Memories of the Fall

Our cities lost to plague and Isla devilry, those brave and righteous souls who valiantly resisted could only retreat inland, seeking the strongholds of our ancestors, but even in this, they found all hopes thwarted. For alas, even as we fought desperately, both near and far, against the abomination tide that the vile demons of the Isles had delivered upon us. Even as we wrestled with the understanding of what dark hand had cast the great King Neron low, word came from the east, that the unmade savages, the spawn of the darkest of the sorcerers of the Heroic Age had also followed us to this land, somehow escaping the righteous judgement that had buried their sinful creators.

Now, in our moment of darkest tribulation, they emerged once more from the deceiving womb of the earth and took for their own dark ends those heartlands of the golden savanah and the green jungle from whence our heroic forebears had led us, the chosen peoples, so long ago.

And so, faced with plague, war and ruin, the humble people, descendants of those chosen few, could only lift up their hands to the sky and cry out, and ask what had led to our Lord abandoning them, his most loyal servants in this dark time.

From the ‘Chronicle of the Saint of the Supreme Word’

By Arch Deacon Baradanus of Jerikhal

~ Kun Juni – Perimeter of the jungle town ~

The darkness before dawn brought rain, mist and little else, which Juni, still adjusting to her return to ‘Qi Condensation’, found she was just fine with. The state of her cultivation had more than enough unusual aspects to it to occupy her mind, without their current circumstances adding to matters. The speed and manner in which she was absorbing qi had fundamentally transformed, although that she was somewhat prepared for. What she had been less prepared for was the purity of the qi that was condensing in her new dantian and meridians thanks to the ‘Bright Lotus’ scripture. The quantity of qi she held within her body was also… outside her expectations.

And the quantity…

She exhaled, completing another cycle and considered the misty cloud in her dantian. It didn’t look like much, but appearances were deceiving. Very, very deceiving. The amount of qi she held in her dantian now was close to what she had after breaking through to Qi Refinement previously.

The more she explored the possibilities of what she already knew, the more impressed she became. Her qi-enhanced vision was noticeably better than it had been – that appeared to be a direct result of the adjustment to her meridian channels. Her perception of the natural qi of her surroundings was also much improved.

Inhaling, she started another cycle and turned her attention to the talisman itself, because what she already knew was one thing; what it was showing her in the sub-chapter on Qi Condensation, the things she could do and learn now that her dantian was reformed, were nothing short of remarkable, especially the martial form and the movement art.

The martial form – ‘Eighteen Earthly Lotus Palms’ – was an unarmed one and spent a lot of time talking about balancing and breaking the harmony of the world and split into several sections. The most basic section focused on five techniques: Blazing Lotus Phantasms, Echoes of the Mountain Lotus, Misty Lotus River, Blossoming Lotus Seizes All and Returning Lotus Gate. Each one corresponded to an element – fire, earth, water, life and metal respectively – and was both a combat art and a technique for forming martial intent.

The movement art was perhaps even more amazing to her though. The martial form also had a movement art – ‘Misty Lotus River’ – focusing on water element qi, but it was, while certainly exceptional, just a movement art. It wasn’t the scripture’s signature movement art though. That was ‘Heart Shifting Steps’: a movement art that was also a divination art focusing on geomancy and the shifts in good fortune within the world. Taken outside this place, it would be fantastically valuable. Well, all the arts she was staring at in the Qi Condensation subchapter would be, but that art was… It was the kind of thing you could found a small sect on…

-And then see ruined within a year when some great power comes and steals it away, she sighed softly.

Fortunately, it was not exactly obvious in its application, at least at her current realm, which made it easy for her to surreptitiously practice it. The same could not be said for the martial form, however, which she could only practice in her mind’s eye at this point for fear of opening up some truly awkward questions from the Argent Justice disciples. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust them…

-Nope, actually it is that I do not really trust them, she had to concede upon some further self-reflection as she finished another cycle.

“Your turn,” Lin Ling’s sign caught her eye and she sighed again and stood up.

It was indeed her turn to take over the watch. Lin Ling had taken her slot earlier, to allow her to adjust to her breakthrough. Nodding, she stretched and got up. In the hall behind her, Han Shu was already working on getting some food prepared. Curious, she focused on him and found that, largely thanks to the Heart Shifting Steps, she could tell that his qi held the faintest sense of sharpness and a subtle shadow of strength compared to how it had been before entering this place. His cultivation was also progressing, almost as fast as hers was now if she was any judge.

Making her way up to the wall, she found the two on watch were Hao Jun and, once again, Teng Chunhua, though the hunter was now on the side where Liao Ying had been. Liao Ying was back in the hall, with Jin Chen and Ruo Han helping Han Shu sort out breakfast.

The view in the pre-dawn light was, again, bordering on idyllic, she had to acknowledge. The rain obscured the distant town while the morning mists swirled across the grassland like a sea, trees and the occasional building peeking through them. Birds called all around them, as did the occasional lizard from the river.

-If only the divinations were not so…

“I hope you haven’t been out here all night,” she asked Teng Chunhua

“Nah, I swapped with Han Shu about an hour ago,” Teng Chunhua said, shifting her own grass cloak as she turned to look at her. “Congratulations on your recovery taking a step forward by the way.”

“Thanks,” she nodded politely. “Your own injuries were quite severe as well?”

“Yeah…” the older woman glowered for a moment. “I was mostly saved by that Sheng Zhao’s ignorance as much as my own durability. I was still pretty sure I was dead at the time though.”

They chatted away for a time, mostly about inconsequential things from home, while she took in the natural mundanity of the area before them.

“Rather than this, it’s the forest behind us that has me worried,” Chunhua said after a while.

“Oh?” she frowned, turning to look up at it.

“Yeah, there are a lot of birds and stuff here… but… well, focus on the forest and tell me what you hear,” Chunhua said pensively.

She stilled her senses, as much as she could and tuned out the birdsong from the grassland behind them. What she got was…

“You hear it too?” Chunhua said a bit more quietly. “Lin Ling was the one who first noticed it, although how, given it was in the middle of the night, I have no idea.”

She did, although it took her a few moments more to recognise what she was hearing. It sounded natural, but it was off very, very subtly and it came and went.

“Not enough diversity,” she judged at last.

“Exactly, the birds that are natural are also quiet, and there are few other animals. Much fewer compared to when we made our way through here yesterday,” Chunhua mused.

She focused on one of the weird ones as it drifted back, listening to the call, trying to work out why it was odd.

“They are calling but no birds are replying. It’s all… warnings…” she said eventually. “Something out there is mimicking bird calls and coming this way…”

“Tetrid Stalkers?” Chunhua suggested, grimacing.

“Possibly. They are mimics, but we haven’t seen much of anything like that in the last while,” she sighed. “Not to mention, Tetrids are more than capable of making their calls perfectly natural… These feel… hollow, somehow.”

“Hey…!” Hao Jun waved to them both, urgently.

“What is it?” she called over.

“There is something–”

She caught the shift in movement even as Teng Chunhua did. A spider, about the size of a large dog, scuttled out of the grassland with breath-taking speed and hurled itself up the wall.

Hao Jun yelled and threw himself backwards, summoning his treasure weapon and cutting at the spider, which easily danced away, deflecting the weapon with a forelimb. Both spider and cultivator crashed into the vegetation at the base of the wall–

She spun sideways, pulling her sword-staff out of her talisman and warded across the top of the wall, slicing both forelimbs of a spider that had just started to stealthily make its way over the lip.

-Already Heart Shifting Steps shows its worth, she shivered.

The spider scrambled over and reared up, spitting a web of gossamer mist at them from its abdomen even as it shot backwards along the wall. Teng Chunhua moved faster, dragging both of them off the wall as a third spider scuttled over nearby and then promptly vanished into the swirls of mist.

Landing on the ground, she used ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ properly.

{Heart Shifting Steps}

Her qi flowed through the incantation even as she found herself drawn intangibly towards the left. She spun away in that direction and was rewarded by the limbs of the third, near-invisible spider passing through the place where she had been. The draw on her qi made her wince inwardly as she understood that the more she sought to have her movement art ‘do’, the exponentially greater the cost would be – especially when combining it with qi attacks.

{Kun Overturns the Waters}

Her sweeping strike with the swordstaff found its target, barely, as the spider skipped back rapidly and also sprayed a swathe of the gossamer mist into the surroundings. Heart Shifting Steps immediately gave her all sorts of subtle warnings about inauspicious directions…

-If in doubt, attack, she grimaced as the movement art suggested subtly that forward was auspicious.

{Kun Splits the Waves}

The spear strike would have caught the spider square on, the quality of the blade cutting into its thorax a centimetre or so before the spider shot backwards with twice the speed it had previously and spotted Han Shu who had just come out of the hall with the others. Clearly judging him to be the weakest–

She watched dully as Ruo Han plucked the spider out of the air even as Han Shu cut for it and smashed it to pieces against the stone block and ripping its core out without any preamble. The glimmer showed her that the spider had been Qi Refinement.

The other two spiders had also died by this point. Hao Jun had hacked his to death, having sealed its movements with a talisman, while Teng Chunhua had caught and finished off the third one.

“Watch it-!” was all Lin Ling said, dragging both Ruo Han and Han Shu back into the hall.

A moment later, a spider twice the size of the previous three, with long legs, a thin abdomen and a grey-blue colouration, scuttled over the wall and landed lightly in the courtyard and shot straight for Ruo Han.

Without any preamble, she pulled out a lightning element attack talisman and used it. The bolt made her vision waver as it arced over, striking the spider and making her skin go numb as the currents of qi flowed out through the air. The spider convulsed and then shook off the attack with ease, but it was enough to give those in the doorway the opportunity to scatter.

Hao Jun was the one fastest off the mark, again, using his talisman a second time.

{Nine Locking Argent Cage}

Nine silvery chains swirled out of the mist, wrapping around the spider's body, locking it in place as Hao Jun shot towards it.

{Argent Sword – Executing Justice}

She had to shake her head at the manifest intent that came with it; the names given to techniques never ceased to amaze. The attack, which was a combination one similar to ‘Double Dragon – Sundering Surge’, crashed into the spider, only to be thwarted at the last possible minute. The spider managed to break one of the nine chains and use the serrated carapace edge down its abdomen to deflect his weapon strike and disrupt the technique.

It managed to tear a forelimb free and stab at her–

Inauspicious

Closing the distance with ‘Heart Shifting Steps’, she executed the broadest lateral strike she had in any of her combat arts.

{Kun Overturns the Waves}

The spear strike swept forward, her qi rolling out like a wave with it.

The intuition pulled her to the side even as she completed the strike. There was no question of avoiding it, the difference in cultivation realms was just too great, but rather than have it pierce her straight through the chest and pin her to the ground, the strike clipped her shoulder, sending her flying even as she pierced through its head, almost up to the hilt.

Lin Ling and Ruo Han both arrived in the same moment, one smashing a jar of yang blood over the spider, the other stabbing it with his own treasure weapon and intent, severing two legs and allowing the binding a moment to replenish all its chains and anchor the spider firmly to the ground.

She pulled herself up and they all watched as the yang blood did its thing, ending the creature’s life a moment later.

“What realm…?” Liao Ying, who was also holding a talisman she had never had a chance to use, hissed.

It took a moment to work that out, because only Lin Ling was able to butcher it thanks to the vicious aura of the blood that was corroding its body visibly now. The core in her hands, when she did, finally pry it free was slightly crystalline and had a blue, smokey interior with a faint hint of red.

“Peak Soul Foundation,” Ruo Han judged. “Water and yin life?”

“Looks like it,” Teng Chunhua agreed coming over, carrying a fourth, smaller spider.

“Do spiders hunt in packs?” Liao Ying muttered.

“Yes,” she said at the same time as Teng Chunhua, Lin Ling and Han Shu.

“They can,” she clarified, still checking the damage to her shoulder. “There is at least one species in the shadow forest that does so – although they rarely, if ever, get this big.”

“Terrifying,” Jin Chen exclaimed with a shudder, making his way out of the hall after Han Shu.

“What do we do with the core?” Ruo Han asked.

“…”

“Never mind that, what do we do if there are more things like those… in there?” Hao Jun muttered.

Finally satisfied she was able to stand without leaning on her swordstaff, she stood up and made her way over to it. By this point the yang blood had basically destroyed all its innards and was working on reducing the abdomen carapace into a bubbling mess on the ground.

“Spiders that hunt in packs like this don’t hunt in small packs,” she said. “We shouldn’t linger here.

“What do you reckon?” she signed to Lin Ling.

“I reckon this is awfully convenient,” her friend signed back.

That was true – this had all the hallmarks of setting up a bigger ambush. Turning to look into the forest above them, it was hard not to think about the duality of those divinations.

“When you say… ‘Don’t hunt in small packs’?” Ruo Han asked carefully.

“The brood in the Shadow Forest is categorised as a thirteen-star threat,” Teng Chunhua interjected. “They hunt in swarms of a few hundred at least. Fortunately, they rarely leave their territory.”

“If we meet a swarm of a few hundred like this, we will exhaust what remains of our talismans to survive and then some,” Liao Ying said grimly.

“It’s a pity it burned to cinders before we could get a good look at its corpse,” she sighed.

“Sorry, I thought it better to kill it fast,” Lin Ling said with an apologetic shrug. “Especially given the sealing talisman wasn’t holding it particularly well.”

“It’s fine, although it would have been helpful to know if this was a brood mother or something lesser,” she said pensively.

Looking at the remains of the largest spider, all her instincts said it had not really come from the regression field at this point. Likely it had cut around and come from the forest behind them. If she wanted to force a bunch of tasty prey back away from there…

The problem, however, was that there was basically no enthusiasm on the faces of the Argent Justice disciples to go into the field.

Again she found herself turning to look at the dark forests above them, with their scattered chirping bird calls and mist swirling through the trees at the top of the cliff. They looked very normal, but the longer she spent thinking about it, all the instincts honed in dark and deadly places in Yin Eclipse gibbered at her quietly. It was also much more profound compared to how it had been yesterday.

“…”

-The only thing that changed was that I broke through…

“Going back into that forest is not a good idea,” she said eventually.

“Agreed,” Lin Ling said crossing her arms.

Han Shu stood there, in silence, still holding the sword in his hand, before also nodding. Teng Chunhua exhaled and added her own nod.

“So we risk that field?” Hao Jun muttered.

“In the daytime it should be fine so long as we stick to the clearer areas and don’t attract the attention of those lizards,” Teng Chunhua mused.

“Yeah,” Lin Ling nodded. “Your treasure weapons are made of superior metals, are they not?”

“…”

“Of course they are,” Hao Jun muttered a bit archly, not looking at the nearly gone spider corpse.

“So what route do we take?” Ruo Han asked.

“Cut around the landward side of the town, stay to the raised dykes and move as fast as we can,” Lin Ling said, although she noted the younger woman did look slightly more dubious about the prospect of going in there than she had yesterday for some reason.

~ Lin Ling – The Wetlands ~

“Well, it was a nice idea,” Juni said eventually, as they stood on the edge of the first raised dyke that the road in had brought them to, a mile into the field.

The first bit had indeed just been open fields now overgrown, with the occasional reservoir and canal threading in from the river. Looking at it from here though, it was a remarkable thing.

“So not farmland,” Ruo Han agreed, frowning.

“No… it is not,” Juni agreed.

She could only nod. In her heart, she had expected something like this. The canals were part of the defences and their role in it was well hidden from outside eyes, as defensive features like this should be.

-Raised levels, trees… and profound feng shui alignments.

This place might have been totally severed from the alignments outside, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t any active alignments here. It just meant that they had to work by an older…

-More dangerous…

And yes, more dangerous formations book, she agreed with the memories there.

-You don’t need to tell me that, she shot back. Our ancestral grounds are a cursed bone that choked even the Imperial Court, for all the good it did us.

“So do we go back?” Hao Jun asked.

She watched as Juni unrolled the bamboo compass chart and performed a divination before squatting back and just looking…

Peering over her shoulder, she hissed under her breath, because even the instincts of the blood inside her, which were already overacting, had not been that clear.

“Enraged Slaughter – Dark Waters, Elixir of Dreams, Guiding all things to their end.”

“What does that mean?” Liao Ying asked, “Beyond the fact that it’s another death from the four directions prediction…”

“It’s a breathtakingly inauspicious alignment for the living to walk through,” Juni explained with a deeper sigh. “A natural alignment devoted to the concept of heavenly death, leading mortals into the afterlife through driving them onwards to their deaths and then delivering them directly to the yellow springs. Whoever made this whole thing likely also severed this land from the outside world – almost certainly to hide that singular fact. It’s a trap hidden within a trap,”

“You led us right into this?” Hao Jun scowled.

“Led into what,” Juni replied, remarkably civilly she thought. The anger inside her would have kicked him off the dyke already.

“We were certainly already in it quite a ways before this point,” she sighed. “This alignment, how big do you think it is?”

“…”

Ruo Han turned to look around at the whole valley, before nodding in understanding. Hao Jun still looked a bit annoyed, but he was clearly well-versed enough to know what was what.

“So it looks like we have no choice but to venture through the town after all?” Ruo Han asked with a hint of resignation.

“It does seem that way,” Teng Chunhua agreed.

Juni nodded. “Or we must at least look for a way across nearer to it… Do you really want to make your way across that?” her friend Juni added, gesturing to the vast swathe of flooded grassland to their left that stretched to another set of raised dykes amid the swirling morning mists hiding fates only knew what other obstacles.

The four argent disciples all shook their heads silently. Nobody needed to be told that they would be in there at the most inauspicious hour of the day either.

The swamp before them probably wasn’t deep, but that wasn’t the point. This place had been built to look like farmland, but it was a massive man trap. Flooded levels, raised dykes on the wrong sides of canals, broken lines of sight, sunken canals, mud pits, and everything infested with all manner of horrible critters. Beyond that, she could just make out shimmering reflections that suggested there was a lake that went all the way to the sheer edge of the massif with its several waterfalls feeding it.

You could walk an army into here and leave tens of thousands dead… hundreds of thousands probably, because that was the other thing she could see.

That all of them could see.

The pale bones, in the water.

The memories also told her what species they belonged to – it had no transliteration, but the closest she could reduce it to was ‘auspicious children born to inherit the first day’. The concept behind them was… confusing as well, and the memories almost seemed to skip over it in favour of…

She winced as they showed her waves of humanoid rat-like creatures swarming across the land. Armed and armoured, they screamed in a berserk fury as they assailed the town in their millions, determined to wipe it out of existence. The defenders fought back, twisting the land, turning the very gift that should have belonged to the rat-folk against them as everything here conspired to drag them down to their deaths. The most terrifying part, though, was that the memories held that the rat people were the righteous side.

The rats had failed, and the blood lamented that.

Told her that the people who raised up these towns in the jungle deserved their fate.

Deserved to die, that they were thieves, despoilers… deceivers… betrayers…

-Villains Who Stole An Era!

-Deserving of Slaughter!

“Are you okay?”

Juni’s voice cut through the moment and she realised she had dropped to her knees, holding her head in her hands, which were shaking slightly.

“Yeah…” she grimaced, taking a deep breath. That had been the first time she properly lost control, she realised, since O’Brian had put her memories back together.

‘Try to avoid places and circumstances that will put a lot of strain on your mind for a few weeks… if you can. You are still young, lass…’ – his words rang rather hollow now, given where she had ended up.

“Hah ha,” she laughed bitterly and managed to stop her hands shaking. “Just… I guess this place isn’t good for my recovery.”

Taking another deep breath, she got a grip on herself and shot a nasty look at the memories. The rage that came with them was still shimmering away in her mind like a bright flame, barely contained with the help of her mantra.

-Why do you flee from it?

An old voice whispered suddenly.

-Why do you run from it…? another hissed.

-It is part of you. They made you what you are… an older, angrier voice murmured.

-TAKE WHAT THEY DID AND WIELD IT, a young, enraged voice suddenly screamed in her head.

-We can show you how. Another, much older, darker voice, or set of voices added.

She exhaled, again and pushed the raging voices that had just peered through the fog of her memories for a split second away again.

“What is wrong?” Juni signed to her unobtrusively.

“The memories in the blood just had a meeting with the memories from the dark,” she signed back.

“Oh,” Juni gave her shoulder a squeeze.

“I’ll be fine in a moment,” she said, out loud this time, more to the voices in the blood than anything else.

The others stood on in silence, with some rather conflicted expressions on their faces. Mostly. Hao Jun was caught up in his own worries, Liao Ying and Jin Chen were looking at her with apprehension, while Ruo Han just looked… pensive.

Han Shu’s expression was inscrutable, but she had to fight the reflex to reach for a pot of blood.

She got a grip on her emotions and without comment turned to walk back along the raised dyke.

-Until you confront it, you will never be free…

She kicked a rock off the path into the water, where it cracked a more humanoid-looking skull and scattered ripples.

-Who wants to confront anything, just let me forget, she hissed back in her own head.

A more dispassionate part of her mind eventually managed to take over as they made their way onward. The rational explanation for this was that devoid of the strength of her cultivation and with the True Physique suppressed so formidably by this place, the memories in the blood were just too powerful for her young, malleable psyche to endure.

“It would be fine if they just shut up though,” she muttered in her head, before realising that she had in fact said it out loud.

All she could do was grind her teeth, because tangible curses had long ago ceased to be effective there.

-I am not going insane, she repeated back to herself.

-I was better before, and I am better now…

She didn’t look at Juni, who was walking just behind her and slightly to the right.

Thankfully though, they didn’t flare up again. Not looking in the bone-strewn swamp helped. The blood really held a grudge there. Both for the way that this Slaughtering Formation had been used, and for those it had slaughtered.

Part of her really wanted to ask them why…

However, the smarter parts of her pointed out that she probably wouldn’t like the answer – the implication that they had had this world stolen from them by the people who built this place already told her enough. In any case, now was not the time to dwell on it, in all certainty. It took some effort, but she managed to follow that advice at least.

“How come we are able to walk through this without any issues?”

She was stirred out of watching for anything remotely dangerous in the surroundings by Jin Chen’s puzzled voice.

“I would point out that we can only go forwards…” she said absently. “That is hardly ‘any issues’.”

-Dammit, she groaned inwardly, having not actually intended to say that out loud.

She eyed the memories, because that ‘swearword’ had definitely come from them. In the same instant Juni actually elbowed her in the back and shot her a dark look.

“We are not going to go through this again are we?” she signed, wrestling with her own annoyance trying to join up with the steady wellspring of ancestral anger bubbling away. “You know what this place is doing as well as I…”

-This place is also messing with our heads, she added in her own head.

“Dammit,” she swore, reusing the word, which was oddly fitting in this instance, because she had finally gotten a glimpse of the route ahead, to the town itself.

“…”

“It’s somewhat of a moot point anyway,” Han Shu said, having seen the same thing.

“Oh, may the nameless fate be buggered by a rabid monkey,” Juni also finally gave in to anger with a more traditional curse and kicked a random sapling by the side of the road.

The bridge across the wide canal to the town was gone and the stone gates were firmly shut. The walls dropped straight into the water as well. Given they had just come from the landward side, everyone was clear that the only way across there was to walk through a mile of swamp that doubled as a bone pit.

“So I guess we have to try the waterfall,” Juni said pensively.

“It’s that or scale the cliff beyond the distant lake, and I bet that that is also inside the repression field,” Han Shu added.

“The waterfall does seem the more likely prospect,” Teng Chunhua agreed after a moment.

She also had to agree there, but just nodded, not trusting that her volatile emotional state wouldn’t make her say something stupid.

“That just causes another problem though,” Hao Jun muttered.

“…”

“We can get out,” Juni said with a somewhat resigned sign. “It will just take a while.”

“It was your divinations that got us into this mess,” the disciple muttered.

“Enough,” Ruo Han said flatly, clearly having lost patience with his compatriot at last. “Or are you telling me you somehow managed to miss the knowledge of what an inauspicious land alignment is designed to do out of your scholarly education in the Hao clan.”

“…”

“I know it perfectly well,” Hao Jun snapped up. “It is these…”

“Stop it you two!” Liao Ying hissed.

“Shut up,” Hao Jun scowled, pushing her back to the side of the-

Jin Chen and Teng Chunhua both managed to grab Liao Ying before she stumbled over a rock and nearly fell over the edge of the dyke.

“Enough.” Juni hissed, her words somehow travelling a bit more forcefully than Ruo Han’s had.

“This is the kind of thing that this place is designed to do. You said you encountered Blood Ling trees before?”

“Um… you have been shouting quite a bit…” she felt compelled to point out. “Maybe shout a bit louder so some other larger predators know we are standing out here in the middle of a swamp in full view of anything for miles?”

“…”

Finally, they all fell silent and looked around, although with nowhere near enough contrition. Her own instincts, which even without qi were easily the best out of the lot of them, she was certain, were starting to niggle at her. They had been for a while, but their shouting was certainly drawing attention. Birds had been scared off at this point.

Her instincts also told her that anything that lived and grew up in this formation was likely close enough to this strange land that they would almost be a part of it.

“This place is designed to break intruders; those that grew up in it will not be anywhere near as hindered,” she hissed.

“Indeed,” Juni scowled at the rest of them and added quietly “And no, divination did not get us into this mess. At least not any divination we are capable of doing.”

That was, she had to agree a very fair point – they were only here because of that fates-blighted Astrology Bureau and the Imperial Court.

“But if this place is one giant formation…”

“It’s an arrangement, not a formation,” Teng Chunhua corrected Jin Chen absently. “That changes the rules slightly, especially given there is no qi. Getting out is merely… a matter of comprehension.”

“Indeed,” Juni said quietly, shooting a grateful glance at the older woman.

“Everything about this place is designed to be aggravating – the heat, the humidity, the creatures here, the bugs, the lack of cultivation, the stress of understanding what it is, the fact that we are walking through a massive battlefield, all our understandings of the world around us, our very world view is being twisted to screw with us.”

There were nods all around.

“My mistake was to not explain it immediately,” Juni scowled. “However, divination is only as good as the knowledge you can put to bear. This is even more so the case with making the divination compared to interpreting it. The world doesn’t care that you didn’t know about a thing; it will provide you the answer to the question you asked.”

“And sometimes force you to deliberately misinterpret things,” she nodded, staring around at the landscape, still trying to see if their impromptu little breakdown had caused a bigger problem.

“Yes, alignments that mess with divinations are a common thing in purely mortal alignments,” Juni agreed. “This place has an arrangement on it akin to cursing anyone walking into a huge tomb: it doesn’t want to scare people away, and it wants to draw them in and chew them up and deliver them to death, one way or another.”

“So no matter what we do, it will seek a way to twist matters?” Ruo Han mused.

“Yes, even inaction. Death in four directions is called that for a reason,” Juni murmured. “There are only two easy ways out.

“Up to ascend to the heavens or jump down to hell,” Teng Chunhua chuckled darkly.

“Stand still, and something here will eventually find you anyway,” she pointed out. “That is jumping down to hell.”

Han Shu nodded silently. Hao Jun looked a bit unwilling, but thankfully seemed to have recovered his own emotional centre, for now at least. Liao Ying as well, although she was more composed as a person anyway she guessed.

“So you have a means to lead us out? Will a divination art actually do that?” Ruo Han frowned.

“Not all divination arts are equal, even if they mostly all come from the same place,” Juni said a trifle cryptically. “Yes, I am pretty confident I can lead us out of here, with only a modicum of stabbing the local flora and fauna on the way.”

“Ling?”

She blinked, realising Juni had just asked her if she was okay.

“Yes,” she said waving a hand.

-Coward, still you hide.

One of the younger ancestral voices whispered.

She nodded again, trying not to let her annoyance at their whispering creep out visibly.

-Still you hide…

-Let us guide you…

-So young… unwilling to learn…

Juni gave her a look that was just a bit longer than necessary before turning and waving for them to follow her. Trying not to grind her teeth, she turned her attention outward, watching the misty reed beds and waterlogged grassy swamp with empty eyes.

The memories were most good for intuition, which worked in here, especially when married with techniques like the one she was using now. It was a trick Old Ling made them all learn that did not rely on qi. That and the ability to walk properly through forests without needing qi were the first things hammered into any hunter expected to be going deep into Yin Eclipse.

After the dark and these jungles, it came easily now. Even easier perhaps, because the blood also carried instinctual knowledge of techniques like it – a means to pull the darkness out before you and see the death that was trying to hunt you down that did not rely on any gift, inheritance, art or even qi.

But only up to a point, as she was discovering in here.

The longer she examined what was going on, as she followed after Juni, looking at the landscape, the more certain she became that something in here was trying to mess with her, specifically in a way it wasn’t with the others. The obvious culprit was the blood. Something in this place targeting it in some way?

Vexingly, the memories and even the voices were totally mute on that. Even when she asked them explicitly. No matter what she did, she got nothing out of them beyond anger, protestations that she should embrace her circumstances and a continual refrain not to flee from the fury, pain and suffering caged away in the back of her own mind.

~ Kun Juni – Return from Wetlands ~

-I definitely sold my grandmother in a past life, Juni found herself lamenting as she used ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ to walk them back through the land and out of the trap that had pulled them in so subtly.

Her earlier assertions had been a bit of an over-simplification, but really the movement art from the talisman was their key to getting out of here. It worked in here, the divination aspect at least, utterly unimpeded, which told her something of its inner mechanisms. Equally surprising in a different way, was the continued ability to perceive the symbol of her ‘Earthly Physique’ in the recesses of her mind’s eye.

How it worked, she was still getting a grip on, though step by step she was starting to see the edges of the true fundamentals of the art. It had nothing to do with how auspicious or inauspicious things were; instead, it was somehow giving her a subtle shift in the perspective that allowed her to see how her own innate ‘good fortune’ was interacting with the world around her.

If she took a step she got a faint impression of right or wrong in relation of how she was feeling. If she was concerned about tripping over rocks she would find herself avoiding rocks. If she wanted to trip over rocks… She had nearly done that, which was a warning in its own way, that it just guided her perception, somewhat uncritically. It was quite hard to do that though, and the focus required to keep using the technique without qi was phenomenal. Even with her current grasp of her mental equilibrium it was the hardest technique she had ever used, she reckoned – and that was just to get the faintest, instinctual glimmers of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ out of it regarding the path out.

As such, the trip out was slow, taking them almost two hours for the distance covered, and left her with a terrible headache. Thankfully though, it was an uneventful meander back through the dykes and across two portions of bug-infested grassland to bring them out, not too far from where they had entered, to her relief.

Equally relieving was the sight of Lin Ling rapidly recovering her composure. The speed with which the younger woman had fallen apart in there, once they encountered the reality of the Slaughtering Formation, had disturbed her. The others had been freaked out, but they didn’t know exactly how deep her friend’s mental wounds really were, and within the space of five minutes Lin Ling had nearly been back in the state she was when they entered that dreadful anomaly.

-Thank you, white squirrel! she murmured in her mind, offering it quiet praise for the talisman and the ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ art in particular. When I get out of here, you’re getting a scroll in the family shrine!

She tried a few steps with it and grimaced, because deliberately using it without qi was, it turned out, a whole lot harder when you had qi there, willing and able to be touched. Even so, the whole experience had, the implosion of Lin Ling’s psyche aside, been surprisingly beneficial – to her, at least.

-Can’t say the same thing for the rest of the group, though, she complained inwardly.

It made her want to punch something, really.

-Definitely, a grandmother was sold in a past life, she doubled down on that assertion in her heart.

The problem wasn’t just Hao Jun, who was now taking the whole escapade as vindication for his earlier suspicions and more forcefully saying they should backtrack directly and seek another route entirely. Within the space of a morning, the cohesive team spirit that had been built up by their easy passage to this point had taken a bad wobble. Jin Chen and Liao Ying’s own faith in their easy onward passage had also been rocked, anchored by the realisation that the landscape was a lot more dangerous than it looked.

Ruo Han was mostly keeping a lid on things, but there was only so much he could do, she had to acknowledge, because this was the tally of inexperience. Not his, or hers, but…

-Monkeyshit-!

She sighed, forcing herself away from that idea.

Blaming the inexperience of others was… the recourse of failed leaders and people who thought themselves smarter than they were. That was what her brother would say: ‘You make your decisions, and once they are made, they usually have a way of staying made, for better or worse… and you should be prepared to own them, especially when they are worse.’

That she had led them out of there without much more incident than having to swat a few dinner plate-sized spiders and throw rocks at a lizard the size of a large dog was beside the point.

-This is why half the senior herb hunters work alone, she added to herself.

Even the fact that Han Shu had somehow drifted along in the middle of this without really getting involved was a weird problem in its own way. The fact that Lin Ling’s animosity over those past events had re-emerged briefly was enough.

“Well, that was certainly an interesting trip,” Teng Chunhua said pensively, falling in beside her as they made their way back towards the river and the wide swathe of waterfalls.

“We were bound to have a bump like this eventually,” she conceded.

“Indeed,” the older herb hunter agreed. “For all that this place looks…”

“Depressingly mundane?” she supplied.

“That,” Teng Chunhua said with a slight smile. “For all that it is depressingly mundane, it has probably done them no harm to realise that everywhere is dangerous again.”

She nodded, wondering what Teng Chunhua’s angle on this was, but the other hunter just walked on in silence after that, scouting out her part of the formation.

Eventually, they arrived back at their mornings starting point and the continued on past it. At that point she eventually managed to temporarily solve the riddle of Hao Jun, by putting him up front along with her and letting him lead the middle of their escort formation. That was usually a role Han Shu or Ruo Han took, but with everyone shaken about as they were in their own ways, the most important one to anchor was in many ways the most outspoken one.

Forced to concentrate on watching her back and also being party to not leading everyone else into an unseen lizard or snake pit, the overall ambience of the group took a jump for the better and the confidence of Jin Chen and Liao Ying also started to recover. It also helped keep Lin Ling, who took up the spot at the rear of the middle, occupied, for all that she protested she was much better now. Han Shu and Teng Chunhua, who had the least in the way of internal group politics to grind, were thus the outliers watching the sides and rear.

In this manner, they reached the waterfalls without any real incidents, much to her relief.

“I have to say, up close they look no less intimidating than they did several miles away,” Teng Chunhua said with a chuckle as she, the older woman and Lin Ling stood on the gravel beach of the river contemplating the best way to get across.

On the face of it, it looked like it should be easy, which was almost certainly by design. Either there had been some very fortuitous boulder fall over the years or the final two waterfalls had been somewhat ‘adjusted’ at some point. The last one in particular looked very dubious, and the middle one just screamed ‘this has an algru mat behind it’ or something to that effect.

“The first one should be easy enough,” Lin Ling said eventually. “The water falls quite far out from it.”

“And we have ropes, thankfully,” she agreed. “The issue is absolutely the far one, assuming the boundary for the regression field is circular.”

“They also quarried it flat, looks like,” Teng Chunhua frowned, shading her eyes against the haze.

“Yeah, it’s almost like they didn’t want anyone getting around their fancy town and its insane bevy of alignments and formations,” Lin Ling added.

“Next you will be pronouncing that water is wet, Laozi,” she deadpanned, which got a laugh out of Chunhua.

“You joke, but the Blue Pit is a thing…” Lin Ling shot back.

“Please, it’s bad enough that we have the Green Pit sat right there, let’s not invoke the others,” Teng Chunhua said with a slightly strained smile.

“I think the best bet is for me to scout it,” she said eventually.

“…”

Lin Ling opened and shut her mouth, before just nodding in the end.

“I’ll take Jin Chen with me,” she added after some further thought.

The other two just looked at her.

“He’s the one with the lowest realm out of the spiritual cultivators. If he can make the path, the rest of them can. I have no doubts about any of your climbing prowess in weird environments,” she explained. “I’ll scout and put the lines, he will follow and check them, then... Han Shu will follow him, then you Lin Ling, then the other Spirit Cultivators followed by Ruo Han and you?” she said to Teng Chunhua.

“Okay,” Teng Chunhua nodded after a moment’s thought.

“The final question is what do we have in the way of climbing gear?” she asked generally.

“I have nothing,” Lin Ling said blandly.

“Anchor talismans are only good while they work,” she mused. “I have rope… Chunhua?”

“…”

“I have a few metal spikes and rope. Again, climbing extensively in maximal suppression was not a thing that featured heavily…” the older woman sighed.

Twenty minutes and some consultation later and she had three lengths of reinforced rope, a small crate of iron spikes courtesy of Liao Ying plus the spikes that Teng Chunhua had. Setting off with Jin Chen, she led him along the rising rocks behind the first waterfall.

“Why did you pick me?” Jin Chen asked, as she directed him where to affix the rope for those following.

“Do you want me answer honestly?” she chuckled.

“I mean… I’m the weakest of those in the group,” the youth muttered.

“Actually, that’s probably me right now,” she shot back drily. “You’re here because if you can make the last bit of the path, everyone else can – that easy,” she added.

“…”

He frowned a bit, and didn’t say anything else, but it made her sigh inwardly. The lingering aspects elements of the arrangement that was tormenting them all subtly was one thing, but she was really starting to wonder if there was perhaps more going on here than met the eye. Inauspicious land alignments were a thing and they had not noticed the Slaughtering Formation until they were stood on the edge of the middle layer of the wetlands behind them, staring at its handiwork.

-Dangerous, she sighed inwardly.

It was a nasty trap though, she had to concede as they finished up the first waterfall. If it was indeed such a thing. She had plenty of experience courtesy of that… It had all been very convincing, right up until the final second it wasn’t. They had only gotten out of that mess back then because Lin Ling had stolen some of that ‘water’ and she never noticed.

Shaking her head, she refocused on her surroundings. That was how to overcome this, by just being well grounded…

“Toss me the next rope!” she waved across to Jin Chen.

The rope came over and…

Instinct made her catch it, because she would have dropped it with the realisation she had just made.

Affixing it to the spike, she exhaled and paused for a moment. It was so obvious, but it wasn’t perhaps surprising that she hadn’t made it before in a way. She had been so worried about the Green Pit and feng shui alignments that she had clean forgotten about another aberrant zone: the Red Pit. That place had a lot in common with this kind of alignment.

It was a place where the spirit vegetation took getting in your head to a demonic art form, and was able to use anything and everything to do so. Anyone with any sense avoided the place like the plague, and it was a major reason the Ha clan’s ginseng fields were so secure. Anyone who was able to reliably traipse through that backdoor was not going to move for Golden Core grade Mountain Ginseng.

That certainly wasn’t what was happening here, but the underlying point was what was key.

-Be well grounded… Don’t get caught up in the pace.

Admittedly easy to say, but it gave her the little glimmer she needed to salvage some order from the induced chaos earlier. The start of that would be a slightly different travelling order when they got over the other side.

Scrambling around the last rock of the first waterfall, she peered over the edge at the wall behind it and resisted the urge to rub her temples. Someone had indeed conveniently filled in the space behind the water fall with chunks of masonry covered in leaf motifs and then hidden their handiwork with a few boulders.

She pulled out her swordstaff and gouged out a bit of rock from where she was standing and sent it skipping with some force across the face of the collapse. It made it half way before a few tendrils of Algru snapped out, caught the rock, crushed it and vanished again.

“The things you know…” she sighed.

“Jin Chen!” she called back along.

“Yes?” he sent back.

“Can you go back and get Han Shu to come up here?”

“-k!”

His reply was somewhat lost in the roar of the water, but she saw him skip back a moment later. A few minutes later, Han Shu returned, but more annoyingly, everyone else came with him.

“What do you need?” Han Shu asked, scrambling over to her.

“Care to use your fancy sword to help me put this lot into the pool below?” she snickered.

“…”

“You know cutting rocks with swords is considered… disrespectful to the weapon?” he muttered.

“Do you know what happens to people who make smart comments like that here?” she said, eyeing the pool and only half joking.

“…”

Han Shu passed no further comment and unsheathed the sword, setting to work.

She sat there and ate a foundation building pill to recover her strength while Han Shu scrambled down the far face of the rock and started to work on undercutting the rocks. Finally, after quite a while, there was the sound of cracking stone and Han Shu scrambled back over the rock. They both watched as the entire stack of blocks buckled and began to slip downwards crashing into the pool below.

They both stared at what was behind. The collapse revealed a colonnaded walkway cut into the rock that led to what had clearly been a fortified outpost between the second and third waterfalls. The building that had likely stood there had been collapsed, she guessed, but the access behind it, which was the ‘edge’ of the cut stone Teng Chunhua had spotted, was still there.

“At least we don’t have to cut a crawlway along the cliff now,” Han Shu observed, sounding a bit relieved she thought.

After a bit of a scramble along the cliff, she found that, much as expected, the repression kicked in a good five metres before the edge of the colonnade. She put a score mark on the surface to mark where it started. Protected by the rock wall built across, it wasn’t hard to see where masonry had been collapsed down to try and secure this way past the waterfall. Alighting on the other side, she tied the rope off and Jin Chen followed after her.

While Han Shu and Jin Chen rigged up a crossing over the impromptu chasm, she quickly checked the passage and was relieved to find it just a series of colonnaded corridors along the cliff face. It didn’t even have any branching passages; it simply threaded around the curved cliff that was what the third waterfall swept down and then split. To her right was a ‘doorway’ that led into a square, rock-cut court that was overgrown with vines and had a large pond in the middle. The other path, which led on past the waterfall at one point vanished down stairs into swirling white water.

By the time she had returned, the others had all crossed, recovered most of the supplies used to make the crossing and were starting to explore the path themselves.

“As far as an attempted disguise goes, it’s... kinda rushed,” Liao Ying observed, stopping to look at a point where a window had been blocked out.

“We can only be thankful for that,” Ruo Han muttered. “Would you fancy trying to scale around the outside of that without a cultivation foundation?”

“…”

There was much shaking of heads as they made their way onward, back to the courtyard she had found.

“What even was this place?” Jin Chen frowned, as they sat on the edge of it, keeping out of the rain.

“It looks almost like a temple?” Liao Ying suggested, looking around.

“A temple?” Hao Jun mused, running his hand over one of the beautifully carved columns.

Looking, she did have to concede there was a certain resemblance to the vestiges they had walked through in the depths. This, though, felt… older somehow, although that could just have been because it was open to the elements.

There was only one exit in any case, so eventually they made their way onward, finally arriving at a much larger rock-cut courtyard. This one was properly carved as well, on two stories… and in the middle…

“Okay…” she said under her breath, staring at the tree in the middle of the pool, with its burned-looking bark. This one also had no leaves to speak of.

-I never thought to see one of those again, she thought, looking around.

Han Shu was also staring at it dubiously. Lin Ling, however, just walked over to the pond, which was full of lotuses just about to burst into flower and peered in for a moment.

“Looks normal enough,” her friend pronounced, which made her sigh in inward relief, recalling the pond around the other such tree.

In fact, ‘normal enough’ was an excellent way to describe the feeling of the whole place. Whereas before, out in the fields, there had been a certain uneasy feeling to the absence of her foundation, here it felt… ameliorated somehow.

“Is it just me or is the ‘repression’ in here lacking the edge it had elsewhere?” Teng Chunhua frowned.

“A bit…” she conceded as the others mostly shook their heads.

“Really?” she looked around at them.

“I don’t feel any difference,” Ruo Han frowned. “My cultivation foundation is still totally gone and now I get this weird feeling like… well, it’s hard to put into words?”

“Me neither, still feels weird,” Liao Ying agreed, while Jin Chen nodded vehemently.

“It’s like I’ve gotten a disapproving big sister looking at the back of my head,” he added after a moment.

Hao Jun also nodded grimly, and, surprisingly, so did Han Shu.

“You also get that feeling?” she signed to Han Shu.

“No… I just feel… like I did before,” Han Shu shrugged. “It is no different to being in the grassland.”

-Well, there goes the idea that we could rest up here, if the others are feeling even more… she sighed, looking around.

“Lin Ling?” she asked, looking around and suddenly sighing, because the younger girl had done a vanishing act–

“You want to come over here and see this!” Lin Ling called a moment later out of the room at the far end.

They all turned to see her wave to them from beyond the tree, where she was standing in the entrance to what had to be a large hall. Shaking her head, she made her way around the pool and arrived at the entrance. The columns there were carved with flowers and swirling lines that could have either been lightning or tree branches depending on your aesthetic tastes.

“Wandering off doesn’t exactly…” she hissed.

“It’s fine. We won’t suffer any issues in this place, so long as we don’t do something really dumb, like kill someone,” Lin Ling murmured. “Come look at this.”

“…”

She was about to ask how her friend could be so sure, when Lin Ling just grabbed her by the arm and dragged her into the room, at which point she could only stop and stare. It was a broad semi-circular theatre, maybe 40 metres across, open to the air some hundred metres above, its opening shrouded in greenery.

The place was majestic, but that wasn’t what caught her – there were statues here, well many statues actually, but only one stood out.

At the back of the room… or maybe the front, depending on how you looked at it, in the middle of the flat wall, flanked by pillars, was a throne and dais. On it, lounged a female figure – the statue of a woman, completely naked, carved in flawless white stone.

Her form glistened in the rain which drizzled down above, making her almost glow in the gloom. Her hair was a deep golden amber, while her eyes, which were half closed were bright azure crystals. In one hand, rested on a jar in the same radiant azure stone, which rested between her legs, ‘protecting’ her modesty. In her other hand, which was raised up in front of her, was a flower – a riot of brilliant gold, amber and orange shimmering in the wet and the mist. The gaze of the statue was fixed upon the flower as if it were a wine cup she was about to drink from, or perhaps some treasure she was pondering.

Staring at it, unbidden, the design on the talisman she had absorbed appeared in her mind. Below the woman was an altar, also in pristine white stone, which held a bowl with water in it that shimmered strangely. Across the base of the statue itself, written in a script that rearranged itself in a familiar fashion before her eyes, was a single word: ‘Arianrhod’

“Wow…” Hao Jun’s voice cut through her admiration of the statue as she tried to work out what connection the lotus-like flower in the woman’s hand might have to that on the talisman she had acquired.

It vanished within a moment, but the anger she felt at Hao Jun and the others surprised her with its acuteness – at how they had robbed her of her moment of wonder at this place.

“So it was a temple,” Liao Ying whispered, making an auspicious sign.

“Ah-ri-an-rhod?” Hao Jun said, walking up to stand beside them and start at the figure.

“Arianrhod,” Lin Ling corrected him absently.

“Wonder who she was?”

“It says on the altar,” Ruo Han said a bit weakly.

Burying her annoyance in her heart, she made her way around to the front and saw the text that Ruo Han had noticed – ‘Empres-’ and ‘Bright’ were still visible among the words that someone had mostly obliterated with a trailing hand.

“Why did they destroy the name but not the statue?” Jin Chen pondered.

“That’s one letter short of ‘Empress’,” she pointed out. “What do you think would happen if you smashed up a statue of the Blue Morality Emperor?”

“You think that this is someone on that level?” Hao Jun said a trifle dubiously.

“This is clearly a remarkable place; it stands to reason it would have its share of remarkable people,” Lin Ling said blandly.

“Huh, and there is this weird water in the–” Liao Ying was stopped from peering at it by Lin Ling who had put a hand across her.

“Don’t touch that; it’s dangerous,” her friend said seriously.

“Why do they leave this stuff just lying around?” Han Shu muttered, eyeing it as well.

“What is it?” Hao Jun frowned.

“…”

“The last place I saw this was in a ruin deep in the Yin Eclipse underworld,” Han Shu said faintly. “It was in a pool filled with the bones of high realm cultivators, people higher realm than Ancient Immortals and such.”

“…”

Hao Jun looked at him dubiously, but stepped back from it nonetheless.

“Well, cool and all as this is, we should probably look to find a way out,” Lin Ling said brightly. “Unless you feel like trying to rob the temple of some ancient and mysterious senior in a place where our cultivation is entirely repressed.”

“When you put it like that,” Jin Chen chuckled nervously.

“Heaven giveth great wonders and steals them back from under your nose while you’re still ogling,” Lin Ling said with an eye roll. “In any case, this room is totally empty bar the statue and the altar.”

That was indeed true, bar the other statues. All of those were in the same white stone, men and women wearing robes in similar styles. Some were seated, others standing, some gestured, others just had their arms folded, and one, very naked and… noticeably proportioned statue was even leaning rakishly against his alcove. The degree to which they were lifelike was quite uncanny, but rather ruined by someone having gone around and smashed the heads off of every single one. The heads themselves had then been placed by the feet of the statue, their eye sockets now blank, but still giving her the lingering feeling that they were staring back at her if she looked for too long.

It was also hard not to feel like their gaze was following you a bit once you noticed them.

“The other statues are kind of creepy,” Hao Jun conceded, eyeing them.

“No argument there,” Liao Ying muttered, everyone else nodding, including her.

They poked around the room carefully for a few more minutes, but there was indeed nothing else to see. The statues had all had their names ripped off. One odd detail she did notice though was that every statue, male and female, had pointy ears. On Eastern Azure the only people who had ears like that that she knew of were the ‘Demons’ of the South- Eastern Continent and, as far as she was aware, these looked nothing like those bar that single similarity.

The rest of the complex, it had to be said, was pleasingly boring. There were some side halls that were also shrines with altars, all smashed up or emptied. A few rooms with broken beds and some other pots and stuff, and then an entrance foyer. Unfortunately, none of them seemed interested in lingering in the place, even Hao Jun, and to a lesser extent Liao Ying who she would have expected to be more interested in this place, for their own reasons. When she raised the possibility of them resting for a while, the group were non-committal at best, and in the case of the men, almost itching to leave.

“That’s not that surprising,” Lin Ling signed to her as they stood watching the others poke around the entrance. “The memories… say that this ancient being is… odd.”

“You said this place wasn’t dangerous before?” she pointed out.

“It… isn’t… not unless you did something monumentally stupid, like murder someone,” Lin Ling signed back. “However… the woman from the statue is a very old influence… very old indeed.”

She eyed Lin Ling, but the younger woman said nothing more for a moment. “It has more to do with what she represents I think – ‘Good Fortune’.”

“Good Fortune?” she frowned, folding her arms and watching the others.

“Do you feel anything… odd here?” she asked after a moment.

“Hah… no more than elsewhere,” Lin Ling muttered.

“I… It’s strange, but in this place the awareness of the repression does feel somewhat less,” she replied after a while.

“I see…” Lin Ling mused.

The exit to the whole place was hidden behind another, much smaller waterfall that fell into a totally flooded chasm. The path out was a path of stone columns hidden just below the surface of the dark water and constantly obscured by ripples from the waterfall. To find it from outside you would really have to know what you were looking for. It was a minor miracle that they got the length of the gorge without anyone actually falling in.

The other path she had marked was totally blocked off by a further waterfall that exited into a deep pool beneath a craggy overhang. She only found it because she could roughly recall the distance they had walked to get there.

If you were very brave, or knew exactly where you were going, you could probably take a running leap across the edge of the pool and crash through the waterfall to get to the stairs. Any kind of miss would see you swept into the pool and likely drowned, assuming the repression had always been there of course.

In fact, the whole complex was remarkably nondescript. Standing in the opening of the gorge, overgrown with vegetation and without any path in sight, anyone could have walked past it a thousand times and never known it was there, such were the limitations on their senses.

The question of which way to go was also somewhat moot, because the vegetation-covered cliffs above them vanished into misty rain that had started to fall while they had been traversing the waterfall and was still falling even now. With the river to their left, and the forested cliffs to the right, all they could do was gather themselves and make their way onward through the forest, blanketed in the repression.

~ Han Shu – Forest Paths ~

Following alongside Teng Chunhua at the back of the group as they threaded their way rapidly after Juni, Han Shu found he felt… uneasy.

Part of it was the climate of the jungle now, which was several times worse than the open land they had been in. Beneath the trees it was muggy and oppressive. The air hot and thick with moisture, making it difficult to breathe as the hot moisture also cloyed unpleasantly to their clothes and skin. Hotter than the temperature of his blood in fact, which made it all the worse.

“Fates, this is vile,” someone muttered from up ahead.

It was a rather accurate understatement, as far as they went. Much like the wetlands, everything here was turning towards being an irritant. The humidity sapped your energy, the greenery messed with your perception and the water… just everything was wet, and that was miserable, weighing you down and slowing your movements yet further.

Stripping off excess clothing was also inadvisable. The quantity of bugs that lurked in the forest, a great many of them more than happy to bite anything warm blooded he suspected, precluded that.

“I think if the Shadow Forest had this suppression, it would be the world’s premier forbidden zone,” Teng Chunhua signed darkly, adjusting her hat.

Given the temperature in the densest valleys there exceeded 50 degrees in the daytime, he had no intention of disagreeing there.

“There are actually water ferns here,” she added, pointing up with disgust.

He glanced up, and saw that she was right. About thirty metres above them, were the familiar vibrant green fronds of water ferns. No mist around them, but clearly they were having some kind of hidden effect, likely through the natural alignments of the forest itself.

They made their way onwards, lapsing into silence. Those ahead of them were happy to talk and complain, albeit quietly, but for them, that was…

The forest had a balance, to the noise, to the animals in it. You learned to become part of it after a while, but the wildlife in a place like this was excellent at picking out unusual and odd things. Survival here was a competition in many ways – who could see the ‘unusual’ thing that would get them first.

“There are quite a lot of spirit herbs here, in fact,” he signed. Noting a few other tree-dwelling species of orchid as they continued on.

They were spirit herbs as well, which was even odder. It implied that this repression did not impede everything, or were they related to the alignment somehow?

“On your left,” Teng Chunhua’s sign drew him way from worrying about that, and cast his eye towards the general locality of where she had just noticed.

For a moment, he wondered how Lin Ling had missed it, until his eye swept off it and he also wondered what it was he was meant to be looking at.

“What…?” he asked Teng Chunhua, wondering what it was she had been pointing at, only to find she had already made her way on.

-Wait… wait!

He fought the feeling he was missing something and cast his eye back across the surrounding and saw it, the carved marking on the rock beside the tree. Again.

“Han Shu-!” a hissed call from up ahead nearly distracted him. Rather than say anything and risk breaking his concentration he waved Teng Chunhua to come back.

“What is it?” she asked.

“You… pointed this out a moment ago,” he said carefully.

By this point the rest of the column had realised something was off and were also heading back.

“What is it?” Lin Ling frowned.

“There is a marking or something on this rock,” he grimaced and barely avoided having his gaze slide off it.

“Oh… it’s some kind of weird rune thing,” Jin Chen muttered, peering at it.

“Well what do you know… there IS.” Juni hissed. “How did we miss that?”

“Miss what?” Jin Chen asked, having just looked away.

“…”

“Wonderful, don’t tell me there’s another accursed feng shui formation out here,” Hao Jun grumbled.

“Huh,” Lin Ling narrowed her eyes, and picked her way over to it.

Ever since they had re-entered the repression, she had been getting edgier again, although nowhere near as quickly as in the proper Slaughtering Formation across the river. Not for the first time, he wished the sword would speak again – he had asked it a few times, very politely, but beyond remaining warm in his hand, it hadn’t interacted with him at all since giving him the ‘Ninefold Lotus Origin’ manual.

He had no doubts the sword spirit would likely be able to clear up a lot of things about this place.

“You know something about it?” Hao Jun asked, curious. He had gotten his own jade out and was recording the rock.

“Even the recording has…” Hao Jun muttered. “Why did I record that…”

“…”

“That’s infuriating,” Hao Jun scowled.

“Huh, how… strange,” Lin Ling muttered, kneeling down beside it.

“What is it though?” Liao Ying said, rubbing her eyes.

“A boundary marker maybe?” Lin Ling suggested. “Maybe some special guide for the place we left earlier?”

Squinting at it, the shape was indeed somewhat like a lotus, so that was not an unreasonable suggestion and he found himself nodding in agreement.

“Well, we can try to keep a look out for others,” Juni said, eyeing it dubiously and marking its location on her own scrip.

“…”

“You just deleted the mark you made a moment ago,” Lin Ling pointed out.

“How come you’re not forgetting…? What are…”

They stared at the rock in confusion, trying to process the ludicrousness of the whole thing before Lin Ling shook her head and turned away.

“We could stand here all day being confused over this. We need to find somewhere reasonably safe to hole up before nightfall,” she said a trifle too briskly.

“Yeah, this is true,” Juni agreed, trying to record the rune again only to delete it without even understanding what she was doing.

“…”

“Yes,” Juni said after a further moment of staring at the rock in ferocious confusion. “Let’s just get out of here.”

Thereafter, they just kept on following the shoreline of the river as carefully as they could. Over the course of the day, the formation did shift a bit though as Juni made some adjustments both to account for the terrain and also the oppressive nature of the jungle. Rather than walk in a pure escort formation, they swapped over to something approaching a buddy system, moving in pairs. Juni walked with Hao Jun, Teng Chunhua with Liao Ying, Lin Ling with Ruo Han and Jin Chen with him. This was as much to ensure that fatigue didn’t make people do silly things as keep an eye on the mentality of the Argent Justice group. He didn’t envy Juni though.

“How would a mortal person ever put up with this?” Jin Chen muttered in disgust, brushing yet another large spider that he had picked up from a tree they just passed under off his hat with a shudder.

“By not doing what we are doing,” he chuckled, scanning for tell-tale webs himself. Most of the spiders were venomous, although not always in the ways expected. The ones like Jin Chen had brushed off were more dangerous for the hairs on them than they were for their bite.

“Euwww-!” the angered half-sob from Liao Ying that came down the line from ahead of them made him sigh.

“Leeches,” Jin Chen grimaced.

He nodded, working hard not to let his own fatigue show. That was expected; this was a proper jungle, close to a river, where all sorts of animals would be going in and out. Leeches were the least of it in many respects. The haze of bugs, most of them out for warm blood, were much worse. The bugs and vermin were basically an honorary third in the ‘this is utterly vile’ stakes now – to the point where they actually overshadowed the lack of wind.

“Come here,” he spent a moment quickly checking Jin Chen, but found none.

Returning the favour, Jin Chen declared that he was also leech-free, mercifully, and they continued on, following after Lin Ling, who was like a drifting evil spirit at this point as she walked on beside Ruo Han. She happened to be the only one not that badly affected by the bugs, or the heat, likely due to the yang blood, but she more than made up for that by being the one worst hit by the absolute suppression of their cultivation foundations.

“Do you think we can get mortal illnesses here?” Jin Chen muttered as he eyed the vines around them, still likely thinking about leeches.

“…”

“We have medicines for that,” he pointed out – hoping that those did actually work. All of them had been taking the most basic poison purification pills with the water they were drinking and nobody had come down with any stomach illnesses or strange fevers – yet.

Largely, he suspected that was because, while they might have their foundations repressed, their innate resistance, locked within their bodies should be much higher, even at birth, than a mortal born in a lower world. They were also storing all the drinking water in Liao Ying’s storage ring at this point, and between the four of them, the hunters had an excellent grasp of the kind of survival hygiene needed for these kinds of places, even if this was quite a bit more extreme than usual.

By the time dusk was falling, however, almost four hours later, there was still no sign of the edge of the repression field. Eventually, to the relief of everyone, they found a small defensible building on the edge of the river that had probably been a loading and unloading point. The stairs to the second floor of the main building had collapsed, making it pleasingly protected from the large lizards that roamed the river bank. It also had only two windows and no access to the roof, making it less likely they would get surprise spiders as well. It was also largely vermin-free, once Lin Ling had viciously evicted one arm-length, bright blue centipede that was lurking under a broken pot from the mortal coil.

Nobody had any enthusiasm for making a fire, if it were even possible in a place as suffused in moisture as this place was where no qi-based solutions would work. So they sat in the humid, bug-infested gloom, eating some previously roasted gourds and spirit fruit along with a few bits of scavenged persis stick to keep their energy up. And recovering as much energy and hydration as they could. The worst part of the whole thing was that you couldn’t even cultivate. He found that particularly annoying, because reading through the knowledge in his mind for the Ninefold Lotus Origin manual was engrossing. Not being able to test things out or try to understand the things it was presenting was almost a form of torment in its own right.

Even sleep, had any of them been so inclined, was borderline impossible. The humidity and temperature were so oppressive that after a while he found it was like there was a psychological block put on the idea. He wasn’t the only one to suffer like that as well. Ruo Han and Liao Ying in particularly were both old enough and of a high enough realm that sleep was basically a funny thing they decided to do every now and then for the heck of it. Hao Jun as well, although he just complained, as did Jin Chen, to a lesser degree.

As such, by the time morning rolled around, he was almost ready to beg something meaningful to attack them, just so he could vent his frustrations with the whole horrible ordeal of the night. The periodic incursions of spiders and a further centipede didn’t really count. He wasn’t the only one as well – although, bar the complaining, most of them were experienced enough in these vile environments to just suck it up and accept it.

The following day was just more of the same. They trekked onwards, following the river, passing by the town on the far side and endeavouring to stick to higher ground. With that height and perspective, it became clear that even had they gotten into the town, they would have been stymied. There was a bridge across the lake, visible at times through the mists and rain but several large stretches of it had been shattered and the lake was clearly deep enough for the remains to sink without a trace.

By the time late afternoon rolled around though, it was clear to basically all of them that something was wrong though. Even the Argent Justice disciples had picked it up, made paranoid by the slaughtering formation of the previous day. The alignments in the forest were built to mess with people, and not just in terms of distance, which they were also clearly doing, given how they spent almost five hours to move around three miles of lake shore and a vegetated ridge.

This was discussed at length, until just before dusk, they were attacked by a pack of bipedal lizard-like creatures the size of a small dogs with crude feathered wings for forearms and very sharp claws and teeth. They were also viciously fast. The skirmish with them lasted a good twenty minutes and by the time they had chased them off, everyone bar Lin Ling was exhausted from the exertion.

Thereafter, they made their way on in complete silence, until about an hour after dusk they found themselves taking shelter in a rock shelter in the side of a gully that was both critter-free and high enough up to afford a good vantage point while being generally hidden and defensible against a further attack by the lizards.

Fire, which might have been a good defence against them, was again out of the question, simply because everything was sodden at this point that wasn’t coming out of Liao Ying’s storage ring – and so they endured another tedious buggy, humid night trying to find whatever equilibrium they could to recover both mental and physical energy. Nobody even had the energy to speak, or the inclination after Lin Ling pointed out that it was likely their talking that had drawn the pack of creatures in the first place.

Mostly, everyone just sat there trying to meditate and rise above the discomfort or find some inner balance, because once again, sleep seemed to be close to impossible.

“This can’t go on,” he eventually signed to Juni, who was sat next to the shelter mouth, staring up at the rain-drenched sky that was just a black void that shat water on them at this point.

“We are making progress,” she signed back.

-Are we? He resisted signing that back.

Involuntarily, his gaze found Lin Ling, who was sitting at the other end of the shelter opening, staring at the forest as if it had insulted her nine generations. That wasn’t a feeling unique to her by any stretch, he had to admit, but Lin Ling did worry him now. She seemed to have reached some kind of inner equilibrium, but look in her eyes made him long for the face that had tried to smash a pot of yang blood over his head and stab him to death. That would have been better than what he saw in her eyes when anyone could bear to meet them.

Juni clearly saw his gaze going to Lin Ling, but she just frowned and said nothing.

-I know you still hold a grudge, he sighed inwardly, but could you at least say what is going on with you two…?

-A curse on this place, he added glumly. Given the number of dead in the swamp across the river he could believe that there was one on here.

“Did you see that?” Lin Ling’s sign to Juni, so fast and obscure he nearly didn’t catch it in the dark, made him blink.

“I did,” Juni signed back.

“See what?” he signed her.

“…”

She shot him a look and then waved for him to come over.

Quietly he got up and made his way to sit beside her.

“W–”

A small hand actually covered his mouth, and he only avoided jumping at how Lin Ling had managed to get right beside him without making any sound at all in this environment through years of training.

“Don’t speak, idiot,” she signed by poking him rapidly in the side.

“Up on the heights, in the rain,” Juni’s sign was hidden by her hat.

He looked unobtrusively up and to their left, at the far side of the valley they were in, letting his vision try to adjust to the gloom a bit better. The advances his cultivation had been making with the Ninefold Lotus Origin manual before they entered this cultivation regression zone were quite a few, but it wasn’t giving him senses much above normal in this place.

It took him a few moments to spot it, lurking in a tree: a hunched-over shape, almost invisible against the gloom except for the odd distortion in the shadow of the tree against the rain and the way the tree branches didn’t move in quite the same way.

“What is it?” he signed.

“No idea, but it’s been watching us for almost an hour,” Lin Ling signed.

“One of those lizards…” he suggested.

“Could be, or a spider,” Juni signed.

“Maybe. It would be the same size as the Soul Foundation one, and I can’t sense anything in its gaze, or even find its eyes,” Lin Ling signed rapidly.

“Any sign during the day?”

“You should know that as well as us,” Lin Ling shot back.

“Not all of us can have your remarkable senses,” he pointed out.

“Not my fault,” the younger girl shrugged.

“Stop it,” Juni signed, poking them both quietly.

“Do the others know?” he added.

“Chunhua spotted it herself,” Lin Ling said with a hint of accusation.

He had to grapple with his own inner annoyance for a moment, and wisely just said nothing. She probably was right that he should have been more observant, but…

“There is something wrong with the land alignments here,” he signed eventually.

“I know,” Juni said simply. “I can guide us out, but it will likely take another day. It is… difficult.”

“The others may not keep it together for that long…” he pointed out.

“Hao Jun and Jin Chen you mean?” Lin Ling mused.

-And you? He thought inwardly.

“You’re a terrible liar; you’re not qualified to worry about this daughter,” Lin Ling signed a trifle haughtily...

-Fates, how sharp are her insti-

“Sharp enough,” Lin Ling signed and he caught the edge of a slightly twisted smile.

“…”

“Still, we should be…”

“Better than this?” Juni said, giving him a weird look.

“This environment would have killed most mortals, driven them to insanity a day ago,” Lin Ling signed. “We are still in the Slaughtering Formation.”

-Because of course we are, he sighed inwardly.

“The only place we were not in it was that ancient temple, and that was possibly more dangerous in its own way,” Lin Ling added, rather cryptically.

“Indeed, this place is probably as bad as the ‘Red Eye’,” Juni agreed.

“And that place was possibly more dangerous?”

“Not for us, but for people like Hao Jun… I… know a little bit about that person.” Lin Ling signed so only the two of them could see.

“How?”

-Oh, her blood, he recalled that she had mentioned in passing the memories before the others joined up with them.

“…”

He just nodded.

“Those… know about her?”

“Yes,” Lin Ling affirmed. “She is not a being that should be crossed. Akin to the Queen Mothers.”

“…”

Unbidden, his hands tightened around the sword.

“Ah, it left, drat,” Juni signed.

Indeed, he realised it had gone, between one sweep of branches and the next, vanishing into the gloom. He sat there, silently watching the wind and rain sweep through the forest in the end. In fact, almost all of those in the rock shelter were doing that now, because sleep or meditation was almost impossible under whatever influence was twisting things.

By the time dawn finally heralded itself, a few hours later, he was more than glad for them to make their way onwards. Juni was certainly right as well, about the forest gnawing at you just like the Red Pit. That was a place he had only been to once, and vowed to never to go back to. Of their number in the West Flower Picking pavilion, only Arai and Sana, and Ren Kalis, among the high-ranked hunters had had the right mantras or arts to be able to walk in and out of that spirit vegetation hell nurtured by the Blood Ling tree grove within the Red Eye with relative impunity. It was, he was sure, one of the reasons why Arai and Sana had risen so fast, beyond their talent and adaptability.

Their father’s connections to the Military Authority would also have helped, but the number of hunters who could work in those environments, where the normal rules of suppression didn’t play ball were all… if not prized, then certainly watched over.

-Why am I thinking about them, he sighed inwardly.

It was a stupid question really. Any angle.

Any angle, no matter how slight.

Slaughtering doesn’t mean merely killing something; it means cutting it up into tiny bits, making it suffer, scream and bleed and flail before it dies. A thing that has been slaughtered knows it has died, and died badly. That it died broken, abandoned and ruined, stripped of everything it could ever be.

Shuddering, he pushed that thought away and held the sword harder in his hand, hoping whatever strength it had given him in the depths might shine a little bit now as well-

Between one footfall and the next he nearly fell over, because the regression melted away, like mist in the midday sun. It was all he could do not to shout out. Even so, he sighed in relief.

“Nameless fates may you go be sodomised by your own grandfather,” Lin Ling hissed.

“Shouldn’t you be thanking the fates we are free of that?” Hao Jun muttered.

“They can kiss my ass,” Lin Ling sniffed, “Where were they earlier, why should I give them any credit now?”

Involuntarily all the Argent Justice troop glanced upwards, but no anger from above was forthcoming.

“We are at least free of that horrid thing,” Juni said looking around.

“Yeah… however…” Ruo Han frowned.

“What is it?” he frowned.

“My soul sense is totally sealed,” Ruo Han muttered. “And my Nascent Soul as well, it can’t leave the confines of my body at all.”

“Well, we are ____ __ ____ ____ …”

Whatever Lin Ling had been about to say was drowned out by a massive peel of thunder and a sudden redoubling of the amount of rain that was falling.

“You just had to cuss out the heavens,” Hao Jun grumbled.

~ Ha Yun – Ruins outside of Town ~

Stood on the outskirts of the small village, sheltering under a cheap paper umbrella from the mid-morning sun Ha Yun wasn’t quite sure what to think. Over the last two days they had found two complexes of tombs like the one he was currently staring down into. When you understood what you were looking for they had not been hard to find in fact. That had, in fact, been why Senior Bia wanted him – she had recalled him talking about feng shui alignments when they were making their way through the forest.

This tomb complex was built, as far as he could see, into a quarry, or maybe a mine for reddish brown stone on the eastern side of the town. It didn’t take an idiot either to match up the symbols above the doorways to those above the doorways of the buildings in the village. Each one tended to be a series of three chambers and a corridor, though the smaller ones were just a single chamber.

There were, however, two problems that were rapidly emerging, which, he had to admit, were really rather funny, if there wasn’t also fair chance that they would cause them all a lot of grief. Firstly, there were a lot of people here that wanted to find treasure. Secondly, but much more importantly, there was a total dearth of people with any actual experience in finding treasure... especially in tombs and perhaps even more importantly living to talk about it.

The result was the rather ‘awkward’ discovery by quite a few seniors over the last two days that their juniors were here to make a name for themselves, and that those cohorts did not include many people from righteous sects with a deep knowledge of the dark art of tomb clearing.

“You are certain there are in fact actual, genuine, heaven-set alignments here?” a cultivator from the Jade Gate Court was remonstrating nearby with a very harried looking disciple from the Pill Sovereign sect who had made the mistake of admitting to knowing about feng shui.

“Senior Sho, I assure you that there are absolutely alignments here designed to protect the sanctity of this place,” the disciple protested.

“But our compasses show nothing…” a diviner from the Jade Gate Court pointed out from nearby.

“That is because the alignments of the land here are…” the poor disciple, who had likely specialized in arranging gardens, drew sympathetic glances from those near him, who were also aware of this ‘problem’.

“Look,” the disciple sighed. “This place is like a specially built spirit garden. The alignments have been dissociated and refocused inwards. It’s both a defensive measure, almost certainly, and also a strategic measure to ensure that those who built this land had control over it.”

“And yet our compasses show none of this?” the diviner scowled.

“That’s because our compasses are designed to look for the larger alignment, of which this area is not a part. We showed you that basic compasses work!”

“Those things are so crude it’s an embarrassment to call them divination compasses. Frankly, those ‘beggar’s compasses’ are more likely to give bad readings than the divination compasses that were carefully built by experts,” another cultivator interjected.

“…”

He sighed, and stared at the ‘crude’ compass in his own hand before standing up and quietly making his way back towards the tent where the Shen clan had set up their own little enclave. They were the ones ‘in control’ of this, thanks to Bia Meifen and the Nine Auspicious Moons sect being the ones to ‘find’ this. The Jade Gate Court were being tolerated here, mostly, he suspected, because nobody from the Shen clan wanted the trouble it would bring back in the camp from kicking them out.

“Well?” one of the disciples sat beneath a large umbrella recording the alignments asked him, a trifle too perfunctorily.

“It’s aligned as it should be, if it’s a local tomb,” he supplied. “There is no particular evidence of accumulation that I can find, but I am not skilled in this kind of feng shui.”

“Evidently,” the disciple scowled, noting down what he had preserved on his compass.

He saluted the disciple politely and made his way back over to the tent that had been rigged up for shade between several trees. In it, a bunch of other disciples were sorting through the contents of one of the tombs that had had stuff still in it. Mostly it was pottery, a few stone chests filled with cloth and such, a few bits of jewellery and a few weapons and tools. As far as he was aware, nobody had been able to open the coffins set into the walls, nor was there much appetite for breaking them open that he had seen – not among the Shen clan group anyway.

“The metal that these are made out of is very strange,” one of the cultivators examining the artefacts was saying as he paused to look at the various blades sat on a table.

“I would love to take it out of here and see if it’s actually enchanted,” his compatriot said, picking up another blue-green coloured blade shaped like a long curved dagger.

“True, but you know that the seniors are wary of others moving to take things.”

What was interesting to him, was that none of the blades here were at all like the one he had ended up with. He had looked at most of those that came out, in passing, and most were either high quality steel, this blue-green tinted metal or had almost a purplish sheen with a hint of gold in it.

“True,” the first one sighed.

“Yun!” he turned to see a familiar figure, Deng Fei, coming over with an excited look on his face.

He waved politely and nodded to the two who were looking through the artefacts as they finally registered his presence.

“Senior Ji, Senior Quan, you are also called for…” Deng Fei said politely to the pair.

“Oh?” the one identified as Quan frowned, putting the blade back down.

“We have another tunnel; this one… well… you should come and see,” Deng Fei said, his eyes almost shining.

“Very well,” Senior Quan said.

“Does it require both of us?” Senior Ji added.

“You were both asked for,” Deng Fei said with an apologetic bow.

“You, stay here and keep an eye-” Senior Ji said to him.

“Err… Disciple Yun was also asked for…” Deng Fei said apologetically.

“…”

“Bo, Erfang, Ansung!” Senior Ji called and three figures sat beneath a nearby tree with swords all stood up and trotted over.

“Senior Ji, Senior Quan,” all the guards saluted politely.

“Watch over the tent. We are apparently needed down below.”

“Of course,” the one named as Bo bowed deeply.

Following after the two disciples of the Nine Moons sect, he fell in beside Deng Fei as they made their way down into the complex of tombs.

“Seniors! You’re here, excellent,” another rather muckier disciple, holding a spirit metal pick, trotted over.

“Ah, they finally let you hit some walls, Feng,” Senior Quan muttered.

“Please, I am the only one here qualified to even touch half this stuff,” ‘Feng’ muttered.

“So you keep reminding us – my soul weeps that your parents were tomb robbers,” Senior Ji said with a sniff.

“If my parents were not experts in antiquarian acquisition you would be sat back in the camp scratching your butt while some scum from the Jade Gate Court was lording it over this place,” ‘Feng’ snickered.

“So what is it they actually found down here, and why do you need me?” he muttered to Deng Fei.

“Ah, you’re Ha Yun, the Ha clan boy who actually seems to know something about feng shui to tell of it!” ‘Feng’ said brightly spotting him.

“Ha Yun greets Senior Feng,” he bowed politely.

“Just Brother Feng is fine,” Brother Feng waved a hand. “Please, all of you, follow me – it is better if you just appreciate what it is we found.”

Left with no other choice, he followed with the others as Feng led them down one of the rock-cut channels. Most of them had been filled over, disguising the whole place from the top. Torches had been lit to help with the gloom as they wound their way through the roughly hewn channel and into another, entirely buried court. From here Feng took them left, down another channel which was now opened up, having previously collapsed from what he could make out.

“So this channel had collapsed, and after clearing it, we found this third court,” Feng said, leading them on into a broad, square chamber that was on two levels. “We are about 30 metres down now, so this was never uncovered.”

“Yet the doors are mostly broken open,” Senior Quan noted, pausing to peer into one.

“Indeed, this place has been cleaned out, long ago, a few centuries ago at least, if the collapse was any indication. We found the ones who did it, anyway,” Feng nodded.

“You did?” he asked, surprised.

“Yep, was dead under the rocks, looked like us, probably a bit shorter from the remains of the skeleton, but built like a dock worker who practices body refinement,” Feng said with a grin. “We will show you later, if you want to see bits of bones reimagined as flat-bread.”

Without further comment, he led them across the court to a gap in the wall that had been a sealed tomb door which was now also smashed open. Behind it, however, was another tunnel, now also lit by torches.

“We would have had a horrid time trying to find this entrance had the other lot not found it first,” Feng nodded. “Alignments in the room are all broken as well, skilled work beyond most of the fools we have along with us here, given the circumstances.”

“That is not necessarily good news,” Senior Ji frowned, and he found himself nodding as well. These ruins suggested others had been here, but if this ‘Brother Feng’ was right, that meant there might still be people up top, living here.

“Depends on what your views on indigenous people are, I suspect,” Brother Feng chuckled darkly.

“And what their views on us are,” he muttered, thinking about some of the tales of war and raiding between the civilised peoples of the Blue Water province and the tribes high in the northern mountains, hiding under the shelter of the north-western and easternmost shadows of Yin Eclipse’s suppression.

“Quite,” Feng nodded, apparently having heard him.

“Anyway, people always hide their good stuff, but this…” Feng led them into another room and on through it without any preamble.

It was carved in a manner rather similar to the ruins they had passed through in the jungle… and was also, he realised, carved in a way that put him in mind of the designs on the ornamental boxes his father kept things in his personal quarters within the Ha clan, back home. The walls were floor to ceiling scenes of the land above. The sky on the roof a mix of stars that he fancied he could see constellations if he squinted. A sword or a cross, a bow, a bowl… maybe a tiger?

They went onward, through several more winding passages and two further cleared doors as Feng narrated their progress. Eventually they took a hard right and entered a small side chamber that held a series of coffins set laterally into the wall and five on the floor as raised blocks…

“As I said, people always hide their good stuff…” Feng said, leading them to the fifth one, which he realised now wasn’t a coffin, but rocks carved and hollowed out to look like one. “But this takes the votive cake.”

They walked down the stairs, led by Feng and down a further passage and into another hall. This one was…

“Wow…” Senior Quan hissed in shock.

The room was not big, maybe twenty metres across, but it was exquisitely carved, much more so than the previous ones. The main things that stood out, though, were its hexagonal shape, and the five statues. Three women and two men. Each had a small altar before them, covered in various ancient offerings. Clay figurines, bowls, a bowl with desiccated spirit herbs, animal bones, some lumps of ore and such, and stone tablets.

To his surprise, the name on the nearest statue – a naked woman, carved in flawless white stone with hair rendered in pitch black stone and her eyes set as black gemstones – rearranged itself in his mind so he could read it.

“Breaker – She who broke the wheel,” he read out loud.

“All of them are like that,” Feng nodded. “Breaker, Taker, Shaper, Changer, Maker. Whoever built this place, venerated these five like ancestors, but kept them hidden away like this.

“So this is an ancient shrine to these ancestors?” Senior Quan mused.

“Indeed,” Feng nodded waving them on through the chamber. “Looking around the town, the people here seemed to have venerated an ancestor they simply called ‘The Supreme’ or ‘The Lord’ as near as my ability to decipher ancient Easten inscribed in some of the tombs goes. Most of those in the outer halls are dedicated to the ‘Saint of the Word’, or the ‘Saint of Solace’ but this isn’t everything there is to this place.”

He led them through the chamber, skirting a font and altar in the middle of the room that still had ash in it, and through a doorway that was one half of a pair that had been unobtrusively located either side of the statue to a muscular old man with a sharp beard. The text below the statue read: ‘The Maker – He who gave names to all’, and into a second room. Here, the chamber was empty beyond a broad stone altar large enough for two people to lie on and carved walls.

On the left, was a stylized scene of a man and four women speaking to a world of animals and plants. On the right, four shadows stood among trees, monkeys and other apes, barely visible amid the swirling greenery behind them. The final wall, was what stood out, because the original carving had been stripped off and was stacked in several parts on one side. Two other disciples from the Nine Moons sect were stood before the exposed surface, copying down the writing which was covering the revealed surface.

“Ah, you’re here,” Bia Meifen said glancing in their direction.

"Senior Bai," Brother Feng saluted her formally.

-Bai? he blinked, having thought up until this point that her family name was Bia.

"Senior... Bai," he saluted her politely, echoing what Brother Feng had said, all the while still wondering why he was here.

"Ah," Bia—Bai Meifen sighed, giving him something approaching an apologetic smile, that he wasn't entirely sure how to read.

“I take it you have not succeeded in getting it open?” Brother Feng interjected, with a wry smile.

“What is there to get open, I have no intention of robbing a place like this,” Bai Meifen replied, affecting to sound scandalised.

“We can go through, I suppose,” Bai Meifen mused, walking over to the other wall and poking a few points on it.

"Sorry for the small deception,"Bai Meifen murmured to him as they waited on the faint mechanical sounds to stop. "Bia is my family name, Bai is my clan, I have been using the former up above to avoid some notice. I thought Feng might have explained on the way here."

"Ah, so it was like that," he bowed respectfully to her, because the Bai clan were... influential didn't really cut it. Almost as much as the Qing, they were a behemoth of the Nine Auspicious Moons. "Thank you for your faith in me."

"Not at all," she chuckled softly. "In any case, I apologize for dragging you down here. I have something I need of you in a bit." Taking one of the torches, she led the two seniors and Brother Feng down the opening and into the darkness.

“So what exactly is this place?” he asked Deng Fei.

“An ancestral shrine or something like it,” the other youth sighed.

“If you two are just here to talk, scram out to the other room and ensure nobody comes in here,” one of those writing the text down said.

“…”

Shaking his head, Deng Fei nodded to the door and they returned to the other room.

“It’s very different in—”

“Corridor,” one of those in the other room hissed through to them.

They made their way through to the corridor, noting that there were in fact two others already standing there unobtrusively.

“Those assholes kick you two out as well?” one of the others, carrying a sword quite visibly muttered.

“Yeah,” Deng Fei sighed.

“I guess someone does need to make sure folks don’t wander down here, but even so,” another of the guards grumbled.

“You just want to look at the tits on those statues,” his compatriot snickered.

“They are well worth looking at,” the guard who had complained said, wiggling his eyebrows.

“I am sure you can find no shortage of real ones,” his companion sniffed.

He shook his head, and turned back to Deng Fei.

“So what are they actually doing down here?”

“Exploring the ruins. There is a whole other complex beyond there; that’s why they are looking for people good with feng shui compasses: there might be other entrances,” Deng Fei muttered.

“I’d much rather be poking around the town,” he muttered.

“Me too, honestly. This place certainly had alignments in it to deter robbers according to Brother Feng.”

“Aye, it did at that – this corridor had two nasty ones in it,” the guard who had first spoken to them nodded. “I don’t advise wandering off too far down some of these side tunnels either,” he pointed behind them.

“True, we swept them earlier. Had to kill a cave spider the size of a small dog,” the other guard grumbled, pointing to a sack on the ground. “Nasty thing, moved far too fast, blended right in as well.”

He eyed the spider, but made no move to go look at it. Having seen some cave spiders in the Yin Eclipse Mountains, he knew what to expect. Deng Fei did, exclaiming at how horrid it was. In the end, they were stood for almost an hour before Bai Bia Meifen—though he was still having a little trouble thinking of her as that—Brother Feng and the others returned.

“What are we going to do about closing this up?” Senior Ji asked.

“Brother Feng?” Bai Meifen asked.

“Leave me with the guards here. We will deal with it and follow you out,” Brother Feng nodded.

“I’ll have to trouble you then,” Bai Meifen said blandly. “Ha Yun?”

She waved for him to follow, leaving Deng Fei with the others. Senior Ji and Senior Quan followed a distance after talking quietly and pouring over something.

“Sorry to drag you down here then have you stand around,” Bai Meifen said companionably.

“Not at all,” he said politely. It had been cooler certainly.

“What I want of you, is to take a small team of people and survey a few points across the farmland above,” Bai Meifen said. “I know, I could have asked you to do it without bringing you down here, but news of this will get out sooner rather than later anyway.”

“This place clearly hid an older ruin, and it appears to be much older than the town,” Bai Meifen said with a half-smile. “Much older than any of the ruins up in the forest as well according to Brother Feng.”

He nodded again, walking on in silence. In her showing him this, she was implicitly trusting him, that was clear, but it was also a way of control, he was pretty sure. If information about this got out, then the first people asked would be those like him. He was sure she was not unaware at this point either, that he had come with Din Ouyeng, for all that the latter had basically ignored him since they arrived at this camp.

-Long may that state of affairs continue, he added to himself.

It was hard to say why… but being here, the longer he spent in this place where cultivation was repressed, the more strangely distant he was starting to feel from Din Ouyeng, and Ling Luo for that matter as well. He couldn’t pin down what it was, but something in the last few days had started to niggle at him there, like an itch he couldn’t find to scratch.