Memories of the Fall

“If I ever lay eyes on Di Ji again, I will make sure his fate is such that he cannot dream of peace though he lives through ten thousand lifetimes! And you… ‘Brave’ Paragons of the ‘Blue Morality’, hiding behind the skirts of the Divine Kong! You who protect him this day from the justice of My Heavens. Do not think you will escape. Even if I have to stalk your ten generations I will see everything you have ever built brought to ruin in this world.”

~Lady Kai, to the assembled Heroes of the Imperial Court.

~ Ha Clan Great Hall, West Flower Picking Town ~

Space shattered in the Great Hall of the Ha family estate in West Flower Picking Town. An injured body materialized out of thin air with a defunct ‘Heaven Shifting’ talisman still on its leg, held there by a bloody handprint, and started to fall towards the floor. The Supreme Elder and the Head of the Ha family both appeared in the hall before the injured arrival could hit the floor. Their arrival via direct teleportation made the room shiver for a few seconds.

“The Hunter Pavilion...Lin clan… They betrayed us… Blood Eclipse Clan… did this… Young master… is…. and Young Noble Din…”

With its last breath, the ruined, injured form barely managed to gasp out its final message to the rapidly filling Great Hall before its soul completely disintegrated, leaving a broken corpse barely identifiable as a human in the Supreme Elder’s arms.

~ Ha Yun, Young Master of the Ha Clan ~

His head felt like someone had cleft it open with a sword and stuck it back together again. He tried to remember who he was and got nothing for several agonising moments...

The pain that was building inside his body was rising, from a sharp ache that pulsed back and forth to something more akin to fracturing glass digging into his flesh. Abruptly he became aware of another 'pain'. This one was very dissociated, for all that it was excruciating. It felt like someone had dumped a bunch of white-hot spiders down his neck. Spiders which were now busy ripping at a spectral part of him, gnawing at everything that made him... him. Just as the parts of him that the spiders were ripping away were properly about to disperse, a warm wave of energy swept him up and swirled all of 'him' around in a strange and disorientating way. The spiders, now made of bone-chilling ice, flowed backwards, their wave-like motion putting things back in place again, turning over his whole being in an instant and threading him back together—

A name shifted back into his consciousness.

-Ha...? ...Yun?

It was followed by a torrent of images, shapes, memories and sensations...

-Young Master... Ha clan...

-Saved... Ling... Luo...

-Betrayed... Herb Hunters...

-Lin School...

-Indigenous... Yin Eclipse...

-Brother Ji... Din Ouyeng... Friends...

-Death... Betrayal...Herb Hunters

-Trial...

Ha Yun opened his eyes with a jolt.

-I should be dead, was his first thought.

The second and third thoughts were crudely truncated by light and noise as his senses were overloaded.

“Wh—?”

He tried to speak and pain flooded back into his world. Something felt like it was hammering at the inside of his skull, his limbs were alternatively ice and fire and every bone in his body felt like it had molten lead for marrow. There were also two Ha Yuns in his head. One, the smaller one, was screaming in horror. He tried to focus on what that other him was trying to tell him, but it just didn’t take for some reason.

“Easy, Young Master Ha…” a soothing female voice whispered by his head.

He felt warm qi flowing from feminine hands into his body, soothing the pain. The fire cooled, the ice started to warm and the twisting agony in his bones was reduced to a dull ache.

“What happened?” the voice that spoke was his, but…

“Don’t worry brother Ha, you are okay now... the injury you took defending Fairy Luo during their betrayal was extreme,” Young Noble Ji was squatting nearby, looking at him with concern. He held several strange talismans in his hand.

He had a strange rush of euphoria that someone that important was concerned about him. About his wellbeing.

“F...Fairy Luo?” he realised belatedly who was holding his head.

Ling Luo was bending over him with a look of deep concern on her face. Tears marred her perfect features and her eyes… He found himself lost in her gaze for a few seconds before he reasserted control over his emotions.

His mind caught up with what Young Noble Ji had said.

“Betrayal?”

He tried to sit up but Fairy Luo still held onto him, so all he succeeded in doing was flailing weakly in her lap...

“Don’t move Young Master Ha, your injuries are still healing.”

Her soft voice further soothed his confused state. She was right. He did need to lie here and heal for a minute, with his head in Fairy Luo’s lap. It was a very nice view, after all. The other voice in his head that was trying to get his attention receded a bit more.

“You took a serious soul wound. You are lucky to have survived, given your low cultivation,” Young Noble Din said from where he sat nearby, looking through a storage ring.

“Brother Ji was barely able to save you using a precious treasure.”

“Save me?” the voice, his voice, sounded confused as it rang oddly in his own ears.

Closing his eyes, he tried to recall what had just occurred. The events leading up to his injury were blurry and fragmented. There was a memory of triggering the barrier. Someone had attacked Sir Huang? Sir Cao had attacked them… and he had been injured in the aftermath?

“Ha… Leng?” he asked... the name was hard to dredge up.

“He…” Fairy Luo sounded… uncertain?

“His body isn’t here,” Young Noble Din Ouyeng shrugged. “I think he was hit by one of the qi blasts from that old freak Yeng.”

“His body?” he struggled up, shaking off Fairy Luo’s kind hands.

Looking around, the ridgeline was in ruins. Rocks were melted. Something had sheared off a two hundred metre swathe to their east. All that was left was swirling dust and an unnaturally flat surface extending diagonally to the edge of the ridge where it truncated oddly.

Three, maybe four corpses lay in a row nearby; Sir Cao, Ha Ding, Ha Mao and maybe bits of Ha Jiao.

He stared at them blankly, not really grasping their deaths. They were his followers… it shouldn’t disturb him that they were dead. It was their… their job to protect him, anyway. That they died like this just… meant… that they had fulfilled their duty? Something about that felt wrong, but he couldn’t work out what it was. Perhaps an aftereffect of this soul attack messing with him?

Their bodies were ruined beyond belief. Sir Cao had a hole through his dantian and was missing an arm and both legs below the knee. Someone or something had smashed his face to pieces. Ha Ding and Ha Mao were bloody and cut to ribbons, their arms and legs stacked on top of their torsos. Ha Jiao’s head was also there, still holding a horrified expression.

The small voice in his mind was growing louder and louder the longer he stared. It was unhappy that they were dead?

-No… that doesn’t seem right.

He shook his head and tried to banish it. Psyche breaks were bad. Very bad. Especially before you manifested a Nascent Soul. All cultivators learned that quickly. Such deviations frequently led to heart demons, or even Demonification if serious enough.

“We cannot let this betrayal go unpunished,” Young Noble Ji moved to stand beside him and clapped a hand on his shoulder.

Din Ouyeng nodded grimly, “Indeed. Now you are okay, we must chase after those lowborn indigenous scum and their sympathisers.”

“Indigenous?” he was confused for a short moment.

-Oh. They mean the Yin Eclipse people.

Eastern Indigenous was the derogatory word the people from the central continent used to describe the lower orders on the Yin Eclipse sub-continent and parts of the Easten continent. He looked around, still confused… there were more people? No? Should be more people?

“Where are the Herb Hunters?” he finally found what he wanted to ask after several awkward seconds of grasping.

“Don’t tax yourself Young Master Ha,” Fairy Luo said with concern. “You might exacerbate your injury.”

“They fled with the indigenous old freak,” Din Ouyeng glowered.

Ling Luo came and stood beside him, slipping an arm into his to hug him. He was suddenly keenly aware of her voluptuous curves pressing against him. The flush of heat from her qi aura made him giddy. Part of him complained that it was deeply inappropriate for… him…? That voice died into silence. If Fairy Luo wanted to grab his arm and hold him close, that was just fine.

“It is as you suspected back at the shelter, Young Master Yun. That indigenous boy was leaving signs for rogue cultivators to follow us.”

“As I suspected?” he felt that he was missing something here…

“Yes. You told me at the time that there had been a spate of unusual issues with Herb Hunters from your town's Pavilion,” Young Noble Ji said, giving his shoulder another squeeze, “I am sorry I didn’t take your warnings more seriously.”

He tried to recall this in his memories of the past few days. Fate-thrashed soul injury, it fogged up everything. After a moment of intense concentration, he recalled sitting in the way station talking to Sir Jing.

-Ah?

Snippets of the conversation flowed back to him somehow. They were concerned about the death of Ha Mun, who had died to a lamium that had ambushed them as soon as they arrived.. Sir Cao had been worried that the Herb Hunters had deliberately misled them. He had been… angry that the Hunters didn’t save him when they could have. More memories slotted into place…

-They led us through all sorts of dangerous places.

-The Hunters.

-Ah… the Jun girls... pretty.

-And the Han indigenous clown.

Part of him was still confused.

-I never..?

...never?

He had never liked the indigenous people. They didn’t respect the Imperial Authority or the Rule of the Emperor as all civilised people should. They also practised their strange heretical cultivation arts that inexplicably worked better in these fate-forsaken mountains.

“After Ha Fang was killed, you confronted them,” he looked at Luo Ling, who had tears in her eyes again. “Brave Hero Fang saved me from being blown up by one of those blaze pine seeds… if he hadn’t pushed me clear that blonde-haired little traitoress would have killed me.”

-Blonde-haired? Does she mean Lin Ling?

“To think the villainy of the former Lin School ran that deep, that they would throw away their civilisation and side with rebel cultivators hiding in the forests to the south,” Din Ouyeng scowled.

Young Noble Ji frowned, “We were fortunate you had such a powerful talisman on you. One of their old freaks attacked us on the ridgeline. The traitors used a ‘Skitter Leap’ talisman to flee.”

His memories showed Lin Ling and Kun Juni fleeing in a cloud of purple butterflies. He had assumed that was just a weird issue with his memory.

“I never expected your bodyguard Sir Huang to be so noble as to sacrifice his own life to save yours,” Din Ouyeng added warmly. “He bought you enough time to use your elder’s barrier to protect Fairy Luo.”

“I….” he found he wasn’t sure what to say… there was still a splitting pain in his head.

The other voice snarled and cursed him furiously even as his returning cognisant solidity pushed it down.

“You will need some time to recover,” Young Noble Ji said, giving his shoulder a final squeeze before stepping away.

He felt the residual warmth of the Young Noble’s qi pass into his body, healing his wounds a bit more and calming his mind.

“But… why?” he looked as confused as he sounded, he was sure.

The why of it still eluded him. He had memories showing this and that... but why did something still felt like it was missing?

“They wanted to exploit the Imperial Proclamation to strike back at the Ha clan,” Young Noble Din scowled darkly.

"Oh…"

He recalled belatedly that the Ha clan was attempting to subsume the Hunter Pavilion. There had been missions aimed at taking key people out of the equation so they would be censured and the Ha clan could take over their operations and control the Pavilion unofficially on behalf of West Flower Picking Town.

Young Noble Ji shook his head in disgust at this and waved a hand. A barrier of golden fire sprung up around them.

“Please stay here with Fairy Luo as her protector,” Din Ouyeng added, as he also stood up.

“We will chase after the betrayers and capture them so the Ha clan can see justice done. The Ha clan is, after all, a good ally of my Din clan.”

“Thank you Young Master Din,” Fairy Luo saluted him. “Please uphold justice on behalf of the Blue Water City Bureau as well.”

He found himself also saluting the pair and wishing them good luck, while promising to look after Fairy Luo. They were indeed lucky to have such valorous Young Nobles from across the ocean with them. If not for the two of them fighting off the indigenous old freak, he might be dead. Or so his memories told him, at least. The tiny voice in the back of his head finally receded away. That was a relief. He had been concerned about that and whether it was a sign he was having a Psyche Break.

~ Ha Leng, Ha Family Old Ancestors ~

Ha Leng smashed into the ground even as he tried to focus on calling the strongest soul bound talisman he possessed out of his storage ring. The ‘Mortal Excession’ talisman in his hand was a forbidden thing that would call down a supreme tribulation on the spot it was triggered. It did that by briefly elevating your cultivation by a Supreme Step. The Mortal would become Immortal. The Immortal could achieve the Dao, tor a brief moment at least, your firefly-like life fully drawn out according to the most auspicious path your destiny might have taken you. Then they would die amid the fury of heaven that descended upon you, a dozen or more Heavenly Tribulations all arriving at once to smite you off the face of the world... you and everything else within a hundred miles that you had just implicated.

“—be going first, Yun…”

The impact took away any breath with which he had to scream in pain even as what he had thought would be his final words hung in the air around him. The talisman was already disintegrating in his hand. He had a moment of regret that Ha Yun’s determination to save him rather than himself might have just demolished a large part of West Flower Picking Town, making him a posthumous criminal against the whole province, before the talisman’s hooks sank into his spirit root.

He wondered if this was what it felt like to be eaten alive by sage cutter ants. That was apparently a horrible way to die. His body itched like there was fire worming into his flesh. His bones were turning to icy lumps inside him, and he was keenly aware that his blood should probably not be boiling. His thought processes crumbled as the talisman burned away, but the expected tribulation never came.

On the other hand, something dispersed every bit of qi in his body. The activation of the talisman was forcibly cancelled by someone or something, although such a thing should have been impossible as far as he was bleakly aware. A part of his brutalized psyche complained that it wanted his money back from Grandmaster Mang.

Muted voices echoed around him. The words were lost in the still reverberating spatial distortion that he was currently masquerading as, but it was certainly complaining about something. At quite some length as well.

Something pressed down on his back and he felt a rush of cool, soothing energy wash away the gnawing of the spectral ants. A hand, he belatedly realised as sensation returned to his skin. He hadn’t realised until this point that his body was numb and that the pain was entirely in his head. Colour was restored next, followed by the ability to not have to think about every single breath he took.

“Easy lad. Don’t choke on your vomit,” a faintly familiar voice spoke above him.

-Don’t vomit?

He was confused until he felt the energy twisting around inside him, doing something inexplicable that made him feel like his stomach had just fallen out of his body and was dragging him down to hell with it. The numbness and tingling flowed back for a few confusing, terrifying seconds and then receded in a tingling wave of tiny sparks that scattered around him like a swarm of little fireflies. Involuntarily he emptied his stomach all over the stone tiles; blood and the remains of a few spirit plants and bread mingled nastily on the ground. Belatedly he was aware of the hand holding him by the collar of his rather ruined clothes, stopping him from collapsing face-first into it.

The hand hauled him properly upright and sat him down, a bit like a puppet that lacked any strings, against the plinth of a stone statue. Looking up at it he saw it was of some sagacious-looking fellow in a weird robe and a very strange broad-brimmed hat that resembled the ones they wore on the western continent a tad. To distract himself from the fact that his body was becoming uncomfortably itchy as the cool energy swirled around inside him, he tried to look around him.

With colour returned to the world, he could better appreciate how bizarre a place he had ended up in. The how of that was still a bit bleary. There was a largish ornamental-style pagoda rising above him. It looked like it was made out of a huge stack of colourful, many-armed demonic figures, to the point that the roofed layers within it seemed almost like an afterthought of the designer. As if someone had at some later point reminded them that a pagoda should also have a bunch of floors and roof tiles.

The place he was in was a broad plaza with large, low-lying stone flower beds. Everything was carved in ornate and esoteric ways with dancing figures, demons, gods, devils and ghosts cavorting in an endless dance across every panel and tile. Beds of spiritual flowers in a riot of colours grew everywhere. Around it was an ornamental lake, filled with lotus blossoms and water lilies. Trees rose around from the distant shoreline, transitioning into picturesque limestone cliffs. A crane strutted amid the lily blossoms. Somewhere behind him, he heard the trilling call of a peacock?

The whole place was like some mortal’s idea of an Immortal’s garden. Except that every tree within sight, both here and across the water, was a cherry tree. He wondered briefly if there was still some problem with his vision. Cherry trees should not be that eye-searing shade of lime yellow. Even the bark made his vision swim a bit.

“Easy, easy. Take deep breaths… don’t panic. Your qi is still unstable. You will feel some emotional—”

The kindly male voice speaking beside him vanished in a fog of surging, confused panic that exploded from somewhere inside him.

-Yun sent me somewhere!

-Is this place a sanctuary of the elders of the Ha clan?

-Is Ha Yun okay?

-Where is Yun?

-Did he come with me?

Ha Yun of the past week had been slowly mellowing. He had known his friend for almost thirty years and in the few days out here, under the influence of Sir Huang, his childhood friend had been closer to the seven year old kid with a snotty nose who dreamed of being a great sage and slaying demons beyond the realm wall, than he could remember… since, well… since they were both that age.

His surge of strange jumbled emotions faded as quickly as it came, and was replaced by a mind-crushing emptiness.

-My friend is dead.

-Killed by treachery from the Din clan.

-It was stupid of the clan elders to try to grasp the leg of such an influence across the ocean.

-Their reputation is even worse than our own clans’ in that regard.

-Is this karmic justice?

-Is all of this punishment for going against the Bureau?

-Did one of those old monsters of myth that transcends the very strength of the world itself notice our clan’s arrogance and cast their thought down?

“That’s it… get all the confusion out. You suffered a huge soul injury,” the kindly voice said beside him. “Don’t think about it. Your realm has… erm… that’s interesting.”

“My realm has...?”

A persistent voice in his head finally managed to make itself heard, jabbering insanely and pointing with far too many arms.

-My realm is wrong.

-My body is wrong.

-Very very wrong. Far too strong.

-This amount of energy rolling around inside me should have exploded me into a bloody mist!?!

-And why am I staring... at myself?

The disorientation… he spun on the spot—

When he calmed down, he finally noticed the three men sat around the nearby table, watching him.

He froze, like a small animal meeting a predator, before realising that of course there should be people here if this was the mysterious elders’ sanctuary of their clan.

Except... he had never seen these people before, and he was sure he had seen all of the—

“Still your thoughts. Your disorientation will pass,” the kindly voice said again, and the hand supporting him sent another wave of qi through him.

He finally recognised the middle figure. Clearly, the qi being put into his body was doing something to him, because he didn’t climb vertically three feet in the air and kowtow to the Ha family's most ancient Old Ancestor. There was a full-length painting and statue of the man in the family’s shrine. His mother’s lineage was descended from the renowned old man’s third son.

“Junior meets Honoured and Serene Old Ancestors,” he managed to force out.

“Not at all. Not at all,” the sagacious, Confucian-looking old man beamed broadly.

-He in’t the person talking to me?

“I don’t believe this is Ha Yun,” the youngest-looking of the three figures said dryly.

His gaze, which was scrutinizing him like he was a humerously shaped vegetable, made him want to prostrate himself again. The third figure, of middle age, with a robust, military-looking demeanour and a well-trimmed beard in a rather outdated style, flipped the sleeves of his deep green robe and coughed a bit awkwardly.

“This is Ha Leng. He is one of Young Master Ha Yun’s childhood friends.”

That was the kindly voice that had been helping him, he realised. The man in green was Sir Huang!?

“Leng… interesting, Interesting! Is that from the Erlang branch?” the sagacious Old Ancestor mused, stroking his beard.

“Junior is indeed descended from Honoured Old Ancestor Ha Erlang Shan,” he fought back a grimace of embarrassment. “Junior cannot bow to Old Ancestor, forgive my impertinence!”

The sagacious old man beamed and stroked his beard again, “Mmmmm...That makes you my descendant?”

“Well, at least my talisman saved somebody,” the youngest looking of the three ancestors grumbled.

Behind them, on the table, a talisman on the table suddenly shook and started to glimmer faintly, and all three turned to look at it.

“Ah,” his old ancestor said with a frown. “It would seem, Father, that your talent for correctly predicting ridiculous situations continues with rather disturbing success in every venture except our games.”

The youngest-looking elder stared at the talisman sourly for a long moment, “I think it is necessary for this old man to take a look.”

The younger man stood and came over to stand beside him. This close, the casually imperious air around him was stifling. It made him want to prostrate himself on an instinctual level.

“Young man, do you mind if I take a look inside your mind’s eye a moment?”

-On the other hand, what he is asking is...?

“Err? What does honourable and wise Old Ancestor mean?" he picked his words as carefully and politely as possible.

-Does the elder, ancestor want to scry my soul? Am he actually in trouble here because I am not Ha Yun?

Panic rose in his body like a surging wave, turning his qi turbulent once again. The cool energy was actually really quite hot, and—

“Oh, you won’t get anywhere like that, revered teacher, that’s like asking a goldfish what it thinks of the sun in the sky,” the military-looking, green-robed old man shook his head wryly. “Not to mention your aura is still oppressing the poor lad.”

The younger-looking man glanced back at the table and then frowned. The imperious aura vanished abruptly, as did the subtle pressure.

“Even that much? The youth of today sure are coddled.”

The kindly-sounding green-robed old ancestor sighed. “What revered Great Teacher means is that he wishes to look through your karmic links and view the last… two minutes or so of your experiences before you arrived here?”

“The time between when I was unceremoniously punted off that fate-cursed cliff and when Young Master Yun’s life talisman inexplicably had a nascent deviation just after using his life-saving talisman from the Second Original Old Ancestor here on his childhood friend rather than himself.”

“Oh…” Ha Leng suddenly found that he wanted the comforting suppression of that imperious aura back to fog his thoughts. There was a lot to process in that statement, but—

“Ha Yun is alive?”

“That…” Old Ancestor Kai frowned.

“That remains to be seen,” the green-robed, kindly Ancestor, Ancestor Huang, said with a worried look.

“That—” he gulped, his throat was also dry and parched.

He blinked and forced out his other worry, having improbably survived up until this point. “That sounds dangerous?”

“Mmmmm… it is a bit, yes. Difficult too,” the youngest-looking, but in fact, most senior Ancestor here beamed.

Ancestor Kai coughed, looking awkward, “What my esteemed father means, young Leng, is that it is likely to be a very bad day, in due course, for the idiot who has tried to pluck away at things that they should have been self-aware enough to otherwise leave well alone.”

The horrible smile that that so-called... Brother Ji... Di Ji had had as he stood on the cliff edge swirled back into his mind.

Sir Huang vanished off the cliff with the two young women, the Hunters.

The terrifying golden rings…

The futile deaths of his friends… sworn brothers Mao, Ding and Jiao—

All of that welled up in his mind’s eye again. The conviction in the dying Ha Yun’s eyes the moment before he vanished. His own determination to give his life, to try to help his oldest friend survive.

“In that case, revered Ancestors, this filial—”

“Ahem,” the Original Old Ancestor coughed a touch awkwardly. “Stop grovelling lad, have some gumption for Christ’s sake. I’m not a god. Anyway, I’ve seen what I needed to.”

Staring dully at the Original Ancestor, he blinked a few times. “Done—?

“I… Ancestor I don’t understand. I thought you needed—?”

His matrilineal Ancestor Kai suddenly guffawed out loud and pounded the table. “See!? This is why it’s amusing to run around among the kids occasionally. They have such wonderfully idiotic notions about how things work.”

The Original Old Ancestor’s eye twitched slightly. “You think this seat needs to resort to such mediocrity? This seat is not those ‘Three Morons ’ of the Imperial Court.”

“N...n-no... Not at all S… Supreme One,” the words came out in a staccato stutter.

Ancestor Huang rolled his eyes while his branch’s old ancestor kicked his feet on the floor in hysterics, tears rolling from his eyes.

“Still your levity, boy—” he flinched as the imperious aura swirled back for a split second. The world rippled and the cherry trees faded out of focus. He realised he wanted to puke again as the swirling resolved itself and the cherry trees turned an eye-warping orange.

“No, not you, child. This idiot,” the Original Old Ancestor was suddenly standing beside Old Ancestor Kai, whom he clipped across the head in a decidedly ill-humoured manner.

Stalking back around the table, he sat down with a dark sigh. “I hate being right.”

In the following silence, it was impossible to say anything. A stifling oppression had started to permeate the whole place. Even the other two ancestors seemed affected by it.

The Original Old Ancestor flipped over a few cards on the table. “Ah. It’s the Long Nine Dragon. I seem to have karma with it somehow.”

Ancestor Huang winced slightly, but Old Ancestor Kai managed to catch his eye and imperceptibly shake his head without his father noticing.

“It seems the culprit is the wage of your inaction that time, boy,” the Original Old Ancestor glanced at his son.

That was shocking in its own right. He had shoved that thought to the back of his mind, where it was sat in a dark corner, holding its knees and gibbering faintly. The younger-looking man was the Old Freak Ha.

–The Old Freak Ha.

There was nobody else he could be. Nobody would dare to impersonate him. He was slumped here in front of someone who could walk sideways even in front of the Imperial Seat.

The Original Old Ancestor stared at the wine cup that had just appeared in his hand, as if by a conjuring trick, and took a sip of it before sighing again.

“I told you then, you should have crushed that brat like the cockroach he was for the crime he perpetrated. If you had done that—”

“Di Ji?”

Ancestor Kai’s voice hissed through the world. The trees exploded into colourful shards. The lake was twisted into a blizzard of shattering water and lily blossoms. The mountains crumbled into ruin in eerie silence. In the sky above… he felt like he was staring into the void, a horrible shadow descending towards him, filled with myriad dancing animals. His vision shrank as he was pulled upwards towards it, his psyche crumbling as phantasmagorical words sang in his ears.

The world snapped back into focus. Ancestor Huang was standing beside him, his actual hand on his head. Warm strength suffused his body, dragging him down out of that horrific, primordial abyss in the sky.

The world was reset around him. The pagoda was still there, but the lake was gone. In its place was a vast garden with lines of cherry trees in a weird shade that dreamed of being mauve. The mountains were gone.

In the midst of all this, a frail and quavering voice spoke up. It took Ha Leng a second to realise it was, in fact, his own voice. He had finally found the courage to ask what had weighed on his mind for several minutes now.

“Honoured Ancestors… What on earth did that Di Ji actually do to you all to offend such persons as your august selves? And how is he still alive here and now?”

“……”

Ancestor Huang winced. “It’s more a case of finding people outside of the umbrella influence of the Imperial Court that that Nameless-bestowed little carbuncle of maleficence didn’t offend in his ten years of running rampant.”

That wasn’t really an answer, he was going to point out, when Ancestor Huang’s eye caught his and he received a subtle suggestion to not prod the topic unduly.

“And there I thought I had anger issues regarding that brat,” the Original Old Ancestor grunted, nodding in appreciation.

He broke into an amused grin as the sky mercifully receded and became normal again. “Should I tell Lady Kai that your regard for her is so great that it would break worlds? She would appreciate the gesture.”

“Please do not, Father. She swore she would cripple my cultivation if I came within a thousand miles of her in the next aeonspan,” Ancestor Kai grimaced.

“Aiiii,” the Original Old Ancestor shook his head and sighed deeply, taking another drink of his wine. “Ahh, to be young again, and feel love so keenly.”

“…”

All of them stared at him, askance. Ha Leng just found that he was confused now, Ancestor Huang was looking a bit oddly at the father-son pair, while his mother's Ancestor was glaring at the Original Ancestor like he wanted to hit him with the nearby wine jar.

“In any case,” the Original Ancestor sighed and stood from his seat, “now that that brat’s father has helped him wriggle out from under the rather austere and short-sighted judgement of heaven, to the point where he is willing to be this blase, even after all the mess he caused you all, he will certainly have some card in hand that makes him difficult to deal with.”

Old Ancestor Kai and Ancestor Huang both looked like they had just swallowed a bitter pill as the Original Ancestor started to pace back and forth.

“That said...” the Original Ancestor started to chuckle darkly.

“That brat had some Good Fortune before: he did his dicking about when I was off-world. Maybe there is an opportunity here to spit in Kong Di and Din Bao’s soup without them realising.”

As the Ancestor finished speaking, Ha Leng found his eyes drawn with some trepidation to the way that the very nature of the world around them all was subtly shifting in accordance to the his now rather sinister laughter, storm clouds swirling above and trees rustling in the wind in eerie mimicry, carrying the laughter into the very fabric of the world itself.

~ Han Shu, The Herb Hunters ~

Another flash of hot wind swept over Han Shu's head, making him flinch into the thick, damp loam for a moment. He suppressed his qi as best he could with his mantra and redoubled the focus on pushing all the sensations of stress and turmoil at it for good measure. The plant in the gully above them rustled and hissed under the external stimuli. It was the real shield, his own attempts at hiding were really only a secondary thing compared to its presence. He pressed his face to the earth and slowly inched his way through the tiny safe space afforded ahead of him between the stems of the plant. Thorns snagged at his hood, pulled up over his head, and scraped the pack, now high on his neck for extra protection. Occasionally he would still get a scratch and the plant would try to grasp a bit of the vitality in his blood, leaving him with a faint itchy numbness.

Another ripple. The ground shook this time. Their pursuers were in the valley they had just left, it seemed. Their lack of knowledge about the ways in and out of this particular conflux of three valleys meant they were busy cutting them off in the wrong spot. He winced as the plant above rustled and was pushed downwards by another ripple. Thorns pricked his arm and leg, making him bite soil in an effort to not scream. It would not do to get snagged more than a few more times. Several of those thorns had been perilously close to the artery in his arm. A direct shot into his heart or neck would be unpleasant, to say the least. He glanced at his arm where the skin was now visible, his blood had a faint greenish tint that made him wince. He was already dangerously overdosed on wood purification pills as it was, to make himself so toxic to the plant that it didn’t care to actively send feelers after him.

Ahead of him, Ling was faring a bit better. She was shorter and thinner and had less to carry now that her supplies were exhausted, which was allowing her to move more dexterously through this maze of a vitality-leaching plant.

In the distance, there was another dull thwack and the thorns rustled above them again. Both stopped, flat to the earth. He held his breath and did his best to still his heartbeat, everything to make sure the plant wasn’t going to take any interest in them. After five seconds Ling started moving again, a bit quicker this time. That impact had been in the valley to their right, in the direction Juni was moving.

Juni had gone through the ridge. She had the most water breathing pills of all of them and the flooded subterranean caves systems were the one place where having a dual cultivation really shone this far in, protecting her from the biting cold of the Yin Darkwater that settled in the still places within them. She was also the strongest melee combatant among the three of them and best equipped to protect herself from the things that lurked in the water. They, on the other hand—

“COME OUT LITTLE VERMIN! COME OUT AND BE JUDGED!”

The blood ran from his nose and ears. He had stopped healing his eardrums and just blocked his ears entirely long ago: the ringing in his head was tolerable and his physical cultivation was stalling off the balance issues. The soul shock made his body tingle, like little ants biting his skin, although the plant above absorbed most of that. Its structure… intensified subtly under the stimulus. The last thing you wanted to do was throw soul attacks at a blood briar, they’d just make it stronger. That gave him a half-smile before he pushed his face into the loam and wormed forward once more.

The language of their pursuers had changed. The first twenty minutes or so had been mostly their pursuers announcing how they were going to make them suffer if they didn’t surrender. It had almost felt like they were treating it as a grand joke; Di Ji had always been following behind at a steady distance, taunting them relentlessly while crushing or bulldozing every threat they dragged him through. How he was doing this through the realm suppression was a mystery, either he was chugging qi replenishment pills like an addict or had an almost inexhaustible supply of talismans... or he had an artefact that lifted the suppression somehow.

“VILLAINS! HEAVEN HAS EYES AND FOLLOWS YOUR EVERY MOVE! ACCEPT YOUR DEMISE WITH COURAGE AND LET YOUR SIN OF REBELLION BE EXPUNGED.”

Din Ouyeng’s voice boomed out from a different direction. He was almost worse. Di Ji was just following behind, but Din Ouyeng had dropped out of the sky three times now, nearly catching them twice, blocking off easy access routes with massive volleys of talismans. Pushing them to harder and more dangerous places.

He was starting to wonder if that was actually the point, if their ‘flight’ was just being prolonged at this point so the two of them could harvest rare ‘opportunities’ that death zone after death zone brought. Plucking riches like fruit from a vine.

What was certain, though, was that the nature of the pursuit had changed after they escaped the clutches of the God Bewitching Jasmine Grove. There had been an all too brief lull for some reason. For a while, they had worried that they were caught in the fate-cursed Grove, doomed to wander an unreality within their minds while their bodies rotted away to become nutrients for it, but that wasn’t the case. When the pursuit returned they were now ‘Indigenous Scum, Betrayers and Murderers’. The threats had changed too, no longer personal taunts and threatened torments. Now the pair gave these ridiculous pronouncements of righteous outrage. Declarations against their villainy, calls for judgement, for fate to lead them to their righteous end and so on. It felt like someone had swapped the cheap script at a market play between comedic tragedy and dark satire in the interval.

Up ahead, he saw Ling roll sideways into a narrow crack and vanish. Finally, they were at their destination, and not fate-thrashed soon enough. He got to that point a few moments later and slid his pack down, before diving in headfirst. He hit the water with a small splash, stretching out his hands to avoid rocks and protect his head. Icy cold shot across his whole body, making his muscles tense. The mantra allowed him to override it and bury the discomfort. He let himself be carried by the flow of the water for forty agonising seconds. His blood toxicity was so high he hadn’t dared eat another purification pill to stave off the razorblade corrosion of yin water qi.

A hand grabbed his collar, feminine.

-Two taps on the shoulder and a poke, Juni.

She must have been waiting for them at this place. He felt a talisman on his skin, and the icy razors of yin qi receded to a muted itch. He let her drag him through the narrow cave system, focusing on holding his breath and keeping his limbs supple and relaxed.

Some minutes later they surfaced into a small underground cave, entirely devoid of natural light. The only sense he had of the space was the surrounding noise; lapping water, drips from above, the crunch of small ripples on some nearby shore, the clop of water rippling gently against rock from every direction, the deep cold of the pool itself.

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, and then the cavern drifted into focus. Black gave way to greys and a bit of white and he could see 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 then sank back into the pool until just his nose and face were above the surface. Lin Ling, who was beside him, had just done the same.

Juni, crouched further up the ledge, pressed flat against the wall, slowly worked her way away from them and finally slipped properly back into the water near the beach of sand. Her detour was all in the aim of making no splashes as she re-entered.

The world finally stabilized into shades of grey as Juni re-joined them. With a final glance at the ceiling, they all sank below the water itself to converse.

Juni pointed down, hand cupped, then counted to three before angling her hand at ninety degrees, palm facing toward her breasts and fingers making the Queen Mother's blessing.

-A tunnel, three metres down, heading west.

That was back the way they had come, but it was what it was.

An almighty crash reverberated through their surroundings, loud enough that it had to be immediately overhead. The shockwave passed through the rock and magnified in the water to make his vision swim. He desperately wrapped himself in qi: it would not do to bleed into the water. The shockwave passed, consumed by the colossal qi saturation in the rocks above them. Nothing joined them in the water.

“YOU CANNOT HIDE, VILLAINS! IF YOU DON’T COME OUT, WE WILL DENOUNCE YOUR FAMILIES FOR IMPERIAL CENSURE! THE EMPEROR REWARDS REBELLION WITH DEATH. BETRAYERS!”

“What do they even hope to achieve with this?” Ling signed in the gloom, once everything settled. Neither of them replied. The question was obviously rhetorical.

Ling grasped Juni’s belt, and a moment later he did so as well before locking his arm with Ling’s. The cold was horrific as they descended deeper into the pool and into the mouth of the tunnel. Juni just dropped silently into the depths for a full minute, letting the water flow carry them onwards until they were well clear of the cavern they had been in. Even with the talisman supporting his qi armour, his skin was blistering by the time they made it to the next, much larger, cavern.

As his vision adjusted to the space again, he saw that the roof here was so low that it was nearly touching the water in parts. He fought the psychological urge to look down. He was almost standing on a stratum of Yin Darkwater within the waters, he depth below him apparent by the cold seeping through his feet, slowly twining around his legs like malignant shadow shackles. Nobody communicated as they considered the cavern.

Eventually, Juni pointed gently to the right.

They both nodded and slowly started to make their way through the cavern, swimming slowly and smoothly just under the surface to avoid making any proper surface ripples.

~ ??? ~

In the chamber they had just left, the ancient Eldritch Arach’Naros watched the three mortal primates go deeper into the cave system. They had been smart enough not to bother it. Such intelligence was surprising in their kind. They also hadn’t made a fuss or a mess, and departed promptly. Such wisdom was uncommon in their Order, so fascinated with suicide and, in its eminently considered opinion, well on track to raising it to an art form.

It was a touch disappointed that they had no Words. Perhaps that was why they had immediately departed without giving a first greeting, uncouth as it was. Staying silent when you had no means for an intellectual discussion was a sign of incipient wisdom. That was why it had let them pass unhindered, they had just been doing their own thing and not been a nuisance. Its peers would have called that soft... but manners were important. If you didn’t observe them, people would never take you seriously when you spoke up.

As an afterthought, it offered them a little bit of onwards good fortune for their trip ahead. Perhaps it would allow them to seek an appropriate suicide. Nobody would be able to say that it was not an understanding scholar of such higher matters. It pondered for a moment if its blessing would make a difference? There was a conflicting school of thought there. Should the young be left to seek their own path? Normally it would agree, teachers were just a burden beyond a certain point after all. On the other hand, good behaviour should be rewarded. It had observed over the years, as a scholar of the matter of reality, that those who didn’t observe such niceties were inevitably nagged. Some thrived on that… for itself? It preferred a certain solitude.

It cast its senses upwards…

In any case, it had been awoken from its gentle slumber by whatever was going on out there. It had been a long time since it had gone outside, it mused.

-How many years?

-Ahh...

That didn’t matter. Years, those were something mortals invented to give themselves a purchase on the unrelenting forward tread towards that final shore.

Since it had managed to get out of that place it hadn’t given years much thought. In its considered opinion, they were a bit of a philosophical dead end in any case. It had made its views on that clear in the past. No need to revisit such old discussions.

In any event… here it was no longer bound by the chains of suffering like its brethren had been. They still raged below, or hungered, or dreamed. It was all the same. They had been foolish.

-Like mortals…

It considered that line of thought. Was it because they ate so many? If one ate too much of a thing, it was possible to become sick after all. It wasn’t above possibility that the mortal condition was chronic if acquired. Those ones were like that. Excellent scholars in their own right, but so… so…

Its mind wandered for a second, an eternity, to the chasm of its memory looking for the correct thought, but that way led to some discussions that were still ongoing. Better to let them alone for now. It would be a waste to miss such opportunities to advance its own understanding. It was sad that it had missed the chance to talk with her before the fall. She was something of an idol to it. To walk so far beyond the final shore... that took so many words. It could learn so much if it met her. It was good to have dreams, it thought contentedly.

The whole cavern rocked as an explosion shook the cavern above. The contented moment it had just achieved was ruptured, so...

-So…

-So vexatious.

Its thoughts returned to its brethren as it checked its reflection in the pool which stood vertically opposite it, like a mirror.

They had been foolish. It was certainly because they ate so many that they had been corrupted so. The primate’s fascination with suicide had nearly been their undoing. Those… unscholarly ones had nearly dragged all species with them in their obsession.

Another explosion. The water rippled.

It quashed a flash of genuine irritation as it stretched a limb down to stroke the water, stilling it so it could continue to ponder its being.

A few moments later another shockwave pulsed through the mountain. To the east. Mortal squealing echoed into its cave. Something about villainy? Such insipid language. Very uninspiring, it judged. Almost… dare it say it… primitive? An amusing mortal concept, spoken language. Another dead-end philosophy.

It stared at the mirror for a while longer.

On the other hand, now it was awake. It seemed there was no prospect of any peaceful repose either until the ruckus above subsided.

It closed its senses and—

More squawking. A different primate. Something about judgement, apparently.

It contemplated manifesting a head so it could have veins that throbbed in its temple. It was one thing to be noisy, but there was such a thing as a bottom line... respect. It considered itself a very tolerant and reasonable being, but even so—

It moved to the floor. The pool of water above it was still rippling gently from whatever was happening outside. It stared up for a moment, and then the water was where it should be. Below. Like all correct things.

If these squawking primates were not going to depart, perhaps it would go and see if they were interested in having a discussion on philosophy. One of them seemed to have words, unlike the previous three. It pondered for a moment longer. The clincher, in the end, was Suicide. It still had questions about the mortal primate’s fascination with it. You could find wisdom in any circumstance, in any event. Perhaps these two would have some new knowledge for it to mull over. It had been a long time since it discussed the finer points of its theories with anyone… maybe the field had moved in some remarkable new direction?

How long had it been sleeping? It tried to remember… but the abyss of its memory was so vast; the memory was dull…

-Dull…? What if its debating skills had also dulled?

It shivered, that was an ugly thought. It prided itself in being a very erudite speaker.

Part of it skittered off on that tangent. -Who was the last person it had discussed?

-No, as it had preached to one?

-Before it had slept, that much was clear, but had it awoken since?

~Ahhh…

The cave shivered faintly as it shook its concept of self in annoyance. Suddenly it felt that it might have taken a bit too long of a nap. Finally, its memory supplied the information. That mortal had been a good debater. Composed, very focused on her point as well. She had been lacking in words, but her earnest nature had convinced it. Thinking back, that one had never left a name with any meaning.

A further detonation shuddered through the valley.

It stared upwards. Now, this was just getting to the point of being rude. Maybe it would go find that mortal after it had a short chat with these two. Perhaps she would no longer be a mortal by now. That would be nice. It might even make up for all this ruckus. Discussing suicide with one of them was always much more stimulating. Perhaps it would even leave a name this time.