Memories of the Fall

...If you ever have the choice between hiring some well connected young scions who have garnered some accolade in slaying goblins and bandits at their parents sponsorship, or a dozen veterans who have cut their teeth keeping mines and sewers clean of filth, I urge you to always pick the latter and to not skimp on pay for their services. Certainly that 'noble youth' might get you some extra patronage, coin and be the toast of the ‘fine folk’ of your district. However, cities are rarely attacked by goblins and, it is beholden on me to remind you here and now that if your sewers have kobolds or worse in them you have bigger problems than some young adventurers can handle anway. On the other hand, every city with even a modicum of mana density and people practicing magic has mutates; spiders, rats, slimes and their ilk, alongside far too many old tunnels, reservoir pits and cellars abandoned to history over the centuries to make a savvy city governeror sleep soundly at night.

A few teams of veterans and experts who survived a decade or two of exterminating Undren spawned rats the size of dogs, clearing slime pits and exterminating spider nests tens of thousands strong and are still alive to show you their merit list may not be glamorous, be the toast of the ‘good folk’, come from a rich family or have a mythical sword; however, they will certainly ensure that one day you do not have to face those self-same ‘good folk’ in a riot over slimes corrupting your water courses, rats ruining their food sources and spiders bigger than dogs that are costing you fortunes in ward replacement and stealing children and livestock by the thousands.

Excerpt from ‘On Good Principles of Provincial Governance’

~ By Sir Ludvig ‘Undrenflayer’ Karo, Master of Public Works and Safety for the Imperial Commonwealth.

~ Sana & Arai, Sewer Labyrinth ~

In the end, despite her determination to not sit still, Sana had to admit after a hundred metres of struggling down the silty rubble-strewn, passageway that was still above knee-deep with water, ducking spiders and stressing out at every odd-shaped rock, that a break was indeed needed. Sadly, that respite only lasted ten minutes in the end. Ten minutes of listening to the roars and thundering shockwaves shaking the tunnels and echoing weirdly before everything fell silent. In a sense, she was very much in awe at how her symbol… this ‘Formless Permutations Physique’ was basically holding her body together with frog spit and spider webs at this point, but even it was clearly not an unqualified miracle worker. Those ten minutes, frantically alternating cycles with keeping watch, were barely long enough to stabilize the rampant disorder within the unrefined qi in her body and allow her mantra to paper over the multitude of cracks in her still not fully actualized meridians.

Soon after, the last sounds of combat faded away, there was the sound of something leadenly stumping down the wide corridor behind them. Groaning, she hauled her body up and they both struggled down the corridor, swatting fist-sized spiders away periodically. Their increasing persistence was making her nervous. The last thing they needed now was to have to fight another swarm of those in their current condition, and all the ones they had killed had been quasi qi beasts at best, without condensed cores. The worst part was having to rely on her vision to spot them rather than scraping their movement from her qi perception sphere as they moved over odd curves and angles. All her instincts told her that there were a significant number lurking in the gloom beyond her sight on the walls and ceiling.

The shuffling footsteps stopped and they both flinched and stared back. The corridor was depressingly straight, so all they could do was hide their qi signatures and keep low to the walls and hope it didn’t spot them by qi perception or some other means. Nothing came into their corridor-

There was a grinding crunch that echoed far too loudly and, with an ominous groan of shifting slabs and cracking rock, the ceiling behind them crumbled inwards collapsing almost thirty metres of the tunnel.

“Well, monkeyshit!” her sister sighed from opposite the corridor.

“Well with this tunnel seems fairly substantial so we probably aren’t sealed in,” she observed somewhat hopefully.

“Hopefully…” came the frustrated response back.

Indeed, it made any choice about direction very academic, as all they could do was head onward. Fortunately, her optimism seemed born out as the tunnel shifted some forty degrees in its orientation in what might have been a strange Y shaped junction, though she could find no sealed door on the wall. After that, it went up a shallow ramp until the tunnel levelled out again. Trying to recall how they had been before, she guessed they might have made their way up to the previous level they were on. Certainly, the floor here was damp and covered in silt. Faint lines on the wall suggested a water depth akin to the tunnel they had arrived in as well. That would mean that the tunnel they had just come from was entirely underwater?

“It would explain the lack of fungi down there, and why it was only on the walls up here,” she sighed to herself.

“Sorry?” Arai said beside her.

“Sorry… musing to myself, the corridor we were in must have been flooded.”

“Hmmm,” her sister glanced behind them. “Yes.”

“This is almost as bad as that fate thrashed bog,” she added as she held onto the wall to avoid slipping on some unforeseen bit of dislodged masonry in the mud.

“No-”

“Don’t even mention those, I’ve only read about them and have no desire to encounter one of them down here,” she said with a hiss.

The tunnel shifted by 40 or so degrees in its orientation after another hundred metres. And there was another shallow ramp up taking them back to the level they were previously on she guessed. The floor was still slick with water and silt suggesting recent flooding. Shaking her head she winced and tried to avoid slipping while using her qi as little as possible. I guess I really converted all the oil to water to the point where the flooding actually receded. How long were we out in the room?

The spiders still sauntered along behind, waiting for their moment.

-Fate thrashed things, how had they even got behind them?

After a few hundred more metres and another few twists, they reached the end of the tunnel and she stood there, cursing silently in her head. They were in a feeder tunnel that had seemingly led them back into the tunnel they had been before, just on the upper level of it. That was why the thing had sealed off the entrance, it knew full well they would be either penned in there or have to come here.

Standing there and stilling her senses she could catch the very faint sound of shuffling footsteps to their left. It was still a long way away, but it was coming in this direction. Without a sound, Arai pointed to the right and she nodded. They had no chance of fighting that thing. She had no idea what realm it was, but she was starting to believe their earlier thoughts about suppression hadn’t been right. There probably was some kind of repression down here. The intent that the sludge and the creature had, had been in excess of a golden core cultivator at least, and yet her symbol had been able to weather it just fine.

She was just pondering which grey demon might have won and was the one coming for them when the spiders picked their moment. Her hearing caught the ripple in the air, allowing her to duck out of the tunnel safely, dragging Arai with her. They watched as a dozen globules hit the far wall with damp thwacks. There was no hissing or sign of corrosion, so straight up poison or the rocks were its match. She was inclined towards the latter in all honesty.

The faint rustle of an awful lot of stealthy movement behind them also suggested that not being here in a few seconds was an eminently wise life choice. To punctuate that her sister ducked and swatted spider that had just left from the channel in the middle of the hall. Another, the size of a fate thrashed dog just appeared on the wall beside her somehow, leaping at her. She rolled with it, wincing as two of its sword-like limbs pierced her arm. Fortunately, she had their measure now and wrapping qi around her hand stabbed into its thorax and refined its core directly, casting it aside with a further grimace.

“Run,” her sister’s voice echoed in her head as her hand brushed her on the way past.

Eyeing the dozens of profiles silhouetted against the dark opening of the tunnel they had been in, she sprinted after her sister.

-How had there been that many behind them…?

Even here the ceiling was uselessly ornate, but she couldn’t have missed that many? Risking it, she scanned the ceiling again as they ran and suddenly hissed as she saw what she was looking for.

“Up, there are holes in the wall on line with the arches, that’s how they are getting around!” she brushed her sister’s arm to get her attention and quickly signed the information.

Arai just sighed, it was the only response to give to that knowledge. More ominously the shuffling was just getting closer. Rapidly closer. In her mind’s eye, unbidden she remembered that creepy stomp that covered half a room in an instant and shuddered.

They pushed on as fast as they dared, sustaining periodic attack from spiders that caught up. However, largely they seemed content to just follow at distance beyond easy retaliation, stalking them like prey. After travelling a few hundred more metres they finally found a point where there had once been some kind of crossing. The tunnel on their side that met that point was collapsed, but the one on the opposite was still intact. Faced with continuing to run this gauntlet and maybe end up in another sludge pit, or go into the tunnel, it was an easy choice given she could feel air moving out of it, while that in the tunnel was largely still.

They went down it at the same speed, conserving as much strength as they could while pretending to look like they were being pushed along, seeding a few corrosive and lightning trap arrays along the way. They went on for another twenty metres or so, and then she stopped as if winded while placing a final lightning array and abruptly boosted her qi perception as far as it would go. To almost forty metres. Every spider caught in profile in that expanding wave froze, but it was a second too late. There were a hundred at least, many of them far too large for comfort. She tripped the ward and, with a thwack a boiling cloud of corrosive mist consumed the tunnel behind them. Half a heartbeat later the sparks in the air caught and everything ignited. She put another symbol down and the rock around them twisted into dust and was swept out, adding to the corrosive maelstrom being swept along the corridor behind them. With a final gesture, she added another lightning/metal symbol and watched with satisfaction as everything combusted into a flickering light show as hundreds of spiders trying to protect themselves from the corrosion became minute torches.

“Let it not be said we haven’t worked that combination out at this point,” Arai remarked sourly, watching the carnage unfold.

Eyeing the roof she watched more spiders slip out of gaps in the roof masonry with a sigh.

“I bet that there are channels of some kind,” Arai said noting the same thing.

“Like… they mined it out and then clad it in this ornamentation…?” she muttered, eyeing the block walls and the ornate arched ceiling.

Pushing her perception up across the ceiling she forced it into every void and hissed, there were indeed channels and they were heaving with spiders of all sizes, and quite a lot of fungi.

“That’s a lot of spiders,” she shuddered.

“There’s a large room ahead.” Arai’s voice echoed in her head, having turned her perception down the tunnel they were in.

“Some kind of circular shaft, can’t reach the floor even maxing out my Qi Perception in a straight line at 50 metres. So it’s at least 3 stories deep.”

“That’s where the spiders will attack then. If we have narrow ledges and can’t dodge easily.” She sighed, turning and starting to jog along the corridor. “They won’t give us time to put wards this time either I suspect.”

“Or so they think,” her sister said with a nasty snicker and started to score a strange spiralling line along the wall as they walked onwards, along the now downward sloping tunnel.

After another twenty or so metres they arrived at the aforementioned shaft and she watched as her sister finished off the strange ward with a corrosive mist symbol that was subtly different this time. Suppressing her qi, she edged her way into the room and looked over the edge of the one-metre wide walkway. The base was close to forty metres below, dimly visible as a rippling surface illuminated by a few clusters of luminescent fungi around it and some algae on the walls.

“Again with the lack of handrails,” Arai noted as she finished whatever she had been doing and joined her.

“Is it the mirror of the sludge chamber?” Arai mused.

“Looks like it, but I wasn’t really admiring the architecture,” she muttered.

“The bottom is also filled with water, which isn’t at all ominous,” her sister grumbled.

“I’ve not yet seen anything that isn’t,” she said with a dark laugh.

Nodding, she continued her examination of the lower floors and noted that the bottom platform did appear to have guard rails, and was wider. Looking up, the shaft went into the gloom, with several waterfalls falling down from various levels above and below, misting the far side of the hall. She could just pick out hints of a vaulted dome and a suspiciously familiar sickly white glow of fungi beyond the mist.

“Great,” she poked Arai and pointed up.

Arai just stared at the distant Eldritch Moon Mushroom colony and sighed.

A quick further survey showed lower entrances on the levels below sealed by what looked like corroded metal doors and no other access points on this level beyond the one they had entered by. Theirs was also, the only platform before the one at the very top of the chamber, which had no visible means of access from here.

“Let’s get out of here fast. I don’t want to have that drop spores on our head randomly. The symbol seems to be pretty good at dealing with otherwise horribly lethal and terrible death-dealing things but those might be a test even for it,” she suggested, at last, eyeing the tunnel behind them which was conspicuously spider free.

That was making her nervous as well.

“Agreed, looks like we have to go down there.” Sana pointed to a set of stairs that curved down on the far side to the lower level.

*Shufffffft*

A strange sound echoed from the corridor they had just left.

“Well, well indeed. Those sneaky little bastards.” Arai muttered

“What did they do?” she asked as they stepped smartly around the platform towards the stairs.

Behind her, Arai elaborated. “I trapped the ward. Twice over. That was why it had that meandering spiral shape. It occurred to me that so long as it was a continuous loop that didn’t cross its primary qi flow it would work no matter the actual shape. The frameworks are mostly there to ensure you keep the right number of core links in a very regimented set of patterns.”

“Huh,” she nodded, peering down the stairs and then going to the edge and very warily looking over it to check there was nothing ‘behind’ the stairs.

“Clear,” she signed.

Arai paused her explanation as they made their way down the stairs to the level below and then put her hand on her shoulder to continue the explanation that way.

“Then I trapped the trap. Just In case someone tried to disable it… and the spiders scored out both the critical points for the array. They can clearly track qi flow and tried to interrupt it at critical points. That’s dangerously intelligent, even if you consider that they were communicating and calling reinforcements. Didn’t help them. I tried another type of symbol up there. I'm glad it triggered.”

“Ohh?” Sana carefully observed this layer. It had two open doors and three sealed ones. “We check the open doors? But neither feels good to me?”

“Yeah we can only check, I agree that this place feels… dangerous somehow. Not that I get good vibes from going down either,” Arai thought to her.

Abruptly her sister tapped her shoulder and pointed. Following her direction, she noted a piece of rubble…

They stared at it for a good ten seconds and then both sighed. It looked totally innocuous and had some luminescent fungi on it which made it kind of hard to examine in the distant gloom. However, and this was critical, there was no way a bit of rock that big could have fallen where it had, next to the stairs down to the first level, without either taking the floor out or having grown wings and flown there.

“Don’t tell me that this place has one of those sludge things in it as well,” she thought.

“It’s a good opportunity for me to show off this other symbol,” Arai signed with a mimed snicker.

“How did you work out what it did, we haven’t stopped?” she signed back as they both slipped through the shadows, towards the ‘rock’ hiding their qi completely.

“Actually, it was before that, it was just that everything has been a frenetic mess and it was not that useful in any circumstance before now so I kind of forgot about it,” Arai signed back with an aplogetic shrug.

She couldn’t really criticise that, there were certainly points at which she had forgotten her own name, let alone worry about newly learned strange symbols and remember what they did. The whole thing had been so stressful and on edge that it was a miracle they survived really. Arai motioned for her to stop and cast around, finding a piece of genuine flat rock, about the size of her palm that had been deposited at some point. Watching, curious, she observed her sister imprint a strange symbol that looked like a half-closed eye with three tails and a small framework in the form of a six-sided shape that bisected the three tails. It was one she half recognised from the academy wall carvings, but that one hadn’t had the eye in it? Flipping it over, her sister did something else to the back and then lobbed it over the gap towards the rock, skidding almost right up to the edge.

Nothing happened for a good ten seconds, then the rock quivered and a little tentacle latched onto it and pulled it up against the ‘rock’ surface which rippled and then absorbed the piece. There was a pause long enough for her to count to twenty and then with a quiet *shufft* sound the sludge thing just dissolved into rocks and a puddle of gloop.

“The innate qi of the sludge before was somewhere near somewhere between water and wood when it tried to absorb me in the corridor, so that was why the half-open eye and the three lines mean it should be an inauspicious yin orientation,” her sister explained.

“That’s a qi disrupting symbol with a water attribute?”

“Uhuh,” Arai nodded.

She whistled under her breath. “Transforming water to wood, inverting good fortune and releasing it from the Dao. Inauspicious.”

“I see you do recall some of Grandmaster Li’s weirder homilies,” her sister nodded.

“How did you work it out though? There are a bunch of others in that sequence?” she asked.

Arriving beside the pile of gunk, which stank, they both grimaced.

“Ah, it was while you were meditating, I marked it in the tablet,”

“You marked a lot of stuff,” she pointed out trying not to sound a bit disgruntled that her sister's notes were almost as long as the things she was studying.

“I know, sorry. Anyway, I just scrawled them on the walls one after another and watched what they did with my qi-perception from a safe distance to see what happened when they triggered. The other three in that group of symbols from the hall created a water blade with mild corrosive properties, a mist of wood qi that disrupted qi and gave minor illusions, and the last one did something with an energy I think is soul force and had a yin attribute. There’s one more I haven’t tried yet, but it should be a corrosive mist that does soul damage if the pattern holds.”

Sighing, her sister held up a fist-sized core from the puddle of mucus. It was barely corporeal and degrading visibly, turning into clear liquid that dribbled through her fingers.

“There is an obvious downside,” her sister observed. “But I’ll take it if it means we don’t have to fight another room like the last one.”

“Fates yes,” she agreed, peering down the stairs.

With a soft sigh, she went over to the edge and looked over again before returning to their kill.

“There’s two more behind the stairs, looks like. Again with luminescent mushrooms.”

“Because of course there are” Arai sighed, eyeing the now no longer luminescent mushrooms that had been on this one. “They also asleep?”

“Seems so,” she shrugged. “But given they look like rocks, it’s hard to tell, and no way I am using my qi perception to check if there is any minuscule movement.”

Looking across the layer to the other side it was possible to just pick out in a pile of silt a rock that had no business being there, and then if you looked carefully along, in the shadow behind the stairs, obscured in the glow of another clump of mushrooms another two.

She drew her sister’s attention to them. “Looks like we get to risk going over the edge. Without qi to anchor us as well.”

“What joy…Lead on Han Shu.” Arai snarked.

She threw her sister an obscene sign and swiftly moved to the edge a few metres away from them. Slipping over the edge she swung herself carefully and then dropped down, landing as lightly as she could. Arai followed her a moment later. They considered the level, then the stairs down. All she could do was shake her head, nothing more needed to be said really. The door on this level, on the far side, felt… off somehow as well.

Making her way to the edge she peered over. The lowest level was in half a metre of water, but the rails were still clear. Looking up from this point she considered the last hall and concluded that this was probably the level they had been on, or the one above.

“That’s a much less fun jump,” Arai noted.

Exhaling softly, she sat on the edge and judged the distance twice in her head before slipping off head first. The rail was disgustingly slippy, so she had to stop herself with pure strength in a half handstand and then lower herself like a monkey onto it, taking care not to disturb the water below. A moment later her sister followed in a similar motion.

Crouching on the rail she considered the dark waters below, squinting. In the darkness below them was another level, and within it, she could, if she looked really carefully just make out reflections of silver and gold. So this one was also a huge bone pit in all likelihood.

In the end, it wasn’t difficult to get out on this level. It was simply a matter of following the rail around and then jumping across the distance to the tunnel. This one was almost twice the size of the last one they had seen. The central channel fed into the pit but was blocked by a stone slab. The water inside it looked to be about breast height, not that she had any intention of going into it. Ever.

It took almost thirty metres before a spider the size of a house cat soundlessly dropped out of the ceiling towards her.

-That has to be some kind of a record at this point, she thought as she slashed out with the leaf knife splitting it in two and refining its core before it could do anything other than scratch the side of her head with a trailing limb.

Two more spiders shot out of the darkness with remarkable velocity and the 'game' began again, except this time they didn’t dare use qi perception until they were several hundred metres down the broad tunnel, just in case.

“Our cultivation has definitely increased,” her sister signed, catching a spider about the size of her fist that had shot out of nowhere and crushing it with a nasty crunching sound.

“Yes,” she replied, catching another small one and splintering it off the floor leaving it twitching in death.

She wasn’t sure quite how much, due to not having had any time to really check her own optimal condition, but most of her bones now had some refined qi in them and maybe three quarters had filaments of purified qi in them. She had guessed it would take her a mere matter of days to get a filament in every bone in her body if she didn’t absorb another bit of qi, given the remarkable transformative means of the symbol. Both the sludge and the grey, the rock-skinned grey ape had had remarkably pure elemental qi which the symbol had devoured and refined without any qualms. If she was going to point to something that was contributing to her speedy progress. Even the qi poison from the previous battle was contributing. The symbol had isolated it all in her body to the point where she wouldn’t even know it was there despite it riddling half her soft tissue, mainly in muscles and one viscera burn from the lightning.

They made it about a hundred yards further along the tunnel, to one of the crossings over the channel in the middle of the corridor, before running straight into the long-expected spider ambush. Hundreds of small ones, the size of her hand swarmed out of holes in the walls while a dozen large, dog-sized ones akin to those they had previously battled scuttled out of the channel or out from behind the columns, again giving her cause to curse the overly ostentatious design of this place. Finally, from the crossing tunnel, a huge spider quietly stepped out of the gloom. It was the size of a small horse, or a cow maybe, with a rotten green coloured carapace, a broad, round abdomen and thorax and thick legs. Spine like hairs covered much of its body that wasn’t protected with carapace.

“I hate this place even more now if that was at all possible,” she said out loud, drawing up short and massing qi into her legs, glad that her ruptured abdominal meridians had basically recovered by this point.

On their side, a second, smaller spider pranced out of that tunnel. Even though she tagged it as ‘small’ in her head, it was still the size of an adult goat, with long spindly limbs and a greyish-green carapace. It also had fangs bigger than her forearm.

“Apparently so,” Arai said with a resigned look. “We take the big female first.”

Without hesitation, she pushed qi into her leg meridians and stacked her movement art in her mind’s eye, read to be used in reserve. She was sure she had used it more in the last day than she had in the last year, courtesy of the effective drop in her realm. at physical foundation she had had barely any need for it and had been holding off, saving up so she could try to either purchase one for contribution from the Hunter Pavilion when they crossed to mantra seed or look for a suitable one on the Auction House in Blue Water City. All moot now.

The spider danced to the side with remarkable dexterity for something so large and a dozen of its smaller progeny swarmed out of the tunnel behind it, varying in size from her fist right up to house cats.

Ignoring them, she massed her qi defences as best she could around her vital organs and slashed for the things eyes. In reply, it slipped backwards and with a speed she couldn’t even follow, swept out its forelegs to drag her down to the floor and inwards. Grimacing as poison invaded her body through the wounds from the hairs on its legs, which she noted with glum acceptance had shredded her qi defence like it wasn’t there, she protected her core as best she could and rolled forward.

As expected, it reacted by rearing up, intending to flatten her with the spines of its underside, slamming down its legs like a cage to prevent its ‘prey’ escaping.

-Thank you, Old Ling, for forcing us all to learn the attack patterns of every kind of spider bigger than our heads! She decried in her mind, offering a short salutation to her lost innocence regarding spiders.

Pretending as best she could to panic and flail, one of her hands brushed a leg and she transferred the lightning element array directly onto its body.

Her perseverance was rewarded with a soundless shriek of agony that made her limbs grow numb and disturbed all the ambient qi around her to the point where her vision swam and the unrefined qi in her body grew chaotic.

-Wonderful! It can use intent, a part of her sobbed

The male, with its long spindly legs and armour, was in front of her so fast she never even saw it until it was stabbing down at her face. protecting herself with her arms she screamed in her own head and fed the mantra again as its front limbs punched through her arms like swords while a rear limb got one of her legs deep enough to scrape bone.

-I have been stabbed more in the last day than I have in the entirety of the last 18 years of my life! She screamed in her own head

-Fates what have I done to deserve this misery!

Screaming in anger as much as pain she spun the Arborundum leaf in her hand and sliced at it, severing a leg. It reared, presumably intending to stab her with its fangs, only for Arai to appear behind it and hit the top of its shell. There was a muffled curse, infused with qi and then her sister, now stabbed through the side, slapped a hand under its thorax. The spider convulsed and crumpled, even as she rolled away again trying to ignore the sensation of crushing spiders beneath her and the scuttle of limbs everywhere beyond her vision.

The Spider Mother screamed and shook itself, finally managing to disperse the qi she had used to stun it. Its charge felt more like teleportation as it arrived beside her, stabbing out with its legs, intending to impale her she guessed. Grimacing and still holding the movement art activation in reserve she dodged both the incoming legs and managed to stab the blade into its thorax before being swept away by a limb and smashed into the far wall.

Searing fire sank into her face and chest as the spider mother spat thrice at her, finally providing the confirmation that that was venom. Yin Fire with minor influence from Yin Life no less and in keeping with what they had seen of them so far, which suggested them to be primarily yin life with minor variance to water and fire. The spiders also seemed capable of surviving against the sludge pits which seemed to be earth attuned, even if the smaller sludges were water, life or even thunder. Yin Fire Attribute Venom fit that vexingly well, being good in some capacity against most other things down here.

The symbol purified it as best it could but it was seriously strong, damaging her body's nerves and corroding her meridians almost as fast as her mantra could repair them. Two smaller spiders pounced on her immediately, their fangs tearing through her qi defence in a way that suggested a certain realm superiority. Gritting her teeth she puppeted her own limbs with qi and used the shock symbol. To her shock though, the symbol itself stepped in and taking her knowledge of elemental transformation shifted the major component in her blood to become Yang Water. The spiders who had been drawing vitality from her both fell away, lethally poisoned, as were dozens of other tiny ones who had taken the opportunity to try to bite her at the same time.

-Never will I complain about small spiders in houses ever again, she shuddered, taking stock in the instant of calm.

The female was distracted by Arai who had managed to hit it with another of the nasty spiritual Qi dispersing symbols. Sadly that wasn’t enough to kill it outright it seemed, just enrage it. Dozens of small ones just charged at her trying to mob her. Unable to move due to the yin poison still paralysing most of her body, all she could do was trust to whatever the symbol had done and bury her instinctual terror and pain with the mantra.

Proving they were smarter than she was comfortable with, spiders just stopped biting her after a few moments and instead she was surrounded by a ring of spiders spitting venom at her from range.

Gasping, she struggled with the help of her mantra, trying to keep her body stable as her blood shifted towards boiling point. If there was a mercy there, it was that her body was now so saturated with qi and undergoing so much punishment that she was living by that. Her inner organs mostly things that functioned in name only, aiding qi circulation.

-This is not normal for a Containment Realm of Qi Condensation Body! She suggested to the symbol, which just shrugged and suggested she worry about more important things.

The boiling battle between Yang Water and Yin Fire finally reached a conclusion, with the Yin Fire Poison finally being overcome, despite the best attempts of the spiders around her. The boiling decreased and she got a bizarre sense of Yin Qi decaying out of her body, exchanging with purified qi in her bones through blood exchange, returning her some manner of control over her limbs and awareness of her surroundings.

At least the spider mother wasn’t having it easy, screaming soundlessly, its intent infused attacks making the ambient qi shake uncontrollably. Arai was straddling its body, stabbing its head repeatedly while it bounced around like a mad thing. Its armour no match for the Arborundum leaf, which she had recovered from where it had remained, stabbed in the thorax. The spider must have tried to roll over her sister as well.

-Stupid spider.

The lack of other spiders swarming them confused her for a moment until she got a better look around and realised that most of the small ones were dead.

-ah, that explained why she was being largely left alone by the spiders, they were also being affected.

The large ones had backed off and were shaking and twitching unhappily. One of the bigger ones, seeing her moving overcame its discomfort and spat a mist of poison at her, before leaping towards her. Reading its intent to impale her with its limbs she let it collide with her and rolled over it, twisting at two legs and then using one to stab it in the wound. Three more shot after her, one she kicked, one dodged and the last smashed down on her back, putting two limbs through her shoulder and trying to pry her flesh apart.

Snarling in pain she rolled over on it, crushing it flat, only to come up face to face with a second male, arrived like a ghost and already stabbing at her neck with whip-like limbs. Left with no other recourse, or risk death by beheading she concentrated every bit of qi she had in her body into her neck, head and upper torso. The pain and the sense of instability transcended even the mantra’s ability to cope for an agonising few moments. Her vision went red and her thoughts grew sluggish even as the limbs connected with her neck. It felt like she had had a boulder dropped on her, but she survived. In response the male spun and stabbed her arm with its fangs, scraping bone and flooding her body with more yin fire poison.

She punched its mouth instinctively and howled in agony at the poison flowing into her. If anything it was stronger than the stuff the mother had spat at her. Forcing herself to overcome the pain, she put a lightning array straight in its face. The spider exploded from the inside out, sending limbs scything in every direction.

Ripping the fangs from her arm, it dawned on her that they were basically the right size to be daggers in their own right, and sharp enough as well. At the same time, the symbol protested slightly that against all the odds she maybe might consider not getting stabbed quite as much as she currently was?

-You're meant to be some heaven-defying thing? Well defy these fate thrashed spiders, they better not be stronger than heaven! She snarked back.

To punctuate that point she stabbed a smaller spider that had opportunistically tried to jump at her from the wall, pleased to see it convulse once on the venom of the fang and drop dead.

Turning to the other side, the battle there had reached a terrifying crescendo as the female spider literally rolled about like a mad thing while Arai just clung to its shell stabbing madly and shoving qi dispersing arrays into the wounds when it was convenient.

-All hail our ridiculous qi reserves! She thought even as she flattened herself to avoid a third male spider.

At this point, there was nothing to be lost by using qi perception, so she pushed it out and grimaced as it highlighted the speed of the thing. Its return attack narrowly missed her head, stabbing through her shoulder and scouring several deep grooves in her back. In return she stabbed it twice in the face with a fang and grappling for it pushed a lightning symbol into it, exploding it directly. At this point, she was long past caring that even their ichor seemed faintly poisonous.

Another wave of destabilizing intent punched through her and the symbol ‘noped’, negating the worst of it.

She stabbed another smaller spider that had jumped at her and noticed their numbers had basically fallen off. The mother was twitching in a broken pile by the wall now. Arai still stabbing it. She thought she saw something blur around its body, like extra limbs for a second…

-Was that….?

Her blood ran cold even as the manifestation crumbled before ever gaining traction, with a particularly deep stab from Arai.

-Yep, no doubt about it that had been an attempted soul manifestation, is that thing a four-star monster!?!

She stared at it dully then picked up the nearest exploded male spider, however before she could pry it open, two smaller spiders had charged at her, trying to drag her down and stab through her limbs. In return she caved in the face of one and then sliced open the abdomen of the other, letting the remaining poison on the fangs kill them, finally earning her respite.

Arai’s skin was smoking and blistered, her clothes basically gone, the contents of her pack only surviving because it was a strip of Luss Cloth. With a final stab, her sister finished off the mortal body of the presumed soul foundation spider and slid off it, giving it a ruthless kick that actually rocked the corpse.

While her sister hacked into the thorax, looking for the core, she took a moment to let her own body focus on finally sorting out the remnants of the Yin Fire Poison without her interfering by pushing qi around her meridians by force of what intent she could muster.

-Ah, cores.

It was a rather belated thing to surface now. Her attention refocused on the nearest male spider. Despite its body having been roundly incinerated by lightning its core was none the worse for the ordeal. Plucking it out she stared at the eyeball sized round core with its shimmering gyre of qi. It really was a three-star beast core. The purity of qi in it wasn’t exceptional, but it was what it was.

She nudged the symbol to refine it and absorb the qi, getting the equivalent of a symbol shrug back, even as it got to it.

Wary of her surroundings she didn’t use meditation, so the process took almost a minute before the core went dim and crumbled into dust. Energy flowed into her limbs, saturating her body and giving her a warm glow inside as it dispersed to where it was most needed, finishing up two of the bones in her arm in the process.

In the process of hunting for the others, she suffered a few small ambushes from small spiders and eventually discovered that the other two male spider corpses had ended up in the water.

“Truly fates, you are determined to make a mockery of my choices,” she sighed under her breath as she carefully investigated the water before slipping into it.

In truth, she was pretty sure that if there had been a sludge in there it would have made its presence opportunistically felt before now in any event. It still took her several minutes of unpleasant fumbling amid a layer of spider corpses before she recovered both of them. One had been thrown quite far, while the other had sunk and required her to use her qi perception to find it.

By the time she hauled herself back out of the water, Arai had gotten the core from the mother spider and another male, the first one that had died, and was starting on some of the biggest of the Qi refinement, two-star ranked corpses.

“Fates… this thing just refused to die. Soul Formation bitch,” her sister said with a scowl as she came over and knelt down beside her.

“If anyone out here saw us… you, a Qi Containment physical cultivator, take down a Qi Beast of a calibre like that, they would question their dao path!” she noted with a weary laugh.

“They doubt their fate thrashed dao path?” her sister groaned, extracting a core and sitting back. “I still can’t decide if we are at something like mantra seed, or something like qi containment, or if everything here is suppressed in some weird way we just can’t understand.”

“It will become clear if and when we breakthrough,” she said with a sigh.

“That’s true, either we get soul meridians or we don’t,” her sister conceded. “In any case, I swear that those things are, on an individual level, tougher than the fate thrashed sludge’s!”

“You won’t find me disagreeing there, we would have fared badly landing in a nest of those nameless cursed things.”

Glancing at the cores in her hand, she passed them over to her sister. “These two are yours I think, and we may as well split things evenly.”

Taking them, her sister considered the two cores for a moment and then handed them back. “Keep them for a bit, my pack needs recovering anyway.”

Hopping into the channel, her sister proceeded to wipe off the worst of the ichor that was still faintly smoking on her body. “In any case, that core from the mother is too big to lug about.”

Eyeing the corpse, she had to agree. The core, with organ viscera still attached to it, was the size of a mango. Within it flickered a strange blue-green flame, which, despite the purity of the qi she could feel from within it, had a rather ominous black corona. It was indeed a pretty good Grade Four Core.

Scrambling back out of the channel, looking marginally cleaner, Arai settled down to refine the cores while she watched in both directions as best she could. It was hard not to worry, given their combat here had to have made some serious noise and drawn all kinds of notice. If there were sludge’s in the pool behind them, she was sure they would come to investigate either the noise or to clean up the battle at the very least.

Once her sister had refined the two cores they made their way over to consider the grade four core. The immediate thing that stood out was that it wasn’t a grade four core now she got a closer look at it.

“This is an early nascent soul qi beast,” she said eventually, staring at the faint silhouette of a spider lashing its limbs at them from within it.

“It is indeed,” her sister said, giving it another kick.

“Why didn’t it crush us with its manifestation?”

“Luck I think, you shocked it badly before it could, then I hit it with a bunch more and then several qi dispersal symbols.”

“Also, you noticed that soul attacks might as well not be a thing for us?” her sister added.

Closing her eyes, she thought back and shivered. Her sister was right, the wave of what she had thought of as intent in the water, was certainly a soul attack, the grey apes roars… soul attack… the striking intent of the mud skeletons… maybe?

“Some of that could be intent though, can you reliably say we can tell the difference?” she pointed out.

“True, but with this fate thrashed thing I think there was little doubt,” her sister said giving the abdomen another kick, rocking it faintly.

Nodding, she reached down and picked up the core, and finally understood why her sister had said it was too big to lug about. It was dense, easily forty kilos, or eighty jin if you used imperial measures. With a bit of effort, she separated it from the remaining viscera and placed it on the ground between them. The spider spirit within sent a rippling wave of something out at them which made her limbs grow cold for a moment before the symbol crushed the incursion into her body with a manifestly contemptuous counter-attack. The spider in the core recoiled and screamed even more furiously.

“Do you think we can refine it together?” Arai frowned… placing a hand on the core.

“Possibly, but we made a lot of noise, and the possibility of something sneaking up on us is pretty good I think. Not to mention it took over a minute to refine one of the golden cores crudely, a soul foundation core would be a big step up, a nascent soul one?”

“We could try putting up a defensive formation with more than one symbol,” her sister mused. “The ichor from the spider is really pretty qi dense.”

“That might not help with sludge’s, never mind another of those grey apes appearing,” she sighed. “It’s weird, usually I'm the one talking reason!”

“Oi… that’s a bit unfair…” her sister grumbled.

“How about this... I’m willing to bet you actual money that this won't be the last one of these we have the misfortune to run into given how many spiders there are here!”

Looking around she sighed again. “You refine it, you killed it mostly, and that way one of us is paying attention so nothing sneaks up on us, wards or no.”

“…”

Her sister stared at her dubiously.

“Look, if one of us can actually break through a realm, it’s only beneficial in any case, and I’ll take the next one we find, or if by some miracle we get out of this spider-infested sewer you can owe me a grade 5 core.”

Arai stared at her for a long moment and then sighed… “Ahh okay.”

She watched as she sat down and took up the core. Sitting there she half-watched the process in case something went on, still debating in her head if it was really a grade five core. It certainly looked like it, but the spider hadn’t felt like a genuine nascent soul creature, perhaps it was a quasi-nascent soul? In the process of crossing over and just looking for an opportunity. When she put it like that, its willingness to attack them seemed to make sense, they were probably the most interesting prey to wander in here in…

-200 million years?

She shook her head… that seemed unlikely and the spirit didn’t seem like the most reliable source on that count.

On the other hand, considering the question of ‘nascent soul’ creatures, her instincts were happy to agree that the sludge pit had been well over Nascent Soul, and the grey demon certainly was as well. It had had an aura of sorts… and that freaky attack it had done suggested some grasp over 'space' or its perception. It wasn’t a cheery thought to consider that the intent from either would have surely consumed and never bothered to spit out bones at the first try without the interference of the symbol.

In the end, despite all her worries, it took her sister less than five minutes to refine the core, mostly confirming in her mind that it was a peak grade four core, rather than an early grade five one. Arai was never not aware of their surroundings either from what she could observe. The qi that flowed out of the core into her body was like water going into a bottomless pit. The spider’s emergent soul thrashed and flailed and raged and tried to influence the world outside the core in various ways for a few minutes, but in the end, it was incapable in the face of the symbol and dwindled away with an inauspicious soul howl, becoming black vapour around the core that dispersed away. It was a somewhat pathetic end for the creature, but it was hard to muster any sympathy. Had it subjugated them, their fates would have been very miserable she was sure.

Exhaling a mist of orphaned qi, her sister watched the crystal dim in her hand, finally crushing it to dust.

“Well that was weird, the spider tried to invade my mind, but the symbol just… it was like the spider was incapable of ever reaching me.”

“How much qi did it get you?” she asked, curious.

“Less than I expected,” her sister said with another sigh, running her hands through her hair. “I got maybe five percent of the total qi from the core by the time the symbol and the mantra had done with it. On the other hand, I reckon I am almost at the peak of Qi Containment again… a few more long cycles or a handful more of the golden core spider cores might do it. ”

“It only gave you that much?”

She had to admit to being surprised, having expected to get maybe fifteen or twenty percent of what was in it. Even if it was a peak soul foundation core, it should have given more than that.

"Efficiency and quality is a bigger hurdle than I expected,” her sister said pensively. “Not to mention I think I damaged its soul foundation quite a bit with those qi dispersing symbols and the lightning. It was pumping qi into me while I was stabbing it as if qi was three-day-old meat at the market that had to be sold before breakfast.”

Looking down the tunnel, her sister stood and looked around at the rest of the spiders. “It’s probably not worth looting them is it?”

“The large ones maybe, but lingering is probably not smart,” she conceded.

“Yeah… it’s probably not, shall we get out of here?”

“On the other hand…” she said, eyeing the corpse of the probable soul foundation spider queen. “Want to trap that?”

“…”

Her sister eyed the corpse, then the rest of the battlefield around them and shared a truly evil grin with her.

“Yeah... Why not. Everything else is determined to make this place hell to survive in. It only feels fair to return the favour in some small way.”