Memories of the Fall

…On that night, the Festival of the Blue Moon, the whole town was a riot of colour and music as men and women cavorted and danced. At that time, I surely saw many wonders as I wandered through those streets of Jerikhal, with its tall ships and great harbour lit bright as day. Fantastical dishes to wet the tongue, beauties to stir the loins and songs to make your heart race... but looking back now, it is only the words of the dancing street children that linger on.

I can recall them still, dressed in faded and thread-bare white, wearing crude paper masks painted with the blue moon and stars… dancing with branches of pilfered laurel and oak, and the very words they sang as adults, myself among them, laughed and tossed them paltry scraps.

‘Death ran into the west,’ they sang, ‘fleeing its dreams’. A nonsense of words it had been, for how could death flee anything? They sang there was a war and a game and death ran on, where ‘death won his war, but his game was lost…’ And after that, they sang ‘war would bring death, but kings would never die.’

The people laughed and danced without care and the words should have passed away, forgotten amid the revels – but on the morn three ships came, each bearing dark news in their own fashion. Of a King who had not died, of a war we had won, and then, of a plague brought on by both and thereafter, there was only weeping and sorrow and then death where once there had been song and dance in Jerikhal.

From the ‘Dream of the Blue Moon’

Author unknown.

~ Lin Ling – Edge of Mysterious Jungle Ruins ~

They all filed up to find her crouched on the intact second floor of a small ruin at the top of a nigh-invisible rolling rise within the dense forest. To her left, shallow cliffs rose through tumbled outcroppings to eventually meld into larger massif pillars while to her right, occasional rocky outcroppings gave way to a raging torrent that ran through a wide gorge and a waterfall. The path on the far side was blocked with more vegetation strewn, mist drenched cliffs.

Normally, what ought to have immediately occupied her interest would have been the clear path, cut through the shallower incline of the cliff, with steps beside it and even runnels for water and drainage, along with the ruined watchtower in which they now stood. However, that was secondary to the scene beyond this little ruin that had everyone’s attention.

Below them, in a broad region of cleared land, stood the ruins of a large village… or perhaps a small town. With her continually improving vision, Lin Ling could make out that it was surprisingly large, and quite intact compared to most of the ruins they had encountered in the last week and a half since Ruo Han and his group ‘joined’ up with them. Around the town, she could make out stone walls and a network of channels and flooded areas in the huge sward of more cleared land around it that spoke to hints of historical agriculture. There were watchtowers as well. By the river, with a group of half flooded buildings close to the edge of the ‘real’ river – here widened to almost be at the scale of a small lake.

“That’s quite a substantial ruin,” Han Shu remarked from where he was kneeling nearby, staring at his own divination compass with a slightly puzzled look.

-You will understand those readings if you go to the bottom of the cliff, she grumbled to herself.

“It’s… weird… makes me feel weird,” Ruo Han, who was also stood nearby, muttered with a frown. “And not necessarily in a good way.”

“Indeed,” Teng Chunhua agreed.

“How come the forest hasn’t grown back?” it was actually Hao Jun who asked the smart question, for once.

“Land alignments, in all likelihood,” Juni replied, sounding pensive.

That had been her thought as well, until she had gone down to the edge, then the ancestral memories from the blood had chipped in, explaining their grasp of ‘the phenomenon’ in loose terms.

“We are not going down there at night,” she said simply.

“It’s only mid-afternoon now though?” Liao Ying added, glancing at her and looking a bit questioning.

“That land down there is not simple. It will take a full day to get across it…” she pondered how to explain the problem, because the memories’ explanation made sense to her, but ‘her’ take on their explanation would make anyone not very well versed in feng shui raise a few eyebrows. Juni would understand, but even then…

“Come with me. You will understand when we get to the ruin at the bottom here,” she said after a long moment of silence.

Sliding down the wall, she let them follow at their own pace. There was nothing particularly dangerous here – the forest was mostly spirit vegetation – however, anything with any understanding of the town and the region around it would not linger here, she guessed.

The ramp was carved from the rock and ridged faintly where it was exposed through loam and soil. The stairs at the side, where they were descending, were somewhat clearer though. An idle or ignorant onlooker would assume that this was thanks to their placement and the artificially crafted overhang sheltering them from the worst of what might fill them in. To her, however…

‘She watched a man, dressed in hides walk along, scraping lines on a stone…’

‘Soon he found a design that he liked, and the man wore better hides and a hat with antler horns, others watched him draw designs on a wall, including her…’ or the memories within her.

‘Then he and others like him were drawing great patterns on the ground, dancing with fires and chants, turning the alignments of the world to their whims…’

‘Later, they made greater works, and lesser works. Turned away from nature, but took a part of the natural world with them in these alignments and ancient arts – they crafted gardens, villages, cities… palaces and then whole landscapes… Even their own kind with those alignments,’ the memories told her.

‘Eventually, they even refined those understandings into what she saw here – swirling motifs, harmonious patterns… inharmonious patterns.’

She ran her hand along the patterns carved into the cut and dressed stone at the edge of the stairs. Swirling leaves, grass, earth, clouds. A scene of people carrying goods down stairs out of a forest to a town. The patterns were a kind of art, something between feng shui and an actual formation. Even without any input, they would preserve the state of the place where they were carved just by their being here. It certainly put in perspective why all of the underworld below Yin Eclipse had been carved like it had. The carvings only had a tiny… miniscule impetus on the land, but…

“It only takes a small nudge in the right place to keep things moving along,” she mused.

“Sorry?” Ruo Han, who was walking behind her caught what she said out loud and looked confused.

“Nothing,” she waved her hand absently.

Juni, who was behind him, shot her a look though. She resisted sighing; Juni was worried about her.

They arrived at the bottom of the stairway after some ten minutes of grappling with the lingering traces of vegetation. Without any preamble, she led them out across an open grassy area that would have been a broad plaza, passing by a tumbled-down four-sided stele that was marked with unintelligible writing, even to her, and half-buried in the earth.

Between one footfall and the next, her cultivation vanished. Amusingly, Hao Jun was the one who strode forward more quickly than the others, following after her only to jump back like a cat that had just stood on a burning rock when he passed the same point.

“What In the name of the heavenly virgin is this!?”

-You wanted a mysterious ruin to loot, she grumbled inwardly. Now that you have one you don’t like it? Sheesh.

“So this is why my compass was going weird,” Juni said, walking over to stand beside her.

“It’s not easy to explain, is it?” she murmured. “On the face of it, there are two things going on here as far as I can see…”

“The alignments of the land have been severed?” Juni mused, looking around.

“…”

“I have 20 years’ knowledge of working in the West Flower Picking pavilion on you,” Juni said with a light chuckle. “That has to count for something.”

“Let me explain!” she said crossing her arms and pretending to sulk a bit.

“Fine…” Juni smiled and patted her on the shoulder “I take it… you have a slightly more nuanced interpretation?” she also signed unobtrusively.

“Duh!” she muttered back.

“Yes, the alignments have been severed, but that only explains why this place has not regenerated back to pure jungle,” she said, looking around as the others stepped back and forth across the boundary looking puzzled.

“The field is something else. This isn’t suppression; it’s… regression,” she muttered.

“Regression?” Juni frowned.

“Your… cultivation has gone right? You can’t feel any of it?” she asked.

“Yes… it has.” Juni nodded, then signed, “Including my ability to perceive a few other things.”

She nodded, understanding what Juni meant by that – the symbol she certainly had in her head at this point, for the Earthly Physique she was slowly forming. Most of her own cultivation was gone as well – only two things remained. The memories were still there, and the strength of her body and how it had changed from the yang blood was still there. The symbol for her Physique – ‘Shield Bearer True Physique’ – had receded deep into the depths of her mind’s eye, but it was still, just about there as well, even if the connections it made to her body were basically invisible to her now.

Reaching down, she picked up a small rock, exerting strength in her hand and cracking it into a few pieces with a bit of exertion.

The memories told her why this was possible as well – although that memory of the understanding of it was equally disturbing in a different way. They had explained, in their eyes, what True Physiques were. They didn’t call them ‘True Physiques’ though. That was a thing of the humans, the apes and the name givers who came later. Merely a name given to an old thing. A realignment of the world that came from within, rather than outside. Before the supreme apes led their peoples out of the shadow, they had existed, these ‘alignments’ of potential. They had even existed before the ‘Name Giver’ and others of that other, even more ancient race existed…

She closed her eyes for a moment and shut off the playback of the memories – without her mantra, it was a lot harder to control what they showed her. Sometimes she got the impression that they were trying to cram a bit too much into her in one go. Her ‘mantra’ was also still there, she realised, but it too was like the symbol, drifting away on the edges of her consciousness.

“Mantras are still…” Juni frowned.

“It has to do with the calibre, the manifest strength of the field,” she said absently. “Our ‘mantras’ are…”

-Not simple, not simple at all… she shuddered inwardly.

Even the memories were unwilling to poke too deeply there.

-Or cannot, she mused.

-Your mantras come from a power far stronger than the field that has taken away all of the accumulation of the world…

She paused and grimaced as something within the mess of memories actually spoke a thought rather than present a memory. They did that occasionally, and every time it made her uneasy. It put her in mind of having all the voices in her head.

-Are they really gone?

“…”

That was the thing that worried her most, out of the parts of that experience that she engaged with at least. There were other parts, nastier, more demeaning parts that she just hid in a box and tried to ignore.

“This field… it regresses the accumulation of the world, returns everything to its original state,” she signed, forcing her to set aside those concerns. “However, it is imperfect, not a thing of genuine ‘returning to origins’ but a later interpretation of it.”

-A stolen interpretation of it, her blood told her, suddenly surging with actual anger.

She exhaled, focusing on not letting that anger latch onto things in her own psyche that would make it linger. Fates knew there were enough of those.

“But why?” Juni frowned, giving her a long look. Her friend was observant enough to have seen that flicker of anger, she was sure. Especially in here where she had only her own emotional strength to suppress it.

“Why indeed,” she nodded, still working on not wanting to kick something.

Unfortunately, while the memories were quite clear on the basic ‘why’, they were mostly silent on the bigger ‘Why’ – or perhaps ‘What’.

“This place is a seal, or was made into a seal,” she signed after a moment’s pause.

That was the most frustrating part of those 'memories', in a weird way. They responded to her questions, but unless it was something she could envisage, they were largely silent on bigger questions, like ‘who made this place?’, ‘why is there a huge sealing field here?’, and ‘why do I feel like the whole landscape is funnelling us to this place now that I am here, but I wasn’t seeing it before I got in here?’

Their intuition about the forests they were leaving was more useful at least, as even without the specifics they were pretty clear there: ‘Get out as fast as you can and do not make a mess while doing so.’

Part of that came from their explanation of ‘Physiques’ and what they were able to do... and what they represented. How some twisted things, paying good fortune in and out like a constant tally, to help their bearer rise. If you were incautious, unlucky or depending on the ‘type’ of Physique you got, the effect on you and those around you could be catastrophic. Others, like hers also had that effect, but to a lesser degree, because the lineage it came from was old enough to twist its surroundings in difficult ways and foolish things would find her desirable in ways she would not like.

In short, they had told her that while she was not a complete walking, talking karmic disaster waiting to happen, her physique would stir interest in many things, especially they told her, until she accepted what she was...

She rejected that muttering – those memories were not things she wanted to deal with right now. Their assurances were somehow not that comforting in any case.

-However, undeniably illuminating in why we might want to get out of these mountains with all these weird ruins and anomalies around, she thought grimly.

“So, if this place is sealing something up… do we backtrack and go around?” Juni asked.

“No… we cannot track back,” she stared up at the distant forests they had come from where she had a constant feeling of something half-watching their passage.

“Have you tried using a compass to see what will happen if we backtrack?” she asked Juni.

“…”

“No, actually,” Juni said, with a frown. “Well, slightly, but not in that sense.”

“Try it – not a landform compass, but one of the string and grass jobs, from the Eight Trigrams Chart,” she suggested.

She had done that unobtrusively during her night watches, and every time she had crushed the compass and thrown it away afterward. They only ever said one thing, once you stripped away all aspects of qi or the strength of the world from the divination.

Juni did as she suggested, stepping back out of the field they were in and stared at the readout of the thing before crushing it in her hands and discarding the pieces.

“Right… backtracking like that is clearly not an option,” Juni said softly.

-Nine Dark Dragons hide in the cardinal directions – Death without dying, Unseen at every turn. Mortally Inauspicious.

One of the four absolute death readings, and the second worst of the lot within the Eight Trigrams Chart.

“No, it is not,” she agreed.

She watched as Juni made another compass, this one from a method she didn’t…

‘She watched the woman, with her white hair and body painted with blue water and white moons, place nine stones in her heart and cast them as they might fall.

‘Death ran East, Life ran South. Fate ran North and Hope ran west. Their two faces scattered in every direction and the ninth stone, the path of the mortal…’

‘The woman sat opposite her, with golden hair and deep blue eyes also cast her stones… Hope ran South, Death ran West…’

She put a hand to her head and the memory settled and receded, even as Juni, crouching down, made the divination with nine different pebbles she had picked up, frowning. ‘The Stones of Fortune’… the divination method of ________ whose names even the memories feared to speak of, beyond memories like this, that were tinted with awe and dread.

-I wish you wouldn’t do that, she reproached them.

Every time they fed her a memory like that, she felt the equilibrium of her thoughts shift a bit oddly. Some were worse than others as well. They did settle but… the warning of the old magus still sat in her memories.

“What did it say?” she asked Juni, who was staring at the nine stones she had quickly scratched signs onto.

“That backtracking is not a good idea,” Juni said, with a touch of unease in her voice. “But what bothers me more…”

“…is why we weren’t worried about this before we stepped into this field?” she said.

“…”

“Yes,” Juni said after a long pause. “You said it was dangerous to be in this place after dark?”

“Predators will come out,” she pointed out, “and this field is… seven, eight miles wide?”

Juni pulled out a talisman from her talisman wallet by her belt and stared at it long and hard before putting it away and turning her talisman over in her hands for a few moments.

“Nothing with qi works here,” Juni said softly. “We would be mortal, and fighting only with what we carry.

“Exactly,” she nodded, then slapped her forehead. “Some fancy storage rings that are soul-bound…”

She cast around for the others. Han Shu and Jin Chen were keeping watch on the perimeter, usually her job, but she let that slide… The others stood around the ‘obelisk’ in the middle of the square, talking about the writing on it, she guessed.

“Ruo Han!” she waved a hand for him to come over. “Can you use your storage ring in here?”

“…”

The Nascent Soul cultivator eyed his ring for a moment and then looked a bit worried. “No, I can’t…”

Ruo Han then in turn waved the other Argent Justice disciples over. “Sister Ying? Brother Jun? A moment?”

Both Hao Jun and Liao Ying came over, grimacing with distaste as they re-entered the cultivation regressing field to stand beside them.

“What is it?” Hao Jun said a bit testily. “This place is seriously…”

“Can you use your storage rings?” Ruo Han asked them both.

Hao Jun shook his head, but to her surprise, Liao Ying materialised a jar of pills out of hers.

“Huh,” Liao Ying said, looking at her ring then the field around them. “So this is one of those fields.”

“You know something of these?” Juni asked her, mirroring her own surprise there.

“Not… as such, but I do know why my ring works and yours don’t.” Liao Ying said with a pensive look. “There are a bunch of different types of storage ring; some are more… robust than others in their mechanisms. Mine was a gift from my parents, a family heirloom I guess, from before we moved to the Argent Southern continent. It was originally made for those who delve the ruins in the heart of the mountains that run the length of the Western Shu Continent, where my family comes from originally.”

“The ruins have fields like this?” she asked, interested, because she knew next to nothing about the Western Shu Continent.

“Possibly… I do know that many of them have gateway restrictions repressing any cultivation or with other bizarre limitations like only formations in a certain style working within them,” Liao Ying explained. “However, even my ring will only work a few times. It can store a certain amount of unattributed qi that is refined by an array within the ring, which has its own internal harmony, totally sealed off from the outside world. Each time I activate it, that qi, rather than my own, is used to activate it.”

“I didn’t know that,” Hao Jun muttered, looking at his own ring with a frown.

“The depth of teaching regarding artefacts and formations on the Western Shu continent exceeds any other,” Liao Ying shrugged. “Much like the Eastern Continent is renowned for body cultivation… and experts in feng shui.”

“And the Northern Tang for bandits and villains?” Hao Jun added with an eye roll.

“…”

“So how many uses can you get out of it?” she asked.

“Not many,” Liao Ying shrugged. “Drawing out this pot uses only a little and it cannot replenish within the field, but if I keep drawing out it will deplete it within a few dozen uses… or less depending on what I draw out. Not to mention I can put nothing into it, this way, just get what is already in it.”

“So this is why you said we should not cross here at night,” Ruo Han said, looking around and stroking his beard which was somewhat longer than before, she noticed. “With our cultivation sealed like this, and no access to talismans or anything like a treasure we are…”

“Yep, we will be ‘mortal’ crossing here,” she agreed. “If only Miss Liao here can use a storage ring… I mean we could, but this place is not devoid of life…”

To illustrate her point, she went outside, got a staff from her own talisman, came back and levered over a small rock that was sat in the dirt. The centipede beneath it, which was a very unpleasant shade of bright red and yellow, hissed at her and scurried away through a crack in the paving below.

“Right…” Ruo Han nodded pensively.

“So we have to wait until dawn?” Liao Ying mused.

“That would be best,” Juni said, stepping back in as de facto leader. “Without any augmentation to vision or senses, traversing this grassland at night will be…”

“An open invitation to get bit by snakes if nothing else,” Ruo Han nodded. “And there are those large lizards in the river…”

“Yep,” she nodded seriously. “And probably larger things come in here from outside as well, spiders and such.”

“Uggh,” Liao Ying shuddered.

“So where do we wait out the night?” Hao Jun asked, looking around. “Or do we try to cut around and see if we can cross the river and make our way past this place?”

“Not interested in seeing if there are any good things in these ones?” Liao Ying said with a half-smile.

“…”

“I want to live to savour my gains from this place,” Hao Jun scowled. “Whatever they may be.”

“For all that it is prominent,” Juni signed, watching the three cultivators leave the field again, still bickering quietly, “I don’t think sheltering overnight in that tower is necessarily a good idea.”

She looked back up at the tower, at its placement, at the lay of the land around them, and nodded slowly.

“It’s not very defensible, is it?” she agreed.

It wasn’t. At least not now, anyway. Once it would have been, but the forest outside the land where the alignments had been dissociated had all regenerated. The edge of the field would be the most traversed place as well, with bigger predators seeking to make easy pickings of other things. That also ruled out the river, the blood’s instincts warned her. A lot of things would come to its banks at night.

“There is one other divination I can try,” Juni frowned… starting to walk along the edge of the field. “We need to find some bamboo, though.”

“You want to do a life and death split?” she said dully.

“I don’t know what bothers me more, that you know about that technique, or that you are not shocked that I know it,” Juni chuckled darkly.

“I know a few things,” she muttered.

She did know about that technique: it was one that mortals used at the end of their lifespans, when it came time to determine if the land their descendants had picked as a tomb for them was truly the right one. The fragments of the piece of bamboo her great grandfather had used for it were still in her family's possession – the night the elders of the Lin clan learned that their lineage was broken, the old man, who had been one of the clan's best diviners, had apparently used that technique, then sent all his closest family into the West Shadow Forest. An hour later, or so the story she knew went, her great grandfather had cremated himself on the grand altar of the Lin School, becoming the focal point of the ritual that had broken their ancestral ground and leaving only a curse of ten thousand generations to whoever would covet that which had stood there for over an aeonspan.

To this day, the Lin School was a fallow ground – its spirit vein ruined, its tombs sealed. In the last thirty years anyone who ventured in there who was not of her great grandfather’s personal blood died without a grave, irrespective of their cultivation realm. The curse had even killed a Dao Sovereign from the Deng clan.

All because of one divination technique, that asked a simple question: ‘Will this land be my tomb?’

“That seems a bit extreme though…”

“Well that divination reading I got for us back tracking back is basically on the same level,” Juni muttered.

That was true -‘Death lies in the shadows of four directions’ was the Eight Trigrams Chart’s equivalent of ‘Sorry, you’re dead’. It even killed the compass if you got it, making it useless for any further divinations.

“The other problem is one the others haven’t noticed,” she said after a moment.

“Which is?” Juni asked, as they walked on.

“The alignments here are severed, but the more I stand here and look at the alignments behind us…”

She paused and picked a few bits and pieces from inside the field and then stepped across it and used those to make the divination with another beggar’s compass. All directions of the auspicious path led to the place they were at. That was all it said. She tried several times, but got nothing more. As soon as she started to put qi back into the divinations they went back to being ‘normal’ as well. That was the genuinely creepy thing.

“Why do mortal divinations show a different thing compared to those with qi?” she muttered.

-Because mortality is pure, and the strength of this world is supreme, a truly ancient voice from the memories whispered, almost wistfully.

-And what in the name of any and all auspicious fates does that actually mean? She shot back.

She got nothing in return, as was expected at this point.

-Great, trade one set of voices for another, she thought with a mental glower.

“Because they operate under a purer set of natural harmonies,” Juni said, frowning. “That’s why arts like ‘Blood and Shadow in Water’ and ‘Life and Death split’ work. In any case, I am not doing the latter.”

They walked on for a few more minutes as the others followed along behind. At this point they didn’t have to point and instruct the four from the Argent Justice sect to walk in an orderly way. As such their progress had been a lot more fluid as they held the formations as asked.

“Ah, here we are,” Juni said brightly, finding a clump of forest bamboo that was growing beside a wall inside the repression field.

She watched as the older woman pulled out her swordstaff and, stepping back into the field again, adroitly cut down part of the clump with a few swipes into several metre-high lengths.

“What are you doing?” even Han Shu came over now to ask.

“Making a set of Eight Trigrams sticks,” Juni said. “Now help me get this bamboo out of the field.”

It took a few minutes for them all to drag them out of the field and stack the lengths up in a clear patch of ground as Juni started to look at them one after another, muttering to herself.

“What is she doing?” Ruo Han said, sidling up to her.

“Making a proper divination chart and compass,” she replied.

“Why does it require bamboo from inside though?”

“Because it is without alignment and will stay without alignment, so only outside alignments will impact it. It’s a pure manifestation of Yin and Yang,” she pointed out, a bit surprised he hadn’t grasped that already.

“A pure manifestation?” Ruo Han frowned. “Ah… because out here has qi and in there… there is no qi?”

“Nope,” she shook her head, realising that this might actually be an understanding of the way the world worked that you could only grasp having seen a few rather scary places in the Yin Eclipse Mountains. “Stuff is still growing in there, so there has to be qi in there… It’s more profound than that.”

“…”

“Oh,” Ruo Han stared at her, and she got a bit of a warm glow in her heart as she saw the understanding enter his eyes, or at least part of it probably.

He pulled out a compass and stared at it pensively, then back at what Juni was fashioning from the specific parts of the various bits of bamboo.

“You think something is messing with qi-based divination…” Ruo Han said much more softly.

“That’s a given at this point,” she agreed. “A basic reading of this place would be that the vitality of the land has been dissociated from its surroundings, but on a very simple level, even I can see the hole in that big enough to walk through.”

She snapped off a bit of a sweet herb and nibbled it, before passing it to Ruo Han, who also nibbled on it.

“Stuff still grows and gives nutrition,” he nodded.

“Exactly,” she nodded. “There is a place like this in Yin Eclipse.”

“Yin Eclipse has Six Pits and Five Eyes as they are sometimes known – the Red Pit, in the west, the Black Pit, near West Flower picking town, the Blue Pit, in the depths of the shadow forest, the Golden Pit, near Golden Promise spire and the Grey Pit, in the outer valleys near North Fissure. Each of them has a quirk that defies the suppression in some way.”

“I see…” Ruo Han said with frown… “But you only listed five there? And why only five eyes?”

“This place is like the Green Pit,” she said. “The sixth and most dangerous of the lot. Perhaps it also has an eye, but nobody has ever found it and recorded it in the Hunter Bureau records I have seen. Anyway, the five all defy the suppression, but the Green Pit, is just a normal, mortal forest right in the middle of the western slope…

“No way…” she trailed off blankly, as the golden haired woman’s divination suddenly resurfaced in her head.

She shook her head, and banished that thought, because it was… insane, and she had some experience with insane now and felt confident in calling out that as such.

“What is so dangerous about the ‘Green Pit’?” Ruo Han asked, staring at her.

“Nothing… it’s a normal forest, but cultivation just doesn’t work there. You cannot touch the natural qi of the world, space cannot be broken, and time cannot be unbound. Everything that steps in there is as mortal as the day it was born,” she replied absently.

“Everything…?” Ruo Han said dully. “So if a… dragon?”

“If you met a dragon in there… you better have Laozu’s wisdom and the Queen Mother’s charm,” she retorted. “But even dragons can die in there.”

It was a funny question, probably he had just picked the first mythical being that had popped into his head with innate ‘immortality’.

“How do you know that?” Ruo Han asked.

“Because there is a record in the Hunter Bureau, of everyone who died in that place, whose body was recovered. Tang Ao died there,” she said, crossing her arms.

“The Moon Tomb Emperor, last emperor of the Shan Dynasty? Of the previous dynasty?” Ruo Han said dully.

“You know of another?”

Why he had died there, the records were totally mum, but his name was on the list, there for anyone with the rank or inclination to search it. It wasn’t even some great secret really. Just one of many terrifying facts about Yin Eclipse that made you question your sanity as to why you would ever poke or prod the place.

“Anyway, the Green Pit is a place where everyone is mortal. I’ve been to it, twice, the edges anyway, with teams for body recovery, and the feeling there is like here, only more complete if that’s possible,” she explained.

-Or I just didn’t have the eyes to see what I see now, she added to herself.

“Well, that’s about what I expected,” Juni, who had now completed her crude divination chart while they had been talking, was staring at the way the sticks had scattered.

She looked at them and sighed – ‘All paths as one, shadow before, overturning order, inauspicious’.

“What does it say?” Hao Jun said, looking at it with curiosity.

“That we wait for tomorrow then go through here as fast as we can,” Juni said, rolling up the bamboo chart and shoving it in her pack. “I guess, though, that as we have walked this far, we might as well look at the river and see if we can’t find somewhere a bit better than that sore thumb of a tower to wait out the night.

~ Ha Yun – Ruined Town on the Edge of the Plains ~

-All good things must come to an end, Ha Yun thought a trifle sourly as he followed the group of other disciples across the grassland outside the town.

The last week he had fallen in mostly with Cang Di’s ‘group’ – and in doing so, managed to avoid anything to do with this horrible place for most of that time. With the arrival of two more large groups, the reality of this valley had finally become ‘clear’. It was a chokepoint. Someone, in the far distant past of this place, had done some grand working and made sure, somehow, that all paths inevitably led to this town. With that knowledge, and a few ‘seniors’ who were actually competent in divining, it had become clear that unpicking the riddle of this place was the key to getting past it.

“It’s really weird,” one of the disciples ahead of him, from the Deng clan, muttered. “One of my seniors was with the group who tried to go past. They walked for three days across the grassland and then, when they turned back, it took the first rise they walked over to be within two miles of the town and immediately back in this horrid formation, or whatever it is.”

“I heard from a senior that their group thinks that this whole town is sealing some kind of treasure probably,” another added.

“Yeah, has to be…” another added.

“Too hot...” someone else grumbled.

“Is this place cursed by an Avici demon or something…?” someone else hissed, likely having been caught by some of the razor-sharp thistle seeds being blown about on the arid wind.

He sighed, and adjusted his own hat, and took a deep drink of lukewarm water from a jar because it was, at that. Even in the late afternoon it had to be close to 50 degrees. The forests were sweltering, sure, but that combination he was used to. Sure it was humid, and claustrophia-inducing, but at least their cultivation foundations protected them from the worst of it, even if the climate here was somehow able to defy most treasures and talismans to some extent.

“Then maybe don’t stand on them?” someone else muttered.

Out here, far from the shade, he had to deal with the dry, abrasive heat, the ever-present, drying wind, grass that had edges like razors and worse… like the aforementioned, ubiquitous thistles. It was like walking through a natural manifestation of a holistic torture device.

He wasn’t the only person suffering either. No treasures, talismans or other items worked out here to mitigate the harsh conditions, so many of those present had stripped off to their waists and were wearing broad hats. The female disciples along for trip were hardly going to lower themselves to that, though, so they were stalking along at the back, muttering a steady stream of curses.

“It could be a formation to stop something escaping it,” Deng Fei, one of the few others here he was familiar with, interjected.

“What do you think?” Bia Meifen asked him, falling in beside him.

He bowed politely to her in greeting, now knowing what realm she had and her status within her sect. “I think people who mess with ruins they don’t understand tend not to understand how they died.”

It was a non-answer in many ways, but it did get a few chuckles from those around him who shared his dislike at being here.

“Coward,” someone else muttered nearby – because there were detractors to that view as well.

“You know of a cure for enjoying life when you’re dead?” Deng Fei added.

Deng Fei was someone he had known a few years ago. His uncle had moved from Blue Water city to Pill Sovereign city on a clan task and Deng Fei had gone with him, eventually joining a mid-tier power there – the Harmonious Splendour sect – through this uncle’s connections. The sect itself was not especially exceptional and it had been a bit of a surprise to find that they had sent people to a trial like this, let alone junior members like Deng Fei.

“Bah,” someone else, another disciple from a sect in Pill Sovereign city, snarled in frustration. “What do they expect us to do without working compasses in this place? Walk around until we trip over riches?”

“It seems to be working, mostly,” Deng Fei said with a chuckle, kicking a small rock off into the scrub.

“That is true,” Bia Meifen sighed, waving her fan in her face, as much to keep the ever-present bugs away that their passage kept kicking up as to stop the heat. “Without qi, compasses won’t work.”

“Well…”

It was somewhat surprising, yet also perhaps not, when he reflected on it – now that she brought it up – that people were complaining about compasses. Most of those here were from well-to-do families and had been around cultivators their whole lives.

“You have some thoughts on that?” Bia Meifen said smiling at him.

He shook his head, buried thoughts that she was very pretty when she smiled and made to pull some odds and ends out of his storage ring before stopping and sighing in annoyance.

That was another annoyance here – storage rings didn’t work. Nor did talismans for that matter.

“Bear with me a moment, Senior Bia,” he said with his best smile as he started to cast about for the required materials to make a crude compass.

… And remember how they worked. It was almost enough to make him wish he had taken more missions into the mountains – almost.

They had almost arrived at their destination by the time he had found enough bits, but even then… He stared at the construction as it swung randomly and sighed, folding it up and shoving it in his bag. Even a ‘beggar’s compass’, as they were sometimes called, didn’t work, which was to be expected really. If one of the really expensive, properly built ones of the seniors didn’t work, then a crude collection of twigs and a few rocks was going to get nowhere.

“So even those don’t work,” Bia Meifen mused, reminding him with a start that she was still wandering along beside him looking around pensively.

“You are… familiar with ‘beggar’s compasses’?” he asked, politely.

“Only by reputation,” she shrugged. “I am more surprised you know how to make one, given you’re from a noble clan and all.”

“It’s a skill I picked up somewhere,” he said with a shrug. “I was just curious – as you said, it doesn’t work.”

Back home, quite a few people had some working familiarity with feng shui or formations, but he did have to admit that it was only those who were likely to go into the Yin Eclipse Mountains who were likely to dig further than that. It was not an easy area of study and most juniors were more focused on their cultivation. There were less formations experts and feng shui experts among the younger generation of West Flower Picking town than there were accomplished alchemists, artefact refiners or even talisman makers.

“And now the best of them are rebels, rogues or dead,” he sighed under his breath.

“Sorry?” Bia Meifen murmured, apparently catching what he had said.

“Nothing. Sorry Senior Bia, I was musing to myself,” he replied apologetically.

She shook her head, and they walked on again in silence, following the rest of the group along the broad track that was probably some old road as it curved around a windswept stand of thorn bushes and finally led them down to their destination.

“Ah, here we are, it seems,” Bia Meifen said with, he noted, some relief in her voice, as they took in the large complex of red stone buildings that bordered on one of the regular canals that ran through the grassland here.

“I must admit, when I came on this grand expedition, I did not expect that I would be watching sect disciples rediscover the joys of hand-crafts and carpentry,” she added, glancing at the group of disciples they were passing, several of whom shot them dirty looks for her comment.

He smiled and saluted them politely as they passed by. They were disciples from some small sect south of Blue Water city he thought. Currently they were standing about while two of their number wrestled with putting a fixed wheel axle back on a hand cart. The cart itself was hideously overburdened with a large stack of pots, decorative floor tiles and a small statue of sitting man holding a scroll with some writing on it that looked rather like a Buddha statue.

“Stealing ruined statues and stone pots… prying up floor tiles – is this all that this place has to offer?” Deng Fei, who was now walking just ahead of him, said once they were mostly beyond earshot.

“Aside from whatever is totally suppressing all our foundations down to that of some village drunk with no spirit root?” he remarked a bit more sourly than he might have intended as the absence of qi was grating on his nerves.

“…”

“Aye, aside from that,” someone else – one of the women from behind them – muttered just as sullenly, if not more so.

Deng Fei scowled and nodded while Bia Meifen just laughed as did a few of the others nearby.

“Senior Bia,” a disciple wearing the robes of the Shen Clan came forward and bowed politely to her.

“Ah, so this is why Senior Dongmei wanted me to come out here,” Bia Meifen replied, barely burying a scowl on her beautiful face.

“Apologies, Senior Bia,” the disciple nodded and gestured for her to follow after him.

He bowed politely with the others as she departed. Most of the rest of them were all Soul Foundation or early Nascent Soul; someone like Bia Meifen who was close to Dao Seeking had standing, even here, where cultivation realms were just a label to bandy around. In many respects he was quite lucky, he considered, to have been rolled into Cang Di’s wider group to all intents now. As it turned out, expertise in spirit food made you quite sought after.

Others were also scattering to their influences’ groups, leaving him and a few others to just wander around or find a group to fall in with. Compared to the missions out into the jungle, this was much more informal in many ways. Aside from the odd wild animal, the danger wasn’t from the surroundings anyway.

Walking through the buildings, he took in the architecture, such as it was. Everything was built of the same deep reddish-brown stone, quarried from the cliffs below their camp in fact, a few miles distant. Most buildings were missing their roofs, and some interior floors had collapsed, but by and large everything bar a few out buildings was intact or only in a state of mild abandonment.

“Uggh… it’s too fate-blighted hot,” one of the disciples poking through a building nearby complained loudly.

“Say it louder, maybe the heavens will take mercy,” his compatriot grumbled.

“At least it makes a good excuse not to have to take back the nameless-accursed wall carvings,” the third member of that group added.

“Thank the auspicious heavens for small mercies,” the first complainer sneered, kicking something that sounded like a pot based on the hollow scraping sound it made as it rolled.

He finally found a building nobody was currently poking about in and proceeded to at least ‘look’ like he was doing something useful. The interior of the building was, with its open roof, hot enough that he reckoned he could have roasted gourds on what was left of the stone floor of its first story. The ground floor was mostly fallen rubble and the odd broken pot. Not having been graced with a shovel he left that well alone and sought out the stairs, which he eventually found in its inner court.

The garden within it had long since fallen into disrepair, but at its heart was a broad tree with small, grey-green leaves that held clusters of small green fruit of all things. Picking one off the ground he considered it, before shoving a few into a pouch of his pack. Dying of poisoning out here was a legitimate concern. It had been an ignominious end to two Nascent Soul cultivators so far, that he was aware of at least. One bitten by a snake, the other stung to death by insects. Several more – not so high realm, it had to be said – had come down with food poisoning as well from eating things without taking them outside to check they were edible.

Elsewhere, there were some scattered pots and what had likely been a small pond that adjoined a wall, replete with fountain. It was bone dry, of course, but the withered stems in it suggested that if it ever rained here it would probably have lotuses or something similar in on a seasonal basis.

Climbing the stairs to the second floor, he peered through the door warily, then checked above it even more warily. The spiders and scorpions out here were big enough that he didn’t want to have one drop on his hat and listening to others told him that they liked to lurk in the shade above doors and such.

The rooms that still had floors were dusty and leaf strewn. What furniture there was – some tables, stools, a chair and so on – was made out of stone, which was somewhat surprising, considering there was no shortage of wood nearby and it would probably have been easier to work. Cut shelves in the wall still held some pots and other domestic items, which he ignored. The cupboards had clearly been fronted in wood though, because he found bits of them where they had fallen.

Walking through the rooms, he ran an eye over the wall carvings as well. They mostly depicted scenes of people working in the fields, doing things in a town, dancing and such. They might have been appealing to someone who liked dioramas of rustic idyll, but there was nothing in them that could be called particularly interesting or compelling beyond that.

The fourth room he entered was, however, different. It was at the ends of one of the wings of the rectangular building. Here the wall carvings were much grander, the lines sleeker and the scenes different. People stood in lines, receiving some noble if he was to guess. They carried gifts of different things, while… behind them…

He had to pause and step closer, because there was a second layer to the scene he realised. The background showed a different thing entirely. A battlefield, full of corpses and broken weapons, burning towns and devastated fields. The people in the foreground were, he guessed, supplicating their lord after some battle, or maybe an attack?

Following the scene around, he arrived at the head of the room and a raised stone dais carved into the shape of a compass and a sun. Above it, a robed figure was presented on the wall, holding up its hands. Flames, or maybe the sun itself, surrounded the whole figure. The niches on the wall looked right for placing statues in as well.

Stepping back, he finally realised where he was standing with a shiver – the ancestral hall of this house.

“And it has a ceiling?” he muttered out loud, looking up at it, realising that key detail had totally escaped his notice somehow, because he had been so caught up in following the carvings.

The ceiling, arranged as a vault, was also carved, depicting sky and clouds and, beyond them a sun, moon and stars.

The rest of the room was totally empty, apart from several also empty alcoves between the carved scenes so he turned to leave, and found himself facing a woman standing in the doorway.

“Sorry, I didn’t think anyone else would be here,” she said with a frown.

Looking at her, she didn’t seem familiar – the loose gown she was wearing was greenish-grey and in a not particularly familiar style, like the tree downstairs in fact, and complemented her hair, which was of a shade to almost blend into the stonework, until she stepped through the shadow of the door and it became a deeper gold. Her skin was tanned to the point of almost being olive. With her piercing blue eyes she was undeniably arresting in appearance.

“Ha Yun, of the Ha clan,” he saluted her politely, remaining wary.

She didn’t reply for a moment, instead walking into the room and considering the carvings pensively for a moment.

“…”

“Ganlan Meixiu,” she said, glancing at him. “I guess I’m an independent… cultivator,” she added with a slight smile.

“My apologies,” he said again, politely.

“These buildings are interesting, are they not?” Meixiu mused, running her hand across the carvings. “To have stood the test of time so long… I wonder what secret lies therein.”

“It is quite remarkable,” he ventured, not quite sure where this conversation was going. “They are mostly quite empty though.”

“They are, and seem to have been for a long time,” Meixiu agreed, flashing him a slight smile. “In any case, this place seems quite empty, shall we look elsewhere?”

Left with no other option really, short of trying to climb out a window, he followed after her as she wandered back through the rooms, looking at this and that, and poking occasionally into corners as if dangerous insects and snakes were not a thing in her world view. When he pointed that out she just laughed and shook her head, before going back to looking through things. The other wing of the upper story was a series of bedrooms, and a common room with a veranda overlooking a walled garden that was dominated by a larger version of the tree in the courtyard.

None of the bedrooms had anything much in them, just a few overturned stone chests and some now empty cupboards, until the very last one, that was.

“Ah!” Meixiu gave a happy exclamation while rooting through one of the cupboards, holding up a short blade of all things in one hand and a carved red stone pendant in the other.

“What a beautiful thing,” she mused, turning the pendant over, which was carved in the shape of a tree he noted.

“Here, what do you make of this?” she added, passing him the blade, still looking at the pendant.

Nonplussed, he took the knife off her. It was about as long as his forearm and only slightly patinated. Turning it over in his hands, he found the wood of the handle was old and the binding fragile, fraying in his hands. He took a moment to realise what was odd about it. It wasn’t a ‘knife’ at all, but the blade of something like a Pudao glaive that someone had re-hafted to turn into a knife.

“What with all the talk of treasure and such, I wonder if this is something interesting after all,” Meixiu mused, still looking at the little stone carving, which would presumably fit on a necklace.

-Wouldn’t you like to have that stone as well?

For one brief, irrational moment, he was tempted to demand it off her.

-What if it’s a treasure, has some art in it…

The moment passed and he quashed the desire almost as soon as it emerged, still unsure where it had emerged from in truth. He clenched his other hand and was glad she was looking the other way, still engrossed in turning the talisman over in her small hands.

“Perhaps it is,” he said, trying not to sound a bit nervous suddenly. “This appears to be some old weapon that has been turned into a knife.”

Stripping off the rotted wood, he found the tang of the blade and the slot where it would be hafted, looking for a makers mark. There was one there, a strange little symbol that defied his ability to see it clearly in the gloom – something between a rather crap moon rune and a badly drawn letter of imperial script.

“Here, look,” he proffered her the blunt end of the blade, hoping she was not also tempted by ideas of momentary misconduct, so she could see the rune.

“How strange. It doesn’t look to be enchanted, though,” Meixiu added.

“YUN!” a voice called from outside. “HA YUN? Are you here?”

Peering out the window, he saw Deng Fei and a few others, who must have been in the building nearby, were stood in the street beyond the wall.

“Senior Bia is looking for you,” one of the others yelled.

Meixiu glanced out the window and shook her head, threading the little carving onto a string and wrapping it around her arm and making a ‘shussh’ sound before turning and leaving the room.

“I guess he is a bit further on,” one of the others added. “Wonder what’s over this wall though?”

“Probably another of those garden court things,” Deng Fei shrugged.

He finished a final quick skim of the room, including looking under the bed, but saw nothing else beyond a pot shoved in a far corner. Pulling that out though, he was surprised to find a dozen dull talisman-like objects in the bottom. Tipping them out, he carefully inspected one with the tip of the blade and was surprised to find that the blade cut the probable coins like they were made of butter. In fact, it cut the stone slightly as well.

Wrapping them up, he hurried back after Meixiu in time to see her vanishing out of the building’s entrance. Following after her, he nearly left the whole place behind, before realising that walking around with the blade as it was, was likely to cause… notice. Having found something, he suddenly had no desire to hand it over to some random senior…

“How to… how to…” he mused, staring at the blade.

It took full minute of empty headed pondering before the obvious solution hit him – just put another haft on it and say he was given it by a ‘senior’.

He contemplated cutting a branch off the tree in the courtyard, but that would be kind of obvious he realised, so instead he went through to the garden and rooted around, carefully, until he found a shrub with a straight branch that was the right width and very much out of the way and cut that instead. It was a work of a few more minutes to pare the branch down to the right dimensions and rough shape before screwing it into the hafting slot for the pudao blade. The final touch was to bind a length of cord around it and polish off the worst of the patina with a bit of the red-brown rock. The result was pleasingly mundane, to the point where he would have ignored the weapon had it been outside here and lying on the ground.

Humming happily, he made his exit from the building, heading for Deng Fei and the others, to find out what Senior Bia wanted.

~ Kun Juni – Edge of the Mysterious Jungle Town ~

The more she sat and messed with the divination board, the more certain Juni found herself of two things: Firstly, that the teachings from the talisman ‘Bright Lotus Earthly Scripture’ had deeper currents than she had realised, and secondly, that she really wanted to be done with these dark forests and all the creepy anomalies.

Misfortune walks in shadowed moments.

Death, hidden in four directions.

Land as a Coffin, Breath as a Curse.

Death…

Divination was what you made of it. It relied heavily on your state of mind, your circumstances, your grasp of things like feng shui, the nature of your qi and many other things besides. Her mother, who had taught her most of the Kun clan’s basic methods, had reminded her that what you got out of it was usually half of what ever information you put in. She had, however, done nine divinations on various things with this bamboo board and if this had been outside she would have been calling for the ancestors to check if it wasn’t a cursed object.

“What kind of picture is this actually making?” she wondered out loud, leaning back to stare at the sky.

She sat there in silence for a few minutes, clearing her head before trying the divination again.

Myriad Worms hunt in Darkness.

“…”

-It might still be a cursed object, she thought, pushing it away in disgust and turning her attention back to the others.

Lin Ling was also messing with divination, and the fact that the two of them were doing so persistently had managed to both interest everyone else, and, she had to reflect, unnerved them a bit. It was, however, unavoidable at this point because Lin Ling was right: going back, properly going back, seemed to be a very bad idea, and the fact that she was seeing two diametrically opposed sets of divination readings about it depending on whether or not she used qi-based divinations or straight up mortal methods was…

-Yeah, it’s freaking me out. I can’t deny it, she complained to herself, rubbing her temples.

To distract herself, she turned her attention back to the Bright Lotus Earthly Scripture. The fact that the author of the whole thing had called the divination art within it ‘Nine Earthly Stones, Cast from the Heart’ was… well, she guessed she should be thankful it wasn’t called something utterly weird like those things often were.

Settling down, she ate one of the Foundation Building pills, regulated her breathing and performed a focused cycle of the cultivation law portion of the scripture, watching the qi of the world flow through her, shifting the natural flow of qi through her body in subtle and auspiciously harmonious ways as it did. Individually, those little adjustments were almost inconsequential. Combined, though, the gains from each cycle building on the last were nothing short of remarkable. There was really, truly, no comparison between this law and any other she had ever seen.

The Kun Hearts Art was methodologically inconsequential next to it. On one level that hurt, because, whatever else could be said about her clan, her family had stood by her since it had turned out her spirit root was fundamentally bad. Up until the age of 8 she had been lauded as the one most likely to become the clan’s successor. After that… well… her family had stood by and provided her other opportunities. It was a stark contrast to someone like Lin Ling, whose family was determined to claw their way back from the precipice and had no use for juniors with spirit roots as ill-suited as hers to their family law.

Exhaling, she finished the cycle and considered her body’s circumstances. Between the efficacy of the law and the support of her ‘mantra’, she was a hair’s breadth from crossing over from ‘Bodily Refinement’ as the chapter in her mind called it to ‘Qi Condensation’. Another impressive aspect of the law was that pill poisoning was close to non-existent. Part of that was certainly the quality of the Foundation Building pills she was eating like candy still, but a large portion of it was also another side effect, or perhaps deliberate by-product of those little auspicious shifts each cycle performed as she circulated her qi.

The lotus-like symbol in her mind’s eye, that held the essence of the ‘Earthly Physique’ she was slowly growing into, shimmered with the completion of the cycle for a moment and then went back to slowly doing what she had just done, but on its own, and much less rapidly.

Stretching, she got up and waved to Han Shu, who was just coming back from his own patrol, with Jin Chen in tow again.

“I’ll go look around next,” she called over.

“It’s pretty quiet out there,” Han Shu said. “Probably going to start raining again in a while though.”

“It’s a jungle; it’s news when it’s not wet,” she chuckled.

Stepping out of the rock-cut building, she took in the area they had picked to hole up in. It was also a place where the shapers of this whole landscape had cut a path down. Once, she guessed, that road would have led to a bridge, now long collapsed and barely visible across the gorge above at the top of the waterfall. It was, in truth, a bit of a bolt hole, but it was the most defensible spot they had come across in two hours of picking their way along the fringe of the field and the cleared area without striking out for one of the smaller collections of standing buildings on raised hills within it.

There were only two proper buildings of note. One was a collapsed wreck, long overtaken by spirit vegetation, the other, which they were in, was a rock-cut building set into an outcropping of the cliff, accessible only if you were willing to walk through the regression field to get in. Its original purpose was likely to store goods – reflected in the rather impressive number of large, empty pots stacked along the back wall of one of the two halls. The whole compound was surrounded by a wall and the cliff above, as well as the path up to it, it had collapsed in an ancient landslip. The exit of the walled compound itself was also within the regression field.

“Any luck?” she asked Lin Ling, who was still sitting on a square block by the entrance.

“If I didn’t know better I’d say I was cursed with ill luck in divination,” her friend said sourly.

Patting her companionably, she headed on out and walked up the stairs to the wall, which was about 10 metres tall and reassuringly substantial. The familiar motifs that had decorated much of the underworld ruins they encountered were present here and there between the moss and the occasional fern.

She found Liao Ying leaning on the parapet, chewing on a persis stick and staring at the distant town in the evening light.

“I can’t say this place is at all like I expected,” the marginally older woman muttered after nodding a greeting.

“That could be the motto of this whole horrid ‘trial’,” she said with a dark chuckle as she put mocking emphasis on “trial”, “It was not as expected.”

“It’s also an actual trial, unlike stuff like the Dragon Pillars, which is really just people running around and solving a bunch of ancient formations someone saw fit to use to seal up their loot in,” Liao Ying added. “It’s basically a massive graveyard from the aeonspan before last… There are rules about it, things people know and such… This is just…”

“Unknowable?” she suggested.

“Ruo Han thinks it’s a remnant of a broken Supreme World,” Liao Ying said pensively. “And that the cultivation oppression we are experiencing is actually realm suppression. That our laws are not able to properly refine the purer qi of this space, much like mortals would suffer it if they ascended to Eastern Azure.”

She nodded, mulling that idea over. It was indeed compelling. She had had her qi dispersed, as had Lin Ling. Han Shu… perhaps some after-effects of his previous loss of cultivation were at play there, or it was the sword again. In both hers and Lin Ling’s case, they also had access to newer, improved cultivation methods as well, although her friend had not spoken much if at all about the specifics of hers except in a few signed conversations far from the prying eyes of others and now.

She could understand her friend’s paranoia – they had on them at least three different things that she guessed most of those in the trial would give their firstborn son and their mothers to get a hold of. Her law, Han Shu’s sword and Lin Ling’s yang blood. Her own swordstaff, for all that it was totally mundane, would also move many a greedy or unscrupulous eye, she guessed. She trusted Ruo Han, pretty much – he seemed dependable and willing to work with them. Liao Ying as well was open and friendly, in a cautious enough way. Jin Chen seemed to have bonded with Han Shu and had, apparently, lost a close friend to this trial already. It was Hao Jun that made her…

He wasn’t the problem per se, but he was the weakest link in her willingness to trust the group of four in a major way. The Argent Justice group had their problems, and they had their own. At the moment those were intersecting in the ‘nobody wants to die, therefore we are all on the same page’ part of a collaboration matrix.

However, the Argent Justice group’s problem could very easily become theirs – Ruo Han had sworn an oath, but the others had not, and as time went on she was regretting that more and more. She also didn’t trust oaths to their heavens in this place. That was more an intuition than a certainty, but that intuition told her that the shadow of their own world, wherever it was in relation to this place, was not as strong as most were perhaps thinking it was. That was a view Lin Ling also shared.

“Part of me really wants to find a way to shake off this suppression as well,” Liao Ying muttered. “My cultivation is already advancing faster in here – while suppressed – than it was outside with cultivation supplements.”

She eyed the other woman in the dusk. That was an… interesting acknowledgement, given their group didn’t talk about cultivation specifics much. Part of that, she knew, was because Ruo Han was aiming to have Hao Jun be the go-between to some of their seniors about matters that had immediately preceded their own collision with the Argent Justice group. Being a target of your own sect and being declared a ‘rebel’ was not a good thing.

“Yeah,” she agreed, so as not to let the silence become overly long.

“Your recovery is progressing well at least,” Liao Ying added giving her a slight smile.

“It is. My dantian hasn’t properly recovered yet, but it should be any day now,” she added, by way of slight elaboration. “I’m going to check on Teng Chunhua. Will you be okay here?”

“Oh, yeah,” Liao Ying said. “I have some good talismans to fall back on if nothing else.”

Smiling, she took her leave and continued to walk around the wall, watching the swaying grasslands between the canals and the shadows cast by lines of tangled trees in the dusk. The distant town with its towers was starting to become obscured by the evening mist of the river and the broad lake that split the valley. The setting sun in the south was reflecting off the water and the distant forest was filled with drenching clouds, its mist and lake reddish blue.

“It would be pretty, if it wasn’t in this place,” she sighed.

Teng Chunhua was sat on the opposite corner, much less obtrusively than Liao Ying had been, watching the river and nibbling on an edible bit of spirit vegetation.

“All quiet?” she said, leaning on the wall beside her.

“Unless you’re something the lizards in the river want to eat, yep,” Teng Chunhua said, pointing to the far bank, where several of the ten metre long amphibious lizards were gnawing on a catfish-looking thing that was nearly as long as they were. “If I had any doubts about trying to cross that river before, they are buried with the spirit of that fish.”

She stared up at the cliff with its waterfalls and the sheer massif slopes coated in vegetation beyond it.

“It might well be possible to keep skirting around the field and find a way past,” Teng Chunhua mused.

“Assuming there isn’t a similar thing with the landscape alignments happening on the other side,” she added.

“Yeah, that is a problem,” Teng Chunhua agreed.

-In truth, the more I look at it, the more I can’t help but feel that this whole setup is less a barrier, and more some kind of defence, or perhaps a containment of something. That’s not a comforting thought though. It poses unpleasant questions like ‘Where are the people who built this place and what happened to them?’

“Is your cultivation also…?” she asked.

“…”

Teng Chunhua eyed her sideways and then nodded. “Yes, it’s also advancing a bit better than it was outside, even with this suppression. I assume you are thinking about what Ruo Han suggested earlier?”

“Uhuh,” she nodded, a bit noncommittally, just so she wouldn’t be caught out in any lies.

Teng Chunhua was someone she could at least trust professionally, with few, if any qualms.

-Why am I so bothered about ‘trust’ today, she thought to herself, staring out at the river.

-Is it just because I’ve done one too many divinations?

Sadly, that wasn’t the kind of thing you could just go around asking their group at this point.

‘Hi, Shu, are you feeling like the whole trust thing is going a bit better today?’

‘Hi Juni, Lin Ling still draws my attention to her jars of that terrifying blood at every opportunity…’

The same could be said for everyone, except maybe Teng Chunhua in a weird way… and her and Lin Ling, but that was a different kind of ‘trust’.

“I have to admit that the ease with which we are pushing through the forest to this point is…” she decided on a different route to that problem.

“Surprisingly easy?” Teng Chunhua nodded. “At least until today.”

“Until this place appeared from nowhere, yes,” she had to concede.

“Well, we are basically an elite team of herb hunters with close to three quarters of a century of combined experience between us,” Teng Chunhua said with a half-smile. “Not to mention, we have been skirting around this mountain range in a massive curve as far as I can see.”

“Like we are going through the outer valleys of Yin Eclipse?” she mused.

“That thought had occurred to me,” Teng Chunhua nodded. “But the mountains behind look nothing much at all like the Yin Eclipse Mountain Range, except by dint of being the same approximate scale as far as I can work out.”

That was true, she had sort of been keeping track of the distances – notwithstanding the real possibility that space in here was weird – and given where they had come out it had ‘looked’ broadly similar to the eastern edge of the ‘Green Pit’, so they should be somewhere close to the northern edge of the Shadow Forest at this point.

“The subsidiary peaks are the only thing that messes with that,” Teng Chunhua added. “But if you were to walk roughly as we have been doing, for this length of time, at this speed, we would be almost back at the Teng School by now, from where my group entered this place.”

“You think the rough geography of this world is mirroring the outside?” she mused.

“Only in very broad brushstrokes,” Teng Chunhua mused. “If we kept going on this way, we would arrive at the great delta south-east of the Teng clan’s territory probably.”

“Doesn’t help much in terms of getting out, though,” she conceded.

“No… it does not,” Teng Chunhua said with a soft sigh. “But in theory, all information is useful.”

“Indeed,” she nodded, watching as another of the lizards caught something in the river and dragged it ashore – an eel-like creature with big teeth that was sparking slightly in the lizard’s jaws.

They chatted for a while longer, mainly about how many horrible things were likely to be lurking beneath the placid, swirling waters of that broad river, before she continued on with her walk around the perimeter. The riverside beyond the wall was a tangled mess of reed beds, several overgrown canals and at least one further rock-cut compound right on the water’s edge. Even at this distance, she could make out a lazy lizard lying on the roof of the half-submerged building, robbing any desire for her to want to go check it out.

The cliff above them was illuminated in the dusk and mostly sparse of vegetation. The forest above dark and… forest-like, the tops of the trees already becoming obscured in the evening mists that were flowing down from further up the valley. She watched the treeline unobtrusively for a while, before turning back and making the slow circuit back again, this time on the ground inside the wall’s perimeter, just to be sure there was nothing lurking in the shadows somewhere around the other building.

Only when she was satisfied that her paranoia was really getting the better of her in that regard, did she return to their ‘base’ within the compound. Lin Ling was still sat outside, so she also took up a spot on a rock and considered her cultivation art again. A quick check of the number of foundation pills she had informed her that she could probably eat one a cycle for the next week without worry at this point, so she settled back down and started to do just that.

The breakthrough, when it came… was both a relief and somewhat anticlimactic, at least in the first instance. Between one cycle and the next, the reorganisation of her twelve basic meridians and the connections between the qi-reservoirs in her bones and that meridian system ‘settled’ somehow, and then just kept settling. With each subsequent cycle the subtle links between her organs and her qi-circulation, which had also been undergoing gradual shifts, all also reached kind of tipping point.

Her respiratory system fully connected with her twelve meridians, all the little changes settling within a few cycles.

Her vascular system was next, over a dozen cycles, and then her digestive system.

Slowly, pure qi was shifted out of her bones, flowing through her meridians and swirling through the lotus symbol in her mind’s eye that was now mirrored in a mysterious extradimensional way through her whole body, mirroring her meridians in a remarkable manner and acting as a framework for the qi to flow as she sat in the meditative pose that the law recommended for focused cultivation.

The point of connection where it all coalesced was a point in her navel just above her womb, where her ‘dantian’ had been. That became the very heart of the symbol’s ghostly form through her whole body… the point where she knew her spirit root resided in the phantasmagorical space beyond her dantian – between her ‘Mind’s Eye’, what would become her ‘Sea of Knowledge’, and what would eventually become her ‘Nascent Soul’.

Rolling mists of qi flowed around her, slowly condensing into a pool upon which she was sitting in her mind’s eye. Within it, a body formed around her once again – bones, meridians, organs and then the rest of her. It kept shifting and changing with every cycle of her qi, growing every solid with each subtle shift. All the auspicious little changes wrought up to this point slotting together holistically until in one single moment it all connected and a final line between the whole thing was drawn, connecting mind, body and soul together and at the heart of it…

‘Bright Lotus Earthly Physique’

The symbol radiated in her mind’s eye and the physique coalesced…

She inhaled and qi rolled through her body, drawn to the previously intangible point above her navel. The filaments in her bones connected to it, her twelve principle meridians connected to it, the new connections through her organs connected to it and in a single cycle, her dantian formed anew.

Though it had only been a short while, she realised that she had missed having a proper understanding of the inner workings of her body far more than she had perhaps wanted to admit. What was there was not yet fully a dantian, it had to be said; it was more a focal point for all the qi in her body. It held qi, yes, but now it did so as the unified centre of all the different reservoirs in her bones, which were linked to it. As she watched, that qi had become shifting pools in each bone and now her bones all had faint creamy imprints of lotus flowers covering them in a motif-like design.

She exhaled, and...

“Oh, come on…”

She didn’t even have the heart to curse, realising that black droplets were already forming on her body, seeping out of her pores and ruining the clothes she was wearing.