Memories of the Fall

...Karma, Fate, Destiny, whatever you want to call them are all, really, once you start to strip away the crap people assign to them by mistake or ill design, aspects of the same thing. It would not be wrong to view them as a kind of fundamental force that works in both obvious and rather oblique ways. Like electromagnetism, or gravity… or cat memes. Trying to explain how it ‘works’ is more than frequently self-defeating, as we will get onto in a minute. First, I would like you all to consider, as a thought experiment, a seaside village.

It is filled with people, animals, buildings and so on, all doing people, animal and building things – and you, today, decide you want to cross the ocean. To do this you need a boat. To build that boat, you need knowledge to do so. You may also need other people to help build and crew it, to supply the materials and so on. But what is important is that the more people in the village that get involved, the more complex the whole thing becomes.

So, to get across the sea you have to build a boat. To do that you have to take apart the world you live in, and twist it accordingly. In this case, you must cut trees to make the boat. You must make canvas for the sails. You must grow food so you do not starve, or find some way to get it from others. You must know how to sail the boat you have built, either yourself, or with others. To cross the sea, you also have to go with the natural world. With the winds, the tides, you must know how they work together, know when to fight them, when to go with them. When you set out on your voyage you must know your boat, know how long it will last, and know how your choices will impact it. The longer you voyage, the more this will matter. The more damage the boat will take, irrespective of how good a sailor you are. Misjudge and no matter how excellent you are, how good your preparations, the boat will eventually founder. Be it during the first journey, or the thousandth.

So, how does this really relate to these three? Fate, Destiny, Karma? At its simplest level, ‘Destiny’ is the actions of building the boat, getting it crewed and so on. ‘Fate’ is whether you got across the ocean in the end. ‘Karma’ is everything messy that contributed to your status at the end, uncaring of whether you’re sitting on a sandy beach somewhere sipping strong alcohol or drowned.

But, if we want to pick at it a bit closer? Well, Fate would be that the timbers were rotten, the rope was weak, a sea monster just happened to be going your way. You cheated your crew, didn’t pay them, stuff like that. If everything is going unhindered, whether you succeed or fail is related to the sum of its parts. In a perfect world, these kind of things are not a bad analogy to Fate in this context. Destiny is the knowledge to build the boat, how your connections were in that village. Were you a rich or a poor man. Liked or hated. Karma… well, Karma is the balance between Fate and Destiny, it is the sum of the parts framing not just your endeavour, but the circumstances of the whole village from moment to moment.

I already see the wiser ones picking up on the key point there. ‘Unhindered'. Ours is a somewhat odd place in that regard, in that those at the top have ‘views’ about this. In another land however, maybe the one ruling the village doesn’t like water. Or you simply live in a land with really bad trees for boat building. Or maybe only specific people can get the good timber? Only specific people know when the sea monster will come, when the weather is good, and they are the ones dispensing that knowledge to the voyagers that they like? And most importantly, they are also the ones deliberately putting holes in the bottom of boats of people they don’t...

~Excerpt from ‘A treatise on the Mechanisms of Being.’

~Author unknown.

~ Ha Kai – Mysterious Cherry Tree Pagoda (now with spring cherries) ~

Ha Kai watched his father stalk back and forth, occasionally stopping to poke at the now chaotic spatial rift they had using to observe matters in the Yin Eclipse Mountain Range. The old man wasn’t angry as such. Not anymore. There was far too much death and destruction among the scions of families that had offended him in various ways over the untold years for him to be really angry now. However, he could tell that his father was definitely not happy with his continued inability over the last few days to track down Di Ji—or any of the other perpetrators of the chaos that had unfolded in the Jasmine Gate.

“I can’t believe that little fate-thief and his associates can evade my arts!” the old man snarled, yet again, as if repeating the complaint would somehow change matters.

Indeed, as he watched his father pause to glare at the rift once more, lapsing in the strange tongue he was sometimes wont to curse in when he was really peeved, then prod it, with more venom than was perhaps strictly necessary. This time, to his mild surprise, it did actually manifest an image, but only for a second, and what enveloped them was little more than a chaotic haze of rain and cloud. Still, within it he caught a brief glimpse of a bunch of disciples, from the Red Sovereigns, it looked like, fleeing frantically from a very peeved multi-headed neonate they had somehow disturbed.

“Father, would it not be better to focus more on discerning what kind of anti-scrying method they are using...?”

Even as he tactfully voiced that suggestion, he could not help but wonder—and not for the first time—whether some part of this was, in its own rather pathetic way, a kind of Karma where his father's own cultivation was concerned.

Frankly, even knowing full well what his old man was capable of, he was impressed that his father could still maintain this scrying art of his so actively, despite having taken basically no breaks since they started, all the while prodding at the most divination-hostile environment in ten Starfields. And the strain it presumably took was only starting to show somewhat in his fraying temper. No other Dao Ascendant he knew of would be capable of it. Certainly, he could not repeat such a feat, despite his own vast accumulation, and that was a bit chastening on a certain level, though it was also oddly inspiring, he had to concede, that there was still so much more improvement he could make.

It was also a reminder, in its own way, of what his old man was actually eschewing, by staying hidden away in this other place. Had his father not spent the last two aeon spans—at the very least—seemingly deliberately stalling his own cultivation in bizarre ways at the Peak of Dao Ascension, he would already be an apex Celestial Venerate, and likely approaching the same kind of accumulative foundation as transcendental anomalies like Meng Fu, and thus, probably not having the particular issue that faced them right now.

“I know that—!" his father, without turning, just growled under his breath as the scene flitted once again, this time giving a momentary view of a series of dark fissures amidst tangled vegetation, before once again vanishing. “What I don't... ahhh—! Why can't I even...?!”

Abruptly, his father stopped speaking and turned to stare at the building behind them, a gloomy frown etched into his face as he ran a hand through his hair.

“Is it possible someone... or something else got him already?” Lan Huang suggested cautiously, from where he was seated next to Ha Leng.

“Mmmm... Maybe," his father grunted, starting to pace again. "I guess I will have to call in some favours. There are no circumstances where that dog-shit little minion can be allowed to run around unaccounted for with that body, or those treasures he managed to retain. Even if he is dead, I'll find a way to re-activate him. The prescience he demonstrated to get so far into the Jasmine Gate, even if they were playing their own game, is only going to be bad news going forward.”

On that point, all of them could only nod. Even Ha Leng understood clearly at this point that the whole thing they had watched unfold was 'Bad News'.

“If there is a bright side, the Jasmine and her posse clearly got his number on some level," Cranea interjected. “And they did cripple that body.”

“There is that,” his father agreed with a further sigh, stalking over to the table and pouring himself some of the fruit wine. “If only the Seven Sovereigns hadn't dropped those Nameless sent swords of Meng Rin’s.”

That was the other issue, and the much more vexing one, in many ways. The massacre of the Seven Sovereigns Censure Force, while not unexpected, had only exacerbated the already extreme difficulty of observing matters in that part of Yin Eclipse.

“Indeed,” he agreed, not able to hide his own grimace over it.

The fact that it had obscured that critical point when they could have tried to track Di Ji after he fled made him want to kick something every time he thought about it, never mind his father's continued anger over it.

“The degree to which someone was able to plan out the chaos is…”

“Concerning?” Lan Huang muttered.

“Yes,” he agreed grimly.

It was easy to joke about the Meng clan overreacting to grievances, but whoever was really behind Di Ji and his compatriots incursion had known a concerning amount of the underlying realities of what a Meng clan response could be.

Personally, he very much doubted Meng Fu would have sanctioned such a strike either, which suggested something had slipped out of her grasp. He could speculate a little, because she did vanish for centuries or millennia at a time, every now and then, and he had known her for long enough to personally observe the cyclical ebbing and flowing of her cultivation foundation towards ever more profound heights without ever really seeming to pass properly into the Venerate Step. However, even if he had a pretty good relationship with Meng Tan, ‘Does your Teacher occasionally just toss her cultivation and redo it every now and then—and did she just happen to do it this last century, perchance?’ was not the sort of question you could just ‘ask’.

Between that, and the convenience of the way the observed events had fallen in the end, and the ‘identity’ of Ji Tantai, it was hard to escape the nagging feeling that the planners of this whole mess actually had someone inside the inner echelons of Seven Sovereigns, which was not an idea he liked the implications of one bit.

In any case, the highly convenient end result was that the Jasmine Gate was now a total dead-zone for any and all scrying techniques, it seemed. The spatial integrity of that part of the mountains was so malleable it was still impossible to get any sort of stable lock at all.

All they could say for certain was that the group had not left the confines of the Great World, because there were ways to check that, that not even the Kong clan could block.

“When things settle down a bit, I'll see about making contact with Morea the old-fashioned way,” Cranea reassured his father.

“Aiii, I guess that will have to do,” his father sighed, disconsolately, sitting down on a bench and glaring at the hazy rift, that was now just reflecting swirling clouds.

“Maybe they did get buried in that place...” Ha Leng muttered, more in hope than anything realistic, he suspected.

“We can but hope,” Lan Huang sighed, giving Ha Leng a comforting pat on the shoulder, while not quite meeting his own gaze.

What with the spatial integrity of the region currently being somewhere south of wet rice paper, it was possible that their escape using that sanctuary artefact could have dumped them underground, or in a relict, anomalous zone.

Personally, however, he felt the most likely outcome, given the reactions in the moment to that treasure, were that wherever that group had ended up, had been a deliberate choice. What bothered him most though, was that with all the other events that had fallen favourably for that group, their escape intersecting into some anomalous space right on the ‘Eye of Harmony’ might have been a deliberately calculated gambit.

“—Still,” Lan Huang mused, after falling silent for a long moment. “Thinking on the origins of some of those things they were tossing out. Certainly, he robbed a Meng clan ancestral tomb, but could some of them have come from the Seng Dynasty remnants in the Yerrek Pit? Di Ji was sent there…”

“Seng Dynasty, Elder Lan?" Ha Leng asked, sounding curious. "I've never heard of them, and anyway, isn't the Yerrek Pit a prison?”

“It is now," he clarified. "As to the Seng Dynasty, they ruled when the Meng Hegemony was at its peak, before Yin Eclipse descended. At that time it was one of their dynastic burial grounds, for the high-nobility and royalty.”

“It... before?” Ha Leng stared at him in shock.

“—As to that, I doubt it,” his father mused, still glaring at the rift. “Honestly, it’s embarrassing how people still harbour hopes there are remnants in those barren tombs. It also means there are enough bloodshot old eyes fixated on it, despite its status as a prison, that some other thieving brat or wannabe old ghost would have gotten treasures like Di Ji was showing, long before he ever got a look in, when he was sent there.”

“—And in any case, that place was picked clean so long ago,” he added.

In truth, given how long Lan Huang had spent on the Shu continent, it didn't surprise him that that was where his thoughts had been directing him. The history of that land would escape a junior like Leng, but for anyone of a certain age, or pushing past Dao Eternal, it was one of the gateways to higher places, and had a surprising number of remnants that still turned up with regularity, even now. What he didn't say was that the Yerrek Tombs themselves had been salvaged by the Shu, Tai and Meng clans with his father playing a significant role in that endeavour, during the chaotic times of the post-Seng interregnum. The last remotely intact surviving tombs had been cleared and relocated by Meng Fu's subordinates’ millenniums before shit hit the imperial fan and the Shan dynasty collapsed.

“You say that,” Lan Huang pointed out, “But based on what we witnessed...”

“True, he could just be ridiculously lucky,” his father agreed with another resigned sigh that he could not help but echo, because that was always a possibility.

“…”

The rift, which was still just doing its own thing, rippled ominously, provoking his old man to stop and give it another slightly aggrieved push. It swirled, the ‘constraining elements’ of the twin fish and the blind woman slid back into focus for the rest of them and shifted its view again; this time showing a group of nine disciples in blue and red robes cowering in a cave shelter in a valley south of Thunder Crest. One that was being ravaged by what looked awfully close to tribulation lightning focused on a withered tree on a rock spire at its heart that was conspicuously missing a branch.

“Uhh… Revered Ancestors?” Ha Leng spoke up again.

All three turned to look at the boy who was adjusting quite well to his current circumstances. Sometimes he felt his father had actually forgotten the boy was there, or that he was as junior a member of the cultivation world as it was possible to find without snagging an actual mortal off the street. Fortunately, both of them were keeping an eye on him to make sure he didn’t have some kind of nervous breakdown. Despite having adjusted quite well, he still had the odd… moment.

“My talisman…” he held it out…

“What about it?” Lan Huang asked, peering at it pensively as Ha Leng held it up as if he couldn't quite believe what he was seeing.

“Well, when you hit the rift just now it updated,” Ha Leng looked at the jade in his hand with an expression between shock and deep unease. “Well, you... you should see this?”

“Updated?” he asked, surprised, wondering what could have—

“Hmmm, that’s... interesting,” Land Huang, who had already glanced at it, took it off Ha Leng and passed it over to him. "What do you make of this, Ancestor Kai?"

Accepting the talisman, he sank his Dao Intent carefully into it. And paused, wondering what he was looking at for a moment, because it was not the talisman it should have been. The update, if you could even call it that, given how all-encompassing it was, had basically rewritten the core formations within it from scratch.

“I could get nothing out of the core...” Lan Huang added, grimacing. “As to what it shows... I can see the connection to a grand augury array…?”

“Unsurprising.” he mused, considering the various components that had been rewritten.

The degree to which some had been adjusted were well in excess of almost anyone would be able to achieve if they were born to this world. He was only able to pierce the heart of them due to his extensive education in the Tai clan's Formations Dao and his father's own, even more profound teachings... and the fact that his own grasp on those fundamentals was likely better than some World Venerates, having seen the actual framework of the 'heavenly order' shift twice now, over the course of his long life.

“This is the work of the Kong clan,” he concluded after some thirty seconds of staring at the new 'child nodes' enmeshed into the heart of the talisman, many of which touched the very fundamentals of how Heavenly Fate and Destiny worked on Eastern Azure.

“Father, can you find a person?” he added, passing his old man the talisman. “The girl at the top of that list.”

His father took the talisman and stared at it with eerily empty eyes for a long moment... until he made a disgusted sound and stared up at the constellations in the sky above them.

“Well, that's not at all ominous,” his father muttered at last. “In her regard, it’s a waste of time though. She is fate locked somehow, or the talisman itself is. It’s still broadcasting outward to their array, but nothing is able to get in that exists within the constraints of this world.”

“It can't be the same Lin Ling, right?” Ha Leng asked, turning to Lan Huang.

“—Same Lin Ling?” he asked, turning to Ha Leng.

“The... group of herb hunters we were with,” Ha Leng replied.

-Ah, of course... the girl who was with the group who were fleeing Di Ji in the Jasmine Gate. Well, this just got more interesting, and perhaps not in a good way, given the size of that 'score' their stupid array has calculated.

-Even though shamelessness is an affliction that only grows with old age, there should be limits…

“What do you mean by ‘Fate Locked’?” Lan Huang asked, also frowning, but also not able to hide his naked curiosity, which was sort of funny to see in someone of his realm.

“Hmmmmm,” his old man frowned, still considering the talisman, turning it over in his hands. “It comes from two different sources: firstly, the array mechanism that’s linked to these is also above my realm, or effectively above my understanding, which is to say that it’s the work of a Celestial Venerate. Those idiots are using the Blue Morality Cult's Fate Seeking Divine Mandate to scry the 'worth' of the souls connected to every talisman that has been updated like this.”

“Which is like using a Dao forged axe to prune a mortal’s horticulture,” he elaborated, mostly for Ha Leng's benefit.

“And about as smart an idea,” his father grunted. “As to the other element, it looks like that girl's own talisman is obscured by the darkness of the very depths themselves.”

“Oh…” Lan Huang looked uneasy now, because he did understand something of what his father was talking about.

“Em... Revered Ancestors? What does that mean?” Ha Leng, who was blissfully ignorant asked, still looking confused, which was entirely understandable.

“It means…” he had to pause for a moment to think how best to frame the answer diplomatically. “Well, mostly that that some old ghost is looking to commit robbery through sideways means.”

“Aye,” his father sneered, staring into the middle distance now, and answering anyway. “It’s one thing entirely for me to talk about hunting down that Di Ji, but this... this is...” His father trailed off for a long moment, then sighed, sounding sad more than angry. “These bastards who did this claim I have a bad reputation, but this is just abhorrent. It is subverting things that should not be touched, without any care for the consequences.”

His old man abruptly turned and gave Ha Leng a long, searching look.

“At your realm, lad, you don’t need to know details, and frankly, should not ask. It’s dangerous outside of places like this to poke at the fundamentals before you know what you’re looking at. You wouldn’t like the response, and those scheming villains that like to think themselves a bit smart in the Imperial Court would notice you.”

“Idiot,” Cranea uncharacteristically gave his father a light chop on the head, of all things. “Your son closed that off and you still went with the flow and answered.”

His father stared at Ha Leng for a long moment, then sighed ruefully.

“As I said, it’s dangerous, and even I am not immune.”

Ha Leng looked between them, rather like a small animal that had just been told that not only does death exist but that it was thoroughly shameless. Which in truth, was probably not a bad moral to take out of the whole conversation.

“You are not?” Lan Huang shuddered. “Are we?”

“In danger? Here? No,” his father sighed. “It is just a me problem.”

“If you do that too much it will not be,” Cranea grunted. "YOU have spent a lot of time poking about at..."

“I know, I know,” his father waved a hand in a rather resigned manner.

“…”

“What my father says is true,” he added, more gently, pouring out a cup of the wine and pushing it over to Ha Leng, who accepted it with slightly shaking hands. “Though it is important to know that there is nothing wrong in fearing this either. It is not the kind of thing you should seek any deep grasp over or contention with until you are preparing to break through to Dao Immortal…”

“Or Dao Lord,” Lan Huang agreed.

“I-I… s-sorry for asking.” Ha Leng wilted a bit more.

“Not at all, just… erm…” he paused, trying to think what options were available. “We can give you a special talisman charm, so you don’t have to worry about miss-thinking.”

"Probably not a bad idea," his father agreed.

“Mm… miss-thinking!?!” Ha Leng went a bit wide-eyed at that and he winced mentally, cursing that he didn’t interact with anywhere near enough juniors.

“I'll look something out,” Cranea murmured, giving him a sideways look now that made him feel about twelve. “There will be something suitable in storage, I am sure.”

“Mmmm, yes,” his father nodded, before continuing. “Anyway, the important take-away here and now is that the evaluation shown on this thing is utterly anomalous for what the idiots who concocted this insanity of a parent formation intended. That child’s talisman fell into one of the deep places beneath the mountain and, if I was going to hazard an educated guess, got found by something best left undisturbed. The echo is faint, but... what do you think Cranea?"

To his mild surprise, his father passed the talisman to Cranea, who stared at it for a long moment, then sighed and nodded.

“Yes, that is the 'Dividing Dark', that cages the deep places beneath these mountains,” she replied slowly. “Whatever she found has been deeply touched by it.”

“Ohh,” Lan Huang frowned…

“So they found some vestige when they fled into the caves?” he mused, again pondering what might have occurred after the appearance of the ‘horror’ and the impact of the Seven Sovereign's guardian treasures.

“—Or something found them,” his father grimaced. “That battle has shaken up a lot, and the area around the Jasmine Gate is a notable confluence between Thunder Crest and the East Fury Peaks. Just another reason to try to re-establish contact with the Jasmine Gate, I guess..."

His father turned once more to the rift, considering it pensively.

*—crack*

Abruptly, the talisman, which Cranea had been spinning absently between her fingers, shattered into pieces and several bright fragments of jade swirled up into the air, becoming the core of a formation.

-Wait, what? he looked on in shock as the arrays within rapidly decompressed themselves, rapidly filling up the ground floor of the pagoda they were currently in.

He had known she had some exceptional comprehensions, but this was...

Only his father didn’t look shocked, though he did glance over at Cranea with a raised eyebrow as she took in the formations pensively. Layer after layer rapidly stacking up until thirty-three different formations were rotating in a fat cylinder to one side. And as one, they all snapped together with a faint chime, forming an impossibly complex compressed array. Finally, another, very different array swirled out of the ether around it and connected the whole thing into the arrays around the rift.

As they watched, slowly it shifted and its field of view coalesced into hazy, cloud-wreathed treetops, then focused up and out, towards the Great Mount itself. Then it flowed forwards,

“They should be there,” she muttered, pointing as it focused in on a shadowy crevasse on the mountain’s slope, between two emergent peaks on its western face.

“Hmm... Can you check the list for two other entries, Lady Cranea?” Lan Huang, suddenly.

“Oh?” his father, who had been gazing at the scene the rift was now showing with narrowed eyes, turned back to Lan Huang.

“The two who fell with the puppet. Jun Arai and Jun Sana,” Lan Huang elaborated.

“OH!” his father snapped his fingers. “Of course, they fell with the puppet, so wherever they are should be the last known location of it?”

-Jun Sana, Jun Arai? He frowned, wondering why those names were oddly familiar.

“Well, yes,” Lan Huang said, clearly not having been concerned about the puppet he thought wryly.

“Hmmm…" his father stared at the unpacked formations, then waved his hand at them. Several dozen layers shifted rapidly in a blur of symbols and then a long list of names in a translucent, blue-tinted box appeared in the air before them.

For a few moments, the list spooled crazily back and forth, moving so fast even his eyes could barely follow the names—

“Ah, here they are...” his father turned his hand and the shifting list snapped to a stop. “However...”

“Location listed as ODR-S?” he asked, staring at the abbreviation with a frown, trying to recall what the current nomenclature for such things was. “Aren't their talismans with the others?”

“Out of Dimensional Range – Severed,” Lan Huang supplied helpfully, while his father continued to poke at the underlying formation components of the array Cranea had somehow broken open.

"Can you...?" his father turned to her.

“This isn't that easy, you know,” Cranea grumbled as the image in the rift twisted and flowed outwards, rippling across ridges in a eye-watering blur, before snapping back into focus—

What manifested itself before, and around them was a green, forested cliff, a waterfall pouring down it into a cavernous sinkhole. The scene wavered then the perspective shifted, and they were plunged down it, to reveal a pool and a colony of ominously familiar, sickly greenish-white mushrooms, surrounded by a faint aura of miasma that made the image before them buckle and warp in strange ways.

“Interesting…” he mused, idly rubbing his beard between his fingers, still trying to work out why those two names seemed familiar.

-Ah… abruptly he matched the name and face to a young woman sitting next to the Ling girl, gawking at the scroll he had given to that scion from the Lu clan in the Myriad Petals teahouse.

-Small worlds, small worlds… he sighed, her talent had been quite good for one so young and she had had a keen aptitude for new things.

“Umm Revered Ancestors, L-Lady Cranea, how does that work? If their talismans are with the rest of the group?” Ha Leng asked, nervously.

“—If their connection to the talismans has been severed, what is their score?” he asked, curious now as he pondered how the formations on display were evaluating matters. It was indeed as his father had said, the means employed were nothing good for juniors or those below the Dao step to be touched to deeply by.

“+91,210 and +82,810,” his father replied, after a moment of consideration. “It’s a Modelled Divination, so that is a number is calculated by these arrays based on what it could divine about the last few days of their progress and some other complex extrapolations. "What happens if you go up the cliff?"

“It will cut out,” Cranea supplied. "The distortion plane from that old scholar breaking out clips the entire upper region, it looks like."

“—of course it does,” his father sighed, shaking his head.

"Modelled... they were gathering herbs for the provincial gift," he mused. "So that score isn't actually out of the realm of possibility, given the things you said you were recovering." He nodded to Leng, who flushed.

"Yes, and the other three actually have logged scores that are..." his father hummed under his breath for a moment as he considered the formations. "Even Leng's are in that region. How sloppy, if someone had a proper venerate realm talisman clone from an elder who had experience with Yin Eclipse, they could actually manipulate some of this."

“The Kong Diviners and sloppy? Say it isn't so,” he murmured, rolling his eyes.

“Certainly, I doubt they ever expected one of the foremost formations experts in the entire starfield to poke around at it,” his father sniggered.

“Yes, and there is also you,” Cranea replied with aplomb.

“Ummm… What does 'Severed' mean in this context, Honoured Ancestors?” Ha Leng asked slowly, while his father shot Cranea an overly theatrical ‘hurt look’.

“It means the soul bound connection, by blood probably given their realm, unless someone bound it on their behalf who was over Nascent Soul, has been broken in some way.” Lan Huang answered before he could.

"—And um... those mushrooms, are they actually?" Ha Leng eyed the white monstrosities uneasily.

“Yes, Eldritch Moon Mushrooms," his father replied with a grimace. “And, seemingly, no puppet.”

“Actually, is the puppet registered as part of their ‘take’?” he asked, a thought occurring to him in light of their scores.

“Hmmm, no,” his father mused. “Which is interesting.”

“Most likely they ended up in an anomalous zone almost immediately,” Cranea mused, considering the sink hole. “It has been almost a week and there has been a lot of spatial distortion rolling over that place.”

“I suppose death in an anomaly will be kinder than dying to Moon Mushrooms,” Lan Huang sighed, sadly. “Such a pity, they were good girls, very talented for their age.”

"Umm, could you shift the viewpoint a moment?" he asked Cranea politely, frowning, as something else caught his eye about the sky above as she moved their point of view around to take in the rest of the cavernous area not encroached by the mushroom colony. "To look at the sky, back towards the great mount..."

With a sigh, Cranea moved her hands and the scene before them shifted, bleeding through the ridgeline before snapping back to show the skies... which just like he had thought he saw, were full of eerily shifting clouds.

“What’s going on with the weather up there?” he wondered out loud, pointing up at them, because even by the standards of some of the things they had seen these last few days, it was odd, even for Yin Eclipse.

“Hmmm,” his father stroked his own chin, narrowing his eyes. “My instinct says that there has been too much mucking about with the balance of the world. There are almost 17,000 entries on that talisman’s link array, and they are likely growing by the second. That whole central region has always had a rather dubious relationship with ‘our’ Heavens in any case. It was already sketchy in the previous era.

“I-in the previous era?” Ha Leng gawked.

“The Shan dynasty,” his father said absently. “In this one, it really doesn’t like the Blue Morality.”

“…”

“So, the mountain or something there is rejecting the incursion of our world’s fate to this degree?” Lan Huang mused, suddenly looking a bit queasy, as he might, given what that could imply.

“Probably, yes,” his father replied pensively. “But there is something else building behind it as well.”

Staring at the thunder shaking the sky and the twisting spatial instabilities again, he searched for whatever his old man had noticed.

“Oh…” his tone became a bit strangled, because once you looked for it… it was hard not to see it. Rather like one of those visual puzzles talisman painters sometimes sold for children.

“You see it?” his old man nodded appreciatively. “Good eyes, son.”

“What the fates is that?” he hissed, trying not to grasp the arm of his chair as he traced the rippling tide of karmic inevitability that was slowly suffusing the depths of the storm.

“Up-strike, and Under-shadow,” his old man said simply.

“Up-strike?” Ha Leng asked, sounding confused.

“—It’s similar to grounding bolts in lightning storms," Cranea interjected.

“Aye,” he nodded. “The world knows when tribulations come, moments before they arrive. Normally it’s… very, very short as a period of time... But the bigger the tribulation, the more energy has to gather. It’s nothing to do with Fate, or Destiny, or ‘heaven’. It’s related to the very nature of the realm plane. It’s like you flinching before you see a punch coming. How do you think the bolts know where to land?”

“An Under-shadow and an Up-strike on this scale…?” Lan Huang asked, unable to hide his unease.

“The last one of these I saw was when Meng Fu raced back to World Venerate outside of the world, during the previous heavens," he muttered. shuddering involuntarily at that memory. "That Up-strike eclipsed the rotation axis of the world plane itself.”

“These?” Lan Huang asked. “There was something special about Meng Fu’s tribulation?”

“Yes. She doesn’t cultivate just any spiritual law. Her strength comes from the Hong Meng, it was never born of this world. She possesses a God Physique, with a… Sovereign’s Symbol. Remember who her grandfather is?”

“Oh…” he realised his hands were clammy. “Divine Sage Vast Obscurity.”

“Indeed,” his father sighed.

“It’s not Meng Fu breaking through to Celestial Venerate, is it?” he felt compelled to ask. “Or something to do with her treasures? She wouldn’t be so… wouldn’t do it in the world? I know that the Seven Sovereigns School has just taken a bit of a beating, but for her to decide to retaliate like that…?”

“While I agree, she can be that petty when it comes to people breaking her things, she is not that close to that threshold,” his father replied dryly. “No, this is something else. Something different... The reaction is too diffuse, the intention to set against it… too vague.”

“—I cannot keep this formation stable like this all day,” Cranea cut in as they all stared at the rift.

“Aiii, I understand,” his father sighed, shaking his head. "Can you pack it back?"

“...”

“Sorry, stupid question,” his father muttered at her rather flat look. “Give me a moment.”

He watched as his father dashed off into the house behind them, then returned to looking at the image before them. In fact, his father was only gone for about thirty seconds, returning with a cedar-wood box into which was set what looked like fantastically complicated feng-shui based sealing device, the like of which even he could never recall having seen before.

“Can we transfer it into that?” his father asked.

“Mmm...” Cranea stared at the box, then nodded. "Take it off me first though; it will be easier—"

His father grunted, his face turning white as she gestured to him and the entire momentum of the twisting formations shifted. In its place, Cranea tipped out the fruit bowl on the table, picked up the wine jar, and poured out a large measure into the bowl, before staring at it for a long moment... and tipping it out over the floor, of all things.

As soon as she did so, however, his father pulled his hands together and closing his eyes, did... something strange. For a moment, it was almost as if the natural 'flow' of the formation stilled, and then one layer after another it dropped into the cedar wood box with its strange feng shui mechanism, until, after a few moments, the entire thing had somehow merged with the box.

“Well, that’s that, for now,” his father gasped, sitting down, looking as drained has he had seen him in a long while.

“Still, was it my imagination or are there... others in there? Have those idiots in the Astrology Bureau actually managed to touch on more than one of those ancient echoes?”

“Mmm, this formation is indeed touching some things it should not,” Cranea nodded. “At least three—the 'Inevitable Dark', the 'Dividing Dark' and the 'Dreaming Dark' are already rising.”

“Umm?” Ha Leng asked... “What are these ‘Dark’ that you keep mentioning?

His old man eyed the youth dubiously and shook his head, leaving the question unanswered, which was fair… and prominently eminently sensible. He had refused to answer him when he asked all those years ago as well—during the Yuan, when the great calamity of that era had unfolded, and he had already been at the peak of Dao Ascension at that point.

~ Meng Fu & Cao Liang – Thankless Sword Recovery in Yin Eclipse ~

Burning away the last of the bed of luminous pink and green mushrooms that were trying to reclaim the third of her mother's scattered swords, Meng Fu hauled the parasol wood blade out of the rock where it was lodged, and glanced back at where Cao Liang was currently resisting a hoard of furious hook bats.

They had taken umbrage at both the arrival of the sword, which had cracked open the heart of their nest caverns, and now, the fact that they were trying to reclaim it before the bats themselves could get any benefit from the misfortune circumstances had visited upon them.

“We’re done here,” she called out to him, wiping the sweat off her forehead.

-I forgot how annoying the ‘enforcement of climate’ that comes with the ‘Dividing Intent’ pervading this place is, she grumbled to herself.

She was glad her clothing was loose and not that prone to draping in particularly suggestive ways. Not that she had any issue with revealing clothing; however, in her current form, her presence would only be magnified by wearing damp clothing that accented her figure. As her Intent was already fully suppressed, if she pushed it away even more, her presence actually would start to exert its natural charm and distract her disciple again, which would be embarrassing.

Looking up at the rock slab in the middle of this cavern, she admired her disciple’s skilful use of the ‘Sky Slaughtering’ formation. For his realm, he was doing admirably in the face of a very unfavourable opponent.

The hook bat swarm was mostly just circling above it now, occasionally sending down a few of their number to strike with remarkable accuracy at the small points of potential weakness in the formation when they thought it worth the risk. Their ability to keep the formation at bay like this was within her own expectations but had certainly surprised Liang. She hadn’t told him that was why she had suggested it, the stalemate was convenient for the sword recovery even if it was causing him a headache.

“What do we do about them, Teacher?” Cao Liang hissed out between slicing a few more to ribbons with the formation he was supporting. “They are quite persistent.”

“The thunder has pushed them in here. Normally they roost in the higher ridges,” she explained.

Thunder rumbled in the distance, as if the landscape wished to emphasize that point directly.

She could taste the changing atmosphere from the power of the storm overhead. Involuntarily, she also looked at the cavern floor that actually concerned her more. The Dark was rising below, being drawn upwards by something.

-What did you idiots do, she thought, casting her mind back to the last communique from Meng Yang concerning the ‘trial’ and its ‘talismans’.

“Something is going against the world's laws?” Cao Liang asked, also looking beyond the swarm.

“No… not as such,” she mused, wondering how it was possible to explain this in a way that wouldn’t disturb him unduly.

-Is some idiot venerate trying to pry at things from outside? Or is it one of the deep powers of this place, moving at last?

She narrowed her eyes and peered upwards. Here, in this place, it was tricky for her to look outwards, but it was still just about doable thanks to the suppression caring less about looking out from within. It was almost like something beyond the eclipse point was trying to focus on their realm plane.

-Is it related to the Kong? Don’t tell me that that boy Dun Fang is going to come back?

That thought nearly made her reach for her mother’s talisman, but she resisted in the end. The aura didn’t feel… focused enough… rather, it felt like…

“No… this is probably coming from outside our realm plane,” she said at last. “Nor is it unheard of for the mountain to have such extreme weather.”

“I see…” Cao Liang said, clearly knowing her well enough to know that she was not being entirely truthful.

-A pox on smart disciples, she thought wryly, not really meaning it.

“It’s not at a truly dangerous level yet,” she added. “But its appearance now is a nuisance. We have two more swords still to get.”

-It is truly a nuisance, she complained inwardly, regarding the latter point in particular.

Teleporting out underneath it would be bothersome and she had no desire to have to walk back from the eclipse point of the great world after getting dumped outside by a random spatial collapse. She had felt a few of those off to the west already – unlucky trial participants in all likelihood. It was not a nice end—travelling outside the realm wall before you reached Dao Immortal was an absolute death sentence.

“We go for the one that is properly in the inner valleys?" Cao Liang asked uneasily.

“Yes. The last thing we need is a parasol wood forest up here." she agreed. "The absolute last thing,”

“What about the one that is still missing?" Cao Liang asked, glancing off to the west, where Tai Wen's partial divination the day before had gotten a rough fix on the one that was still 'missing'.

He paid for his momentary distraction with a wince as another barrage of hook bats shelled the formation’s weaker points with expert timing.

“I’ll deal with that one last,” she sighed ruefully.

"If someone has stolen it, though... how would they even manage it?" Cao Liang muttered, as he caught a bat that had slipped through, crushing it, before vanishing a dozen others in a puff of blue fire.

That was still an enigma. Tai Wen had examined the location and found traces of cultivators, recently, which didn't bode well. Even if it was just some opportunistic, amateur thieves among the trial competitors—using some talisman they had no right to be in the same world as, as juniors—the first traces they had uncovered were on the same day the trial was due to start. She didn't doubt that the Kong clan and the Dun would be shameless enough, given the resources put into the Jasmine Gate incursion, to have subverted the start date for the trial, for whatever purpose, but her own hunch was that it was the work of one of the more established powers in this place—probably under the umbrella of this 'Five Fans' group.

"If its a trialist, it will come out as soon as they leave," she shrugged, feeding him qi to help him resist the next wave.

“Would that work?” Cao Liang asked dubiously.

"Of course not, but there is the outside possibility it was done with... if not 'good' intentions, then superficially advantageous ones."

The look Cao Liang gave her made her snort with amusement.

"Otherwise... whoever is responsible is going to discover the hard way, that no matter what their old ancestors told them, that the delusion of having powerful backers is more curse than benefit," she added, shaking her head. “That said—” she stared at the sword again, passing another pulse of qi through it to make sure the lure of the Eldritch Spore Plague on the far side of the cavern wasn’t also trying to grasp it. “—you see why i yelled at them back in the sect? About sending these swords out here, like this?"

"Yeah..." Cao Liang winced. "Although..."

"They could simply have unleashed one of the bestowed arts," she added.

“Euhh…?” Cao Liang winced, as another barrage of bats tried to deplete the shield around them. “Wouldn’t that have been—?”

“—overkill?” she finished his question with a snigger. "Compared to... this?"

"That's a fair point," Cao Liang conceded, with a grimace.

"I conceed, that while it would have saved us a trek—Not to mention the light show would have been even better than the one we made as is... It’s been almost an aeonspan and a half since someone used a Heavenly Venerate art on this place. That last one is why there’s such a straight channel between this subcontinent and the northern continent. Still, we would not know nearly as much about what happened, for the same circumstances, not to mention... Ahh, I'd curse that old scholar's words, but I suspect he would probably like it."

Even now, that warning was still playing on her mind.

“I see...” Cao Liang said a bit weakly.

“Ufufu!” she uttered a nasty chuckle. “This whole thing is going to make those old bastards in the Imperial Court weep before I’m done with the fallout! And if some brat has thought to pocket one of my treasure swords and dares to abscond to the central continent using mendacious means? They will find out that their ability to obscure what destiny has written for them, to be profoundly lacking, by the time my family is done."

Looking up at the hoard of several hundred thousand hook bats, massing above them, she gave an experimental stretch and pulled a set of four parasol swords, also her mother's works, albeit of a slightly different style to the ones deployed by the sect, out of her inner world. Her swords were still with her disciples, so she had to rely on these, even if they were not quite as good a fit for her, these days.

“First. Let’s clear these out, it would be nice to resolve this before the weather closes in."

Cao Liang nodded, and retreating to stand beside her, passed her control of the formation—

Forcefully inhaling once, she let the symbol that was nominally her spirit root make a connection with the five swords. They swept outwards around her, becoming shrouded in white fire as her ‘Soul Flame’, at the heart of her ‘World Source’, also linked up with her qi. The suppression receded just a hair as her Mortal Physique exerted its own prestige against the suppression here. Her realm, functionally held at the peak of the Immortal Realm while she let her spiritual cultivation take a front seat, surged upwards taking her to the peak of Dao Immortal. The suppression on a Physique was only half that exerted on a purely spiritual foundation.

Rock buckled and warped around her as her ‘Vast Obscurity Dao Source’ manifested through her ‘Soul Flame’ and her ‘Mortal Truth’ started to make the air shimmer as it pushed back against the limits of this place, seeking its acknowledgement.

The hook bats howled in challenge and drove down as one sky blotting swarm. They had their own prestige after all and recognised a fellow traveller from distant shores. Smiling, she called out her innate art, letting the little red gold bird stretch its wings in her cupped hands before it took flight to meet the hook bats, while the four swords, each blazing with a symbol, flared into a crescent arc in front of them.

{Vast. Expanse. Savage. Corona.}

~ ‘Tian’ Cang Di (and tagalongs) – Inner Valleys of Yin Eclipse ~

Cang Di grimly pulled his spear out of the corpse of the giant armoured monkey creature and, wiping the blood off it, looked around wearily.

-Thank you, teacher, for tormenting me with that training before coming here, he thought wryly.

The battle between their ‘group’ and the beast had nearly demolished this valley and had, he reflected, pushed almost everyone here, including himself, well beyond their comfort zone.

Thanks to the fairly horrible ‘acclimatization’ that his Teacher, Ancestor Bronze of the Shu Pavilion, had inflicted on him, the suppression was thankfully not beyond his expectations. His Teacher had also made him read far too many texts from his personal collection on this place and even walk through a few of his own memories of it from previous eras. Still, it was one thing to experience that training, and quite another to struggle against it like this on a daily basis.

-And the worst part is that compared to below… this is nothing, he thought a little less wryly.

All around him, others were scrambling out of cover, putting down their weapons or just sitting there, blank faced, staring at the devastation.

-Coming back here to prepare for my Dao Immortal breakthrough might actually be a smart idea… Assuming, of course, I survive the trip into the depths to recover that revered sect benefactor’s mortal remains that we are exploiting this event to facilitate.

Sighing, he pushed those thoughts away and, taking his spear, started to pry open the great beast’s chest to get at the core.

Thankfully, that process, while messy, didn’t take long and soon he had a large, fist-sized crystalline sphere clasped in his hand. Turning it over and examining it carefully, he found that it was, rather shockingly, a thirteen-star ranked beast…

-A Dao Lord realm beast?

He stared back at its slumped form, expression still holding traces of the furious desperation with which it had fought them. Glad he could pass off the trembling in his limbs as exertion, he bowed to it.

“Truly you did not deserve to die by our hands…” he muttered, by way of apology, because it was also an entirely needless fight, caused by overeager disciples who had read a lot about suppression he supposed, but failed to heed the caveats.

Outside of this place, it would have been a formidable opponent he could never have bested. A Dao Lord spirit beast was comparable to a Dao Sovereign cultivator. Their group would have collapsed at the first blow, talismans and treasures or no. Its arts had contained traces of multiple refined laws, and its physical body was exceptionally durable.

In truth, without him, the group he was leading would have died as well, even though the beast was injured when they engaged it. It was only thanks to his spear, a relic from an ancient vestige on the western continent, home of a long-forgotten refinement clan, which had barely been able to overcome the implicit realm difference, that he had been able to injure it decisively in the end.

With a vexed sigh, he stored the core before any of the surviving perpetrators of the whole mess, or the less trustworthy elements of his own ad-hoc group, saw the ‘prize’ and got ideas above their circumstances.

~Contribution Update: +20,000 points.

The talisman chimed in his head. Taking it out, he watched it flicker up again. It had gone up a mere 6,000 points for slaying the beast itself, which in the circumstances was embarrassing for all concerned.

-Pathetic… that your life was worth so little, he lamented, wondering if it might be able to live on in some way, as a weapon spirit or a guardian beast.

If there was justice, it was that the other group in this valley, partial perpetrators of trying to drag his own scattered band into this mess, had largely perished under the miscalculation of their action. Talismans and treasures got you a certain distance in this land, Ancestor Bronze had warned, but relying on them was… inadvisable. At the end of the day, suppression or no, you had to answer with your own abilities.

Looking up to the slope, where the remnants of the band who had congregated around him mostly cowered, he waved an arm to tell them it was safe to stop hiding.

“That… sucked,” he glanced over at one of the few who had not run to ‘safety’, Liling Mei, an Ancient Immortal from the Dewdrop Sage Sect who was with a disparate group from the Shen clan that had joined up with him the previous day.

“We are alive,” he said with a wry laugh.

“We are,” she sighed, pulling a chakram out of the beast’s arm where it was lodged and wiping the blood off it. “Well fought, Senior Cang.”

“It seems most of your bunch are alive,” he mused, watching them scramble down.

“They are hardly my flock,” she sighed. “I am here because Shen Biyu’s mother invited me.”

“I am here because the Shu Pavilion Elders’ Hall dislike losing face,” he grumbled.

That was partially true… it was the formal reason why if anyone cared to dig, in any case. There were enough from the Shu clan from other influences like the Dusk Sky Pagoda or the Wise Gate of Supreme Law that really, the Pavilion could have just sent some second string disciples, which they had, but the Elder Hall was… political.

“A vile fight…” he looked over to see Yan Fei, a Golden Immortal from the Four Peacocks Court, had also come in to collect his swords, two of which were lodged in the left leg.

They both nodded, watching the less able or less invested parties come in as well.

Four Peacocks Court.

Dewdrop Sage Sect.

Verdant Flowers Valley.

Imperial School.

Nine Auspicious Moons.

Shen clan.

Bai clan.

Qing clan.

Jade Gate Court.

It was a fairly explosive mix of the lost and the terrified, formed of disciples of disparate sects after this storm had swept through the valleys, forcing people off the ridges and into what shelter they could find.

Many had landed in these places by accident, he gathered, thanks to the phenomenal pull of the land alignments in these valleys. It seemed to have an intent that warped anything that tried to overcome it. His own geomantic divination art was like a plaything in its grasp, and he had long since stopped relying on it to guide him forwards.

The result was that many groups’ rather inadvisable teleportation attempts had failed, scattering them into the depths of this place rather than the much safer ‘Higher Valleys’. Others had been forced to use lifesaving talismans and charms to escape disasters in a vein with what they had just overcome in this valley.

“Sir Cang Di!” A young woman, Shen Biyu, came forward, followed by a few other disciples from various sects with links to the Shen clan.

-How funny, he thought.

-I can only think of these people as children, even though they are of the same ‘generation’. Some of their grandparents are younger than me, he muttered to himself.

Shen Biyu for example was barely... fifty?

A peak Immortal talent yes, someone from an influential clan that any sect on the Western Shu continent would be very happy to welcome, but still just a child in the grand scheme of things.

-Seems a lot of their influences have really underestimated this place, he thought with some resigned amusement, watching those who came after her staring this way and that, crumpled talismans clutched in muddy hands.

-Though not the Shen clan…

Behind Shen Biyu two more recognisable faces appeared, looking annoyed, and headed over to collect arrows. Kang Erwei, a Quasi-Ancient Immortal from the Cherished Autumn Pagoda, a sect that the Shen clan had strong links to… and Mingluo Lanying, a peak Golden Immortal of the Nine Auspicious Moons.

“This place makes the Argent Devouring Caves look like my mother’s herb garden,” Kang Erwei grumbled.

He nearly added that it made his own teacher nervous, but bit back that comment at the last moment. There was no need to really break the mood of this lot in that fashion after all.

“Don’t dash off like that!” Mingluo chastised Shen Biyu, quietly.

“Yes, while Miss Shen’s eye is certainly exceptional, this place is not to be taken lightly!” a bearded youth wearing grey and green garb agreed, having just caught up.

He was a local Herb Hunter from Blue Water City, one who had some connections to the Shen clan he supposed. His instincts were good, and his land knowledge was certainly exceptional, though he had his job cut out for him with the way everyone was running about.

-Certainly, he is much better than the trio who came with some of the Shu Pavilion's junior disciples who had also come here of their own volition, he judged.

“Well fought Sir Tian!” another figure had also made it down the slope after them.

-And so the tinderbox appears, he thought with resignation, noting the dour looks from the other Nine Moons and Dewdrop Sage disciples closing in as the Golden Immortal from the Din clan caught up.

{Shatterpoint}

Re-initialising his divination art, he considered the youth, who had introduced himself as Din Ouyeng, and his companions. The problem though, was that while ‘Din Ouyeng’ was a Golden Immortal, he was from a huge clan and a huge sect and Ouyeng was a common enough name on the central continent that he had no impression of him, nor it seemed had anyone else here. He was part of the Jade Gate Court, though… so, of course, he would be ‘Sir Tian’.

-Only they could make a title like that, that they were actually responsible for in part, sound like an insult, he thought rolling his eyes inwardly.

The pair with him were nervous and subdued, as well they might be; a girl and a boy at Golden Core – minnows among minnows in the current company where most of the ‘seniors’ were at least Golden Immortals. How the pair, who seemed to be from the Ling and Ha clans had fallen in with a Golden Immortal from the Din clan was anyone’s guess.

The story they had given – that they had been betrayed by their guides and abandoned up here after the guides colluded with some local experts to kill their companions, was… sadly credible though.

The suppression provided for some extra vulnerability to those at their realm; vulnerabilities many had discounted to their cost, it was turning out.

They had asked him if he could avenge the death of their senior brother, Din Yao and another comrade. They had also been asking others in the group if they would help, though without any real success. Were he not here, he suspected that Mingluo Lanying or Liling Mei might already have left Din Ouyeng dead in a gully somewhere, such was the antipathy regarding the Jade Gate Court ever since the events around Di Ji.

While he certainly had some sympathy for their plight, he had not promised anything either.

Such betrayals were happening all over, the survivors coming together in desperation only to be opportunistically betrayed all over again; that was just the danger inherent in a trial like this. The whole thing was as much a test of the character of a generation as it was anything else. It also didn’t help that he had some niggling doubts about their story. His own talent with geomancy was not widely known, and there had definitely been, if not lies… obfuscation in the words of Din Ouyeng, regarding his companions and their fate.

“What realm was this great beast?” Din Ouyeng asked, looking at it with interest. “The—”

*KRUMP*

A dull thud reverberated through the whole valley, cutting off Din Ouyeng, probably before he could ask about the core or something else innocently awkward.

Turning in the direction it had come from, he hissed under his breath as a sweltering wave of smothering, obscuring, yang-rich intent rolled across the valley, making trees shiver and the ambient temperature surge.

Moments later a series of continuous booms, caused by rapidly expanding fundamental particles of air and water tearing apart if he was any judge, split the returning quiet. The mist and low cloud above them was physically lifted outwards under the pressure wave—

“DOWN!” he roared, dropping to the ground even as others were looking around in bewilderment.

*—————*

There was an absence of sound.

The pressure wave had already arrived before sound did – a white wall of dispersing humidity leading the edge of the explosion.

Cloud far above them roiled outwards.

The heat spreading through the air was now noticeably pulling the irritatingly humid temperature, akin to a bathhouse sauna favoured by mortals, toward something close to being stood in a stream of boiling vapour.

As he watched, faint streamers of yang qi flitted through the sky above, streaking outwards like a flock of scattering birds. There was a profundity to it that eluded even his senses, but it made his geomancy art, much tortured in this land already, shiver with inauspicious vibes.

With an exhalation, the world fell still and he pushed himself up. That had been less worrying than—

Beyond the far ridgeline, a colossal swarm of hook bats swept up into the twisting mists that were dropping back down. They howled and screamed as they fled some other threat, risking the shockwaves of thunder and the vicious lightning that was already crackling along the edge of the clouds above where the blast wave brushed it—

Hundreds of bolts tore down in the blink of an eye, afforded convenient targets as the swarm flew everywhere, uncaring as they tried to escape something behind them.

Staring up at them, he felt a bit of cold sweat on the back of his neck. The scattering swarm itself numbered in the tens of thousands and many of the bats were genuinely unfathomable. While his senses were limited, everywhere he looked he could see bats that ‘looked’ like Golden Core critters, but were in fact giving him very disturbing vibes akin to ten and eleven-star qi beasts – Ancient Immortal qi beasts – and there were far, far too many of them for comfort.

Screaming in rage and fear, they twisted this way and that…and then almost as one swept across the ridgeline and down into their valley.

Cursing, he gripped his spear and lashed out with a wave of Martial Intent that forced a few of the weaker bats away and made them screech and divert course away from their group.

Nearby, others with the capability also copied him, scattering some—

Two talismans burst amid them, scattering blue fire everywhere in shining bursts of petals.

Abruptly a bat, about the size of a small dog, who might as well have been invisible to his qi sense, tore out of the heart of the swarm, dropping down at them like a meteorite.

Just as he was preparing a Dao Sovereign grade metal talisman, a breathtakingly beautiful young woman with glowing golden tresses and draped in a plain, if very stylish white robe plummeted down from the ridgeline the bats had just swept over. Along with her, she dragged another young man, who looked faintly terrified at whatever had just happened.

As he watched, stunned by this sudden development, she landed in the middle of the valley, generating enough force as she did that the shockwave shattered trees around her and actually cratered the ground at her point of impact.

“W-what?” one of the Immortals who had taken cover near him gawked.

The bats swirled away and the one leading a wing of the swarm to attack him hissed and twisted away, flapping frantically to gain height.

“Liang… if you scream like a girl it ruins your image,” the beauty said with a sigh. “At least the fate-thrashed bats got the hint.”

“Miss Fu…” the youth coughed, straightening his robe, “I think…”

As everyone was still picking themselves up the woman lazily swept out a hand and the sword she was carrying blurred around her, briefly becoming five swords before flowing back together to become one in her grasp once more.

As he watched, the half sweep they made upwards sent a spiral of golden-white fire skyward. The bats desperately evaded and circled away, fortunate ones screaming in fury as their compatriots were turned into afterimages by the fire.

“Tcch,” The beauty raised her hand a second time and… he shivered suddenly.

The swarm recoiled under that simple gesture and turned rapidly towards the rising slopes of East Fury Peaks.

Pushing himself up, supporting himself with his spear, he watched warily as the two approached. “Greetings Dao Brother, Dao Sister…? I am Daoist Cang Di of the Shu Pavilion…”

Nearby, the others also hurriedly scrambled up, the juniors just looking dazed or elated to have been saved in such a manner, however the seniors with experience, like Liling Mei, Mingluo Lanying and Yan Fei just looked wary.

-Neither of these two are simple, he thought with an inner grimace, renewing ‘Shatterpoint’, his divination art, in his mind’s eye.

The beauty swept her gaze over the group in a vaguely disinterested manner and then turned back to him. “Hong Fu, and this is Cao Liang”

He could almost hear the swooning behind him.

Her abrupt manner was not rude, but it was still brisk to the point of being a bit stand-offish, perhaps understandable given her looks and the attention she must receive.

-And she didn’t give an influence, he noted, which was somewhat odd.

It was at the stage out here where most people yelled out their influence now – usually before even introducing themselves. That was more of a shield against robbery and malpractice at the moment than one's cultivation level, what with the suppression up here. Anyone who didn’t give it was either certain it wouldn’t matter – or strong enough to not fear any cultivator in here. Considering the gesture she had made, this was likely a case of the latter.

“We are martial siblings from the 'Beautiful Sky’s Walking Society',” the youth gave a slight bow, while looking at the girl out of the corner of his eye, he thought. That, along with their names hadn’t been a lie, neither was bothering to obscure their aura from him either.

“Mmmmm… yes,” she nodded blandly.

Cang Di schooled himself, resisting her implicit intent, which was almost at the level of…

-Now why did I think of her… that is ancient history, as much as the tale is still circulated somewhat perversely in this generation.

He also passed over the weird school name, that was what it was, and asked politely: “Do the Dao Sister and Dao Brother know what caused the swarm to be so disturbed?”

“Mmmmm it was a bit surprising,” Daughter of Heaven Hong Fu replied, looking around at the wider group now, sporting an alluring smile. “I guess whatever made that explosion a few moments ago. Maybe they tried to hide in a cave and whatever was already there disagreed with their life choices?”

“Erm… little Martial Sister, while you are undoubtedly a Saintess to our generation… a beauty beyond compare… shouldn’t you still be a bit more respectful?”

One of the cultivators, not someone from Shen Biyu’s group, but a disciple from the Argent Hall of all influences, had managed to muster themselves and interjected with a remarkable mix of pomposity and borderline obsequious lechery.

“Young Noble Cang is from the Shu Pavilion and a Light of—”

-Talk about trying to curry favour via stupid means. Are they actually trying to drop me in a hole?

“—Thank you for the assist in dealing with that mutate hook bat swarm, Dao Sister Hong Fu,” he said quickly, cutting off the idiot. Both ‘Hong Fu’ and ‘Cao Liang’ gave him a strange feeling as well – like he was in front of his old ancestors, in fact.

“We had just overcome a particularly difficult battle…. To fight so many immediately after—” he gestured behind, at the corpse of the monkey demon “—would have been very difficult.”

“Think nothing of it,” the youth Cao Liang replied, rolling his eyes. “This is a dangerous land to wander in if you are inexperienced. We see you need some time to rest, so we will take our leave.”

Saintess Hong Fu nodded and without further preamble turned and walked off in the direction of the northern exit to the valley, where it led directly into the deeper interior, looking for all the world like she was out on a summer stroll to pick flowers. The other youth, Cao Liang, also gave them a rather dubious look as a whole before walking quickly to catch up with her.

-Well that went better than I had any right to expect, he sighed.

"You’re a credit to your school, young lad,” the voice of the youth echoed in his mind. “Tell Tian Kai Bao that Cao Liang sends his regards and congratulates the Four Peaks Inheritance Hall, your talent does the Hall and your Senior Brothers and Sister credit… Oh… and try not to die up here."

Before he could formulate a response, both had vanished into the steaming forest without a trace.

Cang Di felt the sweat on his neck that had nothing to do with the humidity.

-Scary, absolutely scary, a part of him thought, watching the trees where they had vanished.

To speak of his senior martial brother, the inheriting disciple of Ancestor Iron, Kai Bao in that manner suggested a certain familiarity beyond the normal, especially when you knew that Kai Bao was a Dao Ascendant student of Ancestor Iron… and then there was the mention of Senior Martial Sister Aoxu, who had been in seclusion for most of his lifetime…

He exhaled softly and gave himself a shake.

Their foundations were… the youth had been ostensibly at Immortal based on his ‘Intent’, but didn’t act like it, while Saintess Fu had been ostensibly at the peak of Ancient Immortal… However, both had had a faint edge to what they presented that told him, through experience of interacting with a lot of people who hid their cultivations for various reasons in the Shu Pavilion, that that was just what they were showing outwardly.

“They were a bit rude?” one of the youths behind Shen Biyu huffed.

“Ahh… someone like Saintess Fu can be as rude as she likes.”

“Mmhm yeah… did we have such a beauty in our generation?”

“Indeed…” someone else chipped in.

“And to be wandering around like that… isn’t it a bit much? Young Noble Cang even saved them?”

Turning to look at those behind him, he gave them a pointed glare, under which most of them wilted. He wasn’t the only one either.

“Everyone has their own style,” he said a bit more forcefully.

Suppression or no, he was still at the peak of Ancient Immortal and had almost a realm and a half not to mention thousands of years on any of them in terms of experience.

“Idiots,” Yan Fei muttered, to which he nodded in agreement.

“What influence do you think they were really from?” Mingluo Lanying murmured quietly to Liling Mei, who just shrugged.

“Not our business,” he interjected in passing, which made Liling Mei nod in agreement.

“So, which way do we go?” Liling Mei asked, waving absently for Shen Biyu and the others from that group to gather themselves up.

Sighing, he looked around at the various exits, pondering just that question. Heading after the pair they had just met was probably not a good idea, and there was no point in backtracking or going where they had just come from, which only left two routes really.

“I think we go up the right side of the valley, cross through the gap up ahead,” he said at last, pointing through the mists to what looked like a distant access.

“Ehh? But won't that take us really close to those dangerous places?” someone muttered from the back.

“…”

Liling Mei just rolled her eyes at the volunteered comment, which had originated from the Imperial School group. He resisted laughing, barely. The sense of entitlement and double-think among some of them was almost at the level of a Dao Path in its own right. The reality was that most of them were tagging along with him, or with Shen Biyu or with Yan Fei and were free to leave at any time.

It was somewhat ironic that they were now complaining that it might lead them a bit too close to the Great Mount, though. That hadn’t bothered any of them before they got into these valleys and started getting thrice daily attacks by qi beasts with cultivation that could level towns or devastate small sects in minutes if lifted out of this place.

Looking again in the direction the pair had left, another suspicious thought emerged in his mind, that he tried to squash quickly... The innermost of the sword impact points was in that vague direction. Sect Master Shu Tian had given him a map of those and a warning to just let the Seven Sovereigns do their thing.

-Was that ‘Saintess Fu…’!?!

-Did a terrifying Fairy Goddess, someone that stands at the very peak of Eastern Azure, someone from Vast Obscurity Grove's most elite echelon – that can make even the Shu Heavenly clan step smartly off the path – just saunter by that casually?

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Yan Fei also looking after her with a slightly worried… no, relieved… expression. The Four Peacocks Court was a Huang influence and geographically close to Meng City. If anyone else was qualified to make that suspicion, it was probably him. Meng City was informally known as the ‘Graveyard of Young Masters’ for a reason.

He resisted the urge to look at where the other sword impact point near here should be in relation to where they were. The Seven Sovereigns had as deep a pool of talent as the Shu Pavilion, Meng Fu would not be the only one out here recovering those weapons.

-And the thing about their being martial siblings from the ‘Beautiful Sky’s Walking Society’ wasn’t a lie, or even an obfuscated truth as far as I could tell…

With a sigh, he pushed those thoughts from his head.

They were going in a different direction, anyway. The access point his old ancestor had entrusted the location of to him was still a day’s hike away. That was the last known location of that honoured benefactor, Mu Shansu, the sworn brother of the sect’s second master. The place where their ill-fated expedition had entered the darkness, never to return.

At that point, he would have to consider what to do with this group. It was probably too dangerous to take them into the underworld based on what he had been told about it. Some of them he might trust to walk behind him into the gloom, but others… he was edgy enough about some of them already. Particularly the bunch associated with the Ha clan and the Din clan.

He considered Din Ouyeng again as they walked onwards, trying to work out what was bothering him about their story. Behind him, the rest started wittering again about the three scores on the talismans, complaining at how it was upstaging ‘him’ just loud enough for him, and the other seniors, to hear.