Memories of the Fall

~ Part 3 ~

~ Jun Han – Misty Jasmine Inn (2) ~

“To think her painting was seen that widely…”

That his daughter’s painting had even been seen, and admired, by someone as influential as the woman currently sitting on the edge of the pool felt slightly surreal. Certainly, she deserved the plaudits she had received, and in his heart of hearts probably, should have won that contest, but for the politics of events.

-Yet, she painted a corpse parade, rather than a beautiful goddess, a nasty thought murmured in his ear. And that was because you failed to teach her that important lesson…

Grimacing, he fought the urge to close his eyes again, as the yang poison once again made its presence unpleasantly felt.

“—What if I told you I wasn’t even the third most important person who has seen it?” Shi Xiaolian added drily.

“Third?” he stared up at the dark, vaulted ceiling entirely unsure what to make of that.

“Mmmm, my teacher thought it showed real heart,” Shi Xiaolian remarked with aplomb. “And he is notoriously hard to please.”

“…”

“—How are they?”

While he had been trying to push the dark thoughts conjured by the injury back down, he realised Priestess Ying had joined them.

“Jun Han is mostly lucid,” Shi Xiaolian informed her “As for the others, they are stable, but…”

“—Can they be moved?”

He blinked as the moment seemed to skip, then his blood ran cold, even in the warmth of the water and his heart felt like it was thudding in his chest unnaturally fast. Bai Sheng was standing where Priestess Ying had just been, as if the two had just melted into each other.

“Did I just black out there, without even realizing it?” he asked, taking a shallow breath and trying to calm down.

“Yes, for a few moments,” Shi Xiaolian informed him with a wan smile. “And yes, though it will be quicker to carry them than let them walk.”

“I…”

He wanted to protest, but that episode a moment before had dispelled any lingering hope in his heart that he could just ‘power through’ the effects of the Yang poison. That realisation just felt like a hole in his chest, as if his heart had gone from beating too fast, to not…

“Ah, uh…” he tried to move, and found he couldn’t, and that his mouth was no longer making words right.

Shi Xiaolian’s expression twisted, like a mirage, as the shadows closed in around him, then he found himself being pulled bodily out of the water by her.

“Can you hear me?” she asked, laying him flat on the bench beside the water.

“Y-yes,” he nodded weakly, feeling like his head was suddenly far too heavy. “What just…?”

“The roof got raised,” she replied gloomily. “At the worst fate-cursed time.”

“The…?” he stared at her blankly, the words she had just spoken feeling like they had just passed right through him without registering.

“The suppression got lessened. Something bad is happening,” she informed him calmly.

Behind her, he could see Priestess Ying lifting the unconscious form of Lian out of the water.

“What… about?”

“Unconscious, knocked clean out by the way it made that stupid yang qi in your bodies surge,” Shi Xiaolian informed him.

“So what…?” he wanted to ask ‘what happens now?’ but the words felt so final that he could not even articulate the ‘now’ clearly.

“We have to get you outside, first. If you can remain conscious… somehow, I recommend it.”

“Out?” that surprised him. “To the other… pool?”

“No, we are evacuating all the injured and the prisoners,” Shi Xiaolian sighed, slipping an arm under his body and effortlessly lifting him up.

“But then… what…?”

“About your daughters? The others?” she sighed.

“Don’t worry, Brother Han.” He turned his head to find Bai Sheng was walking just to his other side, carrying the injured Shi Lian.

She looked disconcertingly flushed, and though her eyes were open, he could tell, even as he currently was, that her awareness of her surroundings was barely there.

“We will not abandon your daughters,” Bai Sheng informed him, his expression set. “That I, Bai Sheng, swear to you.”

“And… Lin Ling…” After a fashion, he felt just as responsible for her, recalling how… she had been so enthused to see something positive in the legacy of her broken family. “And…”

“Not any of them,” Bai Sheng declared, firmly.

The words were intended to comfort him, he was sure, but all they seemed to do was deepen the gaping wound in his heart.

“—Indeed,” Shi Xiaolian agreed. “Nobody is being left behind up here, however…”

An unsettling sense of malaise tugged at his body all of a sudden. With it, the corridor around them felt like its shadows were suddenly a few shades too blue and too light.

“Mmmm, they are coming closer together,” she grunted. “How long until they arrive?”

“Imminently,” Bai Sheng replied.

A part of him wanted to ask who was arriving, but just the idea of opening his mouth suddenly made him worried that he might puke all over Shi Xiaolian’s robe, as a sense of nauseating pressure settled on his chest and abdomen.

“Remember to breathe. The rules are twisting,” Shi Xiaolian’s voice cut through his moment of pained stupor, resonating with the formation that they were still part of.

Like something had just been released within him, he found himself inhaling, gasping. Beside him, Shi Lian was weakly coughing as well.

“This is as bad as I have ever seen, especially up here,” she muttered under her breath. “What in the Nameless is…?”

Darkness and stone above them made way to dreary, swirling cloud as she was speaking, and fat raindrops, that splashed distractingly on his face.

Most of the prisoners, even the physical cultivators and those inside the Dao Cages, were already unconscious. The few who were not were pale and trembling, eyes flitting this way and that.

“Incoming,” Bai Sheng was looking up, his eyes narrowed for some reason, before calling out to someone, “Don’t go too far into—”

The misty cloud above them swirled strangely, and then scattered, washing back against the walls of the gorge. In the middle of it, an oblong dark shape slowly descended out of the cloud above—

“KRRRRRRRRRRRRRT—!”

A barking flare of blue fire shrieked out from above it, tearing through the treetops at the far side of the gorge. Trees exploded, rocks shattered and melted and in the distance he thought he saw the crack and flicker of failing barriers. A moment later, a second deafening bark followed after it, from somewhere above them, tracking further into the valley ahead—

Two flashes of distant, destabilizing qi were followed by an eerie silence as the vessel, for it was indeed a vessel, finally materialized out of the low cloud.

“Is that a…?”

“—A Void Sparrow?” Bai Sheng grinned, almost manically as he gazed up at the descending form of what was one of the absolute cutting pinnacles of military authority power, not just on Eastern Azure, but probably the entire starfield. “Yep.”

If you wanted to be uncharitable, the thirty-five-metre-long vessel could have been described as shaped after a stubby catfish, with four chunky oversized, angular fins protruding out from the top of its flanks rather than a flighty, agile bird.

“But how can…?” he wanted to ask how one was flying here, given the way the suppression worked.

“It’s not just any Void Sparrow, either!” Bai Sheng added proudly as it descended slowly towards the ground.

As it did so, he finally realised what was enabling its flight. The four large fins were actually movable cowlings protecting massive spinning rotors. Largely, it was a design long supplanted by more elegant, streamlined alternatives, but almost none of those would work up here, with any sort of efficiency, due to the intricacies of the suppression. It was also shockingly quiet for its size.

“A Void Sparrow designed entirely to work without qi,” Shi Xiaolian whispered, sounding awed. “—And with these colours, Mount Zhi Zhi?”

He fancied that last bit, which she spoke really quietly, was intended only as her musings.

“Oi Bai Sheng, you aren’t even part of our peak. Why do you get to brag about it?” a woman’s voice from above called out, sounding amused more than anything.

Twisting his head to look up, he found the speaker crouched on the edge of the rooftop overlooking them. A woman, based on her voice at least, wearing a full set of heavy battle armour painted in sky blue and grey to match the void sparrow. An ominous fan-like pack protruded off her back and a bulky, cut down crossbow almost a metre long rested on the edge of the roof, pointing at the prisoners.

With disconcerting ease she hopped off the roof and landed with a thud a few metres away.

“Do you plan to bring all of them out?” she asked, turning her faceless helmet towards the stunned prisoners.

“Ideally,” Shi Xiaolian replied, collecting herself.

“Ah, it will be a tight squeeze, but doable then,” the armoured woman mused. “Normally we could just cube them, but those dimensional distortions are vicious. What in the Naraka Hells is even going on up here anyway?”

“Hopefully, some of them will know the answer to that,” Bai Sheng remarked as the vessel finally touched down in the open area beside the now defunct teleport circle.

“We don’t have long,” the white-armoured woman informed them. “The less time we…”

She turned suddenly and, lifting the ‘crossbow-like lightning bow, aimed into the cloud above them.

This close to the weapon firing, he could feel his teeth shaking as a lance of azure death devoured something well beyond his ability to sense.

“There are a lot of tree rats up there,” she grunted, lowering the weapon again. “And they are massing for a proper attack. Fortunately, quite a few of them are terrible at hiding their Intent. Too used to skulking in this place I guess.”

“Aye, that tracks,” Shi Xiaolian sighed grimly.

“What in the…?” Behind them, Yunhee and the others had also come out of the interior and were now also staring at the Void Sparrow in shock.

“Get all the injured on-board.”

Looking back to the Void Sparrow, he found Lord Baisheng had appeared from somewhere and was walking over towards them.

“Have we decided who stays?” Shi Xiaolian asked him as they all started towards the vessel.

Now that it had landed, he could see a second figure was crouched on top of it, armed and armoured just like the woman walking beside them, in a hulking, faceless blue-grey battle armour.

-Did they fly here on the outside of that thing?

Just thinking about that made him want to salute both, for their bravery and perhaps… insanity. The swirling cloud above looked innocuous, but that was thoroughly deceitful mask. What lay behind was a natural deathtrap of chaotic winds, unspeakable lightning and soul scattering thunder, and that was when the weather was… normal.

“Yes, mostly,” Baisheng replied. “If you…?”

“I will probably need to go back,” she sighed, glancing around at the ruin of Misty Jasmine Inn. “The situation in West Flower Picking Town alone likely mandates that. I assume Tao is going back as well?”

“Yes,” Baisheng replied with a nod. “If only to deal with the investigation into the Ling clan. Lord Xianfang and Bai Sheng will stay behind to pursue matters here. The Little Dragon and those who are uninjured will support them…”

“As I said, Brother Han, we will not abandon them,” Bai Sheng said, giving his shoulder a squeeze.

“Kei and Lian will certainly have to return with me, along with Sir Jun,” Shi Xiaolian mused. “However, the rest of my contingent will also remain, assuming that is acceptable?”

“Of course,” Baisheng nodded. “Their expertise will be invaluable.”

“Sorry,” he grimaced, feeling rather embarrassed that even now, Shi Xiaolian was having to carry him.

“The important thing for you is that you get better,” she admonished him.

Not able to say much to refute her words, he could only nod weakly.

At this point, they had reached the rear of the Void Sparrow, which had opened up to form a ramp access to the interior.

“Take them to the front and strap them in,” the white-armoured woman informed Shi Xiaolian.

Shi Xiaolian nodded her head and, following after Baisheng, carried him up the ramp.

The interior was mostly as he remembered from his few trips in such vessels while working for Cao Leyang. The Military Authority had a squadron of them for rapid response deployment, though they used qi-based propulsion rather than the mechanical rotors this one sported. The immediate thing that stood out was that there was markedly less space in this one. He had to assume that was down to however it was powered, because most qi-based propulsion would be a horrendous liability up here.

“Huh, it uses an alchemical engine,” Shi Xiaolian muttered under her breath, glancing around. “This thing must be priceless.”

“They are rather rare,” Bai Sheng agreed as they moved forward through the empty hold towards the front half, where there were rows of seats lining the sides. “It is only thanks to Ling Lingsheng’s mother that we have access to this one on such short notice.”

“Ah, of course,” Shi Xiaolian nodded her head.

“Okay, strap the injured in, then we deal with the prisoners,” Bai Sheng added, placing the still comatose Shi Lian in one of the seats and rapidly fastening her in.

Shi Xiaolian gave him a wan smile as she placed him next to her granddaughter and did the same.

“W-where…” Shi Lian groaned as Bai Sheng gently checked that the headrest of the seat was properly adjusted for her.

“Just relax,” Shi Xiaolian informed her, patting her hand. “Deep breaths, okay?”

Glancing behind them, he found Ling Tao and the others from the shrine were hurrying into the hold after them. The masked figures of the Little Dragon looked largely unperturbed at this development, but those they had rescued, the few still conscious, at least, like Kun Lianmei, were looking a little wild eyed.

“W-what happened to you, Brother Han?” Han Ryong asked, spotting him and hurrying over.

“I ate a bit of a poisoned sherd bomb,” he replied with as much levity as he could muster. “Then a Mantra Manifestation.”

“Oh…” Han Ryong grimaced, then looked at Shi Lian. “Is she?”

“Same as me, we have yang poisoning,” he added, taking a deep breath, because the nausea was creeping back over him, bit by bit.

“I… I’ll do my best to look for Arai and Sana and the others,” Han Ryong informed him, giving his shoulder a squeeze. “When you are better…”

“I’ll be right there with you,” he agreed, with as much certitude as he could muster.

“—Everyone who is free! We have trash to haul!” Ling Tao called out brusquely.

Han Ryong glanced in her direction, then sighed and gave his shoulder a further, final squeeze, before hurrying back outside.

“Wuzz…’at Ryung?” Shi Lian managed to ask him, groggily.

“Yes,” he replied, giving her hand, which felt clammy to his touch, a squeeze.

“I feel… like shit,” she groaned, staring up at the ceiling. “Where are… we?”

“In a Void Sparrow,” he replied with a weary sigh.

“A Void Sparrow…” she repeated weakly. “That is… not how I saw today ending.”

“Me neither,” he agreed, watching as the others started bringing unconscious, stripped and hooded prisoners up, and, under the direction of the white-armoured woman, chain them directly to the walls at the back with what looked like blue-jade cuffs.

“I guess they don’t want any bandits seeing the inside of one of these,” Kun Lianmei remarked wanly from where she was seated opposite them.

“I doubt they would be letting us see it, if it wasn’t for this rarefied hell we find ourselves in,” he joked.

“We are not that secretive about these, you know?”

He flinched as he realised a young woman wearing a full suit, including helmet of the much more common modular combat armour had appeared from the command-and-control area at the front of the craft and was surveying them critically.

“There are helmets under your seats, please put them on, you will need them, because the ride out promises to be bumpier than the ride in,” she continued. “And the ride in was bumpier than a hostile orbital drop.”

Reaching down, he found the kit box and pulled it open, revealing the two-part modular helmet.

“I don’t advise the face plates though, unless you really enjoy eyeballing your own breakfast,” she added drily, starting down the line on the opposite side and checking each person was properly secured.

“Oh fates…” someone on the other side of him—Ha Faolian he thought—groaned.

“One minute, we have to take off…” a second woman’s voice echoed through from the front.

“You heard her!” Ling Tao called out as the last few prisoners were dumped on the floor by Meihua and Ling Fei Weng.

Ling Fei Weng spotted him and gave him a wave and what he probably hoped was reassuring double thumbs up, before ducking back out.

“Everyone here?” the white armoured woman asked, coming up the ramp into the interior.

Ling Tao and Shi Xiaolian glanced around at them, then at Baisheng, who had also come inside to join them, then nodded.

A moment later, the other armoured figure, also a woman he thought, though it was hard to tell given the bulk of the armour, jogged up the ramp to join them. With a slightly stomach-shifting lurch, the whole vessel suddenly started to rise up.

“We going to close the rear?” Ling Tao asked one of them as she hauled up one of the still unattached, unconscious prisoners—Yeng Kwan, he thought—and started to fasten them onto the wall.

“In a—”

A hideous clunk rang through the vessel, as if something had just hit the side opposite from where he was seated with great force. Out the rear he saw flashes of unstable qi melting away into the swirling cloud behind them.

“I lost plating on the starboard side!” the pilot yelled from up front. “Get that motherless archer already!”

In reply, the armoured figure on the left side leant out over the edge of the still half open ramp and with one hand sent a scything spray of return fire into the swirling cloud.

“Hang on and try not to puke,” Baisheng informed them blandly as Ling Tao and Shi Xiaolian both crouched down and grabbed hand holds.

“Old man, if you have enough time to make conversation, go up front and help,” the young-sounding armoured woman remarked sourly to him.

“Haha, of course, if it will help,” Baisheng replied, seemingly not at all put out by the apparent lack of respect.

Abruptly, the whole vessel juddered, as if it had collided with something that tried to jar it wildly to the right.

“This Ancestor’s cursed weather!” she grumbled as a further ripple of turbulence viciously buffeted the vessel. “Did you go too high or something?” the woman called out to the pilot up front.

“If I go any lower, the spirit herbs will be trying to sell us fruit and the monkeys will be trying to high five you from the gorge walls while they steal the rotor blades!” the pilot retorted.

“I dunno, they might give us some good deals!” the white-armoured woman standing at the rear called out, to the clear amusement of her companion.

“…”

“Don’t… they seem a bit carefree?” Shi Lian mumbled as the vessel juddered again.

“—Also, Dimensional distortion in six, five… four…” pilot added gloomily from up front.

“Dimensional what now!?” someone gasped in horror from his other side.

The sense of acceleration in the vessel suddenly clawed at him, dragging him into the seat. When the countdown hit zero, a sense of sickening disorientation, followed by a furious, yet utterly silent roar bled through everything.

Beside him, Shi Lian had grabbed his hand and was holding it so hard her fingers were white.

The interior of the vessel shimmered, every surface taking on a faintly glassy lustre, as if it were glazed ceramic, then returned to normal.

“Is… this entire vessel crafted out of arborundum?” Kun Lianmei asked, staring at the ceiling in awe.

“Yes,” Baisheng, who was still standing, seemingly content to just hold onto one of the handholds affixed to the ceiling, informed her with a toothy grin.

~ Jun Arai — Jasmines and Chrysanthemums ~

-My mouth is sour? Oh, the vomit again.

-Water. Need water.

After fumbling with her storage talisman for a second, she finally got the smaller jar, and managing not to fumble it, gulped some down, and then promptly vomited it all back up again, having forgotten that that jar now held mangosteen spirit wine.

When she had finally calmed down and stopped clawing her hands against the bamboo raft, and sobbing with impotent fury at the whole ordeal, she managed to sit up and properly take stock of herself.

The qi in her body that wasn’t locked into her bones and flesh had bled by almost half, which was disastrous in its own right, given the recovery issues they already faced. She wasn’t quite at the point where she was at risk of accidentally triggering Mantra Seed formation, but she was not far off it, her intuition told her. The ache in her bones also remained, so it looked like the soul shock was here to stay, for the short term at least. There was a terrible sensation of prickling in her face, and a throbbing in her temples. Meridian strain; ocular and vascular by the feel of it, as it extended down her neck and was also present in her breast. That made sense, given the disorientation. The rest of her external meridians, those she had properly opened at least, seemed fine though.

“What in the name of the heavenly daughter's virginity was that?" she rasped.

“Language…” her sister groaned from nearby.

Her sister’s voice came out in a nauseated rasp.

“Bite me!” she spat back in Easten, which frankly had much better swear words for certain contexts. That one in particular was suggesting she kiss her ass.

Sana just sighed and shook her head. The disorientation was real, and they were both stressed.

It was a few more minutes before she felt comfortable doing more than just sitting there with both hands firmly holding onto the raft, which by some miracle they were both still sitting on, taking deep breaths with her eyes closed. Her hands and feet were still trembling from the latent soul shock.

“Are you feeling better?” she ventured eventually.

“I feel like a monkey just dunked a pot of its faeces over my head," her sister groaned.

“Soul shock sucks…” she agreed, before making another face, because the aftertaste of vomit was… yuck.

Scooping a handful of water up, she swirled it around her mouth and spat it out again.

-And of course, the weirdness there means the taste is…

Feeding her disgust into her mantra, she considered Sana, who was sitting up as well now, staring at her knees. Her sister was pale as a sheet and shaking intensely, with glassy eyes and heavily dilated pupils.

She wiped her face with a handful of reed stems, then inspected her clothing with a disgusted wince.

Pulling off her top, and then undergarment as both stank and were badly stained now, she put them to one side.

It was at this point that she realised their surroundings were… well, they were not exactly different, but they were certainly not the same. Lillies were still everywhere, but the water level was a lot lower, for starters. There were a lot of other sagacious wetland plants visible, and the middle distance in most directions was now obscured not by mist, which hadn’t fully returned, but by strands of mangroves and gently swaying reed beds. The building that had been to their right was not there, but the Pagoda beyond the willow grove was, which was something at least.

Grimacing at how much effort it took, in her qi-sapped state, she slid the pole off the raft and pushed it down into the water, and found it was only a meter deep. Sliding off the raft, she luxuriated for a long moment in the coolness of the water, before sweeping away a bunch of the lilies and proceeding to scrub herself down vigorously.

It wasn’t pleasant by any means, but it mostly shifted the smell. For good measure, she tasted another mouthful, noticing with a slight grimace that it still refused to give her any rehydration.

By the time she was done attempting to clean the worst of it off the clothes she had been wearing, Sana had recovered enough to follow suit, stripping off most of her clothing and dropping into the water at the other end of the raft.

They continued to wash themselves and attempt to rinse their clothing in silence.

“I never want to experience that ever again," her sister said eventually.

“You and me both," she agreed, staring at the luss cloth garment in her hands glumly, because beyond a certain point, the vomit wasn’t washing out.

“Is it not washing out for you, either?” she asked Sana.

“Uh-huh,” her sister nodded, scrubbing her sodden top hard on the side of the raft. “It’s probably because of the qi from the food we ate earlier. I lost a lot of qi from my body as well, even with my mantra, my control just…”

“—vanished?” she sighed, knowing exactly what her sister meant.

“Actually, the traces of this really resembles the impurities your body rejects after breaking through to Physical… Oh. Shit.”

Her sister trailed off, staring into space for a long moment.

“The Heavenly Virgin really can go lose herself,” her sister hissed, staring at her hands.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, wading over to Sana.

-Don’t tell me she has started to slide towards Mantra Seed formation properly?

Outside of this place that would have been, well, if not a problem, at least remediable in the short term. In here, though, with the issues already hindering their qi replenishment, it would be a huge strain on their resources. What might have lasted them nearly two months if they were frugal might only stretch to weeks.

Sana was also probably a little ahead of her in cultivation progress, simply because she had been spending less time in Yin Eclipse over the last month. Her tasks had seen her in Blue Water City, with Ling Yu, and doing various consultations and assignments local to West Flower Picking Town. In comparison, even before the fiasco of the last few weeks, she had been to Yin Eclipse twice in that month and not done much actual cultivation around that.

“Huaaa…” her sister exhaled. “I thought my cultivation was starting to tilt into Mantra Seed for a moment there. But the impurities I puked up are probably from the food we ate and me using my longform mantra on my qi replenishment.”

“Ah, that would do it,” she nodded, inwardly relieved.

“It’s going to make replenishment a pain though,” Sana muttered, slapping her sodden top off the raft. “And I liked this top as well.”

After some more futile scrubbing, including getting a yin earth spirit herb and trying to use the sap from that, she also finally gave up and consigned her own ruined top to an empty pot, and tried to put it into her storage talisman—

With a silent sense of rejection from her talisman, the garment refused to store.

“It didn’t store?” Sana asked, as she glared at the jar.

“It does not,” she confirmed, grinding her teeth.

Taking the lighter of her spare travelling robes out of her storage talisman and shrugging it on.

“So what now?” her sister asked, scrunching her own garment up and stuffing it in the same pot, before sealing the top.

“First, we find out what is going on with the compass,” she muttered, hauling herself back onto the raft as Sana followed her example and pulled on a clean robe. “Then, we find some higher ground to see what in the Heavenly Monkeys that just did to the landscape.”

Thinking on it, the compass going haywire had almost certainly been warning for what had just transpired.

To her shock, and relief it didn’t appear broken and showed a trail heading that would take them slightly off to their right. After checking her scrip, it wasn’t even a huge deviation from the relatively straight path they had been following prior to that either.

The bigger issue, in truth, was that with the water level now lower, they had next to no visibility in any direction beyond twenty to thirty metres. The misty haze was already reforming as well, so the only trace of the ‘bounds’ of the valley came from the higher peaks still visible through the drifting clouds. She could only really be visibly certain they were still in the Jasmine Gate, because firstly the ruined pagoda was demonstrably the same, and more importantly, because the perpetual scent of Jasmine still clung to the very air itself.

…

Twenty minutes later, her initial optimism was in tatters, as she stared at the master compass that was ‘still’ showing a trail heading off to their right… having quietly guided them in a near full circle back to where they started.

“The compass is broken, isn’t it?” her sister asked, glumly.

“Yes.”

As loath as she was to admit it, Sana was right. However, even just saying it out loud made her feel a bit nauseous.

“Does it still have a connection, generally?” her sister muttered, considering the now defunct skitterleap mark on her own hand.

-That is the question, isn’t it, she mused.

Putting the balancing compass down on the puppet body, she took out a compass talisman core and, after drawing some of her blood, touched it to the talisman… and got—well, there was something, in fact, but it was so faint she nearly missed it in the first instance.

She put far more blood than she was happy with, into the talisman before it finally gave a proper resonance—three pulses, in fact, signifying that that number of connections still existed to the qi, in some capacity.

“Is it because we just lost a bunch of our qi?” Sana asked, biting her lip.

“It could be,” she acknowledged. “At least with this we can say that the connection isn’t broken—so they are still alive.”

“It’s just that these compasses can no longer divine a trail.” Her sister muttered, picking up the balancing compass and poking at it.

“Yeah,” she agreed, unable to hide a tired sigh.

A few minutes testing revealed that even the cancelling talisman no longer worked. It manifested exactly the same behaviour, but the ‘directionality’ pulled them in a backwards circle that she only had to plot out for a dozen meters of wading through the waist deep water to tell would again loop them back to where they were, just in a leftwards arc.

“A yin-yang recursive divination.”

Four words you had to learn as part of the lessons on formations and compasses in the Hunter Bureau, but never really expected to see used unless you were playing complicated games with stupid outcomes. It was really just a fancy way of saying you bricked your compass in a fairly exotic way, through doing something dumb near a teleportation array, or similar.

Sitting at the front of the raft, she read through the section of the Han Manual that talked about them on her scrip, while Sana slowly polled them towards one of the taller, more intact ruined buildings a little past the Pagoda.

They had set up a marker for where they were—a bamboo pole with a simple lode array, that did work, so they could find their way back there if necessary.

“As I recalled, all the examples are just explanations on how not to do it on purpose,” she stated at last, getting to the end of the section and skipping to the reference table at the end of the document.

“Yeah, it’s usually something that occurs when you are trying to divine alignments around locus of unstable space, isn’t it?” Sana mused.

Which in a roundabout way, was the manual author telling you that if it happened, you couldn’t fix it after the fact.

“—and this place is not setting out the stall for stability,” she grumbled, considering the still swirling clouds above. A still lingering reminder of the world’s brief turn as a spinning top.

“No, I don’t think we can accuse it of that, at this point,” her sister agreed trying to sound, wry and not really succeeding.

After some pondering, and now awkwardly devoid of a straightforward guide onwards, they decided to trust in the rough trajectory of their passage through the marshlands prior to everything upending itself. The compass had been leading them in a fairly direct route, up to that point, and as best they could make out, after a short detour to climb onto the roof of a nearby ruin, the valley, while much bigger now, didn’t seem to split, so she supposed Juni and the rest would have fled onwards, while doing their best to avoid the heart.

The complicating factor there was that as far as she knew, nobody had any idea where the heart of the Jasmine Gate was. If you crossed through it from the other side, you did encounter some marshy areas, but nothing like this. It was more like the Red Pit, in that regard, but even more lethal. She had been forced to skirt its western perimeter twice, to recover bodies. Once accompanying Old Ling, which had been her final ‘training’ mission as a recovery hunter, and again later that same year with Juni. Both trips had been nightmarish, and both had stressed never to go deeper than the adjacent valleys.

There were rules, of a sort—no picking any vegetation, don’t sleep and to avoid certain valleys, and never go into caves—but even those were, to quote Old Ling ‘Not worth betting your life on’. As far as she knew, those who strayed too far in, simply never came back, or if they had, they had not left any records in the Bureau accessible to a nine-star ranked recovery hunter.

Right now, she really she wished she could quash the thought, but it kept coming back, that the actual reason nobody came back, was because they inevitably ended up in some place like this, and eventually just perished here.

“—It looks like there might be higher ground off over there?”

She was stirred from her useless worries by Sana’s observation.

Indeed, after traveling on for maybe a mile, the reed beds around them currently looked like they were opening out, and standing up, to get a better look at where her sister was pointing, it did look like there was a darker haze in the mists beyond them that was a bit more substantial.

“It could just be a stand of mangrove though,” her sister added with a resigned sigh.

“Well, we can only look,” she conceded. It wasn’t that far out from their path, in any case.

Entirely against the odds, and slightly disconcertingly, a few minutes later they did indeed find themselves faced with the reed beds giving way to flooded sedge marsh. The shadows Sana had seen were stands of willows, clustering around slightly higher ground, with the open area between them a tangle of sedge grasses and similar plants submerged in about a metre of water. Then, beyond that, after some thirty minutes of struggling, and eventually pulling the raft through slightly too shallow water, they finally reached a part of the valley that was not completely submerged.

“Woo, solid—ish ground!” Sana declared, rather theatrically, kicking a spray of ankle-deep muddy water up the slope of the sedge-cloaked hillock that finally cut off their water-borne progress in earnest.

Shaking her head ruefully, she followed her sister up to the top of the hillock. If she was being truthful, before they reached the top, she had not expected much, however, it turned out to be quite a bit more substantial than she expected, rising to almost twenty metres above the surrounding wetland.

The summit itself didn’t hold much, just an overgrown tumble of stones. But the view it proffered was impressive, and taking in the surroundings it wasn’t even the highest point. That accolade went to the next hillock over which looked to have some sort of circle of stones on its summit and a wiry, twisted, bronze-leafed tree growing out of a rock outcropping. She was also immediately reassured by being able to pick out a few familiar landmarks, including the distant spire of the ruined Pagoda, peeking through the layer of haze. Off to their left, the sedge hillocks again looked like they eventually gave way to wetlands, again, much like the direction they had come from. Beyond that, the best she could make out was a grey gradient, interspersed with a few glimpses of what could be distant, forested slopes, visible in brief moments through the layer of intermediary cloud that was still swirling like a great cyclone overhead.

In the other direction, meanwhile, deeper into the valley…

“Looks like a lot more ruins, further in,” Sana, who had been looking in the other direction from her, remarked, tugging her arm and pointing in the direction they had been broadly heading. “And honestly, I do not like the look of that haze.”

On that count, she had to agree. It had felt like it was getting progressively muggier and more unpleasant as they worked their way through the flooded sedge meadows below, but the haze ahead of them had a rather eerie vibe, akin to the clearing they had fled from, and a distinctly yellow tint that put her in mind of the talisman signatures they had seen on the ridgeline… just much, much more. Within it, and maybe two miles distant—in theory, at least—she could also make out a much more determined sprawl of ruined buildings as well. Then, further to the right, across the valley two more ruined pagodas that were oddly familiar…

“Huh, are those pagodas the ones we saw?” her sister muttered, noticing them as well. “How weird.”

“Weird?” she queried.

“Yeah, when we were… uh, spinning, it felt like they were oddly focal, yet they are really far apart here?” Sana mused, turning in a slow circle as she considered each in turn.

“Oh,” that did help her place them, and explained why it didn’t immediately jump out at her. She had been too busy trying not to fall off the raft while puking up her lunch by that point.

“—I guess we go check out the higher hillock?” Sana suggested.

“Let’s get the puppet at least,” she suggested drily. “It would suck to lose it at this point.”

“Ah, that is true…” Sana agreed with a resigned sigh, as she started to make her way back down the hill. “Stupid Ha Yun, he just can’t pull his weight.”

“At least he can hold his stomach though,” she joked, following after.

“Too soon,” her sister muttered, shaking her head. “Way to soon.”

“Anyway, what should we do with the raft?” she mused, changing the topic as they arrived back at the bottom of the slope.

“Hmmm, honestly, I think just pull it up this hill, prop it against the rocks so we can keep it somewhat in line of sight and bring the puppet with us?” her sister suggested after a short pause, considering the beached bamboo construction. “Like, I doubt we are done with it.”

“I dunno, we could walk up that hill and miraculously find ourselves free of this place,” she chuckled.

“—And end up right in the middle of the Jasmine Gate?” her sister retorted rolling her eyes.

“True,” she conceded.

“So, lift or drag?” Sana asked, poking the edge of the raft with her foot.

“We will have to replenish our qi, so I guess we can take the opportunity to see how strenuous it is to lift it?” she mused, thinking over the options.

“Planning, Hyo!” with a grunt of effort, Sana lifted up her end out of the water.

Ruefully brushing her wet hair out of her face, she lifted her end as well.

As she sort of expected, it wasn’t especially easy to carry up the slope. The grass was slippy, and truthfully, dragging it up with a rope would have been easier, but the exercise did confirm that they didn’t burn any significant quantity of their remaining qi carrying such a heavy load over that distance. That wasn’t to say she was not surprised at how tired she was by the time they reached the top. Her hands were sore, and her legs, already fatigued from the climbing were definitely complaining at her, through her mantra. The oppression of the humidity was also noticeably worse as well.

Once they had put the raft down on the hilltop, she took a few deep breaths and focused on her qi circulation, but whatever the problem was, it wasn’t there, it seemed.

“You know… it almost feels like fatigue is being amplified the same way we don’t get any satiation from water or plants within this place…” Sana grumbled, flexing her hands.

“…”

She turned to stare at her sister, feeling stupid suddenly, because that was exactly what it felt like.

There were areas like that, within the Mountain Range. Places where the suppression was so harsh that almost none of the ‘benefits’ of cultivation, in terms of sleep, or energy recovery were retained. That was why you had to acclimatize at places like Misty Jasmine.

“So, it’s harsh enough here that even people like us start to suffer, beyond a certain point.”

When she said it out loud, like that, it was a very obvious thing, and in truth, she had sort of considered it, but over the last few days of being stuck in this place, the sense of being pushed down by it had not really gotten any worse. Until now, anyway.

“—And then there is this Nameless-touched humidity!” her sister complained, tugging at her light robe with an aggrieved scowl. “Like, before it was bad, but seriously, I swear its actually getting worse?”

“Yeah,” she agreed.

That was another problem to add to the slowly mounting list.

Rather than dwell on it, though, she just started to untie the puppet. That didn’t take long, at least. It had been secured with the expectation that they might need to free it quickly, so it was just a matter of undoing two knots and pulling the rope away. Lugging it off the raft, she dumped it in the grass, then, after considering the pot holding their ruined clothes, she tipped that out and tried to store it—and found it would not.

It had to be the residual qi from this place. Taking a large handful of the grass, she spent a few moments scrubbing out the inside and tried again. In the end, it took three attempts before the pot stored again, but at least it did.

“Note to self, don’t use a jar next time,” she grumbled, sitting back on her heels and puffing out her cheeks.

“Shall we?” her sister, who had been coiling up the rope while she did that, kicked the raft with her foot.

Nodding, she grasped her side, and between them, they manoeuvred the bamboo craft up, leaning it vertically against the mound of stones in the middle of the hilltop. For good measure, she took their ruined robes and knotted them around one corner, turning them into a crude flag.

“If nothing else, it will help with visibility,” she shrugged, in response to her sister’s quizzical look.

“I guess there is that,” Sana agreed. “Incidentally,” her sister poked the puppet with her foot. “Is it worth slinging Ha Yun on a pole?”

She considered the puppet, the slopes they would have to walk, between here and the taller hill, and shook her head.

“Probably not,” she sighed, lifting the puppet and slinging it over her shoulders. “What we would save on sharing the burden, we would only add in other ways.”

“I’ll take it for the climb then,” her sister added, helping her adjust it so she wouldn’t land on her backside going down the slope.

Nodding, in agreement, she took one final glance around and at the haze over the distant ruins, then together, they set off towards the higher hilltop.

Ten minutes later, she sat down on a small slab of rock, one of dozens scattered across the hilltop, within the ring of twelve stones, and took a deep drink of spirit wine. It helped, but not much.

“Only in Yin Eclipse could you be this exhausted just from walking up and down a monkey-touched hill.” Her sister, who was currently lying on her back in the long grass, beside the puppet, complained. “This humidity is vile. I swear it was not this bad out among the reed beds.”

“It was not,” she affirmed, running her hands through her hair.

Considering her condition objectively, she had not gotten much worse, in terms of expended qi, or anything like that, and yet… somehow, she still felt like absolute monkey-shit. Some of that was surely the soul-shock they had suffered earlier. That would not just vanish, but it was still concerning.

The suffocating ambience made any sort of exertion unpleasant, but simultaneously, there was some part of her that just felt constantly on edge. It had certainly not been there a few hours ago—or even an hour ago. It niggled at her, like an itch she couldn’t scratch, or a noise she couldn’t drown out. It put her in mind of the symptoms of yang poisoning, in fact, but she had checked her body twice and there was no trace of any aberrant Yang Qi. But that could just mean it was too pure for her senses… though if it was that bad, they should be suffering way more than this, she was sure.

On the final ascent to this point, she had even tried feeding the unpleasant feeling into her mantra, but had had to stop almost immediately, because somehow, that just seemed to make it worse. The Soul and Spirit mnemonics had almost rebelled outright, which… did not help her sense of growing unease either.

“Food first, then we can take further stock,” she declared after taking a further gulp of her wine and passing it over to Sana. “We need to recover qi, first and foremost.”

“We do,” her sister agreed, with a groan. “And stamina. I have an actual headache for the first time in ages—” she paused to take a swing of the wine then grimaced. “Uaghk, even the wine tastes lukewarm now. Nameless-touched-monkeys take this humid heat!”

Her sister’s angry words were eaten up by the mugginess of their surroundings.

“What can we make that is more filling than soup?” she asked, considering what she currently had in her storage ring.

“Roasted ginseng roots, garnished with persis sap?” her sister joked.

“…”

“I wasn’t joking.” Sana grimaced. “That probably is the best bet, unless you want to start sucking on spirit stones like they are street candy.”

“Sounds like a great way to get actual poisoning, rather than whatever is going on with this place.” she muttered, after a mirthless chuckle.

“Yeah, well, it is what it is,” her sister agreed, producing several of the stoneware pots and two crates of spirit herbs.

A lot of the herbs they had been focusing on gathering before everything went to dog shit were intended for use as vitality support in advanced pill making, so had good purity and were edible without too much in the way of exotic preparation. There was more than Ginseng to be had, at least, so, while Sana set up a water oven and heated a stoneware dish, she picked a selection of ginseng and other nourishing tubers that were broadly sympathetic and started to slice them into pieces thin enough to cook quickly.

They had no oil, so persis sap and lotus-root juice became the substitute, which made for very oddly textured slices of ginseng roots, that tasted just a little too sweet, but it was undeniably effective. This time, there was no experimentation, she used her longform mantra from the start, eking out every scrap of nourishment and sustenance for her body from every mouthful.

After that, they still ended up making soup—or rather stew, roasting down the remaining greenery and offcuts from the roots as well, then adding several cupfuls of their pseudo spirit wine and soup cakes to create something that had no right to be as tasty as it turned out to be.

Finishing off the first bowl, however, she found herself considering it and them with a grimace put it to one side.

“Problem?” Sana, who had been eating a little more slowly, asked. “Still feeling the soul shock?”

“No… well, maybe…” she mused. “It’s this… edge everything now has, I know I should wait for twenty, or thirty minutes, but it feels like I have…”

“—A nasty little voice poking you in the back of the head, saying ‘do it’?” her sister suggested.

“Yes,” she agreed, staring up at the bronze-leaved tree, which this close appeared to be some sort of myrtle, of all things. “That is exactly it.”

“It feels like yang poisoning, yet there is no overt Yang Qi. It’s like that bastard’s presence, but more… vague,” Sana mused, making a face. “My mantra keeps behaving oddly as well.”

“Which could just mean it’s so pure we can’t sense it,” she pointed out, giving obvious voice to the thought that had been rattling around her head for a while now.

“Could be,” her sister conceded, putting aside her own bowl to lift the cover-bowl off the still simmering stew and give it a quick stir. “Though since we have been sitting here, the humidity has not gotten any worse…”

“…”

Now that Sana mentioned it, that was a good point. It had been ramping up quite noticeably while they were walking. In the time they had spent cooking though, it had not gotten noticeably worse and might even have been lessening again.

Frowning, she stood up and slowly walked over to the edge of the ring of stones. Passing through it, there was not much noticeable difference. At least, until she made it to a good twenty paces down the slope, then she could feel it slowly starting to ramp up again. Returning to the circle, it didn’t immediately lessen either, and she had to stand still for almost two minutes before she noticed any appreciable difference.

“So, something on this hilltop is seemingly keeping it at bay?” she looked around at the stone circle and the tree.

The tree itself was not in the centre of the circle, but rather growing out of some rocky ground on its… she supposed eastern side, assuming the four directions of this place broadly matched the outside world. The stones themselves were all roughly equal in size, though not shape. Each seemed to be a natural slab of rock, set vertically in the dirt, at equidistant points from each other.

Even at a distance, it had clearly been deliberately done, but it was not the only construction they had seen, so she supposed a part of her had just not given it that much thought.

“Though that poses another problem…” her sister rightly pointed out.

“Indeed, it does,” she agreed, her momentary rush of positivity fading a bit.

-Namely, if whatever is causing the increase in this miserable humidity gets worse, how do we keep following the trail?

“The first thing to determine is if it’s only if we advance,” she mused, looking back in the direction they had come from.

The easiest way to do that was probably to back track a short distance, to the edge of the sedge meadows.

“I guess it gives us something to do, at least,” Sana agreed, getting to her feet.

“We just leave that here?” she asked, eyeing the cooking pot and the puppet.

“Nothing has gone wibble since, and it will have to reheat if I store it… not to mention Ha Yun is so fate-trashed heavy,” Sana pointed out. “It’s that or one of us stays here…?”

“No,” she shook her head, then sighed deeply, quietly rather relieved that her sister seemed to be a bit less within herself at long last. “You are right. We need to move our bodies a bit to help them absorb the qi anyways…”

“We can leave a guidance talisman here,” Sana added. “With one here and on the raft, it should give us a pretty good fix on orientation.”

They didn’t quite jog the whole way back to the raft, the humidity ramped up far too quickly for that, but they only had to go a little way back out into the flooded sedge meadows to feel like they were now wading through a steam room. The visibility wasn’t terrible—the mists had not really settled back since everything twisted so crazily—but there was a palpable sense of malaise about everything that had certainly not been there when they first came through this path. The return trip all but confirmed it as well. Now with a better benchmark for the changes in environmental ambiance, it got less intense the closer they got to the hilly area.

This time, rather than leave the raft when they got back to it, they considered their options and then dragged it after them, eventually depositing it rather breathlessly at the top of the slope of the main hill, just inside the ring of stones.

“I guess we are stuck here, for now at least,” Sana stated, glumly, once they had recovered a little. “Whatever is causing this oppressive humidity is clearly expanding faster than we will ever get out of it.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. It hurt inside to admit it, but there was nothing they could do, that she could see at least.

Being caught out in the swamp would be utterly grim, based on what they had just experienced, and if it was something that was spreading actively through this place, Sana was right. There was no way either of them could outrun it. It was sheer good fortune that this place they had initially arrived at seemed somewhat resistant to its effects.

The view deeper into the flooded ruins didn’t look encouraging either. In the time it had taken them to go to the meadow and back, the mists hanging over them had developed a decidedly sickly sheen, and the greenish-yellow hue was markedly more noticeable.

“Well, in terms of things we can do something about… how is your qi replenishment?” she asked.

The food from earlier had helped, but she still felt unpleasantly hungry, and fatigued.

“Better,” Sana replied, after a short pause. “But still not great, I’ve mostly absorbed what I can from what we ate earlier.”

-So, the same as me.

“We will probably be eating that stew till we are sick of it, and then some,” her sister added drily, taking the top off the cooking pot and playfully wafting a bit of the slightly too sweet aroma at her.

Rolling her eyes, she accepted a bowl. To her slight surprise, its qi purity had gone up in the time it stewed—

“I added some spirit stones to it,” her sister remarked, apparently noticing her staring at her bowl as she savoured the taste.

“Ah.”

“It won’t do anything positive for the taste, but at least it is spicy enough to cover the… uh, complexity.”

“Complexity,” she chuckled. “Well, the faster we get our qi back, the better, so it’s all good.”

In the end, she managed to force down five bowls of the stew, interspersed with periods of very focused refinement with her mantra. Even then, it still wasn’t enough to fully recover all the qi she expended up to this point, but it did get her back to something approaching what she had had when they finished climbing back up to where they were thrown off.

“For a stew that cost over six-hundred spirit stones worth of ingredients, I cannot claim that was a work of craft,” Sana muttered glumly, as she poured in water and started to add ginseng leaves to the residue that remained in the pot.

“It doesn’t matter what they cost up here,” she chuckled. “Life is more important.”

“That is very true,” her sister agreed. “But it also doesn’t change that knowledge is a curse, as the sages say.”

“Well, the fate-thrashed sages are not here, and if I ever meet the ones that got us in this mess, I will surely curse them to all eight directions, and then twice to the Queen Mother for good measure,” she muttered.

“Our morning meditation is going to last past the auspicious hour at that point,” her sister giggled. “I think your scrip has finished mapping the area.”

Turning around to look—she had left it with the puppet earlier without even really thinking about it—she found that was indeed the case.

Scooting over to it, she flicked through the various things it had been calculating and projected the map so Sana could see as well.

The first thing that stood out was, that as expected, the geometry of the circle was exact. The spacings between the stones were not regular, but she had looked at enough such arrangements in gardens to have a feel for when a thing ‘looked’ right. What was more interesting was that the hills around them also seemed to be part of the overall arrangement. On a whim, she quickly sketched the inner circle, then the outer circle and drew out twelve spokes.

“An Element Gate and the full Zodiac alignment?” Sana, who had been watching her work, suggested. “And it’s in what looks like a natural orientation?”

“There seems to be more than that,” she mused, considering the three other hills, because there were eight in total, surrounding the one they were on.

Tapping the three, which included the one they had originally climbed, she got the map to extrapolate lines out from them… and found that that hill was directly in line with the distant pagoda, of all things. As, in fact, were the other two. Odder was that they were not regularly spaced, but she was sure that there was some purpose for that.

She was about to get the scrip to match it against the various landscape formations schematics she had saved for reference, when it pinged her anyway. Except, the match it gave her wasn’t any formation from the Bureau, but a match from another environment map—the ruin where she had the run in with the Tetrid Queen, which the Five Fans had been occupying. The exact same sequence, of twelve, five, three and then three in the exact same alignments, was depicted on one of the four stelae flanking the steps into the inner temple. A moment later it also showed her two more instances, as part of one of the floor mosaics inside.

“Well, that’s not at all what I expected,” Sana muttered, eyeing the three comparative images.

“Yeah.” She agreed, not entirely sure what to make of it either.

“How far does the alignment go, incidentally?” her sister asked, poking the line that ran through the pagoda they had passed. “Lets… huh… what?”

She stared at the map zoomed out, and the line passed straight through the entrance into the Jasmine Gate they had accessed, across the valleys, and eventually bisected the main ‘shrine’ at the heart of the cliff top ruins.

“Don’t tell me the compass has actually been drawing us to this?” her sister groaned.

“I am pretty sure that is just coincidence,” she reassured her. “It’s not like there are a plethora of paths to follow. Not to mention, this is just an ad-hoc line. You know what all the manuals say about over-extrapolation.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Sana nodded. “I know. Still, if this is some ancient formation… and it has a zodiac alignment in it, that is probably why it appeared as it did when everything else went woosh?”

“I think you are right,” she agreed.

She could make no claims to be a great expert in formations, but she did like to think she was well versed in them for her realm and age, and certainly, she knew the core functions of most of the basic setups. Zodiac Alignments had a lot of permutations, but the combination of a full circle and an element gate tended to be used to support the wider stability of an area.

What role the pagodas had she could not say. They could be observation points, or have acted as the control nodes around the core set up on this path of land. It honestly didn’t matter, in any case. The key point was that this formation was old, and potent, and seemed to be keeping this particular patch of the valley stable.

The comparison against the information stored in her scrip ran for a few more moments, then threw up several more ‘similarities’. Details in ornamentation on some of the nearby slabs that were barely visible underneath the patina of age, but which also mirrored identical designs from the ruin complex beneath the Red Pit.

*Crack*

The sound of breaking pottery made them both start. Turning to the water oven, however, she found it… unharmed.

“What was…?”

The only warning was a sudden shift in the air as it seemed to flow away from their position, dragging a chill in its departing wake. The cloud mist boiled out of the forests all around the valley, flooding like a white avalanche across the grasslands, blotting out the dells and smaller hills all around them. Within seconds they were surrounded by a sea of rolling white that lapped at the crest of their slightly taller hilltop, with its circle of twelve stones in a fairly haphazard circle. Visibility rapidly shrunk down to a few hundred metres in the time it took her to stand up to get a better view.

Contrary to what she expected, there was no eye-bending or soul-shocking disturbance to accompany this change, just an abrupt shift from suffocating humidity to skin prickling, damp cold that permeated everything.

In horror, she watched as dew condensed on the grass and rocks around them. Within moments her clothes were drenched and her breath was misting the air as if it were a cold daybreak at the peak of the Heaven Seizing Season. She kicked Sana to make her surface from her meditation, although her sister was already stirring at the temperature drop.

The breeze dropped away and the already unnaturally silent landscape started to become positively claustrophobic as the mist continued to swirl in.

“What the—?” Sana hissed, looking around.

As they both watched the roiling mists, she felt an additional, deeper cold somehow creeping through the fog.

In the swirling white, a shadow moved. At first, she thought it was just trees; some were still faintly visible in the direction of the ruins at the heart of the valley. Soon though, the shadow resolved itself and she found herself looking at a vague behemoth of muted lines shifting through the sea of mist. Long limbs of shadow moved with a terrifying, mesmerising elegance past their position at a distance of several hundred metres.

Her heart stopped as the thing, as if registering their petrified gaze, paused.

A line moved through the mist, extending up the slope towards them. The mists billowed higher and thicker, but never quite managed to reach the hilltop itself. She was unable to move a muscle, her gaze unfocused somehow under the tension of the moment, even as a deathly chill swirled through the fog towards them. She could feel the invisible death blistering her skin even before she could hear it, let alone see it. Herbaceous weeds and grass on the edges of the mist froze solid. There was a *snap* and a *pop* as a tree on the near edge of the sedge meadow exploded, turning into a twisted mess as roots, then trunk and finally branches splintered apart under the unnatural chill. All around them she could hear other trees shattering. A frozen branch scythed out of the gloom and hit the rock beside them, exploding like glass.

The twelve standing stones all had a layer of frost on them now. Through her blurring vision, she thought she saw reliefs of animals and other figures on them. The blurring confused her for a second until she realised the ground was steaming. The hill below them was groaning. In the distance, she started to hear other creaks and cracks. Sharper, crisper sounds, of rocks breaking in the cold. Heat was forced out of the soil below them and her clothes, already damp, were abruptly drenched by the sudden rising mist.

She barely had time to register, with a growing horror, what was about to happen, when her clothing began to stick to her skin directly as the temperature difference swept across the entire hilltop.

As her muscles stiffened and started to break down under the force of the cold permeating her body, her bones started to throb and ache. It felt as if she had a fire in her bone marrow. It took all her control not to open her mouth: if this deathly air flowed into her lungs directly, what little qi defence she still had at this point wouldn’t save her. Her vision started to blur and distort, red bleeding in from the edges of her vision until she was looking at a world through a gloomy, dark red lens. Outside of her core organs, her whole body was numb now.

-Is... is this how I die?

The thought was alien. She realised she had never truly considered before now that she could actually die here. Ignorance? Naïveté, brash confidence of youth?

The cold was smothering now. Something was outside the circle. She couldn’t see it beyond a faint shadow. Limbs. Colossal. Immense. Her mind simply refused to understand it. The shapes of its being were such that it seemed to play hopscotch with her ruined senses.

Then, almost as abruptly as they came, the shadowy lines and limb-like things shifted onwards. The fog calmed itself and all that was left in its absence was the *plink* and *creak* of stone and wood thawing and cracking as rapidly as they had frozen.

However, the sense of chill oppression that had come with the shadow did not leave, instead it coated their hilltop island like a thick drape. She didn’t know how long she stood there, immobile, frozen both literally and figuratively as she fought with every fibre of her being against the death that was trying to gently, silently, almost kindly carry her off. Her heart was barely able to beat and the air in her lungs was finally freezing, turning to liquid in the enclosed space. Only her mantra was keeping her body alive now.

Finally, after what felt like an agonizing eternity, the freezing oppression also dwindled away, allowing her natural healing to finally begin making a tiny bit of headway. Her vision, still red, started to return. There was still some remnant of qi shielding her core organs, although her mantra was trying to pull it out of her very bones now. She let it—vital qi was only useful if you were alive. The pain in her chest, of her lungs trying to collapse in on themselves, was excruciating. Moment by moment she focused on that, warming the liquid in them until it returned to its natural state, desperately trying to ensure that it didn’t expand too rapidly, or in the wrong place, and just explode her breast open. While it might not kill her outright, it would probably be the final straw that saw her die an agonising death of compounded problems.

‘My Spirit and Heart are supported by the Renewal of my Body and Soul…’

The desperate battle against the cold raged on until all her bodily reserves of unrefined qi were finally exhausted. All she had was her cultivation base now. Her mantra fought a retreating battle, desperately buying time, organ by organ, trying to keep her alive: intestines, bladder, stomach, gall, kidneys, womb, liver, spleen and finally lungs. All fell until only her brain and her heart were properly functional, protected by the thinnest shell of her vital qi.

Devoid of anything else, she almost became her mantra. It was still too weak. Or she was too weak. Memories twisted in her mind. Called up by the mantra? Or because she was just fooling herself and she was dying? It was hard to say.

The qi protecting her heart finally thinned and—

“Oh, my dear daughter… do not cry.”

The words rose in her mind like a beautiful curse. Not the worst memory, but close to it, a part of her thought. Her mother sat in their garden, in the night air, looking pale, holding her hands. When she finished singing the haunting song, a lullaby, with words in a language she didn’t really understand, her mother turned to her and looked at her with concern.

“You must be strong for your sister. Mother… is... just… going to leave you all for a while.”

A hand grasped hers. She was dimly aware that she was lying on the ground.

“Don’t cry… if you both grow up to be strong, maybe we will meet again, my dear little ones. You must look after your father and brother…”

The hand… felt warm… her mother’s voice echoed in her mind. A sense of sadness gripped her. “… It seems that Fate is indeed a cruel thing… your mother can only give you both this Gift.”

Spirit-Heart. Heart-Body. Renewal-Promise. Body-Spirit. Soul-Day.

Two mantras throbbed, in her body, barely her own, and bled through each other in her awareness, accompanied by bitter, mocking laughter that almost sounded like her Mother’s?

“Tho my Soul to Sleep, this Promise I seek—Renewal, of Body, of Spirit, of Heart, this Day to keep.”

The longform mantra whispered softly, like a lullaby in her mind, bringing with it the most complicated and near unfathomable adjustments and associations of the mnemonics in her mantra.

Soul and Day, Heart, overlapping into Sleep, Body and Renewal bleeding into Promise, and back to Body, then Spirit and Heart, somehow again touched by spirit, before returning via Spirit to Soul then Day, to begin anew.

{A Thought Through Eternity}

She thought she saw her mother's smiling face, her arms holding her, comforting her, telling her that everything would be okay, as she lay amid blooming chrysanthemums.

It was a memory she had no memory of, and which subverted everything she thought she understood about mantras, but she didn’t care.

"Live."

Her vision returned, slowly and painfully. She was certain that her heart had stopped for a second but now it beat, albeit irregularly, starting to send some warmth around her body. Her mantra ate up the sorrow and torment of those old memories and turned them into fuel to fan the dying embers of her life. She claimed her lungs back first. Lungs and heart, to make blood flow.

Her clothes, still frozen solid, opened lesions where they had fused with her skin as she breathed. Just that was enough. It wasn’t pain, not yet anyway, but the sensation of the cloth taking her skin away with it had a sensation in her mind akin to tearing silk. She tried not to focus on it; coherent thought was hard enough without such distractions. Time passed by and her natural healing had finally gotten enough purchase to fight against the cold now, clawing back her life in the face of the very worst of the damage, even as the temperature rose around her.

Soon her body was soaked in both dew and icy sweat as the world around her warmed. This rapidly gave way to a slick of thawing blood: her skin was split all over and her muscles had deformed under the unnatural cold. The water in her body had almost all frozen and expanded, causing catastrophic internal damage even before the air had turned into liquid and formed voids of empty space that collapsed other places.

-It is frankly miraculous that I am still alive right now, a voice in her mind told her. She ignored it and continued to focus on triaging her internal injuries with what vital qi she had at her disposal. The fireworks of whatever her mother had done were starting to fade away, vanishing back into the recesses of her being bit by bit.

At some point, she found that the temperature was back to some kind of normal level, although it was still bitterly cold based on the faint sheen of frost her vision could make out covering everything—

Her nervous system, which had felt like it was stuck in its own fog, abruptly reconnected with the rest of her body. She had experienced serious numbness and the pain that came after once before, when she was stung by a thunder mutate lamium, but this made that experience seem like a rash from a normal nettle. It took all her control not to scream in pain. She wanted to curl up in a ball and sob, as every part of her body now simultaneously felt like it was burning, tingling, had been slapped and hit with a blunt object.

Sana was...

She was holding Sana’s hand somehow.

Within her memories, there was no recollection of that happening?

-Oh, I fell, and managed to grab her hand before everything froze completely.

Through her palm, she could feel her sister shivering ever so slightly beside her, in just as much pain it seemed. With this came a return of some of the other, more instinctual aspects associated with her cultivation, feelings honed in places like the Red Pit. Those instincts were telling her that if she screamed now, or made any kind of fuss, it would lead to their absolute deaths.

The shadow in the mist was still there, looming in the distance, at the heart of the valley.

Eventually, the last vestiges of it did genuinely disappear into the gloom and the oppressive silence was once more complete.

With that threat finally departed, she turned back to the task of not dying. Even at this point, her life was still teetering on a knife-edge. Feeding the pain to the mantra, she started to run through some of the more esoteric aspects of physical cultivation, as explained to them by their mother. Different ways of pushing the mantra about, odd mnemonic tricks that would change the way it worked on the body, soothe the mind and even dissociate perception. Right now she certainly needed the perception dissociation trick.

After two cycles of the variant mnemonic, she felt her nervous system returning to normal in her hands and feet. Circulation was also being properly restored: her natural healing had gotten to the point where it was working on her muscles, mending the ruined blood vessels and nerves that ran to the periphery of her body. The temperature had also burst blood vessels in her…

-My…

She saw strange things and her sense of taste went funny for a few seconds. Her heart skipped horribly and nearly stopped, accompanied by a series of excruciating shooting pains throughout her body.

She recovered from the blood deviation with another cycle of the variant mnemonic, sweating mentally.

After the sixth cycle, she was able to move her eyes sufficiently to check out her sister's condition, although just that little bit of movement still left her feeling like her face was about to fall off.

Sana was slumped next to her, looking like a corpse caught in a blizzard. Her skin was still nearly blue and blistering where her clothes stuck to it, and, even though her body steamed faintly, her dark brown hair was still silver with frost. It lingered on her lips and eyelashes, giving her a strange, otherworldly look.

A broken voice in her mind noted that they made pretty corpses. She banished it to the mantra without blinking. Psyche breaks were bad, so it was convenient that they were yet another thing their mantra could deal with, with abnormal ease.

Blood was starting to run from slowly thawing lesions; Sana’s eyes were still blood red, two large lines of blood running down her cheeks, and, as she watched, blood also started to run from her sister’s nose, ears and even scalp. No breath was visible, but she could feel her pulse through her hand at least.

Seconds stretched on until Sana’s eyes abruptly moved and met hers. Slowly they both crumpled, if such a thing were possible given their already ruined state, as their bodies’ enforced rigidity from the cold was finally banished.

The faint smile on Sana’s face was mirrored on her own.

-We... survived.