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.

~ Jun Arai – Somewhere in the High Valleys ~

There are days that start well and then slowly get worse as they go along… There are days that just start off bad and refuse to get any better… and there are days, sometimes, that just produce a singular moment of mind-numbing awfulness that devours everything.

Which of those their day up to the point had been was something Arai had found herself undecided upon… until the first ‘teleportation’ landed, at which point it firmly stepped into the third category.

She watched dully as Jiang Teng, along with Ha Yun, Ha Leng and the rest of his friends appeared, in mid-air, in the middle of the overgrown plaza and slammed down into its decayed ruin.

In the same instant, her connection to the formation core in her hand seemed to roll over, access to the formation wrenched from her control like the spirit herb was an adult taking a toy from a child. Fearful barbs of corrosive qi tore back into her body, travelling up her arms, invading her meridians, racing for her bones—

“Spirit of my Heart, Renew my Body and Soul.”

Using her mantra to shield herself, she tossed the core away. It was cracked and the formation totally broken in any case, now more liability than benefit.

Across the far side of the plaza, she could see Han Shu stagger back, cursing, a veil of his own mantra hanging around him, even as the skin on his arms flaked away like dried leaves.

Sana, who had been the third focal point of the formation, spat blood and hurled her core far away into the green even as she dashed for Lin Ling, who had dropped to her knees and was screaming.

Juni coughed blood and discarded her core, standing up on her rock and aiming a talisman arrow with a teleport formation at the heart of the plaza—

Then a golden-brown plant bloomed. Everywhere.

Spitting out the mouthful of blood, she grasped the brown and gold stem that had punched into her leg and sent everything she held inside her, into it.

“Spirit of my Heart, Renew my Body and Soul.”

The earth corrosion ate at her, trying to get into her bones, into her flesh, into parts of her that she barely even knew she had.

“Spirit of my Heart, Renew my Body and Soul.”

The herb howled, a shockingly ‘aware’ sensation, like someone who had just grabbed a very hot object unexpectedly.

The whispers of her own fear, her pain, her anger and her frustration flowed through her, into it…

The sensation of repelling rejection hit her so hard she nearly saw double. Something tried to pull, or maybe push a part of her out of herself, away from her mantra, away from her physical foundation.

“Spirit of my Heart, Renew my Body and Soul.”

Staggering up, she tried to run and nearly fell a second time as two tendrils of the plant spiked through her leg. In a heartbeat, it had wrapped around the bones in her shin and ankle, eschewing what it had done before to simply try and snare her up physically. Tearing the tendrils free, she grimaced as they flayed the skin on her hands as well, tiny fibres shedding like thorns into her flesh. Already she could feel it ripping unrefined qi in her body away from her, its yin earth properties overpowering her natural qi circulation so easily she didn’t even bother trying to prevent it.

‘Protect your core, the mantra will fight for you, it is a gift that cannot be stolen…’

That was what her mother had told her, years ago, when first teaching her about how subtly powerful it could be.

--Cursed suppression! she groaned. The issue here was that her ‘Soul’ mnemonic was… barely effective.

“Spirit and Heart Renew my Body, Soul.”

It was simple, crude even, to the point where the lack of harmony made her wince, but it did work, chaining the four words not lessened by their locality—

A second teleport landed, almost on top of her.

Her qi turned chaotic and her surroundings bled colour in very disturbing ways. For a heartbeat she almost felt she saw two places merging through each other, maybe three. The buildings were intact, the buildings were gone, and bodies lay everywhere, scattered bones devoured by the forest, walls tumbled down… a statue of a woman, on a plinth, almost seeming to look at her…

Coughing up blood she lashed at a nearby tendril of the herb with her short blade. The bit she cut scattered into loam, suggesting this probably wasn’t even the real plant, just a material manifestation of its qi.

The new arrivals were Caolun, Sir Cao and a bunch of other Ha clan experts, along with Din Kongfei and Din Ouyeng. She watched as they scattered immediately, Din Ouyeng placing a talisman on the ground—

{Jade Providence Seal}

She got a subtle sense of danger all around her—

{Flickering Steps}

Mustering what qi she could, she darted away, in the direction of Juni. A split second later, a large tendril of the plant, large enough to bind half her body if it caught her, exploded out of the leaf litter where she had been.

Ahead of her she saw Ha Yun, now thrown clear with a few of the others, stagger up and roll away from a similar, if smaller tendril. Ha Mun, who had landed near him, was not so lucky; the plant feinted, making him dodge one way, and then a stem punched straight through Mun’s foot and leg. Yun severed it a second later, but already she could see the skin flaking away, along with Mun’s clothes.

Gritting her teeth, she focused her qi again.

{Flickering Steps}

“Get clear!” Juni screamed at her, and laterally, she supposed, Ha Yun.

Juni started to say something else, but whatever it was was lost in an immense, forest-twisting crash of shattering space as a further teleportation, one with much greater spatial momentum, arrived.

Landing beside Ha Yun and Ha Mun, she watched, her stomach twisting as the scattering rain left thousands of tiny, barely visible flames burning on the leaves of the vast, blooming plant that was surging up everywhere now.

At the heart of the clearing, the core of the spirit herb finally made its presence felt: eleven two-metre-tall white stems with heart-shaped golden-bronze leaves and drooping green-gold flowers.

Seven of the flower heads had a shimmering ball of near invisible fire over them, each holding a rune…

-The Seven Star teleport formation?

Understanding blossomed in her mind, like a grasping icy hand of pure terror.

-Oh no…

The entire clearing distorted outwards, like the inside of it was too large to be contained—

She just about managed to grasp Ha Yun and Ha Mun and drag them back a bit further before the shockwave of the forced collapse, as the herb tried to do something with the formation, knocked her off her feet.

The spatial turbulence that had just consumed the clearing seemed to draw everything back inwards for a mind-bending moment, trees bleeding shadows of themselves and the walls not quite sure if they were ruined or not…

Groaning, she rolled up and got her bearings— and then froze, because the forest she was in… was not the same as the forest they… had just been in.

The old location had been selected by the group led by Ha Aofan, who had chosen it on the grounds that the feng shui was ‘super-auspicious’ for a teleport formation. Having never, ever, come across a place like that in her life up here, she had queried it at the time. In her experience anything that claimed to be ‘really good’ for a thing was, up here and to a lesser but equally frustrating extent down there, usually out to get you.

Unfortunately, Ha Aofan’s group, backed up by Ha Botan, had been tiresomely bullish at the time, claiming that Ha Aofan’s teacher was from the Imperial School and what-not.

In the end, rather than provoke some big confrontation over it, they had just sent their herbs back and headed out as quickly as possible. However, on returning later in the afternoon and finding that both those groups had headed home, she and Juni had poked around a bit. What they found confirmed their worst fears really. Aofan’s group had found a second Seven Star teleport formation… and, much to Ha Huang’s chagrin… used it as the basis for the teleport point.

If she was being honest, that was the point when she had seriously started to consider that this was a day that was just going to refuse to get any better.

After telling Ha Faolian what had happened, they had started to more thoroughly investigate this location, but had found nothing, beyond some evidence that Aofan’s group sealed a spirit herb here. They had been at the critical juncture of disentangling the Seven Star formation from the rest of the network… when Ha Yun’s group teleported in unexpectedly and suddenly the whole place sprouted this golden-brown spirit herb, whose flowers looked a bit like a lamium. A spirit herb which had, unless she was very far off the mark, somehow refined that Seven Star formation.

Her new location was superficially similar, she had to give it that.

Suppressing her cultivation as much as she could, she strained her ears, but there was next to no sound beyond the rain on vegetation and a faint sighing of wind through leaves. The air was humid, almost smothering in the misty rain.

-Where the fates am I?

There was a suffocating antiquity to the place she was now standing.

An overgrown, ruined courtyard, shaded by tall trees, in the shadow of vegetation-cloaked cliffs, wreathed in misty cloud. It was still raining as well. That was where the similarities ended, though.

The ruined colonnades and overhanging tree boughs were entwined with creepers, jasmine and rock rose. The courtyard itself, though, was almost a flower meadow; choked with an eclectic and slightly unsettling mix of clumps of flowering chrysanthemums, narcissus, hibiscus and dead nettle. In the middle was a tumbled-down semicircle of columns, carved into the forms of beautiful young women, surrounding a cracked stone altar…

“…”

Behind the altar was a statue – in white stone – of a woman, her amber-golden hair adorned with a garland of flowers. Her hands were set in such a way as to suggest she was once playing an instrument, maybe a harp, while a bow and arrow rested beside her. Also at her feet lay a mask, carved from stone but clearly meant to resemble wood. Her robe, draped across her thighs, was patterned with flowers.

That wasn’t what drew her attention, however. It was the large swathe of disturbed ground around the statue and off to one side. Walking over to it, she knelt down and ran the loam through her fingers, finding the disturbance fresh.

Looking around again, she was glad she had her mantra, because the ominous hunch settling in her stomach was not a good one.

At this angle, she could see that the statue had been sheltered by something, perhaps a spirit tree?

The vines had also been cleared off the altar… upon which was inscribed the word ‘Lamionis’, in Ancient Easten.

Chip marks on the bases of both suggested efforts to remove them, albeit with little luck…

Turning in a circle, she warily took in the courtyard again, from the slightly better vantage point, looking with renewed concern for the source of her predicament…

She didn’t find the spirit herb, however she did find the broken form of Ha Mun, sprawled in a scattered scar in the low-lying vegetation near one of the pillars.

“…”

Kneeling down beside Ha Mun, she was again very glad she had her mantra to hide her emotions behind.

She had never really gotten on with him, or liked any of Yun’s bunch. Even Leng was a bit… well, prone to moments where he could be very annoying. However, she had never wished serious harm on any of them… and Mun’s condition could only be described as critical.

“This is why you should just have stayed at home drinking in teahouses…” she hissed under her breath.

“Ah… L-leng? I… don’t feel so…” Mun moaned, trying to move.

“It’s not Leng, it’s me,” she murmured, running a hand through her hair as she wondered what, if anything, she could do for him.

His left leg was gone, all the way to the knee bar a shattered piece of bone and some slowly-corroding flesh. His left arm was desiccated and shrivelled, the skin peeling away in greenish-brown flakes, and his body was bleeding yin earth qi in a way that was not good.

“A-arai?” he gasped, reaching out with a hand and grabbing her sleeve.

Almost immediately, her robe started to flake away into loam as the corrosive yin earth qi wracking Mun’s body tried to devour her as well.

Taking a breath, she sent a thread of her qi and mantra-infused Intent into the youth and bit her lip, because his condition was not good. Not good at all.

His cultivation foundation was ravaged by the devouring strength of the yin earth qi from the spirit herb. His bones were brittle, his meridian network in tatters and his dantian, such as she had a nebulous awareness of it, was basically collapsed.

That he was even alive, given he was a spiritual cultivator, she could only put down to either fluke or some refined or provided defensive treasure.

“Hold still, try not to move,” she said softly, giving his hand a squeeze, even as she fed her inner turmoil into her mantra.

“Spirit of your Heart promote the Renewal of your Body and nurture the Soul.”

Normally she eschewed using her longform mantra on others she didn’t know, because it brought unwarranted attention, but compared to letting him expire in front of her… it wasn’t much of a choice.

Mun coughed, his chest quivering.

Grimacing, she sent another pulse through his body, guiding it with her mantra, watching as best she could how it worked. Which was… not great, frankly.

His condition was stabilizing, but far too slowly. He definitely needed to get back to the Inn and probably be put in the baths for at least a full day. Even then, his cultivation might be permanently crippled.

Taking out a teleport jade, she put it down on the ground beside them and painted a talisman for it that connected straight back to the Inn, then stopped and considered his condition again.

“…”

In his current condition there was an excellent chance that the teleport would kill him irrespective of anything she did.

Sending another pulse of qi into him, she considered the chaotic state of his qi and gave up on that idea, in the short term. He had already been teleported once with acute qi poisoning and the yin earth qi was barely being held in check by her.

“Okay, you’re gonna be okay…” she muttered, pushing more Intent-infused qi, guided by her mantra, into him, trying to chase out the curse-like yin earth qi.

The devouring qi in Ha Mun shifted at last, retreating before her…

“…”

She followed it, but…

It surged back again, a fraction of a second later, by other routes, evading her qi, slipping past it, trying to invade her body…

Gritting her teeth, she focused on her mantra again—

“Spirit of your Heart promote the Renewal of your Body and nurture the Soul.”

Again, the qi retreated, but again, not as… her intuition seemed to tell her it should?

“Don’t…” Mun rasped, his voice barely audible, a hand grasping for hers.

Exhaling, she held his hand, ignoring as best she could the corrosion, and looked around again, wondering what was nagging at her. It was like an itch, a subtle sense that something was off?

It didn’t help either that the strangely soporific feeling in the air around them, like something was weighing down on her, was affecting him in some way as well. It was like being stuck in a moment where you were tired and just…

Beneath her hands, she could feel Mun’s vitality still slipping away.

The moment was so incongruously subtle, she nearly missed it as she knelt there, channelling qi into him…

-I let go of him a moment ago… why am I…?

“…”

Closing her eyes for a moment, she tried to banish that… focusing her mantra on herself…

She stared down at her hands again, which were still pressed against Mun’s ruined chest, as she channelled qi into his meridian gates, then looked around her.

“A-arai…” he gasped, his hand digging into her flesh now, which was flaking slightly under his touch.

Almost unbidden, she found herself seeing the face of another Ha clan scion, Ha Fen Fang, lying there cold and alone in a different damp forest clearing—

“…”

She focused her mantra on herself, exclusively, using it to focus on…

The sensation she was seeking was like a phantom, different, alien, away from her. It didn’t engage with her at all, such that she was only vaguely aware of it by the absence of… other things as it passed.

-Shit… shit… fate-thrashed, nameless-spawned monkey shit…

“…”

-When did it start…?

It gnawed at her, in a tiny corner of her mind that was used to being wary about things like blood ling trees, that didn’t always trust in her mantra to unequivocally blunt the bad things.

The image of the flowers, blooming beneath the seven star-like seals of the formation, flitted through her mind.

-The flower was in bloom?

-Pollen…

Looking around, she took in the quietly-blooming spirit vegetation, suddenly wondering why she had not been more concerned about that.

-I was already under its influence when I teleported?

-This is a really dangerous spirit herb, she told herself, focusing clearly on her mantra.

“…”

She stared down at Ha Mun, but there was no Ha Mun. She was pushing qi into a tangled mass of golden-bronze leaves and white stems, which were twisting their way around her arms, binding her to the ground, slowly eating away at her physical form.

“Spirit of my Heart please Renew my perspective on my Body and Soul.”

Her mantra met the devouring grasp of the plant and it collapsed into loam, even as she fought to avoid spitting blood herself.

Her clothing was basically corroded away, the flesh on her arms and legs raw and blistered.

She was still in the clearing, amid the circle of pillars, but the clearing was… not the same, which a part of her felt was getting a bit tiresome—

“You actually resisted…”

She was suddenly aware of someone standing over her, a hand knotting in her hair, a blade resting against her neck.

Turning her head fractionally, she found herself looking at… it took her a moment to place him as Ha Ji Mangfan, one of Ji Wufan’s group.

“I knew you were a physical cultivator, but you’re actually pretty talented for an indigenous little bitch,” Ha Ji Mangfan said with a grin, pulling her head back a bit more so she was properly looking up at him.

Trying to instil some order on her qi, even as the yin earth poison she had been tricked into letting into her body gnawed at her, she fumbled for her…

“Looking for something?” Ha Ji Mangfan said with a grin, holding up her talisman and the jade scrip.

Something chaotic in her qi twisted, trying to grasp her in some subtle, ill-defined way. It wasn’t as strong as the spirit herb, but it was… oddly complementary.

“…”

“Feel familiar?” he chuckled, dragging her head back a bit more as he placed a knee in her back. “I guess I just have to do this the old-fashioned way.”

Gritting her teeth, she mustered her mantra and her remaining qi… and found herself staring at the clearing behind him.

A young woman now stood in the clearing, by the altar, her hand resting gently on it, considering the scene around her. She looked about twelve years old, or near enough, with long, dark hair, and slightly tanned skin, wet from the rain.

The girl considered the spot where Ha Mun had been, then turned to look at her.

She stared back at the impossible person, her mind blank, no longer sure if this was dream, nightmare or somewhere between.

-Ha… Fen Fang?

The girl met her gaze, her dark eyes seeming to eat into her.

Everywhere, on every building and branch, the flowers were blooming again, with an almost luminescent allure, and yet Mangfan barely seemed aware of her, or them.

“You… should not die in a place like this,” she murmured, sounding almost… sad.

“W-what?” Ha Ji Mangfan scoffed, staring at her.

“…”

Like a ghost out of the rain and the whispering of the leaves, the shadow of a second woman appeared, older, far more ethereal, motherly, somehow. Her form was almost superimposed on the statue as it arrived, in that still moment, behind Ha Ji Mangfan, her hand caressing his cheek, just as the woman in the statue was.

“I guess I just have to do this the old-fashioned way,” she purred, her words making every leaf on every tree around them shake and the flowers bloom ever more vibrantly.

The ominously familiar sensation of soporific oppression, which had been settling like a blanket over everything, redoubled… enabling her in one terrifying moment to realise exactly where they were.

The Life Breaking Aspen was one of the most ‘famous’ spirit herbs in the whole of Yin Eclipse, although it was, in fact, a spirit tree, which was not quite the same thing. It was a vast entity that lived on the western edge of the Inner Valleys, controlling a whole swathe of interconnected forest valleys spanning maybe five or six hundred square miles between East Fury and Thunder Crest. Passage through its territory was possible, but only if you touched nothing, injured nothing and kept as quiet as a mouse… otherwise people went in and never came out again. How Senior Ying had wood from the grove was still a mystery to her.

“W-w-wha…” Ha Ji Mangfan managed to rasp, his eyes growing wild.

“—Melinoe…”

The word was like a silent whisper, carried through the world, trying to sink into the depths of her being. Her mantra met it silently and the two recoiled, the bizarre strength of the word leaving her limbs cold, as if she was being buried in the earth. In that instant she was sure that were it genuinely focused on her, she would have perished just from the shock of that meeting.

Ha Ji Mangfan gave a wretched shriek as his qi turned chaotic. His blade vanished and re-appeared in his grasp, summoned by a talisman she supposed. Desperately, he stabbed at her—

The shadow woman waved, effortlessly ghosting backwards as Ha Ji Mangfan was sent tumbling away. Golden-brown leaves erupted beneath him, white stems entangling his limbs even before he hit the ground—

The explosion sent her sprawling, her ears ringing.

“Get away from Mangfan!” Ha Shuwei came scrambling into the clearing, a talisman already in his hand—

Ha Ji Mangfan managed to roll up, scattering leaves and blossoms… and was nearly impaled by a spike of the white-stemmed spirit herb a second time for his trouble.

“Mangfan!”

A second enraged shout echoed through the forest, and an older man with a well-trimmed beard, who she vaguely recognised as one of Wufan’s ‘bodyguards’, dashed into the clearing from the far side, a ring of talismans already swirling around him—

In the same instant, the whole plaza erupted into a sea of blossoming rock rose, hibiscus, chrysanthemum and the golden-flowered lamium, sometimes called ‘dead-nettle’ or ‘devouring nettle’, which she could now finally identify.

She felt the terrible Intent within the blooming flowers focus on him—

A sheet of fire consumed half the plaza, charring the leaf litter and leaving a hundred smaller blazes among the creepers and trees.

The blossoming spirit herbs, however, were already gone, melted into the ground as if they never were. The shadow woman had vanished as well, as had the phantom of Ha Fen Fang, except…

She stared at the spring of white chrysanthemums that had scattered near her. Most had vanished as they hit the ground, burning, except for… Reaching out her hand, she grasped a white blossom before it hit the ground and stared at it… blankly, because against all the odds, it was familiar to her.

“Brother Mangfan!?” Ha Shuwei, who was the person responsible, exclaimed, clearly shocked.

“Ah, you are here, Shuwei, excellent!” Mangfan said, staggering up. “Grab her while I—”

The sense of ‘drain’ intensified remarkably in that instant and Ha Shuwei, who had been looking around in confusion, staggered, his face pale—

Ji Wufan’s bodyguard barely grasped Shuwei, preventing him from tumbling face-first into an erupting thicket of lamium.

“S-stop her… Brother Shuwei!” Mangfan yelled, pointing at her, even as he thrashed with a fan-like treasure at the vegetation trying to grasp him.

Pushing herself up, she fed all her pain, her anger, everything from the past few days into her body, cancelling out her tiredness—

“—Ah, they are over here!”

Before she could even trigger her movement art, several more figures came dashing through the trees, cutting off her only real escape route other than attempting to go up the cliff.

The leader, a blonde-haired youth a bit older than her, wearing a purple and red robe with flame-like patterns around the edges, alighted beside Ha Ji Mangfan, hauling him up.

After him came a pale-looking Ha Yun and a somewhat familiar woman with slightly curly golden hair, in a red and blue travelling dress in the Ling style. She alighted next to her, looking around with a wary expression before looking at her with a frown.

“…”

“Mun… MUN!” Ha Yun, who had just noticed Ha Mun’s slumped form, scrambled over to him.

“Ah, you are here as well, thank goodness!” Sir Huang, Leng and Ha Ding appeared a moment later, followed by, to her immense relief, Juni.

“Ah… Kun Juni,” the woman she abruptly, finally recognised as Ling Yu’s cousin said, giving Juni a nod. “What… happened?”

“Why are you here?” Juni asked Ling Luo, ignoring her question.

“We got to Misty Jasmine Inn earlier… Then this happened. I was able to use one of the Talisman Loci we brought with us to teleport a few experts here to work out what happened,” Ling Luo explained, her gaze never leaving her.

“…”

“—Yes, lingering here is a…” Juni trailed off, finally spotting her. “Fates, Arai, what happened to you?”

“…”

“Mun! Come on Mun…” Ha Yun’s exclamation made the others, talking away, look down again.

Ha Yun grasped his friend’s hand and stared as the flesh crumbled away beneath his touch.

Looking at Ha Yun’s blank expression as he stared at his friend, she again felt a rather unpleasant knot form in her stomach.

-If I had not been caught in the hallucination… could I have saved him?

-If I had not been attacked by Mangfan?

Ha Mangfan, now looking much paler and more shaken, bowed to the youth who had saved him. “T-thank you, fellow Daoist, for freeing me from that…”

“Not at all,” the youth said absently, looking around with wary interest.

“And ah… Young Lord Yun,” Mangfan added, also saluting Ha Yun. “I… I was unable to save your friend. I… arrived just in time to see her… doing something to him…”

Ha Yun and Ha Ding rounded on her, frowning.

-You little shit…she met his gaze with a gloomy look of her own.

“He is lying,” she said flatly. “He never…”

“My qi is in Mun’s body, you can check!” Mangfan protested. “Then she attacked me… and the herbs… I guess it’s the pollen or something? I think she got confused, or controlled!”

“Ji Mangfan’s qi is present on Ha Mun’s body,” Ha Shuwei added.

“She… She attacked me, pushed me into the herb—” Mangfan protested.

“Enough,” Sir Huang, looking almost as worse for wear as she was, snapped. “This has your Ji group’s incompetence written all over it, Feilu, Mangfan. Don’t try my patience.”

“…”

“That’s rich coming from a servant like you!” Mangfan snapped. “It was your group who was messing with it last—”

“Enough, Mangfan,” the bodyguard, Ha Feilu said with a grimace. “What happened, happened.”

“…”

“Sir Huang… can you save Mun?” Ha Yun asked, his voice shaking.

Sir Huang knelt down beside Ha Mun, who was barely breathing at this point, and put a hand to his chest, then sighed and glanced at her.

Grimacing, she tried to move, but her body was basically devoid of qi at this point, between the herb and Ha Ji Feilu, who was looking at her with… concern?

-How dare you look at me like that, after just trying… whatever your charge did, she sneered.

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Mangfan looking at her with a half-smile that made her skin crawl. Reaching for her talisman, she sighed as she recalled it was now in Mangfan’s possession, as was her tablet.

“Isn’t there a pill… or something?” Ding asked, kneeling down beside Mun.

Sir Huang put a hand on Mun and sighed.

“…”

-No, I won’t have them do this to me! she snarled to herself, feeding her pain and anger back into her mantra.

Standing up, she staggered over to Ha Mun, who was as she recalled, only to find her path blocked by Shuwei.

“Get out of my way,” she spat, shoving the youth out of the way.

“What are you—” Ding started to say.

Ignoring him, she knelt down beside Ha Mun and pushed her qi into him.

“Spirit of your Heart promote the Renewal of your Body and nurture the Soul.”

His condition did stabilize, marginally, under the influence of her mantra, but it was all she could do not to kill him herself, just from the strength of the qi passing through his friable meridians.

There was no trace of her qi in his system, just lots and lots of yin earth qi, which told her that she had never so much as touched him before. To her annoyance, Mangfan’s qi was in Mun’s body, albeit barely.

“Well?” Sir Huang asked her.

“He is alive…” she replied with a grimace.

“That’s not a high bar to clear,” Mangfan sneered, withdrawing a pill bottle and passing it to Ha Yun. “Feed him one of these… Brother Yun.”

“…”

“Are you okay?” Juni asked her as Sir Huang plucked the bottle out of Ha Yuns grasp and considered it pensively.

She gave Juni a shrug and merely pointed unobtrusively at Mangfan, who was handing Sir Feilu a bundle that was clearly her luss cloth, that had bound the tablet to her wrist.

Juni gave her a look, glanced at Mangfan and then sighed.

“Give me Hunter Jun’s stuff,” Juni commanded him, holding out her hand.

“You are aware that she attacked us?” Mangfan protested, doing a good job of sounding affronted.

“Unless you want to be marked as a thief in the eyes of the Bureau I would stop being a prat,” Sir Huang said flatly, arriving beside the youth in two steps and taking the bundle off him.

She gave Ha Feilu and his fuming charge a brittle smile and held out her hand to Sir Huang.

As far as threats went, that was a pretty good one. Bureau marks were hard to get rid of and branded the soul. There was a reason why people didn’t rob Herb Hunters very often.

Sir Huang passed her the luss cloth and she put the talisman back around her neck and checked both items quickly. Her storage device showed no signs of being forced, so he had eyes there at least, but the security measures on her tablet had been tripped, which made her sigh.

Focusing on her talisman, she took out some shoes and a light robe and re-clothed herself.

She had no idea what the fates was going on here. Perhaps he had been suffering some kind of hallucination, just like her, but in her heart of hearts she didn’t buy it. Something about the shadow woman, and the oddity of recalling Ha Fen Fang, kept her from settling on that explanation.

“What went on there?” Juni signed unobtrusively.

“I am not sure,” she signed so only Juni could see. “He absolutely attacked me, though. I saw something weird as well. It’s hard to explain.”

“I… see,” Juni signed back. “We can talk it over later.”

“…”

“Who else isn’t here?” Sir Cao, who had just arrived, asked, looking around.

Glancing around, she counted all her friends at least. Juni was already with her, while Sana and Ling were coming over with Han Shu, from the far side.

Of Ha Yun’s group, Yun was there, as were Sir Teng and Leng, Ding, Jiao and Mao. Caolun’s group was only him, Sir Cao and Ha Shuwei, now with the addition of Feilu and Mangfan.

“I dunno where Fang is…” Jiao said with a grimace. “Last I saw he was with you, Ding?”

“Uh… yeah, then we got sent flying, I assumed he was…” Ding trailed off. “It was weird… when we arrived.”

-So it wasn’t only me who got caught in that…

“Leung got caught by the herb… in spite of his barrier,” Caolun muttered, holding his arms.

“This is all because you messed with that formation…” Ha Mangfan yelled, jabbing a finger at her and Juni.

“Funny, I don’t recall seeing you earlier,” Sir Huang said with a faint frown.

“I was watching you lot!” Ha Mangfan replied. “After you started poking around at what Brother Aofan did, in case you damaged it with your ineptitude! I have already reported what you have done to Elder Botan, so they will clearly understand that the fault is yours… for messing with dangerous formations you… you… you—”

“…”

She stared dully as a white stem stabbed out of the ground beneath Mangfan, impaling him through the chest, as if he were an illusion—

A talisman hit the flowering herb full on, scattering it in a coruscating whirlwind of greenery. Feilu grasped Mangfan, tearing him free and dashing away from it to take refuge beside Din Kongfei, who had cast the talisman.

The herb recoiled, then all its tendrils collapsed into the ground again.

Ha Shuwei, who was retreating towards Din Kongfei as well, screamed and collapsed backwards, golden-brown-leafed vines coiling up his legs—

Sir Teng and Sir Cao dodged away, as did Sir Huang, each dragging a Ha clan scion with them, cursing under their breath as the loamy ground became a sea of grasping, vine-like plants. A second charge of the talisman hit the ground near Shuwei, buying him time to scramble onto a rock. Pale and shaking, he fumbled for a purification pill.

“Fates dammit!” Brother Ji cursed and also withdrew a talisman, casting it at the spirit herb—

The explosion sent her, and almost everyone else, sprawling as a hurricane of yang life energy tried to consume the yin earth… and failed miserably for a singularly obvious reason. The golden-leafed spirit herb was likely a yin fire attributed spirit herb that had mutated to yin earth.

“Uh…” Brother Ji stared at the main body, now wreathed in life-giving qi, then pulled out a sword that made her hair stand on end.

The trees shivered and her ability to sense qi in the surroundings all but vanished.

“…”

“What… just…” Caolun stared at his hands in horror.

“Time’s up, we are leaving…” Sir Huang said flatly, already backing away. “The Grove just woke up. That’s the end of our little trip into this hell, one way or another.”

“The… Grove?” Ha Yun, who had dragged up Ha Mun’s body and put it over his shoulder, asked, his voice shaking.

“What about Fang?” Ding said, looking around grimly.

“…”

“You have a loci,” Juni rounded on Ling Luo, whose presence here she had not even started to get around to thinking about yet.

“…”

Ling Luo took out a jade orb and stared at it for a long moment. “His talisman is… one hundred and twenty miles away from here, to the south… west?”

“…”

“He left it in the fate-thrashed Inn?!” Ha Leng actually screamed, kicking a rock, then dodged to the side as a tendril of the spirit herb lashed out of the ground to try and catch him.

Ding, Mao and Jiao all looked… embarrassed and also afraid now, not that she could blame them. They were well out of their depth now. It was only sheer good fortune keeping the three of them, Caolun, Yun and even Leng alive at this point.

Sana grabbed her, helping her up as they rapidly retreated, covered by Sir Huang now, while Din Kongfei and Din Ouyeng wielded strange talismans that just about seemed to protect against the herb. Both were already looking pale though.

“Save your qi,” she signed to Lin Ling and Han Shu, who were less familiar with this place than her, Sana or Juni. “While the Grove is awake, we can’t replenish anything.”

That was one of the things you learned at eight-star rank, once it was expected you might get requests this far in. Yin Eclipse was a nasty place for spiritual cultivators anywhere, but here, near the Aspen, it was especially unpleasant. Here there were only two ways to cultivate: internally, or not at all. Spiritual cultivation, pulling qi from your surroundings to build up 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.

“Here,” Juni tossed a jar of pills to Ha Leng. “Take one each. If you can, feed one to Mun, it may help him.”

Leng nodded, downing one and grimacing. He then passed one to Yun before giving the bottle to Ding and the other two, who had taken refuge on several large, solid stone slabs.

“We can’t stay here,” Sir Huang added. “If we do, death is inevitable.”

“You don’t say,” Juni grimaced.

“What can we…” Leng trailed off, staring in horror.

Looking where he was, she saw that a very large greenish-red centipede, its body maybe a metre and a half across, was watching them from a tree that adjoined the cliff behind them.

“Please tell me that that is not the ‘Great Devouring Centipede’”, she said softly to Juni as they all started to back away.

“…”

As a predator, it was another ‘famous’ one, but more ‘active’ than the Aspen. Its preferred hunting ground was the edge of the Aspen, preying on things lucky enough to make it back out again. She could only assume that it had somehow had its eye on the formation as well?

The centipede now turned to consider them and the spirit herb, its head swaying this way and that—

It made to move towards the herb, much to her relief… except as soon as it did so, the whole grove turned gloomy. That was the only way to describe it. On the winds the faint hint of something approaching… music, like chords merging with the world, or born of it, echoed through the trees.

“Run,” Sir Huang snarled.

Without needing any encouragement, not after she had seen—

The centipede looked into the grove, then at them, and moved so fast it was almost impossible to see its form. Ha Mangfan darted backwards, barely avoiding its strike—

Ha Ji Feilu gave a wretched scream as the monstrosity clasped him in its claws, negligently impaling the luckless Ha Shuwei and nearly claiming Ha Teng and Ha Mao, who had both been backing up as well.

Brother Ji, Din Kongfei and Din Ouyeng all drew treasures at the same time, the Din pair charging for the beast with grim expressions, while Brother Ji moved between the majority of the group and the centipede.

The centipede, for its part, flicked Ha Ji Feilu back, towards the spirit herb, then spun on the spot, easily deflecting the blows from the Din pair’s treasures, which barely left a mark.

“Save m—”

Ha Shuwei’s scream died on his lips as the centipede grasped him by the waist and bit him in half, chomping down his torso in a matter of moments, leaving only an arm and a bit of leg behind. A moment later, the herb bloomed beneath the miserable remains, consuming them.

“…”

Pushing her horror away with her mantra, she saw Din Kongfei roll up and aim his sword at the centipede—

A searing lightning bolt dropped out of the clouds above 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 directed her mantra to fix that; however, there were precious few ‘sounds of the forest’ anyway at this point.

The centipede shook itself and moved back to the clearing, completely unharmed apart from a few light scorch marks on its shell.

“…”

“Where did the herb go with that Feilu?” Lin Ling, who had been crouched beside her, asked.

“Shit… anyone see it?” Juni signed to the others, who all shook their heads.

Sir Huang, also looking wary now, retreated rapidly to their position.

“We need to leave here, now,” she signed to him.

“I know…” Sir Huang sighed. “Yun will not leave Fang…”

“Best circumstance… he is back in the other valley and the others find him, can you contact them?” Juni said.

“No, talismans are totally out. I suspect our whole network is down, and we could be anywhere between ten and fifty miles from where we were,” Sir Huang gritted his teeth as they continued to fall back, further into the ruins.

“…”

She thought about saying something, but didn’t in the end, because it would just be curses.

A second lightning bolt interrupted her thoughts as the centipede continued its clash with the Din group behind them.

“That’s how they did in the tetrid queen,” Leng muttered.

“A Thunder Soul sword,” Sir Huang grunted. “What a wasteful treasure to give to a junior.”

“If it allows us to run away, they can be as wasteful as they like,” Sir Teng muttered.

Still scanning for the spirit herbs, she nodded in agreement.

Her intuition told her the golden-leafed one had not gone far. Likely it was just waiting for them to lower their guard, or possibly for the centipede to take a beating so it could get its formation back.

-Assuming it even needs it at this point.

“I am certainly seeing why the Bureau has a big ‘do not annoy’ warning on the Life Breaking Aspen,” Ha Leng said with a shudder, looking around.

All around them, the subtle soporific effect on the ambient qi was still ramping up.

-If this keeps up even we will be in trouble, she reflected, feeding her unease to her mantra.

“Yep, it’s really not a good thing to annoy,” Sir Huang agreed. “Yun, Leng, we cannot stay here.”

“But…” Ding looked unwilling.

“If we stay here, Mun may die, and there is no guarantee Fang is even here,” Sir Huang said with a grimace.

“Can’t you do a divination… or something?” Ha Yun said, sounding haunted.

“…”

“—Back off already!” Brother Ji was calling to the Din pair. “Let me deal with this for fates’ sakes.”

“What can you do, Meng dog,” Din Kongfei grumbled.

“Watch me!” Brother Ji muttered, looking a bit put out, she thought.

{Murali’s Parasol Cage}

As they continued to move out of the courtyard, towards the waterfall, behind them, Brother Ji tossed out a green wooden slip that twisted and erupted into a thicket of lush blue-green-leafed trees that knotted together to form a basket-like cage around the centipede. It tried to bite the ‘branches’ a few times, as the plants merged together to form a more unified ‘tree’, then just rolled up in a ball inside the void of the cage.

“…”

“That will not hold it forever,” Brother Ji snapped. “Let’s get out of here before that stupid herb shows up again, o—”

The whole ambience turned… leaden.

The whole form of the valley shifted.

The leaves turned autumnal, and the trunks of trees cast shadows that did not match their normal forms.

Pale trunks twisted up around the cage, prying it apart with contemptuous ease, splintering the wood and crushing it. The rampant vitality of the summoned tree was broken in an instant, freeing the centipede, which shot straight at them—

Sir Teng, who had been bringing up the rear, made to dodge, only to find Mangfan had already conjured a barrier to protect himself and fled up the street.

“NO!” Ha Yun yelled, horrified, as the monstrosity smashed into Sir Teng, sending him sprawling, bleeding badly from cuts which were already smoking.

Sir Huang snarled and dashed back for Sir Teng, who had barely avoided a follow-up strike from the centipede.

“…”

Grimacing, she took out her bow and aimed a talisman arrow at it. The arrow exploded off a carapace segment, barely doing any damage. Arrows from Juni and Han Shu landed a moment later, buying Sir Huang time to grab Sir Teng and get clear.

Ha Yun’s group and Caolun, covered by Sir Cao, had already made good distance, although nowhere near as good as Mangfan…

“Get clear!” Din Ouyeng yelled at them.

Biting her lip, she sent a further arrow at the centipede as it surged after them—

A barrier hit the creature, sending it rolling backwards.

“Good shooting,” Brother Ji congratulated them as they quickly retreated.

“At least some of us have skills…” Lin Ling muttered, glaring at Mangfan.

“Where do we go?” Ling Luo asked Juni, who stared around at the enveloping cliffs and just shook her head, then continued the way they were going.

“Well, that’s easy,” Din Kongfei grimaced as they started to retreat in earnest.

“Cover in groups!” Sir Huang snapped as they headed along the tangled channel through the trees, between ruined buildings.

The next few minutes were torrid. Every footfall she took as they retreated deeper into the ruins felt as though someone was draining qi out of her like she was a dishrag. By the time they reached the next open area – a broad plaza before a waterfall that fed a small lake, with a column-fronted building in a familiar style on a rock promontory in the middle – most of the spiritual cultivators were visibly flagging.

“Shit…” Sir Huang scowled, looking left and right.

“When it rains…” Sir Teng, who was still bleeding, muttered, glancing behind them.

“Right side…” Juni pointed up into the mist and the rain.

Glancing that way, she saw that there was a ledge they could take a break on, worn out of the bedding plane that had sheared off, about a hundred metres up the cliff. Below it, a terrace had been half obliterated by an ancient rockfall, giving them a handy way up.

“You want us to climb up there?” Ha Ding groaned, his distaste echoed by most of the others.

“What about that path on the left?” Brother Ji added, pointing to a broad set of stairs that rose up into the rocks near the waterfall.

“Could be more ruins like we just ran through,” she said, shaking her head.

“…”

“We need somewhere nearer and the ledge up there gives us good visibility,” Sir Huang added, setting off towards the cliff, ignoring the groans from the spiritual cultivators.

At this point, even the Din pair were starting to flag, not to mention the Ji youth and Ling Luo, neither of whom seemed to have felt it necessary to acclimatize.

That did strike her as odd, honestly – even odder than Ling Luo actually being here at all.

Her acquaintance with Ling Luo was barely even passing. She guessed she had met Ling Luo, who was a few years older than Juni, maybe three times, ever, when in Ling Yu’s company? However, she was still someone who worked with the bureaus and had a civil position, much like Juni, as a proper Official. Knowing about the need to acclimatize and not rush into things up here was pretty basic in that regard.

They made it to the top of the terrace without incident, quite remarkably, and had started up the scree slope, when below them, the sound of oddly shifting trees led her to glance across and immediately wish she had not.

Their attacker was not, as she expected, the centipede, but a two-metre-long alkyr, descending at a remarkable rate towards them.

Sir Teng, who was nearest to it, managed to dodge across the collapsed terrace, but Sir Huang, Brother Ji and Ha Mangfan were not so lucky. Brother Ji nearly got thrown into the void, Sir Huang had to throw himself into a tree to evade its lashing tail and Mangfan barely evaded its legs, which scattered…

She stared dully as his pack, including several herb jars, scattered downslope. Mangfan barely managed to grab a bundle which held some kind of jade…

-Oh come on! Does that rat have the Seven Star formation plate!?

-Is that why the centipede has been going for him?

Whether anyone else noticed, it was hard to say, because Brother Ji caught the cursing Mangfan before he could fall and hauled him to safety.

The alkyr, caught in the air, was hit by three different talismans and sent tumbling further down the slope in a shower of broken tree branches and dislodged rocks—

The lamium exploded out of the tangled greenery at the bottom of the collapsed terrace like a small eruption, stems tearing at the alkyr, almost seeming to coalesce into shadowy people-like forms as they tore at its chitin plates.

“This is not a ridgeline…” Lin Ling muttered, ahead of her, picking up her pace.

“You don’t say,” Sana, who was also with Lin Ling, snarked.

“Less chat, more running,” Juni, who was over to her right, called out.

“What I would not give to have some working teleport arrows right now…” Han Shu groaned.

“Yeah, I wonder whose fault that is,” she agreed, shooting a nasty glance up at the Ha groups, and Brother Ji and Ling Luo, who were climbing ahead of them.

It took them five nervous minutes of frenetic climbing to reach the vaguely defensible resting point.

“Yep… definitely not a ridge…”

Those charming, unwanted words were wearily spoken by Juni as she, as one of the final climbers, pulled herself over the edge and onto the flat rock, which was sheltered by a slight overhang above them.

“What does that mean?” Caolun asked.

“It means no safety from qi beasts,” Sir Huang, scrambling up after her, elaborated with a grimace.

“Oh…”

Caolun and Yun’s friends all stared down into the rainy canopy of the forest below them and grimaced. Centipedes would have little issue getting to their current spot, she imagined.

“I also don’t think we are at the southern edge of the Aspen,” Sana added, her tone somewhat unhappy.

“Any other charming news?” Sir Cao grumbled.

“Oh yes, an unending supply of it,” Lin Ling muttered.

“Why do you say that? Sir Teng asked her sister.

“Look here,” Sana poked her tablet and a map appeared. “This is the territory of the Aspen, here…”

Sitting back, she watched the battle between the herb and the alkyr below, catching her breath, while Sana manipulated the map for Sir Teng and the others to examine.

Taking in the view, such as it was, she had to agree with Sana’s conclusions based on the map. Either the Aspen was much bigger than they thought, or they were closer to its centre…

Unbidden, the statue in the ring of columns rose in her mind’s eye.

-Was that really ‘the’ Aspen I saw?

The whole scene, in reality and in her memories was… very weird. There was no getting around that.

“—So, what do you anticipate the problem to be?” Sir Huang asked, drawing her focus back to what Sana was saying.

“Well, given we are climbing, that means we are about… here,” Sana poked a broad, unmapped swathe. “There are two ways in and out of this charming little cul-de-sac.”

“Three,” she said absently, glancing at it and noting that Sana had left out the way they had come.

“Yes, well, the third is out,” Sana said with a sigh.

“Ohh?” Sir Cao asked.

“The third is back the way we came,” Juni replied. “Though with the centipede chasing us it will be unpleasant. The spirit herb can probably use that formation freely as well.”

Mangfan snorted and Caolun also looked unconvinced, but fell silent after Sir Cao scowled at him.

“I wonder how you conclude that?” Din Kongfei asked, a touch challengingly she thought.

“Seven Star formations provide robust end-to-end transmission,” Juni replied blandly. “You can use them with just some qi, or a talisman. If the herb was able to get into our network…”

“—If,” Caolun pointed out. “We don’t know what…”

“—Oh, we know pretty well,” Sir Huang cut in, ending their stupid speculation. “Thankfully, they should be able to sort it out on the Inn end in a day or so. So all we have to do is find somewhere to sit tight and wait out the contamination of our spatial qi, caused by a massive unanchored teleport dropping right on top of everyone at a rather inauspicious moment…”

“Without that, half of you would be dead now,” Ling Luo muttered.

“Yes, however, you could have left the Loci there…” Sir Huang pointed out. “I understand your keenness, but that was foolhardy.”

“…”

“Ah… we have a problem…” Sana muttered, pointing down below.

“Not an unexpected one though,” she grimaced, watching the slow spread of distant discolouration across the tree canopy below them.

-Though I am pretty sure it was awake already, if that is even the right word for it?

Not all those trees were the Grove itself, it did permit other things to live there, but anything that drew on its qi acquired its mark, which was the amber-golden-green colouring of the leaves.

“Doesn’t make it any better…” Lin Ling muttered, to which she nodded.

“It’s… huge,” Ha Leng mumbled, watching the amber sea of trees vanish into the rain in every direction. Even up here, some of the leaves of the cliff-hugging trees were turning amber.

“Yes, it’s the biggest spirit tree in the world,” Sir Huang said.

“I am surprised nobody has tried to grasp it,” Din Kongfei muttered.

“Mmmmm I wonder if anyone could make it back after trying,” Sir Huang said sourly. “Maybe you should go, we will await news of your great achievement when it sends us all to the next life.”

“…”

Din Kongfei stared dully at Sir Huang, then sighed and shook his head.

A nasty suspicion, which she had not really had time to dwell on before, raised itself again at that point.

-What if one of the Ha groups, Aofan’s probably, arrived there and didn’t realise it was in the Aspen Grove when they harvested a spirit herb... or herbs?

Ha Ji Mangfan and Sir Feilu should have been back at the Inn, and yet both had been here. They had also merged the Seven Star formation with their teleport network, and now Mangfan had the jade on him…

-Is that what has incited all of this?

If any part of that was the case… then there was no question of them going back through the Grove. In fact, she and everyone else here might well be barred from it for life, which was a very problematic prospect.

-Though why did… I see what I did?

That still didn’t add up to her, on many levels. Some of it was certainly because of what she had experienced in Jade Willow, leveraged by the hallucination. The rest however?

“Why hasn’t the centipede come up after us?” Ding asked, drawing her back out of her reverie. “If this isn’t… a ‘proper’ ridge, as you put it?”

“It likely came out because it saw an opportunity,” she said, sitting back against the rock and staring out into the void.

“Yep,” Sana agreed, casting a sideways look at Mangfan. “It was probably watching for an opportunity to rob that herb. We just happened to provide it. Beyond that, it has basically the same limitations we do. It cannot absorb ambient qi directly, only exhale qi already in its body and can only recovers by eating plants and other qi beasts, like everything else out here.”

“The plants are different,” Juni added.

“Indeed,” Sir Huang scowled. “Take the Aspen. It was classified personally as at least a thirteen-star entity by the Blue Water Sage, thirty thousand years ago.

“A Dao Lord…” Din Kongfei said, slightly disbelievingly.

“Yes, it can use Laws… up here,” Sir Huang confirmed.

“Laws…” Din Ouyeng looked at him sideways, clearly not believing that.

“And that’s as things are now…” she mused. “This is the gateway to the Inner Valleys, in fact we might already be in them, to an extent.”

“Yeah, let’s keep the cheery themes up,” Sana muttered.

“What is the issue there?” Sir Cao asked, frowning.

“The shadow of the Great Mount,” Juni said softly.

“Yep, if that moves and we don’t see it in this rain, we are going to be in so much shit you will think what we just experienced is a walk in a fairy’s flower garden,” Sir Huang agreed, staring out into the rain.

“How so?” Ling Luo asked.

“Because that’s when the really dangerous qi beasts come up to the surface… or out of their caves,” Sir Huang said grimly.

“Uhuh… that centipede down there is famous and it’s a… ten-star ranked qi beast?” she supplied. “There are official classifications for several ‘unusual’ monstrosities up here like that, discounting the squirrel, which is just…”

She shook her head and stared back down into the valley.

“So… more like that?” Din Kongfei frowned. “That is only a Golden Immortal qi beast…”

“When the shadow moves, you will see active qi beasts every bit as dangerous as the Grove down there come up and poke about,” Sir Huang said simply. “Beasts that if you took them outside the suppression would be Dao Lords or Dao Sovereigns…”

“There are Dao Sovereign qi beasts… here?” Caolun sounded somewhat disbelieving at that.

Mangfan shook his head and murmured something quietly to Caolun she didn’t catch.

Sir Huang just shook his head and stared out at the valley below.

“So, what do we do now?” Ling Luo asked after a long pause.

“We should be able to traverse this ledge,” Juni replied.

“The question is which way…”

“Shouldn’t we wait for things to calm down and then go look for the others?” Ding asked, looking unhappy.

“This… will not calm down,” she said softly.

“No, it will not,” Sir Huang agreed, sounding tired. “And we do not want to be here at night.”

“Uhh…”

Ling Luo’s somewhat nervous utterance made everyone turn to look at her.

“…”

Standing right beside Ling Luo, happily eating a food pill it had gotten from somewhere, was the squirrel, its bright eyes taking them all in pensively.

“It’s just a Koppi squirrel,” Mangfan sneered. “Shoo, stupid—!”

Sir Cao had the presence of mind to shove his hand in Mangfan’s face, shutting the idiot up.

“…”

The squirrel eyed Mangfan, who was now struggling with Sir Cao, then reached up and casually pulled the talisman necklace from around Ling Luo’s neck and turned it over in its paws.

-Oh no….

Even before she could say anything, the strange qi beast did exactly what she had feared it might to one of their storage devices when they encountered it in the gorge.

The little squirrel eyed Mangfan as it ran its paws across the different carved bits of jade for a moment… It narrowed its eyes and selected one of the jade gemstones, 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, and several crates of talismans down the cliff below them.

The squirrel adroitly snatched a small, crystal-clear container, with a smoky white and black pill inside it, out of the air.

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 and a talisman sheaf, tossing them at random into the vegetation below, shaking its head as if deeply disappointed. At last, it grabbed a grey-furred animal skin pouch, which it stroked once or twice, before nodding happily to itself.

Slinging the pouch over its shoulder, it turned to them and considered them pensively. Mangfan had a talisman out at this point, while both Brother Ji and Din Kongfei had drawn their weapons.

Thankfully, Sir Huang and Sir Cao were between most of them and the squirrel, so nobody could do anything…

This time it didn’t bow. It took one paw and pulled down its eyelid while pawing its ear with the other. Then, without a sound, it twisted and dropped backwards off the cliff edge.

Mangfan finally pushed Sir Cao out of the way and rushed over, clearly intending to hit it, as did Brother Ji, but much as she expected, there was no sign of it.

“What… just…” Ling Luo stared at her broken pendant. “That was a gift…”

“…”

“Right, we have to move,” Sir Huang sighed, standing up.

Peering over the edge at the scattering of goods from Ling Luo’s talisman, she had to agree. There was a prodigious quantity of cultivation resources lost downslope now, which would draw out all sorts of things.

“Why didn’t you kill it?” Mangfan spat.

“Because we don’t want to die,” Sir Huang said coolly. “By all means chase after it, I’ll be sure to tell Ha Botan you died doing what you loved.”

“…”

Lin Ling had to put her hand over her mouth.

“You…” Mangfan sneered. “You are just going to let him talk like this, Brother Yun? Control your servants…”

“Who is your brother?” Ha Yun, who was understandably not in a good mood, retorted. “Call me Young Lord Yun or don’t speak.”

“Look Brother Yun, I know it is a terrible tragedy that Brother Mun is… as he is… but we might have saved him, but for…” Mangfan started to speak, only for Sir Cao to cut him off, forcibly.

“Please,” Brother Ji sighed, holding up his hands. “Nobody can blame themselves for what spirit herbs do… the key thing is that we, here, are alive…”

“Indeed,” Ling Luo agreed. “How is your friend? Young Lord Yun?”

“…”

Ha Yun looked at the crippled form of Ha Mun, who was barely even breathing, with an agonized expression.

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

~ Sir Huang – Life-Breaking Aspen Grove ~

Sitting on the ledge, looking at the disparate groups, Lan Huang had to fight hard not to press the bridge of his nose with his thumb, index and middle fingers of his right hand. It was strange what habits stuck with you, for lifetimes, and times beyond lifetimes. It was actually an exercise to help you attune your third eye, in certain parts of the world. To help you see more clearly.

He found himself doing it when he was stressed, and today was easily the most stressful day he had had… in a long time.

The appearance of the squirrel just served to season the whole ordeal.

-How do I solve this problem…

-Or rather, which problem do I try to solve first…

The problems’ problem was that all but two of them had very appealing solutions indeed.

-Murder… the solution is murder, a small voice in the back of his head supplied helpfully.

He didn’t like killing people, although it was a sort of necessary evil at a certain point, once you progressed as far down the path of cultivation as he had. Considering Ha Ji Mangfan, though, it was hard not to feel that circumstances might have been a lot easier if he was not an unnaturally lucky little brat.

Ha Shuwei and Ha Feilu were both dead, their bodies lost to the Grove, so Mangfan was the only ‘link’ to what had happened on that side, here and now. With no talisman communication, the fate of the rest of his group was unclear, so having him die out here was outright inconvenient now.

“—Sir Huang…”

He glanced over at Ha Ding, who turned to him on the damp ledge, looking uneasy.

“What is it?” he asked, putting his musings on the simple, yet not easy, problem to the side to consider the easy, yet not at all simple, one called Ha Mun.

“Mun… isn’t improving,” Ha Jiao, who had barely spoken since they grouped back up again, muttered.

Considering their faces – pale, drawn, stressed, all of them suffering to a degree from the same poisoning – he could read them far too easily.

All of them were looking at Ha Fen Mun and thinking ‘that could be me’, and ‘why did I ever come here’, and it was gnawing at them, in the darkness of their minds. Especially Ha Yun, whose emotional state regarding this kind of task was already brittle. Perhaps his father had hoped that the boy getting experience up here would push him past his fear, but this…

“—And our qi isn’t… recovering,” Ha Mao added.

“Not much we can do about that,” he replied, moving over to Ha Mun.

Putting a hand on the unfortunate youth’s chest, he examined the earth corrosion as it tried to eat into his… the puppet’s flesh for a few moments and sighed.

Outside of the suppression, everyone here bar him would have died in moments, he was sure. The Hunters might have resisted briefly, due to their mantras, but only that. The rank of the awakened lamium, or its qi purity anyway, was on a par with an Ancient Immortal. Thankfully, the only evidence of awareness of ‘Laws’ it had produced had been in relation to the teleport infiltration.

-I suppose it’s a positive in these circumstances that it isn’t a genuine, awakened, Dao Immortal spirit herb, he mused, letting his qi carefully suffuse the boy.

Suppressing a grimace, he looked over at Jun Arai again, who met his gaze with empty, emotionless eyes.

She – and he was sure it was her, not Ha Mangfan or the late Shuwei, despite the circumstantial evidence – had worked a minor miracle on him to keep him still breathing. It was yet another reminder of why physical cultivators were the undisputed masters and mistresses of exploiting this land. Even so, if he was being brutally honest, Ha Mun was simply waiting for death at this point.

“…”

“Well?” Yun asked, his voice trembling a bit.

Off on the other side, Mangfan was trying to talk to Ha Caolun, who was also looking equally unhappy. He could only hope Cao Cao kept a lid on that.

-Despite living uncounted years, these mortal conundrums have no easy answers, he reflected sourly as he pondered what it was actually worth telling them.

No answer was good, really. None of the Ha bunch were blooded, tested or tempered emotionally in any way. False hope would make the inevitable all the crueller, yet telling them outright that Ha Mun was basically waiting for death…

-I suppose as little as possible without misleading them, he reflected.

There would be time for grief later, but for now he needed them focused on not adding to their own body-count.

The ‘problem’ was the spatial qi from the Seven Star teleport formation. It held traces of ‘Laws’, which up here were a cancer to anyone who had not spent decades slowly attuning themselves to the harsh qi of these mountains and valleys. That, combined with the herb’s own qi purity, already toxic enough to cripple the average Ancient Immortal if taken beyond the borders of Yin Eclipse, and Mun’s meagre foundation, meant the boy was lucky he was not already rotted from the inside out.

The only way he would even live to see Misty Jasmine Inn was someone like Jun Arai expending serious effort to keep him alive, on pure bloody-mindedness.

A cold, cruel part of him knew it would have been better if she had failed. If the luckless Ha Fen Mun had been dead when Ha Yun found him, like Ha Chu Fang probably was. That kind of grief was easy to push aside in the moment. Watching Ha Mun likely die over the next few hours, despite all their best efforts, would either make or break that group.

“…”

“We can keep him stable,” he said at last, sitting back.

“You can’t fix him, though,” Mao half-asked.

“What about some life-core?” Caolun asked, speaking up.

“Brother Caolun is indeed right; such a thing…” he caught Mangfan casting a sideways look at Jun Arai and Jun Sana as he spoke, almost managing to sound genuinely concerned.

-You little snake, he sighed.

“Life-core might work,” ‘Ji’, the youth from the Seven Star Pavilion, agreed.

“If we have any of that, it should go to Teng,” Cao Cao said sourly, giving Caolun a glare.

“…”

“—Here,” Juni passed him a medicine bottle, ignoring Caolun and Mangfan.

“…”

“Unnecessary,” he said, refusing it. “I have some.”

He had intended to give it to Jiang Teng quietly, once he had his qi in order.

Jiang Teng wordlessly accepted the small vial of alchemical liquid from him and drank it down, grimacing.

Almost immediately he gasped and held the ruined stump of his arm as the flesh twisted and started to bubble horribly. Ha Yun and the others looked on in uneasy silence as the life-core water did its thing. The skin on Jiang’s arm expanded outwards like a series of grizzly balloons, seeping blood and pulsing unpleasantly. After a few moments, the skin sloughed off, revealing red, raw flesh and bloody muscle beneath, which soon started to grow new, pale skin. Within two minutes Jiang Teng’s ruined arm was entirely restored to functionality.

“Why won’t that work on Mun?” Ha Shi Mao asked a bit defiantly.

-Yep, thanks for that, idiots, he groaned, adding a further black mark against Ha Ji Mangfan in his head.

“Because his meridians are ruined,” he replied, before anyone else could. “It would be like pouring it into a bucket with no bottom.”

“—Ah! We can’t stay here long,” Ji cut in. “The centipede is back...”

“Bugger…” Kun Juni hissed.

He looked down below but saw nothing, which didn’t surprise him.

Space-locked as they were, the centipede was a massive problem. Unlike the herb, it was a Dao Immortal qi beast. Thoroughly awakened and possessing both formidable regeneration and cunning.

Jun Arai had identified it as ‘The Great Devourer’, and she was right. He had had run-ins with it himself, tens of millennia ago. Two of the scars his own spear had put on it, back then, were still visible in the chitin near the head as discoloured lines, though thankfully it hadn’t recognised him.

The Hunters were already getting up, conversing quietly in sign-language and checking their kit. They knew what was what, so he didn’t have to worry too much about them.

Glancing along at Ha Mangfan, he sighed again.

The beast was clearly targeting the Ji group, likely because it had been stalking that herb, waiting to try and seize the teleport formation. Just like the herb, if it could refine it, it could break the shackles of these valleys and move to new, unexpected places.

He was basically certain at this point that, despite their earlier denials, Mangfan and Feilu had been here before this mess kicked off, likely left to keep an eye on the teleport point. Mangfan was not touched by the same chaotic spatial qi as the others, something basically nobody bar him was skilled enough to tell, he was sure. There had also been evidence of serious disturbance to the feng shui in that clearing as well.

-Yep, the solution is murder, for everyone else’s safety, the small voice in the back of his head reiterated.

“—I can take Ha Mun,” Sir Teng said to him, flexing his arm. “I’ve got good enough qi control to not be poisoned too badly.”

“No,” he shook his head. “I will.”

Of everyone here, bar the Hunters, he was the best equipped to deal with the corrosion, and also the only one likely skilled enough to fight at full strength while carrying and protecting someone as injured as Ha Mun.

Ha Mun was also a fracture point in the group, and, if something did happen to the boy, it was better it be blamed on him than on the Hunters, for example.

Not for the first time, he found himself inordinately annoyed with the short-sightedness of so many so-called ‘Elders’ in the Ha clan. If everyone made it out of here, he was very tempted to speak to Ancestor Kai and see if some of the Hunters could not be linked to the Cherry Wine Pagoda, assuming Ling Tao didn’t have designs on them. If all else failed, and this all went to shit, he could probably snag some of them for his own school, along with anyone they cared particularly about. Kun Juni in particular, given she was already an outcast in her own clan for reasons that seemed largely political.

“Which way?” he signed to Juni.

Given none of the Ha group, bar Leng, were at all competent in it, and neither were the scions from the Imperial Continent, it made for a useful way of communicating.

Looking along the ledge, she pointed towards the waterfall, which matched with his own assessment.

His brief look at the cliffs as they gathered people up from the second teleport suggested that they wanted to go up, over this massif, not be pushed around it. Their exact location was still very much in doubt as well, so determining that, along with a safe place to hole up until the spatial contamination degraded, was key now.

Hauling up Ha Mun, he grimaced a bit at the attempt by the corrosive qi to invade his body and then waved for Jiang Teng to lead Yun’s group on. Ji, whose other name he still hadn’t got, had already moved up beside the Hunters, followed by Ling Luo. The Din pair said a few things to Yun on the way past and fell in with Caolun.

“What is going on with Caolun?” he asked Cao Cao as he came to the back to take up the rear spot with him.

Cao Cao just shook his head, looking annoyed.

“Mangfan is poking at Caolun,” he signed, in an entirely different language to the Pavilion one, known only to a few core experts in the Ha clan. “Trying to suggest that the Hunters are not on the level here, that it is their fault that their groups are both eviscerated.”

-So about what I expected, he mused.

“It is… unfortunate that he survived,” Cao Cao added silently.

“Tell me about it,” he muttered, before signing: “At least getting answers once this is over with will be cathartic.”

Cao Cao gave him a nasty grin by way of reply and waved for him to go ahead as they started their way along the ledge.

~ Ha Yun – Life-Breaking Aspen Grove ~

“Affff— monkey-buggered moss!” Ha Ding spat, just ahead of them, before adding, “Why did we even come here…”

“Shut up, Ding, please,” Ha Jiao groaned.

“All of you shut up,” Ha Yun muttered, manoeuvring his way around an awkwardly-placed rock on the narrow ledge they were traversing, wishing that the others would just focus on the immediate problems.

It had been almost an hour since they scrambled up the cliffs. An hour of limb-numbing climbing as they made their way around the edge of the gorge towards the waterfall at its head. An hour in which they had covered maybe half a mile of cliff? If even.

Below them, the treetops swayed, a thousand shades of red, green and bronze in the mist and rain, a vegetated veil over the ruins below, that encircled a broad lake.

“What moss?” he hissed, because that was a bit like saying ‘look out for the water’ or ‘Oh, trees!’.

“On your right,” Ha Jiao, who was just ahead of him, muttered, pointing to a patch where there was a bloody palm print.

“…”

Ha Ding had now paused to eat a purification pill.

“Hurry up…” Caolun, who was behind them, hissed.

Shaking his head, he waved for Ding and Jiao to keep moving.

If there was one good thing about how hard this was, he supposed, it was that he could barely afford time, except in unfortunate moments like this, to dwell on Chu Fang and… Fen Mun.

Ding scowled at Caolun and then moved on, around the boulder, carefully brushing past the water ferns there in case something was waiting on a few people having passed before attacking.

In that regard, the trip along the cliff had been stressfully uneventful. He kept waiting for a rock spider, or some other horrible insect, to just land on him, but none had… yet.

Making his way past, he could see how Ding had gotten caught. The gap was small, the path slippery and half hidden by ferns, and the moss coated the most obvious handholds and then some.

-Feng shui… predation.

It was a concept he was not unfamiliar with, if only because it occurred quite a bit in spirit gardens and was something you had to watch out for. Putting environments conducive to growing mosses near footpaths over water, for example, tended to lead to instances of people slipping on it and falling in. In a garden that was funny, or embarrassing. Out here… lethal… and abused.

Carefully crossing over that point, he followed Jiao further along, to where the others were waiting.

“Where go up here from?”

His grasp of the Pavilion sign language allowed him to get most of what Lin Ling was signing. Sadly, she was somehow the least competent of all of that group, and her signing was only readable to him because she had luss cloth gloves on, making her hand movements more obvious.

“Why do we not get those…” Ha Caolun muttered.

“—Here!”

Caolun winced as Kun Juni, coming up behind him, actually slapped him across the back of the head with a pair.

“—Don’t lose them, we only have a single spare pair each.”

Staring at his own hands, he grimaced.

They had only two pairs between their whole group, and the reason there, painfully, was because the rest were with Chu Fang, who had taken on the role of extracting such herbs when they were in Portam Rhanae, as he was the slightest-built among them and could easily slip up walls and between vine-covered branches.

“Ours were all with Chu Fang,” he told her.

“Then you should have asked before now,” she replied.

“…”

As much as that stung, it was hard to argue with.

“Everyone is here, good…” Sir Huang, carrying Ha Mun, Sir Cao and Jun Arai made their way around after Juni.

“Where do we go now?” Caolun asked, looking up and then out at the waterfall.

“To the end of the ledge and then up that stairway as fast as we can,” Juni said simply.

She pointed to where the ledge petered out into the cliff amid tangled vines, the bedding plane they were following folding over on itself and ending where the top of the waterfall was.

“Unless you want to climb up that and wait to be made a target by something?”

“…”

Everyone looked up at the cliff above them and shuddered, even Din Kongfei.

“That’s impossible,” Fairy Luo, who was looking… tired, even by their standards, muttered.

Off to the side there was another quiet conversation in sign language going on between the Jun sisters, Lin Ling and Han Shu. That they were not talking openly was… annoying actually, especially with Kun Juni and Sir Huang both repeating the call for ‘better communication’.

“Are you just going to wiggle your fingers, or is there something you want to share?” Mangfan grumbled.

“…”

Jun Arai gave Mangfan a nonplussed look and shrugged.

“Just tallying up how many arrows we have left,” Sana said blandly.

“That work,” Lin Ling added, archly.

Mangfan met their gazes and didn’t flinch.

There was definitely something more going on there, he was sure. Mangfan had said Arai had tried to do something to Mun… and yet since then Sir Huang had had Arai stay at the back with him and Sir Cao.

Mangfan and the others seemed to take that as fiat that Arai was indeed not trusted, but even if he disliked her, she had healed Mun three times and Sir Cao had let her each time. It was far more likely she had done something to annoy Mangfan, who was not someone he knew at all before this trip, but was firmly in the same bracket as Jingbei and Fanjing as an asshat of the highest order.

“Okay, everyone gets five minutes, while we work out how to put rope arrows over there so you don’t all break your necks,” Sir Huang added brightly.

Sitting down on a rock, after checking it for evil moss – a mistake Caolun and Din Kongfei had both made in the last hour – he took out his canteen and sipped some water with a sigh.

“How is Mun?” he asked Sir Huang as he put his friend’s comatose body down.

Sir Huang gave him a long look and sighed slightly.

Staring at Mun’s pale face, the skin flaking away like dried leaves in a few places, he had to fight the urge to just throw the canteen at someone. Mangfan maybe. Or just hit himself in the head with it.

-I brought you up here, Mun…

-Why did I bring my friends up here…

Back in the library in his home estate he had thought this sounded like an awfully good way to end up in a wooden casket, like Yuanbei, or never come home again at all, like Shi Shimo.

That Mangfan had actually mentioned Shi Shimo to Caolun earlier did not help his mood there either.

He kept telling himself that Chu Fang had just evaded the second teleport somehow… that Ha Mun would make it back to Misty Jasmine Inn and there would be some spirit herb or pill there that might save him…

-I brought them up here…

-My choice killed them…

-If I hadn’t, Mun would be laughing in a teahouse now, praising some beauty, and Chu Fang would be cheating at dice… or off practising his martial forms for the sect entry exams next year…

-Shit…

He took another sip of the water and stared at the mist and the trees and the lake.

In his mind’s eye, it was also impossible not to see that fate-thrashed centipede tear Ha Feilu apart and devour Shuwei, who he had only had a passing acquaintance with as a ‘friend’ of Caolun’s, like he was some tasty snack.

Thankfully, Sir Cao waved to him that they were ready to start moving again.

It took another exhausting half an hour to make it across the ropes that the Hunters set up with arrows and finally scramble down onto the open plaza at the top of the stairway.

“You can see they certainly have a style,” Jun Sana remarked, as they all took in the ruined courtyard, lined by column-fronted, heavily overgrown buildings.

Having spent several days in the other town, he had to agree there.

“So, any idea on which way we go?” Mangfan asked, looking around.

“…”

The five Hunters, who were already standing around, considering the vegetation, ignored Mangfan, instead just staring up at the swirling gloom above and the shadows of the enveloping cliffs.

“That is hardly useful,” Caolun muttered, apparently taking their silence for some kind of answer.

“Indeed,” Mangfan agreed, with both Din scions and even Ling Luo nodding in agreement.

“…”

“Okay, we go right,” Juni said after about thirty seconds of just looking around.

“Right?” Mangfan echoed. “How do you arrive at that conclusion?”

“Where do you want to go?” Juni retorted.

“…”

Mangfan stared at her.

“Yeah,” Lin Ling echoed. “Where do you think we should go, if what we are doing is ‘hardly useful’?”

“Aren’t the five of you supposed to be the experts?” Mangfan muttered. “And it is thanks to you lot that we are up here anyway.”

“…”

“…”

“We are waiting,” Sana added pleasantly. “Which way do you think we should go, and why?”

“I say we go right as well,” Brother Ji said, stepping in smoothly. “Fairy Luo’s Loci does suggest that your missing friend’s talisman is in that direction.”

“Right it is then,” Sir Huang said blandly. “Need I remind you that we were being chased by a bloodthirsty twenty-metre-long centipede only a short while ago?”

It was hard to argue with that, so they set off again, at a brisk trot, across the plaza with Ling Luo now in the lead, flanked by Brother Ji. Din Kongfei followed along behind, with Mangfan and Caolun, clearly not enthused at him taking the initiative.

“Their sects don’t get on,” Sir Huang said, falling in beside him.

“Oh…”

“The Jade Gate Court are the new power, while the Seven Sovereigns is much like the Shu Pavilion, an influence with a complex relationship with the Dun clan. Doubly so for the Seven Sovereigns as they have their roots in the era of the first Dun Imperial Dynasty.”

“Uh… there is a first dynasty?” Ding asked.

“Yes, in the era before the Azure Astral Authority controlled Eastern Azure,” Sir Huang said. “Back when the power behind the throne was the Meng Heavenly Clan, not the Kong and the Huang, or the Tang.”

“That is very old history,” Din Ouyeng remarked, “I am surprised Brother Huang has an interest.”

“It has some fine tales,” Sir Huang remarked drily.

Shaking his head, he tuned that out, because it wasn’t helping in his quest to put one foot in front of the other. It was hard enough to keep pace with Sir Huang as it was.

“What happens if we are out here at night?” he asked at last, after they had walked in silence for a few more minutes through the leafy hell, because that was looking like a very real possibility.

“We hole up in a ruin or rock shelter and set up some feng shui formations,” Sir Huang said with a sigh. “Though I would much prefer to be not in this valley at that point.”

“Because of the centipede…”

“…”

Sir Huang, who had not stopped scanning their surroundings, just nodded.

Like that, they climbed through the forest-shrouded ruins for almost another hour, following what he was sure was an ancient road, barely preserved beneath the canopy, until at last it arrived at a gorge, blocked by a substantial stone wall and a ruined gate.

The path, a ruined, overgrown roadway beyond, protected on both sides by solid stone blocks, took them out into a steep-sided, thickly-forested gorge with a swollen river. Everywhere they looked, the trees held hints of amber and gold in their leaves and, if anything, the soporific oppression was only getting worse.

“How… far does the Grove reach?” Ha Ding asked as they nervously made their way down the valley, along the roadway.

“The spirit tree has a range of several hundred square miles of valley,” Jun Arai, who was walking on the other side of Sir Huang, her bow out, remarked.

“So this is all one… valley?” Ding grumbled.

“No, it is many valleys, but the ridges shift over the years and the entrances and exits are not all over ridges. It’s not wrong to think of the whole of Yin Eclipse as a maze of shifting boundaries, each containing its own peculiar slice of unpleasantness,” Sir Huang replied.

“Yes,” Jun Arai agreed. “The ability to locate safe places to rest is a major part of determining how much trouble you’ll have travelling up here. That is why places like Misty Jasmine Inn are so valuable. Get it wrong, end up stranded somewhere dangerous overnight…?”

She fell silent, just shaking her head.

“You mean end up somewhere like this?” Ha Jiao sighed.

“…”

“I will need to check him again,” Arai said, ignoring Ha Jiao and glancing at Ha Mun.

“You can do it while moving?” Sir Huang asked.

“…”

“Yeah…” Arai sighed.

He watched as she put a hand against Mun’s back and did… something.

It was hard to say what exactly it was, it was subtle and inexplicable. There was some utilization of ‘Intent’ in there, but the fact that he, a Golden Core cultivator, could not see through it… was perplexing. Even if Jun Arai was a physical cultivator, at best she was just quasi-Golden Core. That her ability to manipulate Intent was better than his, up here…

“Physical cultivators are second only to Dharma cultivators when it comes to this,” Sir Huang said softly as they walked on, in a sort of strange procession.

“Dharma…?” Ding frowned.

“Buddhist monks,” Sir Huang said drily.

“Oh… right, their chanting and their ‘self is non-self’ bollocks,” Jiao grunted.

“As to the Intent manipulation, you should view it like a martial cultivator. All Intent comes from the same place…” Sir Huang tapped his heart. “It, more than anything, builds on experience and accumulation.”

“You say that like spiritual cultivation is some second-class method, Brother Huang,” Din Kongfei remarked.

“…”

“It is true that it is the favoured child of these heavens…” Sir Huang said with an almost melancholy sigh.

Arai stopped what she was doing after a minute or so, then left with barely a nod to Sir Huang, to go talk to her sister and Lin Ling, leaving them to walk along in silence. At this point, most conversation had died out anyway, simply because the smothering oppression of the trees was close to a crippling malady.

Even with a twenty-nine-rotation core, he could barely keep qi from flowing out of his body, as if it was being sucked away by the air and the ground with every step. Leng was not much better. Ding and the others were pale and sweating, dark rings under their eyes. Jiao was even showing faintly luminous veins on his neck, which was a dead giveaway that he was beginning to suffer real meridian damage.

“Can’t we take some pills or something?” Ding groaned at last, after they had crossed the river, by a tumbled-down bridge, and set off up the far side of the gorge, again following the roadway.

“Only if you want to suffer this twofold tomorrow,” Sir Teng sighed.

“In the long run, this is beneficial anyway,” Sir Cao added.

“B-beneficial?” Caolun groaned.

“I told you this earlier…” Sir Cao sighed, glaring at Caolun.

“Exhausting our qi will get rid of the contamination by spatial qi quicker,” Brother Ji, who was looking a bit pale himself, agreed.

Ling Luo just gave him a hollow-eyed look that was almost haunted, then ran her hands through her damp hair and sighed.

-Ah… that is true, he realised, feeling a bit stupid for not having thought of that himself.

“It should also help brother Mun’s condition somewhat, so long as he can endure…” Brother Ji went on, giving him a slightly encouraging smile, before it slipped and he added. “Though we do need to find somewhere to rest soon, I think. The young ladies are starting to flag as well.”

“Especially if they are still affected by the pollen,” Mangfan muttered.

“Heh… I think you are underestimating those four,” Sir Huang murmured, ignoring Mangfan.

Brother Ji just nodded pensively.

Of the rest of the group nearby, only Sir Huang and Han Shu looked remotely ‘okay’ at this point. As Brother Ji noted, even Lin Ling and Kun Juni were finally starting to show tell-tale signs of exhaustion. Arai and Sana were up ahead, scouting he supposed, and it was only when he looked for Leng that he remembered he'd gone with the sisters.

-How long ago did they leave, and I’m only noticing now that he’s gone…?

They walked on for another thirty minutes after that, in the ever-deepening gloom of the rainy forest gorge, until the cliffs were almost oppressive walls rising right over them.

“How come so much of the road is still… here?” he asked after a while, as they made their way over one of the surprisingly infrequent collapses.

“Geomantic route-ways,” Sir Huang said, glancing down to the river some hundred metres to their right. “The roads are basically kept intact by profound feng shui.”

“I thought the forbidden zone obviated that kind of thing?” Caolun muttered.

“Depends,” Sir Teng replied. “There are certainly experts in the history of Eastern Azure capable of working wonders in this land. Our Ha clan even has a few in its ancient past.”

“Oh?” Ding asked.

“Don’t you know about the Second Ancient Ancestor?” Sir Huang chuckled.

“—Hasn’t he left the world tens of thousands of years ago?” he interjected dubiously, grasping at what he could remember of the clan’s distant ancestor figures.

Sir Huang just shrugged before continuing. “If you are talking experts in formations and feng shui, few can compare to him. It is no exaggeration to say that he can be mentioned in the same sentence as Shu Tian, Meng Fu or Hua Xiaomei…”

They walked on, listening as Sir Huang and Sir Teng talked a bit about some of those ancient experts. Most of the stories were ones he knew, but in a way it was nice to have the momentary distraction, especially in the heavy, suffocating humidity of the forest gorge. It ended soon enough anyway, when Jun Sana and Leng came back, to inform them that they had a way out of this gorge…

“What’s the issue?” Kun Juni asked.

“Easier to discuss it when we get there,” Sana said with a grimace. “We are moving too slowly.”

“Okay,” Juni nodded.

They walked on in silence again, for a few hundred metres, the path through the gorge still slowly climbing, until at last Ding stopped and put his hands on his knees, breathing hard.

“What is with this…?” Ding panted.

“This is the Inner Valleys, at night,” Juni said grimly.

“Yep, as I said, we are moving too slowly,” Sana muttered.

“We are,” Sir Huang agreed, then paused and looked behind them.

“What’s wrong?” Ding asked, looking around nervously.

“Yes, let’s pick up the pace,” Sir Huang agreed, waving them past.

“Yes, let’s,” Kun Juni murmured, also staring into the gloom.

Looking behind them, the forested gorge, in the rain and the gloom, did feel… less hospitable, somehow, than it had before. He wanted to ask if it was the centipede, or something else, but the brisker pace Sir Huang immediately set over the next mile was so punishing he was surprised nobody actually collapsed.

It was a great relief when they finally slowed again, where the gorge took an abrupt turn left, past a huge waterfall pouring down from the cliffs above. However, they didn’t stop there, continuing to follow the overgrown road for another mile and a half until the gorge abruptly petered out over the space of a hundred or so metres, ending in a complex of familiar-looking buildings and the ruins of a fortified wall and gate. Beyond it, stretching into the gloom, was a large forested valley; stands of tropical pine coated rugged outcroppings, while sprawling, trefoil-leafed trees he recognised as ‘Urki broad-leaves’ dominated the forest between.

“As I said, the Aspen is even here…” Leng muttered as they took in the scenery.

That was also sadly true, well over half the trees around them had amber-gold leaves.

Just beyond the ruined gate, they found Arai sitting motionless against a water-fern-covered rock, almost invisible in the gloom. Had she not moved, he would have walked right past her and never seen her.

“Oh, a guide post…” Juni said, walking over to a nondescript rock he would have ignored had she not drawn attention to it.

“Uhuh, old, but still readable,” Arai murmured.

Sir Huang walked over to it and crouched down, scraping off the moss with a blade and considering what was on there.

“Huh… we are much further away than it appeared,” he mused.

“Yep,” Arai nodded.

“Can… we take a… break now?” Caolun asked, looking wan as he stared around at the forest.

“…”

“Nope, we are about three miles, across this valley and through two others, from an actual ridgeline,” Juni said. “It will be a hard climb, but I am not going to rest easy until we are beyond the grasp of that spirit herb.”

“We haven’t seen a shade of it since we went up that fate-thrashed cliff,” Mangfan groaned.

“And yet the Aspen is also here, which means both herb and centipede could catch us,” Sir Huang said flatly.

Arai nodded and stood, drawing her bow.

“I take it the Loci still points that way?” Sana asked Ling Luo, pointing with her blade into the distant rain.

“…”

“That way,” Ling Luo adjusted Sana’s blade by about a sixth of a circle to the south.

“Not bad,” Sana nodded, glancing at the compass she held in her other hand.

“Set your pace and let’s keep moving,” Sir Huang added to the pair, who both nodded slightly and started off down the road.

“Is your bodyguard still in the Ha clan?” Mangfan, who had fallen in beside him, with Caolun and the Din pair, grumbled as they set off again.

“I dunno about you, but I am not anxious to meet that centipede again,” he scowled.

“Yeah, but if we collapse of qi exhaustion…” Mangfan scowled.

“Yeah…” Din Kongfei grumbled, although he didn’t look that bad compared to the others.

“This pace won’t be doing Brother Mun any favours either,” Mangfan muttered, glancing at Ding, Jiao and Mao, who were just about staying ahead of them, ushered along by Leng and Sir Teng.

“…”

He had been trying hard not to think about Mun, although not at all successfully, so it took all of his effort not to say something snide back to Mangfan. There was just something about his ‘concern’ that set his teeth on edge. He couldn’t even pin down what it was, as they continued on, through the darkening forest.

“—Don’t you agree, Yun?”

“What?” he was drawn out of his focused reverie, of just scanning the trees as they hurried on, by Caolun.

“I said… don’t they warn us about the edge effect, and feeling like you are being pushed along?” Caolun said.

“…”

“Yeah,” Mangfan agreed. “At this rate… it almost feels like they are panicking. We could have stopped at the entrance to the gorge, right Brother Din?”

“Probably,” Din Ouyeng shrugged noncommittally. “If Kongfei is happy to keep on like this though…”

Mangfan grimaced and looked over at him again. “You could say something Brother Yun… He is your servant…”

“Eh…” he stared at Mangfan, wondering if he was an idiot.

-They still want to be the ones with ‘responsibility’ in this mess?

Yes, Sir Huang was there to protect him, and likely Leng as well, but he was also his senior brother at this point, although the others didn’t know that.

Shaking his head, he was about to say something, when there was a curse from up ahead from Kun Juni, along with the sound of something heavy hitting the ground and cracking a few branches.

It took a moment for them to catch up, to find Jun Sana and Kun Juni pulling arrows out of a dead alkyr the size of a cat.

“There are hunting spiders as well,” Lin Ling said, trotting past them. “I shot one a moment ago.”

“Keep looking out for hook bats,” Juni called after Lin Ling.

“Uh… were you going to tell us about that?” Mangfan muttered.

“I just did,” Juni said, standing up as Sana tore out the core and stored away the alkyr, having done in a matter of ten seconds what had taken three Ha clan disciples several minutes and a lot of acid burns.

“Not much to spot with hook bats, just keep your qi suppressed and your head down. A weapon in hand helps, but make sure it’s not shiny,” Sir Cao added, also catching them up.

Glancing at the blades Sana and Juni were wielding, he realised they were almost flat grey, with no real reflection at all in the gloom.

Drawing his own, he considered the shiny metal and sighed.

“Here,” Sir Cao passed him a short sword that was almost matte black.

Accepting it, he hurried on, to be closer to Sir Huang. A moment later, the others all also started to pick up the pace again.

The next half an hour was… fraught. The first hook bat attack arrived when they were crossing a broad, shallow river that the roadway forded. Half a dozen cat-sized shadows swooping down at them from the now properly darkening sky. Obscured by the rain it was only seeing the first one hit the water, impaled on an arrow, that warned him, which was a sobering reminder of how dangerous this fate-thrashed place was.

In the end they killed half a dozen, leaving them where they fell in the river, but that was just the start. Underneath the canopy again, still following the road as it climbed, they were attacked by two wandering spiders, both of which were slain by Sir Huang and Sir Teng. After that came another alkyr, which almost landed on Din Ouyeng’s head before he killed it with a fluid flurry of sword strikes.

It was with great relief that they finally reached the far side of the valley and a tangle of buildings half buried in vegetation next to a rocky gorge between two massif pillars.

“Please tell me we are stopping here…” Jiao groaned.

“Sorry, not here,” Lin Ling said with a sigh.

“How is Mun?” he asked Sir Huang as they waited for Arai, Sana and Juni to finish poring over a projection of a map from their tablet.

“…”

Sir Huang gave him a grimace and said nothing.

-Shit…

He patted Mun on the back and grimaced, as the qi in his body tried to surge into his own hand. Even though the purification pills from before were still effective, it was like having the skin peeled off his palm.

“Stay strong…” he muttered, which was about all he could think to say.

Mun, who was barely conscious, moved his hand slightly.

“Y… Yun…” his friend rasped. “S… sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he muttered, giving Mun’s hand a squeeze.

“If anything… it should be me who is sorry…”

Off to the side, he caught Arai looking at him and tried to ignore her.

-Why did I bring any of them… I should have just asked father to send up a bunch of disciples...

Almost as soon as he thought that, he felt dirty.

Even if they were just normal clansfolk, they were still from the Ha clan.

Caolun had lost friends as well… but the way Mangfan just didn’t seem to care about Sir Feilu, or Shuwei made him feel rather uncomfortable.

Nobody deserved to die up here, like that.

“Okay, through here, watch your step… there will likely be some nasty spirit herbs… the path is not a road either, but a trail, so follow the person in front and don’t rush, or go too slow!” Kun Juni instructed them.

“I’ll go at the back,” Sir Huang murmured.

He was about to volunteer to carry Mun for a bit, but Sir Huang, Jun Arai and Han Shu were already moving to the back.

The trip over the ridge, in the end, was just more of the same. It brought them out into a further gorge filled with Urki broad-leaves, nestled between several massifs, the middle of which held a ruin, not in the style he had gotten used to seeing, but rather like the buildings from Misty Jasmine Inn. Even here, the Aspen Grove’s influence was apparent, with scatterings of golden-amber-leafed trees visible as they made their way down.

“This is the Thunder Gate Waystation… or it used to be,” Juni said as they made their way past it, giving it a surprisingly wide berth.

“Why don’t we use it?” Mangfan asked.

“Because it’s been infested with soul-setting fungus and nobody can get rid of it,” Arai said flatly.

“Soul setting…” Leng stared at the fortified compound in the gloomy dusky light and shuddered.

“…”

Even Mangfan couldn’t refute that.

From there, rather than head south, they headed back east out of that valley and up a steep trail through a gorge, hugging the left wall. The Urki broad-leaves here were shrouded in water ferns and moss, and lichen trailed off everything.

“There has to be some spirit herb here,” Din Kongfei muttered as they reached the halfway point. “It’s almost like being back in the Aspen Grove.”

“We are still in the range of the Aspen,” Leng muttered, pointing to a few golden-amber-leafed trees.

“There are,” Kun Juni, who was nearby, replied. “I wouldn’t go hunting for them though, they are mostly wood qi. Can’t you feel it in the ground?”

“Of course,” Din Kongfei replied, a bit archly.

“There is a whole yin wood ecosystem in the side gullies up here, leading between these massifs,” Juni continued, pointing across the tree-lined gorge into the evening mist, as they made their way on. “Very unpleasant place to be, especially at night. Lots of spiders.”

“…”

“—Yet here we are, and it is nearly dark,” Ling Luo interjected with a grimace.

“Indeed, Fairy Luo,” Mangfan muttered.

“You can actually get to where we need to go, that way,”Juni added. “But it’s absolutely grim, and only a path to take during the day… and never in the rain, when Yin harmonies are strong.”

“—Aiii!” up ahead, there was a curse and the sound of breaking branches.

“Speaking of Yin feng shui,” Brother Ji murmured, looking around with a frown.

“What happened?” he called forward as quietly as he could.

“Hidden fissure between rocks…” Leng called back.

Catching up to Ding, who was the unfortunate victim, he found his friend had incautiously trodden in a dip in the path and nearly collapsed a thin covering of leaves over a fissure between two slabs of rock.

“Oh yeah, there’s a fair bit of that in this valley as well,” Jun Sana confirmed, peering in with a frown. “Watch your step.”

Looking at the overgrown slopes of the cloud forest, with the thick, mossy substrate hiding roots, rocks and fates-knew-what else amid tangled boulders, he shuddered.

Fortunately, nobody fell into anything else after Ding, and they made their way out the other side, into another rising valley full of Urki and tropical pine, at which point all the Hunters stopped at a convenient overlook.

It took him a moment to realise they were, again, having a conversation using sign language.

“What’s the issue?” he asked, surveying the swaying treetops below them.

“…”

Arai and Juni both looked at him, before Juni finally spoke.

“Heaven blaze pines.”

“Yep,” Sana agreed. “There are several groves of them scattered across the higher, better-drained slopes on the far side.”

“As in… the cones they use in alchemical bombs?” he asked, just to be sure they were talking about the same trees.

“Uhuh, this is one of the places where they come from,” Juni confirmed.

“So… we are still in the Inner Valleys?” Leng muttered.

“Yep, we will be until we reach the Jasmine Gate,” Juni confirmed. “Though that will be tomorrow’s fun and games.”

He wasn’t sure what he expected, crossing the valley, but in reality, it was a very anticlimactic hour of scrambling over rocks to locate a stream and then following it down to finally arrive at… a sprawling set of ruins in the familiar style of block walls and colonnaded buildings. It was properly dark now as well, though they encountered very little in the way of qi beasts before arriving at the ruins. The most dangerous thing was a three-metre-long forest centipede, whose inauspiciously-timed ambush, just as they were crossing the torrent, nearly sent Ding and Mao swimming before it was hacked apart with real prejudice.

They didn’t linger in the town, but, following Sir Huang and Juni, quickly made their way along the main street to arrive at a plaza that was… remarkably like the one in the upper city, or the ruin with the lake, now he thought about it.

“Whoever built these really did have a template,” Ding muttered as they located a rock-cut stairway up the cliff and started climbing.

“They did,” Sir Huang agreed, drily.

They had climbed about halfway up the path when he paused… because there was something subtly… different about the air all of a sudden.

“What…?” Ding, ahead of him also stopped, as did the others.

“…” Juni sighed and patted the rock, staring out into the gloomy rain, over the treetops.

“Is that because it’s a ridge?” Din Kongfei frowned, staring at the swirling cloud.

“Nope, just keep climbing, you will hate this mist in like… ten minutes, so enjoy feeling cool for now,” Sana said, from behind them.

“…”

Indeed, after only a few minutes more of climbing, he realised why she had sounded so unenthused. The mist was cool… but there was nothing remotely refreshing about it. He would not have believed it was possible, were he not experiencing it for himself, but somehow it managed to incorporate the very worst of the humidity, the rain and the temperature into one flawless package of misery. By the time he reached the top of the almost endless-seeming set of stairs up the cliff, he was more aware than he had been since he first arrived in Misty Jasmine Inn as to how wet and outright miserable he was up here.

The Hunters and Sir Huang led them warily through several overgrown streets and then up a second broad flight of stairs in a thirty-metre-high cliff and through more buildings to final arrive at a semicircular plaza carved into the side of a large rock outcropping at the top of the ridge, surrounding a circular pool. Beyond it was a broad fissure cut through the outcropping that presumably led to another plaza or something on the far side of the ridge.

“We can rest here, pick a room, replenish and recuperate,” Sir Huang said, looking around at the buildings.

“Don’t go down the stairs, it is only this portion that is the ‘ridge line’!” Juni added.

“Okay, let’s go get some food, before people start fainting,” Sana muttered, heading for a building on the right side which someone had fixed up a bit.

Heading inside, he found it was surprisingly spacious. The main room had several smaller ones off it, a corridor heading back into the rock and a few spirit wood doors stacked on stone blocks, along with some sealed pots in the far corner of the main room.

“It’s used semi-regularly,” Sir Teng said as he looked around. “This is like Misty Jasmine Inn… just less salubrious.”

“Ah… I see,” he replied, mostly by rote, because the exertions of the day were really…

-Shit, he scrubbed his face for a moment, trying to focus.

“How is Mun?” he asked Sir Huang, who had put Mun down on the ground at this point.

“…”

“He is no worse than he was,” Sir Huang sighed. “That’s a small victory I suppose.”

Arai, who had knelt down beside Ha Mun, just grimaced and put her hands on his chest.

He watched as she repeated whatever it was she was doing, noting that the skin on her hands was flaking away quite steadily. Having experienced that himself, albeit only briefly, it was hard not to shudder.

-How does she handle the pain? he found himself wondering, looking on as she kept that up for almost a full minute before sitting back and sighing.

“You should put out a bedroll or something for him,” Arai said, glancing up at him.

“Won’t he just corrode it?” Leng asked.

“…”

Jun Arai sighed and took out two bundles of cloth. Spreading one out on the ground, she dragged Mun, who was barely clothed at this point, onto it.

“Uh… thank you,” he muttered.

“It’s nothing,” Arai replied, almost distantly.

“It’s… not,” he managed at last, wondering why that felt so hard to say. “Because of you Mun is still alive…”

“…”

She stared at him, then at Mun, her eyes again oddly… empty.

“Keep an eye on him,” she said at last. “If he looks like he is getting worse, let me or Sir Huang know.”

“O...okay,” he agreed, sitting down against the wall as she headed off to speak to her sister.

“S… s…orry,” Mun managed to rasp, then coughed, bright red blood dribbling from his lips.

He stared at his friend, with his pallid face that looked almost like the skin was cracking in places, as if he were made of fine china, suddenly not quite sure what expression he was supposed to make.

Taking a bit of cloth he wiped the blood away, then took his canteen and raised Mun’s head up so he could take a bit of a drink.

-Why the fates did I bring him here… he asked himself.

He sat there, in silence, watching the Hunters bustle about, setting up something approaching an actual camp. Jun Sana and Lin Ling had soon fixed up a fire and were preparing some food. Jun Arai helped them for a bit, before going into the side room that Kun Juni had claimed, presumably to talk to her for a bit. Han Shu was also in one of the side rooms, sitting with his back to a wall, his eyes closed.

Of the others, Ding, Mao and Jiao had sat down together and were talking quietly about something. Leng…

“—looking for something?”

He flinched as Leng came out of the room to his right.

“Was just wondering where you were,” he replied.

“Claiming a room,” Leng said drily, sitting down next to him.

“Ah… good idea,” he replied, trying to sound more upbeat than he felt.

“What a day…” Leng muttered, staring over at Caolun, Mangfan, Din Kongfei and Din Ouyeng, who were all sitting on the far side of the hall watching Jun Sana and Lin Ling.

“Why are we even here…” he said at last.

“Because you’re an idiot,” Leng muttered.

“Because I was tricked by a spirit herb, pretending to be s-Ha Faolian?” he asked, not quite sure how to take that.

“…”

“Yeah, I guess, although that makes us all idiots,” Leng said.

“Speak for yourself,” Lin Ling muttered.

“We are just as much victims in this as your group is,” Leng grumbled.

“Yeah, except you had a choice to come here,” Lin Ling scowled. “Whereas we are here because your clan tried to screw the dog.”

Sana shot Lin Ling a sideways look. Lin Ling shrugged and spat into the fire.

-Well, I suppose she is not wrong…

-We are here because the Ji and Cao clans tried to get easy gains from others’ work, both Ha family and Bureau alike.

He sighed and sat back… and stared at the squirrel, which was sitting on a masonry block that had presumably been part of a door lintel, watching Sana cook.

“…”

The squirrel stared back at him, then made the symbol for ‘Fang’ with its paws and fell backwards into the lintel, vanishing.

He stared dully at the block where it had been.

“Uh… Leng?” he asked.

“Yes, sorry, what?” Leng turned to look at him.

“Did you… just see a squirrel there?” he pointed at the block.

“Uh…”

Leng stared at the block, then at him, and shook his head.

“…”

He stared at the flat block, then at the fire, and then back at the block. The only thing that stood out was that the lintel had carvings of animals on it…

-Did I just imagine that?

Looking around, nobody else seemed to have noticed anything at all odd.

Pinching the bridge of his nose, he sat back and stared up at the ceiling. The squirrel peered down at him from a hole in the roof.

“…”

“—Yun?” Leng poked him in the side.

With a flinch, he realised that he was being offered soup by Ha Ding.

“Uh… what?”

“You fell asleep for a moment,” Leng said reproachfully.

“Ah… oh,” he grimaced and accepted the bowl of soup gratefully.

-That would explain a lot, he reflected.

Taking a deep gulp he found that it was both spicy and surprisingly delicious.

“Sbizy,” he sniffed.

“It is, yeah,” Leng agreed, pouring some milk from his storage ring into his bowl.