Memories of the Fall

~ Part 2 ~

~ Han Murai – Green Moon Teahouse ~

“—what do you want us to do with the weapons, Sergeant Mei?”

Han Murai stopped staring at the rain-drops scattering on water lilies in the pond and turned to the workman who had come over, carrying one of the yin-iron blades.

Taking the dagger from the workman, he turned it over in his hands, investigating it, but it really was just as it appeared. Its handle, made of cheap spirit wood, had no guard to speak of and was bound in simple leather. In the same vein the blade was an utterly mundane yin-aligned dagger. The tip was also broken off, probably making it one of the ones he had deflected with the stone-ware jar. Curious, he stripped off the leather binding on the hilt, checking the different parts for maker’s marks, but much as he expected, there was nothing. Even the metal of the dagger at the core was unadorned.

A bit more warily, he first sniffed the blade, then held it out in the rain, observing how the Eastern Rains interacted with the dagger. Even under his increased scrutiny there was no evidence of poison or anything odd with the forging either.

“It looks fairly normal,” he mused, putting the pieces down on the ornamental rock next to him, absently turning the blade this way and that. “That said, be careful anyway. Bring any others you find over as well.”

“Of course,” the workman murmured and gave him a polite salute before hurrying back to help his compatriot shift the ruins of a couch.

“I take it it’s just a cheap dagger?” Kun Yu remarked, coming over and looking at it with interest.

“It is,” he confirmed, looking around now for the blade he had hurled after Dong Fang.

“What are you looking for?” Kun Yu asked, following his roving gaze.

“I threw a blade after Dong Fang, and…”

“—It’s in the water,” Blue Jasmine interjected, from where she was sitting nearby, waiting for Singing Lilly to return with a new robe.

Stepping over to the edge of the pond, he found that she was correct. The weapon had taken a chunk out of an ornamental rock and then embedded itself into the pond-bottom, its hilt barely visible between the lily pads.

“I assume there is nothing unpleasant in there?” he asked Blue Jasmine and Misty Camellia.

“Unless you have a fear of carp, probably not,” Misty Camellia replied, rolling her eyes.

Shaking his head at her flippant reply, he slipped into the water, which came up to his thighs and waded over to recover the blade. As he had both expected and feared, it was superficially a guard issued one, discernible by the distinctive flat end and grooves on the rear side to break and trap weapons.

Curious, he gave it a few experimental swings to check its weight and balance, finding both were also on point for a guard issued weapon.

“It definitely looks like one of ours,” Kun Yu remarked, from the bank.

“Uh-huh,” he nodded, heading back to the shore.

Climbing out, he went and sat down on the other end of Blue Jasmine’s bench and considered the blade more carefully.

“Is it genuine?” Kun Yu asked, leaning in to get a closer look as he squinted along the blade, looking at the forge patterns.

Not replying immediately, he flipped the blade over and unpicked the binding of the hilt grip, exposing the locking mechanism that held the hilt, cross-guard and blade together. Counterfeit weapons were not a new thing, by any means, but a careful inspection of that portion of the blade suggested it was genuine, so he unbound the rest of the hilt in short order and snapped the three pieces apart, exposing the tang.

“Zufan RD-21-Ax10,” Kun Yu mused, reading the maker’s marks with a frown.

“Zufan forge, Rising Dragon, Twenty First Casting, Auxiliary Batch Ten,” he supplied. “That makes it at least three decades old, close to the end of the Zufan sequence as well.”

“What…?” Kun Yu started to say.

“—The forge was levelled during the Three Schools Conflict,” he clarified. “They forged one batch a year, as I recall, the last one was the twenty third. ‘Auxiliary Batch’ means it was created not for the guards, but to arm civil defence units. Ten would be Ha or Deng in all likelihood.”

“Don’t you guards expend a lot of effort to track that stuff, Young Master Kun?” Blue Jasmine remarked, raising an eyebrow and turning to Kun Yu.

“They do,” Misty Camellia interjected. “It’s like the Military Bureau, where the maker’s marks and qi signature of the weapon are kept on record. I still get checks at ‘random’ a few times a year on the weapons and armour my father was allowed to keep as a token of his meritorious service.”

“—because they might get sold off or stolen and used by someone for something,” Kun Yu added, nodding understandingly.

“—mostly though, it’s because she lives in the Seng District,” Blue Jasmine murmured, rolling her eyes. “You could afford to move somewhere nicer you know…”

“…”

“I would move, but father refuses,” Misty Camellia grumbled. “In any case, the guards do something similar don’t they?”

“Uh, yes,” Kun Yu confirmed, looking a bit embarrassed now.

“You can’t retire and keep your weapons,” he clarified absently, giving the blade a gentle tap on the edge of the stone bench, comparing the ringing tone it held with his own issued Zufan mark blade. “But yes, all our gear is marked and has to be signed in and out. Doesn’t stop unscrupulous folks trying to steal or counterfeit stuff, especially armour for their own ends—”

“Of course, such a thing almost never happens here,” Kun Yu added quickly. “It’s in outlying villages where people don’t know what to look for. You can’t just ‘make your own’, after all, there are only three suppliers of luss-type fabrics in the province and ceramic-weave plates are produced only by the Blue Gate School and finished by Ling clan for select customers.”

“I see…” Blue Jasmine deadpanned, while Misty Camellia just rolled her eyes and he tried not to sigh at Kun Yu’s own sideways attempt to impress the pair.

“So, is it a genuine one?” Kun Yu asked, quickly changing the topic.

“It appears to be,” he concluded at last, setting the blade down on the bench. “Or the blade is at least. The hilt has been rebound to match the current guard’s blades.”

“So, they stole it?” Kun Yu repeated, nodding.

“...”

Rather than reply immediately, he just puffed out his cheeks and stared at the rain drops hitting the surface of the pond, mulling the presence of the blade over in his mind.

“Is it?” Kun Yu pressed.

“It’s likely, yes,” he replied at last, given Kun Yu didn’t want to leave that alone. “Though when is much harder to say.”

The issue was that Zufan marked weapons had been around for decades and were much sought after. Even a simple dagger from the Zufan workshop went for tens of spirit stones in auctions. In the years after the Three Schools conflict, there had also been several scandals involving reserve units who had sold off their top-of-the-line equipment, paid for at cost by the Town Authority, to private individuals for profit.

Furthermore, if Zhong was associated with the Deng clan, it was entirely possible this was one of their blades, given they had a unit of Civil Militia attached to the clan estate in the Deng District. There would be records tracking some in the Town Guard’s administrative bureau, the issue was that any investigation there was likely to go straight back to the Deng, Kun or Ha… who had all been implicated at various points in the illegitimate selling of such weapons for profit.

Asking about audits of those supplies was basically a cursed task in his experience.

“—Umm, Young Master Kun?”

He glanced up to find that the other workman had come over to them and saluted Kun Yu.

-I really should have quashed that, he reflected wryly.

It was getting to the point where it was embarrassing, though Blue Jasmine’s inflection earlier suggested she was savvy to the deception now.

“We got three more of the thrown daggers, and… is it safe to move the other two bodies?” the labourer asked, nodding back towards the room, though his interest was largely on the half-clad Misty Camellia and Blue Jasmine.

“Xua and the one in the blue robe?” Kun Yu asked, not quite looking at him.

“I’d leave Xua’s where it fell, Oufan,” Blue Jasmine replied drily, glancing over towards Guanbo’s office. “Unless you have some luss fabric gloves to hand. Not sure about the other. Maybe ask Caoxi?”

The workman snorted with amusement at her comment regarding luss-fabric gloves, then waved for his compatriot to leave the two incapacitated cultivators inside where they were.

They watched him head back over to the other workman, not quite managing to hide the sideways looks at Blue Jasmine and Misty Camellia.

“Where is that girl, did she get lost on the path of life or something?” Misty Camellia muttered, adjusting her ruined gown slightly. “How hard is it…”

“S-sorry!” almost on cue, Singing Lily came hurrying back over from the buildings beyond the pond holding two gowns and limping a bit. “That stupid formation is obnoxious. Don’t try climbing stairs.”

“Ah…” Blue Jasmine nodded.

“They are my spares,” Singing Lily added apologetically. “So they might be…”

“It will do,” Misty Camellia chuckled, stripping out of her ruined gown, quite deliberately he suspected, to show how little she ‘cared’ about the workmen’s thinly veiled leering and pulling on the knee-length red and white gown that fastened over her right shoulder.

Blue Jasmine followed suit, then tried to hand him back his over-tunic.

“You can keep it for now, if you like,” he said with a wry smile. “It will give some protection from the rain.”

“And not because you would have to explain to your wife why it has women’s perfume on it?” Blue Jasmine snickered, placing it on the bench beside her.

“There are worse things I could come home smelling of,” he joked. “Much worse.”

“Very true,” she agreed with a half-smile.

“—Uh, Mistress Blossom!”

A young girl in a cute white and red dress rather similar to Singing Lily’s raced into the courtyard and skidded to a stop by Lotus Blossom, who was still inspecting Guanbo’s injury.

“What is it, Qing ?” Lotus Blossom asked, putting aside the cloth she had been using to wash the gash on Guanbo’s chest.

“There… are guards outside!” Qing said.

“As in going past, or coming here?” Lotus Blossom said.

“Here, they are in the common room, talking with Seojun,” Qing clarified.

“Reinforcements?” Lotus Blossom asked, turning to him. “That was fast, we didn’t even send anyone yet, unless the corporal...”

“They had armour, and weapons on…” Qing added.

“…”

“Which unit, and how many?” he asked, because Lotus Blossom was right. That was ‘fast’.

“Uh… no district marker, just a…” Qing trailed off as two town guards in full body armour strode into the courtyard, their blades in their hands, but still in the scabbards, looking around with interest.

The leader was a corporal with ‘Weng’ on the nameplate on his chest, while the other was a simple guardsman identified as ‘Zhanfei’, who was staring at where he was putting his feet as if his own shadow was cursed.

Both paused to take in the salvaging of the room, sweeping their gaze past him, Blue Jasmine and the others without much interest before focusing on Lotus Blossom and Guanbo.

“You the owner… Guanbo right?” Weng said, walking over to Guanbo.

“I… am…” Guanbo rasped.

“He is injured, so I’ll speak on his behalf,” Lotus Blossom confirmed.

“And you are?” Weng frowned.

“Lotus—”

“Your name, not whatever street name you use,” Weng said brusquely, cutting her off.

“Lianfan Changmei,” Lotus Blossom said, her expression barely flickering. “I must say you’re quick to appear, we had not even sent for the guard yet.”

“Our squad was reporting to an existing matter and happened to be passing by when several patrons said that the formations had triggered,” Guardsman Zhanfei said.

“Which squad are you with?” Lotus Blossom added, eyeing their armour with its lack of a district insignia.

“Lieutenant Deng Xuong Fang’s,” Corporal Weng said blandly. “He is in the common room, awaiting you, and…”

“—this is indeed quite the mess,” a youngish man, a few years older than Kun Yu, with a well-trimmed military-style beard appeared in the courtyard, followed by two more armoured figures, a sergeant and a second guardsman.

That meant that there were likely four or five more guardsmen and another corporal either outside the teahouse or waiting in the common room.

“Lieutenant!” Corporal Weng and Guardsman Zhanfei both saluted smartly.

He managed to catch Kun Yu’s eye but thankfully the corporal did not so much as stir. While he was willing to believe that the group had just been passing by, the fact that Zhong might be from the Deng clan was making him decidedly uneasy. That the corporal had seemingly not recognised him, given he was a District Sergeant, one step below a Lieutenant like Xuong Fang, was… surprising.

Lieutenant Deng nodded, then nearly slipped on the wet paving, only avoiding falling thanks to the pillar next to him.

“Uggh! This formation!” the lieutenant muttered, looking around with distaste.

“Yes, sorry about that, Young Master Deng,” Lotus Blossom said quickly. “The perpetrators subverted one of the main formations of the teahouse. We are looking into disabling it at this very moment.”

“Ah… this is why it’s a bad idea to let those kinds of formations be constructed by commoners,” the Sergeant, ‘Deng Fu Bei’, from his name tag, remarked superciliously. “With mediocre comprehensions come problems like this.”

“…”

Lieutenant Xuong just gave the sergeant a ‘look’, which the man ignored.

“We have secured the area, anyway,” Corporal Weng added as the other guards spread out around the courtyard, taking in the damage caused.

“Indeed, I am sure I can handle this, Sir,” Sergeant Deng Bei agreed.

“Come on, Fu,” the Deng officer sighed. “Even if its fate-thrashed weird out there, we can at least do our bit to help out.”

“Yes sir,” the sergeant sighed. “Jifong, go tell Leung to come, and the two of you check those bodies before these louts disturb them anymore.”

Guardsman Zhanfei saluted and trotted off.

“So, what happened here, Manager…” Lieutenant Xuong trailed off.

“Guanbo,” Guanbo supplied with some resignation.

“I see you are injured… did that occur in the altercation here?”

“Yes,” Guanbo replied, gritting his teeth.

“Several ‘employees’ attempted a robbery a short while ago,” Lotus Blossom supplied.

“—and they are some of the responsible party? You killed them?” Corporal Weng interjected, eyeing the headless body lying on the paving then looking around the courtyard

“Their attack killed one of their own,” Misty Camellia contributed.

“T-the others were caught in a defensive formation,” Caoxi added. “They were trying to steal a treasure from Master Guanbo’s office.”

“I see… and can you… could you identify them?” Lieutenant Deng asked.

“Undoubtedly, both were employees. Dong Fang and Quan Zhong,” Lotus Blossom replied politely. “The others appear to have been their friends of some acquaintance and a pair of workmen contracted to clean up after last night’s disturbance. They work for Master Jifang, who I trust you know.”

“Mmm…” Lieutenant Deng nodded, though rather noncommittally.

“I see talismans don’t work in here,” Corporal Weng interjected, taking out a talisman and staring at it.

“Indeed, they do not,” Lotus Blossom agreed. “The formation they subverted is a fairly formidable Alignment Suppression Formation.”

“Set by you, or…?” The Sergeant interjected.

“Master Liwen’s workshop… installed it,” Guanbo said with a further grimace.

“That’s quite a name for a little place like this, must have cost a lot,” the Sergeant mused, looking around.

“We get by... and until today, it was a worthwhile expense,” Lotus Blossom murmured.

“Something is not right,” Blue Jasmine mouthed, making sure she was facing away from the guards.

He had to agree. The lieutenant and the regular guardsman both were clearly affected by the formation, but neither Sergeant Bei nor Corporal Weng seemed unduly troubled.

Neither he nor Kun Yu had been recognised either, at least not openly. Kun Yu he could understand, but as a fairly senior sergeant, of which there were only a dozen in the whole town, he would have thought most officers assigned to lead squads should recognise him by sight. On that point, Lieutenant Xuong also looked remarkably inexperienced for someone tasked to lead a group of what was likely ten guards. He was trying his hardest not to look at the exploded head, as if he was unused to such sights. His conversation with the sergeant before also supported that conclusion.

“Well, all this seems straight forward enough, doesn’t it, Lieutenant?” Corporal Weng mused, looking around again.

The young officer gave himself a small shake and then nodded. “Yes. Take a statement I suppose, then we do what we can to help the injured, make some enquiries as to where the perpetrators might have run off to… Sergeant Bei?”

“As you say, Sir,” Sergeant Bei and Corporal Weng both agreed, giving him polite salutes.

“If you could talk me through the attack,” Corporal Weng added, gesturing for Lotus Blossom to take him into the office. “—And explain the formation that was used to… incapacitate them?”

Lotus Blossom gave him a level look, then nodded.

“So, you lot were also caught up in it?” Sergeant Bei added, coming over to them. “Seems to have done a bit of a number on you.”

“It was… surprising,” Blue Jasmine replied politely.

“I’ll need your names, real names, and addresses for the statement,” the sergeant mused. “And I remind you it’s a crime, punishable by a ten spirit stone fine, to lie. We will catch you.”

“We are aware,” Misty Camellia murmured.

“I am sure you are,” the Sergeant agreed urbanely, looking her over, his gaze lingering on her bosom as he spoke. “Might as well start with you, miss.”

“—Lian,” Misty Camellia replied blandly, as he marvelled at how the Sergeant managed to make even that basic question sound mildly demeaning

“Given name?” Sergeant Bei added, with a faint smirk.

“Orphan,” Misty Camellia replied, still thoroughly unperturbed by his manner. “I started calling myself Lian because I liked how the character looked.”

“Hmmm… I see,” the sergeant nodded, turning to Blue Jasmine. “And you, miss?”

“Xiaomei,” she replied equally blandly. “I am also an orphan.”

“Of course,” Deng Bei Fu remarked with an eye roll, glancing at Singing Lily who was sitting on the back of the other stone bench by the pond a metre or so away

“Li Lee,” Singing Lily answered with a sniff. “Bo Ji Street, Western District.”

“…”

The sergeant stared at each young woman in turn and then sighed, shaking his head dismissively.

“What about you two?” Deng Bei asked, finally focusing on him and Kun Yu. “Bystanders or employees?”

“Kun Yu,” Kun Yu replied with a slight frown. “We were here when they—”

“So, patron then, unless the Kun clan has gone even more downhill,” the sergeant snorted, interrupting him. “And address, also show me your clan talisman...”

“Six Ponds Street,” Kun Yu replied, taking the talisman off his belt, frowning now.

Sergeant Bei took the clan token and considered it for a long moment. Off to the side, Misty Jasmine shifted and quietly pushed the throwing daggers under the remains of her ruined garment.

“And you?” the sergeant turned to him. “What about—”

He shoved Kun Yu away as the guardsman’s unprovoked, back-handed blade-strike nearly took the lad’s head half off. Fighting the disorientation, he slipped inside the strike, grasping the assailant’s hand, both of them spinning away from the stone bench.

“CONCEALED WEAPON!” Sergeant Bei roared in the same instant as they both rolled on the paving. “Ambush!”

“Lianfan!” Guanbo’s hoarse yell echoed across the courtyard.

“What—!”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the lieutenant turn, distracted by the sergeant’s call… and almost take Corporal Weng’s blade to the neck as Lotus Blossom went sprawling.

“Bastard!” Bei Fu gasped, kneeing him in the side—

The blow made his vision swim as the formation shifted with the blow and he tasted salt and iron in his mouth. Fortunately, the sergeant, while a martial cultivator, was only at the peak of Soul Foundation, so the intent that came with the blow foundered.

Sucking up the discomfort from the blow, he kept a hold of the man’s wrist and spun on the ground, using his whole body weight to twist on his attacker’s wrist to try and break it, or at least pin—

The humidity of the rain around them… shifted, their surroundings suddenly suffused with an alluring fragrance of jasmine blossoms.

“Sorry,” the sergeant grunted as the formation shifted again, allowing him to slip away in one smooth movement. “It’s nothing personal, you under—?”

Misty Camellia crashed into him, for all the world appearing to just slip and fall over.

“The Three Schools Conflict called,” she snarled, wrapping her arms around his neck as he tried to throw her off. “It wants its corrupt dog-son traitors back!”

“You—!” the sergeant gasped, then spat blood as she sent a pulse of mantra manifestation into him.

Having just grasped Bei Fu’s arm again, he also got a taste of it and it left him feeling like someone had just stamped on his crotch.

Singing Lily shoved Caoxi and the other girl towards the rear of the courtyard, however they also only got about four paces before the formation sent them smashing into the paving in a tangle of legs and curses. Lily and Kun Yu didn’t fare much better, both staggering as if drunk.

Blue Jasmine, who had been basically ignored over by the bench, vaulted over it… and fell flat on her face with a grunt, arms almost comedically outstretched as all her momentum vanished.

“There is an attack?!”

“Get them!”

“SERGEANT BEI!”

Three guardsmen came stumbling into the courtyard—

He watched dully as the one bringing up the rear stabbed his confused compatriot through the neck, leaving that luckless guard to bleed out on the paving.

The corporal leading the way, who had called for the sergeant, recovered his footing between one footfall and the next, ignoring the other fallen guard. Instead, he dashed over to Misty Camellia and grabbed her by the hair, yin-attributed lightning qi sizzling across his gauntlets.

If he expected that to do much though, the guard got a rude awakening regarding the punishment physical cultivators could eat up as she refused to let go.

Standing up, he considered Bei’s discarded blade, then kicked it away into the pond on the grounds that less weapons only benefited them. Taking a breath, he made to move towards the sergeant—

At the last possible minute, he spun as the other guard arrived beside him, drawn blade thrusting for his dantian. Courtesy of the formation, it tore his clothes and left a bloody gash across his stomach, even though he mostly avoided it. Thankfully, his attacker, who was barely older than Kun Yu and only at Golden Core, was hopelessly naive in his overcommitment to the attack… allowing him to plant his elbow squarely in the youth’s throat.

His assailant went down with a wretched, rasping groan, even as he disarmed him and hurled the blade up onto the upper story.

“Why?” Kun Yu gasped, pushing himself up and tracing the blade as it ended up on the upper balcony.

“Less blades is better for us,” he grunted as Blue Jasmine grasped the staggering guard by the ankle and stunned him properly with her mantra manifestation.

The temptation was always to pick up those weapons and use them; however, with the formation screwing everything up, being armed with pointy weapons was an outright liability. Falling on one and stabbing yourself in a meridian would, at the very least, be both painful and embarrassing.

“—G-get him,” Sergeant Bei gasped to the corporal.

“Fates go get screwed by a dog!” the corporal, whose name tag identified him as ‘Deng Fu Hsui’, swore and let go of her, drawing a short blade with a flat tip, his right gauntlet rippling into a shield of yang-attributed earth qi.

Narrowing his eyes, he backed up, carefully, keeping his distance—

The corporal charged straight at him, clearly intending to use the shield to stun him. In reply, he just rolled backwards over the bench. His opponent easily followed… however, he had already rolled back under it and was diving for the sergeant and Misty Camellia.

Ignoring Corporal Hsui, he mimicked what she had done and just… slammed straight into him, sending all three of them rolling on the paving—

Misty Camellia, who was surprisingly good at ‘in-fighting’, took advantage of the opportunity to physically bite the sergeant’s ear, ignoring the vicious elbows he was landing on her ribs—

He let go just in time to avoid being directly hit by a sizzling sphere of yin-attributed lightning. However, to his surprise, the sphere wavered and almost immediately lost integrity as the strange, claustrophobic humidity now veiling the courtyard ate it up.

“The fates is—?” Sergeant Bei gasped, trying to trigger the armour’s anti-personnel enchantment a second time, as the scent of jasmine and mulberry… intensified, now joined by chrysanthemums, lotus blossoms…

Before he could finish though, Misty Camellia finally lost patience with their tussle and head-butted him in the back of the head hard enough that the sound made him wince.

“Owwwaaaaa…” she moaned, then promptly vomited over the luckless, very stunned sergeant.

Before either of them could do anything, though, they were both hit by a wall of force and sent sprawling across the paving as Corporal Hsui triggered the bound art in the shield. He felt his qi shake, but didn’t lose anywhere near much as expected as the wave of qi had almost lost its integrity by the time it reached them.

“—mother to a dog!” the corporal snarled, appearing beside him with a movement art. “You’re the corrupt sergeant, aren’t you?”

He felt all the breath leave his body under the force of the follow up impact. Only his superior body conditioning saved him breaking a bone or five as he went sprawling on the wet paving—

“Bastard!” Kun Yu shoulder charged the corporal from the rear using a movement art of his own, likely ‘Kun Skips on the Water’ or ‘Dragon amid the Reeds’, buying him a precious moment to recover.

Across the other side, Corporal Weng was attempting to overpower the injured Guanbo; the teahouse owner trying to cover Singing Lily, Caoxi's friend, and Qing as they attempted to drag the bleeding but alive Lotus Blossom away, cursing the formation with every stumbled step they took. Both workmen were slumped on the ground, unmoving, as was Lieutenant Xuong. There was no sign of Caoxi at all.

“Who is corrupt,” he hissed, dashing forward, flanking Fu Hsui—

An arrow, a blunt one, hit him in the side with enough force to knock the breath out of him again. Coughing, he barely avoided the lashing, opportunistic strike from Corporal Hsui, who had already shrugged off Kun Yu.

“Hey! That’s Sergeant Mei!” a familiar voice, that of a corporal from the local watch-house called out. “Why are you shooting—”

Swallowing down blood, he evaded the second strike and then, rather than dodge back from Corporal Hsui, pre-empted the formation screwing with him by ducking under the corporal’s shield. The shield rippled as Hsui jumped, stabbing down through it, aiming for his shoulder—

Kun Yu slammed into the corporal from the side, sending them both sprawling. In the opening he lunged for Hsui’s sword arm… and slipped, falling flat on his face as an arrow slammed into his knee.

{Five Jasmines Bloom in the Heart}

Blue jasmine petals swirled everywhere, obscuring his vision. Misty Camellia, who had recovered by this point, pounced on the scrambling corporal, hammering his head into the paving several times as he tried to get free of Kun Yu.

“Go where Danshu went!” Blue Jasmine gasped, staggering over and dragging him up her face pale, one of the flowers in her hair showing signs of wilting. “I can’t maintain this for very long.”

To punctuate that, another arrow landed nearby and a shockwave of yin-earth qi exploded out of it, wilting jasmine petals as it went and the flower in her hair dropped a petal.

“Guanbo!” Lotus Blossom screamed.

Glancing over, he saw Corporal Weng had managed to stab the manager in the side.

“Yu! Help them!” he hissed, moving towards Corporal Weng.

Wincing in pain, he made it about three paces before the paving tried to become a wall. However, having experienced that feeling numerous times now, he managed to weather it this time, rolling forward as the swirling petals intensified around them.

Corporal Weng kicked Guanbo off his blade, then spun and appeared almost on top of him, already cutting down at him.

“Sometimes, you just have to—”

A carpentry hammer arced out of nowhere, nearly taking the corporal’s head off. A moment later, Danshu appeared carrying a builder’s mattock, a weapon to inspire real fear in anyone who had ever been to a riot.

A second hammer scythed over a moment later, thrown by Jifang, who had appeared on the side of the courtyard with the other two labourers.

The corporal hissed and ducked Danshu’s opening strike, cutting up at the Master Corporal, only to find his blade failed to split the haft of the mattock.

“Yeah, they don’t skimp on building tools,” Danshu sneered, tearing the blade and mattock away from Corporal Weng and hurling them over towards the side of the—

He shoved Danshu out of the way as the blade reappeared in Weng’s hand, lashing at Danshu’s neck, keeping himself low as he spun, almost inside Weng’s guard—

{Boxers Fist of Five Organs}

The martial technique was almost entirely blunted by the fate-thrashed formation stealing all the momentum behind it, but the eruption of his qi and martial intent still sent the traitorous corporal flying half a dozen metres across the courtyard, spitting blood.

“Grab that fate-thrashed lieutenant!” he signed to Danshu as he staggered over to Guanbo.

Hauling the large man up, he didn’t so much as try to carry him as simply used his physical strength to throw the man across the courtyard.

Danshu, behind him, grabbed the Deng clan youth by the back of his armour and started to haul him across the paving, even as a second yin-earth arrow narrowly missed them both.

“Fates, what a day,” Danshu gasped as he switched his grip to Xuong’s arm and dragged him along.

Abruptly, the floor became… not there. Rather than pause and focus on his sense of self though, he just stumbled through it.

“CLEAR THAT ACCURSED FORMATION!” a voice roared behind them.

“What are we even shooting at?” someone else yelled.

“I don’t care, Lieutenant Xuong is in danger from those traitors and rebels!”

“Sergeant Bei!”

“Weng is injured!”

“…”

A third arrow landed where they had just been, exploding in a nova of yin-earth qi, turning more petals to wilted loam.

“—Ah, there you are!” Misty Camellia staggered out of the haze of rain and petals, grabbed the barely conscious lieutenant by his other arm.

The trip to the edge of the courtyard felt like it took a small eternity, even if it was only about ten seconds. At the edge, they found Kun Yu and Caoxi dragging the badly bleeding Guanbo.

“Why did you bring him?” Caoxi asked, glaring at the Deng Lieutenant.

“Damage control,” he panted, nodding to Old Jifang, who had also joined them now, leading one of his workmen “You think this is bad? Wait until whoever is behind this, claims we killed some Deng clan junior on his first fate-thrashed day.”

“…”

“Aye,” Danshu spat. “What have we even walked into anyway? This shit-show—?”

A yin-attributed arrow hit a nearby wooden pillar supporting the second-floor veranda, sending a wave of disruptive qi into their surroundings. A second followed a moment later, but broke on the paving, scattering its talisman ineffectually.

“Faugh!” Danshu grunted, nearly tripping as he and Misty Camellia dragged the lieutenant through the doorway, into the comparative safety of the hall beyond. There they found a pale-looking Blue Jasmine who was standing, keeping a lookout for Singing Lily, Qing and Caoxi’s friend as they tended to the injured Lotus Blossom. “It's like being back as a junior guardsman...”

“Yeah, why are they—?" The wide eyed, workman with Jifang started to ask.

“I’ll explain it when we get clear of this blasted formation,” he growled, cutting both of them off as he again promised in his heart that he was going to give Han Bao and Chen Bei the beating of their miserable, ill-begotten lifetimes.

“About that…” Jifang, muttered, holding up a fist-sized octahedron of jade covered in fine formation symbols that looked awfully like a formations relay.

“Oh come on..." he groaned, narrowly avoiding stumbling as the floor ‘shifted’ subtly again. “Is that a..."

“Formations relay?” Jifang scowled, looking annoyed. “Yep, someone swapped it for the existing core, recently as well.”

“Any other good news?” Misty Camellia hissed, as they caught up to the others.

“D-dear?” Lotus Blossom gasped, trying to sit up as she spotted Guanbo.

“The standards of archery in the guards are every bit as bad as the last performance review claimed?” Kun Yu quipped as another arrow hit lodged in one of the screen doors into the hall behind them and failed to trigger.

“…”

“Kun, grab her,” he directed Kun Yu, glancing through the opened screen door into the next hall, which just held furniture and a stack of lanterns as far as he could see.

“But yeah,” Danshu muttered, glancing back towards the courtyard. “The formation marks you. Leaving it doesn’t eliminate all its effects… and it has some kind of spatial mark or lock.”

“It has a what?” he repeated, turning to stare at Danshu.

“Yeah,” Danshu confirmed. “Anyone marked by it can’t use any talismans or a storage device.”

“…”

Misty Camellia and Blue Jasmine stared at Guanbo, their expressions suggesting that they were very tempted to leave him behind.

“It... was designed to stop people stealing things," Lotus Blossom gasped. "I-it should not work like... this though...”

“So, they changed it,” he guessed, resisting the urge to rub his temples. “And nobody—”

“WHERE ARE THEY!” Sergeant Bei’s furious voice echoed from the courtyard behind them, cutting off the awkward looks his comment had elicited

“Well, it’s lasting longer than I expected,” Misty Camellia grimaced, reaching down and doing something with her mantra to Lotus Blossom, who gasped. “We have to get out of here.”

“Uh-huh,” he agreed, waving Kun Yu and Danshu through the door into the smaller hall.

“Not that way, it's better to go right,” Blue Jasmine remarked, pointing towards a smaller door at the side of the hall.

“What’s our next move?” Danshu asked, glancing back towards the courtyard as the others started moving where Blue Jasmine pointed.

“Master Liwen has to be the priority,” he replied, watching the fading blue jasmine petals. “My nephew has a good rapport with Grandmaster Li, so that will help. After that... Captain Fan or Captain Ling.”

“Assuming that this wasn’t also done with his help,” the workman with Jifang mumbled. “Why are they even..."

“That, thankfully, is rather unlikely,” Danshu replied, shaking his head as they followed on at the rear, watching their footing.

“Yeah,” Jifang agreed. “This thing is bad for folks' reputations..."

“This way!" Blue Jasmine pointed through a further hall as he reached the rest of them. “And close the screen...”

Caoxi nodded and pulled the sliding door across behind them with the help of Qing—

The formation shifted, sending everyone staggering.

“Any idea when it was tampered with?” he asked Jifang, as they steadied Kun Yu and the Lieutenant.

“Last few days, up to a week ago, maybe?” the old man answered with a helpless shrug. “Formation’s maintenance aren't most folks cup of spirit-wine you know.”

That was true, he had to admit. Most formations installed into places like the Green Moon like that were black boxes to those who used them. To have one subverted like this was… rare.

“How long until your formation is exhausted?” he asked Blue Jasmine as they arrived at a staircase down into a cellar, noting that the blue flower in her hair was almost fully wilted.

“Not long, although it's only thanks to this... whatever that weather is, that it's doing this well,” Blue Jasmine muttered, pointing to the potted spirit herbs over by the far wall, which were starting to come into rather unseasonable bloom.

“I... don't follow,” Kun Yu muttered.

“Those tree orchids don't flower this season,” he agreed.

“Indeed," she confirmed. “And the plum tree was also starting to present blossom, alongside the camellia, the tree orchids... the lilies in the pond and even the weeds in the ornamental border...”

“...”

Thinking back, he found she was right. The camellia aside, they had certainly not been in flower when he had first passed through the courtyard, or even when they went back outside after the first attack.

“Well, it’s a bit of good luck in our favour,” Misty Camellia added.

“That it is,” Blue Jasmine agreed, before glancing down the stairwell and adding. “Hurry up for fates-sakes!”

“It’s not easy to navigate stairs with this stupid formation!” Caoxi hissed back up at her.

They stood there for a nervous thirty seconds, listening to the shouting of the guards as they started to search around the courtyard, until at last the others had taken the injured down the stairwell far enough to allow the rest of them to make their way down.

“Where does this go, anyway?” Danshu asked once they had reached the bottom, which held a fairly normal looking storage cellar filled with pallets of wine jars and other sundry supplies for the teahouse like paper lanterns and spare furniture.

“It... has a connection across the street,” Lotus Blossom answered after a moment’s hesitation. “We have a warehouse there.”

“—It’s convenient due to being on the main road,” Caoxi added quickly.

“And the canal plays a part I am sure,” he murmured drily.

“Yes, well, if it saves our hides, I am sure you can afford to be diplomatic, given the circumstances,” Lotus Blossom muttered. “Go left, by the way.”

“Won’t that bring us out further from Grand Master Li’s estates?” Kun Yu asked, looking around with a frown as they headed between the racks of wine jars towards the exit she was pointing towards.

“Yes and no,” he clarified, wishing his tablet with the town maps was not stuck, inaccessible in his storage ring. “The main thing right now is to avoid that squad coming after us.”

“Yep,” Lotus Blossom confirmed. “It should…”

Caoxi grimaced as Lotus Blossom winced and coughed up a mouthful of dark blood.

“Sorry, the blow that bastard landed injured my meridians,” Lotus Blossom gasped, wiping her mouth.

“Here,” Danshu passed Caoxi a bottle of pills from his belt.

“What does the medicine…?” Caoxi trailed off as the whole building shook and the qi in the air turned turbulent.

Wine jars rattled in their racks. Nearby, a box of candles fell off a shelf, while a few lanterns shook free from their fixtures on the ceiling.

“…”

“—it will help heal the damage done to her meridians,” Danshu reaffirmed after the tremor had passed. “Take one with a cup of water or un-adulterated spirit wine.”

“Two, dissolved in wine,” he confirmed, grabbing a marked jar off the shelf next to him. “It will speed up the absorption of the medicine.”

Caoxi nodded, tipping out two small green pills from the jar, while he tipped the jar over a few times to mix it up. Lotus Blossom took the medicine without comment and then drank directly from the jar while he held it for her.

“—What about…” Lotus Blossom glanced towards Guanbo.

“I… could use one,” Guanbo rasped.

“I gave him a recovery pill already,” Kun Yu remarked, somewhat archly.

“Give him another then,” he instructed, seeing no benefit to being stingy. “And a stamina supplement… or some of those persis-flour pastries. Anyone else, the lieutenant?”

“You… knew the pastries had persis-flour in them?” Caoxi muttered, looking at him sideways.

“Yours is not the first teahouse I have been to,” he remarked drily, while Danshu rolled his eyes. Kun Yu just looked confused though.

“The lieutenant is out of it, but stable,” Jifang replied, after placing a finger against the unconscious youth’s neck.

“Not much we can do for him that his armour won’t already, anyways,” Danshu added with a grimace, quickly confirming Jifang’s diagnosis.

“Lian...” he murmured to Misty Camellia, “Can you do something for the lieutenant to keep him...?”

Misty Camellia gave him a sideways look, likely wondering how much he knew about mantra inheritors, but nodded and crouched down beside the youth and put her hand to his head.

“—We need to go,” Blue Jasmine cut in, pointing to the ever-more shrivelled flower in her hair. “When that runs out they will be after us in moments.”

“Especially if we are marked and they have access to the formation,” Danshu agreed.

Nodding in agreement, he watched as Kun Yu hauled Guanbo up again and Caoxi fed him the pill and some wine.

“Do we have any medicine for limbs?” he signed unobtrusively to Danshu as he put away their squad’s medicine kit.

“Yeah, I have a pill, but for now, let’s keep it,” Danshu signed back. “In case one of us needs it.”

“Now…” Blue Jasmine reiterated, tugging his sleeve more urgently.

“Lead the way,” he instructed Lotus Blossom and Caoxi, who both nodded and started to limp onwards again, accompanied by Danshu.

The others fell in behind, Kun Yu and Singing Lily supporting Guanbo, while Jifang and the other workman carried the Lieutenant between them, leaving him to bring up the rear.

The next minute or two were mercifully uneventful as they made their way onwards through the storage hall, into another short corridor, and then along that into a smaller hall with stairs back up.

“Those go to the kitchen,” Misty Camellia whispered to him as they took in the crates of food, jars of wine and spare furniture. “Delivery through those doors at the far end if I recall?”

“Yep,” the girl with Caoxi confirmed.

“Shall I go get the keys?” Qing volunteered helpfully, her voice shaking only a little.

“…”

“No,” he shook his head, staring at the double doors, then back the way they had come. “There is a back exit with the kitchens, right?”

“There… is?” Lotus Blossom replied with a slight frown. “But going under the street will be faster.”

“Speed isn’t the problem,” he muttered, wondering why he still felt something was… off.

The guards who had shown up earlier were likely to ‘mop up’ the scene of the crime and set up some kind of narrative to explain the aftermath. It was still Zhong, Dong Fang and whoever was working in the shadows, that were the true danger factor as far as he could see.

“They had a plan…” he mused, turning to look at the double doors again.

“A plan?” Jifang asked, quizzically.

“Yeah,” he frowned, thinking back to what their attackers had said… before Caoxi triggered the formation.

That group had also seemingly had a plan to take the women away at the very least, and he doubted they intended to do that by running out into the street like common criminals. Taking them out underground, to another location would be much easier. Doubly so if it was a convenient storage warehouse with wagons and regular deliveries, or canal access.

“We go up. Out the back and into the streets,” he decided. “Our best defence actually…”

“—people,” Danshu agreed, staring at the double doors as well.

“Yep,” he murmured. “They want to implicate us and to do that it’s most beneficial if we are dead. Guards died back there so it will be easy for them to play on emotions and this rain makes inexperienced idiots jumpy anyway.”

“The last thing we need is a fully squad of fully armed auxiliaries believing we killed some Deng scion shooting us full of talisman arrows,” Danshu confirmed. “It’s hard to do that on a main street.”

“It’s also hard to run away on one,” the workman muttered.

“In this weather we can’t be hunted by soul sense,” he reminded them

“We are marked though…” Lotus Blossom muttered. “And that formation was pretty good.”

“Yep, but the further we get from it, the harder it will be. We also have the relay here,” he replied. “Danshu, help Lian move Guanbo. Yu, can you take the lieutenant?”

“I'll go first, check nobody is... waiting,” Lotus Blossom muttered, taking a deep breath to compose herself. “Li, Qing, Yuli, come with me.”

“Okay,” he agreed, watching as Kun Yu and Danshu both hauled up their injured charges, the latter waving for Lotus Blossom, Caoxi’s friend and Singing Lily and Qing to go ahead of them towards the stairs.

He watched the others file past, until it was just him and Blue Jasmine standing in the cellar.

“Cancel your art now,” he instructed her quietly. “Before it runs out completely.”

“…”

“You expect an ambush…” she murmured.

“I know alignment shifting formations and personnel suppression setups for teahouses,” he replied. “And we just keep having little…”

“Delays,” she sighed. “Your eyesight is really good.”

The reason he had not said anything openly, was that ‘passive mazing’ was illegal on civilian formations. Using illusions was fine, but inauspicious feng shui combined with marks was dangerous, uncontrollable and if improperly set up, able to cause long-lasting damage.

Master Liwen was a respectable formations expert though, and well aware of the law, however most formations you could buy were inherently modular, especially if being put into an already existing building. The way things were going he was certainly not going to bet against Guanbo supplementing the formation once it had been set up, or that that was how it had been subverted later.

“Well, I have been at this a while,” he pointed out, biting his finger and quickly drawing a simple talisman trap on a jar of wine with his blood.

“It’s dispersing,” Blue Jasmine said after a moment. “We have maybe a minute.”

Nodding, he quickly moved a few jars around to hide his activity, then hurried for the stairs with her following behind.

At the top, however, in the small storage hall filled with hanging racks of food and goods for the kitchen, he found most of the others, crouched by the wall, looking gloomy.

“What’s the problem?” he asked, moving up to Kun Yu, not seeing Danshu, Caoxi, Lotus Blossom, Yuli or Singing Lily among their number.

“Ah, you are here,” Danshu murmured, sticking his head around the door.

Going through into the surprisingly empty kitchen, he saw Caoxi and Yuli were standing near the door leading into the teahouse, looking nervous and fiddling with some ingredients on a counter.

“Lotus Blossom and Singing Lily took the cook and the servant off,” Danshu elaborated as they made their way over to him.

“Risky, but I suppose it is what it is,” he muttered. “Why are you all still here, though?”

“Guardsmen, in the courtyard,” Danshu replied, as Blue Jasmine warily looked out into the outside courtyard.

“I only see three, and they are not wearing armour,” Blue Jasmine noted. “Think I recognise one as well, isn’t that Kang Jeong smoking the pipe?”

“—yeah, it’s Corporal Kang and his patrol squad,” Danshu confirmed.

“I guess it confirms that there are reinforcements arriving,” he mused, trying to think through the options in his head.

“There is a garden gate,” Caoxi added. “For… elite clients, shall we say.”

“Still requires us to cross the courtyard or risk going back into the teahouse,” Blue Jasmine pointed out.

Caoxi opened her mouth to reply, before closing it again and waving for them to get back.

Blue Jasmine, however, just dusted off her gown quickly and walked over to the rack of wine by the wall.

“Ah, you are here,” Lotus Blossom murmured as she and Singing Lily re-entered the kitchen. “The cook, Qingcheng and her niece will be occupied for a few minutes; do you have a plan for those guards outside?”

“…”

“We will have a headache if we want to take a bleeding, one-armed man and an unconscious lieutenant out of here on foot,” Danshu added. “I know people joke about guards ‘walking with purpose’, but that will be pushing it.”

“Yeah,” he agreed.

“—It’s kinda moot, one of them looks like they are about to come over here anyway,” Blue Jasmine cut in.

Glancing outside, he saw she was right. Kang was having a discussion with a fourth guardsman, wearing armour, who was pointing inside and gesturing emphatically.

“Okay, we can only gamble,” he sighed. “Follow me, Lianfan lead the way please.”

“…”

Lotus Blossom gave him a sideways look as he gestured outside, but let with no real other options, grabbed an umbrella from by the door and went out into the rain.

“Caoxi, come on," Blue Jasmine called to the girl, who grimaced and followed after both him and Danshu.

“I hope you have a good idea,” Lotus Blossom murmured as they fell in behind her, heading out into the courtyard.

“…”

They had barely made it a third of the way across before they were spotted by Corporal Kang.

“Look, can’t you spare at least brother Hsui?” the guard in armour was saying as they came into earshot.

“Hey, Sergeant Mei!” Kang Jeong waved for him to come over, looking relieved.

“Master Corporal Kang,” he replied, giving the lead guardsman, a bearded former military man who was puffing on a pipe, a nod of recognition.

The other two with Kang he also recognised, thankfully, as the usual members of his patrol squad, two junior guards, Huan and Jing. All of them had their weapons out, but none were wearing armour, suggesting they had been called straight from their patrol. The guardsman in full armour was also a Master Corporal with ‘Hong’ on his name tag.

“You got roped into this as well?” the corporal asked, giving Hong a sideways look. “It’s terrible by the sounds of it. Multiple injured and dead, including guards… and something about an attempted cover-up?”

“Yeah,” he nodded, thinking quickly. “We are escorting Mistress Lianfan and her maids to the central district, personal protection as the manager was attacked. They are witnesses.”

“Ah, that rogue Guanbo finally annoyed the wrong ganger?” Huan chuckled, ignoring the stony glare he garnered from Lotus Blossom.

“Bad day for it,” Jing agreed with a resigned shrug. “Given the shit going on out there, not to mention this charming upgrade on that accursed rain.”

“Or a good day,” Hong added, scuffing his boot in a puddle. “Depending on your viewpoint.”

“What is going on out there?” Danshu asked as they all shifted under cover a bit more.

“Honestly?” Corporal Kang muttered, giving his pipe an aggressive puff. “No fate-thrashed idea. I tried asking those armoured meatheads in the square but they just spouted some monkey-shit about a ‘list’ and, ‘operational security’.”

“It’s a total shit-show,” Hong added, spitting on the ground. “I drive one of those fate-accursed mud-skippers and they wouldn’t tell me. Half our lot are parked on the Wusheng Canal crossing, and nobody will tell us why?”

“And there was that alchemical warehouse explosion,” Jing added, “can’t be good for anyone.”

“We saw,” Danshu agreed.

“It looked like Starlight Alchemy Pavilion,” Blue Jasmine added, conversationally, from beneath her own umbrella.

“Faugh, could be, was certainly big enough,” Jing agreed.

“Did you see my other squad member, Kun Yu around, by the way?” he asked casually, the edge of an idea forming in his mind with Hong’s admission that he drove an armoured carriage.

“Ah, no, we didn’t,” Corporal Kang replied apologetically. “I’ll keep a look out, though.”

“Thanks,” he replied blandly. “It’s a bit chaotic around here.”

“So, can we help?” Corporal Kang asked, looking at Lotus Blossom, Caoxi and Blue Jasmine.

“Some spare body armour?” Danshu joked. “We were on routine check-ups before this… and now we are on witness escort duty.”

“—Hey, you can help him but not me?” Hong grumbled

“You want to split my squad in two on the orders of some sergeant I’ve never heard of before. Master Sergeant Mei just wants a set of armour and a weapon.” Corporal Kang replied rather pointedly.

“I know,” Hong sighed, looking vexed. “But he’s from the fate-thrashed Deng…”

“I have a spare set of light armour and a bow,” Corporal Kang added to him. “I’ll… huh, odd.”

“Feugh, it restricts everyone?” Danshu sighed as Corporal Kang stared at the talisman band on the wrist of his armour like it had just stabbed him.

“The formations on the teahouse got subverted by the attackers, sir,” Caoxi supplied breathlessly. “It was terrible.”

“Explains the full-on response and the squad of auxiliaries outside in the square,” Corporal Kang scowled as the other three also checked their storage bands and found them also restricted.

“Though they could have said something,” Guardsman Huan sighed, shaking his head in disgust.

“Typical really,” Hong muttered. “If this is all because some ‘young noble’ got stabbed, I swear…”

“Yeah, it is shaping up to be that kind of day,” Jing agreed.

“You said you have an armoured carriage?” he said to Hong.

“I do, Sir,” Hong sighed. “Or did, now I’m to find a friend and go guard the other exit of this place it seems.”

“Where is it?” he asked.

“Blocking half the street, making me many friends,” Hong grumbled. “Some even know where I live.”

“It’s chaos in there, but they have already secured the gardens at the back,” Blue Jasmine added.

“They have?” Hong stared around with the expression of someone who wanted to strangle someone.

“Yeah, a Sergeant Deng Bei I think it was heading in that direction,” she added.

“…”

“Bring that vehicle in here,” he told Hong. “When I find my corporal, you can take us all back to the central district, with a short stop on route, how does that sound?”

“Sounds like orders,” Hong remarked drily. “Hsui, do you want to give me a hand?”

“…”

“I just need someone to sit on top and make sure I don’t run over a stall!” Hong groaned.

“I’ll need to go look for my other corporal, then,” he added. “I was expecting him to be here, honestly.”

“We haven’t seen anyone since we got here,” Kang reiterated apologetically.

“Go with the Sergeant,” Lotus Blossom commanded Blue Jasmine.

“Thanks,” he murmured, heading off for the nearest doorway.

“You actually intend to drive us out of here in an armoured carriage?” Blue Jasmine asked, as soon as they were through it and into the corridor beyond.

“With an injured lieutenant and an important witness to ‘protect’?” he replied, rolling his eyes.

“…”

“Well, it’s a plan all right,” she conceded, before turning and walking back out into the courtyard.

Corporal Kang gave him a wave, which he returned as they made their way back around to the kitchen.

Back inside, he found the cook was still occupied with whatever task Lotus Blossom had set and the others were waiting nervously in the side room.

“I have good news,” he said with a grin. “We get a ride out of here.”

It was a rather nervous wait, with Caoxi and Yuli keeping a watch on the kitchen entrance until he judged enough time had passed for him to have ‘found’ Kun Yu.

“Okay,” he declared, hauling up the still unconscious Lieutenant Xuong with the help of Jifang. “Let’s try this.”

“What happens if it doesn’t… work?” Misty Camellia asked.

“Then get ready to stun a few guards,” he replied.

Heading back out to the courtyard, he found that the almost ten foot tall, eight wheeled armoured vehicle was slowly being driven into the courtyard with Hsui standing on the top and Danshu waving it on from the side.

“They are not designed for precision manoeuvring,” he explained to the confused onlookers as the surprisingly large vehicle made a slow circle, just about scraping by the cargo wagon as it did so. “At least if you care about the things a metre in any given direction.”

“Yeah, don’t they call them ‘mud-skippers’?” Misty Camellia noted. “On account of their almost cursed ability to find corners to turn where none should exist?”

“Uh-huh,” he nodded as Hong completed the manoeuvre. “Doubly so in this weather, given they rely… quite a bit on qi-sensing formations, operated by a co-driver.”

“Bit of a design flaw, that,” Jifang muttered.

“Yeah, why do you think the guards have them?” he replied drily.

“Is that a lieutenant?” Hsui asked, hopping down off the back as the vehicle came to a final stop without incident.

“Yeah, he took a nasty hit,” he replied. “Need to evacuate him, along with a few others who got injured by a formation.”

“Yikes, blow to the neck, with a blade, without his armour he would be in trouble,” Hsui observed, moving to give him a hand.

“He was lucky,” he agreed. “Others were not.”

“Is that the Deng lieutenant who was leading the auxiliary squad?” Hong, who had now clambered out of the driver’s section of the vehicle asked.

“It is,” he confirmed.

“Get everyone who needs to, on board,” he added. “If your orders are to stay here, Danshu can drive it with Yu as the eyes.”

“Eh, my orders were to be useful,” Hong replied, hauling open the door at the rear of the vehicle. “I’d much rather ferry some folks over the river than get stuck being yelled at by grandmothers for blocking a street. Not to mention, you’re the highest ranked able-bodied person here.”

“Hah…” he shook his head and hefted the unconscious lieutenant into the vehicle with as much care as he could, before waving the others to climb in.

“—armour,” Danshu said, tapping him on the arm as Caoxi and Yuli scrambled in first and found seats near the front.

Nodding in thanks, he stepped away from the vehicle so the others could get in more efficiently and quickly pulled on the leggings and top, then began to slot the armoured panels into them as Danshu passed them over. In a matter of less than a minute, he was outfitted in a full set of ceramic-weave body-armour similar to Lieutenant Xuong’s, only with heavier body plates.

While Danshu finished equipping his own armour, he climbed into the interior and made his way past the others to the front where the weapons locker was. Ignoring the curious looks from the others, he took a bow from the rack and set one of the spirit jades provided into it, then drew the string.

With a faint shimmer, a talisman arrow appeared, accompanied with a display for a small formation asking him what type of arrow he wanted to use.

Satisfied that worked, he took a light blade and strapped that on his right side, and turned to find that most of the others had clambered in at this point.

“Everyone in?” he called back to Danshu as Jifang climbed in, followed by Lotus Blossom.

“Yep!” Danshu confirmed, echoed a moment later by Lotus Blossom.

“Okay, close the doors,” he added, watching as Jifang and Lotus Blossom did so, with the help of Danshu.

“That corporal was not joking when he said it was cramped,” Yuli muttered from where she was now sitting on Singing Lily’s lap.

“I’m going to be up top, so there will be a bit more space,” he replied with a chuckle, pushing open the hatch above him.

Climbing up, his space was immediately taken by Misty Camellia who gave him a cheerful grin, then stuck her tongue out at Yuli, who had been a fraction too slow. Rolling his eyes, he quickly checked that Kun Yu had gotten into his side of the front okay, then tapped the outside of the vehicle twice, drawing a symbol for ‘link’ on it.

It took a moment, but a shimmering lattice rippled over his armour confirming that he was now tethered to the vehicle and would not be tossed off by accident.

“Looks good on the outside!” Hsui called up as Danshu pulled himself up onto the rear. “Have fun!”

“We are good to go, I think,” Danshu said, walking along the top of the vehicle and kneeling down beside him.

“Right, Corporal Hong, drive us out of here, and try not to take out the wall!” he called down into the vehicle.

“Well, I can always blame your corporal on the paperwork!” Hong called back.

“You sure you want Yu being the eyes?” Danshu asked, registering his own link as they started moving forwards.

“I’d rather have you up here,” he replied, giving Corporals Kang and Jing a wave of thanks as they passed through the gateway.

“You think they will attack us, in this?” Danshu frowned, looking around.

“Hard to say, these things are tough, but a good treasure is still dangerous,” he muttered, surveying the first floor of the teahouse as they rolled back out onto the street.

“True, but if someone throws a peak Immortal treasure at us, I can only hope my dear daughter grows up to extract brutal vengeance for my scattered ashes,” Danshu replied sourly. “Anyway, what is all this about? You said you would explain?”

“…”

“You know my worthless nephews?”

“Uh-huh,” Danshu replied.

“Well, Han Bao seems to have come to there, with some juniors from Blue Cliff…”

“…”

“Somehow, I am both surprised, and yet not,” Danshu muttered sympathetically. “But this seems… overkill for a disagreement over some beauties…”

With a sigh, he started to narrate the circumstances. At first, Danshu asked a few questions, however, by the time he was done, the Master Corporal was just staring silently at the rain-drenched street and they rolled along it towards Wusheng Lake and the eastern end of Blue River Boulevard.

“If you do not give those brats the thrashing of a lifetime, I rather suspect that I will have to beg your forgiveness,” Danshu said at last.

“Blue Jasmine suggested that… an arrangement could be reached,” he murmured drily.

“That might be a well-deserved life lesson,” Danshu agreed. “Though, as you say, the immediate problem is who is behind that Zhong and Dong Fang. If they have backers in the Deng clan this could get ugly.”

“Gonna hit the Green Moon Market plaza in a minute,” Hong’s voice echoed through the communication link to both of them. “Doubt it will be busy, but in this weather I’m gonna need you to spot as we turn towards Wusheng Lake… unless you want to go the other way?”

“Nope, we need to go to Master Liwen’s on the way,” he replied.

“What are the fines for flattening some poor sod’s stall?” Danshu asked.

“Enough that you don’t want to ask,” Hong muttered.

“This is the worst weather to be using these in,” Danshu agreed. “Have you tried the helmet optics?”

“I didn’t bother with them,” he replied drily, flicking the edge of his hat. “Multi-coloured fog and my eyeballs have a longstanding agreement to pass on different sides of the street.”

“Smart eyeballs,” Danshu agreed. “How you coping Yu?”

“I hate it,” Kun Yu replied succinctly.

“It’s character building,” Hong remarked. “My driving instructor used to say you can tell a skilled mud-skipper navigator by the fact that he never blinks.”

“Hilarious,” Kun Yu grumbled.

“—Drive slower ya bastards!” a woman yelled, skipping back as Hong clipped a puddle, sending a spray of mud and leaves over the sidewalk.

“Yeah, fate-cursed menaces!” another shopper added.

“I’ll go to the front,” he said to Danshu, who sighed with palpable relief as they left the drenched pedestrians behind on the edge of the square.

Despite Hong’s worries and that rocky start, there was actually a relatively clear path through the market square, although several stalls looked recently repaired and the glares they got said quite a bit.

“Corporal Hong is actually rather good with these,” Danshu remarked as they crawled past several stalls that had been recently moved back.

“Hong was not wrong, the fines are… otherworldly,” he murmured, waving apologetically to a stall owner who had to step back to avoid the spray from a puddle.

“Speeding up a bit,” Hong told them.

“Can I come up?” Misty Camellia called up.

“Pull on an armour set from the cabinet,” he replied.

There was some scuffling below and a very unfeminine curse, then Misty Camellia half climbed up to stand in the hatch.

“Much better,” she sighed, looking around. “The view from up here is certainly different.”

“It’s a different perspective for sure,” Danshu agreed as they started down the street beside the canal, Hong picking up a bit more speed.

They drove on in silence for a few minutes, watching the pedestrians hurrying by, until at last, Misty Camellia spoke.

“Doesn’t it seem like there are a lot more people moving away from the Seng District?”

“It… does look that way,” Danshu agreed as they took in the steady stream of pedestrians and now even a few wagons heading back past them. “That haze… must be the smoke pall from the alchemy warehouse.”

Reaching the end of the street, Hong slowed as they met a genuine traffic jam… caused by three armoured vehicles blocking the bridge south of Wusheng Lake.

“Clear a path!” he yelled at the wagon in front of them.

“How can I do that!” the guard standing beside it called back. “Tell your bastard mates to stop blocking the bridge!”

“We can take the side street,” Hong said as they started to back up. “Just watch out for…”

The air shifted around them, the rain seeming to jump in mid-air.

In the distance there was a flash of blue-green lightning that struck down on the far side of the Wusheng Lake, scattering strange shadows for a few seconds. In the moment of clearer weather… he saw the far side and the waterfront of the Seng District, which were shrouded in rolling smoke.

“That’s not good,” Danshu muttered.

“Yeah…” Misty Camellia agreed.

A moment later Hong turned them and started up a much narrower side street. A few minutes of driving and several cursing matches with locals who didn’t appreciate a massive armoured carriage trying to take that shortcut, they arrived at the north end of Wusheng Lake… and into a scene of chaos.

Hundreds of people were gathered around the bridge there, engaged in a series of shouting matches with two dozen heavily armed auxiliary troops in Ha clan colours. Everywhere, there were burn scars—

The clap of another explosion made the ground shake faintly and the hair on his arms and neck stood up as errant thunder qi sizzled somewhere in the middle distance—

The formations protecting the town shimmered in the sky above as several iridescent lightning bolts scattered across Wusheng Lake like errant dragons before being dispersed.

“Get us across here now,” he told Hong as pedestrians nearby started to point at them.

“They are hailing us, the lieutenant there wants us to use an anti-personnel formation to—” Hong replied.

“Tell them we are evacuating casualties,” he replied.

“…”

“He says that’s an ‘order’,” Hong replied sourly.

“Ignore him,” he sighed, “Go straight across and try not to run anyone over.”

“Understood,” Hong confirmed, turning slightly and heading for the road that followed the canal towards the distant river.

Watching the mob to their right cursing the auxiliaries, he had some sympathy for those on the bridge. However, in the current circumstances he also knew that deploying those formations would not help anyone in the long run, least of all them, the lone vehicle in the middle of several hundred cultivators of largely indeterminate realm.

“Hey, Imperial Dog!”

He turned to find three youths standing nearby, pointing at them.

“Eat shit and burn!” one of them giggled, making an obscene symbol at them.

“Eh?” he shoved Misty Camellia’s head down a moment before the talisman triggered, turning their surroundings into a halo of purple-green fire and disorientating laughter.

“Ahaaaaagh—!” Kun Yu’s shriek of anguish as the optics on the vehicle turned into an iridescent mess forced him to mute the link.

“Ahaahahahh!” the three fled even before the fire had dissipated, barely scratching the qi-armour of the vehicle...

“Do I shoot them?” Danshu spat, half drawing his bow.

“No,” he scowled. “Pick up the pace Hong.”

“You got it,” Hong replied and the vehicle immediately sped up.

“What happened?” Misty Camellia asked, poking her head back out as they turned onto the street by the canal.

“Some smart-asses just tried to blind us,” Danshu said as they watched the three youths make obscene gestures at them whilst laughing from an alleyway behind them.

A moment later he saw several flashes of light on the far side of the canal—

Two lightning bolts hit the vehicle with enough force to make the shield formation fully manifest for a few seconds.

“Fates go—!” Hong cut off his own connection for a moment, but he could still hear the corporal swearing down below as he kept the vehicle straight.

“What the fates is going on out there?” Danshu growled, sighting on the far side of the canal with his bow, to no avail. “Was that aimed at us, or just opportunistic?”

“Yes?” he muttered.

Fortunately, they attracted no further attacks as they raced along the canal, past the park that bordered onto the Han clan’s neighbourhood, only slowing again when they reached the bridge to the Li neighbourhood.

“Fates, I hate bridges,” Hong grumbled as they rolled across the narrow bridge, barely clearing it.

“If ever you needed a reminder of the defensive origins of the old canals, that’s it,” he joked to Misty Camellia as they set off down the street beyond, which was largely deserted bar a few people hurrying to get out of the rain.

“They do claim quite a few wagons,” she agreed. “They knocked down all the ones in the Seng District and rebuilt them to be much wider.”

“Yeah,” Danshu nodded, neither of them needing to say why that was.

“Oh, roadblock,” she added, pointing ahead of them to where a group of rather nervous-looking auxiliaries in Deng clan colours were inspecting a wagon while a woman remonstrated with a group of nearby guards.

“Hey, stop! STOP!” the lieutenant leading the auxiliaries yelled rather redundantly, as they rolled up to it.

“Oh, for fates sakes,” the leader of the guard squad, a Lieutenant called Chang who he half recognised from the Western District, came forward. “Is that you District Sergeant Mei?”

“It is,” he replied, giving the lieutenant a polite salute. “Lieutenant Chang.”

“Let the boss guy cross, you colossal dipshit, you think your list matters that badly?” the Lieutenant Chang told the auxiliary squad leader.

“But…” the auxiliary lieutenant started to say.

“What are you carrying?” Lieutenant Chang asked him.

“Witnesses from a tea house bust up and some injured, including a Deng clan Lieutenant, Deng Xuong,” he replied.

“…”

“Xu-Xuong?” the lieutenant with the Deng group paled.

“…”

Lieutenant Chang opened the side door to the vehicle and glanced inside for a moment, inspecting the rather nervous occupants, including the obviously injured Guanbo and the still unconscious Lieutenant Xuong and nodded.

“Looks in order, fates-speed,” Lieutenant Chang said.

“W-we can give you an escort if you like,” the Deng clan lieutenant added, his tone totally changed from before.

“Unnecessary,” he said drily. “Though I would dearly love to know what the fates is going on in the Seng District.”

“You and me both,” Lieutenant Chang sighed. “Rumour has it that some bigshot juniors got killed and the culprits are here in town.”

“As I said, it’s all smoke and rumour,” Chang continued, meeting their dull gazes with a helpless shrug as he closed the side door of the vehicle.

“We ready to move out?” Hong asked.

“Yes,” he confirmed, before giving Lieutenant Chang a polite salute and adding. “Stay safe, Lieutenant.”

“You too,” Lieutenant Chang replied returning the salute as Hong stared moving forward again.

“What do you make of that?” Danshu muttered once they were well out of earshot and starting to turn down the next street.

“Spirit stone says it’s one of those over-seas scions who came with the Patriarch who went and got drunk in the wrong tea house…” Misty Camellia added.

“…”

“Yeah, I don’t think I'll take that bet,” Danshu replied while Misty Camellia just rolled her eyes.

“Where in the Li neighbourhood do you want us to head for?” Hong cut in.

“Grandmaster Li’s shop first,” he replied. “That is where Master Liwen…”

Abruptly, a wall of mist rolled over them, shaking trees and dislodging roof tiles on the buildings either side of them.

“What the—” Misty Camellia’s words were lost as a thunderclap hit half a second later, leaving him seeing double, his vision turning slightly pink around the edges.

Almost immediately, roof-tiles and half-melted bricks started dropping out of the sky all around them.

“Ohh… my head,” Kun Yu moaned through the link.

“What was that?” Hong asked as the vehicle slowed.

“I…” he trailed off as a body, burnt beyond all recognition hit a roof across the street.

A second one, an un-activated talisman still clasped incongruously in their fist, landed in the street behind them with a dull splat.

“Alchemical… explosion,” Danshu groaned.

“How can you…” before Misty Camellia could finish her very obvious question, a bronze cauldron hit a two-story building twenty metres from them and exploded in a gout of searing green fire.

“Right… silly question,” she muttered as a second half melted cauldron smashed down in the street behind them, followed by a third body.

“Are those… talismans?” Danshu said, his voice cracking as he pointed towards dozens of smouldering leaflets drifting down out of the rain…

His eyes found the body with the talisman in its hand.

“Drive!” he screamed at the same time Danshu did.

Misty Camellia ducked back into the vehicle as it lurched forward, not a moment too soon as it transpired, as a nearby rooftop vanished in a gout of pink fire that enveloped half the street.

The few pedestrians abroad were picking themselves up, fled, screaming for the protection of the nearest estates as a second one erupted ahead of them a split second later, followed by a third off to their right—

The street behind them vanished in a blazing ball of pink fire as what had to be an entire sheaf of golden-core grade ‘Bright Blaze’ talismans destabilized. The explosion hit the back of their vehicle hard enough to make his eyes water.

Danshu grunted as Hong slid them around a corner, uncaring that he smashed into an estate wall, scoring sparks as he did so.

“What the motherless monkey was that?” Hong asked.

“Alchemical warehouse explo—” a secondary explosion rolled over them, forcing him to stop speaking. “Another warehouse went up.”

“Yeah, I wonder about that,” Danshu said, holding something out to him.

He took the tattered talisman, fortunately too compromised to trigger and he saw immediately what Danshu meant. There were none of the usual safeguards on it that prevented chain detonations and no ‘shop mark’ either.

“Some gangers tried to…” Danshu had to stop speaking as Hong took them around another corner at speed.

“—rob a warehouse,” he agreed, shoving the talisman into a pocket as ‘evidence’ once he was sure it was not going to explode. “Hope it wasn’t Old Ji,” he added, staring off at the distant plume of smoke, barely visible through the rain.

“He did report someone poking about…” Danshu grimaced.

“Everyone okay in there?” he called down.

“Y-yeah,” Yuli stammered. “What was that?”

“Alchemical explosion, big one, by the canal probably,” he replied.

“…”

“Another?” Misty Camellia, who was now wearing a helmet, muttered as she clambered back up to look out—

There was a further dull rumble and a transmitted sound like tearing cloth behind them. They watched in silence as dozens of spectral swords, each easily the size of their vehicle, shimmered like a vast constellation in the rain-drenched sky, striking down indiscriminately around the distant pall of smoke.

“…”

“How soon until we get to the shop?” he asked Hong as they turned another corner.

“Two streets,” Hong replied tersely.

Thankfully, there was no further insanity… not on the same level anyway. Everywhere, the shattered early morning idyll was being savaged. They passed two groups rushing towards the chaos behind them, calling for volunteers as they went. Stalls on street corners were being bundled up, while everywhere civilians were arguing about what was going, or cursing alchemists.

“It’s up ahead,” Hong informed him as he accepted a salute from a group of guards jogging past in the direction of the fires.

Shifting to look ahead of them as they slowed to a crawl, he found that they were indeed at Grandmaster Li’s shop, a three-story building at one corner of the Li estate that bordered onto the main road.

“Want me to wait here for a moment?” Danshu said.

“Yep, keep an eye out,” he agreed, hopping off the vehicle and onto the road.

Leaving Danshu to that, he strode over to the shop and pushed on the door, finding to his relief that it was open.

Inside, the handful of shoppers – some youths in unfamiliar robes and an older woman looking through talisman book – glanced up at him, frowning.

Ignoring them, he walked over to the counter and leant over, then poked the talisman to summon the shopkeeper.

“How can I help… you,” the young girl wearing a Li family robe hurried in, then blinked, clearly surprised to be met with a fully armoured town guard.

“Is Master Liwen in?” he asked politely.

“Uh… I believe so, but he doesn’t man the shop today…” the girl stammered.

“I need to see him, officially, about a formation… or three. We also have a vehicle outside. Can it be brought into the estate?”

“I-into?” the girl repeated. “I’ll… go find out!”

She gave him a hurried, apologetic curtsy and retreated.

“…”

Turning back to consider the shop, he found two young women from the Green Fang Pagoda had also come in.

“I heard it was old Yu’s warehouse that went up…” the younger girl was saying on her talisman. “Yes, yes, I’ll come home immediately… but we are just there now… yes, we will be quick…”

Tuning their conversation out, he leant against the counter and checked his own talisman, just in case, but it was still sealed and unable to make any connection.

“Master Liwen asks if it is urgent,” an older woman, likely one of the shop managers said, returning with the younger girl.

“Yes, it is. Very urgent,” he replied. “Can you just take me to see him?”

“…”

The girl stared at him with a faintly unrelenting expression of someone who surely got requests like that a dozen times a day, then sighed and nodded.

“And the vehicle?”

“…”

“Is it one of those armoured monstrosities?” the older woman sniffed.

“It’s a guard vehicle, with injured and people marked by a malicious formation onboard, I would rather not have it in the street,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Fine, but if you run over anything, we will report it,” the woman sighed waving for the girl to go outside. “She will show you where. When you have parked it, send her to come get me and I will take you—”

“Unnecessary,” he cut her off, having no time that. “I am not the one driving it, so we can go straight to Master Liwen. It is urgent.”

“So you said,” the woman sighed, clearly unimpressed.

“…”

“So do I…?” the shopgirl hesitated.

“Yes,” the woman sighed, waving for her to go outside, before turning on her heel and stalking off. “What a day. First some jumped up official, and stupid alchemists… now pushy guards with ‘urgent’ requests… why can’t they all just…”

Tactfully ignoring her muttering, he followed after her down a corridor and out into a tree-lined courtyard with a fetching little pond and ornamental pagoda in the middle.

“Wait here,” she said flatly. “Master Liwen will be with you presently.”

“…”

He considered trying to push the issue, but even with the rain his intuition told him the woman was significantly stronger than he was. Probably not a full Immortal, more like a quasi-one, but still not someone it was worth annoying, so he just nodded and went to sit on a bench beneath a tree.

To his mild surprise, he was only waiting a few minutes in the rain before a young man in a scholar’s robe came to find him.

“You are here to see Uncle Li?” the youth asked perfunctorily.

“Yes, I have important, guard related business I need his advice on,” he said standing up.

“…”

“Fine,” the youth sighed, waving for him to follow without offering so much as a salute, as if the whole thing was a terrible imposition. “Come with me, guardsman.”

Pushing away thoughts of kicking the youth into the pond, he followed him into the hall at the far side, down a long corridor, around the sheltered edge of another tree-lined courtyard and into a small hall where a scholarly-looking man in late-middle-age was sitting, his chin in his hands, staring at a half painted golden chrysanthemum on a wall scroll.

“There is a guard to see you,” the youth said blandly.

“Ah… Oh, it’s you, Master Sergeant,” Li Liwen said warmly, standing up and waving for him to come in. “You should have given your name…”

Wordlessly he pointed to the armour where it was written in bold lettering.

“Idiot boy, go get us some tea!” Master Liwen snapped to the boy, who fled like he had just been kicked.

“Sorry for his attitude,” Master Liwen sighed. “He is Teacher’s grandnephew and believes that gives him some kind of status. How can I help you? Is it about these explosions, do the guard need special talismans?”

“Ah, no, this is unrelated,” he replied, hoping it was truly the case. “Actually, I need your advice… and help on a formation you installed in a teahouse. The Green Moon?”

“Green Moon,” Li Liwen frowned. “In the Blue Blossom Square?”

“That’s the one,” he confirmed, taking a seat and eyeing the design the Talisman Master was drawing.

“Ahh, you like it?" Master Liwen remarked, gesturing to the scroll painting on the table, depicting a white chrysanthemum growing by a pond. “It is called ‘A Mothers Heart’.”

“By Jun Ruliu?” he mused, recognising the very collectible style even without the signature on the bottom.

“A genius young woman in many ways. It was such a shame she failed her tribulation,” Liwen sighed regretfully, stroking his beard. “You are friendly with her husband, are you not?”

“I am,” he confirmed politely. “This can’t be the original though?”

As far as he knew, that hung in the Jun family shrine and he doubted Jun Han had loaned it out.

“Hah... you have a good eye,” Master Liwen nodded. “It is indeed just a reproduction she made. Grandmaster Oudeng very generously loaned me this one to study. I took it out again after seeing her daughter’s remarkable painting at Patriarch Dongfei’s banquet.

“Ah, but I am nattering on,” Liwen added, apologetically. “And you said it was urgent. Tell me what your issue is with this formation. Maybe that boy will have found someone to grow the tea-plant for him by the time you are done.”

“Ha…” unable to help himself, he could only laugh at Master Liwen’s comment as the old man sat down opposite him and cleared some space on the table.

Taking the ‘relay core’ out of the bag at his waist, he put it on the table and quickly outlined the pertinent details, starting with the subversion and then moving onto the various problems it was causing. Master Liwen, for his part, listened attentively, though his expression got progressively more pensive as he spoke.

“So, this is what they replaced the original core for the formation with?” Master Liwen said at last, picking up the jade octahedron and turning it over in his hands.

“Yes, according to Old Jifang.”

“Jifang recovered it?” Master Liwen mused, nodding his head.

“Yes, is that a problem?” he asked, frowning, hoping that Jifang was not somehow a part of this, despite his protestations.

“Ah, no, not at all,” Master Liwen replied, giving him an apologetic smile. “It doesn’t appear… obviously trapped, although…”

“Although?” he prompted as the formations expert trailed off, considering the core in silence.

“…”

“Hhmmmm…” Master Liwen frowned, holding the core up to the light and turning it this way and that. “Odd… huh…”

“—your tea, uncle,” the youth said, shuffling back into the room with a pot of tea.

“Ah… hum… on the table,” Master Liwen replied absently, still considering the jade.

“Is there a problem with it?” he asked at last, as the youth started to pour out tea, rather badly.

“Mmmm…” Master Liwen just hummed under his breath for a moment, then put the jade down and claimed his cup of tea. “It’s odd. Familiar as well, but…”

“But…?” he prompted.

“Ah, it’s hard to explain.” Master Liwen said, sipping the tea only to grimace slightly and putting it to one side. “Quanfei, go get me my records for… twenty-three years ago, month of the Singing Lotus… and uh, inform Teacher Li I need to see him.”

“Uncle,” the youth murmured, turning and sauntering off.

“And be quick!” Liwen called after him, making Quanfei flinch.

He sipped his own cup of tea politely then set it to the side.

“Yeah, tea is not his talent,” Liwen sighed, focusing on the octahedron again, his expression turning faintly troubled once more.

“You are familiar with um… shall we say, the stylistic differences between the formations philosophies of the Ha, Deng and Ling?” Master Liwen asked after a moment.

“Somewhat,” he replied politely, wondering where Liwen was going with this. “The Ha clan are more focused on formations set up using diffuse feng shui, while the Deng prefer precision, artificial constructions and modular, multi-core setups. The Ling clan specialize in static formations with excellent defensive capabilities.”

“Quite,” Master Liwen confirmed. “Anyway, this relay core definitely ascribes to the Deng clan’s particular philosophy. However, I doubt it was made by an established formations expert. For starters, the jade itself is not ‘baked’, if you follow my meaning?”

“As in, it works, but the ‘unit’ itself is unsealed?” he replied, trying to recall the terminology that Li Liwen was talking about.

“Yes,” Liwen nodded. “I will say the core is well constructed. Technically competent, however there is only minimal ‘hardening’ of the interior components around it. The rest of the interface matrix has also been constructed by someone with very simplistic, I might even say ‘naïve’, comprehensions.”

“You’re saying it’s a cheap knockoff?” he mused, staring at the core.

“As tempting as it may be to say that,” Li Liwen replied, with a sigh, “I cannot say that with confidence—”

A polite knock on the doorframe interrupted Master Liwen.

“—Fei said you wanted some records?” a young girl said, entering with several large scrolls.

“Ah, thank you, Qing,” Liwen murmured, giving the girl a grateful smile, “Put them on the table here.”

“Of course,” the girl placed the scrolls down on the end of the table, then noticed the haphazardly made tea and sighed. “Shall I stay and serve tea?”

“Yes, please,” Liwen said drily. “I fear it is a skill outside my nephew’s means.”

“…”

The girl glanced into the teapot, wrinkled her nose and nodded.

“Anyway…” Master Liwen unrolled a scroll, skimming down the list, presumably of jobs or contracts he had fulfilled. “Green Moon Teahouse, payment nine spirit jade… ah, and an agreement that they make a generous contribution to the wedding of Master Li’s third daughter… anyway, hmmm… mmm… uh-huh…”

He watched in silence, as Master Liwen muttered to himself for a few moments, then put the scroll down with a sigh and went over to a cupboard by the wall and started to search through it.

“Miss Qing, I came with a group of guards and some injured,” he said turning to the girl who was now rapidly remaking the tea, hoping that Danshu and the others were not still waiting in the vehicle.

“Oh, the armoured carriage in the main court,” she confirmed, glancing up at him. “They are in a hall across the courtyard, being served some tea and refreshments.”

“—Disciple, what seems to be the problem?”

He tuned to find Grandmaster Li standing in the doorway, watching with interest and quickly stood to give the eminent expert a polite salute.

“Ah, no need, Official Mei,” Grandmaster Li murmured with a friendly smile coming in and waving for him to sit again.

“I am… Uh, I was going to come find you, teacher,” Master Liwen said apologetically, glancing up from his search.

“It’s no problem, I was mostly watching the chaos unfold in the next neighbourhood,” Grandmaster Li replied, waving a hand absently at Liwen. “It seems that alchemists are going to have another rough year.”

“Which warehouse was it that exploded?” Master Liwen asked absently, returning to his searching.

“At this point it’s more a question of which has not… it is perturbing,” Grandmaster Li mused, before turning back to him. “Your compatriots are being looked after in the guest hall, as I believe Qing just said.”

“Thank you,” he replied, giving Grandmaster Li a further polite salute with his cup of tea.

“Not at all,” Grandmaster Li said, returning the salute with a cup Qing had just handed to him. “So, what can I help you with, Official Mei?”

“Ah… look at that Jade on the table, teacher,” Master Liwen called over. “Sergeant Mei has brought it.”

“A relay,” Grandmaster Li mused, picking it up with one hand and holding it to light. “Mmmmm… Deng pattern… simplistic, if technically robust construction… no evidence of reinforcement, but… hmmm…. Oh.”

As he watched, Grandmaster Li passed his cup back to Qing and took the jade octahedron in both hands, peering through it intently for several long moments, turning it various ways.

“Interesting… very interesting,” Grandmaster Li declared at last, putting it down on the table and staring at it with a frown. “Where did you come by this?”

He quickly recounted what he had told to Master Liwen, while Grandmaster Li simply nodded along, listening in silence until he had finished.

“Well, there are two things that stand out,” Grandmaster Li said, taking a piece of paper and Liwen’s brush. “First…”

He watched as the Grandmaster drew a complex pattern onto the paper, then placed the octahedron in the middle.

“If my suspicion is correct…” Grandmaster Li mused, taking out several spirit stones and placing them on auspicious points—

The formation on the paper shimmered, projecting a three-dimensional cube with several different spots where he was sure extra formations could be ‘interfaced’ with it.

“Mmm, as I expected, it really is like that,” Grandmaster Li nodded, not looking especially happy.

“Huh, I was looking for the diagram for that,” Master Liwen said, sitting back.

“Not to worry,” Grandmaster Li mused. “Come over and get a cup of tea.”

Liwen nodded and got up, dusting himself off.

“Anyway, I will not bore you with history, though I am happy to supply you a full written record of what I know,” Grandmaster Li added. “The key things are these. The formation is almost as old as the town itself and was set down by Grandmaster Ling Shuntao, as part of an estate given as a gift to a disciple who was getting married.

“Wouldn’t that mean that the formation there should be fairly robust?” he asked, frowning.

“Yes, I’ll get to that,” Grandmaster Li sighed, glancing at the relay. “However, in the Ling clan’s defence, I will say that Shuntao’s formations are notoriously expensive to maintain.”

“Pfft,” Liwen had to put his tea aside so he didn’t spit it out.

“Anyway,” Grandmaster Li continued. “After the original owner died without issue in the Huang-Mo wars, the estate fell to relatives who split it up—”

“Is that why the canals form a nice, defensible extremity around that part of the Blue River district?” he asked, curious.

“It is,” Grandmaster Li confirmed. “Anyway, eventually, through marriage, several buildings, including today’s Green Moon Teahouse, became property of the Deng clan. That family all perished in the Blood Eclipse, whereupon Deng Huanji, who I am sure you are familiar with…”

“—wasn’t he one of the officials in charge of the Seng re-districting, after the Blood Eclipse?” he remarked, raising an eyebrow.

Deng Huanji was somewhat infamous in law-enforcement circles as a major beneficiary of the previous Captain of the Town Guard’s corruption. He had been largely untouchable because he was a Deng clan elder and had retired with the title of ‘Respected Official’, along with an ‘Imperial Acknowledgment’ from Envoy Qiao, for his ‘good work’ in the aftermath of the Blood Eclipse.

“The very same,” Grandmaster Li confirmed. “Green Moon, or the Misty Moon Emporium, as it was then called, and the estates around it became a key part of his personal fief, full of drinking dens and illicit brothels, servicing a black-market talisman and alchemy emporium…”

“—until he died in the Three Schools Conflict,” Liwen concluded, sipping his own tea.

“Indeed,” Grandmaster Li agreed with a further sigh. “Deng Huanji and his whole household died during the ‘Night of the Tetrids’. When marauders claiming to be the ‘Fangs of Illhan, Reborn’ attacked West Flower Picking Town. In the year after, two more formations experts of the Deng clan tasked with keeping his business afloat died… then most of the district was again destroyed, as I am sure you are aware.”

“Yes, I joined the guards shortly after,” he nodded, understanding now why he knew none of this.

The records for that time were chaotic to say the least. What had not been compromised by almost seventy years of corrupt practices had been conveniently destroyed in the partial sack of the town and surrounding region in the second year of that conflict.

“Afterwards, the estate was split up and auctioned off,” Grandmaster Li continued.

“Wait… the Deng clan auctioned it off?” he blinked. “They have been trying to take over this part of the district for almost a century, and they sold the land around Blue Blossom Square?”

“Hah… yes,” Grandmaster Li nodded. “A lot of people were sceptical at the time. It is why Liwen and I, among others, were contracted to do independent evaluations of what survived.”

“—the rumour was that a Deng clan Astrologer, divined that it was the single most inauspicious area in the whole district,” Liwen interjected. “There was also another rumour if I recall, that that same divination claimed the Deng clan would suffer a terrible misfortune if it were owned by them.”

“The Deng clan claimed those rumours were scurrilous lies and un-truths, intended to sabotage their well-meaning gesture, honouring the last will of Deng Huanji,” Grandmaster Li added with an eyeroll.

“And with the Deng clan having the reputation it has, I can only assume that Guanbo, or whoever owns it, got a real bargain,” he concluded.

“You see it clearly,” Grandmaster Li agreed with a wry nod. “And it’s been a teahouse of sketchy repute ever since.”

“They said you installed the formation,” he added, glancing at Master Liwen.

“I suppose so, I mostly helped restore them back to their pre-Deng clan state as much as I could. To ensure there were no… uh, surprises left by Deng Huanji for future owners.

“Yes, well, it seems this was not accounted for,” Grandmaster Li sighed, nodding towards the octahedron as Qing refilled his teacup.

“Yes, I can only apologize for that,” Master Liwen muttered. “Though in fairness, I have never seen a relay like that.”

“I would be surprised if you had,” Grandmaster Li sighed. “Would it surprise you to learn that this also involves a certain Deng Huanji, among others?”

“Somehow, no, it would not,” he conceded.

“This relay looks very similar to one of a number the Deng clan made waves with, some hundred and fifty years ago. Several of their formations experts claimed to have made a breakthrough regarding a feng-shui based puzzle on a ruin to the east of Misty Jasmine Inn. A ruin nobody else has ever found incidentally.”

“So how do you—?” he started to ask.

“—How do I know about it?” Grandmaster Li rolled his eyes. “Deng Huanji tried to get me involved in it, but I was not interested at the time. He showed me several of the early concepts in an attempt to get me to join the Deng clan as a guest elder.”

“Oh…”

“I refused, because I have never liked how they do business and that was, largely the end of it, or so I thought. Then the blood eclipse upended all of their plans and when the dust settled, all its original architects were dead or lost in the aftermath, along with a great deal of other treasures and accumulated knowledge from the Deng clan.”

“And then Deng Huanji died in the Three Schools Conflict, and two others in short succession,” he mused, eyeing the octahedron, seeing a worrying potential pattern there.

“Indeed,” Grandmaster Li nodded, producing a jade tablet and putting it on the table.

A moment later, a ghostly lattice of a cube flickered into focus, spinning gently.

“This is the prototype Deng Huanji showed me, all those years ago,” Grandmaster Li added. “Several similar artefacts to this have shown up, in the last thirty years and they all do one thing, by and large, if rather crudely. They use a very particular form of feng shui to ‘cuckoo’ a formation, rebuilding it from the inside out. That is why, I suspect, you encountered the effects you did.

“Liwen worked hard to take that formation back to the original Ling clan template. I have worked on similar ones in Blue Water City and they are serious defensive formations. With feng-shui based marking, storage restriction, alignment disruption and worse.”

“They have shown up elsewhere?” he asked.

“Never intact,” Grandmaster Li said. “This is the first one I have seen that has not been smashed like an egg, its innards turned to inauspicious chaos, largely because it does something the others never did. It incorporates a kernel of solid-crystal lattice-work.

“Like your tablets,” he frowned.

“Yes, but I can assure you this is nothing to do with me,” Grandmaster Li said.

“I did not mean to imply that,” he said quickly, giving the Grandmaster an apologetic salute.

“Not at all,” Grandmaster Li sighed. “My tablets are famous after all.

“So, where else have you seen them?” he asked.

“Two raids on warehouses of the Green Fang Pagoda in the last year,” Grandmaster Li said.

“I don’t recall...” he started to say, not remembering hearing or being a part of anything like that.

“Not inside the town, out near Misty Vale,” Grandmaster Li clarified. “Fairy Seong asked me because my niece lives out there, so it was somewhat convenient for me to take a low-profile look.”

“Ahh, makes sense,” he agreed.

“Um, teacher, there was something else about...” Liwen trailed off, frowning hard.

“Something else?” Grandmaster Li frowned.

“It was a name...Ahhh,” Master Liwen snapped his fingers a few times, looking vexed. “When Sergeant Mei was telling me what occurred, it was right there, but...”

“Any particular name?” he asked.

“It was the family, who owned the estate before the Blood Eclipse!” Master Liwen said suddenly, clapping his hands together. “Wasn’t their family name Dong?”

“Oh for…” he stared up at the ceiling, various bits fitting together

~ Ha Kai – Jasmine Gate ~

“Uh… what just happened?” Ha Leng asked, weakly, staring at the dispersing clouds of mulberry flowers and the shining jasmine blossoms as their view of the lake stabilized.

“…”

Staring up at the hazy blue sky, Ha Kai found himself wishing that he also had the young lad’s ignorance to fall back on.

Even with everything suppressed to somewhere around the Immortal Threshold, Morea’s ‘act’ had made for a fairly spectacular statement, in all kinds of ways. Especially when you considered that she achieved what she had just using manifest intent, fused with a singular Law comprehension and a lot of qi.

Also spectacular – and also wholly bad for his peace of mind – was the cockroach-like survivability of the group led by Ji Tantai and Din Ouyeng. Even now, they merely looked pale and shaken. The compass in Ji Tantai’s hand was still functional as well, even if it was no longer expelling an endless torrent of parasol qi. For a group of supposed juniors, they were slinging Dao Step treasures and talismans around like they were old ancestors, except no old ancestor would be that profligate with them.

“She used the Law of Revelation and the association of the mulberry as a symbol of the bridge between heaven and earth, reflecting the transience of all life to forcibly enlighten every living thing to the next life directly,” his father replied, surveying the devastation.

“…”

Lan Huang and Ha Leng both turned to look at his father, their expressions frozen between incredulity, and fear, though Lan Huang’s was leaning towards awe.

“L-laws?” Ha Leng repeated dully.

“—With teaching skills like that, you should open a school,” the Resurrection Lily interjected playfully. “Except wait, I heard you did.”

His father shot her a nasty look which she met with the pure, innocent eyes of a mass-murdering monster.

“If… then how are they still alive?” Ha Leng asked, almost accusingly, pointing at the four cultivators.

That, he was also wondering himself.

Morea had almost completely uprooted the seeds of parasol qi that they had been relying upon to fuel the ‘Blessed Land’, and incidentally suppressed much of Hao Tianxun’s domain as well, but it had not dealt the killing blow. Not by any means.

The parasitic yang vitality was still shimmering like a haze in the air around them, and parasol flowers were already sprouting again on some of the vegetation that had retained some qi. The costliest loss, as far as he could see, was the likely temporary dispersal of the phoenix spirit and the annihilation of the special tetrids.

“Oh, they are not in the clear, by any means,” his father muttered.

“Uh-huh,” he agreed. “If anything, their predicament is worse.”

“Yep,” his father agreed. “If you ever needed a reminder, that in this place, the flowers are not for grasping, that right there is it.”

Indeed, whether Ji Tantai and the others realised it or not, none of them had actually avoided what Morea had done. Much like Hao Tianxun’s attack earlier, Morea’s was closer to a form of domain than a singular strike, and just like Hao Tianxun’s, the mulberry’s was genuinely insidious. It was also much harder to counter.

By not ‘dying’ to it outright, all they had done was mark themselves as beings who rejected the ‘generous’ enlightenment of heaven—

Without any sound at all, a black-grey bolt of lightning drifted lazily down, scattering phantasmal mulberry flowers as it did so.

“…”

At the last possible moment, Din Ouyeng noticed it and stabbed his spear heavenward. The weapon devoured the denial bolt and then cast it back at Hao Tianxun in the form of several grey-black flood dragons—

Hao Tianxun, or her body, sniffed dismissively and snuffed them out, her arms moving so fast she seemed to grow several extra pairs as she did so.

“…”

“Huh.” His father, who had been watching all this unfold, was now staring hard at Ha Mangfan and the other cultivator, both of whom had somehow managed to evade direct involvement in the melee so far.

Watching them for a few seconds, as two more bolts of the black and grey lightning stabbed down, he saw that even Morea’s attack didn’t seem to have a lot of purchase on them, the earlier discussions floated around in his mind, before at last he settled on a likely, and rather ominous conclusion.

“Don’t tell me that they have something like a ‘Devouring Eyes’ child artefact,” he muttered at last, as Din Ouyeng successfully blocked a further three bolts.

It was a bit of a leap, but Ji Tantai and the others were already throwing out the kind of artefacts that would make the average Dao Ascendant eat the hem of their own robe out of envy. There were also very few things genuinely capable of messing with ‘denial lightning’. It should have gone after all of them like a vengeful son of an exterminated clan, and yet it had not. They had also been almost impossible to scry and were attracting far too little attention, even now, for the level of mess they had unleashed.

That said, if there was an argument against it, it was that those artefacts were beyond rare.

As far as he knew, and he was fairly confident in his knowledge, of the powers on Eastern Azure, only the Huang, Shu, and Meng had ‘parent’ Devouring Eyes artefacts. There was no way the Huang would let theirs into the paws of a junior, nor would the Shu clan, so anyone looking on here would easily assume that this was the Meng clan’s doing.

“…”

“They do,” his father confirmed. “I suspected it before, but watching this farce now, and the fact that only that Din Ouyeng was hit by the lightning all but confirms it.”

“The Meng clan’s?” Lan Huang asked, his eyes narrowed to slits now. “I guess it doesn’t cover the Din clan scion? They would be petty like that, even if those two seem to be collaborating in the moment.”

“They are really doubling down on the Meng clan being the ‘responsible party’ for this mess,” he mused grimly.

“It does look that way,” his father agreed. “And the Meng clan…”

“—Has always been notorious in their ‘over your dead body’ attitude to others messing with their juniors,” he agreed, watching as Din Ouyeng dodged a sweeping blow from Hao Tianxun, then used his spear to catch a further four more bolts of lightning, while Ji Tantai continued to focus on his artefact.

If a Devouring Eyes artefact was in play, a lot of things he was seeing here did indeed make a lot more sense. Especially Ji Tantai’s confidence and Din Ouyeng’s apparent deference in letting him take the lead. With the suppression raised as it was, the talisman would actually take effect much more insidiously as well. Combined with the apparent cornucopia of powerful talismans they had, all they had to do was drag things out a bit.

The more he thought about it, though, that exposed another oddity in this. Ji Tantai had lots of treasures from the Meng clan, but he was not fighting like a Meng clan scion.

“That said, this Ji…” his father trailed off, then put his fingers to his temples, his expression turning gloomy.

“Honestly, I wonder how you can be considered old ancestors,” the Resurrection Lily snickered, looking at his father, then him.

“…”

“So that’s how they did it,” his father muttered after a moment, ignoring the Lily entirely. “Talk about wasting heaven’s riches.”

“Did what?” Lan Huang asked, sounding confused.

“This isn’t any of the existing ones,” his father declared after a moment. “If I was to guess, it’s one the Kong clan has supplied to the Din clan, or maybe someone else within the Imperial Court,” his father mused.

“You’re sure?” he asked, staring hard at the group and not really seeing it. To him, the signature definitely looked Meng.

“Uh huh,” his father nodded. “It’s commonly known that the Seven Sovereigns have one, but the ‘parent’ has always been under Meng Fu’s thumb. Unless this boy is her thirteenth inheritance disciple, it’s not theirs.”

“Then it’s protecting one of the two Din scions?” he asked.

“…”

“Nope,” his father sighed and held up a finger. “Di Ji.”

“…”

He stared blankly at his father.

“Di Ji is…” he was about to say ‘dead’, when he stopped, the hair on the back of his neck standing up.

“Honestly, without Morea and Hao Tianxun shelling them so hard, even I might not have noticed,” his father muttered, sounding disgusted. “It really is wasting heaven’s riches.”

He turned to look back at Ji Tantai, but no matter how he looked at him he was not…

“Really?” he asked at last, feeling stupid, and not a little embarrassed now, because while it had been widely claimed Di Ji was dead, only an idiot would actually believe the Imperial Court, and it had been too convenient by half that Di Yao just happened to be there at the time to ‘restore the honour of the Di Family’.

“Yes, really,” his father nodded. “If you think about it, it makes sense. By all accounts, that boy was talented enough to be adopted at the age of...”

“—Fifteen,” he supplied, scowling.

“Yes, fifteen, into the household of that schemer Kong Di Huang, who has been whispering in the current Emperor’s ear,” his father mused. "As I recall, he was even heralded at the best chance the Dun Court had of a scion who could push Ancestor Bronze’s protégé aside. Courtesy of the Empress, the Imperial Scions that count are all covered by the Huang clans’ one, I would imagine, and the Huang and Kong are allies of convenience at best in keeping Eastern Azure out of the hands of the Tang and Meng.”

“So, they used it on Kong Di Ji, and…” he trailed off, trying to think back over those events.

That he had not noticed it himself was, he supposed, testament to how close to the aftermath of those events he was in some respects. He stared at Ji Tantai and the others, a few further suspicions surfacing in his mind, starting with the breakdown in his relationship with Lady Kai. His familiarity with her had hardly been a secret, and then there was his father’s historic rivalry with Din Bao, among others.

He took a deep breath and downed the rest of his wine.

“That is insidious,” he declared at last.

For a few moments, the allure of doing something very stupid had been subtly trying to sway him.

His father just nodded, saying nothing, but he could sense the edge in his mood. What had been perpetuated could reasonably be considered a genuine attack on both of them.

“I suppose I should be flattered that they wasted heaven’s riches on it,” he observed, watching Din Ouyeng use the spear to block another volley, this time of five lightning bolts.

Ji Tantai and Ha Mangfan were still resisting Hao Tianxun, while the other masked cultivator, still holding his bow, was occasionally losing arrows at her.

In the moment, it all looked frenetic enough, but from their slightly distanced perspective he could clearly discern how the Devouring Eye’s artefact was subtly obfuscating the momentum of the combat.

“That’s one way to look at it,” Cranea agreed drily, passing him a full cup of wine.

“But the point remains,” he paused to down the wine in one gulp. “None of these four is obviously Di Ji. Unless it’s Din Ouyeng…”

“Or that other cultivator,” Lan Huang suggested.

“That isn’t Din Kongfei?” Ha Leng asked, confused.

“You think that’s Din Kongfei?” he frowned, glancing at Ha Leng.

He could see why Leng might make that leap, having seen the Din scion at Ha Dongfei’s banquet. Their build and eye-colour were similar. Even the robe was similar. If the suppression were not lifted it might be tricky to be sure, but the inescapable truth was that Din Kongfei was only a Golden Core cultivator. The masked youth with Ji Tantai had developed Soul Intent and a Principle that carried faint traces of emerging law comprehensions.

“Uh…” Ha Leng flinched, and he realised his wording had been a bit pointed, not to mention some of his anger over the Devouring Eyes manipulation had also crept in.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that,” he said apologetically.

“It shouldn’t be Din Kongfei,” Lan Huang agreed after a moment. “Now that the threshold has been lifted, I can see that that youth has a Principle… and has started to comprehend laws?”

“Yeah,” he agreed as they watched Din Ouyeng block a further barrage of the lightning, six bolts this time, and send it back at Morea and Hao Tianxun. “He should be an Ancient Immortal.”

“Oh, uh…” Ha Leng flushed with embarrassment until he gave the lad a friendly pat on the shoulder.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” he said, putting on his best ‘encouraging senior’ expression. “As a Golden Core cultivator there is no way you could see through any of that lot if they don’t want you to.”

If he was having trouble, it was amazing that Ha Leng was even able to see the four given even Lan Huang was still affected… unless.

“…”

They had attacked Lan Huang. That he was still affected after that suggested they had a way to determine that he was not ‘dead’, though it was possible that they were just being paranoid, if he had been marked as an Elder of some kind.

The Devouring Eyes should not be touched by that, and yet Ha Leng didn’t seem particularly…

“Is it that you don’t recognise the fourth one, or that it’s just hard to remember who you were with, back on the ridgeline?”

“It’s uh…” Ha Leng stared at the four as Din Ouyeng’s blocked a further wave of seven bolts, directing them to attack Hao Tianxun again, who scattered four, deflected two more into the lake-surface and then just flat out dodged the last which hit the far shore of the lake in a flash of grey fire.

“Hard to remember,” Leng said at last, sounding haunted. “I can recall Yun… and Mao and Ding and—”

“Easy.” Lan Huang quickly put a hand on the boy’s shoulder as his voice started to crack.

“…”

-What if they never expected him to survive?

It was such an incongruous thought, but the more he considered it, the more plausible it was.

“Ah, of course,” he clapped a hand to his face.

The answer to the whole thing was ‘brick on foot’ simple, and one he had almost overlooked because Ha Leng was just… really low realm. His core had been good, but back then he had not even grasped soul intent. The highly unusual means of his advancement, coupled with the chaotic influence of the teleport, exposure to Yin Eclipse and then ending up in his father’s abode, meant that his qi signature was now totally transformed.

He had barely touched Ha Leng’s perception of events, or his memories when helping the boy. Partly because his mental state had been so fragile, but also because they had been more focused on Lan Huang.

“Can I take a look at your perspective on what happened on the ridge?” he asked Leng, ignoring the odd looks from everyone else.

“Uh… y-yeeah, of c-course, Ancestor Kai,” Leng agreed, still sounding a bit shaken.

Placing a hand on Leng’s shoulder, he carefully, he sent a thread of soul sense into him.

“Huh.”

He spotted it almost immediately, perhaps because a part of his mind was still lingering on the subversion of the Devouring Eyes artefact and the associated obfuscations and aggressions.

“What is it?” his father asked.

“Favour with a Smile,” he said softly, turning to look back at the cultivators on the lake, where Din Ouyeng had just blocked another barrage of eight grey-black lightning bolts with his spear.

“Isn’t that a Dewdrop Valley art?” Lan Huang, who would certainly know it by reputation from his time on the Western Shu Continent observed. “And not one with a good reputation.”

“It is,” he confirmed with a sigh. “Though much of that ‘ill reputation’ you speak of, has its origins in what Xua Ziyi was induced to do after Kong Di Ji snatched her away.”

In his mind’s eye, he could picture the vibrant and outgoing Xua Ziyi, sitting beneath a tree in the Dewdrop Sage Valley, listening to Kai Lan, or laughing with her friends.

“Oh,” Lan Huang sighed. “Is that the origin of the whole ‘Led astray by a fox demon?’ rumour that has been peddled in certain quarters to try and rehabilitate that brat’s reputation?”

“It is,” he confirmed.

That art was the source of many problems, both for Dewdrop Sage Valley, and the ‘legacy’ of Kong Di Ji. He was not one to meddle in the inheritance choices of others, but his own opinion there was that Hua Xiaomei and her compatriots should have known better. Having taught a girl like Xua Ziyi such an art, they should have given her a serious body-guard.

With it, it had been all too easy to play on the rather complicated reputation of Hua Xiaomei, among others, to paint a picture that had done the poor, traumatized girl no favours. The aftermath and recasting of those events landing her with a stain on her reputation only a step behind that put upon Song Jia by the Shu clan.

“Although, in fairness, Kai Lan then using that same art to force an imperial legion battalion to commit mass suicide on the doorstep of the imperial palace did nobody any favours," his father added.

“In the annals of responses to such acts; killing a few thousand tax officials with their guards and then verbally threatening some old ancestors is positively restrained compared to some,” he pointed out sourly.

Ha Leng was just staring blankly at this point, clearly not sure whether he was meant to have heard that.

“Oh, I know,” his father agreed with a sigh. “But you have to be aware of your audience.”

He had to concede that that was fair. The Imperial Court had been agitating for disruption in the middle regions of Western Shu continent well before the debacle with Song Jia. Kong Di Ji’s actions there could, in a sense, be seen as something of a continuation in that trend. The actions, perpetrated by a junior, blocked off any seniors from making overt actions to quell the chaos, the dark side of the ‘junior’s rules’ stunt pulled by Dun Lian Jing and Huang JiLao in Blue Water province.

“You know,” Lan Huang said after a moment as a fan of nine more grey-black bolts came hunting for Din Ouyeng. “Something has been bugging me about this whole display.”

He glanced over at Lan Huang, then back at Ji Tantai’s group, who were still just about keeping up with the steady barrage of lightning bolts, thanks largely to the parasol qi’s ability to resist the surging waves of Hao Tianxun’s fire. In fact, here and there he could see parasol flowers starting to take root again, as the ‘Blessed Land’ began to recover.

“Why aren’t the spirit herbs pressing their advantage?” he mused, glancing sideways at the Lily, who was still sitting on her rock, actually sipping liquid qi, condensed from their surroundings, as if it were wine, out of a cup-sized white lily flower.

“Well, yes.” Lan Huang frowned.

“How many lightning bolts do you reckon have come down?” his father asked.

“…”

Lan Huang stared at the group, counting back.

“Should be over forty?” he said after a moment.

“Forty-five,” he agreed, having been partially marking them as they talked.

“What significance does that have?” Ha Leng asked, confused.

“Wait, there were nine bolts in that last barrage.” Lan Huang stared up at the still largely clear sky. “Eight… seven… If it keeps increasing by one each time, will there be two more barrages?”

“Uhuh,” his father nodded, even as a flare of black-grey lightning scythed down, splitting into ten bolts.

This time Ji Tantai had to focus on them as well, parasol flowers intercepting three in explosions of chaotic yang qi.

“What happens at sixty-six?” Ha Leng, who had also done the basic addition, asked.

“A Denial Tribulation has sixty-six bolts as its limit,” Lan Huang said softly.

“Denial?” Ha Leng asked, understandably confused.

“One of the Five Supreme Tribulations,” he said, giving Ha Leng a considered look, but there was no harm in knowing about them, after a sense, so he continued after a short pause. “Fate for Immortals, Judgement for the Dao, Denial before Ascension, Retribution before the Gate of Heaven, Extermination… before the Throne.”

“The silver in Hao Tianxun’s fire comes from her perceiving an aspect of the Law of Extermination, but it is just a sliver,” his father added. “This is…”

His father stopped speaking, as above them, the swirling mists and mulberry flowers seemed to flow backwards for a moment. Eleven bolts of grey-black death stealthily slid out of the world around the four cultivators, like assassins from the shadows.

Hao Tianxun flitted back, deflecting several arrows from the fourth cultivator as she did. Din Ouyeng gritted his teeth and spun the spear.

{Seven Rods of Jade}

Seven golden jade pillars, fashioned in the same style as the spear haft, appeared on the lake surface around the group, drawing a lightning bolt apiece before collapsing.

Ji Tantai finally intervened as well, summoning four shining parasol flowers above the group, which bloomed into shields that blocked the final four bolts. Silence returned a moment later as Din Ouyeng coughed up a mouthful of blood and leant on his spear. Ji Tantai also looked drained, having shifted to a crouch, grasping tightly onto the compass.

“So is that it?” Ha Leng asked, sounding rather disappointed. “They survived—?

A vast constellation-like formation appeared in the sky above the lake, formed from swirling mist and drifting mulberry blossoms. The lake surface all around them started to drift upwards—

The compass in Ji Tantai’s hand emitted a clarion call so loud it was difficult to even call it a sound anymore. In response, every bit of spirit vegetation for five hundred metres bloomed, and the ghostly forms of hundreds of dead tetrid stalkers danced, once again, across the water. Everywhere, the flowers of the spirit herbs began to warp into bastardized facsimiles of parasol flowers.

“If you think that kind of art is going to do anything, you should just accept your fate!” Ha Mangfan called out mockingly, to Morea.

“…”

“Huh,” his father was staring at the four cultivators with narrowed eyes now.

“That should not have happened, right?” he mused.

“Yeah,” his father agreed, glancing at Cranea, who was also looking perturbed.

“Oh, so that’s what they…” the Resurrection Lily trailed off.

He nearly choked on his own drink as Ha Mangfan staggered suddenly, grasping at his neck with a white furred arm that was not his own.

“Ah, of course,” his father sighed, shaking his head, as Ji Tantai grasped at the arm on Ha Mangfan’s back like it was a snake, sending a pulse of parasol qi into it.

“The… monkey?” Ha Leng said dully, as Ha Mangfan flailed desperately, trying to turn his mantra manifestation on the white-furred arm—

“Here, let me—” The masked, green-robed cultivator, who had also been moving to help Ha Mangfan, suddenly staggered as a white-furred arm also appeared out of his chest, its paw grasping at his hat and mask. “H-h-helb—!”

Din Ouyeng, who had been warily marking Hao Tianxun as she stood there watching, tried to move to help him, but before he could, the white furred arm had ripped the mask off, revealing a clean-shaven youth with chiselled features and flowing golden locks tied back and tucked under his now discarded hat.

“Di Yao?” He and Lan Huang said at the same time, staring at perhaps the last person either of them expected to see.

He had expected a Din clan scion, or a cultivator from the Jade Gate Court, maybe even someone from the Yeng Brotherhood. Not the older son of the Imperial Grand Astrologer. At the same time, though, that crystallized another suspicion that had been brewing in is mind, watching events unfold.

“—Geb… ib… Uffff…!” Di Yao groaned, staggering drunkenly, blood running out of his mouth freely as Din Ouyeng tried to help him—

In an explosion of gore, that covered Din Ouyeng from head to foot, the old monkey, his white fur now dripping with blood and organs, returned to its ‘normal’ size, holding a crumbling talisman in his fist.

Ha Mangfan and Ji Tantai stared, horrified, frozen in their own struggle with the monkey arm on Ha Mangfan, as body parts rained down in the water around them.

“And that kids, is why you never annoy that old monkey,” his father said wryly as Din Ouyeng stumbled backwards “You will never, ever, see it coming to get even.”

“Oh Mo—” Ha Mangfan’s horrified curse was cut off as his body suddenly convulsed and grew a second white arm that slapped Ji Tantai in the face, then a blood-splattered, white-furred monkey stood up, out of his back, holding a part of Ha Mangfan’s rib-cage and spine in one paw.

He had to admit he was quietly impressed the youth had survived, physical cultivator or no.

“Fucking—” Ji Tantai lashed out at the second monkey with his sword, who simply smashed Ha Mangfan’s ribs on it, while simultaneously kicking the injured Ha Mangfan at Ji Tantai as he skipped backwards.

“Did it…” Lan Huang trailed off, staring at the bloody monkey and its newly appeared twin.

“Probably he disguised himself as some qi or maybe a pill or something and then they swallowed him,” his father nodded, as Ji Tantai hauled himself up, sheltering both him and the barely conscious Ha Mangfan in a shimmering, flower-like barrier of parasol qi. “Or he just made himself so small that they breathed him in.”

“Disguised… as qi?” Ha Leng repeated, wide-eyed.

“They raised the suppression,” Lan Huang said, recovering from his moment of shock. “I guess you could say they did this to themselves.”

“I is telling you before, you...” the old monkey made a face and spat out some flesh, then picked up the head of ‘Di Yao’, which he could see now was not Di Yao.

“You is thinking you can kill this old fellow, your delusion is maybe too big for living with,” the second monkey added with a broad grin, snapping the remaining ribs in its paws like they were rotten twigs.

“So, it was something like that, after all,” the Resurrection Lily mused, taking a sip of her ‘drink’ as she took in the remains of the corpse.

“Hmmmm…” his father just stared at the head, then at the bloody talisman in the monkey’s paw, his eyes narrowed.

“If you say ‘Just as expected’, father, I shall kick you,” he said blandly.

His father just gave him a sideways look, while Cranea rolled her eyes.

“Is that some kind of clone?” Ha Leng asked dully. “You can do that?”

“Sort of,” he replied. He wanted to say he was surprised, but in his heart, he had begun to suspect something like this already.

What was surprising was the quality of the talisman in the monkey’s paw, which appeared to be a variation on what was known as a ‘True Reflection Soul Mirror’ and was painted by an expert from the Meng clan. What was more interesting, actually, was that the corpse itself, which was a quasi-Ancient Immortal, also had traces of a body refinement art capable of body-transformation.

“—and is that some kind of ‘True Reflection Talisman’?” Lan Huang asked, also recognising the rare talisman, his eyebrows almost crawling over the top of his head.

“It does look like it,” he agreed, watching Ha Mangfan’s recovery out of the corner of his eye while Din Ouyeng tried to use his spear to ward off the grinning monkeys and buy the youth time to recover. “That would explain why they raised the suppression so early then,” Lan Huang mused.

“Yeah,” he nodded. “They actually planned this quite well. Coupled with the Devouring Eyes artefact, it certainly explains their confidence, and why they were relying almost exclusively on treasures.”

That kind of talisman was powerful, and surprisingly cost-effective for what it did. It worked by using a special talisman to provide a false nascent soul, a ‘mirror’ of their real one, which could be anchored to a host body or puppet. While the talisman was active, that body could use any soul-bound treasure that the wielder had.

Still, there was a reason why so few people used talisman clones up here. Almost all of those that were obtainable by a lay cultivator required a soul-based connection to work, and a ‘True Reflection Soul Mirror’, as its name suggested, was no exception.

“Really, listening to you lot, my faith in old elders is really being reassured,” the Lily murmured sardonically, taking a sip of her drink. Hao Tianxun, meanwhile, just raised her hand.

{Path of Hidden Virtue}

Ji Tantai’s expression didn’t even flicker as she appeared in front of him, bypassing the parasol qi barrier as if it was not even there. Smiling mysteriously, she pressed her palm against his chest, and Ji Tantai collapsed like a stringless puppet.

Din Ouyeng, his face finally showing real fear, spun his spear and stabbed it into the water, only to find Morea standing right beside him, looking somewhat amused, her hand already grasping his, preventing him from doing so.

{Exterminating Geas of the Supreme Strategist}

The design on the spear haft shimmered and scattered into a constellation of ninety-nine golden points, each becoming a phantasmal soldier in Kong clan armour, who struck out with furious momentum at the area around Din Ouyeng, Morea and the White Monkey—

The entire middle of the lake vanished in a vast shockwave of water, warped spirit vegetation, mulberry blossoms and scattering martial intent.

Morea appeared a moment later, standing on the lake surface, mulberry flowers drifting around her, her arms folded. Hao Tianxun’s body did the same a moment later, reforming out of scattered silver fire near to the Lily. Of the pair of white-furred monkeys, there was no sign, not that that meant much really.

When everything settled, there was no sign of Ji Tantai, Din Ouyeng, or the badly injured Ha Mangfan, just scraps of cloth and blood in the water, and the spear shimmering there, ominously—

Three more identical white monkeys appeared on the water by the spear, each grabbing hold of it—

{Fruit and Flower Style: Monkey See, Monkey D—}

He watched as the snow-white lightning within coursed into their bodies, turning them into smoking statues, before their ‘remains’ crumbled into ash that drifted away on the water, leaving the spear still floating there, shimmering just as ominously as it had been.

“…”

“Well, that’s one way to make sure nobody plays with your toys,” Lan Huang muttered, as the white ‘Judgement lightning’ sizzled in the air, forming a vague approximation of a figure he recognised as Kong Jurai.

“What is—?” Ha Leng started to speak, but his words were lost as thirty-three tendrils of white lightning lashed out of the spear.

Some shot out towards Morea, Hao Tianxun, the White Monkey, who had just hauled himself out of the water, and the Lily. However, most of them stayed around the spear itself, forming an interlocking lattice around it. That lattice then shifted in truly eye-searing fashion and spat out twenty-nine more lightning bolts, indiscriminately hunting more targets towards the edges of the lake.

“Wheeeeeeeee…”

It took him a moment to locate the source of the strange whistling sound that drifted out of the mist, which turned out to be a plate-sized, blue-grey coloured, spiky clam that someone had cast like it was a chakram. It skipped off the water twice, and then was hit by a bolt of the lightning some twenty metres from the cage—

There was a faint sense of distortion, then the spear, the ‘shifting clam’, and a significant portion of the lake-surface around it vanished, leaving behind only a misty after-image and a large, hemi-spherical impression that immediately started to fill with water.

“…”

Silently, he turned to see a young girl with a pink lotus in her hair, stumbling to a stop on the tree line, breathing hard, her arm still raised.

“Drat, I missed the monkey,” the girl grumbled, as the white-furred old monkey stood up from where he had somehow evaded the mirage-like distortion by putting a spiky lily-pad over his head.

“You is needing to show respect for elders!” the monkey yelled, shaking a fist at her.

“You is learning to read, I invite big sisters to teach you manners!” the girl retorted, to scattered laughter from the treeline.

“So, did they escape, or did their clones go *poof*?” Lan Huang asked as they watched the waves surge around them.

“That’s actually a very good question, I have no idea if that kind of talisman works with mantra users,” he muttered.

“The fact that they left scraps of cloth in the water leads me to suggest they bugged out,” his father mused. “It would be theoretically possible to use a mantra manifestation with a True Reflection clone, but...”

“What if the puppeted body held the mantra?” he suggested, glancing at the Resurrection Lily and Hao Tianxun who had now moved over to stand beside her.

*—Krrrrrooooom*

A reddish-golden lightning bolt appeared on the lake surface, transforming into a rather annoyed-looking monkey covered in red-ochre.

A moment later, two rather battered looking centipedes appeared on the far edge of the lake, the ochre-painted monkey they had momentarily seen before riding on the head of one. Behind him, the remains of two bodies were slumped, along with a woven net full of what seemed to be tetrid cores.

“By Potnia’s shapely ass, they are multiplying,” the clam-thrower muttered.

“Get out of our valley!” one of the other herbs yelled.

“Yeah, if Monkey can see, cannot Monkey read?” another hollered.

“Enough,” Morea said, her words soft, yet still managing to envelop the whole lake.

“Old Monkey,” she gave the white-furred old monkey, who had also reappeared at this point, now holding his staff, a polite nod.

“Old Tree,” the old monkey replied with a toothy grin, before pausing to flick a scrap of Ji Tantai’s robe out of the bloody water with his staff.

“I must admit, they have balls,” the ochre-lightning monkey remarked, appearing beside the older monkey. “These were the real ones?”

“It does look that way,” the old monkey mused, licking the bit of cloth, then putting it in his mouth and chewing it pensively.

“What exactly is their aim here?” Lan Huang asked at last.

“—In trying to raid the Jasmine Gate?” he asked, wondering that himself, truth be told.

He knew a fair bit about the ‘Jasmine Gate’ as a place, and the entities that lived within it, however, it had already been extant in some form and very hard to reach, even in the days of Tai Shavaran. Its myth already well established in the ruins of Mahavaran that had endured the fall of the mountain and the uplift of the High Valleys.

“Uh-huh,” Lan Huang nodded, looking concerned. “This is clearly far too much expenditure for those three hunters. There has to be something else going on.”

“…”

“Could this be related to the Eastern Mansion of the Eye of Worldly Fortune?” he asked his father, speaking to him directly so Ha Leng and Lan Huang could not hear. “It is shifted back to this land, currently.”

“As in, some old ancestor is fishing and needed bait?” his father mused. “And wants whatever bites that bait, or whoever might happen across it to believe it’s Meng Fu?”

“Or just the Meng clan,” he added.

“…”

“It’s possible,” his father conceded after a moment. “Though anyone with eyes to see, like us, knows enough about either to not buy that.”

“Eyes to see ‘here’,” he pointed out. “There are plenty of idiots who fancy themselves being wise and smart back in Blue Water City just looking for justifications for their hunches and suspicions.”

His father nodded, but said nothing in reply, instead just staring into the middle distance, seemingly lost in thought.

“Ancestor Kai?” Lan Huang asked quizzically, having noticed that the two of them were conversing in private.

“I think you're right; the question is what they are really after,” he mused, glancing at Cranea, who had been largely silent through all of this.

“I can think of one or two things,” Cranea muttered, looking at Morea for some reason.

Before he could pry further though, dozens of spirit herbs, primarily lotuses and lilies, started retreating out of the flooded forest and onto the lake. Almost all of them were injured, many with red blotches and greenish-copper veins on their ‘skin’ or badly wilted flowers. Some were even carrying their compatriots.

A moment later, dozens of false-immortal tetrid stalkers swarmed out of the tree-line after them.

“How horrible,” Ha Leng mumbled, looking aghast at their plight as the young-looking girls heroically struggled to hold back the tide.

“Don’t be fooled,” Lan Huang muttered, as they watched the retreat. “Most of those are older than your grandmother. The lotus and the water lily are the foot-soldiers of this place—”

A jarring, silent shockwave that melded into a discordant sound shook the whole lake, cutting him off.

The red-ochre lightning monkey scowled and vanished in a crack of lightning that streaked towards a shadow-like form on the edge of the treeline, only for it to fade away like mist and re-appear next to an injured pair of spirit herbs, grasping for them with an attack that held traces of ‘devouring law’—

The soul manifestation of the quasi-Dao Step tetrid vanished in a silent scream as a whistling reed arrow pierced through its masked head, scattering it. One of the large tetrids, back on the tree-line staggered and slumped to the ground.

“So, that’s the backup for their distraction, huh?” Lan Huang grimaced as four serpentine, golden lightning bolts surged out of the flooded forest at Morea.

Morea, for her part suddenly had four arms, catching each serpent by the neck and scattering them, then sending the attack back at the onrushing horrors as a wave of mulberry petals.

In the same instant, three silver-purple lattices of light enveloped the three monkeys. All three evaded easily enough, but rather than collapse, the lattices turned into drifting orbs of spectral chains that continued to chase them.

“How many tetrids do they have?” Ha Leng asked, aghast at the vast swarm, which was mostly Soul Foundation and Nascent Soul tetrids, it had to be said, with formations led by false-immortal ones supported by a few much stronger ones.

“A lot, I would imagine,” he said sourly as more reed arrows hit false-immortal tetrids, destabilizing the formations.

“And it depends how long they have been preparing for,” Lan Huang added.

“…”

His father turned to stare at the Lily and Hao Tianxun.

“What, you think I am just going to let the opportunity to get access to a Devouring Eyes artefact just walk off?” she murmured, with a positively terrifying smile.

“You…” his father started to speak, but the Lily was already gone, Hao Tianxun with her, leaving only the lily-petal cup she had been drinking out of, which itself promptly combusted in a *shuft* of silver fire.

“…”

“Well, she clearly knows where she is going,” he remarked, giving his father a sideways look.

“Yeah, yeah, give me a moment,” his father sighed. “It’s not exactly—"

“That way,” Cranea said blandly, pointing towards the interior of the valley.

“Yes, I know, I am not an idiot," his father scowled, making several seals with his hands.

The viewing rift around them, the battle on the lake fading into mist—

Everything snapped back into focus, revealing their surroundings to be a different ‘lake’, with a misty treeline and beds of reeds behind them and parasol flowers gently scattering everywhere, fusing with the vegetation.

A few metres away, the Lily stood on the water, a brilliant white flower with a shimmering yellow heart cupped in her hands. Ji Tantai, Din Ouyeng, an already largely recovered Ha Mangfan, and a totally unharmed Kong Di Yao were standing, frozen in shock, likely having just tried to attack her.

“—If you think waving parasol qi around is meant to impress me,” the Lily was saying, with a playful smirk, “I can only say you are about to have a very humbling encounter with reality.”

“Tcch!” Ji Tantai scowled and drew the sword he had seen the youth holding earlier, while Di Yao also produced a green-jade sword, its blade patterned with dragons.

“Aii… well, if you want to do it that way,” the Lily sighed, waving her hand. “I’ll humour you. try not to collapse at the first blow—”

The white lily in her hands blazed like the sun as her words melded in all-encompassing harmony with the world around the Resurrection Lily. White flowers bloomed beneath the surface of the lake, cast in a phantom world where a dark moon shone on a world of silver and black. The whole scene wavered for a few disorientating moments, then the Lily in her hand dissolved into tiny lily blossoms, and ten figures stood on the water surface, surrounding the pair.

Hao Tianxun, and the experts from the Tai, Xue, and Shan clans he recognised from before, but added to them were now two identical teenage girls with golden hair holding chakrams, a wizened old man with dragon tattoos across his whole body, a tall, dark-haired youth carrying a copper-gold sword, a stately looking woman with a nasty gash across her side and lotus-flower tattoos across half her body, and a short, bearded man holding a monk’s staff.

“…”

Lan Huang stared at the array of Dao step physical cultivators dully.

{Sun and Moon of Tian Yuan}

The two girls, who he was sure were the ‘Sun and Moon Saintesses’ of the Early Yuan spoke in concert, casting their chakram straight at Ji Tantai.

{Blue Dragon Dreams of New Skies}

The old man, an elder from the Moon Tomb Cult declared, spreading his arms wide as blue lightning welled out of his body, turning the tattoos into a ghostly flood dragon that charged at the pale and still badly injured Ha Mangfan.

{Wonderous Solitary Sword}

The dark-haired youth, murmured, simply stabbing forward with his blade at Di Yao with an art as lost to the four Azures as the art of the old man from the Tai clan.

{Burn the Dream}

The stately looking woman hissed, as the lotus blossoms on her body burst into an azure fire that travelled through the parasol qi like it was dry grass, turning the golden blossoms a lurid, nightmarish green.

Ji Tantai spat blood on his sword, which blazed with parasol fire and surrounded the group in a ghostly flame-like flower, a mere fraction of a moment before both the Xue and Shan corpses tried to grasp him.

Everything wavered, caught in the balance as the attackers’ arts ground through the barrier, even as ghostly vines with parasol leaves raced out to grasp them—

“I have no Strike, for my Staff brings only Gentle, Peaceful, Truth,” the white-bearded old monk said softly, tapping his staff on the water before the sealing tendrils could reach him.

Accompanied by the chiming of the bells on the staff and his words, the disparate attacks melded together, the law comprehensions within them merging into something rarely seen outside of a great sect, where elders might train for millennia to harmonize the fundamentals of several sympathetic arts into something far greater than the sum of its parts.

“For fates sakes!” Din Ouyeng snarled, a fly-whisk with a white jade handle, inscribed with azure chrysanthemums and swirling clouds appearing in his hand—

He watched, not sure whether to laugh, curse or weep as Din Ouyeng turned a priceless artefact, a representation of ‘Just Judgement’ bestowed to some senior court official during the Early Yuan dynasty on the luckless corpses.

With a single swish, the woven strands on the end of the whisk became thirty-three whip-like bolts of white lightning, which surged out…

“…”

However, as the bolts were about to hit the Xue and Shan bodies, which were closest, they twisted unnaturally in the air and struck the smiling, white-bearded old monk between the eyes. His body seemed to waver, at which point the other thirty-one white bolts arrived, then turned faintly golden before crumbling into ash, amongst which lay a dozen pure-white pearls, each with a glittering Dao-seed entombed within.

“Uh… Sarira beads?” Lan Huang said dully, staring at the very rare relics glittering in the shallow water.

“Haiii…” a ghostly shadow appeared over the beads, resolving itself into the old monk, who took in his surroundings with a deep sigh.

The accompanying expression of shock on Din Ouyeng’s face was, in his eyes, utterly priceless, as the rare, possibly unique treasure rebelled against its use to execute a blameless person.

“Motherless son of a dog!” Din Ouyeng cursed, throwing it away as the hairs on the head of the whisk burned away in a flash of black-grey fire.

A moment later, the handle shattered into three pieces, emitting a decidedly inauspicious wave of feng shui as it did so.

“And that, folks, is why Buddhists are a pain,” his father sighed, staring regretfully at the broken whisk. “What a waste of a treasure.”

It was hard not to agree there. A whisk like that was actually more valuable than the spear Din Ouyeng had been using previously.

“…”

“Old Mahajingvu,” a familiar voice murmured.

Turning, he found Morea standing on the edge of the clearing, her hands clasped behind her back.

“This old man has walked his path, and found his moment,” the old Buddhist said softly, entirely unhindered by Morea’s manipulation of the moment. “As you said, the dream awaits.”

“It does,” she agreed, turning back to the four cultivators, who were staring at Morea in shock from within the protection of the wavering barrier.

“H-how?” Ha Mangfan muttered, wiping blood from his mouth. “Didn’t you say she couldn’t follow us?”

“Didn’t you say before that I was a lowly spirit herb?” Morea smirked, strolling forward.

“You—” Ji Tantai’s eyes were narrowed to slits as he stared at her, then the Lily.

“That I, no matter how long I live, simply will never grasp the enormity of heaven?” Morea added.

“Scatter.”

At her murmured command and simple wave of a hand, the parasol flower barrier and the bindings on the Lily’s bodies vanished, turning into mulberry flowers.

Ji Tantai stared at the sword in his hand, then at her, his eyes narrowed.

“You think, in all the years, the Meng clan has never turned their eyes here?” the Lily added, mockingly. “You wave parasol qi about, like it is this great thing, that we should be amazed over. If I wanted, I could end this in the blink of an eye.”

“Then why don’t you?” Di Yao sneered.

“…”

“Fair point,” the Lily mused after a moment’s silence. “Juhong, Guanxi, please take their toy away from them and end this farce.”

Ji Tantai flinched backwards as the youth with the orichalcum sword shot towards him like a viper, effortlessly passing through the parasol barrier where before he had been apparently slowed by it.

In the same instant, a young woman with dark hair and smouldering good looks, marred only by a very large wound over her right breast, stood up out of the water beside Ji Tantai and grasped his sword, playfully using it to swat Juhong’s own blade away.

“I don’t know if I should be shocked or not,” his father sighed as they took in the grinning Meng clan girl holding a sword tailor made for her in many respects.

“Gimme,” was all she said, spinning Ji Tantai in a circle and twisting his wrist viciously, shattering it as she disarmed him, before stabbing him through the stomach with the wooden sword—

The Ji Tantai on her sword exploded into shards of parasol qi which Meng Guanxi simply inhaled. The real Ji Tantai was already several metres away, wiping blood from his mouth and nursing a broken wrist.

The girl lunged for Ji Tantai again, who barely avoided the line of parasol-infused sword- intent this time.

“I really want that boy’s divination method,” Lan Huang muttered. “I don’t think I could dodge that.”

“Heyup!” she giggled, ducking under a scything strike from Di Yao and kicking him in the stomach hard enough to send him sprawling.

“I feel that name is oddly familiar,” he muttered, staring at the girl as she almost playfully swatted Ha Mangfan’s own attempt to cover for Ji Tantai away, her actions chaotic seeming, but actually anchored in a truly deep understanding of the sword.

“Meng Guanxi was an elder in the Seven Sovereigns at the time of the Interregnum,” his father said. “She was the previous Discipline Elder for their inner court, until she just vanished.”

“The one that Tuo Bei Kan replaced?” he mused, watching as Meng Guanxi chased after Ji Tantai, who now had the compass from before out. “Whose son, Tuo Kankai is their current Great Elder overseeing ‘Sect Enforcement and Discipline’?”

“That’s the one,” his father agreed. “It strikes me that there are a surprising number of people who ‘vanished’ at that time, in the hands of that Lily… And oddly, all of them are associated with another mysterious vanished individual.”

“The last Empress of the Shan?” he muttered, turning to look at the Lily, who was watching the melee with interest.

Thinking about it, it wasn’t impossible that that weed was responsible—

“Eh, that’s not right,” Lan Huang muttered, pointing to Ji Tantai and Meng Guanxi.

Meng Guanxi had just grasped the compass, but rather than pressing any further advantage, she was just staring at it, mumbling.

A strange, eerie chime echoed through the valley. For a brief moment, he thought it was the jasmine, until he saw Morea’s concerned expression and realised something else was going on.

“Oh, you incompetent, evil we—!” Morea’s furious curse was cut off as Meng Guanxi’s qi signature changed, palpably.

All around them, leaves started to fall from the trees. Jasmine flowers faded away, as if the plant were going into hibernation.

Morea raised her hands and the forest around them wavered, but to his shock, the chord seemed to get in the way of her ability to use laws in a subtle, indefinable way.

“What was it you said before?” Di Yao called over with a mocking grin. “Turns out you are all just lowly spirit herbs in the end! It does not matter how long you live, you simply cannot grasp the enormity of heaven. It is not your fate.”

All four cultivators, along with Meng Guanxi, in a swirl of parasol flowers, vanished, leaving behind only the parasol wood sword and Di Yao and Din Ouyeng’s mocking laughter.

As soon as they vanished, it wavered and the dark blade began to sprout twigs and then parasol leaves.

“Um… they took the beads,” Ha Leng said weakly, pointing to the water, where the Sarira beads were nowhere to be seen.

“Forgive them, they are young and do not know the world,” the old monk sighed, putting his hands together. “It is the gift of youth to burn bright, yet their curse that that light blinds them to wisdom, Amitabha.”

His father stared at the spot where they had vanished.

“This…” Morea looked at the sword, then at the trees, then at the Lily.

“Fix this,” was all she snarled at the Lily, who was looking very angry as well.

The youth who had wielded the copper sword stalked over to the sword, pulling it out of the ground. It shook in his grasp for a few seconds, but then, surprisingly its qi stopped going out of control.

“That body… is it from the Huang clan?” he asked the Lily.

“A lady never tells,” the Lily muttered.

“Okay, got them,” his father muttered, glancing at Morea.

Their surroundings wavered again and they stood in yet another lake. This one was somewhat different though, in that it held an island at its heart, surrounded by three large stone stele covered in esoteric, auspicious patterns. On it, in the middle of a ring of white marble columns joined together by arches, was a sprawling tree with reddish leaves. Its branches festooned with tattered red rags that drifted in the faint breeze, while white jasmine bloomed around its crown.

Kong Di Yao, Ji Tantai, Ha Mangfan, and Din Ouyeng were wading through the shallows towards it, following the body of Meng Guanxi, their presence totally suppressed.

A moment later, Morea appeared beside them, followed by the Resurrection Lily.

“How the fuck are they managing that!” Ji Tantai cursed, spotting their arrival almost immediately.

“Yeah, I wanna know that as well,” Morea scowled, staring at Ji Tantai, who was watching them with a very gloomy expression.

“Can they actually get to it?” The willow, who had also appeared, asked.

“That is not a question I want to have answered today,” Morea said gloomily, her gaze transferring to the tree for a moment, then looking out over the lake.

Looking down, he realised that it was actually quite deep, and filled with buildings, all of which were entirely submerged.

“Are they walking along the ruins?” he asked after a moment, following the rather meandering path that the group were taking between the lily pads.

“So, what do we do now?” the reed-woman asked, arriving beside them, accompanied by a motherly beauty with myrtle flowers braided through her dark hair.

“I am done, this is done.” Morea said simply, holding out her hands. “They have too many artefacts and too many tricks. If we have to kill those who come prying after, so be it.”

Frowning, he watched as the spirit herbs joined hands, wondering what she intended to do.

“You too,” Morea said to the Lily, who, for the first time looked a bit uneasy, but nodded.

“Blossom, bloom and grow, your power born anew, return to us this day, that dream which once was ours…”

The words Morea whispered under her breath held a singsong cadence that cut straight through the strange dissonant chord emanating from the compass. However, all Guanxi did was subtly shift the intonation emanating from the compass and her words became inexplicably lost in the melody.

“You…” his father sounded disturbed as Morea took a deep breath, something about her ‘changing’ in a hard to define way.

“Blossom, bloom and grow, your power born anew, return to us this day, that dream which once was ours…”

All the spirit herbs spoke as one now, the gentle momentum of their words carried through the forest, whispered through the rain and the water and the mist.

“Renew that broken chord.”

The response was almost immediate, and well outside what he expected. The searing silver bolt, scattering azure chrysanthemums, that descended from over the horizon was the stuff of nightmares.

“Deceive the fates decree.”

The suppression of Yin Eclipse rebelled against it, but even so, the silver bolt targeting her had such momentum that he found himself pre-emptively tensing for an impact that never arrived.

“Overturn their cruel design.”

Instead, Morea just opened her eyes and looked at the bolt, the words of the spirit herbs hanging in the air like a haunting, fateful curse, as the silver bolt of heaven-sent annihilation dissolved into sparks that cracked in the air around them before vanishing.

“Return, what once was mine.”

In the same instant, something profound shifted in their surroundings.

The scene before them rolled backwards, Ji Tantai’s face went pale as a sheet as the island seemed to recede into the background and the group were suddenly standing on the edge of the lake they had just been on, beside the other bodies of the Resurrection Lily and the ghost of the old Buddhist Monk.

Morea exhaled, looking drained, yet relieved—

“Loud the wind howls…”

The words were gentle, sad even, carrying with them a sense of loss and longing that overwhelmed everything. All the spirit herbs flinched, even the Lily.

The mist, already stifling and oppressive, became leaden and dreary to the point where it was able to affect his cultivation through the scrying rift.

“Loud the waves roar…”

Inexorably, he found his gaze drawn to the island once again, and found her.

“Though thunderclaps rend the air”

Even though sorrow and suffering seemed to hang around her, like a veil as she sang, she was still the most alluring, beautiful and enchanting woman in the world, perhaps even the whole starfield.

A bewitching fairy goddess that could entrap any heart, her azure eyes, currently closed as she sang, framed by curly auburn locks that tumbled across her fair shoulders.

“Soft will ye sleep,”

At first, he thought she was Kai Lan, the resemblance was really uncanny, even though he knew, on a certain level that that was his desire projected on to her.

It did not help, that currently, she was cradling the body of a tanned, golden-haired youth, who was also seemingly slumbering in her arms, almost whispering her words into his ear. Once his gaze found that figure, it was impossible to look away, for he was, in every way, perfection incarnate.

“Flora will keep,”

The resemblance of that figure to Di Ji was such that he nearly coughed up blood before he got a grasp on his emotions, forcing down the irrational, alluring call to ‘hate’ that figure with every fibre of his body that the scene evoked.

“Watch by your weary head.”

With an effort, he managed to look beyond the hypnotic allure though, and found a hauntingly beautiful young woman, with a garland of white jasmine woven into her pale-golden-brown hair. The youth was still flawless, but he had dark tangled locks and a pallid complexion now, his side pierced by a snapped off arrow of what looked like Life-Breaking Aspen wood, the dried blood around the wound shimmering with an eerie, golden hue.

Oddly, the sense of profound allure towards her and the strange, guttural loathing of the youth did not abate. If anything, they only intensified for being able to look upon the pair as they were, not as his heart desired.

They were not alone either, he found. Two beautiful young women kept her company beneath the shade of the tree. One, her dark-hair adorned with silvery-white apple blossom was playing a wooden flute, while the other, whose blood-red hair was crowned at the back with a radiating fan of flowering grasses, kept a gentle, melodious rhythm on a simple hide drum. Both had their eyes closed, also seemingly lost in their own music and the rhythm of the song...

“D-Diaomei?” Lan Huang gasped, his face pale and his tone confused. “Fu Kubei? T-that bastard of a bandit... h-how?”

“Aiii...” Cranea sighed and put her hand on Lan Huang’s shoulder, stopping him from suddenly jumping forward.

Concerned, he glanced at Ha Leng, but the youth, while pale and a bit shocked by the prestige of the scene, was not that badly affected.

“Why... does she look like Jun...” Ha Leng stammered after a moment. “And Ji... Di Ji?”

“She shows people things they have a strong emotional attachment to,” Cranea said blandly, passing Leng some wine as well, which he gratefully gulped down.

“You okay?” his father, who also looked a little pale, asked him.

“That is the God Bewitching Jasmine?” he asked a bit redundantly, because there was nothing else the woman could be, though he had never, in a million years, thought her presence was this overwhelming.

“That is the name she took,” his father agreed, sounding rather amused in fact.

“Please, don't tell me that’s the body of an actual...” he added, not even able to say it out loud as he stared at the dark-haired youth with the arrow in his side.

“Hah, no,” his father said, much to his relief. “Although...”

“What… is it?” Lan Huang managed to ask, patting Cranea’s hand gratefully, and accepting a cup of wine. “That yang strength... and that...”

“…”

“A weapon,” Cranea replied softly. “Forged for a war beneath a sky far from ours.”

“A weapon?” Ha Leng echoed, looking confused now. “Like, a puppet?”

“...”

“Something like that,” Cranea sighed.

“And best left to slumber eternally in her embrace,” his father agreed, his tone grim. “If that body is what these four lunatics are aiming for, this changes things, radically.”