Memories of the Fall

Perhaps the greatest cultural difference between our lands upon the coast of the southern continent and the vast savannah interior is ‘diplomacy’. Up north we are used to dealing with the machinations of the Holy Empire and the Imperial Commonwealth or the raiding of the Jom and Hath, where words mean nothing and written words mean even less. However, to the people of the southlands, it is actually the spoken word, the names given to things which hold the greatest worth, not the scripts of lesser things that came later. They venerate the five, specifically the Maker and the Shaper – both beings of ancient times that have a long history with the ‘worth’ of words.

We say what is expedient in the moment and then do what is expedient later, expecting others to move to our pace, just as we must move to the pace of those further north. We comfort ourselves by telling tales of their barbarity, their illiteracy and their crude lifestyles, that their words are not equal to our texts and our laws, and yet they will never see it this way, because to them, we are the ones who have cast aside the honour of the past, abandoned the path of our most ancient forbears, in return for the paltry comfort of words of our own invention.

It is little wonder that our dealings with them have become so fraught over the millennia.

~Excerpt from the writings of Rahul Sar’Lazeer

~ Sana & Arai, Storm-wracked massif - with added feng shui ~

“In the name of all the unholy fates I had forgotten how much I despise esoteric feng shui,” Sana watched as her sister, kneeling beneath a forest tree, cursed under her breath.

As much as she did like feng shui, because it was kind of cool how things related to each other, she had to agree in this instance – esoteric feng shui, when deployed like this, was a pain in the ass.

Stood beneath her own tree, she used her Maelstrom Intent, just it on its own – no qi – to subtly twist the ambience of their surroundings again. This time, the result was somewhat better. The slightly diffuse maze of foliage and trees shrouded in mist all around them remained as it had been, but was now missing the sense of maze-like obfuscation that had come with it.

-Just go away, stupid storm, she sighed.

Above them, the thunder boomed and a flash of light illuminated the pillar above them through the wind and rain. Normally, they would be sat in a cave in a pillar-like that, waiting out the storm…

Unfortunately, the cloud layer had descended and the qi in the air above was so turbulent as to be dangerous even to them. The rain above the canopy and the thunder above both held traces of natural principle – just as she now knew the mists in the wetlands had. Travelling above the treeline was a feat beyond their endurance; that natural principle played havoc on their own intent and prevented them from walking in the air. Scaling the pillars looking for a cave was a sure-fire way to invite lightning as well. The final nail in their current circumstances was the way that the feng shui of this place had been manipulated. Outside of the storms, the whole place was a maze of low cloud, endless forest and sheer pillars that they had found impossible to navigate.

To do so, they would have to work out how the landscape was harmonised as far as she could see – a feat far beyond either of them with the means they had at their disposal. As best she could tell, someone, probably some powerful expert of the demons who lived in some of the valleys, had made these places into natural fortresses. Mazes to conceal or obfuscate movement through their territory. Only within the storm walls did that manipulation break down somewhat, allowing them to make the progress they were.

“Who would think that a few years of arranging gardens would see me doing this,” she sighed, observing the valley as it now was, compared to how it had been.

“I bet you a Golden Core from one of these fate-thrashed demons that we are going to be doing this whole rigmarole again in 20 paces,” Arai muttered, standing up and dusting leaves off of herself.

“Fates… not even 20 paces,” she sighed as she felt the subtle shift in the world as they stepped across a totally innocuous patch of ground.

“Whoever did this, did not do it in a week,” Arai grumbled as she started poking around the bushes again.

“And they did it without any qi at all. This is pure landscape alignment,” she murmured admiringly, starting to scuff through the leaf litter around her looking for the tell-tale signs of the local link with the web of feng shui.

“Don’t admire the fate-thrashed bastards! If it wasn’t for that storm above us, we might well be stuck in this valley for the next 20 years!” Arai muttered.

-That is very true, she admitted to herself.

“Why does this set of valleys even have such a ridiculous alignment?” Arai muttered as she snapped two branches off a tree and the place shifted – again – then settled back to a state that wasn’t obfuscated horribly.

“You ask me, but who do I ask,” she muttered under her breath, wiping water from her face.

Standing beneath the trees in this weather was like walking beneath a perpetual green waterfall. Water was everywhere. In the air, in the ground, in the trees and plants, falling from the sky, running in temporary streams. There was another huge clap of thunder overhead and the hair on her neck stood on end as a series of lightning strikes earthed themselves on another pillar above them. The sky was actually getting a little dark now, with the new density of the cloud. It had never done that before as far as she had seen.

She stopped, crouching low as a *tu-tut-tut-tut-* sound echoed in the distance.

A few metres away, Arai unslung her sword, which was now stained in earthen tones, much like her spear blade, and moved closer to a tree. A few moments later a second set of taps came from the same direction. Sweating mentally, she suppressed her qi and watched the forest.

The tapping sound, like someone knocking two hollow logs together, echoed again as she searched in the gloom for the source.

“Forty metres left, Lussu bush – wrong,” Arai signed.

Glancing that direction, she saw the faint shadow behind the shadow of the bush where it tumbled across some rocks. The Shifting Alkr, which had to be maybe five metres long, didn’t appear to have spotted them, which was a mercy they probably didn’t deserve out here. She watched as it rubbed two legs together making the long, tapping call, which this time was answered from further up the pillar above them.

Pointing across the valley, in the general direction of the wetlands several miles and a ridge escarpment distant, she moved very slowly around the edge of the clearing. A moment later, Arai followed her. She didn’t breathe again until they had reached the far valley wall – only encountering one other esoteric feng shui alignment in the process, for that matter.

“So much for the idea that nothing moves about in the storms,” her sister muttered as they took refuge under an overhang.

“I’m more curious as to why we only encountered one more feng shui alignment in this direction when we have been finding them at a rate of one every 30 metres up to this point…” she murmured, staring out at the forest.

“True, and it’s not like they are focused on that side of the valley or anything,” Arai pondered, tossing another divination.

She tossed one herself, with the Jing Ching sticks, and got ‘obfuscation of the western sky, monkey dreaming’.

“Still the same,” Arai noted, comparing their divinations.

“Uhuh,” she agreed, rolling it back up with a sigh.

-If I see that alignment one more time I’m going to throw you down a sink hole, she remonstrated the crude compass.

Another rumble of thunder shook the whole forest, making the ambient qi turbulent. Above them, a sizzling bolt of lightning turned the top of the pillar they were still on into a torch. She fancied she saw a bit of tree actually fall down and hit the floor half a mile distant. Adjusting her broad hat, for all the good it did, she started to make her way along the underhang, Arai following a few paces behind.

They made it 30 metres this time without hitting another alignment, which was distressingly prophetic as far as earlier observations went.

“Okay, I’m officially confused,” Arai scowled.

She nodded, kneeling down with her back to the wall – her sister was not wrong; this was properly ‘Confusing’.

Above them, storm clouds streamed around the pillar tops, flowing like an ocean of dark cloud in the stormy sky. The bizarre half-light still permeated most things, which really did not help at this point. It gave the rain and mist a faint inner glow that limited visibility even more than it might otherwise have been and made it impossible to keep track of time without using her scrip. Glancing at that, she saw that they had been in here for… a day and a half.

“A day and a half to go ten miles,” she sighed, trying to bury her frustrations in her mantra.

It only half worked – whatever was going on with that was something that was bugging her a lot. Ever since she started gaining meridians in her Nascent Soul – since she got a Nascent Soul, in fact – her ability to bury her emotions as she had been with the mantra had gotten much less effective. It made her realise how much she had been relying on it as a crutch to get through this place.

It took almost 20 minutes this time to find the various bits of landscape that had been messed about with. Thereafter, they met two more such re-arrangements within the next thirty metres, the last one which was so profound she had to give up in the end, leaving them sat in the rain by the cliff face in frustration.

“You know,” Arai said after they had been sat there in glum silence for a few minutes, “we could see if cutting a hole into the mountain fixes it?”

“It’s possible,” she conceded, looking up at the pillar above them.

“The other alternative is backtracking,” Arai said, giving her a look that said quite a bit more than that.

“Yes…” she sighed softly.

Backtracking. She looked behind them and sighed again. The alignments did reset after a while. The overall inertia of the arrangement of the landscape ensured that they always found a way to do so, and do so in a way that wasn’t how they had been before. As a pattern, she was familiar with it on a very small scale; it was popular in a certain kind of garden where you didn’t want to spend a lot of time managing the minutia of every plant’s placement. On this kind of scale though, it was both a remarkable feat and utterly frustrating. To overcome it completely, she was certain they would need powerful Principles at the very least, based on what was occurring with the storm, maybe even some vague comprehensions of natural laws. The latter was just fanciful dreaming though, they would be here for centuries before their cultivation ever got to that point, even if their current speed of advancement remained on its current trajectory.

“More to the point, can you actually cut this without the leaf?” she asked, poking the rock behind them.

Arai frowned and placed a hand against it – she watched as Arai stood there doing nothing for a few moments before closing her hand to a fist and giving it a sharp punch to no obvious effect. Wordlessly, she handed her the leaf. It took an hour to excavate a shallow tunnel into the rock face. That was also long enough to determine that the alignment that was miring up this whole landscape also extended a longway into the rocks themselves. Fortunately, it was not the whole way, and after they had mined inwards about ten metres they encountered a boundary point. Vexingly, it turned out to be the same one she had run into before, so they did, in the end, have to back track fifty metres or so and cut a new hole.

By the time they had bypassed the ridgeline, she was, genuinely, about ready to kill something. It had taken four days of solid mining to arrive in the valley beyond the ridgeline. It was, as far as she could tell, one that they had avoided before by expedience of not wanting to play ‘dodge the demon’. Looking back on that choice now, she would have much preferred to spend a week skulking through the greenery avoiding demons or sat in a cave, hidden away in a pillar there, over what they had just gone through in its stead. If there was a bright spot, it was that this valley itself was much the same as the last – forest carpeting craggy gorges and miniature pillars that held occasional ruins and some, although thankfully not many, feng shui alignments obfuscating this and that. The dark cloud still streamed overhead, flickering with distant lightning and making everything shake with the periodic waves of rolling thunder. However, the worst of the current storm front seemed to have swept on through. That lightning mostly struck down at more distant pillars and swept out over what would be the wetlands. The thunder still boomed, but it was no longer immediately overhead.

Making their way onward and now relieved of the need to stare at the ground beneath her feet for more feng shui shenanigans, she once again found herself reflecting on the hints of natural principle held within the storm. The lightning was one thing, but even the shrieking wind and rain from this storm held principles that flitted tantalisingly across the edge of her perception as she paid attention to the sky above the canopy for the first tell-tale warning signs of lightning that might be a bit too close.

She was just considering how the wind splitting the treetops and sheering around the towers above them was similar to some of the things she could try with her intent, when the diffuse bubble of her soul sense she was keeping around her registered a faint anomaly. Turning towards it, she grasped the white-tipped arrow, which was travelling in a remarkably lazy way and eyed it sourly. There was no killing intention in it at all, which was very much at odds with the truly poisonous ‘Absolute Yin Qi’ that was imbued within it. She narrowed her eyes and turned the arrow into wooden chips in her hand, or at least tried to, because it resisted her Maelstrom Intent admirably.

“…”

Arai ducked behind a rock as she traced its path backwards. It appeared to have originated in a very mundane piece of inoffensive forest that she didn’t see the point in looking at too clo-

Forcing her eyes to focus on that part of the forest some 50 metres away to their south, she nearly missed the dozen arrows that drifted towards them from the west. Looking at them she found them to be very disinteresting and not at all-

“Faugh!” she snarled and ducked down behind a rock as they shot into the greenery all around them, vanishing without a-

Another arrow drifted down from above, nearly hitting her in the head. This one seemed to have originated from the nearest rocky outcropping visible through the canopy. Arai sent a wave of her Sundering Intent-infused qi through the trees as she scoped out the devastation it left in its path. Several more arrows arrived from different directions and she absently twisted the qi in the air around them to make them mostly miss their mark. Those were just normal arrows it seemed, painted with gaudy designs that broke up their shape as they travelled through the dappled light of the understory.

Under her sister’s attack, she saw several bushes that didn’t quite break as they should and made the sign for the water orb attack from the tome, imbuing her Maelstrom Intent into it. It spun through the forest, shredding trees and vegetation before exploding in a wave of Maelstrom Intent-infused qi that gave her a brief snapshot of the landscape contours. Picking one of the odder spots she sent out a very targeted pulse of her soul sense, threaded with a bit more intent. There was a piteous scream and the bush, which had survived Arai’s attack and her own, collapsed into a thrashing mud-skinned demon wielding a bow and wearing some kind of bark armour. The demon’s cultivation seemed to be around Soul Foundation, for all the good it had done it.

Barely ten seconds after her soul based attack landed and while she was still searching for the archer on the rocky outcrop, the ‘constriction’ that was so prevalent in many of these places descended upon them both. She winced as her soul sense dissipated and it became quite a few times harder for her to externalise her qi in any meaningful fashion.

“Wonderful,” Arai signed sarcastically from nearby.

She rolled her eyes and hefted a convenient rock.

They had hunted high and low for the source of these formations, but barely got anywhere as they passed through various territories. In the previous massifs they had mostly been focused on the outer extremities, likely as a means to keep things like the serpents under control. Thinking back on it, it occurred to her that even these might actually have been some kind of feng shui alignment.

“That’s all we need, for these demons to be feng shui specialists,” she signed across, ducking behind another rock outcropping as the one she was sheltering behind was less of a barrier than she had hoped.

Several arrows zipped at her prior location, from behind them this time. She planted a symbol on the rock and threw it with all her might at the outcrop. It landed on a lower part and the two symbol array comprised of Lightning and Chain stalked its prey through the vegetation for a blinding second. Two figures collapsed, burning like little candles from the upper parts of the outcropping into the smoking greenery below.

That basically opened the floodgates. Dozens more arrows scythed from every direction as she cast about for another convenient rock. Based on the arrow fletchings and the general trajectory, she guessed there were two dozen ambushers in at least three well-concealed positions advancing from behind, to the south and to the south-west. Quite a few of them had intent as well now – not to kill, but to incapacitate. Her own field of intent, now much less effective without the supporting medium of qi under her control in the air around her, deflected most of them. None of these were painted white either, preferring rather snazzy swirls of red, yellow and blue plant dyes.

“I guess this was going too easily,” Arai sighed, ducking down.

“Nothing in this fate-thrashed place has ever been easy,” she signed back with a resigned shrug as several more arrows splintered into the rock where she had been concealed before.

“On the other hand, the Heavens have clearly answered our prayers after a fashion…” Arai signed with an eye roll.

She had to think for a second before realising she was talking about her desire to kill something after they spent half a week cutting their way through a small mountain. Shaking her head, she gouged a lump off the rock she was sheltering behind with the knife and threw another lightning array over with the rock. It landed with a *thock* and then a *crack*, hitting nothing. In response their attackers hooted and jeered, using some kind of art to displace their voices. She had no idea what they were actually saying, but the intent within them carried enough explanation, unclean and defiling as it was.

Instead, she focused on unnatural sounds from the forest itself. Between the rain, the rustle of the vegetation and the distracting hoots and jeers, it took her longer than she would have liked to filter out most of it. Her acutely improved senses were something of an unlooked-for bonus out of their advancement to Nascent Soul.

-If someone told me that the things I’d be most thankful for at this point were enhanced hearing and the spatial superimposition that visualisation in my Sea of Knowledge provides, I’d have probably called them mad, she gently mocked herself.

In any case, the demons were pretty good with their stalking. Were their ambushers actually trying to be subtle and attacking with the intent to kill, this might more headache-inducing than it was. Their flaw here was basically overconfidence. She got lots of that in their yells. And yet...

She moved to another rock before a lazily shot arrow could smack into where she should have been. It stuck almost ten centimetres into the rock that Arai’s intent had to really work to carve up as well.

-Yep, clearly there are some actual experts out there, or are they ‘playing a pig to catch the tiger’ with all this brash shouting and hooting, hoping to catch us off guard? She evaluated as a second arrow ghosted in, making Arai shift as well.

Looking at it from the perspective of their attackers, who were likely very familiar with this bit of forest, something did give her the impression that they were being underestimated though. The intent within those shouts, mainly – it was a bit too genuinely brash. They hadn’t been especially subtle themselves either, beyond not making a lot of noise – being more interested in making ground than in going totally undetected.

-It seems like a lot of our ambushers are inexperienced, and having noticed us for whatever reason, decided to capture us opportunistically, perhaps believing us to be equally inexperienced.

Several ‘normal’ arrows perforated a nearby bush with likely rock cover which she had considered a few moments before.

“They are being systematic at least,” Arai signed over.

“The trick will be getting them to come close,” she signed back, which got a wry nod.

Their last run-in with archers in these numbers had ended in a stalemate, but there they had had open space and a much clearer awareness of the actual locations of their attackers. Picking up one of the arrows, she considered the qi within it and then a few of the others. The one in her hand belonged to a Golden Core cultivator, while the arrow lodged in the rock had a qi that contained traces of soul strength, so likely peak Soul Foundation or Nascent Soul.

“Moving up,” her sister signed and flitted to another rock, her intent allowing her passage through the vegetation like a ghost.

She nodded and properly suppressed her presence, vanishing through the bushes in the direction of the rocky outcropping. Moments later, two of the demons, a dark greenish skinned one and a grey-green skinned one both slipped out of the understory and arrived beside her rock. Pausing, she considered the pair as another arrow hissed out of the green and shattered against that rock. One of the two, who was totally naked, had spikey hair and tattoos in blue and purple swirling across his powerful torso, shook a fist in the direction of the arrow. His compatriot, who was densely covered in black and purple geometric designs and wore only a loincloth and grass cloak, clipped his compatriot across the head and pointed around angrily.

Narrowing her eyes, she slipped back towards her original rock and spotted a third, also at Golden Core, with a quiver of arrows slung across their back, who had moved out of some bushes somewhat closer to their position than she would have liked.

-Overconfident indeed.

Ghosting up behind that demon, she grabbed it around the mouth and neck using her strength to immobilize it, feeling bones quietly break beneath her hands until it fell down and collapsed, barely breathing. This one was attired much as the one with spikey hair had been. She smoothly dumped it into a hollow between two rocks and cast about for its bow, before sighing in disgust. While she had incapacitated it, his bow had dropped off the rock and down slope.

Claiming the arrows, she made her way back along the slope towards the other two, arriving back at their rock outcropping in a matter of moments, her approach unnoticed as they peered in the direction her sister was fighting.

Slipping between the bushes, she caught the spikey-haired one entirely unawares, impaling him straight through the heart with her hand, grasping its core directly and leaving it twitching in shock on the ground. The other who had spun towards her was already opening its mouth, she grabbed by the face and smashed into the rock. He twitched slightly as dark red blood welled out around her hands.

Scooping up the bow and arrows, she left the two incapacitated demons behind and ghosted on towards the far spot where the earlier arrows had arrived from, relieved to find that the bow wasn’t some sort of treasure, allowing her to use it without any mucking about with refining it. It also didn’t splinter into pieces or snap its string when she pushed her Maelstrom Intent into it, nor did the arrows.

Regarding the Martial Path of ‘Archery’, their father had made them practice a bit and she could hit targets reliably at a few hundred metres, but beyond that she would readily admit to being no great talent with it. It didn’t help that bows were bulky and expensive, arrows were annoying to recover and getting ones of sufficient material quality to be useful in the High Valleys, let alone Inner Valleys, was far beyond her means.

That said… right now it was the tool she needed, so she crouched and waited.

The demons seemed to be pretty good at finding them if they stayed still for a while – probably the formation that was obfuscating everything else was responsible for that, despite the best efforts of the symbol.

The hooting and yelling from all around grew angrier and several arrows sliced out of the green in her general direction. The feng shui alignment, illusionary formation and soul sense suppression combo that the demons were using was really good, she had to acknowledge. Unfortunately, the demons would have no way to know that their pattern recognition skills were beyond excellent and they were fairly used to this kind of thing after years of not dying in the High Valleys and then Inner Valleys of the Yin Eclipse Mountains.

Slinking forward, she watched the bushes become ‘normal’ as she approached them obliquely. The most annoying part of it was the soul sense oppression. Now that she had soul sense, she could understand why so many higher realm cultivators despised large swathes of the Yin Eclipse Mountain range. Trying to get used to not using it again, even if it was only recently acquired, was like making yourself forget what your thumbs were for.

Still moving stealthily through the shadows between the trees and rocks, she tracked two of the unnatural shifts in vegetation that were moving nearby – some 15 metres distant to her left, until one of them finally crossed in front of a tree with too much colour variance in its leaves. There was a split second where just for a moment half that bush looked like another star-leafed shrub and clump of tree vines from a few metres in front of it.

At this distance, with her current strength she was able to make that distance in a single bound, intending to crash knees-first into her target. She narrowly missed thanks to them reacting at the last minute, making her hit a tree, which creaked and shivered, but that was fine, because she had already locked down the area within 30 metres of her current location with her Maelstrom Intent to catch the other one. The other demon, who turned out to be early stage Nascent Soul, was pulled down by the unpredictable shifting distortions even as she arrived beside it in a single bound, leaving the other demon impaled with its own blade.

Arrows split the vegetation around her, aiming to properly cripple rather than just incapacitate and with a lot more determination than the previous speculative shots had had. Between one footfall and the next, she put down a four symbol Yang Earth array and watched as the forest for a hundred metres in every direction was shaken by the increased pressure. The arrows were smashed into the ground. The demon below her grew an extra pair of spectral arms and tried to grasp at her with some strange art.

-Of course they would have a way to use their own Nascent Soul, she thought with an annoyed sigh as they both went sprawling.

It was straightforward enough to ignore its grasping attempt at sealing up her qi, though, and as it recoiled from the backlash, she took the opportunity to stab her assasilant through the head with one of the metal spear blades she had hafted to make a short dagger. Rolling off it, she stabbed into his chest and grasped his core as well, dispersing much of her opponents Soul Foundation in the process.

An arrow shot out of nowhere, aiming for the back of her head. She ducked and spun as it shot over her, missing her by literal hairs, drawing the bow. The vegetation shifted slightly, turning back to normal about 60 metres away from her and she got a sense of something rippling.

-Sight… take aim, shoot, Monkeypoop, she sighed as her first shot went wide.

The qi-infused arrow hit a tree a few metres behind it and the intent she had infused into it rippled outwards, catching another demon that she had missed.

-Sight… aim… shoot… better, she nodded to herself.

The second arrow took that one in the back and she was gratified to hear it scream and collapse twitching as her Maelstrom Intent played havoc with its body. For good measure she put a third arrow through it before the camouflage could reassert itself fully. Off to her left she heard the sound of a falling tree and a truncated demon’s scream – that would be Arai catching another one.

~ Lashnag, Master Hunter of the Cloud Arrows Tribe ~

Master Hunter Lashnag of the Cloud Arrows tribe ground his teeth and crouched behind a rock on one of the smaller pillars in Mun-Jingai valley, watching the ill-fated attempt by their tribal chief’s fourth son’s ‘hunting party’ lose what little remained of its momentum.

They were meant to be shadowing them to ensure that nothing obnoxious like a nest of tree scorpions or some of the more exotic spiders got a good crack at them on the first outing of the new season. Not haul their collective inexperienced asses out of this failure of a kidnapping attempt. Both females were young, and from one of the marshland tribes based on their skin tone – not particularly attractive for females, and lacking in physique, but that rarely bothered youths, because they otherwise had most of the right attributes to make up for that. They were also rather heavily armoured and wore the skin of a juvenile hydra that looked, to his expert eyes, to have been butchered a bit too recently for comfort.

Carefully, he drew his bow and aimed again at the one who had taken Hunter Hakmash’s bow so masterfully.

His target flitted behind a tree before he could properly get a grasp for her movement. She wasn’t fast, but she had a rare movement ability that twisted space – a very rare movement in a 4th Advancement warrior or huntress of their age. The longer this dragged on, the more he was starting to suspect that they were actually 5th … or maybe even 6th Advancement.

She shot two arrows at Hunter Izal, both of which missed.

-Not a skilful archer, thank the Maker.

Another of the talisman charms around his neck cracked at the same time as a tree fell in the distance – a whooshing creak that travelled disturbingly well through the wind and rain of the forest. The other female was even more dangerous than this one.

Whistling in an inaudible tone, a Hook Bat dropped out of a nearby tree. He scrawled the four word message on it and reviewed it – ‘Goglurz, ambush-fail, Five-Advance, lethal?’

With another whistle, the Hook Bat drifted away stealthily carrying the message to the Great Hunter who would hopefully send support before Goglurz’s cock got them all killed.

Catching sight of the other female again, he grimaced and loosed off an arrow that would cripple her if it actually managed to hit her. She dodged again at the last minute. Her reflexes and her grasp of Auram were exceptional. He moved on before she could throw another of those rocks – hopefully the two she had thrown already were the limit of what she had.

“That idiot Goglurz has dropped us in it,” Hunter Kosa signed from a tree as he slipped beneath it.

That was undeniable really, but it was what it was. In a bigger tribe, or a more successful season, the idiot would have been left to suffer for his mistakes, but heirs were light and the tribe was under pressure from all sides. The sprog’s mother was also the Shaman and her position was currently strong, having born two male children to the Chief.

Sweeping up the alignment focus as he went, he headed for a better vantage point where the weather was less likely to give away his position. It was a mercy that they actually had a set with them; they were usually reserved for hunting big game or dealing with the Hydra spawn or the Great Toads that occasionally came inland from the wetlands.

There was another scream off to his left – the sword-wielding female again. The formation seemed to impede their ability to use Auram offensively and limit their offensive capabilities with mana but their ability to read the forest and hide their presence was almost on a par with his. Certainly, it was much greater than it had initially appeared. They had gotten careless perhaps, or not believed anyone would be out this soon after a storm wave.

The searching questions of where the pair had come from was one for later. They didn’t have the physique and were not killing brutally enough for the Broken Ancestor’s progeny. Undoubtedly, Goglurz hoped they were questing Ur-daughters who, once subjugated, he could marry and mate with, cementing an alliance for the tribe. It wasn’t a terrible plan, except for the fact that no Ur’Khal or Ur’Sar had travelled east in a generation or three unless a new group had moved from the Jash Battlegrounds far to the west across the ocean.

An arrow splintered a tree ten paces from him and he steeled his own Auram and resisted the spatial turbulence that came with it, snapping off two arrows at her. He then shot a third, alerting a junior hunter who managed to narrowly avoid taking an arrow through the skull.

Their duel continued for several more arrows before he finally managed to land a hit on her which skittered off the serpentskin hide she wore, making his heart sink a little. The hide of a 6th advancement Hydra – not a juvenile, a young adult.

He gave a long, hooting warning call to the other four Master Hunters. It might be necessary to scrap the formation and determine exactly what advancement these two really were with their own Auram. None of them were 6th advancement. Ducking behind a rock, he whistled and another of their hook bats that were gently ghosting after him descended – this time the message was short and simple, ‘Send squad with 6th Advancement Great Warrior’. They might send one anyway, given this was Goglurz they were minding, but it was best to be sure.

-Was it possible for a 6thAdvancement warrior to kill a same advancement young adult Hydra? he pondered as he searched for her again amid the green shadows of the under canopy.

-Maybe if the warrior was very good and the Hydra caught unprepared. Even a whole squad would struggle. That meant either there were more of this pairs group around… or…

Finding sight of her again, he studied what he could of the rest of her armour – bones, sinew, grasses, ad-hoc, there were even Taranta Serpent bone plates in there. Those only lived far beyond their territory to the west. No spider carapace, which was stylistically interesting. Most forces from out in the wetlands used spider chitin due to how endemic they were beyond the ruined city of Yogo-Shada.

He shot off another arrow, trying to divert the bow-wielding female from killing a particularly promising young hunter. The two duelled back and forth – he sent arrow after arrow at the female trying to disrupt her pattern as she skirted hither and thither amidst the trees-

The female vanished.

-By Daughter Nameless, she could overburden her mana that much!?! He got a terrible sense of danger and threw himself sideways as she travelled across the intervening space so fast he could barely follow.

He danced back and drew his own serpent bone long blade. This close he could see the shadow in her eyes, a flatness that made him wonder what kind of things she had experienced, to have seen that much death.

She pressed her hand to the ground and he felt everything solidify around him. Only his freeing talisman saved him from total paralysis and even then he felt it cracking against his skin.

He charged at her and she swirled aside like a leaf in the river current, smoothly unslinging the spear on her back. Two arrows blurred from the rocky outcrop behind them, both of which she parried easily with the blade before surging forward with the speed of a Taranta serpent. He stepped sideways, parrying her spear and then striking forward, aiming to cut her at the shoulder and bleed her.

In response, she decisively discarded the spear and cut at his blade with her own dagger, a strange green stone thing that looked like a palm frond. Blade met-

He threw himself back with all his might as it cut his own blade like it was grass, barely escaping with an inch-deep cut on his arm.

Making distance, he drew his precious star-metal blade and threw a restraint talisman at her, finally stopping her in her tracks for a brief moment before the whole world twisted and he felt like he was running through quicksand as he lunged for her. There was no mana in it, courtesy of their formation, which meant that this was… pure Auram!?!

-She was able to manipulate the world around her to this extent? He was very glad he had sent the second warning now.

She said something he couldn’t understand, but if he was going to fight this female from an unknown tribe across the marsh, she should at least know who was trying to kill her.

“I am Lashnag, son of Koun, Master Hunter of the Cloud Arrows tribe”. He pointed to himself and snarled at her as menacingly as he could.

“…”

The female stared at him with eyes that suggested he was maybe a bit of an idiot, which annoyed him unduly somehow. It occurred to him that if she was Ur’Sar or more terrifying still, given her slight appearance, Ur’Khal, she might not actually deign to speak the low tongue.

“I Lashnag, Son Koun, Master Hunter, Arrow-from-Clouds tribe,” he spoke in the old tongue that few ever used outside of formal occasions and grand rituals.

“…”

“I Jun Sana, West Flower Picking.”

The words she spoke, were not in the old tongue, but the ancestral one, the one the old Shamans used in their chants and rituals when they led war parties into the depths to seek knowledge of their progenitors.

He mustered all of his own Auram and struck at her with his best strike. She danced backwards, sweeping with the spear and somehow seizing the momentum of his strike. He stepped over it, breaking her flow and swept at her with his blade.

In return, she sent a backhand sweep at him, blocking his blade with her wrist guard, which was made of a curious dark green slab that turned aside the force of his blade with ease. She then spun and swatted an arrow from someone else who was closing on their combat.

He used the opportunity to thrust inwards at her and was rewarded by catching her off mark, his blade aimed to pass between some of the scales and pierce above her heart. His strike cut open the hide, as expected of the star metal blade, but she managed to dodge in the nick of time, leaving a mere flesh wound on her breast and arm. Closing the angle, he made to stop her-

She stepped into his own space and punched him in the gut, the blow lifting him off his feet and throwing him back a dozen yards-

Hunter Urkas burst out of the trees, firing arrows at her rapidly before discarding his bow and unslinging his blade spear to attack her. She ignored him, his arrows twisting away from her even as she leapt for him with the same terrifying speed as before-

His life was saved by a miraculous shot from Master Hunter Vekor who managed to hit her spear blade with an arrow. He rolled away and kicked her in the stomach with all his considerable strength, focusing his Auram and mana through the strike and sending her a few yards backwards.

Coughing up a mouthful of blood, she put a hand to the ground to steady herse-

He recovered consciousness, trying to grasp why, because he should be dead. His body was telling him some very bad things in any case – his limbs were numb and his bones felt like they had all been cracked and were on fire.

Groaning, he took in the scene around him – he was currently slumped against a rock. Much of the vegetation nearby was badly singed and the ground smoked. Nearby, Vekor’s corpse was slumped, its head lying some distance away and its chest gashed open. The female Ur’Sar was sat on a rock, looking at the crystalline mana core and part of Vekor’s heart, making his heart sink.

-Uncompromising.

The female ignored him in favour of the other who was approaching from below the trees, dragging Goglurz, who was flopping like a stunned fish.

“They understand a little Easten,” the female, who had called herself Jun if he recalled right, said, in the ancient tongue.

“They do? Interesting,” the sword-wielding female nodded, glancing at him and replying in kind.

He grimaced, it was hard to follow what they were saying – the ancient tongue was so rarely spoken except for rituals.

“These two are alive because?” the sword female said waving at him and… ah, Urkas who was slumped nearby as well. He was missing an arm and his lower body was badly burnt. He would live, but be resting for weeks, assuming these two didn’t kill all of them when they were done.

“Same reason you kept loudmouth there alive I guess… answers,” The spear-wielder Jun said, sounding amused.

“You understand what we say?” she said, turning to him.

He had to really focus to make words come out, finally managing, “A little, if you speak slow.”

She hopped off the rock and walked over to squat beside him. “You know why I not kill you? For now at least.”

Truthfully he didn’t, given she had decisively ripped out Vekor’s core, which was not the act of someone who was particularly honourable. On the other hand, there was an opportunity here to convince them that this didn’t need to end in all their deaths, especially his own.

“Kill him… big difficulty,” he managed to gesture at Goglurz.

“Ohh?” Jun frowned, turning to look at their Clan Chief’s youngest son.

“He’s the leader I guess, although his manner says more that he is young (unintelligible).” The sword female shrugged. “He was very specific in his hand gestures and physical suggestions. Most of his (unintelligible) fled as soon as I got him. The ones we fought in the far massif wearing the grey hide armour and feathers were much more disciplined.”

-Oh… That was probably very bad, he groaned.

They really had come from the region around Yogo-Shada or somewhere beyond it. If they had made it through the Troll Moon Massif and the Undrenfolk and the Ghoblan that controlled much of Yogo-Shada, that definitely meant they were bad news for the Cloud Arrows tribe.

“What you want?” he managed to ask. Speaking the ancient tongue was hard, even if his memory was excellent for these kind of things.

“What-want? Nothing, just pass by… you-attack… we-defend, think about leaving, but you’re very persistent and that formation-annoying. Not-like leaving surprises,” Jun said with a shrug as he tried to decipher what she had said.

When he finally got the gist of it, all he could do was laugh, very weakly, as did Urkas who had finally regained consciousness a few yards away.

He took a shallow breath, glad that Goglurz was still out cold. Urkas was a savvy hunter for all that he was only 4th advancement. He had experienced much and would not want to die here either. As such, he could only gamble that these two had meant what they said.

“If you let us live, we tell tribe, no follow, no fight. You go through territory, leave fast?” he asked haltingly.

“Your leader disagrees…” the sword-wielding woman said with a smile that never reached her eyes, giving Goglurz a kick.

Goglurz for his part grunted, revealing that he was not in fact unconscious, just very well gagged.

“He not leader, he…. untested idiot with big balls,” Urkas rasped, showing more command of the ancient tongue than he had expected in the older hunter.

“Mmm… I’ve seen bigger on rats,” the Jun sniggered, making Goglurz thrash even more angrily.

“This idiot, we keep alive, first hunt of new season. You strong, but him-mother stronger: 7thAdvancement Shaman. Father big figure, 8th Advancement – Chief of Cloud Arrows tribe. Biggest brother also very forceful - 6th Advancement Big Warleader.”

“Eighth Advancement,” Jun said expressionlessly.

“I guess that means they are same-like in strength to the huge three-headed-serpent we made blow itself up?”

“Could be,” the sword female nodded, just as expressionlessly. “This could be tiresome.”

“Big serpent??” Urkas rasped. “You mean Hydra?”

“Hy-d-ra?” Jun turned the word over in her mouth.

“Some tribe west call Neonate Serpent,” he added. “Here we call Hydra, old word from old world.”

“Ah, yeah.” The sword female nodded. “Big thing, 80 (unintelligible) white and red scales with black lines – three heads, devoured clouds and made nasty mist that drain mana-qi. It big pain, but we make go explode self after try to eat us near big (unintelligible)-tower. Stupid thing.”

“This come from smaller one, also three-headed, decide we food, far west, very annoying to kill,” Jun said, gesturing to their garments, which he had marked earlier.

There was no deceit in their tone, such as he could grasp anyway, although Urkas looked… unconvinced, and Goglurz was still squirming with the sword female’s foot on his neck.

“I see doubt in your eyes…” the sword female snickered.

His breath caught as Jun reached into the serpent skin sack on her back and held out a piece of milky white crystal core. All three survivors stared at the piece of 6thAdvancement Hydra core. It was badly depleted but the faint patina of clouds could still be seen etched in it with faint varicoloured tints amid the creamy crystal. He could sense the mana of unwilling death on it very faintly.

“…”

“Tell you what…” Jun said abruptly. “It would be annoying if we have to fight out of here. Storm annoying, (unintelligible) alignment annoying, you lot annoying. Tell us where the biggest complex is east of here and you can have this piece as recompense for the ones we killed – that’s already very generous given that they intended to do this and that.”

“Biggest complex?” he asked

“There is a place, where the people who make this place make things,” the sword female said.

“Yes… it should be before or near the big mountains. In the east,” Jun added putting the core on the ground where all three of them could see it glimmer.

“…”

He eyed the pair as if they were crazy, which they might as well be, if they were talking about the place he thought they were talking about.

“You mean the dark delves,” Urkas said eventually, “Where the evil humans of the past hewed out the gifts of the dark father and the all-giving mother to fuel their rape of our world.”

“If that is place you speak of, very hard to get to,” he agreed. “Much contest – our tribe, Ghoblan, Undren, Defiled, abomination, many things war there.”

“Our tribe not go deep – 8th advancement bone better than most metal,” Urkas added. “We speak old ancient from reading directions, old text, big ritual, and respect for Five Ancestors. Otherwise die without grave below.”

The Jun sighed and said something fast in another language; the sword female nodded and gave what appeared to be an amused shrug.

“Access through caves? Access through settlement?” the sword female asked, pointing back in the vague direction of the Gloomy Crags tribal territory.

“All access of different tribe well-guarded,” he had to admit.

“Gloomy Crag have 9th Advancement Big-head Shaman to sit and watch like old man who fish a lot. We have 8th Advancement War-Leader always to watch in case death need sent back down,” Urkas added.

“If you give some resource… tribe maybe let you go through tunnel into depths, so long as give something back to tribe of worth to come and go,” Urkas added, glancing back at the core.

“These ones were pretty clear about what they ‘wanted’ to get from us when we were fighting out in the jungle there…” the sword female said blandly, flipping Goglurz over and grinding a foot against his balls to make it clear what she thought of that. Goglurz thrashed and tears welled in his eyes, as well he might, given a possible 6th Advancement warrior was standing on his manhood.

“Perhaps there is some merit,” Jun said, sounding pensive. “If you have (unintelligible) advancement/realm herbs and cores to trade.”

“Im-mor-ta-l?” Urkas repeated back.

“Same strength things as big serpent that this came from,” Jun clarified by pointing at her hydra skin garment after a pause.

“If agreement is made, much honour can be found,” he said, wondering if the tribe would really agree to trade precious things like that with these two.

“How know not betray,” the sword female mused.

“That would be dishonourable…. If agreement is made...” he felt compelled to point out.

“Yes, agreement is honour, word is honour, dishonour is bad, broken oath worst – like lost brethren, turned to darkness,” Urkas muttered.

“Uhuh?” Jun said sounding… unimpressed.

-Please don’t be Oathless Brethren, or Blood-Moon daughters, he muttered in his mind.

“You speak of honour, yet you said you would make us do this and that,” Jun said with another a smile that never reached her eyes.

“They were quite physically explicit,” the sword female added, also smiling in a way that made his skin crawl. “Actions and words… you tried to capture us by force saying this and that, yet only offer words and say oaths and honour are important?”

Both of them looked at the core, and then glared very hard at the idiot Goglurz who was responsible for this misconception. While the Cloud Arrows tribe could probably kill these two through sheer attrition, it would cost a few of those valuable-elites.

Goglurz’s expression was somewhere between apoplexy and regret with a solid dose of pain, given that the sword female was still putting her full weight of one foot between his legs. He was sure there were those youths among their tribe who might like that, but she wasn’t being at all accommodating and was wearing hydra skin boots.

As he was considering matters, the other two Master Hunters moving with the survivors back to the tribe finally moved far enough out of position that the formation suppressing soul sense collapsed. Both females paused and then he felt a terrifying sense of insidious pressure settle in his mind. Urkas also winced while Goglurz went the colour of a dying leaf. Their Auram was terrifying, both in its purity and its depth. Comparable to their tribe’s 6th Advancement Shamans or maybe even a 7th Advancement Master Warrior, which was preposterous given their physical capabilities were somewhere in the 5th Advancement. Not warriors, they– Shamanesses.

“Bargain or die,” Urkas signed unobtrusively to him.

He could only nod in agreement. There was no indecision left. Even if the reinforcements that they had called for arrived, they would not want to fight these two.

-Thank the OldMaker, Giverof-AllNames that we brought the formation, he murmured in his own head. If these two had been able to use this sense in the fight, only the five of them would have stood any chance… of running away.

“So… these two are both Infant Soul... The other is peak Soul Foundation. The two that are out of the valley and escaping are a bit weaker than these two…” Jun mused, in the ancient tongue, which he was sure she didn’t need to do.

The names they gave for the realms were odd as well, old words from ancient rituals – their status as Ur’Sar or Ur’Khal on one of their ancient, mythical even, rite of passage rituals was growing more plausible by the moment.

-And it is just our bad luck to walk right into them, he groaned to himself. Goglurz, I hope you get fluke and shit orange for the rest of your miserable life.

Jun frowned, looking back at him. “Your friends got quite a long way in this terrain and weather in this time – nearly five miles as the bird flies.”

Now he was certain they were just showing off to spook them; his own talisman around his neck told him that their appraisal of the distant that Muraz and Lassok had made was basically correct. It was also working because Goglurz looked like he was about to piss himself with fear over the idea that he had threatened to marry-kidnap these two.

-Please don’t actually piss on her boot, he hoped in his head, you won’t enjoy the healing needed to remedy that injury, he thought, although the idiot probably deserved it for such a blunder when he was ‘leading’.

“For two honoured shamans of your abilities, you need not fear that the tribe will mistreat you…” Urkas said, managing not to sound too nervous.

“Yes, as for Goglurz, I am sure there will be understanding and forgiveness so long as he is living… and whole,” he added quickly.

Goglurz just nodded frantically at this, making whimpering sounds around his gag, that now that he thought about it, looked awfully like a loincloth.

The two woman both turned to stare in the direction of the fleeing hunting party, frowning and talking rapidly again in the other language.

“There are reinforcements coming,” Jun said abruptly, turning to him.

“Two Path-enlightenment-way-Seeking and twenty Infant Soul,” the sword female said, giving a very accurate appraisal while looking at them.

-Shit, he groaned. He had hoped for a bit more time before a warband showed up, so he could explain to these two and they wouldn’t overreact.

“And almost three times that at Gold Core,” Jun mused, still in the ancient tongue.

Part of him wondered why they referred to Mana Cores as ‘Gold’, but before that thought could go anywhere, a voice whispered in his head – “Lashnag, what is the situation?”

He considered for several long moments how to answer the Hunting Camp’s ‘Warleader’ Yargash before replying. “It is a misunderstanding that Goglurz has caused. They will talk and are willing to trade a large piece of a 6thadvancement core fragment with us for access to the caves below so long as we let them alone.”

“Goglurz’s followers are sure he is dead, and have informed the Chief Shaman as such already,” Camp Warleader Yargash sent back.

“Shit,” he sent back. “He isn’t dead…yet. They have spotted you both and have a clear view on your numbers and location. Their sense reaches at least 7 miles and they can use magic to a high level…”

There was silence… but the connection was still there, so he went on. “I fought one with spear arts who was besting us 3 on 1. As soon as she became outnumbered, she used lightning magic that ended the fight instantly. If we fight, only you, Elder Hunter Garku and the 6th advancement fighters will survive initial contact.”

“Well? Have you convinced them that this one’s life is worth saving?” the sword female now held her sword, its point resting against the now very still Goglurz’s chest.

-Ah…. Of course, he grimaced at his mistake made in haste. With their mastery over Auram these two would know he was conversing with someone.

“Err… apparently some of his followers have told his mother of his death.”

He was gratified to see Goglurz go nearly the same shade as the females he had once entertained ideas of making his wives.

“Self-fulfilling prophecies are a wonderful thing…” Jun said with a sigh. “So, they are unwilling?”

“If they surrender and give up what they have, an agreement can be made,” Yargash’s voice murmured in his head. “Access to the caves is acceptable, if they make certain contributions, I would imagine.”

He sweated slightly, looking at the pair, who did not look that amenable to those kind of terms.

“Uh, camp leader, that might not…”

“If they are Ur’Sar they will understand their responsibilities,” Yargash added. “If those contributions are particularly forthcoming then probably the chief will agree.”

“Well?” the sword-wielding female pressed.

“They say that if you…give…” he paused to take his breath and both their eyes narrowed.

He was left with the abiding impression that they already knew something of the discussion. If they were Shamanesses of the 6th Advancement, that should be possible.

-Maybe sugarcoating Yargash’s words is not a good idea…his survival instincts told him.

“If you surrender what you have, they let you enter depths-maybe. Some contribution may be required. Camp leader say you have responsibilities as Ur’Sar, can make contribution that way, chief will appreciate…” he said in a forced even tone, trying not to let his own nervousness at how that might be received filter through.

“Our responsibilities?” Jun eyed him with a considering look that suggested she might be judging those commitments based on the kind of things the Idiot Goglurz had been yelling.

He caught Urkas eye who signed unobtrusively. “They wear a lot of armour for Ur’Sar.”

He would have to defer to the older hunter’s knowledge of their kind’s western powers. He was still trying to work out how to do that when two threads of perception swept the area.

“It seems that our time is up,” the sword-wielding female said with a sigh.

“Camp Leader?” he sent. “These are the reinforcements you requested,” Yargash sent back. “They come to them, near western Mo-Gu pillar, negotiate with envoy from hold directly.”

“They say that if you go to the western pillar, several miles away to south-west, you can negotiate there,” he said.

“I see…” Jun nodded.

Both of them blurred and vanished leaving the three alone in the clearing.

“They are on their way, Camp leader… They-” was all he managed before the soul attack knocked him unconscious.

~ Arai & Sana, Completing negotiations ~

“Why did you knock them out?” she asked Sana as they hurtled across the forest canopy towards the reinforcements.

“Something about the way that was phrased makes me nervous,” her sister said. “He was really edgy about saying whatever it was they relayed to us, and I am certain that he was about to change it to not say anything about surrendering our gear.”

“What he said about responsibilities?” she mused.

“Oh… yeah… what was that about?” her sister asked. “And the signing. I got something about what we were wearing, but it was on the wrong side for me to see clearly.”

“The signing?” She thought back, considering the intent within the hand symbols again. “The impression I got from their Intent seemed to imply that we were wearing a bit too much for whatever these Ur’Sar are.”

“Did it now,” Sana eyed her. “Suddenly it seems like a mistake to have not asked more questions.”

“Somehow we managed to at least imply that we are a force that is friendly to them,” she pointed out. “It would be nice not to have to fight through everything.”

“It would be, but I can’t help but feel there are nuances we are missing here,” Sana muttered as they flitted around a pillar.

Above them, thunder shook the sky, a reminder that the storm front, while it may have passed over, was not that long departed and was still sending down lightning to the south.

“Both of those soul senses were weaker than the first Undren who came to look at us, before we broke through to Nascent Soul,” she mused.

“Only just though,” Sana added. “What if they try to make good on the idea of capturing us when all is said and done?”

“Probably we can run away if things go south,” she suggested.

“If this means we run smack into some iron plank because you tried to be smart I’ll haunt you,” her sister grumbled.

“That’s fair,” she could only agree, hoping that this would actually work out. “The impression I got was that they were quite put out with that child of the chief for being an ass.”

“And yet, I feel compelled to point out that we killed a fair few of them, and are now trusting what they said, badly, in a language they only seemed half fluent in,” Sana added. “You can do a lot in a minute with a force that size.”

Flitting around the last of the tight cluster of massif pillars, she saw the clearing where the group of envoys were, beside a larger stone pillar that made a sort of island in the middle of this forested river valley.

“True, their mastery of Easten was rather spotty. Interesting that they called it the ‘Ancient Tongue’, if I got that right. They are clearly not like us, but the similarities are there beyond their skin being all shades of grey through green and brown, the thicker shoulders, the pointy ears and the somewhat more pointy noses.” Her sister frowned.

“Longer arms as well,” she pointed out, sweeping her soul sense ahead of them.

“So what is the strategy when we get there?” Sana asked.

“You hang back and hide your presence a bit. I’ll go in first – assuming you are confident in hitting things. I recall you were excellent at hitting targets that didn’t need to be hit when father was teaching us,” she joked.

“…”

Sana sniffed, mockingly, and fell back slightly, sifting through the arrows she had claimed for a good one.

Shaking her head, she pushed more qi into her movement art and the ground blurred beneath her even faster. After all the time spent thinking about it how to make efficiencies with it high up in the sky, down here it was almost three times as effective as it had been, allowing her to cover almost 100 metres with a single step. As far as she could tell, that was close to both her physical limit and what her movement art, which was basically a Qi Condensation art, could be stretched to. Any more and it started to haemorrhage qi in bizarre ways as its methods of circulation clearly were not intended to handle that much qi flowing in that way with such basic visualisations.

Watching her sister flit away into the pillar, she shook her head and leapt down into the clearing to land in front of the group of some 50 demons who were scattered about. There was no sign of the ones that had been fleeing the forest and certainly, they were taking steps not to be found.

“You, Ur’Sar?” one of the two demons who were leading the group said, pointing at her.

The two demons were so covered in tattoos it was hard to make out what their skin colour actually was. Both were maybe two and a half metres tall, wearing very little armour that hid anything beyond some thrown on greaves and arm guards and a loincloth that… accented as much as it hid. Both were heavily tattooed in gold and black symbols, accented with a lot of red depicting various beasts and a lot of swirling clouds.

“Who is asking?” she replied in her best Easten.

“I Yuz, son of Teshgar, son of Lun, Warleader of Cloud Arrows – I request honour of making offering to Sar Ancestor as first greeting with Cloud Arrows tribe.”

“…”

“First offering?” she said trying not to look at him weirdly.

“You are daughter of Sar, Shamaness of ancient rites, you take my seed, become stronger – it is great honour for all, I am mighty Warleader, killed two serpents of 6th Advancement.”

“…”

-Oh for fates’ sakes, she groaned inwardly. I could almost hear Sana laughing at me now, if this wasn’t such an absolute fate thrashed-mess.

“You want us to…”

“Don’t you think this kind of thing should be by seniority?” the spear-wielding demon grumbled.

“…”

“You are Sar Shamaneness, take strength from others. We are both strong. You honour Sar, honour old pact, honour us by accepting our request,” the spear-wielding demon rumbled. “I Pezvak, Son of Argor, Son of Kenza, Son of Ur’Lunae of Sar, Great Hunter of Cloud Arrows tribe.”

“While… I appreciate that that might be a great honour,” she muttered, thinking fast and wondering if just running right now would be the best bet. “We wish to travel on east, and were merely accosted by your tribe’s hunting party.”

She tossed over the piece of core, which would be a bit of a wrench to loose, but if it got them access or bypassed the formations around here, it would probably be worth it.

“We offer this? The Hunter before thought it was sufficient.”

“I see,” the larger demon grumbled.

“Uh…” she was about to try to find a polite way of saying ‘no,’ when the blade-wielder narrowed his eyes and said something to his compatriot in their normal tongue.

“My companion thinks you are not Ur’Sar,” the spear-wielder said with narrowed eyes. “My grandmother was Ur’Sar, and they are all very beautiful, you are not so beautiful, and while you have power, you are odd.”

“…”

-Ah, Monkeyshit, she sighed.

“As I said, we were just travelling through and have…”

The horn blast echoed through the valley and then another, abruptly large three figures and some further 50 demons dressed in feather headdresses and adorned with tattoos of eyes in green, gold and blue jogged out of the forest.

“Karoz,” the one who had identified himself as Yuz grumbled.

“You trespass on Five Eyes tribe claimed territory, use big storm as excuse!” the large demon who was covered in ash other than the five eyes snarled, in Easten for some reason.

“…”

She looked between the two groups and groaned.

“Someone come into Five Eyes territory, sabotage many wards, cause big mess under cover of storm, dig hole through mountain with arcane means.” The second figure, a shorter stockier demon carrying a stone blade hissed.

“Dig hole through mountain?” Yuz said blankly.

-Ah, nameless-blessed Monkeyshit, she thought to herself. That would be the two of them, lost in the storm.

The third one said something, pointing at her.

“She Ur’Sar, you speak with respect,” Pezvak rumbled.

“She very small for Ur’Sar, not like this and that,” Karoz said, looking at her dubiously and waving his hands in a way that implied she should not be able to stand up with breasts that big.

“Also quite ugly,” the third demon added. “Has good power though, so must be good at taking gifts. I test and see!”

A vast sense of oppression suddenly settled on her as the third demon stalked over to her and-

The white arrow arrived right before him, punching through his hand before he could even react and then breaking against his skull. The oppression on her vanished as his concentration was broken for a second, only for Karoz to shoot past her and punch Pezvak in the stomach, sending the demons sprawling backwards.

The demon shook his head and grasped at her. Freed, she swept her sword out in a straight up lunge, following the opening form that Elaria had practised all those times, letting the intent flow through the blade as she saw fit. The blow split the edge of the clearing in the gorge gully like a shearing sword from heaven.

Her attacker’s garments were totally shredded and his body bled slightly before it healed and he recovered enough presence of mind to send his own intent against hers. The blow sent her sprawling backwards through the melee behind her as Karoz fought both big demons from the Cloud Arrows tribe.

Bizarrely, strength started to flood into her body, similar in a way to what she had experienced in her breakthrough, except now she could feel it originating from the demons of the Cloud Arrows tribe who were backing up and deploying…

The soul sense depressing formation swept out, fogging everything as it had before, her included, just as a fireball arched down from the north and incinerated several of the Golden Core strength demons not fortunate enough to evade. Two more orbs of fire swirled across and detonated against the pillar, aiming for where her sister was. She scrambled up and focused her Sundering Intent again, attacking the one who had tried to grasp her with the intention of violating her.

With a great roar, the demon swung its blade upward and blocked her strike, its own intent clashing against hers and slowly overpowering it. But that was just his strike, her cut was aimed at everything – the grass, the trees, and the other demons surging out of the treeline. Most couldn’t even scream as they were bisected. The Golden Core combatants died in their droves while the Soul Foundation and Nascent Soul ones who didn’t get out of the way suffered grievous injuries.

Moments later Sana crashed down on the edge of the clearing planting her spear into the ground. A shockwave of her intent washed over everything, stunning those on both sides below Soul Foundation and making the trees rustle and the grass bend. The second big demon who had come with this other tribe, the Five Eyes tribe, roared and charged at Sana, his muscled cording.

Her sister spun her spear and howled “DIE!” in Easten.

The shockwave made her head ring and the air all around grow turgid. The demon attacking her sister stumbled slightly and she used her movement art to dash towards it as well. The damage her sister’s shout had caused couldn't compare to the thunderclap art, because externalisation of qi was being restricted, but it still caused chaos… Weirdly, it caused far less chaos among the Cloud Arrows tribe than she felt it perhaps should have; they were no more affected by it than… she was?

She didn’t have time to worry about that though, because the blade-wielding demon blurred and suddenly stood beside her, swatting down at her with the flat of its blade, still clearly intending to capture her.

She used her own movement art to the max and dodged, barely. The shockwave from the impact still caught her and threw her backwards. Two Nascent Soul demons from the Five Eyes tribe tried to grab her – she kicked one in the crotch, leaving it screaming and head-butted the other with her Neonate horn head guard. It screamed and rolled backwards dark red blood running down its face as her Sundering Intent did its bit.

Scrambling up, she found she was next to Sana who immediately linked with her and then put down a five symbol Yin-Yang Lightning array.

She was treated to a second bizarre experience of gaining something from the Cloud Arrows tribe as their own link and the isolate symbol somehow also encompassed them just as much as her.

“What the?” her sister said dully as she watched the lightning rampage through the clearing, eradicating almost all the Five Eyes attackers under Soul Foundation in a clean sweep. A few survived, courtesy of defensive runes painted on their bodies which vanished in sparks, while all the Nascent Souls suffered severe burns and probably significant qi-depletion.

The three Dao Seeking demons of the Five Eyes tribe recoiled as the lightning washed over them. Kuroz spat blood while the other two both suffered some light wounds and a bit of qi depletion. It was enough of an interruption to allow them to throw out an old favourite that hadn’t seen much love in the last months: the array that spawned a mist of corrosive Yin Water Qi. The mist conducted the residual lightning through everything it touched. There were terrible screams and bellows of rage from the weaker Nascent Soul demons not protected by their inexplicable link to them as they cooked and dissolved in equal measure as it overwhelmed their qi-defences.

The two Dao Seeking demons, Yuz and Pezvak, took the opportunity to lunge at Kuroz who was howling in agony as the mists continually shredded his flesh. It was an attack that didn’t have a lot of penetrative power, but as far as sustained-

With a furious bellow, the blade-wielding demon hammered both fists in to the ground and a massive shockwave of intent dispersed all the qi still in the area for almost a hundred metres in every direction. The weaker demons from the Cloud Arrows tribe screamed and collapsed. Those that survived kept on fighting with a ferocity that somehow fed itself to her. It was like being in a crowd of people who were all egging each other on to ever greater heights. Its momentum and hers were somehow inextricably linked; to her shock, she even saw that they were starting to draw on aspects of her Sundering Intent somehow, hooting and yelling in their own language as they fought around the edges of the clearing with those other few survivors of the second tribe.

“I, VAKLASH, WAR MASTER OF FIVE EYES, WILL CAPTURE YOU AND MAKE YOU MY BED BRIDE!” the blade-wielding demon howled and launched himself at her.

“I hope monkeys drag you down to hell and ruin you!” she roared back at him.

“Yang Earth?” her sister’s voice echoed in her head.

“It’s that or run,” she replied.

“That Karoz is far stronger than these two,” Sana pointed out,

Laughing at her reply, the blade-wielder Vaklash stomped forward, spreading his arms wide and forever emblazoning in her mind that his– she couldn’t bring herself to think ‘penis’– was almost the length of her forearm.

“Two of you? Very ugly, but I am someone who can make a great offering. You will scream your regret for not accepting the Five Eyes tribe over these weaklings!” Vaklash boomed, his intent making her mind shake.

“Yeah, I think not,” her sister muttered as they summoned a five symbol Yang Earth array, pouring as much qi into it as it as they were both capable of.

“It occurs to me that the symbol’s defence against that is actually less effective under this suppression than it is elsewhere,” she observed grimly as they probably poured more qi than ever into the array. Even with both of them sharing the burden, her total reserve of refined qi plummeted to about ten percent while her only twenty percent of her intent-infused qi remained.

The mountain pillars above her howled and groaned. Even the clouds stilled for a second under the exertion of the phantasmal mountain crushing down on everything. Trees shivered and splintered, grass flattened, rocks shattered and all the demons were nailed into the ground.

The demons of the Cloud Arrows tribe, who were once again unaffected thanks to the strange communal camaraderie that seemed to have included both of them, watched slack-jawed as all three Dao Seeking demons from the Five Eyes were forced to their knees. The few other remaining demons from the Five Eyes fighting elsewhere were collapsed to the ground like broken dolls, sunk into the earth.

She rushed towards the Vaklash while Sana charged towards the other one with the leaf knife. Her thrust took him in the chest. Straining, she fought against his innate qi-defences with brute strength and leverage. Her Sundering Intent was somehow blunted by whatever comprehensions her opponent had in his own intent so she had to rely as much on the innate sharpness of the metal sword to do damage. Vaklash’s eyes turned red and his muscles bulged as he fought against the suppression.

Panting, she ripped out his heart and tore off the core, tossing it into her bag in front of the stunned eyes of all the demons.

Sana for her part had already gained one core and arrived beside her.

“We are out of time,” Sana said grimly as Karoz, his muscles cording under the sustained assault of the Yuz and Pezvak started to struggle to his feet.

“You have enough qi for one more?” she asked.

“Yes, just,” her sister grimaced.

“Two… one...” she muttered as the last of the qi in the array ran out.

The suppression collapsed with a howl of rage that shook the mountains as Karoz broke the shackles of the Yang Earth array. A shockwave of intent swept out at her, at them. Both Dao Seeking demons from the Cloud Arrows tribe were thrown away as were the two of them. She crashed into a tree even as Karoz was suddenly before her, cutting down at her with his own stone blade.

She pushed every remaining bit of Sundering Intent into it and blocked with the edge of her sword, cutting at his blade. It was slower, but all it had to do was block. She still spat blood and felt her arm bones break under the impact as she was hammered into the ground. Trees all around her shattered. The turbulence that came with it was-

-Oh go get-!

She barely had time to register that Karoz was not Dao Seeking, when his principle swept around her in a manner that was remarkably similar to Sana’s Intent, making her grasp of her surroundings distorted. Her link to Sana, already weak, foundered in the same instant that her sister’s spear strike crashed into Karoz.

Their surroundings physically twisted as he was pushed away under the momentum of her sister’s strike.

Snarling, he struck out at them both even as Sana re-established the link and the second Yang Earth Array descended. Karoz’s strike landed at the same time, his principle crushing her body like an avalanche. She felt her bones crack and her organs rupture. Her awareness of her surroundings returned as she saw Sana decapitate Karoz with the leaf blade-

When she recovered consciousness, it was to the sound of hooting and chanting. The clearing was a mess, a smoking crater in it 50 metres wide told her what had probably happened to Karoz. Her sister was sat on a rock nearby while the demons, now including the three they had spared back in the clearing, were busy clearing what passed for a battlefield.

“You fight with big honour,” the hulking demon named Yuz, who was missing an arm, and rather badly burned, she noticed, said from nearby.

“I dislike being made a plaything of,” she grimaced in Easten, which made him laugh.

It took her a number of horrible, agonizing minutes to heal. Karoz’s ‘Principle’ was expelled quite quickly at least. He had not had much of a chance to force a lot into her and had instead tried to focus on splitting their link. How he had grasped that she was unsure, but she was grateful for it, because it had meant he hadn’t focused on ruining her body.

The healing also gave her an opportunity to appreciate, albeit painfully, some of the other changes occurring in her body. The qi in her flesh and bones was, she was coming to realise, not something she seemed able to actually draw on or easily disperse once it was sealed within it – only healing injuries seemed to deplete it. Probably something that could disperse all her qi might be able to disperse it as well, but the body transformation slowly occurring seemed parallel to her cultivation and much more clearly tied to the symbol and her soul rather than the qi in her body, a development which had confounded his attempt at the last.

“Did he explode?” she asked in the end.

“Nah, that was the other one,” Sana said with a grimace from where she was sat.

“Sneaky little shaman of the Five Eyes,” Yuz grumbled. “He throw shit better than a monkey and run faster than a snake.”

“So what do we do now?” sitting up and realising she was half-naked. “And what happened to my robe?”

“You’re lying on it,” Sana pointed out. “You took much of that explosion point-blank; you will need to make a new one.”

She looked beneath her and found that she was.

“You less ugly like that,” Yuz said blandly. “Distract people with good bits of body, people comment less on ugly face…”

“…”

Arai found herself seriously struggling against the urge to put down another lightning array. Presumably, it was meant as a compliment, but even so…

Taking one of the spare rolls of the skin, she wrapped it around her breasts to give herself a bit of modesty and then checked to see what else she had lost. Her jade scrip was still, mildly miraculously, part of her arm armour, her head guard was still there, as were most of her skirt, belt and pouches. Sana had her bag next to her, and her sword was leaning against the rock along with the short sword. Everything else of import was still there so that was a minor victory in its own right.

“I am Yargash,” another greenish-grey demon, with a lot of scars, a bald head, braided grey beard and equally little clothing whose foundation she couldn’t grasp announced his presence as she stood up with a grimace. “You killed three Warleader of Five Eyes tribe-”

“And quite a few idiots of Cloud Arrows tribe as well,” Pezvak, who had come over with this new arrival added, leaning on his spear.

“People die. If they see this, they curse Goglurz in future birth-life,” Yargash noted.

Goglurz, who was stripping what remained of a nearby corpse, winced at that she noticed.

“Young tribes-folk have big ideas, big mouths and big balls,” Yuz sniggered, which got quite a few laughs and what she guessed were crude comments in their other language.

“You not speak the low tongue,” Yargash said after a moment.

“We brought up to speak this tongue,” Sana replied, which wasn’t a lie – their mother had taught it to them when they were young.

“You come from where?” the older demon asked.

“That way,” Sana pointed blithely, “From across the ocean, beyond island city.”

“That is a very long way to come here…” Pezvak observed.

“We kill a lot of Undren and spiders on the way,” her sister deadpanned.

“And some serpents,” she added.

“It pity you not interested in taking offerings,” Yuz grumbled.

“…”

All three demons eyed Sana’s pack where the two cores presumably were.

“What, you got his core,” Sana said pointing at the corpse that was lying nearby, which turned out to be Karoz. “Is that not enough of an ‘offering’?”

“We fight with tribe, against your enemies, and you want to bend us over a rock and have your way with us? Are you savages?”

“…”

“We cut our way through everything between island city and here. Don’t make us try to cut our way through you as well,” she added.

“See, this is kind of attitude young-of-tribe should have,” Yargush laughed, then added something else in their common tongue that made several of those nearby also laugh.

~ Urkas, Lashnag and Goglurz, somehow still alive and grateful for it ~

Urkas, Master Hunter and veteran of far too many weird situations for his own comfort, watched the two calamities that had massacred the Five Eyes raiding party as he sorted through the surviving gear of the corpses on the ground.

“-W… w-what do wes do now?” Goglurz eventually quavered, in their normal tongue.

He sighed and shook his head, tossing over some of their talismans onto the growing pile nearby.

“We is thankful they do that to the Five Eyes and not to you,” Lashnag grumbled.

The battle, what he had seen of it in the distance, had been terrifyingly short. The three of them had recovered consciousness just before it, just in time to see the distant fireballs light up the haze and hear the crack of the lightning. At that point he had been worried that it was the negotiations with their clan that had fallen through, that the two Ur’Sar had decided that they really didn’t want to give up anything and would rather just leave no witnesses to their passage. The oppression that came after though, he would have nightmares about that. That had felt like the sky itself was falling on them, even several miles distant as they were. It had collapsed bits of most of the great pillars all around them.

“They killed Warmaster Karoz,” Lashnag said with a somewhat awed tone, for the seventh time in fact.

“Can’t say I am sorry,” a nearby hunter from their group muttered.

“Look on the bright side,” he said to Goglurz, “You can claim that you didn’t get turned into hydra chowder by a pair of Ur’Sar young ones out on one of their rite of passage quests.”

A few of the others nearby laughed, as did he– it was a funny thing. An idiot like Goglurz had survived this whole mess just by being an idiot. Hopefully, he would learn from this experience. Certainly his current manner was much more subdued. In that regard, perhaps this was actually a blessing in disguise. Seeing the consequences of ill-judged actions and surviving them was a gift few actually got a chance to profit from.

“Can you imagine what would have happened if it was Yuz and Pezvak that died…” Lashnag muttered.

“Please don’t,” Izuk, another of the hunters in their group who had somehow survived getting shot in the head by the Ur’Sar named Jun, muttered, scratching his injury.

He nodded. The Chief Ogun would likely have flayed all the survivors and thrown them out in the wetlands while the Ancestor Shaman, who was Pezvak’s father, would probably have fed their bodies to cave centipedes and sealed their mind-forms for alchemical kindling for costing the tribe two of their precious 6thadvancement elites.

~ Sana, In the Cloud Arrows Tribe hold, still not sure this is a good idea ~

Sat in a cave, with a huge pile of food overlooking the hold of the Cloud Arrows Tribe, Sana found herself wondering whether in spite of all that had happened in the last few hours this was in fact a good idea. They seemed to be largely accepted as guests of the tribe and nobody had commented ‘hopefully’ on matters of recreational sex since that demon called Yuz, either. It didn’t really help that from what she could see, these demons held none of their homeland’s taboos about it; to the demons, sex was just something that happened. It was unfortunate that Ur’Sar seemed to have some special importance in this regard, regarding tribal prosperity and such. That ‘gathered through context explanation’ hadn’t stopped them from manually putting down a powerful six symbol barrier around this room though.

They had met the Tribal Chieftain, briefly. A surprisingly slight demon with sharp eyes and a short grey beard who was apparently called Ogun, son of Kagun. It turned out that Easten was basically a language that this tribe, and quite a few others, viewed as an ancient language of their forebears. Their name for it was La’taan and mostly it was known in the context of rituals, oaths and various other important pieces of discourse. From what she could tell, any promise they made speaking that tongue was treated much as a heavenly oath was back home. Those who broke their word in that language were punished harshly – the Chief had informed them of that very grandly while his youngest son didn’t quite grovel, because that seemed to be disrespectful somehow, but was very sorry nonetheless.

“This place is very weird,” her sister Arai muttered, making her way into their cave and distracting her from her thoughts.

“I see you were not pushed down onto a bed by anyone at least,” she observed archly.

“Don’t even joke about that,” her sister muttered, shooting her a dark glance.

“Where were you anyway?” she asked.

“Their shamaness asked if she could accept their ‘offerings’ on our behalf, to which I said yes, without realising that I would then be expected to watch. Be thankful that I, your older sister, have spared you the task of judging a small orgy between demons.”

“Oh…” she shuddered, wondering if she wanted to know, until morbid curiosity got the better of her. “What...”

“She was very into it, much more so than those who survived out there. I feel like my innocence, such as remained in this terrible place, has finally been routed.” Arai said with a dark look. “What they meant by ‘recompense’ and ‘offerings’ is exactly what you can probably dream up if you get drunk enough. It seems that they view the Ur’Sar as symbols of tribal prosperity. When they show up, which seems to be very rarely, it heralds good fortune.”

“At least they gave us a nice repast of food,” she said, changing the topic quickly. “The quality of the spirit fruits is pretty good, there are even some in here we can add to our dantians.”

They spent some twenty minutes working their way through the spirit fruits, splitting evenly what they could before settling down to pick through the cores they had.

They were easily the highest grade cores they had yet acquired that were in any way intact. Certainly they were the first ones with their soul strength still intact – all the ones from the serpents that were Nascent Soul or higher had been damaged in one way or another by the symbol sweeping their owners’ soul strength away. These ones though…

“It’s curious how much better these two are compared to anything, even the serpent cores,” she observed after a while.

“Probably it has to do with how little qi and soul strength they used before we killed them,” her sister mused, turning one over while munching on one of the juicer spirit fruits.

“Yeah,” she mused, “there is remarkably little soul strength in them though, for Dao Seeking… demons I guess.”

“Walking around out there, most of these demons look like Body Refinement cultivators and Martial Intent cultivators,” Arai noted. “They have vigorous constitutions for the most part and seem quite poor at externalising qi. That said, even their children are almost Golden Core and from what I can see all the adolescents were at least Golden Core. If this tribe was a sect back in Eastern Azure they would easily qualify as a local power in their own right.”

“Uhuh,” she nodded.

“May I enter?” a voice asked from outside.

Looking up, she saw a youngish female demon standing in the doorway looking a trifle hesitant. She considered the young demoness’s strength. She was maybe their age but only at Soul Foundation. Her physical presence was slight by comparison to the other demons at least, but she could see perhaps, why the demons thought them ‘ugly’. Her features were quite fine and her nose a touch over pointed, like her ears. Her eyes were narrower too and her forehead quite broad. You wouldn’t call her ugly, but it was hard not to feel that she was a bit severe-looking, especially when she smiled revealing incisors. She was also more generously proportioned than Juni and not afraid to show it.

“Ah,” her sister looked a tiny bit embarrassed although she hid it well, leading her to judge that this must be the shamaness she had met earlier.

“I am Rusula, apprentice to Shamaness Wanava,” the young demon girl said with a gesture she assumed was an act of formality.

“Shamaness Wanava?” she asked in Imperial Common.

“The erm… shamaness who was very into it,” her sister said with a touch of forced blandness.

“The Elder Shaman Isona has asked me to come and serve you while you remain in the hold.”

-So we are not to be left totally unsupervised despite being honoured guests, was how she couldn’t help but read that.

“By all means, come in,” she said, waving a hand for Rusula to enter.

The girl came in and looked around curiously before helping herself to several of the fruits on the bowl.

“You put a ward in here?” she asked, looking around.

“Uhuh,” she nodded noncommittally.

“Ah, I was just curious, honoured daughter,” the girl murmured. “It is as profound as anything the Elder Shaman can do, or the Ancestor Shaman for that matter.”

“We have some skill with them,” Arai said.

“Out of curiosity, I wonder could you answer a few questions for us?” She asked with a smile, wondering if they could use this opportunity to find out something that had been bugging her for a good while now.

“Certainly,” Rusula said plonking herself down cross-legged on a woven rug.

“Where we come from, we don’t use ‘Advancements’,” she said

“You don’t… ah… hum… yes, you use the system of the old age I guess given you speak La’taan so well.”

They spent a very fruitful hour after that talking with the young demoness about a variety of things they had experienced on the hellish journey so far. It turned out, she found, that their guess regarding Advancements and Circles was broadly right but missing some subtle nuance when she started probing about their own world’s cultivation realms. Advancements were akin to Body Refinement while Circles were basically holistic. Her guess that 6th Advancement Demons were akin to Immortals was off by half a realm through: Foundation was first advancement, Qi Refinement was 2nd Advancement, Golden Core was 3rd, Soul Foundation was 4th, Nascent Soul and half of Dao Seeking was 5th, the OTHER half of Dao Seeking where you had a principle was 6th, which then linked to 6th circle, while 7thwas everything from Immortal all the way to the peak of Chosen Immortal from what she could work out. The eighth advancement Chief Ogun was actually something like a Golden Immortal, except only as a Body Refinement cultivator. Only Shamans and the odd Wizard, whatever they were, were graded by circles.

That clarified a lot in her head about why they had been encountering a lot of Immortal-like things. As a system it made sense that they didn’t really have ‘Dao Seeking’ in the same way they had, preferring to bundle it into the stages either side and make the tipping point within it the transition.

It also turned out that most beings who had comprehended ‘Principle’, as they also basically called them, didn’t run around all over the place killing things. In a landscape as dangerous as this, they preferred to sit back guarding their tribe’s strongholds, which were, like this one, situated on strategic locations favoured by the makers of this place.

The history of their people, which Rusula was more than eager to show off her knowledge of, often volunteering this and that without any prompting as they nodded along and added useful little points from what the spear had told them, turned out to be pretty sad. Their people had once roamed the world above, living on the vast Savannah, then the enemies of all, the followers of the mad god, had come and fought wars against them. They had eradicated many, enslaved more and the remainder had fled into the depths, to the shores of the Under-mare. Rusula proudly told them how her ancestors were those who had made that journey – living for millennia in the dark, warring against abominations, Undrenfolk, slime plagues, undead and even, she claimed, a dragon. Eventually, they had learned of this place and invaded it, seeking to free those of their kind who had been enslaved here. When they got here, she said, they had learned that the enemies of all, the mortals from above, had forced their fellow ‘Ur’Inan’ back to their darkness. They had embraced the ancient doom of their people and become Orcnéas. They had also learned that the evil mortals of the human race had captured others of their ancient ancestors in here: Ur’Khal, the children of Keramos of Ur, and Ur’Sar, the children of Ishara of Sumer.

Sadly, beyond those ancient tales, Rusula knew little regarding those who had made this place, speaking only of them as evils best forgotten. This tribe’s ancestors had been cast adrift here when some great calamity occurred just over 30,000 years ago, and within a short time after that, all of those evildoers who had built this place had been eradicated by the concentrated efforts of all those here.

“If you intend to go further east though, you will run into problems,” Rusula said with a sigh, as she finished her last explanation

“These demon defilers?” she asked.

“Jash Ubri’Khund,” she spat, physically, onto the floor and then scuffed it out with a grimace.

“They are abomination, the truest representation of those evil people who made this place,” the young Ur’Inan muttered. “Just as the Orcnéas are the evil in our hearts so are they to humans.”

They ate some of the spirit fruit in silence as they considered what she had said. Finally, when there were no more of the nice, if rather tangy, qi-rich fruits left, she sighed and leant back.

“So if we were to go that way, we would likely run into them…” In truth, that sounded very bothersome.

“It is hard to say; they have only come there recently,” Rusula muttered. “The old ancestor shaman thinks their strength is waning because they are at war with everything. Sometimes people are taken, but more die to serpents of the storms than to them. Currently, their strength is a long way north, at war with the Ghoblan in the White Dragons and the Undren of Swarmblood Pit.”

“The White Dragons?” Arai cut in.

“The local name for the great mountain range in the heart of this continent,” Rusula said. “It was so-called because myth said a dragon once lived there, but the evil humans either killed it or caged it, I imagine.”

Finally, after talking some more about other, more random things, mainly sharing tales of horrible plants with the young Ur’Inan apprentice, she begged her leave and told them she would return in the evening with food and that if they needed anything she would bring it.

Once she had departed, she picked up one of the cores and again started to consider it. The qi inside its structure was heavily influenced towards earth with a bit of fire and some wood. It was also surprisingly pure. Looking at the one Arai was considering, it seemed to be very similar, although with water and wood as the prime elements which were then balanced by everything else.

“It really is as she said: they are closer to martial cultivators than spiritual ones,” she mused, testing the orphaned intent that was within the core.

“We are fortunate that the Ur’Inan do not form souls in the same way we do it seems,” her sister said, holding it up to the light. “They do have soul strength though.”

“I think that’s not a question we can ask,” she muttered.

“Yeah,” Arai sighed. “Rusula was willing to say this and that because she was eager to impress, expecting that she was telling us many things we already knew and that we were testing her in a way. Questions like that though…”

“So… what do we do now?” she asked.

“…”

Her sister sat there for so long in silence that she actually started to feel bad for foisting off the overall decision-making process of their next steps onto her. This was the first time in… well, since the spear probably, that they hadn’t just been rolling from one bit of chaos to the next.

“I think we have to stay here for a while, at this point,” Arai said leaning back against the wall. “What I saw on the walk around makes me think that we are respected, but not necessarily completely trusted.”

She considered the symbol in her own Sea of Knowledge for a moment – it had shown no signs of obvious concern or trying to hide itself.

“I get no sense of danger…”

“Except to our purity,” her sister muttered.

“Well, understanding that a bit more, it seems that they are not willing to force anything,” she said as optimistically as she could.

“Basically, yes – the shamaness was quite keen that I send any more votive offerings of that kind to her,” her sister said with a sideways look at nothing.

“You don’t fancy being pushed down by some big, burly Ur’Inan and introduced to his little Ur’Inan?” she said drily and then ducked to dodge the thrown spirit fruit pit.

“Next time you can go watch…” Arai scowled.

“That aside, how long do we stay here?” she asked.

“I think long enough to recover at least,” Arai said with a sigh. “We have both sustained a lot of punishment, and my mantra is still acting weird.”

“Yeah…” she nodded, thinking that over. “They seem happy enough for us to refine those cores as well?”

“As far as I can gather, it’s deemed a fairly steep penalty, but they wanted to give me their penises as trophies for their dishonour,” her sister muttered.

“So the same as back home, either done for inheritance purposes or done rarely,” she said, eyeing their bag.

“They also suggested that we could participate in various tasks for the tribe,” Arai added.

“Not...”

“No, not that,” her sister said with another scowl. “The Great Hunters seem to have been impressed we made it this far without dying, enough details of what we told them seem to be known through other means that they don’t doubt how horrid that journey to this point has been.”

“Well, there’s a mercy, our life experienced validated by the locals,” she joked.

“Yeah…” Arai said, with an amused expression drifting back into her face. “What they actually want is for us to go out with their hunting parties – that seems to be the kind of thing Ur’Sar do in their eyes.”

“Beyond getting it on with every three-legged male in ten miles,” she added.

“Would you stop that,” her sister grumbled.

“Stop what,” she said innocently, then ducked again.

“…”

“Anyway, there is a second point to this – that other tribe,” her sister said

“Ah, the Five Eyes?” she nodded, having been wondering about that. They hadn’t actually asked Rusula about them in detail.

“Yes, they will likely be smarting from this, having lost a bunch of important people to us. The chief didn’t quite say in so many words that they might try to hunt us down if we left too quick, but it was certainly implied. Apparently, they are allied with several tribes to the north… east…ish,” Arai went on.

“Ah, which is annoyingly, the way we likely need to go isn’t it?”

“Not quite. The main issue is a bunch called the Gloomy Towers tribe who live wetlandish direction to the east – the Five Eyes are a subservient tribe to them and that Karoz had several wives from them, including…”

“A shamaness?” she guessed, seeing where this was going to go in all likelihood.

“Your eyes see clearly, despite being fixed on things below the waistline,” her sister snickered.

“…”

She ignored the jibe and thought through the options. Either they left here quickly and had to run a gauntlet of even stronger tribes who were less amenable, or they stuck with this one and tried to see if they could wrangle a way onwards that wasn’t quite so fraught.

“So basically, stay here and wrangle or try to push on and probably have to fight lots more Ur’Inan,” she said.

“Yep, that’s basically it,” her sister nodded.

“What about the feng shui?” she asked.

“I didn’t see much, but I got the impression that it’s not something this tribe is very knowledgeable in. The Gloomy Pillars tribe on the other hand…”

“Figures,” she nodded, a bit disappointed there.

“Probably we can ask Rusula about that though. She was somewhat interested in the array symbols,” Arai mused.

“Probably if we share those, it should only be some of the ones from the walls in the school,” she noted.

“Of course, but even those basic things seem to be valued based on what Rusula was saying earlier,” Arai added. “In any event, we are here for a week or more, so we might as well do the best we can… and not..”

“Yeah… let’s not go there. I can’t swear that these Humans are like the people of Eastern Azure, but the people of the Perilous Realm looked pretty familiar,” she nodded grimly.

That evening, Rusula returned and took them to dinner with a bunch of tribal dignitaries. Rusula’s Shaman teacher did a very lewd dance that got a lot of hooting and chanting before it, but that fully didn’t do anything more. The meal itself turned out to be mainly roasted snakes and birds with a bunch of other spirit fruit, and in the course of it, much of their earlier suspicions were confirmed. The Tribal Chief was indeed quite keen for them to stick around for a while, and anyone who talked to them made a great point of emphasising how remarkable it was that they did that much damage to the Five Eyes tribe, and how that was a really big honour, and by the way, their son - or daughter was a very strapping young thing…

The next storm wall, when it arrived the next day, forced almost all of the tribe to retreat underground into a warren of rock-cut caverns in the heart of the largest pillar.

Between refining the cores, they spent some time wandering about the hold, talking to Rusula or other Ur’Inan, usually through being invited to feasts in various groups throughout the hold. That set up several more awkward, if amusing in hindsight, encounters with bands of Ur’Inan women folk who all seemed determined to work out why they were not interested in getting it on with any number of their sons, or even, in one somewhat excruciating encounter, husband. What they did glean from various conversations though was that their disinterest in having sex wasn’t really held against them and that most had rationalised they were on some quest to enhance their beauty and prestige in some way or on some strange prophecy. Both these were things their stories claimed that Ur’Sar did, a lot.

Similarly, their disinterest in walking around half nude got people thinking they were lacking in confidence because of their ‘ugly’ faces. She was unsure whether to laugh or cry when even Rusula suggested they should show their breasts more. The female Ur’Inan even tried to give them advice on how to be more proactive and assertive before they managed to change the topic.

In order to avoid more of that kind of silliness, they started to go out with hunting groups. That, they both found interesting, because once the brashness of the unblooded was taken away, the adult Ur’Inan who did most of the hunting were very competent at what they did and quite collegiate in sharing knowledge with them.

Those trips also netted some surprising harvests. Foremost among them was some of the fruit of a Yunlang Spirit Tree, a variant that was known more commonly by its colloquial name of ‘Minor Yang Walnut Tree’ – a metal-attuned tree that thrived in areas rich in earth and metal qi. They took five fruits each after discovering that they were absorbable into their dantians and traded the rest to the Cloud Arrows tribe for other odd resources of similar quality.

Coaxing them to grow in an aesthetically pleasing way on some of the core-rock pillars in her dantian gave her something to do while absorbing qi from the core.

Three storm fronts came and went in that time, eventually, she had completed over 25,000 cycles of refinement. Her body was nearly bleeding qi out of every pore as she compressed and refined it as fast as she could by the time she finished each series of cycles. Her capacity was now pushing past 70,000 units while Arai’s was only a little less. On the other hand, her Nascent Soul had barely budged in the same length of time, confirming to her what had been vaguely hinted in the pagoda’s texts – that the growth of her soul power and her Sea of Knowledge was not directly related to the amount of qi she absorbed.

By the time a fourth storm had ended and they had almost entirely recovered from any lingering fatigue from their previous journey, the core she was refining was still only half depleted.