Memories of the Fall

...The marvels wrought beneath the Evergrove Mountains by generations of mages would, many say, grow to eclipse the very thing they sought to understand through their centuries of work. They turned a desolate series of ancient mines into a treasure house of knowledge, built amid marvels both natural and magical.

It is a shame therefore that in the end, all their work was returned to naught. One wonders if some future generation, millennia hence might find their ruins in turn, and create some even greater marvel seeking to unravel their riddle. At the very least we can only pray that they should not fall prey to the villainy of our late, much unlamented former ruler of Meltras that has marred this day. Then again, perhaps it is only fitting that it is the robber Dukes of Meltras, Belthorne, Renlath and Renborin that have consigned a brilliant jewel of our nation into a bloody memorial to insatiable avarice and ruinous pride.

Excerpt from a Pamphlet speaking out against the Duke of Meltras.

~Anonymous author. Executed for sedition.

~ Lin Ling – Ancient Ruins ~

Lin Ling sat on the edge of the array platform, staring at the blood and mud-caked figure before her. It was hard to reconcile this matted, bloody, dust-covered woman with the elegant and sisterly Kun Juni. Setting aside the matter of her being totally naked, if she was Kun Juni, she had clearly been wrung out quite thoroughly. The injury from the blood she had dealt to 'Juni' was already healing. Healing remarkably fast, in fact.

-Far too fast. Juni couldn’t heal that fast before, a voice in her mind murmured.

-She still kicked your ass you useless little bitch! another, far more malicious voice added.

-Yeah! You just walked about doing fuck all and she still trashed you, what a loser, a third chimed in.

She hissed under her breath and focused on pushing them out of her mind.

The voices had come back.

Again.

It wasn’t at a point she could pin down either – sometime after she fled the complex up above was the best she could do. What came after that had been hazy until now, when their brief, bitter fight had ended in her getting her head smashed off the floor by the older woman.

-Trash, total trash.

-Worthless person… not worth your rank…

To try to distract herself from the broken inner monologue that was making little sense, she ended up asking. “How come you look like that?”

-Are you an idiot? She looks like that coz you threw that stuff at her, her mental voices snickered as one.

Juni stared at her as if she were some kind of alien, crawled from a rift and croaked: “Because it’s a fate-thrashed hell hole down there filled with terrible things that I can’t even begin to explain?”

It was somewhat undeniable that the ominous feeling currently emanating from beyond the entrance to whatever lay beyond this small hall was quite… intense. She found her gaze drawn back to the hideous series of scars on Juni’s shoulder and arm. It looked like something had twisted a hole right through her?

-That feeling? It’s nothing compared to that thing up there, a voice needled in her head.

-Yeah, yeah, she’s just weak.

-She’s not weak, she pushed back.

The voices just sniggered at her and vanished back into the recesses of her mind.

-We have a problem though, another more rational part of her mind interjected.

-No, you’re the problem, you! one of the nasty voices swirled out of nowhere again like some evil crow, cackling.

Gulping hard, she took a breath and tried to focus on drowning out the voices again. Truly, her nerves and her mental state had never really recovered from the shock of seeing that…

That…

She stared blankly, suddenly unsure of what it was she had seen that reduced her to this state.

-That didn’t seem… right?

The complex had been creepy sure, but it was just dark… there had been… something?

-A chest?

-Yes…

-A room with stars?

-Yes, yes…

-Something…

-Something, something…?

Involuntarily, she looked back at the shaft.

-The feeling of being ‘watched’.

When she fled she had been certain she saw the figure of a young girl holding a wooden sword and a lizard doll behind her, but that wasn’t what was watching her … was it?

-You are just freaking out, take deep breaths and calm down, you just have an overactive imagination. Everything is fine now, another of her voices tried to calm her… it just made her want to strangle it.

It was possibly all in her imagination, maybe she was just critically poisoned from the blood and this was all delayed symptoms. She had also seen a few other things in that moment and after, none of which were likely real.

-Absolutely. You were probably poisoned, but you're shaking it off now, the same voice murmured.

-Odd, she frowned.

They never sounded the same, even when they kept talking about the… the…

The…

Her mental state went a bit wibbly again and she had to close her eyes and focus.

‘Scion… P-path, Lotus… BOdY…GiFT…

Again, she tried her mantra, and again it slipped away from her… somehow.

It kept doing that, and it was infuriating to the point of tears. It had worked initially, but ever since she went upstairs, her emotional state was so bad that she kept trying to force it, rather than just let it do its thing. It shouldn’t have been possible, but it was – and that terrified her on a whole other level, she realised.

“Are you okay?” a voice from nearby asked.

She flinched and stared at the woman… Juni… it was Juni, Juni was here.

Had she just forgotten that Juni was here?

-She might not be real, you know, a different voice murmured.

-Yeah, it could be like upstairs… and you’re in another terrible place, another helpfully added.

-Yes…

She had gone up…

-That had been a… a mistake?

Part of her just cackled at that. A few parts, parts she was certain were what remained of the less cracked parts of her subconscious told her it really had been a mistake.

“I… err—” her voice sounded hollow and weedy in her own ears.

Some more mendacious aspects of her almost certain psyche break were shoving flashes of that trip up in front of her, like images.

The shaft up there was collapsed.

She had gone to the topmost rooms…

Wasted all her blood…

-I used blood in the… fight… here? she tried to push back at their weird generalisations.

-Wasted all the blood she hadn’t spent here, opening the door.

-Stupid cracked girl, believing that everything would be as easy as that first room, another voice giggled manically.

-Yes… yes… The prince was so pretty, you should have stayed with him, yet again a different one, that was again a bit odd sulked.

-It had been a room.

That memory settled indelibly into her mind, trapping her for a few horrible moments back in that place, with the man of her dreams sat on a gilded chair near a roaring fireplace, drinking wine and eating delicacies off a spirit wood platter, speaking to her by name, calling her friend… inviting her in.

-His face had seemed familiar?

-Hah. How could you know the face of a prince sealed here by those evils for so long? A voice sniggered.

-Stupid little girl, you thinking you see your past lives or something? Another poked from the side.

He had seemed to know everything about her, told her that they were fated to meet, that this was the greatest opportunity she would ever have.

In her memory she was shocked stupid, unable to know what to think. The plush surroundings seemed unreal and yet real. He had told her to speak his name, that if she would just speak it and free him, all the things she desired would be hers… although she didn’t know it. She said she did not, he grew first mirthful then vexed and finally angry at her protestations and increasing nervousness. In that instant his rage at her apparent unwillingness to know who he was had broken… whatever it was, and she had seen clearly what was within the room.

-Hahahahaaaaa… stupid girl, getting taken in like that, another voice snickered.

-We wouldn’t have been fooled, another agreed.

-Noo, we would never have done that stupid thing in the first place, would we? A third whispered.

-But it’s because of you, your mediocrity, that we are all tied to a failure like you, others spitefully hissed.

“…”

A desiccated body, the same man bound to a chair – chains passed through him, binding him to the floor. A formation burned across the whole room, restraining the corpse. A bronze cube flickering in the air above it.

The cube was odd. It felt like it was trying to slip out of her memories entirely but somehow wasn’t able to.

-The [cube] is not important, forget about the [cube].

She forgot about the cube.

The memories spooled on, trapping her in the images of her own traumatic experiences. It had spoken to her again then. A terrible voice commanding her to…

To…

To… rampage—?

Her memories twisted and for a split second. She had a strange, double memory of that moment and something else that slipped away or was buried under the shrieking voices.

It… something… had commanded her to free it…? To bow down? To show observance to her ‘Lord’ and ‘Master’?

-You only survived thanks to us, a sibilant coaxing voice whispered.

-Yes, if we hadn’t thrown the blood, it would have seized you and claimed you, another grinned.

-Useless child, without us you are…

She did indeed feel useless, watching it seize her, grasp her without ever leaving its throne.

Distance had meant nothing to it.

-No…

-I fled before that… I am certain? Again, strange half memories flickered through her consciousness, anchoring on the fact that there had been a lot of blood somehow, and a dark inverse pagoda like place… or a lake? I fled first… then I was grasped?

Her memories refuted it, maliciously. It… the thing had said she was a mediocre vessel, but it would do… that she should be honoured to become its doorway to a new world – then her beloved had tried to peer into her soul and grasp at her in some way she had no way to evade.

-Her beloved!?!

Something about that jarred her so badly that the voices were nearly silenced just from the cognitive dissonance of the twisted memories as scenes of the room, the fireplace, a bed… something… blood on the floor... unspooled in her mind’s eye momentarily.

She realised she was sweating… sweating a lot.

“—Errr...”

Fighting the disorientation, the syllables of her ‘err’ still hanging in the air from a moment earlier, she reached for her mantra again.

‘Scion… P-path, Lotus… Body…Gift…”

This time it actually worked, the voices fading away entirely as her mantra mnemonics shimmered in her mind like a cool balm. Even so, the memories of that moment hung in her mind’s eye unpleasantly, just within view, refusing any attempt at being banished.

She tried with her mantra, but it was suddenly, again…weirdly incapable in that one, subtle thing.

-That shouldn’t be possible? Mantras are…

-You're just frazzled, [take] a deep breath and…

She took a deep breath and nearly shrieked, because she was back in that fate accursed room, feet from the throne—

Reflexively, she threw the blood—

-How do I still have a pot of blood if I used it all…? Part of her tried to ask…

— The moment aggressively ignored that, flattening it into nothing almost as it gave rise to that thought.

In a final desperate gamble, she had thrown the blood in her clay pot over it. That had been spectacular, it had melted away desperately, trying to escape while still raving and screaming obscenities at her leaving behind only a corroded skeleton that gave her a horrible and ominous feeling of lingering death.

Its final scream rattled in her mind like a never ending shadow of an echo, shaking her…

Shaking her…

Juni was crouched in front of her. Holding her shoulders.

“Are you okay?”

-Say [Yes].

“Y-yes... I-I am… I’m just a… a bit,” her voice stammered out even as the memories kept tormenting her.

The skeleton’s scream echoed in her head – a curse in a language she had not understood – even now she could still hear it, feel it lingering in the darkness of the shaft, just out of view.

It had also woken up other things as well, with that terrible wail. She had heard them howling and raging behind their doors, their shouts echoing through the silent shaft. Some cursed their jailers… swearing unspeakable things on the heavens and hells, declaring themselves kings…men destined to be emperors, exalted above all others… Others proclaimed more insane and horrifying things. Things that no one would dare speak of underneath this world’s sky, lest they find themselves receiving lightning and fury from on high.

Her hands were clammy and her heartbeat harder just thinking about what… might… have…

-Complain that she hit you far too hard.

“You… hit me pretty hard… I’m...” her voice trailed off

Just saying that felt wrong. She had been the aggressor?

-Why was ‘she’ demanding the apology?

“Oh… sorry,” Juni’s face looked conflicted.

-Ugly bitch, she's smiling like that, but you can see the distrust in her eyes, a voice whispered.

-What a privileged old hag, another added maliciously.

-She definitely attacked first, one added.

-Yeah, she had a rock and chord and everything...

-Gonna strangle you and take your stuff.

The voices giggled, even as the rest of her flailed, still stuck inside the prison of her own reality, as she fled downwards—

The shadows of the shaft had hungered for her, those mad taunts and insane proclamations turning the oppressive and smothering dark of that quiet memorial into a tyrannical, hate-filled, hunting darkness that stalked after her, whispering insidious ills and taunting her with her darkest fears, twisting her deepest dreams.

They had followed long after she was out of actual earshot, far, far down the shaft… and she was on some small level certain they were following her still, the source of the myriad voices running riot in her fractured psyche.

Juni finally asked carefully, “What the fates did you find up there?”

“Up there?” she tried to process what she had just said out loud while she was stuck in her own nightmares.

“You said its ‘not exactly a bed of lotus up there either,’” Juni grimaced.

“I... yeah… I...” she trailed off, her throat try.

The darkness stared at her from the doorway, giggling. Its evil hunger hidden just out of view, but she knew it was there. Waiting.

-Because [you] desecrated that place. That’s why the [memories of the dead] have [cursed] you, another voice whispered.

“I put them back,” she whispered.

-You’re a bad girl. You desecrated that place, I bet people died there, another hissed sanctimoniously.

-Doesn’t matter, what’s done was done, you can’t put spilt milk back up, the voices judged.

“You put what back?” Juni was frowning at her now, assuming this wasn’t an elaborate fake Juni brought on by the darkness.

-No, she’s real! Part of her snapped back.

-You don’t know that… the voices giggled.

-Are we real?

-If we aren't real, she certainly isn’t.

The twisting doubt of their words gnawed at her even as she tried to push them all back…

As much to try to silence them and put what she thought was the right narrative of her memories back in the right way, she found herself recounting her exploration in brief: talking about the wave of golden-white stuff, the lizard thing, the doorway, finding the abandoned complex, then her trip upwards and finally the encounter... with whatever they had been – they had acted like arrogant young masters, but their rage and power was beyond anything she could envisage – and finally, her flight down here, taunted by the shadows.

Juni listened in silence, then she recounted what had happened to her.

After the golden wave, the fall, the lizard people, the… thing that had subsumed them. To her description that sounded awfully like the ‘thing’, the third… whatever it was…she had seen before she teleported.

Curiously none of the voices that were trying to rip apart her memory and put it back together in their own image commented on that at all. It was almost like it was something they couldn’t or wouldn’t interact with? Not that she wanted to either.

Instead she tried to focus on the rest of Juni’s endeavour, but that was difficult with the voices whispering in her mind’s eye, pulling apart everything her friend said and denigrating it. They mocked her clothes being stolen, didn’t believe about the skeletons, thought she was exaggerating the danger of the rock sludge things, and so on and on.

When Juni was done, they both sat in silence.

Eventually, Juni spoke. “I don’t suppose you have any of the water jars left in your storage?”

She blinked and checked her storage talisman, which was…

-Why is it so fate-thrashed empty?

-The prince emptied it out. When you bowed down to him, one of the memories snickered.

-Yeah, you let him rob you like a little bitch, it’s a wonder he didn’t take your purity as well, another giggled.

She ignored the voices as best she could.

-[Give] her the [Water], she will look a lot prettier cleaned up.

All that was in there was a few jars of… water? She skipped over those for now, looking at the rest of the remainder. Her medicines were also weirdly depleted – only some replenishment pills and what not remained. All the expensive purification pills and her defensive talismans were missing… really he had robbed her, hadn’t he.

-[Give] Her. The. Water.

Finally, she found the reservoir container, which held about 100 litres of drinkable water and passed it over to Juni.

Belatedly she also passed over a bit of luss fibre cloth and watched as the possibly illusionary Juni cleaned off some of the dirt and a lot of the blood, much of which seemed to be her own, to look a lot more like the Juni she knew – just much more naked, haggard and very battered-looking.

Now she could also see the full extent of the damage the other woman had suffered. The scar on her midriff, below her diaphragm, was slowly fading, but it looked like she might have had most of her stomach ripped out. Her shoulder was pierced through, the skin on her right leg was paler as well as if it had all been regrown. The overall effect was that Juni looked… blotchy.

Juni wiped her face blearily and looked down at herself. "I don’t suppose you have any spare clothes?”

She didn’t have to bother checking again to know that she did not, for some reason. Why those would also be gone was another mystery. The spirit herbs and such made sense, even the medicines and the real food – the blood and whatnot as well? But her mundane spare clothes? While leaving all the luss cloth?

Part of her tried to point something else out, but it was drowned out again by the chorus of bad voices uniting briefly to tear it down.

After some consideration, she passed Juni the worse of the non-blood stained Luss cloth pieces. The other woman stared at them dubiously and sighed, before knotting them together into a loose poncho-like thing and tying it around her waist to give her a thigh-length loose tunic. It didn’t really protect much of her modesty… but down here, modesty was quite far off the bottom of ‘important’.

“Assuming you’re not an illusion or a trick by that terrible thing up there or down here,” she said carefully.

“I could say the same about you, Ling,” Juni sniffed.

-Change the Topic. Ask her about your waste of a male companion.

“Anyway,” she looked around. “Do you think Shu also survived?”

~ Kun Juni – Ancient Ruins ~

Juni crouched on the edge of the raised dais, watching the other girl, unsure of how to feel. She had struggled so hard to get out of that place, but now, having done so, realised that she hadn’t considered the issue playing out in front of her.

-If I hadn’t met Valash… If she hadn’t done what she did, would I be like Ling here?

-Assuming she is real? And this isn’t like the Sar’Katush all over again, another less helpful shard added.

She groaned inwardly. That was Ling's fault, her contribution to the shadowy horror and insanity of this place and its impact on her mind up to this point.

It had never occurred to her that the girl in front of her might not be ‘real’ until Ling started babbling about it under her breath. The odds of it happening were stupidly small, another part of her felt, but then again…

A small and vocal part of her was still really pissed off at having been hit over the head with that meat that appeared to be condensed pure yang poison. However, mostly she was just concerned now, as she watched her friend and junior sister within the Hunter Pavilion rocking back and forth looking glassy-eyed. Her friend was clearly having a proper psyche break.

-If she was real… the nasty little voice chirped in again.

-She is! She pushed back on that thought ferociously, it was not a good idea to start down that path.

Based on what she had just recounted, it seemed she had stumbled into some kind of genuinely dangerous relict place somewhere here.

-But it could just be a cunningly crafted illusion or memorial phantasm brought on somehow by that creature…

She sighed mentally. Her subconscious was really refusing to let go of this bone it had decided to gnaw at it seemed.

-It had plenty of opportunities below if it was able.

-Maybe it was just behaving like the sludge rocks did, sneaking upon us?

-Yeah… waiting for a moment for us to lower our guard.

‘Devoted, Path, Lotus, Body, Bestowal’

Rubbing her temples, she stimulated her mantra again and pushed the dissonance back, imagining them being herded out the door still protesting, then locked it behind her with her mantra.

Something was odd there as well, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

Still, Ling had given her water and something to wear… She looked at the two sheets of luss cloth preserving her modesty with a grimace.

-Such fashion, so comfortable, her own mind added sarcastically.

That said, she really hadn’t thought this far ahead, she had to admit. Everything below had been one moment to the next. Short-term goals like survival to the next stele or getting past the next danger. She had not wasted any mental effort on wondering where she was going to get some clothes if she– they– ever got out.

-When!

-When we get out!

Letting the negative thoughts of her circumstances become too entrenched in her subconscious– still fragile and skittish– even if it seemed rock fate-thrashed solid compared to Lin Ling, would be dangerous.

Pessimism and dark thoughts had a way of clouding your judgement in stressful circumstances. That wisdom didn’t come from her teacher, Old Ling, but from her older brother Talshin, regarding his time working with the Provincial Duke’s forces during the ‘Three Schools Conflict’ of some 30 years prior. If you saw too much death and destruction, sorrow and pain it became its own way of thinking. It could even manifest as a heart demon.

Her body shuddered involuntarily at that. A psyche break could be fatal, but a heart demon… that was a whole other level of insidious.

She eyed the darkness in the shaft. Yes, it was clearly oppressive, but it had nowhere near the all-encompassing gloom of the deepest caverns below. There, the shadows had been ravenous in comparison to what was up here. When held up against that standard, it certainly didn’t seem as bad as even the cavern she had just departed for all that Ling had all but raved about the terrors above when recounting her tale.

That was the issue here... cruel as it was to think it.

-How much of what Ling just spoke of can we believe?

“…”

Moments like that didn’t help either, she reflected sourly, as her own subconscious chipped in again, somehow.

Sure, her friend’s tale was… coherent, after a fashion at least, but her friend had been arguing with herself as she recounted what she had experienced, as if trying to convince her own mind that this was what she had experienced.

-She is definitely cracking up.

Rubbing her temples, mulling back through the details, Ling sitting there in slightly distant-eyed silence somehow lost in her own thoughts again, she made a quick effort to sort what her friend had recounted from most probable to psyche break induced hallucination. In other circumstances she might have tried to do a feng shui divination to help with that, but here and now that would certainly be a bad look, and given her own state of mind, she certainly wasn’t going to trust anything she herself had touched in that regard.

-Ah well, it is what it is, she sighed.

The teleportation into the cavern and the monster getting exploded by the qi wave fit well enough.

The shaft was there so that was also legit.

That left the abandoned complex with the squirrel? That seemed... improbable frankly, but a part of her friend was clearly terrified that she had disturbed something in a ruined complex, so perhaps she had stumbled across some ancestral shrine or dharma remnant? That kind of curse could see this effect.

She had then fled it – that seemed real enough.

The problem, she had to concede was Ling’s account after that. That was where she had really started arguing with herself, seemingly unsure if she had gone up or down or stayed down then gone up…

If she took the final ‘version’ as roughly true, Ling had gone up the shaft, and there found something else that really messed with her head.

The more worrying possibility was that after that, everything her friend had experienced had been ‘in her head’ and she just fled randomly after the first complex and was suffering perception dissociation.

-How real are the voices in her head?

She wished her cousin Ji was here, as irrational as that thought was. She knew she had talent with feng shui and divinations, but Astrologers were good at this kind of thing, and he was at Soul Foundation and could use his soul force to probe her mind carefully…

-Except soul sense doesn’t work down here anyway, a part of her subconscious chipped in

“…”

Grinding her teeth she stared at the floor for a long moment, taking in the way it too appeared to have been deliberately worked into the form of tiles.

What was undeniable was that both of them appeared to have experienced, at this point, pure and sustained mental and physical torture in this unspeakable place. In that regard, it was hardly unsurprising that they were both ‘fraying unpleasantly at the edges’. It was a phrase her older brother had used a few times when prosaically describing the experience of his time in the South Grove forests with the Duke’s Levy during the ‘Three Schools Conflict’.

Invariably, bits of these places did follow you home, even when everything went exactly as planned.

-Didn’t you think that before? One of the voices managed to yell through the keyhole in her mind.

-Shut it, she retorted. Now is not the time for you lot.

-But you need us, we kept you alive.

-Yes, her story is complete crock. You have to be careful. You need to stay alive.

“…”

-How the fates did they creep out? she groaned, focusing on her mantra again.

This time, ‘Bestowal’ shifted somewhat more concertedly and the disparate voices that had started propagating again were swept up and added to the others.

Oh yes, she was certain she herself had had at least one proper ‘break’ as her grandmother, or uncle Kun Shan, would describe it. As to what Ling was experiencing now, was this what she had been on the cusp of when she landed in that cavern?

This time, she focused much more firmly on ‘Bestowal’

While she spent a few moments adjusting herself and letting the deeply uncomfortable injuries to the side of her face and her upper back heal, she reviewed what Talshin and Uncle Shan had told her about them. They were a dangerous by-product of too much qi-based stress on the brain. The main causes tended to be either through focused spiritual cultivation in stressful circumstances; losing a grip on your mental state when points of emotional reference eluded you, excessive exposure to qi of a quality and purity beyond your realm, or through qi based mental trauma – like failing repeatedly at breakthroughs, or damaging your meridians in the core zones.

-Like the eyes, now that she thought about it… well, she had been aware of that risk before, so it wasn’t like she was going to claim ignorance for her own circumstances.

In any case, any and all of those things could put excessive load on the brain in places it wasn’t designed to deal with until you broke through to Nascent Soul and your body fundamentally changed. The strain touched on aspects of the soul, in short. It probably wouldn’t get to the level of a heart demon, of a proper spiritual deviation on its own, but they could be equally insidious in their way and took a long time to bounce back from.

Ling should know this as well, though. It was the kind of thing elders, or parents, sat you down and talked through very early in your cultivation, especially in families with deep histories like the Kun or Lin. Even the Hunter Pavilion forced you to sit through those explanations for that matter. Old Ling's view had been similar, but he held that it was only weak pampered people who were at risk of irreparable damage. Her training had involved a lot of pushing in that regard. Toughening her up so she could deal with the dangerous places in the high valleys.

-Just think, Old Ling said there were even some Physical Cultivation Mantras and Spiritual Cultivation Laws that actually required minor breaks to progress, a weirdly awed voice in her mind reminded her.

She examined herself—again, but it was just her memories acting out, not anything she had pushed behind the door, courtesy of her mantra and that useful extra tool that ‘Bestowal’ seemed to have added to her mental toolkit.

Exhaling, she stared at Ling again. There was no change there, unfortunately. Her friend was just sitting there staring into the middle distance looking… actually, the look on her face was quite disturbing, she was starting to feel. It had a dissociated blankness that she was certain she had seen somewhere else, but… where?

While she let that thought process work its way through her rather discombobulated memories of the last few days, weeks maybe, her mind turned to Shu. Had Han Shu survived? He had been behind them, bringing up the rear and as far as she knew didn’t have a teleport talisman such as Ling had had.

A little voice in her head sniggered at her for thinking too hard about formalities of names and honorifics at a moment like this. She refuted back that it was the little things that saved your life.

-Lizard see, sludge do, only you get in much trouble though! One of the voices cackled from behind the doorway.

-Atrocious…

More symptoms of the qi strain dancing through her mind’s eye like cavorting lunatics.

That part of her psyche was alive and well, it seemed. Illogical and terrible rhymes and all.

-A pity…

-Could it not have been the bit that dissolved into a gibbering mess and ran off screaming into the dark?

-Enough! she thought firmly. No more skittering between things.

Hoping that her own inner conflict was not playing out in her face for Ling to see, she reviewed their options again, not that it changed anything. She could only work with what she had, and that was apparently a Ling that was clearly not in the best state, which made her unreliable.

-Unreliable is way underselling her issues and you know it, one of the voices whispered through the door.

-Not that I am any better, she sighed inwardly.

No, she shouldn’t judge the younger girl at all harshly… if she really was sitting there and not some puppeted phantom—

“…”

“Sorry?” she queried, realising that Ling had spoken again, asking her something.

“Out there,” the other girl pointed into the dark cavern behind them. “You said there might be other shafts. Other… ruins?”

She eyed Ling again, looking at her carefully. Again, something about that was odd. The first half of what she had said seemed okay, but why did the latter half seem a bit too… searching? Doubly so, because the fact that there were more ‘ruins’ down here should not be any strange new knowledge to her.

-Has something really latched in her mind? Now that was a worrying thought, considering the darkness of the cavern before her.

She pondered again how she felt about the idea of venturing back out there, with the ever-present possibility of never seeing that one sludge rock that had somehow managed to look properly rock-like before it punched a hole through her head.

Shuddering slightly, she refuted that idea thoroughly. “I think so, but they are beyond a really dangerous bunch of caverns.”

“Do you think we could reach it?” Ling asked somewhat decisively.

“Maybe?” Juni winced at her unthinking reply. “But likely we run into more of these sludge rocks. They are stupidly dangerous.”

“Mmmmm….” The other girl looked unconvinced, glancing back to the shaft “More dangerous than the crazy imprisoned people up there?”

When she put it like that…

“However, not as crazy as the weird horror that controlled the lizard people,” she countered.

Ling nodded slowly at her words, her facial expression actually shifting at last, if only into a slight frown.

“How far down are we from your empty rooms?” she asked, as much to buy time for her to think as for any other reason.

Several suspicions were starting to coalesce in her mind at this point, though from where, exactly, she couldn’t say. One had been nagging her ever since she fell out of the water on the ceiling... another was related to Ling herself.

-The ceiling water had been gone when she was on the floor with the skeletons…?

-Maybe you just couldn’t see it at that point? another countered.

-It was a huge cavern, a third voice supplied helpfully from beyond the door.

-Your qi-enhanced vision wasn’t the best at that point either…

Her mantra had another moment of doing the rounds, ushering out clamouring voices. Now she had two doors for fate's sake. The argument against that was fairly easy, though. Under this suppression, a fall of more than twenty or thirty metres would have probably been quite incapacitating if not fatal.

She closed her eyes and pushed the whole mess away abruptly, because the fact that she had fallen into the anomaly really screwed up any theory about that, now she thought about it.

-Not to mention I was healed at least twice in that dream-like sequence, she mused.

Now the Ling thing—

“…”

"—Not that far, I guess,” Ling’s voice interrupted her thoughts with remarkable prescience. “Maybe?”

No… it really wasn’t a good idea to go back out there into the gloom with Ling at her back, not as she was now. There was definitely something going on with her, she was certain now. Either the other girl really didn’t believe she was entirely real, or she was being pushed by something, that much was clear at this point.

Abruptly she felt a headache coming on. At another time it would have probably led to her just throwing up her hands and giving in, but now? Now it just got to join the fate-cursed, nameless-blessed pile of other headaches outside the door, ‘Bestowal’ and ‘Lotus’ did that without her even having to think too hard on it.

For a brief, blissful moment, she was alone in her head with just a mundane headache brought on by stress, anxiety and getting hit in the head by a lump of pure yang infused meat.

“…”

She again considered the darkness of the shaft. It felt oppressive, heavy even, but there was no malicious element to it.

Wincing, she reached out to put a hand on Ling's arm, giving her a reassuring squeeze. “Will you be happy to wait here? I want to go out into the shaft and check something.”

Ling flinched slightly as if that wasn’t the answer she had been expecting somehow. “You want to go back out there?”

“Not very far,” she assured her. “I just want to see some of these doors you spoke of, around the shaft.”

“Oh, okay,” was all she got. Ling made no other response, nor did she try to get up or follow her.

Shaking her head sadly, she went into the shaft. She felt bad, leaving Ling there, but on a certain level that was a relief that she was making no move to come with her. The idea of jittery Ling, who maybe didn’t believe she was real, following her around the edge of that pit beyond the door really didn’t appeal to whole swathes of her mindscape, both inside and outside the doors.

Her darkvision, tempered by the deep gloom of those caverns, was able to penetrate it a rather reasonable distance, she discovered. The deep shadow of the shaft was, on the face of it, just a visual artefact brought about by the contrast between the qi-absorbent nature of the rock it was carved from and the perspective of the place. Staring at the rock that the wall next to her was made from, it was definitely a bit different from the cavern. She peered closer, keeping a careful watch on the door she had just left – just in case Ling really was some evil phantom that was going to appear behind her.

It took a moment of searching, but comparing it in her mind’s eye to the steles, it seemed that they were both wrought from the same stone somehow?

-No. not quite right, another voice added.

-The stele were carved into the cavern rock, apart from that one. Isn’t it more like this place has been changed to be like the stele?

She considered that supplementary suggestion, turning it over in her mind. It was possible. Looking up, the shaft was ruler-straight and the unnatural smoothness of the lines did support the theory that it was cut with some kind of art—Or warped directly out of the rock itself? She was pleased she got to that one before the mental chorus did.

“Merciful fates, I’m in competition with my own thoughts over this stuff – I am in trouble,” she grumbled under her breath.

-The two pursuing us could break rocks like this? Maybe it was made by people over the Dao threshold?

-How in the fates had that voice gotten back in through the door?

Her mantra, if it had been sentient, would probably have just shrugged wearily as it ushered a voice out of a third door… and why had it drawn her mind back to… that…

-Oh… Han Shu?

Her mind really was playing games now, she reflected with a resigned sigh.

She made her way around and found the first of the carved ‘doors’ as Ling had described them. She looked at it carefully. It was indeed just like the stele, same motifs around the edge. This one had no symbol in the middle like the ones Ling had described. She looked at the symbol over the top and blinked. It had the same symbols as the stele had, 2 rows, just under the symbol. It was actually quite obvious if you knew what you were looking at. If you didn’t though, in the darkness and stress you might easily miss it as it was ‘above’ the actual door border itself.

‘Jadework Storage (14): Pavilion Authority Only.’

The words arrived in her head as they had before.

-Pavilion authority? That was a word that it seemed to struggle with before finally settling on.

She went up another turn and found the next door.

‘Jade-Make-Workshop (14). Pavilion Authority Only.’

It also had no central symbol that had apparently allowed access, but was otherwise laid out in exactly the same fashion near as she could tell from examining it. The text also seemed to struggle with ‘Jade-Make-Workshop’ in a way that it hadn’t with ‘Jadework Storage’. Her mind was also muttering that there was something familiar about the lettering. The letters on the stele had mostly been badly vandalised, visible only as full sentences thanks to whatever telepathic connection they provided – or so she had assumed. Now, though, she was changing that thought.

-What if it was simply the words being carved with the ‘Intent’ to be understood?

-That’s a whole other level of power though, her mind supplied.

-And yet the people who made this place were clearly not neophytes, she shot back.

In any case, that gave her a ‘workshop’ and a ‘storage area’. She went up nine revolutions of the staircase after that, fairly briskly as well. There were levels for other things, beyond workshops and storage, for starters. Two of the potentially openable ones identified themselves as ‘Scholar Living Level Nine: Focus and Array’ and ‘Scholar Living Level 8: Pavilion Disciple’. The latter also confirmed that 'Pavilion' was definitely a word it struggled with.

On the other hand, the numbers descending as she went up meant that her suspicion about the geometry of this place being flipped probably wasn’t right. Not unless she was somehow going down despite believing she was going up. Eyeing the staircase dubiously, she had to concede that it was almost an optical illusion when viewed through her qi-enhanced vision, especially when looking up or down.

She reached an open door, presumably the one that Ling had talked about, some two turns above the ‘pavilion disciple’ landing. The darkness in there did indeed feel… thicker inside, she had to admit, but there was no oppression. Rather, it just seemed sad somehow, like a solemn memorial space.

The words above the door read: ‘Scholar Living Level Seven: Test and Array.’

Looking back down the shaft, she hummed pensively under her breath. It had taken her about thirty minutes to walk up here, with frequent stops to examine doors. Not long at all, really. Comparing this to Lin Ling’s recounting, that either meant her friend had had a very serious break indeed, or something else was going on.

-We told you it didn’t add up! A voice yelled through the keyhole of the second door.

She grimaced and looked upward. The arithmetic of the decision was fairly brutal. Either she trusted that Ling had her problems under control and went back down, or she went back down and didn’t trust Ling, or she went up there and there was nothing, or she went up there and got caught by whatever got her friend. All the options bar one had a not unreasonable possibility of her dead at the bottom of a shaft or with a rock in the back of her head. Bar one.

“It seems I will have to risk it,” she sighed softly.

Her ascent now became much more paranoid and less focused on sightseeing. A few revolutions up she found another open shaft, this one identified itself as ‘Shaft Access Four: Mid Zone’, likely making it the one that Ling had entered through.

The darkness beyond it was stronger again. Just walking a few paces into it, she also could also feel faint traces of Thunder and Water Qi prickling her skin. Their sympathetic reaction with the wounds on her head and back made her wince.

-Definitely where the blood came from, she reflected, retreating back to the main shaft, happy that that part of her friend’s account was also somewhat confirmed.

After only ten minutes’ more of wary ascent, she arrived at a level where the shaft finished, stepping out into a broader space that had several levels stepping upwards – somewhat like an inverted version of those really old Buddhist pyramid things, with stepped edges.

The lowest level extended about four metres from the shaft in every direction with stairs cut into the wall opposite, zig-zagging up for several turns before truncating into the gloom. Three of the levels had doors in them, from what she could make out at any rate. There was even a stele, though she only spotted it because she had spent so long looking for them in the darkness, positioned against the wall between the two sets of steps that led up to the second level. It was truly unobtrusive unless you were already familiar with them though.

She was about to take a step forward, then stopped. The same instincts that had kept her alive with the rock sludge’s ambush whispered that walking onto the floor would be a really bad idea.

Frowning, she looked at the stele again. It was hard to make out in the darkness, but somehow it felt like that was because of more than just the gloom and its location. Now that she thought about it all the others had been obvious. This one; however, felt like it was trying to be a bit too innocuous?

Casting about, she searched nervously, looking for some warning or sign she might have missed. The place didn’t deliberately seem like a death trap.

-Then again, the ones that kill you never do, a helpful voice, her own for once, added grimly.

Retreating back down the stairs a bit, she started a somewhat more discerning inspection of the walls and platforms. It took her quite a few perplexed moments to understand what she was actually looking at, reviewing what she knew of this place. Finally, though, her eyes found the familiar series of trefoil leaves and flower motifs that ran down the edges, across the platform and…

Her eyes traced the edges of the shaft, thinking back to the defaced stele in the caverns below, savaged by claws.

They had been unable to damage the motifs, but had systematically obscured the writing…

In the end, it took descending a whole level for the other bits of the puzzle before her to slot into place. Subtly, on the outer edges of the platform, were claw marks. You would hardly notice them going up, because of the shadow and the angle…

-Unless?

She descended another circuit and looked up. The undersides of the stairs were barely visible in the gloom, but they definitely looked scored. Her first thought, rather banally, was ‘how?’ given they were a good ten metres above her. The claw marks looked like something had scooped and clawed out something along the edge – All the way around the platform, in fact.

She could see why she had missed them before though. Nobody in their right mind would be looking straight up walking this fate-thrashed death-trap of a staircase, only a metre wide with no guard rail into the bottomless shaft below. Similarly, you wouldn’t be staring randomly at the far side for the same reason, in case you took a misstep and slipped into darkness and death.

Warily, she retraced her steps to the top and squatted down to squint at the designs ahead of her. Was the warning of danger due to that or… in the darkness she finally saw something else, familiar amid the stones. Something that should have no business being there…

-Talisman Paper…?

She frowned and stood up—

Something shoved her really hard in the back, sending her sprawling across the floor.

[You are very paranoid for such a… pretty face. So hard to fool. So hard to lure.]

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. She scrambled up and dived for the stele. The warning hadn’t been anything to do with the designs, she now realised. It had been to do with the talisman trap on the fate-thrashed floor, barely visible in the gloom…

Something struck at her mind—

It tried to disguise itself, pretending to be the empathic manifestation from the Sar’Katush, but it wasn’t.

It lacked the…

The…

‘Devoted, Path, Lotus, Body, Bestowal’

—The pressure jarred her mind again, even as she wielded her mantra to try to resist it.

-It’s the same force of disorientation that came when Ling first attacked us, a voice in her head supplied.

[Tsk.]

The echo sounded annoyed.

She scrambled up, turning to see what it was…

Ling stood where she had been, or a thing wearing her face stood there.

[Curious. STILL you do not succumb?]

It was almost sympathetic sounding, if a bit condescending – like an older sibling mocking a child’s misconception.

-Still? Oh, it had tried before… when they fought.

Bits of oddity in the conversation slotted together, filling out the puzzle. The reticence to come back up here, the interest in other ruins… Whatever this was had been looking for an opening to get her, like it had Ling…

She tried to look about and found she couldn’t. It was impossible to look away from the Ling thing. Something in her mind was clamouring that the stele was important—and now she couldn’t fate-thrashed see the cursed thing.

The 'not Ling' strolled across the floor towards her, unperturbed.

[Still, in the end, it is too easy. Despite your curious mental durability, your paranoia makes you easy to shape. To push your direction. If you had just gone to the caverns below, you might have maintained the fiction of your own being for a while longer…]

It walked across to the stele beside her and placed a hand against it and sank its hand into the stone, scoring out the writing – with human hands this time – obscuring what was written there completely.

[—But you had to come up here. If you had just dared cross back over that threshold you might have persisted a little longer. I cannot have anyone else knowing what was hidden here.]

-Nameless—! Monkeyshit! She sobbed in her heart. This thing is the same one that defaced the stele below—?

-Except… No, that isn’t right, a stray part of her psyche screamed. Those stele defied that attempt at vandalism... Yet here…?

She watched from the corner of her vision as a hand—

-It’s not Ling’s hand!?!

A larger hand emerged from the shadow behind Ling, dragged its fingers through the stele until they stopped for a second.

[Tcch.]

There was a flicker of annoyance and then yang qi blazed around the hand. A second ghostly hand reached from somewhere else, embodying that more physical hand as it swept through the edge of the stele with only the merest hint of resistance. She saw something come away in its hand—black crystal threads of some sort. It twisted them like thread and snapped them and the motif partially faded away.

-Ah. So not the same thing…

[Their desperate, petty vandalism cannot compare to the true power we can wield.] Another voice murmured, amused, not talking to her it seemed?

The original voice turned amused as well.

[That useless boy you wanted to kill—?]

[They all ran so fast, using that annoying talisman.]

[Alas, it seems he could not even succumb to these depths.] It mused, seemingly uncaring about her presence. Not that she could do anything other than stay frozen against the now broken stele.

[—Garbage like that really does deserve to die all alone in the darkness.]

-Was that a third voice? She wanted to focus on it, but somehow, couldn’t.

Suddenly the ‘first’ was back on her, bearing down with a strange sense of coaxing winsomeness and crushing domination.

[I had to waste a lot of effort to mark you to the point where you would start to move in accordance with actions suiting to my needs. It attracted far too much attention.]

[He wasn’t of use anyway. His kind cannot unpick the secrets of this place. It is not within their fate.] The other older voice added.

[No matter, this was the one we really wanted.] the first voice added.

The younger voice was starting to make her psyche hurt. It was too fate-thrashed nice.

-And reasonable.

-I think he's doing it for your benefit.

-Yeah, you’re so old, yet still a spinster?

-No. Fight it, we need you to fight it.

She tried to push back against it.

It felt different from the thing in the deep. That had been like a devouring swamp: Old, uncompromising… insidious, yes, but with a visceral antiquity that provoked every dark instinct in her soul. This was different. It was trying to twist her, ensnare her… yet there was a force to it. A lack of patience almost.

The Ling ‘thing’ frowned and turned back towards her.

[You still resist? Marvellous!]

[I love ones who have some spark… and underneath the grime, your important assets are really not bad... enough to make up for…]

[Ah. It seems this approach will not work. Ahh well...]

Again, she had the oddest sense that she wasn’t hearing just two people talk—

[You have served well in this… so I will allow you this boon for us, boy.]

-Oh. Nameless. Thrashed. Shit.

“KNEEL.”

The command came from both ‘dominant’ voices simultaneously.

She crumpled forward, unable to move, her qi-reserves had almost entirely dispersed from that one commanded word. The qi in her dantian dispersed completely, even what was sealed in her flesh and bones as part of her foundation built by physical cultivation recoiled, repelled somehow from her physical form. The abrupt absence of qi, that had been a constant companion for years, made her feel like she had lost limbs and been plunged into icy water. Her cultivation base wasn’t just diffused, she realised. It was completely sealed away.

“The suppression on this place…” her attacker sounded ‘normal’ now, but the whole room wavered nauseatingly in her vision. “And yet, still you are not mine, how amusing. Well, perhaps it’s for the better. Commanding like [this] is really no fun.”

Her body twitched, as if something had just grasped her bodily, but somehow it still failed to gain any real purchase, again thanks to the remarkably robustness of her changed mantra, even if something was again obfuscating its active use.

“A mere Qi Condensation girl with a few crudely learned tricks, who stumbled through this place like a blind man in a butchers shop never managing to quite injure herself enough to provide that critical opportunity? How remarkable,” it sighed, the mockery in the tone was unmistakable.

The Ling 'thing' approached her and lifted up her head, forcing her to stare up at real Ling, who was blank faced.

“But I see you just won’t yield that last little bit. It doesn’t seem to be that broken art… Is it just your pride as a noble daughter?” it chuckled. “Some were like that, you know... It never helps, but struggling right to the end seems to be innate...”

The voice sighed softly.

She felt her body flush unnaturally as if caressed gently. Now she understood what was happening, what this art was, by reputation at least, even if the mnemonic had not manifested openly.

“—Just makes the prize, so delayed, all the sweeter, really.”

Ling tore off the robe she had fashioned and cast it away, smiling disturbingly. In the depths of the younger girl’s eyes, she could see… fury? Rage? Something was trying to kindle in there, even with the control she was clearly under.

“All the sweeter…”

Ling’s voice echoed the words of her controller as she leaned in and kissed her. “This way I can enjoy you both at once. Truly a man’s romance…”

“The stress of this place has made me quite uncouth though,” the mocking voice shifted even as another figure appeared behind Ling, stepping out of her shadow somehow.

The hauntingly familiar, blonde-haired youth was clothed in a rather garish purple and pale green dragon robe. A faint, enticing smile lingered on his too-red lips, while every part of him extruded a wilful splendour that tried to sink into her mind and twist her desires and dreams.

-Di Ji...?

Every voice in her head hissed at once—all except the weird one she was a bit concerned about, who just seemed to... frown?

Within a heartbeat her physical body was basically outside of her control. Her mantra was clawing desperately at some remnants of her psyche, but something else was pushing it down. Pinning it down even.

-That shouldn’t even be possible...

At the same time that thought was vanishing though, something caught her eye across the room, a strange flicker between shadows—

A cool, strong hand that slid across her chest, fingers trailing, while another powerful hand now gripped her hair, smoothly forcing her to move according to their wishes. Apart from the gibbering voices, one of which was saying insistently to look across at the other side, most of her conscious thought was split between wailing in horror and moaning in unnatural pleasure at the touch.

-LOOK AT THE FATE-THRASHED STELE ON THE OTHER SIDE YOU MORON! the chorus in her head howled.

-Two statues, robed figures, wearing garlands of flowers and fan-like crowns of... some other plant, with… upright, animal looking ears on their heads? —a part of her blinked in confusion at that— stood either side of it.

The mental control that was locking her body away from her was momentarily disrupted. Di Ji grabbed her neck, hauled her up and—

Absolute, utter, searing pain that ate into her bones and seared her soul.

Her vision went black and she was dimly aware of screaming. Hers, another voice, and a man’s voice all in pain and rage.

“YOU LITTLE BITCH!”

The grip on her mind and her body was gone now...

She tried to move but couldn’t. She wasn’t by the stele anymore. She tried to focus the mantra in her head… nothing happened.

-Of course, no qi…

The other ‘presence’, though distant, was still somehow still pinning it down she realised, and that was also locking her in place in some way.

She tried to open her eyes and realised she couldn’t—reality intruded in a horrifying moment of understanding that told her that much of her face was…

Agony, pain… unspeakable…

A blur of ‘attempts’ by parts of her crumbling sanity to ‘rationalise’ the horrific nature of the injury and the pain washed over her.

Her face hurt like leaf-cutter ants were stripping it away…

No— it was like being scalded by boiling oil…

Stung by a fire lash lamium.

Her vision returned, her eyes regenerated by what little remained of the healing impetus in her body. Somehow her mantra had found purchase on something amid the agony to divert a tiny bit of her innate qi from her spirit root, it seemed, to heal her back from the threshold.

Her renewed ability to see the world though, did not improve her views on their circumstances. Now she could see Lin Ling, as well as hear her, rolling on the floor screaming in agony and cursing inarticulately at turns.

A smashed water pot lay on the ground nearby, wisps of semi-luminescent vapour rising from splashes of a blackish red substance…

-Oh, the thing she said she threw at the thing up here...

-Wait. Didn’t Ling say she used it all?

-But she threw some at you? How could she?

-Maybe she hid it?

-From him? Do you know how powerful a Golden Immortal is?

-Mantras are really resilient.

-I told you that story was monkeyshit.

The voices in her head rampaged back into full force, spurred on by the pain and the injury done by Di Ji. The ‘blood’ had gone everywhere, it was even melting the floor, leaving a shimmering haze that had a horrific penetrative quality to it.

-Pure Yang Effervescence, a voice dully supplied.

-Don’t inhale it, another helpfully added.

She could only agree there. Her skin was already blistering from the exposure and she could smell burning hair – her own – it seemed.

Di Ji had staggered away, holding his smoking face in one hand and raging inarticulately as he fumbled for what she assumed was a medicinal pill. Except now, he was no longer wearing purple and green robes, but dark blue, muddy ones…? Which were rapidly dissolving to reveal his chiselled, lithe, body as…

-I hope he isn’t too badly…

Groaning, she forced the unnatural, remnant, mental relics of the earlier control, manifesting as errant thoughts away, trying to work out what had happened. His control over them had surely been absolute. Had it just been her mantra and the ‘voices’ that broke it for a second? That seemed…. improbable. A quasi Golden Core cultivator resisting anything a Golden Immortal did, even down here was proper ‘your mind is cracked and dreaming of rainbows’ territory.

Her gaze sought out the statues almost as an afterthought. There were none. Had that just been her imagination? A desperate plea for something to save—

The control locked her out of her own body again sending her tumbling to the floor, her limbs entirely without any kind of strength.

Di Ji had stood up, she realised, except he was different. His face was already healing, returning to youthful splendour, albeit now twisted in rage—but something about it was just off.

-Crude mask, to hide such a weight of years, a voice in her mind sneered.

He strode back over and grasped Ling by the shroud of Luss cloth and then her hair, and threw her over beside Juni.

“You. Little. Minxes! I was sure you hid something from him, but to think you still had some of that left.”

She felt her vision blur at the words. They punched her like the rocks from those accursed sludge monsters. The weirdly playful wording just made it all the more horrifying.

“You think that because you ruined yourself a bit I won’t have some fun with you before we leave here?” he sneered. “I didn’t even get to have any fun with the Ling girl, pretty as she is—and after what she cost me… you have no idea how stressed I am!”

He still limped slightly as he walked back to them and pressed a hand on both their heads. Warmth flooded through her as she felt herself return from the edge of death's door in a single breath. The dirt fell off her and she was left sweating.

Vitality pounded through her body now, although she still couldn’t move a muscle.

“That’s better,” he smiled. “Much more ladylike. No reason to have fun with two ugly, scarred wretches after all.”

He tilted her head up and she was forced to look into his smiling, beautiful face again.

“You know… it wasn’t meant to be like this.”

His eyes seemed like they wanted to consume her, his own demeanour now radiating a sort of kindly earnestness that made her skin crawl even as she felt parts of her drawn to it.

“Ahhh… it’s been so annoying, you know,” he spoke to no one in particular as he knelt over her. “You and that Ling girl were to be the last pieces…”

She stared up at the top of the stele above her, above ‘Di Ji’. Against all logic, a dark furred, two-tailed squirrel was perched there stroking its ear, staring at the scene below with narrowed golden eyes.

Di Ji followed her gaze and stared at it.

“What. How did you survive? I turned you into meat paste before I entered this place.”

The voice didn’t come from him. It… for a moment—

-In the shadows—hiding, how amusing.

The voice in her head sneered at it, at the two people some part of her swore were standing right behind ‘Di Ji’, who was somehow ‘not’ Di Ji. In his shadow—

{FOOLISH CHILD OF ANOTHER SKY.}

{YOU GAINED A BOUNTY FROM THE HEAVENS...)

{—MANAGED TO TURN ASIDE YOUR ORIGINAL KARMA}

{—AND YET YOU SQUANDERED IT SO CAPRICIOUSLY IN THIS LAND.}

The voices were gentle, soothing even, washing away all her worries and fears—the subversive tyranny of Di Ji, the ominous horror of the thing that had held the lizards...

{Because of you that accursed horror even we cannot touch awoke once more.}

The figure standing over her screamed.

It was a scream she had never heard in a living being before, although perhaps she had made it herself when confronted with the abomination. He gripped his head and staggered backwards away from her, from the squirrel who watched him dispassionately—

“Mo Demon! Go burn in Diyu.”

In the same instant, his hand moved and a golden, eye-searing symbol hit the stele above her—

…

She regained consciousness as she crashed onto the ground against the nearby wall, her ears ringing and her vision a wavering mess of blotchy afterimages. The top of the stele a few metres away was a melted ruin that glowed a rather lurid greenish-yellow in the gloom, wreathed in devouring yang haze and strange, unfamiliar flower petals.

There was no sign of the squirrel.

“You cursed thing!” the blue-robed youth, that most of her still wanted to think of as ‘Di Ji’, howled.

Di Ji abruptly spun and grabbed another squirrel out of somewhere. As she looked on, horrified, he crumpled the small red furred animal between his hands and then unscrewed its body gratuitously before throwing it aside.

"If you’re not dead, I’ll find you and make gloves out of your hide—”

However, even as the sad remains of the little creature hit the floor, his words vanished into the gloom of the shaft.

The temperature plummeted and she had a vertiginous sensation of something inexplicably changing all around them. What remained of the instinctual voices in her mind were gibbering and screaming, praying to The Queen Mother, the Grandfather of Heaven, Heavenly Tian, Buddha and others besides as all the claustrophobic, smothering humid warmth of the depths flowed away, somehow drawn into the shaft.

{Because of you, that old scholar of calamity stirred from his aeons-old slumber}

The voice that rose, from the depths, made her body shake.

Di Ji had staggered up, now, finally revealed to be not one person but four. Ji Tantai was there, pale-faced and empty eyed. The blue-robed youth she could clearly see was not him, and there was another empty eyed, dark-haired youth. Between them, stood a tall, pale, androgynous beauty, a bronze-coloured, hand-sized metallic cube covered in vision-warping geometric patterns gripped in his hand.

She couldn’t see his face, or the object clearly, but his movements were hurried as he did something to the cube.

It wasn’t her trembling, she realised, it was the whole shaft, or maybe the whole underground world that was trembling.

She couldn’t breathe…

-Space is frozen solid—like an ice cube. Of course, you can’t breathe, a voice added in her mind.

She could see odd black cracks forming against the non-darkness saturating the space.

-How do we know what frozen space looks like? Another voice in her mind asked in confusion.

{Because of YOU our sister had to dream of those painful days once more...}

The words, no more than a whisper, despite seeming to come from everywhere, held a pure, endless rage.

“Damn," the figure holding the cube hissed, in very apparent anger, holding out the cube for the dark-haired youth to spit blood onto. “To think I would have to risk this already—and after I just found it—”

{—Because. Of. You. Our. Dear. Friend. Died.}

It arrived.

Out of the watching dark.

Out of the long years.

Time fled.

Space cowered.

The oppression bowed to it, the darkness saluted it, called it sister and brother... friend.

Absolute suppression rose from the depths like a heaven-sent geas. Total stillness. No space, no time, no fate, no heaven, no earth, just it. Incomprehensible being that it was.

Ten grasping wings of nihility devoid of any concept of colour, yet containing all the shades of creation itself ascended, flowing from the shaft like the corona of a stellar eclipse. At its midst, she thought she saw a shadowy form, lines shifting to form something half-human, half something else, with tails and ears, crowned in a fan of white flowers and golden grass, eyes like dark pits in the twisting lines that contained a devouring intent that suborned everything before it.

The room distorted beneath the shadow of the corona, warping outwards from the edges of the shaft. All its colours twisted apart, edges picked out in black lines. Everything down to the finest lines in the rock was picked out in painful eye-gouging relief. It rolled over the room in a single frozen moment. There was an instant of stillness, like the moment the moon obscures the sun in eclipse and all the onlookers could see the corona.

In the moment before that corona finally arrived, the cube broke apart, spilling multi-coloured light into the frozen reality. The figure holding the cube gasped, and hastily did something to it. There was a tearing sound and then the cube turned into strange symbols that sank into the dark-haired youth. The ten wings coiled around his body, trapping it in the distorted space even as the cube somehow evaded them, dragging all four into it and vanishing into nothingness as if it never was.

{...}

{...}

{...}

The enraged silence seemed to double, then tripple itself for a second and then consumed the distortion and swept upwards into the darkness.

As it rolled over her, everything went black.

It felt like she was floating in a warm ocean, the summer sun caressing her skin, deprived of all her other senses...

—Her vision snapped back into focus, the darkness receding in a jarring moment that felt almost like she had been plucked out of that place, replete with a strange sensation of tearing cloth, and plonked back into her old reality.

…

The room was as it had been—damage to the stele, puddles of smoking blood and the deceased remains of a squirrel included. The only ‘missing’ thing was Di Ji, or any trace of his presence. Rather disturbingly, it was like he had never been there.

She looked down at herself and found that while her appearance was uncannily clean and her superficial injuries and the healing scars from what Ling had inflicted on her were gone, she was... not healed. There was cold deadness in her limbs, a reflection of her true physical condition as she could just about perceive it. Presumably Ling’s was also as it had been down below.

The suppression on her qi was gone at least, but she had no qi in her body at all now, it was totally exhausted…

-Dispersed, a voice whispered in an annoyed manner.

The longer she dwelt on it, the weirder and creepier the healing art Di Ji had used felt. The powerful compelling feeling of intoxicating vitality and a craving to submit that had coursed through her was gone as if it never was. What she had taken for healing...

Closing her eyes she focused on her Vital Qi and winced, finally understanding. He had pulled out her Vital Qi, from her spiritual foundation and turned it into what was sometimes called 'vital overburden'. That over exchange was gone now. It hadn't been used to heal her, just to make her feel like she had been. As an added 'bonus', she was as clean as if she had just been in the bath, utterly disturbing...

-That was soo one of those abilities, you know the ones. Like the scandal with Ha Lian, a nasty voice in her mind posited in a fearful tone.

An art that was designed to twist her emotions and physical condition. A Soul Art, technically a healing art as well, but in this case twisted to evil means. She lay there in silence trying to quell the deep feeling of uncleanliness that was seeping into her mood. Never would she have thought that feeling so 'clean' could make her skin crawl to this degree.

-I am so severing you when I get to that particular realm, just for bringing that up again, she shot back as she scrunched her eyes shut.

-Indeed.

She realised she was shivering uncontrollably, in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature and tried to curl up.

~ Lin Ling – Ancient Ruins ~

Lin Ling pushed herself up off the stone floor, which felt blissfully cool against her skin and tried to piece together what, exactly, had in the name of the nameless fate, happened.

-Well. Where do you want to start? a glum voice in her mind spoke up.

She hit her head on the floor, lightly, trying not to cry. Of course, those voices would still be here.

A bunch of voices, almost like a civil committee for the sanity of one Lin Ling, were all taking up stations, holding a bunch of different memories like identifying signs for her to consider. All ready to make their case to be the ‘real’ one.

All agreed that she hadn’t gone mad in the living area at least. The also all agreed that the ‘feeling’ that she had done something bad there had been later events trying to pry open her fragile mental state to further their own agendas. After that, however, their viewpoints diverged.

One Lin Ling swore she ran back out and in her panic at the oppressive darkness tripped some kind of ward that had caused this whole hallucination until… that was blurry.

The second swore that she had fled upwards and encountered some sealed monstrosity behind one of the doors that twisted her mind and made the shadows speak to her, making her flee downwards in the aftermath.

The third Lin Ling thought she had fled back to the original entrance point, before cautiously making her way upward to a room that had four stele in it. There had been a youth in the room, looking pensively at one of the sealed doorways.

Comparing notes, all three Lin Lings had to concede that in the face of newly emerging evidence, that third scenario was the clear leader.

-He…

Now apparently identified as…

As…

She groaned.

His name was missing, somehow.

She knew it was a he, young, a youth… somehow. The commanding gaze and the hungry eyes that haunted her memories still made her skin hot and her heart palpitate disturbingly just from thinking about ‘him’.

A hand reached through her memories and shook her, hard, one of the Lin Lings was pointing furiously and telling her to get a grip, that she was clearly being influenced by a soul art of some description.

Shuddering she forced the memories of him haunting her to change.

The gaze was now obnoxious, the smile unpleasant, the tone of voice boorish…

‘Scion, Path. Lotus. Body, Gift’

Her mantra took the desired changes and started to work on her memories, unpicking the damage done, albeit in a way that struck her as somewhat odd. Unfortunately, though, even it could not help her grasp the ‘name’ of the youth. The images relating to that just flowed away from her, slipping between her fingers like fine sand or swirling fog. It was like someone had just unpicked that information and the means to connect it meaningfully to anything out of her memories, leaving only a few stray stitches and a less faded bit to signify its original presence.

-There had been a blue and white-gowned youth and uh...?

“…”

She put her head in her hands and groaned again. That name was also gone.

What all Lin Lings could agree on though was that they were familiar.

The gaudy purple and green gowned robe the youth wore also seemed to occupy an inordinate amount of her memories in regards to him, even to the point of obscuring his face in the few more coherent memories that remained – she apparently had seen him at a distance in the Blue Gate School, over a week before this whole mess even started, for example.

-Clearly it was an artefact designed to stop us remembering him.

-Clearly.

-Certainly, this is so.

The gaudy purple and green gown certainly was memory searing, she had to concede.

After that promising progress though, it all got jumbled again. She watched them bicker back and forth until they finally had another shared moment of clarity regarding the trip back down.

After whatever divergent experience had occurred before the encounter with the Juni 'Not-Juni' thing?

She had been so perturbed by her obsession with the caverns below and their assertion that the other shaft…

-No, a voice cut in. It hadn’t been like that.

Another, a fifth voice entered the fray, pointing out that the other voices were not thinking about this right, that her conflict in her own head about the other shafts had been because someone else wanted them to go there and see if there were other things of interest down here.

A sixth added that she wanted to find a different exit, because of the devouring darkness.

Watching it go back and forth, she had to wonder if part of it wasn’t her sub-conscious, aware that she was… had been under whatever influence and skittishly trying to find ‘ways out’.

That wasn’t a pleasant thought at all. They fell to bickering about the minutiae of things and the fourth Lin Ling, who hoped she was the real one, held her head, because it was starting to hurt, a lot.

Eventually, though, she collected enough of herself to sit up properly and take in her surroundings.

The space they were in was an octagonal depression at the top of the shaft, the ceiling above lost somewhere in the gloom that exceeded her current vision. The only light in the space was currently originating from the faint haze on the floor nearby…

That brought other unpleasant memories to the fore, starting with the very discomforting emptiness in her body, like someone had pulled something very fundamental away from her. It was confusing on quite a few levels until she tried to use her mantra on something other than her mental state and all she got was a deeply sickening twinge in her stomach that spread through her whole body in less than a heartbeat, looking for… something… that wasn’t there.

Equally disturbingly, it took her far too long to realise what that ‘something’ was, almost as if something had tried to remove any idea of ‘it’ from her memories as well.

-I have no qi… none at all…

-Really, that shouldn’t be possible… Unless—!!!

Panicking, her heart suddenly thudding away in her chest, she reached for her cultivation base—

She exhaled, relief washing away terror. It was still there.

On the other hand, her body now felt like one massive bruise. She was sure she had been healed at some point in the jumbled mess of prior events?

Focusing on that memory, she was left with a strange feeling of cold discomfort creeping through the core of her body for a few seconds, while the memory itself slipped away like a fish in a muddy river. In annoyance, she hit the ground beside her and winced as jarring pain shot up her right arm.

-No qi, no reinforcement, bad idea, a voice giggled.

Ignoring it, she fumbled with her storage talisman, only to stare blankly as the connection with her mind’s eye to its contents showed her absolutely fate-thrashed nothing of value.

-You were robbed by eye-searing robe guy, a memory pointed out.

She scrunched up her eyes and fought the instinct to just scream in rage. As much because of the laughter from the voices lingering in her head, as if her misfortune somehow wasn’t their misfortune.

After a few deep breaths later, she looked again and found that she still had a bunch of qi replenishment and fasting pills left. She swallowed one of the qi pills down, grimacing at how sweet it felt. The residual warmth from it was eaten up in seconds by her bones…

“Oh for fates-sakes...” she groaned and looked again at her body's condition.

Her vital qi was mostly intact, thankfully, but all the qi refined into her bones – her physical foundation – had been scattered, just like what had been in her dantian. It would replenish, this wasn’t the first time she had had that injury, but it would take dozens of qi pills or spirit herbs and leave her nauseous and in agony for days to come.

Grimacing, she ate a second qi replenishment pill, then continued her examination of the room while she waited for her body to absorb it.

The style of the carvings that covered everything were very similar to the first complex she had explored while the floor around her was also covered in the same motif carvings. The first layer of the eight walls were about three metres high and had pairs of stairs ascending on four of the faces to an upper layer. Each side of the pit had a stele-like slab set into the wall by the stairs that ascended. So four stele…

-Three-and-a-half stele, one of the voices absently pointed out.

“…”

Shaking her head, she tried to ignore it, telling herself firmly that she would have noticed that anyway.

Now her darkvision was thoroughly gone, and she was seeing things in gloomy colour. The relevant, half melted one was still smouldering with green fire and she was not blind.

Speaking of colour, the rock wasn’t as half as ‘dark’ as she had originally thought. Everything was carved from a sort of blueish stone with the same texture as fine marble, but no marbling in it and a remarkably uniform grain beneath her…

She looked down at herself and realised that aside from a few remaining bits of luss cloth on her arms, all of her other clothes were functionally destroyed. Memories again flickered to the forefront – She recalled throwing one of the clay jars of blood at the youth. A lot had landed on her as well, it seemed?

-But in that case, why am I not still rolling around in agony?

No voice in her head seemed to know or if it did, it wasn’t telling.

While she was still trying to work that out, two other things caught her eye.

The first was the motifs themselves seemed to be darker than the surrounding stone but had a faint external glow – now her eyes were adjusting properly she could see them faintly illuminating everything at a very low level – picking out edges on most things.

The second was the slumped form on the ground next to the melted stele.

Her dulled confusion at that other form was abruptly dispelled as the Lin Ling committee for her own sanity finally finished their deliberations and bits of memories were set in place one after another. Recompiling their ‘notes’ if she could call them that and shuffling the order of events in a disturbingly dispassionate manner as they did so. It was, she felt, a bit like her mother shuffling business accounts she didn’t quite agree with.

She stared at the slumped form of… Juni?

It was Juni, lying on her side, next to the oblique wall to the side of the stele. She looked…

She stared at the strangeness of her friend’s condition for several moments. On the one hand, Juni looked far too clean and beautiful—she was also very naked, just like she herself was—yet the longer she looked the more wrung out and exhausted Juni seemed behind that ‘beauty’. It didn't help that memories were suggesting Juni should have a nasty scar on her stomach and shoulder, another on her back, on her face and neck… now, however, she looked almost unnaturally unblemished.

A quick check told her that while she, too felt like she had been hit by hammers, much of the visible scarring from the blood to her face and body was lessened – a purely superficial mask on her current condition.

-Remember that memory of being 'healed'? another voice added grimly.

“Uggh...”

Again, she rubbed her temples. That certainly explained the lack of scarring, except it didn’t, because the healing should have occurred in a hazy set of memories before she threw the blood all over the place just now?

She tried to put her blurring memories back in place, but they just wouldn't sit.

-Confusing.

-Too fate-thrashed confusing.

She pushed herself to her knees and noted at the same time that Juni’s face was… off – her complexion was slightly too pale and wan?

-You did probably catch her in the face when you smashed the jar into the attacker, a voice helpfully clarified for her.

-What a bizarre art, a different part of her mumbled.

Another part of her suggested that whatever the healing was might still have been in effect for a while after she threw blood all over…

-I… I broke a jar of the blood over Juni?

It made her head hurt just trying to focus on the events so she gave up in the end, it was that or linger rather unpleasantly over how she might have almost killed Juni.

-And it would have been your fault… a malicious little voice hissed, before she managed to swat it away…

-All

-Your

-Fault!

“…”

She was swearing at it when she realised that Juni was now looking at her, her slightly glazed expression reminiscent of someone trying to process their surroundings and probably some very weird memory distortions and dissociations. There was little doubt in her mind anymore though, among any of the Lin Lings actually, that this was the real 'Juni'.

As much so she didn’t seem like she was staring, she turned back to the stele beside Juni. It was thoroughly destroyed, it's upper half melted somehow. Taking in the damage it looked like someone had raked their fingers through the rock, disturbing whatever was written there and even managed to break the motif around the outside. Beside it was another small tattered form of a mangled, dark furred two-tailed squirrel.

“I very much doubt the squirrel is actually dead, so you need not worry about your tormentor’s fate on that account” Juni’s voice sounded odd and echoing in the space.

“What...?”

Her memories and the other Lin Lings started to answer that, but it started to exacerbate the headache something horrid, almost preventing her from being able to match words to thoughts.

“What… just happened?” she asked, succeeding this time as she shooed the voices away as best she could and focused on Juni.

“Hard to say,” Juni sounded older than her years—positively weary, in fact, and winced. “Ahh don’t look that concerned A’Ling… I’m, Ah—just suffering from qi-depletion. I’ll be okay in a while. Assuming some other abomination or mind-bending horror doesn’t appear in the meantime.”

She flinched at Juni's expression as much as the fact that she had just called her A'Ling. The broken look that had flitted across her face for a moment made her skin crawl.

“AH—AHAAahaaa…”

She started looking around in panic for the laughter, before realising that it was her.

One of the other Lin Lings had thought that understatement hilarious and taken it upon themselves to laugh out loud on her behalf. She suppressed it back into silence, trying to ignore how Juni was just 'looking' at her... with far to much understanding, somehow, and crawled over to the wall to sit beside where Juni was slumped.

“H-h-here…” she mumbled, rummaged in her mostly empty storage talisman and gave Juni one of the pills, watching her swallow it with a grimace.

To her mild surprise, she still had drinking water as well, so she offered Juni some of that. The older woman smiled wanly and gulped it down, straight out of the reservoir container before tipping a reasonable bit over her face and scrubbing it hard before passing it back.

She drank some herself for good measure. It was lukewarm.

After that they both sat there in silence, staring at the shaft. It was hard to know what to say really. After a long moment, Juni just put her arm around her shoulder.

…

It took them both about thirty agonizing minutes to recover enough qi to reach the point where either of them were able to stand. After that, it was mostly a matter of taking stock.

The fact that she had held most of their spirit herbs ate away at a part of her mind as Juni divided a bunch of purification pills and other medical oddments from her own supply.

–With Arai and Sana lost somewhere, and Han Shu…

She trailed off, swiftly patted herself down before checking in her talisman again, dumping everything out in front of her, just to be sure.

“Fates… they stole my fate-thrashed talisman,” she hissed after several moments of frenetic searching.

“He stole what?” Juni blinked at her, clearly not following.

She put her head in her hands and groaned. “Whoever… when all the other stuff in there was filched, he took my pavilion talisman as well!”

“Oh…” Juni put her arm around her and gave her a hug, of sorts, trying to be sympathetic she supposed. It did help, but...

She stared again at what she had, now scattered before her. For whatever reason, Arai and Sana’s talismans were still in there, wrapped up with a bunch of other oddments. That he hadn’t taken those was odd.

“Wait…” something Juni had just said caught up to her. “You remember who did this to us?” she frowned.

“I…” Juni’s tone grew complex, and a bit distant.

“I… don’t have any memory of it,” she said after a moment. Her voice sounded very quiet in her own ears. “All I can see is the robe – green and purple – and that fate-thrashed smile. No other features, no name, no nothing…”

“Oh…” Juni still sounded… weird, but didn’t pass any further comment.

It took a while after that before she felt capable of walking about. The first thing was to sort out some kind of clothing. Between the two of them, they were able to fashion enough to give them both some crude tunics. Her hand wraps were still with her. The piece of luss cloth that she had been wearing around her head and shoulders was also somewhere below. It was nowhere around here unless it had been thrown down the shaft.

Skirting the blood, she thought it annoying that they had no more…

Her gaze fell pensively on a pile of abandoned pots stacked near a far door. There was, in fact, a surprising amount of clutter up here; an overturned table on the far side, several stacks of pots and bowls… even what appeared to be a few broken stone crates piled up on the far side of the shaft.

Curious, she walked over to the nearest stack of pots. There was no instinctual fear against disturbing them, like she had experienced in the complex below, so she experimentally tried to lift one.

“…”

To her surprise, it was only a bit heavier than normal but no worse than any large ceramic or stone container back home. More surprising was that they were storable.

“What do we need those for?” Juni asked, coming over to stand beside her.

“We could do with some more of the blood…”

-If he left any, a voice added in her mind.

Juni involuntarily reached up to her face, an expression akin to a shadow flickering there…

She grimaced, again having to quell a scattering of taunting, smirking voices and clarified what she meant. “It can get us through doors and such, or seems able to, due to being so rich in qi.”

“Oh… Mmmmm,” Juni nodded after a moment and then also started going through the pile, selecting and storing what she could in her own storage talisman.

…

The trip down the shaft was nothing like she remembered. Gone was the hunger and the horror of the dark. Now the ambience was just oppressive and smothering. It also took much less time than any memory of the previous trips had led her to believe. Within fifteen minutes, they were standing in the cavern staring at the remains. None of her inner voices were particularly happy about that. Most of the blood cake was gone, as more worryingly were many of the smaller bones, teeth and pieces of shell. She assumed the youth took all of them, leaving only a few small puddles of the blood in out of the way places. It was still just as qi rich and dangerous, but thanks to the remaining luss fibre cloth, and by virtue of having two people rather than one, between them they managed to get ten smallish containers safely half-filled with no mishaps beyond some minor burns from the yang rich haze. Their qi depletion issues also rapidly resolved themselves as they worked away in such a qi saturated place.

“It seems he tried to take the arborundum vein as well,” Juni noted, directing her gaze towards the back of the cavern.

Looking over at the titular vein, someone had indeed made a spirited attempt at trying to carve it out of the rock and eventually given up it seemed. There were what looked like several fist imprints on the wall nearby as well, which made her feel a bit better.

Surveying the cavern, she also found a few more lumps of congealed meat paste scattered in the farther reaches. Presumably, they remained because they were too small to be of interest to her tormentor. She had cleared out the majority of the biggest pools before. That all that painstaking effort had just been snatched away by someone else was a perpetual knot of twisted anger in her gut at this point.

The other stop was the lower cavern, to recover her other bits of luss cloth. She also recovered the two bits of congealed blood she had thrown before and scraped up what remained of the actual blood from the jar she had used. Her memories had largely properly orientated themselves it seemed, so standing there looking down further into the shaft, she was pretty certain she hadn’t gone lower than this point.

That assertion, combined with Juni being fairly adamant that only bad things lurked further down, led to the returning up the shaft fairly quickly once all the various bits they need to recover had been collected.

Returning to the top, Juni immediately went over to look at the undamaged stele while she continued sorting out jars of blood.

“I see now why they vandalised that stele,” Juni said at last, sighing in frustration.

“You do?” she frowned, glancing over at it, then the one Juni was currently standing beside. “I can’t make head nor tail of what’s on them.”

“The other two appear to be pure gibberish, but this one gives directions,” Juni mused. "The one on that side seems to have been an explicit explanation of something. This stele also alludes to it a bit. The place we are in is apparently the top level of ‘Shaft Two’.”

“So where is this Shaft One?” she felt beholden to ask after they had considered the stele for a long moment in silence.

The one controlling her had been quite keen on going to check that out. It was a disturbing memory, hearing the hunger in his voice as he commanded her to reply to Juni. How it remained when others were unclear she wasn't sure.

“Somewhere… uh, that way,” Juni pointed to their right and down vaguely. “It had a big danger warning for it on the stele below, so I came this way instead.”

“When you… say 'big' danger?” she nudged Juni, as she was still skimming the stele.

“Oh…Ummm” Juni frowned for a moment. “Golden Immortal grade threat at least—and a warning about whatever realm a 'Mystic Law Lord' is.”

“Mystic Law Lord?” she turned the words over in her mouth. They sounded weird. “What kind of realm is that?”

-A stupid one.

“You ask me, but who am I meant to ask?” Juni ran her hands across her face absently as she shook her head slowly. “Anyway. That way,” she pointed up and left. “That is apparently the direction of the left junction into someplace called the ‘High Scholars’ Halls’.”

“—And the other way?” she glanced over the far side. That was the direction of the ruined stele.

“Give me a moment,” Juni was frowning. “It’s not easy, the words are… Ah… okay.”

“That way,” Juni pointed behind them. “Leads to the ‘Central Upper Hall’ and something it refuses to translate coherently. As for what is beyond the ruined stele, that seems to be ‘Access to’ then something like cages, security, prison and burial along with a place that again refuses to translate in a logical way. It keeps trying to say something like ‘Under Hall N’, or maybe ‘Under the Hall’. In any case, the ‘security access’ needed to go there is apparently [Super] ‘Sovereign’ and [Great Circle Sovereign].”

She was about to ask what realm that was, before Juni cut her off with a wave of her hand and an apologetic grimace.

“Please don’t ask. I have no idea what that might be equivalent to up above, but certainly they are important and powerful realms or ranks.”

She nodded as Juni went on: “The various stele below had all kinds of weird ranks and threat ratings on them as well. Stuff like ‘Big Mystic Hundred Leader’ or ‘Mystic Law Lord’. Even the shaft below had warnings on a lot of doors saying that access was only allowed for stuff like ‘Lantern Becomes’ and ‘Elder of Words’ or ‘Wanderer of Paths’. Certainly, they are all words or titles, but whatever the stele are doing to transmit the words or help me understand them cannot find the right word in my own vocabulary in any of the languages I know to translate them.”

Looking in the direction of the supposed ‘Under Hall N’ she was sure that that was the direction she had gone with the youth after first encountering him here and him discovering her blood…

“That way, beyond the ruined stele, is where I think I went with the youth who attacked us and… controlled... me,” she supplied eventually.

It was hard to even say it. Part of her mind just wanted to blot out the whole ordeal, pretend it hadn’t happened. There were still huge blanks in her memory outside of the flitting moments that he had clearly allowed her to remember.

“Is it now?” Juni said pensively. “He was certainly very keen that that stele get annihilated.”

They both stared at the ruined stele again. It was still glowing faintly, over an hour, if her timekeeping was right, after it had been attacked.

“Let’s try one of the other ways first,” she suggested at last.

“Yes,” Juni said in agreement, her voice sounding a bit weird again. “Lets.”