Memories of the Fall

While your proposals are all very well, it is usually the council that reminds the monarch, not the other way around.

The only things more dangerous than a Crystal Locoi mine, is a Locoi mine dug in a hurry, or a Locoi mine dug in a hurry by people who want to keep it secret. If you wish to know the consequences? Just go ask the people of Renwald. Except, you likely won’t find any, because that kingdom is now drifting amid our planet's now somewhat more extensive ring system. Periodically entertaining people across three continents as seasonal meteor showers and really not serving as anywhere near as prominent reminder as it should apparently as to why greedy idiots and mana veins don’t mix.

Excerpt from public records on the 4th debate on the expansion of the deep delvings on the southern border of Renhallan

~Marius Renhallan, 10th Emperor of Renhallan

speaking to elected officials bringing forward new proposals.

~ Arai & Sana, Spear Plaza - Processing the aftermath ~

Lying there, on the damp stone, Arai watched the sky as the symbol devoured qi at a rate she wouldn’t have credited possible even at this point. Most of her mental faculties were still devoted to using her mantra to alleviate the worst of the physical damage to her body, which even at this point was prestigious. There was a deeply unpleasant series of spiky, knotted sensations across her arms, in her side, abdomen and lower body that required little in the way of memory re-association of the previous few minute's events to tell her what had just transpired.

-That fate thrashed lizard opened me up like a fish, for fun.

Even then, quite a lot of the detail at that point was a blur, buried in visions of a broken world, a sea of white flowers and some very weird memories regarding things from inside the pillar.

She found she was just fine with that as well.

Finally, her meridians felt like they were recovered enough that she could extricate the other source of worry. Reaching down with a huge effort she absently pulled the leaf out of her stomach and tried to circulate her qi.

The spasm nearly made her curl up and scream as her qi flooded back into her ruined dantian.

-Aaaaaaaggghg.

-Oh. It destroyed my Dantian… that’s very bad… right?

A part of her was reasonably prosaic about it, for some weird reason, telling her that she had made it this far without…

All the confused and worried parts of her trailed off dully as she observed the symbol, as it shifted and started to direct her mantra again. The means by which it was doing so wasn’t even all that obscure, she was familiar with this set of…

For the second time in as many seconds, she let her thoughts trail off blankly and just traced the flow of qi around her body in shock.

-What the fates? Was all she could manage after a while.

As she observed its flow, the somewhat odd non-dependence of her dantian within her qi circulation system began to make sense. Her body was still healing the wounds that had been dealt to her, but mostly the qi in her body was rapidly reconnecting the severed meridians, finding old links to bones and then as she watched retracing the routes now etched fundamentally into her to reconnect her shattered dantian to the network of meridians. It took mere minutes and reformed right in front of her eyes, in contravention of every scrap of understanding she had acquired about spiritual foundations up to this moment.

Part of it, she suspected was due to the exceptionally clean wounds dealt by the Arborundum leaf, which made re-joining damaged parts much quicker and smoother than it might have otherwise been.

-Well… you were wondering if this was a superior law of some description, she thought wryly.

It absolutely was not in the same class as any scripture or manual she was certain could be bought with spirit stones or spirit herbs of the relevant star grades.

It took a few more moments to feel confident in actual movement beyond her arm. She pushed herself up and winced a bit, examining the wounds as she did so. Her body was a patchwork of livid gashes and smeared blood. It would heal, and her condition in spite of how she looked was surprisingly robust, but it was still unpleasant to see with her own two eyes the damage that thing had wrought on her body.

Sana was still lying on her back nearby, just staring at the sky and breathing slowly. She had a series of horrendous wounds in her side that were still healing over, and a gouged, livid rent in her navel where her dantian would have been. Bone was still visible in the wound across her side as well… what appeared to be a half-formed rib, with a silver sheen?

-Am I regrowing a rib?

-Had that horrible thing torn out a rib!

-It was one thing that I was tormented, but… to have visited this upon Sana?

She immediately vowed to visit all kinds of unspeakable horrors on its kind if she ever encountered more of them, lizard people or uncaged thing, for all the good it would likely do.

-Wherever it has gone…?

She looked around the plaza, which was damp in the eerie twilight mists that now shrouded the whole of wherever they were. It was remarkably devoid of much of what she recalled dimly. The forest of macabre, desiccated corpse pillars, lanterns and stele. On a smaller raised area in the middle, a black spear with a metre long blade and a two-metre shaft was planted in the ground, the sole occupant of this place other than them.

Trying to thread back through her memories as she slumped back, she concluded that it was probably dead. Something had come from the black pillar, taken the spear, and ruined the lanterns…?

Closing her eyes she had a dim memory of a shadowy figure on an altar, a woman with dark hair streaked with red and gold fire. A different, much grander polearm, akin to a glaive. A sealed weapon? Was that what had freed them. The memory of the rage it had held for everything was muted, as if held away from her deliberately, and thereafter, it was hard to focus on events beyond everything warping, the creature being dragged into some other place and then everything else that was ‘dangerous’ with it somehow, leaving them and the spear here.

It was probably dead at the very least, which meant they had won, somehow.

Which raised a second question.

-Where has that unchained lizard actually dragged us?

-And was it the lizard or the Uncaged that did this?

One of them was clearly powerful enough to distort space unless that had been all the now ruined and vanished black pillar. What she did know of uncaged was entirely from second-hand accounts as well.

They were dangerous parasitic puppeteers who were some kind of sentient metalloid qi fluid that was very adept at soul infiltration. That was it really. As to whatever that lizard thing had been, were they the people who built this whole place? Were they responsible for the tunnels below?

To distract herself from those confusing and circular musings, she turned her attention back to the plaza. The outskirts showed signs of exceptional and recent battle damage in the buildings beyond its confines. Even in the mist and the stormy half-light, it was possible to make out buildings that had been melted like they were made out of wax, others were partially collapsed. A few appeared to have suffered colossal lightning strikes and others were frozen like bizarre balls of spikes akin to what the grey demons had done. Much of what survived with less damage was made of the same strange qi-repelling stone which, now that she could see it in the light, really was a very appealing shade of deep blue-grey with a fine crystalline grain.

~ Sana, Ruined Plaza ~

It shouldn’t have surprised her, Sana reflected, that her sister managed to recover quicker than she did. For all that the abominable lizard thing, now very dead, had seriously cut Arai up, the damage that it had done to her with ripping that bone out was deceptively convoluted. The process of healing her meridians, then her dantian, then her bone then her dantian then her meridians and so on took almost an hour.

Even then, that was shockingly fast. Before, even if this kind of injury hadn’t crippled her permanently, it would have had her bedridden for weeks and seeking all kinds of medicines for supplementary healing. As it was, an hour, some qi absorption and her mantra had the worst of the damage sorted with no appreciable, permanent damage other than through her memories of the whole ordeal.

“Are you good to sit up?” Arai asked making her way stiffly over to her.

“…”

“Probably,” she said after a moment’s consideration.

Her sister helped her up into a sitting posture and she experimentally tensed her body. Everything hurt.

“I’m getting really sick of this place,” she grumbled.

Helping her to her feet, Arai laughed and nodded. “If it’s any consolation, I don’t think this place is very keen on us either.”

“That horrible lizard did imply that much…” she agreed with a weak chuckle, as they limped over towards the central raised area of the plaza.

Sitting down on the edge, she looked at the spear that was now stabbed into a raised circular area in the middle of this space. It was, from what she could remember, what had been sealed within the subsidiary altar that the column… represented?

She shuffled through those rather blurry memories a few times before being satisfied that that was the right conclusion. The final memories of small hands pulling her back from that darkness and a sense of… had those hands been something related to this spear?

As far as she could tell had been quite unhappy about that from the patchy recollections of what happened. There had also been the other entity, the woman a grand prestige that had been at the middle of the altar. Had she been the entity that arrived after, that had destroyed the lizard abomination that was possibly possessed by the uncaged. Confusing, it was all still very confused in her head.

“This spear… doesn’t it seem awfully similar in its pattern and blade to the sword that Elaria was wielding?” her sister said after a moment.

“It does… but it’s not the same as the one in the middle?” she rubbed her temples, trying to draw that one out of her memories.

Very reluctantly they showed her the shadowy memories of that tall weapon with a fearful prestige, not a spear but a glaive of some kind?

“Yes… that was… more in the western continent's style?” her sister said pensively.

“You had that as well!?” she turned to look at her sister, surprised. “It felt like it was just me in there… but then I can’t really recall much about it at all... beyond the most general elements.”

Her sister frowned. “Well my awareness of what happened in there was very passive, the symbol had some link… to… you? I think?”

She nodded, considering the spear again. It really did look more like it took after the pattern of the blade Elaria had been wielding, compared to the glaive in her memories. The blade wasn’t curved for one. But shaped a bit like a broad-bladed Jian. The blade was made of dull black metal with details picked out in a green/gold copper-like metal. The haft was dark wood. It had a tassel of cloth just below where it was seamlessly hafted that was red, white and gold around the edges with a matt black centre.

Suddenly curious, because she got no intent at all from the spear, she got up and walked over to it. Walking around it, she considered it carefully and then holding her breath, reached out and grasped the haft.

Nothing untoward happened and she exhaled.

Carefully, she tried to extract it from the shallow dais where it was planted, but it was impossible to shift, even after she exerted as much physical strength as she was able.

Steeling herself, while Arai looked on with an expression between concern and trepidation on her face, she pushed a sliver of qi into it, only to have it be gently repelled. The impression she got suddenly was that she wasn’t strong enough to wield it. A follow-up sensation implied strongly that it was important that it remained here. There was a deep sense of ‘responsibility’ that came with that.

On the one hand, at least it didn’t seem… dangerous? On the other, it was a bit vexing having finally found a weapon that might pro-

‘It is safe for you to rest here, at least for a while,’ arrived in her head as a series of following impressions.

“Big sister is free now!”

“Big Evil will be punished if it appears!”

“Other Biggest evils will hide!”

The sudden series of thoughts made her gasp and let go of the spear.

“Laughter, amusement!” followed her somehow for a few seconds.

“Are you okay?” Arai asked grabbing her arm as she stepped backwards and stumbled as her physical condition caught up with her.

“Y-Yeah… just got a bit of a surprise.”

She exhaled again and collected herself. “Apparently it is fine for us to rest here… according to the spear.”

“It…is..?” her sister said a touch dubiously.

“It said that ‘Big Sister is now free’ and, paraphrasing slightly, ‘Big evil will be punished, and something about Biggest Evils hiding’,” she repeated.

Even as she said it, the way that it was presented, held an almost… childlike, or maybe cute determination. It was so upbeat in its presentation as well.

“I wonder why it was here…?” her sister said looking at the spear again… “And why was it sealed away?”

{Growth. Maturation. Experience. Responsibility}

They both flinched as the words arrived directly with them. They emanated from the spear in a much more vivid way than the earlier sensations had. Some of what came with those words was simple enough for her to extrapolate on, however other bits were much more profound. What was most obvious within that was that it was originally placed here to get stronger, to grow somehow? To gain experience while looking over others. It had a task that had been entrusted to it. An important task. There was a ‘pride’ in there and a sense of ‘conviction’ that again put her in mind of a child who was conscientiously observing a task that a parent had set them.

{Fall. Terror. Mendacity. Tragedy. Villains. Sealing. Sideways Means. Greed, Evil, Big Villains! Chains, Horror, Alone, Sorrow. Long Suffering.}

The comprehension and understanding of those words came like waves one after the other.

This place had become ruined because there had been a ‘Big Disaster’ elsewhere, everyone had become afraid and done stupid things, not followed rules, acted in not good ways.

Deception and panic had been subverted. Greedy people had coveted them. Then villains arose. Many were sacrificed.

Villains had used sideways means to seal Big Sister, used them to betray her and then started to use them to refine Big Sister, seeking to steal... something.

Big Villains had taken their powers from those other villains, revealing their hands and tried to turn them to evil, to corrupt their purpose somehow, seeking to offer up Big Sister to ‘Unspeakable Evil’ and grasp something called the ‘Over-Soul’, or maybe ‘All-Soul’.

With that, came ‘Shame’, ‘Sorrow’ and ‘Rage’.

They stared at where the pillars had been.

In her mind’s eye she saw once again the ‘corpse lights’, that vast plain of sealed, desiccated corpses within the array… recalled the words of the lizard thing, or maybe the creature that had seized it.

It had shouted; 'How have their bindings come undone.'

{Evil. Old Evil. Big Evil. Angry Evil. Fate-Seizing Evil. Ancient Evil. Greedy Evil, Sleeping Evil. Waking Evil. Hunting Evil. Devouring Evil. Outside Weird Evil. Defiling Evil. Abnormal Evil…Unspeakable Evil}

As if in response to her consideration of the lizard, a blizzard of words erupted from the spear in a bewildering swarm of intentions and outrage. It was like it was checking things off that were bad on some kind of metaphysical finger count. There was no real understanding given of what was what, but the impression was clear.

Down here, there were a lot of Evil things and they should never see the light of day.

Following on from that came another series of slightly more clarifying words.

{Suppression, Role}

That had nothing to do with evils, and seemed to be more to do with old stupidity and a responsibility to train or something like it.

{After Fall, Big Suppression, Huge Danger, Calamity, Saving, Following Stupidity, Greed Villain-Above, Betrayal, Sealing, Catastrophe, Confusion.}

She stared the spear dully, trying to sort that out in her head. What it seemed to boil down to was that the spear—and other weapons?—had had a task here to suppress or control something, after the fall or whatever it was, the danger had been bigger? Their task harder, they had averted a calamity, saved many people, yet because of that people had gotten greedy for their power, then at a pivotal moment they were all betrayed and a villain sealed away everything in this place, trapping…

-Oh.

-Monkeyshit.

They stared at each other.

“Do you mean that spirit one?” Arai queried.

{MENDACIOUS}

The word was howled rather than spoken, making them both stumble back and sit down as the spear raged. The space twisted around them faintly and the entire plaza shook ominously for a moment before everything subsided back into calm.

{Apology, uncontrolled, Shame, anger, safe.}

The spear sent a strange set of words afterwards that almost held the manner of sobbing in frustration. Bits were starting to slot together in her head now, the chain of events that had led to… well… everything.

“It’s… okay. It’s been a bad day for everyone...” she muttered, reaching out and patting the spear sympathetically.

Between what the library spirits had hinted, what that spirit had said when it sent them down here, and what the lizard had implied and now this, she was pretty sure now…

“What about the Eldritch Moon mushrooms?” she asked it.

{Outside Weird Evil}, the spear replied after a short pause

“The 'Spider Queen', in the depths?”

{Evil} the spear replied, almost seeming to sigh.

“The 'grey demon things'?”

{…}

“Big, grey-skinned, several metres tall, a lot of roaring, look like an ape without fur?”

{Angry Evil} the spear supplied after a moment.

“The sludge pits?” she asked after a moment of further contemplation.

{Amusing, Sludge-Slime, Evil.}

She paused, considering that, it was considering the spiders and the sludge… no slime? She turned that word over in her head, it made sense actually, Slime Pit, were both just Evil things? Was that its way of saying they were simply monsters in some way, compared to the other more specific entities?

“What about the people who were here… the four-armed Lizards?” she asked at last.

{Abandoned, Big Evil, Hallow, Unspeakable Evil}

“And the thing that was controlling the sea beast?” Arai added.

{…}

{Fate-Seizing Evil}

They both looked at the spear. Her mouth was dry she realised. Was it implying that the Uncaged was less dangerous than the lizards?

The spear was silent for a moment, before it spoke again, more deliberately she felt.

{Denial, Four Arm Lizard Abandon, Unspeakable Evil, Robe-Lizard, Big Evil, Fate-seizing Evil, Bigger Evil. Weaker… Now…}

For the spear that was almost an essay of thoughts compared to before. Each word unpacking itself rapidly in her head to explain and clarify matters. The lizard people had been lost somehow, fallen in the thrall of this Unspeakable Evil, which was a very dangerous thing. Perhaps the most dangerous thing? The robed lizard had been their leader here, a Big Evil in its own right that had been killed by the Uncaged, who was technically a bigger evil than the lizard but had been weaker or weakened somehow?

“Thank you for elaborating…” she said, giving the spear a salutation in appreciation of it having taken the time to unpick that

{Amusement, unnecessary…. Gratitude}

“Well that clarifies quite a lot,” she sighed, running a hand through her hair.

“—And we know that the sludge things are called slimes," Arai agreed. "Which is not a word I would have associated with them before, but is oddly fitting…”

It’s not speaking to us in Easten either, but Imperial Common somehow?” her sister mused, eyeing the spear again.

{Apology. Mind. Mana-Qi. Take-intent. Small-link, shared-ordeal. Your words. Easier.}

The spears explanation made sense when she viewed it like that. It was able to forge a connection with them due to their shared experience. The comprehension of the words it was speaking came through the connection between its intent and their qi. It was easier for it to adapt to their words than it would be for them to adapt whatever words it spoke natively presumably. It even apologised. It occurred to her, yet again, that it was awfully polite. Immortal Weapons were never this polite in stories, except to their owners.

{Owner? Improper!}

The spear sulked faintly at that implication, making her stare at it. The implication was that nobody should own another, that that was… wrong. Very profoundly wrong in fact.

{Immortal? Denial, Big Sister Immortal. Immortal Ceaseless, Immortal Absolute, Immortal Dominion, Small-self, Young, Grown, Dream}

“Uhhhh…” she tried to process that, the intention that came with the words was as profound as it was confusing.

As near as she could grasp, the spear was implying a somewhat different definition of Immortality than what she had been thinking of.

“Dao?” she asked it curious.

{… path, voyage, limitless}

“Huh,” was all Arai could say.

“Is this Big Sister the glaive we saw?” she asked.

{Big Sister} the spear confirmed. {Scary, Protector, Powerful, Supreme, Awe, Dream.}

Sitting back she sighed, trying to process all that. This confirmed quite a bit, she thought as she sorted things out in her own head as best she could. It was still a shock that they had finally found something that didn’t seem to want to kill them and had so far been on the level.

{Annoyed. Good. Protected. Apologise.}

Ah… they both felt bad as a burst of annoyance and sorrow flitted from the spear as it took clear offence at her... thoughts?

“You can hear my thoughts?” she asked dully.

{…}

The Spear sent a series of suggestions that were somewhere between a sulk and a rebuke. It had protected them, how was it not righteous, they had saved it, saved big sister, there was no way it would harm them.

When it was put in that context, she felt ashamed suddenly. There had been a kernel of distrust in her mind, a paranoia even with the symbol seemingly quite at ease now. Part of her still felt... uneasy though… wondering if it was a…

{…}

The spear's sulking eyes on her—almost like those of a small fluffy animal that knew she had done wrong—made her feel even worse.

-But even so…

“Look…” her sister started to speak, before pausing with a wince…

{Before-incautious, idiot}

She grimaced as the spear pointed out that she had been more than happy to try drawing it and having had a conversation of several minutes, this was only just occurring to her now?

That was a point she had to concede, it had had more than ample opportunity and had been very patient with them. There were also other strange concepts that were filtering in there as well, the overriding one being such a familiar one it felt almost alien after so long in this hellish place. ‘Hospitality’. The idea that there was a certain code to how things were, and that that pact having been entered, all parties were at least respectful of obligation and propriety.

“Ah… sorry,” she sighed, scrubbing her hands through her hair in frustration. “Look… We haven’t met a single living thing up until now in this horrible place... Not a single thing... That so far didn’t want to either eat us, kill us, possess us, turn us into mushrooms or all of the above.”

{Pity, understanding, faint amusement, survived. Impressive. Growth}

If the spear could have shaken its head or laughed she suspected it probably would have. The intention that came from the words was sympathetic though, with a faint hint of ‘Well this is why we are superior’. The acknowledgement of the sheer feat of their survival left her a bit divided though.

The way it appraised their survival also made her wonder about the symbol and this ‘Physique’.

{Old thing. Curious. Uncommon. Mortal Physique}

The spear's sending confirmed that it was somewhat aware of it.

-Oh, of course, if it’s reading our thoughts, she shook her head wryly.

The symbol snickered quietly, mirroring her own inner derision at her lack of common sense in that regard.

{‘Many’ Physique. Big. Heavenly Not-Interesting. Earthly Rare. True Impressive. Mortal Unusual-Growth.}

That was an interesting ranking she thought. The stress on many was odd, that meant that what they had was probably an unusual deviation.

“Why are Heavenly Physiques not interesting?” she asked, thinking about what Ling Yu had told her before—what seemed like a small lifetime ago now—about various physiques.

{Inborn. No talent. Luck. Blessing. Less growth. Destiny. Not interesting}

They both stared at the spear. What seemed a fairly simple statement was in fact mind-twistingly complex a soon as she started to properly consider what it was saying. It made sense, in a way she could rationalise though.

‘Heavenly Physiques’ were a blessing of the heavens, from the Heavenly Dao so people who got them would rely on them and not push themselves as much? Or maybe it meant that because they were given by the heavens they were always what they were and couldn’t change?

A burst of annoyance came from the spear as if it was trying to simplify something and it didn’t quite have access to the right words to make it clear to them.

{Denial. Inborn. Less fate. Less progress. First power. Hard exceeding limits. Limits lower.}

She had to turn that over in her head several times before she thought she had made sense of it.

“Do you mean that people have to be born with a Heavenly Physique and that that limits their potential somehow? That growing beyond that is hard because they are already so close to…. the Dao?” she asked eventually.

“So someone with a Heavenly Physique starts off strong, but never gets much stronger… or it is very hard for them to get much stronger because of the nature of the Physique?” her sister added.

{Correct. Truth. Heavenly Physique. Fate same fate. Mortal not fate.}

“Ohh...”

They both nodded in comprehension... kind of.

“So people with Heavenly Physiques have something to do with a world's Fate and that makes their future growth harder?”

{Truth}

That was one gnarly fate thrashed collection of nuance, she thought.

“So…what about Mortal Physiques?” her sister asked before she could.

{Suffering, Unusual Thing, Big Leap. Potential, Accumulation, Deliver-Aquire Fate. Never inborn}

{...}

The spear paused for several long seconds before also adding {—Mortality}.

She tried to work out what the fates that actually meant. Compared to the Heavenly Physique, that explanation was positively esoteric.

{Immortal is Heavenly, Immortal Inborn, unknowing Mortal, Mortal knowing, Lives.}

The spear finally expounded somewhat further, which actually… didn’t help at all. Beside her, her sister was also frowning and looking perturbed. Compared to before, this was well above either of their theoretical knowledge of ‘cultivation’, and it seemed like the spear was similarly limited either in its own way to phrase the terms or by their own lack of knowledge somehow?

Its frustration felt, slightly, to her like what she remembered in her Mother when she had first been trying to explain ‘Qi’ to her.

{Truth} the spear almost sighed in relief as she reached that comparison.

Sighing herself, she pondered each word in turn, thoughtfully exploring the potential meanings.

-Suffering isn't… suffering? is it suggesting that the implication is closer to the philosophical concept? Suddenly she found herself really regretting not paying more attention to her 'classics' from the lessons Old Oudeng and their father had occasionally given on these kinds of topics.

“Any ideas?” she asked her sister at last.

“Suffering seems like it should relate to the philosophical aspects of mortality?” Arai suggested with a helpless look that certainly mirrored her own. “Regarding ‘Unusual thing’, I have almost no idea, same with ‘Big Leap’, unless that means we advance fast? ‘Potential’ seems to relate to… what the Physique does? ‘Accumulation’ I have no idea on either. ‘Deliver-Acquire Fate’ seems like it should suggest we can gain fate in some way? As to ‘Never Inborn’ that seems somewhat clear in the context of the Heavenly Physique."

“Yeah… you can’t be born with a Mortal Physique?” she mused.

They both looked at the spear, which was remarkably spear-like all of a sudden. She got the distinct impression that their ignorance was a disappointment somehow.

{Mortal; living-learning, experiencing, progressing.}

When it was couched like that she suddenly felt a bit stupid. Of course, that was what it meant. It was a remarkably scholarly reading of the word though.

“Only mortals can learn them?” she ventured after a moments thought.

{Truth} the spear really did sigh that time she was sure, then it continued, {Never Inborn, not connate, Non-Inheritance.}

“Oh,” Arai frowned suddenly. “I get it… I think? You can inherit a Heavenly Physique from your parents? But you cannot pass on a Mortal Physique? It’s um... unique?”

The spear gave a suggestion that that was ‘good enough, but not really unique’.

“Suffering?” she asked, with an apologetic grimace, returning to that one.

{Suffering} it returned the word with extra emphasis somehow.

They both stared at it blankly and she got to see an inanimate object do a wonderful impression of someone walking off and holding their head in their hands cursing the ignorance of others.

{Suffering, Unusual Thing, Big Leap. Potential, Accumulation, Acquire Fate. Not inborn}

The sending this time was subtly different as it enunciated the words.

-Oh.

“Oh...”

She winced, that was actually very profound,

-So i was thinking about it wrong, she reflected with a mental sigh. The explanations are paired. Mortal and Immortal, Mortal and Heavenly?

“Mortal and Heavenly Physiques can end up in the same place?” she asked, to confirm.

{Truth} the spear almost sighed again in relief.

“They start in different places. Heavenly ones are already absolute, so there is no…. achievement?”

{Truth!} The spear said, clearly happy that its ‘explanation’ was finally sinking in.

“Whereas… mortal ones… um, lead to lots of trials and mean that the person who has them has to grow to get to the same place?” she added.

{Truth} the spear nodded mentally.

“—So one is a forgone thing, but it’s possible for it to underachieve…" her sister added. "And the other is a difficult thing, but it’s possible to overachieve?”

{Somewhat...}

The intention of the spear was mixed again, in a way that made her want to just groan and put her head in her hands along with it.

“It’s more about the... the nature of the journey than the destination?” she hazarded, thinking back to why it didn’t consider Heavenly Physiques ‘interesting’.

{Somewhat Truth, Interesting... Different...}

The spear sighed in relief and also with a hint of what she felt was accepted resignation of their perceived ignorance. Following after was a subtle suggestion that they should not think too hard about some of this. That that might actually be detrimental in some way? That was not at all worrying, but probably now was not the time to dig into that mire. This was already confusing enough.

That still left unexplained the bits about ‘Accumulation’ and ‘Acquiring Fate’, but she suspected she might start to bleed from her eyes before they got to the bottom of that.

“Thank you for explaining,” she said saluting the spear again, which returned a sensation of happy nodding.

“Talk about confusing,” Arai murmured, sitting back with a soft sigh.

“Yep, but at least it gives us a better understanding of a few things…” she pointed out.

With that, if not settled, at least somewhat clearer, she was reminded of the other thing that had struck her.

Picturing the sword form that the two of them had been practising, she asked. “What about this?”

{…}

{Disbelief.}

“Right, that’s… not exactly helpful,” Arai chuckled, rolling her eyes.

{…}

{DISBELIEF.}

“Uhhhh… okay…” she winced at the sending and decided to set that aside for now.

“So..?” she was about to swap tack and ask a bit more about what this place actually was, except the spear just kept sending strange intentions now.

As far as she could see, it just sat there muttering ‘Disbelief’ over and over, ignoring them.

“Uhh..?” her sister said dully.

“It seems to be in shock,” was all she could say really.

...

Left with nothing else to do they recuperated until their injuries were fully healed. The spear did eventually recover some sense of normality, but it swiftly begged off further questions, stating it also needed to recuperate and talking to them was draining. It didn’t seem to mean that in any negative way, but rather as a simple statement that talking to them cost it qi and it was still recovering. Although she suspected it was also unused to talking to people after so long, much as they were interacting with something not trying to murder them. It did reassure them again though, that here was safe-ish and that there was nothing worse than {evil}, with a small e nearby, and even then not that nearby.

It was beyond strange, she had to reflect as she just lay there on the damp stone watching the swirling clouds in the perpetual grey stormy evening light as the hours ticked by, not to be in mortal peril for once. She hadn’t realised just how continuous everything had been. Even when they were refining the Spider Queen's Core Qi, there had been a certain paranoid tension.

There was a certain joy in just experiencing a space that wasn’t fetid and claustrophobic though. Mist and rain were both refreshing in their own way, although the latter still made her flinch at odd shadows of buildings. Her qi replenished quickly at least, and afforded continuous rest without the stress of doing much at all, her damaged and battered meridians were mostly fixed within the first day. Her dantian took a bit longer, that process was iterative with her ruined rib and the brutal trauma dealt to her inner organs by the lizard.

What was truly remarkable though, was watching what the symbol, the manifestation of the Mortal Physique was doing quietly throughout all this. As her meridians were fixed up and her dantian repaired, her body’s innate circulation systems for qi were subtly shifted around to make it much, much harder for her to suffer that kind of injury from the ruined rib again. As qi flowed around her body, she saw how these changes were making it easier for qi to bypass non-essential elements of her circulation system, introducing redundancies to meridians as they were reinforced and subtly reinforcing those that could not be adapted, until her twelve basic meridian channels were barely recognisable from what they had been before. It certainly gave new meaning in her mind to what ‘Formless Permutations Physique’ could actually represent.

In the end, she reckoned it took them around two days to be back to something approaching ‘hale and healthy’, which returned to stark focus that they had been existing on a knife-edge for so long that she had almost forgotten what anything approaching normality felt like.

The plaza itself was quite easy to explore, being big, open and roughly circular with exits in two directions. The one she arbitrarily decided was ‘north’ was blocked off by a badly melted building and the street beyond it was barely any better. The buildings that were accessible from the plaza had a few exits into them, but all of them led to enclosed complexes and lots of sealed doors.

As they poked around, warily, few if any showed a lot of evidence of occupation. The spears definition of ‘safe’ also kept bothering her, as it hadn’t really specified a particular distance for ‘nothing much around here’. Since then it had barely said two words to them and seemed either distracted or determined to ignore them for some reason. The implication it gave was that the locality around the square was safe at least, but their exploration rapidly showed that there was an underworld here as well, basements, sub-basements and then shafts down in several of the buildings that could be wells, which ended in water hundreds of metres below.

Most of what was left in the buildings around the plaza could thus be classified into two categories she decided; broken junk and garbage. The former was stuff like ancient stone containers, the odd table and chair and things that might have been beds in a few rooms. The latter was literal garbage. Rotten carcasses of rat-like things, the odd spider and in one case a room with a dozen decaying eel-like things hanging from the roof as if something had left them there to cure.

“So, what do we do now?” she said with a sigh, as they sat back on the edge of the dais in the rain, having completed a fairly exhaustive search of the plaza perimeter.

“Set out a few more containers in the hope of getting some water to get clean?” her sister suggested drily, gesturing to the dozen or so ruined bowls and jars they had dragged out of buildings for that purpose.

“Tempting, I’m still vexed that we lost all the weapons,” she signed.

“Well we still have the leaf,” her sister pointed out.

They turned their gaze towards the other weapons. The lizard had shattered both blade and sword beyond repair, unnoticed by either of them, at some point during their altercation. The daggers were missing, discarded somewhere on a distant coastline she guessed along with much of what had been in their crude packs that hadn't been lost in the beast.

“I’ve yet to see bits of that stone that are bigger than my…” she waved her hand at her torso to indicate approximately the size of the blocks.

“If you wish for it hard enough maybe the symbol will give you bigger breasts,” her sister giggled.

“Stop stealing my part!” she pouted, giving Arai a mock glare.

It was a problem though. The plaza was clad in that stone but it was, for the most part, thin slabs that were barely half a metre square. The quality was also nowhere close to what they had found deep below.

“Its qi devouring properties have been compromised somehow anyway,” she remarked at last, throwing a chunk across the plaza and watching it hit the far wall with a clack.

“I guess that means we either sit here and cultivate, or go explore?” Arai suggested as they both looked at the chunk she had just tossed.

They both considered the qi in their surroundings.

Whatever had happened as a by-product of their altercation with the lizard abomination and the pillar had caused enough disruption to it to make it rather awkward to fully refine. Even the symbol struggled with the most turbulent aspects of it. While they had made rapid progress with their physical recovery and replenishing their bodies' reserves of unrefined qi, that seemed to be a very different set of processes within the context of their 'cultivation' when compared to actually advancing their cultivation foundation itself.

“Cultivation seems kind of a bust until things settle here I think,” her sister said eventually. “Also, it’s not that I doubt what the spear said, but it considered the slimes and spiders as ‘evils’, and even the Spider Queen as an ‘Evil’, which is a subtle enough distinction as it is.”

“Yeah…” she nodded and stared at the exit to the south.

That was the crux of the exploration really, how deserted was the place they were in. She suspected that most surface-level things were dead in whatever had happened before and during their altercation, but that might not necessarily extend to ‘below’.

“In favour of exploration though,” her sister said with an eye roll, “it’s not that I am particularly concerned about modesty at this point, but some clothing and another weapon would be kinda nice.”

...

Exploration turned out to be a touch more involved than either of them expected. Their careful progress was slowed when they found out the exact scope of their location, which was a town that was, at face value, half again as big as the entirety of West Flower Picking Town. Calling it a town seemed disingenuous really, it was basically a small island city.

Stood on the high points of one of the rocky outcroppings into which buildings had been carved like a warren, they considered their surroundings properly.

“How far away do you reckon those cliffs are?” her sister muttered.

“At least twenty miles I’d guess,” she said, making a few crude calculations in the air using the scrip.

“I mean… I knew we were on an island… but I was kinda expecting it to be…”

“Closer to the shore?” she supplied, wiping warm rain off her face.

“Closer to the shoreline,” her sister agreed with a sigh as she leant on the balcony of the viewing platform.

Looking around them, she couldn’t see any other land beyond that which might lie as a distant line in the ocean to their north between them and the cliff. In every other direction, it was just white waves, huge swells and visibility vanishing into rain and cloud.

“The humidity is also…” she finally said.

The humidity was impressive, she had to guess it was close to summer temperatures outside, with humidity to match the subtropical cloud forest, even apart from the rain. Thunder rumbled distantly and a few bolts of indigo lightning skittered across the southern horizon, fading away.

“If this is a cavern, how big is it?” her sister muttered, shading her eyes.

“You ask me, but who do I ask?” she half-joked. “And don’t say 'the spear' or I’ll try my fate-thrashed best to push you off and see if you bounce.”

She focused qi in her eyes and stared again at the horizon in the rain to the north for a few seconds before giving up again. She could just make out the shadowy line of the coast beyond the waves if she held her head very still. Rapid movements in her vision with that degree of qi in her ocular meridians still made her feel nauseous.

“At least, the island seems unoccupied now,” her sister noted, having turned her gaze back to the rest of the small city below them.

Nodding, she swept the rooftops with her own gaze. On the way here they had had ample opportunity to see it up close. The majority of the occupants of the island appeared to have been the four-armed lizard people. They had found corpses of some grey-skinned ape demons and a large number of bipedal rat-lizard creatures imprisoned in a complex she could only term ‘fighting pits’. The city itself seemed to have a surprisingly robust economy. The staple food from what she could gather of ‘shops’ was the rat-lizard creatures, supplemented by some mushrooms and algae-like substances and a wide variety of very dubious-looking sea critters. It made her very glad she didn’t need to eat anything frankly. Elsewhere, there were lots of shrines mostly devoted to sacrificing anything and everything to idols shrouded in rotten yellow robes.

All the dead seemed to have originated from either the massive draining power the pillar had been able to exert or the conflict between the controlled yellow-robed lizard creature and almost everyone and everything else in the city. Nearly all the extant corpses appeared to have died of either soul shock or qi dispersal, their meridians were fused, dantians, cores and even soul foundations—near as she could detect them—ruined and scattered. Bodies were devoid of qi, and everything was starting to decompose in the humidity. Death qi was already beginning to permeate everywhere, to the point where she was beginning to wonder if ‘risen dead’ were a thing here.

Their exploration of shops and warehouses on the way here, such as they were had also shown that everything had been damaged by that draining power at a truly fundamental level. On the one hand, it made exploration almost suspense free, as all the wards, formations, unsettling symbols and such that were plastered everywhere were totally inert. Their feng shui was such that even now, they made her skin crawl and she could see their inauspicious natures clearly in the way Death Qi was drawn to them and Yin Qi bled into shadows in their proximity. On the other hand, it was deeply vexing, as the city had been rich. Warehouses and stores that survived had had a lot of spirit mushrooms, herbs, cores and even pills in them, all ruined. Weapons were all garbage now and what spirit ores they found in a smithy were totally wasted.

“Where do you want to try next?” her sister asked, squeezing some more water out of her hair.

“The docks to the southwest seem as good a place as any, there are some fairly large constructions still standing down there?” she suggested, considering the city below.

“Not to mention we can probably jump in the harbour to wash,” Arai chuckled darkly.

“You have more faith than I in what’s in that harbour water,” she said drily, hopping over the edge of the railing and beginning the descent down the side of the wall back towards the city below.

The trip back across the city gave her more time to consider its layout. It appeared to have two general areas. The inner ring was focused around a bunch of plazas of which the one holding the spear was the biggest by a fair margin. Much of that core region was built in the same rock-cut rectangular style, with pitched roofs and square fortified towers. Amid the later sprawl, they had found at least three sets of defensive walls as well. Most of the buildings were easily identifiable by the cladding of the repelling stone. In the rain and the damp, it was really quite a pretty building material, setting aside the obvious strategic uses of the stuff, she could see why it might catch on aesthetically in this place, with its perpetual twilight.

Mostly the inner part of the city had survived pretty well, apart from some areas of scorching, a few lightning strikes and the ruined bit to the north of the spear plaza which was thick with bodies. Elsewhere, it was possible to make out clusters of smaller complexes in the same style, mostly buried beyond convenient watchtowers, in later construction. It was these later constructions that had not fared anywhere near as well. The lizard folk had built vast warrens of ad hoc stone buildings, cut from a dark grey-black stone and crudely cemented together. The lack of any kind of wood for construction meant the roofs, which they were mainly traversing, were a twisted warren of domes and flat spaces.

Districts were heavily fortified and segmented with sturdy, squat fortress towers and walls centred on the older watchtowers, with warehouses, shrines and sacrificial pits scattered at random through them, interspersed with housing districts and markets. Most of this they passed without ever pausing. The construction quality had not been able to stand up to the scale of warfare that had been unleashed, and the majority of the populace were dead where they had been going about their day to day business of… slaughter and ritual sacrifice from what she could see. Many of the buildings were collapsed, burnt, exploded, fused or otherwise deformed. Death Qi was everywhere and though the wards were all defunct, the inauspicious feng shui alignments that riddled everything made her nauseous just being near them.

That many streets literally ran red with rotting material, blood and broken corpses did not help.

“Somehow, this place is almost as bad as Evergrove," she remarked, as they avoided a particularly large slaughter pit surrounded with the impaled corpses of tens of thousands of rat-lizard folk in a deeply unsettling array formation that made her want to vomit. "even though the populace of this place seem to deserve everything that happened to them...”

“The evil within them seems awfully similar though,” was all Arai muttered by way of reply, and looking around it was hard to gainsay that observation.

Eventually, they arrived at the docks, just as the rain stopped for a while. That was par for the course really, it would have to let up as soon as they decided to head into buildings to explore. This region was, as far as she could tell, as far away from their arrival point from the distant shore as possible. It seemed to show, in the somewhat more intact nature of the buildings that were there.

Now that they stood at the foot of a pier she could also see that this was a complex that originated with the same phase of construction as the plaza and the watchtowers. Later piers and the waterfront had been built up at some point. Even here, there was still the sound of buildings succumbing to slow collapse in the wind and rain in every direction. Glyphs were plastered heavily across the shore front buildings and harbour walls, replete with their inauspicious vibe.

“Thankfully none of these show any sign of recovering,” her sister said scuffing one on the rough-cut stone.

“Yeah, let’s not tempt the fates there, they have not had a good track record of late,” she joked.

“No… they have not,” her sister agreed, looking up at the sky.

“Speaking of weird things though…” she said staring at the far side of the harbour.

“Well, we are on an island, it makes sense they would have ships,” Arai said as they made their way around the dock towards the nearest ruined hulk.

“I know… it’s just…”

“Surprisingly mundane?”

“Well... yes…” she nodded lamely.

The nearest charred hulk appeared to be clinker-built and designed for fast sailing, insofar as she was no expert on boats at all beyond the few you saw on the river between West Flower Picking Town and Blue Water City.

“They appear to have died by lightning at any rate…” her sister remarked as they walked across the wharf beside it.

The next one was in much the same style, she observed as she nodded in agreement with that observation. By some minor miracle, its paintwork had survived in lurid shades of green and yellow. It was also missing its mast, and she couldn’t help but note that various bits of charred timber were imbedded in buildings across the harbour.

“Based on the amount of charred timber a few of these ships must have properly exploded,” her sister said, picking a bit up and then tossing it away.

“There is almost no wood used in any kind of land-based construction?”

She picked up another bit of wood and sent some qi into it. To her surprise, it turned out to be spirit wood, depleted of course, and suffering the same fundamental malaise as almost anything else. Underneath the yellow and green swirls it was possible to see blue paint as well that was much older.

“I’ll bet you one spirit stone they captured these somehow,” she said with a dark chuckle passing the slab of wood to her sister

Arai looked at it and then shook her head wryly and tossed it away into the water.

“Pass, thanks!”

Entering the first of the warehouses, she was surprised to see how intact it was despite the outside looking nothing if not wobbly. The interior contents though were much as she expected. Badly burnt, despoiled and depleted in qi. They poked around in it for almost an hour, looking in crates, piles of this and that and through the various rooms. Much of what she found was already starting to decay, including bales of what were almost certainly things that the lizards had used to make cloth.

“So they flayed the grey-skinned ape demons and used their hides for cloth…” Arai remarked distastefully, staring at the half charred bales and crates before them.

“Can’t say I feel a lot of pity for the former, but I’ll give you that it is disgusting,” she agreed. “As is that,”—she kicked a second crate that contained the still damp, and now decomposing hides of small four-armed lizards—“They flayed their own kind as well it seems.”

“—And all of it appears fundamentally degraded from sustained Qi drain anyway…” Arai added, breaking off up a piece of grey ‘leather’ from a bundle and watching it crumble to dust. “I’m not sure whether that’s a good or a bad thing…”

She eyed the still soft skins with no intention of touching them at all. They were well on their way to breaking down. Elsewhere in this part of the warehouse, she could see racks of rat skins hanging as well now, as well as a few things that looked like either serpent skin or maybe the skin of some fish.

Without comment they departed that hall and went into the next one, which was thankfully much less unpleasant, holding large stacks of rock in various sizes and qualities, a few large piles of ore and mineral fuels. The ores and ingots were all thoroughly depleted, but many of them made her eyes itch oddly just looking at them. The greenish-purple ingots, in particular, felt particularly unclean in ways that she didn’t want to think about.

“Did they have a source of the qi-resistant stone I wonder?” Arai held up a small block.

“They weren’t obviously using it for buildings or houses that I saw, or anything much beyond a few crude totems and slabs in the city,” she mused, eyeing the stack of blocks.

“I guess they could be resources left over from the original builders? Some of this other stuff looks atypical as well.” Arai flipped open a box nearby that was set on a low shelf.

Turning to look at the stuff by the wall, she appraised the boxes. They had once, possibly quite recently in fact, been heavily restrained by warding’s based on their exterior carvings and the amount of blood daubed over it.

She stood by as her sister lifted various things out and put them on a nearby stack of slabs. To her eyes, it appeared to contain a rather random assortment of items. Several grey slates that looked like they were heavily corroded. A bunch of manuals written in the flowing script that had somehow survived the qi draining, several jars and pots that were now filled with cracked dull stones and crystals and a few boxes of wood and stone that were empty and showing signs of damage from the depletion.

Looking further along the shelf, as her sister poked through another box, she finally found other things of actual interest. Stacks of books.

Most were just as brittle and fragile as the ‘hides’. However, after a few minutes of careful rooting through them, she had picked out a few that were in somewhat better condition. Most were akin to the slim manuals her sister had found in the first crate. Flipping through them revealed very little of interest beyond the apparent durability of the paper that had gone into them. She recognised the language as the flowing script from the library, and occasionally double pages had complex diagrams with lots of annotation that looked like formations.

Putting those to one side she picked up one of the others, not expecting much. It was one of two thick, very battered tomes bound in proper leather. Such books were common back in Yin Eclipse only among those who couldn’t afford jade but wanted something more durable than paper and were not that much cheaper than a really cheap jade anyway. At face value the one she selected was also drained of qi like everything else, so she was surprised when it drew a tiny bit of qi out of her palm and became warm as soon as she lifted it.

Gasping, she dropped it and jumped back, cursing that she had let her curiosity run away with her, even as she checked that it hadn’t done anything untoward to her.

Bending down, Arai picked up the book with a frown. “Isn’t that symbol kind of… familiar?”

“I don’t...” she was about to say ‘follow’, but Arai showed her the cover of the book, which now had a 'symbol' present on it, ghosted against the faded and battered leather.

It looked odd at first but as she stared at it, shifted in her mind into common imperial and read ‘Invocation’. A few moments later, a second line of text appeared below it. Its faded gold lettering shifted through several different alphabets before becoming Easten and translating itself in a way that was only half comprehensible.

‘Treatise on fundamentals’ by 'Bright Sunrise' of 'The Border People'

“Huh, that’s handy,” was all she could muster in the end.

“Yeah, it seems to be like the text in those manuals for core martial arts back home, where the text uses your qi to configure itself to a language and alphabet that the reader best understands,” her sister mused.

“Should we open it?” she asked, it was possible she was being overly paranoid, but still, this place was clearly run by a bunch of evil things…

Arai put it down on the impromptu table and they considered it.

“Well…” her sister said after a moment’s consideration, “If you consider things logically, it was left here randomly in a warehouse that doesn’t have a lot of warding on it, in amongst a random bunch of books and other general goods. From everything we have seen of these lizards, if it was either dangerous or valuable it would like have been snared and stashed away?

“Anyway,” Arai added drily, eyeing the other one and then the rest of the books. “None of this stuff looks at all like things these lizards have made.”

That was an excellent point, she had to concede, working through her paranoid objections that were mostly in response to her being stupid and picking it up without checking first. Most of the tomes and other such things they had seen that were ‘definitively’ lizard make were written in blood on large sheets of the grey hide and about as auspicious looking as the silhouette of a young master of the nobility crossing your doorway claiming you owed them spirit stones.

-Aiii... Steeling herself, she picked up the other one.

It also drew a small portion of qi from her palm and became warm to the touch. This time she focused on it and felt a faint sense of release from the object.

After second the strange and oddly familiar symbol and text re-arranged itself in her mind’s eye to read ‘Evokation’.

The text beneath it did the same thing, flitting through almost a dozen different sets of symbols before becoming Easten.

‘Principles Two by Enclosure Strength’

She eyed the name dubiously. That had all the hallmarks of like-for-like meaning substitution. The title itself was also suspicious now she thought about it. The grammar looked off for the Easten it was proclaiming to be.

Staring at the book, she put her hand on the cover again and with a combination of qi and intent tried to convince whatever was showing her the name in its translated meanings to just display the letters so she could read it phonetically.

It resisted her for a full thirty seconds before finally giving up and drawing a bit more qi from her.

The title changed to ‘Principles II’ while the author became ‘Cl aud la Dru S U S’.

She mentally cursed Easten for being weird in its less common phonetic syllables and indicative accents and concluded that the author was either called 'Claudia Drusus' or 'Claud Ladrusus'.

“Pass me that one a second would you?” she asked Arai.

“Sure,” her sister passed her the tome and she repeated the same process.

It now read ‘Invocation: Treatise on Fundamentals’ by ‘Al B in U S of M Er C iA’. That made a lot more sense on a certain level, even if the name hadn’t been quite as weird as the other one.

“Ah, I thought that was kinda odd,” her sister observed watching the name shift.

Flipping through the pages of the one about 'Invocation', her sister continued to examine the one she had been before.

They sat there in silence for quite some time before Arai finally put hers aside with a frown. “This one is some kind of instruction manual about defensive arts, the wording is weird, but it talks about methods to give minor boosts in defence against elemental energies on a temporary basis for the most part.”

Her sister scanned another few pages as she looked on.

“Is that one about resisting energy drain?” she said eventually, pointing to one her sister had flipped past.

“Seems to be,” Arai looked through the next few pages as well. “The whole chapter is on that it seems. The wording is very weird as well.”

“That’s probably because it’s in Easten or something?”

“It’s… not though… it’s more like… what the spear was doing. The words are clearly Easten...” her sister said with a frown. “But...”

She stared at the page and frowned as well. The words were Easten but the meanings that were arriving in her head as she read it was in imperial common, even if the words on the page were not.

Her sister kept flipping pages and started to frown. “This is really different from what we would understand from cultivation arts… Some of these seem pretty good but they don’t last long and they require weird things.”

She stopped on one page, which held a full-page diagram that looked awfully like one of the arrays that they had seen people by the lake shore practising a small eternity ago, just much simpler.

“This one here for instance. ‘Dancing Lights’ I think. It creates a light source that lasts at the very least for one minute. To use it you need to chant a phrase, make a hand gesture in the appropriate fashion and have a piece of something called ‘wytchwood’.”

Her sister flipped the page and they both looked at the description and the drawing of the material.

“Isn’t that 'Sages Straight Brush' tree?” she said eventually.

“That would be my guess as well,” her sister agreed. “The text also says that some kind of glowing fire insect will do as well.”

“That seems more like talisman arts than a combat or utility art,” she mused.

“Yeah,” her sister said frowning. “What about yours?”

Turning her attention back to her own tome she started to flip through the pages. The early section spent a lot of time talking about basic elemental theory and the connection between different elemental effects to different types of fundamental stimuli. At that point, the translation of the tome did in fact founder, and she could only skip forward until things started making sense again.

The first chapter that held a ‘technique’ seemed to be something like a ‘Fire Bolt’ which, if she was understanding the text correctly would focus and hurl a small orb of fire qi at a target within forty or so metres range of the user that would explode on impact and poison them with residual qi for a short duration making them more susceptible to follow up fire attacks.

It only required a small chant and a hand gesture, but flipping over the pages of explanation she found notes that suggested the chant could be forgone entirely at the cost of decreased qi efficiency, requiring just the gesture and appropriate qi flow to use it.

“Well?” her sister said coming to peer over her shoulder, as she had been silent for several minutes she realised.

“We might have just hit some proper luck,” she said. “This is a book about basic offensive arts from this place, a lot of them seem comparable to Qi Condensation elemental arts.”

“Maybe heaven does have eyes…” her sister observed with an eye roll that got her an elbow in the side.

“We found this, not that scamming heaven that had us nearly killed by spiders, mushrooms, a sea beast, some evil cult and an uncaged,” she sniffed.

“You hear that heaven, you can go suck nameless-” Arai caught herself just in time, and they both flinched and stared upwards, but contrary to her expectations no thunder rippled

“...”

They both eyed the hole in the ceiling, but beyond the distant, natural thunder, there was no evidence of any angry retaliation for cursing out the eyes of the world.

“Dun Fanshu can go suck the nameless’s cock,” her sister muttered very quietly.

Nothing at all happened.

“Well that’s something,” she said exhaling. “In any case, it seems we have found something useful.”

They spent some further time poking around the connected series of warehouses. In the end, their exploration turned up two other books of a similar kind. One just called itself ‘Fundamentals of Elemental Exchange’ while the other was titled ‘Principles of Casting Version Nine’. Neither were as big as the Invocation and Evokation books, but held the same properties, and were if anything possibly more durable. The ‘Fundamentals’ book was in the middle of a heavily scorched bit of warehouse but barely showed any evidence of fire damage other than some discolouration. Several others didn’t seem to have been so lucky so they left them alone. One, entitled ‘Lightning’s Mystical Application for Beginners’, appeared to have quite ironically been damaged beyond legibility by the lightning bolt that had torn a hole in the roof of the warehouse and also probably caused the scorching around the ‘Fundamentals’ tome on reflection.

In the end, they packed all of the undamaged books into one of the smaller chests and then added a few of the least decayed bits of qi absorbent stone that were of sufficient dimension to be worth attempting to make weapons from. The loaded chest was surprisingly heavy, but between them, they were able to carry it.

After taking one last cursory look around the warehouse on the way out, they started back towards the spear. As they made their way back through the streets and across the rooftops, even the weather respected their good mood for once.