Memories of the Fall

For most folk on the Central Continent, spirit food is a thing of grand restaurants and prodigious expense and pageantry – what is sold by vendors in city markets or made by the common folk would be considered qi-rich food, but most would agree is not ‘spirit food’ which holds a certain connotation. As such, when you think of all the benefits that the Hunter Pavilions bring to Blue Water Province, perhaps the most underappreciated by those who visit it is the quiet renaissance in traditional means of cooking spirit food that is by and large accessible to the masses. Certainly, of the top ten restaurants and tea houses renowned for their spirit food in Blue Water City and Yun Shan City, eight are run by retired members of the Hunter Bureau and all employ or hold dedicated contracts through the pavilions for their resources, yet it is not here that you will find the most exquisite foods but instead by the roadways through little villages or in the market plazas of the inland towns. Here, it is seldom the grand thing of the other continents, and most who come from outside just dismiss it as qi-rich food, much to their detriment, for there is a different sort of harmony to be found in its rustic means and its simple preparation…

Excerpt from ‘Wandering through Seven Continents’

By Seng Mo, Wandering Chronicler

~ Arai & Sana, Undrenmarsh ~

Arai stood on a rocky outcrop, looking out over the endless swamp that the spear had called the ‘Undrenmarsh’. The name definitely fit, she had to give it that. It was a gnarly twisted landscape of waterways and dense vegetation. Behind them, shrouded in mist, were escarpments that lay on the coast. Ahead of them, occasionally visible when the mists lifted or receded, were more mountains, visible as dim shadows, right against the horizon.

The wetland landscape all around was usually shrouded in misty rain and almost as humid as the tunnels they had left. It was like being back in the High Valleys in many ways, especially in the way it was one holistic death-trap. The trees could move and frequently objected to things coming near them with qi-infused violence. The waterways were infested with carnivorous fish. The mangrove-like wetlands between the vast expanses of reed beds were infested with crabs whose ambush capabilities made the spiders down below seem cute and amateurish in comparison. The spirit-vegetation was as mendacious as anything she had ever encountered and what wasn’t trying to kill them was usually exotically noxious to anything that interacted with it, as a countermeasure against predators presumably. The insects were all venomous and there were also Undren up here albeit in much lesser numbers and quite weak along with a few other creatures they hadn’t got a close look at in the day and a half they had been out here so far.

However, and this was important to her at least, it was a wonderful change from the crushing claustrophobia and gloom of the depths. It was nice to not have to fear being buried in rats, drowned or buried in a rock collapse, and the feeling of sky above them made her feel like a weight had been lifted off her shoulders.

That was not to say that it was not without its disappointments, beyond being remarkably like the High Valleys. Most annoyingly, their newfound ability to, if not exactly ‘fly’, then walk through the air, didn’t avail either of them nearly as much as they would have liked. The culprit there was the mists that rolled over much of the wetland, spiralling out of its heart to the west of them. If they travelled too high into them, away from the land, they could exert a certain amount of draw on their qi. That in and of itself was no longer dangerous to them, but it meant that walking above the trees or in the treetops cost qi with no means to replenish it, as absorbing the environment’s qi proved to be impossible within the mists themselves.

There were also strange spider things in the mists. They had nearly been caught in one of their drifting webs earlier that day. Invisible constructions that seemed to float like ephemeral fishing nets above the wetlands, presumably to catch anything foolish enough to do what they had been doing.

The one they had encountered earlier had, as soon as they were snared in it, delivered what would have been a crippling soul sense attack, comparable to the Spider Queen in the depths. Had they not been nigh immune to directly targeted soul sense attacks on their psyche at this point, beyond some minor inconvenience, that might have ended them right there. With no suppression and the qi-drain from the mists they made a swift exit courtesy of the Arborundum leaf and her metal sword. It was a stern reminder that there was always a bigger monster.

Since then, she had found several more by sending random sweeps of her Intent into the fog, and even killed a few translucent spiders that drifted on nigh invisible threads alongside them in the mists. One was drifting above them, even now, about forty metres above the reed tops. More than equal to the Intent she had sent that collided with it.

“How is it going?” she called down, targeting her voice with her soul sense.

“Not bad… I’ve got it caged, it should be docile and we can harvest it in around 20 minutes!” her sister replied.

That was a handy perk of being at Nascent Soul, the ability to cast her voice in a much more targeted manner-

She sighed, catching sight of a tell-tale ripple in the reed beds across the water. It was very subtle, nothing more than a few reeds shifting into the breeze rather than with it. She struck out with her Sundering Intent directly, focused around a tiny seed of qi, and was rewarded with a sensation of splintering shell and a faint gasp as an ambushing crab succumbed. Even in death the crab itself was almost indistinguishable from the background qi of the swamplands.

To her left, she saw another two very stealthily moving through the shallows of the waterway, past some trees towards Sana. For Golden Core Qi Beasts they were exceptionally sneaky and had a wide array of water-based attacks. The stronger Soul Foundation ones, which were thankfully not that common, also emitted mists by way of attack that were rich in Yin Water and held some form of Intent that made a mockery of even their Nascent Soul qi-armour. She still hadn’t worked that one out fully.

Ending those two, she took out a third that had made it even closer before being noticed and focused once more on the area around her sister who was suppressing a Duo Li Water Lotus that was hiding in the little patch of Mangrove besides the outcropping. It was only because they were both suppressing their auras down to Qi Refinement to catch the fate-thrashed thing that other critters were taking these liberties they might not have otherwise.

Minutes flowed by… she finished off another opportunistic crab, two wandering spiders and a river snake that decided to chance its hide on attacking Sana who was stood in the water channelling at the lotus in its little inlet before her sister was done.

Finally, the plant twitched limply in her grasp, its long tendril roots now harmless as she arrived on the top of the rock.

“Talk about opportunistically annoying.” Sana sighed.

“Well it’s only a juvenile; still, good thing you caught the tell-tale signs, or we might have been in trouble.” Arai nodded.

“I’m starting to think that a lot of the stuff out in the High Valleys has some subtle relationship to places like this…” Sana gestured around.

“Possibly… I will agree that many of the nastier bits of vegetation are distressingly familiar, the Soul Light reed beds for example, and the Leeching Lilies…” she sighed. “This place must be almost as big as the entirety of Blue Water province.”

“At least it’s clear now that Nascent Soul Qi Beasts are pretty close to the average apex of danger...” Sana frowned and shook the lotus plant. It twitched once more and went still.

“Except for the hook bats…” Arai reminded her.

“And the mist spider web thing,” she added, which just got her a glare.

“So what do we do with it?” her sister said after a pause, eyeing the plant where it was lying on the bank.

“Cook it? The root will make a nice soup…” Arai joked. “I killed some crabs that tried to get the jump on you. So we can use one of their shells and have crab meat and Duo Li Lotus Soup.”

“That sounds nice… It’s been… over half a year since I ate anything that wasn’t blood, sweat, or my own tears…” Sana walked down through the air, parting the reeds to go find the crabs she had killed.

While Sana got the crabs, she went and refined the spider cores, which were Soul Foundation in quality. After breaking through to Nascent Soul these Beast Cores had even more benefits compared to when they had been refining them at Golden Core. It made her a bit sore in her heart to think how many Soul Foundation and Nascent Soul Cores they had wasted back in that hall now. Most of those they were claiming had tiny traces of soul strength within them… She had accumulated a lot of it passively during her breakthrough, but every bit helped to mature her soul.

She considered the bodies themselves before tossing them away. Crab was acceptable, but cooking and eating spiders?

“Nope, nope, no way…” she muttered, crossing her forearms in resolute denial.

You had to draw lines somewhere after all.

~ Sana, Undrenmarsh - rediscovering the joys of camping ~

Sat in the crude campsite they had set up on one side of the rocky outcropping, Sana watched the crab and lotus soup bubble away over a small fire in a large crab shell. Cooking a meal was an oddly normal thing to do here, but she had fancied doing it simply because it was just that. A normal thing. Never mind eating prepared food, they also hadn’t done anything like this in… almost a year counting back.

-How depressing, she remonstrated with herself, drawing laughter from her Nascent Soul.

-We have been ‘down here’ or ‘in here’ or something like it for almost a year.

Scooping out a bit of the soup in a much smaller crab shell and sipped it. It was still earthy tasting… She considered the small pile of greenery beside her and scrunched up a few bits of a juvenile ‘Blossom Leaf’, adding them along with several more bits of the Duo Li leaf and root.

“Still tastes like mangrove mud?” her sister asked, slipping down the rock to land on the broad, sheltered ledge where they had set up.

“It tastes like Blossom Leaf now,” she said with an eye roll.

“This may help,” her sister tossed her a handful of damp grass, which she caught and inspected before tossing it into the shell where it smoked faintly upon contact with the soup.

Sipping it again, she found that the ‘Water Grass’ had indeed taken away the saccharine sweetness and accented the bitterness of the lotus leaves.

She let it simmer for a few minutes more before tasting it again, noting that the spiciness from the grass had also started to come to the fore.

“Now it tastes of slightly sweet and sour mangrove mud,” she said drily.

Her sister took a sip and shrugged, then took a deeper drink of it. “We work with what we can. It’s edible and it tastes of something that isn’t blood, sweat or our own bile! For that alone I give it 15 stars.”

“This is true,” she agreed, pulling a piece of the root out of it and munching it.

“As far as Spirit Food goes, Mrs. Leng isn’t going to be worried,” her sister snickered.

“Whose side are you on here?” she sniffed. “You could have cooked it yourself…”

“…”

Her sister gave her a look that suggested that tossed spirit salad was about as far as she was willing to go.

Shaking her head in amusement that her sister’s dislike of cooking except as an absolute last resort had managed to make it this far, she took another sip of the broth. The earthy taste was sort of growing on her. However, there was such a thing as having some pride in your concoctions. Her sister would just make it into perfectly good spirit food but leave it tasting of peaty sand. With another wry shake of her head, ignoring the dirty look her sister shot her for her transparent thought process, she added another handful of the lotus leaves. It was better that the bitterness came through rather than the mud at least. As an afterthought, she grabbed a nearby flat rock and transmuted it into bread, a flatbread to be exact. It was a curiosity of that application of the transformation symbol that the bread you got was almost as predicated on what you were transforming into bread as the intent to make it.

Nibbling a bit, she sighed and tore it up and threw the rest into the soup. It tasted of mud, which was a ‘flaw’ of sorts to go along with the uncertain shape. The bread was perfectly edible, but tasted like the rock it was made from, in this case some kind of mudstone.

As they kept on eating, she turned her mind to the seeds from the lotus. They had about forty all told. Lotus seeds were usually a pretty good cultivation resource, akin to base-building pills. The Duo Li Lotus they had snared up had also been a Grade Five spirit plant, akin to an early stage Nascent Soul cultivator in many respects.

“Should we refine these?” she asked eventually, pointing to the crab shell full of them.

“I guess?” her sister said, eyeing them. “Do we need to be wary of them parasitizing our soul force though?”

“Shouldn’t need to,” she said thinking back over what she knew of the plant, or at least the very similar plant she was familiar with. “This variant is one they put in spirit springs; you can raise them to be qi aggregators if you’re patient.”

On that note, she picked one up and refined it. To her surprise it didn’t dissolve into qi, but was instead drawn into her Dantian, where it dropped into her Qi Sea and drifted for a bit, bounced around by the currents before settling on the strata of shattered Undren and monster cores that drifted at the bottom of it. There, it sat in a wedge between two larger bits of core while her Nascent Soul floated nearby observing it. After some thirty heartbeats it shivered and put out tiny shoots, becoming a facsimile of a juvenile Duo Li Lotus.

Frowning, she drew her spear of qi out of the water and prepared to destroy it as soon as it showed the first signs of attempting parasitize; however, all it did was shimmer in the current and slowly send a feeler out amid the core fragments.

“Huh… how unusual,” she muttered under her breath.

“What is it?” her sister said frowning, putting the seed she had just picked up back down.

“It has-” she broke off to scrutinise it further, because now it was just being plain weird.

As she watched, wracking her brains for any knowledge about this family of lotus and their seeds doing anything like what it was now doing, the lotus’s roots snaked out across the rocks anchoring the seed in place. Once it had done that, it slowly started to produce two leaves and a stem and pushed upwards. Finally it bloomed a lotus pad that found a little point of calm between the vortical torrents whereupon it began to eke out its existence, feeding a tiny bit of qi into her greater qi cycle as it broke down the cores around its roots. The whole thing had taken maybe ten qi cycles.

“What?” her sister asked, sounding concerned now.

“Uh… sorry… that was weird… the lotus seed just integrated itself into my greater qi cycle and started helping break down the core residues that are in my dantian,” she explained.

“It parasitized!?!” her sister said, sounding shocked. “It really shouldn’t…?”

“Uh… no, I would have said that!” she said, running a hand through her hair.

“It’s… strange, but doesn’t seem at all harmful,” she mused. “I wonder… is it because the plant is a qi aggregator and refiner in its own right?”

“Huh… that could do it. Those are highly prized for setting up spiritual springs and such,” her sister mused. “But I’ve never heard of a Duo Li Lotus or anything like that doing what you just describe…”

“I wonder, do some of the other qi-aggregating herbs also do that?” she said speculatively, looking out across the misty reed beds.

She eyed the lotus again with her Nascent Soul. Squatting down beside it on the water surface, she ran her fingers across it, feeling the shininess of the leaf pad beneath her fingertips. It was physical enough, but at the same time it was very much a ‘part’ of this place and not a thing from outside. Involuntarily, she looked at the symbol within her Sea of Knowledge, but it wasn’t doing anything at all odd.

“It seems to be like the Qi Cores in a way,” she said after a long pause. “It’s there, as a physical thing in that space, but it’s also very much a part of it…”

She dropped into the water again and stared at the seed which was now barely visible amid the root. Reaching out, she took another seed and absorbed that, watching it…

“Hah!” she exclaimed as she finally caught the flicker of a shift, right as the Duo Li seed entered her dantian.

Her sister looked at her quizzically.

“It is the symbol’s doing… kind of, I think… maybe…” she said. “When the seed entered my dantian, its Intent touched the seed briefly, binding it to my dantian… I think.”

She watched the second seed fall down and sprout just as the first one had, forming a second little lotus pad in the broad shallow expanse of her Qi Sea. As she watched it, paying much more attention to what her Myriad Elements Qi was doing in relation to it, she saw dew drops roll off its leaves occasionally, returning to the Qi Sea. The qi around both of them became a little more stable as well.

“It seems to have co-opted the lotus seeds and integrated them into my dantian to help refine the qi in the cores more efficiently,” she said eventually.

“That… so it’s basically acting like an earthly treasure?” her sister muttered, eyeing the crab and lotus hotpot.

“I’m pretty sure it’s only the seeds. We haven’t wasted anything by eating the fate-trashed plant,” she giggled.

Thinking about that though… the other thought that had just settled into her head was…

She focused on her Nascent Soul and was standing within her dantian once again, beside the second lotus pad. Focusing on it, she tried to move the piece of core that it was latched to nearer to the other one. Just as she had hoped, it did indeed shift. Sinking down to it, she grasped the core fragment, which was half the size of her Nascent Soul, and hauled it up to the surface. She stopped and sighed, rolling her eyes and shifting the size of her Nascent Soul so the water was only waist-deep. Cupping the lotus, she moved it over to the other one so they sat within a few ‘metres’ of each other.

That achieved, she looked around frowning and lit upon the Pagoda, which was floating some distance away. Her Golden Core still hung like a moon in the sky above it, still the focal source of the refinement going on here, which was also feeding her Nascent Soul through the link between them.

Re-adjusting her size somewhat, she walked across the water surface and arrived beside it, looking around her. Curious as to whether it was in fact possible to make the change she was envisaging, she focused on the inner workings of the space she was in and tried to pull up some of the larger core remnants from the floor of her Qi Sea. They rose, slowly, drifting towards her until she had a few dozen spinning around her. She visualised them coming together and merging into a singular lump and they did so, forming a crude agglomeration. However, when she put it in the water to act as a platform it just collapsed apart again.

She stared at the pile, then envisaged them pulling together again in front of her, which they promptly did. This time she put her Soul Force into them, trying to make them fuse. It kind of worked, but they collapsed again after a few short minutes. Hissing in frustration, she stared up that the reflection of her Golden Core, which was actually in the depths of the Qi Sea still, with the symbol shimmering away inside it like a moon…

The symbol had imprinted itself in her dantian during Core Formation…

“Nah…” she muttered. “If that actually works, that’s beyond broken, that’s practically sideways means…”

It was a truly crazy notion, but it refused to go away.

Shaking her head she pulled the core fragments back up, forced them together with her Soul Force and then visualised the array for ‘Stability’ that they had been using to fuse rock before, imprinting it onto the agglomeration with her Soul Force. To her shock and surprise it worked flawlessly, making the fragments of cores settle into each other to leave her with a large greenish grey crystalline boulder. She dropped it back into the water where it sank to the bottom and didn’t break up.

“…”

Her Nascent Soul’s tiny heart was beating loudly in its chest with excitement. Grinning, she reached out and drew up hundreds of pieces of broken core, dragging them together to form a broadly octagonal rock that had a flat section on the top. It took a reasonable amount of Soul Force to imprint the stability symbol, but once it was done she let it settle back into the choppy Qi Sea. When she was done she imagined the pagoda on its summit…

The pagoda shifted and without ever seeming to move, appeared on the top of the rock… which turned out to be a quarter of the size she needed it to be. A few minutes more fusing lumps of rock and she finally had a small fused qi-core-stone pillar that properly held the Pagoda on its summit. As an afterthought, she got more core fragment rubble and fused that into steps. It was somewhat time-consuming, and she could make no claim to be some great landscape architect, but after a while she had added several more bits to the side of the pillar and had steps down to the choppy waters where they ended in a small platform that stretched out into them that the waves broke against.

Drawing the Duo Li Lotus over, she focused on the outside, intending to grab her half of the rest of the seeds, and realised that her sister was staring at oddly.

“Are you okay? You just stopped… talking?” she asked.

“Uh… yes, I just made a really… well…” she trailed off.

“We can use arrays to reshape our dantians’ superstructure.” There was no point in being coy about it.

“…”

Her sister stared at her as if she had just suggested the sky was pink and made of lotus blossoms. She gained a faintly distant look before returning to the present moment with a shocked expression.

“That’s…. crazy…” she whispered, clearly having just tried it out for herself. “What exactly are the limits of this?”

“…”

She shook her head, and took the remaining 20 seeds that were her share of the 44 they had recovered and sent them all into her dantian, reappearing within it in the form of her rather ethereal twelve year old self.

As she watched, the seeds fell into the water around the platform and rapidly germinated, developing their own pads. Looking around at the choppy water, which really wasn’t that suited to them, she focused on the debris below, dragging some larger bits up. The sea was broad and shallow, except where the core spun in the distance, where it was a raging maelstrom, dragging the misty clouds above it into a vast hurricane.

It occurred to her that this whole setup might actually be more efficient over there, by the core, so long as the rocks didn’t get damaged or the lotus pads…

Scooting over to it, she focused on raising up a new pillar overlooking the churning maelstrom. Alighting on top of it, she flattened it off and started to experiment. It became quickly apparent that she could only imprint arrays, not carve them. The limit on an individual array was four symbols and the transformation symbol remained inert. That raised the question of what to put on the arrays. Given the transformation symbol that would allow things to change into qi was off limits, the obvious answer was actually gathering and focus formations. Anything that sped up or further enhanced the rate at which she was advancing was probably only a good thing in the current circumstances.

She put down the array on the rock and abruptly groaned as the flow of qi in her dantian became slightly disharmonic. Focusing, she dispersed the whole rock, scattering the qi-gathering formation with it, and the horrible sense of imbalance vanished after a few moments, leaving her soul form panting.

“Right… don’t just experiment as you like,” she groaned and clapped her hand to her cheeks in remonstration.

“Really,” she castigated herself. “I should have seen that coming.”

It made perfect sense that her dantian, if it was this malleable, had its own feng shui. The clue was the rolling maelstrom behind her with her core sat right in the centre. Thinking about it, she set her Nascent Soul to raising up four more pillars at equidistant points around the maelstrom and focused back on the world outside.

“So it seems there are limits,” her sister said drily.

“Yeah, it seems there are,” she agreed. “What did you find?”

“We can't work with elemental transformation symbols, nor do the gathering or ambient centres work,” her sister said.

“I tried a gathering one; the results nearly gave me a qi deviation,” she said with a grimace.

“Yeah, I tried to set them out around my core as well, but it just made everything disruptive,” her sister mused. “I think it’s because the Golden Core already occupies that role?”

“That would make sense,” she agreed with a sad sigh. “No great leap forward with qi refinement then?”

“Focusing symbols work,” her sister added. “And that brought about a really surprising change.”

“It did?” she said, curious.

“Just try it,” her sister said with a mysterious smile.

“…”

She stared at her for a moment and sighed, knowing her well enough that she was going to torment her and refuse to say, which likely meant it was something she couldn't explain and was just being mysterious.

In her dantian, her Nascent Soul put down a four symbol focusing array on the rock next to the pagoda. She watched it, puzzled, and then gawped as the geography of her dantian started to rapidly shift. Qi flowed in towards the array and her Golden Core, which was sunk into the depths seemed to swap places with the shimmering reflection as her Qi Sea twisted around itself. From an outside perspective, all that happened was everything swirled though the centre and refocused itself slightly, but it was really quite jarring to experience from within.

When everything settled, her Golden Core was now shimmering in the ‘air’ above the pagoda, which along with its rocky base was now in the centre of the shifting maelstrom. No longer did she have a huge vortex welling up beneath it. Instead, it had started pulling in qi in streaming currents that upwelled around the rock that the pagoda was on, swirling into the sky to feed the Golden Core with a degree of efficiency that was, if anything, slightly better than it had been when the core was at the heart of the maelstrom.

She slapped her spiritual forehead and raised both hands, dragging up four more pillars around the one holding the pagoda. Once they had formed, she cancelled the focusing array by the pagoda, observing the shifting currents decrease slightly. Flitting over to the nearest pillar, she chopped the top off it with her qi spear and, leaving her Nascent Soul to sort the rest of it out, focused her attention back outwards.

“Well that explains why the Spear said these arrays were powerful,” she said, trying to stop grinning and failing.

“Yep, even if gathering doesn’t work, a single focus symbol is a remarkable boost,” her sister agreed. “I was able to increase my refinement efficiency by almost a fifth just from deploying one, and it totally reorganised my Qi Sea as well in the process.”

“Yep,” she agreed. “And it seems like our dantians have their own internal feng shui as well.”

“Huh,” her sister face-palmed, which made her happy inside that she hadn’t noticed that at least. “In that case…”

While she waited for Arai to sort out whatever it was she was doing to her own dantian with this newfound epiphany, she oversaw her Nascent Soul’s own landscaping endeavours. She had always enjoyed that side of her responsibilities within the Pavilion, to the point where most of the others usually handed off such responsibilities to her at this point. She was, by her own admission, something of a neophyte in the arts of feng shui and geomancy, but she had consulted with enough different estates in Blue Water City regarding auspicious arrangements of plants, medicine gardens and silliness like the Ling Estate’s to know the basics. The ability to turn some of that knowledge inwards to her own self-betterment was… exhilarating, in a way.

“I think we should try to hunt out more useful species as we make our way through here,” she suggested, looking out over the wetlands. In the stormy half-light that was never quite day and never quite night it looked quite picturesque, if you didn’t look at it too closely anyway.

“Absolutely!” her sister agreed, hopping off the rock and striding through the air over the waterway.

They walked high enough to have a vantage over the reed beds, so they could see where they were going. Now that her Nascent Soul was able to do the qi cycle and qi refinement thing on its own—she saw it had set up a platform just for that purpose below the pagoda,—she basically didn’t need to sit in proper meditation to really advance her qi refinement. That was still more efficient overall; however, so far her abiding intuition out here was that stopping for a few hours to meditate somewhere was asking to have something obnoxious sidle up and try to take a piece of you.

Over the following few days as they continued on through the marshlands she started to observe more changes in the landscape. In their hunt for interesting spirit herbs they were eventually drawn towards the collections of large stone pillars that rose out of them periodically. The areas around them tended to have a lot more open water and mangroves, while the highest peaks of the first one they investigated eventually turned out to hold some grade six Sun-Seizing Orchids. Much as she had hoped, they were able to add those into their dantians’ spiritual landscapes. Sadly the Jasper Moon Blossom that they found shortly afterward on the fringes of the mangroves could not, however. Nor, it turned out, could several other lotuses that lived in the sheltered lakes within the interior, between the rocky island pillars.

After a while though, the pattern became clear, and made her feel a bit foolish for not having made the connection earlier in a way. The Duo Li Lotus was a formidable spirit plant, even as a juvenile and had a stabilised spiritual form. Its seeds, which derived from it, also held that innate potential. For most other things though, only spiritual plants above the fifth grade and that had some aggregating property seemed suitable. Even those that did have a qi-aggregating aspect that were not at the fifth refused to take, as they found out when her sister tried to include a fourth grade Sun-Seizing Orchid they chanced upon on an isolated outcropping as they moved onwards.

A little bit of further experimentation proved that most other criteria she had assumed, such as adaptability, were largely irrelevant so long as the spirit herb was able to self-seed and had an intact Soul Foundation. After that realisation they largely began to ignore everything under fifth grade unless it actively sought them out and started hunting for weird eco-pockets within the landscape that were likely to hold rarer herbs.

The real surprise, though, came when she realised that the cores of some Nascent Soul water critters could also be incorporated. This inadvertent discovery came after she refined one of the crabs that pounced on them out of what she was sure was a proper spatial fissure that it opened in the river bed. Thereafter, her Qi Sea acquired a small spectral ambush crab that flitted through the shallows below her little bed of Duo Li Lotuses, consuming the finest fragments of core dust that drifted there and providing a tiny bit of purified, refined qi.

At that point she just stopped questioning really…

At the next set of stone pillar islands they spent several hours hunting down Nascent Soul water critters, mainly fish, to see what benefits those might have if incorporated. The majority refused to take, demonstrating that non-‘spirit herbs’ apparently had much more stringent criteria, but eventually they wound up with four Nascent Soul ‘Gulping Koi’ apiece from one of the swampy lakes and a few more ambush crabs. The fish took happily to her Qi Sea, flitting through the shallows, drawing qi from the vortexes and gyres and refining it passively.

As they continued on, she set her Nascent Soul to work on a much larger reorganisation. Fixing up the central area of her dantian, she made it so that the Pagoda on its pillar was surrounded by a ring of island pillars much like those they were exploring, with five openings between this interior region and the more turbulent shallow seas beyond it. After that, she made five much larger qi-focusing formations on the peaks of the five pillars to complement the five that were already ringing the Pagoda. Ten seemed to be the limit she could support, activating an eleventh gave her a weird sense of pressure in her Sea of Knowledge and a headache.

When she was finally done, having actually deepened the outer area of her Qi Sea slightly thanks to her drawing up so much of the core fragment rubble, she had a shallower central region within the qi-focusing pillars that contrasted with the choppy, stormy seas that rolled continuously beyond it. The shallower area she decided would be the home of the imprinted plants and the little spirit echoes of the creatures. The whole setup basically became a giant refining cauldron for her qi, feeding her Golden Core and Nascent Soul in a harmonious manner. For the effort involved it had only increased her efficiency by a further tenth or thereabouts, but all increases were good, and perhaps most importantly, it looked good, and she had had fun doing it. At that point, she basically left it in the hands of her Nascent Soul to continue making whatever further minor changes were required.

They journeyed on for another week after that, pretty much without pause, gathering as they went and slowly building up their personal spirit echo menageries and herb gardens within their dantians. The landscape slowly changed around them as well as they went, shifting from the winding waterways and mangroves between stone pillar islands blanketed in vegetation, back towards swampy bogs with vast stretches of reed beds and fenland once again. There were occasional mangroves around broad shallow lakes and even the odd deeper lake.

Within one, which was several miles across, she saw dark shadows moving in the depths as they walked above it, and several soul senses washed over them as they passed by, investigating them. Even without the symbol she guessed they might have been okay, just about, but that was only because there was no dangerous intent within those distant eyes, just curious investigation. After that though, they skirted those deeper lakes or flew high over them if the mist permitted. The drifting web-nets in the mists, with their innate soul shock were thankfully long gone as well, so the only obvious danger there was the perpetual qi-drain, that became stronger the denser the mist.

Despite having fought occasional monsters and hunted down quite a few weaker Nascent Soul water critters, it wasn’t until the end of that week that they got their first proper test of combat prowess.

They were flitting across the treetops of the mangrove swamp that flanked one of the craggy rock pillars draped in sub-tropical vegetation when a colossal surge of Intent swept out from it, carrying with it a prodigious soul strength that tried to paralyse them both in place. She weathered it with a bit of effort, pleased that she hadn’t had to call on the symbol to do so, and was just about to send out her own probe to try and disabuse whatever opportunistic ambusher had set eyes on them when a vast spectral web dropped out of the misty cloud swirling overhead, snaring up the landscape for a mile or more in every direction.

A vast soul strength surged through the web, trying to incapacitate them both as it dropped in a dome down over them. Gritting her teeth, she pushed the Maelstrom Intent as far as she was able, testing its inherent turbulence against the web that was largely attuned to Yin Wood Qi, albeit not in its properly poisonous aspects, from what she could intuit. Arai’s Sundering Intent joined hers a moment later, carried on the currents of her own Intent and tearing at the web like a devouring tsunami.

Rising, evading the worst of the ruined web, she finally got a decent look at the aggressor as it scuttled down the rock face above them: a Spider Queen about the size of a small house, with long spindly legs covered in subtle serrated edges. Its carapace was green and white and it had a long thin abdomen. It was also fast, very, very fast.

She charged forward with her movement art and struck out at it with the spear she had made from a decently spiritual tree trunk and one of the spear heads they had recovered. Arai shot at it from the other side, cutting at a forelimb with the metal sword.

The three met in a shockwave that cratered the ground, briefly dispersing the flow of the waterway they had been travelling along through the mangrove. Her spear bit deep into the side of its thorax before the sweep of a limb forced her to withdraw.

On the other side, her sister was similarly repelled, having taken a decent chunk out of its other foreleg. It waved its limbs and sent a second wave of soul strength–infused Intent and qi at them even as she collected the recoil and stabbed back towards its eyes. On the far side, her sister danced away from a series of lunging strikes from its limbs even as she tried to properly sever one with a strike from her own martial form.

The exchange lasted maybe a few seconds and then she felt a flicker of something on the edge of her own qi perception, a shifting in the misty cloud and the greenery above-

Thousands of ensnaring webs drifted down around them, followed by tens of thousands of spiders. They surged out of the forest, jumped off the cliff above or just dropped straight out of the cloud above. Most were Qi Condensation or Qi Refinement, but there were still hundreds of Core Formation male spiders. The main threats though were the several dozen Soul Foundation Spider Queens. Amongst them were even a few Nascent Soul ones, attempting to hide their auras and advance stealthily amid the chaos of the charge.

Soul attacks swept over them both like rolling waves, chaining one after another as the new arrivals sought to create openings for attack. She twisted her surroundings as forcefully as she was able, shredding everything that came within 30 metres of her and what she didn’t shred, her sister sundered and cut apart. Mangroves splintered, water from nearby waterways and pools was swept up as the qi for a hundred metres in every direction swept up and miniature gyres merged into miniature cyclones that connected with the misty low cloud—tearing hundreds more spiders to shreds in a blink of an eye.

She launched herself up into the air, stabbing down with the spear, intending to use ‘Dreaming of Abzu’ to impale the Spider Queen through its thorax. However, in response it swept up its forelimbs and uttered a silent soul scream. The blades on its legs rippled and a discordant, distorting chime tried to envelop her.

She responded with the Thunderclap art—it had been a while since she used it really. In the instant that she used it, it became a thing she planned to use in every mob fight from now until the end of time. Infused with her soul strength and the Maelstrom Intent, the qi that went into the shout became a detonation of exhaled noise that collided with the spider’s chime. The shockwave repelled both of them dozens of metres, sending her crashing down into the remnants of a mangrove and the spider through a stand of tattered trees. The roar of noise rolled in every direction, shaking birds from trees for miles in every direction.

Every spider below Golden Core within earshot was pasted into ichor and chitin, trees shuddered and splintered and the air itself twisted, flattening what remained of every reed bed within 200 metres. Those above, who had been too close, were stunned or thrown back, their legs flailing and their own soul attacks lost in the aftershocks.

Arai’s strike landed as the Spider Queen surged back up, biting deep into the foreleg that slammed down into the earth as it stopped its backward slide. She shortened the distance between her and a side leg, half-severing it before finishing off one of the smaller Spider Mothers that was struggling up. Small spiders that had dodged the initial shockwave rolled in like a returning wave.

The Spider Queen forced her sister to dodge back again and launched itself forward, sweeping its long limbs across the ruin of the wetland like whips, aiming to swat her between them. In response she pounded a hand into the mud and imprinted an array that was ‘Yang Earth’, ‘State’, ‘Isolate’ and ‘Detonation’. The shockwave ruptured the earth, casting up a wave of Yang Earth Qi-infused mud and detritus. A Spider Mother howled in rage as its charge was destabilised by the miniature earthquake that accompanied it. Hundreds more spiders perished, crushed by rocks that crashed down off the stone forest pillars or smothered and crushed in liquefying ground.

Covering the distance between them in a single bound, she crashed onto its abdomen, driving the spear deep into its thorax and then planting a four symbol lightning array straight into its body. The spider’s spiritual form dissociated from its flailing physical one and tried to stab at her. Finally, she let her own Nascent Soul out to join the fight, having held it in reserve for just this moment to catch the creature off guard.

Dressed in silver and black armour straight off the Militia Parade Ground, her ghostly 12 year old self looks almost a bit comedic as it wielded its spear, hair streaming and struck at the creatures soul form with a tyrannical soul strike that echoed those she had managed during her tribulation. The spider’s spiritual form screamed soundlessly and twisted backwards. It somehow drew webs out of thin air and tried to coat the entire landscape around them in a mire of poisonous Yin Wood Qi.

-Well that explains that ability, she thought with a grimace as she shifted her Intent once again and resisted it, shredding the webs and dispersing them.

Her sister’s own Nascent Soul arrived a moment later, cutting downward with a ghostly replica of the metal blade she was wielding. Their combined assault drove the Nascent Soul of the spider back a second time. With her new senses that came with her Nascent Soul realm she could faintly feel the connection between the spider’s own Nascent Soul and its body. She half-expected it to recover its soul, but instead it charged back at their own souls, intending, she guessed, to keep them separated.

Shaking her head, she stabbed at one of the smaller Nascent Soul Spider Mothers that had just shot out of the ruined landscape at them. It wasn’t a bad plan on the Spider Queen’s part, but it was… working with incomplete information, she thought with a giggle.

Her stab connected with the first one, her Maelstrom Intent more than up to the task of snaring it. As expected its spirit form blurred out at her, intending to capitalise on her own Nascent Soul being otherwise occupied.

She visualised the ‘Thunder Charge’ art that she had memorised and unleashed it directly.

The lightning tore through the spider, dissipating its spiritual form and making it bleed ichor as it reeled to collect itself. The other two shook their abdomens and a field of corrosive miasma filled the area. Their spirit forms slunk into the shadows and started to snipe at her while the Spider Queen danced beneath her, trying to attack her sister who was clashing with its limbs in a flickering blur of sword strikes. As far as she could see, the only reason her sister hadn’t severed a limb or three so far was the Queen’s own self-healing ability, which as a Yin Wood-Life attribute Qi Beast was probably its strongest suit after-

As if to pre-empt that thought—why it hadn’t used any proper poison based abilities—the Spider Queen shook its own abdomen and executed the same move that the smaller ones had just attempted. A wave of poisonous miasma rich in the most obnoxious aspects of Yin Water, Yin Life and Yin Fire qi and carrying a vicious Intent nested within it coated everything within 50 metres. It made her skin sizzle and her lungs burn even as her body devoured it, refining it away.

She bounded backwards, through the churned up ruin of the mangrove as the spider rolled on the spot trying to dislodge her and crush Arai in the same motion. Barely dodging two flailing legs, she placed a Yin Fire version of the Detonation Array she had used before onto the swamp mud. Seeing what was about to happen, her sister fled smartly as a sheet of flickering fire swept across everything within a hundred metres of her own position. Every spider, live and dead within its radius turned into a little spirit candle. The miasma from the Spider Queen ignited a heartbeat later, throwing her back into the dirt, blistering her skin even with the Isolate node in the array shielding her from the worst of the blowback.

Rolling up, she launched herself straight for the nearest Spider Mother, which was flailing and desperately trying to put out the phantasmal fire that was burning on its back. Her spear pierced right through it and the Maelstrom Intent tore its body to ribbons, scattering bits of carapace everywhere. Grasping the core, she hurtled straight for the other one, refining it away.

-Sorry spiders, I am sure you fulfil some very valuable niche in this ecosystem, but not inside my dantian, you don’t, she thought as she had no interest whatsoever in having tiny spectral spiders running around inside her Qi Sea or on the rock islands in it.

-Nope. No way is that happening, she thought as she obliterated its remaining Intent.

Their battle after that settled into a lengthy brawl of attrition. Both they and the Spider Queen had practically inexhaustible resources to call upon it seemed. The Spider Queen could heal as fast as they injured it and was large enough that even the Arborundum leaf could not sever limbs fast enough to prevent the spider healing them as the wounds were inflicted. Similarly, once they got a handle on its offensive capabilities, it became clear that it couldn't do enough damage to them to deliver anything like a critical blow let alone a lethal one. Neither side was in any danger of running out of qi either it seemed, while their Nascent Souls were able to keep the Spider Queen’s tied up just as much as it was keeping theirs distracted. If anything, the pressure being put on her Nascent Soul in the battle was becoming increasingly beneficial.

They fought it out for at least 30 minutes, fighting off two more waves of reinforcements from the massif beside them before the Spider Queen broke off directly and with a blur bounded backwards onto the cliff face and shot back to the top of the pillar. Once it had gotten there it gave one final soul strength–enhanced silent scream before fleeing into a barely visible gully cave, leaving them to take stock.

The landscape was transformed by their battle. They had fought over a distance of several square miles and everything within that area was flattened, sunk, burnt, charred or cratered. The waterways were starting to re-stabilise into a wetland mire but the edge of the massif and the mangrove were simply devastated. All around them fires burned admidst drifts of charred spider carapaces, half buried in the devastation.

Her Nascent Soul, which barely came up to her waist, flew back down and waved its spear in childish delight before making an obscene gesture at the pillar above them that she would never have known at that age. Arai’s soul was similarly exuberant. It was a strange visual reflection of her own inner elation at such a fight… She was her Nascent Soul and it was her, but it held a lot of childish delight and a disarmingly naïve manner she had thought long lost somehow. Also, actions that would have been aggressive in her 18 year old self just came across as amusingly cute at times when replicated by her ghostly 12 year old self.

They started to recover the spoils of battle once it became clear that the Spider Queen had truly called it quits, a task made much easier through the use of soul sense. That was largely a passive augment on her ability to perceive qi and use it to map movement in the surroundings, but it also, as she had discovered during experimentation since their breakthrough, had a sort of linking quality between Intent and Qi. A quick scan of the area with it showed her five quasi Six-Star Nascent Cores, 21 Five-Star Nascent Cores, and almost 89 Four-Star Soul Foundation Cores. The number of Three-Star cores as at 410, just in the area she was sweeping, so likely it was several times higher in reality.

“Was that really a Peak Nascent Soul Qi Beast?” she half-questioned, half-wondered out loud as they hauled out one of the smaller Spider Mothers from a flooded crater.

“I’d guess it was either peak Six Star or maybe just broke through to Seven-Star,” her sister mused.

“Yeah,” that sounded about right, she guessed. “It didn’t have a principle though…?”

“It’s possible to get to Dao Seeking without a principle…” her sister reminded her.

“Huh… that’s true,” she agreed, wincing at having forgotten that.

It was possible to break through Spirit Severing and then set about turning Intent into a Principle; it was just frowned upon as far as her limited knowledge was aware.

“Unless its Principle was somehow related to soul attacks… That Yin Life web was very odd…” her sister added drily.

“Huh, that could be it,” she conceded, looking at the symbol in her Sea of Knowledge.

If it was at early stage Dao Seeking, a proper Seven-Star ranked Qi Beast, without suppression – self-examining, she wondered if they could actually kill it as they were. The battle had shown her that they were not exactly weak in terms of offensive strength, but they were lacking in real depth. The strongest attack she had was ‘Dreaming of Abzu’ by a large margin, and both times the Spider Queen had been able to block it or evade it. The arts from the manual in the sack on her back were powerful, but they didn’t scale easily from what she could see. Five-Symbol arrays took a lot of qi to put down and were again surprisingly easy for it to dodge. It had mostly shrugged off the lightning and fire ones she had used, and the Yang Earth one was much less effective out here anyway.

“That’s just the fundamental gap in survivability between a Six-Star and a Seven-Star Qi Beast, I guess,” she stated with a sigh.

“Probably we would have to trick it, make a connection to its core, like with the Spider Queen in the depths, and then use the Symbol to try to cancel its Nascent Soul,” her sister theorised.

“-And that sounds like a wonderful way to get yourself killed,” she added, to which her sister nodded with a resigned sigh.

With her own resigned sigh, she shrugged off the ruined remnants of reed cloak number three. It had been made out of the local variant of ‘Wool Top Reed’, a reasonably common fourth-grade Spirit Sedge. Her hat, made out of some thicker reeds that were nearly as good as bamboo, was long lost to the miasma of the Spider Queen; it was surprising really that her possessions had survived this long.

“It seems we have no destiny at all with retaining armour,” her sister said with a sad chuckle.

She nodded sadly. “There has to be some trick to it…”

“Yes, there is! Not constantly fighting things that laugh at the conceptual idea of qi-defence,” her sister said drily. “Besides, almost anything out here is more interested in eating us than looking at our breasts.”

“That doesn’t help,” she pointed out, crossing her arms under her own and scowling at the rock above them where the Spider Queen was observing them from the depths of its cave still.

With a *plop* her sister scooped up a broad lotus pad that had somehow survived unscathed despite being just a grade-two plant and put it on her head.

“If you’re going to scowl like that, at least wear a hat and dispense sagacious turtle wisdom,” her sister sniggered.

She took the floppy leaf off her head and looked at it with a sigh. As if to punctuate the humour of the moment, the sky overhead rumbled faintly and it started to rain once more.

Joking aside, it didn’t take her that long to remake the crude matte cloak, which was a very crude affair in any case. Despite her sister’s mockery, the lotus leaf did in fact become a new hat, with a bit of adornment from some reeds to make it serviceable. It at least helped keep the worst of the rain out of her eyes as they cleaned up the rest of the battlefield.

There were quite a few other dead things in the vicinity as well. They had, amidst all the devastation, extinguished much of the fauna ecosystem of the surrounding wetland. The Spider Queen’s venomous miasma and her own deployments of Yin Fire arrays along with the Thunderclap art, had been the main culprits there, slaying indiscriminately for the most part. In contrast Arai had used remarkably little in the way of wide scale attacks, preferring to rely on her Sundering Intent and occasional uses of the Qi Blast and Firebolt or Fire Orb arts.

Over the course of an hour they got dozens of crab cores, quite a few fish, some other water critters and even a group of toad type Qi Beasts—including two early stage Nascent Souls that got absorbed into their dantians. There was even a group of the small grey-green demons, dressed in some crude bits of woven grass and carrying stone spears that had been killed by the Spider Queen’s initial web she was pretty sure. All of them had Golden Cores, similar to the Undren, rather than beast cores.

All the while, the Spider Queen observed them silently from the side of its rock pillar, making no move to come out from deep within its cave. After taking stock of what they had: the sword, her spear, the spare metal weapons, the two arts manuals, the leaf knife and a few other sundries along with their current iterations of ‘garments’, jade tablets and qi-repelling stone armour included, they departed, heading on through the wetlands.

Behind them, the Spider Queen slunk back out of its cave and waved its forelegs at them tauntingly. In return, both of them sent symbol-enhanced pokes back at it with their soul sense, which didn’t do much at this distance beyond make it screech at them silently and then head back into the interior of the massif.

They didn’t meet anything else willing to tangle with them as the massif vanished into the sheeting rain, or sense anything else at all really in the vicinity.

“You reckon everything else got spooked and ran off?” her sister mused as they flitted down a waterway about level with the top of the reeds.

“Probably,” she said, looking around speculatively. The rain had pushed back the mist a bit as she surveyed the swaying tops of the reed beds that vanished into the storm-lit haze.

“I guess with the mists not rolling through the reed beds, that was visible for quite a few miles in every direction,” she added.

“And yet, still nothing came to bother us,” her sister mused.

“Probably that’s a good thing; it suggests that that spider was the apex predator in this region,” she suggested.

“Don’t say things like that out loud,” her sister said with an eye roll.

“…”

She rolled her own eyes, hidden as they were beneath the peak of her lotus pad hat and surveyed the landscape again. It was tempting to sweep it with qi sense, but really that achieved very little. The landscape was almost as impenetrable, even with the help of the Myriad Elements Qi as the worst of the High and Inner Valleys of Yin Eclipse’s densest green pits. Her vision and hearing were by far the best senses to get anything out of it seemed, especially away from the rock massifs.

They ran on for several more minutes before her sister finally spoke again. “What’s gnawing at you?”

She blinked, but didn’t glance over, it was easy to forget that there was a subtle link between the symbols sometimes. The worries that were just drifting in her mind, like the mists and the rain themselves were…

“The same thing that’s bothering you really…” she said after a long pause.

“What is this place, why are we here, what even can we do here… can we even escape here?”

They ran on in silence again for some time before her sister finally came to a stop and stared around at the landscape.

“It was easy to ignore it down below wasn’t it?”

“…”

She stared at the vast open landscape that vanished into the rain in every direction, taking in the sight of occasional rocky outcroppings and the distant dark shade of a swathe of mangroves or some other fenland grove tropical wetland flora. It had been easy to ignore, down below, where they had been struggling to survive from one minute to the next.

“In that place... the ‘Perilous Realm’ as they called it, there was a purpose, a direction… We had to not die of starvation, not go mad…” she agreed. “That mausoleum of a city was worse… but the Bell… did it send us here?”

“The spirit sent us here,” her sister pointed out drily.

“No… remember what it said…” she shook her head.

“Oh…” her sister turned to survey the horizon.

“The Spear said to go east… which we are broadly doing, as much as the periodic bits of geomancy we are crudely attempting can gauge anyway,” she muttered.

“You think the Bell put on this path for a specific reason?” her sister mused.

“Call it a hunch or maybe I’ve been staring at the Maelstrom Intent too much,” she sighed, wondering if that was indeed it.

It did have some inherent affinity for feng shui and geomancy. That much she was becoming more and more clear on. The way things were described in the spear form, in the unarmed form, even the refining art, all had subtle hints of it as well, even if they never stated it outright, preferring to have her draw her own conclusions.

‘I had a strange experience with my tribulation’, was what she nearly said next, before stopping.

That had been a very strange experience, in that brief moment. It had reminded her of their mother in actuality—a shadow that was powerful and strong, that would protect her, and knew things she could not. It was also hard for her to articulate why she felt that odd experience was relevant to this point. Part of her, quite a lot of her actually, suspected it was just a weird part of the tribulation, a phenomenon that had occurred in the moment due to stress or similar.

“What happens if we can't get out of here?” she said eventually. “Do we just cut a hole in some mountain somewhere and try to become Immortals?”

“…”

Her sister stared at her in the rain and then just started to laugh. She had to smile as well, because just saying it out loud made it sound like some child’s dream. A dream in the middle of a waking nightmare.

“Perhaps that’s not a terrible idea,” her sister said drily. “This is meant to be the shard of a Supreme World, at least according to the Spear. Maybe we can get the opportunity to leave if we cross the Immortal threshold?”

“And how many decades is that likely to take,” she asked equally drily.

“At the rate we are currently going?” her sister said with more amusement in her tone now.

“Fair point,” she conceded, “It could be years rather than decades.”

Sobering again, she stared around at the landscape again. The vast openness was oppressive, a different kind of oppression compared to the depths.

“I am glad we don’t need to sleep,” she said eventually.

“Yeah…” her sister said quietly.

They stood there in silence, in the rain, lost in their own thoughts for a few moments more before they started moving eastwards again. It was a good thing they didn’t need to sleep. It allowed her to bury the bad memories and worries with her mantra much more firmly, or box them away in a part of her mind… her Sea of Knowledge now…

“I wonder if that is what the problem is,” she said after a while.

“Ohh?” her sister asked.

“Our Seas of Knowledge,” she explained. “All those memories I had packed away in a little box, Father, West Flower Picking Town, The Pavilion, Juni, Ling and Shu… how much time has passed…”

“Oh.” Her sister was silent, understanding what she meant now.

Those memories were drifting in her Sea of Knowledge; all her memories were now. It was a very different feeling compared to before. She had more control, more structure to them… but also, somehow, less ability to turn away from them? It had been easy to seal them away in her mind when she didn’t have such a good awareness of them, but now, it almost felt shameful. The taunts of the adult ‘her’ in her tribulation also had an element of that as well. They were getting strong, trying to survive… but at the same time, it was hard to escape the paradoxical feeling that they were both directionless and simultaneously pieces in some other plan. Whose plan, was a different matter entirely? Ji Tantai and Din Ouyeng had set them on this course, inadvertently, but they had only gotten this far because of the Symbol. They were only here because of the Bell, she was pretty certain. It had said it would send them towards the ‘end’, when they asked for a way out.

“But what exactly is that end… and how does it involve this vast, terrifying place…?” she muttered under her breath.

“You ask me, but who the fates do I ask?” her sister muttered.

“Not the ‘fates’ it seems,” she said with a dark chuckle.

“It’s just weird, I really dislike this feeling that we are dancing to some tune we can't quite grasp,” she added after a while.

“I get that…” her sister said staring at the distant horizon. “I want to say that it’s… like we have never been allowed to take the initiative… but that’s not quite… right?”

She nodded again. That was indeed it, in a weird way maybe. “Like we have been cast through this place by the spirit for its own amusement or something?”

Strangely, before her sister could even answer, the symbol, that was usually silent now in her Sea of Knowledge snickered and suggested in some strange way that if she was a ‘skipping stone’ then she was a very dangerous one indeed.

“It is hard not to escape that feeling, isn’t it,” her sister acknowledged, “but what can we do about it?”

“Keep skipping until we reach the other side of the lake?” she suggested with a sour smile.

In her Sea of Knowledge, the symbol quietly laughed, not at her, but with her… but in a way that suggested there was something more to that thought that eluded her, even as it settled back into silence and kept on doing its thing -refining natural qi, infusing Maelstrom Intent into it and supplying soul strength to her Nascent Soul..

“Keep on skipping to the other side… huh,” she repeated again to herself.

As strategies went, it was a fairly grim one, rather akin to ‘keep running until you have outrun all the other options’.

“So we get stronger…” she said eventually, “until we can get out of here, one way or the other…”

-And after that, we will see what we will see, she thought silently to herself.

Somehow, her intuition told her that their father would be okay, despite whatever repercussions likely fell regarding their original mission, which was so long ago as to be almost a distant memory. Juni, Ling and Shu on the other hand… if they had been injured… if they had died because of what those two had done… at the very least, she was confident she could sway the Ling Clan to step in. Ling Luo was almost as well liked as Ling Yu, although her talent was not as good.

-Surely though, everyone else thinks we are dead…

“And yet, here we are, running through this place, experiencing a world we never believed possible,” her sister added softly, reminding her again that their shared link was only deepening in strange and somewhat uncontrollable little ways.