Memories of the Fall

Only an idiot of the calibre of Tyrus Belthorne could consider it a good idea to dig a mine on top of the Undren Mare without bothering to wonder what might happen if he managed to breach it. If there is mercy here, for the people of his lands now having to pay to put sewers in a mine they have never seen a penny of profit from, it is that his competence as fish bait has at least saved us all from hearing his mewling justifications and self aggrandising excuses.

A comment on the demise of Tyrus, Belthorne, Ducal Prince of Belthorne.

~Apocryphally attributed to Lucius, Grand Duke of Everkind.

~ Arai & Sana, Mysterious Tunnels ~

“Well shit,” Sana swore, struggling to her feet and trying to get her bearings.

“Quite,” she grimaced, struggling up for herself.

The water was barely that, now they had disturbed it so violently by dropping a metre or more into it. Thick, silty sludge that tasted of mould and biological decay. It was hard to get a grasp on the exact scale of the space they were in. It appeared to be a tunnel, either made of stone blocks or carved into the rock to look like it. Her qi vision worked thankfully, showing her dripping water, mould, algae and a lot of fungi.

She reached over and poked Sana to get her to turn, so she could communicate through signing. “At least it seemed unable to kill us?”

“Directly anyway,” her sister signed back.

Looking around with an ugly expression that was only accented by her muddy face, she touched one of the walls carefully.

“It seemed quite sure that this place would though… and what did it mean by others.”

“I find it hard to believe anyone else has made it into a place like this in numbers large enough to be remarkable,” she replied, looking closely at the mushrooms on the wall nearby.

“I’d actually forgotten about that... But won’t months have passed since that was announced…?” Sana cautiously waded over to a wall and pulled herself up into a convenient alcove. “For all we know, it’s been and gone.”

“It’s also possible it was referring to the original people from the school… there was a lot of battle damage and no corpses.”

“What… like the formation spirits rebelled or something?” Sana responded with a bit of added body language to convey how dubious that seemed. “That’s rare even back home. Nobody gives them that much autonomy when they put bound spirits to administer formation centres.”

“What bothers me more is what it said at the end…”

“Mmm… yeah about the time passing, that… did I imagine that it said 220 million years?” Her sister signed, looking at her weirdly.

“Nope, I am sorry to say you did not. Although if there is a bright side there, it makes it highly unlikely we meet any aggressive people down here.”

“Or friendly people,” her sister pointed out. “Have you noticed the qi down here?”

She looked around and stimulated… the… symbol…

-Symbol?

The symbol in her mind’s eye, which was already gently shifting and drawing ambient qi into her body, automatically did a strange thing that was close to an embarrassed apology.

Sana, sat on the ledge, stood up, on the surface of the water and hopped on the spot sending a few small ripples outward. “Well, it seems like while the qi is fuzzy and a bit weird, we can manipulate it roughly as we would outside.”

She nodded, still staring at the symbol in her mind’s eye dubiously. Now that they were down here, she was aware in a very strange post hoc way that its presence had been remarkably slight all the time they were in the school.

“Well, our realms are so low now that even if it does exist would we even-” her sisters signing paused as she waved a hand at her.

“Did the symbol deliberately hide up there to the point where it actually messed with our perception to avoid notice?” she sent back.

It was more of a rhetorical statement, but she was sure now that the symbol in her mind’s eye properly flickered faintly in… apology? She felt cold suddenly. The symbol sent out a warmth a bit like a pet trying to convince its owner that it hadn’t done anything bad but quite to the contrary its actions had been very timely and vital.

It was a weird feeling to hold some kind of empathic discourse with it. She wasn’t sure if it was part of her own soul or something else that had fused with it. there was a sense of strange familiarity with it that implied that, but also a sense of depth that she couldn’t quite reconcile, although that could just have been the weird way it appeared to not quite all be there at times.

The symbol paused, as if trying to work out how to convey something, then suggested in a strange way that being ‘noticed’ in a certain capacity up there would have been very bad, on many levels. It apologised again, saying that it had shifted her perception of prior events a touch so she wouldn’t act oddly. Here was different. Here, clearly, there were rules that worked in their favour. Protected them in a strange way she couldn’t quite grasp. The longer the communication went on, the weirder she felt as if there was some pressure within and without her that wasn’t quite in balance, almost akin to… soul strain?

Soul strain should have been impossible in that way for her, though. She had no awareness of her soul? Did she?

The pressure was gone, and the symbol sent back a slightly more muted feeling of apology for a third time and then went back to doing what she could only consider as normal symbol like things as if it were a bit embarrassed and ashamed.

“My symbol… just spoke to me…” she signed because Sana was looking at her very oddly now.

“What?” her sister signed back, however, a moment later her face went a touch odd as if something was…

She watched for a few strange seconds as her sister presumably had a very similar experience to the one she had just had, her confusion flickering to fear than anger then confusion then somewhere between displeasure and relief before finally settling back to mildly concerned.

“Well, that’s odd,” she signed back. “Really odd, and a bit worrying on one level.”

“Yeah… but it didn’t feel like it was trying to do anything bad, and something tells me that if that… Spirit One had known about these, things might have gone very badly.” she signed back, noticing something else kind of strange.

“Do… you get the impression that our signing is a lot more intuitive?”

“Now that you mention it,” her sister said.

“Try… signing something but shorthand, as fast as you can.”

“Sure. The brown cat king dances on the roof and sings terrible songs for its feline friends that drive Old Man Mang make talismans to curse all cats.”

This time her sister's hands were a rippling blur for no more than a second. Before she could probably have followed that but it would have taken her a few seconds for her mind to sort out the images of the signs, now however it landed almost immediately.

“Well that is handy,” she said, condensing the whole thing into nearly one symbol.

“Yes,” her sister replied.

“Are we doing this intuitively? With intention?” she sent back.

“A lingering effect of the Vital Merger?”

“If it is, I’ll take it,” she said with an eye roll.

“We are due a break,” her sister noted, adding extra sarcasm.

“The other things that are kind of bugging me, what the bell spirit said,” she signed, looking either direction down the tunnel which was…

-There was something off, her instincts whispered to her.

“Yes… odd really, that old bell said that this was a ‘reward’ did he mean the library and not realise… or?”

She pushed her qi into her feet and stood on the water surface as well, watching the ripples flow away, watching it with her qi perception and her enhanced vision.

“Behind you. On the wall. Hiding from perception.” Sana signed to her. “Dodge left on three. No idea how strong.”

Even for their newfound ability to communicate quickly via signing that was fast, and simplified to make sure there was no mistaking anything.

She counted to three, then threw herself left.

Something punched through the space where her head had been seconds before. She got a brief sense of a cat-sized eight-legged thing that hit the stonework on the other side of the corridor.

-A spider. An armoured spider. Because of course, this place would have more than mushrooms and fetid mud.

Its appearance was almost tailored to this place, with a broad flat, plate-like abdomen, spikey edges to break up its outline and the same colours and textures as the mouldy wall it was sat on. Even its eyes were hidden cunningly by the carapace to avoid notice. If it was motionless, looking at it flat on it was almost invisible to her eyes… and was invisible to her qi perception.

Abruptly it reared, and she threw herself down as it spat something at her.

Not stopping to see what that had done to the far wall, she, pushed qi into the water and threw herself forward as fast as she could and focusing qi in her palm with her mantra, smashed it against the wall, trying to pin it flat.

She got to watch it skip with fluid slow motion out of her grasp, staying just ahead of her movement, moving at exactly the same time she did. Her palm hit the wall with a crack and she let the recoil throw her away.

The spider twisted weirdly, and its outline was briefly lost to her in the gloom.

-A curse on whoever decided to engrave flower patterns on the walls of a fate thrashed sewer.

She spun aside on instinct and something shot past her in the air and hit the wall behind with a faint splat.

-No hissing, so just poison?

Opposite her, Sana moved like a snake and flicked up a piece of masonry. It skipped again, and she kicked a fallen piece after it as well. The second piece connected and knocked it sideways. The spider twisted and leapt for her sister, legs grasping.

Her sister tried to catch the side of its abdomen with a kick as it went past.

Even then it managed to twist slightly in the air to dodge the brunt of the attack. It hit the wall hard and made a ‘crack’ sound, flailing for a second before righting itself and scuttling sideways, hissing angrily. She caught the faint suggestion of deformity in his shell, slight damage that was already reforming right before her eyes.

-Recovery as well as being basically invisible to her qi perception, well it was nice to have that for the five minutes it pretended to be useful, she thought sourly.

She focused on it just with her qi enhanced vision and nearly swore out loud as it twisted oddly and vanished from view like it was sliding into shadows. Backing away, she let her vision expand, focusing on the periphery and caught it again. Not quite invisible then. Wincing she let her qi vision work in her left eye only and her normal vision partially returned. Now she could just make it out, stalking them purposefully. It was using ambient qi to disguise itself, nearly flawlessly if it was stationary, or so it seemed. An ambush predator.

The real question was… was it solitary or…

The spider kept slowly circling across the-

She threw herself away as something scythed out along the water line from the opposite side of the wall. The one that had…

The original spider, still with its damaged shell, waved at her from the alcove, taunting her…

-Cunning things, she cursed in her mind even as Sana dodged the new arrival just as she had.

Two more scuttled out of the shadows on the ceiling as well, barely catching them in profile against the ornate arches with her Qi enhanced vision as they moved past.

“Over six,” Sana signed.

"…"

That didn’t need a sign back, really.

Two were making their drifting out of her vision subtly while the others tried to make use of the width of the tunnel to flank them. Clearly they were setting up for all of them to attack at once when they least expected it?

“How kill?”

“Stomp hard?” Sana signed back with one hand while her other made motions, tracking two of the spiders slinking by her on the far wall.

-Yeah, that was the best strategy available to them at the moment.

-Or was it?

She weighed up the risks and then swiftly bit her lip, drawing blood with her finger. It was a matter of a moment to draw the most basic circle and an inverted corrosion symbol onto it. Holding her breath she pushed qi into it and it pulsed dully but didn’t melt her arm off, which was good.

“Watch back,” she signed with her other hand.

Moving forwards as if she intended to charge down the ‘injured’ spider in the alcove and hadn’t seen the two stalking the ceiling, she watched it move backwards and wave its legs mockingly. Two steps took her out of Sana’s easy reach and the two on the ceiling dropped instantly aiming to split them and hit her in the back and back of the head.

At the very last moment, she rolled sideways and stopped herself, shoulder to the water and feet against the wall, sweeping out her hand as she hit the water. steeling herself she triggered the corrosion symbol on the water itself, pushing intention through it and hoping that it worked as-

There was a gratifying sensation of immediate agony and the water sizzled like oil in a hot pan. Her robe and now her boots as she skipped up were all smoking. Grimacing she jumped backwards and then swore in her own head, throwing herself flat even as Sana kicked another of the ones that had just attacked her into a wall. Corrosive water covered her, and she fought pain with her mantra as it caught her shoulder. She rolled over it and felt something crunch awkwardly beneath her as she flipped onto the column and rapidly drew one of the inverted rock melting symbols with a few second delays.

Behind her, two spiders exploded out of the water, thrashing and flailing, their carapace smoking. The one she had rolled over twisted and shot upwards straight to the ceiling where it hissed at her and then spat whatever it was at her.

Unfortunately for it, she had already leapt for the more injured of the two in the water with as much qi as she dared focused into her hands and feet. Two more spat from the shadows and the others all shot after Sana who had just kicked a second one away and rolled backwards cursing the corrosive water.

She smashed knee first into the nearest disorientated spider. Its shell cracked beneath her knee and she was met with intense pain to the point where she wondered briefly if she had actually broken her own knee.

-Ah, no, it just had acidic ichor for blood. Because of course, it did.

The symbol shifted and her mantra drew in the qi poison from the blood, purifying it in a single fluid motion. A second later she was hammered into the wall by the explosion of the rock. The symbol on it finally unstable enough to explode.

She forced herself to keep rolling and stopped herself against a carved pillar in the wall.

The corrosion had mostly dispersed but it still stung like crazy. Sana was hitting another spider repeatedly off an edge of the alcove, holding it by four of its legs and abdomen while the front two tried to desperately stab at her. She looked around for the others. Two were crawling out of the water angling for Sana, probably sent there by the explosion. The others she couldn’t see, worryingly.

Jumping for the more sluggish of the two, she dropped on it as hard as she could, smothering its escape with reach.

Its compatriot dodged and stabbed at her neck with a limb.

Twisting her head, she winced as it scraped across her flesh, not quite deep enough to catch the artery. Her mantra knit it back together almost as soon as the damage was done, though.

She grabbed the stunned one and threw it at the still partially molten bit of masonry. It hit it with a splat, and flailed soundlessly, trying to scramble away even as glowing molten rock ate into its carapace. Its struggles dislodged quite a bit into the water, turning the tunnel faintly misty.

The twisting ripples in the mist warned her of one of the unaccounted ones skipping across the water so smoothly it didn’t even leave ripples.

-Of course, they could walk on water.

In a moment of singular epiphany, she decided that while she had been ambivalent on the question of spiders prior to this… she really hated spiders.

Finally, she caught the other two, lurking in the middle distance on the ceiling, barely visible as they moved stealthily to try to get the drop on Sana.

Sana finished executing her spider and signed - “Killed two, two died in boom, you kill one...”

To evidence that point, the one she had thrown at the molten bit of masonry had curled up in death now.

She tallied up in her head and exhaled in anger. The other one that had scuttled clear of the water reared up its legs and waved in a funny way. The two on the ceiling also did the same… beyond it she caught something shifting faintly in her peripheral vision as one… two… three… four… five… ever so slowly eased around a pillar carved into the wall, briefly visible to her qi vision by silhouette

That meant at least eight more. Individually they felt like rank one qi beasts, which was concerning in its own right because both of them were back in qi condensation and their bodies certainly lacked the durability of their previous selves, at least for now.

-And we are not made of qi.

She signed and pointed behind Sana.

Sana sighed and started to draw something on the wall itself quickly with her free hand as the spider finished twitching in her other hand, its abdomen totally crushed, ichor smoking around her sister's hand.

Turning to the other one that was sort of cornered, she surged towards it. It easily skipped backwards and waved its forelimbs tauntingly before stabbing the water twice. Behind her, she caught one of the ones back on the ceiling wave a leg.

“How intelligent are these fate thrashed things…” Sana signed in a blur.

“It’s a hoard type Spider critter. It’s intelligent enough that they are communicating. What symbol?”

“The zappy one. I’m regretting not spending time looking at them like you did now, but I’m going to try to boost it with one of the frameworks.” Sana said tersely.

-Lightning... in a tunnel full of rock and water…

-Well if we die it will be with a bang ha ha, she thought to herself.

Two more grouped up in the middle distance. That was nine now?

-On that, though, why not go all-in?

Rapidly, she drew another corrosion symbol on her hand.

-wait…

She paused for a fraction, suddenly wondering why she was drawing it on a medium when she was the medium. It was one of those stupid realisations you tended to get when under stress and you realised you were doing something the really hard way.

Heart pounding she focused on the shape of the symbol and the framework in her mind’s eye and then let her qi flow into the shape, forming the array symbol and its framework on the water directly below her hand. Qi rolled out of her like a tide. She was barely able to provide the basic frame and symbol before her qi reserves were almost expended. Sending an extra pulse of intent into it for good measure she watched it sink beneath the water, towards the mud and vanish from sight. it was still there though, held on a knife-edge, detectable through a faint link with her consciousness.

“Fall back behind me sis.” she signed urgently.

Sana, who had just finished drawing up the symbol, looked at her.

“Ranged.” She signed back and her sister swiped three more strokes onto the activation trigger

Warily they retreated in the direction opposite to the now… 15 spiders that were stalking along the tunnel towards them on the walls ceiling and probably on the water as well, not that she could see those.

Abruptly the darkness before them twisted and dozens of spiders skittered out of the gloom, following them. With her qi perception, she could feel them move briefly in profile into her radius and then ‘vanish’ again. Where they appeared thereafter, it was only when they broke the flat profile of a wall.

“Can’t hide on a curved surface or strange shape?” Sana signed, having clearly noticed the same thing.

Useful to know, but it didn’t help now as it just told her how many were coming across the roof. A lot. Holding her breath as they kept retreating, she marked the spot where Sana had scrawled her own ‘Zappy’ Array. They passed right over it and she gave a mental sigh of relief, so clearly they were not bothered about that... not that it helped now. She watched them pass right by the place where their wards were.

-They can’t detect our qi when it’s put into formations, Arai wondered? Some weird blind spot in their senses or…

Two of them had paused by it and were…

-May-you-rot-in-the-nameless-hell.

She activated the array and felt all the qi tied to it evaporate out of her body.

There was a sensation akin to roiling disturbance in the air. The tunnel turned into white mist. A split second later there was a series of arcing cracks. She barely made it to an alcove behind Sana. It was convenient that there was a pair of them every 15 metres or so, they made themselves as small as possible, not that it helped a lot. A sickening sense of absence and a horrifying absence of noise flooded the world as the explosion rolled down the corridor around them.

Even with the symbols and what remained of her qi reinforcing her body, she felt her skin dissolving. She buried her face in her arms and shut her eyes, holding her breath, trying to protect her eyes and not breathe anything in as her whole body tingled in agony.

-It’s still nowhere close to the transmutation.

In the moment she registered that the symbol had done something strange again. Her mantra aiding it in seizing elemental qi that was making an excellent stab at corroding her body from the outside in and feeding it back into at a breath-taking rate to support her healing. Within a few moments, her body’s qi capacity had recovered enough that she could afford to push out her perception just a fraction where it met her sister's doing the same.

“What the fates did you do?” Sana signed.

“I may have overdone the corrosion symbol just a touch.”

“No shit you did. This is on the level where it’s actually melting our clothes!”

Belatedly she realised her sister was right. Their clothes were smoking faintly in the mist of corrosive qi flowing around them. Her skin was also tingling in a really unpleasant way.

“Do you think it killed them?” Sana added after a moment.

“I hope so,” she signed back.

Observing the symbol for a moment, it seemed happy just doing its thing in conjunction with her mantra. She hadn’t given much thought to the ‘name’ that the symbol presented in her mind for one reason and then another. However, now that she could feel her body starting to adapt to the corrosion in subtle ways as she refined the qi that was still trying to invade her body she was certainly drawn towards the conclusion that this was what the ‘transformation’ aspect of the name might represent.

Pushing that to one side, there would be other times to worry about cultivation esoterica. She slipped off the alcove and winced as her feet met bubbling corrosive mud. Her qi perception sphere was almost useless, more than a few centimetres from her body as well. The corrosive mist and flickers of lightning still arcing obfuscated everything. Steeling herself, she risked opening her eyes, pushing qi to her skin as best she could to protect herself a bit. The ease of the action, even with the assistance of the mantra, was another pleasant surprise. It was still so thin a layer as to be next to useless as actual armour, but against ambient corrosion, it was actually quite effective combined with the symbols continuous refinement.

In the haze, she could make out dozens of spider corpses, curled up or partially dissolved. The walls around the epicentre of their inadvertent trap were somewhat disconcertingly undamaged beyond some superficial scorching and the incineration of the algae growing on them. Clearly the stone this place was carved from or built out of was durable. Cautiously she poked a spider corpse next to her, just in case it was playing dead. When it didn’t move, she signed in relief and started to look around more closely. A few were still twitching, however, even as she watched their spasming legs started to curl. There was a plop in the distance, presumably one dropping off the ceiling which reminded her to look up. There were indeed a few still on the ceiling, locked in death grips to the arches or twitching their last in apertures high up in the wall.

She stood there in silence, watching until the last of the ones near her fell still, her skin blistering faintly in the mist.

“That’s quite the body count,” Sana said, coming to stand beside her.

“Indeed,” she agreed, pleased that the qi armour also extended in that fashion.

“Must be at least sixty?” her sister said, looking back and forth around the tunnel and then flinching as another spider dropped off the ceiling with a plop. “If we hadn’t thought fast…”

Sana shivered, and she gave her sister an impromptu hug, glad that they had both made it through this.

“Yeah, but we did….” she said with a weak grin.

Sana broke away and crouched down by one, wincing as she pried open its legs and pushing qi into her fingers pried open smoking corroded abdomen. “Do you think they have monster cores?

Looking around, she picked up another and pried the legs off considering it. “Most of them must have been at least one-star rank monsters.”

It took a few seconds of searching, but finally she located a small crystal core that was at the rear of the creature’s surprisingly tough thorax .

“We really need a knife or something,” Sana said, finally working one free from her own chosen target.

“I had some in my talisman, but they have long since succumbed to…” she trailed off and slapped her head with her hand.

“The Arborundum leaf?”

“…”

She sighed and swung her rather cramped pack off her side and passed the leaf to Sana. In all the mess, she had totally forgotten about it since they used it a few times in the academy. On balance though, perhaps that was a good thing. The spirit hadn’t taken their stuff, but that was probably because it had judged them to have nothing worth relieving them of before sending them down here.

The use of the leaf basically made the whole process trivial. It easily sliced open the carapaces, allowing them to pluck out the cores quickly. Soon they had over thirty of the marble-sized, crystalline things stacked in the alcove. A few of the smallest ones appeared to have no orb. They also lacked the abdomen plate, so she could only conclude they were juveniles in some capacity. Those closest to the epicentre were also just ruined fragments of shell carapace or vaguely connected legs.

Picking one up, she considered them while Sana finished off the last of the spiders in the immediate vicinity. They were really pretty murky and unpleasant looking, even for low-grade qi beast cores. Speculatively, she pushed some of her own qi into one. There was pulsing uncleanliness to it that was expected. Most beast cores at this rank were inherently unstable. It usually wasn’t until three-star quality, the equivalent of Golden Core, that Qi Beast Cores became useful in that way. Spiritual Cultivators using lower grade cores could have deviations from the unstable qi, brought on by unforeseen incompatibilities or inauspicious shifts within them. Most physical cultivators eschewed them as well because of the slimy feeling that came with absorbing even a few. It took days to go away as well, even if there was no lasting damage. Still, in the name of empirical endeavour, she pushed her qi into it.

It was a pleasant surprise, therefore, when, without her even having to do much more than set it in that general direction, the fearful purity of the qi refined by the symbol effortlessly overpowered the mixed qi within it. The little crystal crumbled into dust and the sliver of elemental qi left was drawn into her body without the slightest trace of the expected slimy feeling.

“Well, that’s a pleasant surprise,” she remarked to Sana.

“Eh?” her sister turned to see what she was talking about.

“We can refine the crystals without feeling like we just took a bath in liquid monkeyshit, although the quantity we get from it is pretty minuscule.”

Her sister picked up the core she had just extricated, and she watched as it turned to dust in her hand a heartbeat later. “That’s convenient, although we would need thousands of this grade to breakthrough.”

“Huh.” Sana sat back and proffered her a shimmering crystalline stone.

“There are other types?” she said, raising an eyebrow and taking the stone.

It was basically pure Elemental Wood Qi and a faint hint of Yin Water.

“Ah, no... Try using ‘Blessing’ and ‘Bestow’ specifically on a core,” her sister urged.

“Purification works on cores of this grade?” she had to admit she was surprised at that.

'Heart' and 'Renewal' would do the job before, but only on higher grade cores. It also took a while and never worked on cores from within the borders of the Yin Eclipse Mountains.

“These are basically normal qi beast cores,” her sister remarked. “They have none of the weirdness that the ones from the Valleys have.”

Nodding, she picked another up and turned it over in her hands, directing her mantra accordingly and watching as it slowly grew clearer and more crystalline. She tried to absorb the energy from it and found that the amount gained was identical, which was to be expected given the full set of mnemonics had worked to absorb it.

“Do you think we could use them as formations flags or ward stones?” she mused, purifying another and turning it over in her hands.

“There is nothing to be gained by not trying, really…” Sana shrugged curiously.

Nodding, she pushed her qi into it. Given it was a wood stone, it should feed fire, so she imprinted a basic fire symbol into it. It flickered dimly and something twisted oddly. The purified stone exploded with a sharp crack in her hand, making her wince. Shaking her head she tried again… and again and then again.

It took nine goes before she got the knack, such as it was. Her mistake was, it turned out, a rather basic one, she needed to use the supporting element rather than the symbol the stone fed. Given these were mainly wood/life qi and Yin in nature, she ended up succeeding with the basic water one, which gave her a bunch of glittering greenish stones with faintly corrosive properties. A few were a bit more water attuned and made dark purplish stones that were cold to touch. She saved the two that were faintly yin fire attuned for last, ending up with two dull reddish crystals that raised the temperature of the surroundings by a tiny bit.

“So they are primarily Yin Wood/Life with minor Yin Water and Yin Fire,” Sana observed as they tested each of the stones.

“Makes sense,” she said. “They are dark dwelling predators that excel in hiding, and spiders, which are innately yin, anyway.”

“Well these should be somewhat useful at least, they aren't amazing for what they are, but for grade one ward stones they are…”

“Mediocre, if good for our talents in this field?” she said deadpanned.

“I was going to go with: 'by far our best work in this field to date',” her sister said with an eye roll.

Considering how to use them, because neither of them had any idea how to refine ‘proper’ ward stones with their own innate feng shui, she pushed qi into one and imprinted a framework around the symbol with an intention of ‘impact detonation’. Standing up she tossed it down the tunnel and hit the far wall where it exploded with a hiss and a snap, into a cloud of corrosive Yin Life Qi half a metre across.

“How did you manage that?” her sister asked with a frown.

“You can imprint frameworks with your qi, it’s a bit draining though.”

“Huh…. Now I feel like an idiot for not realising that before,” her sister said knocking her own head with her hand.

“Don’t be, I only worked it out mid-fight back there. It’s why that corrosion symbol I made exploded like it did.”

“Hmm….” Sana picked up a core and repeated her feat, throwing it and watching it explode in a puff of acidic mist.

Considering the aftermath, her sister sighed. “I suppose they are handy enough in a pinch, although it remains to be seen how good they are at actually killing things as small and mobile as the spiders.”

Sitting down on the edge of the alcove and looking around the gently steaming corrosive ooze, she could only nod. It was hard to shake the feeling that they had survived this encounter largely by luck and quick thinking. Had they explored in that direction, would they have walked straight into that horde?

“Thinking about the spiders?” her sister said beside her.

“It’s hard not to,” she said softly.

“Well, we survived,” Sana said simply, giving her a one-armed hug back.

“We did, I just can’t shake that we did it in spite of circumstances rather than because of them,” she muttered.

“That is the way,” her sister said with an eye roll.

“What this has told me is that I don’t like spiders,” she said, considering the damage to her clothes and boots.

“You only just worked that out now?” her sister said with a shudder.

Shaking her head, she came to the conclusion that if this kept up her clothing such as it was would be pretty ruined long before her qi defences became dense enough to protect her clothes.

“Speaking of qi… do you think the cost of arrays with more symbols is additive or multiplicative?” she mused.

“All we can do is try one and see?” Sana said with a frown. “Do you want to do the honours?”

Exhaling, she sank into meditation and properly engaged with her qi replenishment cycle. It took about a minute of solid focus to draw in enough that she was at ‘capacity’. It was certainly a bit quicker than before, however, there were oddities now she finally had a chance to observe it in a vaguely ‘normal’ seeming qi containing environment. Her absorption cycle was at its most efficient when she used breathing exercises. Her body was capable of passively absorbing qi through her skin, but it was a magnitude less efficient.

Taking one of the remaining spirit fruits, she considered it for a moment but decided against using it right now. Instead, she hopped off the alcove, wincing as the mud rose almost to her knees as it still hadn’t lost all its corrosive properties. Standing on the wall, she envisaged two symbols and then rapidly stopped envisaging them.

“Well?”

“Not a chance of doubling up on them, they are multiplicative.”

“That is an important bit of information missing from the talks,” Sana said with a grimace.

“Well, despite being very reasoned, they were clearly not aimed at the ‘little inheritor’s first formation’ learning bracket,” she said with an eye roll.

“What about if you draw them out manually?”

She eyed the corridor in both directions, contemplating that. If neither of them possessed anywhere near enough qi to make two symbol arrays, let alone three, that was going to be an issue. Even a single symbol and its array framework would take over half her qi. Grabbing one of the cores she walked down the corridor a bit and hid it in the muck next to a spider corpse and then imprinted a framework around it that had ‘proximity’ and ‘delay’ in it as sub symbols. Her qi dropped dramatically. Even that apparently used close to a quarter of her qi?

Taking another corrosive/life stone, she tested with only one sub symbol and observed that the drain was not that much less. The other thing which she hadn’t really had time to dwell on before, was the apparent reservation of qi. She tried to replenish her qi that she had just infused into the array and met with a faint resistance.

Narrowing her eyes, she set up a third array, this time just using her qi, on the other side and watched her qi flow into it. The awareness of the symbol and the array remained, but she was able to replenish the qi spent in this instance.

“Well, that’s interesting,” she muttered. “It seems that using the stones as cores is closer to a delayed art than a formation.”

“Really?” her sister said, not bothering to hide her surprise.

Grabbing a crystal Sana also set one up and stared at it frowning. “Weird, you would think it would be the other way around?”

“You would think, but the simplest frameworks do seem to be closer to arts than formations.”

“Well, that is an unforeseen crimp in using these, although they do draw less in the short term,” Sana said with a frustrated sigh.

They considered the crystals that were still stacked in the alcove with a palpable sense of shared frustration for a few more moments before she walked over and started to pack them away into a bundle. They would still be useful as thrown objects. More experimentation was clearly needed to work out how to use them efficiently as formation centres.

“So, what now?” Sana said once they had finished storing most of the cores

“That’s starting to become a bit of a thing isn’t it,” she said, eyeing the ceiling, just in case.

“Ha, ha...” her sister said without any mirth.

Looking around again, the water was slowly starting to rise over the muddy sludge once more. She watched it subsume the three arrays she had set on the ground until she was satisfied that that wasn’t going to interfere with them, obviously. Cautious exploration first one way and then the other down the tunnel revealed that it was a tunnel that just went in a straight line in both directions without any obvious slope or curve in the gloom.

Returning to where they had started, both of them stood in silence for a while before Sana spoke.

“I don’t know about you, but I really do not want to go wandering randomly into the darkness down here.”

“Agreed,” she said glumly, sitting down in the alcove.

The problem, really, was one of bad choices. Either they stayed here and risked something investigating what had caused this mess, or they headed in one direction or the other to explore and met another spider swarm… or worse.

“With some arrays, this place is pretty defensible,” she conceded at last. “How about we recuperate here for a bit and see how things settle out?”

“It is a plan,” Sana agreed, sounding noncommittal.

In other circumstances, she might have been a bit annoyed over the recurrence of one of her sisters more vexing personality quirks, which was just to go with the flow and not take a clear position on matters where others could be relied upon or forced into taking charge. However, she was also sitting on that fence as well, looking both directions and unable to pick good from bad. People in paper rooms should not throw tea around, as the saying went.

Instead, she went over and started to set up another two smaller arrays for defence. Provided with a meaningful direction, Sana joined her a moment later, starting on a lightning array to match her corrosion ones further along the corridor. The strategy was somewhat masochistic, but they had survived the acid mist much more successfully than the spider swarm had. After that, they took turns in the next few hours to properly cycle their changed mantra and the symbol and get a clearer idea of how it actually behaved devoid of suppression.

After alternating a few dozen cycles, she could only declare to herself that she was impressed. It was already passively refining qi out of their immediate surroundings as they breathed. It was a curious and subtle change to the qi cycle she was used to, which had involved attuning the body to qi and then either absorbing it through the skin or via spirit food. To do so via breathing exercises was not much more efficient and had the disadvantage of requiring a lot of meditation. Eventually, she came to the conclusion that she was being aided here by her meridians being realigned subtly and her prior cultivation knowledge.

Beyond this, each cycle still incrementally increased the strands of purified qi that were settling into her bones. Each bone only got a certain amount and it still expanded outwards from her core. The rate had been much slower at the start, but now that she had some actual refined qi, there was a subtle momentum building behind it which was pushing things along just a touch quicker with each cycle. It was also threading together sequences of more crucial bones rather than suffusing each from her core sequentially. At first, she just assumed it was feeding the core points, but after a while, it became clear that it was actually mapping out bones that anchored her newly adjusted meridians. That finally explained why everything was proceeding much ‘slower’ than she had expected. It was focusing on connecting up all the channels to her qi reserves and leaving the rising momentum of that purified qi the task of passively filling in the gaps and reinforcing the connections to her meridian gates.

In her periods when she was keeping watch, she alternated between adding more arrays to the tunnel and skimming back through the jade scrip, continuing to review other symbols and divine their applications. The rooms with the carvings in the school turned out to be remarkably convenient there. It became quickly apparent that they were sorted in accordance with the themes on their associated panels, providing her a means to grasp the edges of a comprehendible organization system. It wasn’t that what Maria and Eleanora had shown was disorganised, it was simply that the symbols were much more complex and whatever organisation they had hadn’t been explained.

Even with keeping a time count with her scrip, she found her perception of it blurring in the gloom. Hours passed, her scrip told her it was somewhere in the middle of the night, but really it was just numbers. Even within the mist, or in the depths of winter, there had been the comfort of seeing day and night trade places. Here however it just… passed, inexorably.

Even worse, it was far from silent once things calmed down. Water dripped from ceilings while the occasional plop of things in the water echoed strangely in the distance, amplified enormously by the stonework of the tunnels. It was impossible to dwell on the reality that their fight must have echoed a huge distance. A few spiders came, but they were all disposed of by the lightning arrays that Sana put down before getting within thirty metres of them. In the two hour stint she was sat there the arrays killed twelve giving her three more cores in the process which she just refined outright.

On the back of that, it was hard to know if it was good or bad that nothing else had come. Was it because these corridors were the spider’s territory? A horde ambush predator like that would be difficult to deal with. Numbers, camouflage and poison were a dangerous trifecta, and she couldn’t help but feel that they had been lucky in their fight not to discover how potent whatever they spat actually was.

She had worked her way through a preliminary examination of almost a third of the symbols from the school when her scrip notified her that it was time to swap with Sana. Almost on cue, her sister was stirring in any case. It was a matter of a few moments to pass over her scrip and update her on the progress she had made before settling down to her own ‘cultivation’ again.

A quick calculation based on her past progress as she settled back into it suggested that it would take her only 300 hours at the current ever-increasing rate to get a filament of purified qi in every bone in her body, give or take. That was quite scary, and far in excess of what she had felt when she first considered her new condition after recovering consciousness in the crater. She had assumed that to be the ‘higher’ world, but now she couldn’t help wonder if that place had, in its own way, been just as illusionary as the bell had implied the city was. More manifest nightmare or echo than reality. Perhaps their guess that it had been more akin to a formation space was more accurate than they had thought.

Then again, there was no guarantee that that milestone would lead to any obvious change.

-What if it just starts over again, and we go around again condensing a second filament in every bone…

-Unless…?

She threw out her past assumptions and watched the cycle the symbol was doing now, noting the differences to what she had observed back in the school when absorbing the energy from the spirit fruits and even from before that point when they were still in the vale. When she accounted for what had already been refined passively over the previous few days, it came to about just over 100 hours. It had also seemed like the symbol was somehow refining qi into every bone simultaneously. She stopped after her next cycle and just watched it for a full ‘passive’ cycle, comparing the rates to what she remembered, feeling a bit dumb that she hadn’t thought to do this immediately. Two things jumped out within five minutes. Firstly, the qi was absolutely denser down here. Secondly, that the passive rate was around five times slower than her actively focusing on refining qi using breathing exercises and devoting all her consciousness to supporting the mantra. A quick further calculation suggested that even if she did nothing at all, it would take her around 1500 hours of simply existing to acquire a filament of purified qi in every bone in her body. If she recalled right it had taken her six months with her old mantra. All told her cultivation speed had gotten a threefold increase or close to it she just sat on her ass, or thirty times in this new environment if she properly focused.

-Or I am just seeing a minor cycle in the realm and when I reach that point it’s just going to send us around again, her mind helpfully threw up for a second time, just to bring her back to reality.

Eventually, they shortened the length of watches again, down to an hour to reduce the strain on both of them when watching for intruders into their little bit of territory. That continued in the same vein for almost a day since they had entered this place. During that time she killed and refined almost sixty more of the small spiders. The key to dealing with them was to kill them immediately it seemed and not give them any opportunity to break line of sight once spotted. That almost always led to a second appearing within moments, and so on.

She managed to calculate that once a filament of purified qi fully manifested in a bone, it would replenish within mere minutes so long as she had qi in her body. Such use did detract somewhat from the overall refinement efficiency though. It also seemed like she could void the qi in a bone fully, in much the same way a normal physical cultivator could, however, that act would only empty that single bone of vital qi. Even more remarkably, her intuition suggested that there would be no real long term issues with doing so, except to set her overall progress back however many cycles.

What also became clear, as time went on, was that different bones had different capacities for qi storage. On its own, that was not that surprising, but in addition, it transpired that each bone completed increased the overall quantity of unrefined qi her body was able to tolerate, which was. From that, she arrived at the somewhat shocking realisation that even at her very lowest estimate, by the time she had a filament in every bone in her body her capacity for unrefined qi would be comparable to an average late-stage Qi Refinement Cultivator.