Memories of the Fall

[6] Few stand taller as great villains, tyrants and despoilers of hope than those old matriarchs of the first generation. [7] Those who walked the first paths, yet kept their wisdom for themselves, severing their inheritances, that their future generations could never exceed them. [8]Though the heavens have turned and their tyranny is by a distant nightmare, cast down by those who they so wilfully deceived, the curse of their greed lingers on. [9] What glory might we have wrought had those weak willed women done their duty and not abandoned us? [10] What kingdom might endure had they not stolen away the fruits of our hard won labours with their deceiving smiles and wilful words? [11] What eternity might have been ours, but for their fear of the very children they brought into the world? [12] All our ancestors asked for was the same chance that those first people took, and in return they were cruelly denied.

~Excerpt from ‘The Book of Denunciations’

By Baradanus the Pious

~ Han Shu, Montane Valley ~

Han Shu sat quietly up a lower outcropping of the gorge between the rock pillars they were currently resting in, watching the river valley beyond it. On the horizon, the peals of thunder and occasional distant flashes of fire in the night told him where the cultivators were still battling it out. Exactly how many were out there he had no idea, but the scale of involvement in this ‘trial’ portrayed by their new companions painted a deeply worrying picture. Apparently, there had been over ten thousand cultivators assembled in Blue Water City that had travelled there to take part…

A crack of green lightning split the sky a further valley over, in the direction they had originally intended. With it came rolling black thunder clouds that obscured the night sky on that horizon, followed by blue and white bolts that spidered hither and thither. Earthly Tribulation lightning…

Thankfully, nothing was coming remotely in their direction.

“Or they are just being quiet about it,” he muttered under his breath, focusing more on the rippling swathe of distant forest that had been a scene of ruination and frozen slaughter.

Under the starlight, the distant shadows in that place seemed to leap out unnaturally. It had already been unnerving enough to pass through it in broad daylight. Now though, the aura of death and entombment was even more pronounced. Looking to his left and then down into the rest of the valley it was just possible to make out two more such places: otherworldly scars in the darkness, lingering on or maybe above the misty forest canopy.

The solitude of the watch also gave him time to think, mainly concerning the scabbarded sword that sat in his lap.

He had used it enough now to get a grasp of its quirks, and the more he did the more certain he had become that it was slowly imparting some form of sword art to him in drips and drabs. He had already felt it had secrets; the old ghost’s warning about it not being ‘simple’ had been growing ever more prescient in his mind, nevermind the scattered memories of the way it had ended that terrible eldritch threat. The frenetic combat within that ruined estate had only furthered his curiosity and fear towards it. Before there had been doubts in his head, particularly regarding the eldritch spider things and their actual realm, but that experience of a few days prior finally provided an actual measuring ruler for his speculations. It had killed an immortal… with no more difficulty than if he had decided to chop down a tree, or cut up a side of pig. It had also deflected multiple Immortals’ Soul Sense.

Even the fact that that horrible bastard had had to physically ruin his arm to claim the sword spoke to its strangeness. That it hadn’t been able to shelter him from whatever the youth had done was… odd certainly, but at the same time it hadn’t seemed to involve an inner attack so maybe that was why.

That whole traumatic experience had also made him realise that with the warning from the old ghost, Mu Shansu, still circling in his head he had never tried to put qi into it properly. It carried his qi, allowing him to encompass the blade if he so wished, but it already cut everything without difficulty so he had stopped even that after the first day or so of possessing it.

He eyed it again, sweating a bit. He had never thought to do what the grey-robed youth had done, either to investigate the blade or refine it. The latter possibility was out of the question anyway, even if he had been so inclined, without an awareness of his soul or a nascent soul that act was as impossible as grabbing stars from the sky. As to just putting qi into it to investigate it a bit… he had been sat here, trying to work up the courage to ask the sword if he could do just that.

It wasn’t that the act felt stupid… although he was somewhat self-conscious about it for some reason he couldn’t quite grasp. Was it because he expected it to refuse?

He stared up at the sky again, then down at the campfire and sighed in quiet frustration. Juni had gone over to talk to them, and Lin Ling was making a patrol of the circumference of the camp. Both of them were doing… stuff… moving forward, grappling with their problems…

“And here I am, sat talking to a sword, feeling like an idiot, afraid that it will just ignore me…” he mumbled.

The sword just sat there, in his lap, being a very normal sword.

“….”

With a final look down at the campfire he sighed and then turned his attention to it, holding it up before him.

“Uhh… please may I put some of my qi into the sword? I just want to talk to you… to...”

Even as he said it, he felt stupid, hardly expecting it to do anything and trailed off, before working up the courage to continue.

“If you don’t want to do that I-”

There was a faint tug, and a ripple of warmth flowed through his body, grasping him completely. The night sky vanished and darkness stretched out around him. He stood there, frozen with shock, not willing to even breathe let alone move as he found himself standing in a shadowy place with a paved stone floor. There was no obvious sense of walls or a ceiling in the darkness, but the sense of enclosed envelopment was so profound that it was hard not to think of it as a grand, shadowy hall.

The thing that drew his immediate attention was the two-tiered dais some ten metres in front of him. The lower tier was sloped with steps up and carvings on the wall panels. The second tier was circular, with a lowered centre that was open at the front and put him in mind of a throne for some inexplicable reason. Embedded within the seat of the ‘throne’ was a sword with the same broad appearance as the one he still held.

Looking around, he saw nothing else in this space, so steeling himself, he walked forward towards the dais. As he approached, however, the rest of the dais became more visible through the gloom. What he had taken to be the two-tiered structure was just the lower part of a much bigger platform. Behind the ‘throne’ with its sword was a shadowed statue of a seated vaguely feminine figure, shrouded in dark robes that seemed to encapsulate the entire darkness of the space.

Arriving before the dais’s lower steps he stared up at it. It was impossible not to feel awed by the statue. The aura it carried permeated the darkness more and more as he stared at it and the strange symbol on its brow that resembled a lotus flower. There was a sense of lingering duality, an oppression both welling up from below and pushing down from above, compressing the world between them and yet… transforming through them somehow. It put him in mind of yin and yang and yet, intuitively, he knew that didn’t feel right, -or perhaps it was just that his very shallow understandings of the concept were insufficient.

The symbol seemed to draw his attention the more he stared at the face… whispering to him somehow. It was not sinister, in fact, there was nothing at all either sinister or inauspicious about this place, despite the gloom. Rather it put him in mind of the quiet dark of an ancestral temple?

“Beginnings…”

The words finally settled in his head, like gossamer threads, even as the darkness from below took on a new profound and all-encompassing intent.

“Endings…”

The darkness from above fell to meet it, the two twisting with him in the middle, meeting in him somehow. The cyclical nature of the darkness sang to him, its words unknowable yet lingering mysteriously as the lotus became the darkness, swirling black on black. A cycle of transformative creation and destruction…

His ability to perceive it failed and it gently pushed him back, disconnecting him from whatever profound mysteries existed within it and leaving him standing, sweating suddenly in the darkness. His head physically hurt and his heart was pounding, the darkness dragged at his limbs and made him want to sit down and just…

He finally tore his vision away from the symbol and the sense of wanting to just fall into darkness vanished. In doing so, he noticed that there was a stele in the hands of the seated statue, its words graven in a mysterious script that rearranged themselves in his mind so that he could read it.

I was the first, not the way, nor the truth, but the simplicity of being and becoming.

I led my people from the trees and walked the first lands, the first of many who would yet come forth.

We prospered and grew strong, crafting new hopes and dreams upon the canvas of the world.

To my people I gave the greatest gift a mother could give, but to my family, I could give nothing, for they desired everything, and in the end, all that I had built was claimed by others and turned towards ruin without end.

Recognising that all things must have an end, I found my enlightenment upon that final shore and was cursed by my future generations for denying them the eternity their greed sought out for them.

Yet a mother cannot abandon her children, no matter their actions, so I bestowed my wisdom upon my sons and daughters, created on that dark coastline and sent them out to the world that a balance might be kept.

Without endings, there can be no new beginnings.

Eternity is pointless if it is a frozen moment.

‘Original Song’

The words settled into his mind, bringing with them a strange sense of timeless sorrow and… disappointment. He felt himself pulled back to see a primitive, monkey-like figure fallen from the treetops desperately fighting some beast with a grasped stone, killing it finally with broken branches and reaching some simple… understanding or enlightenment. Others came after, picking up stones, breaking sticks, hunting beasts.

Slowly they became more real and comprehensible: men, women and children walking out from forests and into new vast open grasslands. He saw their wonder at the sky, at the horizon, at the stars. The monkey was now a woman, with dark skin and red hair leading a tribe who ranged far and wide across this new land. He travelled with them and saw them dance by fires making songs about the earth, sky and stars. Watched as they gave names to things and found truth in simplicity and common purpose. They walked on and their songs became more mysterious, their hunts became more profound.

Other tribes followed, led by men and women. They sang songs and through them pulled down the stars from the sky and made lanterns of them. They danced through the night and the day and their footsteps drew others on across mountain tops, through the clouds and across the oceans of a vast world. They met mythological beasts and argued the dao with dragons and phoenixes, walked into the depths of caverns and confronted the darkness, danced in the savannah and tamed the fires of heaven in scenes that made his mind tremble just to behold them.

Their arrogance grew as their knowledge grew and he saw how their world became smaller with each passing moment. The wonder at the earth and the sky was lost, the fear of lightning, the joy of rain, the respect of fire. They ran past those first peoples who had set them on this path without a glance backwards, fought and warred and committed terrible acts while the woman and others before him followed after them, pleaded with them even as they looked on in first confusion, then horror… then despair at what they had wrought.

He saw those who had run beyond take from them, some left dead and abandoned in darkness, others corpses lost amid the grassland, yet others just walked away so disillusioned with what they had wrought that they saw no more meaning in it. A few even joined them, their wonder and joy at the world turned to a power and control. He watched as they turned her actions aside again and again until finally, she herself turned away and left them, walking back through the ruins of her path, back into the forests, back into the darkness until she sat upon a desolate shoreline, watching waves rise and fall over an iron-grey sea.

There she wrought things from the rocks, the sea and the sky, turning all her arts and her wisdom to the task, conceiving of twelve children and granting each of them tokens that they might remember her by and to safeguard them thereafter.

A long sword...

A pair of short blades.

A long spear with a broad blade.

A Buddhist staff.

An ornamental bell.

A blade like a dagger or maybe a small machete.

A hunting bow.

A two handed sabre.

A round shield.

A black stone rod.

A one handed axe.

The final one was a simple stone bracelet that was like a gate between the past and the future.

To each child, she also gave a piece of her wisdom, and in return, she accepted their hopes and their dreams and gave them a home to return to.

At the last, she cast them through the years, with a promise that they would return to her when she had found the thing that she had, in her own arrogance, lost.

The scene blurred away as the shadowy woman walked out across the ocean and vanished into the horizon, into a place of silver sand and twisted mountains. Behind her, the twelve altars where her children had been born stood alone, silent and foreboding on that shore, until finally those who had run ahead and brought all to ruin arrived there and saw them.

Some wept, others became enraged and a few even stepped into the sea and vanished amidst the waves. Yet others claimed the altars and took them back, made them temples, believing that they could glean the secrets within them, passing them through the ages, and the children of that shadowy figure walked with them, becoming venerated in turn as those who had betrayed that shadowy figure invited her path back into their world unwittingly, unaware of the promise that those twelve represented-

With a jolt, he was back in the hall, staring at the altar of the short blade with its wavy serpentine pattern that twisted between light and dark somehow, his body slicked with sweat and his legs trembling. Instinctively, having seen this, he understood that this was a thing that could never be wielded, should never be wielded.

“Why are you showing me this?” his words echoed much louder than he intended in the darkness of the mysterious place.

-Isn’t this akin to giving a dying man sight of water he may never drink?

“Is that how you see it child?” the words whispered back.

He stared blankly at it, collapsed to his knees, barely aware of the other sword that he still held in his hand.

-It actually replied?

“… You asked me a question. It would be rude not to reply,” the voice, which whispered faintly in the darkness, sounded amused.

“I…. don’t know” he muttered blankly. “I understand what you are showing me… you are not a thing others can wield. Your… maker did not make you to be wielded as a tool.”

The voice laughed, its tones ethereal in the silence of this place.

“Ha... from the mouth of a child is innocence perceived as it should be, but you are wrong in one count, we are not the weapons. What mother would make her children things to be wielded by others…?”

The voice stilled its mirth and he felt the darkness focus on him in some subtle way.

“None of us were born to be wielded by those that came after. Not our selves nor the reliquaries that our mother made, those are things for us and us alone. Would you have someone reach out and put puppet strings on your clothes, human child? Direct you dance this way and that in them?”

When the voice put it like that, he could only nod silently. The idea of being wielded as a puppet by others, anyone would find it abhorrent.

It continued. “It is a… flaw… a foolish arrogance in the thoughts of future generations, who were given everything and yet understood nothing that we were perceived as such. Their greed blinded them and once such an insidious idea took root it could not be quashed. Ironic. Because in doing so they fulfil our... Maker's final promise to her future generations.”

“Then… why did you bring me here?”

“I did not, she did,” the voice directed his attention somehow to the sword which was no longer in his hand but leaning against the altar silently. “You are here… because you asked to come here. Politely.”

“So… I was brought here… because… I… asked?” he found himself saying, trying not to sound as confused and scared as he felt, and failing abjectly.

The implication there was that there was ‘impolite’ way to end up here, and that that might be highly disagreeable to anyone unfortunate enough to meet such a criteria. Was that what had happened to the grey-robed youth who tried to rob them?

“Ummm… well thank you for showing me the statue…” was all he could come up with.

The voice paused, and then sighed in a way that was almost like an audible eye roll. “Haa-ah… you really are remarkably unambitious…”

“Of course he is little sister, otherwise I would not have picked him,” a second, more noticeably feminine voice said.

He started as between one moment and the next, a woman had appeared on the altar, an arm draped over the short sword. There was a sort of prestige to her that was hard to define. Red-gold locks hung down around her face, with the rest of her hair bunched and tied back loosely behind her. She wore a dark, floor-length robe in a style that was almost like those from the western continent, with broad sleeves, many layers and complex folds. The sword that had been by the altar, that he had brought in with him, had now changed back to the form it was when he first found it. It was very clearly the ‘long sword’ from the stele.

“I guess I should start by saying that the carvings and the words are not designed to give more than a gist of the matter. This abode is… complicated.”

*Tcch.*

The other voice sniffed faintly. “Stop being a killjoy.”

“The twelve ‘weapons’ if you want to think of them like that, took on those forms because they best suited us. They are…”

The woman trailed off for a moment and then started speaking again in a way that didn’t make him feel like he was being faintly pushed into the darkness somehow.

“They are keys to enter this place as much as they are things for our protection. Without us they are incomplete, albeit still dangerous, as you found out,” she smiled ruefully.

“You mean… in how I was cut by that grey-robed youth?” he said weakly.

“Yes,” the woman nodded. “It is possible to pervert the connection, although he was… well he had already kicked another ‘sheet of iron’ as you like to say, at that point. You have my apologies for that incidentally.”

“I…ah…” he struggled for a moment, trying to work out what to say. “I was able to recover okay.”

“Yeah, the blade is not suited to chopping up mortals, all of the twelve, despite sharing a common origin, have different traits,” she picked up the sword and considered it.

“All of them are really pieces of a whole. What you carried around is just the key to enter into this place in effect. Their power comes from its connection to whichever one of us is wielding it. In much the same way that your clothes or maybe even your body are just clothes or a pile of meat unless you are in them, if that makes sense. Someone could tear off your sleeve or cut off your arm and bludgeon a person to death, but it would only be such a thing.”

He looked from one to the other, trying to look like he really grasped what she meant. Insofar as she was implying, was the sword was just like a cloak or a limb for the woman sat here?

“In any case, how long are you going to skulk in the shadows?” the woman said to the sword beside her. “Don’t tell me you’re embarrassed because this is the first guest you’ve had in years or something equally nonsensical.”

“You’re no fun, sis,” the sword on the altar said, sounding somewhat offended.

A heartbeat later a shadowy form coalesced out of the darkness, her dark hair swirling and settling around her. Both of them were harmoniously beautiful, but whereas the woman who was associated with the sword had a sort of grandness to her manner, this new woman was enticing and alluring. Her gown was actually a gown that showed quite a bit of cleavage and draped over her body in shades of black and purple, accenting her feminine form. Her hair shifted and settled down over her shoulder in a loose plait revealing its colour to be almost reddish-black.

“As the most senior of you wretched lot, do you think I was ever destined to have any karma with this mythical ‘fun’ you speak of…?” the woman associated with the sword he carried muttered.

“Your sense of humour is even worse than hers,” the woman associated with the sword on the altar giggled.

Still slumped there, and not quite sure what to make of this, he watched as the woman slipped off the altar and strolled around him in an elegant swirl.

“His potential isn’t terrible, I guess. It’s a shame none of our lesser brethren are in this place, he would make a good fit for one of them to accompany to see the world, maybe even be wielded by them.”

A tiny part of him did want to point out that that view was just a touch hypocritical-

“When I say wield it is not the same thing you mean,” the darker-haired woman murmured, pausing behind him.

Her tone of voice didn’t exactly sound annoyed, but there was a certain edge to it. “Do we scare you, child of the martial skies?”

The oppression of the darkness shifted faintly, becoming slightly more oppressive as she leant close to him, so close he could nearly see her face beside his as she leant over his shoulder to speak in his ear. This close, her presence was suddenly intoxicating in the most disturbing ways, making him struggle to control his breathing.

“Humans get nervous when we talk about wielding them…” the woman still sat on the altar put her hand to her mouth to stifle a laugh and stared at him. “Don’t think anything of it, Han Shu. My sister is just… who she is.”

“You really are no fun, sis,” the woman behind him stood and sighed, walking back around to lean on the edge of the dais in a mildly provocative manner.

“When my sister says wield it is not the same as what you think. To you humans, to ‘wield’ a weapon is to refine it, bind it to your soul, to have it unquestioningly do your bidding. There is no equality in the action; you expect everything but give nothing. I know you speak from ignorance, but I will give you a piece of advice: guard your thoughts carefully; they can say more about you than you realise.”

He gulped, his throat suddenly dry. Realising that he had been very foolish there, of course they could hear his thoughts; both of these women were clearly spirits who were ancient and beyond powerful. If anything their disarming attitude and lack of prestige had, he felt, somehow caught him off guard.

“I… meant no disrespect honoured… sword spirits,” he murmured trying to apologise even as he forced his thoughts into stillness.

“Hah!” the darker haired woman stifled a laugh with her hand.

The woman associated with the sword he had just sighed and shook her head, also seeming amused. It was hard not to-

They both looked at him innocently and he sweated just a bit harder.

“Consider it character building,” the dark-haired woman snickered. “Heart like a bright mirror, mind like a midnight pond and all that bollocks.”

The woman sat on the throne stared at her darker-haired counterpart for a few moments, who just looked back at her with a sort of expression he could only call ‘innocent and bright’. The change in her expression was almost jarring for the speed it took, before returning to normal. In that faint pause, however, he got the distinct impression that quite a bit might have been said that he was unable to perceive, let alone hear.

Shivering, and trying to control himself, he called upon his mantra and got the second proper fright after arriving here, when he found it wasn’t answering. It hung there in his mind, still and placid, but nothing he did could call upon or coax it to take the tumultuous emotions and terrified thoughts that were swirling around inside him.

“Anyway,” the woman, who he realised he still didn’t have a name for beyond ‘sword spirit’, clapped her hands brightly and leaned forward to address him properly. “Since you finally asked nicely to come here, I was intending to give you something anyway, before my sister here woke up and starting being… her.”

“Such a thing isn’t…” he managed to mumble.

“Bollocks,” the other woman sniggered, “I can see the seeds of unhappiness in your heart.”

“Sister…” the sword spirit who was with him glanced sideways and narrowed her eyes slightly.

“My little sister is someone with a natural predisposition towards leading questions. Ignore her,” the elder spirit sister murmured.

“As I was saying, you managed to pluck up the courage to ask to come here, so you deserve a first greetings gift if nothing else. Having your world view accidentally expanded by the statue behind doesn’t really count. Also, frankly, you are weak. Part of the blame for that does lie with me, because you lost your cultivation as you did.”

She paused for a moment and cast a glare into the middle distance. “Well, not entirely with me. Most of the blame should lie elsewhere, but still, the permutations are what they are. Truthfully I would have given you this before, but your little band kept careering through calamity and catastrophe with such regularity that it would have probably only exacerbated things. My intervention in the remnant was difficult enough as it was, had I had extra karma with you at that point things might have gone very ill indeed.”

“And in any case,” she sighed. “The other criteria to get in here was… is... a nuisance. “

“More’s the pity,” her sister scowled. “It was never designed like that.”

“Other criteria, Honoured Spirit?” he asked as calmly as he could before realising that she probably meant that he had to ask… politely.

“Yes… you had to ask...” the dark-haired younger sister snickered. “You would be amazed how many people just shove it on it. It’s like consent never even enters-”

“Sister…” the elder sister said with another sideways look and the younger one coughed and looked back at her with an innocent ‘who me, what did I say?’ face entirely at odds with her actions.

That thought got him a sideways look and he groaned again, inwardly. Clearly, he was an open book to both of them in ways that were utterly outside his means to control.

“Yes, you had to ask, and in the right circumstances as well,” the elder sister nodded turning back to him. “It was something of a pushback against the way this place currently is. If I had just brought you here it would break one of the ‘rules’ and you would have needed to take a ‘test’.”

“You would not have passed that test,” the younger sister said blandly, “probably only Siddhartha himself could, and even then, only after his enlightenment.”

“While that is a touch melodramatic, in essence, yes,” the elder sister said with a sigh.

He stared from one to the other, the scenes of the grey-robed youth turning into a pile of bones returning unbidden to his mind’s eye.

“Ah… no… not quite like that,” the younger sister sniggered. “This test is a bit different, and has nothing to do with those who actually make it here.”

“Shush, you’re just confusing matters,” the elder waved her hand, leading to the younger one pouting slightly and affecting a bit of a flounce.

The elder shook her head wryly and continued as if the other wasn’t there. “The obstacles to entering here are not a thing my maker did; it is a chain that a greedy descendant tied to all our kind in an effort to snare our karma and limit our abilities to see our mother maker’s will done.”

“If you had asked out of greed, or anger, or desperation, it would also have caused problems…” the other woman chipped in with a smile that was far too chipper for what she seemed to be implying.

“Hush... That’s too much information and irrelevant now,” The elder sister said with a chiding tone and another sideways look.

“In any event, you cannot refine those keys like they were treasure swords as a result of their meddling, and in doing so you would likely have become angry, or frustrated, or desperate, or any of a number of other things, and upon entering here been immediately dumped into a test that would have caused your death.” The elder sister said with another wry shake of her head. “The death of that brat that used a Worldly Venerate Grade Treasure Talisman on me was ironic, he was killed before I could snatch him in here and force him to take the test that comes with that key.”

In passing he found himself wondering what it was that had killed him then, although perhaps, he schooled his own mind, it was better that he never knew.

“He got sent to another place, similar to this, but the test there is not affable, even by our standards, or the age it was originally set in.”

“Oh?” the other spirit asked, apparently also curious.

“The Throne of the Red Mortal.”

The dark-haired younger sister stared for a moment and then burst into a fit of hysterics, her laughter echoing through the darkness in ways that made his skin crawl and his mind shake even as she giggled and clapped her hands. The oppressive darkness seemed to shiver and become even more so, drawing around her for a moment, before the other woman waved a hand and it returned to normal.

“Sorry… that’s just… a cultivator, I assume, ending up in a place like that, with their natural disposition to seize power from the world and sublimate everything… That’s like inviting someone to walk onto the chopping block and lie down for the axe unaware they were even on the execution platform.”

“Yes, well, lines were crossed, foolish ideas were had and she is not exactly affable, as you are well aware,” the elder said with an eye roll.

“That is very true, but to think that the last of those three was here, that’s just too good.” The younger sister said with a happy seeming sigh, recovering her composure.

“Anyway,” the elder said a bit more forcefully, pulling what she was saying back on track.

“As you have deduced, you cannot refine me like a treasure sword, even were I willing, which I wouldn’t be in any case. It would cause a huge calamity and you would have a hold of me for exactly one-millionth of a second before some Greater Divinity rocked up and sent you to reincarnation directly in the course of trying that key.”

He stared at her dully, the implication was pretty clear, although he had no idea what realm a ‘Greater Divinity’ even was. He knew enough to say that World Venerates, while they might have ‘god-like’ powers were not, but above that, the realms were so distant and obscure that no mortal could ever hope to comprehend them as much as they could the stars in the sky above.

“However…” the woman’s words cut into his shocked reverie. “Now that you are here, as a guest… ahaha… I can bestow a first greetings gift upon you.”

“There is a loophole like that?” he said incredulously, before catching himself.

“When you look at it from that perspective it is a bit silly, yes,” the younger sister said with a snicker. “However, the state of mind of those old-”

“Let me finish for maker’s sake, you can chatter away to him at a later date!” the elder spirit muttered, pushing the other away from the throne with a hand.

“As I was saying, I can bestow on you an inheritance template, one of the most basic ones, as a first meetings gift. It’s a Martial Sword art. If you cultivate it diligently you will become something like a Sword Immortal, but with a formidable side-line in formations and sword arrays.”

“Why not give him that as well?” the younger spirit said with a chuckle, picking up a white-gold jade slip that had been lying on one of the smaller pedestals around her altar. “It’s not like any of us have a use for it.”

Looking at it, curious, he saw that the manual sized piece of white jade with a golden sheen had the name ‘Seven Wisdoms Manual’ written on it. Strangely, it had no real aura at all, although perhaps that was because the woman was holding it.

“Ah,” the elder sister frowned. “There was such a thing. Still, it’s probably better not to let that go outside this place. There are a lot of greedy young things running around out there with more eyes than sense.”

At her words, he wasn’t sure whether to be happy or cry. At this point it felt like they were both faintly taunting him in weird ways, showing him this and that, only to go ‘ah, but no’. He was still trying to process what he had seen on the stele, nevermind much of this, which was so far out of his frame of reference that it made the conversation with Mu Shansu when he first met the sword seem utterly mundane.

“I suppose we can do this,” she said abruptly and snapped her fingers.

Space rippled around him, and the darkness receded from the hall entirely, revealing it in all its gloomy majesty. Before him, the two altars had become six and behind each one were robed figures in meditation poses. More surprising, two of them were male. He realised with some surprise that he had expected all of this mysterious progenitors ‘children’ to be female for some reason, but the two on the left were clearly a Buddha-like figure, and a general. The nearest one on the right was a more primitive figure that put him in mind of the woman who walked out of the trees, while beyond that the last two figures were seated women with inscrutable faces of similar appearance.

The enshrouding sensation that came from that throne was profound, both in terms of darkness barely perceived around its edges, but also in terms of the grandeur, despite its somewhat primitive leanings and styling. It was mysterious, vast and unknowable, putting him in mind of the night sky or the distant horizon. On that throne now sat the sword he held. His gaze flickered back to this dais and found that it was gone from where it had been sat, even though the woman was still sat there looking at him with faint amusement.

Additionally, he realised with a start, the statue behind this dais no longer had the stele he had looked at before and the statue behind now more closely resembled the woman who was associated with the serpentine sword embedded within it.

Turning to look behind him he found that it was now in the centre of the crescent-shaped hall, set somewhat equidistantly from all six dais. Each of the other dais held ghostly, ephemeral shades of weapons: three swords in a style very similar to the one he had first encountered and a spear, before the warlike sage statue that had, even muted as it was, carried a remarkable prestige and sense of inevitability and inexorability about it that made him want to step backwards just from setting eyes on it.

The other things that stood out were the shades, or maybe corpses that were stood around the hall. There were hundreds of them, in various states of destruction, their final moments somehow frozen, their faces locked in expressions of fury, greed, fear, pain or just resignation. The ones around this throne, in particular, were quite disturbing. The auras that rolled off them as he made eye contact with them made his mind shake and his limbs grow cold. Even lingering here, as mere after images or remnant corpses they had the prestige of heaven shaking experts.

“Umm?” he pointed wordlessly at the corpses, not sure quite where to start.

“Ohh…” the eldest sister, as he now found himself unconsciously thinking of her, nodded and waved her hand dismissively making them all fade away. “Don’t worry about those.”

“As my sister said, there are criteria for coming here. Most who made it here did so by unsuitable or improper means, only to discover that if you try to be a greedy asshole… bad things happen.” The younger sister said with a snicker.

He stared at where the nearest figures had been, shivering somewhat and clutching his arms in his hands.

The eldest sister snapped her fingers again and a second stele appeared, before the throne and between them and the large stele. The floor around it now held a swirling circle of patterns that flowed between it and the stele in mysterious and largely, to his eyes at least, unfollowable paths.

“Go over the stele and see which one fits you best… Well, let it see which of them will fit you best, you get the idea,” the elder sister said gently.

“All you have to do is go stand in the circle,” the younger sword said with an amused chuckle.

Nodding, he apprehensively walked over to the circle of stele on the left side of the hall. As soon as he entered the confines of the circle they all rippled and he felt some kind of sense shift through him. Moments later he felt knowledge entering his head: shimmering patterns of silver and dark that carried with them the sense of primordial endings and the fundamental destination of all sapient things.

‘Seven Nights Sword Art’

“...”

Something touched the stele and the sense of transmission stopped before it had even begun.

“Shit, and there I thought I’d managed to avoid karma regarding that art,” the elder sister muttered, sounding faintly annoyed.

Directing her voice towards the stele this time, she added: “Pick another. That one isn’t suitable for anyone without roots in my generation to practice now.”

The stele pulsed an apology to him and muttered something nigh inaudible about people changing their damn minds all the time and making a spirit’s life hard. The knowledge shifted and re-sorted itself several times over as the stele continued to grumble sourly, sending impressions of annoyance and vexation regarding the two women. He could physically feel their narrowed gaze on upon his location, and it was not pleasant. Finally, after several more moments of unintelligible muttering the stele sent a transmission into his head.

‘Nine-fold Origins Lotus Manual’

There was a faint hint of -‘and it’s a bit better anyway I guess… unfortunately, you have no ‘karma’ with it though so you will have to sweat a bit to reach the apex with it. Sorry’, as it settled into his mind and a physical copy of a rather battered book of the same name appeared in the air in front of him. Its pages fluttered and a flood of strange symbols flowed off its pages and into his body. As he watched, frozen before the stele, they linked up with the words that were still hanging in his mind, becoming a vast web of interconnected things for a brief instant before folding away to become nine distinct ‘chapters’ and then a singular sphere of knowledge twisting within the name of the manual.

He returned to the moment and found both sword spirits staring at him with slightly dead-eyed expressions of mild disbelief.

The elder sister just sighed, looking resigned and then with a wave of her hand sent the ‘Seven Wisdoms' manual shooting through the air into the stele where it vanished in a cloud of gold and white sparks.

She gave a somewhat exasperated sounding sigh and shook her head wryly. “Now that it gave you that, you definitely won’t be needing the other thing, interesting as it was. That ‘manual’ you just received isn't the full scripture, but it is a holistic primer for it I suppose you could say. It contains a ‘Cultivation Art’, as you would understand it, a ‘Martial Weapons Art’, a ‘Movement Art’, a ‘Body Art’ and a ‘Soul Art’. It will also give you a ‘True Physique’, which isn’t terrible. It’s not as good as what your friend Juni has stumbled across though.”

“Ohh?” the other sword queried…

“Yeah… she salvaged ‘Bright Lotus Scripture’ for one of his friends,” the older sister said with a faintly dead-eyed expression.

“…..”

“Yep.”

“Erm… is that… scripture… good?” he asked, staring from one to the other.

He had been dimly aware that Juni got… something, from the mess in the plaza in any event. The youth had clearly gone towards her first, before failing to identify whatever it was and then fixating on the sword. The longer he had thought through that chain of events, the more convincing that interpretation of events as he remembered them seemed to him. Since then she had basically pretended ignorance, beyond weaselling most of the beginner base building pills out of them for spiritual foundations. He had been unwilling to ask or press anyway, what with the new additions to their group. As such, if these two ancient spirits knew something about whatever it was, this ‘bright lotus scripture’ that she had found, anything he could glean from them about it would certainly be beneficial to her.

The awkwardness and bad blood regarding events below were also still drawing on his conscience, he had to admit. Both Juni and Lin Ling had been wronged down below, and it was only right, he felt, that he tried to make amends for his small part in that. In that regard, this seemed as good an opportunity as any.

“Well, that’s…”

“Complicated,” the younger sister said with a giggle.

“Yes… complicated,” the elder conceded with a frown. “In short, almost all the peak Earthly Scriptures are devolved Mortal Scriptures.”

She broke off and sighed. “Now that I say that… I realise you will likely have no idea whatsoever about the ‘Four Cardinal Paths’, the ‘Seven Classics’, the ‘Grand Momentum' or the difference between a scripture and a manual.”

He nodded mutely, because she was quite right, although he could, he felt, probably hazard a guess at the difference between a scripture and a manual.

“Hmmm… simply put, the Four Cardinal Paths are Mortal, Earthly, True and Heavenly. Mortal is encapsulated by endeavour, Earthly by fundamentals, True by holistic harmony and Heavenly by connate perfection. At this point, it is probably enough for you to know that all of the peak Earthly Scriptures, of which ‘Bright Lotus Scripture’, being devolved from ‘Bright Fortune Scripture’, certainly is, are all things that supreme powers would upend worlds to get their thieving claws on. Fortunately, that one is notoriously janky and anything relating to Bright Fortune is steeped in the pointy end of ‘Good Fortune’. It only bestows with karma attached. Your friend, Juni, will not have it robbed unless someone tries to actively deceive the heavens themselves and subvert the ‘Grand Momentum’ and the ‘Supreme Geometry’.”

It was a struggle not to have his eyes glaze as she explained all of that. What he could take away though, was that whatever Juni had found was clearly precious and also, unlikely, in the view of these two to get robbed in an easy manner. On the other hand, it also seemed like the kind of thing that in the stories saw you landed in all kinds of awkward trouble…

“Well, if that occurs, the Bright Sisters will probably get impolite even before this big sister steps in on her behalf,” the elder sister said with a somewhat flatter tone. “The manual you have acquired is also in the same category, by accepting it in this manner you have our auspice to practice it and make of it what you can. I’d agreed to stick with you before…”

“But now… big sis is going to haunt you and your nine damn generations whether you like it or not in case something tries to scam you out of it,” the younger sister snickered putting her hand to her mouth and looking at him in a way that made his hair stand up.

“Yes, although you make it sound like I am some evil spirit…” the elder sister muttered with a sideways look.

“If you asked those old thieves and ghosts -”

The older sister coughed and somehow cut off her younger sibling before she could finish what she had been about to say, eyeing him in a way that suggested he had not heard that last bit.

Frowning, she looked around and sighed, “Well, it seems our time is about up… for now at any rate.”

“Ehhh..?” he blinked and suddenly found the headache had come back.

“Your qi is running out and your soul is weak as a babe's and you haven’t fully comprehended it so you cannot stay here for much longer,” the younger sister said drily.

Now that he thought about it, the shivering was getting worse… He had, he realised, just assumed it was down to the prestige of this place and the aura’s of the two ancient spirits before him. It never occurred that he was here somehow as a soul form, sustained with his own qi!

Taking a deep breath, he bowed three times to both of them, as was proper in this kind of situation. “In that case… I… er… thank you for this opportunity, Honoured Spirits.”

“I love how there’s still an implicit question in there…” the younger sister rolled her eyes and then the whole place dissolved into fog as he snapped back to the outside world.

Knowledge flowed into his head and his supposition of moments earlier was proven to be correct. He had a horrible headache and his limbs were cold as ice, his body was almost totally out of qi and his meridians were starting to suffer from qi stress to boot.

Exhaling, he drew in qi from the surroundings and blinked in shock as he found that it was much easier than it had been before for some reason. The second shocking comprehension, looking at the fire and the group below was that basically, no time at all had passed. He was sure he had been in that place for quite a while, and yet Teng Chunhua, below by the fire, was still speaking the same sentence she had been before.

Even as he was grappling with that realisation, the first section of the manual settled into his head, re-configuring itself subtly as something that was much more recognisable to him as a ‘Martial Sword Art’, divided up into three sections. There was a movement art, a body art and a cultivation art that was also a martial form. Sections of that form were already imprinting themselves into his memories at a truly rapid rate, distilling sets of sword forms, a basic formation and a foundation art to manifest the natural intent of the world to strike at opponents.

He felt a bit bad for Lin Ling all of a sudden, who had, it seemed, borne the worst of all of this really yet only had a slight mutation to her cultivation thanks to being badly poisoned to show for it.

~ Lin Ling, wandering around the camp ~

Stood in the darkness, on the edge of the camp, listening to the sounds of the gorge in the night, Lin Ling found herself drawn to the wild. That was the only way to describe it, really. It had been there before, even in the darkness, certainly in the anomaly. It was what she had thought of as the inner voices that were just unquenchable ‘rage’ and instinct given words. Whatever Magus O’Brian and the other young scholar had done to put her memories back together had somehow pacified the frenzy within it, but even when all the other voices had returned to the fold, the instincts given words had not.

At first, she had been concerned that this was caused by her breakthrough and that she had, as she had been warned against, caused a regression in her condition. However, since then, she had come to realise the truth, terrifying as it was. The Yang Blood from the creature in the cavern that had been her tool of salvation in so many situations had a memory of a sort. That realisation had returned her to panic in many ways, although much better controlled here, that it would still impact on her mental state in a bad way, or cause another ‘break’. It had been surprising then, that those ‘visualised instincts’ that came with the blood were very passive and content to integrate with her in a very constrained way for the most part. They helped her navigate the forests better, see further, be more attuned to danger out here in the green and they had excellent instincts for finding spirit herbs and such.

Until she got smashed by that Immortal’s materialised soul.

Then, in that moment amid the fire and mind breaking strength of that bastard’s soul attack, it had somehow saved her. Spoken through her in a way she still couldn’t grasp, but which had almost ruined the Immortal in the process. She had in that instant, also seen the nature of the half-remembered creature in the cave. Not that she could really call it a creature anymore because it was almost a part of her at this point. It had fought with her, spoken through her, given her instincts, intent, instructions and understandings enabling her to fight toe to toe with three Immortals, until Han Shu showed up late as always and killed one.

It was hard to know how to rationalise it.

Well… she did, actually, but that idea was so preposterously absurd that she wanted to deny it out of hand and proclaim to the heavens at large that there was no way she was that fortunate.

-Ancestral Memories within a Bloodline.

It was not unheard of, usually associated with beasts that related to mythical creatures: Luan, Minor Dragons, actual Dragons… Phoenixes, devolved Qilin or even just powerful Qi Beasts with good lineages. However those were things that even the powers of great sects would fight tooth and nail over, and everything in this fate-thrashed place was out to get them, or so it seemed. She had seen what happened to Juni… twice… and that scared her. Even though these instincts were now telling her, inexplicably that that unspeakable darkness was gone from her friend, she had niggling concerns that that could also happen to her.

Nonetheless in the two days since the battle in the ruin, the voice of the blood, its manifest intent had whispered to her, showing her how to better understand those visualised instincts that came with it. As they made their escape through the valleys, running ahead of the cultivators who were swarming here, it showed her new ways to use her mantra. When they stopped to recover and hide from the things that hunted in the dark, that even the voice in the blood was wary of, it worked with her to change something within her in a way she neither comprehended nor knew how to stop, or if she even wanted it to stop.

It wasn’t a change that came from the intentions in the blood, they… or perhaps it, freely admitted that. It was something she had won on her own, through endeavour and suffering. Her own comprehension, and the changes it was effecting in her body were… bizarre.

It hung in her mind’s eye, the fruit of those days’ labours, still not complete, but a distinct symbol that echoed strangely when she looked at it.

‘Shield Bearer True Physique’

As she understood it, now that she was at Mantra Seed, she should be seeing a gradual integration between her body’s meridians and her bones. Her mantra should also be imprinting into her body, becoming the core of her cultivation foundation proper, akin to a golden core, albeit much more diffuse and harder to ruin.

However, her mantra was just as it had been, and wasn’t doing anything like that. Instead, all the qi it was drawing in was condensing as shimmering threads of Pure Yang, Myriad Elements Qi in her bone marrow. Meanwhile, her meridians were shifting gently in her body like they were gossamer threads blown in the wind, their paths adjusting day by day making her qi cycles more attuned to her.

She stood there, and completed another cycle with her mantra, listening to the world around her. The symbol pulsed correcting her direction of the flow faintly, like an instinctual memory of how it ‘should’ go…

Completing the cycle, she sighed softly. It was pretty much undeniable, she had to admit. The being in the cave had been some rare mythical beast before its unfortunate ‘demise’. The name, unbidden, shifted in her mind, or at least what it had called itself: ‘Fearfully Great Yang Shield Tyrant’.

A less aggrandized ‘memory’, also from the blood and much more ancient feeling, somehow suggested it had also been called an ‘Ankylosaurus ankalderonis’. The name, in a language she knew nothing of, was a total mouthful as well. She had tried speaking it out loud a few times when she was alone, carefully, but the name had no power. That said, it did sound awfully like some weird ritual incantation if you said it quickly too many times in a row.

She completed another cycle and moved on around the camp perimeter again. With each cycle, the qi in her body was also becoming denser and purer. She was glad she still had quite a lot of the blood in her storage talisman, because at this point it was almost a cultivation tonic. She could chug it down with almost no ill effect, other than a slight heat suffusing her body and it did the work of a dozen cycles of her mantra in one. There was the minor issue wherein she could set her surroundings on fire if she wasn’t careful and practised that way for too long, however, that had only happened the once. In any case, she had explained it off as her failing the preparation of a spirit herb to the cultivators along with them.

Beyond that, the best environment was these trees it seemed, which had a boundless Wood Qi welling up in them from deep within the earth that fed her qi cycle like kindling to a fire.

Her previous cultivation law which had already been suppressed, despite her epiphany on how to make it work with the blood, was now totally defunct. It simply couldn’t keep up. The qi cycle that it advocated was weak and inefficient. Thanks to the memories or perhaps the symbol itself, she could tell that it needed to flow better. That meant filling in the gaps in how it interacted with the five elements. As to how she achieved that, the Ankalderon’s instinctual leaning seemed to be towards Yang Qi, which was a weird fit for her, but she had no choice in that it seemed.

That had felt incongruous fundamentally, at least initially, until she realised she was looking at it all wrong. Despite calling itself a Yang creature in its own name, the qi that the symbol was refining with the help of her mantra contained both Yin and Yang intent in equal measure. Yang Fire in her Blood, Yin Fire in her Bones... Yin and Yang Water played some ephemeral connection there as well. This was balanced by the attributes of Minor Yin Wood to stabilize the Yang Fire and Minor Yin Earth to stabilize the Yang Water. Yin and Yang Metal balanced them out.

Her talents with formations and talismans were not that great, but after four days of walking through forests worrying about it, she had finally worked out that it was a ‘Succeeding and Overcoming Five Elements’ cycle. Not a ‘Grand Unity’ cycle, where each fed the next in an eternal spiral of transformative perfection. Instead the major would feed and the minor would split and stabilize its corresponding opposing element.

Making her way onwards again, another cycle completed and no threats observed, she wondered how its kind had coped with this degree of requisite elemental harmony with it's development.

Unbidden, scenes of a great armoured beast consuming myriad types of vegetation all day long as it ambled through life, ignoring the years rolling off it as it slowly grew in strength and power.

-Ah… of course, it would just eat spiritual plants all day, she thought to herself wryly.

That was interesting in its own right though, because she had been wondering for some time if the being whose blood had bonded with her was a predator or not. In response to that thought, the memories shifted and she saw scenes of the beast’s ancestors crushing meagre predators who dared to try to make them prey: pulverizing bones of mysterious lizard-like creatures that faintly resembled depictions of degenerate dragons from her children’s storybooks, or strange demonic beasts with scales and great teeth.

This wasn’t the first such ‘memory’ she had seen, but in every case, she had to admit that the scale of warfare in them was spectacular. Not all of them were as clear as the one she had seen just now either. They drifted in occasionally, in response to her thoughts or her random musings on matters, or when she cycled her qi. Some were fairly logical in response to immediate musings like danger, direction or how to read the landscape, but others were weird or hard to understand. The worst were the memories relating to the everyday life of the creatures, when they just wandered through the world seeing it in different ways, or fighting against different creatures over strange ideas, for survival or just for fun.

There were also memories of monkey-like creatures, who came from the trees, albeit much later. That seemed to be a time when most of the dragon-like creatures had fallen to ruin somehow. In that time they were few and hid in the shadows, cultivating Immortality in seclusion: deep in oceans, in caves, in desolate forests high amid mountains or lost amidst vast plains that stretched without end and where they were now nameless amid the vastness of the world, vanished, but not forgotten.

Those memories came and went in such flitting ways that it felt a bit like a child’s picture puzzle at times: an edge here, a corner there, an indistinguishable middle bit to go with the growing pile of other such bits. However, the overall picture she was presented with was one of antiquity and prestige. Her attempts to connect the blood to other things in the darkness below largely met with rebuttal or annoyance. They knew of the lizard people that Juni had called Sar’katush, felt anger over their demise, but had nothing but anger for their current state. They also seemed to know of the darkness that had touched Juni, and something of the dark intent in the qi within her, but treated both with a fear she could only judge as being genuine. One was an unspeakable evil, the other a terror born of that first age, of the comprehensions of a dread shadow of the monkey folk. She even saw a fleeting memory of that ‘shadow’, a small, hunched figure, walking into trees, through the shadows. Somehow moving against the flow of their era and carrying such a sorrow and a fury with it that even the beasts in their prime, when they were masters of that land, cowered away from it.

Completing her circuit, she considered her condition again. The moon was still high in the sky even as the light was beginning to creep back over the horizon. The others would be stirring soon from their own little tasks, so she made her way back into the camp and waved to Juni, who nodded in return from her rock and went off to do her own circuit.

Settling down on a rock, she determined to capitalise on the auspicious circumstances of ‘dawn’ until they were ready to go. It was a time when new Yang Qi filtered into the world from the sun and was, it turned out, deeply beneficial to her cultivation. She only had a few more bones to go before all of them had filaments of that terrifying pure qi inside them. It was unlikely she would get there today, but maybe by tomorrow, or the day after, with the help of the Yang Blood she would complete that stage.

The instincts and the symbol both hinted that that should bring about an important ‘change’. Once the filaments were complete they would connect her meridians up and the symbol in her mind would fully form. The blueprint in her mind called this ‘Foundation Establishment’. Well, later voices, including the ‘monkey people’ and then actual people like her had come and told the creatures, when they found them that this was called Foundation Establishment, just as they had given them a new name.

That thought made her pause as she wrestled with their view of the path, which was very different.

Suddenly she saw another figure within a memory. A thin male wearing garments made of forest plants, was squatting on a grassy plain by a nest of eggs which he was considering with great interest. The memory seemed to imply that this figure, tall figure, with greyish-brown skin, white hair, a kindly face and pointy ears was ‘not’ like her people, who they termed humans. Instead, the word ‘Ri people’ shifted into her mind, which she could make head nor tail of. Beside him, were four young girls with earthen coloured skin and hair varying hair colours: white, pale brown, golden blonde and… golden-white? The eldest seemed about twelve, while the youngest was four or five? As she watched, the man picked up an egg gently and whispered something to it, before replacing it and picking up another. In the last instant, before the memory fell away, the eldest girl turned and glanced in her direction and then, to her utter shock looked straight at her. They stared at each other for a brief moment, the other golden blonde-haired girl with blue eyes and earthy skin frowning and tilting her had to the side in a way that suggested, somehow, inexplicably, she had been seen.

“Hello?” the word arrived in her head, jolting her straight out of the cultivation cycle and back to reality.

She gasped and nearly fell off the rock even as the memory collapsed in her mind’s eye, leaving only the mildly frowning face of the pointy-eared young girl looking at her quizzically for a further moment before that too crumbled.

The memory melted away, barely graspable and then gone in its entirety.

~ Ruo Han, Sat by the Campfire ~

Ruo Han sat by the fire poking it with a stick for much of the night. It was a strangely mortal thing for a cultivator of almost 80 years in age to be doing, but it was comforting. He didn’t need to sleep, although he could if he wished it under normal circumstances.

Sadly, these were not normal. At this point, he was nearly certain in his own head that this was the shattered ruin of some ancient sect that had fallen into ruin and wound up being connected to the Yin Eclipse Mountain Range. The scar-like anomaly they had crossed, a mirage frozen on the point of carnage-ridden demise, was proof enough of that in his own mind at least. The garb its occupants wore was consistently alien as well, suggesting serious antiquity or one of those calamitous events where other realms collapsed, raining their remnants through space into other worlds. That was apparently the origin of many of the ruins on the Western Continent, the remnants of a conflict between Eastern and Northern Azure in the previous aeonspan. Was this place something similar, a vestige of another Great Realm, or given the issues they were having with qi, a yet higher realm, a Throne World, or a piece of a Supreme Realm?

If that was the case, then it was no wonder that the Imperial Dynasty was struggling to get a hold of it before someone else did. Why the Jade Gate Court and the Astrology Bureau might collude to send people here so quickly. As to why they had not done so before? He didn’t dare presume to second guess, but an unorthodox trial like this didn’t just spring out of the ground fully formed, so probably it had been some in the planning for some time. He also had some vague memory of being told about a catastrophe in this land in the last days of the previous Emperor’s rule, but now was not the time to regret learning about random snippets of ancient history from half the great world away and two generations prior. For the powers on the central continent that span of time was nothing much in any case.

Shaking his head, he looked up at the sky, which was starting to head towards morning. The other girl, Lin Ling, who unnerved him even more than Kun Juni in some ways, had completed her patrol of the forest within the gorge and gone to sit on a rock to cultivate for a while.

“Not meditating?” a male voice spoke behind him.

Turning around he saw the man, Han Shu approaching. It seemed his watch was done. Looking up, he saw Lin Ling now sat in a different spot on the cliffs, watching the exit and the forest below them. If he didn’t know where to look, he would miss her: her qi signature was almost non-existent in the diffusing greenery and suppressing rocks.

“It’s kind of hard,” he found himself saying. “My nascent soul is so suppressed it feels strange in any case.”

“Mmmmm… true, but I understand it can still help the soul to process some things…” Han Shu sat down and plucked a gourd out of the embers and started to eat it.

They watched the flicker of thunder again in the far distance and the occasional flash on the horizon.

“I can't believe they fought all through the night,” Sister Liao sighed, coming over from where she had been taking her turn at ‘watch’ plucking a roasted gourd from the fire.

“It’s quite hard to kill cultivators at that level, even when everyone is suppressed…” he poked the fire a bit more…

-Except for those bastards following after who can lift it somehow, he added in his own head.

“How much further do we have to go through this terrain?” Sister Liao asked Han Shu after she had eaten a mouthful of her gourd.

“Hard to say,” he thought Han Shu sounded oddly tired, perhaps his injury was still lingering. “If we start encountering more anomalies our pace will slow though.”

“Have you found anything in any of the ruins or those places?” Hao Jun asked from nearby.

He sighed and resisted the urge to rub his temples. It might well be necessary to have another word with him in due course, if he kept fishing with difficult questions like that. He had warned him off it already, pointing out their need for cooperation, but Hao Jun didn’t quite seem to have taken his warnings to heart and still didn’t really believe that they were responsible for chasing away their seniors, having witnessed almost none of it.

“Well, we did pick up some things on the way up,” Han Shu shrugged.

He blinked at that. It was such an easy admission as well. Scanning back in his memories though, he did recall Han Shu and Lin Ling grabbing some… pots and the like from one of the ruins by the river they passed through. As he half expected upon quick reflection, Han Shu drew a bunch of jars and pots and then, more surprisingly, two muddy books out of his storage talisman. The jars were stained with the same mud and soil from the riverbank as well.

“What they actually are though…” Han Shu gave a helpless shrug. “They have no qi to them and even the book has no value for cultivation that I can see.”

Curiously, Sister Liao took the book from the rock and began flipping through it.

“How… odd…” she muttered after a few moments.

Hao Jun had scooted over with remarkable speed now, and was also looking at the book. Han Shu, he noticed was… well he wasn’t frowning exactly, but he had a look of studied ‘interest’ in the intent within his gaze that was probably not discernible to anyone below Nascent Soul.

-Are you showing us these as another little test of sorts? He couldn't help but wonder.

He was pretty certain at this point that Kun Juni and Lin Ling had known most of what he told them about their trip here already from Teng Chunhua before he had divulged it.

-And Hao Jun being a greedy magpie is going to fail it, was the lingering worry that went with it.

Oblivious to his look, Sister Liao continued flipping the pages back and forth, frowning more and more.

“Well?” Hao Jun said trying to get a better look.

“Don’t rush me… it’s not easy to read,” Sister Liao sniffed, pushing him away with her elbow.

They watched in silence for a few more minutes before she sighed and put it down. “Do you want the good or the bad news first?”

“…..”

They all eyed her dubiously.

“Bad news then,” she said drily. “At best this is likely worth a few thousand Pure Spirit Stones, maybe more to the right person, but that’s about it.”

“Ohh…” Hao Jun looked disappointed, as surprisingly did Han Shu.

“And the good news?” Jin Chen asked, speaking for all of them.

“I know what it is,” Liao Ying said with a sniff. “It’s written in a variant of ‘Mo Tianshi’ Ancestral Script, a script that’s found in a few ruins of the Western Continent. I’ve seen relics in its style before, the Liao Clan deals in old relics from the ruins on the Great Plains and there are quite a few oddities written in it. My hometown even has one in a small set of ruins. It’s just a plinth that lists a bunch of names, some inexplicable dates and talks about an ancient battle in some place called Evergrove and records the names of a group of people who travelled from there to fight demons and died in the process. An Ancestral Memorial from a previous era.”

“Is that somehow connected to that ‘Mo’ Clan?” Hao Jun asked with a frown.

“No,” Liao Ying shook her head. “Anyway, the book itself is basically a manual talking about how to maintain some kind of formation. It’s just page after page of detailed instructions about what different types of qi fluctuations in various crystals and formations mean. Stuff like: ‘if the two left crystals glow red and you can taste apples in the air, run away’.”

That got a chuckle from Han Shu and a nod.

“As I said, it might be worth a few thousand spirit stones to some formations grandmaster or the right scholar but that’s about it,” Liao Ying shrugged. “In that regard, the pots are possibly more interesting.”

“Really…” Hao Jun said with a sour look at her.

Shaking her head, Liao Ying picked one of the ones from yesterday’s ruin up and pushed qi into it. They all watched as nothing happened and her qi was repelled from the small vessel.

“They repel qi,” Han Shu nodded looking pensive.

Eyeing the younger man from the corner of his eye he was certain that was not new news to him.

“I take it these are not exactly uncommon,” he said drily before Hao Jun could interject.

“Intact ones are not that common, but…” Han Shu shrugged, "but they are not exactly rare either."

He took the jar and turned it over… before handing them back to Han Shu with a relieved smile. “If that’s the limit of these ruins, I would dearly love to see the faces on those idiots throwing away all decorum and millions of spirit stones down below when they are left with a bunch of pots that repel qi and a few random books on inexplicable formations that only a formations master could love or be willing to purchase for spirit stones.”

“Yeah…” Liao Ying said with a sour snicker. “If we weren’t stuck in here with them it would be positively cathartic.”