Memories of the Fall

If we speak of the great tragedies and misfortunes to befall sects in this generation that have had echoes far beyond their origins, many will talk about the deep embarrassment that Di Ji caused to so many, or the misfortune that befell the duke of Green Cliff province; however, the one that most stands out to me, as a scholar of history, as one whose repercussions still linger today, especially for our own Nine Moons sect, is the downfall of ‘Good Fortune Saintess’ Song Jia, from Burning Tiger Province.

While her name has largely fallen out of memory, except to those who were around at the time, hers was the last true ‘Good Fortune Core’ that has emerged in recent times.

She made her name during the disasters and upheavals of eight millennia ago, and such was her fame and standing that she eventually attracted notable attention, from a noble scion of the Shu clan named Shu Bao, who set out to court her. At that point, she had already formed her core, which was how she acquired her name, or moniker.

The events that transpired after that are rather murky, but the gist of it is that she took part in many trials with Shu Bao and his companions while he wooed her, but in the end she had split with him. Later she showed up at the doors of Shu pavilion, alleging that Shu Bao had mistreated her and given her away as part of a lost gamble and that she had lost her purity and her potential to a sworn brother of Shu Bao’s from the Jade Gate Court.

Had things been properly investigated then, disaster might have been averted, but as it was, she was publicly shamed and denounced by those around Shu Bao. He refused her entrance to the pavilion and his large following slandered her and assaulted her with foul words, calling her a whore, deceiver and mendacious woman, even bringing forth witnesses to her purported impropriety before throwing her out. When she petitioned the elders, they turned her away and she was basically chased away in disgrace.

Eventually, however, one of the older ancestors did, apparently, make a cursory investigation, persuaded, so the story goes, by his own disciple after Shu Bao’s flunkies beat him and embarrassed him and his fiancée in sect tourney. That investigation did indeed show that the pitiable Song Jia’s allegations had merit.

Unfortunately, and again, hindsight has not been kind to this position. Because of politics and his background, Shu Bao was barely punished and simply sent back to the Shu clan. Their justification was that it was excessive to abolish the cultivation, even temporarily, of a serious talent over an independent cultivator who was only at the Golden Core realm.

Those elders of the sect, somewhat blinded by circumstance it must be said, also judged that, robbed of her core, her purity, and her reputation, Song Jia would become an irrelevance and so they simply made some payment to her family and left it at that…

Excerpt from ‘the broken court – four decisive events that have shaped our generation’

~by Qing Fei Cui, Chronicler of Nine Moons

~ Juni – Ruined Courtyard ~

As the clouds spiralled above, holding within them the dancing, ethereal figures of the twelve ‘Daughters of the Ocean’ as the Ur’Inan had termed them, Juni could only watch in shock and horror as Chunhua, in effect, half-exploded in the very instant that the sun peaked over the horizon.

Their surroundings wavered.

In the very same instant, the most phenomenal devouring force erupted from Chunhua, ripping qi out of them, and their surroundings. It drew Hydra Qi out of Lin Ling and herself, Parasol Qi from their surroundings, even the golden fire from her own body, and yet something was clearly off. She could tell that even without seeing Lin Ling’s disbelieving, horrified expression, or ‘Bright Heart Shifting Step’s deeply inauspicious tug. That this devouring force that was dragging them all down was likely not a good thing.

The hazy shadow within the shattering form of Teng Chunhua in the middle of the frozen explosion slowly began to crumble as both of them looked on helplessly, now caged by the same intricate bindings of qi that had been aiding them.

The world stilled.

The Hydra’s soul, which had been attacking her unrelentingly, had just done something, she realised. A new, amorphous, intangible intent was suddenly and very rapidly devouring all the qi in her body, even as the manifestation of its soul was already shooting for Chunhua—

She was wondering if they were about to all be consumed by the collapse of one third of their pseudo-formation, thanks to the accursed snake, when ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ shifted again.

A mind-shattering chime rippled through the world around them, emanating from the depths of Chunhua’s ruined form.

It effortlessly transcended the stillness that the Hydra had evoked.

Like sun scattering mist, it dispersed the formless, untouchable devouring absence that had augmented the Hydra’s soul intent – even that which was still in her own body, making her feel like she had just been hit by some terrible hammer.

Lin Ling spat blood, her own body distorting under the impetus of the chime and, suddenly, all three of them were surrounded by a body-corroding vortex of orphaned qi, wrested from the Hydra’s control.

It snarled and finally abandoned its attempt at devouring her completely to focus on Chunhua.

Even without Bright Heart Shifting Steps’s prompting, she chased after it, drawing the golden fire and her mantra to grind it apart and slow it down as best she could; however, their realm difference was so great that she might as well have been a mortal child trying to grasp mist. Without it engaging with her, the Hydra’s intent slipped through her like a mirage.

Above her, as the clouds swirled outward, she was barely aware of the dawn-tinted sky rippling like a…

Inexorably, undeniably, her gaze was forced heavenward, drawn by the song of the twelve masked spirits, carried by the chime from Chunhua, called by the prestige of the vast mountain now shimmering like a mirage in the western sky.

Nine great stars shone in a constellation around it, and on its heights, amid pine forests wreathed in cloud, were five dazzling blue-jade pagodas, each containing a sense of a shrouded figure, adorned in shadowy imperial regalia. Around each, thirty-three fairy immortals lived, their various songs melding with the world to form a chorus of salutation for the wonders of the natural world, while above them, on the heights…

With the first ray of sun, still lingering, came a sense of iridescence, like the tails of a celestial peacock, fanning out around the mountain itself…

The scene was gone in almost the same instant, a mirage as if it had never been, leaving only a lingering sense of awe, but her mind gibbered a bit because she knew what that had been.

-Queen Mother of the West…

-One of the Supreme Heavenly Fates!

-Second only to the Three Pure Ones in terms of veneration by all righteous peoples.

The heavens showing a mirage representing her, along with that clarion cry, and the parasol tree meant…

-Luan?

She had just arrived at that rather terrifying guess when Chunhua, or the collapsed location of space that was Chunhua, seemed to spin through itself and become a recognisable form once more, scattering a blizzard of azure-blue fire and parasol blossoms as it did so.

The Hydra’s soul, which still held vestigial connections to her, because it had delayed her interference with its intent, screamed and gibbered now, just as much as certain parts of her mind were trying to flee Chunhua’s qi —

It snapped back at her, so fast she nearly got caught out by it as it tried to capitalize on her own shock to recover the ground it had lost. Judging by Lin Ling’s expression, it had just tried the same trick with her, because the scattering mist around them rippled and surged everywhere, turning into ethereal serpents of devouring strength once more.

She was aware, dimly, of the other cultivators and the Ur’Inan, who had already retreated into the most durable of the buildings, screaming and cursing; however, the Hydra was already back inside her body. Its assault now was focused on her body, rather than her spirit root. The serpents were raging through her, now trying to wear down the structure of her meridians from the inside out, disrupt her eight meridian gates and ruin her organs.

“…Body of the Lotus, the Gift of the Devoted Path Bestowed to the—”

The change was so jarring she nearly exploded and became a cripple on the spot as the Hydra’s intent targeted key points of her meridian system and gates. So skilful and decisive was its attempt at sabotaging her still-tortured meridians, reshaping the alignments between them, that it nearly led her to bestow her foundation right into its open jaws in the process, before she caught it, pulling her mantra back to its basic state.

“DEVOTED, PATH, LOTUS, BODY, BESTOWED”

Each mnemonic roared through her, now guided by her and supported by ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’, rather than the other way around, which was what had led to her nearly walking into that pit. They still struggled for several more moments though, before she truly succeeded in reversing the flow of what it had done and its attempt at warping her own body to make the mantra less effective foundered.

However, that ushered in a new struggle, because the Hydra came… again, seeking a new path, a new subversion. Cycle after cycle, she pushed her qi around, duelling back and forth with the Hydra.

The sky swam overhead, its colour shifting haphazardly. Whether it was through the passage of time or the warping influence of their various qis, it was hard to say, nor could she devote time to even worry about it.

So focused on the Hydra was she, that she was actually surprised by how quickly the coalescence arrived again, and all the qi in her body started to converge back in her dantian once more.

The pseudo core rapidly passed 20 rotations, whereupon it became a deep, pure gold and the Hydra hissed greedily, forcing her to divert more attention towards it as it prowled.

By the time it arrived at 24 rotations, however, the Hydra soul’s grasp over its own qi was starting to founder.

By 27 rotations, her core was wreathed in pure white flames.

At 28 rotations, it gained a corona of swirling sparks taking the form of golden lotus-like flowers, which easily scattered much of the Hydra’s intent, forcing it to properly retreat at last.

At that point, it wobbled, and then, fed by the qi from the hydra around her, went to 29… then 30 revolutions.

She focused on ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’, which wavered, telling her that the core wasn’t… complete… even as it rotated for the 31st time and gained a strange second corona of golden petals.

As she watched, it half-spun, wobbled and then exploded outwards– with enough force to shatter her bones and liquefy every organ not associated with her meridian system.

The experience was horrifying – she grasped for her mantra, holding onto it like a piece of driftwood in a raging storm as the purified qi penetrated every part of her, infusing her physical body with the white fire, the flower-like sparks and the golden flower petals. The Hydra soul screamed, consumed and scattered by it in much the same way that it had been when it tried to seize her spirit root.

For a brief moment, she was adrift in an absence of qi – it was like her body was being dunked in icy water, tearing itself apart in the wake of the passage of the shockwave—

‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ gave her a subtle nudge and she inhaled, somehow finding the opportune moment with its guidance to keep the momentum of that shockwave going, incorporating it into her refinement cycle itself.

She drew in every scrap of qi she could, feeling the cycle warp the air around her for twenty… maybe thirty metres in every direction, aware that she was also tearing qi from Ling and Chunhua at a rate far in excess of what she had before. She was vaguely aware of their shocked expressions; however, both recovered quickly and redoubled the amount of qi they were sending her.

Within two cycles, two breaths, her body was full to bursting with unrefined qi once again.

Within four, she was basically tearing the Hydra qi apart and refining it faster than its disrupted soul intent could recover any control over it.

Within 10 cycles her Qi Sea was less a sea and more a nebulous maelstrom of coalescing droplets of purified qi that rippled with the colours of all the elements, and with it came a problem.

Control.

It wasn’t quite running free of any guidance from her, but it was very close to it and with every cycle the momentum was only getting stronger…

-Need something…

-Something…

{Bright Heart Shifting Steps}

Refocusing on the art, she found it guiding her into the heart of the chaos, nudging, guiding, twisting…

{Bright Lotus Earthly Physique}

The symbol in her mind’s eye also started to actively engage in this process at long last. At this point, Lin Ling was effectively letting her draw what she needed, with no constraints at all. Chunhua was also sending a torrent of qi into her, effectively using the divination to help with her own refinement, but also carefully trying to control those threads of parasol qi that were trying to worm their way across the connection between them…

However, even with their help, she could feel that there was now no way off this path that didn’t lead to either success or bloody death.

She cast about, desperately, looking for a medium within which to frame everything, because, as it was, she was in danger of being consumed by her own qi, unless she could anchor it…

-Mantra…

That helped bring some semblance of order to the chaos, but she wasn’t able to devote all of it to the task because the Hydra was a resurgent threat now, working its way inwards, trying to once again subvert the alignments of her body to subsume her once again. That left…

Somehow, she kept coming back to ‘flowers’. She had not had the time to ponder it before, but now?

-Spirit root!

She grasped upon the symbolism within it, of the flowers, almost intuitively leaping on the similarities in the experience to when her spirit root had been refined.

The last remnants of the qi from the golden peony flowers, still somehow there after everything she had been through, settled into the grinding maelstrom and brought with them yin water, yang water, yin earth and yang earth along with a hint of yang fire bizarrely enough.

-Still not enough…

Watching it twist, bringing the full focus of ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’ and ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ on it, even to the point of somewhat unavoidably drawing her focus away from the Hydra, she searched for balance.

The first thing she found was the parasol qi that Chunhua was still trying to control as it infiltrated the link between the three of them.

-That’s also a flower of sorts…

She grasped at it and after a moment’s hesitation she felt Chunhua relinquish her control over a portion of it, letting it flow into her as well. The tree in both its yin and yang attributes was also associated with good fortune and prosperity as she recalled, as well as rebirth and bounty across many lifetimes. It settled into the vortex, giving her Yang Wood and Yin Fire.

-However, it’s still not enough, she judged grimly, looking at the imbalance between the forces.

In fact, it was almost getting worse.

-Metal… and more Yin Life…

The only sources of metal she had were her sword-staff and the Orichalcum blades she had in her storage talisman. She considered them both, before decisively picking the sword-staff. It was certainly the higher quality object, and its origin was also much more auspicious, both in terms of how she had come by it, and what it had seen her through since.

Drawing it out of her storage talisman, which Lin Ling had returned to her when they got out of Ulquan, she let it fall into her lap and pushed her qi into it, trying to incorporate it directly into the devouring cycle, hoping it had some innate metal qi within it – that was not always guaranteed, many metals were attuned to earth before the metal feng shui alignment.

Bizarrely it was the golden peony flowers and the parasol qi that both reached out for it, although both held the crushing power of time she supposed. Even then, with all the momentum of the vortex tearing through it, attempting to extract something… anything from the blade, it endured. It took tens of cycles which she barely controlled through agonizing focus, before, finally, a few tiny flecks were scoured from its surface and dragged into her body—

They entered the maelstrom like lead bricks through a cheap window, the impact of the density of the qi within them nearly collapsing the vortex completely and giving her a deviation in the process. The qi tore through her meridians, warping them at will and making her barely mended bones grind and splinter or just plain break in a few cases as Yin Metal and Yang Metal and then timeless Yang Earth overwhelmed everything else.

None of them were normal either, the Yin and Yang metal was not in its normal, heavenly form, but another, weirder and much more primordial form of positive and negative force, so esoteric that she couldn’t do much more than just try to nudge its path with the divination art. It was also responsible for the timelessness within the Yang Earth she saw – the metal in the blade was ancient, older than the heavens itself somehow.

As she struggled with keeping the disparate elements in their cycle using the geomancy art to guide their interlocking flows, keenly aware that she was racing along the edge of a brutal precipice where one misstep would see her explode or worse, she realised that the landscape had become as warped as anything Lin Ling had ever achieved with the yang qi in the jungles or her own breakthroughs.

The sky overheard had turned dark, yet the stars were wrong, the glimmering constellations somehow distorted and over-bright in a night sky that swirled and twisted with disturbing currents of black within black.

The river flowing past and around the fort was somehow flowing both past her and towards her, while the reed beds, swaying rhythmically, leached weird non-colours as eye-scouring iridescences shimmered in the mist. Even the fort itself was crumbling; edges of surfaces and angles of walls were bleeding shadows slightly as the structures within started to erode.

All she could do was focus everything she had at the vortex, keeping the whole thing in check by the framework she was imposing on it, fashioned of the ever-flowing lyrical mnemonics of her mantra and their resonant harmony with Bright Lotus Earthly Scripture, and try not to let it run away from her completely.

With it increasing the speed of its rotation, revolution by revolution, it was now freakishly fast. When she had started, it had taken maybe 20 seconds per entire revolution of a mote of qi in her body, from acquisition to arriving in the middle of the maelstrom. Now, however, that process was taking barely 2 seconds – per entire revolution – and almost so fast that qi being dragged in had no time to settle in her body before being smashed to pieces and refined away.

Still, the gains she was making from it all were remarkable.

The ripples of qi being smashed apart, that were tearing at her body, had begun to form a feedback loop with her mantra, scripture and divination art that was, ripple by ripple, slowly expanding her qi capacity, tempering her meridians and, she was sure, pushing her rapidly through Body Tempering, much as Lin Ling’s crazy tribulation had done for her.

It wasn’t just qi being dragged in either – the vortex itself had somehow acquired a devouring strength in common with the hydra’s mist, though lacking its primeval malevolence.

The result was that, between that terrible rotational speed and the devouring pull it had acquired, the Hydra was also now anchored in her body, unable to attack or retreat as it was now slowly being eroded away by the combined efforts of their ferocious onslaught on its qi.

Finally, 7237 rotations after she started keeping a count in her mind, the cycle finally became sluggish and stabilized, and qi rapidly started to accumulate in her dantian and body again in the prelude to the next quasi-core coalescence as it reached critical mass.

“Kaaaagggh,” she snarled with anger, unthinkingly feeding it back into her cultivation through the mantra at this point.

-How is it still not enough? she complained inwardly as ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ pulled her back, telling her that the attempt would not work as it was.

She stared at what she had, interrogating her intuition. She could, she knew, form a core by the method Chunhua talked about, but that was not what she wanted, and not what the talisman instructed her to do either. It was clear that the symbol – mystic meridian – that represented the ‘Bright Lotus Earthly Physique’ and the heart of the cultivation scripture and the intent that it propagated should be as much a part of it as her spirit root…

She looked at the symbol in her mind’s eye and gave it a poke of sorts, trying to convince it to interact with the cycle in such a way as to do more than just guide things; however, it refused resolutely to budge. The issue was one of harmoniously integrating everything… but when it came to the means to do so…

She tried again…

And again…

And again…

…Until she was thoroughly frustrated and wondering if there was some other fundamental thing she had missed in the text, in the circumstances… or if she really was just overreaching.

Each time, the core twisted and roiled with ominous instability, continually half forming now, but never really starting its first ‘proper’ revolution…

Again…

Again…

It took nine agonizing half-revolutions, combining and re-combining the different parts, teetering on the edge of nearly collapsing the whole thing and obliterating herself, before ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ finally led her to what she was looking for, pointing her towards the disparate strands of the qi in her dantian.

She had to stare at them for a few agonizing seconds, before seeing what it was drawing her towards.

Within the maelstrom were a few lingering, shifting droplets of the etheric dew somehow, a remnant of a shadow, much like the peony qi had been, crushed out of the maelstrom and its accretion disk…

-No… not etheric dew, she realised with a start. It’s closer to Myriad Elements Yin Yang Qi.

-Where did that come from?

She shivered mentally, observing the tiny droplet shimmer and drift in the middle of the vortex present there, yet somehow untouchable by the vortex itself, as if aloof from it in some way. The spark-like golden petals from her spirit root were also drifting in the same way, she noticed, barely discernible in the chaos.

-It’s too dense? Once formed it’s not being drawn back in?

Exhaling, as much a state of mind as a physical action at this point, she set aside her surprise and trepidation at how it was forming and, following the sense of guidance from ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’, worked to move a few of the strand-like droplets towards more auspicious orbits through the heart of the vortex.

While she was doing this, she was aware that the vortex had finally started to condense qi out of the natural environment all on its own, forming flickering mirage like clouds. Its reach was now close to 200 metres and still slowly expanding as the ground around the three of them continued to ripple outwards. If Lin Ling wasn’t basically dumping qi almost as fast as she could devour it…

-Can she send more?

It was such a preposterous thought that she nearly discounted it out of hand, but at this point…

She tried and, after a few attempts, found there was some give, and at last both Ling and Chunhua opened their connections to her a bit more. Soon she was getting qi with soul force in it once again, making her realise the other two had been focusing very hard on stopping the hydra interfering more directly with her.

If the Hydra itself thought it had gotten a lucky break, it probably only thought that for a split second, because the raging vortex that was a pseudo 10 element cycle ate its soul force without even slowing, the primordial power of that system more than it could stand.

Watching those disparate elements get caught up in everything, she started to push the flower sparks in her spirit root inwards as well.

~ Lin Ling – Ruined Courtyard ~

Lin Ling cursed mentally as the black hole that also at some points held the name Kun Juni devoured every shred of qi she had to hand to throw at her. ‘Black Hole’ was something that the memories used to describe the raging vortex, although she suspected they were somewhat joking there. Mostly, her mental cursing was directed at the four cores in her body, because despite letting qi flow out of her to the other two entirely unconstrained at this point… it still wasn’t enough.

She also really hoped that nothing decided to come interrupt them, whether from potential pursuers from Ulquan or Udrasa or even just some other random qi beast in the swamps. The mists and the broken alignments were likely playing in their favour, but given how dangerous Sharvasus was, and how well-prepared he had been, she really didn’t want to bet on that.

Her body was still being slowly consumed from the inside out, by the punishing onslaught of the four-headed hydra’s cores. After all, a quasi-Dao Immortal spirit beast was being held inside a Dao Seeking girl’s body, barely caged by the shell of her Nascent Soul, infused with her mantra and furiously resisting their systematic devouring of her physical meridians.

“You think you can keep this up?” one of the spirits in the cores hissed at her,

“You are our great fortune now…” another laughed, as more soul intent surged to assail her.

“We will consume you… consume the bird… then Sharvasus will consume your friend…”

“Ssh-arrr…vasusss will rise…” the ‘mist head’ snarled, almost joyfully.

“The Ten Will Rise…”

She pushed their voices down, ignoring them as best she could as the shifting vortex of miasma all around them continued to distort the world with Thaumic overburden, as the memories termed it.

It was not that she doubted the serpents’ words; it was simply that she knew what they were aiming at, and refused to engage at all. Their words were merely a vehicle for their soul intent, to try and erode her, to disrupt their surroundings subtly and interfere with the others, act as a vehicle for their innate devouring strength to try and bypass the cage of yang strength in her blood.

Her job now was mainly to keep that side of the hydra facing inwards, unable to creep out with the rest of it.

If there was a bright side here, it was that the fearful pressure from all sides was a remarkable grindstone for her principle, whetting it and forging its suitability as a defensive strength far beyond what she had ever reasonably expected in the time available.

Both her body and soul were being literally forced ever-closer to pure synchronisation from forces inside and out.

Her own qi capacity was maybe a third again as big as it was when she started, which, for a Dao Seeking cultivator to achieve in… a day or so, was nothing short of remarkable.

Her cultivation foundation was also advancing at a quite phenomenal rate – all of them were, in fact. Far beyond what would normally be possible… The purity of her qi cycle was also improving, just through her connection to Juni and whatever the fates she was trying to attempt in the course of forming her core.

~ Kai Manshu – Main hall of the ruined fort ~

“WHAT IN THE NAMELESS FATES EVEN IS THIS?!” Wei Chu wailed, desperately trying to keep her own qi under control.

“This isn’t even a breakthrough? Is this really someone in our generation’s qi refinement cycle?” Qing Yao groaned, also looking pale.

Kai Manshu, inner disciple of the ‘Pagoda of the Erudite Sage of Qin’, scholar, diviner and, recently, deeply lamenting captive of savage demons, sat there carefully, his qi cycling furiously, his principle melding with the disciple from the Nine Auspicious Moons sect and the… Ur…Inan, whose name appeared to be Naakos based on what he could tell, trying to ignore the horrified exclamations around them.

The last two days had been so very absurd that he was still wondering if it would not all turn out to be some traumatic trap by their captors; however, he suspected that reality was too cruel for that at this point.

No savage captor could likely conjure up this depth of nightmare to plunge them into he was sure. It would require far too much of an understanding of the nuance of their Eastern Azure Great World, to the point where even just scouring the collective life experiences out of every person captured he had seen so far would not provide the basis for this kind of insanity to be fabricated as an illusion. It would have been an exorbitant waste of effort when their own terrors were likely already sufficient for such purposes.

Another wave of disruptive, distorting qi twisted around them, weirdly out of step in a way, as if something in it was trying, in some minor way at least, to hold the worst of it back from them.

“What realm was Senior Juni before she lost her core…?” Qing Yao hissed, her hands furiously flickering through the seals of the formation the three of them were using to just about constrain the circumstances around them.

That, he had wondered as well, truth be told. Her comprehensions were clearly in excess of her current strength, and she was a Dharma cultivator of some fashion as well as a spiritual one, and maybe a body refinement one as well based on her rapid recovery.

“She is trying to reform her core?” Wei Chu gasped.

“Yes,” he nodded, staring grimly at the distorting waves of qi breaking around them.

-If we had not somehow had our own cultivation constraints loosened to the degree that they are, we would be really suffering now.

That thought was also surely rattling around the others’ heads as well. Is it because we had all our qi scattered on capture and because of those bracelets? It was only noticeable once we escaped captivity with Senior Juni…

That none of the three who had rescued them were having their cultivations suppressed in the slightest in this strange place was the final thing that made him sure, in his own heart at least, that they had done the right thing by agreeing to go along, even if circumstances now were a bit…

“Rather than that, what influence?” Feiwu Shen panted, cutting through his own thoughts to check on his comrade’s condition, which was not great.

“That could be said for all of them…” Wei Chu added, apparently trying to ignore that she had a bad nosebleed.

She was suffering the worst, even worse than the two Ur who had been injured, truth be told, because the strength and the purity of the qi were almost antithetical to whatever law she cultivated. Feiwu Shen wasn’t much better either, but it could also be because both of them were merely at the Nascent Soul realm.

In regards to their influence, or association, he also had a pretty good idea, truth be told… even before that insane manifestation of an ephemera straight out of a child’s storybook.

The Blue-Jade throne, seat of the Turquoise Pond… for a split second he was sure he had seen the nine sovereign stars as well, shining like jewels in the morning, and above them the five pagodas of the Saintesses. There was a painting of them in the great hall of the sect, stylized of course, but now that he had seen it, a surprisingly good representation of the reality… just lacking in the sky-shaking aura and the sense that his whole life had just been seen through.

Why a disciple from that influence would be here… he had no idea, nor, in truth, did he want to know. His own engagement with the trial had been reluctant at best. His senior brother and sister had decided to come, and everyone else had basically been told it was their filial duty to have their ‘horizons broadened’.

“Hah…” he had to laugh, very bitterly, at that recollection.

“What’s so funny?” Qing Yao muttered.

“Sorry… I was just… recalling why my seniors… came… here,” he managed to reply, in between continuing to ensure he didn’t lose all his qi in a single surge, then caught Naakos looking at him a bit quizzically.

-Ah, of course they don’t understand Imperial Common, just Easten… another riddle there.

“My seniors, send me here to broaden horizons,” he elaborated in Easten.

“…”

“To send youth to experience many trials…” Naakos mused, his own hands easily forming the seals, which focused on channelling ‘Intent’, more than qi.

“The trick is for them to come back sane,” the older Ur'Inan woman, Naakai he thought her name was, added with a grimace.

“Or alive,” the younger Ur'Inan woman, whose name was something like La Shan, added.

He had to agree there, truth be told. On both the sanity and the alive count.

“The momentum here is big,” Naakos nodded, making him wonder what that meant.

-Is he referring to the cyclone of qi distorting this place, or something more?

Looking around, it was true that the alignments of the land were starting to give. His talent for divination was, he self-acknowledged… not the best. He was good at arranging potted plants and reading the odd fortune-chart, but that was about it.

“What do… you mean?” he managed to ask.

“…”

Naakos and Naakai both eyed him like he was a strange animal then had a quick discussion in their own tongue before Naakai swatted Naakos on the head in mild remonstration.

“What my brother talk about is the strength they are summoning to attack the advancement boundary.”

“…”

He resisted sighing, in remonstration with himself really. Study of Easten was not common outside of scholarly circles, unless you lived in the fringe provinces of Blue Water, Iron Crown, Golden Peak or Yuan Gate… or the northern part of the continent of the Easten Tribes. Mostly, interest in it came from looking at records and accounts from the previous heavens and the era immediately preceding the re-establishment of the Dun Dynasty. The form that the Ur'Inan were speaking was, in truth, closer to that ancient form than the little modern any of them likely knew. As such, ‘momentum’ meant forward motion, advancement.

“I understand… thank you,” he managed to nod without feeling like his own body was going to tear itself apart.

His seniors had theorized that this was either a lost shard of a supreme world, or a pocket land refined from one by some peerless expert of the previous heavens that the Imperial Court wanted to grasp for their own ends. The suppression was what had given them the seeds of that idea, but the fact that the inhabitants used some different system, more like Body Refinement, and all spoke ancient Easten in formal occasions was, in truth, to him a much bigger hint as to its origins.

That Senior Juni, Senior Ling and Teng Chunhua were all unsuppressed likely meant that they had come from a supreme world themselves. Their presence here meant that only some truly peerless expert could have brought them as well.

-So either the Imperial Court has asked for help from the Turquoise Pond, through the Heavenly Huang… or one of those influences is here unannounced.

Another wave of destabilising qi surged through their surroundings, casting strange sparks off corners and making shadows waver oddly in colours not really intended for mortal eyes.

“What we do if gets worse?” another of the male Ur'Inan asked.

“Escape?” the youngest Ur'Inan, a pale girl who was also not holding up very well under the onslaught, asked.

“We cannot run,” Naakai shook her head.

“We can’t?” Feiwu Shen groaned, cutting into the discussion.

“You run into the mist, you likely never walk out,” Naakai grimaced.

“…”

“We stay here, we likely never…” the young Ur'Inan woman muttered.

“Did you get hit on the head and miss that battle between Ling girl and the serpent?” Naakos grumbled.

“…”

The girl fell silent, as did the other Ur'Inan, looking a bit haunted, he thought. What kind of realm was it?

Right on cue nearly, the surging currents of miasma and mist shifted again, and the walls of the room they were in were briefly outlined in dark shadows that picked out every mud brick and blemish. With it, came a grasping, devouring strength that tried to gnaw against it, swirling insidiously, like hidden currents in dark waters.

~ Juni – Ruined Courtyard ~

The breakthrough came sometime about noon, she reckoned, when the pressure of qi in her meridians, and dantian, which was perpetually refusing to form a core, became so viscous and compressed that it started to condense into drops of multi-coloured qi as well. Some had a mirage-like quality, twisting in bizarre ways to look like little flowers, others were weird and iridescent.

Once the first few formed, others rapidly started to form in their wake, like the first droplets of rain turning into a shower, then a torrential downpour and finally a flood as droplet begot droplet. Within moments, the inertia of the vortex she had been carefully moderating in order to avoid it chaotically collapsing was overwhelmed by the new impetus.

As she watched, the vortical maelstrom of qi in her dantian started to cycle faster…

And faster…

And faster…

She screamed, as, within moments, her meridians were trembling and warping under the strain, some even starting to show signs of collapse.

In that instant, she understood why the talisman had been so clear that she needed achievements in ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ and ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’. Without them, without the tens of thousands of cycles spent adjusting her qi flow, optimising her meridians, harmonising away all the quirks, the faults, the flaws, the little errors… she would have died in the very first revolution of that raging torrent of multi-coloured, effervescent qi.

Each revolution of qi tearing through her body now took less than a second to complete.

Focusing desperately on maintaining control, she watched as the combined impetus of her mantra, the cultivation scripture and the geomancy art guided that qi to first temper, then widen her meridian channels.

As it surged through her eight gates, the tempering onslaught also elicited subtle changes in them as well, before finally starting to carve out new minor meridian channels around them.

It permeated her bones, saturated her flesh and infused into her blood a shadow of the same iridescence that lingered within it.

Again and again it cycled, continually drawing inwards, packing more and more qi into her body, until, just under four hours after her qi turned viscous, it finally reached a point where, in a single revolution, it crashed inwards on itself.

The pseudo core that formed, gold, with a strange multi-coloured sheen and a blazing white corona, spun for a full 31 rotations before scattering outwards, spreading that first wave of multi-coloured qi deep into her flesh and blood, tempering her body even further.

Four hours after that, it did so again, collapsing at 32 rotations, nearly obliterating her body in the process of forcing another wave of the qi into flesh, but this time also sending it burrowing deep into her bones, infusing her vital qi with its profound and auspicious momentum.

A further four hours later, it went to 32 rotations and she intuitively knew that she could push it deliberately one more time and it would go the full 33 and set, but… ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ nudged her back, telling her that it was not the opportune time.

“…”

Breathing out, she watched it collapse once more, once again scattering a punishing, tempering wave of qi throughout her body and now even into her surroundings slightly. Considering what it meant by the ‘opportune time’, and recalling what Lin Ling had said about auspicious Yang, she guessed that it wanted her to break through at sunrise, like Chunhua’s own… whatever that had been, had.

Above them, the sky was dusky, visible through the eye of the cyclone of mist and qi being pulled in by her, and still, to a lesser extent, Chunhua and Lin Ling, she realised, though both of them were largely drawing on the qi from the cores, moderating their own pull so as not to interfere with hers, she suspected.

-At least this will eat up more qi, she thought, noting that Lin Ling’s condition was not looking any better, in spite of the vast torrent of qi she was directing towards her. That was the original point of all this.

In the end, she had to endure three more cycles of coalescence and collapse before the sky started to pale once more and dawn showed the first signs of its reappearance. If there was a benefit to the torturous experience, it was that she had gotten an excellent grasp for the way the core formed and collapsed by the time ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ finally agreed that now was the optimal time to force the coalescence.

She watched as minutes ticked by and her qi slowly started to coalesce into a core again, collapsing the disk of roiling qi in the heart of her dantian inwards.

In the end, she had concluded that she had to take the spirit root as the core. The symbol itself was… vexatious; the best she could do was mirror it using the teased-out threads of the myriad elements qi, which thankfully seemed to be considered acceptable to the overall harmony of what she was trying to construct. The mantra had become the overall control, basically acting as a fourth set of meridians to funnel qi into her core at this point.

It blurred through its rotation, flickering effortlessly to 30 rotations, as it had the previous two times, then 31 and 32. When it hit 32, however, it seemed to spin on the spot, turning faintly sluggish and slowly solidifying while somehow retaining its rotational momentum. Narrowing her eyes, she watched it carefully for a moment, then carefully started to make it rotate itself again.

The resistance was colossal.

As she channelled all the momentum of the cycle to keep it turning rather than just set at 32, it felt like she was pushing against the whole world all of a sudden.

Her meridians started to rupture…

Her bones started to crack…

Her flesh began to scatter…

She was just beginning to doubt whether it was, in fact, possible to achieve, in spite of everything, when the core finally turned fully for the 33rd time, warping and waving eerily as it did so.

Inside it, she saw the flowers, rippling like ten elemental flames, slowly synchronising with the strands of elemental qi, finally reorganising themselves to match the symbol she had drawn with the diffuse Myriad Elements Qi.

The core slowly changed as she watched from an off-white, rainbow colour to a deep, lustrous golden hue, with myriad colours rippling in its corona… It wasn’t that different from the 30 rotation core that she had watched form a small eternity ago, beyond the corona, but this one held a fundamental sense of harmony that the previous one had not. It spun and spun, devouring qi at a rate that made what she had witnessed before seem positively mundane, tearing qi from Lin Ling and Chunhua as fast as they could provide it to augment the massive inhalation of ambient qi that was also now occurring, like she had just become a hole in the world into which all qi was naturally attracted.

Within a handful of cycles her qi ocean was refilled and her body bursting to the brim with qi mist, which, as it roiled through her meridians, dantian, even her flesh and blood, was rapidly condensing droplets without her having to do a thing.

Soon, the core had acquired a pattern of lustrous golden petals that shimmered like phantoms around it, taking the form of a golden lotus that held a profound and auspicious aura with the core nestling in its heart. As she watched, though, the changes did not stop there. All around it, swirls of mist started to form, shrouding the ghostly petals and occasionally illuminating them with flashes of thunder or bursts of rain in many colours.

Finally, the whole thing became shrouded in a faint white-gold corona, and the tyrannical devouring pull within it receded.

She exhaled, staring up at the sky, as did the other two.

“…”

It was impossible not to sigh with quiet relief as no thunder shook the sky and no lightning fell. There was not even a rumble as the mists swirled and the first rays of morning sun cut through the dispersing vortex all around them. The talisman had said that she wouldn’t elicit a tribulation, but after what had happened to Lin Ling, she had still been nervous about it.

Her core was still pulling qi from Lin Ling, the lightning from the cloud rings around her core obliterating any intent the hydra sent with it in a matter of moments, but it was back to the 23 second cycles.

“Congratulations on Core Formation,” Lin Ling said with a wan smile, before glancing at Chunhua and adding, “and congratulations on forming a Physique.”

“Sorry… it took longer than it should have,” she muttered, suddenly a bit embarrassed for what they had probably had to endure. “I had to wait for the auspicious time…”

“…”

Chunhua laughed at that, a trifle bitterly she fancied, but nodded in acknowledgement.

“Still no dent in the qi?” she asked, looking both at the amount they were both drawing from Lin Ling and at the dull flickers of unstable qi illuminating her meridians.

“…”

Lin Ling’s silent wince was all the answer needed really.

“It’s definitely impossible to remove them?” she asked, frowning as Teng Chunhua also looked concerned.

“Absolutely,” Lin Ling sighed grimly. “If I didn’t know that the final outcome was rather opportunistic I’d be even more annoyed. This bastard has fused the four of them into my body when I reformed it. Their intent was clearly to refine me, or seize me, so the only option I have at this point is to try and exhaust their qi reserves. I thought that there might be some hope given how my body and soul are a tad… atypical in how they interact, but it seems that it won’t matter if it’s body or soul; the cores will still be there.”

“Which is why people don’t refine complete cores that are over 11 stars in that manner before their Immortal breakthrough,” Chunhua pointed out with a rather awkward grimace.

“I know…” Lin Ling sighed. “Not that I had a lot of choice really.”

“Yeah…” Chunhua sighed as well, and she just nodded.

She looked at her own inner condition, which, now that it was no longer being perpetually tested by the raging vortex of qi crushing in on her, was recovering rapidly. Her dantian was… a lot bigger, the core spinning deceptively quietly in its heart as the mists swirled above it and the waters of her Qi Sea shimmered below it.

“What if I try to break through to Soul Foundation?” she asked at last.

“…”

Lin Ling looked pensive, but Chunhua shook her head.

“You had no… tribulation for Core Formation, which is odd, but certainly there must be one for Soul Foundation. I had one, after all,” Chunhua reminded her. “A breakthrough that implicates Lin Ling here, or me, in your Soul Foundation tribulation will be tens of times stronger than just doing it alone.”

“But it would eat up colossal amounts of qi, and the tribulation would also attack the Hydra cores,” she pointed out. “Their qi will also be involved.”

“Yes, that is true…” Lin Ling mused.

“Assuming they don’t hide away and wait for you both to fail,” Chunhua pointed out.

“Hmmm…” Lin Ling nodded again, crossing her arms pensively. “Luan are the natural enemies of such serpents…”

“…”

Chunhua gave her a look that was somewhere between ‘I see where you’re going’ and ‘you’re mad.’

“You wouldn’t break through to Dao Seeking… probably, unless you had some crazy epiphany about your Principle already,” Lin Ling said, staring into the middle distance and then looking back at Chunhua. “However, three is an interesting number. That physique you opened, which one is it? Azure Winds Luan? Western Palace Luan?… Jade Tree Luan?”

“…”

Chunhua gave her a dirty look then sighed ruefully. “Parasol Luan True Physique is what the weird moon rune looking thing reads.”

“Uh…huh,” Lin Ling gave Chunhua a look not too dissimilar to what she had directed at her when she told her the name of the talisman art in full.

“Now your expression is just creepy.” Chunhua grumbled.

“No… I’m just thinking that in the stupid good luck scales in our ‘group’ I really got the short stick. Being poisoned half to death in the darkness and having my mind nearly destroyed three times over to get to where I am. And she gets given a talisman by a squirrel and you get a mythical beast for a physique due to a talisman and a bit of geomancy,” Lin Ling deadpanned.

“…”

She knew why the girl didn’t mention Han Shu, but still scowled at Lin Ling, albeit without any heart, because in a way it was true.

Chunhua looked… amused and a little miffed before sighing. “Okay, it’s not like I can just say no in the context of current events, is it?”

“Well, you can,” Lin Ling grinned brightly, “but then I will smash a jar of blood over your head and will haunt your soul from hell after I die.”

“…”

They both looked at Lin Ling, who was clearly joking… probably, with judging eyes, until she sighed and just scratched her head.

Chunhua rolled her eyes and asked, “So how do we do this? Just continue as before?”

“Pretty much,” she said, looking around at the devastated fort. “At this point I have a fairly clear idea concerning my Intent anyway.”

“Benefits of a mantra,” Chunhua nodded.

“Yep, among other things,” she agreed, not saying too much now given that the other cultivators had crawled out of the hall. “As such, it’s just a matter of me refining enough qi. I should be able to cross over what the talisman called Core Refinement and trigger the Soul Foundation tribulation with 30,000-40,000 cycles.”

“…”

The other two just looked at her.

“That’s like two weeks,” Chunhua ventured carefully. “We seem to have avoided notice for now, but Ulquan is going to notice a missing fort, assuming they didn’t already notice either my physique formation or your Core Formation.”

“Not under the pressure of that Hydra qi,” she pointed out, “otherwise I’d still be more than two weeks away from forming a core, maybe even three. My qi cycles were taking less than a second for the last 20 or so hours.”

“Less than a second…” Chunhua looked at her dully. “That’s… nuts.”

“No…” Lin Ling said weakly. “That’s monkey nuts. Even when I broke through, it wasn’t that fast.”

“Well, in fairness…”

She did a cycle quickly as they watched, and counted as it lasted 23 seconds, synchronising with the time it took for her blood to circulate her body fully once.

“Under normal circumstances, it’s 23 seconds…”

“Ahhh…”

“Whew…”

She shot them both dirty looks as they sighed with relief.

“Um… Seniors?”

“…”

She turned to see the four cultivators had come over, trailed by Naakos, though they were still staying at a respectful distance.

“Congratulations on your success!”

“Congratulations on your achievements!”

“Congratulations…”

Qing Yao, Wei Chu, Kai Manshu and Feiwu Shen all formally congratulated them.

“…”

With a sigh, Chunhua summoned a cloth cloak, shaking her head as she noted with weary amusement as much as anything that the two male disciples were both staring carefully elsewhere now, as, in fact, were Qing Yao and Wei Chu.

She followed suit, casting a loose cloth garment over herself and tying it around her waist, as did Lin Ling with an eye roll.

“Apologies, seniors,” Feiwu Shen mumbled.

“It’s fine,” she muttered with a wave of her hand. “Modesty is invariably the first casualty of this place, and at this point, nobody has anything much left to hide there.”

“Seniors’ outlooks are very generous,” Qing Yao muttered, looking away.

“…”

She resisted sighing and just nodded politely, knowing from experience when to just let others hold their thoughts. The her back home, even after years of working in the depths of Yin Eclipse, would have been appalled and mortified by being so unclad in public, but now… she just didn’t have the emotional energy to care about minor matters like this, she found. It was what it was.

Naakos just chuckled wryly, which got him a sideways look from the four cultivators.

-So, not really fully at ease with that arrangement either, she did sigh audibly this time, and Naakai shot Naakos a dirty look.

It was understandable, in a way. The four had been held captive and mistreated, humiliated and degraded by Ur’Vash, so it would certainly be hard to accept joining up with another group. Had she been in their place, she would have been rightly concerned as well, she supposed.

“Gah—!”

She glanced back as Lin Ling’s qi rippled ominously, the air around her briefly shimmering. Blood ran down her face from her nose, which she wiped away with a sigh.

“If we try to take this to the next level, this will be dangerous for everyone else here,” she added after a moment’s thought.

“Take… to the next level, seniors?” Qing Yao asked her nervously, looking between the three of them, but lingering on Lin Ling.

“…”

“Actually, we can solve this problem somewhat, and also speed up matters for you and Chunhua by the same method…” Lin Ling interjected, before coughing slightly and scowling at the spatter of smoking blood in her hand. “It will require a heavenly oath on their part though.”

“A heavenly oath?” Kai Manshu blinked.

“If we are to share teachings with you, do you think here can be no safeguards?” Lin Ling murmured a bit archly.

“Ah… no… of course not!” Feiwu Shen nodded. “But a Heavenly Oath?”

“Don’t worry. It will not be an onerous oath; however, such oaths in this place are a bit weird,” Lin Ling chuckled. “Do not think that just because the words are different it is any less effective. This is a shard of a supreme world, and not a simple one either, the strength of the honourable seniors who once walked this place is nothing like you can imagine.”

“…”

-That’s possibly laying it on a bit thick, she thought wryly, but she could see where Lin Ling was going with this.

“What my friend means,” she said with a more pleasant and apologetic smile and a bow, “is that we do not want you to suffer injury. We have already shared burdens together, as the saying goes.”

“Not at all, Senior Juni,” Qing Yao said, stepping forward and actually stopping her polite bow. “You helped us escape that horror. The gratitude can only be ours.”

She nodded, politely, being rather familiar with this strange little dance of ‘No, you/not at all’. That said, it was nice, she realised, to see that not all their compatriots were colossal morons.

-Though in part that is because they think we are seniors of some powerful influence. If they knew we’re three herb hunters and bureau officials… she sighed inwardly and fed that thought to her mantra – it was such a useful ability.

“In any case,” she added, looking from one of them to another, “it was somewhat unforeseen that circumstances might develop as they have. If we continue to refine the qi that is hampering Lin Ling, you may all be in danger. It comes from a rather powerful qi beast after all.”

“If it is a matter of refining it, we could also help?” Kai Manshu asked, a trifle hopefully she thought.

“You can try,” Lin Ling chuckled.

“…”

She watched as Kai Manshu bowed politely and walked over to stand before her. As they watched, Lin Ling bade him sit and then sent a thread of the qi into him. It swirled around him, the devouring intent of the Hydra palpably discernible in the air as the younger disciple… and he was younger than her, fought to refine it for several minutes before finally succeeding and exhaling a ragged breath.

“That… what kind of beast…?” he asked, looking shaken.

“I believe the Ur’Inan call it a hydra. It is something close to what we know of as Neonate Serpents,” Lin Ling replied, helping him up.

“A Neonate?” Qing Yao shuddered.

“This place is a giant swamp,” she pointed out.

“What kind of realm?” Wei Chu muttered, also staring at the last vestiges of qi.

“Well over Immortal,” Lin Ling replied, a touch vaguely. “It fused qi with me in an attempt to implicate me when its ambush went wrong, so now I can only refine it or suffer the consequences, vengeful thing that it was.”

“Perhaps some of it can be refined by them?” she asked, thinking about the optics of matters as much as anything that could help now.

On the face of it, Chunhua was of a realm with Wei Chu and Feiwu Shen, and while she was marked as being ‘injured’ in their eyes, she had rather visibly just reformed her ‘core’ right before their eyes, so likely there was a bit of pride at play in their concern as well.

“…”

Lin Ling considered matters, then nodded.

“There is also the question of whether to stay here or move on,” she added.

“Mmmmm, yes,” Chunhua agreed. “We were not exactly subtle.”

“Depends,” Lin Ling frowned, staring at the ruined fort. “We are on the river, but this place, in the mists, is largely impenetrable to any sort of sense, and with the alignments as they are, it’s about as navigable as some of the forbidden zones back home.”

“That’s… very true,” Chunhua acknowledged. “However…”

“Yes. It is hard to shake the idea that matters were a bit too easy,” Lin Ling agreed.

“What was too easy?” she grunted, crossing her arms.

“You know what I mean,” Lin Ling said with an eye roll.

“I do,” she sighed.

That they might have been ‘let go’ in the first instance for some reason had been preying on her mind… as had the fact that she might have been put together with any of these four somehow. It felt unlikely, and ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ didn’t give her anything off about them; however, it still resolutely refused to give her reasonable outcomes on questions regarding the group as a whole.

She could see why Lin Ling might be happy to have them swear some kind of oath against malpractice, and while doing so under the cover of ‘sharing teachings for their wellbeing’ was a bit back-handed, it was at least a way for all parties to save some face. Likely the others would guess something like that in any case.

~ Kai Manshu – Courtyard of Ruined Fort ~

The four of them sat, a small way away from their three saviours, it had to be said, rather awkwardly. In truth, he had expected something in this vein, because circumstances only carried you so far, and this was a potentially dangerous land…

“I have no issue with it,” Qing Yao said at last, crossing her arms.

“…”

Wei Chu just looked a bit awkward.

Feiwu Shen sighed. “It’s not that I am reluctant, but it does smack a bit of them just wanting to be sure…”

“You can’t blame them, truth be told,” Qing Yao sniffed. “I saw plenty of back-handed dealings by major powers in this place before our group got scattered and we had to catch up.”

“That is true,” Wei Chu sighed, “but the oath they want to swear is not to…”

That was the crux of the issue, really. It was one thing to swear by the heavenly power of Eastern Azure’s fates, but an oath to the Three Pure Ones was… he didn’t want to say excessive, but it did feel somewhat over-paranoid.

“What are the other options? They will likely not stop whatever they plan to do to help Senior Ling,” Qing Yao pointed out. “As it stands, they have been almost unusually nice for disciples of some great power. If your objection, Brother Feiwu, is that you are offended that they think we might pass on whatever they share to our sects… that smacks as nothing short of hypocrisy.”

“That is true. In a reversal of the situation, we would all demand a similar thing, or more likely try to part ways at the first opportunity,” he pointed out.

“…”

“What do you say, Sister Wei?” Feiwu Shen asked, Wei Chu.

“I… I’ll go along with Big Sister Qing,” Wei Chu muttered.

-Which basically settles that, he nodded to himself.

“So, we will all swear?” he asked, looking at Feiwu Shen again.

“Yes…” Feiwu Shen said at last, before looking at him with a resigned look. “It’s not that I… It’s just that frivolous oaths…”

“Yes, I am aware of that,” he sighed. “However, the alternative is to part ways with them, in all likelihood, and in this swamp… do you think we will last a day?”

“Not to mention, that so far the three seniors’ attitudes have been very upstanding,” Qing Yao added.

-and understanding, he added in silence.

“…”

There was silence among the others, before Feiwu Shen finally spoke again.

“You make a fair point, Brother Kai, Senior Qing, though we are not exactly helpless, even if we have…”

“Even if we have barely what clothes we are standing up in and no storage devices, talismans, anything?” Qing Yao pointed out a bit too archly, adjusting her gown.

“Well…” Feiwu Shen sighed again, looking at his borrowed garment a trifle awkwardly, it had to be said.

Qing Yao and Wei Chu were wearing a double layer of garments, and sweating for it. Both he and Brother Feiwu were basically wearing similar, doubled down and tied around the waist to preserve good modesty, but were currently topless in deference to the need to carry things on their person. It made him realise that living without a storage device, something he had always had since he was a small child, had to be totally hellish.

“And if we stay on their good sides, there might be an opportunity to get them to help rescue our seniors,” he pointed out.

“That is true,” Qing Yao nodded, giving him a long look now that he chose to ignore.

They all had some vested interest, though Qing Yao and Wei Chu were both from influences that did not align nicely with the current political status quo in Eastern Azure. What was surprising in a way, though, was that Qing Yao, as a Nine Auspicious Moons disciple, was not more concerned about potentially aligning with a group who might well be from a backing power of the Huang heavenly clan or their close allies.

-The curse of knowing too much politics and belonging to a scholarly sect, he complained inwardly. Why did we even come on this hellish escapade anyway? Usually the elders are much savvier than this.

Theirs was an odd sect, in that it was founded by the eminent scholar Qin Qiu, the fourth son of the Duke of Qin province… and was basically a glorified library for the works of their founder and his circle of scholarly associates. The irony there was that while their eminent founder, the Scholar Qin, had set up the ‘Erudite Pagoda’ to advertise his own expertise and political connections, now he was the one almost entirely benefiting from the political acumen of his protégés, the Elders of the sect who swiftly absorbed his grand lessons on politics and immediately put them to good use to avoid being dragged into troublesome situations and underhanded affairs, and not the other way around. In the early days of the sect, their founder even exerted some efforts testing the Elders’ grasp of such matters to make sure his lessons were learned properly, he had heard, and the Elders had proven their competence admirably.

-Did the elders assume this trial would be relatively safe owing to the sheer scope and scale of its attendance? he wondered. Frankly, none of us knew what really lurked within the depths of Yin Eclipse.

Pushing those thoughts back out of his head, he went back to watching the three in question, who were currently seated in the middle of the courtyard, eating some roasted spirit herb roots and discussing something in a way that he certainly could not discern, even had he been willing to pry, which he was not – a matter of courtesy as much as anything.

It was moot in any event, because even if the wards somehow blocking external manifestation of soul sense seemed to have weakened somewhat, the mist still held some disruptive quality and the chaotic currents of qi also interfered.

As a result, there was no realistic way to overhear them that would not immediately be noticed, and the idea of offending a bunch of seniors who might be from a supreme heavenly influence in these circumstances was not in the slightest bit appealing.

“So… the qi you refined?” Feiwu Shen asked, changing the subject.

He shuddered involuntarily.

-If ever I needed confirmation that not all foundations are created equal, that qi was it, he lamented inwardly.

“Horrifying,” he said at last.

Even though Senior Ling had clearly somehow held back elements of it, he had caught glimpses of soul strength in that qi that were well above his own. The qi itself was pure to the point of being nearly unmanageable. Even with his own foundation, built on a 29 revolution True Gold core, it had been barely endurable.

-That said, it was refinable… and an excellent means of tempering my wood element principle, he sighed inwardly. What realm was Senior Juni at before whatever injury she sustained that she could so easily grasp that much of that tumultuous qi with such a deep-seated sense of disruption and devouring strength?

“It was certainly that of an eight-star ranked beast, maybe even a nine-star ranked one.”

“A Chosen Immortal qi beast?” Wei Chu sighed, looking a bit admiring, truth be told.

“Probably,” he agreed after some consideration. His own personal suspicion was that it might well be a ten-star grade one, but that would only alarm the others in all likelihood.

The snippets of soul strength and the empty strength in the devouring principle it held was such that it had clearly belonged to a terrible creature in any case. However, revealing that to the others would likely not help their state of mind at this point. Qing Yao likely suspected as much anyway, he guessed. The Nine Auspicious Moons disciples had a reputation for being good at divining and more esoteric aspects of cultivation.

“If we can refine a bit, thanks to them, it will only be a good deed though,” he added.

“Have you decided?” Senior Ling was looking over in their direction.

“We have,” Feiwu Shen said, before he could.

…

The Oath itself turned out to be somewhat more robust than even he had anticipated, truth be told. It was supplied by Fairy Chunhua and invoked the auspice of the Three Pure Ones and the Queen Mothers and, in its wording, came across as something that some well-studied old senior might trot out in how concisely and discerningly it was phrased. Still, having agreed, they had no easy way to say no at that point.

That said, any doubts he had, and in fact any of them might have had, were quashed within five minutes, because what Senior Lin produced and then drew out for them in the air was nothing short of remarkable.

From what she explained, it was ‘part of a minor inheritance bestowed to her by an old senior who had a passing interest in such things’. With the slight return of soul sense, even if it was very oppressed, he got no sense that she wasn’t genuine about that as well, even accounting for how her principle was about as esoteric a one as he had ever seen. In his heart, he suspected she was downplaying it a bit, but certainly there had been no lie in what she said that he could see.

The formation, for it certainly was some kind of formation, was not a typical one by any means – rather than invoke the strength of those founding it, it was closer to a feng shui alignment that harmonized with the natural world and fuelled itself by that integration. Qi was required to activate it and it did not actively hide you, but what it did do was thoroughly obfuscate any kind of acquired Intent that came into contact with it.

What limits it had, were not clear to him at least, though Senior Lin, who drew down the whole formation, which had five key points and a dozen lesser ones, was quite confident it would be more than sufficient to shelter them all from any backlash.

~ Juni – Ruined Fort ~

In the end, the oath that they had them swear was the one Chunhua suggested, presumably the one her old ancestors had cooked up regarding their family’s mantra inheritance. The four were willing enough in the end, likely having decided that their other options were much less palatable. It was by no means optimal and she would, in truth, have preferred for them all to just help each other out and then just go their separate ways when it was opportune, rather than for all of them to get mired in this kind of thing.

That said, it was amusing to watch how sharp their tune turned when Lin Ling showed them the ‘Isolate’ formation that they would use to ensure that they didn’t get implicated in any potential tribulation that might occur.

-Even righteous cultivators go starry-eyed for treasure…

Lin Ling was not that forthcoming about it to them, merely describing it as a thing her ‘Seniors’ had taught her for stuff like this, but looking at the design, it was certainly the same thing that they had used to hide in the pool, or something very close to it. Lin Ling termed it a ‘Symbol of Power’, and near as she could tell as she watched her friend talk the cultivators through how to interact with the sequence of them, they behaved rather like a material version of the vocal art she used.

The main advantage of them, in this instance, was that some of them could be drawn out and used exactly like a maintainable formation, bypassing the immense activation costs and the strain of continuous sustainment in the short term that a barrier art of the same quality might have required. The main problem, if you could call it that, was that it still required a hefty impetus of qi to activate, but, as Lin Ling wryly observed, that was very much the least of the problems in the current circumstances.

The one planned for the three of them to use, however, was notably different. There was no easy way for the three of them to avoid implication by sharing the qi being sent out by Lin Ling, so all that could be done was to speed up the refinement process itself. To that end, she and Chunhua were left preparing a compound of various crushed spirit herbs while Lin Ling departed to scour their surroundings for other required materials.

They had just finished making a bowl of what she could only describe as a ‘harmoniously toxic spirit herb sludge’ when Lin Ling reappeared with a blur and dropped a large flat stone slab, still dripping with river water and water weeds, in the courtyard, with a thud.

“What is that for?” she asked, eyeing it dubiously.

“Drawing arrays on the ground out here is going to be a pain,” Lin ling replied, looking around at the ruin of the fort rather pointedly.

That was true, she had to acknowledge. There would be a lot of bleed-through and waste if they drew out the array Lin Ling had sketched out on the ground.

“So, we will stay here to attempt this?” she asked after a moment’s consideration of their surroundings.

“Hmmm…” Lin Ling paused, staring around again.

“That’s a good point, actually,” Chunhua said. “I know we sort of decided earlier, but there is also that room full of slaves and other prisoners of the fort. Do we put an isolation formation up for them as well?”

“…”

Lin Ling’s slightly sideways look made her think that the younger girl might actually have forgotten that small but important detail.

“The other alternative is that we travel on the boat until I get to the point where I am ready to attempt the breakthrough?” she suggested.

“Mmmmm….” Lin Ling just hummed under her breath again before shaking her head and then turning to Naakos, who was seated nearby.

“What do you think?”

“Me?” the old Ur’Inan blinked.

“…”

“Hah, youth asking for wisdom. You are normal after all, though given your age, maybe not,” Naakos chuckled. “It makes little difference, I suspect. There is a reason a fort like this was built on this small island between two confluences to the main river to the north.”

“There isn’t anywhere else within a handy day’s travel,” she guessed.

“Pretty much. They don’t just build these anywhere they feel like it; they are hard to maintain and secure out here,” Naakos added.

“Doesn’t that make it more likely that someone will come looking?” Chunhua pointed out.

“Perhaps, but this mist will likely keep most focused on more immediate concerns. Udrasa is a large territory, and this backwater direction, towards ancient Vashada, is…”

“Left here because it’s an easy defensive boundary they don’t need to worry about?” Chunhua suggested.

“Exactly,” Naakos nodded. “The worst that is going to come out of here is the odd angry qi beast, which the forts are built to give forewarning of.”

“And anyone who could come here, as things are, will have no difficulty going anywhere else,” Lin Ling concluded, looking around again pensively.

“That as well,” Naakos agreed a bit more grimly. “I can’t say why we have not been pursued, but—”

“Likely Sharvasus is confident in his Hydra,” Lin Ling grimaced, wiping away another thin line of blood that had started to run from her nose.

“Your people could leave, if you wished,” she pointed out to Naakos.

“Hah… and go where?” the old Ur’Inan chuckled. “We still owe each other, in our own ways.”

“We do,” she conceded. “You helped rescue me, so the least we can do is try to help you find out what happened to the others as we make our way out of here.”

Naakos nodded slowly at that but otherwise fell silent.

“So, how successful was the compounding?” Lin Ling asked, turning back to the two of them.

“Probably we should not give up herb hunting to become alchemists,” she chuckled, “but it is likely suitable.”

Lin Ling took the bowl and considered it, then ran her hand down her palm, opening up a wound for red, smoking blood to run into the mixture until it started to smoke.

“It will also need vital blood and a bit of your refined qi, along with the parasol tree qi,” Lin Ling mused after a moment’s further consideration.

“…”

Chunhua sighed and acquiesced, as did she, after a moment’s contemplation. After that, they watched as Lin Ling took her sword-staff and carved up the rock with surprising ease until it was a flat, octagonal platform with three smaller platforms fused to the edges of it. It took her friend some ten minutes to draw out the whole thing, while they slowly fed qi into parts of it as occasionally directed while the others looked on from a distance.

When it was done, and Lin Ling linked the large circle and three subsidiary ones, they got on the rock to look at her handiwork. The formation radiated out from a central point that was also associated with three secondary circles that sat within that formation. The whole complex geometric pattern was connected with a series of ellipses to the three outer platforms which each held an array with six symbols on them. The large circle also had six symbols, one linking to each outer array and then all of them linking through the three inner circles where they would, she guessed, sit.

“It looks rather like those three designs on the wall in the scriptorium,” she noted after they had considered it for a long minute.

“It is,” Lin Ling nodded. “Although this is nowhere near as complex and from a much earlier time.

“In effect, it takes advantage of the fact that the three of us are quite a good combination of cultivation foundations. I have a strong Yang foundation and will be supplying the qi, Chunhua, you have a somewhat more Yin foundation and with the parasol qi, an excellent tool to break down qi, while you, Juni, have a balanced foundation strong in all the elements with an underlying focus on geomancy.”

“So, you supply the qi, Chunhua blunts the worst of the marauding soul intent from the Hydra and I focus on refining the elemental qi?” she summarised.

“Pretty much, yes,” Lin Ling nodded, glancing back at Chunhua. “Whether both of you can break through beyond a single step, I don’t know…”

“We start with Juni’s and see what that is like,” Chunhua grimaced. “A Soul Foundation tribulation being enhanced by two others is already an unpleasant-sounding idea. A Dao Seeking one might be close to cataclysmic, recalling what I can of yours…”

“Mine was quite a bit… special,” Lin Ling winced.

“True,” she agreed. “So, shall we clear things up here and get started?”

The slaves and other fort hangers-on had mostly recovered at this point; however, while she had hoped that they might be pleased to be freed, in reality, they were at best truculent and many had looked outright mutinous. She supposed it made sense, given what she had seen of Udrasa, that their slaves and servants would have been trained or bound to have such ‘loyalty’, but it was still a bit disheartening to see.

The other cultivators had little sympathy for the prisoners either, likely born of the treatment they had received during captivity, but didn’t actually suggest that they also be killed. Naakos was blunter, stating that they were a liability. Teshek and Caanar… and even Lashaan, to her surprise, had no issues with killing them quickly and mercifully.

In other circumstances she might have let them go, but even then, she suspected that they would just mass and try and attack them, or immediately run for Ulquan. Assuming they got there at all, that would turn the good deed into them needlessly dropping a rock on their own feet.

In the end, because many of the slaves seemed more willing to want to die fighting them than accept any potential offer of being set free, Lin Ling simply stunned them all again and they sealed them up in the most remote and secure hall in the central part of the fort, a reasonable distance from their breakthrough location.

It was the kind of thing she would dearly have loved to ask her father about, even though she suspected she knew what he would say and do as well: tell her to ‘take responsibility for her choice, one way or the other, and not burden others with it’.

Aside from that, though, there was not much else to be done before starting on the second phase of their attempt to refine as much of the Hydra qi as possible. Lin Ling went and scattered a few wards around outside, and also spent some time coaching both the cultivators and the Ur’Inan in the finer points of the formation they would use to ensure that they didn’t get implicated in any potential tribulation.

They also disabled what remained of the soul sense ward, because, as Lin Ling pointed out, it did her no good to try and break through to Soul Foundation in an environment where the sense of the soul outside your body was artificially limited. It was already starting to lose effectiveness anyway, apparently.

The boring bit, waiting for her to reach the peak of Core Refinement and for her Qi Sea to gain enough internal stability to properly manifest intent, still took almost two days. For most of that time, the others, the cultivators and Ur’Inan, were also able to participate somewhat, refining qi that Lin Ling directed to them to make some small gains in their own cultivations and also practice using the array formation Lin Ling gave them while she just focused on pushing forward to Core Refinement.

The main reason it took so long, despite her already having a mantra and being able to use ‘Martial Intent’, was because of the esoteric nature of the Myriad Elements Qi that now made up the heart of her core. She had to work on each element individually for several hours during refinement before getting to the point where she could grasp the more esoteric innate intents.

Even then, she was left to wonder how long it might have taken had she not been so obstinate in her younger years and, against the advice of many, continued to make what progress she could on the Spiritual Path, alongside the Martial and Physical paths. Without the theoretical background and over 20 years’ experience at Qi Refinement, she was pretty sure she would have been stuck here for weeks if not months.

The array was also a major factor, she had to admit – in the first instance, the control and focus it provided for the qi being provided by Lin Ling was boosted severalfold over what it had been when Ling was just imbuing it into them directly. It also turned her into what was essentially a ‘balance compass’ – improving the auspicious flow of qi within it for Ling and Chunhua – while simultaneously enabling them to devote much less focus towards worrying what she was doing with her qi.

They were also two rather nervous days in truth, and it was a relief when she crossed the critical threshold and was finally able to use her core’s ‘manifest intent’ to refine qi, as it was hard not to be worried about the lack of the soul wards.

It didn’t help that her divination art periodically showed that there was some inimical intent focused on their surroundings, but she was thoroughly unsure if it was a real thing, wary beasts, or just an unfortunate case of her divining trouble too many times and now just seeing what she expected to see. Frustratingly, checking by other means found nothing conclusive and any divinations done by anyone else were largely inconclusive, if trending inauspicious.

In a weird way, what should have been the hardest part, what came after ‘Core Refinement’, was thus not… really.

The talisman had a very comprehensive set of instructions regarding the way that the qi cycles of ‘Bright Lotus Earthly Scripture’ worked to make her qi resonate properly with her ‘Intent’ and diffuse it through her whole body, and she was already more than half aware of her ‘soul’, through a whole variety of influences: the physique symbol, her spirit root, the connection to the Ur Gestalt and not least the hydra’s soul attacks when forming her core.

As such, all she needed to do was keep cycling her qi in the ways set forth, using her core to pull her qi and various ‘Intents' together and disperse them as forcefully and thoroughly through her body in each cycle as she could.

The final piece in the puzzle to speed things along was the mantra. All five mnemonics did something in regards to ‘Intent Refinement’ as it turned out, though she had somewhat expected that in truth. What she didn’t expect was how prodigiously good at it ‘Devoted’, ‘Bestowal’ and ‘Lotus’ were, with ‘Gift’ coming in at an honorary fourth place.

That two of them had been words that were adjusted by Valash prompted her to offer a silent prayer to the memory of the ancient and possibly damned lizard woman and her offspring. For without that fortunate encounter, she would have had a much harder job of this, if she would even have gotten to this point at all.

It still took another day to reach the critical tipping point, the array forcibly distributing her Intent-infused Qi through her body as she focused on melding it with the Physique Symbol’s own intent.

By any measure, she knew she had no right to complain really, even if it was three days of unmitigated torture, her body held together mainly by her Mantra and sheer bloody-mindedness. Three days to go from mid Core Formation to quasi-Soul Foundation was… disturbingly fast, even accounting for how she had abused the breakthrough process to speed things up and was now relying on the array to keep that momentum.

So nebulous was the first glimmer of her Soul Intent founding itself that at first she thought she was almost imagining it amid the rolling waves of intent scattering through her body, carrying the physique symbol’s strength out of her core. However, within a few cycles, pushing at the limits, the mist and corona in her core also started to expand faintly and the symbol that had always existed in some other detectable, but somehow untouchable space… settled.

Abruptly she was aware of herself beyond the limits of her own body.

As the cycles went by, that ‘awareness’ got stronger and stronger and the sense of her surroundings grew clearer and clearer, also slowly merging with her use of ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’, until finally, and rather abruptly, she was somehow aware of herself within the surroundings, in a subtle way, and with it aware of a shadow within her that was also her.

It was a very odd feeling, like having your reflection in the mirror wave at you, except it wasn’t really a reflection as such, but more like she was looking both in and out of the same window at once.

{Bright Heart Shifting Steps}

Exhaling, she invoked her divination art and completed the penultimate cycle of her qi, finally attaining the desired, ephemeral association between the shadow her and her physical self through her core in her dantian—

In almost the same instant that the two overlapped, the bolt of lightning landed.

It struck her in the third eye, right in the middle of her forehead, and while it wasn’t quite as bad as what she had experienced previously, that was a bit like asking if your preference was for the limb to be blended or smashed.

Above them, the misty, humid afternoon grew dark as clouds swirled out of almost nowhere, so fast and voluminously that they blocked out much of the hazy sunlight within a few seconds, while thunder boomed overhead.

She hissed inwardly and shook off the worst of the initial impact, guiding the chaotic, punishing surge of golden energy, edged with black, through her body, letting the myriad elements qi consume it.

Rather than multiple bolts, as she had been expecting, the single golden-black bolt pulsed abruptly, and a second surge raged into her body through her third eye… then a third… and a fourth. As they tore at her, they shed black sparks that tried to worm their way into her meridian gates and cripple them… and also, as she had hoped, gravitated towards the insistent invading intent of the Hydra’s soul strength that was still present within its qi.

Immediately, she felt that cunning strength flee and tried to constrain it, endeavouring to let the golden bolts overtake it. In a sense she managed, in that it was difficult even for it to flee at a speed that great, but the Hydra was by no means stupid. Even dispersed and diffuse as it was, its soul shards understood clearly that while any tribulation was potentially dangerous for it in the form it was at the moment, a tribulation focused on the soul was close to a lethal danger, even one of a much lower step like this.

-Is this peak heavenly lightning? she wondered, shocked in truth, as the eighth surge thrashed within her.

-For a Soul Foundation tribulation?

The talisman made little mention of tribulation lightning, but from her common knowledge this was exceptional. She didn’t dare compare it to Lin Ling’s because that experience had been utterly abnormal as it was…

Golden-black lightning was now arcing from her to Lin Ling as well, who grimaced and attacked it deliberately in turn, drawing it into her body and doing her best to let it attack the cores in her body directly. The initial clash made her burgeoning soul intent ripple and turn diffuse, finally giving her an idea of the ferocious besiegement that Teng Chunhua and Lin Ling were undertaking to keep it from skulking away and disengaging entirely to wait out their misfortune.

-Don’t get distracted, she grimaced, pushing more of the surging lightning at the hydra, catching on to its subtle nudge to her still stabilizing soul foundation through ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’.

-With new strength comes new opportunities for it to be subverted, it seems.

Above her, the thunderclouds were continuing to roil out of some undefinable point in nihility. With some concern, she noted that a fourth layer was already forming.

-Didn’t Lin Ling’s tribulation only have four at the—?

Silence bled through the world, racing ahead of the recoiling sky as black bolts smashed down around her like terrible spears. Each became a figure shaped of the crackling lightning, stood in a circle… a cage even, bearing faces and figures she recognised.

-Arai, Sana… Shu… Ha Yun… Immortal Huang?

-What exactly?

She wanted to say they were people who had died…?

However, the bolts were still shifting, and within them were also her parents and brother, Lin Ling, Old Ling… and those latter two were certainly not…

Failure.

Their gazes found her, somehow more painful than any lightning bolt, accusation in their eyes.

“How dare you be a person who seeks to bend the world as you do? Geomancers serve the people. Are you not just advancing yourself?” her father’s words sank into her like knives.

“Failure. My daughter should have been the star of the clan. How dare you be born a failure?” her mother’s cruel words reverberated in the same instant. She could still feel her hands grasping her robe in the quiet of that room after the testing of her spirit root, the shock and the pain etched on her once kind face.

“Your miscalculation let us die. You should have expected something like that. They were clearly hiding something…” Arai and Sana’s voices murmured, twisting her regrets at how they had fled… how she had fled Di Ji and Din Ouyeng.

“You only came here because the clan would not have you…” Old Ling’s harsh tone drowned her out.

“You were the senior official… My brother died because of you… all those years ago… Now I too died because of you…” Ha Yun murmured sadly, Immortal Huang standing behind him in silence, looking grim.

“If you had said something, I might have been prepared, might not have died,” Immortal Huang hissed.

“I was ruined because of you…” Han Shu’s voice was cold, a twisting spike through her heart.

“I was the youngest one… Why was it me…? You were meant to protect us…” Lin Ling’s voice was small, silent, empty almost.

Even though she had been prepared, their words, hurtful and even hateful in some cases, tore at her, all the more so because there was a part of her that suspected that there was truth… there.

Her parents had been so pleased when she was born with that spirit root, after her brother was so injured in the war thirty years prior, his meridians crippled as they had been. They had been so distraught when the old elders did their grand divination and declared that it was so inauspicious she would never cultivate beyond Golden Core in a normal lifetime.

That rejection had pushed her to prove them all wrong… She had always stepped forward to be the voice of reason, authority even, on occasion.

And yet…

“We looked up to you.”

“You mentored us.”

“We were your friends.”

“You were the eldest…”

“The most experienced…”

“The most cherished…”

“And yet what did that bring…?”

Their words tore at her… gnawed at her, as they walked towards her. She had led them to disaster after disaster. Had used her divinations to do so…

Arai and Sana were gone.

Han Shu was gone.

Lin Ling, broken… remade… broken and remade again to the point where she might not even be Lin Ling…

Chunhua caught up in this horror.

The Argent Hall group ruined by association with them…

Failure.

The sense of it was crippling. She wanted to refute it somehow… and yet… Arai and Sana might be alive now, had she realised that those two were false, that something was wrong with Ling Luo. She could have voiced doubts to Ha Huang, but even then, could he have done anything?

Ji Tantai – Di Ji – had targeted him specifically, so maybe he had been a Golden Immortal, not a Chosen Immortal?

Another failure…

She hadn’t made enough effort to learn about those realms, trusting to her environment, her status, that she had clung onto, that circumstances made her and her friends important.

There were other faces there as well now.

She saw the first person she ever saw die, a youth whom she failed to save on an early mission into the inner valleys. Even now, she could see him falling into the deathless oblivion of the Stopping Pit, the eyes of the shadow in the lightning reflecting that endless dark of that dreadful anomaly that held so many unfortunate things.

Her failure clawed at her, their misfortune eating into her in inauspicious ways, even as she struggled to fight back against the overwhelming accusation that, contrary to everything she believed, she was just not meant to be a person who…

She tried reflexively, desperately even, to find a path through it with ‘Bright Lotus Eyes’. It was hard, something pushed against the art, but there was something there… odd, undefinable, almost like an absence in the shadows of the 11.

-Like there are others watching? It was like she was being peeked on, some sliver of intent lingering like an itch she couldn’t scratch.

She tried to focus on it, push past… and something nagged at her, pulled at her.

-Good Fortune, Bad Fortune…

‘We call it good fortune, but it has no smiling face, because it is holistic. You, who are fortunate in this, may well find that someone else was unfortunate because of it…’

That was her father’s teaching, when he first gave her a copy of the Eight Trigrams when she expressed an interest in the weird sayings the old men kept muttering as they tossed bamboo sticks into the fishpond.

-Fortune is holistic… and divination takes the good and ill in their various shades usually and metes a path… What we put in matters as much as what…

It wasn’t that she was blighted by Good or Bad Fortune, she realised… This was more holistic somehow.

-Those other shadows… there were 11 black bolts…?

Still resisting the terrible pressure of the black shadows, she tried to count the number again. The boy, Yung Pei in the pit and now and Ur’Vash… the two Ur’Vash whose cores they had taken…

With the others that made 11, so why had she felt like there were other faceless figures somehow there, in the lightning?

-Am I just overthinking things because of our current circumstances…? This is a tribulation focused on the soul.

That was the danger if you started dwelling on such matters: it was possible to look too hard…

-No…

She refuted it, something was off, she was sure of it, even as her mind spun, until, unbidden, the sight of Lin Ling’s tribulation snapped back into focus and the greedy intent within it.

-What happened to Shu.

-Our names… my name on that accursed list.

That thought had been slowly gnawing at her, in truth, as she turned over the issues with her divination art… the odd divinations, and the ones that just didn’t… It was hard to articulate, really, very hard, how…

-It was like being stuck in that accursed mortal feng shui alignment!

She froze at that thought, but it was already too late: the faces of her friends, the people she had failed, pressed in on her, their gaze boring through her like…

The black lightning was in her body, ripping her apart, constricting what little of her Soul Foundation had formed… and within it she got a flash, for a brief, horrifying second, of greed.

-Fate Seizing…

The black lightning was like a pair of hands, many hands, as something tried to take from the moment, make a connection to her in a way wholly auspicious to someone else.

She fought against it, tried to push back, resist it, but they were untouchable. Shadow within shadow, multitudinous shadows, drowning out her own divination art, overwhelming it, even as their expressions slyly flitted in and out of focus – amused, pitying, derisive, greedy, bored… righteous even, twisting events, changing the path oh so subtly, so that… things came through them somehow.

It was such a grand stratagem that she nearly lost herself on that alone. She tried to fight back, desperately now… and nearly missed the Hydra, gnawing away subtly at the edges.

It was skulking in metaphysical shadow, swallowing away her good fortune even as the deep darkness somehow hid it from the tribulation and, thanks to its momentary, strategic intervention, the lightning made it through what little remained of her Soul Intent and finally arrived at her core.

She grasped for the geomancy art, but it was silent, even as she felt the greed of the watching shadows… the Hydra pausing to strike…

-Ah, in that moment, she returned to a grim realisation. If you grow strong with the aid of great things, then is it you who is strong, or the great things…?

It was such a cruelly subversive thought that if she didn’t know her own inner self, from the horror of the anomaly, the long, crushing dark, she would have suspected it was also a memory sent to drag her down.

-In the end, it’s just a tool, dangerous to rely on overly…

She stared at the faces of her friends…

-Yes, my actions led to this. I can acknowledge that.

It was hard to admit, but it was true. These were her failures, the consequences of choices she had made… but if these old shadows or whatever it was, were twisting things…

-Are these really my failures?

-Isn’t this like robbing someone, then blaming them for having something worth stealing as your justification?

-or…

-…

She stared at Arai…

At Sana…

At Lin Ling…

At Han Shu…

If you set aside Arai and Sana, the other two were… odd. Not in that they were her failures, but in that they didn’t really evoke her true failure, that could be held over her for those events… at least in her eyes.

Her talisman was destroyed, as was Han Shu’s, but they had been remade somehow… Lin Ling’s was still out there and Teng Chunhua’s was also isolated like the new ones were.

-If it was just failure, yes, my parents make sense, maybe even Ha Yun, if I didn’t know that that event turned out to be his great chance to step into the spotlight as ‘heir’ of the Ha Family… Immortal Huang… Old Ling…

In that, there was a chink, a crack in the façade, the manipulation, oppressive as it was, lost a slight edge to its momentum—

She pushed out at it, pushed everything she had against it, leveraging to try and crack the vice-like grip slowly constricting all of her… everything… and dragging it away.

The injustice of it was heartbreaking, that everything she had fought for, struggled for, overcome, and endured would just be ripped away by a greater power… seized away like this.

Golden Flowers bloomed around her core, resisting the black lightning…

For a brief moment, she succeeded, repelled the darkness, diminished the strength of the bolts as they tore at her dantian, pushed…

Something pulled at her, almost completely subverting the momentum of her intention as it did so. She fought against it, resisted it desperately, and yet the transition was inexorable, all her previous momentum with the flowers turned against her, even as the Hydra continued to haul her body down somehow.

The black lightning continued to burrow its way through her body, caging her dantian throughly now. In that moment of stolen momentum, it completely ensnared her core and tore through the golden flowers, worming its way into her spirit root, like a hand grasping into the loam for the prized root of the plant it had just grasped.

‘A jewel in my father’s hall, a bright bird singing in a cage for others, a beautiful flower for others to admire… and pluck’

Unbidden, somehow, the words Quazam had spoken to her in that strange encounter drifted through her mind.

The Hydra and the devouring dark that was trying to drag her down both recoiled. The shadowy, grasping hands from above seemed to flinch away.

A shadow sat on the river, somehow part of the world, yet not. Dark hair that somehow shone like gold, lustrous blue green eyes, flawless and aloof, sat upon the water, holding a frail and tattered golden peony blossom in her hands… staring at her pensively.

She stared at Quazam, suddenly uncertain why she should be here… now… unless it was also, like the others, in some way a means to try and torment her?

Her previous encounter flashed through her, the oddity and the strange insanity of it, and yet Quazam never looked at her, didn’t even seem to notice her existence, just continued to stare, empty-eyed, at the withering, wilted flower, while the waters flowed slowly around her, as if she were welded to them in some strange way.

The lightning continued to devour her, the darkness of the waters drawing her down, helpless, as she tried to shelter her own flower, the spirit root… and yet everything she did was useless. All her struggles just drew in the darkness, while the hydra circled in the shadows, an evil stalker… waiting.

-How is this even a tribulation? she howled, ineffectually, into the smothering darkness, barely clinging to her sense of self as the last of the last of the golden flowers in her dantian faded away, their petals falling one after another.

-Isn’t this just a robbery?

-Can heaven even have eyes?

Behind Quazam now, and in fact all around her, she saw other shadows as some, nearer, were childlike and masked but nigh ethereal – the ones from the mist? – but others, more distant male and female figures, were cloaked in shadow and water. The only thing to pick them out being the golden flowers they held, or had in their hair.

-Is that the connection? Is that why Quazam is actually here? Something to do with the flowers, with the woman I saw before?

They looked on in impassive silence, and something about their unwillingness to act stirred a deep sense of grievance in her heart, as the lightning coiled around her spirit root, constricting it, consuming it, as its petals wilted one after another and she was torn apart from it, her body sinking into dark—

She caught herself just in time, slapping her metaphorical self in the face in the process.

-What was I expecting others to do?

-Interfere?

-Nobody else has interfered for anything good so fa—

That thought truncated oddly, actually, as if something were trying to stop her…

-These others are here, or able to perceive this somehow, because of the flower’s association with my spirit root…

That realisation exposed a crack in her circumstances, in the darkness devouring her: the black lightning grasping for her spirit root had almost inexplicably not implicated the Hydra… hadn’t implicated Lin Ling, who was sending it, or Chunhua, whose strength was fighting against the hydra.

It was almost like this moment was locked in its own little bubble as she slipped away into darkness.

The more she strained, the more she saw that it was scrupulously avoiding Chunhua for some reason…

-Is whatever is doing this afraid of Chunhua?

-Oh.

It clicked and she screamed with rage as she pushed back again, resisting it as best she could, relying on a very unspiritual method to reconnect with another bit of her that had been slowly but quietly nudged away somehow – her mantra.

-This is just like the snakes…

-Except…

-Except…!

-Except it is the fates-accursed heavens themselves turning their eyes aside from whatever it was that is after me!

She stared grimly at the judging figures and their various shadows. It was easy to say these things, to act on them even, but to ‘know’ them deep inside?

“Never mind what was fair… or right… or… auspicious…” she sneered, addressing them directly, as much as she could, although the sneer was for herself really, because the moment of stark self-awareness of the manipulation hurt every part of her.

“Do I expect only good things, and blame bad things on others?”

“Do only good things come from others? Why I am responsible for all the bad things?”

Her words echoed emptily in the darkness, almost smothered by them, consumed by the constricting serpents, the grasping hand from heaven, at the shadows grinning at her, uncaring of her words… looking at her like a piece of treasure, without any care for her.

Just like someone seeing a thing they thought worth taking… like with Lin Ling, with Han Shu…

Just like they were plucking a pretty flower…

‘And in that desert beauties only did two things… dance for people or dance beneath them.’

Quazam’s words surfaced again in her mind, even as she slumped down, staring at the fading flower wilting in her hands… the dark waters devouring her…

-Why do I keep thinking of her?

In a way, she knew, though. Even at the time, she had thought them haunting. Now…? The poignancy in it was maddening, enraging… suffocating, even.

A hand touched her face, and she found herself staring up into the face of Quazam, her features no longer flawless, but wan and drained, with eyes sorrowful, though her expression was still inscrutable, lost amid the shadows of her own hair that tumbled down, disorderly around her bare shoulders.

“It seems you did not forget what we said after all.” The words hung in her mind, echoing, even as she struggled to her feet, and was drawn up by Quazam, who swirled around her, whispering to her.

“This… to them is our fate… Pretty flowers, to seal away and admire… to be their radiance by day and their desire by night.”

“…”

“Are you really here, or are you just a figment of this nightmare as well?” she managed to rasp back.

“…”

“Choice… Such a cruel thing… a cruel gift, by a cruel woman,” Quazam murmured, her voice melding with the darkness, sounding sad and yet also faintly mocking. It almost seemed like her words were not just for her, but for the other shadows, still observing like distant statues. “They have theirs: the choice of those who have everything, take everything, desire everything. We… we can only fight tooth and claw, by whatever means we possess… until the very end.”

She wanted to refute it, and yet, strangely, there was a crushing truth in there, though it didn’t seem to move the others at all, and the darkness around her just mocked the idea or dismissed it as inconsequential. Quazam’s hand’s clasped around hers, holding up the flower, her words whispering in her ear, echoed by her own voice.

“You want me to just go quietly into the dark? To become a thing that dances for you?”

The darkness above rippled, as if disconcerted somehow, while the darkness below… just surged, trying to redouble its efforts to drag her down somehow.

“…”

With the last shred of control she had, she used her mantra to push qi to attack Lin Ling.

Not poke her…

Properly attack her.

If you picked treasure herbs without caring for their circumstances, you could find they had lethal thorns far too late. She had seen what the memories in Lin Ling could achieve… and while, perhaps, the shadows feared Teng Chunhua or whatever she had gained, her intuition was that if the two of them were compared, it was Lin Ling who had the really dangerous thorns.

The last vestiges of her crumbling soul intent and the qi that infused it, twisted in the link. Not all of it was within whatever strange obviation had been done; it was just that she had been strongly encouraged not to interfere with it… Her mantra chimed,

“Body of the Devoted carries the Path as a Gift to be Bestowed.”

In any other circumstance, such a weak attack would never have gotten through, never have found her core, never have struck at it… It wasn’t even a strike, really. It was pathetically weak, the tiniest glimmer of soul intent to carry it, but it was as auspiciously aimed as she could manage.

“You suck!”

The response was gratifyingly immediate, a thorough validation of her suspicions about the memories, ever since she had heard Lin Ling complain about them. It didn’t come from Ling herself, who would think before striking… No, it came from the memories who had ‘chosen’ her, but were too ‘proud’ to acknowledge that they were beholden to others.

“We do not suck!”

The voices howled into her mind, enraged that she, a puny little monkey, had actually managed – dared – to land a soul attack on them directly. They would care nothing for her, but if she implicated Lin Ling, they would care about the effect of these grasping hands on that vessel… and she could sense in them a deep hatred and derision for the hydra as well.

-Fight fire with fire…

It was nearly impossible to finish the coherent thought as the memories screamed into her own core world, shattering apart the grasping hands as they went, scattering the devouring darkness in the waters that was the Hydra and descending on her core, determined to…

-The question is how big a fire is…

Above her, the tribulation twisted. The dark waters below grew positively avaricious, while those above… oddly dismissive.

“…”

The memories paused, and their gaze turned upwards, angered by the apparent disdain. If she had a mocking hand to slap to her cheek at that point, she would have.

The tribulation erupted.

That was probably the only way to describe it.

The black lightning was shattered effortlessly before the enraged howls of the memories, who then, with almost comedic haste, abruptly retreated as 33 white sages carrying a great net descended towards all four of them and all sense of ‘structure’ vanished.

The oppression that had been smothering and twisting everything, isolating her from the other two, was scattered.

Instantly, both retaliated, recognising, she guessed, what had been done in some fashion. Enraged blue fire swept out of Chunhua, enveloping the devouring darkness below, as the Hydra’s soul howled in fury. A purifying maelstrom of yang qi, carrying with it a dreadful roar of rage, swept up all the prideful memories who were recoiling within her and drew them back to the fight.

She mustered her soul intent and infused it into what little remained of the wilting, golden petals drifting in her tortured dantian, devoid of all its qi. With it, she found another strength she had been led to neglect somehow: a chance discovery. The Ur’Inan were close by and while they had not been marked with the petals… Ling and Chunhua had.

“The Bestowed Lotus brings the Gift of the Path to the Body.”

Strength surged into the dying flowers and she hurled them upwards at the net, manifesting her mantra at last as well, as risky as it was, because it drew away from what little defence of her body she had left.

There was no way to avoid the serpents, and, still wracked by the orphaned and scattered black lightning, all she could do was try her best to ameliorate the damage they dealt as they swept through her meridians, melting them as they tried to strike at her soul. She grinned nastily and pushed her core’s Intent and the mantra out, grasping as much of it as she could.

The mantra was fast becoming the unsung hero of this unrelenting struggle, she noticed. She had to wonder at its origins, because for something purported to basically be a dead end after Nascent Soul unless you were seriously lucky according to the consensus back home, it was turning into the tipping point in her favour even more than the geomancy art did, and right now it wasn’t obfuscated.

With the grasping strength of the black lightning scattered, her core was once again able to aid in the refinement of the qi from the hydra which was now being forcibly dragged across the link.

Her Nascent Soul… or its nebulous proto-form, was also slowly starting to gain some kind of structure, she was relieved to see, aided by the qi from the hydra. The process was being greatly aided by the fragments of soul intent coming with it, which the white lightning, robbed of its mendacious direction, was almost prejudicially hunting down, cancelling them out and turning them into orphaned, soul intent infused qi.

Under that pressure, she finally felt the disparate bits of nebulous energy swirl together and flow backwards from her extremities. Almost between one cycle and the next, her Soul Intent finally settled into her body, collecting in her third eye and integrating with her meridians to give her a new, ghostly meridian.

From within her third eye, the strength of her qi cycle, the ‘Bright Lotus Earthly Scripture’ and her mantra combined into a twisting vortex that rapidly devoured what remained of the white lightning. The scattered Soul Intent infused qi was also pulled to it, spreading all that energy through the phantasmal meridian system—

She stood in another place, her form nebulous, the floor around her resembling a rippling mirror. Above her, spark-like flowers drifted as tiny stars in a great arc above her. It took her a moment to realise it was her spirit root, or a ghostly reflection of it, spanning the sky like the arm of some great galaxy, its petals behind it, vast shadows against the night sky.

The whole place revolved around the ‘Bright Lotus Earthly Physique’ symbol, which confused her for a moment, until she realised she was standing in her Sea of Knowledge. Looking at her body, it was misty and unclear still, but it definitely looked like her, merely a 5 or 6 year old her she only had recollections of as reflections in a mirror or a few scroll paintings.

The ghostly meridians were still spidering out, connecting the place she was in to her Golden Core and her dantian. As she watched, they also encompassed her third eye, the symbol and even the patterning of the mantra on her bones. As that last connection settled she observed that her misty form also now had ghostly bones and meridians coalescing inside of her. Soul Intent swept out of her body properly, infusing some of her qi and in the process allowing her to see that her physical condition had basically gone past bad.

Grimacing, she appeared in her dantian with a single thought. The shift was a bit jarring but even that could be fed to her mantra she found. Her core spun below her; however, when she focused on it, she found that the connection between it and her soul was… nebulous… weak, even, like it could tear and break at any time, which didn’t feel right.

The talisman’s information that emerged almost as she queried it, told her she was currently between what was sort of a minor realm at the peak of Soul Foundation – Soul Formation, and the Nascent Soul’s ‘Soul Opening’ stage. The damage done to her Soul Foundation, her core and her spirit root had been significant enough to destabilize that aspect of her formation to the point where it could nearly be considered a deviation. Fortunately, the solution was literally all around her – the orphaned soul power of the Hydra.

“…”

Her perception of the outside world in here was strange, but she could tell that the white lightning from the Judgement tribulation was still raging down like rain around her as the petals exterminated the sages now, not just their net.

“How ironic,” she scowled, looking around with folded arms.

The manipulation of the tribulation was suddenly working in her favour, because it should have been splintering like crazy and attacking everyone equally, but it had somehow been divided deliberately from attacking the Hydra… or the Hydra had been able to mask itself, and because it was part of Lin Ling, she was also protected, even while she was emptying soul-infused qi through the link to her like waterfall.

She tried, a few times, to coax the white lightning across the links between them, but it refused to budge at all, just doing what it wanted. That was annoying, but also, at the same time, a rather convenient stroke of good fortune for her, because the fundamentals of the tribulation were so chaotic that they basically defied control, giving her a vital moment to focus on healing her Nascent Soul.

The maelstrom of qi cycling in her dantian was slowly feeding her Nascent Soul qi as she watched, except…

-So, maybe not so out of control, she hissed, watching how scrupulous the lightning storm was in really avoiding her Nascent Soul and providing it anything that might actually heal it and instead continuing to gnaw away at the connection between her core, her soul intent and her spirit root.

-As if I needed any more confirmation, she sighed grimly. This. Is. Not. Normal.

She made a few more efforts to gain something from it, but the last vestiges of the evasive white lightning dissipated like slippery eels, nearly providing her with actual losses for the amount of effort she spent to try to grasp them.

Above her, the tribulation clouds continued to get darker, and the mist gloomier and more sinister. The sense of grasping strength up above also shifted, trying to reach out and pull at her. She felt the presence of darkness, seeking things to tear her down and make her vulnerable…

A hand reached out of the darkness, grasping her, dragging her up to stare at a face with golden curls framing it and a cheeky, arrogant grin as she felt cold stone against her back.

-Di Ji…

-Oh. Nameless. Thrashed. Shit.

Her mantra manifestation sank into him, only to scatter and founder in some way as his hand closed around her throat, pushing her back. Darkness enveloped everything as she struggled desperately, fighting against his grip.

“KNEEL.”

She didn’t really kneel, but the command sank into her, forcing her to submit, somehow scattering away what strength she had been trying to muster for a brief moment. It sank into her like satin barbs… dulling her senses, making her heart race.

“That’s better…” he smiled, “much more ladylike…”

She barely managed to crush whatever he had done, feed it to her mantra, and spat in his face.

He laughed, mockingly, wiping away the blood with one hand, and then ran that hand, still warm with it, down between her breasts until it lingered over her dantian.

“I dislike commanding…” Di Ji sighed, leaning in towards her. “If you don’t struggle… it will be—”

She snarled, cursing him, and whoever was responsible for this abomination of a tribulation, at how Di Ji appeared to be entirely unsuppressed – a Golden Immortal in a lower step tribulation…

-You have done us service, CHILD of the Kun.

It. arrived.

Out of the watching dark.

Out of the long years.

The oppression recoiled before it.

The darkness grovelled, terrified from it, and called it Saviour and Master. Prophet.

It floated over the shaft, emerging from the shadows – tall, elongated, with four limbs and an angular form, shrouded in a robe of tattered yellowed flayed flesh.

It drifted forward, and grasped Di Ji in a single, fluid shift, its long jaw that fell across its chest opening sideways to reveal lots of teeth and a tongue that was far too long and had several secondary tendrils on it.

-You wonder how? the helpful, horrible, familiar voice of the eldritch abomination said, grinning in her mind’s eye.

Its tongue twisted around Di Ji’s still smiling face, tearing it away, and leaving the smoking, flayed remains of his de-fleshed skull to stare at her, agony and ecstasy reflected in his eyes in equal measure.

-The Spiteful one tried her best, but we endure, Throdog fhalma l' uh'eogg

It cast aside Di Ji’s broken body and reached out a hand to stroke her face, almost tenderly.

-All those years ago… timeless years, we said you would be a worthy offering, Throdog fhalma l' uh'eogg

“No, no, no, no, no….”

She realised she was screaming, because this was vivid in a way that even the appearance of Di Ji had not managed to achieve. This was not in the tribulation, or rather, the moment was somehow… real… and yet also within the tribulation.

-We told you then to accept us… and your doom would not be…

-That he is the only one who can see those who would turn your hopes to dust, delivered to ruin.

“How…?” she managed to gasp.

“How?” the Sar’Katush somehow parroted her, then laughed. A deep, dark, laugh that seemed to emanate from everywhere.

Quazam was staring at the shadows which were etched deep around her, her face a complex expression somewhere between anger and fear.

She felt the most horrifying intent well up from the dark waters below, a determination to warp the whole world and consume it. His form shook as he threw his arms apart and his form blurred the space around him. The dark waters rippled and the mist thickened. Shadows slid out from behind him: four-armed, grinning abominations, Orichalcum blades in their hands and grey fire burning in their five eyes.

She stared, unable to move, as the 66 Sar’katush rose from the dark water of their bottomless pools into the silent world, which inverted around them. Life fell into death and death came back to life. The swamp around them wilted, the reeds warping and withering. The soil rotted, the waters of the river grew foul and the mists grasped and devoured.

What was most terrifying, though, was that the manipulative intent on her tribulation, in and of itself… was not actually this thing, even if it had been brought back into being by it. Despite what it had said, she was pretty certain that the darkness should have been severed from… her.

That left… she turned to the Hydra, the dark devouring darkness… and yet, intuitively, she knew that that was not really it.

-Is that even possible? she wondered, with a sudden chill.

-The darkness was severed from me, but I still remember it…

She had a good idea of what the five steps of tribulation represented. Normal, Spiritual, Earthly, Heavenly and Fate. The five supreme steps of tribulation were Fate, Judgement, Denial, Retribution and Execution. Black lightning was Fate…, white lightning was Judgement, Grey and Black was…

That meant that this was Denial.

-Di Ji appeared first… Did whoever is trying to manipulate this seek something that would try to deny me my path and steal away my spirit root?

The 66 shadow abominations drifted closer and all she could do was laugh suddenly… bitterly even.

- How oddly fitting.

-You tried to deny me my spirit root, like Lin Ling had hers stolen, but you got this instead.

-I hope you…

She stopped herself – barely. Nearly pulled to say it by the darkness.

-Vile thing… dangerous thing…

Quazam – or was she really Quazam? she was starting to wonder now, not that she had much attention to spare to her – was also standing, clutching her fragile, tattered flower to her breast, looking forlorn.

And she knew, at last, where she had seen Quazam’s face. The face on the statue by the waterfall. The beautiful woman holding up the flower, with the pot by her side. It was how she had reclined on her divan in the hall as well and the flower in her hands was the same too, albeit wilted and forgotten. Lin Ling had read the inscription, but she had said it was damaged…

-Rain bringers…

-YET Mere CHILDREN…

-Prey…

-No… there are rules…

The shadow Sar’Katush laughed, fanning out around her, as the childlike figures of the children in the mist, with their bows and flutes and drums stood there, in silence now, somehow defiant despite being ephemeral. Behind them, she could see their shadows looked older, young women with fury in their eyes and sorrow etched into their faces. The distant figures with the flowers though… just seemed as aloof as before.

“Big sister, though we have our differences…” one murmured.

“Your fate was too cruel…” another sighed.

“Too hateful…” a girl with dark hair and a drum hissed.

“The humans too covetous…” a golden-haired girl cursed, waving her spear.

“The clay spawn too greedy…” another sneered, looking at the shadows of the Sar’Katush.

Their words echoed strangely, in the darkness, while their shadows seemed to be straining at the limits of the oppression to try and intrude—

-you cannot enter here…

-it is denied…

-denied…

[Denied]

Dozens of voices echoed, and the figures wavered, their auras distorting in a strange way until all of them, even Quazam, resembled something more akin to a phantasmal painting etched into the world. One after another, the children and their shadow-shrouded older selves vanished, their expressions cold now.

At last, only Quazam lingered, now looking to the south-east, with a gloomy expression. Her aura, such as it was, had completely diminished now.

Intuitively, she knew that whatever role the woman was playing in this strange, nightmarish thing she had walked back into, it would not be to help her fight dozens of abominations. All around the darkness was like a devouring maw, now the worst excesses conjured out of her memories of that dark place. Hot, stifling, grasping, like a hand was…

She ducked and the Sar’Katush’s blade hissed through the air, narrowly missing her. Looking at herself, she was still a six-year-old child…

-So this is somewhere between reality and metaphor?

Spinning away, she exhaled, feeding her fear to her mantra and focused, wondering if…

The swordstaff appeared in her hands, the right size for a six-year-old to wield, carrying with it the same faint echo of timeless earth and ancient metal as the flecks she had ground off it. In the dark water, she saw her reflection and found, to her surprise, that she also had the different flowers from her spirit root braided into her dark hair.

-Flowers…

She reached up and plucked one. Not the peony, but the lily. In her mind’s eye, she recalled the war paint on the woman who had severed the beast away from Lin Ling, the woman who had had lilies as a major theme.

Spinning again, she dodged a second strike from another of the abominations and cast the flower gently up into the sky. As it rose, it rippled and the petals scattered, becoming more lilies and then more, until they were blooming like a white sea across the whole world.

Her qi evaporated, vanishing far, far faster than she could draw it out of the world, faster even than Lin Ling was able to supply it for her to devour. The quantity being taken was incomparable to what she had grasped for Core Formation… and it also made her realise that this ‘stage’ or wherever they were, was not her body, not really, because she was aware of it, and could see Lin Ling’s qi spiking chaotically as the Hydra tried to stop her sending its qi out. The cores had been damaged at last, she was glad to see, if only slightly, and were starting to bleed out qi on their own accord.

As for Chunhua, she was sending waves of blue fire like qi that shed weird ethereal sparks like leaves into Lin Ling. The soul intent and the qi and the mantra and the symbol were starting to warp oddly under the influence of ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’.

“…”

That nearly distracted her from dodging another blow from one of the abominations, so surprised was she. The art was not working at all for her, and she had basically stopped using it when it became clear what was going on. However, it seemed as if that original use still carried impetus for the two of them, even if it no longer worked for her.

A third charged in—

{Misty Lotus River}

She danced away, evading its strike and parrying in kind, before recalling that Lin Ling’s yang blood had been very effective against them.

{Kun Divides the Waters}

{Blazing Lotus Phantasm}

The strike, emanating from her footfall on the water, sent a cascade of blazing golden lotuses swirling out, enveloping two of the shadow abominations with their burning grey eyes and consuming them completely.

The white flowers were still scattering as well, the wave of serene, severing purity that came with them obfuscating the manipulation just enough to return her a vital edge as the shadow behind the manipulation above tried to both grasp her and interfere with the shadow abominations as well, as if understanding that they might have made a terrible mistake.

Quazam was also once again watching her battle, though still occasionally looking off to the south-east with a grim expression.

How long the battle lasted, she could not say, but by the time she had managed to purify the last of the phantoms, refining and purifying the grey fire as best she could, her Nascent Soul was nearly entirely corporeal. Thankfully, its connection to her Golden Core had also recovered enough that she no longer worried that it might roll out of her body if she moved too suddenly.

When the last one fell, the sky above… shifted, darkening to become a vast vault-like hall of dark columns etched from the storm clouds.

The Retribution Hall descended with leaden inevitability. Its 99 sages, all in the long golden robes in the style of imperial advisors, each holding a golden stele in their hands, turned to the seat, veiled in shifting cloud, and bowed down on their knees.

“SALUTATIONS TO YOU, FAVOURED SON OF HEAVEN!”

“GLORY TO THE SUPREME SOVEREIGN!”

“WE COME BEFORE YOU, AT THIS APPOINTED HOUR!”

As she watched, they offered up salutations and recited various titles, but something felt off, still. The shadow behind the curtain shifted, and the veil of cloud dispersed, except the figure who should have been Yama… was not.

A princely youth, wearing a yellow dragon robe adorned with azure phoenixes, stared down at her with a haughty expression.

“YOUR GREAT ACHIEVEMENT IS ATTAINED!”

“BEHOLD THE LINEAGE WE HAVE DIVINED!”

“BEHOLD, THE TRIBUTE DELIVERED!”

All 99 held up their golden scrolls and a surging strength flowed out of them… not towards her, as she had expected, but towards the figure on the throne, who now, reached out towards both her and Quazam.

She tried to resist, but the strength, terrible, ominous, compelling and deeply unsettling, sank through her. Beside her, Quazam had an expression that mirrored her own now, twisted in rage, as dark waters suddenly surged up and she became more… vivid somehow.

“______”

The figure on the throne spoke, and his word sank through the world. Quazam screamed, she screamed, the world screamed as the word touched the essence of the golden flower in some way so profound she could not even begin to understand… The distant statue shadows all recoiled, vanishing one after another… except for one: a woman with golden hair and pale eyes, her flower plaited into her hair, who was now staring at the throne above with undisguised hatred.

‘Always destined to be the thing of others. A jewel in my father’s hall, a bright bird singing in a cage for others, a beautiful flower for others to admire… and pluck.’

Those words, spoken by the Quazam in her memories, but now forlorn and sad, hung in her mind as the emperor grasped the flower out of her, out of Quazam, out of thousands of others, Ur’Vash and cultivator alike, and the flowers merged.

Quazam’s scream shattered the world as the flower in her hand was grasped by something… else, and the moment diverged thoroughly.

Suddenly, there were two halls, two emperors on their thrones… but in the second hall, the emperor was a dark shadow, long face, with five blazing eyes – a robe that was made of shifting, writhing figures. The elders were Sar’Katush, cowled in yellow, their robes emblazoned with a horrific eye-searing sigil, their words echoing through the world.

“Great Envoy, the sacrifices are found!”

“The one unbound, the one unfound!”

“Strange is the dusk where the dark stars rise.”

She saw the sky shake, the stars recede and that terrible, slaughtering rage encompass everything as when Han Shu had been taken.

“And devouring eyes, like moons, circle through starless skies.”

Saw the shadowy hands behind the curtain, old figures in distant halls wearing robes of red, blue, gold and white, peering into a dark mirror with greedy eyes…

But stranger still is the song that those rain bringers sing.

Saw that strange morning where the sky had turned red… saw the childlike figures in the mist singing and dancing as they hunted the Ur’Vash.

Where flap in tatters the standard of my dread king.

Saw the ruins of the pagodas, a piercing spire amid a dark land, a city lost in the mist, scattered across many timespans, evoking sorrow, greed, bloodshed and chaos that gnawed at anything it touched.

Where voice is dead and tears unsung, must die unheard.

Saw this moment, the darkness devouring, the choice of others seized, the good fortune of the world silenced and sublimated, all for greed of a terrible silence that consumed everything.

When all have laid aside their disguise but he.

Saw the manipulations laid bare, cultivator and Ur’Vash, mortal greed for the flower, stepping through many paths, greed for Lin Ling’s blood, for Chunhua’s physique, all decorum cast aside as the golden-haired emperor on the throne grasped everything and took it from the world.

At that last shall you see his pallid mask.

The Sar’Katush elders all held up golden masks, like the steles from the normal hall, bowing down to the shadow on the seat.

Only then will you know the stranger that has entered in.

The curtain shifted, and the youth sat on the throne, his golden locks tumbling down, his hand plucking away the flower from all of them, staring at it with dark, devouring eyes that belonged to no mortal thing, somehow drawing away all the vitality of it.

All around her the golden flowers themselves started to grow dim, their vitality fading away and with it, her connection to the world, inexorably, irrevocably was now twisting.

~ Cang Di – Escarpment north of Udrasa ~

“Are we literally cursed or something?”

Cang Di glanced at Qing Dongmei and couldn’t help but nod in agreement, looking at the Retribution Hall that was blotting out the whole night sky that was just starting to transition towards dawn above the misty river lands for them.

It had taken them much longer than he expected to get to this point, mainly because the land they had had to cover was obnoxiously dangerous, and the trail of the group remarkably hard to track. There had also been several very large parties of Ur’Vash roving around and the ‘power’ in the region they were in was much more formidable than the ones they had fought the battle with. The three towns they had passed had all had Ancient Immortals guarding them and huge areas of control and observation. Their standing troops were also armed with metal weapons, which, having stolen a few, he absolutely intended to take back to his teacher, such were their special properties.

“Once is… once more than I’ve ever seen one,” Qing Dongmei continued, “but twice? That makes three times I’ve seen a Retribution Hall now and each time has been twice as scary as the last, and I was UNDER the last one.”

“Uhhuh,” he nodded, again, not able to refute that.

His first thought was that this was the Dragon, but for her to cross Dao Seeking in a matter of weeks would be beyond abnormal – even for a dragon.

“Qing Yao is over there as well,” Dongmei frowned, having pulled out a scroll with three dozen tasselled jades attached to it with seals.

“Over… Qing?” he turned to look at her.

“A promising, if junior, disciple in my hall. She is a distant cousin, I suppose. The Qing clan has many daughters…” Dongmei clarified, before he could ask.

He turned back to look at it, frowning.

“It’s not her tribulation?”

“…”

“Is it?”

“Please don’t joke,” Qing Dongmei stared at him with judging eyes. “While Junior Sister Yao is a promising disciple, even if the good fortune of heaven and earth fell out of the sky on her head and asked to marry her and make her a high queen of heaven, she would not spawn this kind of hall for her Immortal breakthrough.”

“Just thought I should ask,” he sighed, turning back to look at it.

“This degree of twisting, what exactly…?” Qing Dongmei sighed, putting the scroll down on the rock beside where she was sitting. “And those lizards…”

The last hall had been positively terrifying, but this one was twisted and wrong to a degree that made the dragon’s look positively legitimate. Something about the whole tribulation was twisted and the geomancy of the event was beyond bizarre. It had started off well enough, a heavenly tribulation feeding into a Fate tribulation and then presumably the person attempting to break through would have had to overcome a Judgement one and ascended to Nascent Soul, a very powerful Nascent Soul cultivator at that as well.

Except, the Fate tribulation that had descended was perhaps the most twisted tribulation he had ever laid eyes on, and, having seen a few junior brothers breakthrough in his time, he had seen a lot of variations on the theme of tribulation subversion by various means. The intent within the clouds was positively thieving, avaricious and mendacious.

The Judgement tribulation had been equally crazy, the Judgement of 33 Sages, casting their celestial net to steal away fortune from the undeserving, was not a judgement that followed that step in any reading of Nascent Soul tribulation he was familiar with.

As for how it broke… he was unclear, but the net shattered amid a sea of golden fire and the lightning took a remarkably long time to dissipate. He had never heard of a tribulation where the lightning tried to actively string out its engagement quite like that, or fled back into the sky afterward.

“Yes… those lizards,” he failed to suppress a shudder. Just recalling the dark shadows of that manifestation of ‘Denial’ made his skin clammy, despite the humidity.

“Should be to the south-east,” Dongmei said at last, peering over at the compass she had had sitting on the same rock for quite some time now.

“You don’t say,” he muttered.

“…”

She hugged her arms in the humid wind and said nothing as they both watched the hall twist and continue to form.

The lizards had been a game changer. Even without the compass he had been able to intuit that there was some degree of manipulative force from the south interfering in some way. It was very deliberate as well, in a somewhat different manner to what the Jade Gate Court had tried. The Jade Gate Court’s way was rather ad hoc, but in some ways better… as the appearance of the lizards had shown. Someone to the south-east, or likely a large group – because none of those talismans could be used singly by a junior – had used some peerless Heaven Seizing Talisman in all likelihood.

Those were designed not just to twist a tribulation but subvert it. Most commonly they were used by people trying to bind powerful qi beasts to be sect guardians by forceful means. Except… what had gotten drawn out was those four-armed lizards and whatever was behind them. The aura of them had been unspeakably unnatural and defiling—

“Weirdly apt for a Denial Tribulation, though,” he observed.

“…”

“…”

Surprised by her lack of response, he turned and took a step backward, because a third figure was standing there, staring at the distant sky, her arms crossed beneath her breasts, tapping her fingers on her arm with an expression of suppressed fury veiling her beautiful features.

To call her a beauty was probably underselling it, he was forced to acknowledge – Qing Dongmei was a beauty, Lady Kai Lan was the beauty… but next to the woman standing beside them, Kai Lan, who he had been introduced to a few times, looked like a plain fishwife.

Her hair was lustrous, almost luminous black, held up by a veil of dark cloth that framed her flawless features. Her skin was pale, and faintly luminous as if retaining the radiance of the moon on water, while her eyes were dark pools that seemed to reflect a starry sky that was now obscured by the oppression of the hall above them. She was shrouded in a gown of dark cloth, the edges in a dark black-gold that stretched to the ground and was fastened across her shoulders, leaving her arms bare and revealing a surprising amount of bosom. The only ornamentation she wore were a pair of silver bracelets on her wrists, a girdle of dark gold cloth and a talisman in the form of a sword that hung…

Involuntarily, he reached for the talisman around his neck and found it gone.

“Umm… senior,” he bowed deeply, suddenly gripped with certainty of who this was.

“We meet at last,” Her voice was melodious, and yet held within it the familiar edge that he had always sensed when it – she – spoke.

“Senior?” Qing Dongmei, seeing his reaction, also slipped off the rock and saluted formally.

“…”

The woman, spirit, ancient being, glanced at Dongmei for a brief moment then just looked back at the sky and the oppressive, twisted hall and the elders essaying out and scowled.

“This… is an abomination. It seems I must make good on my promise to you far sooner than I would have liked.”

{Sister… get out here.}

The words made the world… echo faintly, as if spoken in such a way that what was heard was only an idea of what was spoken.

“…”

He never saw her arrive, sitting on the rock beside Qing Dongmei, making her flinch slightly.

Once she was there, though, it was impossible to look anywhere else, because she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Both of them had phenomenal beauty, but if the ancient being in the talisman was such, it was that of a mother: flawless, kindly and austere, at least in comparison to the vision now present.

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 – she was also, excepting a shroud draped across her, very very naked.

“…”

The new arrival looked at them both for a second, making Qing Dongmei blush somehow and he… he managed not to gulp visibly but it took most of his self-control.

“Wassup?” the woman drawled, looking at the two of them, then glancing at the sky. “Is this another one? What are they, taxmen?”

“It is also the source of our damn leak,” the dark-haired woman scowled.

“Huh… well, what do you know,” the ravishing…

“…”

“Bleh,” the woman pouted, and he felt something lessen in her presence, as if a veil of obscurity had been drawn partly across her, making her less… focal somehow.

“You’re no fun, big sis!” she pouted, pretending to flounce.

“As amusing as it is, I am called Origin and she is Divide,” the dark-haired beauty said, frowning at the sky as the hall continued to descend.

“Honoured Senior Origin, Honoured Senior Divide,” he saluted and Dongmei followed his suit, looking unnerved still.

Neither were looking at them though, he realised, because above them, the twisted hall had fully formed, the elders holding up majestically sealed golden scrolls edged in white as they saluted the throne and the ‘Emperor’ seated on it, who wore robes of…

“The Heavenly Kong…” Qing Dongmei, blurted out, also recognising the seal on the front of the robe.

“What kind of hall is this?” she hissed a moment later, as they watched the seated emperor accept the 99 scrolls, which merged to become one, and opened it while the elders bowed over and over.

“______”

The emperor spoke, echoed by the elders. The word he uttered was impossibly loud as it rang through the world like the tone of a dread bell, carrying a meaning beyond his means to directly comprehend… However, the impetus was…

Submission to the Throne

Subservience to Heaven

Sublimation of All

The command was absolute, embodying all the strength of the imperial seat and its mandate to rule over all and do as it wished. As he watched, frozen in its grasp, the emperor reached out with an imperious gesture towards the Nascent Soul undertaking the tribulation. The mists that carpeted much of the river lands below them scattered away as the hand descended, breaking over the edge of the river lands like a tsunami and flowing around them.

“…”

“That is…”

His own utterance sounded hollow in his ears as the whole hall distorted, reality falling away around it to reveal blurred, overlapping chaos. A shade of the emperor arrived before the slumped form of a young woman with dark hair, shrouded in a maelstrom of turbulent qi and scattering golden flowers, pressing a hand between her breasts and grasping something from within her.

The woman screamed – soundless, but still evoking some wretched emotion – and in the same instant her form blurred—

“Dual tribulation?” Dongmei mumbled next to him.

As improbable as it seemed, that did indeed appear to be the case, and the emperor now held a glittering golden flower with a sun blazing in its centre in his hand. A familiar flower as well, for he had seen it bloom all across the battlefield in the aftermath of the Jade Gate Court’s insanity.

-There is no way they are responsible for this insanity… is there? He wondered for a singular horrified moment. The Emperor is wearing Kong clan colours… though that could just be whatever talisman or artefact is responsible for this?

“That flower…?” Dongmei hissed.

He could only nod, dully. The emperor stared at it, and in that instant, there was a flicker of a shadow within the scene. The greedy, imperious desire to sublimate changed subtly and turned… avaricious. The blazing flower in the emperor’s grasp started to take on a distinctly inauspicious hue while the scattered golden flowers swirling around and beneath the woman undergoing the tribulation started to wither and fall like dying fireflies back down into the rippling plane of dark water that was now creeping out and obscuring the river lands.

In the same instant, he was struck by an overwhelming sense of creeping shadow as the vitality of the world… was interfered with somehow.

“Sisters…”

Abruptly, a third figure stood amid the dark grasses, and much like the others she was garbed in dark cloth that draped loosely across her flawless form. Her hair was golden-copper, almost luminous in its shades, yet edged strangely in shadow as it tumbled down across bare shoulders. Her eyes were, again, striking – dark, like eclipsed suns with a faint hint of red around her irises. The only thing she carried… was a dagger in a scabbard at her waist.

It took effort to tear his eyes away from any one of them, but as far as he could see, neither of the others had weapons on them.

“Ah… you’re here as well, good,” Origin scowled.

“Is that… the Envoy in Yellow?” the new arrival asked, staring at the hall blankly. “Is this actually your garbage that crawled out of the pit, big sister?”

Origin shot her a sideways look and sighed. “It does appear that that evil has indeed found a way.”

“How?” the new arrival asked, apparently as confused as they were.

-That is clearly an emperor from the Heavenly Kong?

“I wonder as well… I thought you cut away that blight?” Origin said, turning to Divide.

“I did…” Divide’s tone was almost sulky and pouting as she idly twirled a curl of her hair between her fingers. “Perhaps this is unintentional?”

“…”

“I…”

He tried to speak, and suddenly found he couldn’t. A strange, grasping oppression, lingering from the word, was somehow holding him in its grip, sinking into his body.

The strength behind it was unfathomable and irresistible, arriving in his dantian, passing through the gate of his being and arriving before his quasi-dao seed that was gestating within his spirit root.

“TEACHER!”

Uncaring of any consequence, he triggered the talisman that was in his mind’s eye, and found it did nothing as the shadow finger touched his dao seed, nearly scattering it in the process and grasped a small golden flower that was hidden like a mirage within it. In that instant, all his accumulation in relation to it was in the grasp of that other strength… along with all the comprehensions he had made since it.

“HEALTH!”

For a brief moment, the symbol in his mind rejected the grasping attempt to sublimate every bit of accumulation relating to events touching the flower, but it was to no avail.

Opposite him, Qing Dongmei was frozen, her face as blank as his was. All three figures were standing there, frozen like mirages for a second.

-Please… he managed to rasp, looking for some way, some treasure, some comprehension…

“…”

Abruptly, he saw the darkness behind Qing Dongmei coalesce into a floating figure. A nightmare straight out of the Denial tribulation, a four-armed lizard-like creature, with a long head and five eyes. It cast a furtive look at the three, still staring at the hall above, frozen, and the darkness around them intensified.

Abruptly he felt some kind of grasping hand reach out for him, a shadow within his own shadow—

Divide turned to look at them, utterly unhindered entirely by whatever fog had appeared, scowling. “So that’s what this is about.”

The shadow froze, but it was too late – the other woman had drawn the dagger at her waist and was cutting for it, even as Divide suddenly vanished from view as well.

There was a wretched, soundless scream behind him, while the shadow creature behind Dongmei was pierced by the woman who somehow passed right through her, grasped its body and impaled the dagger into its widening maw.

The shadow lizard collapsed back trying to flee, only for a young girl, maybe no older than nine, dressed in white cloth and wearing a clay mask, to appear like a ghost, leaping out of the swirling mists in the darkness.

“DIE-DIE-DIE-DIE-DIE!”

Her scream was as horrifying as the darkness of the lizard, as she landed on it's stunned back, and the mist rolled over it, burrowing into it and flaying it where it stood.

“…”

The woman holding the dagger stared at the girl as she landed in the middle of it, scattering the remains in every direction.

The constriction on him faded and he collapsed to the ground, shaking. Qing Dongmei just slumped down, tears rolling soundlessly down her face, her eyes haunted. The girl bowed deeply and faded into the mist a moment later, as if she had never been.

The dagger-wielding woman shook her head for a moment and then turned to look at something to the south-east of them, in the same direction as they had previously divined the meddling, though it seemed facetious to merely call it that now.

“That’s also going to be a pain,” she muttered.

“Yes, that’s also bad, but one garbage fire at a time,” Origin’s tone was cold now, and seemed to make the night around them shiver. “The little sisters will likely be onto that soon enough as well.”

“Yes,” Divide, who was behind him, reached down and helped him stand. “Let’s deal with this first. That will partly resolve itself with this in any case.”

“What just…?” he managed to ask, both about the girl… and the darkness in truth.

“Some people just got themselves put on the heavenly shit-list,” Divide grumbled, leading him to sit on the rock next to Dongmei, who had been helped up by the dagger-wielding woman.

“You just saw the lesser face of the second biggest piece of shit in this whole mausoleum to mortal endeavours,” Origin replied, looking at them with a slightly resigned expression marring her beautiful face. “They are called the ‘Sar’Katush’ and they serve an unspeakable thing from beyond the final shore.”

“Did… everyone touched by the golden flowers get affected?” he asked, his voice shaking still as he considered the potential enormity of the crime involved.

Before any of them could answer, the first rays of sun peaked over the horizon, illuminating the dark sky and casting strange shadows across the world below the oppressive vault of the hall and the heaven-eclipsing clouds above it.

“…”

In that moment, as they watched in silence, the world warped. The horizon shimmered and he felt the wind change, no longer blowing inland, but from the sea

Below them, the myriad waterways of those lands, picked out by the first rays of the sun, were rippling, surging in fact, as a vast wave of water rolled up through them from every direction at once, or so it seemed.

“Yes,” Divide was the one who spoke at last, answering him as the glimmering lights of the towns across the horizon receded as they were presumably flooded by the surge which swelled up.

Sighing, she reached down and plucked a leaf off a plant and wiped the rest of the dark blood that was spattering her arms off before continuing. “Though I suspect the spectres are going to have a bad time of it, given that the entire hunting troupe appears to have been down there.”

They watched as the whole river land below seemed to shiver as waves merged with waves and reed beds briefly became vast lakes, before finally collapsing in the heart of the river lands, below the tribulation, whereupon the waters poured outwards again in a vast shockwave, revealing a figure wreathed in the first light of dawn.

Even at this distance she was clearly visible, thanks in part, he guessed, to the deformation of space around the tribulation, and also because her realm was high enough to force the world to focus on her – that meant at least a Dao Sovereign. She was a tall, slender woman with golden hair and tanned skin dressed in blue and green cloth embroidered in golden flowers that matched the one held in the plait of her hair, which was clearly wilting, a petal falling even as he looked on.

“There is something rather ironic in the fact that their own subversion has just been seized by someone else,” Divide observed as the woman, ignoring the emperor, stared at the golden flowers that had scattered on the water around her with a complex look on her face. “She has talent, that spirit elf. In fact, the girl in the tribulation does as well.”

“Little girl…” the Emperor leaned forward and looked at the woman, and the shadow hall behind it seemed to blend into it further, “have you also come to bow down to me and be my servant?”

The words were polite and yet utterly mocking at the same time somehow…

“Still… with this momentum, the spirit elf isn’t going to get far – the hooks are too great and the shadow too insidious,” Divide observed critically.

The other two nodded, watching the shifting sky, which seemed to be…

“This is…” the third sister frowned, eyes narrowing.

He stared at the sky as well, wondering if he was seeing black clouds billowing out above the hall, he thought he could see black cracks. The more he stared, the more certain he became. They were cracks, black on black, spidering like a shadowed web through the whole tribulation, slowly tracking their way down and forming an impossibly intricate pattern that seemed to blend with the world.

“I was apart for a long time, but you wandered widely, did you not, after your… reputation started to precede you?” Origin turned to Divide with a frown.

“I did… It looks like the one in the possession of the Kong clan—”

“You have a big appetite for a thief that crawled in from another sky!” the woman who had been staring at the ruined flowers called out, now staring up at the Kong Emperor on the throne.

Divide, cut off, crossed her arms and sighed, staring at the hall again as the woman’s voice washed over the river lands, making the reed beds shiver and the earth shake. However, when it arrived at them, it just melted through their surroundings as if they were not quite standing in the same place.

“Hmm…” Divide watched the Emperor laugh, then glanced off to the south-east again. “Yep, the thing responsible for this should be refined by Kong Jiang, I think, or someone who learned from him.”

The dagger-wielding woman narrowed her eyes as well and nodded. “I guess the best way is to mark all those responsible. When Kong Jiang crosses his next Retribution it shouldn’t be too hard to impress on him that letting those out into the wild is not in his best interests.”

“…”

“Here’s an idea: grab that idiot old fool who tried to warp the fortune of the world and divine our presence and bring him out here,” Origin said, glancing at Divide again.

“That also works,” Divide smirked, waving her hand.

Moments later, a ragged old man with a terrified expression, sporting a Confucian beard and frazzled hair, collapsed out of nowhere onto the grass right in front of him and, after pushing himself up on shaking hands, started kowtowing furiously.

“Honoured seniors! This humble servant begs a myriad lifetimes for forgiveness! What can this humble slave do for your most august and righteous selves!”

With each word uttered, the old man actually ground his face in the dirt… Looking on, he found he had no words, barely able to look at the three, because the old man’s formerly pristine white robe was clearly embroidered with sigils of the Huang heavenly clan.

“Your Huang clan has really got the worst taste in descendants,” the dagger-wielding woman remarked.

“Yes, o revered goddesses of all time and space!” the old man kowtowed again.

“This old body agrees wholeheartedly!” and again…

“Just say the word and this old man will eliminate them all!” and again.

“As amusing as that would be, Kong Jiang or Huang Shirong would likely stop you,” Divide remarked with a throaty laugh.

“…”

“S-sage Jiang? E…Emperor Shirong?”

The old man looked up at the three figures from his grovelling position, barely appearing to have noticed either him or Qing Dongmei sitting silently on the rock.

The old man opened his mouth, but was cut off by Origin, who just shook her head. “No… we have a better task for you now.”

“Anything! I live to serve your whims, radiant saintesses of primordial perfection!” the old man kowtowed again.

“He has a pleasing tongue. Maybe we could keep him?” Divide murmured, adjusting her hair slightly and leaning forward toward the old man a bit more provocatively.

“Hah… no. One pet is enough,” the dagger-wielding woman said with an eye roll.

“Enough, you two,” the Origin said, looking down at the old man. “You will carry a message from us to Lianshu.”

“L-l… Ancestral Empress Lianshu?” the old man mumbled.

“Unless someone else has that name, yes,” Divide smirked.

“This… lowly servant shall do as you ask…” the old man bowed again. “However… Ancestral Heavenly Empress is reclusive?”

“So I am aware,” Origin nodded, apparently unconcerned. “I will give you a token that will make her… less so.”

“…”

“And what message shall this humble servant carry to her?” the old man asked after a moment as none of the three made any move to give him an actual message that he saw.

“…”

“…”

The eldest and third just looked at him like he was a strange object, while the second just laughed again and, leaning forward, lifted up his head so he was looking at her… breasts actually. “That will become apparent in due course.”

“…”

The old man gulped, nervously and bowed down again as she let him go.

“So… shall we deal with this before it gets out of hand?” the dagger-wielding woman asked.

“Yes,” Origin sighed.

“…”

They stared at each other for a moment, then space around them shifted faintly and all three vanished as if they had never been, leaving only a lingering utterance from Divide that sounded like ‘Fucking squid-humpers…’

They were left alone on the ridgeline, in the half-dawn light and the deeply unsettling mist, with the old man, who was still kowtowing to the hopefully deserted grassland.

“Ummm… they have left, honoured senior,” he remarked politely after a moment.

The old man raised his head, very warily, it had to be said, and stared around carefully, gulping visibly.

“Erm… yes… so they have, it seems…” he coughed awkwardly and stood, dusting himself off.

“You two… not bad seedlings. Are you from the Shu clan?” he asked after staring at them for a moment, sounding much more authoritative… although the effect was somewhat ruined by his ruined clothes and haggard appearance.

“Senior, Cang is from the Shu Pavilion,” he added, bowing formally. “I am an Inheritance disciple of one of the Pavilion’s old Ancestors, Ancestor Bronze.”

“Senior, Dongmei is from the Nine Auspicious Moons sect,” Qing Dongmei also bowed formally. “My teacher—”

“Venerable Bronze is your…? An ancestor of the Shu Pavilion?” The old man twitched slightly, interrupting Dongmei with his utterance.

He was about to reply when a vast ripple of thunder from the tribulation clouds above shook the firmament. Gasping as his own qi turned chaotic, he found his attention drawn back to the hall, and saw that the elders had just cast down a multitude of black-gold chains at whoever was being victimized by the tribulation, ensnaring them in some profound and deeply insidious way.

The golden-haired woman had also arrived before the hall and was being waylaid by the elders, the terrible suppressing power of their steles sending out sheets of lightning that were scattering away and raining down with impunity in the heart of the river lands. Within the cacophony, he could hear great primordial roars and the clarion-like call of some great bird as well.

“…”

-That roar…

“Please tell me this isn’t another one of the Jade Gate Court’s—”

“Remarkable…” Qing Dongmei’s murmur was cut off by the old man beside them. “A Good Fortune Sovereign’s Core… a girl with a Luan bloodline and a girl with a mutated mortal physique that seems to originate with a shield dragon… remarkable… remarkable… most remarkable…”

He stared back at the tribulation involuntarily, but the woman fighting the elders was not the dragon. That said, the other two were almost as preposterous. His initial suspicion was that she was associated with the Meng clan somehow… but someone with a Luan bloodline? They rarely wandered out into the wild.

-Someone associated with the Ju clan? The Wuli Hall of the Huang clan have links to them, don’t they? Or are they from… the Grove or the Pond.

That last thought was quite terrifying, actually… Was there a whole group from one of those supreme influences here?

“Good Fortune Core?” Dongmei was frowning.

“Mmm?” he pulled himself back from worrying about the dragon’s possible origins.

'Good Fortune Cores' were like Qilin horns. Anyone getting one was basically destined to become the golden child of a hegemonic power. That assumed, of course, they weren’t plotted by someone with serious means and had their fortune plundered. A woman with one was a particularly vulnerable person…

That was why the…

-Song…

-Wave Law

It finally clicked…

-Song Jia…

He stared out into the distance, trying to calm his nerves.

-I was walking around in the same group as Song Jia, ‘Good Fortune Saintess Jia’…

He exhaled, softly, his mind running back over his distant memories of that stain on the Pavilion’s reputation.

-Though, why would she have come along on a trial like this? That was the one piece of that puzzle that didn’t fit. Someone like Jiong Jiaying would have been instructed by her teacher, but there should be nothing to appeal to someone like Song Jia… unless this relates to her failed…?

“Dongmei…” he turned to her, then just sighed and fell silent, because she was still asking the old man about Luan and what was happening with the tribulation.

“Honoured Elder? What did the retribution do to provoke that other senior?” Dongmei’s follow-up question cut through his reverie, as the battle above escalated yet again.

Looking up, he could see that the woman, and the golden-haired woman were attacking the figure on the throne, while the strange children, who had been pushed back before, were fighting with the elders in the hall with consummate ferocity.

“Hmmmmm…” the old man stroked his beard, peering at the sky and its unfolding battle. “It appears that someone has used the power of the Denial and Retribution Halls to abolish and sublimate a truth of this world somehow, the particular aspect of good fortune that relates to those flowers…”

“Seize…” Dongmei gulped and stared at him, then at the sky, her hands shaking. Probably she had guessed as much already, just like him. However, to have it confirmed from a senior…

“Foolish… foolish… their teachers should warn them better. Tools have their uses, but to fish in a place like this… this kind of manipulation… very foolish…” the old man muttered, shaking his head.

Finally, he stopped twisting his beard in his hands and shook himself, peering back at both of them, who were still standing there, attention torn between him and the tribulation above.

“This kind of manipulation is dangerous,” the old man went on clearly determined to recover some of the aura of a senior. “Foolish even, for reasons you can see. Who is to see how the fate of promising cultivators has been touched by others for good or ill? The greater the prize…”

“The deeper the waters,” Dongmei muttered.

He nodded as well, thinking about the pitiable Song Jia… and shivering. “And the darker the currents that lurk there.”

“I see you have both studied the classics,” the old man chuckled darkly.

“Ancestral Teacher Bronze is an avowed scholar,” he said respectfully. “And he has instilled in me a respect of knowledge and learning, as senior notes.”

“A smart mouth too.” The old man chuckled, looking up at the battle.

“My own teacher’s teacher, Lady Xue Kai Lan—” Dongmei added.

“…”

“Your teacher is…”—the old man’s head cranked back around—“Xue?”

Dongmei nodded politely.

“Good seedlings everywhere,” the old man sighed. “And none of them in my wretched junior’s progeny, it seems.”

“…”

It was hard to know what to say to that, probably nothing, on reflection.

The emperor had forced the woman back now, and was gesturing to the remaining elders who had actually taken casualties… quite a few casualties, at that. The golden chains binding up the centre of the tribulation and bleeding away into the firmament were down to the last few now. As he watched one… then another broke… however, neither appeared to be winning in any real sense. The flowers themselves were fading away as she attacked the last chain—

“…”

They stared blankly as the chain rippled and became 99 more chains and the tribulation cracked like an egg. Black lightning boiled down from the sky, into the middle of the hall as the whole tribulation—

“Did that tribulation just recurse?” he asked dully.

“…”

The old man stared at the sky for a long moment and nodded. “Dangerous. They are trying to anchor her, subvert her and lock her to the paradigm of that good fortune, and in doing so refine the core through the stratagem of the hall completely.”

They watched the black lightning rage and then the sky twisted again and thirty-three white bolts descended like primordial serpents. With them, he felt a heat in his own dantian as whatever lingering attempt to grasp them before resurfaced.

“Ahaaagh…” Qing Dongmei coughed up blood.

The old man stepped over to stand beside them and put a hand on his shoulder and Qing Dongmei’s. He felt an immense, warm strength flow through his body, pushing back the shadow.

“I see, you were all marked by some fortuitous event. This implicates…” he frowned, before looking at them both. “You said you were a disciple of Venerable Bronze… Where exactly are we?”

“…”

He managed to not inquire as to how the old man didn’t already know, and instead just told him. “We are in a hidden world… we think, a shard of a supreme one. This is a trial set by the Imperial Court of Eastern Azure—”

“Eastern… Azure? In Azure Astral Starfield…?” the old man looked around, looking perplexed. “There is a remnant with this…? We are not in that accursed mountain somehow, are we?”

“…”

They both stared silently, because ‘that accursed mountain’ was indeed where they are.

“We are indeed within an anomaly of the Yin Eclipse Mountains, senior,” he replied weakly, noting that the old man’s expression was rapidly tuning very gloomy.

“I see…” he scowled. “Why don’t you start at—”

Before the old man could finish speaking, the world went still. The grass stopped moving, the clouds stopped swirling and the shifting mists froze. Colours became more vivid somehow yet the sky itself darkened to pitch black, rippling softly like it was a veil of cloth. Within it, the shadows lengthened and then three familiar figures stood in the middle of the hall, above the combat, as terrible four-armed lizards assailed the woman taking the tribulation for a second time.

The Retribution Hall fell away from them, stretching away into heaven in a strange optical illusion that made it seem like there was a vast chasm of darkness between the glory of the emperor and the three new arrivals.

Origin sighed and shifted the veil off her head—

The world overturned.

The sky twisted and the sun flowed back below the horizon.

Beyond that sky, terrible shadows hung in the void, like primordial pillars of creation.

Stars shifted crazily and the currents of qi in the natural world turned turbulent and sluggish, as if being drawn away or otherwise interfered with.

“Aiiiiiiii!” with a terrified scream, the old man staggered back, actually bleeding from his eyes as the hall, which had been receding into the heavens with remarkable speed, still somehow overseeing the tribulation, collapsed back to earth and the tribulation clouds boiled.

The three stood once again in the hall, looking amused.

The Emperor on the throne had a warped expression. The elders holding the chains within the first incarnation were frozen mid-motion, while the second shadow hall continued to progress like a mirage behind the tableau.

“We meet again, prophet,” Origin murmured, her veil still swirling around her shoulders as the other two silently looked on.

The words were not loud, but the whole world shook and the sky rippled faintly.

“This puts me in an awkward position,” Origin went on. “Because I made a promise about decorum in certain circumstances—”

“So, while your presence here is a bit… unexpected, it probably is better that we do this…” the third sister chuckled darkly. “A mercy killing of sorts…”

“You….” The Emperor on the throne snarled. “You think some paltry mortal promise holds sway here? You overstep!”

“We are nothing if we do not keep our promises, are we not?” Divide murmured, her words making the whole hall shiver slightly.

“Do we?” Origin said faintly, seeming to ignore Divide’s aside.

“You will not—!” the emperor scowled.

“—Or what? You think I am not like those old tales?” Origin said softly, interrupting him as three weapons appeared around her: a Buddhist staff, what was probably a chakram and a rod. “I stepped aside for my daughter all those years ago, that her light might shine. You think I am unwilling to hide her eyes from this cruel sky and seek a reckoning with your dread king?”

The emperor, grim-faced now, sent for a palm to grasp at her, but the other two stepped forward, grasping the chakram and the rod, while Origin grasped the staff with both hands and planted it in the floor of the hall.

Grey fire exploded out from it, sweeping through the hall, breaking the chains to the golden-haired woman, collapsing them into black lightning that fell downwards.

“RETRIBUTION!” the great shout from the emperor met the maelstrom of grey fire, washing it back. “YOU DARE ATTACK A SEAT OF HEAVEN?! YOU WOULD SPARK A WAR—!”

“No…” Origin sighed, softly cutting the emperor off, “I would end it.”

{Nine Extinctions Art: Extinction of Three Truths}

The three spoke in unison and the world grew dim. The firmament warped and the spiralling sky fell inwards, forming three vast, phantasmagorical blades of darkness with stars glimmering on their edge. Within each one was embodied a fundamental truth of the spiritual world: Anitya, Duhkha and Anatman. Impermanence, Suffering and Non-Self.

The blades swept through the frozen elders, severing something from them and passing on to assail the emperor of the first hall. However, rather than hit him, they flowed right through him, severing something from him and seeking the shadow—

In the same instant, a shadow tore out of it: a terrible, shadowed, clawed thing that resembled the four-armed lizards he had seen in the Denial tribulation. The elders’ robes fell away revealing they too were also Sar’Katush and they all held up dread golden masks.

{BEHOLD, THE Y—}

Whatever they had tried to summon was cut off by the shearing blades which somehow followed them through from the first hall, scattering their forms and obliterating the masks.

The figure on the throne howled and reached out its arms, blocking all three blades at the cost of those arms, forcing all three back.

“You cannot—”

Whatever it had been about to say was lost as the dagger-wielding woman shifted and became another dark-haired woman who was barely visible in the darkness, as if drifting in and out of the moment. In that same instant, the actual dagger-wielding woman appeared behind the abomination, transforming in stature to tower over it like an executing ghost, wreathed in black and gold.

Her stole, now edged in silver, swirled around it and bound its four arms. The entire tribulation gyre above them twisted, swirling down with a thunderous series of booms that made the whole sky ripple. The dagger in her hand blazed, transforming into a pitch-black bolt of lightning that bled iridescent gold from its edges that, when cast down from above, pierced the largest of its five eyes.

With a soundless shriek that shook the firmament, the abomination wavered and twisted in her grasp, consumed by a tyrannical aura of divine retribution that dimmed the world before also falling down in a blazing meteor of silver fire that drew down the clouds around it like a solemn veil until the sky was barely a sliver on the western horizon, the sun and moon both hanging there like terrible eyes between heaven and earth.

“Ah… that’s…” Dongmei mumbled, her voice shaking.

“Oh…” he managed, not sounding any better in truth, because, amid the vast hurricane of clouds, now that the unspeakable shadow hall had vanished, three halls appeared in the sky, overlapping one another.

Two of them were mirrors of each other, somehow emerging from the shadow hall. Within them was the emperor in the colours of the Kong clan, staring down, enraged. The third one, was… weird.

Before he could see more than a glimpse of it, the imperial seat occupied by a feminine figure, veiled in mist on a throne surrounded by a sea of golden flowers, the whole reversion collapsed. The Kong Emperors howled in rage and cast down twin bolts of silver lightning. The two met in turmoil, and, in a flare of light, everything collapsed into a sea of silver fire, falling downwards. By the time the flare of light ended, the tribulation clouds were already starting to fade away.

“Did they succeed?” Dongmei echoed his own question.

The old man just sat there, slack-jawed, unanswering, with a look of awe-struck terror on his face as the four appeared back beside them, appearing much as they had when they left and as if none of what he had just witnessed had even transpired. With them, also came the blonde-haired woman who had attacked the tribulation, being carried like a cat by Origin, looking every bit as shocked as the old man.

“Right, shall we deal with the manipulation then, before the opportune moment passes?” Origin said with resigned sigh.

~ Juni – ??? ~

Juni found herself sat in the ruins of the courtyard, wondering what in the name of the Three Pure Ones was actually going on. She had two distinct sets of recollections now: one involved a very unpleasant Fate tribulation experience involving outside influence; the other, well, the Retribution Hall raged overhead, and she could see double.

In the instant that the golden flower was destroyed by the seated, youthful emperor, something diverged. The youthful emperor pointed imperiously at her and the scattered, withering form of the flower warped into 99 bolts of black lightning, edged in dimming gold, and crashed into her. With each bolt, she was dragged back into a moment when she had fought some fearful foe bested either by luck or circumstance. Fights replayed before her eyes, against sludges, spiders and serpents. Di Ji and fleeing Din Ouyeng were major themes, as, more disturbingly, were the Sar’Katush, who showed up several times, in fact.

In every scenario, she was delivered misfortune and calamity, time after time.

Each one was more desperate than the last as she fought to overcome them, barely sustaining herself on the cascade of qi and shattered shards of the hydra’s soul being delivered to her by Lin Ling, who was also mired up in something… strange. Chunhua was as well, although she didn’t have time to worry about either. All she could do was focus on not collapsing under the sustained burden of punishment being dealt as her Nascent Soul wrestled with the power of the hall and the terrible retribution it was sending against her.

The other scenario was even more fearful in its own way: that shadow hall, composed of the Sar’Katush, was slowly devouring the vitality of the golden flowers. The corruption of the golden flowers and their root in her soul was… horrifying. No matter what she did, no matter how she resisted, she could feel her own life ebbing away bit by bit, even as the flower ‘Quazam’ had held crumbled away and dissipated – the vitality of the world dissipating with it and the darkness seeping through its connection to every other person touched by it.

She could feel it warping her, even as the other version of her stumbled from nightmare to twisted nightmare, cruel mockeries of her experiences.

The two halls were almost fighting each other as much as her, fighting over the flower, the links within it… and now with something else, that somehow felt like it was related to the shadow Quazam and the other figure who had not fled. Their conflict smothered her and silently subsumed her, bit by bit, in the cruel, greedy oppression that desired something in what she represented, her ‘Good Fortune’, yet had no need for herself, even as she struggled against incalculable odds, as that other her resisted everything that was thrown at it, as best she could.

All she could do was fight on…

And on…

And on.

By the 60th nightmare, surviving the gauntlet in the ruined swamp to recover her spear, but with extra armoured spiders and a proper orc archer… her Nascent Soul had actually grown to the point where she looked about twelve.

By the 80th, their desperate flight through the battlefield amid Lin Ling’s tribulation but twisted so that the Ur’Vash saw through them and turned on them, her Nascent Soul looked like her teenage self, but was starting to bleed white mist due to the degree to which her longevity was fading.

The 98th scenario was her escape from the town, and again they were spotted, so she had to fight through hundreds of enraged Ur’Vash… mages, shamans, berserkers. The quantities of qi she was now having to consume from Lin Ling to sustain her progress were nearly at the point of being unsustainable. It was no longer a matter of a qi cycle, she was just dragging it in and chucking it at the tribulation directly. Her capacity was expanding and her soul being refined by it, but it was as if she had a hole at the bottom of her dantian now, where it was running straight out again. Her mantra was also further fusing with her body, synchronising with her flesh and blood in all sorts of ways as it continued to act as the glue that functionally kept her in one piece.

If she had expected relief with the 99th scenario, however, she was cruelly disappointed, as the two experiences abruptly overlapped and she found that the 99th retribution was… her tribulation.

Around her, the black lightning fell, clawing, gnawing at her.

She fought on, because there was no other option really, yet as she did so, she became aware of something else going on. As she returned through those horrible, traumatic moments, desperately forced to push every instance just that little bit earlier, draw just that little bit more qi, find that little bit extra desperation, conviction, fury to sustain her with her mantra, she became aware of a sort of synchronisation within herself.

Her soul intent, both new and now something she had used so much of that she was starting to wonder if she was getting a psyche break through overuse of it, was also changing, as she fought to claim every little scrap of advantage, and so, something of the devouring strength within the hydra’s qi became hers, in a small, indefinable way.

As she furiously fought for every opportunity back through the ghostly black abominations that were the Sar’Katush, at a certain point her Nascent Soul was her. Completely the same as she was in age and appearance. In that instant, she felt the course of her vital path shift… and with it the danger posed by the Sar’Katush suddenly increased a hundredfold, for their Orichalcum blades, previously a serious inconvenience, now became deadly razors which with every wound would shave away at her chance of success.

All of them were pressured now – the dividing point between survival and ruin starting to hinge on Chunhua’s parasol qi almost as much as the unending torrent from the hydra. She could feel Chunhua, through it, dragged along with her at this point, teetering between survival and ruin, something of the grasping strength now focusing on her as well, in earnest, as if she could be considered some consolation prize.

Yet, just like her, Chunhua refused to break. She could see the other woman’s qi shifting, vaguely, through the connection, the unity of her soul, all the experience within it… her mantra, all coalescing together as much out of necessity as anything as she held the neonate’s metaphysical face to the metaphorical grindstone of her tribulation even as both it and the tribulation tried to evade each other.

Lin Ling was basically a guiding light between the two of them at this point, her condition, admittedly no better than hers… also sustained by the parasol qi in her body…

-Oh the irony of that acquisition…

And yet, she knew, as she grimaced and dispatched them, one after another, that she could not stop. Dimly, she knew from the talisman that she was now at the peak of what it called the ‘Soul Refinement realm’, which left…

The ‘Unity Realm’, as the talisman called it, the equivalent to the various stages of Severing Origins. It was basically the threshold between Nascent Soul and Dao Seeking. The talisman was rather coy on the actual ‘severing’ bit, but right here and now she had a very good idea of what she was going to try and sever, even if she was unclear how exactly… and that was the means of whatever was manipulating her.

It was strangely cathartic, in a rather nihilistic way, to contemplate that while rampaging back through the 99 accursed scenarios. It had a tenuous link to some part of her, she recognized, and she needed to find it, which meant…

She stared into the maw of the recursive 99th tribulation scenario again and tried not to weep inside.

She was within her own choice of decision somehow… of that, she was certain. At this point there was a serious risk she was going to be trapped doing both scenarios simultaneously due to whatever was going on up there. There was a battle, in that shadowed dark sky, between something. She could not see it, even perceive it beyond that vague intuition, but it was there, like humidity before rain, pressure in the nose before thunder…

The question was what had changed in the instant that the vitality of the golden flower… its very prosperity had been cut somehow… and her with it…

It had been a part of the world, and something had broken that and was…

“…”

-Could I have to sever the connection to the flower?

-Is that even possible with the spirit root I have?

-My spirit root should be close to perfection…

-Is that the problem?

Stuck in that purgatorial moment, she agonized over the choice. Could you actually sever yourself from ‘good fortune’ to free yourself from an unspeakable calamity like this and your place in it?

The answer drifted in her third eye almost ignorantly as she stared at it, thinking about the properties of the lotus and what they stood for, about the meaning of the word ‘Bright’… and actually ‘Earthly’ in the physique, as well. It was a weird distillation pushed to the fore, as much by the way her mantra had warped and by seeing how Lin Ling’s power mutated as she had advanced… and then Teng Chunhua’s progression towards the Luan physique which was so left field yet made sense entirely when you looked at the parts and how they slotted together.

“…”

She sighed, softly.

-Chance is chance in the end. It doesn’t matter how you plot and plan, high and low, wise or stupid, kindly or malevolent. In the end, it’s all beholden on people choosing to do utterly insane things in the correct moments.

She severed the spirit root.

However, what she cut away was not the golden flowers themselves, but the idea that good fortune had some kind of fundamental hold on it.

She had to grasp everything to do it – her soul intent, her mantra, the comprehensions regarding the physique, her martial intent, the myriad elemental qi, even the golden fire from the spirit root itself – making a phantasmal spear blade that ripped the two apart.

In that fractional second, she saw clearly the kind of chains that bound her. It wasn’t good fortune so much as the connection between her accumulation and the profound Intent that she had arrived at with her Core Formation.

-No wonder they grabbed for my core, she snarled inwardly. The link it had forged between her ‘Accumulation’ and ‘Good Fortune’ was such that it would be appealing to nearly anyone, she guessed.

In a weird way, it was Lin Ling’s ‘Yang as a Shield’ that played out in her mind as she pushed it all together and then attacked the aspect of the deviation properly for the first time, stepping back into the recursion, willingly at last.

This time, her process was different. Armed with the initially rather vague understanding of what kind of hooks were being put in her, she could only go through it all methodically, pulling out the roots of one distortion at a time, refining them away even as her body and soul howled and crumbled under the act of egregious self-sabotage.

The 11 black bolts tribulation settled as they should…

Then came the 33 net-casting sages, and she overcame them, hunting out the chains that stealthily dragged her towards the net…

The 66 demons, the grasping hands twisting her towards the darkness, were torn down…

The 99 elders and their dreadful scenarios…

Her mind was numb at this point, stepping through every instance, finding the point where things were just not… quite… right even as they played out in duality before her, crumbling away… until at last, she found herself in the 99th scenario again, facing herself.

She stared at herself, and sighed softly.

She severed and cut herself away from the scenario entirely, stepping beyond it as her principle set directly.

The recursion crumbled and she found herself finally standing before the throne, which was now three overlapping illusions, as the black and gold lightning from the two halls descended towards her.

Laughing bitterly, she drank it in, devoured it, forcing as much of it as she could towards Lin Ling and Chunhua’s desperate battle against the Hydra’s remnant souls.

She watched as black and gold lightning, now orphaned of any agency but its desire for retribution, mercilessly ripped apart its soul power in all their bodies, dispersing it like a fine mist, hunting out every single thing that had led to this weird distortion of everything it held to be correct in the situation.

The hall above her, shattered somehow by whatever it was that had occurred in the hidden battle above, descended as a strange, shifting distortion. Rather than one emperor… there were now three, two men and a woman, shifting in and out of each other in strange ways.

The men were twins, mirrors of each other. The youthful emperor in golden robes, the one who had tried to grasp the flower. They both now stared at her rigidly, their faces a mask of hatred, greed and fury, the golden flower, now with a blended hint of azure, still shimmering faintly in their hand somehow, while mist, shadow and blue fire shimmered over everything.

The woman also overlapped, strangely, blurring their features, also holding the golden flower, but looking… pensive.

The first to move were the twin emperors, their free hands grasping for her, even as they tried to close their other fist around the flowers, golden and blue, and gazed with judging eyes, sending twin bolts of silver lightning towards her with a thunderous declaration that she had turned her eyes from heaven by prying at its secrets and that all she should do was ‘Submit’ and ‘Return’ what she had ‘Stolen’.

The empress, however, who had been staring at the glimmering golden flower, simply sighed and scattered it with a flick of her hand. The petals, accented in azure fire, swirled through everything and the other two halls, the emperors and the lightning they had cast became somehow less… sublimated into a much greater, grander hall, as if by the very means by which they had sought to seize the flowers through her.

She found herself sprawling before the empress – radiant, flawless, golden-haired, lounging naked on a divan-like throne – who somehow appeared even more regal than either of the emperors managed.

As the petals drifted, her surroundings took on features far more reminiscent of the shrine by the waterfall. The sky above, once dark and oppressive, was now a shining wheel of stars, with glittering constellations illuminating the world like ten thousand silver lanterns. Beneath it, austere grandeur was replaced by gleaming pillars, shimmering fountains and garlands, while the elders became barely garbed, beautiful men and women who laughed and recited poetry or danced and sang amid the mist and flowers.

With a jolt, she realised that her severed spirit root had renewed itself somehow, as the grasped vitality flowed back into the world. It was still a lotus, but now with petals a janky shade of creamy yellow accented with red and gold swirls.

She stared at it… blankly, because it was very familiar. It was a flower of her own devising, one she remembered drawing as a young girl, the day before she had been due to get her spirit root tested. In her mind’s eye, she could even hear that conversation again, remember showing it to her mother and saying that she hoped her root was like the lotus blossoms because they were really pretty. Her mother had laughed and told her that they weren’t like that at all.

The Golden Core that had shattered when she broke the root and crumbled into nothing in the instant that she completed the recursion and stepped up to face the three thrones now reformed from the lotus as she watched it. In many respects it was the same as before, except that it no longer contained the aura of the peony’s good fortune, but instead her own interpretation.

She closed her eyes and exhaled.

The principle set and she opened them again, looking at the blossoming, unusually coloured lotus in her hands.

The youthful emperors screamed as one, trying to grasp one final time, their twin lightning turning into grasping silver hands that pierced her breast—

The darkness rose one final time, grasping, clawed hands reaching for her as she found she now stood in a pool, amid a spectral swamp, holding a faceless body that tried to drag her into oblivion, strangle her and crush the flower in her heart. Its strength was overwhelming as it whispered to her that she was nothing to it… The pain of those words twisted into her soul in an inexplicable way, grasping for her heart and trying to worm back inside… Screaming in rage at the circumstances she found herself, and at the insidious nature of the final entreaty, for it had dared to use Han Shu’s voice of all things, she pushed the corpse beneath the waters as her flower bloomed upon the surface… watching it vanish into ash as the silver fire within was quenched by the deep pool.

The lightning coiled around her body and soul, transforming into a devouring silver hydra. It flowed through her meridians, her body, her soul… binding all of them somehow… enveloping her in an unshakable net of silver chains with the intent of sublimating and incinerating everything she was before burrowing into the spirit root flower and crackling around its heart, trying to find some way to subvert—

When it touched the heart of the spirit root, the lightning just shivered and turned chaotic, collapsing into orphaned silver fire as it failed to gain any purchase on her that it could worm its way into. Her core turned and that fire flowed back through her body, strengthening the meridians it had tried to destroy, unifying those in her physical body and Nascent Soul in the process so they were mirrors of each other.

The Empress, lounging on the throne, surrounded by water lilies with golden, peony-like flowers, suddenly looked directly at her.

“…”

In that instant, she really was standing in a different place, waist-deep in water, amid shimmering mists that refracted light in a vibrant array of iridescent colours reminiscent of Myriad Elements qi.

The fountain and pool were in a cool, leafy courtyard amid warm-coloured stone buildings several stories high. Rising above everything, framed against the beautiful blue sky, striped with clouds, was a great tower with pennants in black and white, displaying a red lotus flower, while to her right, beyond trees and rooftops, she could make out other rising spires and domes, glittering in the morning sunlight, adorned with various flags and pennants – a white harp, a black sword surrounded by golden leaves, a green and gold cross.

-Is this some great city?

All around, people hustled and bustled about their daily business… seemingly unaware of her presence. Stall vendors hawked wares, several young women were sitting on the far edge of the fountain, splashing their feet in it and laughing… a dark-haired woman wearing very little was dancing energetically around a statue while men and women looked on and several children banged drums or played flutes. The woman in the fountain stared at her, then at the flower in her hands.

“May I?” her voice, melodious and clear, echoed through the courtyard, making the mist dance slightly.

“…”

Stunned, she proffered it, and the woman reached out and, with graceful fingers, still dripping with water, gently took it from her and considered it with a contemplative expression.

“How beautiful,” woman murmured at last with an almost motherly smile, passing it back to her. “Thank you.”

“Thank you,” she managed to utter, accepting the flower back with a bow.

The world around her faded away in a silver sheen of water and mist from the fountain and she was standing waist-deep in the now very flooded courtyard of the ruined fort.

Exhaling, she focused…

{Kun Lotus Mortal Principle}

The water around her rippled under the influence of her principle. The physique, represented by the symbol in her soul, changed in the same instant as well, from ‘Bright Lotus Earthly Physique’ to:

{Kun Lotus Mortal Physique}

Her Golden Core, shrouded in the flower that was an ephemeral version of her lotus-like spirit root, spun gently in the middle of her Qi Sea, which had merged completely under the punishing baptism of the silver fire and lightning from the two thrones. The core itself now held a much closer alignment to her new spirit root, a weird off-white and gold, like the painted petals of her childhood lotus, with a corona of red gold and a many-coloured mist around it.