Memories of the Fall

...Frequently when you interrogate the pages of history, it will turn out that even the most remarkable turning points can have truly banal origins. The demise of the mendacious Heavenly Dawn Sect, the tragic death of Venerate Murong, the decision by the Ancestors of the Seven Sovereigns Hall to eliminate the heirs of Dun FaoLong… all these decisions had their origins in single, simple actions where the unenlightened did not show respect for the strength of our world's destiny, tried to go against the Fates for their own personal agendas and were humbled as a result… Our current generations would do well to understand these lessons I feel, especially those rebellious young Ladies of Teng and Kai who have made such scenes of late, showing little appreciation of the Grace of our Heavens in this era and the benevolence of our Great Imperial House’s shade...

Excerpt – A Treatise on Eastern Azure Great World, in 100 Volumes,

by Qin Qiu, Royal Scholar of Qin.

~ Kun Juni – The Herb Hunters ~

Juni flinched involuntarily as another cone exploded, showering the surroundings with sparks of fire qi and a core of Pure Yang that set up miniature blazes. Thankfully there was no chain reaction this time. Now, all five of them were seated in a huddle around one of the expended, if still slightly smouldering, pine trees in this upper valley. She had to admit that she lacked Arai’s talent for dreaming up new, invective-laden terms to express her displeasure at their circumstances.

-Really this is a scenario blessed by the evil eye of the nameless fates.

The 'heavens blaze pine' nearest them was largely dealt with; that was not the issue here. Remarkably, Ha Yun and the two bodyguards who remained with them, Sir Huang and Sir Cao, had actually been useful. Sir Huang in particular was resourceful, and knowledgeable in formations that provided them access to tools not normally available without great personal expenditure.

The problem was the purple-clothed youth, Ji. He had, for the last two days or so, been using some strange art she was certain. Something was making their instincts go weird and they all agreed it was him; when he was around it grew subtly harder to concentrate in key moments. Not so you would normally notice, the damage was subtle, but the solutions always seemed to be Ji Tantai. It was like he was trying to push them towards accidents that relied on him and Din Ouyeng as a solution.

If you weren’t used to a level of paranoid concentration tied to your imminent survival from one moment to the next – like in, say, a valley where any innocuous plant might be covering an explosive seed cone from a havens blaze pine – it would be easy to dismiss as poor rest, a distracted mind, or nerves. However, nobody here was that gullible or inexperienced with this place.

Ha Yun cowered under a different tree with Sir Huang and Ling Luo, the remains of Ha Fang smoking distressingly close by. The others were cowering under a third tree some ten metres to their left.

Ha Fang's near-instantaneous demise hadn’t been his fault, even if he had been a bully and a thug for as long as all those there who did know him, had known him. If blame were to be pointed it should actually be at Ling Luo, who was totally not acting like herself and who had snagged a bush when following behind, when the three had been asked to stay above and watch for potential flare-ups amid the pines.

Then she had put her hand down, when she should have just stayed put rather than squealing like a stuck pig and jumping away from the spiky needles which she had mistaken for one of the lethally explosive seed pods. In the process, Ling Luo had kicked a real one back across the clearing. Din Ouyeng had grabbed her out of danger and in the process Ha Fang, who had been acting as one of the stable points for the water-attribute formation they were using to slowly wear down this particular pine so they could chop it for wood, had taken the full brunt of the explosion.

Yang Qi had seared his body: turned his bones to charcoal and cooked his flesh from the inside out. A nasty way to go.

Sana signed: “This is the third incident in a day and a half”

Arai flickered back: “Yeah, fool me thrice…”

Ha Yun added: “Apple pear juice not right?” in a very clumsy manner.

If she was deciphering his horrible form right on his behalf, that really meant: 'you think this is deliberate? How?'.

That got a: “You can actually sign?” back from Lin Ling, who was attempting to inspect a map.

She signed to those under her own tree: “Can’t you feel your mind wandering oddly? This is getting stupid now?”

Everyone tensed as there was another dull boom in the middle distance followed by a wave of searing Yang Qi. Even at this distance, with the reinforcement of her mantra, it made her skin prickle and blister. Setting off one seed pod had been like setting off a random firecracker in a firecracker factory. Fortunately, the trees themselves were largely immune to the damage of their own seeds and they also projected small fields of safety beneath them for some inexplicable reason.

Her query got a bunch of frustrated affirmatives.

Arai, who was sat beside Lin Ling, poked the younger girl to get her attention. "Any joy?”

“A little," Lin Ling grimaced, "we actually seem to be closer than I’d credited at first. The Cadre map is pretty iffy, but I can’t blame them, they saw what was in here and went ‘Nope, screw that.’”

She leant over to get a better look as well, as Lin Ling tilted the angle and squinted at the little projection of dots, lines and symbols.

"They guessed from the tree height that the centre where the best trees would be was about two hundred metres from the west valley wall. We're about 120 metres from the east at the moment... so sixty metres to our right, over that outcropping, is where we probably want to go?”

Five heads turned to look in the direction that Ji Tantai and Din Ouyeng had retreated. There were a lot of explosions in that direction and the sound of collapsing trees.

“There’s no fate-thrashed way right?” Sana muttered... "They are deliberately stealing the stuff we need? Are they that poor?"

"I think they are just doing it so we have to go to them for it," Arai sighed.

“Maybe we could just throw a rock over there?” Lin Ling suggested, “We might lose half a tonne of timber in the process, but if it’s to kill that mind-screwing bastard I’ll take the censure.”

“That’s... probably impossible” Sana muttered.

“You saw the talisman or artefact he had on the day he arrived. It bounced an Immortal realm monster. Admittedly one with its qi sealed and its realm suppressed down to Golden Core… but still.”

They had all seen. And so five sets of eyes moved to the other trees, where Sir Huang, Ha Yun, Sir Cao, Fairy Luo, Ha Mun, Ha Ding, Ha Jiao and Ha Leng were clustered.

“Either way we appear to have lost half a tonne of Grade Six fire retardant lumber,” Arai grimaced, as she might… that was fifty Spirit Jade worth of timber gone poof… and a huge loss to their quota harvest.

“We have these trees here?” she noted, poking one.

“Yeah, let’s deal with these two," The decision made, she signed across to Ha Yun and his group, “You chop that tree, it’s all yours.”

They watched nervously as there was a moment of close conferral around the tree then she saw Sir Huang move out to the edge and gesture for the others to get clear. With a single sweep of his blade, he neatly truncated the tree about an inch above the ground without it even giving a shiver. Before it could fall, Sir Cao, who was still at the trunk, pressed his hand against it and with a *pop* it vanished into a storage device.

Happy that one was dealt with, she winced as there was another, larger explosion from over the ridge. It was followed by ominous silence then a short while later two smaller explosions. The aftermath of that spawned ground quakes like firecrackers in every direction. Yang Qi bled out of the world around them for a few moments, making her woozy as she fumbled for a pill to neutralise it. The others were also doing the same.

Once the disorientation passed, she turned to their own tree and handed the axe to Han Shu, then they all clustered around the trunk. He then proceeded to work his way around the outer ring of the pine tree’s understory, chopping into the ground every few paces. Once he had completed his circuit, Arai gave the tree a speculative poke. It didn’t move into the storage container, which was typical really. Missing a root would be somewhat expected on the first attempt, given how poor the soil here was. Han Shu made a second circuit, under the faintly bemused onlookers from the other tree stump. This time when Arai poked the tree it vanished into her storage jade pendant with a whoosh of displaced air, central root column and all.

They looked at the third adult pine. It was about thirty metres away, towards the side of the narrow valley. The risk was ludicrous but now that the best trees had been exploded or ruined they had to make do with what was available to harvest. This time just her and Sir Huang made the trip, the latter following in her footsteps and watching carefully where she decided to tread with a curiously pensive expression. He did the cutting, with his blade, in four swipes, and the six-star blaze pine vanished into the storage talisman.

Glancing at Sir Huang she asked him tentatively… “Do we wait…?”

She thought she saw a look of displeasure cross his face, not seemingly at her though.

-So they also find those two in particular problematic. Interesting.

Sir Huang grimaced slightly and replied, “It seems we must. If we leave that Young Master Din out here and it gets out, there will be trouble. That one has connections that your Pavilion cannot weather and I doubt posthumous exoneration is appealing to you.”

“It is not," she said with some added invective that made Sir Huang chuckle for some reason. She had known that anyway; the Din clan and certainly the Jade Gate Court were not influences they could offend. The Kun clan on the northern continent wouldn't shelter her from them, that was certain.

Their group made their way back to the valley edge and up to the lip. When they got there. Din Ouyeng and Ji Tantai were already sat on a rock, eating some kind of exotic fruit and passing a jar of wine between them. Neither made any effort to share either. Instead, Ji Tantai stood up and immediately rushed over to Fairy Luo and started to fuss over her, escorting her back to the rock and offering her a sweetmeat he procured from somewhere. A spatial device presumably, disguised as an ornament or pouch.

Ha Yun spoke up this time “We made way too much noise for what was meant to be a simple bit of tree cutting. We need to push on to the next way station on the circuit.”

Even he, untested out here as he was, saw that what they had done was basically like ringing a clarion bell in the middle of this place. Half the eyes within a valley’s distance were likely seeking for the disturbance at this point.

“I am afraid that is quite impossible," Din Ouyeng spoke up, “Fairy Luo here is clearly shaken from what transpired before!”

Ji Tantai nodded. “Indeed, it is a hard thing to be a servant of the Ha it seems. I had heard from Fairy Luo how they treated their servants so, but to witness it in the flesh, remarkable.”

Ha Leng was about to speak up and step forward when Sir Cao placed a hand on his shoulder and pulled him aside. Sir Huang, who had been conferring about something with Ha Yun, also just happened to be between them in that moment, which Juni found impressively convenient. In a single step, they had diffused the obvious threat. Unfortunately, it didn't change the issue one bit.

“As much as it pains me to say it, Ha Yun is right," she interjected.

Pointing up at the Great Mount, she went on... “This valley generates a lot of Yang Qi and we stayed here too long as is. If we are caught on the ridgeline when the cloud drops... I wonder, do you Young Masters have wondrous talismans that can fend off the power of the lightning in those clouds and protect against the Yin Qi in their vapours…?”

The rest of it went unfinished as the thunderhead across the valley gave a very timely rumble. Everyone bar Ji Tantai glanced upwards and winced; he just smirked again and shook his head, then leaned down to whisper something she couldn't catch in Ling Luo's ear.

Arai looked down into the green pit next to her and her sister and muttered. “We’re too slow. The shadow is slipping, look to our right.”

She looked, although she really didn’t want to. Over the edge of the far valley, which had been obscured by the horizon line before, there was the glimmer of sunlight on rock. That was something they hadn’t seen in days, not since they moved out of the Low Valleys in fact. Now, it was a sight she really did not want to see.

“Where is the closest way station with high-grade moon runes that the Beast Hunters have?” She asked Lin Ling, working to keep the unease from her voice.

Lin Ling glanced at her map without turning around. “About two miles up the ridge."

"Isn't there’s another about a mile to the west in the far side of the valley over there?” Sana pointed from where she stood, past the pit of dark green leaves below them. "That one should be a lot quicker to get to?"

“Mmmm," Lin Ling looked pensive. “That one has compromised runes in it according to the notes. It was used as a refuge about a decade ago and nobody has been up that side since. They all go up this side now; it’s a faster, more open route."

"Figures." Sana looked frustrated.

She looked at Ha Yun and his group of three remaining flunkies… “How fast are you all able to run without tripping?” she asked.

Ha Yun glanced past her at the sunlight on the rocks further down the ridgeline and visibly lost any remaining sense of bravado. “Fast enough. But…” his voice trailed off.

Her mind stopped working fractionally. Reflex had one of Grandmaster Mang’s talismans in her hand, looking for the threat as her instincts screamed at her and her mantra twinged.

Sir Huang had vanished. Or, to be more exact, where Sir Huang, Arai and Sana had been standing there was now an empty void and some flapping cloth from his bag, and the scattered remnants of Sana’s pack dropping to the ground. Ji Tantai stood next to the edge looking over with a satisfied look on his face… hand outstretched.

He turned towards the group and smiled in a way that made her skin crawl. “Well, that’s the nuisance dealt with. I believe I should properly introduce myself....”

“I am Di Ji, and I am so pleased that you are all able to be here today to help."

~ Sir Huang – ??? ~

Lan Huang let his vision re-adjust and stared at the moving sky, with its weird celestial law in the shape of an ever-evolving spiral of different farmyard animals. He tried to speak, but only inarticulate sounds came out for a few moments. The pain was quite real: it had been a while since he suffered proper soul shock. The sky of the place his physical body was in shivered a bit and two middle-aged men who had been in the process of arguing about their game both arrived at his side simultaneously.

“What... ah... that fate-thrashed, soul-selling little...”

He focused a bit harder and brought his spiritual aura back into the normal range, and the weirdness faded. The puppet body had been severed away from him the second it passed through the anomaly, which had felt like he had been caught inside a huge bell when someone struck it. The resulting distortion had severed his remote connection to the puppet forcefully it seemed. The damage wasn't too bad, his Dao Soul would heal fully, but it still felt like he had been scalded.

“That was unpleasant. On so many levels," he shook his head again. The buzzing wasn't going away.

“What happened?” the Supreme Ancestral Elder Ha Kai asked, looking... concerned? "Did you lose connection to the puppet?"

“I think I was just sneak attacked by a Golden Immortal punk," he grimaced.

That was shameful, frankly, more so because he wasn't even totally certain he knew how the bastard had done it. There had been an unusual fluctuation off of him in the moment of the strike that felt almost like he had managed to lift the suppression entirely somehow, although that should be impossible. Even so, anywhere else the puppet would have eaten the strike easily... but being dropped off a cliff, through an anomaly, was pretty much a done thing in that awful place. It was also a shame about the two girls, Arai and Sana. They had both had talent, and surprisingly good spirit roots for people who just focused on physical cultivation.

If they had fallen through the same thing he had, he could only hope it wasn't a killing anomaly. If they had missed it though... that had been a huge cliff face facing into the neighbouring valley. With the suppression, unless they had teleport talismans to hand, they would likely die or be crippled from the impact. Either way, whatever it was had certainly done his soul a number… so it didn’t look good really.

Both old ancestors looked askance at him.

“I’m sorry?” Original Ancestor Ha Tai said dully... “I don’t think I quite heard you right?”

~ Lu Ji – Blue Water City ~

Lu Ji had nearly finished the second draft of his missive to the Blue Duke when a careful knock came on his door. Sighing and pushing the tablet away, he waited the appropriate ten or so seconds before letting the servant know that they could enter. Behind them came two people; the Bureau Chief Ling Jiang and his vice headmaster Ling Tao. The brother and sister pair both looked stressed in subtly different ways. Tao appeared to have been crying again, making little effort to hide her stress or distress. He was worried she would develop some kind of deviation or heart demon if this kept up. Jiang looked like he was about to throttle someone.

“To what do I owe this...?” he was about to say ‘pleasure’, but that was probably a mistake.

“...Visit.” He finished lamely.

Before Jiang could say anything Tao wailed. “Luo’er is missing.”

“Define ‘missing’,” Lu Ji asked carefully.

“My daughter went to a social function on my behalf three days ago,” Jiang interceded, “and has not been seen since. One of the Jade Loci from the Bureau was also taken three days ago.”

“What—!” Lu Ji caught himself.

Both Tao and Jiang whitened and took a half a step backwards before he got his 'intent' under control.

“Sorry… it has been a trying few days for everyone I fear.” Lu Ji apologized with a grimace for his outburst. “My lack of control was… Unseemly.

“I take it the two are connected?” he continued, quickly skipping the conversation forward.

Jiang nodded darkly. “My daughter was… is… the person in charge of overseeing their maintenance, and coordinates their upkeep with the different Bureau offices in the province.”

“We are all aware of your daughter’s stellar work ethic and professionalism, Jiang.” He nudged carefully. “What do you think is behind her disappearance?”

“Not what. Who,” Ling Jiang growled. “She was seen yesterday at the West Flower Picking Town transit terminus array, in the company of two youths of unknown origins.”

He held out a jade and gestured and two youths, one in blue and gold and the other in purple and green, both appeared as images in the air. “Both attended the princess’s dinner in the Golden Dragon that my daughter went to in place of Ling Yu. They were personally introduced to her by one of our noble visitors from across the ocean – Din Yao”

“And where is this Din Yao now?” Lu Ji felt a sense of unease creeping over him; that name was familiar.

“Din Yao set off north from the city, and went through one of the minor terminus with a larger group of disciples of various influences, a few hours after my daughter was sighted, however, he used a Heaven Shifting Crystal on the teleport platform,” Jiang looked even more thunderous, if that was possible, and pulled up the other two images from a jade pendant he was carrying.

“So there is no record of where he went,” he mused staring at the images.

“Yes, and several other groups went through immediately after, so any signature is… I have someone from the Ling clan looking into it, but…”

-Except... He stared at the images harder.

What he was seeing was somewhat... unlikely but his eyes certainly were not deceiving him.

-Really, as if this day, week, a decade even, can't get any worse. No wonder that name is familiar.

It was hard to tell if he was being made a fool of actually, or if this was some kind of calamitous pie dropping out of the sky for all of them.

-It can’t be that piece of human sewage… The old bastards protecting the shadows of that mess… are not this dumb… he mused grimly.

“…”

“Have you ever met this Din Yao… in person?” he asked, staring at the two youths in the second image, wishing suddenly that he had gone to that fates-accursed dinner…

-Wait a minute… his mood dropped as he ran back through that sequence of events, the death of his treasured little singing orchid, the upheaval...

“I can’t say I’ve had that displeasure,” Ling Jiang replied, even as his thoughts continued to spin and he had the distinct feeling he had just been plotted in some minor way. “His reputation precedes him, however, as one of the more difficult scions within the extended influence of the Imperial Court”

“It does,” he muttered… “Do we have anything else in relation to who he was meeting while he was in the city?”

“Uh…” Ling Jiang frowned for a moment, his gaze growing distant, presumably as he checked something.

“He socialized generally, sticking in the approximate orbit of the Princess Lian Jing’s various little endeavours… A few others from the Din clan seem to have come and… ah…”

Ling Jiang stopped and his scowl managed to deepen. “Din Huan, He is also connected to some of the less… savoury elements within the Ha clan who have been growing closer to the Jade Gate Court as they try to compete with the Kun clan’s export of goods across the ocean.”

“There are savoury elements to the Ha clan?” Ling Tao acerbically cut in, wiping her eyes a bit.

"Well, there are a few that are our inner disciples," he pointed out. Ling Tao ignored that.

He noticed she was stood beside his now fairly empty pitcher of spirit wine.

-That was full a moment ago? Ahh well, I can hardly judge there, he reflected. In the circumstances I would be drinking too.

“There is a significant difference of views between the Ha clan and the Ha family.”

Ling Jiang frowned, “You believe that claptrap? After leading a major influence in this gateway city for all these years?”

“I don’t,” he conceded, largely because it wasn't worth the discussion and didn't seem relevant to what they were here about anyway. “But the Ha clan ‘branch’ family in West Flower Picking Town is a bit special, in that regard at least. The two of their number that are in the school are inner disciples of reasonable if mildly unimaginative capability.... mostly.”

He wasn't that impressed with the Governor of West Flower Picking Town right now, but that, again, wasn't worth pointing out in the context of what Ling Jiang and Ling Tao were here about. It would only be a distraction…

He glanced out the window towards the School pagodas, and across the Blue Pavilion, and recalled some of the group who had gone with Grand Uncle Lu Fu Tao into the mountains… and quietly changed his mind.

“Regarding that specific branch of the Ha clan… they have a direct association with that old eccentric Kai.”

“What does this have to do with anything?” Ling Tao asked.

“Well… it’s less about Old Kai in this instance and more about his father,” he explained, hoping that he wasn’t going to invite a calamity of a different sort for outing the old man’s rather terrifying origins, courtesy of his Aunt. “That specific family in West Flower Picking Town has a direct association with ‘Old Freak Ha’. That is almost certainly a reason why Dun Jian sent those two here and why they have stayed here, acting all secretive and riffling through the school’s history, while those hangers-on who came with them turn this city into a facsimile of the anarchy associated with Meng City… or with the coastal towns up north across the straits on the Northern Tang continent.”

Ling Tao looked slightly confused at that “Old Freak?”

Her brother, however, who was certainly privy to a few things courtesy of the older fellows in the Ling clan, suddenly went flat-faced.

“Anyway,” Lu Ji continued. “I have had the misfortune of meeting Din Yao."

That,” he pointed at the third image, “is not Din Yao. His qi aura is… off, and his soul strength is all wrong.”

He pointed at the white- and yellow-clothed youth. “THAT by the by is Din Ouyeng, he’s an inner disciple of the Jade Gate Court. He supposedly went missing in the Heavenly Fates temple trial a few years ago, although the news wouldn’t have been important enough to make it out here unless someone had a specific interest... or is a schoolmaster who has to keep tabs on the various malcontents that move around the Imperial continent causing chaos wherever they go.”

He pulled up the image of the purple-clothed youth stepping into the formation array. “And this... This smug little fate-thrashed bundle of maleficence? Is called Di Ji.”

“Wait… Di Ji? That Di Ji?” Jiang’s face turned to stone. “That Di Ji? From—?”

“Yep. That. Di. Ji,” He punctuated each word with a poke at the picture.

-Fate thrashed… to think that this bundle of malevolence has just wandered back into our lives, this week of all weeks!

“Di Ji… as in…?” Ling Tao’s face had turned pale and her hand holding the wine jar was white and clenched. “From one hundred years ago?”

“Absolutely—" he growled, his own anger at how this had slipped by him still welling up. "I think the number of people who have actually stood in the same room as the little shit when he wasn’t wearing some disguise, mask or other charm in this city is probably in the low single digits, at least those able to talk about it, but I happen to be one of them.”

-Is that why someone decided… I should be led to the side-lines like I seem to have been? he sneered to himself.

Di Ji himself would likely not have known, but enough people tried to cover that villainy up that his participation in sorting out the aftermath would have been known, especially in the Envoy’s Palace…

“I see,” Jiang suddenly looked deflated. He held up a second jade; an access loci, on which was displayed the documents that the provincial military authorities had for Di Ji, replete with an image.

His own gaze swept through the file, and he groaned. Really, this was just the worst.

“This youth,” Jiang said, pointing to the image of the first man, Din Yao, dressed in garish, regal purple and carrying a fan, “is the one whose face, qi signature and arts are listed for Di Ji, in the official Bureau database. The warrant is explicit about his use of illusions and techniques and the visual appearance in this image comes with the personal verification of the Senior Astrology Bureau official from Jade Gate City.”

“Oh. The little gobshit.” was all he could manage at that as he perused the file. Large parts of the specifics were sealed, at a level even Jiang couldn't undo it seemed.

Ling Jiang nodded, his expression getting darker as he poked at the restrictions in vain.

He stared at what was in the summary before him, what was readable anyway. It read like some kind of idiot savant's idea of a formal exoneration, but there was enough there to read behind the lines on how Di Ji was walking around with his original face on.

"Young master Din Yao was impersonated by an evil demon and had his appearance stolen by a member of the [fox?] clan. Wearing his face he seduced many young ladies and scammed many young lords of their fortunes and virtue while hiding behind the shield of the Din family name. The righteous young lord Din, outraged by the misuse of his name and visage, tracked down the foul miscreant and captured him, returning to the Din clan to let them uphold justice on behalf of the wronged… the Young Master Din Yao was awarded meritorious service and is now a lineage disciple of [sect] in Jade Gate City. This sect also happens to have strong influence with the appointment and oversight of the Astrology Bureau.

"This is..." He wasn't sure he had words really.

"They don't even seem to have attempted to rehabilitate 'Din Yao'. Just packed him off to [sect], whatever that actually is... If that’s his face then it seems he just got a new name and his original face back by all intents. He is now called Ji Tantai and he is the adoptive brother of Din Yao, adoptive son of Kong Di. He apparently tracked down the [fox] who masqueraded as Di Ji, and then Din Yao. Ji Tantai then killed him with the aid of his good friend, the young noble Din Ouyeng here."

"I mean... when you poke at this it doesn't even make sense, there’s no mention of who ‘Di Ji’ actually was before the supposed fox demon ‘stole his identity’," Ling Jiang growled.

"It doesn't have to. They wanted to let Di Ji off because of his talent originally. The only reason he got implicated was because Lady Kai is someone you should never cross,” he supplied. He had been there, with his Aunt, for that particular part of this sorry saga.

"My assumption was that the two were working with Din Yao," Ling Jiang sighed.

"Kind of,” he scanned the file again, needing to read through it several times before he was confident he had gotten a handle on what was going on between the lines.

"Din Yao is Di Ji, Ji Tantai is also Di Ji, and probably Din Yao really was a fox demon, who got caught by Di Ji and made to do his bidding or something to that effect."

"How is he still walking around free?" Ling Tao was shocked enough to surface from her reverie at this point.

"Kong Di," he grunted. "The influence of the Imperial Grand Astrologer is what it is. And he was – is, apparently – an exceptional seedling. Peerless Golden Immortal by fifty is better than most of the Imperial Scions, with the full backing of the Court. Di Ji managed that flitting from one thing to the other, with a terrifying dose of luck to boot."

"Is he from one of their other realms?" Ling Jiang scowled.

"An incarnator of some favoured scion?" Ling Tao frowned darkly.

"It was never proven,” he sighed. "Not for lack of trying either... the last one that was confirmed was on the Mu Li Great World, I imagine stories of how that ended have crossed your desk before now."

"Like a house on fire,” Ling Jiang said grimly.

Ling Tao stepped forward and suddenly grabbed his robe.

"If Ji Tantai is, in fact, Di Ji by face and nature, then I have a huge favour to ask Martial Teacher.”

“We... in fact, the Ling clan as a whole does,” Ling Jiang said flatly. “Our family has served this town well and honourably. We should be allowed this favour”.

He sighed sadly and gently removed Ling Tao’s fingers from his robe. “Perhaps, but if you want to see this Ji Tantai, Di Ji, dead, we need to be both decisive and subtle about it and have a bit of luck that has so far eluded all those others who have lined up to bring him to ruin.”

Walking over to the window to lean on the frame, he paused to put his thoughts in order before speaking. “There is a chance your daughter, your niece, is still… whole. It may be that they just coerced her in some way. Or convinced her that taking out the Jade Loci was the right thing to do somehow.”

Ling Jiang grimaced. “I can but hope. The Loci they took was for the West Flower Picking Town Hunter Bureau.”

There was the sound of splintering stone as the True Jade window frame warped under Lu Ji’s grip. He was thinking about another oddity that had emerged in the past while... the deaths of the people associated with the mess one hundred years ago.

-My Aunt claimed it wasn't her... and wondered if it was the Duke, as he recalled.

He had another suspicion now. Di Ji had been at the heart of that mess, and yet the brunt of the aftermath had fallen elsewhere, oddly enough. He would have been a Golden Immortal back then.

-Did he go into some anomalous ruin 103 years ago, totally unmarked by the outside world and the many watchers on this place? Hidden from prying eyes it might have been possible..

He scowled down at the broken window frame. “Go on.”

“The Loci was buffered with the talisman call locations that the proclamation of two days ago was sent out to.” Jiang went on. “A lot of the locations are fairly innocuous; there is a lot of scrambling to try to deal with the mess that Imperial Court Envoy Lian has been the root cause of, as you might expect. However, two points stand out. It seems that West Flower Picking Town and South Grove Town both sent out elite teams to try to meet their quotas…. before the proclamation.”

“When you say elite?” Ling Tao cut in.

“South Grove sent out their ‘Teng Formation’ as they like to call it. They are mostly six- and seven-star Hunters lead by an eight-star Hunter, Teng Jong," Jiang Lao affirmed… pulling up another binary access jade. “They also supported that team with four elders of the Teng School and an official from the Bureau. Which is not... orthodox.”

Lu Ji sighed. That was... well he couldn’t blame them. The Blue Gate School had a similar problem, though the chances of the school existing in a week’s time were somewhere shy of nil, so he was just ignoring it.

“But... those quotas must be met. We are… were squeezed and those below us cry out in anguish or fall silent. And West Flower Picking Town?” Ling Tao sighed.

“According to my honoured colleague Mo Deng of the Bureau, they appear to be the root of the levy increase. The Ha clan is making a move on the herb gathering side of things and wants to obtain control over the Hunter Pavilion there more directly. Apparently they went over the head of the Ha family within the town itself in the process, which has led to some… internal recrimination.” Ling Jiang supplied, grimacing for a moment before he went on.

"They seem to have intended to use the proclamation as an excuse to get the Hunters of any capability offside so the Local Bureau authorities get censured... then they can step in and offer their services as an alternative," the Bureau Chief sighed. "They are already messaging my office, as of yesterday, claiming that the corruption of the Hunter Pavilion warrants a deliberate intercession from the central continent. They request an Appointed Administrator."

“They have a big appetite," He grimaced… in another time, without this anarchy, he would already be summoning the Valley Master and making the idiot disciple regret his life choices. Expulsion maybe. It wasn’t impossible to change the Valley Master of West Flower Picking to Kun Jiao, for all that he wasn’t a disciple of the school…

“Go on?” he turned back to Ling Jiang.

“The team they sent out in response to this is a bit odd, but contains a pair of nine-star hunters, including a nine-star recovery hunter. It also has three of their best remaining hunters including one of their eight-star recovery hunters. There is an oddity though. Two sets of talisman tokens haven’t updated properly since last week when the Hunter teams apparently set out. Those belonging to the nine-star Hunters Jun Arai and Jun Sana and those belonging to the two eight-star Hunters Dun Kalis and Shi Mu appear to have swapped their loci tags somehow. Another pair, Han Shu and Dun Mu, also briefly swapped tags but reverted shortly afterwards before both registered a 'binary anomaly'. It’s not uncommon for the talismans to… malfunction in weird if inconsequential ways, particularly when we are upgrading the jadework infrastructure in the Bureaus, but there have been no official reports of such work in West Flower Picking Town at that point. The last one was a month ago…”

“All errors that caused were accounted for," Ling Tao added, peeking over her brother's shoulder.

Lu Ji started at the names. “Huh. The Hunter Bureau pulled a fast one on the Ha clan.”

“Yep," Jiang nodded, a brief smile cracking the anger on his face. “So West Flower Picking sent out a team with three nine-star Hunters, and two eight-star Hunters, including two recovery hunters and two dual-style cultivators. They also have a personally designated list of targets from the Hunter Bureau’s Beast Cadre that were due to go onto the watch list in the next update.”

Lu Ji had to nod in appreciation. It was easy to forget, when you were in this position for uncounted years and saw so much fate-scoured shit, that the regional Pavilions could be highly competent when they needed to be. If only his inner disciples could be so. “They planned to clean up the achievable nasties and try to get as much good faith from the Bureau as they could manage in the process to offset the inevitable censure. This is an old hand’s strategy...”

"Ah... I see..." Ling Tao frowned... "The father of two of the Hunters is Jun Han."

"That Jun Han?" her brother raised an eyebrow.

"Apparently. He retired to West Flower Picking with his wife all those years ago," Ling Tao nodded. "We sent him a marriage gift, remember?"

"We are getting a bit far from the point here," he interceded.

“Yep,” Jiang said, his grim expression returning. “And look at this.”

He swiped across and five figures appeared. Four young women and one youth. Next to them, a proximal map of the Yin Eclipse Mountains appeared, showing a cluster of five points. “If there is a saving grace out there, it’s that while Di Ji and Din Ouyeng may have just doomed my poor Luo’er to a horrible end, they have without a doubt bitten off more than they can chew.”

Lu Ji walked around the table as he rotated the conjured map view ninety degrees to see the profile. Mainly, he was after the location elevation and distance to see where they went. “Their last known point of contact was on the west slope of the Great Mount,” he said quietly. “That’s in the vicinity of that Life-Breaking Aspen Grove. The school founder wrote about that. It’s a thing on par with a Dao Ascension old monster on its own territory.”

“Tao here told me about some of the things Miss Jun Sana talks about with little A’Ling when she visits," Ling Jiang supplied. “I understand that place is pretty hard to deal with.”

Lu Ji continued to stare at the point on the map “If this group led by Di Ji teleported in there and managed to survive by some miracle...”

"What would happen if you fed a Grove like that a huge glut of unanchored Spatial Qi?” Ling Tao asked.

"Nothing good for anyone arriving there, or there already," her brother answered before he did. He nodded; the odds of something horrific happening was quite high.

“Can we get a warning message to that team?” Ling Tao asked.

“And tell them what exactly?” he grimaced, then took a deep breath and allowed some of his irritation to leak out.

“That the young master of the Di household, who crossed the Immortal threshold at the age of twenty-seven and who raped, murdered, cheated and extorted his way across two continents in four years, stealing everything he could and killing dozens of sects’ best disciples some 130 years ago, managed to evade all consequences for his actions? As a last recourse he was sent to the Yerrek Pits, where he took to penal life like a fish in water and was able to happily cross the Golden Threshold and become a Golden Immortal at the age of forty-one. He somehow escaped the pits, and ran amok for two further years across the central continent before skipping over here, where one hundred years ago he mistakenly ravished a handmaiden and the adoptive daughter of Lady Kai while running around with the Iron Crown Duke's bunch of mendacious brats? And STILL managed to avoid significant penalty through the intercession of his adoptive father, the Grand IMPERIAL Astrologer. Who has since then apparently faked his own death then returned, falsifying his original record and, in the process, earned both a posthumous pardon for his original crimes and returned to polite society posing as his own half-brother?

"This young noble Di Ji, who was at last clearly known to be almost at the point of breaking through to Ancient Immortal before the age of fifty… and was heralded as being the successor to Cang Di... even after it became clear he was a total shit-stain… this Di Ji just teleported onto the mountain and wants to use YOU as tools to succeed with this preposterous proclamation? Please try to survive until the end, but know that in any event, we will try to see justice done on your behalf?”

“When you put it like that…” Ling Tao looked crestfallen.

“Don’t worry Tao’er," Lu Ji said putting as much conviction into his voice as he could. She was probably his best student and it made him deeply frustrated as her master to see her like this. Ling Luo could also be considered as his sworn granddaughter.

“I know something about that part of the mountain that whoever sprung that little shit into there with a fancy idea in his head has no way of knowing. Years ago when she was a bit under the weather and uncharacteristically…”

“!...”

“Erm, Fairy Xiao, my most wonderful ancestor," he continued more carefully, which earned him very funny looks from Ling Jiang and Ling Tao.

“She… once told me about the Blue Water Sage’s trip into the interior. She said they had to scale the west face due to the ‘Shadow on the Mountain’, making it easier to bypass the terrible beasts that lurked in the valleys. She said that the shadow of oppression off of the mountain gets greater the more powerful you are. The Blue Water Sage and his companions were greatly repressed by it, and could not exercise any of their fabled arts or skills.

"In that place, she said he encountered several terrible existences; a grove of Aspens that had cultivated a Grand Dao and attained semi-sentience and a form of primitive Sovereignty over that patch of land, A jasmine of many colours that had achieved 'One with What Will Be' and taken for itself the moniker 'God Bewitching', and an entity that usually took the form of a two-tailed koppi squirrel … that defied all understanding and was attracted to beautiful young women.

"She said the squirrel stalked her every moment for eighty-nine days, stole food pills and broke random jewellery on a daily basis and generally drove her nuts. When she asked the indigenous wise men after their return about it, they just bowed to her and said that it was a god of the mountain, who watched over those it felt were in danger of unjust death, and that it was her lifetime’s honour to have been in contact with it..." he trailed off, realising he’d gone off topic somewhat.

“What does... that…?” Ling Tao sniffed.

He coughed, then hurriedly continued, “In short, there are eyes in that place that are… strangely specious and can be very dangerous to the wrong kind of person… of which Di Ji is certainly one such. The squirrel, in particular, is something of an evil star that she claimed would aggressively hunt out bad seeds or things likely to promote problems. There is a credible possibility that the thing may intercede in some way,"

It was hard to add that his ancestor had a carving of the thing on her villa wall, and she frequently threw miniature suns at it when she was annoyed. Or that the infamous calling card of Lady Xiao's extreme displeasure, that crappy drawing of a two-tailed squirrel, was the self-same animal. He had a suspicion that more people probably had died because of that squirrel over the millennia than the actual creature had ever managed to save in the intervening timeframe.

Pausing for a moment, he remembered to check a salient point. “What is the status of Luo’er's Soul Jade?”

“Intact, although it shows some discolouration that suggests soul damage has been sustained,” Ling Tao held out the tablet so he could see the damage for himself.

“There is no other deviation within it?” a difficult question for Lu Ji to ask, but necessary given ‘Din Yao’s’ previous record.

“Thankfully, no," Ling Jiang grimaced staring at the carved jade tablet.

There was the sound of shouting outside and his hearing told him that Ling Weng, Ling Tao’s husband, had also arrived. He had been on a mission down to Teng Lin Town; presumably, he had rushed back as fast as he could once he heard the news and come racing to find his wife.

“In that case, we are not too much against time”. Lu Ji put a hand on both Ling Jiang and Ling Taos’ arms and gently guided them out of his now slightly trashed home study. A servant arrived and then rang a bell to call for the formations builder to restore the room.

“Mulai," He called out for another servant and when he arrived passed him a token. “Please find Sir Weng, and tell him that I am taking his wife and brother-in-law to deal with this mess… I would like him to assume the role of vice headmaster while I am out of the town.”

“Of course Sir," The old servant bowed and went off swiftly. That would keep the overwrought Ling Weng from causing too much of scene at least.

Leading them down the hall towards the villa’s quite secret personal teleportation array, he started to explain his strategy. He had intended to try a softer approach to the problem before today’s events. Now, though, he considered, he was tired of playing by other people’s rules. Particularly when those rules seemed to always cause problems for people just trying to do their best by the places they lived in.

As they waited for the array to cycle up, he found himself thinking back on some of his Aunt's previous advice about 'advancement' and 'perspective'.

-Is it weeks like this that lead people at my realm to take up hobbies like cloud watching or writing atrocious poetry? It certainly gives a different ‘perspective’, as... Auntie... is always complaining about, on things.

That said, before that, he now fully intended to make sure those arrogant little shits properly pissed their pants. Just once. There was an opportunity for it, somewhere in all this mess, he was certain. Maybe even twice if his Fairy Aunt got directly involved. Before they stepped through the array to Blue Gate City he idly wondered if he could somehow get directly in contact with Grand Uncle Tao. Now that would make both those upstart brats and the influences puppeting them through the anarchy here properly sweat.