously survived to this point.”

After some further consideration of her appearance she walked over to the plaza edge and carved out twelve more, broadly forearm length pieces of the stone and bound six of them around her shins as best she could with the last of the leathery sinews. It was a meagre extra bit of armour, but if she had to kick something the extra mass might help.

“It is really annoying that there is basically nothing usable in this whole city,” she muttered, jumping up and down to check they were not going to come undone.

Her sister rolled her eyes, saying nothing, and kept working on affixing her own leg guards.

“I take it we go to the eastern harbour and down into the main underground concourse?” she asked the spear.

“Yes, pretty much. Then follow the main hall east. You will descend around three hundred metres and arrive at the original underground transport hub for raw materials. Cross it, without falling in the water, and head straight down the main tunnel that follows alongside the canal. It will be quite obvious.” The spear’s ethereal voice echoed in her head as much as in the plaza.

“You will be okay here?” she asked. “When these people from the west come.”

“There may be danger, but I can ensure that I am mostly safe. You on the other hand…” the spear trailed off, sounding a bit sad.

“It’s fine,” Arai said, reaching out and patting the spear. “Thank you for the help you have given us up to this point.”

She followed suit, “Thank you, without the advice you have given us, and the help you have provided, we would be truly without means.”

“Nonsense,” the spear said, somewhat failing to disguise its pleasure at being praised. “It was simply good hospitality.”

Both of them stepped back and bowed three times to it and saluted, exclaiming: “Thank you for your generosity, Benefactor! If the fates will it, we shall meet again!”

The spear sent out a feeling of happiness and then space shifted subtly around it and she found her eyes suddenly sliding away from its location in a strange way. Within two heartbeats she had to focus really hard to even perceive the shadow of the spear in the middle of the plaza, and even that, she was pretty sure, was only because she already knew where to look.

Heading out of the plaza at a brisk trot, they quickly passed through the neighbourhoods they had already swept for gear and headed directly for the eastern harbour. The streets on the way were largely devoid of whole corpses at this point. What the Undren Kin hadn’t cleared away, the spiders had presumably cleaned up during their attack.

The way down didn’t take them long to find in any case as all the ancillary rubble from the collapsed buildings around it had been cleared away and what remained was heavily melted and corroded, a lingering memory of the showdown between spider and Undren probably. Heading down the stairs, she saw small, Qi Condensation realm, spiders scuttle deeper into the shadows to avoid them. They hunkered down motionless behind rubble or on the reverse side of columns, only visible to her as she passed close to them thanks to the swirling distortions of her qi highlighting them. None showed any intention of attacking, presumably able to sense that both of them were prey well beyond their league, at least up here.

Even with the spear’s brief descriptions of the large halls and a former transportation complex to guide them on, the upper halls of the undercity were beyond what she expected. The tunnels led down to a huge cavern-like space which contained an artificial subterranean lake with several harbour and warehouse complexes hewn into the rock or arrayed in a mile-wide crescent on its western shoreline. The ships within the docks had long since been ruined or torn apart by the lizards or the Undren Kin, but looking in the water she could still see the faint outlines of hulks or a length of mast. Shattered piles of empty stone crates lined wharves. The roof was supported by grand columns carved from the qi-dispersing stone. The wharves appeared inlaid with it as well.

It was largely deserted apart from some spiders and a solitary slime. However, traces of battle and death were strewn here and there, picked out by glassy swathes of ground or misshapen buildings. The northern concourse from the cavern was entirely blocked by a massive roof collapse and the harbour beside it little more than a misshapen hole filled with water. Most of the buildings had runes that she assumed were scrawled by the Undren, mainly crossing out or further debasing the carved runes she had come to associate with the lizards who held the town before. Thankfully they were inert, and those that were not were very obvious and easy to avoid.

They passed through the area cautiously, on guard for potential ambush that never arrived in the end. The odd Qi Refinement spider tried its luck but the ease with which they dispatched the first few almost certainly discouraged any further attacks because soon even those stopped.

As the spear had said, at the end of the harbour was a large bridge that crossed the channel of water. Looking across it, the route was indeed as obvious as the spear had made out, leading them straight across from the lake, beyond the bridge, and through an even more derelict series of wharves on the other side of the vast cavern. To the east and south of them ran a series of large canal tunnels that held dark placid waters and a dark gloom that made her senses shiver a little from the inauspicious intent their shadows radiated.

The undersea route they were to take turned out to be the main thoroughfare of the local network of tunnels alongside one of these transport channels from the harbour. It was nearly thirty metres wide and as many metres high, with dividers down the middle suggesting that it had taken traffic in both directions. Compared to the canal tunnels themselves, the aura from them was a bit less ominous, she judged, but only marginally so.

With no reason to linger, they headed down it at a brisk trot, keeping an eye out for ambushers and side tunnels as they went. Those tunnels all led to short wharves on the sides of the canal, presumably for unloading and offloading things at regular intervals. Most had access stairs set off them that travelled up, presumably to passages over the channel, connecting the tunnels on both sides of the canal.

“How much stuff were they moving up and down these?” Arai wondered as they passed the third such stairwell and with it a smashed screed of empty stone crates scattered across the tunnel.

Scuffing the worn surface, she found herself wondering the same thing. How many hundreds of millions of tonnes of rock had come out of this place? The spear had said the ‘Watchtowers’ were the size of small mountains and that was just the later exploitation by all accounts.

As they ran on, they also started to encounter other cavern flora. The tunnel, once they got away from the harbour cavern, was home to enough mushrooms and other weird algae plants that much of the time she had enough bioluminescence to see tens of metres through the gloom even without her qi-enhanced vison, had she been so inclined. There was little point to that though, because her qi-enhanced vision was several times more formidable than it had been before, not to mention basically a passive thing. With its help she could clearly make out features in the mercifully flat walled tunnel hundreds of metres distant. The lack of ostentation meant that any movement was noticeable if you paid attention to the edges of things, so spiders tended to be spotted far off, and usually retreated long before they got close.

Her other senses also picked up periodic movement above and around them, usually skittering through the tunnels on the far side, opposite the canal. As such, it was not a huge surprise when a large pack of male spiders danced out of one of the side passages ahead of them and behind them, angling for both of them

What was much more surprising, in a pleasant way, was the efficiency of the Maelstrom Shifting Steps movement art and her Maelstrom Intent infused qi when it came to dealing with them.

The first one blurred towards her, striking at her heart, only to get snared up in the innate turbulence on the qi in the surroundings that came with her using it. The disruption in its movement made it misjudge its attack, which passed by her head, affording her the opportunity to grab it by the head. The combination of her qi and a vague application of the Intent on her qi made the spider twist in her grip as if she had just rung it out like a wet rag. Her palm struck its core even as its legs pinwheeled away from its smashed body with the force of the impact, sending the core itself rocketing into the wall with a sharp *crack*.

She turned and pushed out at a second one that had almost arrived at her and observed the same effect with a broad grin on her face. The other two managed to overcome the distortion and stabbed her but the Intent fused into her body meant that they just drew light gashes rather than the crippling limb piercings of before. She punched one and grasped another other, exploding it directly within her grasp.

Arai dispatched the others with several fluid sword strikes, her meditations on the thread having clearly paid dividends, as she watched from the corner of her eye. She had experienced some of it herself when they were chasing each other, so she knew ‘what’ was happening as spiders failed to dodge strikes they might have otherwise or were inexplicably hit despite being just a bit too far away.

Smirking, she pushed out her qi and disturbed the environment through the whole tunnel for a brief moment, providing her sister with the opportunity to finish off the last few discombobulated spiders on her side. It was taxing, but worth it to get a grasp of how it worked.

Seeing no further male spiders, she picked up one of the cores and dragged it into her dantian, curious about how much a Golden Core would get her now she was actually at that realm. The core was dragged down into her Qi Lake where it was rapidly shattered into dozens of pieces by the roiling tides of pure qi within it. Observing the bits disintegrating slowly, it was hard to put a properly quantitative number against the increase, but on first impressions it certainly involved much less loss of potential than before.

~ Arai, Tunnels - Renewed Hostilities ~

Arai watched her sister refine the cores from the male spiders while trying not to look outwardly disconsolate. It had been her own choice after all to pick the thread and in terms of what she had gotten so far… it was probably the right choice. Still… when faced with the reality of the little pagoda’s cultivation art and its means to mire up the ambient qi for metres around them both it was impossible not to have the odd twinge of regret. Not to mention she hadn’t caught Sana once when they were playing tag and she was using it. On the other hand, the disruption and controlling ability it brought was something they had sorely lacked before now… and it had been her own choice.

Shaking her head, she picked up one of the cores and absorbed it into her dantian. The Intent that she was comprehending rather rapidly, courtesy of meditating on the red-gold thread, swept through it and tore it to pieces, scattering it through her Qi Lake in a glittering burst of qi. It had done the same with the other Nascent Soul cores and the qi crystals as well. Compared to how they had been doing it before, which was the traditional way, this method was easily several times more efficient, albeit at the cost of the qi from the cores taking much longer to refine.

Absorbing another core, she pulled her emotions back under control a touch more than they had been. Excessive use of the Intent the thread was instilling within her tended to draw out weird side effects like that. The most common were these momentary flashes of emotional turbulence that even her mantra couldn’t really do anything with. She had been experiencing them for weeks, but that was the first time she had really used the Intent with elements of Elaria’s Martial Form outside of training. A form which she still had no actual fate-trashed name for…

“Haaa…” she exhaled and grabbed the last few cores.

-Nope, she reflected.

There was certainly a long way to go there. She had, truly, at one point felt that Sana had gotten the better deal out of their two rewards initially. Now though, she was not so sure.

The Intent that the thread displayed was terrifying in ways she couldn’t grasp at all. Unlike what Sana had, which was something like a holistic blueprint, what she had was more flashes of intuition and strange course corrections to things she tried that came from the thread. It was almost like having a second symbol in her mind’s eye in a weird way, just one that was several times more inscrutable.

Thanks to it she had already grasped a slightly different way to circulate her qi, which the symbol had adjusted to with remarkable alacrity. After a few weeks of circulating her qi according to it, the Martial Intent the sword form passively gathered and distributed now suffused her whole body. Any unattributed qi that she absorbed was torn to shreds upon contact with it. Beast cores were rendered into glittering clouds of dust and it obliterated almost every weapon she had tried to wield with it after a single strike. The sword she was left with, the blade from that Undren from before they were thrown down, and which she had recovered from the ruins, was barely up to the task. Even a crude sword carved from the rock of this place, not the qi-repelling rock, the normal rock, which was what she was currently using, was probably going to need to be replaced within a few more days.

Watching the remaining cores disintegrate, she cast a further eye through her dantian, watching the subtle but continuous changes unfold as they became part of the system within it and her body at large.

The Qi Mists rolling in her dantian were now dozens of times bigger than her Qi Lake – she couldn’t really bring herself to call it a ‘Qi Sea’ yet – which was slowly condensing out of it. The rotational power of the core, combined with the Intent radiating from the thread that was itself in orbit, was sundering and sifting the mists into a distended, swirling currents of elemental transformation. Alongside and within these orbiting currents, she could feel elemental agglomerations forming for different types of qi. Several rings of qi crystals’ dust and shattered cores also swirled around, feeding their incremental formation.

The Intent periodically swept outwards in sundering pulses that distended, agitated and disrupted the rings and currents, sending down sheets of multi-coloured qi droplets into her Qi Lake. Occasionally little thunderbolts would also arc out of her core, further agitating the inner rings. They were even occasionally attracted towards agglomerations that got too large, briefly turning them into their own little emitters of the bizarre lightning-like phenomenon.

These large agglomerations soon started to fall down, descending like mini meteors to create disturbances in her Qi Lake. Something about their different densities made the pure Myriad Elements Qi shift into vortices and strange eddies that were gradually forcing her dantian to increase in size while gradually condensing the agglomerations into crystalline forms that the lake then slowly broke apart once again. The shattered pieces of crystal and core were gradually being ground down into powder and picked up during each passive cycle of qi flowing through her body, merging into her flesh and bones, giving them an ever more crystalline hue.

Compared to what she had expected of a Golden Core and how it worked, which was effectively: ‘Core be gold, core spin, attract qi, make qi sea’, the whole process was broadly mesmerising.

Seeing that she was done, Sana waved a hand signalling that she was also finished up and they could continue.

Jogging alongside her sister and keeping a wary eye on the side passages for more interlopers, she continued to watch the process with interest as they journeyed on into the endless tunnel.

They were largely unbothered beyond some packs of the male spiders chancing upon them during the first hours. Eventually, the tunnel reached what appeared to be some kind of interchange where two of the channels joined. The road-like tunnel sloped down for several hundred metres here before flattening out and dividing again. To her right she saw another large pool, presumably adjoined by some lock system. Blue Water City had canals for transporting goods inland so the concept was not alien to her; however, the scale of engineering here was on an entirely different level.

At the heart of the interchange they also found their first proper evidence of the Undren Kin as a territorial presence. A series of totem poles erected out of the remains of various other monstrous denizens’ bones. There were the skulls of the giant rat-things, what appeared to be half a carapace of a small Spider Queen and dozens of large horned skulls that presumably belonged to the grey-skinned demons. Large banners made of flayed skins hung from poles surrounding them, covered in an illegible rune script that gave her a slight headache when she started at it for too long.

Standing on the edge of the ring, it was clear that all the open tunnels likely lead into Undren territory, which wasn’t really what they wanted if she was honest with herself. The only one that didn’t, the one to their right, across the canal, was blocked off by a huge roof collapse. Both the tunnel straight on and the tunnel that departed to the left had totems bearing Undren symbols and banners hung over some of the side exits. Recent efforts had also been made to clear off the worst of the fungi and algae growth as well.

Suppressing their qi properly now, using their mantras and the combination of various exercises from the Hunter Pavilion, they headed down the tunnel that led straight on, continuing east.

All along this tunnel there were regular signs of clearance and travel, wards and script scrawled on side passages leading away from the canals. The access tunnels to the canals had almost all been collapsed, she presumed to provide more security for the tunnel?

They travelled on for almost thirty minutes before finally encountering a proper obstacle.

One of the smaller hallways that broke up the lengths of tunnel every three miles or near enough had been occupied and heavily fortified by the Undren Kin. Large rocks had been dragged from somewhere and deposited at the entrance of the hall to block off most of the tunnel to a height of ten metres beyond a narrow vertical slit in the middle.

Crouching in cover of the central dividers a few hundred metres from the ad-hoc barrier it was possible to see somewhat bored looking Undren Kin sat on the other side of the crude wall. The blocking walls and the tunnel walls around the entrance had what she could only assume were defensive wards plastered all over them: huge swathes of inauspicious-looking rune script in nauseating lines and circles that gave her a deeply inauspicious vibe and made her eyes itch if she looked at them too long.

“Well, that’s not good,” she signed.

They both watched as a group of exactly one hundred Undren minions and fifteen large, much better equipped Qi Refinement Undren departed led by three Golden Core Undren with full armour and proper weapons trotted out through the gap in excellent rank order and headed off down one of the side sections.

“I don’t get the sense that there are any particularly powerful qi presences in there.” Sana signed. “But we are a long way out…”

Suppressing her qi even more and using the symbol to hide herself even further, she followed after Sana as they both snuck forward, carefully keeping to the shadows of the central dividers. She didn’t want to use more qi perception than was necessary, but even when they had made it to within fifty metres of the wall, her qi-enhanced vision was unable to see anything beyond it. Warily she pushed out her perception, keeping it to the edge of the cavern and avoiding the rune script, but even that couldn't make any-

-Monkey-shit.

“Shit,” Sana signed. “They have some way to detect qi sense?”

On the walls, the ‘guards’ had all perked up and were staring down the tunnel warily. As they watched, two of the Golden Core Undren scrambled up on either side and also started scanning, not where they were, but further back. Even so, it didn’t inspire her confidence in the slightest.

“Probably relates to those creepy wards or the banners,” she signed after some short consideration.

Truthfully, the idea of genuinely sneaking up on them had never seemed plausible to them. Sneaking through there would be next to impossible anyway.

“I guess it was inevitable we would be spotted, especially given they have a huge fortification like that,” her sister signed, clearly on the same page she was.

She nodded in agreement. The Undren had been able to detect them easily above ground, in spite of the symbol. The question of how effective the pavilion’s standard concealment art ‘Empty Eye Steps’ was against Undren had not really come up until now, either. It had certainly been useless against the spiders with their acute senses so she wasn’t going to hold her breath over it working on Undren either.

“Side passages?” Sana suggested, frowning.

“First check the way over the waterway,” she signed back, which got a nod of affirmation.

They slowly retreated and made their way back up the tunnel and into one of the side passages. The one that led to the waterway truncated in a wharf on the side of the channel. Looking out across the dark waters, she could tell that her sister was just as unenthused as she was with the idea of crossing by any means. Just standing here made her feel like something was peeking at her from unseen shadows.

Very cautiously she sent a tiny bit of her qi perception into the water, feeling the lurking presences in the depths shift subtly, believing they had fully avoided her detection. The sense of being watched intensified ever so slightly as well.

“Well that’s definitely a no. Go up?” she signed.

“Yeah.” Sana signed, already turning away.

In the distance, as if to confirm her concerns, the water rippled faintly. It was within the range of her qi-enhanced vision… but just barely. Whatever was out there had clearly underestimated their observation powers a touch, which made her quietly happy as they rapidly retreated from the canal.

The paths up and down were collapsed, it turned out. They backtracked even further but all three prior exits were sealed on the second levels of the stairwells in ways clearly intended to stop anyone crossing over. Unfortunately, in this case, the Undren had failed to take into account a determined person or persons with a piece of sharp Arborundum that could carve solid rock like cheese. It took them a mere three hours of quiet excavation to cut through a blockage and make their way across, finding no further barriers along the way. Sadly, when they did finally get across, the other tunnel situation wasn’t any better.

They found themselves staring at mushroom farms, fertilized by piles of dead rats and small spider corpses along with a few other less recognisable things.

Stealthily she led the way down the tunnel, Sana trailing behind her, the pair of them leaving a hidden trail of stealthily killed Undren minions in their wake. It was almost impossible to sneak up on them except using brute speed. Fortunately, all the workers in this place were minions, who could be effortlessly and silently dispatched at this point. Even Qi Refinement Undren, the better armed ones, were unable to react at all to her strikes from the shadows with the leaf blade.

As they progressed she thanked her past self profusely for deciding to carve a few more daggers. They made for excellent short range throwing weapons for taking out sentries. She was also glad they had encountered the drummers and rock throwers back in the island, because without prior knowledge of those nameless accursed rats they would have been spotted within ten minutes of first starting down the tunnel.

Even so, it was apparent that word of the deaths was still somehow travelling ahead of them.

Armoured sentries were rapidly becoming more wary or moving in pairs or trios. Minions were no longer solitary, and bunched together, looking around suspiciously, and eventually they even encountered a Golden Core Undren which would have raised the alarm but for Sana tying it down with her movement art immediately, allowing her to kill it with an opening sword thrust through the heart and claim its core. Eventually though, their progress was completely halted and they ended up crouched in a cluster of mushrooms at the very end of the tunnel, looking out into the large hall on this side of the channel and the scene below them.

The complex that the Undren had made was close to a small town. The floor had been quarried and the ceiling of the hall was raised in such a way that there was now a second tier on two sides of it and a third wall, presumably over the channel, was in the process of being excavated. It was, she judged, an endeavour that must have taken those Undren centuries. The steady clink of stone on stone echoed down from above, even as she appraised the lower levels as best she could.

There was no question of using qi sense, or even letting their qi creep out at all in this place. However, even a cursory visual inspection indicated that this place had a population that likely exceeded 10,000 minions and however many dozens of larger kin were patrolling. The construction was hardly as primitive as the rather ramshackle wall in the other tunnel suggested either. Roughly pointed, roofed, stone buildings extended out of warren-like excavations into the hall walls. Streets spiralling down were a hive of activity, mostly relating to mushroom harvest from what she could see.

On the far side she could even make out several large cages holding spiders, Undren sorting eggs into small cages or occasionally throwing other screaming Undren into larger ones to be eaten by spider mothers.

Sana poked her and pointed up quietly, attracting her attention back to the upper level. It took her a moment to spot them, but there were a dozen or so heavily armoured Undren sat keeping watch around the hall on the highest level. All of them in vantage points that commanded excellent views over the lower levels and both main entrances to this side.

Such was her focus on that, that she almost didn’t see the spider mother, camouflaged on the rooftop a few metres away from one of them.

“Where there is one, there will be more,” Sana signed and she nodded grimly.

The last unpleasant surprise she found nestled away on one of the two towers rising up the wall that flanked the far exit. Crude mechanical ballistae.

She glanced left as a drum beat echoed across the hall, watching nervously as almost 200 armed minions and over a dozen larger Undren wearing spider carapace armour mustered rapidly.

“Let’s move out of the tunnel and into that building,” she signed quickly, not liking where this was going.

Sana nodded tersely and followed carefully after her as she threaded her way through the shadows of several large piles of mushrooms and slunk over a low wall. Behind them, validating her intuition, the large band of Undren fanned out into the tunnel they had just vacated and started to sweep down it in the direction they had come from, looking everywhere.

“We sneak as far as we can, but get ready to make a break for it as soon as we are detected,” she signed quickly.

“That’s a terrible plan.” Sana’s voice echoed in her head.

“It’s the only plan unfortunately.” She shrugged.

“Doesn’t make it less terrible,” Sana sighed.

“It’s probably the best plan,” she shrugged having already thought of and dismissed a few in the last few seconds.

“Still not making it less terrible,” Sana sighed.

“Then what do you suggest?” she sent back.

“…”

Sana frowned, staring at the guards, then back at the other watching Undren with their maybe Nascent Soul spiders. “There are a few four symbol array formations that would do a lot of damage to this place,” her sister said eventually.

“True, but we are likely just on the edge of their territory, going into it,” she pointed out, having already considered and dismissed that idea, at least as a first course of action.

“In any case, we will have to fight at some point. Empty Eye Steps was still not enough for us to avoid complete detection out there in any case. However they are managing it, it’s also able to bypass the symbol and my mantra is already working flat out on controlling my outward qi aura anyway. Better to save our strength and get as far as we can without causing a massive ruckus?”

Sana scowled at her, even as she added. “How many Undren are even down there anyway, do you want to fight a thousand? Ten thousand? There are three ways out of here, one the way we came -which is not possible, one leading to another hall that’s likely identical to this one and that one over there.”

It was, she also had to consider, unfortunate that most of their major offensive arts and arrays were supremely eye catching.

Sana frowned. “At least it would be good for our martial cultivation, and we do need all the strength we can quickly get… Well, we could at least try to catch some of the more dangerous ones off guard before the fighting proper starts.”

She narrowly avoided signing: ‘you’re smarter than that’, and instead suppressed her presence yet further, watching the hall.

“We will have to fight at some point, but the main thing is that we get as much distance between us and whatever might be coming to the island as possible. It was enough spook the spear. You noticed it made no guarantees about Big Auntie’s aura keeping them away and instead hid itself as soon as we left?” she signed.

“A town this big has what are at least Soul Foundation spiders just chilling. I know we got stronger, but are you confident we can fight that Nascent Soul old rat? There is no suppression here.”

“I know,” Sana signed, a bit more forcefully. “Although the spear thought it died…”

-True, she thought in her head,

“For all we know it was the big boss… But these guys are very into spiders… they look a lot more like the first lot we encountered, not the second bunch which had rats and a lot more spider fang weapons.”

“In any case, there is nothing much to debate, all the plans are… bad and involve a lot of running,” she signed with a soft sigh.

“I know… but…”

“I know, it’s frustrating,” she signed back.

And it was, the comprehensions on the thread had made her somewhat more prone to emotional instability as a side effect of over-engaging with the Martial Intent from it. Part of that was things like this she couldn’t help but feel. Thus it was also annoying her that Sana was the one who seemed to want to fight things…

-Just because we got dantians doesn’t mean we have to start behaving like young nobles dabbing everything and solving all our problems with inappropriate force, she grumbled in her head.

“What about cutting our way through the wall…” Sana murmured at last.

She eyed the Arborundum leaf and then the wall in question.

-That is… actually a not terrible option.

However, the immediate problem, and she was sure Sana had seen it already, for all that she was clearly trying to play sage’s advocate here, was that it would be slow work and they had no real way to close up the hole afterward, so the risk of just getting stuck in a trap, especially starting in these circumstances…

Out of the corner of her eye she noted that one of the armoured Undren was staring more pensively in the general direction of the mushroom piles, beyond which was the building they were lurking beside.

“Whatever we do after we get spotted, and I very much suspect we are going to get spotted,” she sighed, pointing it out, although there was no need really. “It will certainly involve just as much manic fighting as before.”

“At that point all we can do is gauge it as it comes and conserve our strength until then, in any case, if we lurk here any longer it will possibly be moot,” she signed.

-How the fates are they getting clued in to our position? She thought with a scowl as the Undren pointed to several of its subordinates and told them to go check out the mushrooms.

“That… is true,” Sana signed with a mimed sigh.

“The best we can hope from the many things that are likely to go wrong is that at the end we are still alive and they are not,” she added with an eye roll.