Memories of the Fall

...Among the most terrible, yet also prized resources that are available to us, as experts discerning the matters of the cosmos, are those waters that derive from the Star Ocean. Their innate strength is, it seems, an anathema to all living things, yet from them and only them can we truly see the purest fundamentals of the structures of being before they were, well, anything. To us mere mortals their presence is rarely a boon, yet to those who stand at the apex, it is a remarkable gateway to a new land, and one of the pillars upon which the dominance of our world has been built, enabling those with sufficient strength and reason to peer beyond the veils of reality and step across strange aeons and even arrive at that mythical final shore...

Excerpt – Ad Astra, Quam Infinitum.

By Lucius de Woll, with compiled contributions.

~ Kun Juni (and company) – Ancient Complex ~

Juni stumbled out of the darkness and sprawled on the floor, wincing. She was alive, which was good. It meant her intuitive guess about the meaning of the words that appeared over the ward as it deactivated had been right.

There had been no ‘Scripture Halls’ numbered one, two, three or four in ‘Shaft Two’. Her mental map of their progress told her they had taken a right-angled turn, so the huge room they had entered should have been the ‘High Hall’.

The second, much bigger gamble there had been that the design of this place was somewhat symmetrical. The knowledge that there were steps down behind the door that sealed off the shaft they had found Han Shu at the top of had supported that theory. The door opposite their original entrance to that series of rooms at the top of their own shaft had been sealed in the same way, not that she had given it undue notice at the time.

So coming back they could only take the exit opposite where Han Shu entered and gone straight through two smaller halls that had nothing but storerooms that were either sealed or some empty rooms with tables and chairs and the occasional lectern. The transverse hall they briefly investigated had been at right angles to the main halls. That should, therefore have been the route into other arms of the same complex.

When the abomination taking the form of a Sar’Katush had *appeared*, sliding straight out of the darkness as if someone had pulled aside a curtain to reveal it, she was debating how to talk them through this knowledge. The need to stay alive had spectacularly supplanted that. So she had basically thrown and shoved them both over the threshold and then without looking back dragged her two paralyzed friends along.

-How far we have come, you owe Valash a lifetime of toasts for whatever the fates she did to your mantra, her mind whispered.

She could only agree. Her mantra had provided the final edge, the last little bit of impetus that allowed her to resist the crippling soul shock just long enough to stumble through the wards before they triggered behind them. Those had stopped the thing in no way what so ever, but fortunately it hadn’t mattered because the swirling darkness had rolled over them and dragged, or teleported, them away.

Han Shu sat up nearby. She could almost feel his teeth chattering. He looked like a wrung-out washrag, although that might also be her fault. Staring around wildly in the darkness, he grasped for his sword.

“It’s okay,” she spoke up. “There is nothing dangerous in here.”

“Juni…?” he looked around, disorientated for a moment before fixing on her voice. “Where are we?”

Looking around with her qi enhanced vision at the room they were in, she couldn’t really answer that, so instead, she opted for the obvious fallback. Explain how they got here.

“We’re probably safe… for now. I don’t know how far we got teleported, mind you—” she immediately regretted saying ‘probably safe’ though. It would be just typical for something to pop out of a wall at this point and go ‘Oh Really?’

“You threw me through those wards,” an accusing voice female came from beside her and she glanced over at Lin Ling who was sitting up rubbing her head.

“Yes. It was necessary, sorry. Would you rather be dead?”

-Mmmmm, she had to admit that was a bit blunt of her, given the circumstances.

Fortunately, Lin Ling just nodded pensively and went…. “Ahh...Umm…. thanks.”

“Did you know we would be teleported?” Han Shu asked, still checking himself over.

“Erm… I’d be lying if I said yes with absolute certainty. But the wording on the seal looked ambiguous enough that it seemed likely,” she replied, glad her expression was hidden from him at least.

“Really? Scripture Hall One seemed pretty unambiguous.” He muttered.

“I’m fluent in Formal Easten. We use it quite a bit at the Brokerage,” she pointed out. “Are you?”

He blinked “What does being fluent in the various Easten languages have to do with those wards?”

“Nothing,” she said blandly, a part of her taking a certain perverse delight in this now. “You didn’t read the text over the door itself?”

She saw him frown. “The words kind of imprint themselves into you, don’t they? I got ‘Danger’, ‘Big Danger’, ‘Opening’, ‘Hall’ and ‘Writing’, ‘Learning’ and ‘First’, which seemed to be ‘Scripture Hall One’. Danger represented the wards. The alphabet looked a bit like the one on the stele which I thought I’d seen something like somewhere…. I guess.”

She could only stare at him and really struggle not to roll her eyes in the darkness.

-He was even from the Yin Eclipse People, how could he not know…

Well, the logic wasn’t entirely faultless. She had also been given mental nudges by the stele when she found them for directions, so she could see that they might give rather pointed nudges in other ways if necessary. It had taken her a while to work out what she was really reading on the stele and then much more obviously on the doorways in the shaft. Once it clicked, during the second trip down the shaft to get the remaining blood, it was so obvious she had wanted to hit her head on something and could only blame not seeing it on the stress of her circumstances.

“The alphabet is one of the ‘Old Easten’ Scripts. Not the current one. The tutor I had when I was young was obsessed with the remnants out east before he ran out of spirit stones to fund purchasing stuff from them. Because he owed my dad a favour, he got hired and taught me the ‘General Classics’ from when I was six until after my Testing Ceremony."

“Ohh…” he frowned, “but I’m sure I’ve seen it somewhere and certainly not in the context of the Easten tribes.”

She offered a hand, and he hauled himself to his feet. She noted his legs were still trembling a bit from the chill and the soul shock.

“It’s not ‘the’ Easten Alphabet, as I said. Remember, they have two? A formal one, that’s phonetic, not like the Imperial Glyph Script, and an informal one that’s rather similar, but is what we co-opted to add phonetic nuance to the local Imperial Script. There are also a bunch of regional scripts and dialects beyond that the tribes use that are cobbled together into a second big alphabet.”

“I… see,” he said a bit blankly.

“Oh. That’s why it looked so familiar,” Lin Ling muttered from nearby.

Nodding, she went on. “The one above the doors here and on the stele is considered by scholars to be an ‘Old Easten’ one because apparently it was first identified to the north of Snow Jade. That’s not current Easten Territory, hasn’t been for 20,000 years or so as I recall being taught.”

“It’s one of their claimed ancestral homelands, isn’t it?” Lin Ling interjected.

She wondered for a moment how the younger girl would know that pointless bit of information, until she remembered that she was, technically, from the Lin clan, and they had a lot of difficult history with the Golden Promise School and the Easten Tribes to the south of Yun Shan City.

“Yes, it’s one of their claimed ancestral homelands until the Golden Promise School forced them out with the help of mercenaries from the central continent,” she agreed.

“My tutor, old Jiang, was fascinated by the ruins up there. The ones near the red-stone mines. The vestiges up there are potentially hundreds of thousands of years old, or so my tutor thought, anyway. A similar version to the script over the doors was found on several carvings in that area. It’s not quite the same. Simpler, I think but close enough that I can guess the pronunciation through the alphabet and a lot of the words and phrasing are very similar to the older Easten dialects their weird mythology tales are written in. Another thing my tutor liked to read, and thanks to the curse of a cultivator's largely perfect recall, I can mostly remember if I focus. That seems to have been enough for whatever it is that handled the transmission in the script to translate them fairly accurately to me, and it’s only gotten better the more I read it.”

“Oh. So that alphabet originated here somehow?” he mused, looking around.

“So it would seem,” she agreed with a sigh.

“My former tutor would be fascinated. That said, I think the fewer people we talk to about this trip into this endless maze of dark, horror haunted halls and caverns where intangible abominations that keep trying to kill us, the better somehow…”

“Anyway,” she went on. “The text above the door read Principle Scriptorium, Open Channel. The danger did indeed come from the wards and wasn’t actually articulated on the text itself. The doorways all have a sort of warning system in them I think that alerts anyone interacting with them about the strength of the protection and the authority level needed to access it. It’s somewhat coincidental that the blood that Lin Ling has appears to have a very high access authority for some bizarre reason.”

Looking around the room again, she was struck by how familiar it was to the hall by which she had entered the shaft, and where she had had that unpleasant scuffle with Lin Ling. Unlike that room though, it was almost impossible to make out any details beyond the emptiness of the room.

-Is the room in total darkness? She wondered, looking around.

Deactivating her qi enhancement on her vision, everything plunged into pitch black. Devoid of any ability to see through it, the darkness felt like a smothering blanket, suppressing all her senses and enveloping her in a black cocoon. Waving a hand right in front of her face, she could barely detect any shift in movement now her that vision was unenhanced.

She reactivated it and winced. It still hurt faintly, even though almost two days had passed since that moment. She thought about using another revitalisation pill to try to bolster her healing but rejected it after a moment.

-Better to use my mantra regularly instead.

Closing her eyes she took a deep breath.

She was still getting used to that.

Not a voice. Her soul really was sensitised somehow, she was certain now. An extra set of thoughts, questioning and prompting. It was something very different from an inner thought – and it was also right, it would be better to rely on her mantra. The stress would push her closer and closer to the peak of Physical Foundation as she used it to mitigate the side effects on her body. The meridian forcing and constant control of her qi’s outward emissions from her body were also contributing there.

Han Shu was still squinting into the gloom. His situation would be a magnitude worse than hers.

“I see,” he muttered. “That explains why I got… directions and danger levels from the stele, but not much else. Presumably, I didn’t know the symbols and the… whatever it is that governs projecting them at whoever sees them couldn’t find a way to make me recognise the names?”

“Yep. They seem very similar to the way people infuse intent into their shop signs, actually,” she mused.

Han Shu sat down on a bench at the edge of the room and sighed wearily, resting his chin on his hands and his elbows on his knees. “So we’re randomly somewhere else in this place…”

“When you put it like that,” she conceded.

Looking around again, there definitely was only one exit from this room.

-Hopefully, it doesn’t lead straight out into a cavern, rather than a complex.

-But would that be any better, she mused to herself.

-You ask yourself, but who do you ask, she responded with a sardonic giggle.

“I hope there is a way out,” Han Shu went on. “It would really suck to escape death just to die trapped in some isolated chamber in the rock with no way out except past an ancient evil from the depths of this place.”

“The really important thing is that we are somewhere not where we were though,” she felt compelled to point out.

“Hmmmmm this room looks like the one in the centre of the second main chamber in the complex I first found,” Lin Ling said, finally getting up off the ground. “So it was a teleportation array… even has the same… odd feeling.”

“Maybe,” Han Shu said. “Or this is just the reception room for the teleport point.”

The only exit, that they had all been eyeing cautiously, turned out to lead into a large open hall. Considering it warily, she had to admit it was very unthreatening. Her first impression was some kind of meeting area or reception hall as it held a bunch of tables and chairs, a tearoom counter looking thing and a large fireplace. Most of the furniture was rolled to the right and scattered down the wall base. Several of the tables were broken.

“Why a fireplace,” Lin Ling muttered to herself.

-Why indeed, she agreed.

The heat down here, from the pressure of the rock overhead, was such that she was sweating even in her current rather inadequate attire.

“And why hasn’t the air gone weird,” Han Shu added.

“You ask me, but who do I ask?” she grumbled.

In fact, the air was stuffy. Far more so than it should have been from her own, admittedly limited experience with such places. It suggested rather ominously that this might be a sealed-off complex... Accessible only by the doorway, now ruined by the abomination.

-Bad thoughts, worry about it when it’s clear that is the case, if it is the case, her inner self chipped in.

-Being cheered up by your own attuned soul, wonderful.

-I try, if I don’t do it, you will stew in it, like you did over your spirit root. For years. You make Lin Ling look like an amateur in that regard.

She was distracted from arguing with her own inner self by Han Shu, who was still poking around the hall. “There is no evidence of claw or scratch marks…. Or the weird bit I saw where it looked like something had just scooped lines straight out of the rock. The guard posts were all heavily vandalized and there was some evidence of it when we went through the outer halls as well, although it was only a small amount.”

“Hmmmmm,” Lin Ling was staring at the way the stuff in the room was all slid down one wall. Juni also found herself looking at it curiously.

“What’s up?” she found herself asking.

“Dunno...Just something feels off about the room,” Lin Ling shrugged, sounding… bored?

Her manner was really all over the place right now. Looking around, she picked up one of the pieces of smashed pot that wasn’t by a wall.

“These look rather familiar?” she mused, seeing if that would draw anything out of Lin Ling.

“Obviously. They have the same patterns on them as the ones in that other complex, weren’t you paying attention?” the younger girl snapped.

-So the inner voices were still not fully under her control, despite her own attempt at giving them a good shove back in the High Hall. At least she seemed a bit more engaged.

Han Shu added. “I wonder, is it worth seeing if we can find any intact ones? They might actually be worth something, given we have a serious issue with levy contributions hanging over us now.”

Lin Ling made a crossing motion with her arms. “Uh nope. Do you wanna get cursed? The last complex had this really creepy vibe when I was walking about it, and I got the feeling that taking anything would be a really bad idea. This place feels even weirder than there.”

She filed that away. For all that Lin Ling was jittery as one of those special alembics for mixing herbs, her instincts for wrongness were sharp. She had been very keen to get out of those halls now that she thought back on the moments before their terrified flight.

“Ahhh it was just a passing thought…” Han Shu sighed and walked over to look at the fireplace.

“If this place is some kind of… what did you call it?”

“A Scriptorium, the Principle Scriptorium in fact.”

“But what IS it?” he mused. “This looks mostly like a dining hall or a place for people to relax.”

“I was going with 'meeting hall for people coming out of the teleport room', but that also works.”

“In the other complex all the workshop like rooms and storerooms were off that way,” Lin Ling pointed towards a doorway at the far end. “Bedrooms were over there, although not in this one it seems… maybe they didn’t have them in this place.”

“Or the layout is different?” Han Shu added, clearly not learning fully from his earlier lesson.

“Mmmm.”

She caught Lin Ling giving him a truly foul glare in the darkness, even if she sounded like she had just agreed with him and sighed softly. That problem was by no means done, it seemed. Han Shu was clearly forgetting, or dismissing aspects of her behaviour too incautiously. She could see his idea, act professionally and try to ensure that they were largely competent, but he was deeply underestimating the depths of an emotionally compromised Lin Ling’s grudge. She had seen the edges of the tangled mess that was her friend's mind… and it was really very bad.

-He doesn’t understand her background, her helping voice muttered, not so helpfully for once.

-And what, you want me to find the time to give the village boy from Yin Eclipse, who barely has a bad bone in his body, the rundown on the Lin clan’s splintering and how their various arms are dealing with it? She shot back.

-Well, when you put it like that.

-And it’s not my place to say those things. We only know them because of the stories my brother told me of the three school conflict.

-But if it means her not braining Han Shu with a pot of blood, he doesn’t have our healing capabilities, her helpful voice worried.

-Also, talking to myself in this way is not doing wonders for my perception of my own sanity, can’t you… uh… just pretend to be a thought or something?

-That would be problematic. I am already a functional manifestation of your connection between your soul and your mantra, and the only thing keeping the other voices locked away, especially those weird ones that keep sneaking back in, her inner voice muttered.

“…”

She wasn’t sure where to go from there, short of calling an enforced stop while she meditated on her own mental wellbeing and tried to sort out that. On the other hand, that had been a surprisingly strange rationalisation of what her ‘voice’ was.

-Also, the others are wandering off, don’t get distracted, the voice muttered.

She rubbed her temples and looked around. Both of them were heading off out of this room. She could worry about how it arrived at that interpretation of what it was later. Either both her subconscious and her memory were much more entangled than she was comfortable with, or something more ominous was manifesting in her symptoms.

-For fate's sakes, she sighed.

Stepping quickly, she caught up with them as they made their way down the corridor. Lin Ling now looked a bit worried. She was muttering to herself about how this didn’t fit, so presumably Han Shu had been right and the layout was a bit different. That probably wouldn’t help with Lin Ling’s insecurity issue.

…

Twenty minutes later, leaning on a balcony on the third story of a wide courtyard, she wasn’t sure if she should be happy or concerned. In the end, the layout had been so different that nobody had any grounds to linger on their prior knowledge too much. Both the scale of this place and the extent of it far outstripped anything either of the other two had theorised about based on their previous experiences with ruins down here. She could have told them that was the case, just from the fate-thrashed size of the corridor after they left the meeting hall, but sometimes you had to reach your own conclusions to avoid problems.

So she now leaned on a balcony on the third story of this wide courtyard while the other two poked around, within her line of sight, in different directions on the gallery. In its centre was a circular pool filled with water that seemed far deeper than it should have been. In the middle was a rocky outcrop with a tree and five statues, carved out of the rock, seated around it. Two were male and one was a female with pointy ears. The other two might be women as well based on their profiles but it was hard to say. The tree, if that was what it was, was gnarled and twisted, its branches stretching out like malformed limbs and its roots biting deep into the fissures in the rock or coiling down into the water. It had no leaves and its bark was a greyish-white. Under her qi infused eyes it had the texture and appearance, less of bark and more of bone burnt at a searing temperature.

The whole thing gave off a faint flickering halo of luminescent gloom, providing the minimal illumination that revealed the extent of the courtyard. When she disabled her qi vision it looked, if anything, more eerily beautiful with all its branches covered with little colourless flames that moved like leaves in an unseen wind. Part of her suspected it was really some kind of sculpture, but she also knew enough about weird spirit plants to suspect that it might well be a spirit tree of some unknown kind – if it was the latter, disturbing it was a total non-starter of an idea.

Her gaze also drifted to the pool on occasion. When it did, she fancied she could see stars within it, even though the ceiling above showed no evidence of enchantment. More likely it was catching some odd reflections of the flickering halo of the tree. Around the pool were eight octagonal platforms, set into its lip where the eight points would be. It was hard to avoid thinking they might be the base stands for cultivation platforms of some kind.

“The rooms are almost all sealed on this layer.” Han Shu noted arriving beside her.

“Done already?” She asked, somewhat surprised by his rapid return.

“Ehhh... What do you mean already? We have been poking around this gallery for almost thirty minutes while you stood there staring into space,” he pointed out.

-He has the mind of a koi carp, I’ve half a mind to hit him on behalf of Lin Ling, her inner voice scowled.

Ignoring that idiotic idea, she turned to stare at him. “What do you mean? I was just looking at the pool for a few minutes. I thought it odd that there appeared to be stars in it when there is no enchanted sky above, but probably it’s related to the tree.”

Leaning on the balcony she glanced down, only to see Lin Ling leaning out from the floor below to gesture up to them.

-Fates, when did she scurry off down there!?!

“Come down here. There are rooms and doors you can actually access. I want to know what they are, seeing as you’re the only one who has some claim to being able to read them…” Lin Ling called out.

-Maybe we should hit her again as well, her inner voice grumbled.

-Maybe hit their heads together, she conceded.

The rooms on the next gallery down contained precious little of interest despite the grand-sounding potential of the place. Their identifying text was all very boring; Workshop F2-509, F2-510 and so on. Random letters and numbers that were clearly some code or means to identify them, but not informative to them in the slightest beyond the ‘workshop’ identifier. Most of the stuff in them was intact, although a few rooms had their contents upended to various ends for whatever reason. Mainly it was tables, chairs, pottery, grey slabs, occasionally what looked like scribing tools made out of unusual materials. Contemplating those, she picked a few up, noting they still held their edges. There was no sense of foreboding or anything inauspicious about them, so she stashed a few in the off chance they might be useful. If nothing else, she could try to stab the shadow abomination with one.

The walls were all carved in the same exquisite fashion. Weird as it was to say, but she was almost getting glassy-eyed with them, such was the persistent level of quality within them, despite normally liking these kinds of things. There were carvings of flowing landscapes, animals, oceans, boats, cities and more on most of the walls. After a while, oddities did start to jump out at her though.

Whoever had built the place had gone to exceptional lengths to highlight particular details of each panel above and beyond everything else that was inlaid. One room, for example, had an armada of strange-looking ships on an ocean, but only three of the ships in the middle were picked out in red and black stone. Another had a forest scene with a large tree picked out in what appeared to be a beautiful, faintly luminous green jade. In another, there was a vast city, picked out across a dozen panels, all monochrome marble except that every flag on every tower and building was picked out in different stones and carved gems. Each one no bigger than her finger, yet each an exquisite piece of workmanship. The tables and chairs in many rooms were also wonderfully carved. Their legs shaped like legs or animals or trees, scenes of strange plants and wondrous animals were a common theme.

As she walked through them, she occasionally got uneasy feelings, but on reflection that was likely down to the overall abandonment of this place. It felt almost like the occupants had just downed tools and left one day over lunch.

There were also lots of the blank stone slabs in the rooms. Her working theory, after listening to Lin Ling’s descriptions of the other complex, was that they were a bit like jadework tablets that hadn’t been enchanted. Dropping blood on them, from a small pot she had claimed, did absolutely nothing nor did attempting to push qi into them. It was only when she found one that had been decorated, hidden behind a flipped table in one of the rooms with all its contents shoved to a wall, that she got anything like a reaction from one.

Turning it over in her hands and examining it through her qi enhanced vision, she found it had sweeping lines around the edges, like the stele, but with a motif of waves or flowing water rather than vines, flowers or weird geometric shapes. There was, frustratingly, nothing to suggest how it was used, so it wasn’t until she speculatively probed it with a little bit of qi that anything much at all happened.

She watched carefully as it vanished into the slab without a trace, which was an improvement on the other slabs, where it had fallen straight through it. Frowning, she cautiously sent some more into it as she continued to explore the rest of the room, wary in case it had some adverse reaction. Eventually, she did get a faint sense of resistance and her qi was repelled, suggesting whatever capacity it had was filled.

With it came the awareness that the thing had, in the end, taken almost a fifth of her qi from her dantian. That was quite a lot in the grand scheme of things. Turning the stone over in her hands, it resolutely did nothing. It was only after a few more moments that her eye found the flowing wave-like patterns. Three points where the waves swirled around and became circles, each about the size of her fingertip. Flipping the tablet about again looking for more, she could find only those three across one of the short edges. Poking one changed the texture of the central panel faintly, but that was about it.

Shaking her head in the darkness, she stashed the tablet in her pouch and continued looking around. The tablet, however, had other ideas and resolutely refused to go into her talisman, instead, it fell to the ground and slid down the floor towards the back wall as if it were being pulled away from her. It was already halfway there by the time she realised what had happened, finally stopping with a clunk against a chair that was on the edge of the tangled mess of most of the room’s furniture.

Slowly, she walked over to pick it up. That had been really odd.

-I’d say a bit more than odd, her helpful voice muttered.

She picked it up and walked back up the room. Pausing for a moment she finally put the tablet back on the floor and gave it a little push towards the long wall, opposite the way it had slid. It went in that direction for a few paces and then slowly started to slide down the floor again finally it was resting against the short wall, where she had found it, amidst the jumble of furniture. Frowning, she walked out of the room with the slab and placed it on the floor outside. It resolutely stayed as it should. Flat and unmoving.

“Hey, Shu!” she called quietly, “Come over here a moment, will you?”

“Yes?” Han Shu made his way around the gallery and asked. “What do you need?”

“Grab something from your storage talisman and put it on the floor,” she said, looking to see where Lin Ling currently was.

He materialized a jar and put it on the ground where it behaved perfectly normally. “Are you expecting it to do something?” he asked after a moment.

“Here? Apparently not,” she said, trying not to let the relief creep into her voice.

“Can you take it into the room and put it on the floor?” she gestured towards the room she just exited.

She watched as Han Shu walked carefully inside and without much preamble placed the jar on the floor. She watched as it slid, then rolled away down the floor as if it were on a steep incline and hit the pile of debris with a clunk.

“What was that?” he flinched at the unexpected noise and looked around, clearly his dark vision was still very bad.

“Your jar…” her voice sounded a bit weak to her own ears, even though she shouldn’t be surprised at this point.

He looked down at the jar and flinched again to find it gone. Given his vision was so bad, she pointed down the room, then took him by the arm and led him across to where it now rested, with everything else, now on its side. They both stood in silence contemplating it before she collected her thoughts and took it back up to the far end of the room once more. Again she put the jar on the floor and they both observed it immediately roll all the way down.

“We should check some other rooms.” Han Shu said, now sounding as nervous as she felt.

A few minutes later, all three of them stood in another room with all its contents down the far long edge from the door. Three different jars all sat at various points on the edge of the pile.

“Well… this is really…” Lin Ling said blankly.

“Odd?” Han Shu muttered.

“I was going to go for ‘concerning’ personally,” she chuckled darkly.

“Yeah…. That also works…” Han Shu muttered.

Lin Ling continued to stare at her jar, drumming her fingers on her leg. “Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to affect us….? We should check more rooms.”

After careful investigation of another eight rooms, all with their contents spread down long or short edges, they had found that all of them sloped different directions, seemingly at random. The ninth room, however… she found herself staring at the jar on the ceiling, really not sure of what to make of that at all. The other two were also looking at it like it was some alien creature from beyond the realm wall. Finally, after the others made no effort to recover it, she crouched down and jumped the three metres to touch the ceiling and recover it herself.

Now that she looked more carefully, the ceiling had a few unobtrusive grey slates and a pot in the far corner.

“So why are the tables and chairs not…?” Han Shu asked eventually.

Walking over to one, she tried to pull it. It resolutely remained where it was. Even her full strength, which was a bit wasteful of qi really, failed to so much as make it move a hair.

“It’s stuck to the floor,” Lin Ling said rather dispassionately – after she had strained for a good ten seconds on it. “I’ve told you that twice already now.”

Han Shu gave her a weird look but thankfully said nothing this time.

-It seems her voices issue still isn’t resolving itself.

-I’d be more concerned if it had, she pointed out.

-True, that would suggest an escalation, based on her current symptoms, the helpful voice muttered.

Sometime later, they were stood in the central courtyard, having finally finished going around the remaining rooms. Access to the locked ones had been easy enough once she realised that their ‘unsealing’ points were beside the doors, in the wall, not on the doors themselves. Most of them were equally odd, but a few stood out. One had had a pile of broken clutter plastered along the walls, repelling anything to the edges of the room from an Ill-defined point none of them was willing to investigate too closely. Another, devoid of anything movable, had the effect swap its orientation mid-way across the room, so a jar just kept rolling back and forth, never able to find a place to rest.

A few were even unaltered, or at least not obviously affected. She found herself marking them off on a crude plan on her scrip. In the end, of the thirty-three rooms across three floors, twenty-seven had some kind of anomaly that affected the orientation of things in the room. None of them appeared to affect them either. Some experimentation demonstrated that whatever it was could touch any inanimate object that touched a floor, wall or ceiling. Items in mid-air were unaffected until they came into contact with a surface. All in all, it was really weird.

Considering this, as she leant against the rim of the pool, looking at the water and the tree again, she found herself trying to see if there was any pattern in way things changed in the rooms. At this angle, you couldn’t see the stars, but the water gave off a coolness that was almost refreshing by means of its proximity. Little tendrils of mist swirled across the surface, though she was avoiding paying too much attention to them. They seemed to shimmer and flow almost as if carrying out tiny dances, and it was mesmeric to watch them for too long. It was possible to see how someone might use the platforms around the lake for cultivation, not that the waters, or the tree for that matter, seemed to contain any qi.

She was again shaken from her reverie by Lin Ling, who came by and gave her a poke.

“We’ve explored everything. Apart from that tablet you found, I found one other one from the ground floor. I spotted it where Han Shu said there was nothing… in the middle of a pile in the third room on the left side,” she pointed towards the far corner… “Was a pain to get at, so maybe that’s why he ignored it? I also found something else you might want to have a look at. It has writing on it.”

She sighed, nodding slightly in the gloom. Lin Ling was really holding a grudge.

-Before she hid that insecurity so well, the helpful aspect murmured.

There was something a touch odd about the way that thought formed, but she didn’t have time to focus on it. It was right in any case. Clearly Lin Ling’s sense of insecurity in her rapid rise through the Bureau ranks within their Hunter Pavilion was being exacerbated by this mess. Hers was an impressive achievement, born out of a desire to prove her own worth after being branded the ‘least valuable’ of the Lin family's younger generation by dint of being a girl who also happened to possess a spirit root that didn’t match well with her family's arts. It was the antithesis of someone like Ha Yun, who had risen rapidly to five-star rank, gotten special waiver to become a ‘Young Official’ and now just leeched off the chummy missions to Blue Water City.

“You’re brooding again. Don’t do it,” Lin Ling scowled. “Anyway, how long are you going to stand there looking at that water like it’s your long lost love. He’s currently trying to dislodge—”

Idly she grabbed for the younger girl's ear, intending to give it a proper twist. Unfortunately, Lin Ling skipped back smartly and gave her an innocent look.

-Fate-thrashed brat, bringing up inconsequential things, she thought dourly.

-She should definitely crack their broken heads together.

Pushing that away, it was a very unhelpful set of thoughts and memories to have now, she instead asked. "How long has it been since I started standing here?”

Clearly thrown off by her change of tack, Lin Ling frowned. “Erm… I dunno… 40 minutes, maybe?”

Remembering what Han Shu said up above, she felt a chill that wasn’t the blessed cool of the mysterious water on her skin. Turning to look at it, it was just as it had been. Millpond smooth, like a mirror, with its little serpents of mist near the rock.

“Have you looked at the water?” she asked.

“Eh. No, not yet,” Lin Ling mused and, walked over to the edge, looking into it curiously.

Watching she started counting quickly in her head when she reached 100 she asked. “How long do you think that was…?”

Lin Ling blinked and stood back up from where she had been crouched next to the water’s edge. “Why? I just started looking.”

“I just long counted to 100…” she said quietly.

“Impossible. You're just messing with me now,” Lin Ling snapped “there’s nowhere near enough time…”

-There is definitely something weird with this place, she thought to herself.

The background set of calculations she was running on her scrip had also come back. All the distortions in the rooms were… She stared at the readouts, then at the pool, and the layout of the courtyard.

“Perhaps we should take some more of the water—?” Lin Ling was in the process of saying.

Decisively she put away her scrip before Lin Ling could curiously peek at it and reach a rather concerning conclusion. She turned to the other girl and walked away from the pool, taking her reluctantly with her as she returned a pot to her crude satchel.

“I think we should leave this courtyard,” looking around, she didn’t see Han Shu anywhere.

-Great. Just great. First one, then the other, she grumbled to herself.

“Han SHU!” she hissed as loudly as she dared in the misty gloom. “You finished up?”

“Eh?” he poked his head out of the door at the end of the courtyard. “Yeah, but first you should definitely come look at this room.”

Giving one last, somewhat more concerned look at the tree in the middle of the pool, she sighed again and led Lin Ling over to the room he was in.

It wasn’t one of the thirty-three, but on its own at the far end of the lower floor. A broader hall with tables and chairs set in a square in its middle. More stuff was stacked neatly along another hall. Unlike the other rooms, the motifs here gave her a faint sense of oppression as they threaded around the four walls.

“Do you feel that?” she asked Lin Ling as they stood there looking around.

“Feel what?” the other girl grunted, still unhappy at being dragged away, it seemed.

“This room… it feels heavier somehow,” she mused.

Heavier was a good way to describe it, now she thought about it. It seemed to press on her psyche faintly.

“Nope. I don’t get anything like that,” Lin Ling shrugged.

Finally pulling her arm away, she walked off, muttering under her breath. “What does she think I am, a little kid? What an old nag.”

Resisting the urge to reciprocate, she walked over to see what Han Shu, who was standing beside one of the walls, considered so important for her to see. Now that she looked around, each wall had a massive carving on it, or maybe drawing, as they didn’t quite seem carved into the stone. The one she was standing before was immense, twice the height of her, yet all of it weirdly visible in the gloom. The one on the left had a weird interlocking series of five circles inside a big circle and two squares placed at right angles to each other. In the middle was a weird shape that Juni thought looked awfully like a moon rune, but far more esoteric. On a whim, she deactivated her qi vision and hissed in shock.

“What’s wrong?” Han Shu said nervously.

“The drawings are perfectly visible, even in the pitch darkness,” she whispered.

She turned to look at the other two walls. The one on the far side had a similar kind of diagram, but in an octagonal shape, with eight circles feeding the eight cardinal points. Three triangles and a bunch of curved lines connected the eight circles in a way that made it weirdly hard to trace any one connection all the way around. The whole thing was outlined by a square fan with eight rune-like symbols arrayed at the midpoints of its edges and on the corners.

The last drawing, on the wall to her left, or straight ahead as she would have entered the room, was a triangle with two more inverted triangles inside it, surrounded by a circle and with a square surrounding the circle. Each corner triangle had a strange symbol in it. Perhaps because of the prominence of the writing compared to the others, the name ‘Eternity Seizing Heavenly Riddle Cage: Container Test Kind One’ was easy to pick out above it.

“What the unseeing fates is an ‘Eternity Seizing Heavenly Riddle Cage’?” she asked out loud before checking the others, noting that they had similar names, just in less obvious places on the wall due to the scale of the drawings.

Walking down the hall to look at it more closely, her eye was also drawn to the much finer writing along the bottom in various places. Some were just incomprehensible but several bits, which seemed to relate to the study of the drawing, she could get the gist of. Those she could easily decipher from the Old Easten language she read out loud in Imperial Common for the others’ benefit.

“Test 1: State unstable, can’t contain test specimen sufficiently. That’s by someone who identifies as ‘T’.”

“Test 9: Changing primary direction increases power by dimensional two shifts. Desirable yes/no? That’s T again.”

“Test 17: Never reverse its polarity. C”

Lin Ling, who had approached to stand beside her, muttered: “Well, those all make about as much sense as the rest of this place.”

“What of the other two?” Han Shu asked.

She turned back to the square fan drawing, it took a moment to find the name. This time set to one side of it.

“This one is called ‘Gift Bringers Calamity Cage: Container Test Kind Two’,” just saying the name out loud made her feel uneasy somehow.

“That doesn’t sound at all ominous. Nope, not at all,” Lin Ling said, in the most weirdly bored tone imaginable.

Scanning the wall, this one had a lot of notes, she read out some of the highlights. They suggested a test process that was, well...

“Test 7: Inexplicably lost three controllers for a week, appeared in west gardens of the academy with no memory of the previous month. C.”

“Test 13: Cage inverted, locked out half of laboratory. NEVER swap runes to try to boost power. E.”

“Test 22: Summoned stable cage, but it already contained a minor abomination of many angles. Unclear why. More research needed. K.”

“Test 28: Don’t use non-prime numbers of controllers. V.”

The third symbol, which Han Shu had called her over to originally, had a big note scratched beside it and most of the other notes were crossed out or unreadable.

“The text at the top reads ‘Unity Transformation Seal: Container Test Kind 3’.”

“They seem to have done a lot of disagreeing on it,” Han Shu noted, taking in the degree of crossing out and editing that had gone around it.

“Maybe,” she frowned. “I think it was rather that they ran into some… unforeseen issues.”

“What makes you say that?” he asked, curious.

She scanned the wall again, to find the comment thread that ran through it.

“Ah, here it is,” she pointed up to the right side. “This one reads: Test 1: Caused surprise Decimation Tribulation upon initial activation. Containment held, barely. Thanks to IWT Thunder Crest’s timely intervention. Stop until advice with creator. L.”

“Uh…” Lin Ling said from nearby. “What is a 'Decimation Tribulation'?”

“I have no idea, Han Shu mused with a frown. “Maybe it’s their name for the black lightning that shows up sometimes when people cross over the Immortal Threshold?”

“What would you know about that?” Lin Ling sniffed. “I was asking Juni.”

Ignoring the pair, as she had no idea herself what realm that was, she continued reading out the discussion.

“Underneath that, someone else has written: ‘This should work? Will investigate details. El.’

“It’s then followed by: ‘It worries me that this still doesn’t work. A true archetype should not have this issue. Even one that was supposedly lost for some aeons. El.’

“Then there is a note that reads: 'There is apparently a problem with the proposed archetype as it now manifests. More investigation needed. It plays into a bigger problem we had hoped was not related to this. Something or some influence is containing or monopolising the pure manifestation'.

“After that, there’s some back and forth that are just questions it seems and then this ‘El’ comes back and adds: ‘Problem relates to Boundless Transmutation Paradox. The issue is more creeping than any of us expected. Do not use this!’ After that, it’s just a bunch of initials and drawings of angry faces.”

“Maybe the Decimation Tribulation is related to a special type of Immortal tribulation?” Han Shu was saying nervously behind her.

She closed her eyes and exhaled, suspecting that they had just kept arguing back and forth about that, and not listened to anything she said.

“I’ve heard stories that to pass beyond the Immortal Realm, Immortals have to undergo tribulations to prove that their Dao Principle is sufficient for the world’s fate to not condemn it, and annihilate their foundation,” he went on. “If it’s something like that... This diagram when used somehow can call down the anger of heaven to such a degree? That’s too extreme.”

“What do you know?” Lin Ling was scowling, “it’s probably related to the great realm above 'Immortal'.”

Rubbing her temples, she eyed them before interjecting. “It’s not. The Supreme Five all have terms in Old Easten. Fate, Judgement, Denial, Retribution, Execution. The authors of this are clearly fluent in it, based on this script. They said Decimation, which is certainly not in that group.”

“So what realm is it then?” Han Shu frowned.

“No idea,” she sighed. “But this place is still here, so either the makers of this place were powerful beyond our wildest imaginations, or there is something else going on.”

“Possible they called them a different thing?” Lin Ling said stubbornly. “It might be related to the realm above Immortal…”

“We are getting sidetracked,” she pointed out. “What is clear is that all three of these things look like seals. Whatever they were trying to do here, it clearly involved restraining or constraining something?”

“We should at least record them?” Han Shu frowned.

“Uhuh…” she considered the three walls dubiously.

-That’s probably not a good idea, her inner thoughts piped up.

She nodded pensively. There was probably a reason this place was buried and had remained that way.

“A crazy thought occurs,” she murmured. “What if one of these… is the cause of the suppression?”

-If it is, don’t you think that taking these out of here might anger anything still maintaining it? Clearly there are scary things down here in the dark, it added as an afterthought.

That was a thought she had already been considering, without her mind throwing it up for her directly.

“That’s a bit of a stretch?” Lin Ling said dubiously. “The suppression field is immense, thousands of miles and nothing within this world can truly escape it, according to the bureau records.”

“Right,” she agreed.

“Odd.” Han Shu had his own jade tablet out and was staring at it.

“What is?” she turned to look at him and sighed.

-Seriously? He was trying to be competent, and clearly, the levy thing was weighing on him, but civic duty could go to the fates right now…

“Well… erm… you can’t record them. Look,” Han Shu held out the scrip for her to look at.

“Well duh," Lin Ling sniggered unhelpfully from the side. “Remember what I said about being cursed and stuff?"

Sure enough, the wall was just a fuzzy blur. A quick comparison showed her that everything that was written that held its own inner luminosity was gone, leaving only a blurry splodge of nothing in its place.

“Clearly they had some means to ensure that it wasn’t copied,” she said, eyeing them both. “So why don’t we just leave it at that and get out of this hall?”

“Why are you so keen to leave?” Lin Ling said with narrowed eyes.

-By all the fates, they are doing this deliberately, a part of her groaned.

“Maybe because that pool and spirit tree outside makes me nervous? Maybe because all the rooms here are weird? Maybe because I get the distant impression that copying these could be a very bad idea?” she hissed, finally letting some of her own annoyance creep out.

-Maybe because you’re both acting like morons in your own way, and I don’t want to die because of it, was what she didn’t say out loud.

Han Shu flinched back under the intent in her voice. Lin Ling scowled, turned to stalk off, towards the exit at least.

…

They made their way back out of the room in sullen silence, past the pool towards the other end of the ground floor, where the proper exit seemed to be located.

“Hmmm, now that you mention it, that pool…” Han Shu had walked over to look at it.

She shook her head and walked over, prepared to drag him away if the same thing happened to him that had happened to her and Lin Ling. However to her surprise, he just shook his head and turned and walked on.

“I think you're right,” he said after an awkward pause as they followed after Lin Ling. “I didn’t look at it properly before, but up close, the water in it looks a lot like one I saw in a vestige before we met up. The ‘old cultivation grandpa’ as you called him – Sir Mu Shansu of the Heavenly Dawn Sect said that he thought the pool in the tower was exceptionally dangerous and that if I did anything with it, it would cause my death.”

“So not at all auspicious then.” Juni found herself muttering. “Shall we push on?”

“Um… I heard what Lin Ling…” he said awkwardly.

“Not the place. Not the time,” she briskly cut him off.

“No… it isn’t I guess,” he said softly enough that she was sure he didn’t mean for her to hear.

-It really isn’t. That was years ago, and it was awkward besides, her mind added.

-Why do you keep bringing that up? He had a stupid crush that you humoured because—

She quashed the thought harshly. That was the creeping gloom and the stress forcing weird thoughts back up. It was just because she had been worried he might have died. You gave darkness tiny weaknesses in places much less oppressive than this, and they would gnaw at them like a dog on a bone. Down here it barely even took that it seemed. Any stray thought that was faintly divisive or problematic seemed to get drawn out as if it was a property of the very suppression itself.

-It could well be, her more helpful inner voice reasserted itself.

-What? Beyond anything to do with qi, there’s actually a mental suppression on this place?

-Or one relating to the soul. Qi alone wouldn’t keep all those beasts above 6-star rank in place, it suggested.

Eyeing her own memories dubiously, she realised Lin Ling had re-joined them as they all stood staring once again at the pool and the tree. It seemed to defy their attempts to understand anything about it even more aggressively if that was possible. Both Han Shu and Lin Ling eventually sighed.

“Yeah, that thing is definitely off-putting when you look at it for a while,” Lin Ling eventually said, turning away.

The corridor had only a few rooms split off from it. All were normal, showing no weird effects or strange displacement and contained very little, other than some empty storage vessels and a lot of shelves. With nothing overtly weird or engaging to keep them, their progress sped up remarkably after the first few rooms. Eventually, the corridor turned by about 30 degrees and opened up into another large courtyard with a hexagonal layout. This one was just a single ‘level’ if you could term it as such, but the ceiling was easily as high as the one they had just left.

Several corridors with different carved motifs led off from it. At the far side, on the broader, flat wall, were two larger exits. The left one led to a smaller hall with arched colonnades and then on into a large semi-circular space. Within it, they found descending rows of carved benches and seats tiered down to a central dais which contained a carved stone platform. Beside it was what appeared to be a plinth about the right location for someone to stand at while talking to the room?

To her eyes, the room itself looked like it could seat at least several thousand people. The walls of the room were again covered in carvings. The ceiling held constellations and a text in some strange script stretched around the border between the two sets of designs. Set into the walls were dozens of statues of people. Men and women dressed in robes, in unusual styles of armours or even dragon robes. All projected a faint aura of grandeur.

Returning to the main hall after poking around in that space and finding nothing much at all, she started to look at the other exits. Somewhat reassuringly for her grasp of the language, much of the text here was written in Easten. The place they had left was called ‘Scriptorium One – Void Hall’. The others were Scriptorium One; ‘Astral Hall’, ‘Etheric Hall’, ‘Thaumic Hall’ and ‘Divinic Hall’. The last three she was rather unclear on.

-Divinic could refer to Divination? Her thoughts mused.

-Or Divine, that might be more problematic though, she added to herself.

Each door also had a different motif design, she noted – all with their own inner luminosity.

The pattern associated with the Void Hall, which they had just left, was dominated by strange flowers that resembled something between a peony and a cherry blossom, with lots of trefoil leaf like designs swirling around them. The colour of the designs was discernible as somewhere between copper and gold for the flowers and blue-green for the leaves.

The Astral Hall was jagged lines that seemed to be stylized lightning in a multitude of colours.

The Etheric Hall was swirling flames or maybe mist, again in many different colours. She counted at least eight.

The Thaumic Hall was flowing water and cloud-like designs but in black and white marble.

The Divinic Hall was chains of linked constellations picked out in crystals and joined with silver and gold.

She felt it strange that that hall, rather than the one called Astral, should be marked with actual stars. Maybe her instinct was right, and it related to divination.

The remaining exit, on the same wall as the large auditorium, had text above it that also held its own inner luminosity and read ‘Principle Scriptorium Transfer Hall’.

“You know… it looks like someone had a serious fight in here.” Han Shu noted, running his hand over a cut mark in a pillar.

Looking again at the wider condition of the hall, she realised he was right. She had been so caught up in the different designs and the strange appropriateness of them, that she hadn’t really considered the wider ambience at all beyond a cursory check to see that there was no hidden danger. Whatever had happened here in the distant past had clearly involved extreme fire and quite a lot of structural damage to the environs. There were chunks gouged out of pillars, scores in the floor, and melted bits on the walls.

-Notice that the damage doesn’t extend to any of the motifs. Even in the columns, her inner voice murmured.

Indeed, they did not. There were cut marks in the floor that ended very abruptly or skidded sideways along motif edges. Looking closely at one, she also noticed that the damage to the floor always ended a few centimetres below the surface. The exposed stone there was faintly different. A much denser grain. Putting her hand against it, she was surprised to find it had a very faint aura of repulsion when it came into contact with her qi.

“Look here,” Han Shu frowned.

She turned to see where he was staring at a pillar. Someone had punched a fist-sized hole right through it, at about chest height.

“This damage looks nothing like the damage I saw in a lot of the ruins outside. These are sword marks, and there are palm prints on some of the columns,” he said as they stood there looking at it.

“We should check out the other courtyards.” Lin Ling said, sounding a bit bored.

“Mmmm, yes.” Han Shu agreed.

She was amused, and also quietly exasperated to notice the faint flicker of smugness across Lin Ling’s face at having forced him to agree with her on something on her own terms.

She stared at the patterns again and considered the potential meanings of the hall names. The intent within them was quite variable, but all of them hinted at danger and oppression.

“I guess we could check them quickly and see,” she conceded eventually. “But if they are as weird as the first one, maybe it’s not a good idea. The Lightning and Fire ones look like they could be potentially quite dangerous…”

She didn’t bother calling them Astral and Etheric, which would only confuse them

“…Yeah,” Lin Ling nodded pensively. “We could try the one that looks like clouds and water then? It doesn’t feel quite as ominous as the others.”

-Really, she was all over the place, she grimaced in her own mind.

-Half the time her voice doesn’t even match the intent of what she’s saying. If this keeps on her psyche break is going to become a mental divergence, her inner voice added helpfully.

Nodding, she went after Lin Ling, who was already making her way to that exit. On the way, she couldn’t help but wonder if she wasn’t already unknowingly at that point.

-We have been over this, her inner voice said, sounding a touch exasperated.

-Yes… we have. She agreed to herself.

She still cycled her mantra though, unwilling to fully trust the rational manifestation of thought entirely. Making sure it reinforced the oppression on the doors into compartmentalised bits of her psyche where the properly undesirable voices were sealed away.

The cloud and water courtyard turned out to be very anticlimactic. All the doorways except three were sealed off and the open ones just contained stacked benches, tables and a bunch of blank wall carvings. There was no pool in the centre. Instead, the courtyard held a huge, mostly flat, one metre high raised platform that seemed to be made out of a fine-grained, smooth white stone none of them could identify. Steps at five equidistant points around its circumference gave access to the top of the platform. The stairs lead to a raised walkway around the outside of the great platform, with raised circles about two metres across at each access point.

The lower, middle part of the platform was inlaid with flowing designs in a creamy coloured crystal she couldn’t recognise. It seemed somewhat similar to the arborundum vein in the blood cavern, but not enough that she was happy to think it was really the same mineral. The designs formed an interlocking set of circles and symbols that made her mind drift when she looked at them too closely. It was also hard to focus on the whole of the middle part of the platform. She found her vision being drawn in odd and distracting ways into weird details, whereupon it became exceptionally difficult to look away again as you were compelled to follow edges and swirls ever deeper into the patterns.

In short, it gave her, and apparently the other two, headaches and a nosebleed. So, they were all happy to just leave it alone, even though nobody could feel any qi off of it at all.

The ceiling of the courtyard was vaulted and entirely covered with carved flowing cloud patterns. The clouds were edged faintly in various metallic colours, gold, silver, and bronze and so on. The floor of the courtyard had rolling waves, picked out in what appeared to be blue and white. It was all very beautiful but apart from that and the unsettling platform there was nothing else to hold them here, so they traipsed back to the central hall in silence.

The Lightning corridor was simply sealed off with no way to access it about a third of the way along, as was the Fire corridor. She was quietly relieved at that. The courtyard with constellations, the Divinic, or perhaps Divination Hall, turned out to be the remains of a large orrery-like construction. It had mostly fractured and somehow tipped off its axis and stand. Both of those were melted into the floor in a way that was faintly disturbing to look at. Globes of different metals and stone types were embedded in the walls, floor, and even ceiling of the room. Placed or smashed there by some great force.

Curious she tried to approach one of them, only to encounter a strange intent that made her skin crawl. Backing away she watched in shock as a tiny bit of the silver patina on that orb flaked away and drifted through her. In that moment she felt a weirdly unpleasant chill and a sensation like she had been pinched where they passed through. Nearby Lin Ling also yelped and jumped back like she had been pinched while Han Shu spun looking around wildly.

Her heart pounded in her breast for a few moments but nothing else happened. Shivering, she stepped away from the orb and made a mental resolution not to pass too close to any of the others.

Most of the lower courtyard was destroyed beyond measure. The floor looked like it had melted to the point where its designs were lost to swirls of gold, silver and the occasional warped crystalline inclusion. The rooms contained warped furniture, stone pots and chairs. Surprisingly a few of the grey slabs with designs were present, but all of them were fused into surfaces just like the tables and chairs were to the floors and walls, so removing them was impossible.

On the upper floor, they did, however, find another one more of the decorated grey rock slabs. This one had somehow miraculously survived whatever melted the ground floor without being fused to a surface. It was decorated with a motif like the previous one she had found, but with constellations instead of flowers.

After some internal debate, she added it to her improvised pack. In another room, Lin Ling also found a small pot full of dull grey stones, rolled against a wall. It had also somehow avoided whatever melted the rooms. Equally curiously, it also turned out to be unstorable in a talisman.

The doors on the third level were all sealed, each door proclaiming to her that they required ‘Purple Authority’ to enter, whatever than meant. Lin Ling tried putting some of the blood on one of the spots beside a door, but even that did nothing so their exploration of the other complexes was brought to a rather anticlimactic end.

Left with nowhere else to go, all they could do was head down the last corridor to look at the ‘Transfer Chamber’. In her mind, this seemed the most likely route out of here. She had seen exits from the other complex that mirrored the location of the one they had entered by, but they were all sealed off.

“When you said corridor to transfer chamber—” Han Shu muttered. “—I didn’t quite envisage something on this scale.”

She nodded dully at that. It was closer to a long hall, stretching into the gloom ahead of them. Four stories, with inaccessible galleries and sealed rooms to left and right. The arched colonnades that held up the roof held elements of all the different designs that had adorned the previous rooms. It was also trashed. Pillars were cut, patches of the floor melted. One column she passed even had what looked like the fused imprint of a human form half pushed through it. Upper levels were scoured to glass or had doorways just collapsed. In other places, she fancied she could see shadowy forms on the walls, ghosts of unfortunate people preserved in the darkness of this place for all eternity.

“Hey come look here!” Lin Ling called, breaking her away from staring at the damage.

Turning, she made her way over to a collapse that had slumped down from above. It was immediately clear what had caught Lin Ling’s attention. Fused into the rock of one of the fractured slabs was half a breastplate and some other bits of armour. Removing them would be impossible, she immediately judged.

“That’s not a nice way to die,” Han Shu judged from the side.

“No… it would not be,” she agreed, staring at the warped surface of the rock.

To all intents, the unfortunate victim had been half shoved through the pillar, head first, entombing them. Clawed hands on the pillar and the twisted way the body was contorted spoke to how they had then died… miserably. The unfortunate had also been turned to stone at some point.

“Is this the first actual body we have seen?” she frowned.

“I saw a few, petrified in the place I found the sword,” Han Shu murmured, making a holy sign over the body.

“Does it even count as a body though?” Lin Ling interjected, currently, in a rational moment, it seemed.

“That is debatable,” she agreed, squatting down to look at it.

“The rock is also too warm and makes my skin itch just standing near it,” Han Shu grimaced.

Curious, she pulled out one of the crystal scribing knives and tried to cut open a piece of the statue's arm. The knife easily bit into the stone and then stopped, at about the depth bone should have been at?

Cutting sideways she revealed—

She stepped back smartly as a disturbing luminescence crept out of the fissure she had just opened. Her skin also started to itch and blister within moments. Lin Ling adroitly threw a bit of yang blood over it, which made the stone smoke and warp, hiding the bone once more.

“Maybe we don’t go cutting open weird corpses?” she grumbled, putting the pot back in her satchel.

“Mmmm. Yes,” she said, grimacing. “Sorry, that was impulsive of me.”

“Yes, it was,” the younger girl sniffed, without the slightest hint of irony or self-awareness.

“Uhhhh,” Han Shu was kneeling down nearby, looking very unwell, she realised.

Fumbling in her storage talisman, she pulled out a stronger healing pill and passed it to him. He crunched it down, grimacing at the taste, and took a swig of water.

She eyed the corpse again. There were faint flickers of qi on the surface of it, from where she had broken whatever seal was on it. They were very Yin and Yang. Unstable as well.

“Let’s get away from here,” she said grimly.

Neither complained as they swiftly made their way onwards, leaving the macabre little gravesite behind.

As they travelled on she saw a few other things like that. Not really petrified bodies, although there were a few scattered stone limbs and bones in corners, along with twisted weapons that were fused to the floor. Mostly it was voids or afterimages. Stencils of incinerated forms, body-shaped imprints in walls or once, warped through a column.

Threaded through all this were the most beautiful motifs she had yet seen as well. Like in the previous hall, they were largely untouched by the passage of battle. Flowing vegetation, flowers, trees and even occasional animals, both familiar and unfamiliar. Between these designs were large panels, where they survived, that showed scenes of mountains, forests and cities. The cities were particularly interesting to her as they showed a wide array of architectural styles and cultures. It was the first time she had gotten a real grasp for the potential scope of the world this place must have known.

Trying to match them to stories from her tutor about ancient Easten culture, she kept drawing blanks as well. They varied from strange blocky buildings with flat roofs and sloping walls to ones dominated by rising towers carved like giant tree trunks. Amongst them there were some that did look familiar, with giant pagodas towering over neighbourhoods with wide tree-lined streets, the roofs even had roof tiles similar to those in West Herb Picking Town or Blue Water City. However, the glyph scripts picking them out were utterly alien.

Each panel was also accompanied by some kind of text, but the script was different from the one widely used throughout the rest of the complex. After a while she took her scrip out and tied it to her arm, setting it to passively record. Telling the others to wait, she ran back up the hall and quickly let it record the hall panels from the start. The process only took a few minutes and gave Han Shu more time to recover as she caught back up. If nothing else, they might be able to get some merit for the pretty pictures she was preserving. Han Shu was right in that they needed answers to make up for the lost resources.

At the end of the long hall was a room that held a raised ceremonial altar-like construction with a flat top about thirty metres across. If the previous one had maybe been inlaid with arborundum, this one definitely was. An immense crystalline lattice of the rare and unworkable mineral swirled across its surface, up the columns around it, and met in a series of eye defying shapes far above. Other materials were also woven through it, either stone or metal in various places to create a truly intricate kind of formation design that was so far beyond anything she was familiar with, she didn’t even know where to start. It looked vaguely similar in style to the ones they found carved on the hall they had arrived in, the Void Hall courtyard, though, and also like a much larger version of the one in the cavern where she found Lin Ling.

The roof of the chamber was so high that her qi enhanced vision was unable to penetrate the gloom to see it. A circle of doors, all sealed with familiar, if unlit, symbols ringed the periphery of the room. The only other exits being two corridors on the far side of the chamber, beyond the platform.

“Do you think this is some kind of teleport array?” Lin Ling mused. "It’s like a huge version of the one in the first complex I found."

“It’s also like the one in the cavern where we met,” she noted. “And there are similarities to the doorway we ran through in the High Hall, to those ones at the side.”

“It also looks similar to the ones I saw at the top of the larger guard towers,” Han Shu agreed. “I’d assumed they were some kind of teleportation network at the time, but if this place is really called ‘transfer hall’…”

“It is, that bit of language was very simple. Unusually so,” she confirmed.

“Then this is likely to be one of the hubs for this entire complex?” Han Shu finished…

“Not that that does us much good,” Lin Ling grumbled. “There appears to be no way to activate it?”

“Yeah,” she sighed, sitting down on the edge of the platform. The arborundum was cool beneath her.

“…and even if we could, how much qi do you think something like this needs? I can’t see any openings on the platform for qi stones or anything like it,” Lin Ling muttered, poking around at the edge by the stairs up to it.

Nodding again, she squinted into the gloom at the two corridors. Her vision was certainly getting better with continuous use. That was something, at least.

“The two corridors read ‘Control’ and ‘Big-Storage Warehouse’ – that's Control and Big Warehouse.”

“Could Control be related to how this room works?” Han Shu suggested.

“Obviously,” Lin Ling snarked from where she was still tracing the designs around the outside of the platform with a hand.

“That seems reasonable,” she agreed, adopting a more conciliatory tone and looking around the hall again… “The other is likely a storage area for stuff brought through the teleport array. This appears to be a whole complex related to formations or researching formations somehow… Maybe they took all the stuff that was in it and put it in the storage area?”

“There is no point in splitting up to look at both at once, is there?” Han Shu pondered.

“No.” both she and Lin Ling confirmed.

She looked at Lin Ling again. It was hard to say why, but this newfound normality was actually bothering her more than the irrational outbursts.

Turning her worries back to the physical world, she added. “Better we all stick together. I’m still uneasy at how that… that ‘thing’ got into the areas we were in before.”

-Yeah, it’s possible there were other access points around that High Hall, her inner voice added.

“Yes”… Lin Ling shivered.

Han Shu just glanced back in the direction they had come, nervously. Certainly, a lot of their manner was lingering trauma from that moment. She remembered how she had been for hours, days afterwards. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling at all.

They sat there or poked around in silence for a few more minutes before she finally stood and decided to instil some direction into the proceedings. “So, a quick look at the ‘Big Storage' – then check out control?”

“…Yes, I guess,” Han Shu said…

“Okay…” Lin Ling added in a muted fashion as she completed her circuit of the platform to arrive back beside her.