Memories of the Fall

~Part 2 ~

~ Ha Kai – Heart of the Jasmine Gate ~

Ha Kai stared across the lapping water of the lake at the three spirit herbs residing on the island within its centre. They sat, unperturbed by the chaos unfolding around them, lost within their otherworldly music even as the moment flowed backwards under the combined influence of Morea and the other spirit trees. His mind spun, deeply unsettled, as his gaze eventually rested upon the spirit herb, the Jasmine, sat beneath the sprawling tree, and the ‘body’ of the youth within her arms.

The longer he looked at that dark-haired youth, the more certain he became that his father was right, and that, whatever it was, was best left well alone. As Lan Huang had noted, there was a profound, almost primal yang strength embodied within it that, while sluggish and stagnant, retained an ephemeral sense of perfection that defied his gaze in some hard to define way.

“Does it possess one of the Heavenly Yang Physiques?” he asked at last, because that really was what it reminded him of.

“…”

“Something close to it,” his father said grimly. “Though as it currently is, it barely qualifies as a Venerate Treasure—”

“Though that is as much an artefact of its stagnating state,” Cranea observed.

“Even a… Venerate Realm puppet body is no joke,” he pointed out uneasily.

“Indeed,” Cranea agreed. “Currently it is like a dried seed, but given the right nutrients and circumstances…”

“What do we do if… they do try and rob it?” Lan Huang asked, looking at him with concern.

“You do nothing,” his father muttered. “We will be safe here…”

“Probably,” Cranea murmured, taking a sip of her wine.

“We will be safe here,” his father reiterated, giving her a sideways look that she didn’t meet.

“And then what?” he asked, warily.

That alone was enough to really concern him. His father’s abode was basically the stronghold of the Ha Family. The final resort and bolthole that had seen his father through two changings of the Heavens of Eastern Azure and several other brushes with calamity besides.

“Then I rather fear I am going to have to have a difficult conversation with your mother,” his father grimaced, stroking his short-cropped beard.

“When was the last time you spoke to her?” he asked, frowning, because his mother was… temperamental at the best of times.

“She has been in seclusion,” his father said with an awkward shrug. “I write letters… occasionally your sister replies, of late, usually to tell me who little Yanmei has beaten up.”

“You have… a sister?” Lan Huang asked, dully, before adding quickly, “—Ancestor Kai.”

“I have three,” he grimaced. “None of them are in the Ha clan though—”

Before he could say more, the ‘reversion’ of the moment finally completed.

Ji Tantai, Din Ouyeng, Ha Mangfan and Di Yao were all pale, their qi chaotic as they found themselves standing in a re-imagining of the clearing they had previously ‘escaped’. The shallows of the lake and the island within were still faintly visible through the haze behind them.

Meng Guanxi once again stood before Ji Tantai, her hand grasping the compass, staring at it blankly as the strange, eerie chime hung in the air all around them.

“Uhh…” Ha Leng looked about uneasily as the leaves fell from the trees and the jasmine flowers continued to fade.

Morea, her hair still glowing faintly, was staring at Ji Tantai, her hand raised, but still somehow unable to fully exert influence on her surroundings, despite the last lingering echoes of the combined attempt at rolling back that moment enduring. There was something about the tone the compass was emitting, preventing the two from entirely resolving back to the origin point. “This boy…” his father muttered under his breath, his eyes narrowed to slits now as he stared at Ji Tantai. “This boy… what has he…”

“What was it you said before?” Di Yao declared with a mocking grin as parasol flowers exploded out of the compass. “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!”

“…”

“Forgive them, they are young and do not know the world,” the old monk murmured, once again putting his hands together. “It is the gift of youth to burn bright, yet their curse that their light blinds them to wisdom, Amitabha…”

He turned to look at the old monk, the two scenes lingering bizarrely in his mind for a few disorientating seconds before he realised what Morea was aiming for—this was as far back as it was possible for them to go without risking intersection with the destruction of the whisk.

Everything wavered for a few seconds longer, then Morea lowered her hand and the parasol flowers swirling around them subsided and the scene around them remained unchanged.

They were still on the lake shore.

The island was still there, visible through the misty haze.

“What just… happened?” Ha Leng muttered, rubbing his eyes, switching his gaze between the Huang clan youth, Juhong, who was holding the parasol sword in one hand and the orichalcum one in the other, and Ji Tantai’s group.

“Hah… we—HOW THE FUCK!” Ji Tantai cursed as he stared at Morea and the other spirit trees, his face turning pale.

“Is this boy an idiot?” the Myrtle asked, shaking her head.

“No, just ignorant,” the Willow remarked.

“This is what you get for using stolen gifts,” the woman with flowering reeds in her hair murmured. “Ever was it so.”

“Uh…” Di Yao stared at them blankly, his arrogant smile also slipping.

“Didn’t you say that that thing could lose them?” Han Mangfan asked Ji Tantai uneasily, glancing at the compass—

The last notes of the flute faded away, and in the same instant the compass stopped resonating. The discordant sound it had been emitting to disrupt its surroundings was swallowed up by the enveloping, alluring silence left in its absence and the gentle patter of raindrops as they struck water and leaves.

As one, everyone, including the four cultivators, found their gaze drawn to the island. There, the young woman with apple blossoms in her hair had finally lowered her flute and was considering them pensively from her rock.

In a strange way, even though she was an incomparable beauty, it was her eyes which drew him in. They were dark, almost pitch black, like sinkholes, filled with dark water—

He never even saw her move.

Between one second and the next, she was already across the lake, the flute in her hand swinging down like a sword towards Meng Guanxi—

Ji Tantai and his group wavered, like a mirage, and then the moment froze amid a swirl of gently scattering parasol blossoms. Thanks to their ‘elevated’ perspective and his realm, he was able to watch Ji Tantai and the others immediately start to move forward, past her. The profound yang strength within the compass managing to briefly warp time in their surroundings—

A second version of the dark-haired woman appeared before them, stabbing at Meng Guanxi’s throat, even as the first remained frozen where she had been—

He stared dully as Ji Tantai’s group evaded the second phantom and continued on across the water, moving much faster than Morea or any of the others, who were moving after them now, easily evading—

A third phantom, wielding the flute like it was an axe appeared, frozen, forcing Ji Tantai to change directions again—

A fourth appeared, swinging for Meng Guanxi with the flute as if it were a hammer.

Then a fifth, like a dagger…

Then a sixth swept like a halberd, checking their progress again.

Then a seventh.

In the blink of an eye, dozens of her were striking at the corpse of the woman from the Meng Clan as they tried to cross. Meanwhile, the compass in Ji Tantai’s hand first trembled, then properly started to shake, giving off vibes that were decidedly inauspicious. Continuing until abruptly, after several seconds, the figures simply vanished, leaving only a few swirls of mist and scattering patches of parasol blossoms as evidence that they had ever ‘been’.

“So it’s like that, huh,” the dark-haired young woman murmured once again on her rock as if she had never moved, only now she was tapping her flute idly against her leg, looking at Ji Tantai with a considered expression.

“What just…” Ha Mangfan asked, looking around with deep unease.

“This… is getting ridiculous,” Din Ouyeng complained, a green jade ruler inlaid with azure and gold chrysanthemums appearing in his hand, which he then waved vaguely at the advancing corpses from the lily.

“Well, it was expected there would be something like this,” Ji Tantai muttered, biting his lip hard enough for it to bleed.

“Yeah, but not that we would be chased by a bunch of rabid spirit herbs to this extent!” Di Yao muttered, warding against the Huang youth with his own blade.

“Ummm, what did just happen?” Ha Leng asked, staring dully at the lake before them.

“That’s a good question,” Lan Huang muttered, looking at him and his father.

“That boy tried to use his compass to slip through time, slowing it for them, speeding it up for him,” his father replied, glowering at Ji Tantai, who was poking something on the compass. “That really is a most… peculiar treasure. I really want to know where he got it now.”

“No uh, I got that,” Lan Huang murmured. “I meant her. What did the apple tree spirit over there do?”

“She checked him each time, forcing him to intensify his use of the compass until he had to choose whether to risk damaging it or retreat,” he replied.

It was a simple thing to speak of, yet the grasp over this place and its feng shui that such a feat required, even with the suppression lifted to the Immortal threshold, was remarkable. A further reminder that this place had depths almost never seen, and likely for good reason.

“Uh… and h-how are they able to fight equally?” Ha Leng added, pointing an accusing figure at the four cultivators, who were backing up from the corpses now, spreading out in the build-up for another attack.

“You gonna do this again?” Di Yao challenged the Lily. “You failed before, so sure, let us purify more of these lost souls!"

“Parasol qi has a few quirks,” Cranea muttered.

“It does,” his father agreed, eyeing Di Yao and Ha Mangfan, who had almost recovered from his injury at this point. “However, I must concur with young Leng, something is not—"

Ji Tantai spat a mouthful of blood onto the compass and the hazy obfuscation around them rippled auspiciously—

{Out of the Ashes}

A tiny, flickering flame appeared over the compass, and in the same instant the land around Ji Tantai and Meng Guanxi… wavered. All the vegetation within a hundred metres turned to ash, leaving ghostly afterimages that melded into the familiar sight of the ‘blessed land’.

“It’s an Ancestral Locus,” his father said, sounding strangled, staring furiously at the compass in Meng Guanxi’s hands. “That little shit has an Ancestral Locus. This whole escapade of theirs…”

“—has been to attune the Locus,” he concluded, grimly watching as tetrid stalkers clawed their way out of the rapidly-revivifying vegetation around Meng Guanxi.

‘Ancestral Locii' were rare, hard to manufacture feng shui treasures designed to embody, nurture or even seed an ancestral land. In that context they could be anything, so long as they had some kind of accumulation of destiny, had existed for a good while and were thematically appropriate. Usually, they were an ancient possession or treasure bequeathed down through a family or clan—a talisman of a famous ancestor, a favoured weapon, a garment they had worn, or a feng shui compass, likely containing some remnant of their cultivation.

In any case, they were rare, jealously guarded by any influence lucky enough to possess one, and much sought after.

In this instance, it likely belonged to Meng Murali while she was alive, or was perhaps cultivated by one of her disciples on her behalf. For Ji Tantai, a mere junior, to possesses something like it was... odd.

“—And he got a Meng clan cultivator who can shoulder the burden,” his father muttered, casting a sideways look at the Resurrection Lily, who affected not to see the accusatory glares being levelled by not just his father at this point.

That, he had to agree, was a problem. A junior using that compass was one thing, but the Lily’s corpses seemed to have retained a degree of agency in their twilight existences.

Meng Guanxi had lived and operated at the heart of the Seven Sovereigns. To her, wielding a treasure made and intended for use by someone of her clan and realm was as easy as breathing.

“I heard tales about how everything Di Ji comes into contact with polarizes and leads to weird shit happening,” he muttered, recalling the various disasters and inauspicious events that had followed that malignant boy around, which always seemed to benefit him in the end. “But this is the first time in a very long time that I have seen someone turn shit into gold with such..."

“—regularity?” his father scowled.

“Does he have some weird constitution?” Lan Huang muttered, staring at Ji Tantai.

“Doesn’t seem to,” his father replied gloomily, “though that is not the only way. Good Fortune cores are a thing, after all.”

“As far as I know, none of those have emerged in recent times,” he pointed out, watching as Hao Tianxun and the Xue clan cultivator charged forward, wielding white fire and azure mist respectively, to try and break through the rapidly expanding barrier.

“Oṃ amṛta teje hara hūṃ,” the old monk’s ghost murmured, putting his hands together, evoking a timeless, ancient chant.

Involuntarily he glanced up at the sky above as the parasol flowers exploded like firecrackers all around them, wavering, the rapacious intent within faltering, but no executing lightning came to silence the monk’s words.

“Oṃ amṛta teje hara hūṃ”

The old monk repeated the words softly, and took a step forward onto the water.

“Old Mahajingvu,” Morea said, turning to him. “This is not your fight.”

“I have seen my fight,” the Buddhist monk murmured, taking a further step as a profound momentum started to swirl around him. “And it has led me to this place.”

“Oṃ amṛta teje hara hūṃ”

“You…” Morea stared at the old man, her expression complex, then, with a sad sigh, she plucked a flower out of her hair and passed it to him.

The old monk took the flower and bowed deeply to her, before continuing his solitary march.

This time he felt the momentum of the world around the old monk truly shift as he repeated the mantra once again. The parasitic nature of the parasol bloom and the ‘blessed land’ lessening with each syllable, allowing the Resurrection Lily’s other corpses to start to move into it more decisively.

“What… is that old man doing?” Ha Leng asked as the monk took a further step and his body started to glimmer faintly.

“Ask not questions that will cause you big problems,” his father muttered as he watched the Huang youth trade a flurry of blows with Di Yao. “That old man is dangerous to all cultivators of this era in ways that will kill you before you ever understand why.”

The old monk’s ghost glanced over at his father, but he just smiled sadly.

“Oh…” Ha Leng gulped, eyeing the old ghost as he murmured his mantra and continued his advance, the flowers around him shifting subtly as he did so, their manifestations starting to resonate with the sincerity of the old man’s words.

Ji Tantai, who had been focused on the compass while the others protected him, stared at the old man and the effect he was having, looking thoroughly confused. On one level, it was hard to blame the boy, who had likely never met a Buddhist monk of any real means before, let alone an ancient devotee with such a profound grasp of Dharma cultivation.

In effect, the old man was subverting the subversion. The Buddhist term for it, if he recalled, was ‘The Conquest of Death’, though it confused the heck out of most cultivators when called that, because it had nothing to do with ‘conquering’ death in a strict sense. Instead it referred to the final awakening, the attainment of the pure self and the enlightenment that led to one’s rebirth as a Buddha.

Ironically, the Meng clan had had few issues with it back in the day. It was only with the Shan dynasty that the Pure Land Tradition on Eastern Azure had come under persecution, because it presented a competing doctrine to that of the Shan Emperor as he had sought to raise up Shan Lai. Later, the Kong and Dun had gone all in on suppressing it, which was again rather ironic, because the Dun of the first Dynasty had had several remarkable Buddhist practitioners among their number.

His personal hunch there was that the Pure Land Tradition had rather too many technical points in common with the Blue Morality Scripture for Dun Fang’s liking, even if the goals of the two could not be further apart. Thus, that thief of an age had worked hard with his backers in the Kong clan to bury all traces of it in this era. Nowadays, it only existed in ancestral teachings of the Shu Pavilion, the Moon Tomb Cult and within Erlang Shan on the south-eastern continent. All places that the Dun Imperial Mandate had next to no real influence.

“Deal with that fucking ghost will you!” Ji Tantai called over to Din Ouyeng, who grimaced and levelled the ruler at the monk.

“Yeah, I don’t think so,” the Myrtle murmured, stepping forward into the blessed land.

As they watched, a cart-sized tetrid stalker surged out of the water, its limbs lashing out at her. Barely even glancing at it, the Myrtle swatted the monstrosity away, sending it crashing through the trees and out of sight, before hitting two others hard enough that they were torn clean in two.

Din Ouyeng gritted his teeth… then slammed the ruler into the water as the azure and gold chrysanthemums on it shimmered—

{Azure Current}

A coruscating nova of flames shaped like azure chrysanthemums surged out, enveloping the Myrtle, the old monk, the Elder from the Moon Tomb cult and the Moon Saintess. The Myrtle just gave her head a half shake and stamped on the water, then frowned as her ripples simply multiplied the chrysanthemums, which were starting to swirl up into a pillar with Din Ouyeng at their heart.

“Isn’t that the Din Clan’s inheritance art?” Ha Leng gawked.

“You know it?” Lan Huang asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Uh… Din Kongfei showed it off, though it was nowhere close to this,” Ha Leng said with a grimace.

“Ah,” Lan Huang sighed.

“It is,” he agreed. “Though his control is rather bad.”

That was, in fact, an understatement. Din Ouyeng clearly knew the art, certainly enough to direct it, but the bulk of its momentum came from the ruler’s bound version. His comprehensions towards it were also rather hollow, suggesting someone had instilled a seed of comprehensions for it into him at some point to speed up the rate at which he could advance with it. It was the sort of short-term gains that were favoured by those who chased quick breakthroughs. Or by elders who didn’t want their descendants to have too much autonomy.

“All style and no substance,” Cranea mused, sipping her wine.

"If he lives, he will eventually come to regret that shortcut,” Lan Huang murmured.

He nodded, agreeing with their assessment as they watched the fire swirl up to the zenith and then collapse back downwards. As it did so, it formed a vast Roc that stretched out its talons for the old monk—

“Oṃ amṛta…”

The chanted mantra was swallowed by a roar of qi as the Roc hit where the ghostly monk had been standing. Trees charred and the water boiled all around them for several seconds.

“… amṛta teje hara hūṃ”

The old monk walked out of the fire, azure chrysanthemums shimmering around him like enlightenment ephemera as Din Ouyeng’s control of his art failed him.

“Heinous criminal, sinner against the righteous path, receive judgement!”

The whispered words were spoken by the jade ruler, which rose out of the water without Din Ouyeng doing anything, a ghostly figure in a Dun clan robe, wearing imperial dragon armour, now holding it.

“Old villain, repent your path and accept the virtues of the Grandfather of Heaven!”

“Mother of Celestial Mercy,” his father hissed, mildly aghast as the Dao weapon’s spirit tried to dodge past the Myrtle and the Saintess, aiming for the old monk—

In that same instant, however, Ji Tantai’s compass emitted a piercing cry and a greenish-copper feathered phoenix, several times the size of the one previously summoned, rose up into the air above the group. Flames scattered down everywhere from its feathers, transforming into smaller phoenixes that streaked out at every attacker in range.

Morea swept a few away, but for each one that she did, the sparks transformed into smaller versions, eating away at the blizzard of petals she had summoned.

Similarly, Hao Tianxun and the Xue clan woman found their fire largely ineffective as the reborn phoenix leveraged the fact that it had already received baptisms of execution lightning that led to its rebirth.

The other corpses, and indeed several other spirit herbs that had materialized to support the fight from the side-lines, retreated rapidly, covered by the woman with reeds in her hair. In the process leaving Morea, the Lily, the Willow and the Myrtle to restrain the rampant spread of the emergent domain, which was fuelled by Meng Guanxi’s comprehensions rather than Ji Tantai’s.

“That is absolutely forged from some venerate disciple’s Dao Spark,” his father growled, his gaze somewhat ominously lingering on the compass. “Seriously, this bunch are making me question if I have a personal treasury or not.”

“It is a bit… depressing,” Lan Huang agreed as they watched the phoenix continue to gather momentum.

“W-what do they want to do with it?” Ha Leng stammered, eyeing the majestic creature.

“Use it to hit the island probably, literally blaze a way through the feng shui maze,” his father grunted. “Phoenixes have a natural destiny with regards to Yang strength.”

Ji Tantai simply pointed at the island, at which point the phoenix emitted a piercing cry that evoked a faint sense of... a Truth.

“That’s going to be a problem,” he muttered, watching the edge of their viewing rift waver.

“Can we do—?” Lan Huang started to ask, but in the same instant, the woman with the flute put it to her lips again and started to play.

The melody was... gentle yet held within it an enchanting allure that drew him in within a few notes. It easily matched the piercing cry of the phoenix… and it was, he realised after a moment, familiar.

Simultaneously, the red-haired woman with the fan of grasses set aside her drum and started to walk towards the phoenix, her arms outstretched, drawing…

The pair of symbols mirrored each other like shining stars, evoking a terrifying and enthralling sense of wonder. Within moments, a second pair manifested that were furious, brilliant and overpowering, followed by a third pair that spoke of authority and sovereignty. By the time the fourth, alluring and beautiful, had appeared, he knew what the art was.

When the fifth pair appeared, the twin constellations shone with a brilliance that turned the world dim, as if all the light were somehow drawn to it.

At this point the momentum of the phoenix had carried it halfway across the lake, even as the sixth star, evoking a sense of going on a journey of discovery, appeared at her fingertips.

The lake had vanished, but rather than baked mud, somehow the tree and the jasmine and the ruins were an island in a vast swathe of swaying grasses. Her Domain; summoned without any fanfare between one footstep and the next, even as the seventh star appeared, drawn together in front of her, guiding the whole thing as the dark-haired woman’s music soared.

“Descend…”

At her whispered word, the already darkened world around them went from dusk to night, the sky seeming to flow backwards above them—

“Bright Auriga!”

His mouth fell open as the constellation around her transformed into a golden chariot pulled by horses of starfire, embodying a furious, terrifying and familiar yang strength that touched on a concept so absolute it could be considered a manifestation of a fundamental law. One before which the phoenix and the parasol were imitators of slight skill, daring to show off before a master.

{Blood from the—

A discordant, piercing shriek of chaotic ‘cry’, so out of tune with the concept of ‘sound’ it was simply disruption, enveloped everything.

The scattering remnants of the Phoenix, already starting to reform out of thousands of drifting flames wavered, each spark becoming an enraged bird that turned on those around it. The resurgent blessed land revolted, its qi turning chaotic as it tore itself apart in the blink of an eye.

It merged with the almost forgotten jasmine blossoms, with the parasitic parasol qi, with the obfuscating mists and the very humidity of the climate itself to become something so distortive and inventively vile that he wondered what would happen if that sound was heard outside Yin Eclipse.

“What the fuck!” Ji Tantai screamed, rounding on Din Ouyeng. “What part of ‘get them with that Dao weapon’ didn’t you get?”

“Me? You’re the one with the massive pile of shit!” Din Ouyeng snarled back. “You think treasures just grow on trees? Anyway, you wanted me to ‘get’ that nameless-blessed monk, ghost, whatever he fate-thrashed is!”

“Shut up, both of you, can’t you see this is that stupid herb’s art?!” Di Yao cursed.

“You shut up! You just came in here and want to order us about?” Ha Mangfan snarled, shoving Di Yao backwards. “Thanks to you not admitting to being a fate-thrashed clone back then, now I have this injury—”

“You—!” Di Yao, who seemed to be the least affected of the four, flushed with anger.

“Yeah, these stupid herbs have the power of a hegemonic fate-thrashed sect!” Din Ouyeng added. “If we don’t do this properly and they come out after us, you think the old ancestors who sweep them up are gonna care about the bloody smears we became before that?”

He stared as the dynamic between the four cultivators imploded between one moment and the next, then realised his mouth was hanging open and closed it.

“My ears…” Lan Huang groaned, holding his head as his qi turned chaotic.

“Elder Lan… y-you are bleeding,” Ha Leng stammered, sounding concerned as Cranea smartly stepped over and put a hand on both their shoulders.

Lan Huang put his hand to his mouth and realised his nose was bleeding, badly.

“Nasty,” was all his father muttered with a sniff.

“I am done with this!” Ha Mangfan gasped, wiping blood from his mouth. “We are going to die at this rate!”

“Wait, no—!” Ji Tantai yelled, suddenly grasping for Ha Mangfan as the youth pulled out a formation disk and put qi into it—

A golden lamium flower appeared right beside Ha Mangfan, who stared at it blankly as it transformed into a sullen, starved-looking young girl with livid brands across a third of her face and upper body.

Before she could do anything however, the sword spirit stabbed her and the flower scattered into loam.

“What did you do that for!?” Ha Mangfan snarled, actually poking a finger into the chest of the Dao weapon’s spirit.

“Touch me again, and I will kill you,” the Dao weapon said flatly to Ha Mangfan, who flinched backwards, then looked over at Din Ouyeng, who was still muttering about artefacts. “This is very bad, you finally kicked a board you cannot easily overco—”

“You talk too much,” the Myrtle muttered, stabbing at the Dao Weapon—

“Denied, my wrath is as the Heavens!” the sword spirit snapped, stepping to the side to evade her strike.

A silver sword of lightning smashed down, hitting the Myrtle and scattering her form into flower blossoms.

“First, let’s deal with—” the spirit ducked as the dark-haired woman swished at his head with a stone blade.

“That weapon, isn’t that Din Bao’s?” he asked, staring at the Dao weapon as it dodged a second cut from the dark-haired young woman, becoming more and more certain of that by the second. The appearance of the ‘spirit’ and the style of the ruler were clues, but in the end, what sold it was the manner.

“It is,” his father nodded grimly. “Though it has a bit of history before he acquired it.”

“I would love to know why it’s not affected—” Lan Huang muttered.

“It is,” Cranea murmured as the ruler crackled with golden lightning. “This is it ‘panicking’. It is taking charge of the situation so those it must protect do not perish.”

“…”

In response, the apple blossom girl skipped her blow off the water, scattering a wave of mist and parasol-infused vegetation at the weapon spirit, diffusing the lightning using the strength of the environment itself.

“Gah!” the weapon spirit deflected a further blow from her, as she met his ruler with her blue-stone blade, then a fourth and a fifth, at which point he started to notice something was… off.

“Are her blows getting stronger, each time?” Lan Huang muttered. “Is this an art like ‘Purple Forbidden Enclosure: Northern Dipper’?”

“Yes,” his father replied tersely.

He nodded as well.

As a principle, arts that sought to stack damage were not that unusual, though few ever aspired to take it to the limits being demonstrated here. The Ha clan even had several variations of it on their ‘books’, so to speak, including the ‘Northern Dipper’, and another somewhat more exotic one courtesy of his own father. What was remarkable here was the breadth of inclusion in what she was doing.

As they watched, the young woman’s seventh strike flowed with the motion of the weapon spirit’s strike and smoothly returned it, yet again, with interest to the point where even the natural laws of the world around them began to move in harmony with her.

Grimacing, the weapon spirit lunged forward, trying to break the flow of her attack—

She deflected his counter, spinning amid the scattering parasol blossoms, phantasmal phoenix feathers and her own apple-blossoms like a celestial fairy, returning the blow in a scything overhead strike.

Meanwhile, the area around Meng Guanxi distorted, hundreds of the small phoenixes promptly recovered their senses, streaking off towards the red-haired woman and her domain of swaying grassland. For her part, the red-haired woman just sighed and redoubled her efforts to overwhelm the rapidly recovering momentum of Meng Guanxi’s blessed land.

“Ah, he worked it out,” Lan Huang muttered as the Dao spirit deliberately disengaged with the dark-haired woman’s ninth strike at the last minute and instead darted backwards, dragging Ha Mangfan and Din Ouyeng with him.

“Nope,” his father muttered, even as they watched her strike slice down onto an entirely unremarkable parasol blossom amid the lily pads around her, as if that had always been her target, leaving Ji Tantai and the others to stare blankly at the parted flower and the falling blade.

“You can…” Lan Huang’s eyes had turned round as he watched her roll with the blow—

The tenth strike melded, not only with the momentum of the chariot, as she spun, but the gentle allure of the old monk’s mantra, the still lingering, discordant wail of the flute, the vivid, parasitic vitality of the parasol qi, the alluring pressure of the jasmine, the majesty of the mulberry, the beauty of the myrtle, the suppleness of the willow, the boundlessness of the vast grassland and the aloof, brutal prestige of the tribulation lightning, into a singular manifestation of martial intent—

{Apple Blossom Style: Sunset in Paradise}

The blow struck at Meng Guanxi like the executing blade of a vengeful celestial—

The blessed land, still attempting to repel the profound yang strength invading it, courtesy of the subversive domain of blossoming grass, recoiled under the force of the blow. ‘Renewal at any cost’ colliding with the idea of the natural order of the world changing.

The problem was, he realised, as Meng Guanxi coughed up blood, the compass in her hands shaking so violently that it cut her hands, that she was durable. She had an inherited mantra, or he assumed she did, because the Lily had seen some reason to capture her…

“That…” his father, however, was staring at Di Yao and Ji Tantai, his eyes narrowed.

Following his father’s gaze, he saw Di Yao had produced a blue-jade sword that gave him a decidedly creepy vibe—

“Upon this land, the Law is Known, for the Mantle of Heaven—”

Morea and the Myrtle attacked at the same time, as did Hao Tianxun, only for the space around Di Yao and Ji Tantai to ‘grow’ unnaturally. The two herbs smashed through the barrier with ease, however the momentary pause bought enough time for a barrage of phoenixes to stall all three of them—

“—righteous,” Di Yao continued, “shall a peerless blow be struck!”

The world went still as the blue jade sword rang like a bell.

For her part, the red-haired woman stared up at the sky and sighed, before focusing on Ji Tantai.

The dark-haired young woman tilted her head, then wordlessly spun and hurled her sword high into the sky—

Something flashed above them, then the clouds rolled away to reveal a pitch-black lotus flower descending like a meteor, a burning skeleton sitting within it. The blade hit the skeleton, obliterating it in a swathe of inauspicious flame.

A pure silver lightning bolt scythed over the horizon… and hit the nearest of the three large upright stones that ringed the island.

The stone itself, which he now realised had had a gnarled little apple tree growing on top of it, was consumed with silver fire, revealing an ancient painting of a dark-haired woman holding a flute and a sword, her hair crowned with apple blossoms, on a stele amidst its roots, before the lightning split it.

The dark-haired woman considered her physical form, then sighed, a little regretfully he felt, and vanished in a scattering of apple-blossoms.

Meng Guanxi waved her hand and hundreds, then thousands of pigeon-sized phoenixes diverted from the island towards the other two pillars, shelling them with such ferocity that the ground shook.

All that did, however, was clear away some of the vegetation, revealing a pair of paintings on rocks placed atop those two worn columns.

The nearer, intact one was of the red-haired woman standing before them. In one hand she held a sheaf of flowering grass, in the other an orb of gold presumably meant to represent a sun, a drum sitting at her feet. The further was of a black-haired figure that could have been male or female, holding a lightning bolt in one hand and a book in the other. Unlike the first two, it was so weather worn as to be barely visible, and the fire had little impact.

The red-haired woman stared at Di Yao, then at the descending lotus, and spread her arms—

For a brief instant, they stood on a vast grassy plain, blue sky stretching from horizon to horizon, not a cloud in the sky. The black lotus, suddenly tiny and mundane, fell into her hand and was crushed out of existence, before reality re-asserted itself.

“It seems our time of merriment and song is at an end, sister,” the woman sighed, looking over at the jasmine, even as a second terrible white bolt of light dropped over the horizon towards them.

Shaking her head, she turned back to look at Ji Tantai and the others.

“We will remember you,” was all she said, before the bolt hit the stone nestled on top of the pillar, shattering it into pieces.

“Well, something finally worked, even if it’s a bit of a waste of a good treasure,” Di Yao muttered, in the moment of silence after she had vanished.

Din Ouyeng just scowled and warily pointed his weapon at the assembled spirit herbs, while Ha Mangfan just looked around nervously.

“Yeah, but tools are there to be used,” Ji Tantai remarked, glancing at Meng Guanxi. “Open us a path.”

Meng Guanxi nodded, then did something to the compass. The remaining small phoenixes, who had now also regained their senses, swarmed in their hundreds towards the spirit herbs and the Lily’s corpses, forcing them back.

{Vermillion Enclosure: Summer Chariot}

Several of the phoenixes swirled around each other, merging into four constellation-like birds drawing a blazing orb of the sun that shed parasol blossoms like rain as it plunged towards the jasmine—

“Aiiii…”

The sigh hung in the air as the phoenixes scattered into motes of multi-coloured qi that swirled down into the hand of the jasmine, who stared at the sparks of primordial qi, dancing like butterflies in her hand, before letting them fly away.

The jasmine stared at her empty hand for a long moment, then looked up at them—

“My love…”

He froze, flinching as a familiar hand brushed his cheek. Shifting slightly, he found Kai Lan, dressed in a beautiful, alluringly light gown, lounging beside him, smiling up at him with radiant azure eyes.

“The Chancellor of the Left is here,” she sighed, sitting up and pouring herself some wine.

“Chancellor of the...?” he repeated, confused, because this didn’t seem like a memory.

For starters, they were on a dragon-ship, albeit a small one, drifting along a broad, placid river, past fields full of spirit herbs. Secondly, the curtains were embroidered with the symbols of the Tai and Xue clans.

“Your Imperial Majesty, My Lady Empress…”

He turned to find Lan Huang, standing in a purple Imperial Official’s Robe, bowing politely.

“…”

“The messengers are here, from the Kong clan,” Lan Huang added. “You said you wished to be informed immediately…?”

“I… did?” he replied, realising that he did recall that and…

“Um, are you okay, Your Majesty?” Lan Huang, Chancellor Huang, asked carefully.

“I… um, yes,” he replied, looking around, his mind still trying to work out what was going on.

-Before I was…?

He spun, finding the maid, who was standing near his… wife. He wasn’t sure why he sought the girl, who had golden-brown hair and dark eyes, but something about her was just…

“Ah… you could enjoy it a bit,” the maid muttered, everything dissociating slightly.

“You… are the Jasmine,” he half asked, half stated.

“I… am many things,” she mused, sitting down on the edge of the broad couch. “But yes, currently, I am the Jasmine.”

“And here, you are my maid,” he asked carefully.

“Here, I just am,” she shrugged, with a faint smile. “Unless you want me to be more?”

For a brief second, her smile was… hauntingly intoxicating, until he forced himself to look away, at Kai Lan, who was sitting there, sipping her wine and watching the river flow by, oblivious.

“What do you want, Lady Jasmine?” he asked warily.

“A new world,” the Jasmine purred.

“And… me being emperor is… that world?” he asked unable to keep some of his disbelief from his voice.

“It could be,” she murmured, almost playfully.

“And what would it cost?”

“Who knows…” the Jasmine chuckled, reaching out and stroking his cheek. “I do think you look better as a young man than as a boring old Confucian scholar though.”

Before he could find words to reply to her, everything wavered and he was standing in his father’s abode, cold sweat running down his neck. Ha Leng and Lan Huang were both pale-faced as well, their breathing a bit ragged. His father, however, just looked a bit annoyed.

The Jasmine was where she had been, though sitting up now, resting her chin on her knee, staring at the four cultivators and Meng Guanxi with a furrowed brow. For their part, they just remained where they were, transfixed, until her eyes slid sideways, to the smaller stones that sat between the three large ones.

“Did nobody ever tell you it is rude to spy on others, old ‘scholar’?” she asked coolly.

~ Jun Arai – Into the Cloud Forest ~

Once they made it back to the fissures and picked up the trail, they found that Juni, Shu and Ling had indeed fled straight up the escarpment.

The first bit of the climb was tough, though not quite on the level of scaling the cliff back to the ruins.

“Wasn’t there a centipede nest up there?” Sana asked her, as she was pulling the puppet up, over a ledge, having made it up to the first level of the escarpment.

“There should be,” she agreed, following where her sister was pointing, towards a dark fissure running along the cliff above them.

“Also… have you noticed?” Sana added, looking around. “The uh... scale of these ridges and this valley… seem a bit off?”

“Certainly, we have been climbing for a fair while,” she agreed, hauling herself up on a handy rock and taking in the view.

Looking back over the valley they had just traversed, she found that Sana was right, the scale was a bit off. Projecting the map from her scrip, she checked the distance, frowning. It should have been about a mile and a half, in a straight line, from where they were now, back to the far side, where the path up to the ruins and the ridge was. She had to squint through the rain, but certainly the distance to it was much more than that.

“It wasn’t so apparent in the forest, I think, because we were so focused on the compass and then on… whatever is going on with this place,” Sana mused, also staring out through the misty rain. “However, I did wonder about it when we were going to the northern gully. I just assumed the map was out, or I was misidentifying slightly where we were in the forest, until we got to here and...”

“—got a better idea of the view,” she murmured.

The ruins where they had spent much of the previous day had all been within the cloud level. It was only now, looking back across the treetops, visible like islands amid swirling rivers of misty rain cloud, that it became apparent just how far they had walked. Shading her eyes against the drizzle, she guessed that they had rather efficiently covered about ten miles without ever really realizing it.

“Is it weird that somehow this scale almost feels… more fitting?” Sana added.

Taking in the landscape, she saw what her sister meant. There was a sort of ‘harmony’ to it, that ‘fit’, much better compared to ‘outside’. The High Valleys always felt cramped and claustrophobic. Partly that was the ever-present ‘edge effect’, but also the mazes of twisting, high-sided gorges and gullies that, even when they opened out somewhat, into larger ‘regions’ like the East Fury Rifts or the valley east of Misty Jasmine Inn, were still oppressive and dangerous, shrouded in rolling cloud and greenery, hiding warrens of caves, deep ravines and bottomless lakes.

“No, I get what you mean,” she agreed. “This… looks more like the cloud-vales in the Blue Water Mountains, south of Blue Water City.”

“It does rather,” Sana agreed.

After that they lapsed into silence while she finished hauling up the puppet and Sana scouted around to see where they could get up the next rise of the escarpment in a vaguely efficient manner.

By the time that was done, and she finally remembered to check her jade tablet, she found it was close to early evening. Time having slipped by… surprisingly fast, a part of her felt.

After a quick ‘evening meal’, they continued the climb.

To call the terrain treacherous was possibly underselling it, with slippery, moss-covered rocks and drifts of leaves that had the potential to hide unstable slabs of rock or water-weakened soils as they made their way up. They also found a large swathe of ‘verdant’ greenery, though the qi it was rich in was some kind of metal-yang variant.

Finally, after a further hour of careful climbing, they surmounted the crest of the ridgeline… and found, more or less, what she suspected they would.

The valley beyond, which ‘should’ have been an interconnected series of massif pillars jutting out of tangled jungle, interspersed with river gorges, was now a vast swathe of tropical cloud forest. The rolling cloud and rain, which had closed in again, obscured most of the horizon, but the shadows of the nearest massif pillar were just about discernible, suggesting it was much bigger than it had been.

“Could it be that… space is less compressed here?” she wondered at last, thinking back yet again to Senior Ying’s words on the ridges as they caught their breath in the shelter of a tree.

“Any thoughts?” Sana asked jokingly, poking the puppet, which she was now carrying, in the side of the head.

“…”

“He is the only one who is gonna know!?” her sister pointed out, rolling her eyes.

Her reply to that was to poke Sana in the side with enough force to make her squeak.

“Owwww… anyway, what does the compass say?” Sana muttered, rubbing her side.

Unwrapping it from the pouch where she had been storing it while they climbed, she set the dowsing compass down on a flat rock and let it settle.

After about thirty seconds, though, she gave it a gloomy poke, because the reading, such as it was, was pulling back the way they had come.

“Maybe they didn’t use it again for a bit,” Sana suggested. “Didn’t Lianmei say that once it was used it would take a while to recharge. There were three of them fleeing…”

“—there has only been two ‘hops’ though,” she pointed out.

“Counting the one that presumably took them off the ridge?” Sana pointed out.

She poked her fingers into her temples, because Sana was right. That could well be three hops. That said, the reading was still… odd. If they had gone past the final hop, the compass should have been unequivocally pulling back the way they had come, and yet the reading, while it trended that way, had a noticeably mixed signal.

Narrowing her eyes, she pulled out a bit more of the material she had been using to make the compass from the crude bag at her waist and quickly constructed a second compass. Placing that a hand’s span away from the first one, ensuring it was eclipsed by it, so the ‘major’ readings cancelled each other out, she watched pensively as it found its bearings.

“Huh… well, what do you know,” Sana remarked, eyeing it.

“So, the next hop is a long way away,” she sighed, staring out in the general direction that the new compass was very faintly pulling—roughly towards where the eastern side of the Jasmine Gate should be.

“This next valley… it was less than a mile across,” Sana observed, projecting a topographic map of it, from her jade scrip tied on her forearm. “If they were fleeing with speed, I doubt they did more than go up and down this ridge.”

They both considered the map, then looked out over the swaying, rain-obscured treetops of the much larger swathe of rolling forest below them.

“So, I guess we go across and look for signs of ‘vibrant’ vegetation,” she suggested at last.

“I guess,” Sana agreed, shrugging off the joined lengths of rope she had coiled on her back. “So, more rock climbing?”

“Yep,” she agreed, with a weary sigh of her own.

Compared to the route up they had just climbed, the face on this side, where she could see it at their level, was fractured and sheer, to the point of overhanging. There was also water visibly running off the face in places, courtesy of the steady rainfall. It just screamed ‘this is gonna be a pain’.

“—And I don’t fancy dropping the puppet off there if we can’t see the bottom,” Sana added, peering carefully over the edge.

Moving over to the edge as well, she glanced down and found it impossible to make out the base, with the protruding rocks covered in obscuring, tangled vines and clinging trees, before vanishing into mist and treetops some two hundred metres below them.

“How are we gonna do this, with a hundred metres of rope?” she mused, unslinging her own length from her waist, where she had stashed it and joining it to the loop in the end of Sana’s.

“Maybe we go a bit further north?” Sana suggested pensively. “Look for a place where we can at least see most of the face?”

“Hmm…” she bit her lip, thinking over their possibilities, then poked her own scrip on her forearm, projecting the map of the valleys outside, overlaying it with the crude one her scrip had been making of their progress so far.

They were fairly good at climbing, in her eyes, but in this place, she didn’t want to take stupid, unnecessary risks —like the early attempts to scale the cliffs after they got out of the sinkhole—and the rope was valuable. The three lengths had served them fairly well up to this point, however climbing up and down cliffs were slightly different problems. They also only had one rope’s worth of metal pegs and had already lost a few on the ill-judged ascent of the initial cliff, when re-storing the rope.

“I guess so,” she agreed at last, marking their current location, so they could find it again, below.

“We should also do some way-points,” Sana mused, eyeing the misty forest below, then looking along the ridge with a frown. “Given how… odd the distances here are, it would suck to get lost down there.”

“It would,” she sighed, capturing an image of the view before them and quickly drawing points on it, then tasking the scrip to calculate a rough map based on what it could see.

“—I’ll take the puppet, anyway,” she added, hiding the map as it started to work on generating that.

“I am tempted to say we should have left it,” Sana observed drily, walking back over to it and giving it a poke with her foot. “It’s a terrible conversationalist, for starters, and absolutely not pulling its weight.”

“Ha…heh—” she snorted back a laugh and shook her head.

It was a nuisance, Sana was right, but at this point, carrying it with them was as much a statement of intent as anything, certainly for her. That she would get her and Sana out of this place, and take it back to Ha Huang. That Di Ji’s actions would not leave them stranded in this strange, unnerving place.

“In any case,” she added, looking around again, “I’ll go check out the ridge to the south-west of us while you sort out the ropes?”

“Yeah, okay,” her sister nodded, sitting down on a handy rock and starting to check the rope and their remaining metal spikes. “Just be careful.”

“Of course,” she murmured, giving Sana a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

Giving the compass, which was still slowly zeroing in on a more accurate reading for the direction of the less dominant ‘skitterleap’ signature, a final glance, she set off along the edge of the ridge.

If anything, this side was even worse than the other. At least on the ascent, while it had been precipitous in places, they could see where they were going. Here, she was basically wading blind through a bog of moss and leaf-litter, saturated by runoff from the trees and rocks around her. Coupled with the poor visibility and the ever-present threat of the large overhang in the cliff below, her every step became an exercise in paranoia, just in case she put a foot through into a void or caused a small avalanche in the detritus she was moving over.

Under those circumstances, she barely made it a hundred metres, before concluding that everywhere was equally vexatious as a route down and turned back.

By the time she returned, Sana had finished checking the rope and was watching the rolling low cloud, which had started to close in again.

“You look like you found a bog,” her sister observed as she scrambled back out of the treeline. “I take it nowhere is really better than here?”

“It’s cloud forest, and dense enough to be truly obnoxious,” she replied, wiping off some of the detritus lingering on her robe. “And yes, the visibility is largely terrible.”

“So, I guess we are rappelling down here?” Sana sighed, standing up.

“Yep,” she confirmed. “Nowhere is as open as this and the other side looks just as bad really.”

“It’s kind of strange though,” Sana mused, looking around. “The plants aren’t flowering, yet the trees here are shedding enough leaves to create the proper conditions for this cloud forest?”

“…”

“—If you say what I think you’re about to, I’ll kick you,” her sister added with a mock glare, as she opened her mouth to suggest asking the puppet.

“…”

Rolling her eyes, she took the rope, to which Sana had finished checking, and started to look for a suitable place to anchor it. After some consideration, she eventually selected a tree of middling size, a few metres away from the cliff edge.

Once she had confirmed that the sap wasn’t corrosive, though the luss weave of the rope was minimising that danger anyway, she looped it around the trunk, close to the ground and fed it through until she had the mid-point. After giving it a few firm tugs to ensure that the tree was securely rooted, she put the doubled rope around her thigh, then looped it across her chest, over her shoulder and down behind her.

She then checked the most important element of the whole thing, that the rope would store in her talisman. Thankfully, it did, though she repeated the check a few times, just to be sure, then went over to recover the puppet.

“Rope works?” Sana asked as she helped her affix it across her back in a position where it wouldn’t impede her feeding the rope as she went down.

“Seems to, though the fact that it doesn’t reach the bottom already makes my arms hurt,” she muttered.

“I’ll go first and check, then,” Sana said.

A part of her wanted to say no, but she thought better of it and nodded.

-Now is not the time to play bossy big sister, she told herself.

Sana just shook her head, then squeezed the water out of her luss-cloth gloves and went over to the rope and did as she had done, doubling it around her thigh and across her body, then carefully backed over the edge and out of sight.

She had to endure several rather nervous minutes of silence, alone with the rain and the mist, before Sana called up.

"—It’s safe to come down!” Sana’s voice echoed, projected by qi.

Sighing with relief, she checked her own gloves, then got onto the rope.

The descent down the slope of the cliff was about what she expected. The slope was wet, mossy and there was quite a lot of scree in between the out-growing vegetation. Sana was about twenty metres down, supporting herself on a tree.

“I thought you would have gotten further,” she said, bracing herself as she got level.

“There isn’t much below us for about forty metres,” Sana replied with a grimace. “So, to get the best out of the rope, probably, we want to affix it in the fissure above this tree.”

Leaning out, she looked down, into the mist and grimaced. The cliff below them was undercut to a depth of at least a few metres, vanishing into swirls of mist with little in the way of vegetation.

Sighing, she gritted her teeth and tested the tree. Thankfully, it was firmly rooted, so she stepped in and braced herself against the cliff, letting Sana pull the rope down past her. Under any normal circumstance, you absolutely never wanted to try to re-rig a descent rope half way down like this, but short of risking weaving vines or something this was all they could do. Even storing it was something of an act of last resort, because the whole thing would vanish immediately, and it was not unknown for that to dislodge rocks, or trees, especially if there was weight on it.

In silence, she watched her sister quickly re-do the rigging, check it again, then wrap the rope again and continue down, swinging out of sight after a few metres.

A short while later, she heard the faint echo of metal on rock, as her sister put in one of the valuable anchor pegs, to provide some semblance of safety for going around the underhang.

It was almost ten minutes, however, before her sister finally called up for her to come down.

“Coming down!” she called, for what little it mattered, before following her.

Swinging under the overhang, she saw what had delayed Sana almost immediately. Her sister had had to go almost to the limit of the rope and was using two metal spikes to secure her position, given there was no ledge. That made her descent, at least, rather quick, but the technical aspect of re-rigging this time was much less straightforward.

“It’s the best I could do,” Sana said apologetically as she reached her sister.

“We are doing good,” she murmured, giving Sana a squeeze as she found handholds on the cliff a bit below the spikes and checked that they would take her weight.

“Ready?” Sana asked her, to which she just nodded.

The rope flickered and vanished, this time, and then reappeared in her sister’s hands, with the metal peg that had secured it up above.

“Reassuring,” Sana mused, feeding it through the one she had just anchored.

“Let’s not tempt fate,” she murmured. “Their kindness is already in doubt.”

“…”

Sana shook her head, then took a deep breath and slowly put her weight on the rope and the spike. Thankfully, there was no sign of any give in the anchoring of the spike.

“We go again,” Sana muttered, and started down again.

They had to change twice more before reaching the scree slope at the base of the cliff, and it was with enormous relief that she finally put her feet down on a mossy slab of rock and felt she could relax a little.

“Tch…” Sana grunted, as the rope appeared in her hand. “We lost the last spike.”

Leaning back, she stared up into the mist at the rock face with its scattered waterfalls tumbling down from above and sighed, then took out a jar of water.

“Must have driven it in too far,” she commiserated, between large, lukewarm mouthfuls. “It happens.”

“Still, rather annoying, as we don’t have many,” Sana sighed, accepting the jar from her and taking a few deep gulps of her own. “And while we can… replace a lot of things, those are… not one.”

“True, but it's better than falling to our deaths in this place,” she pointed out, half rolling over and getting to her knees.

“A charming thought,” Sana agreed, staring up into the swirling cloud and the shadow of the cliff.

Puffing out her cheeks she poked her scrip and brought up the map. It was still ‘calculating’ on the basic route based on the image taken above, but from the rough sketch she had done, she knew they had to basically go straight out from the cliff in the short term, in any case.

“Not done?” Sana asked, glancing over as she coiled up the rope.

“Nope,” she replied, with a deeper sigh, “But for now, we just go straight anyway.”

“It’s still proper cloud forest, as well,” Sana mused, looking out over the cloud-wreathed treetops before them as she squeezed the moisture out of her hair. “At least the canopy is fairly high though…”

“There is that,” she agreed, setting off carefully down the mossy, fern covered slabs.

High canopy, with established trees, in this context meant that hopefully the understory was not an impenetrable tangle of epiphytes and vines.

Sana’s assessment there turned out to be fairly on point. Once they cleared the rockfall from the cliff and set off through the forest proper, the understory turned out to be largely of a kind with the previous valley. They didn’t have to go far, either, to find more oddly qi-rich vegetation. About a hundred metres in, they found a swathe of vegetation that as before, looked like they were actually ‘growing’ as opposed to simply ‘existing’ in this place. There was also no trace of any heaven blaze pine qi, though.

“These… are more like the ones on the ridge,” she observed as they walked through it, examining some of the qi, which was curiously unstable. “Though that was yang metal, and this is some kind of yang fire?”

“Talismans?” Sana suggested, which really was all it could be. “It also seems kinda… weak compared to the heaven blaze pine qi.”

“Hmmm, yeah,” she agreed, inspecting a ‘sprouting’ sapling pensively.

“Why… are there saplings for trees, if nothing seems to be flowering or seeding?” she muttered at last, staring up into the misty canopy.

“…”

“Perhaps this type of tree can put out suckers from roots and it’s just not mature?” Sana suggested with a shrug, glancing up from noting the location on the map they had been making of their trip.

Wordlessly, she grasped the sapling and tried to pull it up, out of the ground. It wasn’t deeply rooted, as it turned out, and a very quick inspection showed that it wasn’t growing from a sucker.

“I dunno…” Sana sighed, a little helplessly, looking around at the rain-drenched, gloomy forest floor. “Perhaps its qi that makes it all grow?”

“Mmm…” nodding, she used her short blade to slash the sapling in half.

The wood inside, however, was uniform, without any evidence of rings. Focusing on it, she tried to check if there were obvious changes in qi density or type across its width, but in the end, had to draw a blank there as well. There was qi in it, but she could only conclude that her abilities were insufficient to differentiate it.

“It’s just weird,” she grumbled, passing one of the pieces to Sana who took it and considered the cut with a faint grimace of her own.

“Tell me something new,” her sister sighed, swishing the sapling into a trailing vine and watching the water scatter off it.

“Anyway, what does the compass look like?” Sana asked, turning back to her and changing the topic a little pointedly, she felt.

“The compass… oh—” she took the pair of them out from her bag and held them up.

It took a few moments for the readings to settle, but when they did, it showed their progress to be largely following the right direction, with the ‘lesser’ signature registering a little more strongly.

“We are going in the right direction,” she answered, after letting the compass sit for a few seconds, just to be sure.

“Well, that’s something at least,” Sana muttered, setting off again between the trees.

“…”

With a soft sigh of her own, she nodded and set off after her.

As they made their way onwards, they found several more patches of similar greenery, all with the same strange qi signature.

“It seems this talisman wasn’t one of ours,” Sana said at last, after they had stopped several hundred metres further into the forest to contemplate their path through a particularly dense bit of forest where the strange vibrancy was especially pronounced.

“Too big,” she nodded in agreement, taking in the cloud forest around them. “These scattered areas of activation have to cover at least a square mile…”

“Yep,” Sana sighed, sitting down on a rock slab, that were this Yin Eclipse would have made her check three times for Algru. “How is the map coming?”

Glancing at it she found it was, in fact, almost done.

“We can wait here while it finishes its calculations,” she replied, wiping rain drops from her face.

“I suppose we can, yes,” Sana agreed, with a deeper sigh.

“Problem?” she asked, because Sana was looking a bit… out of sorts, in a hard to define way.

“Where do you wanna start?” her sister muttered.

“Fair,” she conceded, sitting down on the other side of the slab and pulling off her boots to empty out the water.

“Like…” Sana started to speak, then stopped again, simply staring up into the drifting rain and misty cloud. “Some part of this just feels… futile?”

“It’s not like we have a better option,” she pointed out.

Sana gave her a sideways look now, as she realised, she had said that a bit defensively.

“It just sucks,” Sana muttered, staring into the hissing trees. “All of this just… sucks monkey balls.”

“It does,” she agreed, because there was nothing else to say there really—

“He is still in my head, that fate-cursed bastard,” Sana added, softly.

In silence, she turned to stare at Sana.

“When we came down the cliff, it was like I was being pushed, from behind… every move I made… I can make it go away, but… it always comes back in some stupid way. It’s like an itch that won’t leave, or some stupid bite, just annoying enough that you can’t ignore. I think that’s why I lost the spike…”

With a sigh of her own, she slipped over to Sana and put an arm around her shoulder and gave her a squeeze.

“And yet, we are still here,,” she pointed out. “they failed.”

Rather than reply, Sana just put her head on her shoulder, in silence.

It was hard to know what to say, really. A part of her was quietly furious that it was Sana who was affected in that way, and not her, and the rest of her was fairly sure that Di Ji… or Ji Tantai—whatever he called himself—had somehow targeted Sana like that for this reason. The idea that he had seen that far through the dynamic between them… in that short period of time, was also deeply unsettling to her.

-How far ahead did he think in this kind of thing… or is it just an unintentional after effect of what he did in that moment?

The longer she thought about it, the worse it became, in its own way.

*—Chime*

With impeccably bad timing, her scrip finally notified them that it had completed crunching a crude projection for them to use to navigate with.

“—So, what does it say?” Sana asked, a little brusquely, as she looked over at it. “Are we already hopelessly off course?”

“Have a bit of trust in me,” she murmured, projecting it for them both to examine.

To her mild surprise, their current path was basically where they were meant to be going, at least according to the route based on the view from the top of the ridge. They had veered a little too far to the west, largely due to the topography, but not to the point where they needed to do some massive course correction.

“So… we need to head,” her sister pointed her arm vaguely off through the understory to their left, in what should correspond to a vaguely ‘north-westerly’ direction. “—that way? based on the compass?”

“Uhuh,” she confirmed, checking it again. “That will also take us close to the massif we could see from up above.”

“Well, no point hanging about,” Sana sighed, standing up and walking over to where she had dumped the puppet.

“Do you want to take over the compass?” she suggested.

“Eh, its fine, I’ll carry him,” her sister shook her head.

“…”

She was tempted, for a moment, to refuse, but thought better of it, and instead just watched her sister in silence as she hauled the puppet up onto her back and tied it in place. Sana was actually the better of them when it came to compasses, in her opinion, and her offer had, in part, been to reassure her sister, and stop her dwelling on the Di Ji—Ji Tantai thing. Pushing the matter would just be counterproductive at this point, though.

“Little Lady Nameless has a blade…” Sana started humming under her breath as she set off between the trees. “—Here a blade, there a blade…” Her sister paused to kick an unoffending rock off into the understory as she drew level.

“—Everywhere a fate-trashed blade…” she finished drily, while Sana joined in with the singsong chorus of ‘Aye Aye, Aye’s…’—properly this time, rather than just under her breath.