Memories of the Fall

…Of the Great Trials by Fire, perhaps the most famous, or infamous, is that presented in the previous aeonspan by the ‘Empress who Broke the Heavens’. It is famous because usually such trials are limited only to the younger generation; however, the Empress’s trial was made open to all who wished to challenge it, so long as they were below the realm of Dao Ascension. The rewards for succeeding were all treasures from her personal collection, so it goes without saying that the pride of ten thousand worlds attempted to challenge it. In the end, twelve victors were crowned and won tokens of personal favour from the Empress who, considering the trial a great success, had then returned to her seclusion – leaving others none the wiser as to why she had even held it.

It is infamous because only bloodshed and carnage has followed the possessors of those twelve talismans since then. Shortly after the trial ended, as people tried to make sense of its goals, strange rumours and theories started to circulate that assembling all twelve is in fact the Empress’s true test. and that the one who claims all of them and stands before her will be acknowledged as her successor. As far as anyone is aware, the Empress has never interceded for any of the original talisman holders, and in the intervening aeons what was originally unfounded speculation seems to have become largely taken as fact, or at least something close enough to it. Subsequently various influences, having started to covet those relics, have waged various bloody wars and dark deeds, fuelled by those ideas. Currently, all but three of the talismans are accounted for. Those missing, their original possessors never knowingly robbed or slain, are the ‘Heaven Shifting Scale’, ‘Heaven Seizing Loom’ and possibly the most precious, the ‘Heaven Breaking Talisman’. As to the others, two are currently held by the Heavenly Ming, three by the Heavenly Kong, one by the Heavenly Tang, one by the Shu Heavenly clan, one by the Heavenly Solace Society and one by the Longevity Cult…

Excerpt from ‘The Treasures of Heaven’

~By Myo Gwan Sung.

~ Meng Fu & Cao Liang – Inner Valleys of Yin Eclipse (with deep regrets) ~

“Oh, sweet Fates who have sold your worlds! What is this hell!?!” Cao Liang screamed as the tribulation seemed to take a deep breath and then… intensified, proving that fresh hell was indeed capable of appearing in this place despite, or perhaps to spite, her disciple’s wishes.

“Really, you picked a bad time to adapt to the suppression,” she said wanly as he stared at her with terrified eyes.

There was no point trying to deny or curse at this point, it was a wasted effort. Her clothing was in tatters now, red-gold blood running from myriad wounds across her body. The protection talisman had shrunk to barely cover them both. She had one more, with a full charge, but that would be kept for a potential direct hit by some of the thunder now spidering overhead, white cracks against the black starless dome of obliteration covering the whole sky… or another dimensional avalanche if the ruination above actually managed to inflict a second such feat on the mountain.

-How laughable that I thought to seize Good Fortune out of this, she remonstrated with herself. Should have remained looking like an old fogy, that’s the mindset needed to survive this.

Still, she had succeeded in what she set out to do, in part at least, and they were still alive. Her nine swords were still swirling around them in a ring of protection, while the five swords her mother had given her were orbiting above them, with the talisman at their core. The sixth blade from the sect was in her hand, mostly as insurance in case she had to cut more bolts directly.

The thunder howled in abject fury, echoing through the firmament as if spawned by some primordial god of old, hammering out their curse on the mountains and skies above Yin Eclipse as if they were some ancient foe it sought to render to pulp. The realm wall had long since collapsed under the onslaught and what was staring down at her now, from on high, shattering slowly apart, was another, rather different ‘wall’.

It was a ‘wall’ that had no name for most people and most, if told of it, wouldn’t even believe it could break. But here, now… before her eyes, those silver spiders of lightning were flaking away the darkness and beyond it, shards of unreality were starting to drift upwards, revealing a new sky beyond.

“W-what is… th-this?” Cao Liang quavered, staring up at the awe-inspiring, if thoroughly terrifying sight.

“Remember that time you asked me what the star ocean looked like?”

“I... I apologise, teacher, I have incurred a penalty!” her disciple wailed, now having completely shed his pride as a senior it seemed.

With a soundless shift, the entire sky dome fell upwards, finally succumbing to—

“What——!?” Cao Liang’s scream vanished into the soundless void.

Her comprehension failed her momentarily as she watched the red and black tendrils descend into the world from that hellish heaven where even gods feared to walk.

-Heaven Sprite lightning…

Slack-jawed, she could only watch the roiling hyper-dimensional quake that rippled out from it as it fully forced its way through their realm wall and entered in, a behemoth of shadow and lightning, its form reflecting a nightmarish cosmic sea-beast. Helpless, she could only stare in horrified awe as its myriad tendrils swept towards the peaks around the Great Mount, its maw opening into a channel that was already twisting disturbingly.

With a noiseless howl, the darkness rose, the suppression flowing out of the land and focusing around the Great Mount.

As she looked on, the clouds that had been sheltering its peak surged upwards and the great crater edge finally became visible. Above it, like a jagged lance, was the rest of the watchtower, ghostly chains of darkness now twisting out of the subsidiary peaks…

Space unravelled.

No longer was she standing in a valley, but on the edge of a vast and terrible pit.

The valleys were gone, not that anyone below Dao Ascension would know it – their realms were too low, insignificant even, in the face of this new manifestation. To them, it would merely seem like darkness had fallen, just another layer of incomprehensible chaos amid a world rapidly being buried in calamity. If they lived or died was up to their own fate… although it was being twisted such through all the trial talismans that she suspected the immediate death toll would be preposterously low unless the Heaven Sprite lightning actually overcame the mountain.

If that happened, however, never mind them, or their influences, the whole Great World would be buried without a whole corpse. She might survive such a calamity courtesy of her soul lamp back in Vast Obscurity Grove, but she would drop back to Dao Ascension for the price of a life stolen away.

-That will take some explaining, a small voice in the back of her mind wailed: ‘Hi Mother, uh… don’t mind me, I’m just being revived from my soul lamp, by the way, Eastern Azure is a black hole now and everything we worked for there is dust… um… oops…? It was all the Kong clan’s fault… I swear?’

Banishing that rather inauspicious thought – teased out by her taking the form of her younger and slightly more whimsical self – she redoubled her focus on keeping control over the treasures protecting them.

-Now is not the time to be having ‘moments’, she muttered inwardly.

All around her, land rose and the idiotically immense mountain rapidly collapsed away into a much more reasonable set of mountain peaks. At its heart was a great black spike, like a fragment of volcanic glass speared into the Great World – reality shrinking as it was pulled up by the suppression itself. The whole mountain range was fighting back now.

This was also Yin Eclipse, but as it had been over two aeonspan ago, when she first set foot into this world. Above, now revealed to view once again, were the shattered remnants of the lands cast up when this relic of an ancient war between gods fell down. The ruin that speared the heart of the mountain's great crater of peaks dimly visible against the sky.

She fancied in that moment she could see a figure standing on its peak. With one hand, it supported itself with a spear, pennant fluttering in red, white and gold. In the other, it was raising a short black sword to the sky—

The ghostly chains connecting the tower to the peaks collapsed, becoming eight wings of shadow and light to join two more on the distant figure's back, sweeping up through the sky as the pinnacle rose up directly to meet the descending judgement.

With a single move, the figure slammed the spear-butt onto the ground, sending out a wave of ‘Intent’ that carried with it principles so esoteric that they made her eyes bleed and her souls shake just to witness it.

‘Karmic Inevitability’, she realised with awestruck dread, a fundamental force of all that was, is and could be made manifest…

The force met the descending fury, and the two were frozen, impossibly—

The figure swept the sword upwards.

The intent behind the stab upwards with the sword was so mundane that it might have been ignored if it wasn’t for the veil of primordial confusion that came with it. She stared, enraptured, at what was almost certainly a manifestation of ‘Fundamental Division’, as it swept through the descending tendrils—

In the same moment, the wings, manifest like a blazing corona around the distant figure, swirled and flowed outwards, transforming into the petals of a vast, heaven spanning lotus that swept up all the dissociated lightning and somehow dispersed it directly.

In response, the sky above twisted and the channel in the heart of the manifestation of Heaven Sprite lightning quaked. Still more thunder in myriad colours howled down around the peak, like some cosmic hurricane. Dark rain slammed like meteors from the tears in the sky and now silver lightning was starting to fall.

The dimensional shearing above her took on a new and terrifying angle as ‘Exterminating Intent’, every bit as profound as the forces that had just repelled the Heaven Sprite lightning, descended out of the channel—

“…”

Unbidden, the tales in their family’s sacred shrine in the depths of the Vast Obscurity Parasol Forest of the Hong Meng Treasure Realm came to mind. Of her revered ancestor’s ascension across that fabled threshold beyond the Venerable Realm, on the shores of the star ocean where the Flowers of the Worlds bloomed beneath the Mountains of the Elder Moon.

Beside her, Cao Liang just slumped down, foaming at the mouth as the oppression drew inwards, focusing not on the mountain, but everything in the entire mountain range.

-Not a venerate tribulation… how naive! Or a divine crossing tribulation. This isn’t a tribulation at all!

She screamed her own defiance, the words lost to the soundless calamity that gripped everything, and spat blood onto her mother’s talisman, activating it fully.

-Gods don’t suffer tribulations, they are tribulations, a terrified voice in the back of her mind reminded her as she felt the reflection of her mother’s mantle enshroud them both.

-A Declaration of Decimation—!

A fundamental intent to exterminate all things within its auspice and blot them out of recorded knowledge.

Karmic Execution, aimed at a God by another God.

It arrived; flickering in the channel the first of the bolts of total nihility descended, pulling the Heaven Sprite manifestation inside out and reforming it flawlessly in a single mandala-motion.

Like a lidless eye, the Decimation Intent scoured the Great Mount, searching for something… something it didn’t seem able to find?

She focused her soul symbol on ‘Obscurity’, melding it with the supreme comprehensions sealed within her mother’s talisman and the swords, endeavouring to shield them from view as best she could…

However, before that searching eye could do anything, the intent rising out of the ancient land intensified.

The figure swept their sword up again and this time the strike that met that Decimation Intent also carried soul-shaking aspects of ‘Karmic Execution’ – a primordial intention to divide 'being' from 'un-being', 'reality' from 'unreality'.

The Decimation recoiled like a wounded beast, spewing lightning in an unceasing torrent at the watchtower. Dimension quakes radiated out where they hammered down, even as the bolts themselves were deflected back by the wings of the white shadow in the broken space at the top of the watchtower.

To her shock, then horror, those deflected bolts instantly became directionless – as if orphaned from the tribulation above somehow. Unchained, they radiated outward – spidering in every direction across the ancient landscape, their realm inexplicably reduced at least a supreme step. Even so, each and every single one was still comparable to the final bolt of a Venerate realm ‘Execution tribulation’.

With a piercing cry, she infused the fire of her soul into her mother’s heirloom sword and cut the first one that came to seek them out – every shred of intent, truth, power she could still muster focused on deflecting them away.

~ Huang JiLao & Dun Lian Jing – Inner Valleys of Yin Eclipse ~

Trembling, Huang JiLao stared up at the much calmer sky far above them.

Finally, the calamity had subsided.

Their group had survived… somehow.

A part of him wanted to say it was utterly improbable, but he would take it, miraculous as it was.

After the first wave of lightning bolts had scoured the ridgelines, they had fled for the nearest cover which was this sinkhole. It wasn’t that deep, but they had retreated inside as far as they dared. The rock overhead provided some comfort and protection against whatever was unfolding above. He had to reflect that it was like no tribulation he had ever experienced or heard of, and he was privy to some of the accounts of old ancestors’ supreme ascension tribulations.

The flickers of black light and silver lightning that contained that boundless 'Principle of Ending' had been shocking in their own right, but the red and black lightning?

“That silver lightning was…?” Lian Jing had also come over to look at the sky, her face pale in the gloom.

“I’ve never heard anything like that in any record…” Ran Hao, similarly shaken, also joined them.

“The spatial distortion from whatever that was has completely broken the structure of this place,” Yan Ju groaned, pushing himself up and looking at the ruined divination compass in his hand.

“It was a good call to make it into here, Miss Lu,” Tan Fang added behind them. “How did you know that this place would have these—” he gestured to the vein of strange matte crystal ore that ran across the back and roof of the cave floor.

“—It’s Ignitic Arborundum,” Mo Lu replied, not looking up from whatever it was she was poking near the pool. “There are records of it in the Blue Pavilion Library. It’s apparently unworkable by anyone under Celestial Venerate, whatever realm that actually is.”

“The stuff that ‘that jewellery’ and those artefacts in the southern continent's ruins tend to be made of?” one of the other Blue Gate School disciples asked, sounding dazed.

“Yes, that stuff,” Mo Lu said drily. “Its one unusual property is that it projects a stable field of qi that is almost unshakable by most worldly forces. Don’t ask me where they came by that information, though. It might be something from when the Blue Water Sage walked these lands. He did found the pavilion after all and left a lot of writings in it for the old ancestors there who helped him.”

He glanced over at her.

-Well, that is certainly not something we heard before, he sighed inwardly. And you throw it out so… offhandedly?

In the course of their investigations, they had been able to discern that the Blue Pavilion had a much closer relationship to the Blue Gate School than any obvious record or intelligence either the Huang Clan or the Imperial Court had produced for him indicated, but the information that the old ancestors of the pavilion had personal writings of the Blue Water Sage…?

Some part of him was tempted to relay that to ‘Imperial Teacher’ Dun Jian, if it was convenient, just for the supreme annoyance that it would likely cause the Imperial Uncle in trying to get anything out of Shan Lai. It was funny how he was starting to put undue emphasis on that title. Their relationship was fairly loose, not like Lian Jing, who was his actual sworn disciple. He was more of a visiting disciple if anything.

“—Don’t get any weird ideas though,” Mo Bing, her sister, who had been listening in near by added. “It’s useless to get anything out of them unless you have family in the pavilion. It’s associated with Lady Xiao.”

“T-that Lady Xiao!?!” someone else exclaimed.

Nearby, Lian Jing, who was still brooding about the fate of the former headmaster's orchid, dropped her pack. Ran Hao, meanwhile, nearly slid off his rock in shock...

“Uhuh,” Mo Bing acknowledged, sounding largely unconcerned at the ‘revelation’ she had just divulged. “Our great-great-uncle is an Elder within the pavilion. For a bunch of young nobles from the central continent, you are surprisingly uninformed given you have been trying to turn the Blue Gate School upside down and back to front for almost a month.”

“…”

“We can go outside now, the danger has passed…” Mo Lu added, standing up with a sigh and completely ignoring the askance looks her sister's comment had drawn. “The tribulation has been forcibly dispersed and whatever did it has also gone off to nurse a supreme headache, probably.”

He was about to query that when one of the surviving mercenaries actually beat him to that question, a bit less respectfully than he would have phrased it. “How do you figure that, Miss Lu?”

She flipped out a plate-sized compass carved of blue and white jade from somewhere and held it up for them all to look at – it was rock steady.

“I…is that—!” It was Lian Jing's turn to gasp now.

“That is—!?” Yan Ju also gawped, his eyes growing wide... and a little greedy it had to be said as they flitted between the sisters.

Quite a few other members of the White Storm Sept and even the Ran clan were staring at it with eyes that were respectful, but also just a touch hungry. He resisted the urge to rub his temples.

-Just wonderful, another thing to worry about, he groaned inwardly. Mo Lu is useful enough and competent enough that I don’t want to have to worry about her being targeted by accidents or ill will and her sister Bing is no slouch either. If for no other reason than it will reflect very badly on me and Lian Jing if word ever gets out of it.

“A Fate Shifting Compass. Yes,” Mo Lu answered, as blandly as if she were naming some root vegetable, not a priceless divination compass. “My great-great-uncle had the family protector give it to me before we came out here. He was worried that we were just going to be used as cannon fodder—”

He winced quietly at her succinct estimation of the purpose of the Blue Gate School's Inner Disciples, trying to ignore the side-eye many of them were now giving literally everyone else who Dun Jian had selected to accompany them.

“—and wanted to give me a lifesaving treasure," Mo Lu continued.

"Aye," her sister Bing added more archly. "So don't think about stealing it, or trying to kill her for it, by the way. All of them originate from Lady Xiao's personal patronage, and i don't think your backing influences would take very well to being implicated in stealing her things!"

-Ah. Fate-blessed monkeyshit. No, they would most definitely not, he thought with a wince.

Even Lian Jing wouldn’t be able to hide under imperial protection from the anger of one of the twelve Heavenly Ladies of the Great Realm, of which Lady Xiao, for all that she was considered an ‘Imperial Advisor’ was very much in the 'problem causing – best left alone' camp. She was not as bad as Lady Hua or the Mysterious Lady Mo or more recently Lady Kai, but she had enough of a reputation to raise eyebrows as far as he knew. Somewhat more pertinently, she was also known to act on margins of proof most would consider rather… ephemeral when it came to personal slights, something which had been worrying him a great deal the more he discovered about her roots in this region.

In fact, it was fair to say that Lady Xiao was feared in certain circles almost as much as the Imperial Ancestor of the Seven Sovereigns School or the Four Hermetic Ancestors of the Shu Pavilion. Between her personal power and her young age, she was one of only a handful of quadruple generation ascenders still in the Great World. The other notable ones being Lady Hua—the Dewdrop Sage, Sect Master Tang—the current leader of the Moon Tomb Cult, Ancestral Peak Disciples Kai Bo and Shu Aoxu of the Shu Pavilion and Cao Liang and Lady Meng Yang of the Seven Sovereigns School. It was a source of extreme angst, politically speaking, that all of those were influences which, for various historical reasons, did not have lot of time for the Imperial Court either.

He looked up at the sky, quietly discarding the idea of telling Dun Jian the next time they had to speak to him. He was already pretty certain the Imperial Uncle had known full well about the links between Lu Ji and Lady Xiao at this point and never bothered to tell them. If he hadn’t known… well that was a different matter, but someone in in that position should be aware of things like that, given how long he had been at the heart of Imperial Power. In a way, it was strange, as if a weight had dropped off of his shoulders as he made that decision. He had been scrupulously careful of the core elements of the Blue Gate School anyway since it became clear they were not simple, in the aftermath of the auction debacle, so he could only trust that his Uncle's assertion that things could be smoothed over with Lady Xiao and the former headmaster would draw a line under things.

“Should we tell him?” Lian Jing messaged him, putting a hand to his shoulder.

The distortion above was still rippling away. Truly a convenient excuse.

“Well, your talisman was broken, and mine can’t transmit,” he sent back.

It was a lie, his would still transmit, to his own Uncle at least, but a convenient one now.

“Uh… something feels off with the suppression…?” Tan Fang muttered after giving him a poke to get his attention.

“Yeah… we are underground,” Mo Lu replied with a shrug. “That’s quite normal.”

He nodded, wearily.

It definitely felt like it had risen slightly. The stability of the space around them was reaching a point where he could barely teleport out of this sinkhole without exhausting himself of a good portion of his current qi reserves. Directly breaking space was a dream of mists and lights. The small mercy seemed to be that at least the realm suppression exerted on them was still the same.

“Well then,” he said with as much mock gaiety as he could muster. “I guess we get to practice the ‘Dao of Rock Climbing’ for a bit.”

Only Mo Bing laughed as they considered the sheer, slippery sides of the sinkhole they had taken refuge in.

~ Meng Fu & Cao Liang – Inner Valleys of Yin Eclipse ~

“I survived…”

Her own words… and voice, Meng Fu thought, sounded slightly hollow to her ears, breathy even, as she looked around the lightning-cut chasm both she and Cao Liang had ended up in. Above her, the last fading echoes of thunder were still rumbling, even if the calamity has largely receded back into the firmament.

As an ordeal, she could only describe the experience towards the end as harrowing; deflecting half a dozen of those orphaned bolts of lightning had been a far harsher test of her attainments than she was really comfortable with. That they had survived was purely down to her managing to outlast the ‘battle’ between the competing primordial forces.

At least her natural vitality was largely undamaged by the whole ordeal. That was the key thing, besides refining her sword.

“How long has it been since I was genuinely pushed like that?” she mused out loud, scanning the swirling grey clouds and mist above her for any lingering tell-tale surprises… any further surprises.

Finding none, she sat down with a small sigh of relief and checked Cao Liang, who fortunately was just unconscious.

-It would have really been quite embarrassing to have my disciple killed in such a situation...

“…”

With a deeper sigh, she looked around their surrounds again. Already she could feel the suppression was returning, although space felt… twisted and fragile in ways that made her deeply uncomfortable.

“I guess we are not teleporting out of here,” she grumbled, standing up and dusting off the worst of the ash on what was left of her robe.

The climb did not look particularly difficult, just time consuming. Most spirit herbs with sense were hiding three feet down and the lightning had obliterated much of the spirit vegetation in the immediate vicinity.

Their inadvertent trip to the bottom of the freshly wrought gorge they were in was actually courtesy of the Eastern Azure Great World’s own light show on the periphery. The heavens were quite predictable like that. They could always be relied upon to supply a few stray bolts for interesting onlookers, particularly ones like her who had a beyond dubious relationship with the current lot pulling the strings.

Not to mention many of those old fate-cursed sell-outs coveted her blood lineage, not that they would dare put that into words. Those ‘stray bolts’ were something someone had tried to twist... at least two someones if her instincts during that hadn’t been clouded, and both in her general direction. Most of them had failed, unable to overcome the allure of the unending torrent of lightning from above or to avoid being neutralised by the bolts from Thunder Crest and East Fury. Apart from that one lightning bolt at the end.

-I will find out who that was in due course, she sneered to herself.

Hopefully, they had seen her use her mother’s heirloom talisman to block the bolt. She had been very obvious about it and that talisman would record such attacks and make her mother aware directly of their ‘crime’. It was unlikely she would bother to act unless she pushed for it. However, it would serve as a tidy reminder to those powers that while the heavens might currently be tilted badly in their favour, other options were available.

“Ohh look… it’s another group who managed to survive through some treasure talisman!” a voice shouted from above.

“Ahhh little sister… let us give you a hand…” a second voice called out.

She turned and looked up above her... About two dozen people stood on the ledge a bit further along, previously unnoticed because they were using some kind of stealth talisman and because the ash was almost as bad as the spirit vegetation for qi-enhanced vision. She recognised a few of the sects… quite a few of the tokens were Shu Pavilion or other sects from the western continent.

Except…

She eyed a token dubiously, unpicking its secrets.

“…”

Looking at the group, although they were all looking very helpful and studious, behind their facade they were very distinctly neither of those things. They had big balls at least, pretending to be the Shu Pavilion. Some poor junior would likely be fooled, but to her the tokens were clearly looted, the aura of death on them and the sense of subtle subversion were not beyond her sight.

-Aiii… their intent is just…

She fought the urge to just laugh, it was a supreme effort not to burst into hysterics.

A bunch of 'True Immortal' and 'Golden Immortal' brats with cultivation arts from the Red Sovereigns Sect and Argent Hall? For them to have such designs on her – a World Venerate? It was like one of those crappy jokes mortals told in tea houses, really.

She ignored them and gave Cao Liang a poke with her foot. “Wakey, wakey Liang. Nightmare's over!”

When he made no motion to wake she gave him a harder poke with her bare foot.

“Ah…” she sighed, realising that she had forgotten to reform her shoes from her soul-bound robe.

In fact, her robe was, itself, still mostly in tatters, revealing quite a bit more of her than a ‘Saintess’ from the younger generation would probably care for…

She gave Cao Liang a third, much harder, poke and infused a bit of her truth into it to shake the poor boy's soul out of its stunned state. He was a peak Dao Ascendant, but witnessing Decimation Intent descending into the world was a bit like an Immortal standing in the middle of a Dao Ascendant’s crossing tribulation, or a Mortal in a Dao Immortal one. The aftershocks alone would have turned him into dust if she hadn’t been there.

With a gasp, he sat up. He still had his more youthful appearance as well, looking like a rather befuddled young scholar with a now singed beard.

“Little Saintess sure has had it hard….” one of the Golden Immortals murmured, approaching her and putting a hand on her arm to ‘help’ her forward, ignoring Cao Liang entirely.

-What a moron, she rolled her eyes mentally.

“So lucky…” another came forward, brushing a hand across her arm and smiling winsomely at her.

Deciding to play along, she smiled wanly at them and accepted the ‘helping’ hands.

“Did your old ancestors give you a really good treasure to keep you alive?” another asked with studious admiration from nearby.

“Aiii we got lucky too, our sect master gave us a Dao Lord talisman!”

“Can you believe that lightning!”

“—It was so shocking!”

“I really had my horizons broadened…”

“Invigorating!”

-Invigorating my shapely ass, she sneered.

“Ahh little sister, let us help you out there.”

“Yeah, hold on, little sister!”

Watching them scramble down, she raised an inner eyebrow as she was targeted surreptitiously with a Dao Eternal realm ‘Serendipitous Meetings’ talisman.

Almost immediately, she felt her spiritual qi rather lethargically questioning whether it should in fact ‘leave’ her control.

-Clearly they are taking no ‘chances’ with my realm, given they won’t be able to see through it, she smirked.

In the aim of not rousing any suspicions she relinquished her ‘qi’ willingly as, at her realm, she no longer had a ‘dantian’ or ‘meridians’, not to mention her soul was totally severed from this world's fate, anyway. The talisman, designed to exert a remarkable degree of control over her and turn her into a very pretty living doll in effect, was functionally useless on her as a result.

On both of them, in fact.

All her disciples had severed their own fates from this world's before Dao Immortal, as she had no intention of having their future prospects constrained by the whims of the Kong Heavenly clan.

-Really though, as a strategy, it is obnoxious… she mused, pondering how far it was worth taking the whole farce. I suppose I can just keep feeding them rope and see how badly they hang themselves?

“I… err… feel a bit...” she muttered, as she swooned a bit, feigning sudden weakness.

“Aiii, little sister, come sit here, I’ll get you a tonic,” one of them said dutifully, taking her arm and leading her over to a broad flat rock.

Still, that was also karma in a fashion.

-Live by misdeeds and misdeeds will eventually see you, she thought with an inner eye roll as she let them sit her down.

Her wince as she did so was genuine, although more from the after-effects of her exertions, defending herself from the lightning.

One of the nearby ‘Shu Pavilion’ disciples ‘helped’ Cao Liang up, taking the opportunity to offer him a ‘healing’ pill. A very cursory glance at which pierced its disguise, revealing it in her eyes to be a nasty poison that would disperse what qi hadn’t been ‘grasped’ by the Fate Seizing talisman.

He groaned and sat up groggily, accepting the pill without even bothering to catch her eye.

“Ahhh, little sister... Let us come down and help you...” six more of the youths landed nearby – all of them wearing stolen talismans.

The main group was almost thirty strong, mostly from the Red Sovereign Sect, Argent Hall, Argent Dawn Sect, Golden Flame Sect, and even a few from the Gan clan pretending to be members of a bunch of other sects.

-Funny that they are here, she frowned…

The leader strolled over and laid a firm hand on her shoulder…

“Little sister, it seems my junior brothers are tiring you, why don’t you come with us while my junior brothers look after your compan—”

His head vanished as Cao Liang just tore it clean off with his hand, taking most of the True Immortal’s spine with it she noticed idly.

She sighed and stood up as the other youth beside her, who had grabbed her arm, abruptly found himself utterly unable to suppress her.

“Really little Cao… you just make everything no fun sometimes…” she grumbled. “Couldn’t you have at least let them believe that they had a chance?”

The others staggered back, looking aghast.

Sweeping her gaze across them, she watched with amusement as their strength melted away and their principles were sealed as she used her Vast Obscurity Truth to seal their comprehensions completely. It was a bit of a fudge to do so, using one of her venerate grade soul-bound swords to bypass the suppression slightly, however, it would be more annoying to have any of them run using some treasure.

She turned and touched the youth's face with her hand, sending a strand of her perception-infused truth and Vast Obscurity Martial Intent into his mind and cleaving it open like a rotten log. Knowledge and understanding, paltry as it was, flowed out and his body twitched in her gentle grasp before growing loose.

-A Dao Immortal from the Gan clan.

“Really, you rampaged a lot, didn’t you,” she mused.

She eyed the purpose that the Gan clan was chasing, that the youth had now thoroughly divulged. She had no love for the Dun clan, but the knowledge of that plot would certainly come in handy down the line.

-Not to mention he seems to believe that they were here following traces of a remnant piece of Heavenly Solace Celestial Emperor's Inheritance?

-Is this related to that malignant brat Gan Hao in the Huang clan?

-Do they want to set him up as a Young Sovereign or something? And plot to do it at the expense of stuff in this world? If so it’s a ploy almost half a century in the making... to think they would see it exposed to me for something like this…

She considered the drooling cultivator by her feet one final time and shook her head.

“How pathetic,” she murmured, before adding to herself – Ill deeds will beget ill ends.

With a soft sigh, she waved her hand, and the ruined cultivator arced through the air and into the depths of the crevasse opened up by the lightning.

Getting up she sauntered casually towards the rest of the idiots, frozen in stunned tableau, noting that Cao Liang had already killed two of them in what amounted to a blink of an eye.

Even with no qi, a damaged soul and recovering his vitality, he was still a Dao Ascendant Old Ancestor. There were limits to how far the fabled suppression of Yin Eclipse could ‘level the field’, especially in odd moments like their current circumstances, and both of them were hilariously beyond that horizon for this lot. Not to mention that his ‘Physique Scripture’, while lacking in comparison to his theoretical peers on the Hong Meng Treasure Realm, was still at the peak of Dao Bones.

She grabbed another of the True Immortal youths absently as she arrived before the majority of the group and casually examined his soul as well.

He really was from the Red Sovereign Sect as it transpired. She looked at his talisman idly and shook her head.

-So that explains the vehemence of the ‘local’ involvement, she mused. What a bunch of idiots.

She couldn’t claim to be any kind of expert in the ways and means of karma given her realm, but surely someone up there must have wondered if this was actually a good idea…

“Wow, you really robbed a lot of people,” she exclaimed out loud, sounding as vapid as she could.

She casually sealed the idiot’s soul and threw him over by a rock. True Immortal Souls — ah, no they were called Ancient Immortals now, she had to get with the times – were useful for certain arrays, after all and it was shame to waste nature's riches, especially when they were so fortuitously delivered.

“Little Liang…!” she called playfully over to where he had grabbed two more who had been in the process of trying to escape up the cliff.

“Yes Teacher?” he didn’t look back as he sank his arm through another one, about to tear them in two.

“Ancient and Golden Immortal Souls are kind of useful. Maybe don’t break them quite that much?” she called over, as she idly snared another and scanned his soul.

This one had done quite a few unpleasant things and intended to do some rather improper ones to ‘her’ as well.

“Actually—” she smiled even more beautifully at the cultivator she had just grasped. “I take that back…”

The cultivator in her hand whimpered faintly and tried to ask for mercy – not that he could speak currently.

“Discard their bodies and just take their heads. If we have to carry this many back intact, it will be a pain,” turning around in a circle, she gestured to take in the entire, frozen crowd.

“If we do that, we can get the best of both worlds. We can tie them to a branch and make a standard out of them, and the few of actual influence will make for nice bargaining chips when I go to get my other fate-thrashed sword back from the thieving little shits that stole it.”

“Ah. Of course, Teacher – I apologise. I was just angry when that one laid hands on you with that kind of intention…” Cao Liang looked a bit embarrassed.

“Yes, yes, your filial piety as my student is impressive, but remember your position. An exalted Dao Ascendant tearing Golden Immortal brats’ limbs off isn’t…. err… what’s the word…?” she trailed off, idly snapping her fingers while looking at the sky with a frown.

Those arrayed around them managed the minor miracle of turning even paler.

If it was possible for them to soil themselves they probably would have – she had as good as named who she was with what she just said after all.

“—Proportionate?” Cao Liang supplied dryly.

“—befitting of your elevated perspective,” she rolled her eyes.

“You think you can get away with this? Our Old Ancestor will—!” one of the red-robed youths gasped out loud, just about managing to manifest a bound talisman.

-Or maybe not, she thought wryly.

“See, this is why you shouldn’t break through to Immortal until your balls drop,” she giggled, walking over to him. “Your masters should be ashamed at having a bunch of judgementally retarded morons like you to fly their flags.”

It really was remarkable how long that knowledge had been around. Yet despite that, every generation had invariably returned the same bunch of idiots – people who thought that they were somehow special enough that the fairly well-understood side effects of breaking through to the Immortal realm before puberty would not apply to them. All it led to was a bunch of children in adult bodies with 'self-control' and 'judgement' issues galore as their emotions and mental state took a hundred times longer to settle.

All for the sake of not waiting a few years.

It would be funny if it wasn't quite so widespread.

She watched with an amused expression from the corner of her eye as another tried to crumple a message talisman out of her line of sight. His look of confusion when nothing happened was almost cute.

“Cute, that you think such a mediocre message talisman can save you somehow?” with a single step she was beside him, leaning far too close to whisper in his ear. “Even I can’t message outside people at the moment.”

The idiot youth rolled his eyes and nearly had a heart attack and an emotional deviation under the full force of her natural beauty. A phoenix in human form was… a force of nature in that regard. The suppression here would do nothing to blunt that. She ran a finger across his chest and sighed breathily before sealing his qi completely. Sinking her hand through his neck, she tore off his head, sealing his soul in it. His regeneration struggled in vain until she pushed her foot through his dantian, solving that issue.

Without looking she kicked the headless body into the chasm behind her. Ignoring the horrified shriek from the head still in her grasp, she tossed it to Cao Liang who had grabbed a tree branch and was busy tying several other heads to it using their long hair, humming as he did.

“So… Anyone else have some famous old ancestor or sect founder or ancient uncle?” she asked with a smirk. “Perhaps a mysterious master who you think will shield you so conveniently?”

“Please… R-revered seniors… h-h-have mercy!” one of the remaining idiots who was just about able to speak wept.

“Y-you can’t do this—!"

“W-we’re... Disciples of—”

“The Young Sov—”

“Huang won’t—”

Their chorused voices, the charade totally dropped at this point, echoed out from all quarters.

“…”

With a further wave of her hand, she silenced their inharmonious wails. Their screaming and pleading would become vexatious after a while.

“Right, let’s get this over with,” she said, turning to consider the rest.

“Of course, Teacher,” Cao Liang blurred and within an instant had unscrewed all the remaining heads of those down here and tied them to the Y shaped branch.

“Oh, and one last thing...” she said, eyeing them with an amused look. “To those of you pleading about the Huang? Do you think that I, a proud daughter of Vast Obscurity Grove, care about that bunch of inveterate peacocks?”

Chuckling at the dying embers of their hope written across their clustered faces, she twisted space and the ground around them rose, carrying the group up to the surface where their unwilling compatriots awaited, also restrained by her Vast Obscurity Martial Intent.

Surveying them, she smiled beatifically and leaned forward a little provocatively, adopting the air of a sexy older sister. “Your friends down below were very rude, and highly improper, as such I was a little bit strict with them, I haven’t had a chance to hear your mewling protestations, so we will assume the best, yes?”

-Really, it is far too much fun tormenting these inveterate morons, she thought happily.

There was frantic nodding.

She waved a hand to Cao Liang – “Just behead them and seal their souls without a brand, its more than they deserve, although by the time we are done negotiating your ransoms, your sect masters and old ancestors will likely want you and your nine generations dead for shame.”

The flicker of ominous intention from behind her made her skin prickle, even through the unpleasant humidity. She had been keeping half an eye on the spatial stability of the region around them, just in case, but this was…

“Umm… Teacher?” Cao Liang said weakly. “Something is… I—”

Everything twisted and turned into strange hues and blurred outlines.

“Oh fates, may you be cursed to dance tricks before the grave of gravity!” she swore.

Beneath them, the dimension quake rippled out. Turning mechanically she, along with the frozen youths, all watched the peak of the Great Mount slowly roll outwards.

“…”

One mountain, became myriad – a mandala of shifting mountains – as the quake spawned a full-blown avalanche and the integrity of space finally failed, like a house that had had its foundations washed away in a flood. Rolling waves of dissociating space swirled around the former peak of the Great Mount before surging out across the whole mountain range in a fantastical aurora. For a split second, there were two mountain ranges, mirroring between heaven and earth with an immense plain and deserts between them.

The world around them rolled into the sky and then back in on itself.

At the point in which those mirror mountains met, the Great Mount briefly reformed, then wavered and shattered outwards into untold billions of shards.

The valleys around them blurred and unspooled even as the entire landscape within the suppression zone fluctuated and buckled; mountains reconfigured themselves, distances changed, weird smashed valleys and odd landscapes transformed and oscillated – Plains opened up in valleys and deserts amid arid canyons, rainforests coated mountains.

When the world finished reordering itself around them the Great Mount was gone.

She could taste the dimensional distortion within it as it rolled back across the now unveiled landscape.

In its place was a grand vale, the montane valleys leading into it wreathed in mist and cloud. Five immense ruined towers loomed over its entrance, a fortress of ruins in a style alien to this world and yet oddly familiar to her, who had seen records of certain other places far from these starry skies.

A great complex of buildings rose up the immense peak at the heart of the vale, red and white towers with roofs tiled in a hundred colours, both ruined and not. Two realities ground against each other like titanic sheets of ice or rock for a few realm plane jarring moments. Their current location was already flowing away from that vale, mountains rolling up out of ridges between them to either side.

She found herself staring into a jagged wound in the heart of the mountain on the far side of the vale, amid the ruins of a great clock tower, within which was yet another, different, inherently twisted starry sky.

Even though it was only extant for a few heartbeats before it started to fade away, it still took all her strength to resist the lure of that hellish rift. With its vanishing came mists, and the landscape twisted around them, radially spooling out in every direction.

Still gasping from the pressure exerted by that horrible rift, she pulled out a dull grey crystal talisman from her inner world. Upon it was marked in a crude if subtly esoteric style a golden bell-like symbol that rearranged itself in her mind so she could read it.

She stared at it for a long second, then decisively triggered it.

{Heaven Breaking Seal}

*clank*

*Clonk*

*Clong*

The strange, dull and tuneless tones of the phantasmal bell rang out in pitches not quite meant for any sane world. They were now firmly within the vale once again, the mists swirling around the heights of the valley. Within the ruins above them, she saw a great pagoda, still intact amid the ghostly remnants of ancient ruins. At its peak stood an ethereal figure, arms behind her back, long white hair plaited in a loose style. Eyes like silver moons, and a robe like the starry sky.

Everyone else was frozen, lost in the moment it seemed. That distant, regal figure held her gaze for a moment, then bowed her head faintly.

The mists dispersed, and the world shifted slightly.

Her feet found purchase on nothing.

With a sigh, she grabbed Liang by the collar so he wouldn’t float off.

With a final look at the charm, she shoved it back in her inner world and exhaled. If one of those idiots, trying to put strings on things from outside, saw it, they would absolutely wilfully misunderstand and use it to cause problems.

Twisting in the void, she turned to stare down at the Eastern Azure Great World.

A vast maelstrom swirled below them, pulling up its celestial gyre from the star ocean, a dimensional shift removed from this reality.

With another soundless sigh, she focused and teleported back down to the ground.

They landed in a rice paddy which promptly turned into a bowl-shaped depression twenty metres across, sending the nearby spirit herb farmers fleeing in terror for the nearest cover.

With a wave of her hand, she restructured the land and returned their crop harvest to how it had been, before strolling through the air, still carrying Cao Liang to deposit him on a convenient rock by the roadway through the paddy fields.

In the distance, the outer valley region of the Yin Eclipse mountain range was as it had been, billowing rain clouds shrouding most of its peaks. Behind her, the distant blue of the ocean glimmered, along with the rising spires of Blue Water City.

Refocusing on their surroundings, Cao Liang just sat there, mute for a few minutes before finally venturing to speak. “What… beneath the fates was…?”

She stared at the Great Mount, returned to normal now.

“Nothing good, never mention what you just saw of the totality of the heart of there. If it gets out we will be in for a whole world of trouble.”

Looking around, Cao Liang noted the absence of their prisoners and sighed. “It seems that Heaven may have left a way for that bunch of morons…”

“Only some of them,” she said dryly, pulling the stick with its heads out of her inner world where she had stashed it before they were dragged down by the spatial collapse.

They hung there, glaring in mute terror.

"If those others do manage to survive wherever they have ended up and make good on their escape it will be a small matter to bring them back to me easily enough. To think that a bunch of brats from the Heavenly Solace Society would have slunk in so quietly."

It was annoying, but her state in the last few years had been what it was. The price of her cultivation art, to achieve what she wanted, was such that it was unavoidable that she would have moments like this, where her vision had slipped by necessity. The skill here was in seeing the opportunity that afforded. Cao Liang was right, it would be easy to just burn it all down and make a statement, but that would put the blame at her gate – whereas now?

She chuckled nastily, looking around. “It would be a waste not to ensure that such idiots serve an actual use now that they have gone to all this effort to pull off their little plan.”

~ Jun Arai – The Perilous Realm ~

Arai opened her eyes and stared at the blue sky overhead.

A flock of what appeared to be water birds flew over in a V shape, honking.

It took her a few moments to register that she was still, in fact, alive.

Reality started to intrude quite rapidly after that, as the birds flew down and landed nearby. Wincing, she sat up and was surprised that she was able to do so with barely any feeling of discomfort at all, which turned out to be a good thing because the circumstances of her surroundings were not quite as comfortable. She was sat in the middle of a very big crater.

Standing up groggily, she looked around and came to the conclusion that it was a very big crater indeed. Almost 500 metres across if she was any judge, the bottom already starting to flood, such was its depth.

Beneath her feet was…

She frowned and looked down and finally registered that she was completely naked.

-Well, that makes sense, she thought to herself.

“Shit, we should have taken our clothes off before doing this…” she groaned out loud, putting her hands over her face.

-We...? ahh...“Sana!”

She spun around and found Sana a few metres away, lying on her back, also stark naked in the shallow water.

Grimacing she slid off the rough, slightly spongy rock she was on and scrambled over to her sister.

“Ah, you’re awake,” Sana said, moving her head to focus on her as she arrived to stand over her sister.

“Are you okay?” she asked, offering a hand.

“Seems that way… rather inexplicably,” Sana replied, taking it and pulling herself up.

She stared around the crater again, as did Sana.

“Well, erm…” she started to speak, then trailed off, not quite sure what to say really.

“It is a very big hole in the ground, isn’t it,” Sana deadpanned.

“How are we even still alive?” she asked, eventually.

“Are we still alive?” Sana mused, casting her a sideways look.

She turned and shoved her sister over into the knee-deep water. Sana fell with a surprised shriek and a splash, floundering up a moment later, spitting water.

“Either this is a very strange afterlife, or we are indeed very much—”

Sana tackled her down into the water and proceeded to try to pin her down by her arm. She wormed out after a few moments, the water being just too deep to make that work, and started to laugh. After a few moments, Sana also started to laugh with her as they sat there in the icy spring waters which were presumably running in from the nearby lake that would soon become a much bigger, deeper lake.

After their momentary amusement had passed, Sana looked behind her and asked: “What is that slab of rock over there?”

Frowning, she turned to look where her sister was pointing and realised it was the soft squishy rock she had been slumped over when she regained consciousness.

Wading over to it, she found it was the size of a rock, the shape of a rock, and very charred. She poked it and found it had the texture of a rock. She gave it a push and found it was… light. Far lighter than a rock should have been. Curious, she pried off a bit of its rough outer surface, curious why it was both rough and spongy. Sana arrived beside her and they both stared at it for a good twenty seconds… then just kept staring. Eventually, she put it in her mouth and started chewing on it.

It was somewhat soggy, freshly baked bread.

It took a supreme effort not to spit it back out. Her heart suddenly pounding, she swallowed it, intending to follow its progress through her body. It was an action done without even thinking. Nothing happened. She gasped and realised the problem – she was totally devoid of qi.

Her head swam abruptly, and she coughed the bread straight back up into the water beside her.

“Ahh!?!” Sana exclaimed in shock, grabbing her to stop her falling.

“Khh—orry…” she half choked. “I did… a… stewpid fing.”

She had to pause for a few seconds until the coughing fit subsided.

“A… stupid thing?” Sana asked, looking at her with concern.

“Yes,” she said eventually, with an apologetic grimace for making her sister worry. “I tried to use my qi instinctually.”

“Oh,” Sana winced, understanding immediately what had… happened.

In that same instant, she had a sense of… understanding that Sana had somehow… 'understood', which was very, very weird. It was almost like their shared link from before had not quite dissipated.

“…”

“Okay, now that’s just plain weird,” she muttered, looking back at Sana.

“What is?” Sana asked, confused.

Rather than explain, she ‘worried’ about it.

“…”

Sana stared at her, then carefully let go of her, staring at her weirdly.

“Okay, that is weird,” her sister conceded. “A side-effect of the Vital Recombination?”

“It’s possible. It doesn’t seem to happen if—” she reached out and took her sister's hand.

Immediately, a faint sense of subtle confusion and worry settled into her own mind’s eye.

“—It could be,” she conceded, slightly changing her mind. “I suppose we will have to see if it goes away with time…”

“Yeah…” Sana agreed with a faint grimace.

“Speaking of weird,” her sister added after a moment holding up a chunk of the rock, “Is this what I think it is?”

Pensively, she considered the ‘rock’ then broke another bit off and chewed it slowly.

“Mm-huhum,” she mumbled around the rest of the bread, which she was still chewing.

Swallowing, she nodded. “Yep, it appears to be a rock, which has been transformed into a loaf of fresh-baked, if rather soggy, bread. There is also a golden butterfly over there.”

She pointed to where the butterfly about the size of her hand was flapping around lazily a few metres away, above the water's surface.

“Now… I can safely say that I am very confused,” Sana said simply. "That said..." her sister trailed off, staring around at their surroundings, then at the piece of bread.

"What's wrong?" she asked as her sister's expression turned more and more... perplexed.

"Uh... does this look... familiar?" Sana asked slowly, waving her free hand at their surroundings.

"Familiar...?" she repeated, not quite following.

"..."

"I know some time has passed... probably," Sana muttered, "But don't you recall that weird... vision?"

"..."

She stared around at their surroundings again, and found she suddenly had no words. Indeed, they were standing in a shallow lake, with her sister holding a burnt lump of 'rock', looking thoroughly confused.

"That... can't be possible?" she muttered at last, turning in a full circle, and yet...

"This is definitely that 'moment'," Sana mumbled, also looking thoroughly spooked now, something which the strange link to them was also further exacerbating.

She had mostly forgotten about that strange moment. It had been so early on in their agonizing ordeal in this place, and as time went on, had just become yet another thing that simply... didn't make sense.

Taking a deep breath, she tried, and mostly failed, to collect her racing, confused thoughts. To try and calm herself down, she waded a short distance away from where she had just puked and splashed some water on her face.

It was cool and crisp, and surprisingly refreshing, and as some touched her lips... sweet?

As much to distract from the confusion over the Taiji thing... she took a wary, experimental sip of a second handful... and found that it was indeed ground water, but more importantly though, it quenched her thirst.

She took another bigger gulp, then a third, and sighed happily, luxuriating in how lovely and refreshing it was.

"Hey... sis?" Sana came over to her, looking, and feeling concerned.

“Just drink some,” she replied, scooping up another handful of the water, which was suddenly the most wonderful and beautiful thing she had seen in weeks, and just pouring it over her face.

Frowning sceptically, her sister also cupped a handful of water and took a wary sip—

"..."

Sana stopped and stared at the water in her hands, shock emanating through their connection, then with a joyous whoop, threw herself backwards into the water with a splash.

“Well, it’s not entirely empirical,” she pointed out, as grinning, her sister resurfaced. “We won’t know for sure until we sort out what’s going on…”

Belatedly, she remembered that there was a very easy way to check this and reached for her mantra.

‘Spirit. Heart. Renewal. Body. Soul.’

She took a deep breath and gasped as a familiar warmth flowed out from her chest, into her body. The words floated nebulously in her mind, but there was a strange sense of resistance. In her mind’s eye, the seal slowly surfaced like a leviathan from some deep pool. She flinched and grasped for her face, but all it did was… sit there, looking symbol-like in some unquantifiable way in her head. Focusing on it, it was not really a visualisation, yet also not really part of her mantra. It felt like it was… considering her just as she was—

The symbol itself did something, twisted oddly in her mind, its edges falling away weirdly, making her unable to focus on it.

What emerged a timeless second later was something a bit like a distorted moon rune that represented 'transmutation' but even that wasn’t... really... right some part of her intuitively knew. It felt more like a visualisation it was providing for her, rather than its explicit reality. In fact, the overall feeling was rather similar to the way her mantra settled in her mind and suddenly she intuitively understood what it stood for.

{Boundless Transformations Sovereign Seal}

After a moment that truncated itself and twisted again with a strangely self-effacing intent to simply:

{Myriad Transformations Seal}

The symbol and the mantra swirled around each other again, like fish in a pond. Her sense of the world around her went fuzzy for a brief moment and—

The seal symbol abruptly aligned itself with the mantra and the two reshuffled themselves in her mind. Her mother’s mantra rearranged itself in her mind, becoming something else.

{Spirit. Blessed. Bestow. Body. Day.}

She was suddenly and rather inexplicably in brief possession of two mantras before they both flowed back together again. They could only combine into five words, and there was some weird overlap between several of the phrases as they reshuffled themselves. When everything settled again, she was left with a single mantra, but… from what she could intuit, she now had eight phrases rather than five from which to construct a five-word mantra: Spirit, Blessed, Bestow, Body, Day, Heart, Renewal and Soul.

That then became, by default it seemed.

‘Spirit. Blessed. Bestow. Body. Day.’

As far as she could see, the changes were ‘Heart’ was synonymous with ‘Blessed’, ‘Renewal’ with ‘Bestow’ and ‘Soul’ with ‘Day’.

Abruptly, the two merged a second time, making her sit down in the water as she was totally disorientated. When the moment passed, the ‘Myriad Transformations Seal’ was gone from her mind’s eye. In its place was the symbol, subtly different and somehow much more a part of her.

{Myriad. Transformations. Mortal. Physique}.

The words settled into her like they had always belonged there. A subtle symbol a bit like a moon rune that reflected the meaning of those words. Swirling shapes and transforming lines that flowed through one another in a spiral pattern that was akin to the original symbol but somehow... more. In truth, it most put her in mind of a flower with swirling petals that were ever changing in shape and colour around a point where the words reflected into her consciousness. The depth of it also struck her as very odd, it clearly had depth, but it also didn’t at the same time. As if what she was looking at was just a facet of a greater whole that her mind wasn’t yet ready or able to fully grasp. A reflection of the moon in water rather than the moon itself. What was clear though, was that it had a purity in its forms that somehow calmed her mind and made her more clear-headed as she considered it...

She was shaken out of her stupor by Sana pulling on her arm.

“Are you okay?!?” her sister asked, looking concerned.

“Yeah…” she replied, trying to work out why she suddenly… didn’t feel so good.

Instinctively she knelt over and vomited into the water for the second time in as many minutes. This time it wasn’t food that came up though, but stinking black blood.

Pain knotted her stomach, then her chest, then her arms and legs.

She stared at her hands then arms woozily, watching as reddish-black blood welled up and wept from every pore on her body. Sana, who had been standing beside her, was now cursing under her breath, sounding worried. Her skin itched intolerably and her vision blurred red, then purple, then monochrome and finally back to red in a dizzying shift that coincided with her sense of balance going woozy again as the pressure in her ears shifted.

After what felt like a small eternity, she managed to take a deep breath, fighting the panic that was trying to properly grasp at her. She desperately fed the emotions into her mantra, to try to remain clear-headed. It swept them away smoothly… very smoothly in fact, but she barely had time to focus on that, because as suddenly as it had arrived, the pain was gone. The weakness in her limbs was also gone, she realised, like a phantom in the night.

Standing, she realised that she was in the middle of an expanding puddle of steaming black scum that really… really stank.

-Bodily impurities?

“Mortal impurities?” Sana said dully from where she stood beside her, looking at the film with distaste.

She examined her condition once again. Her initial thought was that she had broken through to Mantra Seed Formation, but that was clearly not the case. Her body’s condition was… weird, frankly.

“What… exactly is..?” Sana asked, sounding concerned.

“I… I don’t rightly know,” she murmured weakly after a moment of fruitless introspection.

“Well… do we have to work it out right… here? I’m gonna puke in a…” her sister’s expression turned pale, and she abruptly knelt over and retched up water.

-Oh, she drank it a few moments after… so now she also has qi, she belatedly understood

“Oh… *ulp*… fates… what… in…!?!” her sister choked out as she also doubled over.

~ Jun Sana – Perilous Realm ~

When the horrible dizziness passed, Sana stood up and stared glumly at the gunk that was still on her. Arai was stood there looking… mildly concerned. She replayed the last few moments in her head.

-I survived.

-I drank the water.

-When Arai was vomiting up stuff I cycled my mantra to try to draw some qi into my body to help her…

-Then I got dizzy… and…

The symbol floated in her mind’s eye.

{Myriad. Transmutations. Seal}

That was what had appeared in her mind as soon as her mantra had shifted. It had done something with her mantra and become…

Become...

{Formless. Permutations. Mortal. Physique}

She set that aside for a moment: there were questions there that probably had no immediate answers.

She returned to considering her mantra, which was different. With everything settled again, she had lost that weird feeling of having two mantras, but instead, she somehow had eight mnemonics with which to construct it: Spirit, Blessed, Bestow, Body, Day, Heart, Renewal and Soul.

Its default set of phrases had already reformed in her mind at this point to now become.

{Spirit. Blessed. Bestow. Body. Day.}

“Huh,” she exclaimed, somewhat… surprised.

“You’re… okay?” Arai asked, helping her up.

“Um… mantra mutation?” she asked somewhat disbelievingly, trying to work out what had just occurred.

“Among other things, yes,” Arai replied, mirroring her shock, surprise and unease.

“Anyway, yeah…” she added, in reply to the actual question, "I am... Euwww..." she trailed off with a grimace as she realised her hair was... gross, to put it mildly.

Wading out of the expanding scum, she proceeded to dunk herself under the water and then spent the next few minutes scrubbing herself, vigorously. Particularly her hair. When she felt a bit cleaner and much colder, she stood up again and shook her head to get rid of the worst of the water. Arai was taking the convenient opportunity to clean herself off as well, so she considered her mantra a bit more.

Mantra mutation was not, in truth, a concept that was alien to them. It was instead, another 'secret' of sorts, relating to the way mantras worked. She had only known her mother to speak of it in passing, once. Since her death only Mrs Leng had talked about it with her… both of them, when she took it upon herself to give them some instruction in their changing bodies and what they could expect and… not expect to happen as they passed through puberty while already at Physical Refinement.

The upshot though, was that mantra mutation in women was most common when you first had intercourse, basically, or during childbirth.

For men, it was much harder, apparently.

Mutations could also be induced, as she recalled, with a few other external stimuli, of which puberty was one of them. Theirs hadn’t mutated back then, but it had… now...

“So… what... exactly happened to us?” she asked, eventually and in truth, rather rhetorically.

Her memory after everything went white, and the world was a mass of pain and… the symbol was… wasn’t sketchy, but it was diffuse. The question of the vision from the Taiji was also still weighing on her there as well, starting with 'How?'.

“Well, we, colossal morons that we are, got the activation point swapped around,” Arai replied drily.

“Uhhhh. Yes. I remember that,” she agreed with a shudder.

“So… what? We, err… transmuted ourselves?” she added, trying and failing to keep the dubious edge from her voice.

“It would very much appear that that is the case” Arai agreed with a grimace. “Although how we survived the process is…”

Right on cue, the symbol surfaced in her mind and symbolled quietly. The intent was akin to someone sympathetically patting her on the shoulder and going, ‘There, there, I understand, it was strange for me as well’. Oddly, it also seemed to hold that view about the 'vision' from the Taiji.

“But clearly we have survived,” her sister muttered, looking around at the huge crater.

The water in it was up to their thighs now, she noted.

“First thing is to get out of here before the water gets so deep that we are swimming,” Arai added with a half-smile.

It was hard to disagree with that sentiment.

“And… what do we do about the loaf of bread?” she asked after a further moment’s consideration.

“…”

Her sister just stared at her, then looked up at the sky, clearly trying to work out how serious she was being. In other circumstances she might have been a bit put out… but in truth, she wasn’t sure either.

…

Twenty minutes later they had dragged a reasonable portion of the transformed rock to the edge of the crater and clambered out. That had been easier than expected when it turned out that their physical conditions were… well, excellent. Not Physical Foundation excellent, but well above what they should have been in their current situation. As such, throwing the bread out of the crater and then climbing out after it was, in fact, easier than wading through the base of it.

The trip also gave them both time to consider the symbol and what in the fates it actually was. It was deeply rooted in her body. That was probably understating it, actually. It was inextricably a part of her on a level that was so subtly fundamental that it was nearly beyond her perception unless she focused on it directly. Her sense of her own body and its role in it was ephemeral as well. She clearly had qi in some capacity now, but the sensation put her more in mind of the very first days after she first started cultivating.

Arriving back at the rock shelter was strangely nostalgic. Rather miraculously, the crater had managed to miss both the circle of stones in the lake, which was now exposed once again, and also the shifting stones on the other hill nearby.

They both stood there, considering their remaining small pile of stuff, including a few bits of spare clothing, in silence for several minutes before Arai finally spoke up.

“So… what did your symbol change into?” her sister asked.

“Hmmm, ‘Formless Permutations Mortal Physique’,” she replied, considering it again.

“Interesting… given our mantras mutated in identical fashion, how come the symbol didn’t?”

“So yours isn’t?” she asked, somewhat surprised at that.

“No… it’s ‘Myriad Transformations Mortal Physique’,” Arai mused.

“Huh, the names seem very similar, but the nuance is a touch different,” she noted, comparing the two.

She checked her body again while considering the problem from various angles.

“Mmm, yeah,” Arai agreed with a sigh. “The names are similar, I guess it picked something a bit different because we are… ourselves?”

“Yeah… I’m just glad we didn’t change into a rock, or a living explosion or something,” she shuddered.

Those memories from during the whole ordeal were disturbingly clear.

“I claim no responsibility for worrying about becoming a rock!” Arai said quickly.

Looking back on it, really all you could do was treat it with a dash of humour. The alternative would make her want to take her spare under-robe and go hide under it in the corner, sobbing quietly.

“So…” Arai asked eventually, looking at the large lump of bread they had brought with them, which was now sitting on a convenient rock. “Do you think the bread is… edible?”

“Well, the water gave us sustenance and qi…” she mused, breaking off a piece.

Chewing it, it was lukewarm and soggy and a bit charred, as befitting a loaf of bread that had been dunked in a lake and survived a rather large explosion. It was also remarkably tasty, with a sweetness that she realised she had been missing in the months they had been here. Fasting pills tasted of mint-infused cardboard for the most part, and their food was so long spoiled it was just a traumatic memory to think about it.

“Tashty…” she said around another mouthful.

Sitting there, considering what they could do next, she ate a few more mouthfuls before setting it aside. The proof wouldn’t come there for a while. Instead, she turned her mind towards the matter of their foundations.

“So… are you also back at… erm, something like Containment Realm?” she asked Arai at last.

“Yeah… but it feels… different,” her sister replied, staring at the line of herb pots.

“Well, there is nothing for it but to try to actually cultivate, I suppose,” she mused.

Arai gave her a sideways look, but did nod in agreement.

With a deep inhalation, she circulated her mantra and watched dully as it behaved differently. It didn’t really cycle like it had before… instead it just did its own thing, rather more optimally than her directing it to do the very basic circulation. The symbol was also…

She examined it critically, in her mind’s eye, focusing on how the threads of ephemeral warmth in her body were gently twisting. It was also, or so it seemed, doing its own thing?

-No, that isn’t quite right… she thought, frowning.

Intuitively she grasped that it was a part of her, so the symbol was basically doing what her mantra was – passively cycling the qi in her body and gently re-adjusting its distribution throughout in the most optimal manner. Her mantra was shadowing it, or perhaps the symbol was shadowing the mantra?

A third, more logical explanation that they were now both parts of the same cultivation cycle rose in her head, making her sigh softly. The tendency to overcomplicate was what it was.

What was more important, was that this interaction was akin to what her mantra should be doing, if it had formed a ‘Mantra Seed’. Except, her body was certainly not at Mantra Seed, but something closer to early Qi Containment, near as she could tell.

Shaking her head, she took a step back from all of that and considered her mantra specifically and how it was actually interacting with her body.

-Worrying what realm I am ‘in’ is absolutely jumping the cart, she thought wryly.

Watching it for a cycle she realised, eventually, that while her mantra was only using five mnemonics actively, the odd feeling was because passively it was using all eight, just at a much gentler level.

Curious, she tried to grasp all eight and initiate a cycle and got… nothing. She might as well have tried to grab fog.

-Of course, that won’t work, she remonstrated to herself.

Next, she turned her mind towards the individual mnemonics, considering each in turn.

-‘Spirit’ behaves as it did before.

-‘Heart’ has opened up ‘Blessed’…

‘Heart’, she discovered after a moment’s investigation worked as it had before. A key advantage of that mnemonic was it could turn her blood vessels and arteries throughout her body into a shadow meridian system in their own right. ‘Blessed’ also gently enhanced the effects that Heart already provided – helping her qi circulate directly via her blood vessels with much less strain than before while also providing additional tempering to her body in the process.

-‘Renewal’ has opened up ‘Bestow’ somehow…

She watched as ‘Renewal’ helped her body’s recovery and nutritional absorption. At this stage in her cultivation, her ability to detect its inner working was really subtle. She had to seriously focus on it to get more than a sense of fuzzy warmth slowly pulsing through her. ‘Bestow’ though… Bestow took what Renewal did and did it better. If anything, its touch was even more subtle and light, but in that process it took tiny threads of qi and focused them with utmost precision into parts of her body that needed those most... without her so much as lifting a finger for the most part.

She stared at its perceived workings, her heart thumping loudly in her own ears. As a mnemonic, the effect it was providing was… insane. It wasn’t simply repairing and renewing and supporting, it was directly and subtly enhancing, thread by elemental thread. Fire qi to her heart, earth qi to her bones, water qi to her blood and organs, metal qi to her flesh and bones… and that was just what she could intuit at this point! There was absolutely a lot more it was touching with each little nudge that was escaping her immediate grasp.

-‘Body’ is also unchanged, but it is also driven by the change to Bestow and is almost twice as effective in everything it’s doing as a result.

-Finally, ‘Soul’ has opened up ‘Day’.

She considered ‘Soul’ pensively. It was by far the most esoteric of the words in their shared mantra, providing them with a very crude awareness of some aspect of their soul through the medium of the mind’s eye. She couldn’t use soul force or manipulate anything relating to it. However, it along with ‘Spirit’ were the main reasons why their mental resilience was so formidable.

The combination of Spirit and Soul was very unusual in a mantra, according to their mother. Usually, you had one or the other. Their combination led to her having something close to a quasi-soul-foundation without ever possessing one. That, combined with the way mantras worked, was why both of them could shrug off mental damage and effects that would have left others psyche break riddled wrecks. It was that combination of words that had allowed Old Ling to make that exception and enlist them as five-star rank Herb Hunters at age thirteen.

‘Day’, though, was just weird. Her instinct was that it should be ‘Heaven’ or have a similar meaning, but what it was doing in her cultivation cycle was… bewildering. It flitted between this and that, touching other effects of her mantra mnemonics, drawing qi in strange ways with the help of Bestow, infusing it thoroughly with the help of Body and Bestow and so on. She would have to watch it for quite a long time, she suspected, or improve her perception markedly.

At least now she understood what was going on though. Their bodies had been completely remade, remoulded somehow. Her vital qi in her bones was gone and traces of some lingering injuries on her body were also gone, she noted, including the scar from that one time she had half her arm taken off by a spirit herb in the outer valleys. There was no trace of past breaks in bones, or any of the other vestiges of accumulated trauma from years of training and surviving in the Yin Eclipse mountain range either.

She followed the whole cycle again and sighed. Their souls had more closely integrated with the energies of this place as well it seemed—

“What!?” she exclaimed out loud.

She looked blankly out over the changed landscape. There was no way she should or could have known that… well, she could hypothesise it… but to ‘know’ it that fundamentally was…

Narrowing her focus on the most obvious variable – the symbol in her mind’s eye – she observed it symbol very neutrally back at her as if saying ‘who me?' innocently. There was no ill intent with it either. The symbol symbolled in a way that suggested mild offence, a bit like a kitten making round eyes.

“Well, it’s clearly not any cultivation method we know,” Arai mused from nearby, where she was also sat pondering the same things in all likelihood.

“Yet it has vestiges of familiarity,” she pointed out. “The unknown variable in this is clearly the symbol.”

“Have you watched how energy flows around your body?” Arai asked, looking at her with a perplexed expression.

“I—” she realised she hadn’t actually paid that much attention to it, and been rather more focused on the minutiae of her mantra’s changes.

“I had not gotten around to it yet,” she replied a bit more archly than she had, in truth, intended.

Her sister rolled her eyes but said nothing. Ignoring the attitude, she turned her attention towards that and watched her qi for a few minutes, trying to process what she was observing.

“How is this even?” she asked at last, struggling to ask the question that was clearly before her.

“You have more meridians as well?” Arai remarked.

“It’s not even that,” she muttered. "They are… so ethereal and… ghostly.”

“Yes, but look at them really closely,” her sister said with a weird tone in her voice.

She looked again, and finally said… “This is—?”

“That should be Myriad Elements Qi,” Arai said, not sounding particularly sure herself. “However, it’s kind of odd… isn’t it?”

The qi was indeed odd, she had to agree.

Letting the mantra and symbol do their own thing, she focused on her breathing and mental condition, sinking into a proper state of meditation. This was the only way she could perceive this until she recovered some aspect of her innate perception of the qi running through her body, something that would only return with time, sadly. There were no shortcuts there.

The swirling mix of qi that her body was now drawing into itself flowed out of her lungs, carried through her bloodstream initially. It passed into her blood, her muscles and then her bones, where it was starting to build up again as before. With each cycle, her ghostly meridians were shifting ever so slightly, almost as if… they were attuning themselves to her body in some way.

Watching that process ever more closely, she found there were other aspects that she could not easily follow. She focused on one of those unrecognisable forms of natural energy. Almost immediately, the symbol shifted subtly. There was no name for the energy she could grasp, but it was being drawn around by the symbol rather than her mantra. Her mantra was shadowing the symbol, implausibly. It almost felt like it was observing what the symbol was doing.

-Is… it teaching my mantra? She thought, not sure if she should be surprised, disturbed or pleased.

As she continued to observe, the Spirit and Bestow aspects finally gave her a faint impression that the element was related to Yang.

Other aspects she focused on also shifted in that way, the types of energy around them slowly untangling themselves and becoming, if not less ephemeral… less… well, obtuse at least.

Each one associated with a different aspect of her body somehow through the medium of the symbol. In the process, the very sketchy map of her meridians started to become more cohesive and closer to what she remembered. The main change was the number of connections to her core organs and other important parts of her cultivation cycle. Throughout all of it, the Myriad Elements Qi was being fused subtly. Now she had acquired the grasp of Yang, she could also faintly sense Yin courtesy of the symbol. The qi now cycling through her body wasn’t the normal ‘Five Elements Qi’ but ‘Myriad Elements Yin Yang Qi’, something she had only seen in a few rare spirit herbs.

Courtesy of this process, she could also now recognise the strange, empty pressure that had been driving qi from their bodies. She struggled to think of it in any kind of defined way, but it tried to absorb all the other forms of qi that came into contact with it. The qi it absorbed was dispersed and then fled from her body as remnant parts. This process, and that strange qi, was balanced within her by an amorphous qi that seemed to coalesce into other forms of qi just as the strange pressuring qi broke them apart.

As she observed the passage of these two energies as best she could, she finally grasped that it was this change that had been forcing the existing qi out of her body all the while as well as making her meridian channels incapable of holding any new qi. It was also why there had been a residual remnant of the world within their bones even though they had been unable to refine qi. Some of the forms created were so dense that they simply couldn’t leave her body.

-Really, she sighed in her own mind, to think our speculation was this…close.

As she continued to watch, the conclusion was undeniable. Her meridians – her old meridians – had been tempered with qi from their world, which was simply incapable of integrating fully with the energy here at a truly fundamental level it seemed. The qi in their world was deemed to be ‘incomplete’ by these most fundamental components at the heart of the qi cycle of this place, and had been broken down and discarded as a matter of course. The reformed qi was ‘complete’ but before it, their meridians were no better than a damp paper bag trying to hold water.

-My deduction that this was some aspect of a higher world… was actually right? If we hadn’t been physical cultivators… with vital qi anchoring our foundation… doesn’t this mean we would have likely died of a qi deviation long before now?

That thought was… she could only give thanks in her heart for their remarkably prescient decision to use no external qi at all. They had been walking around on a frozen lake without any knowledge of how thin the ice really was…

Quelling the unease in her mind, she watched the last parts of the cycle as those most fundamental forms of qi settled into her bones in minuscule quantities in a way she recognised.

She opened her eyes and looked across the valley, to find that night had fallen.

She had no concept of time passing, she realised with a jolt and looked across at Arai who was seated nearby. Her sister was also still meditating, so rather than disturb her she watched the process from an outside perspective, then experimentally tried to push a little bit of the qi that had settled into her body into her restored ocular meridians—

The sensation of a thousand needles stabbed through her face and a dull chill rippled behind her eyes, making her scream in agony. The world spun and she saw double even as she crumpled on the ground, vomiting again.

-Too. Much. Qi. Monkeyshit!

She opened her eyes, and found the world was a mess of blotchy colours and the pain was like someone grinding sand on the backs of her eyes. She had overstrained her vision. Badly.

It took a second to realise what was wrong. Well, not wrong. If this process was akin to learning to walk, she had just tried to run flat out.

She thought she had been careful, but she had still fundamentally underestimated the purity of the qi strands inside her body. They were too diffuse for her to easily use so she had grasped a lot and then re-directed them into her ocular meridians. Some cautious investigation suggested her qi was approximately a magnitude purer than it had been before. That was something she would go gibber about in a corner later.

Once the disorientation had mostly passed, she took a deep breath and decided to try again.

This time she focused and eventually managed to isolate a tiny bit of the qi before attempting to actually push it into her ocular meridian. The process helped remove the lingering traces of gut-wrenching nausea as well, she found.

Much more carefully she pushed that tiny thread of the qi towards her eyes and felt her vision shift.

Abruptly, she was looking at a world that was… Well, it wasn’t vibrant, but it was colourfully smudged somehow, in a weirdly vibrant way.

She watched, letting her vision settle and become more like the qi-enhanced vision she recognised. Except, now the colours were flattened and muted rather than shifted to the dusky monochrome. She looked up at the sky and saw… swirling smudge mostly, which was both expected and unexpected until she realised that what she was probably associating with the ‘sky’ was just a function of the anomaly’s overall structure. Her brain was still processing those images, but at this distance, the immense tides of amorphous energy within the world around them were clearly drowning out the detail like a faint haze.

Curious, she focused on the moon and was rewarded with a slightly more structured fuzzy blob and a splitting headache for her troubles.

So the scope of this place was vast, but it wasn’t unlimited, that was the take away that she had in the end.

When she turned to consider her sister, however, Arai looked remarkably mundane.

Contrary to her brief, irrational hope, what she had done did not allow her to see any of the inner workings of her sister’s qi circulation. That kind of ridiculous art and application only existed in mythological stories of progenitors’ inheritances fallen from the stars after all, or to realms far above their own. She mentally scratched that off the list of childhood dreams of cultivation power.

-That has been seeing a lot of removal action in the last few months, she thought as she mourned sadly for the broken dreams of her childhood.

“…”

-Then again…

She focused a bit harder on her sister and realised that there was, in fact something.

If she concentrated really hard, she found she could just make out the faintest of ripples around Arai. Distortion where the qi in this place was being drawn around her and inhaled with each breath. After a few more moments, she managed to pick out the merest hint of the qi transfer gradient. Qi that left Arai was dissociated for a few seconds – like it was not quite in balance with itself – before it was subsumed into the local environment.

She watched for a few seconds, which felt like a lot longer, then had to stop because the degree of focus was making her eyes itch.

After a further attempt, which went about as successfully, she finally switched her focus back to her own bodily refinement again, watching once more how the qi changed and combined as it slowly settled into her body.

It took a few cycles but finally, she did begin to feel confident that she somewhat understood the logic of what she was seeing. Each cycle was taking all the disparate aspects of qi from their surroundings and slowly combining them in very specific ratios. Breaking down from complex to simple, to fundamental to myriad and then back again with each breath. The symbol's involvement in this process was so fluid and intuitive that it was functionally impossible for her to see at the most fundamental levels what was going on. She could only follow the breakdown of the qi into types she already knew at the moment. Others would take quite a long time to identify and come to understand.

And the process was… slow.

Very slow, compared to how her cultivation cycles had been before.

It appeared to be governed by the rarest aspects and their availability. Intuitively the symbol suggested to her somehow that everything had to be in a particular ‘kind’ of balance that was constrained by those fundamental qi types she couldn’t yet properly perceive. Five Elements Qi was the most abundant, then yin and yang qi. Her Five Elements Qi split into its Yin and Yang aligned variants then recombined according to how those elements fed each other to form Myriad Elements Yin and Yang Qi.

What wasn’t taken up there, reformed to become the compound qis that many beginner spiritual cultivation laws used. They all had their own Yin or Yang aspects built into them, requiring a much more hands-off approach to their manipulation as she understood it.

Stuff like wind qi, rain qi, rock qi and so on. Those would return to the Five Elements cycle. The surprising bit of ‘new’ knowledge to her understanding here, again courtesy of the symbol, was that this combination was imperfect. Not everything would return to the Five Elements. Some of it would become unstable variants of 'Yin' and 'Yang' elemental qi which then shed something to become stable. That was what...

She watched for a few more cycles before finally figuring it out by process of elimination.

They were combined with various elements already attuned to Yin and Yang Qi, shattering that apart and turning it into a mass of different qis once more. In the process, however, something very pure and positively fundamental formed in very small quantities. Myriad Elements Yin and Yang Qi Those two qi types then recombined with the other weird qi types that were drifting through the world but felt closer to a form of natural intent than a manifest type of qi. At that point, her grasp of the fundamentals of this place beyond her own body vanished into fog.

Within her own body, it was also at the very edge of her ability to perceive.

The process ended in a blur of interactions and recombination back through the element cycles. Finally, she felt the minuscule strands of qi that had been purified through the two forces she had come to think of as 'Primal Pressure' and 'Amorphous Absorption' integrate with her body under the instigation of the mantra and the symbol. The unstable elements – not impure qi, but imbalanced qi, perhaps from the compound qis that were broken down earlier in the cycle –– exited her body into her surroundings where they just diffused away.

As she watched it cycle again and again, she had to admit the system of conversion was so elegant it was breathtaking.

When she opened her eyes, the sky outside the rock shelter was blue again...

“Hours?” she murmured.

“Nope,” Arai’s voice cut into her reverie. “You were meditating for about two days since I woke up.”

“That’s…” she found herself looking around, trying to grasp the reference frame...

-For that much time to have passed… it felt like hours at best?

“Not necessarily so weird.” Arai stood up and stretched... “Did you watch how the energy flows when you cultivate now?”

“Oh… yeeeeah,” she drawled, taking a bite of some of the bread.

It was a bit stale but it was still delicious.

“That was some combination of freaky, awe-inspiring and a bit scary… and while I get your point, I think, I’ll still maintain it’s a bit weird...” she replied.

“…”

Her sister stared at her for a long moment then sighed, shaking her head.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Arai said, just sighing again for some reason, even the strange, ‘not quite in your head’, link they still had not telling her why.

“Have there been any more shifts?” she asked, looked over at the mountains and changing the topic.

The storm clouds had departed and the fog still swirled, obfuscating her view up the forested slopes. The whole landscape was still in full flower, aside from the area they had devastated. The crater was now two thirds full.

“Not really, there was a weird thing earlier with the fog so I took a look around, but nothing had obviously changed outside. The cloud has been low over the mountains the whole time, anyway, so you can’t see much there either,” Arai explained, shaking her head… at which point she finally realised what was throwing her off, and why her sister had just sighed earlier.

“You cut your hair?” she said, staring at Arai.

“Yeah… it was… yeah,” her sister said, shaking her now shoulder-length hair that was tied back in a loose tail.

She considered her own hair, which was really rather grim, she had to admit. Not that appearances counted for much out here. Cutting it might not be a bad idea, although it was a culturally dubious thing to do. Women were not meant to cut their hair before they got married, for… well, the reasons had never seemed convincing to her and their father had never cared. Taking her hair, she bunched it up experimentally and then used a sliver of qi to cut off the worst of the damage. The matted locks fell down behind her.

“Soo… what now?” she asked, standing up.

They both looked around, out over the spring landscape. Having overcome the hurdle of obvious inexorable death it was… weird…

Not that they were suddenly lacking in any direction… it was just that she considered… the overriding focus of their current predicament was now suddenly diffuse.

“Start trying to find a way out? I guess…?” Arai ventured.

“After all this, I could use a walk.” She agreed, “Let’s see how much more ‘attuned’ to this place we have become.