Memories of the Fall

When you are making your way through the Inner Valleys between Thunder Crest and East Fury, do not be hasty or injudicious in your path. It is no exaggeration to tell you that you are, at any one time, no further than one hundred metres away from something that could kill you as easily as breathing. What will keep you alive is not your strength, or your spirit root, or your family name. It is knowing every damn thing in this jade slab so well you can dream it backward and become the Dao Parent to its firstborn child.

Excerpt from ‘Survival in the Shadow of the Great Mount’

~By Ling Shao, Teaching Elder of the West Flower Picking Hunter Pavilion.

~ Kun Juni, The Herb Hunters ~

Kun Juni ran. Sprinted even, as fast as she could. Han Shu kept proximal pace abreast of her as she zigzagged between trees and shrubs. The valley floor here was less dense due to the taller tree canopy overhead, which she was certain was not optimal for her survival in this particular situation. A flash of heat swept over her from the left and Han Shu said something, inarticulate cursing she guessed, as he rolled away from a gyre of fire that had swept up in its wake.

“They blocked that way,” Lin Ling yelled as loud as she could, appearing out of nowhere to slightly behind and to her right.

“Nameless fates,” she rasped the curse out.

Every breath was agony still, a gift from her initial landing in the forest here, having thrown herself straight off the other side of the ridge to open up distance to escape their pursuers. Glancing to the left as she skidded over a low boulder, she really wished she hadn’t: a wall of weirdly reddish fire was crackling away around three hundred metres from them. It split the valley in half, blocking any means to head further into the interior. That had been the way Lin Ling had come from. She was about to ask her why when it became self-explanatory.

*KUUAAAAASSSSK!*

The inarticulate, keening wail from beyond the wall of fire made her skin cold as ice and her heart skip a few beats. A female tetrid stalker, and now enraged as well. She caught flashes of a cow-sized, eight-legged spider-like thing beyond the wall of flames. Even at this distance, its presence made her skin crawl with the kind of fear that prey feels just being in the vicinity of something they cannot escape.

“Fates! We go up,” Han Shu snarled.

“No… argument… there...” she hissed under her breath.

She didn’t dare pause as she hurdled another rock. It was ironic that her crappy spirit root was finally paying off. Her physical cultivation, which she had originally picked up because reaching Mantra Seed would allow her to abandon and restart her spiritual cultivation with some fairly significant and much-needed benefits, was nearly as good as Han Shu’s, a bit ahead of Arai and Sana. If she survived this, and that was a big IF, she would have to buy Old Man Ling some excellent wine. It was his teachings, beating the arrogance and conceit out of her like she was a dust rug in the process of advancing her training, that was keeping her alive at this point, the mantra giving her soul a few precious extra seconds of protection from the gaze and scream of the stalker.

Behind them, there was an even bigger explosion and the stalker’s scream cut off abruptly. So an eight-star qi beast was no match for him at all?

Behind her, in the forest, Di Ji… or maybe Din Ouyeng was laughing manically.

-Are they treating this pursuit like some kind of fate-thrashed game? It might very well be one to them, based on what she knew of the nameless-blessed calamity that ‘Ji Tantai’ had revealed himself to be.

She skidded over another rock and narrowly avoided going feet-first into a crevice full of spiderwebs. Shadows flickered below as she dropped a fire ward stone into it in passing and Han Shu, evidently realising what she was planning, also threw a thunder one down. Thousands of shadows scuttled and hissed as they illuminated the nest, stirring it up.

The ridgeline rose above them now, as behind her was a flare of thunder and another muted shriek from a tetrid stalker. Another fissure, also full of webs, nearly dropped her into darkness as she leapt forward again.

-Is there a cavern underneath here? On a whim, she grabbed one of the talismans from Arai’s pack, one of Grandmaster Mang’s, and dropped it into the fissure after pushing the required activation qi into it. If there was a cavern nest of cave spiders down there, bringing them up would unpleasantly delay the pursuit a little. Neither of them seemed particularly tolerant of spiders.

She made it thirty metres and one more chasm before the ground behind her lifted slightly. The pressure wave from the detonation carried her onto the scree.

Lin Ling smashed down nearby, panting hard, and hissed; “What did you do!?!”

“Talisman into spider nest. RUN,” was all she could gasp out.

Swinging the two packs onto the other shoulder where she could get at them more easily, she just ran straight on. Leaping boulders was easy with her current physical prowess at least. The wave of insidious, lingering, intent – carrying something undefinable that might actually have been soul sense – which swept over everything a moment later vindicated her decision to throw the talisman down.

-Do they have a treasure that allows them to lift the suppression somehow? she wondered, even as her own defensive artefacts blunted the worst of the probing attack.

Such objects did exist, but using them was suicidal because up here everything was enmeshed into the valleys in bizarre and esoteric ways. Pushing the suppression upwards in a region to Soul Foundation was thus an act of utter insanity, simply because it would get you noticed like the world’s fattest, juiciest fly smashing into a spider’s web.

She didn’t look back to see if the spider queen was coming to the surface, instead, just praying that the creature might buy them a few more minutes against the pursuit.

The lower part of the ridge climb was thankfully straight-forward. A dozen vertical leaps carried her and Han Shu a third of the way up it, to the base of the actual cliff. Lin Ling was still burning her current air walk talisman, so she just ran straight up, dodging from tree to tree to keep cover.

Above them, a chain of lightning bolts roared across from over the previous ridgeline and scoured the cliff. That was a ridiculous talisman, if talisman it was.

“My concealment talisman is about to run out,” Han Shu signed as she landed beside him.

Without comment, she tossed him Sana’s spare talisman sheaf. She had both their bags, having grabbed them as she bounded off the ridge they had been on.

The route further up was not easy, it seemed, leaving the best route as the inland One, towards the sun peaking past the mountain.

“You think the Ha cultivators are all dead?” Han Shu grimaced as he rapidly reapplied his talisman.

“Certainly. Sir Huang was sneak-attacked like that, and based on the explosions Sir Cao probably was as well.” She paused to think for a moment, then continued. “If we head for the sun line, there are several larger nests.”

“And there is that Jasmine,” Han Shu agreed.

Looking up and seeing that Lin Ling had reached the cliff as well and was looking down at them, she pointed towards the sun and signed, “Go there.”

Lin Ling didn’t bother to sign back and started flitting through the trees on the cliff face.

“Is that wise?” Han shu asked. “That Jasmine grows in the next valley down.”

“They seem to have tried to shift the suppression up to Soul Foundation!” she signed back as Han Shu finished reapplying his talisman.

“…”

“Are they insane?” Han Shu groaned, before crouching and jumping to the next boulder.

“No, probably just ignorant and very confident,” she grimaced, following after him, making her way vertically up the slumped cliff face

They were almost certainly being tracked by their jades in any case, Ling Luo’s Jade Loci was able to do that and a lot more. As such, as far as she could see, their only strategy for survival was the ‘death fields’: the places they usually avoided, the paths where anomalies hunted, the lairs of terrible things in the valley floors that the jadework records talked about. They would run through them all and throw whatever they could into their pursuers in the process, turning the entire valley system over in their wake. If flight was impossible, then the pair either had to chase them in person or risk teleportation. So far their pursuers were going with the former.

That was probably why they had chosen to force the suppression somehow: to them, it likely seemed an expedient choice given their background, but up here, soul sense just made you a target, and with any luck, they would die horrifically without ever knowing the extent of their mistake.

“Up ahead. Centipede burrow,” Han Shu signalled.

She nodded and prepared another talisman one of Arai’s this time. Slapping it on the edge of the dark slit in the cliff, she finally risked a glance behind. The forest was on fire, the screams of enraged tetrid stalkers still echoing in the distance. She caught several flickers of lightning amid the burning forest, telling her that one of them was in the valley now.

“I’d hoped they would have lost some ground with the ridge,” Han Shu signed.

“They aren't gaining much though,” she sent back.

They hit the lower ridgeline a few moments later, the ground levelling out and the undergrowth becoming thicker again. Wincing, she charged straight through. All she could do was trust to the barrier charms at this point to save her from anything overt. In any event, dying to something in the shrubbery was probably preferable to being caught by Di Ji.

Behind them, there was an enraged shriek that made the air quiver and the world around her swim. Not a tetrid stalker. The spider queen? The calibre of the soul strength that came with the noise was phenomenal. Even at this distance, it was all she could do to stay conscious and running. The qi-infused laughter cut off for a moment, followed by a series of ground-shaking detonations that far exceeded anything they had yet felt.

The shrieking intensified and then Lin Ling was beside them.

“One teleported ahead. Waiting on the upper limit of the west valley wall.”

“Bah!” she scowled. “They are going to make us race the shadow?”

“Looks like,” Lin Ling grimaced. “I left them a surprise though.”

There was nothing more to say, really, so they turned and sprinted flat-out through the green. The edge of the ridge appeared out of the mists like a spectre, but none of them stopped for it. Behind them came a crack and then the smell of sweet spirit grass. Another thunderous howl echoed through the trees, from the direction of the sun line.

“You woke the moon loon,” Han Shu said accusatorily.

“I did,” Lin Ling giggled, with an incredibly nasty grin on her face.

The whole ridge behind them shuddered. The mists warped and for a second she caught a glimpse of a four-armed furred ape hanging on the edge of the cliff. A moment later a figure in purple appeared on the top of the ridge, in full view of the ape.

“You dare disturb this seat? Wretched things!”

“Oh, fates it even speaks,” Han Shu winced as they crashed through the upper story of this new valley.

Before she could reply, a vast arc of purple lightning struck down on the far side of the ridge. A nova of what she was sure was soul sense erupted a moment later, making her miss her footing, only Han Shu’s hand on her collar preventing her from smashing into the forest floor. With a grunt, he threw her forward and followed after.

This was a narrow valley, mostly unremarkable except for some swampy bits to the far side. Nothing worth wasting talismans on. The next ridge, however—

Grimacing, she swallowed another pill infused with fire qi for her blood and earth qi for her bones. The rush of extra energy spilled through her like a torrent. Her arms were almost glowing and her skin turned translucent under the overload of elemental energy. Without pausing to lose any momentum from the throw she launched herself vertically, running up the cliff face, using the qi in her body to pull herself towards the face. She could feel her physique fraying at the edges even as she did so. Old Ling would have called this cultivation... and laughed at her when she complained.

All three of them arrived at the top at the same moment. She barely had time to react to an ‘uki kantis’ tree that broke her path as she hit it feet first. Fortunately, Han Shu caught her again on the rebound and threw her upwards once more. Before she hit the canopy in the next valley she palmed a ‘Lightfoot’ talisman’ to break her fall. The inertia of the impact turned it to dust almost immediately, but its purpose had been served.

Twenty metres to her left Lin Ling landed, cratering the ground and scattering vegetation. Han Shu landed a moment later using the same method she had.

“Left or right?” she signalled.

“Left,” Lin Ling signed back. “God Bewitching Jasmine.”

She signed affirmatively

-Left it is then.

Right led towards another swamp area with some cave pools. There were snapping xuanwu there, but the Jasmine was a harder threat to deal with if you just charged in.

There was a roar behind them and a massive detonation shook the whole forest. A figure impacted the far ridgeline, its four arms twitching weakly. In the sky behind them, a second sun was burning. She recognised the sigil in it grimly.

“’Sun Seizing’ talisman,” Lin Ling yelped. She had clearly been to the same auctions in Blue Water City.

A moment later a second figure, in blue and white, flickered over the ridgeline and she understood how they were keeping up.

-’Sky Shifting’ talismans?!?

“Is that…” Han Shu narrowed his eyes and looked across at the scene as they ran.

“A Sovereign grade ‘Sky Shifting’ talisman,” she signed.

Opposite them, the terrible ape, a ten-star active threat, howled and hammered its chest. Before it could even react, a warping distortion in the sky over the valley extended out and hit it full on. She saw its body twist and distort for a second before exploding into pieces. Something hazy flitted out of it, into the forest, and vanished without a sound.

“Are they made of talismans?” Lin Ling asked, looking more than a bit panicked. “What realm are those two actually at?”

“With this kind of firepower? Chosen Immortal at least," She signed back.

As one, they charged into the grove. The God Bewitching Jasmine was a threat comparable to the Life-Breaking Aspen Grove: a thirteen-star ‘zone’ active threat that was also considered as a minor anomaly in its own right.

“I am sorry mother… your daughter is going to die without a corpse,” she muttered under her breath as they ran beneath the twirling silver blooms.

"Be careful," Lin Ling grimaced, looking up at the hypnotically beautiful flowers... "I don't have another ‘Skitter Leap’ talisman from Grandmaster Mang to bail us out."

“If we survive this place, we are going under Sky Chaser Ridge,” She signed.

The signs that both of them sent back were not worth translating.

~ Ha Yun, Young Master of the Ha Clan ~

“I am Di Ji, and I am so pleased that you are all able to be here today to help," The youth said with a broad smile, turning from where he stood. Six golden rings gently orbited his body that hadn’t been there a moment before.

Ha Yun stared blankly at the place where Sir Huang, Arai and Sana had been standing a second before. His brain was still trying to formulate a rational response to whatever the fates this was… a nightmare?

–Is this a different Di Ji? Isn’t Di Ji… dead?

“Sneak attack?” Ha Leng gawped beside him.

Kun Juni had used her movement art to arrive beside the edge where Arai and Sana had fallen, and was already holding their bags. Din Ouyeng lazily grasped her by the arm, preventing her from falling. In the same instant, Lin Ling threw out a talisman and launched herself off the edge, following Juni and Han Shu.

“Tcch,” Din Ouyeng laughed and suddenly two more arms were grasping for the fleeing Herb Hunters.

“I didn’t want to throw them over with that old fool, those two were worth making my toys,” Di Ji sighed, lowering his hand and staring down.

The talisman that Lin Ling had slapped down twisted and the moment warped. Lin Ling, Han Shu and Kun Juni dissolved into multi-coloured butterflies.

“FUCK!” Di Ji snarled, his mood changing instantly as he uttered an odd curse that sounded faintly like it was in Easten. “They had a talisman like that?”

The words shook him free of his reverie and he instantly palmed the strongest barrier talisman he possessed from his storage and triggered it to cover the area around them. Ha Mao and Ha Ding both dived for cover, triggering their own barriers without bothering to comment.

The multi-coloured butterflies continued to swirl around. The world was spinning faintly.

His ears were ringing. There was no sound?

–Ah! blood was running down his face.

The aftershock of the strike that hit Sir Huang in the neck and threw him, Arai and Sana over the edge. Belatedly he saw Ha Jiao lying in two pieces nearby.

-When did that…?

Ling Luo sat where she had been, unmoving and seemingly oblivious to what was going on around her.

“Fuck…fuck fuck… what kind of Qi Condensation brats have a Dao Immortal ‘Skitter Leap’ talisman?” Di Ji shook his head in disgust.

“It will only buy them a bit of time,” Din Ouyeng's tone oozed contempt. "With that support, we can still keep pace."

He tried to grasp how strong the two of them really were, but when his qi came into contact with the pair he discovered that they might as well have been a hole in the world for all that he could feel. Sir Huang had been right…

Their surroundings lurched. Something in that moment triggered the special barrier within his body even as he realised he had screamed out loud in shock.

Sir Cao blurred towards Di Ji. The motion was so fast that the other man was just afterimages as he covered the ten metres between them.

Everything froze. Again.

Din Ouyeng was standing before Sir Cao, holding his sword blade with his hand. The white- and blue-robed youth had a faint sneer on his face as his hand closed around the Immortal Artefact, bending it like it was soft wax.

A palm strike sent Sir Cao flying towards the far edge of the ridge. Something blurred, Sir Cao and a younger version of himself both charging forward.

-But Nascent Souls can’t—?

{Nine Forms of the Jade Severing Sword}

The words weren’t spoken so much as manifested through the phenomenon executed by Sir Cao. A beautiful jade sword slid out of the void and hit the surprised Din Ouyeng, but seemed to do no damage at all, merely making the youth stagger backwards a few feet.

A golden ring of light spun away from Di Ji into the sky, then smashed down onto the ridge, locking them all in a circle of golden fire. The talisman barrier he had conjured collapsed at the first blow, and the qi he had not been able to feel was suddenly flowing inside him.

Staggering up he saw that Di Ji was now holding a small golden orb. It glittered like a gem and seemed to hold a blazing sun within it. The barrier around him rippled weirdly and the moment distorted.

Sir Cao’s attack flowed backwards.

Din Ouyeng walked forward, looking bored.

Sir Cao desperately parried the casually swiped hand from Din Ouyeng, only to see his Nascent Soul grasped at the neck.

“Pathetic,” Din Ouyeng sneered, closing his hand into a fist.

The crack of energy that discharged was so bright that he was left with spots in his eyes. Sir Cao screamed in agony and staggered, blood running from all the orifices on his face. Ha Mao, sobbing in terror, threw a talisman desperately in the direction of Din Ouyeng. The youth laughed and reached out to grab it—

When the world stopped ringing with strange aftershocks, the ridge was in ruins.

Din Ouyeng and Di Ji were a bit singed, if otherwise unharmed. That was… had Ha Mao used the Dao Immortal ‘Spark Dragon’ talisman?

Suddenly Di Ji’s eyes widened. A small green sword was hovering by Sir Cao. The fire that flickered across its surface gave off an unholy aura of destruction that was eating up the man’s physical body. The sword shot forward, towards Din Ouyeng, who finally drew out his weapon. The first strike from the small green blade Din Ouyeng deflected upwards with his sword. The second spun off to the side, shattering rocks, and passed out of the golden circle where it turned a decent portion of the ridgeline beyond it into dust. The third strike made Din Ouyeng stagger back as the deflected strike was dispersed all around him, twisting the space with strange green lines for a few seconds.

When everything settled and the world slid back together he realised that Ha Mao was dead, his body split in two and his eyes still wide with horror. Ha Ding was missing both his legs at the knee, weakly pawing at a bottle of blood staunching pills. Ling Luo had also been caught in the attack and the lower half of her body still sat where it had been. Her torso was on the rock beside it, still upright. She was still sitting placidly, as if oblivious to her death.

Di Ji glanced towards Ling Luo and Ha Yun saw his facial expression twist into incomprehensible rage.

“YOU MOTHERFUCKER! HOW DARE YOU BREAK MY THINGS?”

He felt the words rather than heard them. His vision swam double and something swept across the ridge. The barrier twisted. In a panic, he triggered his other lifesaving talisman, the one his father had given him for his tenth birthday. It would defend against a direct attack from an Ancient Immortal, according to the family’s Supreme Elder who had taught him how to use it.

-Ah. Nameless. He was too weak to use it to its full effect.

The barrier cracked like glass.

When he recovered himself he was lying on the ground, a ringing in his head and strange pains in his body that stopped him moving. The other barrier, the one from the clan elders, had held, miraculously.

The weight of Di Ji’s soul strength was properly manifest now. The colours had bled out of the world, aside from the golden flames of the barrier around their location, flickering in slow motion.

Di Ji stood in front of Sir Cao, his fist through the other man’s stomach. Sir Cao’s dantian was smashed in the same instant that the movement occurred, orphaned qi swirling out into the world around them.

What remained of Sir Cao’s Nascent Soul tried to flee.

Di Ji ignored it. Instead, Din Ouyeng reached out, almost at random as far as he could see from his current vantage point. Space twisted around his hand and he watched blankly as the hand of the youth arched impossibly, travelling all the way to the far ridge and grabbing something, pulling it back…

Sir Cao’s Nascent Soul flickered in Din Ouyeng’s hand as he held it up as if it were a bedraggled kitten.

“Stupid old thing. You think you can flee with this degree of capability?” Din Ouyeng chuckled.

“Let me show you what real power is like,” Di Ji grinned broadly and waved his hand.

The space around Luo Ling twisted and flowed backwards. Luo Ling was where she had been, sitting intact and well. He tried to move his head to see better. Ha Leng lay nearby, within arm’s reach, still conscious and with a horrified expression on his face.

“You will regret this,” Sir Cao hissed. “The Ha Family is not the—”

“Boring, boring,” Di Ji waved a hand and turned to look at him.

Din Ouyeng closed his fist and Sir Cao’s soul was pulled directly into his hand, forever silenced.

Space twisted around him. The barrier rippled and twisted as Di Ji put his hand on it, then through it. As soon as its integrity was compromised he felt the recoil pass through him, the whiplash making him vomit blood as his world turned red. It also washed away the remaining dissociation and made him properly aware of his current condition, which was… very bad.

His body was ruined. That was the pain, his meridians had finally managed to supplant his nervous system to give him proper information. His back was broken in three places, his right leg was missing at the knee and far too much of the sensations he could feel was phantom pain tricking him into thinking he still had limbs. His left arm, that he had thought broken or trapped underneath him, was lying a few metres away and his left leg was also almost severed through. His dantian was ruined, his Golden Core cracked and leaking qi.

Belatedly, he realised that his last resort was still in his remaining hand: the ‘Heaven Shift’ talisman that Sir Huang had given him just before they departed.

He stared at it blankly, and then at Di Ji, who was slowly prying open the barrier centimetre by centimetre. His blood was already on the talisman, so it could be triggered instantly, pulling him away… except…

Ha Leng’s hand was resting on his arm, close enough for him to easily grasp...

His own awareness of his condition told him he had seconds left to live with his Core disintegrating as it was. Nobody in the family would be able to save him in this condition either, by the time an old elder made it to the town… he would be a corpse.

“Yun… flee…” Ha Leng whispered desperately staring at him with bleeding eyes. “I’ll—”

He never heard what Ha Leng was going to say, as he had already pressed the ‘Heaven Shift’ talisman onto his childhood friend’s arm and triggered it. Ha Leng was merely suffering from soul shock and physical trauma. He might die if he was left untreated, but it would take tens of minutes. Enough time for someone to teleport to him. That way this betrayal by the Din family would be known of at least.

Through his fading vision, he saw Di Ji’s face twisted in fury, reaching out for him somehow…

As the final darkness closed in he felt…. Happy? The pain slipped away. His final thought was that at least Ha Leng, his oldest and dearest friend, might at least survive this calamity.

~ Jun Sana & Arai, Mysterious Anomaly ~

By her own count, Sana was sure they took almost a full day to climb to the top of the cliff in the end. It was a slow and arduous process that proved far more challenging than getting out of the sinkhole. The rolling cloud made the rocks damp and slippery and there were frequent springs flowing out as they crossed over the various strata in the rock. It didn't help that her only memories of it from before were... patchy at best.

“The cliff here should certainly not have had that many waterfalls in it,” Arai grumbled as they sat on the top, taking in the place where, theoretically, they had been unceremoniously thrown off.

“The vegetation is just like down below as well,” her sister also noted as she nibbled speculatively on another bit of grass.

“Yeah,” She nodded, staring hard at their surroundings.

It was almost a challenge at this point. She felt honour-bound, almost, to find something, anything really, which proved they were not in an anomaly. There was no living presence visible or audible beyond the plants and the two of them. The landscape was utterly unthreatening and the sky above was perfectly normal, with no sign of the terrible thunder clouds of East Fury and Thunder Crest. No shadow from the Great Mount either. In fact, it wasn’t possible to see any of the peaks. The low cloud swirled in grey and white gyres all around them, obscuring any sight beyond a hundred metres and turning everything distant into vague blurs and amorphous shadows.

“I never thought that normal cloud could actually be this oppressive,” her sister’s words broke into her staring contest with reality.

“It’s so… depressingly opaque.” She scuffed her foot on the ground, then kicked a small rock off the edge for good measure. It sailed off into the void and vanished from sight.

“No sign of our stuff either,” she added after her sister stayed silent.

“…”

“It’s like a facsimile of the outside world,” Arai said eventually. “The structure of the valleys seems to be the same. The trees are much of a muchness, as are the plants.”

“Indeed…” that was the logical conclusion, except...

“There are things that are different,” she stared again at the place they were in. “Take those standing rocks over there for instance. Outside they were fallen over, collapsed like a stack of betting sticks. Those trees over there are much denser compared to outside.”

“Mmmmm,” her sister nodded. “So... what? It’s the same basic terrain but it’s developed over time in a different way?”

“Or it’s the same terrain from long ago,” she supplied. “You know the stories about some of the anomalies.”

“I was trying not to think about the possibility that we have been time-shifted somehow,” her sister scowled. “Thanks…”

“Sorry…” she grimaced. “In fairness, there is only that one account, and nobody else was ever able to find that anomaly according to the Bureau file. And it was on the other side of the mountain range, below Snow Jade.”

“Returning to the facsimile thing,” Arai scowled. “There is a disturbing amount of stuff that’s also inexplicably identical though. Take those trees and that shrub cluster against the rocks beyond where Lin Ling was seated just before we went over...”

She stared at them, superimposing her memories of the scene over this different place as best she could.

“Yes. That’s really fate-thrashed weird,” That was all you could say really – that it was weird.

They walked through the previous camp location, looking in vain for any evidence of their prior passage. Eventually, they moved up the ridgeline looking for the original trail up. It took a while to find it, there were none of the guide markers left by previous generations of Pavilion exploration. The cave which should have been the way station they had decided not to head towards was empty when they finally made it there.

The higher they went, the denser the swirling cloud that billowed around them became. It restricted visibility to only a few metres most of the time. In the rare event that it receded for brief moments, the ridgeline seemed like a stone road through a sea of clouds. After a full hour, they were both drenched through and starting to feel the cold as well.

“See this is what I don’t quite get,” Arai frowned, waving her hand through the swirling mists and watching them twist around her.

“The moisture makes us cold and wet, but we are getting no hydration from it at all. There is yin water qi here, it's interacting with us on a certain level, but it’s also not affecting us in any beneficial way.”

Sana stared around, pondering this. There was indeed yin-attributed water qi up here… and yang wind, and yang earth; there was no difficulty in feeling their presence intuitively. There was also another type of qi in the air which defied her ability to identify. It seemed to swirl past them like an ethereal, draining breeze and, if they stood too long in thicker eddies, the accompanying cloud made them both feel slightly short of breath, though besides that it appeared to have no other ill effect.

Eventually, the combination of decreased visibility and the temperature dropping so low that moisture was taking the form of ice crystals on the vegetation slowed their progress to a crawl. She had now found three different ‘kinds’ of qi in the air that she had never sensed before and with which they couldn't directly interact. It wasn’t that her cultivation was sealed, it was simply that nothing she did would replenish any qi she spent, or so it seemed. Not even her mantra could pull the qi types she could recognise into her body.

Eventually, they wound up sat on the edge of the ridge, looking north up beyond the Great Mount and Thunder Crest, mulling over their possibilities.

“Do we go down again? Or down here?” she mused, staring at the cloud below her.

“Ascending directly down this cliff face is probably not a good idea if we need to preserve our strength.”

“Mmmmm,” she nodded at that. “It’s just a question of whether or not there’s any benefit to backtracking, really.”

“True. I think we should though. We know the paths through East Fury pretty well,” her sister sounded pensive.

“There is some other problem?” she asked looking around.

“Oh… no,” Arai shook her head. “I just found a fourth type of weird qi in the plants over there.”

“Oh,” She stared in the direction of a small, gnarled tree.

Her sister was right, there was a weird qi mixed into it that was again subtly different, and somehow hard to focus on.

“Anyway… yes. We should head back down to the lower gullies on the far side of the area where the heaven’s blaze pines were,” her sister suggested.

The trip back down was uneventful. The markers they had made on things on the way up were all still there, which was reassuring. They passed by the site of their fall without stopping this time and headed down the far ridgeline. The grove where the heaven’s blaze pines should have been contained a tree that was basically identical in appearance to them, but not a spirit tree. There was some tiny trace of fire and Yang Qi within them but that was it. They might have been considered interesting high-quality timber in a mortal world with no proper cultivation... but compared to what should have been there, they were just normal trees. Finally, they reached the point beyond that area, where the path would have diverged between the two main routes through this part of the mountain range.

It was here that she first noticed a proper oddity if you could call it that. Or perhaps the absence of abnormality, if you looked at it another way.

She paused by a tree, staring at it. “The vegetation here is the same as on the ridgeline.”

“Uhuh…” Arai replied noncommittally, checking beneath the vines on the rock face in case the guide marks were miraculously there.

“No. Sis. Look around you. Rather than poking for the runes that are not going to be there,” she stared around in case this was just a fluke. It would be silly to make a fuss if it was.

Seeing no immediate evidence to the contrary she continued. “I mean it’s literally the same. We are still in the same ecosystem.”

Arai frowned and glanced around; the cloud was still dense here, so all but the closest vegetation on the path down into the gully was obscured in mist. “Yeah, we are still on the ridgelines. They tend to be like that. There’s very little variation.”

She said nothing, waiting patiently for the spirit stone to drop. Her sister wasn’t stupid.

After a few seconds, her sister paused and stared around again. “Oh.

“Everything is simple herbs and grasses… there is some low-lying under-scrub over there. Ferns and oily trees with gnarled water-resistant bark. It’s all montane… evergreen and...” her sister trailed off, staring around with a look of dull comprehension in her eyes.

“Yep!” she nodded and gestured around them. “Remember when we came up, it was all full of urki broadleaves. The water ferns are still there… but this place had wood qi practically cracking out of the trees and arcing into the rocks.”

Arai looked around at the greenery. “And yet there are no broadleaves of any species here, and the qi is still yang earth and yin water, with a background of balanced wood and balanced water if you ignore the weird ones we can’t grasp.”

“Exactly!” she nodded vigorously. “And the trees are all common boreal cloud forest species, or at least variants of. It’s nearly impossible to tell which with the total lack of flowers.”

“Uhuh,” Arai was nodding now as well... staring around as they walked onwards through the misty, mossy forest. “In the valleys, the ecosystem changes according to the qi flows through the strata below them. They feed each other and you get those weird pockets with almost no transition between them except maybe a ridge, or a thicket of particularly spiritually resistant shrubbery for the most part.”

“Yep. Look here,” she pointed out a side gully as they passed it.

“That should have a little yin wood ecosystem,” her sister stared at the gully in question.

“With all kinds of nasty active herbaceous cultivars,” she agreed. “The path that ran on the other side of the gully right under the wall was impassable, so we couldn’t avoid triggering the ying cloud creeper that covered half of up here.”

She stopped in the middle of the entrance to a water-cut rock gully about five metres wide and tapering steeply vertical. “It’s why Juni brought us up onto the ridgeline by the other route in the first place…”

Both of them looked at the aggressively normal gully, with a mix of water-loving creepers, ferns and overhanging cloud lanipur higher up.

“This is just a normal cloud forest,” Arai concluded, looking about.

“Yep,” She agreed, spinning around on the spot. “A totally normal, nothing untoward, cloud forest like you would expect to find in the high montane valleys, below the thunder line south of Blue Water City.”

“Except the species are weird, the qi feels like ‘it’s’ either missing something, or we are missing something, and there are no living things, other than the plants. And nothing is in flower. At all,” Arai added dryly.

She coughed lightly and rolled her eyes. “Yes…Except for that.”

Arai looked up through the cloud: the shadow cast through it was still there, tracking right faintly now. “If we keep going down this way we would eventually pass into the valley at the heart of the shadow zone beneath the north-east face of the Great Mount…”

“The previous Blue Duke's expedition tried to enter there from the north side,” she mused, the beginnings of a worrying idea emerging in her mind.

“Yes, from what I recall of the deconstruction of that trip that Sir Oudeng was willing to share that one time, they weren’t confident about cutting a path through the narrow gullies that break the ridgeline at the far side of this valley.”

Both of them turned to look back upslope, through the gap their party had trodden when they came up. The idea was treacherously tugging at the corners of her mind now. Taking a deep breath she eventually gave voice to one of them.

“How do you think we actually get out of here?”

“I was trying really hard not to think about that, you know.” Her sister shot her a dark look

“Do you think it’s just a ‘field’? If we pick a direction we will automatically exit the space after a while. Both of the anomalies vaguely like this in the Low Valleys are like that…” she stared around again.

“If we have any good currency with fate, it better be," her sister scowled.

She nodded. The other thought was still niggling away. It was so disturbing to her that she didn’t want to vocalise it, even if it hung there like an evil spectre in her mind.

-Are we in the actual, genuine ‘inner zone’? The place where the Blue Water Sage went. Where the Duke’s lost expedition was forced to stop?

-Or is this yet another inner world anomaly? One totally unknown to the Bureau...

Because this place looked nothing like either of the records of those trips she had read.