Memories of the Fall

The ancient region of Belel’Ethec. A land with an atrociously humid climate, steep mountains, dense sub-tropical jungles and deep caverns and an unusually wide variety of mendacious flora and fauna that follows the southern edge of the great savannah plains that run from the western shore of the Northern Continent, to almost its centre. This is the area about which we will talk in detail this chapter.

Historically, it first came to prominence during the early efforts to colonise the wilderness regions on that side of the northern continent, before the first succession crisis turned everything on its head. When the dust of that first great schism of our two civilised continents settled, the region was left broadly in the configuration it is today. Its southern extremity controlled by the Grand Duchy of Abernathy, the north western portion within the territory of the Grand Duchy of Meltras and the eastern side wholly held by the Grand Duchy of Evershire.

Since then, it has largely become famous as the second most troubled region in the entirety of the Northern Continent; exceeding the reputation of the border between Calingrad, Grey-Carrolan and the remaining marches of the Hibric Tribes for the honour of being the continents most hotly contested pile of trees and rock. The only reason it is not top of the list is because the Dark Veils are still, miraculously, a thing.

The reason for this is threefold. Firstly, it is a land with a vast supply of Etheric Mana, one of the three major upwellings of it for the worlds Mana Tides in fact. Secondly, linked to this, it is remarkably rich in exotic flora and fauna. Its montane valleys with their cloud forests and sky piercing rock pillars, between which rivers wind, are home to all manner of curious magical plants rare and unique beasts. It is even home to some ancient vestiges that manifested with the origin of our world, -echoes of previous eras cast through time like skipping stones from the end of the Heroic Age. Thirdly, and probably most vexingly for many in power, it contains one of only two known entrances to the Undrenmare not under the control of either the Eternal City or Isla Dan’Autha

Excerpt from ‘The Lands of the Northern Continent’

By Marcus O’Firth

~ Ruo Han & Group ~

Ruo Han groaned and rolled over. His head felt like he had just hit a rock…

A piece of masonry next to him suggested that he had in fact been hit in the head with a piece of masonry. He tried to push himself up and found his whole body screaming at him.

-Right… no qi, he castigated himself.

That he could just about remember. The lightning landed, there was a big explosion, Senior Ning was fighting… the brown-haired beauty had nearly killed Sheng Zhao… then more… lightning? That seemed to be when he had had all his qi dispersed.

Looking around and then up, he found himself face to face with the blonde-haired girl who had been brawling with the Immortal Seniors from the Discipline hall.

Beside him, Teng Chunhua pushed herself up out of the dirt and was looking around groggily. “That was... the squirrel?” she muttered.

“Yeah,” the blonde girl said, looking at them consideringly even as Miss Teng flinched. “Every time it shows up it seems to exceed expectations… maybe that’s its real power.”

“Umm… thank you for-” he started to speak only to be cut off by her.

“Don’t thank me just yet. You lot nearly got us killed.” Her blue eyes bored into him, making him feel decidedly uneasy.

There was no soul strength there, but the Intent within them was almost dangerously yang. It wasn’t like the hunger and violence against reality that the other woman had had though. Rather, it was much more recognisable to him, who had cultivated for quite a few years now. It was holding lingering traces of fury, pain, sorrow and trauma. She had far too much of it for someone with a bone age of only seventeen years to possess under normal circumstances. Outside of here, he would have found it almost laughable to think that he, a Nascent Soul cultivator, was actually being faintly oppressed by a quasi-Golden Core Cultivator. The reality, however, was rather undeniable, and he had seen enough crazily talented individuals in the Argent Justice Sect to know that there were certainly those out there even more ludicrously blessed than those scions.

“You’re a Herb Hunter?” the girl asked Teng Chunhua bluntly.

“I am… are you from… one of the Yin Eclipse clans?” Miss Teng asked with a certain degree of trepidation, he thought.

Was there some significance in that? From what he recalled before, she had said this girl was at Mantra Seed and had a stronger Physical Cultivation method than most elders in her local Hunter Pavilion. Unfortunately, he had no idea what that meant in the wider context, being neither familiar with the average strength of an elder from a pavilion in somewhere like Blue Water Province or the relative strength of a Physical Cultivator at that realm compared to a Golden Core one. If it was anything like a Body Refinement cultivator though…

The sight of her punching Shan Roxu backwards like she wasn’t an Immortal Realm cultivator flitted through his mind and he shuddered. There was certainly some trick to that, but the result was undeniable. If she could throw an Immortal, even a suppressed and very inexperienced one, backwards, she could probably rip his head off before he got his qi back at the very least.

“No,” the girl shook her head. “I can't say I recognise you. What pavilion are you from? Or are you from out of province?”

“I’m… from the South Grove Pavilion,” Teng Chunhua replied, sounding a bit affronted in all honesty.

“And you?” she said abruptly, turning back to him.

“Argent Justice Sect, a subsidiary sect of the Argent Imperial Hall,” he replied carefully, scanning for the others while keeping half an eye on her.

“The… southern continent, explains why you look like you rolled through a tangle vine patch.” The girl sniffed and looked around as well.

He eyed her again, taking care not to linger on her quite noticeable nudity or the fact that she seemed to have crawled out of some blood pit. The damage lingering on her body as scars in its natural qi flow and intent were terrifying. She had also undergone a tribulation very recently based on the subtle edge to her qi.

“Those others were from the same sect as you? Why were they really after you?” she asked abruptly.

Behind him the rubble there was a groan and Jin Chen picked himself out of the ruins of a side room.

“We had a… disagreement,” he said warily.

“They tried to capture them because they wouldn’t follow dangerously bad orders, and they tried to kill me to hide their own mistakes, choosing to blame my guidance for the ruinous consequences of their own poor decisions,” Teng Chunhua said flatly, not bothering to look at him.

“Sounds typical,” the girl nodded.

Turning away she made some rapid hand motion that was almost too fast for him to follow. It made Jin Chen flinch and almost draw out his treasure sword before Teng Chunhua caught his hand and stopped him.

“There are more of you?” the girl asked again, looking in the other direction as the sound of shifting rubble from the other room became audible.

He debated whether to answer, her manner so far was not outside his expectations, but she was certainly not acting friendly by any means.

-It would be more concerning if she was though, part of him muttered.

Abruptly, she reached out, with remarkable speed for a Golden Core cultivator and grabbed his robe dragging him up and out of the building. He nearly resisted just from the surprise of how strong she was before deciding that it was better to just stumble after her.

“Get out there, where we can keep an eye on you,” the girl said in a matter of fact tone, pushing him on past her.

“You too, Hunter from South Grove,” she added waving to Teng Chunhua, who nodded, dragging Jin Chen after her.

They sat there in the plaza, taking in the scene of carnage around them while the girl stalked into the ruins they had just vacated. Half the complex of ruins was now properly ruined, weird as it was to say it. Before it had been standing, if overgrown, up to the second story. Some buildings even had roofs on them. Now though, the far side of the courtyard was a broad, shallow crater, the buildings to either side of it little more than scattered piles of scorched and melted stone. All evidence of the flame talismans and such from before was gone, probably dispersed with much of the rest of the qi that came with the last thing he remembered clearly. That bolt of purple-black lightning that descended like a celestial lance to hit…

The woman it had hit was crouched about ten metres away, administering to another youth who was badly injured. She was, he had to admit, a beauty. Also very naked, even more so than the other girl who at least had a crude skirt and a lot of grime to hide her unclad state.

“Huh…” Teng Chunhua said dully from beside him.

“What is it?” he whispered.

“I… recognise that youth…” she sounded confused and also a bit worried.

“You do?” Jin Chen said with a scowl.

“Han Shu, from the West Flower Picking Hunter Pavilion,” Teng Chunhua murmured quietly. “He looks a bit more rugged than when I last saw him...”

“You don’t say,” Jin Chen muttered sourly. “My own mother would struggle to recognise me right now I am sure.”

He scuffed his foot and froze because lying there in the ground was a pill bottle.

Looking around the ruined courtyard he realised that there were dozens of pill bottles, various other oddments, bits of clothing and such scattered everywhere, even a few weapons. He was about to reach out and pick it up to look at it more closely when the blonde-haired girl came out of the building carrying Liao Ying over her shoulder and dragging Hao Jun by the scruff of his collar. Without comment she dumped them both on the ground next to the three of them and then headed off to the upper end of the courtyard, presumably to check the other buildings.

“Uhhhh….” Liao Ying moaned after a few seconds and tried to push herself up.

“What just…”

“Something happened with that lightning. All the qi in the area got dispersed,” he said quietly.

“Oh… so that’s why I feel like I’ve got a hangover good for a week’s drinking,” Liao Ying groaned, rubbing her temples.

“Pills… pills…” she muttered, fumbling for her storage talisman only for him to reach over and stop her before she could.

“That’s probably not a good idea, I don’t think we are prisoners… but we don’t want to fight these three.”

“No, you do not.” Chunhua said with a grim whisper, glancing in the direction of the blonde-haired girl.

Liao Ying looked up the courtyard and sighed in annoyance, before also noting all the pill bottles and stuff lying around.

“What… happened here?” she asked.

“You ask me, but who do I ask,” he grumbled.

“The squirrel,” Teng Chunhua muttered.

“Squirrel?” they all asked pretty much at once.

“Yeah, it’s… well the fact that it’s in here is somewhat reassuring at least,” she muttered.

“How-?” Jin Chen was cut off by the abrupt return of the blonde girl who hopped down off an upper level of the building on the far side and sauntered back over.

“It seems you’re the last ones… or the ones too slow or injured to run away,” she said with an eye roll.

“Uh… Is the injured man over there Han Shu?” Teng Chunhua asked the blonde girl.

With a blur that was a struggle to follow in his current state, the blonde girl was suddenly holding Teng Chunhua by the front of her robe with a very ugly look on her face.

-By the Inauspicious Fate… this, he groaned in his head.

“W…wait… I… know him…” Teng Chunhua gasped, her face turning white under the girl's grip.

His eyes widened as he saw Teng Chunhua’s robes start to smoke and the air around her grow hazy.

“Sure you do,” the girl said flatly.

“Enough!” The dark brown-haired beauty had stood up and was now looking their direction.

-Fates, he groaned inwardly and diverted his eyes, because really she was very beautiful in all the right ways.

“You say you know Han Shu?” she said with narrowed eyes.

“Ye...yes…” Teng Chunhua gasped.

“Do you know her?” she said, turning to the other youth who had pushed himself upright.

To distract himself from the woman’s nudity, which didn’t seem to concern her very much, he looked at the youth beside her. Tall and tanned, with brown hair in a scholarly style that was now badly bunched up. He looked more like a labourer or a warrior… a martial cultivator actually, than a spiritual one. His injuries, a still bleeding cut to his side and an arm that had bones sticking out of it were really nasty. The woman had been setting the bones in his arm it seemed because there was a lot of blood on her hands and he could make out her handprints on the arm.

“You’re… Teng… Chunhua,” he said after a long pause.

“Ye...yes!” Teng Chunhua panted, her skin now flushed from the really quite infernal Yang qi that was being transmitted through the blonde girl’s grip.

“We…we worked to…together in the west… shadow… a year… ago… the matter with the…please…” she gasped as her skin started to physically blister on her neck.

“Stop burning her,” the brown-haired woman said absently.

*Tcch*, the blonde-haired girl let Teng Chunhua go and she collapsed to the ground, gasping hard.

“We can probably heal your friend,” he said quickly, seizing the opportunity to try to sow some goodwill with these three before something else could happen.

“Wh… what…” Hao Jun groaned and he nearly groaned out loud as well.

“You can?” the brown-haired woman said with a frown.

“The courtyard is scattered with all sorts of stuff… there are bound to be good healing pills in amongst this lot,” he said quickly, before Hao Jun who had a remarkable talent for saying stupid things he had come to realise, could open his mouth.

“We don’t want to linger here,” the blonde girl said suddenly.

“No... We do not,” the brown-haired woman agreed.

“You,” the brown-haired woman said pointing to Teng Chunhua. “Help Han Shu.”

Turning to him and the others she narrowed her eyes and considered him in a way that made him suddenly very uneasy. The blonde girl was young and clearly had some trauma, but the coldness that was in this woman’s eyes was one he recognised equally clearly. If anyone was going to kill them without blinking it was this woman, not the blonde girl.

He watched warily as the two turned away and stood in silence for a moment, before turning back to them with pensive looks. Teng Chunhua, who had gone over as instructed to help ‘Han Shu’, caught his eye and very subtly shook her head to the left three times. It was the sign she had taught him that meant “don’t do anything stupid.”

“Okay,” the brown-haired woman said in a neutral tone. “Here’s what we are going to do: You four are going to help us gather up all the pills and junk in this courtyard. You aren’t going to put any in storage rings. If you do, I’ll break your arms and legs and leave you here for the scavengers who will come to investigate this place real soon.”

“And then, Miss?” he said as politely as he could manage.

“Then you’re coming with us, to a somewhat safer location and we are going to decide what happens next,” she said simply.

“Which way did you come from before?” the blonde-haired girl said with narrowed eyes.

“Uhh… that-” Hao Jun started waving his hand in the direction upriver before he cut him off.

“We crossed the river and arrived here thinking to use it for shelter when night fell,” he said looking up at the now rapidly darkening sky.

The blonde girl nodded to herself and he exhaled, softly. She had certainly known what direction they came from before asking. For Hao Jun to stupidly try to obfuscate like that was typical short-sightedness. Hiding which way they’d come just wasn’t very important, but making sure their captors could trust them was. The younger man was nearly a Nascent Soul cultivator and only an outer disciple because it was required for a certain period of time in the Argent Justice Sect and just like him, he could probably gauge these two’s realm. Unfortunately, unlike him, Hao Jun had been caught in the shockwave from the first bolt and seen little of the second half of the battle between these three and their seniors.

“We go along the river then,” the brown woman said.

“That would be best,” the blonde girl agreed.

That seemed to settle that, so he waved for the other three to get gathering. Hao Jun grumbled quietly, but both Liao Ying and Jin Chen had eyes and had clearly seen some of what he had. Finding the various pills and bottles wasn’t hard; however, gathering them up without using a storage ring was a chore. In the end, he pulled out a sack and just started throwing them in that, moving as rapidly as he could. The concerns of their three saviours were also his now. That battle would have attracted eyes and clearly, something had happened to chase off the first wave of scavengers that had led to…

He walked around a building and saw the ruins of the gateway. Half the corpse of a youth wearing golden robes embroidered with the markings of the Shimmering Dragon Sept lay there, vibrant red blood with a golden hue draining away into the soil. It was nothing more than a myth that Golden Immortals had golden bones and blood, evidently. Death Qi was already swirling around it, indicating that the unfortunate scion of the sect had died with a lot of lingering resentment. The gateway beside him had a slight bowl carved out of it, the bloodstain over it suggesting it had occurred before…

He was distracted from that train of thought by the realisation that there were a lot of qi bottles, various boxes, even a shattered crate of fruit scattered around. Also, two more corpses now that he was standing closer to the gate. One was just a head, arms and legs while the other was just a pair of legs and an arm scattered around a spherical depression in the ground.

“Collapsed storage rings,” Liao Ying said, looking shocked as she arrived beside him.

“Yeah,” he agreed.

That explained why everyone else had run off at least. Whatever had done this was powerful and discriminating enough to break people’s storage rings and yet left them alive… This… squirrel that Miss Teng had mentioned?

Shaking his head he started tossing everything into the sack. It was already getting dark to the point of annoyance. His qi-enhanced vision helped a bit, but with his body still in the state it was, relying on it was already giving him an almighty headache.

By the time they got back to the central courtyard after clearing out as much of what they could find, dusk had properly transitioned into nightfall. The sky across the valley was still beset with flickers of light and occasional bolts of actual lightning signalling. It was also, he noted with some concern, visible in the direction upriver, on their side of the river.

“Can we really not put it in storage rings?” Hao Jun was grumbling from where he sat next to Jin Chen and Teng Chunhua beside three other large sacks of pills.

Shaking his head, he added his sack to the pile as did Liao Ying. Han Shu was sat nearby, his wound to his side apparently healed and his arm no longer looking like a collection of broken branches tied together with flesh. The brown-haired woman had acquired a cloak that she had tied around her and turned into an ad hoc tunic. He wasn’t surprised that most of the cloth that was scattered around the square wasn’t really good for clothing, almost all of that would be soulbound in some way given the calibre of people who had probably had their storage items vandalised. The blonde-haired girl had also claimed a few of the pieces and cut a hole in a piece of quite expensive Earth Spirit Cloth to make a crude tunic of her own.

“Hunter Teng, could you toss out a third of each sack at random and put it in those?” the dark-haired woman said gesturing to three large pots that appeared from nowhere as she waved her hand.

That was a smart idea, he had to admit. As a Herb Hunter Miss Teng wasn’t ‘with’ them in a real sense, and she wasn’t with these three either despite seeming to know the youth, Han Shu. Hao Jun scowled but said nothing which was a relief.

“Uh… Miss, would you… would both of you like some more convenient clothing…?” Liao Ying asked, dumping a second smaller sack next to his that he hadn’t noticed she had on her back.

“……..”

Both women stared at Liao Ying and then the dark-haired woman jerked her head towards the nearest vaguely intact building before heading in that direction in silence, followed by the blonde woman and a moment later Liao Ying.

By the time the three returned, looking much more civilised, Teng Chunhua had effectively finished splitting the various sacks of pills into the pots. For his part, he just sat there recovering his condition a bit and keeping an eye on their surroundings. The fighting on their side of the river had shifted around somewhat and was starting to grow closer, which definitely wasn’t a good thing. Eyeing the three pots, the dark-haired woman drew a sheaf of talismans out of her own storage device and slapped one on each of the five sacks, then stored one of the pots.

“We will sort these out when we are somewhere a bit safer,” she said flatly. “Each of you store one of the others.”

“How do we know you won’t pocket them,” Hao Jun grumbled, sounding a bit sulky.

“You don’t, but you are free to walk away.” the blonde girl said blandly.

“Pick a direction that’s that way…” she waved her hand behind them in a broad arc between the river and the mountains. “Oh, if you do though, and I see you again after this I’ll have to assume you mean us ill. At that point, I’ll break your legs and leave you for whatever comes-”

Hao Jun looked unconvinced by her threat, but mercifully said nothing to make the situation worse.

He moved fractionally faster than Hao Jun and grabbed the sack that Hao Jun had dropped earlier. He was willing to bet that he had pocketed some of the pills at least, but this way Hao Jun might be saved from himself. He had a pretty good idea of the value of the pills he himself had picked up and they were largely all below immortal, albeit still of pretty good quality. Liao Ying, noting what he had done, stored Jin Chen’s, leaving Hao Jun to take the remaining sack as Teng Chunhua had taken Liao Ying’s. As a goodwill strategy he had to admire the dark-haired woman; she was clearly taking steps to ensure that they didn’t do anything stupid and at the same demonstrating some degree of goodwill by letting all of them carry some. Most people would just have divvied the pills up between them and left the four or five of them here.

“Why are you willing to take us along with you?” he asked her quietly as they made their way out of the courtyard towards the dark forest.

“You tell me…” the woman said blandly, waving the blonde-haired girl to go past them and take the lead, which she did at a brisk jog.

“You don’t want us running off and making a fuss,” he said, keeping pace with her as they followed in a loose group.

“We came from across the river and there is fighting in two directions… and the mountains in the third, which leaves this direction, and you clearly aren't intending to go back into the mountains because you arrived from that side,” he continued.

“So… we would be going this way anyway, and this way you can keep an eye on us and we won’t chase after you.”

“You are much smarter than your friend Hao Jun over there,” the woman said with a faint smile.

“I’m almost three times his age,” he said drily. “And I’ve spent a lot more time around spiritual cultivators who don’t rely on their families for backing.”

She nodded silently and said nothing further.

The next hour turned out to be, perhaps, the most stressful hour he had experienced since arriving in Blue Water province. Not because it was dangerous, but because the expected dangers never came. They ran at near breakneck pace through the forest, following the blonde-haired girl as she wove through rocky outcrops, changed direction seemingly at random and flitted between trees and around thickets.

He constantly found himself looking for the danger, following in her tracks, wondering when she would stop or double back and yet she never did. The brown-haired woman, whose name he still didn’t know, even though Teng Chunhua did seem to, took up the rear, ensuring that nobody slowed down. That she wasn’t willing to talk about their ‘companions’ at all made him somewhat nervous, but there was little he could do to force the issue. The blonde girl had an unpredictable temper as it was. The others, especially Hao Jun, had tried to make introductions, but their overtures had been politely ignored by all three in any case. They fought once, briefly when a strange scorpion-like thing the size of a monkey threw itself out of a tree at them so fast he barely registered it as it moved. Almost as quickly Han Shu just swung his sword at it, treating him to the scene of the insectoid like thing evading then collapsing to the ground, cut clean in two. It was a familiar trick, to him at least, and by the intake of breath from Hao Jun and Liao Ying, to them as well. The reorganisation of fundamental probabilities of chance was something you could only do deliberately with a principle.

-Or a treasure weapon, his mind murmured rebelliously.

He rolled his eyes inwardly as he watched the brown-haired woman recover the core, which was just a three-star grade core, and store it away without comment.

“Not everything is suppressed here is it,” Liao Ying muttered beside him as they continued on.

Looking at her sideways he rolled his eyes, making her shake her head at her own question. They had already come to that conclusion already, but mostly they had just run from qi beasts before now, and with a larger group it had been easier to kill them even if it frequently meant that they were left without cores worth claiming. In any event, the killing had all been done with talismans rather than arts.

Eventually, after a further hour of running through the forest which was guarded on both sides by steep vegetated cliffs, the blonde-haired girl turned abruptly and started to lead them upwards. He was still amazed at how good her sight was in this darkness for her realm. He had recovered enough to see as if it was a gloomy day, but between the disruptive nature of the greenery and the colourless hues he was constantly having to modulate it to avoid getting a headache.

A few minutes of quiet climbing through rocks saw them all arrive at a ledge which he had marked on a few occasions earlier. Here, to his surprise, he found a hidden, shallow cave, some twenty metres deep and with a good vantage across the greenery that stretched out towards the river.

“We stop here for an hour, recover what you can,” the dark-haired woman said simply.

Sitting down against a wall he sighed and began to adjust his condition. To his surprise he was actually recovering more qi than he had expected, it was still nowhere close to what it should be, given his realm, but his qi-absorption efficiency was basically back to what it was at Qi Refinement. Watching how his spiritual cultivation art, Argent Star Law, drew in qi, the problem was… odd, as far as he could see his law was struggling to find qi that was simple enough for his law to refine.

“Here, eat this.” He was shaken from his introspection on that point by Teng Chunhua who had come to sit down beside him, offering him a stem of some spirit plant.

“What is it?” he asked, taking it and nibbling on one end, finding that the sticky sap was strangely refreshing and rich in unattributed qi.

“Blossom Leaf,” Teng Chunhua said. “It’s a fairly common spirit tree. We passed some young ones on the way through the last gorge.”

Munching it down, he found it to be refreshing and almost as good as a Golden Core grade replenishment elixir.

“Is there more?” he asked.

“Yes, but you don’t want to eat more than that,” Teng Chunhua said with a giggle.

“Why?”

“If you eat too much you will get a boner that won’t go down for two days and then start having trouble regulating your qi. In minor doses, it’s excellent for stamina replenishment, but with too much, it’s difficult to purge,” she said with a faint smirk.

“Wait... Blossom…is this one of the components in Maiden’s Blossom?”

“It is indeed,” she said with an amused expression.

He suddenly regretted wolfing it down in one go.

Seeing his expression, she shook her head wryly. "This is a young plant, only mature ones have effects that potent."

Looking across at the other side of the cave he saw the two women crouched over a pile of herbs and other oddments rapidly sorting through things, storing some away and tossing the rest into various pots.

“What are they doing?” he asked, curious.

“Sorting through stuff to see what’s worth keeping and what isn’t,” Chunhua said, sitting down beside him and wrapping her arms around her legs. “We are all low on supplies, so anything that can be easily compounded is useful, for medicines at least, so long as you don’t overuse them.”

“There will be a lot of healing medicines in the pill bottles we picked up and the other stuff,” he observed.

“True, but those are all sealed for now,” Chunhua reminded him, not that he had forgotten.

Frowning, he looked at them again. “But if they gathered those on the way here, won’t that have left a trail?”

“They didn’t,” Chunhua shook her head. “Look closer at the herbs.”

Narrowing his eyes, he followed her advice and realised that only a tiny portion of those they were rapidly sorting through had qi that was fully attuned to this place. The rest of them all seemed to be ones from… outside. They were all herbs they had gathered previously, in the Yin Eclipse Mountains. As he watched, the dark-haired girl started to crush what was in one of the bowls with a rock, humming some tune as she did so.

“Why are they just compounding them?” he asked.

“This part of the world is oddly traditional, as to why nobody has taught the… blonde-haired girl alchemy I cannot tell you but neither Han Shu nor…” she trailed off for a moment. “Well neither of the other two have any talent for alchemy.”

“Chen can do basic pill refinement,” he frowned.

“They aren’t compounding basic herbs,” Chunhua said drily. “Those are grade seven and eight mid-grade herbs that have started to spoil, probably because our storage talismans containment spaces are not as robust in this place compared to outside.”

He flinched involuntarily at her comment. Those two women were just happily crushing and compounding grade eight spirit herbs… in a pot… with a rock?

“They know what they are doing,” Chunhua said with a sigh. “Just leave them to it and recover.”

“Your storage talismans are starting to show weakness?” he asked, frowning as he thought about how his spiritual law wasn’t working anywhere near as efficiently as it should.

“A little, yes,” Teng Chunhua said after a moment. “I don’t have any herbs that sensitive in mine though…”

He nodded, understanding. Their seniors had gathered up almost everything early on to help them amass contribution points. Later on, gathering herbs had been somewhat secondary to just not dying, especially much later on. He had more beast cores than herbs on him in reality but cultivating with untested beast cores was a good way to end up with a qi deviation. With a further sigh, he settled down as she instructed and started to focus on his recovery properly.

The rest of the trip through the nighttime forest went much as the first hour had. They followed the blonde girl who set a relentless pace, while the dark-haired woman brought up the rear and Han Shu and Teng Chunhua warded either side of the column. He found himself pushed towards the back, keeping Jin Chen, Liao Ying and especially Hao Jun ahead of him, where he could both see them and keep them moving forward at a good pace and in a manner that didn’t lead them to feel they were being unfairly put upon.

It was largely uneventful, beyond a near-miss with some kind of treetop spider that had cast its web through the forest. That led to some fraught sneaking and a hissed explanation, primarily for Hao Jun and Jin Chen, that exploding your way through a place like this a night was a good way to introduce yourself to the local menu as breakfast. It was hard to disagree with that logic, based on what he had seen in the inner valleys. Had they not been pulled along by their seniors in a swathe of fire and acquisition, things might certainly have gone a lot smoother.

Dawn brought a quick stop by the river while the blonde girl climbed up a rock pillar to scout ahead. At this point, he had basically worked out what the ‘choice’ they had ahead of them was in any case. The chance of these three leaving them behind to follow the same route they would take was close to nil. That meant they either stuck with them, or went off in a tangent direction and risked survival out here on their own merits as a group of four or five. It wasn’t much of a choice either, because while he hadn’t broached that with Teng Chunhua, the latter was only really a choice if she came with them, and really he wouldn’t blame her in the slightest if she did not.

It was a choice that was no choice at all, really. He was very clear in his own head at this point that their survival lay with not being left behind by these three, who had by sheer fluke and misfortune crossed paths with them. Their skill at reading the landscape was… well it was unfair to say it was better than Teng Chunhua, but all three of them were expert pathfinders and skilled at basic geomancy to a degree that was quite surprising. He was still uncertain if all three were Herb Hunters though. Certainly, Han Shu, the young man with the sword was, however, the other two had the manner and tone of noble daughters, for all that they were basically slumming.

They still had no names for them either, for all that Hao Jun had already mooted the idea that this ‘Han Shu’ might be the Han Shu who had been at the top of the list. He had nearly kicked the idiot into a forest pit for that, but fortunately, he hadn’t voiced it near the others. There was no way to be sure either, because the lists were not searchable anymore. Ever since they had entered here they had stopped updating and it also turned out that they only held a small portion of the data for the total list as far as he could work out. As such his own held a few hundred names either side of his own very mediocre rank. Liao Ying and Jin Chen were the same. Hao Jun had a few more, but only because he had been searching out seniors’ names in his faction regularly to see how they were getting on. In any case, whoever this group were he was clear that their best chance was convincing these three that they were trustworthy enough to be worth keeping around.

It wasn’t until that evening that he finally got the opportunity to make his pitch on behalf of their group. The blonde-haired girl dragged them halfway up a rise between two rock pillars, to a half-disguised cave he would never have known was there had Chunhua not pointed right at it several times and told him exactly where they were going. How she found it was, she claimed, no big secret. If you followed the strata in the rocks, there were bands with vertical cracks in them that showed frequent signs of water erosion. This was a river valley with high mountains above it which, she explained wryly in the middle of the downpour that was currently drenching them, meant it saw a lot of rain. Indeed most of the pillars visible in the misty gloom had waterfalls on them now, feeding lakes in the low regions between them that were, in turn, feeding the river that was running through the valley below them. As such, these caves were cut by old waterfalls or water seeping through the rocks and washing out weak points.

Leaving the other three to settle down on one side, he steeled himself and came over to where the pair were again working on their herb compounding, largely in silence while Han Shu sat and kept watch by the entrance.

“Yes?” the brown-haired woman said after a moment, without looking up from the bowl of herbs she was currently stripping to fibres.

“Uh… can we talk about what happens… from here on out?” he said carefully.

“Go on...” she said, continuing her task.

“I can’t pretend at this point that we are that useful,” he said with a grimace.

“Good,” the blonde girl said with a snicker.

“However, we er…”

“However these have been the most painless twenty-four hours you have experienced since you set foot in these mountains and you don’t want to be cut adrift,” the dark-haired woman said, stopping what she was doing and looking at him for the first time.

“When you put it like that…” he grimaced and ran a hand through his wet hair. “Yes, that is basically it.”

“That is a bold proposition for a group who we only met by chance less than a day ago,” she said, eyeing him a touch coolly he couldn't help but feel.

“It is in both our interests,” he said, rapidly putting his thoughts in order. “You don’t want us running around making a mess behind you, attracting notice. We don’t want to run into any of our seniors again, and neither of us wants to get caught up in what is behind.”

“Go on,” she said impassively.

-Yeesh, he thought in his own head, she is surprisingly good as this.

“You went to a good amount of effort not to antagonise us before, divvying up the loot from the square, sealing it and such.”

“And you had good eyes regarding your fellow disciples,” she said with a nod.

“They are less… experienced… in matters where they cannot rely on a family name to bail them out of trouble,” he said with a wry shrug, wondering what the others had done, beyond Jin Chen grumbling and that snake hole Liao Ying had trodden on.

“Wonderful,” the blonde girl muttered with a clearly derisive tone. “Not only are you here to cause a mess, you are all here on your first attempt at causing a mess. Even a cretin like Ha Yun could be trusted to not trip over his own feet.”

He wasn’t certain who Ha Yun was, beyond presumably being someone from the Ha Clan, but he filed that away quietly in any case. If they were willing to speak ill of the Ha Clan then they were certainly from nobility of equal standing, or far enough removed from the Ha Clan to not fear repercussion if word got out.

“Hunter Teng said you were basically competent and willing to follow instruction,” the brown-haired girl said after a moment.

“My seniors were short-sighted in that regard,” he said with a grimace.

“Usually disciples of the great powers are. I am quite familiar with how they usually treat Yin Eclipse,” she said with a nod.

“So what do you propose?” she asked after a further moment.

“Let us travel with you, we won’t slow you down and we have knowledge that will be helpful,” he said a little more hopefully than he intended, eyeing her herb compounding.

“Knowledge that will be helpful?” she narrowed her eyes.

“Alchemy, for starters,” he replied. “My Junior Brother Jin Chen may only be at Golden Core but he is an accomplished alchemist for his realm. My Junior Sister Liao is also someone whose family has a background in ancient artefacts and history.”

“And you?” she said with a half-smile.

“I know which people are worth running away from,” he said drily, which was broadly true, he was certain he could recognise most of the major sects… although that wasn’t much of a selling point if both these two were noble daughters from important clans.

“And Hao Jun?” she said.

He sighed, “My Junior Brother is not as bad as he seems. He is relatively important for an Outer Disciple in our sect, but he can follow instructions and I’ll keep him from speaking out of turn.”

“And why would he need to do that?” the blonde girl asked with remarkable astuteness.

He looked back at her, trying to maintain his current expression. “He is prone to speculation and talking a lot about things that don’t concern him. I’ll impress upon him the importance of co-operation.”

“I see.” The dark-haired woman said in a tone that suggested that he really better have some words with his erstwhile Junior Brother.

In truth, he was also cool on the idea of Hao Jun at this point. If his Junior Brother had fled with the others from their sect in the aftermath of what had happened in the ruin it would have been a huge relief in some ways. As it was, however, Hao Jun remained and so long as he could be kept from himself would be potentially useful down the line. Hao Jun was the only one among their number with any real backing in their Sect, being a member of the core branch of the Hao Clan, who were themselves influential in their parent sect, Argent Imperial Hall. He had also been there for the whole fiasco with Sheng Zhao, been injured by Sheng Zhao and played witness to much of the insanity that preceded that event. If they were going to avoid serious repercussions upon leaving this place, assuming they survived, Hao Jun was, at this point their sole talisman to something approaching a fair hearing with the sect elders.

The issue was impressing that upon their three saviours before they decided it was expedient to break his Junior Brothers legs and throw him in the river.

As it was, they both eyed him in a way that made him wonder if they were going to make him swear an oath, before the brown-haired woman just sighed. “I would make you swear oaths, but I don’t trust them here.”

He blinked, surprised at that statement. Clearly, though, she knew more about this place than she was letting on. He had some speculations, based on things he had read, about the qi-replenishment issues they were having at this point, but hadn’t given voice to them for fear of alarming the other three. That posed another problem though: if she thought swearing oaths on the Heavenly Dao might not be quite as watertight here, then cooperation really did have to be built on trust rather than hard rules.

“Okay, tell me why they were after you,” she said after a moment.

He spent the next twenty minutes or so recounting a summary of their adventures from Blue Water City to here. There was no point in hiding much of anything in any case. The two nodded along and said very little beyond asking a few pointed questions about events like the Lash Lamium and that red tree their seniors had tried to cut down. When he finished speaking they just sat there in silence, considering him without saying anything for a good minute.

“Okay,” the brown-haired woman said eventually.

“I am called Kun Juni, my friend here is Lin Ling, we are daughters of the Kun Clan and the Lin Clan, our compatriot there is Han Shu, from the Han Clan.”

“All of us are Herb Hunters who were already up here on a mission when we are basically abducted by an advance group from the Ha Clan and the Din Clan and forced to participate in this trial. They tried to kill us, succeeded in killing two of my companions, who I… considered to be lifelong friends as well. We escaped them, barely, by fleeing into the caverns below and lost our talismans thanks to them as well. At this point, all we want to do is find a way to get out of here, or far enough away from the rest to survive long enough for us all to get dumped back out of whatever anomaly this is.”

“The Din Clan?” he said warily, thinking who that might have been.

“A youth called Din Ouyeng, he had a friend called Ji Tantai. The youth from the Din Clan was from the Jade Gate Court, or so he claimed.”

“When was this?” he frowned, there hadn’t been a Din Ouyeng that he recalled among the rather grand group form the Jade Gate Court that had been held front and centre in Blue Water City while he was there. He also knew of only one Din Ouyeng by general reputation in recent years, a newly risen inheritance disciple that had made waves after the last Dragon Pillars Trial. If these two were to be believed, and they didn’t seem to be telling any falsehoods as far as his ability to read their intent went, then this whole thing was… suddenly looking…

“About a week before your grand congregation, they arrived and waylaid us within half a day of the trial proclamation being sent out,” the blonde girl, Lin Ling, whose name was… familiar for some reason, said blandly.

“On the same day?” he said dully, then just started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Jin Chen asked from the far wall, sounding a bit grumpy.

“This whole trial is sham,” he laughed.

“What makes you say that?” Hao Jun said with a frown.

“There was a team with an inheritance disciple from the Jade Gate Court in Yin Eclipse, the very day the trial was announced,” he said blandly.

“Then why weren’t they high up on the list, if they got such a head start?” Hao Jun frowned.

He started at the two young women, not saying anything, his memories had finally supplied why Lin Ling’s name was familiar.

“They took your talismans and didn’t have contribution talismans of their own. That’s why the Bureau talismans are co-opted the way they were,” he said quietly.

It was such a big jump that he found it shocking, that he was encountering this kind of corruption and subversion. A lowly Nascent Soul Disciple, a Junior Elder in the Outer Sect of the Argent Justice Sect, coming face to face with the Imperial Astrology Bureau scamming a whole generation to cover up whatever it was this trial was aiming to root out here. These three were at the very top of the list, but their talismans were not in their possession. If anyone had the means to subvert the bindings on talismans for these trials it would be the organisers who had implemented the system to keep track of all the ‘contributions’. Proving it was impossible, but as the proverb said: where there was smoke, there was fire, so something was clearly at the bottom of this alright. It was also something that could very well see those two both disgraced and all wind up dead if it ever got made public knowledge. That presumably was why they had ditched the hunters: they found what they wanted and then…

“The thing with the Seven Sovereigns School,” he muttered very quietly.

Both of them looked at him consideringly before the woman, Noble Daughter Kun, sighed. “This will work so long as you go where we point, stop when we say and pull your weight when we ask you to. If there is any inclination that this isn’t going to work…”

“I’ll-” Lin Ling was cut off as Kun Juni clipped her over the head with her hand and scowled at her.

“If this doesn’t work, that would be a shame. I don’t like killing people,” she said simply.

He nodded, it was all the more potent for the fact that she was straightforward about it. She clearly doubted Heavenly Oaths would hold them for some reason as well, or was it that…

-Ah, of course, he sighed.

It wasn’t that she doubted oaths would work, she was guessing that they had a means to not be bound by them, which meant she knew they were a subsidiary of the Argent Imperial Hall and was assuming they had Argent Star-Path Talismans on them. When he viewed it from her perspective, it made sense. The problem was that only one of their number was likely to have such a talisman, Hao Jun.

“It won’t come to that,” he said simply. “I swear upon my own mother’s reputation and my father’s name.”

~ Kun Juni, Hunters and Others, Forest Valley ~

Kun Juni sat quietly beneath an overhanging tree on the edge of this narrow gorge, ignoring the hubbub of their little group a few metres below her. The previous two days had been fraught. A race to get ahead of any pursuit while making sure that their newfound additions were not going to stab them in the back. Thankfully that was resolved, despite her concerns about how well a heavenly oath would hold here. Her memories of what occurred in her tribulation and the events around acquiring the talisman were a bit blurry, but the feeling that their Eastern Azure’s Heavens didn’t have quite as much sway here as many might like was one she was struggling to shake now, even if she couldn't say why exactly.

“Really it’s a fine mess we are all in… isn’t it, Juni,” she said to herself with a sigh and took another sip of the spirit wine she had acquired from the stuff scattered around the courtyard.

Shaking her head, she turned her gaze back to the group below. Now that they were included within the travelling band and she had set them some tasks, like sorting out the pills they were carrying, they were much more at ease, chatting quietly around the hidden campfire.

Thankfully after their heart to heart in the cave in the rock pillar, today had gone much better than she expected. They had turned into this new set of valleys where the river split into a series of broad meandering flows after descending a wide waterfall. The odds of anyone picking their series of rock pillar valleys from the seven or so on offer was pretty slim, as the terrain here was brutal in comparison to what they had been covering before. Even then, it was, she concluded, much better to suffer this, avoiding qi beasts and traversing the rather more active spirit vegetation and ever-present ruins in the valleys and gorges, than risk getting ambushed by more cultivators. There was also no sign that others were ahead of them either, which was heartening.

On the other hand…

She looked up at the cliff, where Han Shu was sitting, keeping his watch. That youth who died so inexplicably had had the means to track his sword, and they were somehow marked by wider events for whatever reason… it was hard not to put those two threads together.

Her inner gaze was drawn to the talisman in her mind’s eye…

“But what kind of picture are they actually making?” she wondered out loud.

The leader of the disciples, Ruo Han, had also put two and two together quite quickly, and while Han Shu had kept the more exotic capabilities of his sword a secret after that execution of the ambushing Alkr by the river and she had told no lies about anything, it was hard not to feel uneasy, both over the closeness of the escape and the details of what had happened.

Even now, in the dark of night, a good thirty miles on from the ruin they had joined up with their new travelling companions in, she could see the flashes of fighting on the horizon. If she really squinted and pushed qi into her oracular meridians she could even see the detail of the unnatural flashes of lightning and hear the peals of thunder.

“They just do not let up do they…” she trailed off and took another deep swig of the wine, which was also spiritual enough to help with her cultivation as an added bonus.

With another sigh, she looked back at the sky with its winking stars with swirling constellations totally unfamiliar to her. They had far too many worries.

Far, far too many.

Returning her mind to the talisman the squirrel had thrown at her, which, with its new cultivation art, was in many ways much more worth exercising her mind over compared to those things largely outside her control, she settled back into her quasi-meditation.

It was hard, looking at this law, to feel angry about losing her previous spiritual cultivation and established foundation to that mysterious black and white serpent of lightning. It would likely continue to disturb her for a long while how close to the edge she had come. Rage had nearly consumed her, demonified her, courtesy of the festering and insidious entity that had sunk its claws into her psyche. Her Physical Foundation was a bit… weirder. Her breakthrough to Mantra Seed that had happened in the midst of all that insanity appeared to have stuck, which was something at least. However, all her accumulation and vital qi had been dispersed by the black and white lightning, presumably for the same reason her spiritual foundation and accumulation had been dispersed, to remove the lingering danger from that horrifying entity.

It also appeared to have… mutated somehow, which was a bit disconcerting. Of the five mnemonics, ‘Bestowal’ had changed to ‘Bestow’ and she could substitute her original mantra mnemonics ‘Gift’ and ‘Scion’ with any of the others. Her limit was still five, but it was now a choice of five out of seven words. It was also noticeably stronger in the application of all the mnemonics.

That was all fine though… compared to the Spiritual Law from the Talisman. It was ridiculous, ridiculous in a good way, but there were probably other words for it as well: terrifying, remarkable, miraculous, heaven-defying… but really, ridiculous summed up everything.

‘Bright Lotus Earthly Scripture’

She cycled it again and felt the warmth of the world flow into her, like she was soaking in a gentle bath, suffusing her whole body and strengthening her meridians.

It had three chapters, although she had only really looked at the first for now. That chapter would take her all the way to the Immortal Realm. At first, she had been worried, thinking about her frankly horrible spirit root, but the more she read, the more terrifying this law became. She shook her head and sighed again as the cycle finished.

-What kind of crap did I think was a good cultivation law before? She thought to herself, staring at the sky again.

With each cycle, the law was gently changing the very nature of her body. Her poor spirit root aside, she was not exactly untalented and had been reasonably proud of her families ‘Nine Kun Hearts Manual’. The first chapter which she had been practising would take you to Golden Core. The second, although harder, would see you to Dao Seeking. The third would allow you to cross the Immortal threshold. There was a fourth chapter, that apparently finished at Golden Immortal, but that was in the hands of her Grand Uncle, Kun Jiang, who had stated that he would share it with suitable talents, of which he did not consider her one thanks to her spirit root and the rotten politics at the heart of their clan.

-Truly I was a frog at the bottom of the well, she sighed.

After seeing this Bright Lotus Earthly Scripture in action, she felt she could probably deliver seminars on that saying at this point. If she compared it to her Family’s ‘Nine Kun Hearts Art’…

She completed another cycle, watching the qi of the world flow through her in auspiciously harmonious ways according to the methods the scripture set out and sighed again.

Really, you couldn’t compare them.

One was the scrawlings of a child, drawing trees and clouds for amusement; the other was a peerless scroll painting that had captured a piece of the Primal Dao within it.

And that was before you even got to the truly terrifying aspects of it. This First Chapter set out the path to Immortal in tremendous detail. The structure of the ‘realm’s it defined were broadly similar, but within them, the specifics were very different to what she knew. They combined aspects of Spiritual and Physical Cultivation with Martial Intent, the Dao of Feng Shui, Body Refinement and several other weirder sidelines besides. At the very least it was a threefold cultivation art. The only such art she knew of was the Dun Clan’s Imperial Inheritance art. Even their own Kun Clan’s supreme inheritance art, the ‘Devouring Kun Sovereign Scripture’ was only a twofold art with ancillary chapters that dealt with Soul Strength and Martial Intent as far as she was aware.

The first realm was ‘Foundation Establishment’, which seemed to broadly mirror the phase of Spiritual Cultivation before you reached ‘Qi Condensation’, when you tried to awaken your qi and attune your body to it, accepting a spiritual law to practice. After that, though, came ‘Bodily Refinement’ which was like all three early stages of Physical Cultivation packed into one and shuffled about slightly.

It was hard not to compare the past with the present. The issues with ‘primacy’ between the different paths, spiritual and physical cultivation were ones she was well aware of, and there was nothing of them in this law she was now cultivating. The subtle rearrangement of her meridians, the way it was drawing connections to her bones, linking in extra branches to her twelve principle meridians which had been somehow dormant or underutilised before were all leading her to a single, shocking conclusion. The sages had been right. Physical Cultivation was a broken thing, but not in the way they thought.

-What would those people give to see this art? She thought with a shudder, completing yet another cycle.

From what she could see, the first three ‘realms’ of Physical Cultivation: Containment, Foundation and Refinement were fundamentally derivatives of this realm. Almost like a chapter or fragment of knowledge from it had arrived in their world.

She slipped out of the semi-trance as another cycle completed and stared once again at the sky.

“Did physical cultivation come from this place?” she whispered softly, her words vanishing into the night air.

It was a compelling thought, for all that it was just an educated hunch.

She was nearly done with ‘Bodily Refinement’ as well, thanks to her portion of the pills that were scattered across the courtyard. The number of low-grade pills had been surprising until she started inspecting the bottles and realised that the lightly armoured, red-robed youth who had been attacked by the squirrel had had bottles marked with the sigils of over two dozen sects. The dragon robed youths had been little better. The four Outer Disciples with them had also voluntarily offered her up a few pills as well, to aid in her ‘recuperation’, claiming she was something of a benefactor and that this was the least they could do.

Shaking her head at that, she turned her attention back to the talisman while she began yet another cycle.

The next stages, beyond ‘Body Refinement’ were familiar… at least in name. ‘Qi Condensation’ and ‘Qi Refinement’. Qi Condensation was somewhere between Physical and Spiritual Refinement, it opened up her twelve basic meridians fully, integrated them with the accumulation from the previous realms and joined them together in a dantian, then began condensing qi within it. When that reached a certain threshold she would break through to ‘Qi Condensation’ and open up a Qi Sea. This was what she was having trouble with, theoretically speaking.

As far as she understood it, you formed a golden core by inducing the mists in your dantian to a certain density then stimulating them to make them move, drawing more and more qi in from the environment, refining your body and enlarging your dantian in the process. This was ‘Qi Refinement’. At a certain point, the density would become enough that your qi would coalesce around the densest point in your dantian and then collapse to a core. The number of rotations and the colour determined the quality of the core, and when it was completed you would experience a tribulation that would temper the core. If you crossed that successfully your golden core was cast, and your dantian could, with the aid of your spiritual law, assuming it was suitable, begin to condense liquid qi into droplets and your dantian would manifest a Qi Sea.

This law, however, went about that in reverse, opening up your Qi Sea before you formed the core and then inducing the collapse and coalescence of the core with already pure, liquid qi. What was particularly notable was that unlike their world’s Orthodox Spiritual Cultivation, with this law, forming a golden core would provoke no tribulation.

The scripture gave detailed instructions on how to maximise her breakthrough chances, including pills, recipes and earthly treasures. It also stressed that with time and patience you could get a 30 or 31 rotations core…

Even reading that for the umpteenth time, she felt her palms go sweaty just thinking about it.

A core above 30 rotations was a core that was ‘above’ grade one. ‘Special’ Cores, simply put. The founder of her branch of the Kun Clan, tens of thousands of years ago had had such a core. His ‘Nine Devouring Kun Core’ had incorporated aspects of Yin and Yang Metal and Water to form a ‘Minor Unity Cycle’ that reflected the nature of the mythical Kun beast. It was his art that was the basis for the several different arts their branch cultivated by, including the one she had previously used.

After your Core was formed, the ‘Golden Core Realm’, as it was commonly known on Eastern Azure, was in this law split in two as well. The first half was ‘Core Formation’, which seemed typical enough, and tallied with what she already understood. It refined qi from the mist using the inertia of the core, fed your Qi Sea and then built up the core using the pure qi you had refined. The second part though, ‘Core Refinement’, made her heart palpitate every time she skimmed it. Usually, Intent ‘establishment’, the creation of an ‘Intent’ unique to you, happened during Soul Foundation and was integral to comprehending your Soul so that you could condense a Nascent Soul. In this Law, however, it was established during Golden Core, and also considered to be a holistic thing with Martial Intent and Soul intent, both of which usually required a separate art entirely.

Her family had one such scripture but it was even more jealously guarded than the third and fourth chapters of their family art.

‘Soul Foundation’ came next, which was about what she understood, although it placed a lot more emphasis on the ‘Sea of Knowledge’ and integration of intent than she was familiar with from her short looks at the Second Chapter of ‘Nine Kun Hearts Manual.

‘Nascent Soul’ came after Foundation, and there was a warning about tribulations for both those realms.

In this law, however, Nascent Soul was split into three sub realms: ‘Soul Manifestation’, ‘Nascent Refinement’ and ‘Soul Severing’.

Soul Severing appeared analogous to Spiritual Severing as she knew of it. That was the act of freeing one’s self from earthly constraints and cementing the primacy of the soul within the body. Successfully crossing it would take you to Dao Seeking where you worked to establish a principle.

In this law, the realms above Nascent Soul were called the ‘Unity Realm’ and ‘Seeking Principle’. Her knowledge was not deep enough to make much headway with the text and the methods beyond grasping that this was basically ‘Dao Seeking’, but again slightly subdivided.

After that came ‘Immortal Unification’, which was the same as ‘Immortal Realm’, but she could make no headway at all with what was spoken of in those sections, beyond appreciating that the art was quite forthright in its instructions on how to prepare optimally for attacking the Immortal Threshold.

She completed another thirty cycles, pondering what was written in the early sections before finally deciding to stop.

The moon had risen properly now, casting a silvery light across the half of the gorge it illuminated. The clouds had stayed away as well, which made a nice change, and also afforded her another chance to observe the stars above shifting.

A quick patrol of the perimeter took ten minutes and told her that Lin Ling was sat on some nearby rocks cultivating while Teng Chunhua was sat near the others in the shadow of another low outcropping. The other hunter gave her a hand sign of acknowledgement as she passed and then went back to watching the forest gorge quietly. Apparently, Sheng Zhen had also tried to kill her, and left her with the injuries she was currently recuperating from.

She finished her circuit back at the group of four, who were still sorting pills out around the fire.

The hierarchy of their group was easy enough to remember at least. They were all Outer Disciples of the same sect, Ruo Han was the leader of sorts, and the only one at Nascent Soul within the band. Hao Jun, who was at Soul Foundation, seemed to have some status within the sect but was a bit of an outsider and prone to being a bit nosey. Jin Chen was a friend of Ruo Han’s and the only Golden Core cultivator within the group, while Liao Ying was also at Soul Foundation and pleasant enough company.

“May I sit?” she asked, coming up to the edge of the fire and making her presence known so as not to surprise anyone.

Ruo Han smiled wanly at her and nodded, gesturing towards a rock next to the fire. “Of course, Miss Juni.”

“How are you all…” she asked politely, sitting on the rock and looking at the stacks of basic pills they were sorting out with curiosity.

“….”

There was a silent pause for a few moments before Ruo Han answered. “Well enough, thank you, we were lucky things panned out as they did…”

“We were just talking about the squirrel…” Liao Ying muttered.

“The squirrel is the kind of unknown quantity you learn to respect out here… or it finds you and teaches you respect in various ways… as you all saw…” she said dryly.

That got wry chuckles from the darkness, her comment clearly having been heard by both Ling and Teng Chunhua.

“I still can’t believe there is something out there that can -break- storage rings of Golden Immortal Cultivators with its bare paws…” the girl, Liao, muttered, casting her eyes towards the treeline…

-Golden Immortal? She mused inwardly. She would have to ask later how the girl knew that. Was she talking about the red-robed youth or the others in dragon robes who came after?

“I’ve had three encounters with it since we got into this mess weeks ago and every time it’s found a new way to surprise me. And I’ve known about its weird, trickster ways for almost a decade…” she replied, turning to look at Liao Ying with a sympathetic smile.

“I would say that it’s rarely, if ever, lethally aggressive, but that might be a point of interpretation…”

That got chuckles even from the group around the fire, which was good.

“We saw some of the other things as well,” Liao Ying shuddered. “I was hit by some hidden rock-like creature that exploded rocks back when Sheng Zhao…”

“Uggh,” Hao Jun shuddered as well. “That was horrible. It spat acid as well.”

“That sounds about right,” she nodded sympathetically.

“Even that bastard Zhao struggled to kill them…” Jin Chen muttered, spitting into the fire.

She pulled a roasting spirit fruit out of the fire and started to eat it…

“Those are something from the darkness below. They hunt with qi-perception and you can find caverns with dozens of them, if not hundreds, just drifting about, hidden until one ambushes you,” she said by way of her own experience, not adding that she had met whole caverns of them.

All of them shuddered at that thought.

“Can you imagine one in the green out there?” she said pointing into the darkness. “Or hiding in the shadows of some gorge up here, just looking like a rock, waiting and then…”

“Then how do you survive if…?” Hao Jun muttered. “Presumably it takes some good treasures…?”

She eyed him and just shook her head. “You only explode things up here if you want to find out how bad things can really get. You sneak through quickly and quietly, disturb nothing, use as little qi as possible and don’t dally to look back. If it looks dodgy it almost certainly is. That’s the only way you stay alive out here… or down there.”

“Trust her,” Teng Chunhua added dryly. “The answer to: ‘Could it get any worse?’ out here is usually: 'Always'.”

Nodding, she changed tack, partly because the conversation was heading in directions that might involve talking about things that were best just left unexplained, or Arai and Sana. Hao Jun liked to ask far too many nosey questions for her liking.

“Anyway… Is there anything good among the pills you have been sorting out?”

“A lot of it’s just qi replenishment stuff of varying grades and some breakthrough elixirs for realms above Immortal…” Ruo Han grimaced.

“Who brings breakthrough elixirs on something like this?” she muttered, realising it was a silly question even as she asked it, but it did change the topic.

“They are from a dozen different sects, probably they were looted,” Liao Ying mused, picking one up and looking at it. “Those close to breakthroughs might bring them, just in case they got a lucky encounter.”

On it, she could see the symbol for ‘Blue Gauze Pure Pavilion’, not a sect she recognised.

“Figures...” she sighed. “What we really need are mending pills and poison-dispersing pills.”

“I can have a look when there is time and a bit more peace and see if I can make any of the lower-ranked ones,” Jin Chen noted.

“Low ranked ones are good, but out here we really need ones that don’t have side effects or have good purity,” she noted.

“Yeah,” Ruo Han grimaced as well, as did Jin Chen.

Neither took offence at her comment; it was just a recognisable reality of this place so far. Medicines to alleviate qi poisoning were no good in the long term if they traded one form of poison for another.

“Base building pills would be helpful as well,” Lin Ling added as she strolled over, carrying a bunch of spirit herbs.

“Yeah...” Ruo Han sighed, agreeing with that as well. “We still have a lot to go through, everything was jumbled beyond belief, and the youth from the Red Sovereign’s Sect seemed to have most of his stuff soulbound from what I dimly recall.”

“And our ‘seniors’ brought the most useless bunch of crap with them for the most part,” Jin Chen added glumly.