Memories of the Fall

In few cases do we have more cause to be grateful, for the aforementioned difficulties of creatures born within the confines of the Yin Eclipse to leave the valleys of their birth, than with the various sub-species of ‘stalker’ – most notably the ‘tetrid stalker’.

For a physical depiction of a tetrid stalker, refer to the attached illustration[2,3,4], but in addition to the obvious features note that while resembling both a scorpion and spider the tetrid neither produces webs nor has a stinger on its tail, although its carapace leans towards the armoured nature of the scorpion. As regards the ‘tail’, it is used to produce truly obnoxious area-denying clouds of acidic, paralytic venom and, being unique to the females of the species, is also a reliable means of determining the gender of the adults – male tetrids have only an elongated abdomen rather than a tail and so produce their more corrosive venom from their mouths instead.

Physically, all tetrid stalkers are intimidating and intelligent – adept and cunning ambush predators from the moment they hatch and with an innate ability to manipulate feng shui. Juveniles are ‘merely’ hard to notice, moving in deceptive ways, but young adults and full adults can use qi-camouflage and minor illusion. Given their speed, their ability to conceal their presence and their dangerous venom, the suggested means of engaging adult tetrids is at range, with arts able to counteract their venom clouds – yang-aligned lightning, fire or water arts.

However, the most dangerous characteristics of the tetrid stalker are not individual. The real terror of this sub-species comes from their colony coordination and the speed at which those colonies grow. Tetrid juveniles hatch at Qi Condensation and can stalk prey within minutes, being capable of reaching Golden Core and being considered 'adults' within only a few months under favourable conditions. Even worse, compared to those few remaining beyond the forbidden zone, the tetrids of Yin Eclipse communicate and control their colonies via a combination of pheromones and bestial Martial Intent rather than a sort of ancestral soul-link. Foreign tetrid queens are required to reach Nascent Soul to control their brood and Immortal before they can lay eggs that maintain this link, while those of Yin Eclipse, likely as a mutation induced by surviving in a place where active soul manifestation is impossible outside of one specific locale, can act as fully functional, and reproducing, queens at Golden Core.

As such, the standing expectation for all hunters is that all nests be reported if found and if possible exterminated immediately, assuming it is possible to do so without danger to the hunter, especially in the outer valleys.

Excerpt from Beasts of Yin Eclipse, Volume 4.

~by West Flower Picking Town Hunter Pavilion Elder Ling.

~ Jun Arai – Outside the Mysterious Ruin ~

*uwwwwuuuunnnn…..*

-What just…

Arai shook her head, or tried to, because her senses were totally disorientated amid the chaos unfolding all around her.

-Oh… second scream….

-Fate-thrashed tetrid stalkers!

“…my Spirit and Heart are strong, bringing Renewal to the Body and tempering the Soul…”

The words of her mantra, turned into an… actual mantra, echoed in her head, spoken by her, within her mind’s eye, as she fought against the lingering echoes of the enraged howl of the adult, female tetrid stalker. Outside the suppression zone, that would have been a soul attack, and not a weak one. Inside, it was still approaching it, but it was… odd…

-Odd?

-Odd.

Her thoughts wavered strangely, not… splintering, just dissociating slightly from the shock she had sustained for a moment before she sorted out her subconscious thoughts from her real ones.

Rain still fell, the vegetation all around her shuddering and shivering as the last remnants of that second—

*CRACK*

The detonation made her push herself even further into the loam as something very tree-like smashed nearby…

*Tkk Tkk Tkk Tkk Tkkkk…*

-Go-be-reborn-as-a-dog! she half cursed, half screamed in her own head, forcing her body to move as she rolled away from where she was, trying to keep some awareness of her surroundings as the tetrid stalker shook its back legs, sending out a reverberating summons that doubled as a Martial Intent-infused sound attack.

Her mantra wavered for a moment, her attempt at forcing it nearly messing everything up before she caught herself—

Something serpentine, maybe a metre long, landed nearby with a non-standard number of legs. Without really thinking too hard, she grabbed at it as it shot up her arm, feeding pain into her mantra as many sharp legs clawed at her—

“Spirit and Heart, the Renewal of your Body unmade and your Soul broken!”

The centipede, which was a Golden Core realm critter, reflexively twitched twice and died as she punched her qi and intent through it before it could bite her.

*KUUAAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSK!*

The world wavered, though this time she had been ready for the howl and let her mantra feed off the confusion, turning it into recovery as she scrambled away.

‘Spirit, Heart, Renewal, Body, Soul’

She cycled her mantra, normally this time, feeling a little strange as she did so after the harmonious torrent that had been its longer, fuller form, and swept her surroundings, quickly taking in the chaos around her. As a method, using her mantra like an actual mantra – a trick known only to inheritors who had had it passed down properly – and focusing all the mnemonics to a singular purpose made it much more effective in terms of immediate impact. If there was a downside, it was that while a ‘normal’ use of the mantra could be maintained almost indefinitely, doing quite a few things, the ‘long form’ required active focus to do so, and at her current realm was prone to easily being disrupted as the focus required put incredible strain on your ability to multi-task and by extension your psyche as a whole. As a result, she rarely used the longer form, except for moments like that, where she had to guarantee a decisive result.

Thankfully, her little saga with the centipede appeared to have gone unnoticed, probably because the female tetrid was going berserk, trying to murder everyone else below her. That nobody had actually died yet was largely because of the ‘oddity’ she had subconsciously registered moments earlier – namely that the tetrid, like all of them, was not in fact a native of Yin Eclipse, and thus was every bit as suppressed as they were.

“CUT ITS LEGS!” one of the cultivators below screamed.

{Fu Kan’s Lash}

A bolt of lightning, unleashed by the same type of talisman she had used in the Red Pit, scoured the tetrid’s carapace, leaving glowing frond-like patterns but not accomplishing much else as the stalker easily blocked the bolt.

-So, it’s at least Nascent Soul, she judged, maybe even Dao Seeking.

“Heavenly Virgin’s tits… use a stronger—!”

The exclamation was lost to her, and probably everyone else, as the stalker swayed back and uncurled its tail—

{Fu Kan’s Spea—

She picked herself up, swallowing down blood as the afterimages of trees and strange patterns in the rain vanished into normal trees and rain while the explosion, caused by the ignition of the acidic mist from the stalker, faded away.

-Idiotic lunatics! a part of her swore, her own mantra still ringing in her ears.

Several stunned critters, a spider and a—

She reflexively stabbed the cave centipede, all long legs and spines, upon spotting it an arm’s length from her face, then quickly checked there was nothing else obnoxiously horrible dislodged from the landscape nearby. Satisfied that there was not, she scrambled under a smoking, half fallen tree and got a better look at the aftermath of the chaos below.

The two physical cultivators were nowhere to be seen, while one of the gang members – or mercenary experts, there was little difference in her mind at this point – was flailing in the water, cursing, where they had been thrown. The others were emerging from behind rocks or the fallen statue, while the tetrid was shaking itself, again largely unhurt and clearly sizing up its opponents.

-Definitely Dao Seeking, she judged with a grimace, her ears still ringing from the noise of the blast.

Odd movement caught her eye, at the entrance to the cavern. A moment later, she saw one, then two… then maybe a dozen smaller tetrid stalkers emerge from the shadows, each about the size of a cat, skittering over collapsed awnings and rocks, aiming for the reeling cultivators. Those she spotted clearly through the rain and the chaos all had darker, freshly moulted exoskeletons, the yellow missing, replaced by a faint red tint…

“…”

Before she could even articulate how utterly moronic someone had clearly been, the others, who had been turning to see what the screams were about, noticed the new arrivals as well.

“SHIT, the others are—!”

“KILL THEM YOU IDIOT—!”

“Ahhaiaai!”

“—Erdan!”

{Flaying Mists of Jiong}

{Mei Mei’s Fire Flower}

{Echo of Mun}

{Lu Pei’s Hammer}

A veritable barrage of talismans scoured the cave entrance, even as she looked around for the adult tetrid, wondering where it had…

The adult, right on cue, dropped its disguised form, a trick that made the adults a thorough pain because it was part feng shui manipulation and part illusion, and smashed a foreleg into one unlucky cultivator whose qi armour didn’t stop them bouncing twice on the lake with a wretched scream before vanishing into the reed beds on the far side.

Two others nearby hurled talismans at it which transformed into shimmering bindings, grasping it directly until it spun, sliced off its own leg… and regrew it instantly, nearly impaling one of the talisman casters.

-Oh wonderful… it’s an Immortal… or maybe quasi-Immortal, she groaned.

Two barriers flared, blocking off its attack… at which point the female physical cultivator appeared like a mirage before the tetrid’s ‘face’, slapping her hand onto its head—

The tetrid recoiled, presumably as the woman’s mantra did its bit, though that didn’t make her any happier as she looked on.

-So, she is also a mantra inheritor… that’s… sub-optimal, she thought sourly, feeling quite a bit of familiar resonance in the way she used her intent.

“Finally!” one of the cultivators snapped, pulling out a talisman of their own. “Just hold it right there!”

{Mu’s Multifarious Mountain}

“NO, YOU—!”

The woman actually screamed at the over-enthusiastic cultivator who had just tossed a talisman version of a Dao Seeking grade, earth element sealing formation out… locking the tetrid down for about half a second, before it exploded into loam and fell into the ground.

“…”

“AAAAIIIIIIEauk—!”

The unlucky talisman caster screamed as four limbs exploded out of the ground, followed by the rest of the tetrid, as it erupted in a swirl of earth element qi, dirt and rock, narrowly failing to tear the luckless idiot in two. Even so, she suspected he would be fortunate to recover without dropping a realm; half his abdomen was gone and one arm was totally severed before two other cultivators smashed machete blades into the legs, just about managing to chop them apart and send the tetrid staggering away.

“Stupid bitch!” one of them yelled at the woman. “How could you lose control over it for a little formation!?”

Shaking her head, she had a strange pang of sympathy for the nameless Easten expert, who had done everything right, only for her gambit to be ruined because the cultivator didn’t understand how the suppression worked.

“Just because it’s suppressed to Golden Core doesn’t mean it’s not still an Immortal monster you son of a dog!” the woman snarled, backing up as the tetrid regrew its two legs in a matter of moments and rounded on her.

“What the fates did it just—?!”

-Qi manifestations are not soul manifestations… and an Immortal monster can still put out a Golden Core grade qi manifestation… The wise advice of Old Ling… and a few others since, echoed in her head as she saw that reality play out before her.

“It’s a qi manifestation!” one of the other cultivators barked, “Still suppressed to Golden Core though!”

“Fates get buggered… aren’t those suppressed, those should be suppressed!” one of the others yelled from behind the collapsed statue.

Between the two groups, the tetrid swayed left and right… then abruptly collapsed into loam again, vanishing.

“…”

“What…?”

“Where did it go?”

“Where is it?”

The confused exclamations echoed over-loudly in the suddenly much quieter surroundings.

-Ah…

She looked off into the forest, realising what might have happened.

-If it’s not native to this valley… it can leave as it pleases…

-Has its real body gone after the one who was ‘binding’ its kin? It will be able to follow them by their scent trails…

“Dog shit!” one of the cultivators suddenly swore.

-Or is it just faking out… they are smart enough to do that, she thought with a grimace, quickly looking at her surroundings again, hunting for places it might be lurking, waiting for the opportune moment to strike. Unfortunately there were far too many of those.

“Maybe it’s gone after Yeng and the others!” a cultivator exclaimed, warily standing up and looking around.

“How?!”

“If that goes out… it’s… SHIT!”

She stared into the gloom of the forest, her mantra keeping a tight grip on her emotions, recalling the stories from the previous day about a rogue tetrid that had attacked villages, laid out Elder Fei and presumably some others, then been ‘dealt with’, leaving no official record of its destruction with the local militia.

-What are the odds that this and that are actually related? she pondered grimly.

“How can it follow… they must be…”

“Miles away?” the male Easten expert answered derisively, staring around warily.

“Tetrid queens can track the pheromones of all their brood for tens of miles…” one of the other Easten experts who had been diving in the lake added.

“—especially their successor kin,” the woman agreed with a frown, staring around at the forest and the cliffs with narrowed eyes.

“If it goes to the village, there will be an extermination called…” one of the others pointed out, sounding rather nervous now.

“We can blame it on the hunter!” another snapped.

“How do you plan to swing that?” Wen Suan spat, crawling out of the shallows where he had taken refuge.

“It’s clear she went into the Red Pit… came out of it too,” Ha Kwan pointed out. “Outside of the upper echelons of the Pavilion nobody knows enough about that place to be able to deny it. With Elder Fei side-lined, by the time they sort it out…”

Ha Kwan stopped for a moment, then shrugged.

“In any case, Elder Mu is not up to speed with things, so it will be easy enough to sort out. I know something of her background, so the Ha clan will be happy to go with superficial excuses to push the Kun clan here and the West Flower Picking Pavilion into a disadvantageous position.”

-Really now…? she mused, surveying her surroundings warily, because she really doubted that their barrage of talismans earlier had gotten rid of all the juvenile stalkers. Is that why you stole my ginseng and the body?

“Fine, warn the others, if they can head it off maybe it won’t come to that and we can use its escape to cover our tracks...” the cultivator who had been giving orders after ‘Ku’ departed said.

“The question is where are Old Ku and Sir Huan?” another added, looking back in the cave

“…”

“Maybe it did for them already,” one of the divers remarked, not sounding that cut up about the idea to her ears.

“Bah!” the leader scowled, stalking over towards the ruin of the camp, followed by two others, presumably to recover whatever artefact they had been using for distance communication.

The others sighed and started to relax as he shoved aside the torn canopy and—

The tetrid dropped off the cliff, where the shadow of the massif had meant its form was not so obvious in the rain, pinning one luckless cultivator to the ground with two limbs, though again, not killing him. The leader blurred away with a curse, but still managed to get hit by a stray leg, sending him crashing into the ruins of the camp, while the last, frozen, found himself face to face with the crouching tetrid.

In one smooth motion, the insectoid predator leant back and spat another cloud of searing venom across the entirely unprepared group who had relaxed their guard.

“Arriiiggggggsh!”

The luckless cultivator standing right in front of the tetrid was sent sprawling, flailing in agony.

“Noooo my…”

“Ahgggggghhh!”

“Aashsssff! You motherless—!”

“Guaaaaahh… my! —Ucccskkk!”

“—Mother!”

-And that, folks, is why we don’t antagonize qi beasts… she reflected grimly, ducking down under her half-fallen tree, even as the others all scattered chaotically for cover, screaming and cursing amid the roiling cloud. And probably why Huan and Ku have not reappeared, they want to strike decisively, once they are sure that they have its physical body.

Gritting her teeth, she carefully looked around for her compass, which had fallen to the ground during the chaos. Finding it in the dirt, she picked it up and sent some qi into it, then glowered and resisted the urge to toss it down again.

-May monkeys piss in your tea! I liked that compass! she complained in her heart, staring at the ‘absolute reading’ frozen on it even as her mantra consumed her anger, using it to boost her recovery.

Two more quick tests proved that it had indeed been totally ruined, the alignments within it fused by exposure to whatever had happened a few minutes prior.

Grinding her teeth in frustration, she took the beggars’ compass out of her pouch.

“Oh fates go curse your own nine generations!” she hissed under her breath as her beggars’ compass twisted once and then ‘died’ before her eyes, again telling her that now was ‘the most auspicious time ever’ to recover corpses.

“…”

Shaking her head she shoved the ruined compass back in her pouch, frowned for a moment, then quickly grabbed a bunch of suitable materials – from those she had habitually gathered while approaching the cavern – from her storage talisman and made a new one. This, thankfully, worked just as she had hoped, although it only told her in no uncertain terms that the nearby surroundings were very inauspicious to her personal wellbeing. A second test told her that now was indeed the most auspicious time to recover bodies… however that was… diminishing.

She considered it, turning that over in her mind a few times. On the one hand, that likely meant that the longer the fight went on, the harder it would be for her to sneak in, probably because over a dozen cultivators would win out… eventually. On the other, the abruptness of that shift, and the fact that it had broken both her extant compasses, including one that had survived trips into the Inner Valleys and encounters with the threats there… was suspicious. There were ways to mess with compasses, and they were expensive enough that destroying them was a viable way to inconvenience someone, or annoy them into making rash decisions.

-Is this related to my alignment talisman use from earlier? she frowned, ducking slightly as a piece of cave collapse crashed into the forest near her, having been deflected by the tetrid.

Pulling out her alignment talisman, she considered it pensively then slapped it on her arm. Next, she checked the teleport talisman, which was thankfully still working. It was high enough quality that most commonly available locking formations shouldn’t interfere with it, not that she necessarily wanted to trust to that. Finally, she donned a nondescript grey and brown robe and a grass hat, stashed her Bureau talisman and everything else vaguely incriminating into her storage talisman, which she then tightly bound around her right wrist, the jade flat to her skin and hidden by luss cloth wrapping, and glanced over at the fight once again.

The cultivators had recovered and she noted that two more had rushed out from the cave, though neither were Ku or Huan.

-Maybe it did take them out… though the way it exited the interior did not look deliberate… What if my presence has been noted and this is all a trap to draw me in, looking for the bodies in a predictable manner?

That last thought was… not pleasant, however, it also suggested a degree of forward planning that looked rather at odds with what she had witnessed up to that point.

-Unless the perpetrators… Ku or Huan just see this lot as disposable and the release of the tetrid… is designed to cover this all up?

“…”

Staring at the dirt for a moment, she sighed, knowing that in her heart the decision was… unchanged from her earlier determination in many ways. Not to mention, she still needed clear proof to not self-inflict the very thing Ha Kwan had just talked about in any event.

-Well, with the suppression it’s not that important… the key thing is an opening…

Turning back to the fight, she ran through what the stalker had been doing, thinking about how it was rather carefully stretching out its ‘cries’ for maximum impact.

-It’s been almost long enough since it spat venom for it to recover its stamina, she judged, recalling her previous experiences with adult tetrids and steeling herself pre-emptively. Which should mean any time… about… now—

*KUAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSK!*

Almost as she predicted it would, the tetrid shrieked again, sending out deeply disorientating waves of intent to pressure everyone. Such creatures were not stupid, quite the opposite in fact, and near as she could tell the creature’s goal was to keep its prey on the back foot. Likely it wanted fresh bodies for more spawn… live cultivators would be preferable to dead… so it had to wear them down sufficiently. That meant lots of poison, lots of screams… a few ambushes.

-And it’s still possible that this is just a manifestation it’s channelling… she thought grimly, again sweeping her gaze across her surroundings, looking for anything abnormal or out of place.

Satisfied that she was in the clear, she at last made her move, slipping under the fallen tree and into the shrubbery overhanging the path. A quick glance told her that everyone was focused on the tetrid, who was now charging after the physical cultivators, very much aware that they were the biggest threat.

{Empty Eye Steps}

Holding her breath, she stilled her heartbeat and dropped down into the rubble below to hide again, in the shadow of a tangled vine—

A flailing limb caught one of the cultivators in the side and sent him smashing into the low cliff a few metres away from her. The youth, who as luck would have it had darkish brown hair about her length and a tanned complexion, twitched a few times but didn’t get up, so she quickly vaulted over her rock, dragged him fully into cover of the ferns he had fallen into and stole his hat.

Making sure he really was properly out, she then crawled back out—

“Hey… you okay?”

She half glanced at one of the other cultivators who had now spotted her and half shook her head, pointing to her stomach and head.

He nodded, made to move towards her, then threw himself flat as the tetrid spun, seeing an opportunity, and lashed out a limb towards them both—

The wave of intent hit her like a hammer, jarring her organs, even as her mantra blunted the worst of the blow. She still took the opportunity to be thrown away into the ruin of the camp below her observation point, near where the jars had been, rolling for good measure just to make sure she got the distance. The luckless cultivator who had been trying to ‘help’ her was caught full on and collapsed like a stringless puppet, blood running from his orifices.

“Shit! Don’t go doing that you idiot!” someone else screamed from nearer the water’s edge at the unconscious cultivator.

“The Spirit of the Heart becomes the Renewal of the Body through the Soul… ”

Shaking her head, she recited the mantra in her mind’s eye, feeling her qi surge out from deep within the core of her body and pushed herself up, quickly looking around—

Intuition made her roll away as a small tetrid, the size of her head, struck from the shadows of the collapsed awning, its colours shifting slightly as it moved. Catching it by the abdomen, she sent a withering pulse of her own intent into it… and it died in her hand, legs unable to pierce her skin.

-Not even Qi Condensation? She blinked, surprised. Ah… wait… it is… but has barely got a core.

Crushing the dark, freshly moulted carapace in her fist she found the ‘core’ which was little more than a small peach pit-sized smoky green and brown pearl tainted with the merest corona of red.

-And they can already disguise themselves this well? Today just gets better and better, she glowered and tossed it down in the wreckage of the body, then looked around again, taking in the interior of the cave.

“…”

Her immediate impression was of a tall, cavernous space, maybe forty metres deep by thirty wide, the roof sloping down at an angle at the back, with a large fissure in the ceiling. The floor, which sloped down to the lake slightly, was strewn with large boulders. The right-hand side of the cavern had a second large fissure, also blocked with several more water-rounded boulders, out of which a shallow stream was running, currently dammed and diverted to stop the rest of the cave flooding.

The ‘ruins’ inside were a series of very worn, rock-carved figures, seated in a rough semi-circle around the interior, each on their own boulder plinth… or maybe carved from the boulders themselves. Behind that, somewhat illuminated by lanterns, she could pick out at least four doorways in the rear wall of the cave and a fifth where someone had walled off the fissure on the left that led up into the roof. All in all, the style was quite typical of the way shrines, with the exception of the carved statues in the cave itself, which looked… archaically familiar.

-So, a larger ruin that someone repurposed long ago… now rediscovered?

Her musing was cut off by the appearance of three more cultivators rushing out of one of the exits at the rear of the cave, weapons drawn. Faking being stunned, she watched as they joined the battle, castigating the others for being so useless.

-As expected, there are way more than twelve just waiting around here, she complained inwardly. Nothing is ever simple is it?

There was still no sign of ‘Elder’ Ku or ‘Sir Huan’ either, which was making her nervous.

-I could contact Elder Mu… but there is no guarantee that the Pavilion isn’t outside his control, she thought with a frustrated mental sigh. Contacting Father will cause its own problems as well… which leaves Sana… or Juni?

Listening for the tell-tale scratch of tetrid claws moving on rock, she pondered for a moment, then picked Juni, on the grounds that the Kun clan had local influence here already and her friend could easily find ways to share some information about matters without it getting back to her.

Taking out the talisman, she focused on it… and nearly hit her head on the ground, as she got nothing.

-A formation blocking it? she thought, looking around for any obvious signs of one, but there was nothing…

*KUAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSK*

Another scream from the rampaging tetrid stalker outside the cave made her quickly check in that direction, but it was just the bull-sized beast rounding on the new arrivals and sending one crashing into the cliff below where she had been earlier…

“…”

She watched, frowning as three of the cultivators each got another solid hit on the tetrid, and involuntarily put her hand to the alignment disruption talisman on the inside of her forearm. Using it would be a bit of a gamble, but it didn’t appear as if the tetrid was being puppeted directly. The main concern she had was in controlling its external manifestation so everyone else didn’t immediately realise that someone had…

-First… let’s see if I can’t find one of the formation flags? she decided, reining in her rampant speculation about formations and restrictions. It’s also not impossible that there is something blood ling related going on here, given the red markings on the juveniles.

Casting around, she thought about where it would be convenient within the cavern to continue the formation she had seen outside and found herself looking at the lanterns, set or hung at various random points…

-How did the formation go…?

Sending her mind back, she thought of the formation flags she had seen earlier and the layout the few outside had been in, trying to visualize how that might translate.

The hair on her arms and neck suddenly stood up as a stray bolt of lightning from some unseen talisman or art grounded itself on the far side of the cavern, leaving splotches in her vision for a moment.

“…”

Glancing back behind her again, she saw she wasn’t the only person cursing the deflected bolt, which again reinforced that the tetrid fighting out there was durable beyond what the suppression might lead you to believe.

Deciding that her current location was not the best place to ponder questions of formation alignments, she quickly slipped into the darkness, heading for the nearest lantern that was hanging from the ceiling, bound to a handy stalactite.

Arriving at it, she checked the lantern with a resigned grimace, because just as she had half expected, it was… just a normal lantern.

-So, clearly not every lantern is a flag… but it’s a basic detection one that they added extra layers to… so it will be fairly well structured… she mused, looking around again.

A quick check of two more along the edge of the cavern told her that her hunch had been right, because the third one did hold two formation flags… which were both inert.

-So… I would have wasted an alignment talisman, she judged, looking at both of them.

One was the detection flag; the other, however, she didn’t recognise at all, beyond the fact that her talisman had only partially disrupted it from whatever it did, dissociating it from the formation node.

“…”

Quickly looking around again, she saw nobody paying her any attention and… paused, doing a double take past the far door, the one closest to the boulder-choked chasm, because there was a shadow in it. Using her mantra with ‘Empty Eye Steps’ to avoid moving unnaturally, she waved to the figure, who didn’t respond, barely turning in her direction…

“What are you doing, we need everyone out here!” a shout from behind her made her half turn.

She pointed at her ears, then at her side and shook her head, then pointed at the lantern with the formation, quickly miming a universal sign for ‘it’s broken’.

“Fates get… okay, check the others!” the cultivator called back, to which she nodded, glancing back at the other figure in the shadow of the door… who was gone.

-Right… that’s not creepy at all, she thought, looking around the cavern and wondering how many more—

A small tetrid stalker leapt out of the dark from above, making her step smartly sideways and send it spinning away with a kick into the wall, where it died with a leggy *splat*. Two more shot out of the gloom, one of which she caught, directly, using it to hit the second, sending both freshly hatched critters spinning away, their qi already dispersed by a quick pulse of her intent.

Watching for a fourth one, she considered the placement of the lantern next to her in relation to the others and set her sights on another, hanging off a rock half-way along the cave wall.

Staggering over, she checked it and found her hunch was right, as she found three talisman flags this time, attached to the base of the lantern: two inert, relating to detection and some kind of barrier, the final one the same as in the other lantern, also partially inert.

-It’s a standard large-scale formation then? she thought, sketching the points in her mind. It doesn’t work so much off the auspicious alignments themselves, like you tend to use out here, but follows a rather regimented internal alignment that has to be fit to… a space?

Those had advantages, namely that they could be very modular, allowing for integration of similar formations within the same framework of internal alignments, which in turn allowed for quick setup and easy maintenance. The issue, if you could call it that, out here at least, was that they ate spirit stones like a physical refinement cultivator did spirit food… or you had to find other mediums to power it…

-That will have to eat spirit stones and formation cores… unless… are they using spirit herbs? she wondered, her gaze sweeping across the other doorways.

Taking an unobtrusive glance at her compass, she saw it was pulling her towards… where she had seen the shadow… because of course it was.

“…”

She stared at that door for a moment, seeing nothing in the darkness, and sighed softly, setting off for the next lantern.

Of the other flags in the cavern, she only miscalculated two of the seven, which was interesting to her in its own right, because it implied that whoever had set down the formation had known enough to skip unnecessary flags, or perhaps that they had had especially good documentation with the provided formation.

In the process, she also ended up killing another nine juvenile, hand-sized tetrids, which was actually less than she expected, truthfully. However, looking around as she went, she saw evidence that a fair few had also been killed, shredded or burnt by the early barrage of talismans, so she supposed that those attacking her were the lucky ones or the stragglers.

The first room at the rear of the cavern she checked was very boring; just a pile of crates, some foodstuffs, various tools and the like, all tossed in there. The second was a chamber that had been turned into living quarters, which was in some disarray but otherwise unoccupied, all its lanterns recently extinguished, so she again avoided entering for now.

The third room, close to the middle of the cave, was in fact a long rectangular hall lined with statues that was adjoined by two more doors and appeared to have steps up at the far end. She considered it warily for a moment, before again moving on to the fourth room… where she had ‘seen’ the shade.

In contravention of her expectations, though, it actually held nothing much. It was large, yes, but mostly dedicated to storage with a few stacks of pots in the middle of the room, some crates along the walls, a few statues that had been dragged in and set up that someone had been cleaning and… that was it. Again, she didn’t really enter, just examined it from the doorway, in large part because the potential risk of having tetrids fall on your head while going into such places was quite high. What did stand out though, was that here too all the lanterns had been extinguished, recently as well, because smoke still drifted in the air.

“…”

“How is it?”

She turned to find one of the other injured cultivators had stumbled in to the cavern from the fight outside. Thinking quickly, she shook her head, pretending to not quite understand.

“Ah… intent shock,” the male cultivator remarked, his grimace barely visible.

“That idiot Yeng was meant to have them all sealed up in the hall… how did that big one get out here even?” he complained, looking around—

A lantern near the doorway of the living quarters, one of the formations ones, fell over, making the cultivator turn.

-Oh come on… this is getting beyond a joke, she complained, stepping smartly away from the doorway behind her, just in time to pre-empt three tetrid stalkers, a bit larger than the ones she had seen before, skipping out almost in a line, aiming for both of them.

She stomped on the second one, then kicked the third away with enough force that it left a fluorescent, smoking smear on a nearby stalagmite-encrusted boulder. The cultivator spotted the last one, stumbling backwards and trying to hit it, his reactions oddly clumsy…

-Oh, poisoned! she realised, understanding what was going on, and darted towards him.

The tetrid saw her coming and ducked away into the shadows, breaking line of sight and vanishing amid the rocks and shadows cast by the lantern behind the cultivator.

Sweeping her gaze across the flickering edges of the lanterns, which were offering only partial illumination and annoyingly deep shadows, she fought the urge to sigh again.

“D…dangerous,” she rasped, deliberately making it sound like her vocal chords had been injured.

“You sound a bit…?” the other cultivator stared at her for a moment, before again trying to look two ways at once, his back against the rock.

Shaking her head, she pointed at the nearby tetrid corpses, then at her neck, hoping her deception worked.

“Hinjury,” she rasped. “Pillsh, b..but harrd to… spee-kuuuh-hu!” her attempt at speech ended in a stifled, barely audible cough, making him nod understandingly.

“Phoison,” she hissed for extra emphasis, pointing again at a tetrid.

“Shit… dogshit thing… that bastard Yeng should have kept a closer eye on them!” the male cultivator complained, still looking from side to side.

“For…mations damaged,” she added, pointing at the lanterns and making a sign for ‘all broken’.

Frowning, the youth glanced at the lantern above him, which held one of the nodes, and grimaced in disgust.

“Ku, Huan?” she asked.

“Faugh,” he spat, looking around again. “Dunno, maybe the spiders did get———”

His words were cut off as a soundless howl from the female tetrid outside made the air in the cavern waver unpleasantly. Involuntarily, she put a hand to her ear, glad she had her mantra to help, but even with it, blood was running out and her vision was not quite right, the shadows bleeding in unpleasant ways, shapes twisting in the darkness.

“— —— ——!” the other cultivator screamed something, his words lost in the ringing absence of sound, even as he had to drop to his knees, barely able to stand as blood ran out of his nose and ears.

Her gaze caught two tetrids slowly creeping across the rock behind him, only visible to her because she knew what to look for in the flickering borders between shadow and light from the lanterns.

Thinking quickly, she stumbled herself, appearing as if the distorting howl from the stalker had done its work… and both tetrids leapt, not for her but for the cultivator. As she anticipated, several more exited the shadows near the living quarters where they had been slowly slinking around, moving now in a straight line that totally messed with your depth perception, making the casual onlooker really underestimate the numbers moving forward, even when the darkness was not trying to paint itself into whirlpools in one’s vision.

-Three… four… six… seven, she grimaced, counting the undulations in the ‘line’ as they covered the distance with reflex-numbing speed—

She gritted her teeth, pushed qi into her mantra and fell straight into them, rolling over two, squashing a third with her falling leg and grabbing a fourth with her hand, splattering it into the floor on the edge of a handy rock. The fifth, sixth and seventh skittered away, dashing into her blind spots.

Behind her, the other cultivator screamed and punched something, missing and hitting solid rock instead.

Scrambling sideways, she narrowly dodged a larger limb that extended out of the shadows of the doorway she had just been beside, materializing into a large dog-sized tetrid with dark grey-green chitin marred by several reddish discolourations.

“Fate-thrashed-bastard—!”

{Fu Kan’s Lash}

The talisman, triggered by the other cultivator, turned the cave around her into a diorama of blazing candles as lightning scythed through a smaller dozen tetrids of varying sizes. The bolt narrowly missed her, grounding itself in the one that had just been about to attack her.

She was about to scramble up when a dull… distortive lag in her mind caught her attention, a moment where the fog of circumstance didn’t quite match…

Two more stalkers descended like spectral executioners out of the darkness, even as she expelled its influence—

The blow came not from the stalkers, but the cultivator, who had hit her, she realised with a talisman that had not manifested its activation seal via widely discernible ‘intent’.

A wave of glittering qi washed over her, the nearest stalker and then the wall behind her, incautiously taking out a lantern with a formation in it as well, even as the cultivator snarled with inarticulate frustration.

-Oh for fates’ sakes, this is…

She cut off her internal, icy anger and rolled away, focusing on her mantra to expel the ill effects of the qi trying to invade her body from whatever he had used. Even the momentary contact had blistered the skin across half her body, an act that would have been crippling were it not for her ability to bury all that and turn it back into recovery and resilience.

“Spirit of the Heart brings Renewal to the Body and Soul…”

-Ancestors curse all blood ling trees, I hate this day! she swore, even as the long form of her mantra echoed in her mind’s eye, locking down her emotional state and repelling the invading qi.

“Watch… it!” she rasped at the other cultivator, swallowing down a palmed qi-replenishment pill

“Nameless inauspicious… you’re not Quanlu!” he snarled after a moment of shocked staring.

It took her a moment to realise why he had arrived at that conclusion, before finding that the talisman the idiot had cast had disintegrated half her robe.

“…”

“Who—?”

Before his shout could carry anywhere, she leapt on him, smashing his head directly back into the rock pillar that had held the lantern. He groaned and tried to fumble for another talisman, but she easily tore the wallet from his hands, tossing it away into the darkness before grabbing him by his hair and smacking his head a second time off the rock.

“Spirit and Heart, the Renewal of your Body unmade and your Soul broken!”

Not willing to take any chances, she punched her mantra, at full strength, straight into his body, visualising him being smothered in the sapping darkness of Yin Eclipse’s suppression. The only part of her mantra that didn’t really engage was the 'Soul' mnemonic, largely she had come to conclude over the years because of the way all aspects of the ‘soul’ were interfered with by the suppression. The mnemonic there worked passively, but any active manifestation was just… blunt.

He tried to fight back, but his qi revealed him to be only a weak Golden Core cultivator and in his current confused and injured state it was easy for her to overwhelm his intent.

“Faugh!” she sat back, shaking her head in disgust once he had fallen properly unconscious and stopped moving, still not relaxing her watch for more tetrid stalkers.

Once she had caught her breath, she quickly got up and hurried towards the doorway at the left-hand side of the cavern, where the wall had been built across the fissure. A quick look inside revealed another hall some thirty metres long, a bunch more statues and a rather traditional-looking altar adorned with foxes and dragons.

-The Ha clan? she thought with some surprise, looking around at the other worn statues in the main cavern which, now that she thought about it, were clearly cultivators, albeit in rather archaic, formal garb.

“So, where did the adult tetrid stalker come from?” she pondered, looking back around the cavern, her mental state still locked rigidly by her mantra.

Grimacing, she quickly stuck her head into the hall. Nothing dropped on her immediately, so she darted inside, making a few random changes in direction before stopping, looking around warily—

With a grunt, she caught the tetrid stalker, ignoring the pain of its limbs stabbing her forearms, and tossed it down on the ground. Pulling out the dagger from her talisman, she stabbed it between its third and fourth thorax segments, feeling the blade skitter off the core.

“Stay down!” she snarled, gritting her teeth and putting her palm on the wound, manifesting her mantra again, inverting ‘Spirit’ and ‘Renewal’ to strike at it.

The creature twitched then its legs curled...

“…”

Not buying its reaction at all, she tore the blade out and lopped off half the legs before it could straighten them to stab at her stomach, legs and heart.

-Cunning things are cunning, she spat, tearing out the core from the crippled thing and examining it.

Much like the puppeted one she had slain on the slope had been, this stalker’s peach pit-sized core was also tainted with a faint smoky red.

-And it’s big for a Qi Refinement one as well… well fed.

Looking around, she fought against the itchy feeling on the back of her neck that made her feel like she was being watched and swallowed down another qi-replenishment pill. None of the stalkers had been stronger than the one she just killed, near as she could tell, which matched well with the theory that most of them were a very new brood.

The maturation rate of such things was… fast, much much faster than spirit herbs, which might take a season or two to gain a proper foundation. In comparison, a tetrid brood could be hatched at Qi Condensation if the queen was high enough realm, and reach Golden Core within weeks so long as they had food. Progression above that in Yin Eclipse was rather stunted, because of the suppression, as far as she was aware, but with sufficient resources it would be quite possible to raise one to Nascent Soul or Dao Seeking within a year or two.

-They must have had a nest here, puppeting the ones with good mutations for scouting and the like… she mused.

Continuing her investigation, she found no other exits from the fissure itself as she went. The space just narrowed after some thirty metres, with the end wall being taken up by a large shrine, partly built and partly just cut out of the rock, within which sat a notably larger pair of statues – a man and a woman sitting side by side holding hands. Both were depicted in early middle age, wearing elegant robes carved with foxes and dragons. The bearded man had a sort of benevolent expression that looked vaguely familiar, though not in any way she could place, while the woman was regal and dignified, a veil obscuring her features. An inscribed symbol held jointly by the pair seemed to read something like ‘Tai’, or maybe ‘Tie’.

-Definitely a later ruin, she judged, comparing the style with what she had seen from South Grove and the Inner Valleys, not lowering her guard for any errant tetrids. There is nowhere near enough floral inscription for it to be from Yin Eclipse itself. Is this some old clan shrine?

Looking around, she saw that most of the other smaller, seated statues had similar, if less ornate, robes. Mostly they were men, but there were a few women interspersed, she now saw, visible mostly because they lacked beards and carried fans rather than swords or blades.

She was about to depart, when she noticed a pair of well-hidden doors in the shadow by the shrine. Frowning, she warily made her way over and peered inside one, finding that it was a passage further into the fissure, which narrowed rapidly until it became a door someone had carved into the rock.

“…”

Considering it for a moment, she glanced behind her but, seeing no evidence of pursuit or tetrids, sighed and silently made her way onwards.

Beyond that door she found a smaller chamber, carved into an octagon with a door on each face, while in the middle was a strange figure with eight arms and four heads facing in each cardinal direction, the plinth below it holding an inscription that, while worn with age…

‘Beware, for Darkness shall claim all who trespass here, Holy Ancestors see all, the Sanctity of Tai is all. Beware, for Darkness shall claim all who trespass here.’

“…”

She stared at the inscription, which had quietly rearranged its ancient text to be understandable, and swallowed, glad she had her mantra to provide mental support.

-It is a tomb… this lot are exploring some old expert’s tomb or ancestral shrine…

The inscription was archaic in tone, but the style was familiar, because some things really didn’t change and one of those things was the formal language for burying the dead and warding against the ill intentions of others.

A quick look to either side told her that those warnings had not necessarily been heeded, because all six of the doorways had been torn open. Thankfully, the damage to the doors was not fresh, though some effort had been made rather recently to clean off a lot of the algae. Warily looking inside one, she found the contents to be… anticlimactic.

The room in question was about six metres by four, well appointed, with a shrine at the far end flanked by four ancestral guardian figures glaring down. The sides of the room were a series of shallow alcoves that likely had once held statues or maybe some treasures or artefacts of import. In the middle of the room there was a blocky altar, about two metres by one, which someone had been in the process of cleaning algae off.

Pulling out her beggars’ compass she watched the various readings just come back as ‘yin, yin, yin, all the yin, nothing but the yin’ and sighed. That was expected, all but confirming that this was exactly what she could see with her own two eyes – a long-abandoned ruin that was a tomb or a shrine.

Grimacing, she stared around again, trying to see if there was any overt evidence of formations that might have been recently added.

Her compass twitched slightly, but settled back into another ‘nothing but yin here’ reading a moment later.

“…”

After looking around for a bit longer and still finding nothing, she eventually returned to the main hall and quickly checked the other side rooms. The other three not on the cardinal directions were all the same as the first one she had checked. The two on east and west, however, were proper shrines, carved with large statues at the end, each one with hands raised. Presumably, they had once held stele or something like it, but the degree of weathering told her that they had long been removed.

*Tak, tak, tak!*

The sound of chitin on rock made her quickly check this way and that, but in fact… the cat-sized tetrid was outside the room, on the wall, poking at the edge of the doorway, apparently unable or unwilling to enter. Upon seeing that it had drawn her attention, it withdrew into the gloom of the corridor, vanishing from her slightly qi-enhanced vision.

A moment later, a large boom echoed through the complex, reminding her that the battle outside was still ongoing.

“…”

She stared at the doorway, with narrowed eyes, then around the octagonal room, expecting a trap, because she knew enough about tetrid stalkers to know that even those only a few hours hatched could be as dangerously intelligent as any mature adult.

Walking back across the room, she actually had to turn her back, breaking line of sight with the doorway in, before they finally moved.

Three stalkers shot out of the side rooms, followed by the one she had just seen from the doorway, accompanied by two others that danced after it, their legs nearly moving in synch, illusionary diffraction off their carapaces making it hard to track the number running in a line—

Puffing out her cheeks, she withdrew the knife from her talisman and cut one straight out of the air.

-Thankfully all of them are weak—

Her rather leading thought was proven ‘wrong’ when her blade hit the carapace of the first one and actually bounced, sending a shock up her arm. Rolling her eyes, she spun with the rebound, connecting with one of the others and flattening it to the ground with a rather icky crunch. Her return blow stabbed a leaping one in the mouth, the blade sinking all the way to the hilt. Discarding the dagger, she caught a fourth by its stabbing foreleg, hurling it against a statue hard enough to leave a fluorescent splatter, then stamped on the fifth.

The remaining two backed off into the shadows, circling away from her as she traversed the room in a semi-circle, heading for the far door. The first leapt from the top of the middle statue, actually managing to land on her shoulder before she killed it with a pulse of mantra-supported intent. The second ran, but not far, because she kicked half a broken pot that was lying on the floor at it with enough force to nearly cut it in two.

Not lowering her guard, she recovered her knife, cutting out the core of that stalker, which was Qi Condensation, much as she had expected. Going around all the others, she eventually found that the one she had originally hit, and which she had killed with the smashed pot, was Golden Core, but all the rest were still Qi Condensation. The Golden Core tetrid was also only two moults old, which meant it been hatched at Qi Condensation.

“…”

-Really, I am not being paid enough for this, she grumbled, noting that all their cores were contaminated with smoky red qi.

She left them where they fell, because there was no point in collecting such cores. You would have to pay someone to take them off your hands for the most part and, given they had all come from a reared brood, it might be possible to trace them back to her.

-No recent formation stuff in here either, she observed to herself, noting that someone had at some point hung a lantern from the main statue in the middle of the octagonal room, but it was not there now.

The far corridor, which descended at a shallow incline, took her to another hall, where the fissure widened out again. The area around the entrance had several lanterns, all recently extinguished, she could see courtesy of the smoke, while a few further out were still lit, providing glimmering, eerie illumination of the flooded fissure.

-Yep… definitely some old ancestral temple, she mused, taking in the statues on the walls, each one with a series of friezes below it, no doubt depicting famous deeds of those ancient elders.

The floor of the ‘hall’ itself was almost completely flooded, bar a few pieces of rockfall and a grid of smaller statues laid out in two groups either side of what was probably a now-submerged path up the middle. The far end, about forty metres away, held a large, five-story pagoda made of stone, set into the fissure and blocking it off entirely. Looking to either side, she could just make out a few other closed doorways, visible on the sides of the fissure.

-Well, this is probably a dead end, she judged, sweeping her gaze across the water, which was rippling faintly here and there as more fell from above.

Her gaze lingered on the side doors for a moment, but all of them were sealed and she could make out fresh gouges on the nearest one suggesting that the group had failed to open it. In any case, she had no intention of wading into the cold, murky waters, so after a moment she turned and hurried back up the corridor.

Returning to the octagonal hall, she had to pause for another enraged shriek from the tetrid queen before making her way back into the first hall of statues and finally the main cavern… which was much as she had left it, except that half the lanterns in it were now extinguished and two more prone figures lay near the entrance, silhouetted in the harsh glare of the outside world.

Crouching down, she checked her compass again, and got nothing at all really in regards to a direction or an auspicious induction regarding the bodies, which made her a bit annoyed even if it was expected. Scrunching up the compass, she quickly put together another one, keeping an eye on her surroundings for any threats, and interrogated it as well… and got exactly the same reading.

Curious, she gave it a much simpler reading, namely ‘is this place dangerous’, and got a… concerningly ambivalent reading back.

-Is something still messing with qi-based feng shui in here?

Biting her lip, she pulled out a handful of talisman coins and tossed them down on an algae patch. The results she got were… more promising, it had to be said, however, they also confirmed her suspicion.

-So, either the alignment disruption talisman was not as effective as it first appeared, or there is something else here messing with…

-Oh…

-If it’s a tomb, of course there will be defences capable of standing the test of time, maybe even the lingering claws of Yin Eclipse given how close this place is to the edge.

Staring into the gloom, she felt a bit silly. ‘Mortal’ divination was anchored on things like tomb alignments and worked just fine, even in Yin Eclipse, though that loophole was availed by very few as far as she was aware because, unlike qi-based divination compasses, you couldn’t just buy one and a manual of corresponding results to know what it was telling you.

Similarly, ‘mortal’ feng shui also worked, but was phenomenally hard to set up within the suppression zone, simply because of how hostile to outside manipulation the alignments were. Probably the complex’s own original alignments had long been claimed by the land, but that didn’t necessarily mean aspects of the local feng shui had totally subsumed them. That was why way stations, which monsters in Yin Eclipse tended to avoid unless baited, were such a valuable resource for those travelling the mountains and valleys.

The rain cascading down over the cave entrance abruptly rippled, shimmering with ethereal colours.

{Eighteen Palms of King Kang}

The whole cavern shook as a vast series of impacts tore through it.

-So, someone is starting to treat it more seriously, she guessed, clenching her jaw and focusing on the stability of her qi for a moment, so her teleport talisman would not trigger abortively.

“Cover! Cover!”

Someone’s scream from outside made her focus her attention there again as three of the cultivators fighting outside dashed back into the cavern.

*Tcch*

Biting her lip, she quickly ducked into the cover of a convenient bit of roof-fall and started to make her way along the rear wall of the cavern.

“Back! Look out!”

A second yell made her glance around and find that the tetrid queen had charged directly inside—

Intuition made her drop flat as a boulder twice the size of her was sent spinning across the cave, ricocheting off others, narrowly missing a cultivator to smash into the roof ten metres to her right and spray rock fragments everywhere.

Scrambling back up, she rolled into the nearest available room, which happened to be the living quarters—

-Shit!

Intuition screamed at her and she kept rolling, barely dodging the opening stab of the stalker that had been lurking in the shadow of a bench right beside the door. Ignoring the sensation of tearing cloth, she lashed out at it, catching something, before being thrown down as a shockwave rolled through the main cavern, jarring her body badly and making her vision blur—

Excruciating pain lanced through her side and she reflexively grasped at the wavering space in front of her, her palm meeting chitinous carapace—

“Spirit breaks the Heart, the Renewal of the Body subverted through the broken Soul!”

Qi flowed out of her, followed by all kinds of suppressed, angry and frustrated feelings, obliterating the sapience of the dog-sized tetrid stalker that had just stabbed her in the side. It didn’t even thrash as it died, such was the unconstrained anger that she unleashed on it. Two more fell out of the air with dull thuds a moment later where the expanding aura of manifested intent had clipped them.

“Mother, your daughter is still alive somehow…” she panted, pulling the claw out of her side, feeding her pain and the dangerous, empty feeling that was the aftereffect of putting that much emotional weight into the attack back into the ‘Spirit’, ‘Body’ and ‘Renewal’ mnemonics.

Pushing the dead tetrid off her, she sat up and took her blade, now stashed at her waist, and hacked open its carapace, affirming that it was also a Golden Core critter. Based on the instability of the core and the lack of any markings inside the carapace, she could only conclude that it was a very young one as well, maybe only days old or perhaps a week at most.

-This is why you don’t mess with these critters! she cursed in her heart, noting that the core was, again, tainted with red. They exceed expectations in all the worst ways! Bastard Yeng, I hope a tetrid hides under your bed in your next nine lifetimes!

That was a bit of wisdom imparted from Old Ling, though concerning qi beasts in general, rather than just tetrid stalkers. All the major groupings of ‘colony making’ insects – spiders, tetrids, ants, some centipedes, the rare occurrences of colony wasps – were horribly dangerous in that regard. Their maturation rate was only limited by available resources and they rarely underwent ‘tribulations’ in their advancement before hitting ‘Immortal’ and even then, not necessarily if they broke through in Yin Eclipse’s suppression zone itself.

Casting a quick look around the room, she stood up, wincing; though the flesh wound was already healing, the phantom pain still lingered and while she could feed it to her mantra, she was already running a dangerous deficit there.

The ‘living’ quarters were kind of what she expected. Mostly a place for those watching the cave or working there to stash their stuff and a few hung hammocks for those who needed them to rest in. One hammock was torn to pieces, a slumped figure unmoving on the floor in its wreckage, blood pooling around them.

Making her way over to the unfortunate victim, she found that he was not dead, but rather unconscious and thoroughly paralysed by tetrid venom. The blood came from the several strips of flesh torn out of his arm and side, but probably he would survive, albeit with some nasty trauma.

Quashing the little bit of sympathy she might have felt for him in other circumstances, she riffled through his belongings quickly. The luckless cultivator had no storage ring, however his talisman wallet held basic offensive and defensive talismans similar to what she had seen being used outside and his waist pouch held some currency talismans, a broken compass and four talismans.

The first one she checked marked him as being an outer disciple of the Jade Willow Sect. The second proclaimed him to be a guest member of the Deng clan. The third was a good luck charm, somewhat akin to those the young boy had been selling in Jade Willow Village. The fourth, however, was really unusual, because it marked him as a three-star ranked Associate Herb Hunter, conferring him the equivalent of a one-star silver ranking.

-Huh…It’s actually genuine? she frowned, turning the Bureau talisman over in her hands. Associate Hunter of Mu Banlu Village Pavilion?

She filed that away in her head to check later. As far as she knew, Mu Banlu was a small village south of Blue Water City on the coastal side of the mountains and was a place she only knew as a random dot on a large map.

The ‘rank’ of Associate Hunter was similarly a weird one, because it was rarely handed out. Compared to a Guest Official of a Pavilion, an Associate Hunter was basically a full Pavilion member but with none of the official responsibilities and all the advantages of being considered a full official. It was, in short a position awarded to cronies or people who had money.

-Though given how hard these are to fake, it’s probably easier to get one issued under dubious circumstances, she reflected.

“…”

After looking at the four talismans in turn for a second time, she set them back down with a vexed grimace.

The Hunter one, if it was genuine, would mark her immediately if she ‘stole’ it. Similarly, on the off chance that the other talismans were genuine, the last thing she needed was some angry discipline hall disciple from the Jade Willow Sect rushing after her before she could explain. In much the same vein, possessing a Deng clan talisman might also cause her more trouble than it solved.

-It’s like everything is just conspiring to screw with me… she grumbled, looking around again, pondering the question of ‘evidence’.

-It’s a compelling picture… but only a superficial—

Another large explosion outside shook the room she was in, breaking her train of thought for a moment as she checked nothing was going to attack her again.

-I suppose I can only risk it… she decided, shaking her head and pushing some qi into her scrip.

The scan took a nervous two minutes, however, rather miraculously in her own eyes, she was not discovered. While it was doing its thing, she quickly went through the rest of the room, but beyond a few bed rolls, some spare changes of robes, a few pots of liquor and some commonly available manuals on dangerous flora and fauna of Yin Eclipse there was very little to provide any concrete identity on the occupants.

Casting a final glance at the comatose cultivator, she sighed and went back to the door, carefully checking the state of the cavern outside.

The tetrid was still rampaging, or putting on a very good act of it, keeping the disparate groups of cultivators under continuous pressure as they wasted minor talismans trying to slow it down and manoeuvre it into a less disadvantageous position.

Waiting until a particularly large explosion had sent everyone scurrying for cover, she darted out and into the shadowed protection of one of the large rocks.

“Hey!!”

She turned, pushing herself into the shadows of the rock as cultivators wearing nondescript robes and leather armour dashed out of the middle door, from the direction of the stairs, one carrying a broad-bladed spear, the other a pair of jade green chakram.

“Thank the fates you’re here, what was the hold-up!?” someone, the ‘leader’ from outside, yelled, his voice infused with qi.

“They have ——”

Whatever the spear wielder had been about to say was lost to the renewed attack of the tetrid queen.

{Ten Thousand Strikes of the Valorous Prince}

The echo of the martial art tore through the cavern, dozens of shimmering shadows swirling as rain drops scattered. A moment later, she heard the sound of what could only be a tree or something similar crashing into water.

A quick check of the time she had been exploring made her sigh. It felt like much longer, but it had only been some fifteen minutes since she first entered the cavern, according to her scrip.

-How time drags when you’re having fun, she complained under her breath, though viewed from a different perspective, the less time this took the better really.

Waiting for another attack to make the whole place shake, she darted for the first storage room she had seen.

This time, she was not ambushed on entry but, much as she had observed, it was just full of food supplies, some mining tools and a few other odds and ends – spare ropes, a spare awning, buckets and so on.

Exiting again, she ducked across the short distance to the other, larger storage room and darted inside, making sure she got plenty of distance from the door as she did so. This time, she heard two dull scrapes as things dropped from above, vindicating her paranoia. Rolling up, she turned on her attacker… and then backed up rapidly, because it was not a tetrid stalker… but the big brother of the cave centipede that had attempted to accost her outside.

-Just when you think it can’t get worse! she groaned, because objectively any cave centipede was several times more vexatious than an individual tetrid stalker.

This one had a body as long as her legs and its own long, segmented legs were close to the length of her arms. It was also pitch black, but with red flesh visible in a few places.

Quickly palming a yang purification pill, in case she did get bitten, she pulled out her ironwood staff and lunged for the creature, striking downwards towards its head.

It swayed away, skittering sideways with preternatural speed.

“Gah!” she hissed under her breath, sweeping the staff in a broad arc ahead of her, making sure she didn’t stop moving as she circled towards it around several pots.

In the shadows of the room she could make out what appeared to be a slumped figure of a male cultivator just to the left of the door now, likely explaining the ‘silhouette’ she had seen earlier.

The centipede burst over the top of the stack of pots, long forelimbs lashing at her—

Swiping one of the limbs away, her stab caught it in the mouth, the staff fashioned from a fallen branch from a ten thousand year old ironwood tree in the upper valleys easily skewering it, even as she did her best to ignore the burning pain across her shoulders and arms from its other trailing limbs.

{Flickering Steps}

Vaulting over the pots, chasing after it as it retreated, she leveraged the staff to smash down straight on top of it, twisting the horrible creature over on itself with an ugly, wet, cracking sound. Immediately, she pivoted away, kicking off a wobbling pot as she leveraged the enhanced reflexes conferred by her movement art to avoid standing in the ichor flowing out of it in all directions.

“Fates I hate those things!” she hissed under her breath, skidding to a halt a few paces away, watching as the dying creature twitched in a lethally poisonous puddle of its own inner organs.

Exhaling, she stood… and then dashed sideways again… before realising that there was nothing there beyond a faint, rippling sense of the manipulation of her own disquiet, reflected by her mantra.

-There absolutely is a powerful blood ling mutate here somewhere… she groaned, pushing down the sense of unquiet in her mind. It better not be the fates-accursed tetrid queen out there…

Making her way back over to the dead centipede, she checked the core for the sake of completion, and found that it too was slightly mutated; the centipede barely qualified as a Golden Core critter really, despite its size. That was yet another reminder, along with the tetrid from before, that nature was nothing if not deceptive.

Taking in her surroundings again, she considered the ambience and concluded that the renewed sense of the blood ling tree’s presence was likely because they had been storing the pots with mutated spirit herbs in the room she was now in. The few remaining pots, all empty as far as she could tell, were certainly of a size with those she had seen out in the forest and being taken away earlier.

There were no other exits from the room, but a quick sweep of the ceiling did show several fissures and a closed, far door with a large fissure down one side where an enterprising centipede might have lurked, waiting for the right opportunity. Finishing her quick circuit of the room back by the dead cultivator, who had had his throat torn out by the centipede, also turned up five dead tetrid stalkers, all bitten in half, their cores consumed, and one tipped-over crate of what had likely been low grade beast cores, perhaps tetrid ones, only a few scattered shards remaining.

Abruptly, the hair on her arms stood up and she tasted a hint of something sweet and pungent in the air.

A second later, a double flare of light swept through the doorway as a powerful metal element talisman triggered somewhere.

There was a huge crash and the sound of something large hitting solid rock with enough force to make her surroundings shake.

Glancing out of the doorway, she saw that the tetrid queen had been hit hard enough to force it back into the cavern once again, half a dozen cultivators advancing, holding up talismans emitting flickering chains of lightning that coiled around its eight limbs as it thrashed by the largest slab with a statue on top of it, trying to use the boulder to break line of sight.

“…”

“Survivors!”

“Two unconscious over here, no sign of Quanlu or Botan though!”

“Check the living quarters, Botan was on break I think!”

“Where the fates are Ku and Huan?”

“You ask me, but who do I ask?”

The last was angry, from the spear wielder she had seen rush out earlier.

“Hurry up and seal it off!” someone else yelled, from the other side.

“You want to do it?” a woman’s voice snapped.

“Maybe I should!” the previous speaker sneered.

-Do I cancel their formation? she mused, peering out from the shadows of the room.

She was just erring towards that, when there was a scream from outside and the sound of water splashing.

“SHIT IT’S OUT HERE!” someone screamed.

“Look out!”

“Help me!”

“What… no!” the Easten expert yelled. “Focus on—!”

“Screw you, bitch, I’m not letting ——!”

Whatever the last person had been about to say was lost as a wall of swirling acid fog enveloped the whole cavern.

Holding her breath, she darted out, taking the opportunity to head for the only door she hadn’t yet been through – the one from where the two guards had hurried earlier.

Behind her, there were screams and curses. Two different barriers flared as a shadow outside surged disturbingly; terrible, enraged intent, laced with a deep, greedy hatred suffused everything.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the attackers striking at the tetrid, which exploded into acid fog a moment later even as the real body, which had been restrained, spun away, severed its sealed limbs and rolled over two luckless cultivators who didn’t even have a chance to scream, before it vanished into the shadows, followed by a barrage of minor qi arts.

Momentarily grateful for the distraction, she ducked into the hall with the statues and found herself face to face with three blade-carrying cultivators, who were staggering back from the venom.

“Hey—!”

She ignored the very ill-advised shout of the first cultivator, ducking out of the way of his uncoordinated grasp.

“Ku!” she rasped, waving a hand frantically at the cavern behind them.

“Shit… he is out of it, just lay him out, we will deal with him once we finish this off!” the guard behind snapped.

-Wait… what?

She pushed herself on through the swirling acid fog, avoiding the grasping hand of the second cultivator who tried to grab her.

“Ai! Get back here!”

Shaking her head, she raced up the corridor and without any hesitation dashed into the side hall on the left and quickly looked around… then looked around again.

The hall was about twenty metres by twenty, dominated in the middle by a sort of hollow pagoda that had clearly been the nest of the tetrid queen. Below it, in the middle of the pagoda was a broad, open altar, all around which were scattered decaying corpses of qi beasts and cultivators in all stages of being devoured… A quick count got her at least two dozen qi beasts and probably as many again in cultivators.

All around the pavilion were scattered dozens of tetrid eggs, a third already hatched near as she could tell, with more moving energetically everywhere she looked.

“…”

She had the presence of mind to use her mantra to stop herself taking a deep breath, because with the sinking yin ambience of the hall and the poisonous fog already welling in the corridor that would not be a good idea.

-Well… this is worse in every way than I thought… she grimaced, putting a hand to her mouth.

“Hey, you!” The cultivator behind her rushed into the room after her.

Without hesitating, she ducked sideways, against the wall by the door, and focused on ‘Empty Eye Steps’, thoroughly suppressing her qi with her mantra.

“Shit, where did they go?” a second voice called from further back.

“I…”

The cultivator stood there, looking confused, clearly knowing enough to not sweep the darkness with his qi sense.

“She can only be in there… it’s not like you’re being asked to comprehend a supreme Dao!”

“Shit... she ran in there? That’s suicide!” the other cultivator groaned.

“…”

There was a second explosion from outside, making the whole cavern shake.

“Shit… shit, shit, shit!” her pursuer peered around inside, looking around at the shadows with narrowed eyes.

Stilling her breath and her heartbeat, she watched him take a further few steps in, up to the edge of the shallow platform by the door, looking around with a grim expression.

Steeling herself, she silently slipped back out into the tunnel behind him, straight into the shadows of a collapsed statue that had been half dislodged from its plinth.

The other two cultivators were now half-way down the hall, jointly using a barrier talisman to force back the worst of the acid fog, so she swiftly crossed the hall and checked in the other room, which was just a large storeroom as it turned out, repurposed into what appeared to be a workshop for binding tetrids. A dozen eggs were stacked carefully on a table, all now hatched, while two large jars had been tipped over, the medicinal fluids in them spilling over the floor.

Slipping into the shadows by the door, she saw the cultivator back out of the room, looking very annoyed.

“Where did they go?” the cultivator holding the right-hand barrier called over.

“No idea…” the one who had chased her spat. “Idiot ran in there like the nameless fate was up their ass and there is nothing… I ain’t going in to look for ‘em.”

“Could it be another of those accursed shadows?” the second cultivator asked, sounding… edgy.

-Shadows… that wasn’t the centipede? she frowned, listening from her hiding place.

“Now don’t be going with that again, it was clearly one of ours, I am not blind!” the first cultivator snapped. “This ain’t a tomb and it's been abandoned for fates know how long!”

“Yeah… you seen what’s up there, do you believe that?” the second cultivator muttered.

“Anyway, did we have a second female mercenary, other than that Easten bitch?” the first one who had tried to grab her asked, sounding puzzled.

“Could it be one from the first group who made it back?”

“Hey! COME ON OUT!” the mercenary who pursued her called into the room she had just been in. “It’s dangerous in there!”

“…”

“Hey, stop shouting!” a fourth voice interjected, footsteps hurrying down the stairs and passing by the room she was in. “What is the problem?”

“One of the idiots outside ran into the nest,” the third speaker muttered.

“If they ran in there, they are dead, or far more confident in their hiding than we are…” the new voice said authoritatively. “Even with that queen bitch out of there, there must be dozens of those bugs still hiding in the corners, waiting…”

“What about that hunter Ku was worried about?” the third one muttered.

“In here? Now?” her pursuer scoffed.

“Weren’t they saying things was being set in motion to ensure she found her way to us…?” the third one added.

-Were they now? she frowned.

“Not your problem, now shut up!” the new voice said flatly.

-So at least one of them is smart, she grimaced, the exchange rather vindicating her earlier caginess in reporting things back, not to mention the feeling like there was politics far above her station involved in this whole mess.

“We have it sealed!” someone yelled from out in the cavern.

“Thank the fates,” the third cultivator muttered.

“Right, you know what’s what, let’s go,” the new voice said flatly, not bothering to hide the ill intent in his tone.

Narrowing her eyes, she listened to the four depart, counting roughly how long it might take for them to get to the main cavern.

There was some distant conversation she couldn’t quite catch, however the first shout of anger confirmed her suspicions entirely, so she pushed her intent into the Immortal grade alignment disruption talisman and steeled herself.

{Li’s Alignment Disruption}

Qi drained out of her and the talisman in equal measure as a smothering blanket of alignment obfuscation dropped over everything—

*KAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHKKKKKK!*

A furious, enraged howl made her vision blur as the tetrid stalker queen’s seal presumably failed along with everything else. In the distance she heard screams, curses and the sound of fighting, both against the tetrid and against the three guards. Before seeing the other room she might have felt a little bad about re-unleashing the queen on the group as a whole, but a room full of decomposing corpses and all the controlled tetrids told her enough about the views of the group as a whole to just let nature do its thing. The conversation between the three guards had just sealed the deal really.

Listening, she waited, but no one else came rushing through, so she pulled out the black bracelet from her pouch and slipped it on her arm and, suppressing all her vital signs with her mantra as best she could, focused on ‘Empty Eye Steps’ in her mind’s eye and slipped back out into the statue-lined hall. Ignoring the din of combat down the hall, she quickly returned to the room holding the tetrid stalker nest.

Unbidden, as she surveyed the room, the sight of the queen tumbling out of the cavern like a toy tossed down by a child resurfaced in her mind.

-And how did it even get out of here anyway? she asked herself, taking in her surroundings, having not really had the opportunity to consider that question before.

The cavern was not that big, dominated by the small pagoda thing in the middle, with a stepped platform at the entrance and a few odd bits around the side that might have been places stele or something once sat.

-While it is possible it form-shifted… it is an Immortal, that is not easy under the suppression and the way it was moving did not look… deliberate.

Frowning, she tried to match up the angle of the flailing tetrid with the door of the corridor in her mind’s eye and got nothing. It was just weird, inexplicable and more than a bit disconcerting.

Shaking her head, she pushed the riddle from her mind again, crouched down and carefully started her scrip recording, watching very carefully in case anything in the room reacted to the marginal ‘intent’ of the action.

Thankfully nothing did, at least not overtly, so, after giving the scrip a moment to build up the requisite image of her surroundings, she made her way silently across the slight raised platform by the entrance, down the shallow steps at one side, and headed towards the nearest of the cultivator corpses. Focusing on the scrip for a moment, she checked that it recorded the location and image properly, then lightly touched the male body’s leg, making it vanish silently into the bracelet. Moving on, she put a hand to an arm, this time of a child maybe fourteen years old, who again vanished.

-This is going to start a riot when they get back, she thought dispassionately, noting that none of those she could see amid the scattered beast corpses had any clothes, goods or anything else with them.

This sad ritual she repeated again… and again… and again, as she moved slowly on, skirting beast remains and the odd pool of foetid water. As she went, she saw that quite few of those dead were in fact villagers, near as she could tell. Most had lost their foundations, those having been gouged out by the tetrids, but otherwise, their features were, in many cases, distressingly intact, their ages ranging from children all the way to old men and women.

By the time she made it about a third of the way around the pagoda, she at last found that her progress had been obviously noted. Two large tetrids, the size of dogs, were stealthily moving through the gloom towards her. Pausing, she retreated, warily making her way directly across the room towards the far side of the pagoda instead, where she again started to quickly store away corpses, checking as she went for any she might recognise.

She had almost half-filled the bracelet by the time she finally found Nen Shirong, his body untouched and still icy cold in the darkness, close to the front side of the pagoda, opposite the doorway. A quick look around didn’t show either Nen Hong or Ha Fenfang though.

*tkkkk Tkkkkk tkkkk*

One of the tetrids made a clicking sound on the far side and she saw several egg-sacs near it stir.

“…”

-Yep, we don’t want that happening, she thought sourly, eyeing the nearby, melon-sized egg-sacs.

Leaving the nest was untenable. Not only were the tetrids present in the ruin mostly mutates, they also had a taste for cultivators flesh and while the new hatchlings might be bound to the valley, leaving them alone would be a disaster for all concerned. Given a season or two, assuming the cultivators didn’t clear it out, the whole complex would be an unassailable nightmare that would take a team of Beast Hunters a lot of effort and expense to deal with.

-Really I should have set up the demise of this place from the get go… she added, feeling a bit annoyed all of a sudden that she had let circumstances get ahead of her and focused too much on the bodies.

A formation of lash talismans might do it, she mused, considering her options, except, I really doubt the tetrids will give me the time, and the environment is not… the best, so that leaves… formations.

Looking at the layout of the cavern, she took out the same high grade formation core she had used to restrain Elder Mu and considered its remaining charge for a moment, then put it away again and consulted her compass. It spun a few times before giving her a vague sense of the elemental alignments of the hall. Picking the nearest point where there was a confluence of yin life, she planted an earth element ward stone, then a fire one, and watched the compass shift. Sighing, she added two more, then another, before it finally moved in a way that looked convincing for setting up the ‘Yin Devouring Worm’ formation.

-Good thing they gave me lots, she muttered to herself, embedding two more fire ones by a rotting corpse of a small cow.

Returning to the task in hand, the recovery of the rest of the bodies, trying not to feel aggrieved at herself for not having been scattering ward stones from the start, she finally completed her circuit after several agonizing minutes that culminated in her having to throw a few rocks to distract the paranoid and uneasy tetrids from the last few bodies. When she was done, however, she still had a problem she found, because the Ha clan youth she had recovered was not among them, nor was anyone with the likeness of Elder Li… and nor was Ha Fenfang or Nen Hong.

-Why is nothing here ever simple? she complained, looking around for any she might have missed among the animal corpses, which she had largely left undisturbed.

Unfortunately, as if to mock her hopes thoroughly as she silently picked her way back around the room, she could see nothing she had missed, not even any bones, which she had also been gathering up as she went.

In the end, all she could do was bury her anger and frustration and place a second set of fire and earth ward stones as she went, before finally returning to the exit, where she took out the ‘Devouring Pit of the Yin Worm’ core and then a second high grade core to accompany it. The second core she swiftly imprinted with a metal element formation – ‘Mang’s Storm Flower Field’ – designed to do basically this task – clear out nests swiftly and efficiently.

“Mother, please watch over your foolish daughter and pray that she doesn’t come join you today…” she murmured to herself, then sent a pulse of activating intent into the ‘Devouring Pit of the Yin Worm’ core and tossed it out into the hall.

It bounced twice, landing close to the edge of the pagoda, about where she had hoped it would. Immediately three tetrids shot for it, intuitively recognising the threat the strange object posed—

{Devouring Pit of the Yin Worm}

The formation triggered, linking to the earth and fire element ward stones she had placed around the room. Every tetrid stalker was locked in place, even those in the eggs, as they became part of the qi cycle of the room, their foundations only serving to reinforce their entrapment.

-May you be reborn as something less obnoxious, she thought sourly, tossing the second core in.

{Mang’s Storm Flower Field}

There was a flash as thousands of tiny bolts of lightning crackled out from the core like threads of a spider’s web, finding ward stones and feeding off the earth element strength inherent in the surroundings while in turn feeding the water and decay in fundamentally purifying ways.

Everywhere she looked little sparks flickered over tetrid stalkers, eggs… and basically anything else living in the cavern that wasn’t her. Within moments, many of those sparks, especially those focused on the bigger tetrids, became flames, then tiny blossoming flowers, which reconnected in a new web of lightning that kept shifting between its targets, frying everything it touched in purifying yang lightning.

She watched the lightshow for a few moments until she was satisfied it was working as she had hoped, then slipped out of the room, back across the hall, and set the scrip to recording the other room.

While the scrip did its thing, she checked that room more carefully for traces of the other missing bodies, but in the end could only draw a blank.

“Sir Ku!”

A voice in the corridor made her pause and quickly take cover.

“Sir Ku!”

“Shit… you bastards, don’t you dare run!”

The male Easten expert’s voice carried down the hall, just about audible over something else that was certainly the tetrid queen still fighting.

A few moments later, two other guards dashed past, retreating hurriedly up the stairs.

“…”

Crouching lower, she waited… and waited… and waited… until, finally, quite a few footfalls echoed on the stairs again.

“Someone cleaned out the nest…” a voice stated laconically.

“A pity… but it was only a crude thing,” another added.

“You two, stay here, put that shit out,” an older male voice – ‘Elder Ku’– commanded.

“No need, no need…” Sir Huan commented.

“As Sir Huan says,” Elder Ku replied respectfully.

“The other room seems fine at least,” someone out of her line of sight remarked.

“That is not full of ravenous insects… still I wonder how the big one got out…” Sir Huan mused. “I am disappointed they cannot handle one suppressed qi beast.”

-So I am not the only one with that question, she thought a bit wryly, as the snippets of their conversation drifted to her.

“When it is subdued we can find out, Sir Huan,” Elder Ku replied respectfully.

“Quite,” Sir Huan agreed.

She knelt there, her heart stopped and her vitals nearly suspended as the group continued on, not sounding all that concerned by the distant chaos.

-Please don’t be a dead end up there, she prayed in her heart, stealthily making her way to the doorway and listening carefully.

“SIR HUAN!” a happy yell came from down in the main cavern.

“Sir Huan has come!”

Listening to the relieved shouts, she had a moment of concern in her heart that ‘Sir Huan’ would just toss out some high grade spatial cage or barrier talisman and that would be that, but thankfully that didn’t seem to be the case.

Warily peeking out of the room, she found no guards had remained so she quickly slipped up the staircase as quietly as she could.

The hall at the top was a broad, open, roughly circular space maybe sixty metres across with an ancient pagoda built in the middle that was now half drenched in vines and creepers making their way down from an opening high above. Around the edge of the hall, she found a circle of ancient, gnarled spirit trees growing from raised, rock-cut terraces with purplish-red leaves, their branches reaching for the tantalizing slivers of light that made their way down from above. Each terrace had its own little waterfall that ran down from above, flowing away into channels in the floor which were bridged at the four cardinal directions. Most of the terraces were carved with scenes of the landscape, but beneath each tree, she noted that there was a picture of a woman –or women – dancing, playing music or drinking, usually wearing what looked like fox pelts, with flowers garlanded in their hair.

-Right… she stared dully around, trying to process the little spiritual grotto. Not what I expected at all.

Crossing the water, she saw that it was cloaked in water plants but gave off a surprisingly pure aura. Beyond it she found that the lower level of the pagoda was open plan, with a large statue of the same middle-aged, bearded man from the other hall sitting in a scholarly pose, holding a tablet.

The text on the tablet was, somewhat surprisingly, in a very ancient Easten-style alphabet, but she could make out a rough meaning for one word in every three.

‘I, old… dreaming… of Chang’An’

‘Walk, many… island… Horse Sea…’

‘New land… auspicious… ruin of…’

‘Beginning… the era… becomes.’

Most lines had a proper name in them, which helped though she had no idea where ‘Chang’An’ was, despite the context suggesting it was a place, and ‘Horse Sea’ was probably a mistranslation with the word holding some other meaning. The rest of it was just weird, something about a new land, an auspicious beginning and the change of an era. The whole thing had a sort of ancient gravitas to it, but no real aura or intent, that having likely been etched away long ago by Yin Eclipse.

She considered it for a long moment, until she realised what was confusing her about the inscription, aside from the fact that it had no spacing between words or any actual punctuation. If she squinted at it, the outline of a symbol for ‘Tai’ in the Moon Rune script was drawn subtly by the outline of the proper names in the inscription, almost like a hidden signature.

Turning her focus back to the statue again, she finally shook her head and collected herself, aware that she was working to a potential time limit.

-As fun as this is, I will haunt my own rebirth if that lot catch me because I was focused on this, she mocked herself as she made her way around to the opposite side of the pagoda.

The rear half of the large chamber was dominated by a complex of multi-story rock-cut buildings set into the far wall. The circle of trees ended to either side of it, and two rather tastefully engineered waterfalls cascaded down over minor roofs before being funnelled into broad ponds that also then fed the same circular watercourse she had crossed to get to the pagoda.

The lack of any threat at all, after all the tetrid stalkers down below, was… disconcerting, she had to admit, as she walked along the path towards the two tiered temple-like buildings, but it was undeniable that there was a sort of harmonious… tranquillity to the whole place.

The middle building appeared to have been opened already, so she warily made her way up the steps and peered inside.

The hall beyond was long, carved exquisitely from the rock in the same archaic take on the traditional temples of the province. A colonnade ran around the outer edge, each pillar again carved into the form of a woman, either naked or only robed from the waist down, garlands of flowers in their wild hair. Many also sported animal skins and most were strangling dragon-like serpents or carrying horn-like musical instruments and drums. The wall panels were similar to outside, but here, the women mostly revelled or… in a few cases were pictured tearing men limb from limb, turning others into trees with faces that screamed, or hanging heads, like lanterns, from those same trees.

The whole hall was illuminated in dim reddish lanterns, and disturbing decorations aside, was entirely deserted, except for several…

Her mantra refused to be influenced in some subtle way, akin to the influence of the blood ling trees, which told her that she had just come under some kind of attempted influence from a formation trying to emulate some form of soul-based deception or manipulation.

She shook her head vigorously and focused for a moment on the six bodies lying in a sort of fan shape on the large platform before the shrine, then looked around the rest of the dimly lit hall, worried that she might have missed something else.

Only when she was satisfied that she had not, did she head forward to get a better look at them… which really only served to deepen her confusion once she could get a good look at the six, all dressed in simple, nondescript loincloths and not much else, because two of them were people she was here to look for.

The middle figure, a man in his late twenties with a short beard and a thin face, was clearly ‘Elder Li’ from the descriptions she had been given. The body two to Elder Li’s right was… the youth she had recovered, now looking markedly less yin poisoned. The other four she didn’t recognise at all though.

Considering them one after another, she realised with some surprise that there had been seven originally, not six. There was an inexplicable gap between the fifth and sixth on the left side of the platform, which just held a cracked jade compass, a ruined talisman and a discarded loincloth.

Each of them also had an emerald-green jade compass resting on his dantian, with perhaps the most ornate talismans she had ever laid eyes on – all flawless white paper, jade dust ink and gold inlay, with the seals on them picked out in deep silver, jade and red – placed on their foreheads, over their third eyes.

“…”

Moving over to the ‘gap’, she warily considered the ruined talisman, and then shuddered, because after staring at it for a few seconds, she could only say that something about it was singularly inauspicious in a way that made her skin clammy just to look at it.

Turning back to the others, she moved over to Elder Li and noted that the talisman attached to his forehead did have his name on it painted in what appeared to be blood. The youth who had been with Ha Fenfang and the others was apparently called Ha Quan based on his talisman, while the four others were Ha Yuanfei, Ha Jiao, Ha Mun and Ha Tang respectively.

-What? she stared at the names, running them back through her head, confused. Kwan… Quan? Yuanfei… why does Yuanfei sound familiar?

Frowning, she sent qi into her scrip and quickly recorded the state of the six bodies, because she could already see all kinds of potential headaches appearing when she tried to explain this. A bunch of Ha clan scions’ bodies being used for some shady ritual in an ancient ancestral shrine to a long-forgotten clan in the middle of Ha clan territory had the sort of ring to it that—

Her thoughts skipped, wondering if she had imagined what she just saw…

Again, the talisman over Ha Quan’s face shifted ever so slightly, as if stirred by… breath.

-That’s impossible, she frowned, certain that he had been very, very dead when she found him.

Looking again at Elder Li, she could see that all the ‘corpses’ didn’t really look… dead, on closer inspection.

Narrowing her eyes, she pulled out her compass and looked at it, but it just spun, useless. Sighing, she discarded the one she had and remade it quickly… only to find that there was fundamentally nothing wrong with it, it simply didn’t get any readings at all for the four, instead shifting to an ‘absolute’, ‘indeterminate’ alignment and never leaving it.

-What the fates? she muttered to herself, staring more uneasily at the four.

It wasn’t that the aura was inauspicious on the other six, not compared to the damaged talisman in the empty position anyway, but that it was absolutely indeterminate, which was the feng shui equivalent of a cosmic shoulder shrug, and something she had only ever read about in the Eight Trigrams Manual…

Pulling out a bunch of coins, she quickly tossed an Eight Trigrams divination and got exactly the same readings from the coins… four times in a row.

-Yep… that’s not creepy at all, she thought uneasily, looking around at the hall again, the whole enclosure outside suddenly seeming a lot less idyllic.

-Is this something to do with them trying to clean this place out? she pondered, looking around. Not that this looks at all like a tomb, and the cultivator before didn’t think it was either. Rather… isn’t it closer to an assembly hall, or a place where people might chant scriptures?

Turning back to Elder Li, she examined his body again, wondering if she dared to do anything regarding moving it or not while she waited for the scrip to finish.

-Why can’t this nameless-cursed stuff just be simple! she complained in her heart.

-And I still have no trace at all of those three other idiots from the Ha clan…

“…”

Suddenly struck with a slightly concerning thought, she pulled up the mission details which, while poorly written to a truly remarkable degree, did at least have names and pictures for the three she was sent to find. So much other stuff had occurred since then that she had not given that mission, or them, much thought at all. After a moment of searching, she found them: Ha Yuanfei, Ha Shimo and Ha Tang Lee, along with pictures.

She compared the picture of Ha Yuanfei to ‘Ha Yuanfei’ before her and sighed, because he was indeed one of the missing scions she had been sent to find. Ha Tang was also Ha Tang Lee, but oddly none of them were Ha Shimo, with the last two, Ha Jiao and Ha Mun, being completely unknown to her.

-Yep, this is stinking like ten day old fish! she groaned, leaning close to try and see if he had any breath.

A few moments of careful observation got her nothing, beyond a renewed awareness of the slowly increasing paranoia in the back of her mind over how quickly ‘Sir Huan’ and the others might come back.

Abruptly, the scrip chimed in her mind, telling her that it had finished. Pulling up the recording, she checked it was not obfuscated in any way, then considered the bodies again.

Narrowing her eyes, she pulled out a beast core and dropped it onto Elder Li’s chest, observing the qi within and how it reacted.

It did not.

Next, she tried with a stick and again, elicited no untoward reaction.

Taking a deep breath, very warily, she stretched out her hand, touched the bracelet to Elder Li’s chest and tried to store his body directly.

Nothing happened.

She stared at the body, then the bracelet, well aware that her heart would be pounding if she wasn’t making her mantra control her mental state to a positively unhealthy degree.

-And with that, Arai, you have used up all your good fortune for the day, she thought with a dark chuckle.

Exhaling softly, she touched one of the others, finding the same thing. She quickly repeated the test for all of them, but none of them were storable in the bracelet, which meant that as far as it was concerned, none of them were considered ‘dead’ by the bracelet for some reason.

The others, she might concede that there was room for doubt, but she was sure – very, very sure in fact – that Ha Quan should have been dead as the aforementioned ten day old fish.

Pulling out Kun Juni’s talisman, she focused on it… and again got nothing, which she had expected really. Curious, she tried her Hunter talisman as well, and found that it was not dead, though that didn’t make her happy, rather the opposite. Finally, she pulled out a piece of grey jade carved in the shape of a flower and inscribed with ‘Jun’ and tried to use that. Again, she got nothing.

-Yep, not suspicious at all… she reflected sourly, looking around again. Though I do have what I came for… even if it’s not what I wanted.

Focusing on her teleport talisman, she felt a faint resistance to it, mostly because she was deep inside a massif pillar.

Taking a further, final look around, she closed her eyes, offered a silent apology to Ha Fenfeng and Nen Hong and triggered the teleport talisman.

There was a lurch and she was standing in the rain on the field margin.

“Fates take this shitty day, I hope they choke on it!” she cursed, staring around at the misty early morning scenery of the canal and the fields with its little burial plot.

Pulling out Juni’s talisman, she sent her intent into it and got an immediate ping back.

“What is it?” Juni’s voice echoed in her head.

“I need help,” she sighed, “and I don’t necessarily want to use a Hunter Pavilion talisman to do this.”

“Oh, joy, go on,” Juni replied.

“Firstly, I need a warning sent out that there is a very high likelihood that an Immortal realm tetrid stalker is on the loose in the ginseng fields right next to Jade Willow Village, close to the Red Pit.”

“…”

The talisman on the other end was silent for a long moment, before Juni replied. “Is it able to leave?”

“Yes,” she affirmed. “It is not bound to the suppression, though most of its brood is.”

“And secondly?” Juni asked.

“I found a ruin, occupied by… a rather eclectic bunch of shady bastards… I am pretty sure they are smuggling rare artefacts out of the mountain range, and spirit herbs… though whether it’s for the Ha clan, Deng clan or… some third party I am no longer sure.”

“…”

“Monkeyshit,” Juni sighed.

“Tell me about it,” she agreed. "This clearance tranche has nearly gotten me killed thrice over today for the sake of ‘local politics’ and the sun is barely even an hour over the horizon!”

“So, this needs to be relayed to…?”

“That’s where it gets a bit tricky,” she replied. “Can you find out if Elder Mu of the Jade Willow Pavilion is trustworthy? He should be a Dao Seeking expert within the Kun clan who has been in seclusion for quite some time.”

“…”

“Give me a few minutes,” Juni replied sounding a bit tired.

“Sorry,” she apologized.

“Its fine, this is… well, it’s okay,” Juni sighed. “So… why the cloak and dagger?”

“One of those involved in the whole thing is a local Pavilion elder, or was posing as one, an ‘Elder Ku’,” she added.

“Shit…” Juni groaned. “Have you completed the requests?”

“Yes,” she affirmed, “though I suspect nobody will like what I found.”

“Go on?” Juni muttered.

“Well, I have a visual recording of six scions from the Ha clan, inside an ancient ancestral shrine, being used for some ritual I have no idea what for, one of whom was very dead when I last saw them… and who is now, less dead.”

“…”

“Shall I just demote you to seven-star rank now and save us all the trouble?” Juni joked wearily.

“Maybe…” she grimaced.

“…”

“Okay, Father was a bit nonplussed, but two clan elites are heading to Jade Willow Village in case the tetrid comes out of the mountains. They will report that a clan scout detected unusual activity, and stick around for a while. He also says Kun Mu is someone of character who has never been seen as a liability. I can tell Elder Mu of your current location if you want?” Juni replied. “I have also passed on the rest to Old Ling… who is now swearing a lot at me.”

“Okay,” she replied. “Can you keep the talisman connection open?”

“You want me to listen in?” Juni mused.

“Well, if I die horribly I’ll expect you to put my killers’ heads on my grave as well,” she retorted, only half joking given how the day was shaping up.

“Hah…” Juni laughed, but did keep the channel open.

Putting the talisman back on her belt, she moved away from her current location a few metres, into the shelter of the trees, to wait for Elder Mu, trying not to feel like the world had it in for her.

About a minute later, Elder Mu appeared in a shimmer of rain, holding an umbrella.

“Seeing Elder Mu,” she murmured from the shelter of her tree.

“The clan’s big miss has already brought me up to speed with… most of it,” Elder Mu replied, walking over to the trees to stand next to her. “You are concerned that the Hunter Pavilions’ talismans are compromised?”

“Well, I confirmed with my own two eyes that the elder I met in the Pavilion here two nights ago is up to his neck in this shit, whatever it is,” she replied, not bothering to hide her annoyance. “Not to mention I saw at least one cultivator up there with a silver rank Associate Hunter talisman…”

“You have pictures?” Elder Mu asked, frowning.

“…”

She didn’t reply, just manifested the recording of the living quarters.

“So it is,” Elder Mu sighed, spinning the image of the talisman in the air for a moment before dismissing it. “And the bodies?”

Focusing on the scrip again, she summoned the compound image of the room with the tetrid nest, eggs and corpses for him to see.

“…”

He stared at the shimmering image, watching as she went around recovering bodies, before sighing again, more deeply. “You have them, I take it?”

“Of course,” she replied, holding up her arm to show him the storage bracelet. “Forty-nine bodies, twenty-six of them intact, the rest partial and a lot of extra bones, and I may have missed some on account of the number of slain spirit beasts there. I am pretty sure that this tetrid is related to the attack that injured Elder Fei as well… It seems too coincidental that there would be two Immortal realm tetrid stalkers here and apparently the last one was never reported dead to the Hunter Pavilion through official channels.”

“Do you know their origins?” Elder Mu frowned, panning through the image as she looked on.

“Mostly local, I think,” she said. “Although I suspect when you look through them, you will find quite a reasonable subset came from West Flower Picking Town. At least one was a body I recovered, then had to abandon leaving the Red Pit, the day before yesterday.”

“And that found its way in here?” Elder Mu frowned, looking back over at her and stroking his beard.

“This is not far from the Red Pit... the old exit is impassable now, unless you have exceptional mental resilience. That is a different matter though, which I will make a full report on. I encountered at least one trapped spirit herb up there as well, a yin blossom lamium.”

“The same group is responsible?” Elder Mu asked with a sigh.

“The same,” she nodded. “I ran into one of their parties taking spirit herbs out in pots, they were also using moon runes to put some of them in cages.”

“That requires skill,” Elder Mu agreed. “What kind of numbers are we talking?”

“At least forty,” she said without much hesitation. “Probably less now, given I left them fighting a very angry Immortal realm tetrid stalker queen.”

“Truly, I knew my day was going to be terrible when the Pavilion diviner told me it would be better than yesterday,” Elder Mu grumbled. “And what of Elder Li?”

“Elder Li… well… I found him,” she grimaced, moving the recording forward to show him the hall.

“This…” Elder Mu stared at the shimmering image of the six bodies with a deeply perplexed frown.

“I have no idea either,” she remarked with a sigh. “Each one had a compass and a talisman… there was a seventh, but that talisman was destroyed and the compass broken, maybe the body was removed? All of them seemed alive, or at least ‘not dead’, including the body I put in the secure storage in the Hunter Pavilion, which was then stolen.”

“Is it possible you misread and he was just deeply crippled? Or had a Nascent Soul?” Elder Mu mused.

“…”

“He was iced by a meek yin ginseng and so cold I could barely lift him without luss cloth,” she pointed out. “Which is not to say it’s impossible, but I’d like to think my instincts are not that bad.”

“These other two – Jiao Fei and Mun Quanji – were, I think, associates of Elder Li,” Elder Mu frowned, pointing at the two whose names she hadn’t recognised. “Though those last two…”

“—Are two of the three I was sent over the mountains to find in the first instance,” she interjected with a resigned grimace. “The third one is missing without a trace as far as I know, my working hypothesis before this was that they all got lost and died in the Red Pit. Maybe Ha Shimo is among the other bodies and I missed them in my haste to get everything. My hunch, though, is that Ha Shimo is a body I had to destroy after running into a tetrid nest inside the Red Pit itself. However, I concede it’s entirely possible I could be mistaken there, he could have escaped this group and is hiding somewhere?”

Even as she said that last bit, she doubted it though.

“So, you want this registered as proof you have located ‘Elder Li’ as requested by the Ha clan and also ‘found’ the missing scions?” Elder Mu asked, not bothering to hide his own grimace, that of a man who saw a lot of annoying paperwork in his immediate future.

“It is what it is,” she replied with a resigned shrug. “And I have a bracelet full of corpses and verified scans of the relevant locations to prove it.”

“There is still the matter of the rest of the teaching request…” Elder Mu added.

“Yeah, that’s not happening in the ginseng valleys west of here,” she chuckled darkly. “Not unless the village wants a lot more bodies on their hands.”

“I rather think you will have to convince them of that yourself,” Elder Mu sighed.

“Probably,” she agreed. “But that group of bandits knew of my presence in Jade Willow Village and were not… concerned with the consequences of ‘dealing’ with me. They seemed fairly confident they would get away with it.”

“Which is why you are out here, and the Kun clan’s big miss is listening to every word we say?” Elder Mu murmured, giving her a certain degree of side-eye.

She sighed and nodded, choosing not to notice.

-Not that you can blame me, she added to herself. Clearly that gang are well connected here, and I know as well as anyone the kind of spirit stones involved in smuggling out high realm spirit herbs.

“So, what will you do now?” Elder Mu asked.

“I can intercede for you and have you stay at the Kun clan estates in Jade Willow Village,” Juni said. “You already know that Kun Shi—“

“What about his cousin?” she cut in, thinking that idiots were capable of doing stupid things and the last thing she needed was a loudmouth who had lost face deciding to stick it to the clan in some subtle way.

“…”

“I would come personally, but I have landed an obnoxious task in Blue Water City which will tie me up to the end of the week,” Juni sighed. “Give me a moment…”

The sense of presence in the talisman receded.

“Sorry, Elder Mu,” she said respectfully.

“Not at all,” the Elder said with a wave of his hand. “I assume you are sorting out some matters.”

“Taking a few precautions,” she said drily.

“How about this,” Juni said, her voice returning through the talisman. “My older brother will come out to Jade Willow later today… ostensibly to oversee some elements of the harvest and inventory, and a few of his old friends will come with him because West Flower Picking Town is getting obnoxious if you don’t wear purple and sport a Ha clan moustache—”

“Hah!” she could only laugh out loud at that comment, which got a raised eyebrow from Elder Mu.

“—You will be his guest as a high ranking Herb Hunter until you go back to West Flower Picking Town and that should forestall any local idiots getting smart ideas because, while my status is… well, you know what it is, Talshin is not someone anyone with eyes will mess with.”

“Thanks!” she sent back, feeling relieved.

“Disciple Mu, if you could escort my friend back to the Kun estates in Jade Willow Village?” Juni said, speaking out again.

“Of course, Young Lady Kun,” the old man replied politely.

“This service… the Kun clan will be thankful for,” Juni added.

“Young Lady Kun is too polite, this is just an elder’s duty,” Elder Mu said, somehow even more politely.

The talisman went mute in her hand, but she found that the connection was still running from the other end, which told her that whatever Old Ling had likely said to Juni, it had her a bit uneasy as well.

-Fate-thrashed politics! Why can’t we all just wrangle herbs and get along, she thought glumly.

“I take it we won’t be able to teleport back?” she asked, looking around at the sodden fields.

“I am afraid not,” Elder Mu agreed.

“Ah well, it’s much more appealing out here than up in that horror of a valley,” she sighed.

“While we walk back, perhaps you could explain in detail exactly what has changed in that regard,” Elder Mu half asked, half stated. “Starting with what you were saying concerning the Red Pit.”

“Ah… yes,” she grimaced. “Well, it seems that…”

Following Elder Mu back along the canal, she concisely recounted her various experiences with the entrance to the Red Pit: the flooding, the flooded and ransacked way station and everything else that had transpired there. As he listened, Elder Mu’s expression became progressively gloomier, although, as she sort of expected, it was mostly because of the enormous headache that awaited with updating the records. He was amusingly less concerned about the potential losses to the Ha clan thanks to their fallow ginseng fields; mostly, she supposed, because the Kun clan dealt in brokerage, not in growing herbs for the most part.

By the time they got back to the road, she had finished the bulk of the explanation and the rain had started to pick up again, so, after she donned her rank robes, they returned to the village in comparative silence, she watching the world go by, tracking the occasional teleport flare and wondering if any of them were the herb smugglers, and Elder Mu just staring into the middle distance with the expression of a man who saw only paperwork in his immediate future.

Thanks to the Elder’s thousand yard stare, they walked right through the gate guards, who actually saluted both of them. The village was just as bustling as it had been when she left it the previous night, which was slightly surreal after all that she had gone through.

The Kun clan estates turned out to be a walled compound on the south side of the village, across the canal from the Jade Willow Blossom Inn. She arrived to minimal fanfare, again mostly thanks to Elder Mu, and was shown to a second story room overlooking the canal and gardens, whereupon the Elder informed her that she could rest there and he would handle the matter of looking into ‘Elder Ku’ and the Pavilion’s potential links to local gangs.

As such, a mere thirty minutes after she had landed back in the fallow field, she found herself leaning on the veranda overlooking the leafy garden in the rain… just feeling… odd, as she swirled a large cup of strong spirit wine around in her hand.

She knew in her heart that part of that was the backlash from the emotion and pain suppression starting to make itself felt again, multiplied out by the gnawing frustration at not having achieved the one thing she really set out to do – recover the mortal remains of Ha Fenfang and Nen Hong. That she had recovered Nen Shirong’s remains helped a little, but it still left her in a gloomy mood that she didn’t care to use her mantra to alleviate.

“It is days like this that really make me hate this job,” she complained to the trees and the rain, with their muted colours in the early morning light, before taking a deep gulp of the wine. “Seriously, this is going to turn me into one of those drunk old men who rave about the ills of war outside the teahouses by the river back home.”

“…”

Staring at the swaying trees and listening to the hiss and patter of the rain on the tiles above her, she sighed again, then turned on her heel and walked back into the room.

Going to the table, she pulled out the painting of her mother, stared at it for a long moment, then went to the door and stuck her head out into the corridor.

“Can I help you, Miss Jun?” a maid asked, seeing her looking around.

“I’d… like some materials for making a scroll painting, if there are any?” she asked.

“A… scroll painting?” the maid blinked, then curtsied politely. “I believe there are some, I will have them brought forthwith.”

“Thank you,” she said with a wan smile.

“Will there be anything else?” the maid asked.

“Uh… food,” she said, “doesn’t matter what really, but just something refreshing.”

“We have some excellent Icy Li Soup…” the maid remarked. “Young Master Shi brought back some roots and the cook was… able to rise to the occasion.”

“…”

She stared at the maid, then just started to laugh.

“Is… there a problem?” the maid asked, somewhat confused by her reaction to learning that she would be eating more soup made of herbs she had gathered.

“Sorry, no… not at all!” she replied, wiping tears from her eyes. “That will be fine, but can I have some fried bread or fish with it and some more wine?”

“Of course,” the maid nodded, only slightly raising an eyebrow at her request for extra wine.

She watched the maid hurry off, then went back into her room and just flopped down on a couch, staring out at the hazy curtains of rain extending into the distance, disguising everything in a veil of grey shadow that rather aptly fit her current mood, she couldn’t help but feel.

She wasn’t sure how long she remained like that, but she was finally stirred by a polite knock on the door and the maid announcing that food and the items she asked for were here.

“Come in!” she called out, getting up from the couch with a sigh.

The maid and another younger girl bustled in, depositing a tray of food on the table and a second tray of scrolls, inks and brushes beside it, before leaving again with polite bows.

Walking over, she dipped a piece of fried fish in the soup and munched it down, before pulling up a chair and opening the scrolls.

It didn’t take her long to re-arrange the brushes and inks and sort out what was there, then she pushed the food off to one side and, taking one of the scrolls, closed her eyes for a moment, recalling a scene of smiling young women by a bridge, selling flowers to those passing by while a younger brother counted money and threw sticks at the monkeys in the trees.

The art of scroll painting was something her mother had taught her and Sana when they were young and, while Sana was somewhat ambivalent about it, she had always enjoyed it as a means of calming her mind and just processing problems. It was, she supposed, the closest thing she had to an actual hobby, beyond playing card games with her sister, Juni and Lin Ling.

The painting took her about thirty minutes in the end, after which she took it, went over to the other table and put together a small shrine, placing her mother’s painting in the middle then that of Nen Hong, Nen Shirong and Ha Fenfang beside it.

Going back to the table, she quickly folded one of the sheets of ink paper for the brushes into an origami chrysanthemum, then returned to the shrine, lit the candles and bowed three times to it. Finally, taking twelve sticks of incense – three for each person on the shrine – from a box, she shoved them in a bowl and lit them from the candles, then pulled her robe over her head and just knelt down before the impromptu shrine in silence for a long moment.

“Mother… your blessing is still with me… it seems,” she said at last.

“Nen Hong, Nen Shirong, Ha Fenfang, I… am sorry…”

She trailed off for a long moment then just bowed to the altar, not caring particularly about the tears of pain and frustration welling up in her eyes.

“I… did my best, but it seems the fates are cruel.”

~ Kun Juni – Blue Water City, Kun Family Estate ~

Juni stared at the communication talisman in her hand for a long moment, then tossed it across the table at which she was seated with a disgusted sigh and leant back to stare at the ceiling of her ‘sitting room’ in the Kun clan estates in Blue Water City.

“Why… is everything just coming home to roost in the same morning?” she groaned, tracing the dancing fish carved into the woodwork.

The source of her annoyance was not Arai’s earlier conversation… not directly at any rate. Rather, it was the thoroughly uncompromising headache that was playing out in West Flower Picking Town off the back of it.

*Drrrrrr…*

The talisman on the table shook and morphed into an upper torso of a thin man wearing purple robes and a rather sleek moustache.

“Sir Xianji,” she said, sitting up.

“Young Lady Kun,” the man, who was not really who she had expected to see, replied with a slight scowl.

“I take it Liaison Official Weng is unavailable?” she asked, even if the answer was obvious by the appearance of his deputy.

“Official Weng is occupied with important business and is unable to speak to you in person,” Xianji agreed.

“…”

“Unusual,” she remarked, a bit sourly. “He almost always makes time to speak to me. Official Weng’s dedication to his post is that of a ghost haunting his ancestors more often than not.”

“Ahem…” Xianji had the grace to look slightly embarrassed at her remark, which was really not far off the truth, and a lot kinder than ‘Official Weng’ deserved in her view.

‘Liaison Official Ha Weng Aoji’ was what happened when the Ha clan thought it had a sense of humour really.

She hated dealing with him, largely because he had offered to marry her… on three separate occasions after the fiasco of her losing the clan’s inheritance seat. It was a match that had met with a disturbing amount of support from several Kun elders and haunted her through her later teenage years, despite her father refusing to even consider the matter.

When she had become an official in the Pavilion, the Ha clan had promptly appointed the old lecher, who had made no secret of his interest in her, as Liaison to the Pavilion on the grounds that he had once been a silver-ranked six-star herb hunter before ‘retiring’.

He was now married to a niece of an influential elder in the provincial Ha clan, who was half her age, yet remarkably similar in looks and figure.

“Official Weng sends his apologies, politely telling me to inform you that you are, regretfully, not yet his wife,” Xianji added.

“Right…” she sighed. “Please tell Official Weng that every day I too give thanks to the Three Pure Ones and my Honoured Ancestors that I am not his young wife.”

“…”

Xianji raised an eyebrow this time but said nothing.

“So… I assume you are not authorised to do anything regarding the matter of this request without Official Weng’s express input?” she asked, moving the topic on.

Xianji put on an admirable card-playing face, but it didn’t really fool her, as this was not the first time she had been stuck in this particular loop of bureaucratic villainy.

“The terms of the request have not been completed in the eyes of the issuer,” Xianji replied blandly.

“You have read the documentation Hunter Jun was provided for the request to seek out Ha Yuanfei, Ha Tang and Ha Shimo?” she asked, forced to play out the farce if only to put it on the record.

“I have,” Xianji conceded.

Pulling up a copy on the jade tablet on the table beside her for both of them to see, she let it hang in the air between them.

“My four year old niece could do better than this, and she cannot even write yet!” she pointed out.

“Unfortunately, while I must agree that the literary quality of the request is somewhat challenging insofar as the usual standards of bureaucratic endeavour tend to present themselves, it was certified by all the proper channels,” Xianji pointed out. “The requirements—”

“Setting aside the fact that this request nearly got one of West Flower Picking’s most promising junior officials killed,” she cut back in. “She has in fact provided more than enough intelligence for you to consider this matter closed from our end—”

“Their response is that there are many questionable points regarding both the testimony of your Kun clan experts and what little information the Jun girl has supplied,” Xianji sighed. “While Official Weng would dearly love to help you out with this matter, the crux of the issue, as I am sure you can appreciate, in their eyes, is that no conclusive proof on the fate of Ha Shimo has been provided which is not unreliable hearsay from a child, from a dangerous area like the Red Pit, a place well known to be dangerous to malleable young minds. Subsequently the issuer does not yet consider the matter closed.”

“Right…” she replied, doing her best to keep her smile diplomatic.

“—However…” Xianji went on. “However, on behalf of Liaison Weng I can say that we are deeply concerned about these rumours of a smuggling gang operating and so I can tell you that the Ha clan has, at his urging, agreed to send a party to Jade Willow Village to act as escorts for Hunter Jun until she returns to West Flower Picking Town, where she will be fully debriefed by our Ha clan about this matter.”

“…”

“I trust this is acceptable to the Hunter Pavilion?” Xianji added as she looked on in silence.

“The Ha clan will have to take that up with my brother Talshin,” she said at last. “The Kun clan was also deeply concerned about these rumours of bandits. Hunter Jun is currently enjoying the hospitality of the Kun clan local to Jade Willow Village while we thoroughly investigate these rumours for ourselves.”

“I see…” Xianji nodded. “I shall pass that on to the group who will escort her, now if you will excuse me? There are other matters that require my attention.”

Waving a hand in acknowledgement, she watched his image waver and vanish.

She stared at the space above the talisman for a moment, then grabbed her wine cup off the table and hurled it across the room, watching it bounce off the wall leaving a dent in the plaster.

“Is there a problem, Young Lady?” an older-looking maid asked, sticking her head around the door.

“It’s the Ha clan, there is always a problem,” she complained, slumping back as the maid walked over and recovered the cup.

“When it rains, truly the Ha clan can be found pissing in the street and telling others it is gold washing in the gutters,” the maid remarked superciliously, returning the cup to the table.

“What else is there?” she asked, knowing that she would not have been loitering pointlessly.

“Four messages, Miss. One from your guests, hoping you will join them for breakfast…”

“—Maybe,” she cut in.

“—and one from a Miss Lin Ling?”

“Fuaaaa…” she stared at the ceiling, sighing deeply.

“What does Ling want?”

“She… uh… says there is a complication at the Blue Gate School, and that she wants to see you today, as soon as possible.”

“Tell her to come here when it is convenient for her,” she said after a moment’s thought.

“And the breakfast?” the maid asked.

“Tell them I have a headache and am washing my hair,” she replied, pouring herself more wine into a new cup.

“Oh, the third message is an invitation from Young Lady Ling.”

“Also from Lin Ling?” she frowned.

“No, uh… Young Lady Ling Yu…” the maid corrected.

“—Ah…” she shook her head at her mistake, and took a gulp of her wine.

“She invites you to tea… today,” the maid said, eyeing the wine cup in her hand with a faint frown. “At the Myriad Blossoms Teahouse.”

“Okay,” she agreed after a moment’s consideration. “That at least will be pleasant, though I expect I will have to bring our guests or others will complain.”

“The last was a request for an audience that came in yesterday, but you were out… It is from a Sir Zhong Bei?”

“…”

She frowned, wracking her brain to try and recall who that might be, before associating the name with a scholarly old man who ran one of the brokerages in the docks…?

“Does he run one of the brokerages down in the docks?” she asked.

“I believe so,” the maid replied. “There is also a letter.”

Taking the proffered letter, she opened the seal and skimmed through it.

“Ah, the poisoning case, his nephew got into trouble didn’t he?” she mused, tossing the letter, which was a note of thanks by and large, on the table. “It seems Sana resolved that at least. What does he want?”

“An enquiry about spirit herbs,” the maid replied, going over and opening the screen doors to the veranda. “He asks if we have any metal attribute qi-gathering spirit herbs similar to the water jasmine from the Lianfan estates down the coast. Apparently Young Lady Ling Yu is interested in purchasing such a herb. He also made a secondary request about today’s Wind and Waves Auction, but in light of this request and you seeing Young Lady Ling later, that seems slightly redundant.”

“Oh?” she asked, mulling that over in her head.

“Basically, whether we knew of any such herbs that would be going up in preferential bidding at the auction.”

“He really wants to curry favour with the Ling clan,” she chuckled.

“Can you blame him, Miss Ling is a jewel of our Blue Water City,” the maid said with a sigh. “Such a talented young…”

“…”

The maid caught herself and curtsied apologetically.

“Sorry Miss, I misspoke.”

“It’s fine,” she murmured, taking another sip of the wine. “It is true, Young Lady Ling is indeed talented.”

The maid coughed and smoothed her skirts.

“Tell Sir Zhong Bei that as far as I am aware, we do not, but I can make enquiries and will keep him in mind,” she mused after a moment’s thought. “I doubt a meeting with me will be necessary, but if he wishes for one… maybe tomorrow?”

There was no harm in letting the old man do his bit of business and remain the intermediary there. The clan’s administrative elders would be happy to get another good business link with the Ling clan in any case.

“Anything else?” she asked.

“No, Miss,” the maid murmured, curtseying again, clearly still feeling embarrassed for her comment earlier.

“In that case, thank you, you may go,” she said with a sigh.

She watched with mixed feelings as the woman retreated from the room with a bit more haste than she might have usually. Years ago, she would have been annoyed at the slip she supposed. The maid, Kun Lia Qiao, had served in the household long enough to know that the question of ‘talent’ was a sore point with her and most just didn’t comment on it now. However, occasionally those old scars did rear their ugly head and cause awkward moments like that. No matter what she said, the woman would feel bad for her mistake anyway.

“What a fate-thrashed day!” she muttered with a sigh, finishing off the wine and staring at the talismans on the table and the communication jade sourly. “Bandits, clan politics and young masters… all faces of the same thrice-accursed demon!”

She considered the wine jar again, then waved a hand, moving it over to the side of the room and out of her sight. Even if the way the day had started rather warranted it, drinking a whole jug before breakfast was not a sign of a healthy working relationship with life in general.

Getting up, she left the communication talismans where they were and walked into her bedroom and waved her hand at the wards on the wash stand, making it fill up with water. Shrugging off her outer robe, she tossed it on the bed, which was hardly ever used, and then went over to the sink and scooped up a handful of the cold water and splashed it on her face.

Staring at her face in the rippling water for a moment, she exhaled and then looked at her reflection in the mirror.

The Juni that stared back at her was rather tired, with slight shadows under her eyes as befitting someone who had basically been out drinking… socially speaking, all night. Her hair, dark brown and mostly straight, was a bit frazzled, but again, mostly because she had spent much of the last hour running her hands through it and resisting pulling it out in lumps. Running her hands down her cheeks, she stared into her own blue-green eyes for a long moment, then closed them and focused her qi slightly.

‘Scion, Path, Lotus, Body, Gift’

The mnemonics of her mantra echoed in her mind’s eye as she let it stimulate the qi slowly shifting through her meridians. It was not especially refreshing, but it was better than nothing, given sleeping for half the day was sadly not an option.

Splashing a second handful of water over her face, she manipulated her qi to fix her hair and considered her reflection again as her hair loosely plaited itself back under the influence of invisible hands. Grabbing a comb carved like two jumping fish from the table beside her, she fixed the hairstyle and made a face in the mirror.

She considered her under-robe for a moment, then shrugged that off as well and stalked over to the far wall. Opening the large screen cupboard, she considered the contents of the closet for a moment, then selected a new under-gown and other garments from the lower part of the closet and pulled them on. From the main row of gowns she eventually picked out a fairly traditional Kun clan robe of deep blue with white slashes and embroidered waves of silver picked out in the panels and golden fish swirling through the hems and shrugged that on, watching as it resized itself down to fit her.

The overall effect as she considered herself in the full length mirror was stated elegance, which was about all she felt capable of really.

Spinning around a few times, she checked that she could move freely in the robe if required, then fastened her Kun clan status talisman around her neck and shoved her Hunter Bureau talisman back into her storage talisman.

Giving herself one final look in the mirror, she walked back into the sitting room.

“Sister, are you busy?”

“What brother talks to his little sister while she is getting changed,” she muttered out loud.

“If you were, you would not have answered,” Talshin remarked drily through the talisman.

“True,” she conceded, switching to communicating mentally. “So what is it? Please don’t tell me there’s a problem with going to Jade Willow Village already?

“No, actually, I bear the ‘wonderful’ news that you have been put forward by the Supreme Elder to be the clan representative at the Patriarch Ha Dongfei’s birthday celebrations at the end of the week—”

Absently, she grabbed the wine jar sitting on the table next to her and threw it the length of the room, actually sending it out the open screen doors to the veranda where it hit the tree outside, bounced off a branch and fell down to the paving of the courtyard below with a distant *clonk*.

“…”

“You just threw something out the window, didn’t you,” Talshin remarked.

“I did, I imagined it hitting that snake Weng’s head from a great height,” she grumbled.

“If you don’t want to do it, Father can likely send cousin Xingjuan?” Talshin said.

“I doubt it, the clan officials here have her nearly welded to the shadow of the Huang clan young master JiLao who is with the Imperial Princess,” she grumbled, cursing all elders in her heart. “If I refuse, it will just put more pressure on our side and give them more ground.”

“Probably, yes,” her older brother replied, sounding rather annoyed. “But if you say no he will certainly make sure someone else goes. It is already totally shameless that they keep trying to push you towards that old lecher Ha Weng’s son, especially…”

“It is the fate of a pretty flower to be admired and potted up by others, for the benefit of all, is it not?” she sneered.

“Quotes from Seng Mo? This early in the day? Lay off the drink please, little sister,” her brother chuckled.

“…”

“Anyway, thanks for the heads-up there,” she said after a moment’s annoyed pause, because he was right, day drinking was not good. “At least I can prepare myself for the surprise short notice command when it inevitably arrives.”

“Not at all…” her brother replied, conciliatorily.

“Oh, the Ha clan are sending a bunch of ‘elites’ to Jade Willow as well, ostensibly to look into the rumours of bandits I just lobbed back at them, but they will certainly try to be a pain,” she added, recalling her earlier conversation with Deputy Official Xianji.

“Okay, I’ll send word ahead,” her brother replied. “Anyway, stay strong and try not to let the foreigners get to you!”

“Bleugh,” she sighed, “Somewhat surprisingly those two, at least, are actually quite manageable.”

“Don’t say that near an elder,” her brother chuckled darkly, “or they will have you picking out a red dress on the boat to Pill Sovereign City.”

“Uggh…” she didn’t bother dignifying that with a reply beyond a shudder and let the transmission link end.

“Monkey shit, now my wine is down in the courtyard,” she complained, staring at the open window and the rain-drenched veranda beyond.

Walking over to the balcony, she peered out but couldn’t see where it had landed. While it was tempting to just jump down the two stories, the ‘Young Lady’ of the clan did have to have some decorum, so instead she turned and went out of her rooms, snagging a paper umbrella as she went.

“Young miss is going to breakfast?” a different maid waiting near her door asked, walking quickly to keep up with her as she set off.

“…”

“I suppose so, where are they?” she asked, turning and heading down to the floor below as the maid hurried after.

“The Blue Jade Courtyard,” the maid replied. “They were admiring the sunrise over the ocean.”

“You can see the sunrise?” she remarked drily.

“The theoretical sunrise,” the maid muttered. “Mostly they are recuperating from the drinking and admiring the scenery.”

Rolling her eyes, she reached the ground floor and headed out into the courtyard below her suite of rooms, sweeping her gaze across it looking for the wine jar.

“What is miss looking for?” the maid asked, pulling out her own umbrella.

“…”

Not immediately seeing the jar, she opened her umbrella and set off down the spirit vegetation border, looking this way and that.

“I threw a jar out of the window, courtesy of the Ha clan,” she shrugged.

“Ah…”

The maid glanced up, she noticed, but didn’t say anything.

In truth, that kind of behaviour was rather atypical of her, but the combined push and pull of clan politics, scheming elders and the clearance season was never a time of year she enjoyed, not least because the new year ceremony was only a week away, and that was when she had been unceremoniously kicked out of the provincial clan’s inheritance seat in favour of her cousin Xingjuan. All because of that fates-accursed grand divination that her spirit root was somehow ‘inauspicious’ for the prosperity of the Kun clan.

“Sorry, it’s been a bad week,” she muttered, finally spotting the offending jar rolling on the path. “And today has not started off well.”

“Miss has nothing to apologise for,” the maid muttered, which was a lie, she could have hit someone with the jar for starters, but she had long since learned to just let other people have their thoughts.

-The curse of the bubble of ‘nobility’, she reflected, picking it up and stashing it in her storage talisman. You are not really you, just a thing in a dress that reflects values for other people.

“The Blue Jade Courtyard?” she asked, looking around.

“Yes Miss,” the maid murmured.

“Okay,” she sighed, turning and walking back the way they had come.

The Blue Jade Courtyard was the fanciest one in the whole estate, which was perched on the heights of Little Harbour rather than across the river where all the other large estates of the provincial nobility were focused. The courtyard got its name because it was mostly decorated in expensive ‘Blue Jade’ which was mined on the Northern Tang continent and now under a strict provincial trade embargo by the Imperial Court – mostly, she had suspected, because the Imperial Envoy, Dun Qiao Honghui, didn’t want anyone upstaging his own palatial estates.

That this estate held an entire courtyard decorated with the stuff was a source of both pride and angst in equal measure to the wider clan. Mostly because it was part of this estate, which her family owned personally, and thus had never been moved to the more sprawling estates across the river where the majority of the Kun clan’s influence was focused.

Entering it, she took in the shimmering pavements, statues and auspiciously placed rocks, almost all of which were projecting faint azure mirages in the rain, and was immediately spotted by Kun Feng Jinhai, Kun Ying Ji and Bai Jiang who were all sitting in the shelter of the three story high pagoda in the middle, watching the grey curtains of rain slash down over the city and docks below.

The courtyard was… impressive, you had to give it that. Almost everything was carved from the shimmering blue-coloured jade, which shifted from almost grey through to nearly luminescent azure depending on the light and the ambient qi. The gardens around the courtyard had been themed accordingly, prioritizing spirit plants and trees that contrasted or accented the priceless stone. At its heart the pagoda, situated in the middle of an octagonal ornamental pond that was fed by a small spirit spring running out from bedrock, was also made entirely out of it.

“Ah, Lady Juni! Good morning!” Feng Jinhai called out, waving to her cheerfully as she crossed over the small bridge to the pagoda. “They said you would not be joining us…”

“Good morning, Lady Kun,” Bai Jiang said, actually standing and giving her a polite salute.

-Ah, I did say that, didn’t I… she sighed, having forgotten that she had fobbed this off before changing her mind.

“Good morning,” she replied, making her way over to the three of them. “I trust you are enjoying your stay here so far?”

“Enjoying?” Ying Ji laughed. “I had no idea these estates had a treasure courtyard like this.”

“Yes… this is quite remarkable,” Bai Jiang agreed, looking at the gleaming pavements and the faint, mysterious mirages that swirled in the misty early morning rain.

“Given the challenges with sourcing Blue Jade and the trade embargo from the Northern Tang continent we do not publicise it that widely,” she replied, sitting down at the table, which was also carved from it, and pouring herself some dark tea.

“Ah, that is understandable,” Feng Jinhai agreed.

“This estate is much older than the main Kun estates on the far side of the river,” she added. “My great grandfather once told me it is even older than the Dun Dynasty itself, though not everyone believes him.”

“That would be quite a thing,” Ying Ji agreed, looking around at the interior of the pagoda with its myriad carvings, mostly of fish and birds.

“That would make it older than Blue Water City, would it not?” Bai Jiang mused, his roving gaze tracing the procession of leaping, winged fish carved into the balcony encircling the pagoda.

“There has been a settlement on Little Harbour long before Blue Water City,” she shrugged, sipping her tea. “The Blue Water Sage founded the city here because of that, or so the story goes.”

“The view in better weather must be spectacular,” Feng Jinhai mused, looking out over the city towards the ocean. “And this estate is not even the highest one on the island?”

“It isn’t,” she agreed, glancing upwards into the misty heights of the cliffs rising above, where other pagoda towers could be barely picked out. “Anyway, what are your plans for the day?”

“We thought to ask you,” Feng Jinhai chuckled.

“Well, I have various responsibilities to sort out,” she sighed, taking another sip of her tea. “Perhaps if you wanted to see the local sights we could go to the great gardens across the river, and the Blue Gate School?”

“I heard there is a weekly auction in the gardens,” Bai Jiang added.

“The Wind and Waves Auction, yes,” she agreed, nodding. “I have business there, but you will probably find it a bit boring. The public spectacle is somewhat divorced from the reality of the actual goings-on there.”

“We are happy to just go along with whatever,” Feng Jinhai interjected, pouring himself some tea.

“We are Fairy Juni’s guests after all,” Ying Ji agreed.

“Oh, I have a dinner invitation this evening, at the Myriad Blossoms Teahouse. You can come to that if you like, so long as you don’t make a mess.”

“Ha-ha…” Feng Jinhai coughed slightly. “Fairy Juni, we know the drill for these kind of things—”

“Of course we will come,” Ying Ji cut in.

“Your invitation is most generous, Fairy Juni,” Bai Jiang murmured.

“Fine, wear something smart,” she added, casting an eye over the three of them. “The Myriad Blossoms Teahouse is not like the Golden Dragon or the Three Sages Inn.”

-With this, those elders cannot claim I am not wining and dining these two at least, she mused inwardly, finishing her cup of tea.

“More tea, Fairy Juni?” Bai Jiang asked, noting her empty cup.

“Sure, why not,” she agreed, holding it out for him to pour the tea.

They talked away for almost thirty minutes after that, mostly asking questions about the estate, the courtyard and what she ‘did’ as ‘liaison’ for the Kun clan to the Hunter Bureau in West Flower Picking Town. It was fairly boring, if easy conversation which, after the headaches of dealing with regional bureaucracy and the scheming agendas of Ha, Deng and Kun clan politics, was in truth a welcome change.

That boring morning idyll did, however, finally end, with a maid arriving to announce that Lin Ling had arrived and ask whether she was to be asked to wait or shown in.

“Bring her here, she will no doubt want some breakfast,” she said drily.

“Of course, Miss,” the maid replied, before scanning the table and departing.

She sipped her tea in silence for a few minutes, pondering what might have led Lin Ling to visit quite this promptly, while the other three continued to discuss the finer points of some of the duels from the central plaza, until the maid returned, bringing with her a second maid who bore more food and a slightly bedraggled Lin Ling, who was twirling her umbrella as if it had offended her in several previous lives.

“I was not expecting you quite this early,” she said, standing up as her friend, and junior within the West Flower Picking Hunter Pavilion, stepped into the shelter of the pagoda and leant her umbrella against the balcony.

“Me neither, but if I stayed in the school a moment longer I’d have either poisoned someone or sabotaged their pill furnace,” Lin Ling muttered, shaking the water out of her cloak and putting it over a handy statue, then checking that her long, slightly curly, sandy-blonde hair had not become a total mess. “It is a real nuisance not being able to teleport in the city without a permit.”

“It is,” she agreed with a grimace. “Want some breakfast?”

“Please,” Ling sighed, walking over to the table and pouring herself some tea.

She watched as the younger woman… girl really, because she was only just seventeen, picked up her tea with slightly shaky hands and sighed deeply again. Theirs was a strange friendship, mostly because of the age gap, born out of her learning that Lin Ling’s family had changed her formal birthday to make her ‘sixteen’, half a year younger: not because they were trying to get ahead, but rather because they disliked that their ‘daughter’ had had a more auspicious birthday than her younger brother. After discovering that, she had ended up mentoring Lin Ling when she entered the Pavilion.

That small, petty act of familial sabotage, somewhat similar to her own circumstances, provided the common ground for their eventual friendship. Even beyond that, they had a lot in common and it was hard not to see herself in Lin Ling, had her father not been as supportive as he had been all those years ago.

The root of Lin Ling’s ‘problem’ really, was that her ‘family’ was complicated. Her friend was a scion of a branch of the now scattered Lin clan who, as recently as thirty years prior, had been a major regional player, even controlling their own school on the far side of the Shadow Forest. The Lin School, however, had been caught up in political intrigues from across the ocean and, by various means, ruined and then dispersed. That event had been pivotal in the ignition of what had since become known as the ‘Three Schools Conflict’, so called because the three other provincial schools – the Blue Gate School in Blue Water City, the Teng School in South Grove and the Golden Promise School near Eastwatch Town – had all fought to divide up what remained.

Lin Ling’s family, who had been among those advocating for closer links with others rather than bullishly keeping their independence, had settled in West Flower Picking Town, largely with the backing of the Kun and Ha clans… but that had since led to problems of a different sort because Lin Ling, while talented, was not a favoured scion of the family and was among the youngest of four siblings, and the only girl.

“Oh, these three are guests of the estate,” she said, waving a hand to the others who were looking at Lin Ling with curiosity.

“Kun Feng Jinhai,” Feng Jinhai said politely, by way of introduction.

“Bai Jiang,” Bai Jiang added, saluting politely, though this time he didn’t stand, she noted.

“Kun Ying Ji,” Ying Ji finished.

“Lin Ling,” Lin Ling replied, saluting them with a slight sideways glance at her, which she returned with a nod.

“A pleasure,” Ying Ji added, offering Lin Ling a seat at the table, which she accepted.

“So, what brings you here?” she asked, sipping her own tea.

“My clearance requests are a bust,” Lin Ling scowled. “You better tell me that someone else’s request got completed by a monkey or something…”

“…”

“You were teaching outer sect disciples herb lore…” she pointed out drily. “If Arai hears you claim that those were a ‘bust’ when you get back, she might actually stab you.”

Lin Ling scowled at her and took a vicious bite out of an innocent pastry.

“I know! I am not incompetent… it’s just…”

“Go on?” she prompted.

“Well, an idiot blew up a pill cauldron, then blamed my poor teaching… I wasn’t even teaching alchemy, just herb compounding, and he refused to use the supplied cauldron!” Lin Ling explained, looking disgusted now. “Anyway, that should have been fine, but he called his cousin or senior or something, who turned out to be some visiting disciple who is part of the Myriad Herb Association, who claimed what I was teaching was crude and that I was incompetent and didn’t know anything.

“Then the elder who was overseeing it all told me to share the responsibility for ‘teaching’ the group, so I was stuck there with this idiot promoting all sorts of misconceptions because he knew nothing about Yin Eclipse and showing off because he could do actual alchemy and had a fancy cauldron, while all the outer disciples basically applauded him and the elder kept saying he was a fate-thrashed genius in the making…”

“Okay…” she groaned, seeing what had happened. “Though why did the elder get involved?”

“The Blue Gate School Elder overseeing the herb court today is that Ha Gongli,” Lin Ling explained with a deep sigh. “All he wanted to do was suck up to the disciple as well, because ‘Myriad Herb Association!’ He started setting it up as this ‘Imperial Court’s superior teachings compared to the Hunter Bureau’ thing as well.”

“That… sounds harsh,” Bai Jiang, who had been listening from the side, remarked sympathetically.

“Very much so,” Ying Ji agreed. “Do you know who this disciple was?”

“Huang Fuan,” Lin Ling groaned.

“Ah…” Bai Jiang grimaced.

“Isn’t he from the Four Peacocks Court, not the Myriad Herb Association?” Feng Jinhai mused as she looked from one to the other. “And an Immortal to boot?”

Lin Ling actually dropped her cup of tea at his comment.

Sighing deeply, she withdrew the wine jar from her talisman, topped her cup of tea directly from it and took a deep drink, grimacing at the bitter taste of the tea and the spirit alcohol mixing inharmoniously.

-Of course it would be a big power like the Huang…

“I think the Four Peacocks Court also has a lot of disciples who hold positions in the Myriad Herb Association,” Bai Jiang pointed out. “The Huang clan are influential in both.”

-And the Myriad Herb Association is one of the major powers trying to get a foothold in the province from across the ocean, she reflected sourly. No wonder their disciples are happy to try and undermine the connections the Pavilions have to powers like the Blue Gate School.

“What do I do?” Lin Ling grimaced. “If I fail the request won’t it cause a huge problem for the Pavilion? I just made eight-star rank this year and this will see me sent back to like… six-star?”

“Probably you can appeal it,” she mused. “This is not the first time this has happened.”

-Though it’s probably the first time it’s happened with a scion of the Huang clan as the perpetrator. I bet those scheming elders pushing pieces around are in hysterics over this. How was there a junior associated with the Huang clan as an outer sect disciple in the Blue Gate School though?

Lin Ling just groaned, making her views on that clear.

“Here,” she pushed the wine jar over to Lin Ling, who took it wordlessly and poured herself a cup.

“Huang Fuan is known to be a bit of a hot-head,” Feng Jinhai added with a grimace.

“Wait… is he here with Huang JiLao?” she asked, sighing deeply as she saw an already difficult day only get more annoying.

“Yes,” Bai Jiang nodded. “Huang Fuan is a young master of some… repute within Nine Moons Province.”

-I suppose I can only try to intercede through Xingjuan, she thought with a grimace. And here I thought that the mess with Arai was going to be the worst thing I had to deal with today…

“I take it you stayed to the end of the ‘class’?” she asked Lin Ling.

“I did,” Ling sighed. “We started before dawn, because what they wanted to have explained was the auspicious transformations of spirit herbs when ‘New Yang’ enters the world at sunrise.”

“So, it was already a popular class,” she remarked with a wry grimace.

“It was… unusually well attended,” Lin Ling grimaced, holding her wine cup in both hands to sit it. “That should have been my warning to be honest.”

“Well, it is what it is,” she sighed. “I take it you were meant to give several?”

“The next one was after sundown today,” Lin Ling muttered. “Following up by talking about the transformation of Yang to Yin in the life cycle of spirit herbs in Yin Eclipse. Probably they hoped I would be so embarrassed by this that I would just not come back or something. Elder Gongli was so ‘impressed’ with Huang Fuan that he asked him to help ‘demonstrate’ for that group as well.”

“In that case, we can probably resolve this then,” she mused. “In the meantime, if you have nothing else to do, you can either stay here, or tag along with me?”

“What are you all doing?” Lin Ling asked, looking at the other three.

“Showing Feng Jinhai, Ying Ji and Bai Jiang here around Blue Water City on behalf of the Kun clan, then going to dinner with Ling Yu,” she replied.

“…”

“I’ll tag along,” Lin Ling said with a sigh, looking slightly less miserable than she had on arrival.