Memories of the Fall

...The Ha clan are a curious beast in the current generation; where other ancient noble clans almost exclusively focus their efforts upon securing their position from one generation to the next upon the grand stage of the central continent, the Ha clan has long divided its efforts in acquiring and controlling assets beyond these scepter’d shores. To many, this is seen as anathema of what the nobility of this world stands for.

The nobility of the world are the favoured sons and daughters of heaven. To seek to control mere towns and cities in those lesser lands is the act of the mercantile, and the common person… such influences should be beholden to them, yes, but who would stoop to relying on such paltry and ephemeral influences and moneys to support their position directly? Such a thing would be a disgrace to their ancestors.

However, another view can also be espoused: In taking this path, the Ha clan is largely without competition and has, through the millennia, quietly become the back channel by which many lesser influences seeking to rise into that highest rank find resources to set up their own footholds on the Imperial continent. Which is the correct path is hard to say but, in all my own dealings with the Ha clan, I have always found them to be circumspect and much more approachable than their peers... if with a certain edge.

Excerpt – The Great Clans of the Imperial Continent

By Seng Mo.

~ Ha Yun, Young Master of the Ha Clan ~

Ha Yun stood in the hall of the Hunter Pavilion in West Flower Picking Town and felt annoyed. Old Man Ling sat behind the desk, looking remarkably unperturbed for the amount of focus being put on him right this moment. The Valley Master – his great uncle and also an inner disciple of the Blue Gate School, as well as the current administrator of the valley for the school – had both hands on the old man’s desk and was panting slightly, having just given voice to his frustrations. At quite some length and with a certain volume, it had to be said.

Ha Yun had been impressed at that. He didn’t think a lot of his uncle, who had married into the clan through his somewhat meek elder cousin; for an inner disciple of the Blue Gate School, he was fairly mediocre as a cultivator. Several employees of the Pavilion were cowering behind Old Ling, their faces white and their clothes suspiciously damp in places. The Valley Master was clearly under pressure from the clan for this to work out, because he had not held back much as far as he could see. The old man, on the other hand, looked utterly unperturbed, and could not have seemed more at ease even if he had put his feet on the desk.

The crux of the problem was this, it seemed: three days previous, at the break of dawn, all four Hunter teams that were currently active with unified ratings of five-star or higher had moved out. They were gone before anyone in the Town Authority actually realised they had departed, and someone had had all the official jadework done to dispatch two teams, of eight people each, to the north apparently, via the spatial terminus at the head of the valley to North Fissure Town. Their listed mission was to gather leng jing flowers at special request of the North Fissure Military Bureau. That alone would have been fine, although those teams had taken with them a further forty-odd Herb Hunters as adjunct bands, claiming it was a training mission, which he thought rang rather hollow as an excuse in the current circumstances.

It was the other two teams, however, the real elite teams that had also left, that had his uncle spitting invectives and the old geezers on the Town Authority looming like they believed they were some ancient primordial beings.

One team – Han Shu, Jun Arai and Jun Sana according to the records – had gone west with one of the civil advisors to the Town Military Authority, Jun Han. Apparently the Blue Duke had personally summonsed him for something related to the logistics levy and he had decided it was opportune to take his daughters with him. He had even secured an official request for it, which was unusual; there was no way someone of Jun Han’s status should be able to leverage or bribe that and certainly not from the Duke's Authority. Han Shu had accompanied them, apparently because ‘he wanted to broaden his horizons’ according to the official designation. That was as close to a non-reason as it was officially possible to get, really, and he considered himself something of an expert in such 'reasons' since they were usually what his parents ensured was on the record when they sent him to Blue Water City to do family missions under the cover of the Hunter Bureau’s authority.

The other group had gone east. This team, led by Kun Juni, was comprised of Lin Ling, Ren Kalis, Deng Mu and Shi Mu. Their designation was apparently to hunt down a bunch of mutate plants listed by the last few Beast Hunter Cadre patrols in the Inner Valleys, and even on the lower slopes of the western face of the Great Mount. If, in the process, they could bring back anything of a grade sufficient to bolster the town’s newly enhanced levy commitment they would get special commendation PER submission, which was disgustingly generous.

-Akin to daylight robbery actually, he thought with a scowl.

The whole thing had been signed off in an extraordinary meeting of the most influential town captains in Blue Water Province – from their local West Flower Picking, South Grove, Nine Clouds and Moon Peak Gate – the very night they departed, to address some new levy commitments upon the four towns’ Imperial Bureau Captains and the Envoy Bureau. He had heard something of this back in the clan, but mostly ignored it as it had no bearing on him at the time.

The higher-ups had been quite proud of it, however, so it stood to reason that this mess had now enraged people in many quarters who were seeking to exploit the situation. Especially after they went to the effort to engineer it with foreknowledge of the proclamation that had landed, intending to take all the elite Hunters out of commission for the duration of the trial to 'support' the Ha family. That would have put such pressure on the local Pavilions that they could have swept up everything in the aftermath of the trial he guessed, using their own clan reserves to 'buy' out the engineered levy deficit in the process.

It was hypocritical as a point to complain about, but Ha Yun, looking at this, could only think that the two forces were colluding to screw over the logistics levy designation that had been so painstakingly set up by the coastal nobility and the Ha clan. It was hardly the place of the Bureau to intercede in municipal matters out here. When the trial announcement had arrived that morning with the Ha clan, through their private contacts, hours before it was formally announced in West Flower Picking Valley, his father, aunt and big brother had all started putting pieces in motion to make the best of it.

Then all parties discovered to their horror that everyone they needed to make their local advantage feasible had already left town on these official designations. Not through the Hunter Pavilion, because those would have been caught and twisted accordingly, but through the higher authority of the Hunter Bureau itself, co-designated by the Military Bureau. His father, in a rage, had summoned the Valley Master directly, who had come here with most of his own Authority in tow and plenty of hangers-on, all looking to see a good show.

And so here they were. A command message had been sent, by Valley Master Authority, backed by the Town Authority and a rough quorum of sympathetic elders from other associations. It was just a matter of ensuring that they had some way to catch up to the team hunting mutates on the western access to the Great Mount... except the team had not acknowledged the reply. It was clear they had received it, seen it even, the authority the Town Governor’s office possessed was capable of determining that along with their proximal location, but the total lack of acknowledgement was the final slap that had set the man’s rage on fire.

So now they had six hunters left in the valley, which was the accepted threshold limit that had to be in reserve at all times. It just so happened that all six were either members of the Lin or Ha family, and all were also part of the Master's Pavilion. Three of them, including Ha Yun himself, were accredited as five-star herb hunters.

-Not that I’ve ever actually been out on anything more dangerous than spirit grass picking, he thought with a grimace; all his missions were theoretical consultations, intended to put him in a good position for the School trial in two years when he would be Soul Foundation. Practical missions were menial and below a noble scion of an old and influential family like the Ha. They were also terrifyingly dangerous, and so someone as important to the family as him would never be risked on them. It was those six, including himself, who were now arraigned behind the Valley Master. All of them looked a bit shifty, he had to admit… even him, as much as he didn’t want to acknowledge it.

After several more minutes of protestation and wrangling, the Valley Master just spat on Old Ling’s desk and stalked out, his bodyguards in tow. Old Ling's gaze shifted slightly to the six of them and made a faint head motion with a clear meaning: get out. There was a subtle pressure that came with it that made his skin crawl. It wasn't qi, intent or soul strength, some other kind of energy radiated off Old Ling or a moment, making his skin prickle and his insides twist. Nobody needed any second reminders, assuming this was the first.

That was how they found themselves in a tea house overlooking the central square, drinking spirit alcohol as only rich young scions of nobility could in a place like this and trying very hard not to be too obvious. Outside, the town was undergoing something of a shakeup, based on the squads of militia shuttling around as the powers that be ransacked the bureaucracy of the town as best they could to try to resolve the 'problem' brought on by the mystical Qilin of genuine, actual – in their eyes – Bureau corruption. It cast an aura over the whole town that was unsettling frankly, and no amount of wine seemed to be able to quell his unease or that of his flunkies as they drank wine and ate fried snacks with a kind of aggressive, low key mania.

Eventually, the four Ha Hunters arrived back at the Ha estate on the outskirts of the town sometime after midnight. He wasn't really drunk – it was hard to get drunk as a Golden Core cultivator in this town. He was just considering how best to make a quiet entrance when one of the family elders stepped out of the shadows and motioned for all four of them to follow. All four were hauled into the private study of the Supreme Family Elder, and Ha Yun found himself being given a curative by a severe-looking manservant while the Supreme Elder, his father, the Valley Master and another thin man he didn’t recognise pored over some chart on the table.

“Yun,” he glanced up. His father was staring at him with a frown. “It is unfortunate that circumstances have panned out the way they have.”

Ha Yun frowned: that was probably an understatement. Today the Ha clan had nearly come to physical blows with the Military Authority and the town's Astrology Bureau.

Left with nothing obvious to say, he just asked. “Father, why don’t we discipline Old Man Ling? What he did was clearly—” His father glanced at the Valley Master, who looked… peeved and curtly shook his head.

“That old man has status outside the town. We have issues with the Bureau and overreach by the Blue Duke enough as it is, we do not need to add the ‘indigenous’ into the equation... Yet.”

So the old man was definitely indigenous. It was hard these days to tell who was and who wasn’t unless they wore their tattoos openly. Yet another reason that the Blue Morality should be more strictly enforced among the lower orders, Ha Yun thought. Then again, he found himself wondering what that strange power had been. Old Ling was a pure physical cultivator as far as he knew?

“There is a solution to our problems… I understand,” the Supreme Elder spoke up with a calculating look.

The Valley Master looked a bit sour. “That... I would be wary of that. Our family is not so weak these days that we need to crawl up the leg of one of the young nobles from over the water.”

“That they reached out to you, us… makes me worried," the Valley Master added. "You know what’s going on in the other towns, right? In Blue Water City, with the Blue Gate School?”

“Someone in the Imperial Court has decided that the Yin Eclipse Mountains are worthy of interest,” this was the other participant. “I can try to reach out to the... Old man? See if he has any opinion on this?”

Four people turned to look at Ha Yun for a moment, their gaze seeming to him a bit too speculative, as if judging something he couldn’t quite grasp.

“I don’t think that old man… is a good fit,” his father murmured in the end.

“It’s better we leave him to his eccentric card games," the Supreme Elder agreed more decisively.

“Yes—” the final participant nodded. "You can rely on us in this matter. If he gets involved we will cede what little control we have left in this."

His father looked a bit uncomfortable at that he thought, but the Supreme Elder nodded. "And there is no saying he is of a mind…"

The elder in favour of informing this 'old eccentric' scowled, but stayed silent at that.

"I suppose you are right," his father finally acquiesced. "Once it’s done, so long as it’s done right, they won’t care enough to undo it.”

Ha Yun wondered who they meant. It was obviously one of the old ancestors they were talking about keeping out of the loop, but which one he had no idea. Did any of them like games? Thinking back to his age naming ceremony of some years back, when he had met most of them, none of those half a dozen old monsters who just sat in their villas playing music, fishing, writing poetry or watching clouds drift by seemed like the type of played ‘card games’. Unless games was a euphemism for something else.

“This is just some local politicking, I’m impressed that you were so irritatingly outmanoeuvred frankly.” The other man stared at Ha Yun for a moment. “Especially after you went to all that effort to try to weaken the Hunter Pavilion. Perhaps it’s fortuitous that that cracked idea of using a borrowed knife to off this Jun Arai girl did not come to pass.”

The Supreme Elder scowled at the other man, but mollified his reply with uncharacteristic contriteness. “The fates work in mysterious ways, always an opportunity within adversity can emerge.”

“Yun. Boy,” the Supreme Elder turned to him “Tonight you will pack kit for travel, a spatial ring from the family vault will be made available and you will head to the main transition array at the valley head. You may take your ‘friends’ if you will, if you think you can guarantee their safety, but do not speak to them about your objective until you are at the teleport. There you will be met by four elite envoys from the coastal estates. Come the morning, your father and I and Teacher Lan here will have prepared a spatial shift formation which we can use at the transition array. It will not be able to send you deep into the mountains, but it should put you close enough to Kun Juni’s group, based on their determined location, and you will catch up to them that way. Our Ha Envoys will ensure that they cooperate fully with our Ha clan’s goals. You understand?”

Standing upright, Ha Yun suddenly felt invigorated, now he actually did understand where they were going with this.

“Yes Old Ancestor, YES father!”

He offered a formal salutation and then practically ran out of the room to prepare. If everything went to plan he wouldn’t be going to the Blue Gate School, but a proper influence across the ocean after all.

…

The spatial fluctuation shattered the pre-dawn peace of the valleys like a peal of celestial thunder, distorting the qi flows and cooking a small section of loam in the process. Ha Yun stepped through and immediately wanted to vomit. His sworn companions – others would say cronies or flunkies – who were following fared little better. The four elites from the coastal estate impassively strolled through and then looked around warily while the other occupants of the clearing, of which there were five, stared blankly back at the new arrivals.

-Well…

Belatedly, as the wrongness of the situation started to intrude, he realised that the group were staring blankly not at them, but rather at what was immediately beside where they had arrived.

The clearing in the cloud forest was some forty metres across and was situated near the valley wall of wherever they were. The smell of earth, rich in the air, was now punctuated by the smell of faintly burning vegetation and the severed trunk of a twometre tall giant plant with furry brown-gold leaves lay to their immediate left, smoking faintly as threads of void flame licked at it. To their right, the other four primary stems of the plant shifted faintly and the elite envoy, Sir Teng, who had stepped out in that direction, quietly crumpled to the ground and turned into loamy leaf litter without uttering a sound.

Ha Yun felt a hand grip his back and a force propel him to the edge of the clearing. One of his childhood friends, Ha Mun, crumpled into loamy dust, a look of disbelief in his eyes even as his life force was also pulled away.

-Earth corrosion!

The realisation of what had killed both of them made his limbs go cold. The remaining two envoys grabbed a boy apiece and blinked away from the plant simultaneously. Sir Jing cursed abruptly and tore his own arm off and threw it back into the clearing even as it disintegrated into leaves, his decisive action saving his life.

The second teleportation made everyone’s hair stand on end.

Literally.

He yelped in shock as the space where they had just been buckled and spatial static and void flame consumed the point where Ha Yun and his group had previously arrived. This time the mutate lamium, which was what the thing seemed to be, was entirely subsumed in spatial turbulence. However, rather than being destroyed it just seemed to pulse faintly then fade away, its thick bamboo stems collapsing into the earth only to re-emerge on the opposite side of the clearing from the group, all five now fully regrown. Its furry brown leaves shivered faintly.

If anyone present had been able to connect empathically with plants they would have been met with some interesting verbal invective and a grim sense of something called ‘Schadenfreude’ a word that would have perplexed all concerned except for the plant itself, which prided itself on its learned status and knowledge of esoteric things. With a further ripple, it collapsed once more into the loam and vanished from immediate sight.

Three figures stepped out of the turbulence, totally unperturbed by the mess they seemed to have caused. One, a beautiful girl in a red dress and a veil, held a jade tablet. The other two, youths of his age it seemed, were both dressed like eccentric scholars: one in a garish purple and green robe hemmed with black and red roses, the other in a much more staid blue and gold number with chrysanthemums in white inlaid across the panels.

“It seems we have arrived at our destination despite your companion's concerns… Young Noble Din,” the red-robed woman drawled, looking around her curiously.

“It was your stratagem, Fairy Luo, that led us this far,” the youth in blue and gold pointed out.

“I am surprised your father the Bureau manager agreed to such a thing, frankly. It is one thing to turn a blind eye, it’s quite another to loan out one of the Jade Loci Arrays.”

“I’m in awe of your talents Fairy Luo, Young Noble Din, but really I’m much more concerned with what that thing that just waltzed right out of the void fire was,” the purple and green youth interjected with a faint smirk on his face.

His brain was already racing… the fact that the blue-clothed youth was from the Din clan… he wasn’t sure if that was good or bad actually. All three turned to look at the point in the treeline where the lamium had vanished before turning back to the other occupants of the clearing, dismissing the group of five on the left side who were clearly commoners or some form of indigenous, based on their scruffy and muted attire and low cultivation levels.

The red-clothed girl walked towards their group. “Young Master Ha Yun… right?”

“Ahhh…?” he was surprised at that. He felt he would have remembered meeting her, although she did seem… somewhat familiar.

The beauty looked embarrassed and a bit discombobulated at his non-reply, until she noticed a patch of vomit on the ground nearby, somehow missed by the void fire.

“Ahh. Not much of a teleporter, Young Master Yun?” she asked politely, while offering him a handkerchief.

With a cough, he straightened up and replied: “You find me at a… disadvantage, Fairy?”

“Luo. Ling Luo," she supplied helpfully. "I am one of the vice managers for the Civil Authority Bureau, in Blue Water City... I believe we have met before, Young Master Ha. Although I may not have been fully introduced at that time”

She offered her most diplomatic smile and carefully eyed the three guards behind him. “I trust your brave companion’s injury was not…?”

“Ah. No. It was not, Lady Ling,” Sir Huang spoke up directly on behalf of Sir Jing, who was seeing to his arm. Sir Cao just glared at the new arrivals.

“The injury was caused by the thing you…your companions chased off with your ‘chance’ arrival,” Ha Mao managed to find the courage to speak up.

However, his words might as well have been water off a duck’s back for all the good they did. In fact, the purple-clothed youth just sneered more, while the blue-gowned one looked… annoyed now. Fairy Luo for her part just looked unconcerned. That was odd, now that he could place her. She was a cousin of Ling Yu, the famous… or infamous, ‘daughter’ of the Blue Water City Govenour…except, that Ling Luo, while a beauty, was aloof and...

“…”

He frowned, because the gaze she had just given the blue-gowned youth, that she likely believed subtle, wasn't really that subtle... The object of her glance just shrugged, seeming to not care about their bad timing.

The de facto leader of his remaining elite escorts, Sir Huang, spoke up again. “I am Sir Huang, this is Sir Jing and my compatriot over there is Sir Cao. We are Young Master Ha Yun’s personal protection for this trip.”

Sir Huang paused for a moment, eyeing the other two youths, who had not really stepped forward or introduced themselves.

On cue, the blue-gowned youth stepped forward and smiled a bit dismissively. “It is my honour to meet you, Sir Ha Huang, I am Din Ouyeng of the Jade Gate Court and this is my good friend Brother Ji.”

He turned and gave a salutation to Ha Yun. “Brother Ha, it is an honour to meet you in person, I hope you can convey my best wishes to your Honoured Father in due course?”

Ha Yun finally found his footing in this weird conversation and replied: “So it was Brother Din and Brother Ji, your own reputation resounds loudly. I am honoured to meet you here on the path.”

He managed to sort out his recollections of the briefing before they left enough to recall that the Supreme Elder had suggested inviting someone from the Din clan along.

-Presumably, this is who he had contacted, but then why didn’t we know?

However...the fact that he was from the Jade Gate Court was… outside of expectations really. That was a monolithic power of the central continent who could walk sideways in these lands if they wished. How had the old man gotten that much face, to ask someone like that?

“So, I take it you are here for the same reason as us?” he asked in the end, fishing for some further context.

“It would appear so, what do you say we team up and proceed together in this endeavour?” Ling Luo replied brightly with a total non-answer.

He masked a frown. Had she had a personality transplant, or was the officious and very proper manner she had just a thing for her role within the Bureau? He had never had the opportunity to socialise with her in Blue Water City...

That… brought his focus, and that of the rest of their group’s surviving members, back to the other occupants of the clearing. The five Herb Hunters were staring at both groups like a group of cats who have just seen a tiger walk into their alley. What concerned Ha Yun, however, was that he suddenly had the impression, for the second time in as many minutes, that neither he nor the other arrivals, were the tiger.

"Why are you not coming—" Ling Luo started asking a question just as he was about to ask where the Lamium had gone, but both were cut off when there was a gut-churning sense of disorientation, and then he was moving in an unnatural way for the second time in as many minutes.

~ Jun Arai, The Herb Hunters ~

The lamium bloomed. Everywhere. Arai dragged Han Shu onto a fallen tree that was particularly rich in wood qi and slammed a ward stone for water into a crack in it for good measure to provide it some support. Some dozen metres to her left, Sana had managed to get up a tree and was busily excavating a trappist vine shoot from its bough to use as a flail. Juni and Ling had used a valuable ground contraction talisman and stood on a ledge about thirty metres to their left on the scree wall, among a bush of flowering chrysanthemums with a strange blue-green tint. As for their new arrivals... they were not coping quite so well.

The first group was within her expectations, although their timing was worthy of a truly inauspicious feng shui alignment. However the second group was just confusing: Ling Luo was Ling Yu's older cousin, and more importantly was someone who worked in the Bureau, as a deputy for her father in his role as Bureau Chief for the entirety of Blue Water City.

-Why the fates is someone like that out here, taking part in this mess, with two random young masters?

-Also, why did she acknowledge Ha Yun, who she should barely know, but not so much as look at either Sana or Juni with whom she should be on at least greeting terms with?

-Not to mention... why in all the fates is she dressed like she is going to some high society party and acting totally informal with those two?

She would have to check with Sana and Juni later, they both had much closer personal ties to the Ling family, and friendship with Ling Yu...

-At least they can throw talismans, she grimaced, quickly surveying the carnage that was unfolding.

The second group had now managed to react to the totally unsurprising return of the lamium and were hurling talismans like they were going out of style. Unfortunately, they had precious few wood talismans by the looks of it, so their attacks were muted in impact.

Ha Yun’s group was down to four, not counting the guards. She didn’t recognise any of them beyond their earlier introduction, which had been loud enough for them to hear. Sir Jing had gripped Ha Yun and teleported into the treetops based on the screaming and the falling leaves, Sir Huang was using some form of Immortal sword art to fend off the enraged lamium mutate, while Sir Cao had rescued the other two... and copied her, she noticed, by finding another nearby log enriched with yin wood qi to squat on.

Grimacing, she signed towards him to come towards her. The bodyguard glanced at the youths he held, then at her much larger log, and with a single bound brought the two over.

“Young Master Ha showed us images of the five we were meant to find. You are not among them, although I see you carry one of their tokens?" The bodyguard half asked, half stated.

Arai glanced at the two idiots he had brought with him. Both were early Qi Condensation by the looks of it, and with minor earth qi poisoning now. She rummaged in her pouch for a moment and pulled out a bottle, tossing it to the bodyguard.

“Lun wood poison-shifting pills?” he queried.

“Yep,” she nodded. “It’s a corrosive earth mutate. Feed them one apiece and they will recover in a few minutes. We just need to hold out for… ten minutes probably, until it causes enough imbalance that the local ecosystem takes action.”

“Those young—” the bodyguard started to speak, frowning at her authoritative tone.

“—Are going to run out of talismans before it runs out of qi. Certainly, if they don’t start throwing wood talismans at it soon,” she snapped.

Because he seemed a bit oblivious to the circumstances they found themselves in, she added for good measure “And because you all so kindly fed it spatial yin qi by the looks of it, thanks to teleporting right on top of it, we just better pray to the fates that it doesn’t mutate a second time. If that thing evolves into something thunder element we are all deader than your poor compatriots will be.”

The bodyguard stared at her. “Yin... Spatial? Evolve? You’re an indigenous body cultivator…how…”

Arai had a split second where she wondered if her brain was actually running out of her nose before blanking what he had said from her mind and returning to the important matter at hand: their imminent survival.

“Might I ask the Honoured Sir’s cultivation realm?” she muttered while surveying the devastation in the clearing.

Ling Luo seemed to have finally wised up and was throwing out wood talismans like boiled sweets, which was fortuitous because the other two were not coping particularly well. She guessed their arts were water and metal, a bad match for this place. By comparison, Sir Huang had corralled two of the lamium's main stems and appeared to be admirably immune to its earth corrosion.

“You may not,” came the frosty response.

“Then if you’re not going to be useful, at least keep Han Shu here alive,” she replied. Sana had finally got a second trappish vine off the tree and was signalling her.

With an expert throw her sister cast one of them over to her, then took a bunch of ward stones out of her own pouch.

She noted, belatedly, as the vine lashed in her hand, that the other two bodyguards had also realised their issue at this point, as had the young masters and mistress: realm suppression. They were unable to draw qi from the landscape around here at all to enhance their arts. All they were doing was feeding the existing system. 'Devouring Crag Path' as it was sometimes called, was one of the properly forbidden zones in this part of the mountain and they were on the edge of it. As indicated by the name, the devouring strength of the landscape was even more obvious than usual here.

The only reason they were here was to get this fate-thrashed plant because of the levy order. Otherwise, it would have been quietly marked and ignored like a dozen other six-star threats just not worth the effort under normal circumstances. The trick now was to make sure it ran out of qi before the grove all around them woke up. Fortunately, the lamium was unwilling to move too far from here. Her earlier suspicions, about it using the edge of the 'Wandering Grove', the life-breaking aspen’s little part of the Devouring Crag Path, seemed to be true. It was indeed using this place to pressure its own cultivation to force a breakthrough. Suppression and ignition.

-Yet another thing most people don’t believe, that the fate-thrashed plants can and will cultivate according to their own theories.

That was a properly sealed bit of Bureau knowledge and the great secret that Old Ling had told them when they passed their eight-star certifications. Apparently there were only two ways to cultivate qi up here: Internally, or not at all. Spiritual cultivation, pulling qi from the surroundings to build your own foundation, becoming one with the world? That only worked when the world wanted to become one with you, rather than making you one with it.

The lamium seemed to realise the game was up as well; its flowers, that had been an all-encompassing carpet before, were now merely dense. She gripped the trappish vine firmly and shoved a water ward stone at it. It hungrily devoured the qi inside and seemed to grow... Spikier. Good enough. She pulled out an air-walk talisman and slapped it on her chest, before running off the log towards the nearest of the five upright stalks. The lamium bloomed beneath her but she had put wood ward stones in her boots before the fight so the corrosive force was muted to a dull itch. For now.

She hurled the flailing vine at the nearest stalk and watched with satisfaction over her shoulder as she made her way back to a different log, further around the clearing. The plant was now engaged in a tug of war with the trappish vine. A few moments later she saw Lin Ling repeat her feat on a stalk on the far side of the clearing. Then Sana, who had climbed high into one of the trees, dropped a third in an arching lob onto the furthest, most centrally located one. The plant rippled and two of its remaining stalks collapsed into loam while the three tangled up in vines were prevented from doing so by the trapping wood qi boosted by water ward stones within them.

Its change in tactics and aggression was expected... by them at least, although it threw the arrivals for a loop as the two youths barrelled backwards, both using barrier talismans to block waves of earth corrosion. She had a pretty good understanding of how lamium fought intruders and predators, so she wasn’t surprised when two stalks became dozens of smaller ones, punching upwards under all kinds of targets. They particularly focused on the log that held the three injured flunkies and the cultivator, Sir Cao. For his part, the Ha clan guard grabbed Ha Yun’s compatriots and ran up a nearby tree.

Han Shu, who had been left behind by Sir Cao, was saved from death by Juni, who used a precious blink lash talisman to teleport him off the log and onto the ledge above the cliff beside her. She wanted to curse the guard, but there was no opportunity. A split second later there was a dull boom as the tree the bodyguard had run up twisted in on itself and then exploded its upper portion across half the clearing. Half a body of something landed on the scree slope about twenty metres away. The two youths were nowhere to be seen for a few seconds before they both fell out of the tree looking frazzled but otherwise unharmed, having avoided the fate of their compatriot.

She shook her head, wondering for a second what in the fates had happened, when a myriad-limbed thing skulked, somehow extending out of the tree, and picked its way gently across the ground. It gave no heed to the cultivators or the trappish vines. Instead, it moved to the middle of the clearing and sank its two front limbs into the earth, which suddenly churned. It was hard to make out what it was, in amongst the churning earth and splintered tree, but after a few seconds it raised its front claws and held a large fragment of dull grey root that was impaled on its limb and started to chew on it.

She groaned. Mantis, Cicada meet Oriole. This was just the scenario that they had worried about when setting up this trap. What was worse was she recognised this particular predator. She was just about to signal their retreat from the grove entirely now that that thing had shown up when ....well... the insanity intensified. With a righteous yell, the youth wearing purple drew out a spear from his storage ring. The ‘great devouring centipede’ slid out of the tree foliage entirely and landed on the ground. Its full length was about twenty metres long, a dull brown and green carapace with white and grey legs now in evidence to confirm the identification. It didn’t rear, it just blurred towards the youth, who flipped out a strange talisman from his pouch. The centipede diverted at the last possible second rather than trying to surround the youth, who moved off into the scree, which rumbled and distorted as the centipede shifted through it with alarming speed as it chased after him.

Juni and the others on the ledge glanced down and instantly vacated their position via air-walk talismans, sprinting towards the far side of the narrow gorge on that valley side. Their talismans ran out feet before they reached the wall and they leapt and clung onto the stones like rock lizards. The purple-robed youth clicked his tongue in annoyance and then shoved the spear into the air and spoke some unpronounceable words. A split second later a searing lightning bolt dropped out of the clouds onto the centipede. The air almost seemed to boil around them for a few seconds, then there was an eerie quiet.

She felt a bit of blood dribble out of her ears. -Deafened. With a grimace, she ate a healing pill and within a few moments, the sounds of the forest become clearer once more. The centipede shook itself and moved back to the clearing, apparently unharmed apart from a few light scorch marks on its shell. She expected that; it was an earth and metal element qi beast… wood and fire were what was needed to make its day miserable, not thunder which it was strong against anyway.

The lamium at least seemed mostly spent. The damage to its root was probably not terminal. But... she made a quick calculation. She had been counting back the probable point when the grove would decide enough was enough since they started this. Between what they had achieved earlier, this, the centipede and the qi being wastefully spewed all over by the new arrivals she was not liking her answer at all. She signed Ling and Sana to pull out. Both affirmed quickly and started making up distance. Juni had Han Shu and one of Ha Yun’s lackeys somehow. He was quivering like a leaf, but she saw a sheaf of talismans in his shaking hand. So that was good.

“Up? Or across?” she signed to Juni, who had the best vantage point.

“Across. Higher,” came back from Juni.

“Higher. Left,” from Sana.

Glancing up she nodded her understanding and bounded from her current position to a low bough about 10 metres away. From there she tapped the air-walk talisman on her chest again and sprinted upwards, avoiding foliage until she was in the tree crown. On the next tree over she could see the one-armed bodyguard and Ha Yun, who was looking… disorientated. Glancing over she pointed up and away to the left, towards the cliff wall, then without waiting for any response jumped to the next tree crown.

The fight down below reached its logical endpoint for the watching Hunters. The final bodyguard, Sir Huang, had gotten involved at last. Unlike the youth, he appeared to be doing actual damage to the centipede. It might have been her imagination but the purple-robed youth seemed quite put out by that.

-Talk about pointless priorities... she hissed mentally.

To her right, three colourful blurs sprinted up the scree slope as fast as their movement arts would let them in this oppressive landscape. Eventually, all the survivors reached the top of the ridgeline, dwarfed by the mountain above. There was no thunder now, just oppressive shadow and an unearthly, but still faint, chill; Yin Eclipse living up to its ominous name.

Juni was first to speak. “Shu…?” she caught herself with a grimace and glanced towards the others.

“Han Shu will be okay. He got a lung-full of the vapour when the second teleport landed, was all,” she supplied…

Han Shu was a cultivator at the mid Qi condensation stage like Juni, he would be okay with time.

“It's unfortunate, but I gave him the antidote already… it could have been any of us.”

Sana nodded wearily in response. She was suffering from mild meridian shock it seemed, but would also recover in time. Although, speaking of time... she noted that the treetops had changed colour below, indicating that time was not on their side.

“We have a problem,” she said, pointing down into the gully.

Sana cursed. “The Grove woke up”.

“Yep,” Lin Ling groaned. “The fate thrashed Grove woke up,”

She looked across the treetops, noting the distance of the discolouration and its slow spread. Both directions and across the far ridgeline by the looks of it. The thirteen-star ‘Life-Breaking Aspen Grove’, an infamous passive threat that was as much a location as it was a plant and which all the Bureau documentation stressed to never annoy, was slowly sending out feelers to see if this disturbance was worth feeding on. She could feel its sleepy intent already on the edges of her mind, hunting for the things that had roused it from its slumber. Across the valley, she saw a long shape slither over the ridge and into a dark gap. The great devouring centipede had made its escape seemingly, back into its own little ecosystem.

“What is that…?” Ha Leng whispered, staring at the forest of identical trees changing colour below.

Ling Luo also sat looking blankly at the valley.

“The Life-Breaking Aspen Grove… it’s waking up.” Juni grimaced.

“First time seeing the Inner Valleys at their most entertaining, Miss Luo?” Sana chucked, rather grimly.

The girl turned to look at her seemingly unable to even muster any particular charm. “Why can’t we use our qi properly here?”

“What!?!” Ha Yun gulped… “That…that’s that Grove?”

“You teleported right into the Inner Valleys without even… checking what kind of place this is…” she just stared at them, tuning out the disbelief and not so mild terror from the Ha group, who knew enough to know at least what to fear.

She pointed up at the mountain. “That’s ‘Yin Eclipse Great Mount’. Where its shadow falls—” she pointed out towards the horizon, where the Low Valleys ended and the High Valleys began. “—the natural laws of the world are sealed away. You either bring your own world with you to draw qi from, or you use physical cultivation to reinforce your body and get an extra edge. It’s not fool proof but it does work.”

The girl snapped back at her. “What crap? How is that even possible? This. Is. Eastern. Azure. Great Realm. The Blue Morality Emperor is supreme. How can something like that…the... just because you Hunters know a little bit about plants you think you can claim something so… it must be some weird geology in that.. Yes...”

She tuned her out as well: she wasn't behaving like the Ling Luo she knew, Ling Luo would have known what she just said... which was odd, maybe the shock? In any event, if they were going to be idiots like that, there was no point really in talking to them.

She turned to her sister and Lin Ling. “Assuming the weather holds... we have just under half a day to get off this ridgeline and under the next high cliff. We have made enough noise as it is.”

Juni nodded grimly “I don’t want to be here when the shadow moves on.”

Sir Huang, who had remained silent until this point, frowned slightly. “What happens then?”

Sana looked grim. “You just met one of the valley’s local seven-star mutates. The great devouring centipede… That thing came out because it saw an opportunity to profit from our mess. Otherwise, it has the same limitations you do: no qi-retention, only exhalation. It recovers via eating the plants, like everything else out here.”

Pointing down into the valley she went on, “The plants are different. That thing is a thirteen-star passive threat, personally classified by Sage Blue Water thirty thousand years ago when he was first exploring these mountains. ‘Life-Breaking Aspen Grove’. He wrote that its strength was close to that of a Dao Lord, even under this suppression. When the shadow of the mountain moves, that’s when the twelve- and thirteen-star active threats come out and hunt… I’m not sure what realm you’re at, Sir Bodyguard of our Ha Yun, but I can tell you that we have official realm classifications for several of the critters up here. Discounting the squirrel. Which is just..."

She shook her head and stared back down into the valley. "The centipede is a seven-star sentient mutate with a cultivation rank somewhere around Dao Seeking. The nine-star are about the peak of Immortal. As for the higher grades? Those threats? Nobody who’s seen an active one in the last thirty years has survived sane or uncrippled. The Duke's forces met some during the expedition thirty years ago on the north-eastern slope of East Fury, by all accounts. A pack of bipedal rat-lizard-man things that could make themselves invisible and teleport when not in visual sight. He thought those were quasi-thirteen-star grade and was kind enough to register an extensive bestiary with the Hunter Bureau."

“I wonder, do you actually comprehend what those words mean… Miss?” Sir Cao cut in drolly.

The purple-clothed youth laughed and said. “Bumpkin, you think because you know about realms, you can just say something is close to Dao Lord and we will be impress—?”

A cough from the red-clothed girl... who may or may not have been Ling Luo at this point... cut through their attempt at ridicule. “Sir…Din…?” she quavered.

Perched on her head, happily eating a food pill, was a two-tailed brown squirrel, its bright eyes glittering in the afternoon sunlight. It sniffed the air a few times and then hopped into her lap where it proceeded to paw the storage talisman around her neck a bit. What happened next made their collective blood run cold. It was what she had feared it might do to one of their talismans back when they encountered it days prior. The little squirrel gently hopped back onto her shoulder and, while everyone was still frozen in shock, unclipped the necklace and hopped onto the rock nearby. Completely oblivious to the onlookers, it poked at the different pearls and jade for a moment. It narrowed its eyes and selected one of the pearls, held it between its paws and… squeezed. Just squeezed.

The *pop* sound would live long in the nightmares of all present as the spatial cage on the jade pearl shattered open and scattered a hoard of pills, clothes, weapons, several crates of talismans randomly down around them.

The squirrel hopped onto the pile and, in front of everyone, proceeded to haul out a small, crystal-clear, pill container with a smoky white and black pill in it. The seal on the outside read ‘Nascent Origins Returning Dan’. It considered it for a moment then flung it over its shoulder. She watched, hypnotised, as a presumably very expensive pill fell into the valley covered by the Aspen Grove, beyond any salvage attempt. The squirrel poked at a few more pill bottles, tossing them at random into the vegetation, before finally arriving at a grey-furred animal skin pouch. It poked the pouch a few times, then nodded to itself.

Slinging the pouch over its shoulder, it turned to the assembled Hunters and cultivators. The purple-clothed boy had his spear out, levelled at the creature, and the blue-robed youth had drawn out a dark jade sword.

This time it didn’t bow. It took one paw and pulled down its eyelid while pawing its ear with the other paw. Then, without a sound, it dropped into the ground and vanished. A split second after, the pile of clothes was demolished with a lightning bolt cast from the end of the spear. The youth snarled in fury.

She watched the koppi squirrel leave, even as she ducked to avoid a shattered chest of potions that flew off past her and broke open downslope.

After a few moments, all she could find it in her to say was: “Yeah. As we said. There’s also that squirrel. And its fate-thrashed weird.”