Memories of the Fall

...The question of heaven’s eyes within the Yin Eclipse Mountains is one that has gone around and around in circles for as long as people have tried unpicking its secrets, so there is no reason to bore you with the long list of failures in this report. However, undoubtedly our own Fates seem somewhat blind to the happenings within it, and that is not for lack of trying both amidst our own influence and others to ensure otherwise.

But what I will tell you in this report, is my own experience… if any force of the heavens genuinely has eyes in that place, it clearly works through those damn squirrels; nothing else can really account for the strange geometry of chance they effect on the success and failure of any endeavour which crosses their path in those deep places. Without their crossing we would certainly have died to that lizard abomination, more ghost than being.

~Excerpt from a report on traversing the Inner Valleys

Authored by Han Ouyeng

~ Jun Sana, The Herb Hunters ~

Sana cursed the water, and the crappy path, and also the Ha family for good measure, although that last one was probably futile. Ahead of her crouched her sister: just a few hours older than her, but sometimes it felt like years existed between them, particularly in moments like this. She liked to needle Arai for being a bit staid but, after Juni, she was the least flappable of the lot of them probably. Certainly that was the case when faced with crazy situations, one of which currently sat in the middle of the path looking as cute as some noble lady’s pet. About fourteen centimetres tall with two tails and pointy ears, the koppi squirrel with its beautiful earthen-tone fur looked – and there was no avoiding it – cute. It was, however, a known mutate with an impressive list of incidences to its name, assuming they were all the same squirrel. It was also at least a seven-star ranked critter, with an innate earth corrosion attribute. That it wasn't ranked higher was probably because it mostly lurked in the lower and middle valleys and there was a lot of debate in the file over whether it was active or passive. To those in the Beast Cadre it was almost talismanic; however, it was undeniably also a notorious bully of teams of Hunters and frequently robbed them of both pills and harvests.

Currently this cute, twin-tailed 'menace' was happily perched on Lin Ling’s head, nibbling one of her food pills. It was doing nothing awkward beyond this, but its earth corrosion aura sat over the whole path, like a fluffy blanket. While part of had to genuinely admire the squirrel's control over it, the rest of her just hoped it kept that control, or they would be leaf loam before they could blink. Ling was sweating profusely; even in the misty rain, you could see the steam rising off her neck. The younger woman was probably cursing everything under the cloud-drenched sky as well. Do you try to bait it off, or do you just gamble it will leave when it finishes eating the pill? That was the question that sat in everyone’s mind now, even though it had not been verbalized. Their trip over the last two days had been... if not hard going, somewhat beset by a certain nervous tension that this encounter wasn't helping at all.

Juni and Han Shu had leapt at the chance to get out of town. Both had experienced difficult requests that seemed tailored to cause them trouble in the previous week it turned out. Han Shu had been nearly crippled by a ‘stickwork miner plant’ that had been erroneously reported as a ‘wandering thorn veil’ and had to pay a small fortune to the local healer to get the wound patched up satisfactorily. Juni had apparently been designated two consecutive missions to escort young masters from minor local noble families between here and Blue Water City. Both trips had been awful by the sounds of it: her charges had been five times Juni's age and, while her request had been to educate them on the common and alchemical uses of a bunch of variant local herbs, they had been much more interested in trying to make her the mission than in learning anything about alchemy. Fortunately, neither was particularly skilled at cultivation and Juni's effective strength was close to that of a Golden Core expert, so the harassment was entirely psychological given her family’s status as a distant branch of the northern continent’s Kun clan.

The remaining member of their field group, Lin Ling, was carefully looking through a jade scrip, reading up on the previous encounters with this occasional menace, even as it sat on her head. She had also been called to Blue Water City, to advise some students of the Blue Gate School apparently. It had only been when one of them exploded a pill cauldron next to her that she was permitted to return home on ‘remedial leave’, and she had practically fled the Lin compound when asked to come, nearly running out of town directly rather than come to the Hunter Pavilion for supplies.

Returning to the critter on hand she watched, with bated breath, as it finished its pill under their nervous gaze and then turned to stare at them one after another. There was nothing they could do to actually harm it. Seven stars meant it was effectively untouchable down here, even ignoring its earth corrosion aura covering everything. She wasn’t going to even go there; she had no intention of getting turned into loam today. Absolutely not.

With a flicker, the koppi squirrel was suddenly in front of her instead. Lin Ling exhaled and carefully sat down, divesting herself of the pill pouch containing food pills for safety.

The squirrel sniffed at her bag and pawed at it a little. Cautiously they all watched as she pulled it off and offered it to the animal. It poked at it once more than gave a vexed chirp. Fearing that it would use its mutate strength on her precious bag, she carefully pulled it open and tipped out the contents, mostly food pills and some miscellaneous herbage they had gathered along the way for injuries. Her storage jade was what held the real kit. The squirrel picked up a pill bottle and turned it over in its paws twice, shook it carefully, then licked the top. If a squirrel could look pensive it probably would have. Then it held up the bottle and, to the shock of all five of them, gave a small bow, tipped both tails flat to the ground and in a flicker seemed to fall straight into the earth, pill bottle and all.

The aura of earth qi flowed away after it, like water down a drain, and they all exhaled and slumped to the ground.

She stared at the place it vanished for a good twenty seconds before vocalising the thought all of them had. “Did that squirrel just thank me formally for stealing a bottle of fever breaking pills?”

~ Ha Kai, Old Ancestor of the Ha Family ~

Some forty miles away, on the outskirts of West Flower Picking Town, in a spacious compound lined with cherry trees and the occasional statue of a sagacious-looking cultivator, that was somehow not quite within the confines of the world around it if you looked really closely, two old men sat. The one in youthful middle age, who was dressed in rather garish colours, yet had the air of a 'weird old grandpa' in the way he held himself, sighed and pushed the hand of cards away.

“Son… there are only so many times this old mind will take your cheating ways.”

The older-looking man, who was taller by a head and thin, with a beard that made him look like a Confucian scholar, schooled his slightly harried remonstration and replied, “The only thing that’s 'cheating' here is your memory of how to play ‘Nine Sages’ Stars’.”

His father frowned for a moment and said, without any hint of self-reflection, “Hmm... perhaps you’re right.”

Leaning back, he reclined on thin air and starred at the cherry tree above them. “So, what is so important that you had to get your old man to exit his cultivation century two years early to solve the problem?”

Ha Kai, Old Ancestor of the Ha clan, grimaced. “You know we have rules, right?”

His father, Ha Tai, the 2nd Hermetic, Original Ancestor of the Ha… of the original Ha family in fact, before they ever became a clan, now relegated to the status of an orthodox branch due to later politicking neither the old man nor he himself had cared much for, sighed deeply.

The cherry blossoms in the whole garden fell like rain.

“What have my idiot descendants done that is going to cause me so much vexation that you haul me out just to vex me in advance, boy?”

Ha Kai reshuffled the cards and sorted the jade stone counters keeping track of scores back into their pots while he composed his thoughts. The cherry buds on the trees regrew and bloomed once more, bright green this time rather than pink.

“I recall you went into the interior, with that promising lad who is now called Blue Water Sage?”

His father gave him a disinterested glance before returning to looking at the scroll with the ‘rules’ of the card game they were playing on it.

“I did. Effing nightmare it was too. Never stood in a place simultaneously so beautiful and so singularly full of deathly peril in my life before or since. Why...? Has one of our idiot scions gotten himself lost in there? If he has, just write the bugger off and be done with it.”

“Sadly, it is nothing so easy to deal with, Father,” he sighed, passing the deck to the old man to deal this time.

Ha Tai picked up the shuffled deck and started to deal, placing cards on a map of the world in accordance to their starting positions. “Go on…”

“Apparently two young nobles from the Imperial Continent—" he was cut off by his father’s snort.

“Names, boy… any two ‘Young Nobles’ from the Imperial continent is like pointing at a lake and going ‘so about these fish’….” The old man managed to make that sound both denigrating and demeaning just by invective, which was quite impressive really.

He winced. It was easy to forget that the old man demanded specificity, especially when you dealt with idiots who were congenitally allergic to it all the time. “The Huang Heavenly Clan’s Wuli Branch, their ‘hidden’ heir in the eighth generation, Huang JiLao and an Imperial Princess, the daughter of Concubine Lian, Dun Lian Jing according to an old friend in the Blue Pavilion.”

“Dunno ‘em,” his father grumbled. “Must be untried. Does the Huang clan have an eighth generation in this realm? Those strutting peacocks move fast… or did they accidentally kill off anyone of merit in the seventh?”

“Huang Leng is still alive," he noted with amusement.

"More’s the pity," his father muttered, making him wonder in passing what minor misfortune Huang Leng had brought upon himself.

"The boy appears to be the actual son of Huang Leng…" he pointed out. "The grandson of Huang Gao Wuli in fact, although the Huang clan is keeping it well hidden. There is no other reason Lady Ju Shan would hover around like an evil songbird unless for something like that, though."

“Ah…” the old man considered his first move, the mention of Lady Shan barely eliciting a twitch from him. “I am still not seeing why this is worth disrupting my cultivation isolation?”

“The girl is rather unexceptional for an Imperial Princess, beyond her possession of a somewhat odd minor connate physique… what is important is that her teacher is the emperor’s youngest sibling, Dun Jian,” he went on, watching the old man carefully to make sure he didn’t double-deal his cards ‘accidentally’.

“Dun Jian? Doesn’t he teach all the Imperial Spawn of the ‘Right’? I was sure someone would have offed him by now, obnoxious young fellow, always staring up his own importance and believes far too much in gaming fate and not enough in thinking about Fate to be healthy.”

His father started to flip cards, revealing five in total. “It seems my starting hand this time is a bit more auspicious… hah. ‘Star of Sages’ and ‘Nine Long Dragons’.”

With a polite cough, he corrected the old man’s mistake. “That’s ‘Long Nine Dragons’ father...”

“…”

“Here, let me see...” he blandly made a show of re-inspecting the board and the cards. “Actually it is my unfilial eyes that are false dear father, you are in fact quite correct. It is ‘Nine Long Dragons’ in the auspicious alignment.”

Mollified, the old man nodded and continued, “Quite so... Quite so... Very auspicious hmmmmm”

“So… erm, Father,” he returned to his original point. “I need to know what exactly happened when you went into the rift with Teacher Lu all those years ago. Dun Jian was part of the group that went… after? Right?”

“You need to know? Or my unfilial descendants need to know?” the old man narrowed his eyes as he pored over the board, considering which card to flip next.

“I need to know.” Some stressed inflection crept into his voice for the first time. “Our... as you put it so succinctly, 'unfilial descendants' have decided to hug the collective leg of the Din family."

"The runts in charge of the Jade Gate Court?"

"The same," he nodded.

"That old fucker isn't dead? Didn’t I tell you to let me know if he ever steps past their sect gate?" his father scowled.

"....."

He shook his head. His father's enmity with the old ancestors of the Din was a thing that went all the way back to the previous Imperial Dun Dynasty, to their founders.

"Anyway... the Din clan has some connection with the merchant upstarts near South Grove that supplanted the Lin clan—"

"The Lin clan got supplanted?" his father cut in. "That bugger Lin Rong owes me Jade... is he dead?"

"..."

"Some merchant upstart’s son from near South Grove Town... erm... South Watch Boundary Crossing, fished out a piece of one of these from the river down there and promptly handed it over to those two.”

He finally managed to complete the point he was trying to make without interruption and pushed a small grey stone slip across the table.

About nine by twelve centimetres in size and about one centimetre, deep the 'child slate' contained a series of interlocking circular patterns, each of which themselves contained a shifting moon rune. The middle rune stabilized as they looked at it and read ‘Unity Shifts Formation Basic Script Array – Annotated teaching aid [$5_5&t9_A%@]’.

His father stared at the tablet, then at him, then back at the tablet.

“Why the bloody blazes didn’t you LEAD with that piece of information in the first place you dithering—”

The words were cut off as the space disintegrated. His father hadn't put any qi in it, yet that was still enough to collapse the world this place generated temporarily. No air meant no sound. They stared around at the empty space in which they now sat, containing only the game board and the cards, untouched.

This was going to take a while, he reflected. His father, half the Great World away, reappeared as a shady image and slowly the spatial realm re-manifested and their joined space reformed through the connection of the parent and child artefacts. This time as a pagoda in an idyllic lake surrounded by cherry trees.

He still found it curious that cherry trees were always a feature of the worlds the ‘Unity Shifts’ formation conjured. Each one could be weird as the day was long, but always cherry trees, and never in their normal or natural colours. These ones were… indigo. The formation array was their secret; even among the Ha clan, father and son had never passed it on. It was the sole thing 2nd Ancestor had brought out of the heart of the Yin Eclipse Mountains when he entered with his old school friend Meng Shulai. Shulai had long travelled beyond the confines of this world, giving up his status as an ancestor in the Seven Sovereigns Imperial School to voyage into the depths of the cosmos. His father had entered once since, with the Blue Water Sage, around thirty thousand years ago… but brought nothing out of that trip except a foul temper it seemed.

They stared pensively at this particular version of the stele. It had been given to him when the old man went into seclusion, by his grandmother, as means to contact him in case something so preposterously insane occurred that the old recluse’s capabilities would actually be required to deal with it. The master stele never left his father’s side as far as he could tell.

The artefact itself was, he had found over the last fifty thousand years, utterly remarkable. It was capable of forming a formation that opened up a separate world without any disturbance, without any anomalies, that was as stable as the ‘real’ one in which he still sat staring pensively out over the blue sea from his clifftop villa north of the regional capital. Within, it was possible to completely customise the innate qi attributes of the environment you trained in. It also seemed able to do something strange with time if you killed chickens in it and occasionally would spawn a small altar upon which the words “They see me severing, they hating, but I severing still” and “Teacher told me to write lines so I would get better, but all I ever seem to do is write more lines for teacher?” could be read, depending on whether the chicken killed was male or female, but that was largely ignored by both of them these days. Artefacts this powerful always had... oddities. And that was by no means the oddest thing about a stele that anyone could use.

"So they found another? Is it a Unity Shifts one?" the old man asked eventually.

"No... It seems to belong to a new one and is heavily damaged. All it says is 'Yin Eclipse W-'"

"Oh... hmm... that's probably from the ruins near the torrents then, where they flow out of the underground caverns below East Fury," his father sighed. "I am surprised that someone hasn't moved to take it off them already. Meng Fu is quick like that."

"It seems they walked right into the Blue Pavilion with it." He smiled wryly at that. How ironic that they waltzed right into the only influence in this region more likely to take their plans and bend them into hoops than the Meng Imperial Ancestor's current project.

"..."

His father just shook his head at that. "Does Dun Jian want to die childless in this generation?"

"I very much doubt Dun Jian is childless within this generation based on what I know of him," he said with an eye roll. "With any luck though, this one is just a warding formation or an access key. If it has a celestial law in it..." he added.

They both paused to admire the inner workings of the complete universal law that were still clearly on display in the sky above. It was visible if, like his old man, you let your aura get out of control to the point where you ‘broke’ things. Yet, it never provoked any form of tribulation, ever, that either had observed, and not for lack of trying since they had started corresponding through it once a millennia. Not even the sneaky little grey lotus blossoms or the invisible eldritch cat spirits that came when you talked too much about gravity.

His father chuckled. "I suspect this is quite unique...the work of an eccentric artist."

He did agree with that assessment. This relic set was rather special in all sorts of odd ways, perhaps even more so than the one in the Blue Pavilion. Even so... having never been inside the remnants, he had to ask...

“Father... Is there any chance at all that one of those… erm… anyone among the younger generations will make any headway with that place?”

“…”

The old man stared at him with eyes that were both deeply judging and just a little bit haunted. “Not a fates-thrashed chance in the celestial realms. That place views people of the calibre of moral fibre espoused by our world’s current ten generations as fertilizer for the laws of entropy... at best.”

~ Lu Ji, Headmaster of the Blue Gate School ~

In the Blue Gate School, another family pair were having a similar kind of conversation. The Blue Gate School headmaster sat in a chamber at the pinnacle of the Blue Town Pavilion, sweating profusely. Lu Ji had finally conquered his shame and done a terrible thing: he had gone to seek out his aunt to make this mess her problem as much as his. For this, he guessed, fate would probably judge his soul harshly. In front of him a shimmering figure, a youthful-looking brown-haired woman with charmingly severe eyebrows and a short scar on her temple, was glaring out at him. Without the scar and the perpetual frown, she would actually be a peerless beauty…

“Revered and most Serene Ancestral—”

“Auntie.” The room shivered slightly as she spoke. “Calling me by that preposterous title that the current imperial boy ‘awarded me’ to make his position more secure makes me feel like the world has both passed me by and paused to spit in my tea at the same time.”

She glanced out towards the Blue School, visible in the distance over the rooftops, its great buildings shimmering in the first sun. “I can feel your fear Ji, and while it is, perhaps warranted at a purely visceral level for one of your talents...”

She put down her teacup. "At least try to pretend you aren't a scared little child about to see his heirloom toy broken.

“It is not the attitude the future ‘head’ of the family should have. You care too much for the trappings of the thing your uncle and father built. So what if some brats come and kick it over. Compared to our…your Grand Uncle’s legacy, it is nothing. Even if they pull it up root and branch, overturning the sod 3 feet and sifting the soil, they will not find the thing their teacher seeks.”

Lu Ji could only nod, but carefully; their family was one that many in the Imperial Court would have considered upstart commoners, under normal circumstances anyway. This was wilfully ignoring, of course, that they were a lineage of cultivators stretching back at least two million years and counting among its number seven advisors to previous Emperors in the past dynasties, not including his own ‘Great Grand Aunt’ who sat in front of him, along with founders of two dozen different schools who had all achieved renown or influence in their generations, and currently possessing one of the foremost alchemy canons on any continent. All that mattered to the Imperial Court was that they were 'common-born’, at the start of it all. It was a piece of wonderful dissonance on the part of their current generations that they managed to ignore that his revered ancestors were, simply put, terrifying old freaks.

Most had, however, left the confines of the Eastern Azure Great Realm over the aeons, thankfully. Of those who remained, only his 'aunt' Lady Xiao, who was nominally considered as his Grand Uncle’s mother’s sister, still paid attention to family matters... mainly because she had hung around this pagoda for the last thirty thousand-odd years like the old ghost she most definitely was not. He had to admit that while she was hard to talk to, and her presence here could be a trial, especially when she decided to turn her gaze elsewhere for whatever reason, she was also one of the few people he could talk to about this mess safely.

In the last week and a half, the Blue Gate School had undergone a quiet revolution in many ways that exceeded the usual definition of ‘mess’ by any real, reasonable, standard. Almost a dozen young masters from noble families with branches in this part of the world and roots on the Imperial Continent had arrived. All with invitations to join the school from a dozen influences to whom the Blue Gate School had trading agreements or owed complicated favours. The strength of the school, which lay in its economic influence, in the region was embarrassingly vulnerable to that he had to admit. Mainly because his father had been an overly trusting idiot, it had to be said. While it had cultivation powerhouses – not counting himself – the school had five old ancestors; two teachers from his grandfather’s generation and three from his father’s, all at least Dao Lords, – all had been at a loss in the face of what was in effect an annexation of the entire school by the Huang clan and their affiliate influences, with the subtle support of the Imperial Court.

All of them, himself included, had invested a lot in the Blue Gate School and been at great pains throughout the millennia to make sure that the Blue Gate School was never truly associated with their family’s other influence in this city, the Blue Pavilion and its lineage. While any of them could end the new 'disciples' with a mere thought or a whispered word, all were cynical enough to know it would not end there. Despite the obvious transgressions being perpetrated against the school, their reputations and the city’s economic base, that context would count for little.

They would probably survive the reprisals as six old monsters with assets to burn and if all else failed they would shelter here, in the pavilion. However, everyone else in the region would not be so fortunate in all likelihood, simply due to the dynamics of the way the greater nobility across the ocean waged wars of reprisal. While they had all conferred in the past few days and had told, or perhaps assured, him that they were confident in their power – in this case their ability to run away afterwards – they were at heart all unwilling to cause the destruction of everything they had quietly built up over thousands of years just to extricate themselves from what could, when it was all done, just be a minor bit of machination that spilled over into their corner of the world.

And so the Blue Gate School had finally joined the Golden Promise School and the Teng School in the same pit, all effectively under the control of the hidden or supporting influences of a bunch of competing 'young nobles' from the Imperial Continent. None of those old ancestors from the other schools likely knew what the endgame being pushed was though. All of them were younger than he was, which was funny in its own way. He was the only one still in their school, let alone in the other influences here, who had been born back then, a youth of mere decades when Lu Fu Tao returned to found the Blue Pavilion. And yet he had only come to the eastern continent several thousand years ago, so most believed him a member of the previous generation, not the same 'generational era' as his grandfather. It certainly was long after the Blue Pavilion was set up, even long after the Blue Gate School was set up, so it was probably only him, his aunt and the two old monsters in the Ha family amongst the 'outside influences' that knew exactly what the game here really was... what the stake was that was being sought.

-And where it is likely to end, he reflected glumly.

And so a week in the presence of the teeth-grindingly and vexatiously polite oppression of the Huang family’s Young Noble had been enough to make him bury his pride and contact his aunt.

“You are daydreaming, boy. My time is not yours to spend so freely,” his auntie... yes... auntie, because the old mons—

“…”

—Beautiful and maidenly paragon of the family, who could read the thoughts of someone at his realm as easily as others observed the grass and trees around them, was really very understanding...

“While your mental gymnastics are amusing Ji…”

With a light cough, Lu Ji schooled his mind and returned to the matter in hand. “Apologies Fairy Ancestor. There is no chance that those two… or this ‘competition’ the Imperial Court is cooking up independently of them, can actually get anywhere with that place? ...Is there?”

“Your optimism on their behalf is charming, sweet child of the brightest season,” Lady Xiao observed dryly. “I entered that place with your Grand Uncle, as his protector, along with that Ha eccentric among others. That place was… terrifying. In all the wrong ways…”

His aunt shook her head as if she were thinking about something else, which was very unlike her in all honesty. “It was terrifying before... it was terrifying then… it will be terrifying for a small stretch of eternity to come.”

-Right, he mused to himself, thinking about the permutations.

-That is not at all ominous.

Indeed, the place did have a reputation of sorts among the truly elder generations – namely those from the previous Heavens of this Great World – that he had never quite gotten a grasp on. Those on the Imperial Continent, under the umbrella of the Blue Morality Court and the Second Dun Dynasty, all post-dated that generation and had largely ignored or denigrated it. It was only the more independent individuals with terrifying depths behind them, like his ‘auntie’ that treated Yin Eclipse like an alchemical bomb made out of stinking hook bat shit that might explode at any moment as far as he could tell. It made him wonder what they knew that they weren't saying.

Deflating even more, he schooled his thoughts and spoke again. “So what do you recommend?”

Narrowing her eyes, Lu Xiao considered pensively for a few moments.

“Let them have their fun for now. It is not the opportune moment to look into that place once more. During your Grand Uncle’s time, it nearly caused a calamity with what followed. I know the calibre of those young nobles and, knowing what I know of that place, they will probably survive, if only because of the depth of their wallets... assuming they don’t bother the keepers of that place somehow. Those who truly lack eyes may suffer unduly, however. That medicine field we found, for example, was a marvel, and the things at its heart even more so. You need not fear, it was not designed to kill by intention, but therein lies its danger.”

“Because even a beautiful jasmine may cause death if plucked injudiciously, even though no ill is designed or intended by any party…” he quoted back to her. “If I tell them that..?”

Lady Xiao looked at him with a somewhat amused expression. “The depths beneath are not to be trifled with. Enough old paths have led to their inauspicious end there, forgotten by the aeonspan for better or worse…”

He must have let some of his vexation slip because she leaned forward, poking him hard in the chest.

“Good heavens boy, did you fall on your head as a child? Calm your nerves. You are too attached to this school of your father's for one of your realm."

"Tell them nothing," his aunt poked the table. "Let them assume what they want. It is not our concern if they pratfall as a result."

He wasn't sure he totally subscribed to that view... unless his Aunt was willing to really show her hand.

Ignoring his concern, she went on. "Those two and their lackeys have so many threads tied around them that it is a marvel they don’t trip over themselves."

Lu Xiao waved her hand and the two in question, sitting in a teahouse, eating some of the signature herb pastries of the city's Tea District, were visible in the air.

"As far as the competition goes... They will bury ten thousand souls in that place, for naught in all likelihood, and we will do this song and dance again in another thirty thousand years when the generational memory is dull enough that they can convince themselves that this time it will be different.”

He frowned at that, turning back to consider the two. His aunt absolutely had sources beyond anything he could hope for, but he had to wonder what she meant by that. The implication was that there was more than just Dun Jian attached to the two of them?

“At worst, those two will probably be wiser for their escapade, while the hands behind them will be a bit scorched for their arrogance and find their plans not playing out at all in the manner they dreamed for."

His aunt spoke now with a certain animated relish. "If we are lucky one of the ‘bigshot’ brats will indeed take leave of their eyes and will actually kick it in their moronically suicidal attempt at looting disguised as a 'competition'. That would be a useful shakeup for the status quo over there, frankly.”

She paused to sip her tea and smirked. “The current generations are far too hegemonic to be healthy, and seriously coddled. Only that Song girl has dared to step across the threshold with any kind of panache and with her backing that’s… rather unexceptional.”

That made him suppress a twitch at his temple. Casually wishing for the death of one of those young nobles was something only his grand ancestor would dare. Or maybe Old Freak Ha or Fairy Meng…. Or Lady Mo…

Lu Xiao went on. “Your father was really short-sighted in crawling up the leg of Dun Sheng’s faction all those years ago. It has re-opened the door to this mess, by various means. I told him that at the time, and I told those two brats who call themselves Supreme Clan Elders that as well. Not that it counts for much; he is happy in his position at court as Sage Alchemist to the Third Imperial Princess’s household, and the rest of us be damned sideways.”

Lu Ji stayed silent. The matter with his father deciding to support the Second Crown Prince and his faction in this generation, and passing on the seat of the Blue Gate School to him, was… It was rare that Lady Xiao was actually introspective about anything. She usually ignored all family communications and told them to only bother her if it was a matter of the lineage ending or something similar.

“You, on the other hand, you at least have a brain and eyes to see. Even if your talents are otherwise sorely lacking compared…”

-And we are back to the usual. He sighed internally.

“In that case, I shall follow your instructions and let them do what they will. For now.”

Lu Xiao nodded “Yes. If you must provide some titbit let them draw out of you, with great reluctance and much uncertainty, the events of thirty years ago with the old Blue Duke. That should make even those brats squirm a bit. I am certain they already tried by other means to get at that, but it really can only come from you… or the Duke.”

He nodded in agreement there. There was no way the new Duke was going to entertain those two without some prodding from other quarters. The Imperial Authority was not necessarily adversarial with the Huang clan as such: they had an understanding with the Wuli branch, but the other branches not so much. Nor was there much goodwill with the Imperial Court due to the mess with the Iron Crown Duke. At best they would get politely led around by the nose until they did something stupid, at which point the Blue Duke would slap them down hard, which might be for the best.

His aunt continued after a short pause to pour herself more tea. "It will do them some good to have to grovel for their pains if they choose to follow that thread. Their viewpoints are so skewed towards things that they can lord it over that none of them will have cared about it when it happened, which was ‘conveniently’ during the Dragon Pillar Testing Competition… both times no less, which has to be some kind of record. So even if some of them would have otherwise have taken note, it will have passed them by, one way or another.”

Lu Ji could only stare at this point and feel like he wanted to hit his head off of something. Bowing gratefully to his Great Grand Ancestral Aunt he started to see a route out of this mess, if not for the school itself, at least for many of the students enrolled at it.

~ Lady Xiao, Blue Water Pavilion ~

Watching her descendant nephew almost skip out of the chamber, Lu Xiao suppressed a wry smile. The boy was indeed pretty talentless and needed occasional pointers in the right direction, but he was much better than that waste of a father of his had ever been. The son had his vices, but he kept them in moderation and never lost track of his goals. He had barely succeeded in her test to surpass not one but two generations, the last one having only turned nine thousand-odd years ago. He had surpassed his own generation with two hundred years to spare, and the following generation by a margin of a thousand years. 21,000 years to Dao Lord was an impressive enough feat. His progress since though... Well, nothing was perfect in the world. It was a shame he had no children of his own. However, his cultivation progress was just about acceptable for his admittance into her mother’s influence if she squinted at it sideways and made some special pleading. What with the family on the central and western continents all playing to their new-nobility aspirations, someone of Lu Ji’s talents presenting actual heirs would have allowed her to make a public declaration or Intervention and shuffle the orthodox branches around. Instead, all she had was another piece of the mess that was unfolding here.

-If the little shit from the Huang clan, strutting peacocks that they are, actually causes proper problems though...

She narrowed her eyes and glanced across to the tea house, then sighed. A fight with Lady Shan, while a fun prospect, was not really in the public good. Neither would come out on top, for all that Lady Shan was a big realm above her. The girl on the other hand... She was not above a little re-education for the common good there. It would do no harm to remind a few in this Imperial generation that real power was earned. Not born into, or acquired because your mother married fortuitously.

That one would also do well to learn that responsibility was a two-way road, with dangerous obstacles in it. She watched with a half-smile as causality shifted just a touch. Just that intent was enough really… the girl had some ‘protections’. Some surprisingly strong ones, old too. She considered the threads around the Dun girl. Her strength was nowhere near her own mother's, but she had been taught a few things from the other side of that threshold, enough to see more than most others would. Now, why would those three old ghosts care about someone with a minor, if rather odd and, now that she looked at it, strangely inauspicious, connate physique? She filed that one away to think about later. More means to push the Dun clan around was never a bad thing, and if she could mess with the Three Eyes, or the Kong clan in the process ...

Truncating that thought, she looked out towards the towering silhouettes of the Yin Eclipse mountain range in the distance, and then at it directly, wincing a tad as her gaze gently slid sideways off its oblique angles and her previously crystal-clear vision of the mountains and valleys blurred, like a glass pane frosted in winter from the wrong side. Upon the mountainside, there was a faint silhouette, maybe a building? Maybe some other edifice or artefact? It was impossible for her to say even having been inside it. And there... there was the familiar sense of being watched for a split second. A subtle, silent gaze that stared down at her as if she were a beautiful butterfly that someone had managed to catch under their eye.

Oh yes. Those idiots in the younger generations plotting to pry open the secrets of that place would be in for a rude surprise if they ever succeeded…. Nobody thought too much about the nature of divinity in Great Worlds, much to their detriment. It was all too easy to take as writ the idea that Divine beings were suppressed in the same way that Worldly and Venerate ones were. A dangerously ignorant view, according to what little she understood. Then again, this world had only ever generated three Divine cultivators. All of them had reached that realm far from its azure skies, and none had ever returned in person.

As she watched her nephew hurry across the grounds towards the City Authority Pavilions, she considered once more the wording of her mother's warning all those years ago. ‘Such a place.’ Not ‘What’... ‘Such’.

If even someone as fearfully powerful as her adoptive mother could not, or would not, pry too much into it, what kind of things lay at its heart… or beneath its roots, beyond what she already knew of? That was surely related to those subtle eyes, staring outwards when you looked too far. That was the thought that kept her eyes returning to this mountain range… even as the aeons turned and the heavens changed.

She had formulated some suspicions, hypotheses even, herself over the years and asked her mother on several occasions but to no real avail. The trip with Lu Fu Tao had been an alliance between her and Ha Tai Wen to try to make good on some of those theories, not that they came to much in the end. Lady Mo had been unhappy with the expedition but gave it her blessing, tacitly, and had provided some small support before and since, she reflected. It was clear her mother... her teacher knew or suspected what that place held but for whatever reason was happy to just let it be, which was worrying in its own way. The Mo Heavenly Clan was a behemoth of the greater cosmos after all. Her usual response was along the lines of ‘Things best left alone would mind their own businesses', or something like that. Her gaze once again flickered towards the tall pagodas of the Blue Gate School and the tea quarter beyond them, by the coast. Yes. Some re-education was long overdue, assuming those brats survived their ‘teacher’s’ hubris.

Idly, she drew a slip out of thin air and glanced at it. It was almost certainly one of several accounts they were seeking. It was short enough at least. Most of the accounts were horribly florid, even this one had its issues and he worst were so close to unreadable that she just left them in the wild to act as deliberate obfuscation.

‘Before the towns, before the Blue Scripture, that old man, Blue Water Sage as he would become, came to this land and meditated in the valleys. Apparently he lived here for several centuries, trained a few disciples, slaughtered some demonic beasts and did various deeds of good merit for the wild people of those lands. Then, one day, he was walking in a valley and found a spatial rift, purported to be not far to the west of the great peak of the thundering clouds, a place where that valley joined another inexplicably. Being a valorous and upright person, and generally righteous in his demeanour by all accounts, he became concerned for the local people and sought their elders out to warn them.

They in turn told him that their ancestors had occasionally gotten caught in the rifts and that, while some had vanished without trace, several had returned. This lead to an exchange of views and teaching between the old man and the locals who lived there. They showed him some of the things that had emerged over the years, mostly innocuous or strange oddments, and in return he gave them new insights into the will of the heavens and the movement of the celestial bodies. History is mute as to what finally convinced him the rift would be worth investigating, but he meditated for an auspicious time and, having made suitable preparations with his disciples to secure his lineage should he not return, he entered that place with several other reclusive experts.

Apparently he met nine trials and nine mysteries, while walking dark paths between heaven and hell, and eventually entered a great crystal house amid a field of flowers. Within it were treasures of heaven such as adorn the imperial gardens of the great continent, and a stele that contained a profound manual. When he left, he apparently took his disciples and departed with some haste, only pausing to advise the local chieftains to treat any rifts they encountered with the greatest respect and caution and not to treat any gains obtained from them cheaply or frivolously. He founded the Blue Water Pavilion soon after around which Blue Water City grew up, and his son would set up the Blue Gate School with a part of that inheritance released to him after his father departed on the Great Xuan Expedition. That event sparked a great rush which became a ‘bloodless massacre’; the pride of a generation fell without trace in those rifts and the sects that sent them all suffered inexplicable calamities shortly after.’

Yes, they would find little to resemble this account in those records. This text, meagre as it was, was among the most detailed of what she bothered to keep up here. She had taken everything relating to Lu Fu Tao’s expedition that contained anything of real significance millennia ago. What little remained outside her grasp was on Shan Lai, offworld, and in the possession of Lu Fu Tao. The account within this was still a second-hand source; none of the others had ever written anything personal about the trip into the interior, and any other detailed accounts from before Lu Fu Tao were held by either Meng Fu, Ha Tai Wen or the old ghosts watching over the Azure Astral Region’s Hunter Bureau, from Shan Lai, in the middle of this starfield. That they would have some records was inevitable due to its roots on the western continent and status as another colossus from beyond the sky. She wasn't worried about those leaking, nobody in this world was capable of thieving from that well, even her.

The previous Blue Duke's encounter had actually been far more dangerous in regard to what was experienced and what information was around, but that danger was offset somewhat by him not being some young neophyte seeking riches and glory. Instead he was a cunning old bastard who, to his credit, resolved those matters himself before she had sought him out personally. She suspected that at least one Senior Watcher from the Hunter Bureau had also sought him out: his speedy rise and awarded responsibility at the realm plane’s eclipse point suggested some compromise there between him and the Azure Astral Authority.

Drumming her fingers on the table, she also gave a moment’s thought to the other oddity, the steady silencing of many of those associated with the events one hundred years prior. That wasn't her, although others likely suspected her hand in it... perhaps Meng Fu or the Hunter Bureau were making their presence felt there.

She put the jade back in its space and took out another.

At least Lu Tao wrote occasionally in the intervening millennia. Most of the others she had watched over or decided to provide some guidance to throughout the years had never bothered once they managed to worm free. However, few died, so she felt her methods fairly successful. Annoyingly few in her clan had been able to live up to the destiny Lu Tao carved out for them in this era... It was easy to grow disenchanted in regards to your descendants when you lived that long, she reflected. If you saw the same cycles over and over... people just became patterns after a while. Long and short. Big and small. Interesting or boring. The Lu clan's present determination to rest on their laurels and flout their ‘newfound good fortune’ was just another of those cycles.

Skimming what was in this second jade, not a text but another somewhat conniving request for her presence from over the ocean, she was starting to think that her choice there had been a mistake on a certain level. Stepping away to the degree she had in the last generations and focusing here in the years since Lu Tao left had opened the door for some of the other, lesser, ‘Old Ancestors’ to take a more active role, with mixed results that defied their purported age and claimed experience.

Snapping her fingers, the jade exploded into nothing and was blown away on a gust of wind.

-Once this is done with, I will maybe see about... cleaning up... and find Lu Ji a nice girl to start a family with.

She sighed and sipped her tea as the dust floated away.

The wind rustled outside in accordance with her whims, a nice perk of her current realm in this form. She shaped the world, rather than having it shape her. That was real power, power free of the fates themselves. Ironic, really, that it wasn't even the power she actually craved, which was something only a few other people understood. She cast her eye back to the mountain again. Once you had seen that, understood what it represented, the paltry trappings of the means of this world were nothing really. It almost hurt to watch her family's descendants squabble over relics and ruins, cultivation manuals and such. They fought like cats in a sack, for stinking shit, and thought it gold.

Most of the vexatious ones, like her current protégé's father, were because of the main family back on the central continent being over-indulgent in that regard. Pushing these generations towards the court in the hope that they would be accepted while being wilfully blind to the nature of the beast they courted. Had he been her disciple she would have sent him heavenward as soon as he got his principle founded and crossed to Dao Immortal, given the potential vexations that the court in this era could present. She knew they only tolerated the deluded boy, his alchemical talents now largely wasted in that place, purely because of his connection to the Blue Water Sage through Lu Tao’s long-deceased brother. Another idiocracy of the wider clan, letting that slip for scraps of third-hand dross from the Kong Heavenly Clan.

Different branches of cultivator clans, noble or not, tended to be very diffuse with multiple, sometimes competing, influences, so – having two largely unrelated influences from the same family on different sides of the politics of a region was not uncommon. The Ha clan and the Lu clan were poster children for that. The school as a construct could fall to the nameless fate for all she cared, but the Blue Pavilion was important. Luckily, linking the two in the eyes of the Court had been mostly brushed off as unfounded rumour. Still, she was certain there were eyes there that saw and didn’t believe.

-Still, she mused, he does seem to have a proper, if unofficial, thing with that poor princess who is being sheltered under the wing of the Second Prince.

Thinking on that sad young woman, just one of a large number of gilded descendants trapped in their courtly cages through the influence of the Blue Morality, made her feel a bit out of sorts.

She had worried it was just a rebound thing or an attempted manipulation after Lu Ji’s mother passed away.

It was both of course, but by the greater forces there thankfully and not by the girl herself in a bid to elevate her status or push forward that brat's agenda. None of them had dared make much of the potential opportunity anyway once she made her own views on that vaguely understood.

She cast one last considering look at the Dun Princess before letting her fall from her mind again, and turned her thoughts back to the Pagoda itself. That was what was important here. A stele appeared before her as she pondered it, its glittering gold and green symbols shimmering on the strange grey stone. This one hadn't come from the expedition thirty thousand years ago, although it had needed until then to render up its initial secrets. It was from a remnant so long lost to antiquity that none would ever have known it...

It had fallen out of the sky with the mountain, all those aeons ago.