Memories of the Fall

When we arrived in that place, it was as easy as stepping through the doorway to this room. However, once inside it was hard to say what was real and what was false, for the rules made a mockery of everything we understood of the world around us and death had no consideration for mighty or meek. To leave was more fraught than seizing good fortune from the heavens themselves... and all we got for the experience was a bunch of stone jars and a grade eight herb.

Excerpt from an ancient written account of an anomaly in the Inner Valleys to the Hunter Bureau.

~By Immortal Valiant Lion

~ Jun Arai & Sana ~

Arai opened her eyes and spent a few moments wondering if she was actually dead. The fall was a blur; they had fallen into the cloud... then she remembered hitting something wet? She tried to stand but discovered she was floating in shallow water, at was the now-silty edge of a deep pool. Presumably it had been nice and clear before she and Sana smashed into it. How she had survived that fall into water was somewhat inexplicable really. She tried to move deliberately and found that she was practically one giant bruise: everything hurt

-I don’t think anything’s broken, she thought as she very carefully moved her limbs and head and twisted her torso slightly, which is a minor miracle.

Looking up, she could see daylight above, such as filtered through the verdant greenery overshadowing the... entrance high above. They looked to be in some kind of sinkhole, and she had to guess they’d fallen more than six hundred metres. The hole was at least four hundred in its own right. Had they nearly fallen a mile vertically? Her head hurt, and just thinking of the good fortune required not to die horribly made her mind gibber a bit. Part of her told her she was in shock, and also suffering some kind of mental disconnect. Probably due to the fall.

I absolutely am, she shot back sourly, someone of my realm should not have survived this fall.

She corralled her thoughts back together and tried to call upon her mantra to help her healing but got nothing, which was concerning. She tried again, but it still seemed to do nothing much.

Flailing a bit more as she sought to get closer to the shore while simultaneously looking around to try and get a better grasp of her surroundings, she noticed belatedly that the light in this space was also a bit... off somehow. The air seemed fine, or if it wasn’t she was going to die not knowing what killed her.

-Worry about the things you can actually change, she told herself pointedly. She tried blinking a few times but it made no difference to the light, so she concentrated on moving through the water until, after a few more moments, she found purchase and was standing on her feet, sinking only slightly into the disturbed mud. The icy water was about breast-deep.

Now that she could look around properly, she confirmed her initial guess that she was at the bottom of some kind of sinkhole. Down here it was maybe one hundred metres across, narrowing to sixty or so at the entrance above. She stared warily at the walls above her, just in case the cracks and crevasses were filled with something properly dangerous, waiting to fall on her head. It would be rather pathetic to die to soul setting lingzhi or devils’ anthem after surviving that fall. Finally confident that she wasn’t going to die inexplicably, she turned back to the pool to see to other bodies in it.

Sana and Sir Huang.

With an alacrity she didn’t realise she was capable of in this condition, she covered the distance around the edge of the pool in several heartbeats. Thankfully, Sana was also right on the edge, so it took her mere moments to jump back in and drag her clear of the water. Cursing and trying not to panic, she rolled her sister over. A part of her that was much calmer than the rest somehow stepped in and started telling her what to do.

-Checklist: injuries to head and neck, broken spine, broken limbs? There were none, or no obvious ones anyway

-She was face down in the water for who knows how long? 'Drawing Breath' talisman! She had at least one, thankfully, and in her inner pockets. Not a storage device. Not for something that important.

Her sister was lying on her back, so she tilted her head down before rummaging through her own inner pockets to bring out a small talisman made of jade and carved with a moon rune. Biting her thumb, she smeared blood on it and then opened Sana’s mouth and pressed the talisman against her tongue, then waited a few moments until it dissolved into qi.

Agonising seconds ticked by until her sister’s dark brown eyes opened and she doubled over retching, water streaming out of her lungs.

“Where... the... fates... are we?” Sana managed to gasp out through the hacking, sobbing coughs.

“Easy sis” she helped her sit up. “As far as I can see we are alive.”

Sana managed to grin weakly, her voice creaking. “For ...now.”

“Will you be okay?” she asked, concerned.

Sana looked pale and s was shivering violently, so she fumbled a Yin Neutralising Pill out of her inner pockets and pushed it into her sister's mouth. Sana swallowed it weakly and, after a few moments, started to breathe more easily as the pill dissolved into her system.

“Probably?” Sana croaked, experimentally moving her hands and feet.

Patting her side her sister rasped “It seems I lost my bag in the fall... A pity.... It was mother’s.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she felt the pain as well, but it was just a bag, despite the memories that came with it. “You’re alive, that’s what’s important.”

“Speaking of,” she muttered, more to herself. “We need to see to Sir Huang.”

She had seen his body in the water, but it wasn’t there now, so it must have sunk? If he was wearing armour... Her thoughts were still skipping it seemed, not shaking off whatever damage had occurred with the fall. She wasn’t sure what realm he was in either, although it was a fair bet he was at least Nascent Soul, which meant the fall wouldn’t kill him even if he had landed on his head.

-Although other things might have after, she though as she stripped off her sodden and muddy gear and clothes – there was no reason to make the dive harder – and waded back into the icy water. It was rich in Yin Qi it seemed, she could feel it tugging at her leg muscles as she went deeper.

“Sis… throw me the pouch of Yang ward stones please!”

Sana sorted out a few of the bigger ones, then shoved them in the pouch and threw it out to her. It wasn’t a great throw, so she had to wade over and grab it, but she wouldn’t be able to do any better in her sisters situation. Tying it around her torso she took one and popped it in her mouth. That was a dangerous trick anywhere else, but now was not a time when danger was the problem. Tucking the stone, that was rapidly heating up in her mouth, into her cheek, she took several huge breaths then plunged under the water.

The pool was not as deep as she feared, but the stratification of qi in the water spoke to how long it had sat here and how old it was. The water was cloudy with disturbed silt, slowly settling, but it wasn’t so bad that she couldn’t immediately see Sir Huang, so she started swimming down towards him. At two metres below the surface the qi started to burn her skin, but it was at three metres deep, on the edge of a sloping drift of debris and silt, that she finally reached Sir Huang. Tying a rope around him, she kicked back to the surface and splashed ashore. It took her several further moments to haul him clear and kneel over his still form, but... the body looked, by any measure, rather wrong. Well, ‘wrong’ was not necessarily the right word, she realised, staring at its arms.

Belatedly she flipped him over onto his back to make sure he hadn’t drowned, only to find herself staring at the face. Or lack thereof: in its place was a moon rune on the forehead that was now devoid of energy. She searched the ‘body’ and then pulled the clothes off the torso when nothing more availed itself.

Sana stared on from the side before volunteering, “Well that’s one way to minimize danger in this place, infuse your soul into a puppet.”

She nodded, took a few steps away from the… puppet, and sat down on the shingle beach. “There’s zero chance of getting a fire going down here, isn't there,” she muttered.

Looking around, the only visible plants growing on the walls were fern-like things that offered leaves and fronds, but no wood unless she made the steep climb higher up the wall.

“Think we can burn rocks?” her sister joked, holding up the bag of elemental ward stones and scuffing the beach with her foot.

In lieu of a fire, because burning rocks really was a last resort kind of thing, they explored their surroundings properly in hopes of warming themselves with the physical exertion. The cavern sinkhole was a bit larger than it had first appeared, and it took the two of them about thirty minutes to explore the various side crevices and lower eroded parts, including a cavern of sorts at a point where the beach of the pool met the wall. Her initial judgement that it was a water-eroded sinkhole turned out to be correct, as they found a bunch of water-cut notches in the rock further up the walls of the cavern. Aside from that, their locality contained little else of interest, they had to agree.

Sitting on the beach a while later, having relocated to just inside the cavern, her sister skimmed a stone across the water, watching it skip. “No animal bones.”

“Not even shells, or anything else like it,” she agreed. “In fact, no evidence animals have ever been here at all.”

“Literally the only things here are plants and water, which bodes rather poorly." Her sister sighed, staring up at the ceiling. “No evidence of birds either.”

“There is fungi,” she grunted, waving a hand in the direction of the back of the cavern, where some mushrooms quietly shroomed, as mushrooms had a tendency to do in dark, dank places like that.

"There is always fungi," Sana chuckled. "It's like the apex species out here."

It really did contain little of interest though, completely lacking any signs that anything that wasn’t a plant or a fungus existed down here. Even those were boring, the most exotic specimens being were a few very minor spirit herbs.

“Even the herbs barely qualify as 'spiritual',” Sana held up a few stalks of a very weedy spirit grass.

“That is rather unusual given the density of qi here,” she frowned and looked around. The ferns looked like water ferns, but they weren't. Same for the vines on the far side and some other plants. None of them were really 'spiritual' even though they had the look of species she recognised.

“Really… climbing out seems to be the only route,” Sana finally observed after several minutes of silent consideration by the pool.

“Before we do that. I really want to sort out in my head why we are down here,” she slumped back on the dry sandy shoreline, with her head outside the cavern, and lay there staring at the blue-ish sky far above them. Something about the light was still bothering her for some reason.

She reached up for the Hunter Bureau talisman on her necklace... and stopped, because she wasn’t wearing it. For a moment she thought that meant she was really dead, which would make this a deeply ironic afterlife to be stuck in. Then her mind kicked her panic to the side and reminded her that she had been sorting her pack out on the ridgeline, before they noticed the Eclipse Shadow had nearly moved around. Her talisman, along with her storage jade, had been on her pack, which was hundreds of metres above them. At least they both still had their jade scrips; those were tied to their forearms for use as armour, just like Ling had a habit of doing.

“You have your Hunter talisman?” she sat up and asked Sana.

Sana blinked and began to pat down her pockets before slapping her forehead. “Shit. I gave it to Ling. She was imprinting the updated map on it so we had a spare. Then you called me over and—”

The two stared at each other dully. She patted herself down, then stared around the beach, before finally turning her vision to the water.

“You have a storage jade right!?” she asked, her panic rising again.

“Oh… yep, and yours,” Sana held up her wrist, on which was a knotted cord with two talismans.

They both stared at them and breathed out in relief. No storage jade would have been very bad. Bad in all kinds of ways. It was already bad enough that their packs, which contained the minor pouches, were lost. Her talisman sheaf was in her bag and Sana’s was in their mother’s. Both of those were presumably still back on the ridge. Hopefully. The alternative was they were scattered somewhere above as they fell, which would be an expensive and inconvenient loss, she considered. Also a sad one, as the bags were mementoes of their mother, kept and worn for luck, as were the talismans, a gift from their father upon entering the Hunter Pavilion.

A quick stocktake of the jade storage talismans confirmed to both of them that they did not have an immediate issue in terms of food or basic medicines. Looking at what they had, arrayed between them on the beach, she felt a touch better at last.

Her talisman held four large bottles of food pills, two bottles of fasting pills, one pot of purification pills, two fifty-gallon ‘jars’ of pure, drinkable water, several sets of various medicinal and poison curing pills, quite a selection of random elemental ward stones and formation-related curios, a set of tools for chopping and digging along with a crowbar, thirty metres of rope and four sets of spare clothes.

Sana’s talisman, meanwhile, held only three large bottles of food pills instead of four, courtesy of the squirrel, along with most of the herbs after they had rebalanced their stash of those the previous day, and a small stack of odd ores that had been stashed in one of the way stations at some point, left for recovery by a future team.

Their herb stockpile consisted of the three heaven’s blaze pines their group had harvested, several other smaller spirit trees and shrubs, a small selection of rare-grade herbs, some of a very high grade indeed, and a fairly large collection of miscellaneous herbs and fungi, mostly at the four- to six-star grade. Included within that category was several pieces of the six-star lamium the five of them had been attempting to collect, she noted. Most of the semi-rare herbs had been collected by Sana on the paths through the valleys.

As they sorted this all out on the beach and then she took her storage talisman back, they talked through the events preceding their arrival in the cave. It was as much a psychological exercise as anything, to calm their nerves and try to make sense of things.

“I was looking the other way,” Sana sighed, as they tried to piece back together those final moments.

“The nearest person to us should have been Ji Tantai,” she frowned.

“Fate-suckling mother-lover,” her sister spat. “You think he did this?”

“He has been the main cause of most of the issues up to this point,” she noted. “He makes Ha Yun look like a reasonable and upstanding person with the attitude he was waving around.”

“But how?” Sana frowned.

“Clearly he was hiding his strength,” she pointed out rather banally.

“Well duh,” Her sister grimaced. “That’s one for the Dao Father Obvious jar. I meant how did he circumvent the suppression?”

“You ask me but who do I ask? I’ve never heard of a treasure or talisman capable of it, not even in the Bureau listings of high-grade talismans and pills,” she sighed again. Breathing deeply still hurt.

They both sat in silence for a bit after that listening to the lapping of the water. That was somewhat soothing for her; she still had a headache from whatever injury was done during the fall, although Sana had checked and she wasn’t bleeding or bearing any obvious head trauma.

“So... he sneak-attacked Sir Huang, I guess?” Sana said eventually.

“It seems that way,” she agreed. That was a rather sad way to look at it really.

“If he had attacked us, with the strength to punch that... Sir Huang off the cliff, you or I would have turned to red mist,” her sister said quietly.

Not a pleasant thought, although it would have been an instant death and they wouldn’t have known, which made it better than some other forms of death she’d been close to over the years in Yin Eclipse. She poked the puppet with her foot. It was as durable a thing as she had ever seen really.

“Aren’t the Din clan allied with the Ha clan though?” That was bothering her. The logic of this just didn’t fully add up at the moment.

“I guess he didn’t want competition?” her sister sighed. “Who can say what cracked kind of logic goes through the head of someone like that? He was clearly using some kind of art to try to mess with everyone. Even the Ha clan elites were noting it.”

“That could be it?” she ran a hand through her dark, matted hair. It was nearly dry; a reminder that, for all the humidity here, it was actually pretty warm. Maybe 35 degrees.

“You think that was why?” Her sister started to squeeze her own hair out. It was filled with silt she noticed, giving the dark brown locks an even more matted look.

“His art wasn’t working, so he took the opportunity to get rid of the biggest threat. I guess he wanted us, or some of us, due to the proclamation,” she thought out loud as she checked her top, which was drying near at hand.

“Seems logical,” Sana agreed. “Ironic that he kicked the two of us off the cliff as well then.”

“We were probably an acceptable loss,” she scowled. That hurt to say out loud, her potential life’s ending summed up in two words as an ‘acceptable loss’.

“That’s meant to be my role,” her sister chuckled darkly. “I’m the one who makes the dark asides, not you.”

“There’s enough to go around,” she had a half-hearted laugh at her sister's now pouting expression, but her mood wasn’t really in it.

They stopped talking about it for a while after that and ate some of the fresh food. There was such a thing as picking over things too much after all. Once her clothes were mostly dry, she put most of them back on. Her sister stayed partially stripped down as she waded through the shallows, checking for any evidence that some of their stuff might have fallen. As she sort of predicted, however, nothing showed up.

It took a while to rebalance and repack their kit into the storage talismans. The division of the pills and food gave her some renewed hope that they wouldn’t run into any issues for quite a while on that front, thankfully. They had preserved food apiece to last a month and then some, alongside the fresh goods they still retained. Water might be more of an issue, but so long as they kept the jars in a storage talisman it would be okay, even assuming they couldn't top it up or find another source.

That only left the puppet's body. Once she stripped what remained of its garments, she found that it was really a full model of an adult human male, just lacking a face. The density of the thing was immense. Not to the point where they couldn’t move it, but she must have used more strength than she had initially thought to pull it out of the water. The water itself had aided her in that somewhat, being oddly buoyant, she had since noticed, probably as feature of its qi density although the qi in it was weird and hard for her to parse. Eventually, her detailed inspection of the puppet turned up a slight scratch on the back of its neck, just above where the seventh thoracic vertebrae should be. If it wasn’t a puppet, that would have been a lethal wound in all likelihood. There was something residual around the scratch as well, a faint corrosion perhaps, that she made sure not to touch. That would be another on the ‘stupid ways to die’ list.

Sana stared at the wound. “Do you think that Ji Tantai knew this was a puppet?”

“I’m going to assume not… But who knows? Neither of us can sense soul residues,” she sighed softly, squatting back and stating the obvious. “We have no way to know if it was the attack or something else that pushed whoever Sir Huang was out of the puppet.”

“One way or another,” her sister gave voice to the thought both of them were dancing around. “We are going to have to get back up there. Or at the very least, get out of here.”

They both stared upwards again, at the sheer sides of the sinkhole.

“The cliff is sheer. You can’t fly this close to the mountain. Even teleportation with the really expensive ninth grade talismans gets spotty,” she rambled out loud. That was more for the Dao Father Obvious pot.

“On the bright side,” her sister chuckled. “Even if that Ji Tantai is an Immortal or something... Unless he wants to physically jump off the cliff after us or plans to climb down here personally, we are unlikely to encounter him. Not to mention qi sensing doesn’t work at all up here, beyond what you can see. The mists are the death of all those arts. If he comes looking for us he is going to flail madly and get lost in all likelihood.”

“Where is my sister? I want the snarky one back,” she gave her a small shove. Sana laughed a bit weakly. It wasn’t really funny, but they were both stressed enough that they needed some coping mechanisms. She needed some, certainly – she was still worried about her inability to think clearly for more than a few moments at a time.

“Do we even try to get back up—?” she sighed, standing up.

“…”

Sana gave her an odd look. Oh, she hadn’t finished the sentence. Shit.

“I mean, do we try to get back to the top of the cliff.”

“Ah,” Sana pondered. “I say we get out of here then worry about that. It’s what… a six hundred metre sheer drop, at least? With marginal overhangs, maybe I wasn’t that conscious of the descent.”

They stared up at the walls of the sinkhole. It was at least three hundred metres. Sheer and sloping inwards towards the top, also, with very few overhangs and not much in the way of creepers.

“…” Climbing it was going to be taxing.

“It’s still weird that there are no birds down here,” her sister groused. “Or even bats.”

They sat quietly for a while longer, without much need to talk since both of them were largely okay. It was going to be an arduous climb, with a lot of communication and concentration required, so n the end they both decided that they should have a short, proper rest before attempting it. She kept the first watch, for what little it was worth, seeing nothing but rustling leaves, lapping water and mushrooms; if it wasn’t for their current circumstances it would be idyllic. Her sister slept, with the aid of one of the meditation pills, for just over an hour before they swapped, and didn’t seem particularly satisfied with the rest. When she woke from her own short, meditative sleep, she didn’t find it that replenishing either; they were only doing it because experience told them both that these kinds of preparations helped.

Taking one last look around their cave, their view was inevitably returned to the puppet, now somewhat re-clothed, lying nearby.

“What do we do about that?” her sister mused.

“Can it go into the storage jade?” she wondered. She hadn’t bothered to check before now.

Sana walked over to it and pressed the jade against it. Nothing happened: after a few seconds she looked at the notification that had lit up on the side of the talisman and said, a bit glumly, “It seems it counts as its own spatial container somehow,”"Now I really regret not asking for a better storage device when we started this endeavour, they could have at least spotted us one," Sana grumbled.

She eyed her own one, nodding just as glumly. Theirs were fairly crude by the standards of such things – stuff with their own inner spaces, living things, corpses with intact foundations and some stuff that was simply too dense in qi wouldn't go into them. Mostly those were limitations you could work around, and unless you were capturing high star grade herbs intact, were ones she had found ways to live with. Buying a storage ring that a Qi Refinement equivalent cultivator could bind was disgustingly expensive because all the normal, affordable ones were aimed at Soul Foundation cultivators or higher who could soul bind their own artefacts.

“Bleugh. We’ll mark it on the map. At best we can only try to explain. Sir Huang seemed fairly reasonable as far as the Ha family’s goons go. I doubt he will hold it against us that we couldn’t recover it right here and now,” she suggested.

“I hope so,” her sister groused. “Carrying it out, up that, will be impossible for us given its weight. We will burn half our replenishment pills in the process.”

The climb took long enough that Arai found she didn’t want to count after a while. Not beyond the immediate specifics of their pathing, anyway. Here was not the place to ask searching questions of your mental condition, starting with how long they had been down here already, and the minute by minute pathfinding took a severe toll on her concentration as it was. The rock faces were quite a bit more overhanging than they had looked from below. At least the surface was manageable; the original rock was smoothed by water or some other erosive force, but there was enough by way of crevices and faulting to give them handholds. Even so, it was harsh and demanding. For a good portion of it, she was holding on only with her hands, or holding onto Sana as they climbed past each other. Sometimes there were creepers or vegetation she trusted enough to hold their weight, but mostly they stuck to the rocks. Those were clearer. She was also constantly on the lookout for anything that might spring at them from a crevice or piece of greenery: just because there was nothing below didn’t mean that there wasn’t something here, after all.

So they made their way upwards side by side. Hand by hand, foothold by foothold. It was impossible to think beyond the next twenty hand- and footholds. The worst thing to do would be to end up in a dead end and have to waste precious energy descending or scaling sideways around the face more than they already were. She reckoned they had already done almost one entire circuit of its perimeter in travelling the first two hundred metres vertically.

“How much time do you think it has been since we fell?” Sana asked from below her as they climbed one of the easier parts about half-way up.

“I dunno. I think we have been climbing for around two hours? Before that... we slept for an hour each, we messed around for half an hour before that. It’s nearly five hours in total? Six?” she pondered as she looked for the next handhold, considering the merits of scuttling sideways along this crack. There was a plausible surface about ten metres to their left.

The question of time, and the reminder of the fall, brought along with other unwelcome thoughts. She didn’t want to think what might have happened to Juni, Shu and Ling; presumably they were valuable for their knowledge, so they wouldn’t have died? Part of her was a bit annoyed at Sana, suddenly and rather irrationally, for making her think about it. Halfway up a sheer cliff face over a pool that you only survived falling to the first time by random chance was not the place to have 'existential crisis thoughts' about your lifelong friends’ fates.

“Sorry,” her sister sighed as if she had read her mind. “I was just wondering if something weird was going on with the time. The light doesn’t seem right... it's shifting to afternoon, but...”

“Oh,” She quashed her annoyance even more firmly.

That was right. She had been wondering that herself, but not really vocalised it.

“No idea. I do agree that the light is weird, it’s been bothering me for a while but I can’t say why.”

They climbed on in silence after that, beyond the occasional direction. Compartmentalising the tasks was all that made it manageable, particularly for the final fifty metres, which were probably the worst. The rock there was actually wet, and slick with algae that she had to stare at carefully with every handhold just in case it was algru. The mould-like plant would be properly lethal this high up if she put her hand into a patch of it unaware.

Here the creepers were not as strong. The vegetation was more vigorous, but their root systems were more nebulous and searching, spreading over the surface but not working their way into cracks. Eventually, they abandoned relying on it at all for handholds, and soon after that she started getting nervous of even using the trunks of small shrubs, flush to the rock, as footholds. However, the most unnerving thing about the greenery was the complete lack of anything untoward hiding in it: there were no bugs or insects. That said, existential questions about the space they were in were also relegated to the naughty rock in her mind. No distractions.

It was with a deep sigh that she finally pulled herself over the edge and helped Sana over a moment later. She found that the sinkhole was slightly offset from the cliff face: a waterfall, running out of the cliff some four hundred metres above if she was any judge, had changed course incrementally over the years so the pool was about 20 metres further over now. The moisture and runoff from this new pool was what was feeding the one they just climbed out of, a ridge of slightly harder rock all that separated the new and old plunge pools. An incremental difference in erosion that had made all the difference over the aeons. They had apparently fallen squarely into the void left by the waterfall’s old plunge pool.

That was beyond lucky... thirty metres either direction... her gaze traversed the cliff base. They would be crippled to the point of an agonising death.

“We were down there for six hours... Right?” Sana muttered, staring skywards.

She looked up the cliff again, and then out into the treeline above them. She managed to force out woodenly: “Riiiight… six-ish hours.”

Sana let a flicker of worry into her expression. “It was mid to late afternoon when we fell, it’s still mid-afternoon now. There’s no way we were out a whole day….?”

That wasn’t even the foremost thing, she realised. Staring around, she found what had been bugging her subtly all the way up. The vegetation was...

“The vegetation here is all normal,” she said, plucking a common herbaceous weed out of a rock crevice.

"That’s not uncommon," her sister frowned. “We have encountered valleys which were depressingly normal on rare occasions, even this far in. Although…

“Hmmm,” Her sister also started to poke around, cautiously. “You’re right. This is almost normal. ‘Mortal’s garden’ kind of normal in fact."

She found herself wondering if the suppression here was even more severe and, in attempt to check, bounced on the spot a few times. Her strength seemed as it was, and she hadn’t had any issues climbing, after all.

Sana strolled over to a nearby tree and casually poked her finger into it. It pushed through the bark like it was damp paper.

Pulling her finger out, she examined the hole. “Yep. Totally normal, looks like a variety similar to blue river oak.”

Looking around, she was struck by how much stuff looked similar to things she knew. Yet, when she stared closely at them, there were subtle differences. Shapes of leaves, types of stems, no flowers— actually... no flowers anywhere that she could see.

They both stared up at the clifftop far above. It was now wreathed in cloud above them it seemed to be slowly descending as they watched.

“Do you fancy another climb?” Sana asked pensively.

“Tomorrow,” she shuddered.

Her arms added to the chorus of mental denial, she was definitely approaching the point of proper meridian strain. “Definitely tomorrow.”

A quick exploration of the pool by the waterfall revealed no fish, or anything other than plants, living in it. Sitting by the pool, Arai found herself again afflicted by a growing sense of unease as she tried to place what else was wrong. It was only when she got up to look further along the cliff base, travelling far enough away from the waterfall that its sound faded, masked by the trees, that she realised what was off. There had been nothing living in the sinkhole, no bugs, no nothing. That, however, was vaguely explicable, there were weird places like that. The problem was that, now that she listened carefully, there were no birds. No calls. It wasn’t that the forest was dead, it just contained no animals that she could hear. No birds, no mammals... she stared around her... also no insects, even here.

With a certain ominous curiosity, she got the shovel from her storage talisman and dug a small hole. When it was knee-deep, she scattered the soil, looking at it. Leaf litter, rocks, and it was quite rich in qi – although the qi was odd, seemingly impossible for her to interact with. The real problem, again, was that there were no worms. No grubs. No insects or anything like it. That being the case in the air and plants and such was already weird, but even in the soil... That was not normal.

She made her way back, to find that Sana had finished her own excursion in the other direction.

“No birds that way either?” She queried.

“Nope. Nor any insects, worms or the like,” Sana added pensively “Also no flowers on the plants”.

"Yes. No flowers," she muttered. Sana looked at her. She had let the worry creep into her voice. "That shouldn't even be possible for a place this lush. Unless the season here is radically off?"

"That is possible.” Sana replied, with rather more hope than confidence she felt. “There are those valleys near the South Grove ruins that are always in late spring, the ones with the perpetually flowering plum and cherry trees." That was the main reason she wasn't worrying too much about the lack of flowers. Not yet anyway.

They both spent the next thirty minutes looking through the forest boundary carefully. By the end, both of them were starting to feel genuinely uneasy.

“This is not the right valley,” Sana said eventually, staring up at the sky, probably so she wouldn't see her rather concerned expression. “This should be the western side of the East Fury peaks, in the cloud forest, and this area is a tetrid stalker zone. There should be a big nest of them about two miles west along the far ridgeline.”

“Mmhm,” She agreed there. This was most certainly not the valley that they had been looking out over from the top of the cliff. Somehow.

Sana pulled up a stem of common herb grass absently and started to nibble on it. She did this for about ten seconds before taking it out of her mouth and staring at it.

“What is it?” she asked her sister. “Is it poisonous?”

“No…” her sister frowned deeply. “It’s… just try it.”

Puzzled she took a piece of grass and nibbled on it. It was starchy and left a pulp in her mouth, much as non-spiritual grass should. She held it in her mouth for a few seconds and then froze. It was…. intangible? No. That wasn’t quite right, it still tasted of something after all. She kept it in her mouth for a few more seconds before spitting it out, then took another stem and chewed that carefully. It was there, then it bent and broke apart. That was all normal. The pulpy mess in her mouth tasted of sour grass, basically: it was sometimes used as a pallet cleanser in rustic salads. She closed her eyes and focused on it, trying to work out what was wrong. There was no sense of nutrition from it? Was that it?

Dropping the grass she walked over to a green, slender wild cabbage plant. It was also devoid of its usual orange and indigo flowers, even Though it should have been showing buds at this time of year. Plucking some leaves, she proceeded to carefully chew them for a short while, but spat them out in the end. Aside from the feeling of substance in her mouth, there was nothing more. The flavour, the sweetness was there, even the sensation of moisture, but they gave no actual sustenance. Her body didn’t even get anything from the absorption of the moisture in the leaves. It just seemed to vanish somehow.

Sana was squatting by another cabbage, looking at it closely, with a disconcerted look on her face.

“You know...” her own voice suddenly sounded quite loud in the forest clearing despite the waterfall in the distance. “I think we have fallen into one of the properly problematic anomalies.”