Memories of the Fall

The matter of the Huang-Mo war is an interesting one, because it highlights objectively, to us scholars of the Grand Dao of Divination, the risks inherent to meddling overly with forces of Heavenly Fate. The original spark for this conflict, which went on to wrack a broad swathe of the ‘Azure Astral’, ‘Ten Thousand Stars’ and ‘August Splendour’ starfields has largely been buried by the events that followed; however, I, having peered carefully at the heavens, have determined it aligned with Red Splendour Great World, a minor influence under the protection of the Huang Heavenly Clan.

There, several juniors arrived intending to participate in an auction of rare treasures ran afoul of friends of that world’s Imperial family. Failing to recognise the devil they tempted, they were presented evidence linking one of that number to the Mo clan. Seeking to do good in the eyes of their own world’s fate, these juniors captured them and calling out ‘Evil’ on behalf of the Huang clan, seized their good fortune and executed them as sinners against the world, unaware of their origins.

When the Mo clan discovered what was done, an expedition was sent out to demand answers for this enormous slight against their clan. However, upon arriving at ‘Red Splendour’ Great World, they found the auction well underway and many grandees in attendance who were not well disposed to their clan or its wider influences. As a result the Imperial Family who found strength in the circumstances, rebuffed them and sent them away with paltry reward, mocking them as devils who wanted justice for their slaughtering ways.

Enraged, the leader of the expedition departed, but before he did, he noted that the rampant rule of the world had tainted its fate, such that its rulers had used many sideways means, using oaths incautiously and deploying various stratagems to stymie the good fortune of others that they might keep their position secure, hiding all this behind the shield of the Huang Heavens.

Upon returning, that leader disseminated widely that this world was, as such, deeply exposed to karmic backlash and that there was good fortune to be made among those who sought to quell villains in the eyes of their own heavens and that the strength of its juniors was restrained by their deep ties to their world’s fate stymieing their hopes of severing their connections to their world’s fate and ascending beyond the Ancient Immortal realm.

Soon ‘Red Splendour’ Great World, courtesy of its central position and established links to other worlds, was visited by several influences who themselves had been bottlenecked for want of suitable ties to fate at higher realms. Many slaughtered widely without care for status, hunting those who had incurred demerits to aid their own advancement. Others illicitly supported those who would rebel against those who controlled the world, providing them many opportunities. This, in a single stratagem, forced the rulers of that world into a pit, whereupon their rotten edifice collapsed as their own fortune was overturned and their rampant behaviour consigned everything they had built.

Thus did the first campaign of the Huang-Mo wars start.

Excerpt from – ‘Insanity of a Thousand Years – The First Huang-Mo Campaign.’

Authored by Kong Wei, Celestial Scholar.

~ Cang Di – Edge of the Savannah ~

Cang Di stared at the youth from the Argent Hall, who was holding what was almost certainly a key element of the very thing he had been sent into this trial to get and fought against the instinct to curse.

-Is this what teacher means when he occasionally says you must be careful divinations do not anger you to death?

Seeing it here, here in some random grassy field, made him question the geometry of chance a little bit. Having been stymied from entering the underworld by that terrible tribulation and then ended up shepherding a bunch of lost souls through a jungle, largely against his better instincts… except it had brought him, undeniably, to this point… where he was stood not five paces away from what he sought.

-Iron shoes, meet circumstances and such, he sighed inwardly.

Well, that was the lesser problem, in a way. The disciple, Hao Tai if he recalled rightly, was barely an Ancient Immortal and as a member of the Hao clan was likely fixated on it because of the strength of returned fortune that the tablet held.

It had been forged to fulfil lingering wishes and in the brief moment he had seen the talisman, he had recognised two other names on it, beyond those of Shu Liang, Mu Shansu and the two ancestral experts his teacher had mentioned, who had vanished with them into darkness.

-Ju Tianji and Ruo Tian.

Certainly, it was those two names rather than the others that Hao Tai had seen and immediately gone goggle-eyed over. Ruo Tian had been a World Venerate, an independent cultivator who had nurtured many talents during the later Shan Dynasty and whose inheritances were still widely sought after today. As for Ju Tianji, he knew that name because he was a scholar of history himself, and the Three Sages’ War was something the Shu Pavilion had been heavily involved in. Ju Tianji had been a friend… and fierce rival of another great figure of that era, Tai Weimin.

What Hao Tai certainly didn’t know, or if he did, he had bigger balls than he credited the boy with up to this point, was that the Ju Tianji he knew from the stories was just that, a story. Ju Tianji himself was a fearful expert, yes, but his ‘widely known’ humble origins were totally bogus. He was, in fact, a scion of one of the most prominent families from Turquoise Pond Supreme world, the Ju clan.

-Seizing it from him now would just be counterproductive, he sighed. You will learn the scorching potato those names on it are when you leave here, that is the easy part of this.

At that point, the Argent Hall would be unlikely to thank him for bringing allegations of ‘robbing a fated object’ and ‘disturbing the honourable dead’. Especially if Hao Tai intended to use it as he expected, to promote his own foundation to prepare for the formation of his Dao Seed. Robbing the ancestral good fortune of a bunch of old ancestors from the Shu Pavilion, Huang clan, Ha and Lu clans, especially from that generation, was to invite attention of several old freaks who did not care much for the norms of ‘juniors’ and ‘seniors’ and would only see the debasement of the legacies of brothers, sisters, mothers… fathers or children and act accordingly.

Shaking his head, he turned back to the problem at hand…

-Because I have been standing here for a full ten seconds now, staring at this youth holding out a broken sword and the Jade Gate Court standing behind him are starting to creak under the strain of whatever ‘stratagem’ they are trying to pull here.

Letting time run on, he considered it further. Based on those words the youth had spoken it was linked to Mu Shansu in some way. His own divination art, which did work here, despite the previously weird and now deeply frustrating restrictions on soul sense and a bunch of laws, told him that the two did have some tangential relationship.

It was also very broken, very plain… then again his own spear was very much on the staid side compared to the artefacts most juniors liked and he was going to carry her until the day he fell, such was the quiet strength it was a vessel for.

-And then there is this youth, who is certainly the Court’s prisoner, or maybe the Argent Hall, which makes me even less inclined to see this at face value… and they have to know it?

He was tired, subservient, bound… but even without soul sense or any of those usual tools to work with, he could see he was also defiant somehow. The aura of slaughter fairly dripped off him as well. He had recently been involved in a serious fight and the intent that came with it lingered like a ghostly pall, just as it did off the whole forest that swept down out of the broad valley.

The youth bowed slightly, offering the half of the broken sword to him, hilt perpendicular to both of them.

-So he knows how to handle swords properly…

“Shu… this villain… offers… the sword found with Sir… Mu Shansu,” the youth’s words were again tired and drained. His divination art suggested ambivalence, but again nothing untoward.

-Am I over thinking this? Have they decided to back Hao Tai and are just giving me this broken sword as a paper gift to assuage matters, trusting that I will not put a lot of pressure on Hao Tai for the talisman?

-If it was a ‘treasure’ they would have surely stripped it from him already. He considered carefully.

-His realm is basically non-existent, even if what I can just about intuit of his foundation in the current circumstances is remarkably solid.

Staring at the youth, he scrutinized what remained of his qi…

-No sense he ever had a Nascent Soul; even without soul sense there are ways to know… and while there is intent, it is unfounded… so no Golden Core either. His durability is remarkable. Body cultivator or he has an inborn physique maybe?

The key thing there though, was that this youth had no way to bind an artefact himself it seemed.

-Which doesn’t explain then, why they didn’t just take it off him, unless they just didn’t care and it’s utterly mundane? Or given how plain it is… they thought it was just a normal weapon until they let him speak up?

-Even if it is was a damaged Dao Artefact, or one that was somehow able to bind itself, of which it has none of the aura, they have talismans capable of that feat easily…

In the end, the deciding factor was his divination art. He had been practicing it since he found the spear in a ruin when he was twelve, working with his village to exploit that vestige for meagre scraps, millennia ago on the Western Shu continent, before he ever joined the Shu Pavilion or met his teacher, Ancestor Bronze. That old man, who had been his mentor for longer than the total lifetimes of any ten people here combined, had appraised the art and told him that while it was functionally plain, it was better than anything the Shu Pavilion would easily provide him, and that he should keep practicing it diligently.

The art was telling him that the sword before him was… important somehow. Those hunches, big or small, always led… somewhere… and while you had to treat matters relating to the fracture paths of cause and effect carefully…

Sometimes you just had to trust a hunch, and now… that hunch told him that the key to this was in fact the sword somehow, that everything here was tied to it.

“Thank you,” he nodded politely and took the remains of the sword carefully in his hands–

“Ha….. So that’s what it meant…” An old voice whispered in his ear…

‘He stood by the sword watching the youth converse with an old ghost in a basement...’

‘Heard the conversation… saw the youth, named Han Shu, bow three times to it, pledge to honour the old man’s last wishes.’

‘Saw Han Shu pick up the sword… nervously.’

Scenes shifted – ‘Han Shu explored the darkness, searching desperately for his friends while the sword watched and sheltered him… Han Shu entered… a village, hewn into the rock’

He stared at the pool and there as something–

[PREY]

Horrific and ancient, the lingering resentment and unquenchable fury of the words nearly made him suffer a deviation on the spot. Like barbed hooks they sank into his psyche, dragging him deeper into the moment as it somehow became more vivid.

‘He fled, running across dark water… as the world was subsumed by malevolence, rising from the deep places, chasing him across the very chasm of time itself…’

[PREY!] ... [HUNGER!] ... [SWEET!] ... [EXPANSION!]

“…To ruin.”

‘The words surged as the darkness swirled up to try to devour him, even as he fled upstairs, pursued by an ancient abomination… into a great, vaulted space…’

{I wondered what your game was, vile thing}

The words seemed to originate from beyond… everywhere… reverberated in his soul as he collapsed, caught at last by the shadows that hunted him… The blade scattered like glass, turning into a sea of silver stars that devoured….

[The HATEFUL One...]

[INEVITABLE ONE...]

[CRUEL ONE?]

[SPITEFUL ONE...]

[Another?]

The horror and abomination that rose reached for a name, even as his psyche crumbled under the sustained onslaught… It fought, even as he fought... the shared moment and the awareness of terrible gaps…

The silver stars surged and the darkness was washed back… the pattern of corruption they wrought on the world… washed away like a drawing on silver… sand?

{I am one of Mother’s first children, born of her Reason to Be.}

The words descended from eternity, soft yet terrible, a cloak of darkness devoid of time and place. Night in its purest embrace hung above, illuminated by shimmering silver stars…

[Oh.]

[Reason To Be.]

[FIRST ONE.]

[ORIGINAL]

[I...AM...PREY!?!]

Silver sand multiplied from the scattering shards of the sword, consuming the dark cavern… and the moment was somehow split; he saw the world flow forwards… while…

The old man sat there, seeming unsurprised, in the ruin of the dark hall, staring at him.

“Ha….. So that’s what it meant…”

“Um…?”

He stared dully at the old man, who wore tattered battle armour in a style he had not seen outside of the Shu Pavilion’s ancestral shrine. The damage it carried revealed several grievous wounds, including one that would have ruined his cultivation. He had white hair, a thin beard and drooping eyebrows. Two swords were scabbarded at his side.

“Junior Di greets… the Founder of the Heavenly Dawn Sect, Mu Shansu,” he bowed deeply, because based on the portrait he had seen, there was only one person this could be.

“It seems my last moments are destined to be fraught, no matter what heavens they fall in,” the old man sighed. “I am glad, that despite that thieving little bastard taking over the heavens, my descendants are still filial and the Shu Pavilion stands to uphold justice. If that old bastard Kong Din Hao is also still alive somehow, you are to tell that boy Shu Tian that his big sister, my dear beloved Liang, was betrayed by him.

“This old man fell to seal away the disaster he wrought, and managed to keep this sword out of their grasp, in death. Perhaps it would have been better that I vanished into darkness along with the evil that came. Our foolish pride certainly warranted such a penalty. All that lurks beneath Yin Eclipse is unsleeping death. A terror unbound from the Aeonspans themselves… and it gnaws on the bones of worlds far greater than our humble azure isle.”

“…”

He found he was momentarily speechless as the old man, Mu Shansu, continued to consider him pensively. “Well… I don’t have long, just an old ghost, lingering intent held here by its good grace.”

Mu Shansu sighed again, growing hazier and gesturing to the sword that Han Shu, who had slumped down comatose, was still grasping with both hands. “It seems he will not be able to honour his promise… The heavens… aii… they are cruel.”

For a moment, he was confused, then realised that perhaps he was… somehow… in this moment? If that was the case, this was… his gaze drifted to the sword. Here and now, it held a very different aura to the one he had grasped. This one felt… more weighty somehow?

“We entered here at the behest of Azure Tyrant Dun Fang… fresh seated on his throne, and he buried us here to secure his power, probably to blight Din Hao and draw the Kong Clan thoroughly to his side as much as anything, so that the Dun could be the voice of the Kong clan in this world. But do not forget. This action… it is the true worth of the Dun Dynasty. Their seat is only for themselves, and Dun Fang is not simple.”

“I will not ask you to do such a thing as seek restitution for us. To war against the Heavens is not a light thing, and this old man saw the fall of Teng first-hand and the rise of Shan Lai. I cannot curse Eastern Azure to a second such turning of the day. Instead let me ask you only this, Junior of the Shu.”

He bowed politely, and Mu Shansu, now thoroughly fuzzy, shook his head a final time.

“This old man was foolish in life; let me, my beloved and those brave souls who came here with me become the strength of common folk in death…”

A glowing, red-gold flame flickered in Mu Shansu’s eye for a brief moment. The old ghost’s form finally vanished and the spark settled down onto the pommel of the sword, where it vanished without a trace.

The moment snapped back and he suddenly had a most unsettling sense of double vision.

In one instant, he staggered back and the sword blade fell down, hitting the ground and a rock between them where it shattered like glass, bits flying haphazardly everywhere.

“Villain, you dare attack, destroying your weapon to harm Sir Cang?”

“This is showing no face to the Shu Pavilion or our Jade Gate Court!”

“Unbound by oaths? Rebelling against Heaven!”

In the second, he staggered back, sprawling, the sword handle in his hand shifting, drawing qi from his body, reforming around a spectral golden lattice that originated from that red-gold spark to form a long, broad-bladed jian-like sword in his hand that, as soon as it gained weight, shrank into a sword shaped talisman of identical design that nestled in his hand, subtly adorned with what looked remarkably like a Yantra that held the moon rune for enveloping night.

The two resolved themselves and he watched the remains of the first sword bounce in to the grass nearby as the shouts echoed through his surroundings. Mostly they were fuelled with martial intent or just anger, as nobody could so much as touch a hint of soul force. He closed his hand around the talisman, which was still there and totally unnoticed by all around him, it seemed.

Han Shu, now surrounded by four masked figures, Golden Immortals from the Jade Gate Court, gasped and stumbled, staring at him perplexed and pale-faced for a second.

“He–”

Whatever the Han Shu had been about to say, however, vanished as a palm strike from Din Ouyeng smashed into his re-restrained body, scattering his already nebulous foundation. In that instant, he got the most horrific flicker of slaughtering rage from the talisman itself. It made his skin slick and his soul, chained within his body, cower.

His qi was no longer draining into it at least, but it had taken well over two thirds of his reserves, such as he could access, he realised. A lesser cultivator might have been struck stone dead just for grabbing the original weapon he realised… purely from the qi drain.

-Is that their plan? To weaken me somehow…?

It was a tempting idea, but even the Jade Gate Court did not have that much foresight, and from what he had just seen, if they had known in the slightest what this sword… or rather the talisman that had appeared was, Han Shu would not have been holding it to give to him.

-There is such a thing as overthinking things, he complained inwardly, wiping his other hand, which shook faintly, across his mouth to check for blood,

Sitting up, he glowered at all of them.

“Who is the villain? You seek to act on my behalf?”

His martial intent, still chaotic from the connection to that moment and haunted by those screams of the unspeakable abominations, settled around everyone. Even those from ‘his’ group, shivered – he was angry enough now, not to care.

“But… Senior…” one of the juniors nearby quavered, barely managing to avoid kneeling under the fearful oppression.

“You were…”

“All I see is a broken treasure sword that scattered after trying to draw some qi to repair itself?” Zi Min, who he had some passing acquaintance with, was standing beside Din Ouyeng, blocking his path with his own weapon and looking annoyed.

Others had also been running forward, presumably believing that the Jade Gate Court had been about to attack him, such was the ‘furious’ martial intent many of their Golden Immortals had exuded with those shouts…

“Is this the capabilities of the discipline gate of the Imperial Court?” Quan Dingxiang, from the Pill Sovereign Sect, had also stepped forward, frowning.

He was clearly smarting still for his ‘group’ having been ‘left behind’ by the Jade Gate Court and the Argent Hall when they went haring off here with no warning at all. On the face of it, that alliance would likely require some repair, but there were far more members of both those other sects than there had been in their camp now collected on this hilltop. Maybe close to a hundred from the Jade Gate Court and 40 from the Argent Hall. Unfortunately, without soul sense, keeping track of them was nigh impossible, even for him.

“Screaming as if unmanned, over a broken weapon?” a woman’s voice snickered from the crowd, her comment met with nervous chuckles.

“Enough.” Kong Bo, who had been standing nearby seemingly unfazed, snapped. He felt his martial intent repelled enough to allow the others to move without ‘rudely’ breaking his own momentum.

“While I am ‘gratified’ that you are so willing to act on my behalf, step back,” he growled, picking himself up and unobtrusively stashing the talisman in his robes as he dusted himself off.

Thankfully, everyone seemed more focused on the ‘sword’ which had shattered. Two bits had actually impaled those who had originally been beside Han Shu. They were pale and shaking, looking like Yama had just crossed over their shadows… A third bit, he noted, was sitting right beside his leg.

“It is as Brother Zi said: the sword only tried to draw qi to repair itself, yet my qi was perhaps too pure for it and so it shattered instead. Just what were you expecting to have happened, that you act this way?”

-And thank you mysterious soul intent sealing field, for allowing me to obfuscate that so easily.

Reaching down, he picked up the piece of the sword blade that was beside him and considered it pensively, then glanced at the two ‘injured’ Jade Gate Court Golden Immortals. The shards of the blade had easily cut their treasured robes and stabbed one in the leg and the other in the arm. There was an awkward silence as the Jade Gate Court disciples, perhaps concerned that their ruse had been discovered, all collected themselves…

“…”

-Did they expect it to do that?

-Worry about it later, he sighed, turning his attention back to the blade. The formerly black metal was now grey and grainy.

-Almost like?

He put some pressure on it, and the blade bent with a flat ‘crack’, scattering silver sand over his hand.

-That is way too much of a coincidence.

“Everyone calm down.” Kong Bo said flatly, glaring around to instil some decorum into the chaos. “Apologies Senior Cang, the difficulty we encountered in the forest appears to have somewhat shaken my sect’s disciples… leading them to overreact.”

“…”

“Especially given the current… limitations we all seem to be experiencing?”

-Right… he said, looking at the groups arrayed around the hill. If this were weeks ago, I might buy that, were it not coming from you lot…

The gazes of quite a few other neutral parties were also clearly not buying that… although quite a few were also just pleased to see the Jade Gate Court looking ‘contrite’, he noted.

“At any rate, this is this and that is that. There is still the matter of other allegations against him,” Senior Bo went on, shaking his head. “Relating to the good name of our Jade Gate Court, and also the death of two Hao Clan juniors.”

-Ah, you cunning brat, so you did notice something untoward, he complained in his heart.

“That may be the case; however, I also have questions for him,” he pressed.

-Like what those dark abominations were that nearly clawed their way out of the darkness before that sword spent much of its energy to get rid of them.

“You wish to consult about treasures before we deal with questions of life and death?” Senior Hao snapped. “Suddenly, my impression of Sir Cang is less.”

“…”

-Shit, they had these kind of silver-tongued bastards as well, he recalled.

Hao Tai was standing right beside the largest bits of the ruined sword as well, the handle, hilt and what little remained of the blade. The jibe was almost stereotypically cheap, but the problem was, people bought that kind of rhetoric, because half of this was just playing with masks. Few people here were really ‘clued’ into the political manoeuvring, if you wanted to call it that, in the upper echelons of their generation.

To maybe 90 percent of those here, these ‘seniors’, himself included, were as much ‘symbols’ as actual people. Flags defining a faction, and those factions played up reputations and used them to promote their agendas. The Argent Hall was ‘known’, outwardly, to be one that placed a lot of emphasis on justice. Never mind that the Hao clan was, in his own teacher’s words ‘a bunch of backbiting rabid dogs gnawing over the legacy of the now long departed Dao Father the ‘Old Ghost of Hao’. Ghost Lantern Hao had had a deep relationship with Ruo Tian, if he recalled right.

Narrowing his eyes, he stared at Han Shu again. His aura was… rather inconveniently drenched in death and slaughter. “This boy… who did he kill…?”

“Two juniors of our Argent Justice sect, members of my Hao Clan, Hao Jun and Hao Fang. He has also crippled two more sect juniors,” Senior Hao replied, looking serious now. “So, while I welcome Brother Cang’s concern, this is not a matter for outsiders.”

-Who is your brother? If they were juniors from your branch of the Hao clan, his head would already be in a box and I wouldn’t be standing here talking to him, he cursed inwardly.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t something he could easily throw back in his face, especially without either ‘junior’ here on display. The saying ‘words were cheap, actions speak’ was being leveraged quite neatly here.

“You brought Qi Refinement junior brothers into this trial?” a woman from beside Fairy Dongmei asked incredulously. He glanced at her again, curious. That was the second time now, she had stuck a well-timed jab in.

“Senior Fang was a Golden Immortal…” one of the Argent Justice sect refuted.

“This Qi Refinement boy killed a Golden Immortal…?” he asked, echoing the question that was now certainly forming in everyone else’s mind. “What did he do? Anger him to death?”

“…”

There was some awkward shifting. A few more cynical eyes were now considering the ruins of the sword as well, and also looking at the talisman in Hao Tai’s arms.

“Everyone was suppressed to Golden Core outside, Sir Cang,” one of the Argent Justice disciples finally muttered, raising the obvious point at last.

“Yes… and in that horrible forest, with these bizarre anomalies that suppress our cultivation, who is to say what can happen?” another disciple added, bowing deeply. “We were led astray by these Bureau Dogs… suffered many problems because of them and were nearly ruined by their stratagem, as you are all aware; what has occurred–”

-Ah, so that explains it. This Han Shu stumbled across the Argent Justice sect or vice versa and likely there was some conflict regarding the treasure Hao Tai now holds… so this is what all this is.

This matter was clearly a bunch of noble brats coveting the worth of others and now it was getting away from them, justifying keeping a hold of Han Shu so others would not find out? That they pegged him as a ‘Bureau Dog’ had also not gone unnoticed.

-He doesn’t have any markings of the Bureau though…

He swept Han Shu quickly again…

-No storage talisman or ring… not that that is at all surprising, and no rank talisman either?

He was about to ask about that… because the memories he had experienced of Han Shu’s journey through darkness didn’t really answer that question either, when Kong Bo cut him off.

“The matter remains, he has also accused my Jade Gate Court, and the Kong clan,” Kong Bo said, cutting off those speaking. “Serious allegations, regarding our good name and status, Sir Cang.”

“Indeed, his allegations have already required Senior Din here to swear an oath to refute them!” one of the other Jade Gate Court disciples stated, sounding outraged.

“Yes, Senior Din did so…” others nodded.

“A thing he has been most reluctant to do,” the same Argent Justice disciple as before added.

“There are other ways around that,” Kong Bo sighed. “Senior Zi, please?”

“…”

He stared as Kong Bo pulled out a child artefact of the Jade Gate Court’s ‘Eight Directions Jade Gate Compass’ as Zi Min stepped backwards, letting Din Ouyeng and those still warding Han Shu with their weapons to step clear.

“Our Court is the Discipline Gate of the Dun Heavens, Upholding Honour and Righteousness before all. The allegation is that you conspired to harm Brother Kong Ji and Brother Din Yao, whereas you in turn accused them of betrayal and murder against you and your fellows, in your own words ‘for no reason’, at the start of the Yin Eclipse grand trial. Yet both have performed righteous deeds that resonate with our world, uncovering evil and righting misdeeds of our generation to the acclaim of many, whereas you are marked as a rebel against the Imperial Court, found at the scene of grave crimes, and stand accused of rebellion, treachery, murder and banditry,” one of the masked disciples announced.

There was much nodding and muttering. It was a reminder that few here were really aware of the ‘true face’ of Imperial Justice.

-Not that the Shu clan is much better… or any other here; it is just flags we wave.

“In light of the circumstances as they are, we can only rely on more… oblique means, it seems, to assuage you all and ensure our court is not held to be overreaching,” Kong Bo added, sounding resigned, which was a funny joke.

-However, if they are going to go to these lengths, either they really want to claim him… or he really did somehow manage to slap their face.

“If this Han Shu is speaking the truth, it will show it. If he is lying, or has performed grave misdeeds, it will also illuminate the nature of those deeds in the eyes of our world’s heavens,” Kong Bo finished.

Han Shu’s expression was… interesting, he noted. The youth had somehow shaken off a bit of the fugue they had had him under it seemed. Probably because it was actually harder to keep someone whose foundation was chaotically disturbed cleanly controlled with just qi. Even he would struggle in these circumstances to flawlessly puppet another just with intent and qi, and he had millennia of experience as a martial cultivator to draw on.

Controlling someone, yes… doing so in a way that didn’t make it immediately obvious to his peers… very difficult. That he had only his gut instinct to go on, looking at Han Shu, and the memories of his mannerisms he had seen… And even then it was an open-ended question made him nervous.

-Is there a Dao Immortal hidden away in their group?

That was the immediate answer…

-However, if there is a Dao Immortal there… they wouldn’t be putting on this show… so a bluff, but that still doesn’t explain the possibility of control…

In any case, Han Shu now looked deeply apprehensive…

-Why…

-Oh… they already know the answer… Interesting, does that mean he did somehow manage to do something to get his fate marked to the point where that compass would present a result that would strengthen their argument?

-Well, I can only call their bluff, he decided.

“These charges and means of judgment seem a bit drastic for a Qi Refinement kid,” he noted, “especially since you just tried to abolish his cultivation once already. Surely that alone is punishment enough? Any further questions can wait until we are not limited as we are?”

There was some muttering and nodding behind him, until two of the Argent Justice disciples dragged forward a sack of pills and talismans and displayed them all.

Looking at them, he could see chaotic spatial qi and twisting threads that might have been a mark formed with laws. Within that, was an attenuation in the qi that resonated with Han Shu, proving quite comprehensively at least two of their claims. Firstly, that these items had been in the youth’s storage ring… talisman in fact, and secondly, Han Shu was in all likelihood a member of the Hunter Bureau of a high enough standing to have a warded storage talisman.

“We recovered all these with him,” Senior Hao said simply. “There are a dozen sects here, including our own Argent Hall, the Shu Pavilion, the Thunder Gate… Pill Sovereign Sect and more.”

“…”

Surreptitiously, he could see annoyed looks now on quite a few people. Many of those who had arrive here had survived multiple attempts at others stealing their stuff, mostly for no apparent reason beyond that they could. Among 15,000 cultivators, it stood to reason there were a lot who would try to bury grudges or seek opportunity. Glancing at the Shu Pavilion pills, he had to note they all had ‘common purchase’ brands on the jars, which in fact meant they were pills sold by influences affiliated with it, rather than those usually carried by his juniors.

“As such, he was given opportunity to swear an oath before,” another of the Jade Gate Court piously intoned. “This I swear before the Eye of Heaven.”

“…”

There was quite a bit of muttering all around.

-Interesting semantics there, he noted sourly. Unfortunately it went over the heads of quite a few of those present, still focused on the pile of–

Zi Min just shook his head and chuckled. “If it is just pills from many sects… I wonder what we might see if we emptied out some of your juniors’ rings, Senior Bo, Senior Hao.”

He would not have put it quit that bluntly, but it was a fair point… In this play, half those here, if they emptied their storage talismans, would likely have awkward questions to answer.

“What exactly was that oath in relation to?” he interjected, narrowing his eyes and looking at the various ‘outraged’ disciples.

“This villain alleged that his group, who was tasked to safely guide Brother Ouyeng, Brother Ji… Fairy Luo and various juniors from the Ha clan, were in fact betrayed by Brother Ji, who he believed was called Ji Tantai. He claimed that this Ji Tantai was in fact ‘Di Ji’ and that Brother Din was working with him, that his companions were killed by this Di Ji and that another was abused,” one of the masked disciples added.

“…”

“Those are your words… Can he not speak?” Senior Zi added, glancing at him.

“Villain, repeat your allegations, so these seniors can see your falsity for themselves!” the disciple beside him and Din Ouyeng prompted.

“Din Ouyeng and his companion Ji Tantai killed my friends for no reason, whereupon Ji Tantai revealed himself as Di Ji. The others were chased hither and thither. This Di Ji… abused my friend and junior. Din Ouyeng’s accusation of rebellion is just words. He styled himself as a Din Clan junior allied with the Ha clan and revealed none of his exalted position.”

He watched as Han Shu recounted his version of events. There was still no overt evidence he was being controlled.

Din Ouyeng scowled. “Very well. ‘I was not working with a Ji Tantai, but with Brother Din Yao and Brother Kong Ji. I have no recollection of a Ji Tantai at all.’ – This I swear by the Eyes of Heavenly Fate, who watch over all truth.”

Turning his gaze back to Din Ouyeng, who was looking suitably affronted at having had to swear a ‘binding oath’… he had to acknowledge that there was no evidence it had been twisted in and of itself to his eyes, or that it was forswearing an earlier oath, although with no soul sense it was close to impossible to tell.

-A Qi Refinement youth like Han Shu has no soul sense… Would he even be aware that this seal on it is there?

If that was the case… this Han Shu would certainly need balls of Arborundum to lie in front of this many Immortals with a straight face.

-However, the way he worded it was certainly…

It appeared superficially solid, so long as you took the intent at face value, but he could see at least two issues there: ‘working with’ and ‘a Ji Tantai’. Does that mean Di Ji could have been there after all? Or someone else masquerading using the name?

“As you can see… a grave allegation that Brother Din has sworn…"

"Di Ji has no association with these matters – This I swear by the Eyes of Heavenly Fate." Din Ouyeng added flatly.

"Villain, you make Brother Din swear three oaths to refute?" one of the Jade Gate Court disciples spat while various others nodded in sympathy, murmuring about how this might ‘trouble Senior Din’s prospects’ and such.

-And of course they want to close that off fast, he sighed inwardly. Although even there is still an interesting bit of grey there in ‘these matters’.

It was annoying, because there were many aspects of this that posed problems individually. It also illuminated in not so many words why it was problematic to try to resolve matters by throwing Heavenly Oaths around like this. Wording and intention were absolutely key in heavenly oaths, especially ones regarding borderline taboo subjects like ‘Di Ji’.

-Not that this lot seem to understand that.

“…”

“Uh… seniors?” the same Argent Justice disciple as before piped up, ever respectfully, pointing at Han Shu. “Shouldn’t his cultivation be crippled?”

Considering Han Shu, he had indeed noted that his cultivation was recovering fast. His working assumption at this point was that that related to the sword, which was still seething ominously in its talisman form. Its anger wasn’t quite given to words, but it had risen from a thrum to a dull buzz now.

He eyed that youth unobtrusively as well; the observation had arrived conveniently enough to break up the flow again and draw attention of the wider audience back to Han Shu himself.

“That speaks more to Daoist Ouyeng’s incompetence than the boy.” The brown-haired woman standing beside Fairy Dongmei snickered, glancing at Din Ouyeng. “Are you not ashamed as a Golden Immortal?”

“Indeed,” he agreed with her drily, and skewered the Argent Justice youth with his gaze. Those kind of petty people annoyed him the most. They repaid every grievance tenfold, and sadly, more often than not had some way to hide from the consequences of their actions because they picked their targets well.

“His foundation is clearly that of a Physical Path Cultivator…” he went on. That was the most logical supposition really, given he was a Hunter. With his rank, cultivation and that talisman, he was certainly a herb hunter local to Blue Water province who worked mainly in the forbidden zone itself. “Even if he has a dantian, mixing the methods is not uncommon in Blue Water province. As a Dao Seeking cultivator, should you not be embarrassed for your perceptive skills, even with how things are right now?”

“Even so… they do not recover this fast…” Din Ouyeng, who was also well past the point of testing his patience, observed, pulling the still slightly twitching Han Shu more upright.

Han Shu, for his part, now looked somewhere between resigned and terrified, as he probably should.

There was some uneasy shifting around from the onlookers and a lot of shaking of heads and calculating gazes hidden behind them… Both sides were now clearly wondering if the youth had ‘more’ to cough up in the way of old treasures, he suspected.

“If it is this… our Nine Auspicious Moons has an artefact that fulfils the same purpose.” Fairy Dongmei of all people, spoke.

Her admission made him blink…

-They actually let her bring out a child artefact of the Nine Moons Auspicious Mirror? No wonder she was so confident in taking the lead in exploring that town and gathered up all the unattached experts in feng shui to do it.

It was just a pity they still had no idea what had happened on the far side of the town before this series of events distracted everyone. A bunch of junior disciples were missing without trace now, and nobody claimed to have seen anything… or if they had, they were not talking.

The flash of relief that passed across Han Shu’s face also didn’t escape his notice… nor did the fact that a few of the distant Jade Gate Court disciples were smirking, thinking their actions hidden in the gloom and lack of soul sense.

He tried to wave at Fairy Dongmei unobtrusively, suddenly wishing he was closer to her and cursing the lack of soul sense properly. Focusing his intent, he…

It melted away, leading to him to really narrow his eyes…

-Someone is quietly dispersing manifest intent as well as soul sense?

-Or is it a feature of the same thing…? Soul sense and intent have a very close relationship once you start to move away from its more manifest elements that Martial Cultivators focus on…

“You doubt the impartiality of Heaven’s judgement?” Kong Bo was asking, looking appropriately affronted.

“Certainly, you are going to great lengths to convince us that this Qi Refinement boy, with a bone age of 27, is a sinner to the extent that even a rabid dog like Di Ji was not condemned,” Zi Min murmured.

“Convenient as well,” he added, “that all this has to take place when this strange bar on Soul Sense.”

He watched the back of the Argent Hall and Jade Gate Court groups as he said that; however, this time there was no obvious reaction, even when he had put a thread of his divination intent into that to deliberately stir things?

“Let us say, that this would not be the first time your Court has… put a costume on a cat and denounced it as a wild tiger for their own benefit,” Liling Mei, the most senior member of the Dewdrop Sage Sect he had yet seen in this place, added from where she was standing beside Fairy Dongmei.

“Senior Liling,” someone uncertainly replied, and for the first time, the Argent Hall at least suddenly looked a bit uneasy.

“The Dewdrop Sage Sect has no face to talk here,” a Golden Immortal from the Jade Gate Court responded contemptuously. “Be thankful we do not arraign a villainess like you beside this wretch.”

-Which is why she is haunting Dongmei’s shadow… He sneered inwardly. That said, if you think the Dewdrop Sage Sect is good to cope, you are blinded by chaste bosoms and beautiful flowers – just as they want it.

That was another influence that had a strong link to Ruo Tian as well, courtesy of his most famous student, Hua Xiaomei, the Dewdrop Sage herself. As a result, it frequently found itself the gaze of less than scrupulous juniors… and had acquired a certain reputation for mendacious thorns among its pretty blossoms.

“Takes one to know one; few are clearer than us on how your Court works,” Fairy Liling stated, folding her arms. “If you wish to disagree, you are welcome to take it up with Lady Kai Han.”

He was about to agree, because this thread was long overdue a few direct comments about that shit stain Di Ji… when Kong Bo smoothly cut everyone else off, including his own juniors, he presumed, before they could make this come unstuck by pushing too hard.

“You are speaking of your sect’s famous Nine Moons Auspicious Mirror?”

“I have a child artefact on me,” Fairy Dongmei said, producing a pale silver mirror about the size of a plate that presented a holy aura.

He tried to catch her gaze again and quietly shook his head. At this point, he could nearly believe that this was inadvertently turning into a ploy to target that mirror. Artefacts that divined the world’s fate were… if not taboo, rather closely watched. The Jade Gate Court was notoriously proprietorial over them as well – going so far as to ruin quite well-established sects under the guise of them ‘misusing the eye of heaven’ or ‘subverting the righteous nature of the dynasty’.

She just shook her head back and ignored him as awed murmurings travelled around and people craned their heads to ‘get a look’ at such a fabled thing. Kong Bo just looked pensive, before finally nodding.

-Shit, she is going to hold a grudge isn’t she, after I refused to get involved over the tombs, advocating that they were best left alone…

Oddly, Kong Bo now also cast a surreptitious look at Han Shu, as if trying to understand something he couldn’t quite grasp before shaking his head and waving a hand to the disciples holding Han Shu.

“Cast his blood upon that mirror. Let us see if he is indeed a sinner in the eyes of the auspicious fates.”

-Yeah, this definitely feels wrong.

Ignoring propriety, he sent her a direct communication using his intent. Fairy Dongmei glanced at him.

-You cannot imply that they are targeting this mirror somehow?

-Perhaps not… just take it back however...

-Having brought it out, it will reflect badly on my sect, she snapped, as two disciples carried the mirror forward.

-This is not a thing juniors like us can meddle with. I don’t know what has you so concerned; if it is that talisman, I will help you get it back later.

[AVOIDED RIGHTEOUS DEATH!]

The words shook the fabric of the space around them as Han Shu’s hand and blood were placed upon the plate. The talisman in his pocket seethed, as if refuting the shout directly. The mirror, a priceless artefact, shattered and went dull, its central section ruined as a vast, furious strength recoiled on it directly and the world’s ‘fate’ denied the very artefact that had delivered the message. A black line snaked through it, twisting out of some other place and the ‘Fate Extinguishing Lightning’ struck almost in reverse.

Everywhere, people stumbled pale and shaking. He had the presence of mind to take a few steps backwards and ‘spit blood’ as well, to hide the fact that the talisman had just isolated him from that declaration completely.

“…”

Fairy Dongmei, who had been bound to it, coughed and staggered back as her connection to the compass was broken as it was rendered useless. The two unlucky enough to be holding it and an Argent Justice hall junior collapsed like broken puppets, the shock of the recoil rendering them unconscious.

“Truly the Bureau has widened my horizons…”

“To have committed such a crime… now I have seen a dog.”

Echoes of shock and anger came from everywhere as onlookers demanded explanations.

-Oh great, so this is what they were after, he complained in his heart. These bastards never make gambles like this unless they know the deck is stacked; that is why the whole debacle with Di Ji played out how it did.

-Never mind the fact that Han Shu called them out on that directly earlier, I should have seen this coming a mile off. They aren’t interested in him; they are just using him to hammer home that their reputation is ‘good’ and that people are using that event to slander their good name, further throwing shade on the whole thing.

“This junior can certainly provide some clarity there…” Din Ouyeng added grimly, waving a pale young woman wearing the robes of the Ling clan of all things, still affected by the proximity to the broken compass forward.

-Ah, there was a girl who was with Din Ouyeng when we first met… and that Ha clan boy… who had fallen in with Dongmei’s group. It took a moment, but he found a face to put to her.

“Sir… Din speaks truly. Without him and Sir Ji… I would have died thanks to this villain,” she exclaimed tearfully. “We trusted them to guide us, and in return, he and several others led us through a den of horrible creatures… trees that exploded and vile insect beasts… When we confronted them, they denied it, unleashed talismans and fled, tearing up the forest and disturbing all manner of horrors.. We barely escaped with our lives.”

She trailed off, looking pale and holding her stomach. “I… was… cut in two by one of their stray strikes… only saved by Senior Ji… Many juniors from the Ha clan died… this you all know having met my friend Ha Yun… It is a pity… he is not here to also see this villain brought to justice.”

“Fairy Luo is a noble daughter of the Ling clan,” Din Ouyeng added, looking around as people nodded angrily. “She is someone independent of this mess, fortunate to survive by the blessing of heaven.”

Han Shu, just looked… disbelieving now.

“Indeed,” Hao Tai added, looking ‘angry’ as well. “Murdered many juniors, including my clan members and those of several others here, coveted goods, committed treason against our Imperial Court, offended old ancestors left and right, is it any surprise that he has incurred the anger of the world itself?”

One of the other Golden Immortal Jade Gate Court disciples looked back at him, adding further fuel on their righteous fire. “What right does the Shu Pavilion to interfere in this matter at this point, I ask. That treasure can be debated, but this is clearly our internal affair. And Fairy Dongmei’s mirror confirms he has done enough to be considered a sinner before the Eyes of Fate.”

-Wait… wait wait wait…

An old warning from Teacher Bronze sizzled through his head regarding divinations. ‘Be wary of taking things that seem absolute at face value. Death in eight directions can have two meanings. Firstly that there is death in eight directions, and secondly… that all eight directions are bringing death to you’.

“What you put into a divination is what you get out…” he muttered under his breath, recalling how he had seen Han Shu lying pale and dying and holding the sword…

-Sword… Is the sword responsible for… saving him somehow…?

“I trust there are no complaints there?” Senior Hao added sourly looking around at the others.

There was a lot of shuffling and shaking of heads and nodding in agreement.

-Did this Han Shu manage to avoid…?

“Well… that seems conclusive enough,” the disciple holding Han Shu snapped.

“Wait!” he snapped, sending out his martial intent to forcibly push the guards away from Han Shu… a fraction too late.

Din Ouyeng staggered back, but the damage was already done. The Fate Locking talisman was triggered by him directly and Han Shu slumped to the ground like a broken puppet.

“BROTHER CANG!”

Kong Bo met his strike directly, deflecting most of the intent. Had he been at full strength he might have succeeded in forcing the other Ancient Immortal back, but Kong Bo was not someone from Eastern Azure; it was easy to forget that at times. He was a disciple of the Kong heavenly clan itself, his foundation built on a supreme world, not a great world.

“What is your objection?” Kong Bo snapped, blocking him from getting to Din Ouyeng and the two other Golden Immortals who were pale and shaking.

“Be wary of taking things that seem absolute at face value. Death in eight directions can have two meanings.” He raised his voice so everyone could hear. “Firstly that there is death in eight directions, and secondly… that all eight directions are bringing death to you. Divinations reflect the preconceptions we put into them, is that not right, Brother Bo?”

“You,” Kong Bo suddenly looked… annoyed at last.

-Got you, you monkey-diddling outworlder, he sneered.

“What are you saying?” Zi Min said, frowning.

“That Fairly Liling was right,” he snapped. “This is putting a costume on a cat and denouncing it as a wild tiger.”

“You are simply giving our Jade Gate Court no face now, Brother Cang,” Kong Bo said flatly.

“We humoured you. Present proof that convinces all others here…”

Looking around, he could see a lot of people still nodding, especially the women, who had been won over by Luo Ling’s testimony it seemed.

Kong Bo stepped forward until he was only a few paces away from him. “Brother Cang has a reputation as one who upholds righteousness–”

His divination art shimmered as it showed him a few different paths through this conversation. Kong Bo was untouched by it… as expected… In one, where he pushed matters, they just kept throwing ‘the face of our Jade Gate Court’ back in his face until he basically looked stupid… In another, he ended up with a huge target on his back…

“…”

“Do you not feel ashamed to so obviously speak on behalf of one who has been clearly shown as a villain? That he is not already dead is our Jade Gate Court’s lenience, but we have no further face to give you in this matter.”

Staring at Hao Tai… then at Din Ouyeng… then finally at Han Shu… he sighed deeply.

-At least they did not kill him outright… even if he has been fate locked.

His gaze turned to the others. The three who had come with Han Shu were awake now, and staring at their current circumstances like it was a dark nightmare. The Golden Core boy was missing an arm, the girl had taken a blow through her dantian that would probably see her Soul Foundation crippled without a serious treasure… while the older one, who was at Nascent Soul… just looked blankly hopeless. The auras of those from the Argent Justice Sect didn’t exactly seem like those pleased to have saved a bunch of juniors either… more like a group of people who ended up having to share the pie with the Jade Gate Court and are not sure what they got sold in return for their face.

-This is absolutely this horrid lot hiding robbery behind a righteous mask, he sighed inwardly.

-And the worst part of it is that all these idiots will just play along, because of the flags we wave.

Looking around, it was clear that far too many had willingly bought into that flag as well… and those that were more disposed to doubt… had very conveniently eaten a big loss at the hands of ‘Han Shu’ as well.

-A curse on people treating divination talismans as a black box and trusting to manuals for their compasses, he added for good measure.

“Who is righteous here, only time will judge,” he said flatly, casting a dirty look at Fairy Dongmei, who had the good grace at least to look away as she stared at the broken pieces of the child compass.

-And now, the Jade Gate Court has the best compass in town… If it wasn’t for the fact that I am sure this sword talisman is what they are really after here… somehow… I would think that alone was their gambit.

The worst part of it was, he could already see his own role in this being spun in their eyes. Cang Di, righteous Cang Di, speaking up for someone from the Hunter Pavilion…

-When all we ‘know’ is scattered rumours talking of an attack on the Imperial Court and the Duke overthrown outside by the Azure Astral Authority.

It didn’t help, that the talisman in his pocket was radiating malevolence now. It was making him feel like an evil god was standing right at his back, holding a sword against his vertebrae and wondering out loud whether or not everyone here should just… die.

-Yes… why didn’t you kill him immediately…?

“In that case, why use an expensive talisman? Why not just kill him?”

“…”

Kong Bo frowned, while Hao Tai and Din Ouyeng both blinked, as if that was not the answer they had been expecting.

The abrupt change of direction made quite a few others blink.

-I know why that is, but it will set the rest of them to wondering at least, he sneered inwardly.

It was pretty clear that this was ‘that’ Han Shu at this point. Nobody had actually spoken his name out loud among his accusers. Even when he spoke his own name it had been ‘Shu, this villain.’ His storage talisman had been smashed to smithereens and he noted the others… didn’t have their storage rings that he could see. If this was ‘that’ Han Shu, it made a lot of sense why he would have gotten rid of it… except.

Their talismans had all updated, at the same time as the momentary outside communication had arrived and the reshuffling had presented those two familiar names back at the top, but there were a bunch of problems with both listings. Starting with why they were ‘unlisted’ and why the ‘scores’ were identical. His gut instinct, from a position of somewhat greater knowledge than most here, was that both talismans had been in someone’s storage and that that person’s ‘score’ was what was cloned somehow.

The obvious answers to that were ‘Gan Renshu’ who was listed third, or ‘Gan Jiao’, listed fourth now.

The Red Sovereigns Sect had been one of those behaving most rampantly back in the forest, from what few survivors had managed to escape them. The issue there, was that they were even harder to deal with than the Jade Gate Court. The latter hid their fangs behind righteousness, but the Red Sovereigns sect had the open backing of the Huang heavenly clan and mostly their approach was—‘Don’t like it? Shut up, or we shut you up’.

Han Shu’s previous 'high score' was surely down to finding the tablet and the sword had been with him since then. That meant that ‘Han Shu’, or whoever was in possession of his talisman, had somehow found something five times as valuable in the intervening time.

“What does that have to do with anything?” Din Ouyeng asked, pushing back. “Clearly he was a member of the Hunter Bureau…”

“…”

He twisted his lip and said nothing. That was the route that led to him having an even bigger target on his back than the one called ‘I am Tian Cang Di’.

-For now it is enough that I know that poor boy is ‘that’ Han Shu. I have no intention of letting you lot know I know it… or that you certainly know it.

“And why is killing him out of the question?” Hao Tai scowled.

-Because clearly you lot want to get at whatever knowledge he has, he rolled his eyes inwardly.

“You broke his foundation, twice… now hit him with a Fate Locking talisman…” he shrugged.

“Brother Zi… my memory is getting a bit patchy in my old age it seems… Do you recall what penalty that villain Di Ji got?”

“Oh,” Zi Min snickered, “I believe he got life imprisonment in the Yerrek Pits, a sentence so light he managed to get out in a decade, rather paradoxically, with his life.”

“Well, I am sure that the conduct of the Jade Gate Court in this matter is thoroughly upstanding, Brother Bo,” he said seriously. “How about this: I, Cang Di, admit my error.”

“What are…” Kong Bo’s expression went a bit weird.

“…”

He unslung the spear from his back and levelled it at the ‘slumped’ Han Shu.

“In order to make recompense, I am left with no choice but to clear my good name, which I have besmirched it seems in the eyes of many here. I, Tian Cang Di, shall execute this boy, giving him a merciful death, and deliver his soul to the afterlife for judgement by Yama himself. Clearly, he is a sinner in the eyes of Heaven, so it is right that Heaven decides, is it not?”

“Uh…”

Hao Tai’s expression turned a very interesting shade of neutral as well. Even Din Ouyeng seemed a bit put out of kilter.

“Well? Will you give me face in this matter?” he said, stepping forward.

Four of the masked Golden Immortals flinched slightly, but made no actually move to step away from around Han Shu.

“…”

“Could it be that you suddenly doubt Fairy Dongmei’s compass?” he frowned. “You have your own such one, do you not? Perhaps a second reading might be in order after all?”

“…”

Kong Bo’s eyelid actually twitched slightly.

“This Daoist misjudged Brother Cang,” Kong Bo actually bowed his head in apology. “I must ask you to give us face.”

“And If I find myself unable to settle easily with this slight on my good name?”

He planted the spear butt in the ground again sent out his martial intent more fully. Having the talisman continue to level its killing intent down the back of his neck was a wonderful motivator towards making others feel awkward, he was realising. Kong Bo paled slightly.

“I am afraid I must insist on at least seeing your compass’s reading, to set my heart at ease,” he pressed.

“…”

He pushed back at them, again. In truth, if they called his bluff he would probably have to kill Han Shu, which given he had been fate locked might not be a good deed, depending on what had been done.

-A curse on this soul sense block, that way I could at least see how determined they are, he sighed.

On the other hand, if he got implicated that way in something shady they had done, unless they were willing to risk silencing the witness to a crime directly, when he got out of here there would be hell to pay with his Teacher.

-And if they do go down that route?

He self-examined that he had twelve reusable Dao Ascension grade talismans on him and three World Venerate grade ones, gifts from his teacher. Not to mention a small sect armoury’s worth of bound weapons and single use artefacts. It still wouldn’t be enough to kill all this lot, or he would have been tempted to do so already. However, he could take everyone below Golden Immortal down to hell.

The question was whether there really was a Dao Immortal lurking in the Jade Gate Court’s group. At least one had come in with the Red Sovereigns Sect, he was sure of that.

“I must ask Brother Cang, humbly, to give my Jade Gate Court this face,” Kong Bo actually bowed at the waist.

“I must insist,” he reiterted straightforwardly. “My good name is important. I gave you face in this judgement; now I ask you to give me face in redeeming my own part in it.”

Stepping forward, he smashed the spear straight at Han Shu’s chest, aiming for his heart. The four Golden Immortals shifted, forming a formation, and blocked the strike directly, stopping the spear, quivering, centimetres from Han Shu’s heart gate.

“You…!”

“This is the justice of the Jade Gate Court,” he sighed, withdrawing the spear. “Justice is for them, but not for others.”

He shook his head and turned to walk away, back to Fairy Dongmei. Kneeling beside her, he passed her a replenishment pill from his storage device.

“Next time, trust me when I say those bastards only play with stacked decks. I did what I could… for now.”

“…”

She stared at him dully, as he walked over to the far side of the hill and looked back at the forest. Behind him… the muttering shifted and the Jade Gate Court’s disciples began trying to undo the damage that had been done.

-At least this way, the other three will probably be left relatively unscathed, beyond what has already been done to them, he sighed.

{You are a far cannier boy than Han Shu.}

He froze as a voice slipped through his mind; it was like a big sister standing just behind him telling him he hadn’t done anything wrong -yet- but there was the chance that could change very fast.

“Sorry, senior… I couldn’t save him.”

The malevolence of the talisman twisted slightly, as if trying to find something wrong with that, but he meant it, simply and purely.

“You killed every other disciple who picked you up… didn’t you?” he asked eventually.

{Greedy hands make for greedy ends.} The talisman's voice was cruel and cold, a heavenly matriarch tired of meagre, mortal failures.

“Why… did I not die?”

He was clear now, that this talisman had to be an awakened spirit on the level of at least a high realm Dao cultivator, maybe even a Living Weapon. A spirit that powerful was not to be trifled with. While some could fight it – they had talismans to do so in their group, he was sure… if they saw it coming – an ambush attack by a thing this powerful would not be a massacre; it would be an execution.

{…}

{You have taken good care of this lost little child, buried alone in the dark for all that time.}

Its voice, grim and ethereal, appeared in his mind as a shadowy, kaleidoscopic eye and somehow drew his attention somehow to the spear in his hand.

{Also, Mu Shansu… while he did not receive my acknowledgement, he did garner my respect. He and his companions incurred karma with me. Finally, that Han Shu… he received my acknowledgement. So, I will give you some advice.}

“Thank you for the instruction senior,” his Immortal Soul bowed deeply in his Sea of Knowledge, faced with the shifting, shadow-like eye of night with its bizarre, Yantra-like pupil.

{Treat this child well. Discard her, and I will discard you.}

As far as threats went, that was quite… up front.

{Secondly, do not ever cross me, or breathe a word of what I just said. That bronze pot of a teacher won’t be able to save you. Even that old gold coin won’t be able to come for your corpse without kowtowing nine times and calling me grandmother.}

The eye closed and the ethereal, cruel voice faded away. The Yantra-like design seemed to spin through slightly too many angles and became inextricably part of his Sea of Knowledge, marking him in some way.

That, however, was not what was making him suddenly feel very small and far from home. It knew his teacher’s ‘nature’, and knew about ‘Ancestor Heaven Gold’. That was not knowledge any kind of spirit should have.

‘All that lurks beneath Yin Eclipse is unsleeping death.’

The fury from the talisman seemed to pulse slightly, as if that idea, espoused by Mu Shansu, was amusing to it.

-What the fates is in this place…

“I am sorry for not listening to you… before,” Fairy Dongmei, Qing Dongmei, had come over to stand beside him.

“It is fine,” he acknowledged, not looking at her. “You meant well… but sometimes…”

“Nothing they do is ever straight,” Qing Dongmei sneered. “Liling’s senior sister screams in her rooms every night or just sits silent by the Dewdrop Pond for months on end doing nothing but plucking flowers because of what Kong Di Ji did to her. But for my being in seclusion, perhaps it would be I and not her.”

“I should have seen it before,” he sighed. “I was foolish, forgot my own advice to you and now a Qi Refinement Junior is a living corpse.”

“The other juniors’ rings… I saw what was in them,” Dongmei said softly.

He blinked.

“You have been standing here for almost 20 minutes, brooding. The slaughtering intent around you is such that there are some juniors from the Argent Hall tripping over their own shadows,” she said blandly.

He shook his head… “Time flies when you think hard it seems… What was in their rings?”

“Well… there were only two… They had quite a few pills in them from the Shu Pavilion… and also from the Red Sovereigns Sect, White Storm Sept, the Imperial Clan and a few more besides.”

“…”

Now he turned to look at her, frowning.

“Interesting,” he agreed, because it was. “However…”

“Oh it gets more interesting,” she mused. “Most of those had spatial shatter on them as well, but no anti-theft wards, so others in the group had the same approximate distributions of pills and talismans in their rings, which were destroyed. Quite a lot showed evidence of being burned in Ghost Fire.”

“The Hao clan’s rings?” he saw immediately what she was angling at.

“Would you really have killed that boy?” she asked abruptly, also staring at the distant, ominous forest in the humid night air. “They could have made a much more convincing case for his death than circumstances provided.”

“I…”

He wanted to say ‘I don’t know,’ but in truth… he did. Had there been real evidence that he had killed Shu Pavilion juniors, he likely would have. It was a sobering thought. There should be precious few ‘Shu Pavilion’ juniors in this test, although some would likely have come from the other influences associated with the Shu Heavenly clan. That some of them were dead was unfortunate and something to keep in mind in future dealings in this place.

-The last thing I need right now is to be led to kill innocents as a borrowed blade.

“They wanted him ‘condemned’, but not ‘dead’…” Qing Dongmei scowled. “And now my teacher’s compass is staved as well…”

“It is only a child compass; there are quite a few. Rather than that,” he frowned, “I am more interested in why they didn’t just do the divination a third time. This clearly paints a picture with a few too many corners at present.”

“She will still blame me for it,” Qing Dongmei muttered, twisting her hair between her hands.

“As she should,” he said blandly. “That Kong Bo scammed you like a master.”

“…What do you mean a third time?” she caught up with the conversation.

“You think they were willing to do a divination like that without already knowing the answer?” he said drily. “Either they have a more robust compass than it appears, not a copy like yours… or they already lost a compass and were opportunistically seeking to spread the pain.”

“So, they knew he would be declared as someone who had avoided death by sideways means and offended heaven as a result?” she furrowed her brown.

“Remember that warning I tossed out, rather futilely it seems in all honesty,” he replied, giving her a sideways look.

“Oh… I heard my teacher say similar on occasion… usually when cursing things.”

-Why are you even using that artefact if you don’t know the truth of that! He wanted to grab her and shake her suddenly, but resisted. It had been a stressful time for everyone as it was.

“Let me put this a different way. You scoured our group high and low… How many experts in feng shui did you find who could make a beggar’s compass, let alone read one made by someone else?”

“…”

Qing Dongmei didn’t look at him and instead stared at the distant jungle, which was still burning in a few places. Stragglers from what he could only assume were the Argent Hall and Jade Gate Court teleportation here earlier were still mopping themselves up, regrouping and arriving here. Two more distant teleportations had landed as well.

-Clearly there is no issue coming here.

“News travels fast…” Qing Dongmei noted, as a third teleportation landed on the next hill over, a dozen more cultivators arriving.

“It has the advantage of not being where we were,” he pointed out.

“True... especially after half those investigating vanished in an afternoon and those who extricated themselves have nothing meaningful to say,” Qing Dongmei spat on the ground in disgust.

It was a very ‘un-fairy-like’ action, but he couldn’t blame her, ‘her camp’ had lost nearly all of those who went out there earlier today. Several heavily armed teams were out investigating and now that message talismans suddenly worked again, splitting up was less problematic. The ‘restriction’ over the town had also collapsed for good a few hours ago, just before nightfall in fact.

“Anyway… among those over Immortal realm, in maybe the 200 we have milling around here, probably ten can find the back end of a divination talisman and a further three could actually make one,” he pointed out. "And of those left, who have acknowledged skill, how many are grasped by or aligned to the Court?"

“Your point is made,” she sighed.

“The basic root of the problem, though, is that even there, they don’t know about the big problems, because most compasses are built to… circumvent them in some way. While there is good money to be made in forcing the readings of everyone within a mile of ‘site a’ as we shall call it, if someone there draws ‘death in eight directions’, people get understandably shirty about that happening every time little princess Miao divines what happened to her pet cat that fell in the fish pond using daddy’s special compass that always finds people.”

“…”

Qing Dongmei had the good grace to look a trifle awkward there. His analogy had not actually represented her, and nobody else’s compass had broken, but death alignments and the like were notoriously contagious and it was entirely possible to create cursed items if you got too many in a location in rapid succession. Feng shui had some surprisingly pointy fangs like that.

“In short, most compasses are designed not to break themselves out of hand when they get ‘board’ or ‘chart’ toppling results and most 'experts' among the younger generation are just very good at reading compasses others have made. However, your compass doesn’t have those safeguards… because frankly you don’t do divinations relating that deeply to worldly fate before you undergo your Dao Immortal Tribulation unless you’re willing to wear your brown pants come that big day.”

“…”

Qing Dongmei looked sideways at him.

“I did say it would be better to just wait for soul sense to be useable,” he pointed out.

“But everyone loves a big compass…” Dongmei sighed.

“Everyone does love a big compass,” he agreed, putting as much sarcasm into that as he could.

“But that’s not what is important. Ignorance is what is important. Ignorance and ‘what people know’. The key thing is, those divinations are an absolute bitch. They give you a ‘thing’ and ask you to understand it holistically. ‘Death in Eight Directions’ is the famous divination manual example – it can either mean no matter which way you go, you will meet death, that you are in effect in a certain death layout. Or… death could come at you from any direction and it’s entirely up to you to work out the details… Or it could mean you are death, and will go where you will.”

“Oh…” she stared at him dully.

“So, that boy getting ‘Avoided Righteous Death’, has to be viewed through the prism of ‘fate’ because that was what your compass is attuned to. Absolutely, he did something to piss off the worldly fates enough that they held a grudge over him cheating death, but the ‘how’ of it is entirely up in the air. That everyone immediately concluded ‘Ohhh, villain, must condemn’, is more down to the context and everyone being thoroughly wrapped up in their rhetoric and the ‘flags’ of righteousness we have all been waving like maniacs since we got in here and nobody knowing a fate-thrashed thing about that kind of divination. You can do a lot with Intent to people who are on the edge and looking for things to blame their circumstances on.”

“You’re saying they duped us…”

“I am saying enough people out there hate the Azure Astral Authority enough that it doesn’t matter,” he sighed, suddenly feeling as old as his years. “They want something to justify their ‘misfortune’ up to this point, and the Jade Gate Court just fed them one unfortunate victim on circumstantial evidence. The fact that that boy found an actual treasure is actually what had kept him alive, as I demonstrated in not so many words earlier.”

“Yes… you made quite an impression,” Qing Dongmei muttered.

“We arrived faster than they expected probably, so to avoid a lot of people asking awkward questions some of them thought remarkably fast on their feet.” He sighed again, more deeply this time. “In any case, it is less important to them that we know something shady went down and more that they carry the will of the majority… We know the true faces of most of those here. None of us are good people… not if you have survived this world of ours for any length of time.”

“I… that is true,” Qing Dongmei nodded. “They are handing back all the pills and talismans to different sects here, which given how everyone is still having trouble adjusting to this… That boy and the two other rings that broke had a small talisman shop and a pill warehouse full of mortal step pills, near enough.”

“All useless to most of them, but to the smaller groups, resources speak,” he agreed.

“Here is ‘your’ bit… They actually gave you some extra, because there is nobody else from the Shu Pavilion here,” she chuckled darkly.

He stared at the bag in her hand and shook his head. “You have some juniors who likely need them.”

~ Kun Juni – Devastated Valley ~

Cold darkness consumed her, crushing her body, blotting out her consciousness, worming into her mind, drawing out cold, dark feelings that…

“Aaaaaaahgggg –gluub?!?”

Her scream of rage and rejection ended up in choked spluttering as icy water flooded into her lungs and she realised she was deep underwater, being held down by… Lin Ling?

“Stop thrashing,” a small hand signed, right in front of her face, as she realised they were both lying within a strange symbol on a rock in a deep pool, Lin Ling holding onto her back, her legs threaded through hers. “It still isn’t safe outside.”

“What… happened?” she managed to move her hand and sign back.

“We ran into an iron wall is what happened, or it ran into us; I can’t decide which yet,” Lin Ling signed.

“That old… Ur’Vash?” she focused dimly on the events before what she was certain had been a soul attack…

“Not really an Ur’Vash, just an old bastard pretending to be one,” Lin Ling’s hand added some interesting invective to it.

“Not?” she was confused now.

“Well… kind of, the memories are… confused about it, or maybe ambiguous is a better word, but it should not be an Ur’Vash, not wholly, but a descendant of another old race, a Jotnar,” Lin Ling had to resort to turning her around so they were face to face so she could read her lips because the name didn’t exist as a sign she could easily convey.

“Oh…” she signed back.

“What is this… Jotnar?” she mouthed back.

“A kind of demon, near enough,” Lin Ling sighed.

“SO… it’s just another obnoxious inhabitant of this land that has it in for us,” she concluded.

“Well, yes,” Lin Ling agreed a bit lamely.

“In any case, there is a colossal battle raging overhead. We are hiding at the bottom of this plunge pool.”

“Because of this Jotnar?” she asked.

“That… and another bothersome thing came back, the owner of that black spear.”

“The… figure on the black spider?” she recalled the scene dimly from the battle.

“Yes, that one… although it appears to have gone again now,” Lin Ling nodded grimly. “I cannot fight it unless I thoroughly hand over control to the memories. If I do that again so soon, I will probably succumb to them.”

“So we hide,” she understood.

“So we hide.” Lin Ling sighed.

Turning her attention to the shimmering rune of blood they were lying on, she found it somewhat similar to the one in her mind’s eye that came with the strange mnemonic for the ‘One with what is’ art Lin Ling had imparted.

“This is… the same as your art?” she asked after a moment.

“It is a stronger variant. It requires the blood, but now it is anchored here, it draws on the ‘Yang’ of the world, isolating us in the shadow where yin and yang collide,” Lin Ling explained. “Functionally, we are hidden from the eyes of the world; only something stronger than the blood can see through it.”

“Seems… inordinately useful,” she acknowledged.

“It only works on soul sense,” Lin Ling signed back. “If we get spotted by eye, we are still done for and it only lasts as long as I have blood to maintain it. Our realms are not high enough.”

Looking down, she spotted a jar, wedged into the crack in the rocks, blood flowing out of it like a mist that was then drawn into the symbol they were drifting in. They were, in fact, hidden in a nebulous cloud of the blood anchored in the dark water as it turned out, just above this rock, and in a larger crevice in the floor of the pool.

Left with nothing to do, she drifted there in the darkness, embracing Lin Ling. Both of them were stopping their hearts with their mantras, their qi turned inwards, and with the mnemonic shimmering in her mind, she felt like she was blending away into emptiness. The stillness, though, left her feeling oddly empty, like she had lost something she couldn’t quite remember having.

The most likely culprit seemed to be the crippling soul attacks. Her bones were cold and her foundation somewhat…

She turned her gaze inwards and to her mild disbelief found her cultivation to be largely untroubled by her current circumstances, beyond her meridians being a bit jarred and her qi sluggish to the point of stagnation thanks to how tight a rein she was keeping on it.

-Not the soul attack then…

…

…

How long they lay like that, silent, amid the swirling waters with only the darkness and the dull roar of the shifting water above for company, she had no idea, until at last Lin Ling stirred and signed that it was somewhat safe.

Rather than crawl out of the river, Ling instead led her to swim along the bottom of the river. It was not what she could call a pleasant experience. The shockwaves of whatever had happened had killed most of the occupants. Those that survived were mostly hiding in the depths, beneath rocks, or pretending to be dead. None of those that survived were at all inclined to move on them either.

Eventually, though, their progress was stymied by another waterfall. Rather than go over it, they slid down the rocks, staying as hidden as they could, and in the process she got a chance to see the chaos that had unfolded.

Behind them, the lights of war flickered and flared. Everywhere drums pounded distantly. The rain had stopped, but the night mist still swirled everywhere, fogging everything in an eerie afterglow. Ahead of them, a huge swathe of the forest was burning. The greenish fire bled into the night air somehow, making her–

The unsettling feeling, which had surged before, seemed to return, nearly making her slip and loose her footing. Lin Ling’s hand grabbed her arm and she was left dangling for a moment before the younger girl hauled her up and she could grasp the rocks again.

“Sorry…” she signed. “Not… sure what happened there.”

The unsettling sense of something having been torn away or being missing that she couldn’t pinpoint clearly before had slid back into frame again. Lin Ling just gave her a long look in the darkness. The other girl’s eyes had acquired a sort of inner glow she had noticed some time ago. It didn’t radiate outwards, but it meant that they always seemed to be visible, irrespective of the light level.

She took another step down and found that ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ was drawing her… peculiarly as they made their way down to the edge of the ‘lake’. To call it a lake was a bit misleading really. It was a swamp that extended beneath the trees, fed by the waters from the falls they had just come over. The land rose again a bit in the distance… amid the flickering embers of green fire in the middle distance the gap in the tree line, was very obvious.

“Ah, that seems to be where we are going?” she pointed it out to Lin Ling.

“Hmm… yes, that does seem to have been impressively exploded,” the younger girl agreed. “However, the memories are wary of the green fire, at least on our behalf.”

“The… sorcerers you called them, the Ur’Vash wielding it, probably did it,” she suggested.

“Maybe,” Lin Ling agreed, slipping down into the water, which went up almost to her chest.

She pushed a bit of qi into her feet and tried to…

“Don’t waste effort, the ambient alignments and qi here are so chaotic it is a wonder we are not falling into the air,” Lin Ling sighed.

Nodding, she slipped down into the water beside her and they started to make their way onwards again.

The ridge, which was what it turned out to be, was a devastated mess. A huge tree, something like a broad leafed Koppi tree perhaps, had been annihilated and in the process turned a hundred metres around it into a wood chunk strewn mess.

“Huh…” Lin Ling frowned, stopping as they picked their way through the mess.

“What is it?” she asked, turning back to see Lin Ling holding her storage talisman in her hand pensively. A moment later, she pulled out ‘Arai’s old talisman and considered it as well.

Walking back over, she saw the faintly wavering alert formation shimmering on both of them.

“Anti-theft ward?” she blinked.

“Someone busted a Hunter Bureau storage jade within half a mile of here,” Lin Ling agreed.

She pulled her own storage talisman out of her robes and sighed.

“What’s wrong?” Lin Ling asked.

“Oh… I turned that off on mine, was just cursing my own naiveté,” she shook her head, sending qi into that rune.

Her own jade also immediately picked up the signature.

“Well, that will make this quicker,” Lin Ling noted. “You go that way, I’ll go this side, don’t leave line of sight?”

She nodded and made her way off to the right, picking her way through the ruins. There were a lot of dead Ur’Vash scattered around, she began to notice. Many were badly burnt and appeared to have died to fire rather than immediate battle trauma.

After some hundred metres, they found themselves beyond the periphery of that broken tree and staring down slope at a second distant broken tree about half that distance again and finally out of the mists. The gap was clearly visible amid the canopy from their vantage point, even had it not been highlighted for being not quite the epicentre of the remnants of the green fire.

Looking up, she saw the sky was dark and nearly starless, lit only by a full moon on the distant horizon that felt like a deep, glaring eye… It was the most oppressive she had ever seen it, she realised, since arriving here. The clouds were not there, but the stars that had been there seemed dim and… sad somehow? It wasn’t just a localised effect either, looking from horizon to horizon; the night seemed… cruel somehow.

“What… is going on with the sky?” she asked Lin Ling quietly.

“You ask me… but who do I…”

“…”

Lin Ling trailed off as she shot her a sideways look.

“Look, the memories are as bugged as you and I… and they won’t talk so who do I ask? What’s going on with the sky, Juni?” Lin Ling snarked back at her.

“Sorry…” she sighed… “It’s just… kinda… It feels like it could rain at any point… and my divination art is going…”

She shuddered, because the longer she stared at the distant, dim stars, the more the divination art almost seemed to be bowing down somehow, as if it was subservient to whatever was responsible for this unnerving change to the night sky. It did also feel like it was about to rain, which was weird because the humidity was in fact quite a bit less than usual.

“Anyway… the signature is down there… and I can’t see a thing moving. The soul sense blocking wards are still here as well,” Lin Ling observed.

On the way down the slope, she found many, many more dead Ur’Vash. The means of their death was also bizarre. They had clearly died to fire… but her divination art as she moved through the landscape was telling her that this ground was something close to cursed.

Abruptly, she stopped and, taking a few steps backwards, scrambled over a nearby rock to see what she had just caught a glimpse of out of the corner of her eye more clearly. Picking up the white object, it turned out to be half a mask, stained golden red with blood. Wiping off the worst of the mud and the blood, she found half an imperial seal on it that should be ‘Gold’. The mask itself was plain, and oddly familiar, made of something close to ceramic rather than wood or metal. The cut was clean and crisp but, looking around, beyond some more golden-red blood splattered on the shrubbery, there was no sign of the wearer.

“What is it?” Lin Ling had noted her distraction and come over to join her.

Wordlessly she handed the mask to Lin Ling, who turned it over in her hands.

“This belongs to a cultivator,” she said eventually. “Seems familiar, but masks are not uncommon. Made of white-plum jade… so not cheap either.”

“Ah…” she placed the material now. That was not cheap, Lin Ling was right…

-And strong enough to resist blows from a Chosen Immortal’s weapon, maybe even a Golden Immortal.

Quashing the unease in her heart, she looked around again. “Let’s find this broken talisman…”

Now, they didn’t split up, and used all their stealth to advance; those hideously huge scores on the two talismans and the recent presence of cultivators here was giving her all kinds of worrying premonitions. If Din Ouyeng had a locus that could pinpoint…

“Jade Gate Court,” she signed, finally placing the masks in a distant memory of a rather fractious meeting she had ‘sat in on’ with her father, serving tea for several very arrogant nobles from over the ocean who had wanted to negotiate a transport contract.

Lin Ling just ground her teeth, which seemed appropriate, really.

“Here,” Lin Ling finally held up her hand and pointed.

They had arrived at the smashed tree. The clearing was devastated, all the vegetation crumbling away in a manner not at all unlike the talisman they had used before. Peering at their surroundings, she saw no signs of life… just a lot of dead Ur’Vash, mainly charred to near skeletons. There had been some kind of disruption as well.

“Look at that,” she pointed to the nearest severed tree.

“Huh,” Lin Ling nodded.

Looking around, she saw others. In fact every tree within a hundred metres appeared to have been cut off about a metre off the trunk – and there were no stumps anywhere. Reaching down, she lifted up a handful of the glassy soil, crumbling it between her fingers.

“Arid,” she judged at last.

“It’s not the same soil as the forest,” Lin Ling agreed, also squatting down to peer at something. “This grass isn’t right either… It’s intensely fire retardant; the memories say it should be from… well, the plains out beyond the edge of the forest somewhere that we could see earlier.

“Teleportation?” she concluded.

“Or ‘Land Contraction’,” Lin Ling nodded, standing.

“There are missing bodies,” the younger girl observed after a moment, hopping up on a fallen tree.

“There are?”

“Well... at least one,” Lin Ling stated.

Clambering up, she saw what Lin Ling meant. Everywhere there were dead Ur’Vash, charred within an inch of material integrity, but still there. The epicentre of the blast that had probably killed them though, was a glassy crater that held the shadow of a corpse maybe three metres tall. Nearby she spotted a centipede claw, embedded in the dirt.

“One of the two Ur’Vash we saw had two centipede limbs as weapons,” she said softly.

“They did,” Lin Ling said grimly… hopping down and walking slowly towards that spot, peering this way and that at the ground.

After a few paces she knelt down again and picked up something, holding it up.

“A broken storage ring?” she said, scrambling over.

“Yes… it is Hao Jun’s,” Lin Ling concluded.

Looking around she saw what could have been a second smaller epicentre… split by a fallen tree so she had missed it. Lin Ling was still poking around where the first one was, so she walked over towards it… watching carefully what the ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ told her about her surroundings.

The qi was turbulent, but through it the art was still giving her what she could only call… bad vibes.

“Juni…”

Lin Ling’s weird tone of voice brought her back to the moment and she turned to find the other girl standing a dozen metres away… staring at something on the ground. Making her way over, she found Lin Ling considering a broken discarded pot. In her hands were two twisted, snapped pieces of dull blue-green Core Jade in the form of a twisting oval. The design was familiar to her as Han Shu’s talisman.

“…”

Looking around, she saw no sign of Han Shu… and a… There were footprints fused in the nearby glass. Looking around, she saw other signs of people. A quick count gave her over a dozen footprints, even as her stomach sank yet further.

“Cultivators came here… Did they interfere with the group pursuing Han Shu, Ruo Han and the rest?” she spoke the words, but her intent, bleeding out into the world around her, gave them an edge as, involuntarily, some of the manifest darkness in her heart slid out along with it, before she could pull it back and package it up tightly in its little box.

“…”

Lin Ling said nothing, just began looking through the surroundings. After five minutes, they had a small pile of scattered artefacts: some jars, nutrition pills, a few things like luss cloth that had been discarded and several ‘tool’ talismans like surface anchors, a set designed to purify water… even a few proper jars of pills marked as common purchase from West Flower Picking town.

“Someone sorted through this, very quickly took everything they thought was of value after it smashed and then left,” she judged critically.

“And whoever did it was not a herb hunter. They left most of the things that we scavenge to death… luss cloth, the unaligned clay pots… these anchor talismans and such,” Lin Ling nodded, her face strangely twisted in the flickering firelight.

Looking around again, she pushed a quasi-question to the ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ and after a few paces back and forth found faint nudge instinctually pulling her beyond the clearing. Following it, with Lin Ling behind her, she found a tree that had been cut in two.

Nearby was blood and a lot of scarring on a rock. Ragged tatters of dark green cloth nearby and then a stray boot finally led her to half a head lying in the dirt. Reaching down, she tried to pick it up by the hair and grunted, because it was immovable.

“Immortal’s corpse,” Lin Ling noted, arriving beside her.

“And Ur’Vash capable of using arrows that can explode an Immortal into a corpse like this,” she observed. “No wonder the soul sense ward is back.”

They followed the trail of devastation all the way to the forest edge. Here, the fire was omnipresent, but had mostly burned itself out on the ground, lingering only in the tree trunks which were smouldering away like candles. Here and there, there were traces of fighting. They found one more dead Immortal, just a pair of legs and a few scraps of a green robe and no sign of a storage ring.

“So at least three Jade Gate Court died here,” she noted, sitting down on a tree trunk and looking out over the transition zone between the jungle and the rolling grassland.

“And two from a sect with silver robes with brown trim,” Lin Ling added. “I found another head and a bit of a robe over that way, and a second body that got hit by a ‘blue, red and yellow special’ as I am going to start calling them.”

“Ah, the ‘This is blue to me, makes red unlucky and explodes on impact making the opponent very orange’?” she chuckled darkly.

“That’s the one,” Lin Ling nodded. “I am pretty sure they force some kind of cultivation deviation that makes the target lose control of their qi and thus self-detonate.”

“So… what now?” she sighed.

“The cultivators fled out there, at great speed… and there are several large shifts of disturbed qi out there, on the nearest hilltops,” Lin Ling mused.

“Big teleports?” she suggested.

“Or barriers, but I don’t see a lot of evidence of fighting out here, just people running away in a hurry,” Lin Ling frowned.

“See… the thing that doesn’t really add up here,” she said eventually, “is that Han Shu didn’t have a talisman.”

“Teng Chunhua had hers…” Lin Ling pointed out.

“But her score is… normal, or so she said,” she refuted. “Even the other Argent Justice disciples… most of them were barely pushing 100k and that was after we started harvesting plants for Jin Chen to make crude pills out of on occasion…”

“And you and I kept most of the valuable ones because we were doing the foraging while Han Shu watched the group,” Lin Ling nodded.

“The first teleport was right onto the battlefield there,” Lin Ling mused… “and I felt a familiar Intent there.”

“You did?” she asked. “Why didn’t you say that before?”

“Well, it was for that Jotnar…” Lin Ling sighed. “Hardly relevant to this, it seems.”

“Fair enough,” she agreed. “So… they managed to call reinforcements? But then why didn’t they wait?”

“…”

“I know you are trying to be optimistic and all… but really there is only one conclusion I am drawing here,” Lin Ling muttered, sounding a bit…

“…”

She quashed that thought and shook her head and, keeping low, began to make her way through the brush, following one of the trails. It soon joined others, and by the time they reached the vicinity of the first twisting distortion that ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ drew her to faintly she was sure she was looking at maybe thirty cultivators milling around.

By the second one, that number had risen to maybe 90 and eventually, on the hill crest itself, about a mile away from the forest and right on the edge of the transition zone, they found themselves standing looking at a vast area of trampled and flattened grass.

“That’s… a lot of cultivators,” she observed eventually as they squatted down on the edge of some rocks, looking out over it.

“Over 300,” Lin Ling agreed, her eyes tracking back and forth.

“How do you arrive at that?” she queried.

“Groups, clustering and the memories are able to help me isolate at least that many individual signatures. Soul sense is suppressed so everyone was using qi and intent to supplement it I guess. Effective but unsubtle, to the point where even I can unpick it. Most of those here are higher realm though, so the nuance is like watching ghosts. As such, there might be more; I just can’t feel them because of their qi control.”

“So there are 300 odd cultivators here with poor enough qi control that your senses can differentiate them… and an unknown number of others scattered through it?” she sighed.

“Yes… probably no more than 30 or 40 over. At a max I’d guess 350 cultivators here.”

“That’s… a small sect,” she groaned.

“Yes… but…” Lin Ling trailed off, her eyes narrowing to slits. Suddenly she started to trot through, across the grass, before stopping near one of the most obvious distortions, so vivid you could feel it even without special means so long as your qi senses were at all turned on.

“What is it?” she followed after her and found the other girl crouched down, trembling.

As she approached, ‘Heart Shifting steps’ started to give her all sorts of bad vibes. They were the kind of vibes she might have expected for stepping into a cursed layout… except there was little of anything here–

The sense clawed at her, making her feel simultaneously like she had been hit in the head with a rock… and was also having horrible, greedy hands slide all over her body. For a brief moment she had a flashback to … grasping hands, a sinister, hungry smile… her fate no longer in her own… lost in the darkness… hunger.

“What…?” She managed to rasp out, her head still spinning.

She was about to castigate her, even as she struggled to reject the memory of her near brush with a woman’s darkest misfortune, when Lin Ling stood and she saw what was in Lin Ling’s hand – the rest of Han Shu’s storage talisman?

-But…?

Looking around… Heart Shifting Steps recoiled again as she tried to move. All sorts of bad intuitions came from the sensations it was presenting her.

-What you put in reflects what you get out…

She had to force that thought around in her head, almost like a second mantra, as her mind raced.

Distracted as she was, her vision abruptly picked out another unnatural shape nearby, before she was even aware of what she should be focused on. Reaching down, she picked up the smashed half of a small clay pot. All its contents were missing. Turning it over in her hands, she felt the intent cloaking it instil into her mind a few fragmentary scenes.

‘A hand grasping a talisman, shattering it, scattering the contents… broken connection… blurred forms, green and silver, rain…’ It fizzled out, depleted.

Her own hands shook, letting the pot fall to the ground, suppressed fury creeping out. Looking around, there were some other bits and pieces scattered here and there, trampled into the mud: some luss cloth fabric that had covered a jar, a destroyed talisman nobody had cared for…

“So they were ambushed by other cultivators,” she muttered, the fury seeping out of her own voice making the grass around her ripple and twist as her mantra involuntarily manifested ‘Bestowal’ again.

Lin Ling didn’t reply… She was staring off across the distant grassland… as if looking for something?

Her friend’s abilities were getting stranger and stranger by the hour, ever since she had overcome the ‘blood rage’. Now, the ghostly hexagonal scale-like patterns were drifting under her friend’s skin again, the qi not quite flowing out around her to form that bestial cloak, but it was something close.

-Hopefully she can keep control… Rage is the trigger it seems…

“Ling?” she called over, suppressing the knot of rage that had snapped into focus as soon as her hopes that maybe the group was ‘okay’ were broken by the unsettling and malign feeling that ‘Heart Shifting Steps’ had just given her and the scattered mix of artefacts on display on the ground.

Lin Ling turned to look at her with eyes that burned with an inner, bottomless fury for a few seconds before it dwindled away, leaving only the lightless glimmer. Looking around, she took in the rest of the shattered pots and oddments. Trying to store one got a flat rejection, all but confirming for her that the talisman had been ‘improperly broken’.

Every anti-theft ward on it had triggered, near enough. It was easy to forget, amid the complaining about them not storing things with Qi Foundations, that the Bureau’s storage talismans were exceptional artefacts, tooled over millennia to fulfil a very straight forward purpose – store and transport the majority of things that came off the Yin Eclipse mountain range safely and securely.

Securely was key here, because while all the talismans were rather basic in appearance and largely only durable enough to survive an Immortal’s direct attack, that was almost bait in a way. It was easy to break them because it invited people to break them. The wards that marked them when broken were nowhere near as simple and the Blue Water City Hunter Pavilion had old elders whose realms even she didn’t know who handled those things. Above Ancient Immortal certainly.

You could steal from the Bureau, yes, but the Bureau would find you and would ensure you regretted your foolish action.

Shaking her head, she started to gather up the scattered pots and oddments while Lin Ling just stood there… watching the birds return to their roosts in the distance.

“This place just feels… unclean.” Lin Ling suddenly looked every bit her actual age… small, thin, pale and drained.

“It’s fine,” she gave the other girl a hug, trying not to wince from the ephemera of the yang blood still shimmering across her body. “I know… I felt it as well, thanks to the ‘Heart Shifting Steps’.

She said nothing, and just continued to keep her arms wrapped around the younger woman until she stopped trembling. Only when she was sure Lin Ling had composed herself, did she comment again.

“…”

“I am fine now…” Lin Ling exhaled, collecting herself. “I just saw… – felt, rather – the memories can feel something of what happened here…The natural instincts of the memories and the blood itself have a certain resonance with this landscape. It seems like places such as this were their ancestral home. It gives them some kind of unusual sense or insight… I was just surprised by the vividness of it.”

“…”

She said nothing, just gave her a further hug, until finally Lin Ling actually pushed her away, scowling and looking like the old Lin Ling for a brief moment again.

“So… what next?” she asked, looking around grimly. “Do we track them through the night…? We cannot just run them down, you know. Unless your blood rage is able to handle a whole sect’s worth of cultivators…”

“…”

Lin Ling’s luminous eyes just stared at her, seeming to judge her quietly in some way before she replied. “You ask me–”

She threw a rock at Lin Ling, who caught it without looking and crushed it with her bare hand before smirking at her.

“There is an old ruined tower, on a rock outcropping about three miles to our south… We can go there and get a better view of the wider landscape… It is only an hour or two until morning and the vantage will give us a better idea of what is going on out here and what we can do about it.”

~ Han Shu - ??? ~

He wasn’t sure what death was like as he looked around, but he was fairly sure that this was not it. He was drifting… His last moments had been…

Odd… that was the only way to consider them, really. Cang Di had grasped the sword and there had been a wrenching sense of dissociation and then… he was here… wherever here was. It was oddly familiar… yet also disturbingly not.

He tried to look around.

He stood on a flat plane…

He was drifting…

Everything felt very… not empty… distant. It was hard to focus, either on himself, or on anything much actually.

He tried to focus on where he was, but it slipped away.

And away…

And away…

Some critical part of him seemed to be slipping away, growing dimmer with every passing breath.

-Except I am not breathing, a stray coherent thought whispered.

There was a creeping cold darkness as well, not inside him but around him. Slowly flowing. He tried to move away from it but it seemed to be linked to him.

There was also a warm dark. It wasn’t anywhere near as big, but it was latched firmly to his chest, a golden red flame that shimmered over his heart… protecting it?

The cold darkness was slowly rising around him now.

He struggled harder against it…

He was slowly sinking into the plain now.

No…

The plain was slowly rising up to subsume him?

The warmth was still there, holding onto his chest somehow, anchoring him in place even as the cold slid up past his chest… It was inexorable, timeless…

It might have been seconds or minutes, hours… days… years…?

Even though it had nearly dragged him under, the warm darkness in his heart was still pushing back in some intangible way. It almost felt like they were having an argument outside of his hearing… or perception? Intentions from it periodically flickered through to him though, and those were… disturbing.

-Shouldn’t I be more disturbed by this whole experience? he told himself.

Even as he thought it, the cold darkness froze that thought, shattering it, devouring it, pulling it away, as if it was not a thing he should have. It felt… inexorable, unforgiving… and impartial. A price had to be paid.

-A price for what? Another stray thought was frozen, smashed and subsumed leaving only a lingering question in his mind.

-Something about silver?

-Starfire…

-Beautiful starfire?

-A sword?

The cold darkness intensified abruptly and nearly pulled him under as he foundered on its surface.

The warm darkness that was no longer shrinking seemed to offer a counter-rebuttal somehow. Before, it had been oddly impartial; now it was just… annoyed, he realised. Still, it seemed to be arguing that a price had been balanced somehow.

The cold rejected this idea. The price was absolute. And this was its place.

The warm shadow pointed out that actually this wasn’t -really- its place. It did it in a way that was… disturbingly pleasant… almost sweet in a way… that the hidden depth almost went unnoticed.

By comparison, the cold dark was also immense, but its immensity was different somehow.

His sense of state started to drift again.

The complex exchange went on as the darknesses made weird counter-arguments that failed to really connect with any frame of reference he could envisage as he slipped in and out of the all-encompassing cold darkness.

Dimly, there was a point in the darkness…

A… not a shadow.

A grain of glittering silver?

It drifted oddly in front of him, as if seeking something. Part of him wanted to reach out and grasp it, but at the same time, it felt like there was an endless chasm between it and him.

The cold darkness rose more. It was vexed now somehow? This was not the way the ‘rules’ went somehow?

More silver specks appeared, then seemed to abruptly dim.

The warm darkness around his heart… Was he a he? It no longer knew.

It wasn’t even sure what it was.

The warm darkness blurred somehow and got angry, sneered at the idea of ‘rules’ that the cold darkness was proposing. The cold darkness refuted, pushed back again…

For a split second it thought it was totally subsumed and the warm darkness would be pushed out…

A glittering constellation-like hand descended out of the infinite void; the sand was stars, the sky above a night that never ended, and for the briefest moment… beyond it… he saw…

Saw…

…

…

…

“Ah, excellent. You survived,” A feminine voice purred from nearby.

He found himself lying, naked and shivering, on hard stone. His skin was drenched with cold water, or something like it at least.

He tried to speak, and found he…

He… am…

I… am?

I am… he?

“Your soul is stronger than I thought,” the beautiful voice added pensively.

I am me… Han Shu…

That thought took far, far, too long to coalesce.

-I… there were spider things?

“Spiders?” he managed to ask.

“Ah,” the feminine figure seemed… if not concerned, perturbed by his question.

He tried to look around, but it was pitch black. There was no light at all, just smooth stone beneath him, intangible yet clearly wet water on his skin, the awareness that he was very naked… and the ethereal feminine voice.

“Nothing… more than spiders?” she asked, sounding pensive now.

“A… sword?” he hazarded. That seemed… right, somehow.

“It’s a start,” the feminine voice acknowledged.

He struggled to think back… more…

“A lot of spiders?”

The spiders had been very weird…

“They do leave an impression, I will give you that,” she said, as if that was not quite the answer she had hoped for?

…

There was silence, for a very long time.

That left him to awkwardly consider spiders. There had been a lot of them; they kept running through his head, dancing weirdly and singing about suicide for some reason. They were surprisingly tuneful, in an off-kilter kind of way. He felt he should find that more disturbing than it actually was.

“So, anything other than spiders?” the feminine voice murmured, sounding curious.

“Singing… spiders?”

“…”

There was silence again, for an even longer time.

Eventually the singing spider things got bored… or maybe he just stopped noticing them. Instead, he was just left with cold… and solitude.

“Cold?” he managed to hazard eventually.

…

“Alone?”

…

“Sword?”

…

Each time he found something to ask about… there was just silence.

Somehow, that made him…

It was a weird… something…?

It made him… something, and it was certainly odd.

Water on his skin…

Alone…

Cold stone…

Darkness…

It made him…?

He struggled, because this was… twisting at him, tormenting him now… but he didn’t know how to articulate it.

“Still nothing?” the feminine voice was almost breathy, as if she were crouching over him, examining him like he was a curious, rare beast…

It made him…

Made him…

Feel.

It made him feel!

In that instant, a bunch of things snapped into focus.

He felt that he was cold, wet, hungry and quite angry. He felt bored, he felt happy that he wasn’t where he had been before… and he also felt confused about where he was now.

“I feel like I want you to tell me what is going on,” he said at last.

“Thank fuck, I was getting tired of this, and this is my thing!” the feminine voice said, and his awareness of the world around him flooded back fully. “I was worried I was starting to lose my touch.”

He looked and then found he was deeply disorientated, because he was lying on his back, staring up at the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

Her long, lustrous hair was somewhere between reddish, purple and black, her pale features flawless in every way… yet it was her eyes that drew him first. They were like moons mid eclipse. Pitch black pupils surrounded by coronas of silver fire.

“Your soul is stronger than I thought,” she mused, looking him over in a way that made him feel decidedly… uncomfortable, especially as he was naked and she was well… very attractive, and also, he realised very naked.

“Um… you’re naked?” he pointed out, trying to look only at her face.

She was very attractive.

“Does it bother you?” she giggled, running her eyes over him.

“…”

“Yes…?” he ventured eventually, feeling embarrassed

“Good,” she nodded, standing up and stretching rather provocatively. “Bothering people is kind of my thing. I was worried that I was losing my touch for it, having been in this dreary place for so damn long.”

“So,” she said, lounging down on a divan that had somehow always been there in the gloom; he just never noticed it. “What else do you recall?”

He gulped and tried to look away, but found himself unable.

“You know there are heroes of yore who would cut off their cocks to be in your position right now,” she giggled. “Why don’t you come here and sit beside me…?”

“Why… are you doing this?” he asked.

“I told you… bothering people is kind of my thing and you, Han Shu, led me to have a minor crisis of confidence.”

She sighed theatrically, raising a hand to her brow, which really did not help with the distraction and whatnot.

“Me… a minor crisis of confidence. If I do not make you pay for that, I will feel bad about myself!”

He tried to look away, but it was impossible. It also proved to be impossible to ignore her as it turned out. She was impossible to ignore, and after a while that helplessness…

It settled on him like a curse, weighing him down more terribly than anything previously that he had experienced… and he was still wet and cold somehow. She refused to say where here was, only poked fun at him, and occasionally asked him if there was anything more when she woke up from napping. Even when she ‘slept’ there was no relief, because she was entrancing… however, she was… and it drove a part of him to utter distraction.

And so he sat there… in the darkness… pondering, almost unknowingly, how he had arrived here… when he had handed the sword over to Cang Di?

“Who is Cang Di?”

“…”

She opened a sleepy eye, and stared at him for a second.

“Fuck off, I was napping.”

“…”

He tried to grind his teeth as she shifted to lie even more lazily somehow and then went straight back to sleep.

“Who. Is. Cang. Di?” he asked again, feeling a bit annoyed now.

She had asked him ‘if there was anything more’ for hundreds if not thousands of times… and now this one time he found something new to ask her… she just ignored it?

“Did I misspeak before?” she said sleepily. “I don’t give a vestal virgin’s tits who this Kung De is.”

After that, she totally ignored him for so long that he wasn’t certain if he was going mad or not. The feeling of helpless restraint, of somehow being tied in these circumstances was… infuriating.

To try and distract himself, he sought other things to do… not that there were very many. Being stuck alone with this mysterious, naked beauty was a sort of existential torment in its own right, because she twisted and tugged at things in his mind just by being there. It was almost a kind of pain, trying to erupt out of him…

“Ahhh….”

“Ahhhhhhh!”

At a certain point, it just became too much… He wanted to reach out, express his anguish somehow… yet he had no words for it. Her beauty haunted everything; his circumstances were just crushing… It was like being torn between two absolutes… and there were… no words to do it justice…

“AAAAAAGGGGGHHHHHHRRRRRrhhh!-”

He opened his eyes and realised he was naked on the floor, thrashing and flailing. His words echoed everywhere, lingering like eternal spectres of sound in the dark place.

“Finally, you stopped screaming,” the woman was sat on the couch, her chin rested in her hands, her dark purple-red hair flowing over her shoulders… Her body was draped in a loose, black silk cloth that hid basically nothing.

“I…” He tried to focus on his surroundings… but it was hard… because the pain was excruciating.

“I would say… let it all out… but you have been screaming for far longer than I’d thought possible as it is,” she sighed.

“What… is… wrong…?” he managed to articulate.

“Would it surprise you to know that there are very few ‘good ways’ for a mortal soul to leave its body fully?” she asked.

“I… soul? Body?” he managed to string those thoughts into words.

“I am not sure if this is a good deed or a bad one,” the woman sighed. “You are currently a soul without a body, which is a problem, because souls of your rank, by their very nature, are not… designed to be without a mortal vessel. You do not have the conceptual awareness to hold yourself together for a long period of time.”

“I… am… dying?” he grasped for that… “Then… what… was… before?”

“Ah, you remembered that? That is… probably a good sign,” she mused, her dark eyes seeming to peer through him.

“Probably?” he gasped.

“It means your… sense of self was not too badly fucked over by what occurred. Usually a soul of your calibre getting eyeballed directly by the devouring dark is a straight up ticket to deathless eternity. Do not pass go, do not reincarnate, too bad, so sad, spin out a new one.”

“Ah…?” he found he had no words for that, words that didn’t involve cursing at length anyway, which suddenly seemed kind of…

“So, this actually works in our favour, because this is happening in our house so to speak. Or at least the original crime was committed there, so we have final jurisdiction… or I do at least. None of the others is particularly suited to this task.”

“So… ah… what will happen to me?”

“If you don’t find a ‘body’ soon? You will suffer ever-increasing pain and torment, eventually a psyche deviation, and become an evil spirit. As I said, there are very few good ways for a mortal soul to leave its body to this degree, and you are certainly a case study of which I could write a small textbook.”

He was about to ask… ‘Why am I out of my body?’, but recalled she had never answered his earlier question.

“So… am… I… dying?”

“Depends, how do you define death?” she asked.

“…”

“Can’t you… just give a straight answer on it?” he snapped, his anger somehow allowing him…

He blinked in surprise as his rage at his circumstances somehow helped, allowing him a bit more focus.

“To answer your question though… you are technically between living and dying. If things continue as they are… you will, as I said earlier, suffer ever-increasing torment and eventually your mind will crumble and you will become an evil spirit… Or your soul will just disperse due to being removed from its body. Either way, you will die, but the choice is knowing you died, or going utterly insane before you die… It’s really up to you which makes you feel more at peace with the situation.”

“So, I am… doomed to sit here… in the dark… watching you until I go insane or just dissolve into nothing?” he hissed.

“Sister, this is why nobody ever asks you for these services,” a second voice, sounding vexed, slipped out of the doom.

A second beauty materialised out of nowhere, cloaking herself in the shadows of the void around them. Her form was just as dazzling as the woman before him. She was beautiful, yes, but it felt… motherly or maybe like a big sister’s in how he was drawn to view it. Her golden red hair shimmered and bound itself up, held in place by a simple crown. The pupils of her eyes reflecting a strange triangular pattern that was hinted at lotuses.

“I am glad you survived and my sister did not turn you into a lunatic. I was somewhat concerned that the connection got so fucked up because of their stupid seal.”

“Seal?” he managed to ask.

“The point you appear to have drawn him back from is a touch distant to current events,” the dark-haired beauty explained. “He spent an impressively long time screaming along to the dancing spiders and their eternal chorus of insanity.”

“Ah,” the golden-fire haired beauty looked equal parts annoyed and embarrassed. “Sorry… it’s not every day I have to go through that rigmarole.”

“What… happened?” he asked again. “You said I was… sealed? I remember… handing your… broken form… to Cang Di? But why I was doing that…?”

“That’s better than I expected,” she said, looking at him critically. “Your soul is a lot stronger than I anticipated, although I have to bear some of the blame for it. You do recall that I said you were mine… well, ours now?”

A memory surfaced of strange words and an angry… She had said something like that, he had to acknowledge.

“There is, as you like to say… always a chink left by heaven where a way can be found,” the fire-haired beauty sighed. “Now you are here at least.”

She looked around and sighed deeply again. “Annoying we can’t properly redecorate without a certain… consensus.”

“Don’t go there. Recall what happened last time?” the dark-haired beauty muttered, having procured a jar of wine from somewhere.

“So anyway, what is the problem with him?” the dark-haired beauty frowned. “How come you had me go fish him out of the soup of the firmament, right from under the noses of that ancient abomination?”

“His body,” the fire-haired beauty said with a sigh, looking back at him. “As you can see, his soul, aside from that brief brush from recursion, is basically fine… in the short term, as far as souls in this circumstance go. His body on the other hand, has been fundamentally bricked.”

“Bricked?” he repeated dully, still shivering. Somehow the existential pain swirling inside him was less when he focused on the fire-haired beauty compared to the dark-haired one.

“Ah, a colloquial term,” she nodded. “Fundamentally impaired to the point of uselessness. Fate Locked. In your case, those obnoxious brats have ruined your future on the four paths. Heaven’s way is well and truly fucked up. Unless I sever the fate of the heavens in relation to the holistic concept of ‘you’, you are basically barred from ever cultivating again.”

“…”

He opened and shut his mouth, wondering if screaming more would help. “Uh… if I understand you right then… am I not just condemned to unspeakable and… agonising… torment… and then eventual death through dispersal and insanity?”

“Heaven always leaves a way,” the fire-haired beauty repeated, pouring herself some of the wine into a broad-brimmed cup and sipping it.

“And as far as you are concerned here, we are the closest thing you will probably meet to said heavens in 10,000 lifetimes,” the dark-haired beauty giggled.

He wasn’t sure if she was just making fun of him with that rather silly homily of the sages, or it was actually serious.

“In any case, I am impressed,” the dark-haired beauty sighed. “Did you have sex with someone’s mother or something?”

“Better… let me show you,” the fire-haired beauty said a touch acerbically.

“…”

There was a strange pause… then the dark-haired beauty looked back at him and sighed. “A pity, at least there would have been a chance the mother was hot; you could have had a nice memory to go with the existential torment.”

It occurred to him that both these beauties had distinctly off-kilter senses of humour, especially since they were talking about his current circumstances.

“Sever my…?”

“Ah, yes… basically, to ‘fix’ this I would need to sever your connection to the conceptual form of ‘fate’ fully. ‘You’ might survive, but nobody would remember ‘you’. Your parents would never have had a son, and anything you ever did over the course of the threads I'd have to unravel would vanish like mist. Everything you touched would be affected in an ever more profound kaleidoscope of edge effects. People you killed might come back from the dead, or die at different times, people you saved from death would probably die… From the biggest to the smallest interaction, everything would be touched.”

“…”

He stared at her blankly.

“The shockwave would be… impressive from a karmic perspective, and in the process the backlash to the potential paradox would lead to you incurring a karmic execution from the heavens and dying. At that point I might as well just kill you myself and shortcut the whole process for much less pain all around.”

“Uh…. Isn’t… that kind of… un–?”

“Unfair?” the dark-haired beauty finished for him, snickering.

“Fundamental forces are not fair; they just are. You are no more special to them than any other random grain of existence, just more complicated.”

He gulped.

“So… you said the heavens always leave a way?” he returned to that, grasping for some kind of ‘straw’ in an otherwise unspeakably grim scenario.

“We… yes,” the dark-haired beauty mused, staring at him intensely, “but bear with us… and remember that death is still an entirely credible option…”

“Ah… yeah about that,” the fire-haired beauty scowled.

“They really fucked him over… and I say this looking at it from the perspective of our generation. That seal damns him to nine generations upon death, guarantees that he will be reborn into this world and all nine of his next lives will be karmic siphons for the person who cast the seal, who will then harvest all the karmic merit he would have gotten for his unjust demise. It’s almost artistic… in a set someone on fire and push them outside of time kind of way.”

“…”

“…”

Both of them stared at her, he… totally struck mute for words.

“Humans… gotta love em and their crowbar approach to petty vengeance,” the dark-haired beauty sighed at last. “It’s almost elvish.”

“You mean dwarvish,” the fire-haired beauty asked.

“Dwarves are just short elves with better talent for growing facial hair,” the dark-haired beauty snickered.

“…”

The fire-haired beauty gave her a really long look.

“What? It’s true… though I guess elves are just taller goblins with mommy issues…”

“…”

The fire-haired beauty stared at her sister for so long he almost thought she had turned into a statue. As much as to break the awkwardness of the moment, he finally spoke up. “I… can’t keep thinking of you as ‘fire-haired beauty and ‘dark-haired beauty’…”

“Can’t you?” the dark-haired beauty said with a mischievous grin.

The fire-haired beauty gave her sister a long look.

“Aww… okay, I am ‘Dark-haired’ Division, and she can be ‘Fire-haired’ Origin.”

“Divide and Origin will do,” Origin said a trifle primly.

“Erm… so what do I have to do to… not die and go insane then die?” he asked.

“Break your connection to your own body…” Divide said.

“That’s not helpful, sister,” Origin said with an eye roll.

“He asked what… not how!” Divide said with a chuckle. “And anyway… it’s important to keep a sense of humour in circumstances like this… It’s better than becoming a seething ball of soul rage.”

“Just stop procrastinating and get on with it then,” Origin said, putting down her cup.

“Eh…” Divide eyed him dubiously for a moment, then looked back at Origin. “Don’t you want to check what he wants to first?”

“…”

“Ah, there was that…” Origin grunted, then turned to look at him.

“Tell me Han Shu, do you want to die in agony or survive?” she asked blandly, taking another sip of her wine.

“…”

He wasn’t sure how to take that; it almost seemed like she was messing with him now.

“Live… obviously!” he muttered, his annoyance creeping out through the pain.

“See… he said he wants to live; you have his permission,” Origin said with a smirk.

“Unorthodox… but it will do,” Divide snickered.

“Sorry about this…” she added “If it helps, you can focus on the idea of my beautiful naked body.”

“Ehh–?”

He managed a half second of momentary confusion at her comment before leaf-like black blade appeared in her hand and, in the same fluid motion, she swept him up and stabbed him in the forehead with it.

The pain was out of any world.

His body felt like it was being forced through some kind of invisible grater.

It had thought it understood what the pain of dying was like, after that fates-cursed Ur’Vash had killed it so many times in that looped moment, but as its awareness of self crumbled, it occurred to it that it had been naive.

Very, very naive.

The pain was the entire thing, the whole thing and nothing but the thing.

Its consciousness crumbled, different voices screaming in pain and sorrow as dozens of voices all fled in different directions, different moments… and different horrors.

“Who is a villain, am I in some play now??” some of it tried to deny.

“I might as well just slit my throat now and be done now if the sword kills him,” some to accept

“Is this related to the Imperial Court? I know only that Mu Shansu cursed this Kong Hao… He proclaimed the Blue Morality Cult a blight on the Heavens?” some to understand.

“Please don’t kill him…” some tried to beg.

“Din Ouyeng was there, when we got buried…”

“There are ruins, caves beyond that ridge line. It is the main access through to the depths beneath East Fury, if you were insane enough…”

“The caverns where we were would surely connect…?”

“Was this whole trial just to find this sword…”

“Or somehow related to that old man Mu Shansu!?! Have I been walking around this whole time, with the treasure that ten thousand cultivators are all coveting somehow?”

“Destroy what weapon? It was…”

“Your mother was reluctant!”

“I wish I had screwed someone’s mother; that at least would be understandable.”

“What opportunity?”

“Is this whole trial somehow related to Mu Shansu?”

“Isn’t this cursing me with semantics??”

“Thank you!”

“How can someone not find this utterly suspicious at this point!”

“But wasn’t I just… soul scanned?”

“Do I even have a soul now that can be scanned!?”

“Ling was controlled bizarrely though, in ways that didn’t seem… normal?”

“Is this not a soul art?”

“Please don’t see it…”

“What? Why did it break?”

“AVOIDED RIGHTEOUS DEATH!”

“Fuck off you, we don’t allow rabid dogs in here.”

“Origin!”

One of it grasped instinctively for the only thing he had still somehow in their mind…

“My whole family…”

The mantra, it was pointless to cycle it…

It thought of its mother… a father… someone’s uncle… of the moments when they were teaching two boys about a mantra… anything to help with the sense of it that was slipping away… but even that didn’t help in the end…

“H…How?”

It screamed… or tried to… but even that was somehow being warped…

The last, lingering thought was strange and haunting…

There was a courtyard… a crisp, sunny autumn day, birds singing, people whispering. A dark-haired girl maybe eleven or twelve, dressed in cream robes with blue and gold trim, was making her first bows to several old men who sat imperiously on thrones. Two boys watched on. One, bored, was being lectured by an older man about how he would one day marry the girl bowing. The other, listening to them talk, was a bit sad, because he also liked the girl.

She made her last bow and held out a scroll, a picture of a lotus she had painted as a gift and gave it to the eldest of those there, who smiled warmly and received it. In that moment, somehow, she looked sideways and her eyes caught its… and she smiled through eternity at him.

Juni…

That last thought, a sad, unrequited thing… sank with him into an oblivion of torment.

He was split… there were two of them… him?

Drifting there, he watched himself disperse and die, the phantom pain finally dragged down with it–

He hit the ground with a flat splash, and then the stones just beneath the centimetre-thick coating of water hard enough to make his teeth rattle. Scrabbling wildly with his hands, he realised two things:

He was stark naked, and he had quite possibly just watched himself die… again.

-Even after a thousand times… it’s still disturbing!

He sobbed in his head as the sad, remnant form sank away into scattered oblivion below him, lost in the shadows of the water.

-Your mother! I should have known that it would be horrid when she ‘asked’ permission!

He pushed himself up… and found strength still flowing out of his limbs…

The water was cold, the surroundings crushing down on his chest and his head fuzzy.

“OI, DON’T THINK, just BREATHE!” a beautiful voice snapped sternly right beside him.

“You’re here–” a second murmuring chime of a voice added.

“Shut up you,” the beautiful voice hissed. “Before was you; this is all me.”

“Yes maam,” the second beautiful voice said a bit contritely.

The urgency of her voice somehow cut through his confusion, indecision and the draw of watching the last fragments of that shadow him vanish.

He… focused on himself…

He was him…

He was… Han Shu… and he managed to take a deep breath.

The feel of air in his lungs, or the lack of it, was enough of an abrupt and agonizing distraction that he fell face first in the water before remembering that he could not ‘breathe’ underwater and managed to roll over.

His limbs felt dead and leaden, the world slipping and spinning around him, but he managed it and took a ragged breath and it stabilized and instinct took over as his body remembered how to breathe now he wasn’t trying to tell it how to do so.

The pain, however, continued… If anything, it got worse: twisting, shredding knives stabbing every part of his cold body… He clutched for his chest and found he had…

Heart… no heartbeat… He wasn’t…

-STOP THINKING! he screamed at himself…

It took a supreme effort, the wage of nightmare itself, to conquer the irrational fears twisting within him and just stare blankly at the darkness, letting the moment flow, accepting his current circumstances before everything sorted itself out, or appeared to.

His heart beat normally… his body didn’t feel like a piece of meat he wasn’t in control of… and he could…

He took a careful breath… He could breathe…

He patted his chest… His heart beat.

He ran his arms over himself quickly as he pushed himself up out of the very shallow puddle of water he was lying in… He was still whole.

“What… ha–?” he asked, and found ‘Divide’ crouching beside him, having never appeared to move, her finger over his lips, stopping him from speaking.

“…”

“…”

Wordlessly, she pointed upwards, shaking her head.

He looked up… and realised he had somehow been looking down before.

Above him, almost invisible in the starless night, pitch black lightning hung. It was only visible to his eyes because it seemed disorientated, confused and searching. Like a serpent that had suddenly lost its prey. From beyond it, he got a faint sense of hunger… fury… embarrassment?

The three of them watched in silence for quite a while as it twisted this way and that… searching for… him, he realised, his skin slicking with sweat.

“Fuagh,” Origin sighed and shook her head after a long moment.

“Fucking hell, the fates up there are nosey pieces of shit,” Divide hissed.

“Like taxmen, always keen to do their good work where they are least needed,” Origin mused.

Her eyes were like two twisting pools of fury, even if it never seemed to creep out into her words.

“Then again, I suppose they would claim they are just… 'obeying orders' or something. That it isn’t their fault the government that controls them is run by the worst sort.”

“…”

“So I take it I shouldn’t ask what…” he asked carefully.

“That depends on how much peace of mind you want in your final moments,” Divide said drily. “You, the victim, could become the subject of a bestselling treatise on how small things cause big messes.”

“While I appreciate that now you have all your memories back in sequential order, you might not be that enthralled by the Eldritch Rachnaros… or those pestilent clay pots down there, but thanks to them you were inadvertently provided a path back from this mess,” Origin added, still staring at the lightning which was frozen like a cat caught doing something naughty.

“Maybe not that Scholar of Calamity,” Divide said absently. “He and I have an understanding of sorts, but offering goodwill to them can lead to bizarre results.”

“Scholar of?” he asked, confused.

“Uh… the shadow… in the cavern pool?" Divide replied. "You met when you ran away from that obnoxious little cunt, who is now on my list.”

“Uh…?” Thoroughly confused, he could only stare at her. "Shadow... pool?"

With trepidation he tried to cast his mind back to... and found to his shock that his memories were back. All of them and with a crisp clarity which was… He was about to say ‘good’, but revaluated that notion quite quickly.

-Okay, some of those are ‘deeply’ disturbing and not quite so good. He acknowledged, reviewing the unfiltered version of his journey to this point, which starting with the events in the Jasmine Gate... gave him a surprising amount to skim through until—

‘Rising above the surface, he swiftly ate a ‘Dark Sight’ pill. There was a short period of disorientation as his ocular meridians reacted to the stimuli of the pill. The cavern drifted into focus, black giving way to greys and a bit of white.

Juni crouched beside him. They were floating on a submerged ledge at the edge of the pool. Silently she poked him, and pointed up.

He looked upwards… and saw the shifting empty form of a thing that had a strange hint of too many legs sprawled across the roof of the cavern. It seemed to be ignoring them, but just staring at it made him feel like he was looking into the edge of the abyss.

-Wait... what? What in the fates is that!

A dissociated part of him stared in horror at the 'thing', of which he had no recollection from that past moment prior to this point, as it whispered to him that perhaps he might consider saying a few words … before he threw himself in?

Silently, his past self sank back under the pool until just his nose and face were above the surface. Lin Ling who was beside him had just done the same.

As they departed, he got the strangest sense that it had wished them ‘good fortune’ on their onward journey somehow. Disturbingly, that seemed to carry with it an implication that they find the ‘suicide’ that suited them best.’

"W-what was..." he tried to find words to ask her just what exactly it was that he had just seen, but now the moment had ended, it was like his tongue was frozen solid in his mouth.

“I hesitate to say that this is all its fault, but that bugger has a habit regarding mad science,” Divide sighed, staring at him. “It actually gave you all an onward blessing, although it probably did it for its own amusement… or just to see what would happen.”

“Oh…” he struggled momentarily with the idea of the total lack of apparent agency involved and also his previous inability to even remember it clearly. “So… everything…?”

“Please, that is far too boring. We would never stoop that low, and that kind of meddling has issues, as you are discovering first-hand,” Divide snickered.

“But if… something had been just a bit… different…?” he shuddered, as the pursuit by the tetrids, the lingering, inexplicable interest of that terrifying spirit herb flitted, unbidden through his mind, accompanied by the realisation that he had been walking across a thin wire amid chaos, blithely stepping from one impossible ledge to another while all around him the world fell upwards and down—

Divide’s gaze drew him back and he felt like she had just hit him over the head with her eyes.

“Did you just not listen to a word we said about ‘thinking too closely about your circumstances’?” she hissed.

“So… sis…” she turned back to Origin, who was still staring at the lightning, which was frozen there. “Why are there still tribulation clouds in here?”

Origin made no comment, continuing to stare at it like it was an unusual if very disgusting bug that she couldn’t decide to capture or kill.

“I know there have been a lot of oddities happening of late, but this is one too far…” Origin said finally.

“Oh… does this mean we might finally get to redecorate?” Divide asked, sounding oddly vested in that idea.

“It could come to it,” Origin sighed. “Why don’t you go and have a word with third sis… see if she has any ideas? Otherwise we will have to get all of them back in here and have a serious talk about redesign and the role we are currently playing in keeping this whole sorry mess of shattered plates spinning.”

“It better, the idea that the fates in the world out there are able to poke their thieving little noses all the way in here makes the shadow in my karma itch. It’s bad enough that they are in the sub-worlds, rooting through that disorganised mess.”

“Hmmm…” Origin nodded.

“Oh,” Divide slapped her head. “With all this excitement and you making me spend several months putting this one back together again after they kicked him off the shelf of life, I clean forgot. I found Undergrove.”

“You found what now?” Origin said flatly, the entire place they were in shivering faintly.

The lightning flinched, again showing him by its momentary movement just how extensive its presence here was. Like black cracks that riddled the darkness.

“Uh… yeah… remember you were all like. ‘What is this shiet?’ when that ‘damnation’ bolt came down outside… and she was all like ‘find what it was, or I will make you suffer as I do!’?”

“I see…” Origin was starting to exude an aura that made his skin want to crawl around his back and hide.

“Uh… well… yeah, I found it, and I at least know why we couldn’t ‘find’ it before. It’s been sealed up, thoroughly… until recently, there was a chink in it for the briefest moment.

“Go on.” Origin’s voice could have cut glass.

“Well, we couldn’t see it before, because some rogue automata spirit that fancies itself a reliquary seems to have plotted with the invaders who shattered the academy…”

“…”

“Don’t look like you want to shatter space and go murder it, you know that’s a bad idea, and in any case, it looks like something else might get there first. Anyway, they seem to have grasped the seal that was put in place to stop the Dark Veil’s Mana Conflux going pop. I can only assume they are plotting on Senjun’s spear somehow… or were. Except… something seems to have gotten itself sent in there, probably by that spirit given how the keys to that place are thoroughly grasped. However, as a result, the weapons are unsealed and there is a major outbreak of defilers.”

“Just like there are a bunch of things that seem to have gotten themselves in out there and there is now an outbreak of that bitch Asuraerleth?” Origin mused.

“Yes… that was my working theory. The ‘chink’ was caused by a tribulation down there that was not related to the system that operated on Aertha Majoris. It loosely mirrored the blueprint of the Eastern Gate Ascension Matrix, but it had the fingerprints of the fate of the world outside all over it.

“The source of whatever drew that massive damnation down?” Origin frowned.

“Could be,” she replied. “I cannot go in there; my form there was kicked out as well, and they removed the cube back when they first uncovered Chronominthian, before they ever summoned a blade and used you to anchor Undrhallen. That, incidentally, is going to cause another problem.”

“You’re just full of good news today aren’t you,” Origin stated acerbically.

“It is kind of my thing,” Divide said a trifle theatrically.

“So, what crawled out of Undrhallen?”

“Longevity Cult.”

“…”

“One headache at a time,” Origin said after a long pause, her gaze never leaving the cracks and the lightning. “You were saying about Undergrove.”

“Well… I poked as much as I could, without it being obvious. Whatever it is… it can hide from me, it can hide from the guardians up above and it can hide from third sis. I was going to go ask the bell, and fifth sis, but disturbing that vestige from the outside is an even bigger risk than poking at the edges of Undergrove, even for me and my perspective on it,” Divide explained. “Ameno is sealed away as the heart of Undergrove, the Pagoda’s core is down there as well, not to mention the Bow from Kefalonia.”

“I see,” Origin sounded pensive now. “That puts it in very rarefied company. I only got as far as the remnants of its echo which were dispersing through the ‘Gate to the Perilous Realm’ and the ‘Uncreated Time’. Those are broken moments that sit very close to the anchor point; one false move by me and I could have sent all of us straight into the abyss. At least while my sole hand in this game was bound to that clunky, crude form they used to anchor the ‘Undrhallen Pit’. While that would sort the problem… it’s a very long walk home from the ass end of eternity and I quite like my karma the way it is.”

“Aiiii.” Divide sighed as well. “At least, from what little I saw, it doesn’t appear to be belligerent to us, but that doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous. If another judgement descending in search of it could break the seal over the mountain properly…”

They both trailed off into silence, leaving his mind spinning slightly.

“What is Long–”

Divide’s hand tightened over his mouth before he could even worm out that single question. The cracks above intensified somehow.

“…”

“…”

“I’ll go ask them,” Divide sighed. “See if they won’t consent to some vermin removal.”

The whole exchange was, for lack of a better word, weird, as he sat on the side lines… It was a bit like being a child, listening to your parents arguing about household accounts, or what needed to be done about the rats in the ceiling, in this particularly instance.

That they viewed tribulations as something akin to an infestation of rats that needed removed was…

“All I wanted to do was survive this, make sure Juni and Ling also survive… make it back and share a drink with the others,” he complained inwardly.

“…”

He stared at Origin, as he spoke the words in his head out loud rather than thinking them.

“What just?”

“My sister isn’t here,” Origin said, not looking at him, her eyes still fixed on the black shifting snakes, her tone holding a certain edge to it.

He was loath to say she looked nervous, because he had only ever seen her seem collected and composed, with little flashes of emotion bleeding through. Certainly compared to Divide, who was very emotive as it was turning out. He had seen her annoyed, exasperated and in that horrifying outside moment when he had died over and over along with its aftermath, somewhat angry. Never had there been a sense of ‘concern’, but that was clearly what he was getting from her now.

“So… I can’t do anything until you fix… this?” he asked, nervously.

“No… Not really,” she sighed.

“Can’t I cultivate the Nine-fold Origins Lotus art?” he frowned… still concerned about the whole ‘go mad and die’ thing.

“Have you tried looking for that information in your head?” she murmured.

He looked for it and stared… because it wasn’t there. He hesitated to say he was completely ‘normal’ just because of the circumstances… but he could not visualise his mind’s eye and the inner workings of his body he knew… because he had seen them before, not because he could see them now. He realised he knew how to touch qi but…

“That would be inadvisable,” Origin said absently.

“It’s… gone?” he asked, trying and failing to control the squeak that echoed in his voice.

“They are in the process of ripping it right out of your mind, such as they are able,” Origin sighed.

“Isn’t… that… bad?” he hazarded, before recalling…“Doesn’t it require the acknowledgement of the stele?”

“To learn it legitimately, but they also stole your given connection with it, so others can use that copy as if it were yours, to learn it. They also cut off your path forward, so you could not cause problems later. That is another reason why that seal was so obnoxious. It has forever blocked your fate with every aspect of cultivation already in your head and whatever can be extrapolated from it. In short, you are evicted from the Heavenly Dao, as you might have reasonably understood it. If you did cultivate, it would be as a puppet of others, a cipher for the one who cast the seal and a lightning rod for all their ill deeds.”

“Uh…” There were many things in there that… he wanted to ask about, but Origin continued.

“Do not fear, that enmity can be considered as having been recorded by this sister. Regarding the manual itself and the things that come from it, even with the stolen acknowledgement, anyone that looks at its inner workings in a remotely critical fashion, even a bit, will end up here for their Ascension Tribulation, when they cross over from the realm you call ‘Dao Ascension’ to a ‘World Venerate’ and even before that… their every crossing tribulation will be akin to a deviation between heaven and earth.”

“Oh…” Reading between the lines, that was actually kind of scary.

“Wait… anyone? So if someone copied an art from it and then disseminated it… like the sword cuts or something?”

“I don’t think you understand what it means to cross me…” she sneered, making the tribulation lightning shake even more. “The things of this seat are this seat’s and not those of any other.

Even though her words didn’t really seem to be aimed at him, by the time she finished he realised he had indeed never seen her angry. The tribulation lightning somehow held in abeyance was shivering like a little lamb before a ravenous carnivore. The words she spoke made the night above deepen even further somehow and the shadows of the world around them turned dark and hungering.

Shaken by that, he realised he did still have his mantra, which was surprising.

“My mantra?” he asked, rather than risk touching it at this point.

“Ah… yes, you would still have that. Its origin is not something the puppet masters who have diddled your fate can dream of touching. However… you would still generate qi with it. As a trap, that would have interesting repercussions for those responsible… not that you would live to see it.”

“Um…” he shivered, taking her warning to heart. “So doesn’t that mean I’ve had my cultivation screwed over not once… but twice?”

“Thrice actually,” Origin said drily.

“You lost it because you crossed the world’s fate that time, which I must acknowledge as the root of all this mess really. You lost it because of those moronic orcs as well, and now the fate locking attempt counts as its own thing.”

“…”

He was a bit speechless at that, and her candour.

“Don’t sweat it too hard. That kind of misfortune breeds its own very interesting and unpredictable kinds of karma. You are sitting here, with me. Every cultivator in the entire Martial Axial Cosmic region below Greater Divinity would sell their nine generations and their cow into eternal servitude with devils for that opportunity.”

“I… see…” he mumbled at last, feeling very small suddenly.

“That, ironically, is exactly why they would never get it,” she sneered. “In the end, the result of all their meddling has instead led them to topple over a chart of a game they never even knew was in play and allowed us to begin to set the pieces anew.”

The way she said it… suddenly she was no longer a big sister, sitting there talking about the world… instead she was an ancient matriarch of heaven… tired of meagre mortal failings yet with a faint hope that somewhere, some spark would surprise her and allow her to see the world as she once had. Her analogy was one he sort of grasped… but the implication was quietly terrifying in its own way.

“Before… we were aloof, those of us present here bound by circumstance. I, to that sword, a key to a prison man forgot, my third sister, a glorified pin, holding an evil butterfly down, before they kicked her out of that place in the aftermath of its ruin. My other sisters all fulfil similar roles… We imprison at the behest of others, or because we must, because it is our responsibility to the position we find ourselves in. We were bound by the rules and conventions set. Only Divide was not so, but she was sealed away here, abandoned to time while the rest of us were drawn to those things. We were content to just let matters work as they should and observe our role in them.”

“And… because of me… you were able to return here,” he suddenly understood.

“Yes, because of you, Han Shu, I was able to return here.”

“In that time, it seems others have taken our inaction and our willingness to just go with things as a sign of weakness… forgetting that even inaction is a form of fishing… and so… we can move once again.”

“…”

“You are wondering if we are… in fact the real evil sealed here… are you not?” she chuckled suddenly.

“Uh… I would not dare,” he muttered.

“Good and evil are just labels people put on things so they can sleep at night. I am what I am, Divide is what she is… What we represent does not define us, even if others painted flags on us and tried to make it so.”

“The carvings before, the story, this place is… everything here… is it…?”

“A trap?” she laughed, lightly… “For the unwary, the greedy or the opportunist? You are growing… Han Shu!”

Above them, the lightning shivered, as if trying to react to that acknowledgement in some way.

She collected herself and looked pensively at lightning again

“My knowledge of Eastern Azure’s cultivation systems has taken a significant leap forward thanks to this Cang Di…”

“Is he-?” he was about to ask ‘alive’ because the outward recollections after he had handed over the sword were the only thing lacking really.

“Alive?” she chuckled. “I am angry, but I am not a bloodthirsty monster. The sword and I are not the same thing. Before, a part of me was bound to it, and they restrained it. You are not familiar with the idea of ‘Djinn’… they are spirits, powerful and ancient, bound to a vessel and set to grant wishes. I was not dissimilar. There were rules set to guard me, to limit my power and to limit the power our vessels could have on the world in turn. The sword represented a facet of my power, but it is returned to me now.”

Somehow, he was relieved, given he was pretty sure Cang Di had tried to extricate him from the circumstances as best he could.

“Anyway… returning to the original point… now I know a bit more about your system… I can understand what has been done and how things interact with it. It helps that I also now have a frame of reference for where we ‘are’ thanks to those meddling brats forcing open the link to this place.”

She stared at the sky then started to laugh, cold, mocking laughter that made the lightning twist and sob in fear. “They sought to use a great stratagem ‘Seizing Fate in Eight Directions – Binding Good Fortune to the Righteous Seat’ to connect this land to their own. In their arrogance, their preconceived notions of how the world works… they forgot that that has a mirror - ‘Fate, Seized from Eight Directions – The Righteous Seat Binds Good Fortune’. It is all too easy, to forget the maxim ‘be careful what you seek to bind, lest it instead become the thing that binds you’.”

“Uhh…” he didn’t really know what to say to that… other than that ‘this’ Origin could be kind of scary.

“Why am I not more scared of you?” he asked.

“…”

She stared at him, and chose to politely ignore that vocalised inner thought.

The sat in there in silence for a few more minutes, she watching the lightning and he… thinking about very little.

“It’s a little-recognised fact, but accumulation is perhaps the most important aspect of progression through the realms.” She went on after a moment. “At Golden Core, qi and personal aptitude, are basically the most important thing. At Nascent Soul and the Immortal threshold, however, it is accumulation that really matters to determine the worth of your foundation. Crossing the Dao Realm is more complex, with close ties to fate… an interesting sub-stratagem there, by that boy who sought to turn you into a karmic lightning rod… I wonder if he has some elvish blood in him somewhere – he should never meet Asuraerleth.”

“Din Ouyeng?” he questioned blankly, caught out by her sudden change in topic, even as he was working to grasp what she said about cultivation. “And… who is that… Asuraerleth anyway?”

“…”

“A thing for later. Ask my sister about that one.” The way her tone turned oppressively unpleasant made him want to curl up into a ball and just hide away from her. Clearly Asuraerleth was something of a taboo topic.

Sighing again, she continued as if he had just said nothing. “Dao Realm is tied closely to fate, but if you fulfil the proper criteria and Principle as you are condensing an Immortal Soul it is not difficult to attain the appropriate Dao Seed… After that, things get a bit more variable… But that’s so far ahead as to not be a thing we need to worry about.”

“Oh…” he replied…

“I’ve been saying that quite a bit…” he reflected, forgetting for a moment.

“…”

Her smile, even though she didn’t look at him, made him suddenly feel a bit self-conscious.

“Thank you for clarifying things,” he mumbled.

“That… seems at odds with what they tell us though?” he queried after a moment. “Even before Golden Core, it’s all about Potential and Talent and Spirit Roots and such and then about your fate with the Grand Dao and such? Juni and Ling… both had bad spirit roots for their circumstances… so they became Herb Hunters… People held they had no fate with the Spiritual Path…”

She laughed and they both watched the lightning above continue to quiver.

“Potential is just another way of considering accumulation. Defined on whether it’s inborn or acquired. As to fate, yes, but in these heavens of yours, you might as well accept that you are dealing with a counted, stacked deck. The tax collector analogy is not far off as well; they will fleece you coming and going. As for talent, sure… but that’s boring. What do you get out of it if everything is handed to you so easily? Even the talented must work just as hard. That is a poor measure alone to pick a disciple.”

“And what about mantras?” he asked, “You said my mantra remained because they could not dream of touching it?”

“Oh… yes, ‘the words in the heart, freely given, may not be taken by any mortal means or coveted by any heavenly path’.” she mused, sounding as if she was in fact quoting something else. It was also, word for word, what his Uncle had said the day he inherited his mantra.

“My parents... and Uncle said the same thing… but I kind of assumed… that they were just—”

“Just words people spoke?” Origin gave a derisive snort. “It is true that there are ways around it: it does not take a genius to work out that even if you cannot take the water from the vessel, you can take the vessel and run away with that instead. That, incidentally is what would happen to you, if you re-founded it in the current circumstances.

“However, as much as those old thieves would wish them to ‘just be words people spoke’ with every aching breath they take in their ivory towers and palaces amid golden clouds, that inheritance is untouchable. It approaches one of the fundamental tenets of the way things are. A living manifestation of what you sometimes term ‘The Heavens Leaving a Way’.

“Within it, you will find a shadow of the paradox that balances Omnipotence and Omniscience. It is up there with the Immutable nature of Karma. Why the ‘Grand Stratagems’ always have two faces…Why the Fires of Destiny and the Silver Sands are the way they are…

“If you ever reach those heights you will naturally understand."

She trailed off, looking again at the scattering depths of the lightning above them.

“In any case, you must arrive at those comprehensions yourself, otherwise the worth of your accumulation would be cruelly lessened. Such as your path has been, I will not be the sinner who robs you of the wonder of discovering such things for yourself. I could not do them justice anyway…”

With an idle wave of her hand, the scene around them twisted. Ghostly grass, plants, trees, and shrubs – even a very startled snake – found themselves flowing by around him for a moment. The ghostly forms faded away and he was left with a scattered pile of… stuff.

He stared at the pile of roots and tubers and some weird leaves… and a collected puddle of water in a very crude vessel of reeds and mud.

“…”

“You need to eat, and drink,” she observed wryly. “In case it escaped your notice, this place is a bit spartan in the edibles department. All my sister has stocked in this place is wine it seems, made mostly of apples – none of it fit for your consumption, given the dubious circumstances of its origin.”

“Ah…”

He stared around blankly, at the gloom, the starry night sky, the shadows that were presumably the distant altars and the cold ground below him which was still wet with water that didn’t… appear to be water even though it had all the outward appearances of it.

“Thank… thank you,” he bowed to her, deeply.

“You… saved me… when you didn’t have to. I, Han Shu, can only bow my head and accept your good intentions!”

“Please, don’t. I am the one who wronged you, even if it was the petty nature of your heavens that has condemned you.” She waved a hand, still not looking away from the lightning. “It should be I who bows to you… In any event, you are our guest here, and not of your own volition. Hospitality is important, especially since we do not have much to work with…”

She cast a sour look around the place as if somehow offended by it and waved her hand, grasping one of the roots. Nibbling on it speculatively, she paused after a moment. “Odd… it should be a sweet potato but it tastes like spicy celery.”