Memories of the Fall

Nobody really 'expects' the Undrenfolk, and yet, really, they should. They are far more invasive and observant than most powers realise, dismissing them as just some mutate rats hyped up on mana. The danger they bring is not so simply fixed with a few pest wards, doughty men with sticks breaking skulls in sewers and a dismissal of worse as rumours and the febrile ravings of those who would cause instability. Undrenfolk walk among us, see us for what we truly are, and hate us for it.

In the depths below the City of the Eternal Trimvirate they hunt them with a violence that is mocked in the courts of our land. In the deep south, beyond those savage deserts, their enclaves are left alone and our Princes and Dukes call it craven weakness and the naivety of the barbarian. The Isla Kingdoms hold them at bay with the blood sacrifice of legions and mausoleums to hope upon the Undren shore and our leaders sneer and say ‘they are only this much’, or use this as evidence that they are weak and that we can eke some new strip of godforsaken and useless rock in the ocean away from them for the price of a million lives and a decade of spilt blood.

If they really knew what the Undren were, their origin and their mantle and their dreams, understood what we have stolen from them, they would not be anywhere near as blasé and dismissive of the existential threat they pose.

They will happily die by the thousands, screaming vengance and judgement to bring a single scion of the surface down, because to the Undren Folk, we are the Great Enemy, Despoiler, Devourer, Deceiver, the Thief of All...

~Astoria Galadris Belmont, Principle Arch Magister of the Green Tower.

~ Sana, Island City Sewers ~

The Undren soon found them again, but in confined spaces, they were very much at a disadvantage despite their overwhelming numbers. Stunning them on mass in chokepoints with the ‘Thunderclap’ art turned out to be a remarkably efficient way to clear out the minions. The downside was that in these enclosed spaces the increased effectiveness was nearly as much of a hindrance as an asset. The book warned that friendly fire was very likely with the art, but she almost stunned herself a few times, never mind her sister. The tome said that limiting this aspect of the art would come with ‘experience’ in the ‘mechanism’ of the technique, but it was already not behaving quite as advertised as it was…

At least her cultivation was advancing at a noticeable rate now they were actively refining as many of the Undren as they could. She had also pretty much given up using anything other than the leaf blade now. Really she wanted to reach back in time and tell herself to do this a few weeks previously, when they were being inundated with spiders. However, it was what it was, and things had been frenetic in the depths, to say the least.

“Oh well,” she sighed out loud and smashed another Undren into a wall and refined its heart-core as she had come to think of them.

Now they were coming with short clubs of bone mainly. Spear wielders staying back and supporting in the narrow confines of the tunnels. This worked to their advantage for now, but if the Undren brought explosive rocks or the dust orbs down here she only foresaw a rematch of their early encounters with slimes.

Ahead of her, her sister slapped a lighting array trap on the wall and waved right. She nodded and followed after her. Keeping moving was the answer. As if to punctuate that, behind her, she heard the ominous skittering chitter of the other tactic being deployed against them. Hordes of rat critters. They rounded another bend and met several more Undren, dragging a spider corpse. Clearly, not all of those down here were hunting them. The Undren discarded their spider and leapt for them almost as one.

Her sister sighed as she smashed one into a wall, ripping its heart out even as its bone club smashed into her, leaving a red weal and nothing more on her skin. She kicked another on the leg and punched it in the neck, slicing its heart-core out and refining it. It was grizzly and almost inhumane. Even with the mantra blunting her emotions regarding it, she had seen more slaughter and bloodshed today than she had in the rest of her short life. The only way to move forward was to tell herself that this was the way. And the Undren would be dying anyway.

Arai waved at her and pointed on. She grimaced and used her movement art to crash through the other two. She ignored their cores and rushed after-

There was an acrid *thwack* behind them and a wave of numbness and heat passed through her as the lightning symbol detonated turning the corridor behind into a moving sea of incinerating rats.

It hit their backs as it swept through the tunnels and sent her sprawling, her skin smoking.

“Sorry,” her sister grimaced, pulling her up.

“That was… stronger than expected?” she muttered, shaking her limbs.

“Yeah, I put quite a bit more qi into it than we have been usually,” Arai said looking apologetic.

-And we have both gotten stronger, she didn’t need to add.

That was actually the first time she had been hit by a lightning array that wasn’t her own she realised. The last few times her sister had used them she had been well clear of their range-

The male spider danced out of the darkness on the ceiling and tried to decapitate her.

-Monkeyshit, she cursed.

She had nearly forgotten about those.

There was a short scuffle in the darkness as she freed the leaf blade to carve it up while trying to get stabbed by its lethally sharp legs as little as possible before it could get any distance on her and hauled out its core with her free hand and refined it.

Corrosive mist swirled in her vision as she rose, her wounds already healing.

She slapped down a water array for a change. She hadn’t done much with water symbols so far. Up until now, there had never really been enemies that should be notably weak to them. From what she could intuit from the intent that was innate to the design, this array centre should turn all the qi within its activation area into a mist of razor-sharp blades that would lacerate anything they touched. That was the other reason she hadn’t really bothered with them, she reflected as she hurried on. Getting caught in that by accident sounded… unpleasant.

Moving swiftly on, she could hear screaming, chittering and howling behind them. Apparently, the Undren were about as fond of unfriendly spiders as they were. A few moments later a flicker of bioluminescent light swept through the corridors. The screaming and fighting intensified.

“I am glad they met a spider mother and not us,” she remarked as she caught up to her sister who was pulling a male spider leg out of her shoulder.

“Wonderful. At least it will be a distraction.” Arai winced and threw the last leg down on the ground, picking up the spider and using a blade of pure qi to slice its thorax open with quite a bit of effort to get at the core.

However, they had only travelled a further twenty paces when a dull thump echoed above them and everything shook. Equally abruptly ghostly clawed paws flowed through the walls and tried to grasp both of them directly.

“Shit, that thing is really…” Arai gasped

She nodded, fighting the stunning effect as best she could. She could feel her strength draining away somehow as the claws sinking into her body drew away the misty qi in her meridians, pulling it backwards.

Blood welled up in her mouth as her inner organs rebelled and her blood and qi started to flow backwards. The mantra and the symbol fought it as she focused on keeping her surroundings in focus. Her sister screamed, even as she did, pale mist flowing out of her pores for the briefest of moments before the symbol and her mantra finally exerted enough pressure to sever whatever connection the fate thrashed rat had just made. Right on cue, a male spider blurred out of the darkness. She moved her head aside and flinched as its claw ripped into her neck and its fangs scoured into her shoulder biting for the veins and arteries in her neck.

She set down a lightning array at the same time that her sister, who had just gained two more male spiders herself, triggered a corrosion array. A further male spider dropped off the ceiling even as the symbols combined in world blurring explosion. Turning the tunnel into a sea of acid, lightning and pain. No longer really caring, she invoked the Thunderclap Art in her scream of agony. The tunnel shook and the spiders flailed.

Somehow she found a moment within that mess, perhaps because focusing outwards involved a lot of pain, to gauge that her dantian was starting to condense several larger denser droplets of qi that were beginning to directly aggregate others within the rolling silver mists. There was a faint hint of purple and gold in the larger Qi globules as well, to go along with the silver.

“Nameless!” she bisected one and held another by its head, hammering it into the floor.

“Fate-thrashed!”… She rolled over a third that was trying to stab her leg, squashing it and then stabbing it in passing.

“Nine-generations!” dozens of small spiders that had been converging on them died to another thunderclap shout.

“Fates I hate these fate thrashed spiders. I really, really hate them!” she snarled kicking one away and sitting up.

Right on cue, a wave of rats burst around the corner. Groaning, she put down a lighting array and triggered her movement art to flee. Her sister did basically the same thing and the crashed down in the corridor. She felt her meridians in her leg spasm slightly. Her mantra was doing its best, but the punishment was starting to build up again it seemed.

-Fate thrashed nascent soul rat lizard! I’ll cancel your soul and devour your potential somehow!

She screamed in her head as another wave of phantasmal claws rippled out of the walls, even as a massive lightning explosion consumed the rat tide behind them. Fortunately, no spiders came this time and they fought off the grasping drain after a few seconds of cursing and flailing.

After several minutes of dodging corridors and dashing down some shallow stairs, they hauled up short looking out of the tunnel at another obnoxiously familiar octagonal room, about forty metres across with murky, scum ridden water rippling over barely submerged upper walkways. Glimmers of light were visible above them through circular stone grate maybe a hundred metres overhead in the middle of the dome.

“Well monkey-shit,” she hissed, cancelling her qi perception and suppressing her qi as much as she could, for whatever good it might do.

“If this thing isn’t two hundred metres deep and just one giant sludge monster my name isn’t Jun Arai!” her sister muttered under her breath.

There was another thump overhead. She froze, sweating suddenly, even in the humid dark as the rat tried to grasp at them from the walls once more. However this time it felt… weaker, and the drain was barely able to tug at her qi.

“Well that’s handy,” her sister’s voice whispered in her mind.

“Yeah…” she agreed, scraping a handful of algae off the rock to reveal the familiar texture of qi repelling stone.

“The stonework,” she pointed out.

“About time something went in our favour,” her sister’s thoughts sounded… weary.

“Maybe, but I bet that just means the horde is coming in person, to push us on, or deeper to our deaths,” she grumbled.

She surveyed the room again. There sound of fighting was apparent behind them again, and more explosions. Sighing, she made her way as close to the water as she dared and then jumped to the nearest balustrade. It was a risky jump, given how much algae coated everything. Fortunately, her physical strength was more than up to the task of stopping her dead when she landed on it. The stonework itself was a good thirty centimetres across as well. Wide enough to walk one foot after another while holding on with her hands.

They skirted around the upper portion of the walkway as fast as they could using brute strength for their purchase rather than qi. It was tortuously stressful, but after 10 minutes they had crossed the perimeter and entered a tunnel on the far side that had steps up, only barely disturbing the water on their jumps to the staircase.

Behind them, the dull cracks of thunder triggered and moments later there was the sound of chittering and a wave of rats exploded out into the room floundering in the water. They went both ways around the pool as far as they could while they carefully made their way up the staircase.

*shuffft* *sluuuup* *glugluglusss*

The sound of lethal viscosity made her hair stand on the back of her neck stand up.

The empty silence lingered after every lingering question about the large body of ‘water’ they had just traversed was resolved quite emphatically.

At the top of the staircase, they found a complex of rooms that contained a few spiders which were promptly executed.

“Hold up!” Arai signed with a frown. “I have a devious idea that will, if it works, properly inconvenience those rat bastards coming after.”

Her sister walked back to the first room looking at the walls. “And even if it doesn’t quite work, it will still make it a massive nuisance to get up the stairs into here.”

As she followed, curious, she finished her traversal of the first room and picked a spot on the wall, in the far corner of the oddly shaped room that was out of both direct line of sight of the door and also easy deflection range for anything that might be thrown.

After a moment's further consideration, her sister shrugged off her blade and started to cut regular sized chunks out of the wall panel. Within a few minutes, she had exposed a half by half metre section of the bedrock beyond. Looking at the depth of the qi repelling stone she hissed in understanding. The panels were maybe four times as thick as the cladding outside. That certainly explained why it was hard for the nascent soul rat to reach out, and also maybe explained their against the odds performance down below. She couldn’t feel suppression here, but certainly, qi arts and presumably soul attacks seemed… blunted.

“Can you go set some crowd control wards on the stairs for now? This is going to take a bit of time and they may just try to brute force the pool in the meantime somehow.” Arai asked her, as she kept carving.

“Sure, what are you going to do?” she asked as she went over to the doorway and started drawing them on the wall.

“Raise the water level over the railing” Arai giggled nastily.

“Ah, that…would do it,” she nodded with a nasty smile, staring to work on a second water mist array.

“But what if there is a way to drain the pool? Or that is its maximum water level?” she asked, frowning as a few issues occurred to her.

“Probably it does drain somehow,” her sister agreed. “But did you notice how stagnant the water was, and that there were no obvious tide marks on the walls. And if it doesn’t work… well we still made the stairs a terrible hazard.” Arai elaborated with a shrug.

She left her to it and started carefully going back down the staircase, drawing trap arrays in weird and awkward places where they wouldn’t be easily visible. Below she heard the rippling sound of the pool devouring something else and a faint shriek of horror. She was almost at the bottom of the stairway having laid about twenty arrays, mostly water or wood and a few small lightning ones when her sister hissed from above.

“Come back, I’m about to activate it and you will not enjoy the trip back up the stairs if I did this right!”

She made her way back up, taking care to avoid the traps' activation points. Coming over to the hole in the wall, she saw it had been widened quite a bit inside and diverted in two directions. There were now arrays at both ends, truncated by points to stop them being easily visible to anyone. Both contained three symbols; ‘Water’, ‘Devour’ and ‘Transmutation’.

“Huh, that’s neat!” she murmured looking at them.

“Yeah, The idea is to fuel it by transmuting the rock perpetually into qi, with a ‘Yin Attribute’ that will condense running water. ‘Devour’, as I recall from the scrip, should also cover ‘Flow.” Arai said, pasting blood from her hand into the carved lines.

“You are going to activate them like that?” she asked, trying not to sound dubious.

“It’s not my blood, it’s from some of the male spiders,” her sister said pointing to several crumpled corpses in the corner of the carved space that she hadn’t noticed was there before.

“Can you trigger the one on the right in a moment...? I made them require direct activation for the maximum inconvenience of anyone trying to get in here to disable them – and they’re on the ceiling at a weird angle,” Arai hissed over, waving a hand and pointing behind her.

Turning around she crawled over to it, eyeing the complex lines of the framework patterns with their multiple lines of redundancy. If you knew what you were looking at it was very basic, but at the same time, it was so basic that you could get very exotic with how the lines ran so long as you kept the overall structural rules in mind. There were also traps in there for the unwary scattered through the whole thing, spread in odd places like across corners or on the ceiling.

Watching from the corner of her eye as her sister counted to three. Pushing qi into it, she winced as it devoured an entire large droplet before finally feeling saturated. She eyed the array and shivered. The leg work was being done by the spider blood, which was sizzling faintly. Even so, that was a lot of qi just to push it to the point of initial activation. It wasn’t a vast loss, but it was still the equivalent of a few dozen dead Undren or one of their Golden Core’s worth of qi.

There was a faint sense of uncomfortable humidity and drips of water started to coalesce on the ceiling. As she watched going backwards the drips became a trickle, then a small stream. Arai scuttled out ahead of her and she followed quickly as the small stream became quite a flow of water. As it flowed out she put a hand in it and hissed. The temperature was beyond icy and her qi actually crackled slightly in contact with it. They vacated the room and she noticed Arai had made a small dam of the qi resisting blocks and piled loam up behind it. It wouldn’t necessarily hold but it would hold for long enough to make sure the main water flow was down the staircase. They watched quietly as the flow moved really quite quickly through the room and started to run down the stairs.

“Do we watch it for a bit or push on?” Sana murmured after a short while.

“We might as well make sure there are no inexplicable paths up or to elsewhere.” Arai nodded.

“I kind of hope we aren’t stuck here. Though I suppose we can probably cut a path to the surface over time, with the leaf and some careful rock transmutation,” she suggested, trying to sound more hopeful than she felt right now.

“Really, if we hadn’t picked up that leaf we would be in so much trouble,” her sister sighed, staring at it.

“If we hadn’t picked that leaf up we would have died in the flood,” she said glumly.

As if fate was trying to mock her thoroughly, another thirty minutes of exploration of these chambers revealed that they linked between two octagonal shafts. The other shaft, however, was a spider lair.

Peering over the edge, keeping her qi as suppressed as she could, she noted the paths left and right were largely ruined or given over to the spider silk and mud constructions. The darkness below just moved, subtly and ominously, in a way that told her that there were many thousands of spiders there. She had no intention of peering down there with vision enhanced qi either, in case something powerful enough to sense it was being observed happened to be down the bottom.

Returning to the hall before that corridor they sat there in silence for a while. As far as discoveries went this was definitely heading past ‘deeply inconvenient’.

“Passing through there is impossible at our realm,” her sister said eventually.

“It is,” she agreed.

-Sneak up through that upper story without disturbing anything, in this place full of spiders that can hide their qi… and even appearance if they are standing perfectly still? With the ever-present threat of getting jumped by those Golden Core males?

-Nope, nope, nope! Just no!

Her thoughts denied it, even before she got to considering the hail of spat venom that would likely envelop them.

It had only been possible in the deeps because of the Eldritch Moon Mushrooms.

Her hair suddenly stood on end as another burst of sustained pressure abruptly pushed down on them from somewhere above. The grasping sensation returned, and this time continued for a good half minute. The whole ordeal was agonisingly prolonged by that fate accursed rat never engaging with the symbol and scrupulously oppressing her body. Her mantra fought it, but the symbol had to rely on the mantra much more than itself. The rat skilfully avoided the intent of the symbol for agonising seconds before the symbol eventually managed to catch it and crush it. Even then, the rat just decisively abandoned it, leaving the backlash to wreak even more havoc on her. By the time the symbol had won she was left bleeding from her eyes and ears. Her meridians felt like they had been hit with hammers and then scoured with cut glass.

Shaking her head she stood up… and then everything shook. The rumble came, it transpired, not from a further soul attack, but from distant detonations above them and then rapidly from the octagonal hall that held the spider nest.

From it came a sudden upwelling of an immense intent that flowed out in every direction. Something akin to eyes staring out of the darkness… searching. The symbol hid them, even as they hid their own qi desperately. Thankfully, it didn’t focus on them and just flowed outwards and upwards before finally passing. A few moments later, another chain detonations came from up above.

“Fates... I swear to you I will flay that rat and wear its skull as a hat!” Arai groaned as she staggered up.

“What in the nameless accursed heavens do we do now?” she grimaced. “Seal it?”

“Seal that shit off,” her sister agreed as she pre-emptively put down a lightning array.

“We could also cut down a bunch of blocks from the ceiling and collapse it?” she suggested.

“Certainly we could make the access smaller,” her sister agreed. “And add in another of those arrays for good measure that just produces the water mist with the ludicrous shredding potential.”

She nodded silently and started to work on a water mist array. Both of them were thorough converts to that particular bundle of horror. So long as they didn’t walk through one at any rate. Even for one she had set herself, it would penetrate her qi armour in seconds. It turned the male spiders into… ribbons. Moving fast through it was not an advantage as it turned out.

After some further considering and really seeing no other easy option, they started to trap the room they were in accordingly. Cutting a section out of the ceiling and carving the array in their blood this time, as no more male spiders were forthcoming. She also set up a small array to make a simple gust of wind flow through the room periodically. As a solution to the shredding water mist spreading it was the best they had at hand.

They were interrupted twice by waves of enraged spiders being forced out of their nest by more detonations, but really all that served to do was prove that the water mist arrays were terrifying defensive tools.

Eventually, the setup was complete and they had a room that was rapidly filling with flesh flaying water vapour that did extraordinary amounts of Yin Poison damage if you stayed in it for too long –which was really any time at all. As a final act, they hauled quite a few of the blocks that had been cut to the entrance of that room and blocked it off as best they could before returning through the complex.

On the way, she looked carefully for ceiling level spider rat holes, but was pleased to notice there were none. The ceilings, while vaulted, were much less florid and more geometric. The style was similar to what was above, but it was also a curious distinction from what was below.

Returning to the other end of the complex, they found water flooding out of Arai’s arrays. It was now filling the room to a depth of almost thirty centimetres and flowing down the stairs which were now a small stream. Some more remedial work on the doorway into the rest of the complex was required to prevent flooding, but once that was done they sat there and watched it for a full ten minutes before another soul attack finally arrived.

The searching grasping attack again made them vomit blood and curl up in pain as their qi tried to flow backwards through their meridians and disperse out of their bodies before the symbol restrained it once more with the help of their mantra. If there was a minor mercy it was that it seemed weaker than it had been before.

After another while of just sitting around, hiding their qi and watching, nothing seemed intent on coming from either direction, so all they could really do was settle down and cultivate as fast as they could. The ambient qi level from the water arrays in the next room was surprisingly helpful there. Another soul attack came about thirty minutes later, but it was much less targeted and more grasping in how it felt. It was also having a much-reduced effect on her while she was pulling in qi from the surrounding area...

As it faded away, she stopped her cycle and spat half a mouthful of blood onto the damp floor beside her, frowning.

“You know…” she said, turning to her sister. “I wonder if it’s possible to set up one of those transmutation arrays… but you know… not as a lethal trap? Just to slowly convert the bedrock into orphaned qi?”

Stopping her own cycle, her sister leant back against the wall looking pensive. “Possibly? That would be ‘Transmutation’ and ‘Flow’? Or does it need to be a threefold framework…”

“What would a third symbol in there be…?” she reviewed the ones that might be suitable in her head, suddenly regretful that their scrips were up with the spear.

They sat there in silence for a good minute, considering.

“You could just have unattributed ‘Water’... That would give it a controlled medium…?” she mused.

“...'Condensation’ or ‘Saturation’ might work better….” Arai frowned

“I guess we can only try it and see.” She said with a wry chuckle, thinking back to their early experiments.

“This is true.” Her sister said with an eye roll. “At worst it will just explode slightly.”

“Explosion hoo!” she cheered in a childish manner that got a laugh from her sister.

It was a terrible joke, but the levity did help to distract from the more grim aspects of their situation.

After some consideration, they went into the next room to set matters up. The first step was to carve a section of the wall out and expose the bedrock. Most of that went to fixing the dam that was leaking again, and then to blocking off the passage to the next room in a similar fashion in a belated attempt to just slow the flow of water enough to keep it going mostly the other way. Then it was just experimentation.

The first array didn’t really work, nor did the second… or the third, which was expected really. That it only took three hours, two explosions, and one proper implosion in the end, to get the changes to the framework correct was, she thought, a minor triumph in its own right given the circumstances.

The main root of this was changing the framework from the circular one they had been using with an inner triangle of core linkages to a square inside a circle. Four symbols turned out to be the bare minimum that this kind of array could support, which was also not ideal, but it was what it was.

The finding of the correct symbols took a lot longer. They were mostly limited to those shown in the sets of 100 and 40 that Eleanora and Maria had shown. All those symbols, even in the form of memory imprints somehow retained an element of their own innate inner intent. As both of them had memorized those sets in their entirety long ago, it was just a matter of skimming them repeatedly ‘searching’ for the ones that felt right, meditating on it for a while, visualising it to unpick what it meant. The process was similar to conversing with the spear in many ways.

Drawing them was a bit more bothersome, but after a day of working and several deeply annoying soul attacks from the fate accursed rat and one that she guessed was from the Spider Queen of the nest they eventually got a stable array put together that comprised the sigil symbols for ‘Transformation’, ‘Transmutation’, ‘Stability’ and ‘Condensation’.

The final hurdle was the activation cost, which was, frankly immense.

Even relying on the long-form way of drawing them and using their own blood as the medium, it cost them almost three-quarters of their current qi reserves and they had to be linked together, leveraging the symbols own intention as well. That was a serious wrench, over a dozen of the large refined droplets each. However, the result was beyond her wildest expectations.

Within ten minutes of cultivating next to it, she could feel the qi density of the room itself rising noticeably. In the enclosed space, with qi repelling walls it didn’t get absorbed into the surroundings or dissipate very fast into other rooms.

They received another soul attack a short while later, but this one was truly muted and very diffuse, as if the rat could no longer fully perceive the place it was trying to target.

“You know…” Arai said, staring at the ceiling after it passed. “I bet you that it was targeting through the purity of the qi we were refining in our bodies.”

“Yeah,” she shuddered slightly.

That made a lot of sense. That she… either of them hadn’t thought of that before this point was… embarrassing actually. It was well known that a lot of plants and stuff in the valleys hunted by qi sense. It was also how they hunted out high-rank spirit herbs. Even the stealthiest of herbs could not hide the purity of its qi. If they were the purest beacons of qi around then it would be easy for someone or something to track them at range.

However… down here… in these rooms lined with qi repelling stone, with hundreds of metres of rock above them. With a spiders nest watched over by fates only knew what realm of spider queen a few hundred metres to their left, and a slime pit that could be just as strong forty metres to their right…

“Probably we are under the inner city as well in some way, so the aura from the spear might also be helping” her sister mused.

“Yeah, there is that as well,” she nodded.

Without the interruptions of further crippling soul attacks, it became possible to achieve a kind of rhythm in their cultivation at last. A few adjustments had to be made, like cutting some blocks to sit on when it became clear that the floor was going to fill with water, no matter what they did, but after that, they both managed to cultivate for almost an hour before finally stopping to check on things.

The mist room at the far end of the complex was a veritable death trap at this point. Even two halls away they could almost taste the death qi emanating from that direction. She guessed the mist might even be spilling into the actual spider lair at this point. It occurred to her, that if the Undren had tried to be a bit over devious and attempted to seal the other entrances to that nest in the hope of driving it towards them the odds of the spiders being driven above ground to attack their more accessible tormentors was pretty good. She had no idea what the realm of the queen at the bottom of the pit could be, but their brief brush with it’s intent put it more on parity with some of those from the depths than the nascent soul spider mother they had fought outside.

It was much better for all parties she thought, with a nasty smile as she sat down to cultivate once more, that it get pissed with the rats rather than them.

~ Arai, Underground Spirit Pool ~

Beyond some periodic searching intents from both the spider nest and above, they were largely left alone after a while and time flowed by rapidly. Arai soon found herself wondering though, if the transmutation array they had set up might be a little bit too effective for their purposes. She had cultivated for almost five days now, as fast as she could, they both had in fact, and the density of qi was still rising.

It was a truly excellent thing, she considered, that they had cut rocks to sit on as the unforeseen factor that was giving her minor palpitations was the pool the water that was now covering the floor of this room to a depth of almost ten centimetres. Perhaps it was because of the arrays she had put in the next room, but the purity and qi density of the water all around them was now approaching that of a spirit pool. It was also probably cold enough, courtesy of that now somewhat foolish-looking decision to make it a Yin Water array, to freeze her feet if she stood in it for more than ten seconds.

She inhaled another wave of qi rich air, wincing at its chill, which was still far too prevalent despite setting up a smaller Yin-Yang array to regulate that. It was a pleasant surprise that those ‘basic’ formations worked pretty much as expected, beyond some experimentation to find out which set of frameworks was optimal. For the Yin-Yang Array, it turned out to be helical lines that spiralled between nodes rather than straight ones. Still, that array was only putting a poultice on a serious problem.

Thankfully, her refinement of the mists was still increasing at an almost exponential rate. Under this qi density, it was practically semi-liquid within her meridians in its own right. The mists had even started to saturate her soft tissue, organs and even her blood, turning her body itself into a reservoir for unrefined qi that made her feel a little like she had overeaten. It also hit home just how inefficient their containment of the Spider Queens qi had been. She had thought they got maybe ten percent of it, but now she was certain it had been less than a single percent, or the moon mushrooms had done much more damage than they realised.

Such was the unnatural density of the qi in this place that they had even had to start leveraging breathing exercises to enhance the efficiency of their refinement. She hadn’t done this before mainly because it was a negligible gain up top. She also hadn’t really had time to sit and watch the refinement process like she was now, and had just reasoned it was better to let it get on with whatever it was doing. It also wasn’t easy to use the methods they knew while outside of meditation, and while you could do moving meditation, there was no way she was going to use it in the melee up above. Still, adopting the breathing exercises and adapting them to this purpose had had a secondary benefit as it turned out. Helping to regulate the continuous refinement throughout her body into something approaching an actual cycle. Dozens of little droplets condensed throughout her meridians with each inhalation and exhalation. The process was still continual in her dantian, but even there the momentum of the incoming droplets was having a subtle effect.

The larger orbs were starting to slowly move around in the mist now, taking on vibrant multi-coloured hues with little rings of tiny droplets coalescing out of the mist of qi.

Time flowed on, as she let the cycle of breathing and refinement become a natural thing for her body while observing it and guiding it as much as she felt confident. Soon the largest of those drops all coalesced in the heart of the super dense mist in her dantian to form a shimmering, amorphous ovaloid of liquid qi. To her senses, it looked something between molten metal and the moon reflecting on water. She watched as more of the globules joined it with every cycle until it trembled and scattered apart entirely into tiny dewdrops to begin collecting again.

Counting back in her head it had been close to one and a half weeks since they broke through in the mushroom colony. Somehow it felt like it should be longer, but it didn’t seem to be.

To her joy, however, as she continued to look on, the second one took nowhere near as long. The act of scattering the droplets caused a rapid intensification the coalescence rate within the mist. The second took only three days, while the third time took only three hundred cycles, or close to a full day. The one she was currently observing, and which had just collapsed, had only taken one hundred and fifty.

With another breath, she took in as much of the qi rich air as she could and started again.

The act of the breath itself, now the cycle had properly sorted itself out, was actually becoming somewhat symbolic. Her whole body was drinking in qi, like a woman dying of thirst. Around her, she could see the water surface rippling and flowing in auspicious little eddies at the draw exerted by each ‘inhalation’. It then shifted further as unsuitable qi that didn’t refine fully in a single cycle was exhaled again to return to the environment. Nearby, Sana sat with her eyes closed engaged in the same cycle, quietly breathing in and out, the water and air rippling faintly around her as she did so.

Time blurred away again and the next cycle took one hundred.

-Really the pattern was odd, she thought as she tried to make sense of it.

The shifting mass of super purified qi increased by about fifteen percent this time, as she compared it to the previous times.

The next dispersal and recombination took a further seventy-five cycles, increasing the total by seventeen percent.

She had to pause for a while after that one, just to think about things. Mainly to try and work out how it was getting more each time, but for less, although in the end, she had to draw a blank. It was doing what it did, with almost no input from her. Even the symbol was remarkably hands-off, and her mantra was just doing what it had always done, although even its efficiency was better now. The density of mist in her meridians was also becoming such, at this point, that she was having to actively work to push it around, even as the droplets formed in a steady stream.

The next split came at sixty cycles and increased the total amount of Qi by twenty percent.

As she watched it, she finally thought that the pattern was becoming clear-ish, the speed and efficiency stepping up a fraction each time and the quantity being refined increasing accordingly. This was what was leading to the continual escalation in speed as the two rapidly fed each other.

The next split happened after fifty more cycles.

Her dantian creaked as the mist was compressed by the disruption of the amorphous pool collapsing. Thousands more small droplets condensed straight out of the mist in a single instant under the force of the disturbance. The shockwave flowed through her body, making her shiver. Even in her meridians, the mist condensed hundreds more droplets under the impetus of its passing. Many of those now started to flow directly through her meridians, in and out of her dantian, collecting more as they went with each cycle.

It was almost a form of torture. Not pain but not… not pain.

She watched as, slowly, her meridians, which had already endured a lot of punishment, were further tempered with each cycle, widening and strengthening gradually to accommodate the density.

Each cycle seemed to last a small eternity as she aided the symbol, which had started to become more active again, in pushing and pulling the whole system around.

She was expecting forty-two cycles but it went to fifty again before splitting apart.

She nearly spat blood this time as the dispersal of the pool increased the droplets by almost a third with the compression it exerted on the mist still packing her dantian and meridians. She felt her dantian itself actually shift a touch before the pressure in her lessened fractionally… that nearly made her stop cultivating from shock. Had the process just… enlarged her dantian? It was a tiny amount, barely five percent or something like it, yet as far as she was aware, techniques that did that were really rare. It was possible with some earthly treasures and pills, but usually, it was just a one-off occurrence.

After that, she descended into a kind of unthinking hell, moving through three ‘big’ cycles of fifty as she came to think of them. Each time the pool collapsed, her dantian expanded a touch and her overall capacity increased. By the time the third collapse happened, it finally clicked, she had entered Qi Refinement.

That was enough to bring her back to the moment.

~ Sana, Underground Spirit Pool ~

Surfacing from her own cycle, she found Arai sat there in the gloom looking pensive. The space was still ripping around her sister faintly, even though she wasn’t focusing on refinement it seemed.

“Everything okay?” she asked.

“I think… we misjudged our realms a bit,” her sister murmured, her voice echoing slightly in the darkness.

She closed her eyes and considered that. Her sister was probably right… the stabilisation of the refinement at 50 cycles and the slow expansion of her dantian was probably…

“Qi refinement…” she said a bit lamely.

“Uhuh,” her sister said dully.

She could only agree with that sentiment. When you looked back, it made sense, yes. This was clearly a somewhat different method.

“So… what we experienced at the start… was that… like… Foundation Establishment?” her sister muttered a little weakly.

“I can only assume so, we really will have to ask the spear if we ever get out of here…. however, there is another issue,” she said, eyeing the pool.

She focused on drawing in qi and the water rippled for metres around her, properly overlapping with where her sister was sat.

“Hmmm, yes,” Arai mused, looking around. “It does seem we need to do a bit of re-arrangement.”

It wasn’t that hard in the end, although neither of them was at all keen on stepping in the water, which had a sort of glassy calm to it that made her skin prickle. The shape of the room was already a bit weird, and the array was at one end, so they each picked a corner where they could see both doors in and out of the room. It also gave a few metres more clearance between each other so their absorption of the ambient qi wouldn’t interfere. It hadn’t really been before, despite their ‘ranges’ overlapping, but she was pretty sure that if their rate of absorption and refinement kept going up like it had been it soon would have.

After checking the arrays to see that they were still okay, she settled back down and started a new ‘big’ cycle as she was starting to think of them. Now that she didn’t have to worry quite so much about overlapping her sphere of refinement with her sisters, she focused and tried to see how far she could reach. The results were impressive, she had to self-acknowledge. Water rippled for metres around her as she drew in qi with each cycle from half the room. The radius of her qi absorption still stopped a few metres from Arai, who was also it seemed drawing in similar amounts of qi. Their cultivations shouldn’t be that far apart in any case.

She continued on for a few more cycles, observing the room and her refinement radius until her attention was drawn by something shifting on the wall, by the door to where the slime pit was…

-Shit a spider. That was…

It entered into the room through the door frame, made it maybe a metre along the wall and then twitched and fell off into the water where it froze solid, then slowly dissolved away.

-Oh.

-That is some qi density alright, she shuddered.

-And yet why didn’t it detect it? She thought to herself, eyeing where it had fallen.

-Is the purity that high?

She looked around the room again, pensively. Insanely high ‘Qi Purity’ making qi almost undetectable at realms that didn’t have ‘Soul Sense’ was a thing, although it was uncommon. The only place she knew of where it occurred naturally was in the depths of the Southern Shadow Forest between Yin Eclipse and the coastal mountains south of Blue Water City. There, on the edges of the zone where the Great Mount’s suppression extended well into the forest, were deep qi pools that could manifest mists pure enough to entice foolhardy to seek them out as breakthrough spots to attempt Golden Core Formation.

Many died, simply because they misjudged the purity of the waters in a pool. Some of them were lethally dangerous even to Nascent Soul or Dao Seeking cultivators from what she understood. They were just as useful for Physical Refinement cultivators in their own way, and marginally less dangerous, but Old Ling had basically warned them all that the risk was not worth the reward. Even Mantra Seed Cultivators treated them with caution, especially within the suppression itself, which extended for some distance further underground than it did above in that part of the forest.

The more she thought on it, the more likely that scenario seemed to her. They had accidentally made a Spirit Pond. It also occurred to her, in that moment, that they hadn't given a lot of thought to deactivating the array. If it were done with just their qi it would be easy enough, but it was done as a proper formation, carved into the rock. The blood itself was just to keep the flow stable enough for it to imprint itself during the activation process. Once that was complete, the array which would draw qi to it and focus it in this location, was fundamentally part of that piece of rock. Becoming something like a plant putting down roots as far as she could grasp. It would, as she understood the arrays functions so far, likely keep going until they destroyed it. Probably.

-No wonder the spider and the slime aren't bothering us, she shivered eyeing both doorways.

-The nest and the slime are probably praising their slime and spider divinities for this miraculous bounty of qi that’s just dropped on them from on high.

Several more spiders came through in due course including a male, which was presumably golden core. It crawled along the wall just watching them for a while before quietly departing. That was either good or bad. She just wasn’t sure which.

Just shy of fifty cycles later, she was in her sixth large cycle now… a small spider mother crept into the room, very cautiously. It also observed the room for a short while. Waved its legs at them and took up a position on the far wall near the door to the slime pit. Far away from both of them, thank the fates. She could see Arai also looking in its direction now.

-It’s waiting for us to break through and will try to steal our cores, she guessed.

-Or it is waiting for the moment my large cycle disperses and I have a moment of weakness?

She stopped the current cycle, the forty-eighth out of fifty.

Arai stopped her own cultivation a moment later and they both just watched in silence. A minute or so later, several male spiders also slunk into the room.

More than several actually.

Her senses caught a dozen more sets of faintly scratching legs on rock than her eyes initially picked out. Focusing on the difference, she thought she got glimpses of others, weird ripples in the air. Had her qi senses always been that sharp?

She could see the ripples in the air from their qi camouflage.

The spider mother waved its legs at them a second time and then abruptly spat an acid orb at her.

Pushing out her qi to block it, she steeled herself, preparing for a lot of pain, only to be shocked when the orb's trajectory turned sluggish and eventually stopped halfway across the room.

Not explode, not dissipate. Just stop, like it was snared in a mist of pure qi.

Which it was.

It still exploded, a heartbeat later… qi ripping through the room, hitting her body… both their bodies and making them flinch on their rocks.

“……”

They both eyed each other dully. That was it? The damage had been undone almost as the wave of corrosive qi arrived. The mist of qi in their bodies ate up the new arrival, barely deforming in the process. Some of that was the ambient density robbing the much more impure qi from the orb of its momentum, but even so… That was still an attack, however speculative and testing, from something that was at least soul foundation?

The spider mother also stared, in as much as it was possible to judge a spider staring blankly. Clearly, that had not gone how it expected though. It waved its legs again and the males that had shifted around the walls to surround them all pounced. Almost ten spiders for each of them.

Their qi camouflage dissipated as they leapt, which at least explained why she had not noted them having it before.

Another much stronger acid orb shot across the room.

Left with no other real option, all she could do was push out the qi mist in her body in the manner of qi armour and hope it was enough.

The males who connected with the mist that swirled around her twitched and succumbed to the poisonously pure qi. She caught one that was heading right for her face and tossed it away, watching it’s body freeze as it lay in the water, dissolving. There was no point in being concerned about their cores now. She was condensing tens of thousands of new droplets with every small cycle now, so a few hundred was nothing. Most of the others missed, the two others that stabbed her only inflicted light flesh wounds in death and one managed to survive by some fluke and scrambled back up the wall.

The acid orb exploded, much closer this time. She managed to block most of it with two spiders that had leapt for her, throwing their decaying bodies back at the spider mother.

It skipped sideways and waved its limbs as more males entered the room… followed by a second spider mother.

“Ideas?” she asked Arai.

“Movement art them and make sure we are standing on them when they fall in the water?” Arai suggested with a sour glare at the spider mother.

“Hmmmmm, Call me crazy but I do not want to fall in that water either…” she shot back.

Before she could do anything, however, a watery figure stepped into the doorway. It was humanoid in shape with a skeleton of golden bones. A shifting set of silvery gold strands was visible throughout the slime person.

“Oh, by the fate accursed monkey,” she hissed, staring at the slime.

The spiders also froze, observing the newcomer.

She was shocked to see the spider mothers both grow marginally intangible and shift ever so slightly sideways to break the point where they had been sat in her distant perception. It looked at them, then looked at the water before stepping over the barrier.

“Run,” She signed even as her sister signed the same thing back to her.

Without really thinking about it, she put her hand to the rock and imprinted the strongest lighting array she could into the floor. They both fled for the far door, covering the distance in a single bound, using her movement art at its max-

She smashed into the wall in the next hall so hard her vision swam

-Fates that’s fast! She screamed in her own head.

Orientating herself, she touched water which splashed around her, making her feet grow numb even as she leapt for the next exit. Behind them, neither spider nor slime actually reacted in time. Which was not surprising because neither would have likely expected them to be that fast.

-Namelessmotherof, her cursing was continuous as she kicked off the wall to avoid falling into the water again. The water here was if anything deeper than in their room…?

They went three rooms, the water getting deeper each time…

-Oh, she recalled belatedly that there had been a step down in these corridors, and the next few halls would be...

Barely four seconds had passed when she skipped into the fourth hall in the middle of the complex, getting a foot to a wall when the lightning triggered.

She managed to put a foot to a wall and-

Behind them, one of the spider mothers shot out of the corridor after them, barely visible as a blur of shifting occlusion. The lightning, however, was faster still. It raged through the extended spirit pool like a flickering blade of white death, its tendrils scouring every surface.

One of the bolts struck her and pinned her to the wall. The symbol roiled in her mind and moved her mantra to control the lightning-metal element qi even as it rampaged through her meridians and tried to burst her dantian.

The grinding pressure of the mist actually suppressed the lightning but it still flayed her skin and tried to cook her bones, boiling the qi within them. The agony was excruciating.

Numb and unable to do anything, as control over her body and the qi within it faltered she collapsed into the spirit pond, which was almost half a metre deep in this room, plunging into a new kind of hell.

Hot and cold battled in her body to try to kill her while the lightning still coursed through her meridians. She desperately pushed the mists through her body, barely holding on…

Forty-nine times…

Fifty times!

The rippling pool that was still barely cohesive in her dantian exploded in a raging torrent of droplets that turned over the qi fighting it out in her body in a single breath. It swept up and dissociated the raging currents of lightning and cold in her body and mixed with them. All three qi’s raged through her meridians, returning to her dantian, homogenising as they went. She was on or under the water now, it was hard to say which, with the lightning raging everywhere. Her qi twisted alarmingly as the lightning kept raging, the whole mess of merging qi’s barely under her control.

She focused desperately and pushed the cycle forward again, and managed to find her footing, grasping the wall to pull herself up. The yin cold of the spirit spring was turning her skin black. She was only able to move by puppeting her limbs. Staggering a few paces she lost control of her movement again and slumped down, seeing her sister nearby flailing in the waters, in a similar situation to her.

The lightning kept interfering with her ability to do anything meaningful other than just push her qi around her system to avoid it freezing solid.

-If I die from my own fate thrashed lightning array that will be a really stupid death, she screamed in her own head.

Her sister staggered half to her feet, tearing off her armour and with a scream slammed the blade she had been wielding into the wall between the cracks in the wall. The bindings on the armour had already dissolved, scattering the bones in the pool. Part of her, a very small part that had been stunned enough to think about other things, was surprised they didn’t dissolve. Her sister slumped onto the blade, and she managed to make it the metre further and pull herself up, onto it as her sister grasped at her back.

Even as she was hauled up, she realised that Arai had grabbed the cut bone spear haft she had kept and, pushing qi into it, jammed it into the wall. Nodding gratefully she pulled herself up on it, hoping it would support her weight. It did, barely, and her sister started fishing bones out of the water as fast as she dared with the damage it dealt, giving them both a few bits of extra support.

Finally, after several minutes the residual lightning in the pool dwindled away. All the while she cycled her qi ferociously, forcing it to heal her frostbitten limbs. It took five cycles to restore herself to something resembling fitness, which was scary in quite a few ways. Though she was recovering fast, she was keenly aware she had come dangerously close to death there.

She pushed out her qi perception and felt Arai doing the same. Her perception flitted through the halls as she took in the devastation. The spider mother that had followed them was lying in the hallway behind them, smoking and slowly dissolving, looking like a cooked crab. Their original room was a complete mess. Golden bones littered the floor and… thirty-seven different charred spots were visible on the walls that were certainly the remains of the male spiders. The other spider mother was nothing more than a carapace and a few legs, smoking on the far side of the pool. A third set of legs was visible, dissolving in the ruins of the dam, also smoking.

The water in the room wasn’t getting any lower either which suggested that the pit room might have flooded just a bit more than anticipated or the torrent from the other array was more than otherwise expected.

They sat there on their ad-hoc platforms, recovering for a few more moments until her spear finally gave up and dropped her back into the water. Snarling in pain she skipped across the room and landed on the spider corpse which rocked a bit but was otherwise stable. Arai joined her a few moments later, perching on the other end.

“I guess-” she tried to sign and failed.

“I guess…it… seems… clear now?” she forced out between still chattering teeth, trying not to bite her tongue.

Arai just nodded.

They dashed back through the water cursing at the chill invading their flesh and arrived in the room. The leaf blade was stuck in the floor she noticed and swiftly collected it, stabbing it into the rock she upon which she had been seated. It was none the worse for its exposure to supercharged lightning, which was expected but somehow oddly gratifying.

“What are the odds that the lightning killed the slime somehow?” Arai groaned as she knelt on her own rock.

“Very low I’d imagine. Should we should check that out – carefully – before?”

“…”

She trailed off as Arai stared at her with ‘are you an idiot?’ eyes, even as she winced at her own stupid suggestion.

“Yeah… no,” Arai stated, drolly. “However, it might be worth checking how much water is down there now. The spiders got through so they must be able to make it across the ceiling at least and into the tunnel.”

“True,” she acknowledged sweeping her perception cautiously into the next room.

Noting, yet again, the other dead spider mother as she passed, she found quite a few more burn marks on the walls. Also on the floors as well, when she looked carefully. She considered the stairs but didn’t send her qi perception down in the end. The swirling mists were evidence enough that the traps had been triggered and were still active.

“Odds are, anything still watching this likely thinks that the lightning exterminated everything here,” she muttered.

“I don’t know that I’d want to bet actual money on that, but probably yeah… let’s hope,” Arai said with a grim glance in that direction as well.