<blockquote>


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


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


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


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


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


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


    </blockquote>


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


    ~Author unknown.


    <hr>


    <h3 style="text-align: center">~ Ha Kai – Mysterious Cherry Tree Pagoda (now with spring cherries) ~


    <hr>


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


    “Concerning?” Lan Huang muttered.


    “Yes,” he agreed grimly.


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


    “…”


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


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


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


    “My talisman…” he held it out…


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


    “…”


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


    “Or Dao Lord,” Lan Huang agreed.


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


    “Ohh,” Lan Huang frowned…


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


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


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


    *—crack*


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


    “…”


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


    “Indeed,” his father sighed.


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


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


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


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


    “...”


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


    <hr>


    <h3 style="text-align: center">~ Meng Fu — Thankless Sword Recovery in Yin Eclipse ~


    <hr>


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


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


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


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


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


    Looking up at the rock slab in the middle of this cavern, she admired Cao Liang’s skilful use of the ‘Sky Slaughtering’ formation. For his realm and the short length of time he had spent up here to get used to it, he was doing admirably in the face of a very unfavourable opponent.


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


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


    “The thunder has agitated them,” she explained, even as a multi-layered peel rumbled in the distance, as if the landscape wished to emphasize that point directly. “Normally they only hunt at night and are particularly sensitive to rapid changes in the weather.”


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


    Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


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


    “If it’s someone taking part in the trial… would that even work?” her disciple asked sceptically.


    "Of course not,” she replied drily, feeding him qi to help him resist the next wave that was already massing above them. “but there is the outside possibility it was done with... if not ''good'' intentions, then superficially advantageous ones."


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


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


    “Yeah..." Cao Liang winced. “Although...”


    “Like, they could have unleashed one of the bestowed arts,” she added.


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


    Looking up at the hoard of several hundred thousand hook bats, massing above them,


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


    “First. Let’s clear out these, it would be nice to resolve this before the weather closes in—or the suppression re-coalesces to the point where we can no longer externalize laws, even with some acclimatization.”


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


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


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


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


    {Vast. Expanse. Savage. Corona.}


    <hr>


    <h3 style="text-align: center">~ ‘Tian’ Cang Di (and tagalongs) – Inner Valleys of Yin Eclipse ~


    <hr>


    Cang Di wearily wiped dark blood off his hands as he considered the ‘corpse’ of the four-metre-tall Moon Loon, his spear still lodged through its neck, and then their ruined surroundings. Thunder rumbled ominously overhead, echoing off the cliffs of the hot, humid, tree-choaked valley. A moment later, a flash of lightning bled light across the underside of the tumbling clouds.


    “A-as expected of Tian!”


    “We did it!”


    “What realm even was that!?”


    “Why is the suppression weaker here?”


    Chatter… incautious and inattentive, rippled through the onlooking cultivators. For the most part he ignored it, though the last two questions were certainly playing on his mind.


    Five days to penetrate this far into the mountain range, even with a helpful teleport, facilitated from the borders of the forbidden region. Five days of hardship and a stripping away of certain illusions about this place. Five days of other groups slowly gravitating to his initially rather select group, by word of mouth, seemingly. Each bringing their own particular brand of problem.


    “This beast is not simple…”


    He glanced over at Liling Mei, who had just spoken. An Ancient Immortal from the Dewdrop Sage Sect, she was part of the original group who had joined up with him when he passed through West Flower Picking Town.


    “We are alive,” he replied with what he hoped was a ‘wry’ laugh


    “We are,” she agreed, walking over to the prone form. “Should we leave the weapons in it?” she mused, gesturing to her chakram, which was lodged in its back, interrupting the flow of qi through its spine.


    -That is the question… he agreed, eyeing the body critically.


    It should be down, for good, at this point, but there was no denying that the fight and this qi-beast were… odd. It was a testament mostly to the martial skill of his compatriots, the strength of his divination art, ‘Shatterpoint’ in these moments and the deep pockets of the various groups that had gravitated to them, that the worst injuries suffered amounted to little more than flesh wounds and soul shock. That and the fact that the Moon Loon, despite having the durability of a Dao-step qi beast in his estimation, had only fought with the strength of a powerful immortal, and with almost no targeted soul attacks, despite the state of the current suppression. Even then, it had still pushed them all well beyond their comfort zone to down it.


    Exhaling, he focused on his divination art.


    {Shatterpoint}


    The moment shimmered in his minds eye as he considered the consequences of recovering their weapons. The Moon Loon stayed down, amidst various snippets of conversation as the other senior experts among their groups came over. What was interesting was that the points contribution for removing the core were not especially high, and the trial talisman didn’t register the moon loon as ‘dead’ at any point.


    -Does that mean this isn’t its real body?


    “This fight, I don’t like how we ended up in it,” Liling Mei added much more quietly as he pondered the frankly rather confusing possibilities his art was showing him.


    “Me neither,” he agreed, crouching down beside the beast’s head, its expression twisted in a cold death mask of furious desperation and rage, and sent a probing thread of his qi sense into the body—


    He was met almost immediately by a flat sense of rejection, like his qi was water, pouring onto smooth granite.


    -That is indeed some serious qi purity, he mused, carefully pushing against it again. There was also a subtle sense of lingering, shadowy oppression, to that solidity, that could only come from law comprehensions, firmly rooted into its body and qi. So, it’s at least in the Dao Step?


    It’s realm, tallied with what his art had just shown him, certainly explained how so few of their treasure weapons had had any real effect on it for much of the battle. Only his spear, Liling’s chakram, Dongmei and Lanying’s arrows and the treasure weapons a few others like Yan Fei had, had proven capable of piercing its hide, and only his spear had done any real damage to its body beneath.


    A Dao Step qi beast suppressed a whole step. He could only say it was deeply unlucky and that they were very lucky.


    “It is old,” Liling remarked, communicating through qi sense, pondering her chakram and the bloody wound it had caused. “But more importantly, there are traces of… ‘that’ art, on its body, they are drawing a reaction from the protections my teacher gave me.”


    “Are there now?”


    Frowning, he turned to consider the various groups of cultivators who were re-emerging from the ruined tree line, many still sheltering within barriers, unwilling to believe it was truly ‘over’.


    -‘Weird’ and ‘odd’ are great words for this whole encounter, he reflected.


    Most qi beasts they encountered had stood off of them, especially once they started using formation barriers as a larger group. Some ambushed at night or tried to target stragglers in groups whose paths had intersected with theirs, but the strong ones had excellent sense, he had observed. They didn’t engage needlessly, and clearly had an excellent grasp of hunting in this harsh landscape. Spirit herbs were far more insidious, especially since they entered this region on the edge of the Inner valleys where the suppression was somehow raised from Golden Core to above the Immortal Step.


    This Moon Loon itself, had come straight for them, suppressing its presence until it was almost too late, and gone not for him, as the greatest threat, but for the soft underbelly of their group. It had been enraged, and targeting someone, that much had been immediately clear.


    Most of those here believed his presence in the trial was because the Shu Pavilion Elder’s Hall disliked losing face to the Imperial Court. As for the actual reason, only Liling and Mingluo were truly privy. Not even Dongmei, who was a friend of many years now, knew. He could rule their groups out in any case, simply because they had been travelling together since the very start of the trial, along with the party of Shen cultivators under Liling’s care.


    Quan Dingxiang’s Pill Sovereign group and Yan Fei’s Four Peacocks’s party had also been with them for three days now. Kang Erwei’s group, which was already a mishmash of several less fortunate parties, for two.


    That left Jin Fu’s Imperial School group, who they had encountered beset by spirit herbs the previous morning, the group of random cultivators who had arrived at their camp last night, and asked to stay, and the six strong group who they had run into this morning led by Din Ouyeng, a Golden Immortal from the Jade Gate Court, and which no matter how he looked at, was an odd assortment of Ling, Ha and unaffiliated experts. Much like Kang Erwei’s bunch, they had claimed to be thrown together by adversity, presenting a… credible enough tale of being ambushed by rogue cultivators, after their local guides betrayed them, only to be saved by Din Ouyeng, but now…


    “You are sure it is Favour with a Smile?” he asked Liling, quietly.


    Now that felt way too convenient, frankly.


    “It is my sect’s art,” she pointed out sourly.


    “It isn’t possible that it’s another group from the Dew Drop Sage sect?” he added, considering the various permutations this was presenting. “Could they have—?”


    “—There are no male inheritors in this heavenly generation,” she added archly. “and the underlying mentality is wrong for anyone who learned it in the sect.”


    “Ah.”


    “Most people have no idea, but you can tell,” she sighed. “This was done by a male cultivator, Golden Immortal, probably. There are no traces of Law’s, but the execution still has clarity comparable to their use.”


    “I see,” he found himself grimacing involuntarily.


    “—And before you ask, what I can glean from it doesn’t match the qi of anyone here.”


    “Of course not, that would be far too convenient,” he sighed.


    “Unfortunately, its qi purity is too much for me to probe it directly,” Liling mused. “That said, there is an… um, divination method we could use, if we extract its core?”


    “…”


    “It… is dead, right?” Both of them turned as Yan Fei, the Golden Immortal leading the Four Peacock’s Court group, came over to join them. “And not about to explode, horribly?”


    “It shouldn’t,” he nodded.


    Nothing in what Shatterpoint had shown him suggested its ruined qi-circulation would cause a deviation of that sort, but he had only checked once.


    “—But I would not remove your weapons just yet,” Liling added drily, as he marked Dongmei and Kang Erwei also coming over to join them.


    “You have my thanks, Senior Cang, Senior Liling… and Senior Qing, Senior Erwei.” Yan Fei added, bowing politely to Dongmei and Kang Erwei as they reached them.


    “You are too polite, Brother Fei,” Erwei replied, returning the bow. “Without your swords…”


    He didn’t miss the hidden glance between Qing Dongmei and Liling Mei. It wasn’t quite an eyeroll, but he was sure both women felt Yan Fei and Kang Erwei were milking things just a little. Even in a circumstance like this, it was hard for them to entirely set aside the wider relations between their powers.


    The Nine Auspicious Moons and the Dew Drop Sage sect both got on well with the Shu Pavilion, but the former had a lot of territorial issues with the Four Peacock’s Court and the latter roundly despised nearly every central power except the Moons, Zhi Zhi Mountain and the Seven Sovereigns over their stance regarding the scandal of Di Ji—and that wasn’t even getting into the various clan rivalries.


    “It was a group effort,” he murmured. “Everyone played the role that was required, and we should give thanks to the Great Prince of True Felicity and the Queen Mother that nobody died.”


    “Well said,” Dongmei agreed, smiling faintly. “So, what do we do about it’s corpse?”


    “There are some odd things,” Liling mused. “I am sure you noticed as well.”


    “Mmm, its behaviour was certainly…” Yan Fei nodded.


    “—So I would like to try a divination on it,” Liling continued.


    “Removing the core will be difficult if we can’t use our weapons,” Kang Erwei pointed out.


    Rolling her eyes properly now, Liling Mei produced a palm length matte-grey dagger with a faintly ceramic look from her robes and stabbed it into the Moon Loon’s back, over where its core would have formed within its rib cage.


    “A void jade blade…” Yan Fei whistled in appreciation.


    “Family heirloom—don’t get any funny ideas,” Liling Mei murmured drily.


    “You wound me, Senior Mei,” Yan Fei replied earnestly.


    “This place makes the Argent Devouring Caves look like my mother’s herb garden, don’t you think, Senior Qing?” Kang Erwei murmured to Dongmei.


    “Having never seen your mother’s herb garden, I could not possibly comment,” Dongmei replied with a clear-eyed expression that would have done a cat proud. “What about you, Brother Di?”


    “…”


    -Is she doing this on purpose? He suddenly wondered, noting Liling was now very interested in carving open the chest cavity of the Moon Loon.


    “Certainly, Yin Eclipse has quite a bit on that forbidden zone,” he replied diplomatically.


    “—We, uh, have secured a perimeter, Big Sister Liling!”


    To his mild relief, a young woman in Shen clan robes interrupted the moment.


    Shen Biyu was… much more typical of the average participant in the trial, in his opinion, than any of them. A peak Immortal talent, from the Shen clan, her family was part of that ancient clan’s core echelon and had deep roots on the western continent. However, because of the current politics of the Imperial Continent and Court, the Shen had been losing influence for much of this generation, and so, despite being barely fifty years old, Shen Biyu found herself in these mountains, one of several ‘good prospects’ flying the flag for the Shen clan.


    “It… was, um… a, an honour to fight with you, S-senior Cang!” she added, bowing to him and flushing a bit.


    That said, she had not expected to end up in his company, he suspected.


    “Were there any injuries in your group?” he asked, accepting her bow.


    “J-just some people stunned by the initial howl,” Shen Biyu replied, flushing even more. “T-the talisman you gave us was the difference.”


    And she was thoroughly ‘starstruck’, he reflected with a rueful, mental sigh. At least it made a change from the disciples from imperial powers who constantly acted like his presence here was a challenge to their very reputations.


    It was hard not to look at her, and almost everyone here as children, in that regard, even though they were from the same ‘generation’ he was. Most of their parents, and even grandparents, were younger than he was.


    At least Shen Biyu’s family had not underestimated this place, attaching their daughter’s group to Liling’s, and securing the advice of several veterans of the Hunter Bureau with personal familiarity with these mountains to accompany her. The same could not be said for some of the other groups that had stumbled into their path.


    In truth, even his own teacher, who could truly be said to stand at the apex of this world, had been so perturbed about the need to delve into this place, that he had spent the last few months having him undergo harsh acclimatization training to fight in highly suppressed environments.


    His teacher had also made him read what at the time had felt like every text in his personal library that spoke of this place with any authority, and even taken him through a few of his own memories of these valleys, from trips made into them. Still, it was one thing to be shown, and undergo ‘training’, and quite another to struggle against it like this on a daily basis, and learn in person, the key thing his teacher had drilled into him, that the thing that killed you in Yin Eclipse faster than anything else was ‘taking your current circumstances for granted’.


    “Hmmmm… that’s interesting…” Liling Mei’s comment interrupted things again, before he could work out what to say in reply to Shen Biyu.


    “Oh?” Kang Erwei leant over to look at the core she had just begun to expose. “Oh.”


    “What’s wrong?” he asked, carefully schooling his face. He had a fair idea of what she had just discovered—namely that there was next to no soul presence in the core at all.


    “Its soul...?” Kang Erwei muttered, sounding confused.


    “Indeed,” Liling Mei nodded. “It doesn’t appear to have one.”


    “Or it abandoned it, at some point?” Dongmei mused, glancing at him.


    “That would make a lot of sense,” he agreed. “It’s use of Soul attacks in that fight, despite its realm could only be described as ‘instinctive’.”


    “Mmmmm, yes.” Yan Fei nodded as well.


    “Will this interfere with your divination?” he asked, suspecting he knew the answer there already.


    “M-maybe?” Liling Mei frowned. “There are still traces, it feels like, but…?”


    “—So, it abandoned its body for some reason before it reached us?” Kang Erwei suggested, looking around at their surroundings.


    “—Did… someone or something injure it to this degree before it ever crossed paths with us?” Dongmei asked softly, at pretty much the same time.


    “I-it was already badly injured?” Shen Biyu paled, eyeing the Moon Loon, then shattered trees, cracked rocks and flattened vegetation of the torn-up clearing, then the rest of them.


    “That would explain a lot,” Liling Mei agreed, not quite looking over at him.


    -Making the question now, ‘why is it poisoned with this weird Yang Qi and also affected by Favour With a Smile’, he reflected to himself glumly.


    Unfortunately, he had been off world, attending a series of Dao Gathering’s with his senior brother when the whole matter with Di Ji unfolded. As such, he had no real first-hand knowledge of what occurred, beyond what he had heard from others. He had met Xua Ziyi a few times prior to that. And once since. He remembered a bright, outward looking young woman, not much different from Shen Biyu, in so many ways. Talented, eager to make friends and always ready to try and be the bridge between others. It was that generosity that had ruined her, and so many around her, including personal friends of Liling Mei, Dongmei, and Mingluo Lanying.


    Afterwards, he had met her once more, visiting the Dew Drop Sage Sect. Now, that brilliant child was little more than a shadow. A broken thing, who spent most of her days staring at her own reflection, in the dark waters of the same pool beside which she had played so vibrantly before. Broken by her ordeal in so many ways that she might never, truly, be whole again.


    As to that cursed art, which had become synonymous with Di Ji, and also the excuse behind which the Imperial Court had permitted the Di family to hide from the consequences of their scion’s disgraceful actions, at least one complete manual—that Xua Ziyi had had on her person—was known to have circulated in the dark corners of Eastern Azure. It had never been recovered, as far as he knew.


    -Someone with connections to the underworld of Eastern Azure clashed with this Moon Loon, up here?


    They were close, relatively speaking, to the area that had been devastated by whatever transpired a week earlier.


    “You know, there is something else… odd, going on here,” Liling observed, beckoning to him, and stirring him out of pondering the various warnings and information he had been given over those events. “Brother Cang, what do you make of it?”


    Making his way around the body, he crouched down by Liling, who was still carefully extricating the core from the Moon Loon. It took her a moment to realise what she was pointing out, but there, within the murky surface of the core, which was about the size of his head, was a faint matrix of greenish gold, almost like tangled vine leaves?


    “That isn’t what I think it is, is it?” Liling whispered to him, using her immortal sense and a thread of soul law to avoid being overheard.


    Indeed, to his eyes it looked remarkably like a residual trace of Parasol Qi. He focused his divination art on it, and instantly got a profound and unsettlingly ‘bad’ vibe, without even needing to explore a moment in which he interacted with it.


    “It does appear to be,” he replied.


    Sources of Parasol Qi this pure were not common. In fact, probably none existed outside the personal gardens of very powerful people. Even in the Seven Sovereigns, as far as he knew, you could not just produce active Parasol Qi of this degree as a junior, unless you practiced methods associated with the very core of that influence.


    “Is it some kind of poisoning?” Kang Erwei asked, peering at it and making a face.


    “…”


    Yan Fei peered over at it as well, then flickered his gaze sideways at the two of them, raising an eyebrow.


    -Being from the Four Peacocks Court, he surely recognises it as well, he mused, hoping that Yan Fei had the good sense not to say anything to openly about it.


    “Yang based, yes,” Yan Fei agreed after a long moment. “I would not advocate for messing with it.”


    “You don’t say,” Liling murmured. “Do we extract it?” she added, turning to him.


    “I don’t think we can afford to leave it here,” he mused. “Let me…”


    Curious, now, he invoked his divination art a third time, and tested what might happen if he tried to store the corpse. To his slight surprise, his storage ring rejected it, with an indication that it was indeed because it still had an extant soul link. In that moment, he tested what happened if they took the body, and left the core, and that got him some very odd… vibes, none of them good either. Cancelling the art, he took a breath and tried again, this time on sealing the core and leaving the body. That was more auspicious…in a remarkably tenuous sense, but only if he took the core. Anyone else taking it was almost as bad as the previous divination.


    “Well?” Qing Dongmei asked.


    “I think we seal the core, leave the body, valuable as it might be.” He pronounced at last. “It is clearly damaged goods.”


    On that point, a worrying thought occurred to him.


    -What about the treasures Liling and the others used?


    Considering that, he turned Shatterpoint to Liling’s chakram, Dongmei and Erwei’s arrows, Yan Fei’s sword and his spear—and got very unpleasant, lingering results for everything but his spear, which was unharmed.


    “Unbind your Chakram,” he instructed Liling, with soul sense. “I’ll compensate you for the loss.”


    “Un…? Oh, motherless son of a Dun Whore!” Liling actually stood up and kicked the Moon Loon’s body, cursing somewhat theatrically, and loudly enough that some of the cultivators still keeping their distance looked over at them.


    Scowling, she invoked the unbinding seal for her treasure. He felt her qi shift, and an intangible sense of ‘loss’ bleed out from her for a moment as she discarded the treasure.


    “What…?” Yan Fei, Kang Erwei and Shen Biyu all stared at her in shock.


    “Your treasures are also corrupted,” Liling informed the two men gloomily. “If mine is.”


    “Corrupted…” Yan Fei stared at his swords, embedded in knee and ankle of the Moon Loon, his expression curdling.


    “What about my dagger?” she asked him.


    “It is fine, whatever it is, doesn’t seem able to deal with materials of that calibre. My spear is also fine.”


    “I’ll compensate you for your loss, Brother Yan,” he consoled Yan Fei. “My teacher gave me several excellent sets, you can have your pick.”


    “I… ah, thank you, Senior Cang,” Yan Fei gave him a wan smile. “It was just… it was the treasure my father got me, when I was accepted as an inner disciple… you know.”


    “I am sorry, Brother Yan,” Kang Erwei murmured.


    “—This came from my grandmother,” Liling Mei sighed, nodding to the chakram. “It’s been passed down through my family for half an aeonspan.”


    “…”


    Dongmei grimaced and gave her friend’s shoulder a sympathetic squeeze. Shen Biyu just looked mildly horrified on their behalf.


    Considering the small arsenal of talisman weapons his teacher and given him, he selected a set of three chakrams, made from the same composite material as Liling’s dagger and passed them to her.


    “Use these for now,” he suggested, before considering what might suit Yan Fei.


    He had a lot of swords, but most were intended for support formations, and thus paired with talismans to unleash specific attacks or defences. In terms of actual backup weapons, there were a few that might suit Yan Fei, so he selected a matched pair infused with Yin and Yang attributed moon jades that would support the arts he had from the Four Peacocks Court, and then a slightly less impressive set, that would boost recovery.


    “Would either of these suit you?” he asked Yan Fei, producing the four and setting them on the ground.


    “…”


    “Umm, uh... y-yes?” Yan Fei stared at the swords in shock. “But um… these are really…?”


    “I know I said that that chakram had been in my family for a while,” Liling coughed, considering the weapons he had given her. “But these… are you sure?”


    “It’s fine.” He waved away both their objections. “Having a good weapon here is important. Life is important, spirit stones are just…”


    “In that case, please accept my thanks!” Yan Fei bowed to him and accepted the swords.


    Liling considered the three chakrams, then also bowed deeply to him.


    “You both bind those,” he suggested, kneeling down and taking up Liling’s bloody knife, which she had left in the wound. “I’ll do something about this fate-thrashed core.”


    Another long rumble of thunder overhead made some of the lower-realm cultivators around the clearing glace up uneasily.


    “What do you want me to do?” Shen Biyu asked, looking nervous.


    “Just stick with Liling and Dongmei,” he suggested, giving her a reassuring smile, before setting to work carefully isolating the remaining meridians Liling had not yet cut.


    Freeing it from the Moon Loon’s remnant Qi circulation network didn’t take long. Near as he could tell, the corruption was only in the process of spreading into the core, and had not fully overtaken it, but using his immortal sense, and now knowing what to look for, he quickly found traces of it in the flesh around its Heart Gate as well. That suggested most of the body was afflicted.


    Shaking his head, he considered the various barriers before selecting one of a batch of eight Eternal Realm Eight Trigrams sealing charms his teacher had given him that came from the Meng clan itself. Others would probably have worked, and this was certainly overkill, but Parasol Qi was a thing of theirs, and their barriers were truthfully the best for dealing with it, so he had no intentions of taking any chances.


    Producing a Dao Jade, he focused his Intent and Shatterpoint on the talisman—


    {Vast Sovereign Primal Trigram}


    The talisman chimed cheerfully and a shimmering trigram of golden flames appeared in the air over the core, imprinting itself onto it.


    Eight ghostly runes flickered at auspicious directions around the core, then flowed towards it, imprinting themselves on a ghostly clay pot, that became fully tangible a moment later, signifying that the sealing was a success.


    “That’s… a sealing talisman all right,” Dongmei remarked drily, as he picked the melon-sized pot up and carefully tried to store it.


    “Better safe than sorry,” he shrugged, as to his relief this time, it stored with no problems whatsoever.


    As a final act, he stood and bowed to the Moon Loon’s corpse.


    “Truly, you did not deserve to die like this,” he murmured, by way of a prayer, turning to each of the four directions, in turn and making an auspicious symbol as he bowed.


    Some would not consider it necessary, but his teacher had impressed on him years ago, that any entity, even something like a qi-beast, that made it to the Dao Step was not to be trifled with, in terms of the accumulation they had accrued. The workings of ‘Heaven’, in its much more abstract and supreme sense were doubly mysterious in this strange, otherly land, as well, according to many of those written texts he had studied. Ritual and The Way were important here.


    The others gave him a slightly odd look, but Dongmei did mirror his gesture after a moment, followed by Liling. Then, presumably because they did it, so did Yan Fei, Kang Erwei and Shen Biyu, which was sort of funny.


    “—Lady Shen!”


    His quiet moment of reflection on the possible futility of the lost life of the Moon Loon was broken by a young bearded Chosen Immortal called Shen Fan Jingfa, who waved to Shen Biyu from the far side of the clearing with some other members of her group.


    “Ah, sorry,” Shen Biyu muttered, glancing sideways at him.


    “It’s fine,” he chuckled, waving for Jingfa to come over.


    Wearing Shen clan robes, embroidered on each upper sleeve and the chest with two golden stars and the Hunter Bureau sigil, Shen Jingfa was the most senior of the three former Bureau officials that had joined them with Biyu’s group. All three belonged to the Shen clan influence in Blue Water City, as he understood it, and while none were ‘active’ members of the Hunter Bureau, having retired after the calamitous ‘Blood Eclipse’ that had wracked the province, all three had centuries of practical experience in these mountains between them.


    “What did you find?” he asked the youth once he had jogged over.


    “Beihuan spotted Hook Bats active on the ridge above us, Young Lord Tian,” Jingfa informed him respectfully. “Given the hour, that isn’t good,” then added helpfully. “Like this Moon Loon, they are usually nocturnal, and Beihuan spotted several dozen circling above the cliffs to our west—” Jingfa pointed off to their right in the direction of the Thundercrest, the Jasmine Jate and the Inner Valleys. “If a whole nest has been agitated…”


    “How big is a nest, uh… typically?” Shen Biyu asked, eyeing the cloud wreathed cliffs Jingfa had just indicated uneasily.


    “Big enough,” Jingfa replied with a grimace. “In the outer valleys, usually hundreds strong. Up here? There is one near the Three Falls Valley on the slopes of East Fury that swarmed and assaulted Misty Vale about three hundred years ago. It had about six thousand bats.”


    “Six… but they are just bats… right?” Shen Biyu muttered, rather hopefully.


    “When they tallied the corpses, that swarm had left dozens of immortal-realm bats dead in the Military Authority’s formations and hundreds only a little weaker,” Jingfa replied with an understanding grimace. “This might not be as bad, but we are in the open, and that Moon Loon—Fates curse its memory, I cannot believe such a creature met its end at your hands, Young Lord—made a lot of…


    Even as Jingfa was speaking, he felt his skin prickle.


    Dongmei, Erwei and Fei all flinched.


    Liling, who had been experimenting with her new chakrams paused, her eyes flitting to him, then at the cliffs behind them.


    A fraction of a second later, a smothering, sweltering wave of yang rich intent rolled over the whole valley, making trees and vegetation shiver—


    “—noise...” Jingfa trailed off, staring around them in horror as displaced moisture transformed into a veil of smothering, humid mist in the blink of an eye—


    *KRUMP*


    Even as the temperature around them surged, shifting from ‘deeply unpleasant’ to ‘steam bath’, a dull, flat sound rang through the valley—


    Following it, moments later, was a much softer, but to him, much more worrying rumble. A series of distant, continuous booms, layering over each other, caused by what was probably rapidly expanding droplets of water vapour—


    “DOWN!” he roared, grabbing Shen Biyu and Jingfa and pulling them to the ground, as he projected all of his intent into his voice hoping those further away heard and just obeyed.


    A second later, there was a total absence of sound, as the mist and low cloud was physically lifted outwards. Rolling over them in a white wall that battered his qi and sucked the very breath out of his body as the pressure wave—the leading edge of an immense explosion—reached them.


    Ears ringing eerily, he got to his knees and looked around.


    The ground was steaming, heat spreading through their surroundings, dragging the ambient temperature to the point where any mortal without qi armour would be badly scalded, and even cultivators like Shen Biyu, who was groaning beside him, started to see their skin blister—


    Above them, the clouds were roiling outwards, faint streamers of Yang Qi flitted through the sky above, streaking outwards like a flock of scattering birds. There was a profundity to it that eluded his senses, and he didn’t need Shatterpoint or any other art to tell him that what he was seeing was the physical manifestation of natural laws.


    The raising of the suppression that fractional amount to touch the threshold of the Dao Step made his skin crawl. The relaxation, and the sudden awareness of laws left him feeling like he was standing at the edge of a dizzying precipice, yet he could not dwell on it.


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


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


    Staring up at them, he felt cold sweat forming on the back of his neck and an urge to curse Shen Jingfa for invoking troubles, even if the herb hunter’s warning had been entirely prescient.


    What he could see of the scattering swarm had to number in the tens of thousands, and many of the bats were genuinely unfathomable, even now that he was effectively no longer seriously suppressed.


    Among those he could sense, there were dozens of Ancient Immortal bats, Golden and Chosen Immortal bats and so many Immortal ones he could not even count them.


    Screaming in rage and fear, the swarm twisted this way and that… and then, almost as one, the nearest edge swept across the ridgeline to their west and down into the shelter of their valley.


    Not waiting for anyone else, he produced a Dao Eternal Barrier talisman—not one of the Meng ones, just a normal one, and focusing on what he remembered to be the rough extremity of the groups around the clearing, expanded that range by a third again and triggered it.


    The barrier snapped into focus just in time. Hundreds of immortal-realm hook bats slammed into it, followed by tens of stronger ones, unexpectedly impeded as they hurtled down between the trees.


    “That’s a lot of bats…” Liling muttered grimly, getting to her feet and conjuring a second, much more focused barrier just around their group.


    “My… head…” Shen Biyu groaned.


    Off to their right, a talisman blossomed into a several huge blue chrysanthemums, consuming several hundred of the weaker bats as they wheeled across the surface of the barrier and even badly injuring the immortal-step ones caught in their radius.


    “What idiot is…?” Dongmei snarled, as a second wave of chrysanthemums expanded overhead—


    A silent screech bled through the barrier, which rippled as the strength of laws washed against it, dispersing the blue flowers and several other talisman attacks.


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


    Invoking his divination art again, he watched as the bat collided with the barrier and shattered it like glass, depleting the entire Dao Jade fuelling it in a single impact. It impacted Liling’s barrier a moment later, failing to crack that, but stunning all of them and scattering their qi, at which point…


    He didn’t need to see the rest to know how that turned out.


    Re-invoking Shatterpoint, he allowed his barrier talisman to use as many of the spirit stones in his ring as it needed, he also took out one of his teacher’s life-saving talismans… and got to watch as the descending bat suddenly twisted in the air, eight more inscrutable bats, thirty three ancient immortal bats and ninety nine other lesser immortal realm bats moving into what was absolutely a naturalistic formation—


    Even as the strength of the main barrier rapidly deepened, the ninety-nine slammed into it, and the entire top portion of the field shook, the nodes within juddering—then the thirty-three targeted the momentarily exposed weak points, allowing the nine dao step bats to break through, the eight scattering to target various groups, while the leader… vanished from his senses—


    The divination ended, just as the previous one had.


    At this point, they were demonstrably out of time, so all he could do was strengthen the barrier with the Dao Jades, and use the knowledge he had gained to focus Shatterpoint on the nodes themselves, moving to reinforce—


    The descending bat twisted, its shriek shaking the whole barrier. The swarm of bats crashed down, and he could only watch in horror as they effortlessly evaded his art’s reinforcement of the barrier, hitting an entirely different sequence of nodes, to much the same effect. Shatterpoint still allowed him to react somewhat, but then, rather than the ancient immortal bats, as soon as he began to push back, it was three of the dao step ones that moved in decisively and with shocking precision break three of the lesser barrier nodes causing a third of the upper hemisphere to catastrophically weaken.


    -Ah. Shit.


    Triggering the strongest barrier he had to protect the area immediately around them, he abandoned all pretence of conserving resources and produced the life-saving talisman avatar that his teacher had given him, able only to trust in that strength to save them.


    Before he could trigger it, however, the swarm above recoiled.


    In the same instant, a breathtakingly beautiful young woman with glowing golden tresses and draped in a plain, if very stylish white robe plummeted down from the ridgeline the swarm had just swept over. Along with her, she dragged another young man wearing heavy armour, who looked faintly terrified at whatever had just happened.


    As he watched, stunned by this sudden development, of which Shatterpoint had given no indication, she landed in the middle of the valley, a short distance from the edge of the now properly collapsing barrier, generating enough force as she did that the shockwave shattered trees around her and actually cratered the ground at her point of impact, leaving ripples across the barrier.


    “W-what…?” Yan Fei gawked as the vast swarm of bats swirled away from them. The leader amongst them checked its meteoric descent and with a silent, law-infused hiss, rapidly began to gain height again.


    “Liang… if you scream like a girl it ruins your image,” the beauty said with a sigh, her words easily reaching them as she took in the valley. “At least the fate-thrashed bats got the hint.”


    “You could have told me…” the youth muttered by way of reply, tugging at his armour.


    “First—” before the armoured youth could finish speaking, the golden-haired woman lazily swept her sword up at the reforming swarm circling above. For a brief moment he swore it became four swords, or the afterimages of them, then it was just one in her hand—


    With a silent roar, a golden-white curtain of fire split the sky above them. The bats that had been swarming through the collapsing barrier desperately evaded and circled away, fortunate ones screaming in fury as thousands of their compatriots, including most of the ancient immortal and half the dao-step bats that had led the charge were turned into afterimages by the fire.


    “Tcch.” The beauty raised her sword a second time, almost like the swarm was a dog she was threatening.


    To his immense relief, the hook bats clearly had no appetite for what she was offering, either, because they rapidly turned and flew away, out of this valley and in the direction of the East Fury Peaks.


    “Who…?” nearby, Kang Erwei was staring at the pair, who were now slowly walking towards them.


    Yan Fei was just staring at them, his face pale, clearly in shock.


    Dongmei and Liling didn’t reply either, just gave him uneasy sideways looks.


    -That… is the question.


    Focusing on Shatterpoint, he watched as both came up to them… and simply exchanged greetings, asking how they were and offering some help, until the moment ran out, with nothing untoward occurring. That in itself was fine, but the thing that made the skin on his arms and neck prickle was that throughout it all, there was no sense of anything beyond the moment. The aspect of the art that dealt with fortune and misfortune entirely failed to get a meaningful purchase on either of them.


    Had it failed outright, that would have been one thing. There were talismans that could do that. However, instead the woman was just… there, as if she were a mortal young woman in her late twenties, bowing while her junior brother greeted them. Not hidden, although if he had not been looking at her—


    He blinked, confused, because suddenly, over the course of the conversation she did slowly become more a part of the divination, until by the time it ran out, he was hard pressed to understand why he had thought she was so odd at the start.


    “…”


    “Do I have something on my face?” the young woman asked drily.


    He stared at her, and realised he had been, for the last moment. The weird feeling from the initial moment he activated Shatterpoint refused to go away, but here and now, there was indeed nothing untoward, and in fact, the art was telling him that this meeting was very auspicious.


    “Ahem, no, sorry,” he coughed and bowed to both her and her companion. “Greetings Dao Sister, Dao Brother…? I am Daoist Cang Di of the Shu Pavilion, you have my thanks for your timely intervention. Without it…”


    “—We did make an entrance,” the armoured youth agreed drily.


    “Hong Li Fu,” the young woman replied returning his bow politely.


    “Cao Liang,” the armoured youth added, also saluting him.


    “Qing Dongmei, of the Nine Auspicious Moons.” Dongmei also bowed formally.


    “Liling Mei, of the Dew Drop Sage Sect,” Liling murmured, mirroring Dongmei.


    “K-Kang Erwei, of the Cherished Autumn Pagoda,” Kang Erwei saluted her.


    “Yan Fei, from the Four Peacock’s Western Court,” Yan Fei added.


    “S-shen Biyu, from the Shen clan,” Shen Biyu hurriedly added also bowing deeply. Jingfa didn’t introduce himself, just followed Shen Biyu’s greeting.


    He couldn’t help but notice that neither Hong Li Fu nor Cao Liang had given an influence, either.


    Such were the challenging circumstances of the trial by this point, that most groups called out their influence now—usually before even introducing themselves. That was more of a shield against robbery and malpractice at the moment than one''s cultivation level, what with the suppression up here. Anyone who didn’t give it was either certain it wouldn’t matter—or strong enough to not fear any cultivator in here. Considering the entrance the two had just made, though, this was likely a case of the latter.


    “Huh, it’s only been a few days and its already that stage of the trial?” Hong Li Fu murmured to her companion, just softly enough that he suspected only he heard her… or was allowed to hear.


    “Ahem,” Cao Liang coughed, giving Hong Li Fu a sideways glance, then stepped forward with a friendly smile. “We are martial siblings from the ‘Beautiful Skies Walking Society’. Please forgive our relaxed introduction.”


    “There is nothing to forgive,” he replied, politely.


    Neither their names, nor their influence felt like a lie. What was odder was that despite him adhering to what he had done in the Shatterpoint, the conversation itself was just… different. If he had to describe it, it was almost like the pair just existed within the moment, yet it was impossible to pin them to the past moment. Both had occurred, they had introduced themselves similarly, and yet…


    -Both of them are surely at the Dao Step, but don’t tell me—are they fully severed from Eastern Azure’s Worldly fate?


    Suddenly, he was very glad he had experience being around mysterious experts. Cao Liang he could get no read on at all, age wise, but Hong Li Fu really didn’t seem to be hiding her age at all. Most would assume she had some amazing treasures, or that she was some off world scion, here with a senior to ‘partake’, but there was just something about that initial impression she had made.


    It was not the sort of presence you could get simply via treasures, and he had been in the presences of prodigal scions of the Shu clan, who were Dao Step juniors, and even some of the Saintess Candidates of this generation, and none of them came close to that. Yet the person she really reminded him of, for some utterly mind-boggling reason was…


    =There is no way… right? But what happened last week…?


    There absolutely was a Cao Liang in the Seven Sovereigns upper echelon. He had even been introduced to the youngest Dao Ancestor and disciple of Heavenly Daughter Meng Fu when he had visited the Shu Pavilion, though that had been a few centuries ago. The youth in front of him had some resemblance, but the Cao was a big clan, and Liang was not an uncommon name…


    -Is it just because of the Parasol Qi, that my mind is going to weird places?


    He realised she was looking at him, with an almost amused expression.


    “Beautiful Skies, alas, mine eyes had not known it before now,” Kang Erwei murmured, before he could say anything further. “I will surely engrave it in my heart.”


    “Indeed,” Yan Fei added, saluting her.


    “Please ignore them, Senior Hong,” Qing Dongmei cut in, giving Kang Erwei a sideways look that Erwei probably didn’t notice, so enthralled by her presence was he.


    “Ah.” Hong Li Fu frowned and suddenly, the faint sense of enthralment that still clung to her faded even more.


    “My apologies,” she murmured. “My aura was a little… much—because of the hook bats.”


    “Ah-haha…” Yan Fei and Kang Erwei both coughed and bowed, flushing a little as they realised what had happened.


    Slightly to his surprise, the look Cao Liang gave the pair was more sympathetic than anything else.


    “It seems you have had a hard struggle here,” Cao Liang suggested, gesturing at the Moon Loon.


    “Ah… yes, it ambushed us at a most inopportune time,” Liling replied politely. “Fortunately, we were able to overcome it, but…” unbidden, her gaze flickered in the direction the hook bat swarm had retreated.


    “—To fight so many immediately, we owe you our good fortune, Senior Hong,” Qing Dongmei added respectfully.


    “Our meeting was auspicious,” Hong Li Fu chuckled. “And please, just call me Senior Li, we are compatriots in this battle of life and death, I will not be at ease, otherwise…”


    “…”


    Now, Cao Liang really did give her a sideways glance, though it was rueful, and probably nobody but him picked up on it.


    “Senior Sister is most gracious,” Qing Dongmei and Liling both murmured.


    At this point, some of the leaders of the other groups, who had been sheltering under their own barriers, were finally plucking up the courage to approach them, he noticed.


    “If you need pills, some medicine to recuperate, we have them to spare,” Hong Li Fu added. “The harsh Yang Strength in these valleys is most devious, and should not be underestimated—” so saying, she produced a box of pills and passed them to him.


    “Please accept them,” her voice whispered melodiously in his mind. “The circumstances of these valleys are far more precarious than you know. I suggest you depart them quickly.”


    Accepting them, he bowed to her.


    “Thank you for your generosity, Lady Hong,” he replied, accepting them. “—And for the warning,” he added with his soul sense.


    “We will also dispose of that body,” she added, her gaze flitting to the Moon Loon behind him. “Did you take the core?”


    “I… uh, yes.” he replied carefully. “It is sealed,”


    “Good,” she replied with an amused chuckle. “The art you used is auspiciously suitable, but do not treat it lightly, or flaunt that core. If you encounter other such poisoned beasts, seal them similarly.”


    “I… shall,” he replied, mulling over her words, more and more certain now that she was indeed someone affiliated with the Meng clan, at the very least.


    “Oh, one other thing,” she added, her gaze turning serious. “Be wary of those affiliated with the Jade Gate Court and especially the Din clan. There is more at play in this trial than meets the eye.”


    “Thank you…” was all he could really say in reply to that warning.


    The whole conversation had basically taken place in the instant of him receiving the box from her, so he simply stored it and gave her a further polite salute of thanks, which she returned with another faintly amused smile, before turning to Cao Liang.


    “Liang,” she gestured to the Moon Loon. “Would you do the honours with that corpse?”


    “Oh, sure,” Cao Liang, eyed the corpse for a moment then nodded and gestured for them to step away from it.


    The others glanced at him, particularly Yan Fei and Kang Erwei.


    “It is better to destroy it,” he informed them quietly. “Otherwise it will just cause more issues…”


    “That is true,” Yan Fei conceded, as they moved to stand beside him.


    “And it is better than leaving it, given what is contaminating it,” Liling added.


    “Yeah…” Kang Erwei sighed. “It is, isn’t it.”


    “—Very much so,” Cao Liang agreed, drawing his long sword from its scabbard.


    He watched with interest as Cao Liang walked over to the Moon Loon and crouched down beside it. There was no sense of qi, or anything else, as he put a hand to its head, simply stared at it for a long moment, then sighed and gave Hong Li Fu a slight nod.


    Hong Li Fu sighed softly and glanced around at the ruined valley, then nodded in return.


    Cao Liang pulled his spear out of its neck, then stepped back and, after stabbing it in the ground, drew his own two-handed Jian from its scabbard and swung it down towards the corpse—


    There was a sense of the space around the Moon Loon’s body blurring, then inky black yang flames enveloped it in an eye-searing purple flash, reducing the corpse to little more than scattering ashes—


    Yan Fei hissed under his breath and the others all took a step back, as a heartbeat later, the ashen outline started to sprout twisted green plants he recognised as parasol blooms—


    The dark yang flames shifted, swirling around and turned pale white, now radiating a profound Yin Strength. The parasol blooms wavered, struggling against it for a moment, before finally dissolving into iridescent sparks.


    Cao Liang made a seal with his free hand and the flames spun, turning into an orb in front of him that was somehow every colour, and none, then the eight trigrams shone around them and the whole thing solidified into a fist-sized jade-like sphere. Cao Liang caught it out of the air and stored it away before it could fall to the ground.


    “Please take this as well,” Hong Li Fu passed him a second box, which turned out to be a container with five Dao Jade worth of Heavenly Jades. “As compensation, this seems fair?”


    “More than…” Yan Fei, coughed, eyeing the box.


    “Fairy Saintess is most generous,” Kang Erwei agreed, his words echoed by Shen Biyu and Jingfa.


    “Senior sister is most forthright,” Dongmei and Liling added, also proffering her salutes.


    “Not at all, not at all…” Hong Li Fu chuckled, accepting their gestures with a wave of her hand.


    “In any case, we see you will need some time to rest…” Cao Liang added, glancing at the other cultivators who had almost reached them. “So, we will take our leave now. Take care and do not overestimate yourselves. Take it from me, these valleys are dangerous places to traverse, especially if you are inexperienced.”


    Hong Li Fu nodded at his words.


    “Travel safely, and may the Prince of True Felicity guide your steps,” he replied, saluting them formally.


    “True Felicity… he certainly could do with putting eyes on these valleys this last week,” Hong Li Fu murmured under her breath, so softly he almost thought he imagined what she said, returning his salute.


    They watched in silence, as without further preamble she turned and walked off in the direction of the northern exit to the valley, where it led directly into the deeper interior, looking for all the world like she was out on a summer stroll to pick flowers.


    Cao Liang just sighed, gave the cultivators approaching a long look, also returned their salutes and then quickly trotted off to catch up with her.


    “—The Shu Pavilion is lucky to have a talent like you, young lad,” he nearly jumped as Cao Liang’s voice echoed in his mind. “Tell Tian Kai Bao that Cao Liang sends his regards and congratulates the Four Peaks Inheritance Hall, your talent does the Hall and your Senior Brothers and Sister credit. Oh… and try not to die up here."


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


    “Well, that went better than I expected,” Liling murmured softly, once the pair had vanished.


    “Yeah,” he agreed, taking a deep breath.


    To speak of his senior martial brother, the inheriting disciple of Ancestor Iron, Kai Bao in that manner, suggested a certain familiarity beyond the normal, especially when you knew that Kai Bao was a Dao Ascendant student of Ancestor Iron… and then there was the mention of Senior Martial Sister Aoxu, who had been in seclusion for most of his lifetime until she showed up to see him off before he came here.


    There was no doubt in his mind now that Cao Liang was, indeed, that ancestor from the Seven Sovereigns.


    “They were a bit rude?”


    “Ahh… someone like her can be as rude as she likes?”


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


    “Indeed…”


    Exhaling, he turned to face the dozen or so disciples who proclaimed to have some ‘influence’ among the disparate groups they had absorbed.


    “And to be wandering around like that… isn’t it a bit much?”


    “Do they not respect Young Noble Cang?”


    Not for the first time, their chatter gave him cause to wonder how, exactly, they actually saw the events that had just transpired. Especially given they had nearly suffered a total disaster.


    He wasn’t the only one seemingly sharing that view, because Kang Erwei and Yan Fei were both glaring at them


    “Everyone has their own style,” Mingluo Lanying, cut in, silencing most of the chatter, to his relief.


    “What influence do you think they were really from, Brother Cang?” Erwei asked him more softly with his soul sense as the others started to ask questions of what had just gone down.


    “They told no untruths when they introduced themselves,” he replied.


    “True, but there is no trace of either of them on the trial list,” Erwei pointed out.


    “Not everyone in these mountains is necessarily a participant,” he mused. “Remember what happened a week ago, and who was at the grand dinner, before we all set out?”


    “…”


    Kang Erwei gave him a long look, but did seem to get the hint.


    “So, what do we do now?” Dongmei asked him, falling in beside him as he walked over to claim his spear from where Cao Liang had stuck it in the ground. “The compass heading you had before we got ambushed was taking us in the same direction they just went…”


    “—and waiting around here isn’t necessarily a great idea,” he mused.


    “Yes.” She agreed, nodding.


    “So, I think they will understand,” he replied after thinking about it for a long moment.


    It was indeed, a bit awkward, because backtracking wasn’t really an option, nor was going in the direction of East Fury, because that would take them towards the hook bats. There was no way he was going to lead this group into the heart of whatever had disturbed that swarm, either.


    The only other path took them close to areas like the Jasmine Gate, and he had been warned in no uncertain terms to stay clear of that region unless his own task here made it absolutely unavoidable.


    “First things first, let’s distribute some of these pills, check who is injured then bribe everyone with these heavenly jades,” he continued, withdrawing several of the pills Hong Li Fu had given him, and a hundred heavenly jades and passing them unobtrusively over to her.


    That was almost certainly why she had given him what amounted to about five million spirit stones, all told. Among those talking to the others, he could already hear voices complaining about the lack of any return for the danger they had just ‘endured’. A part of him really hoped they would get out of that mindset, because this place was just too fate-thrashed dangerous. The trial-talisman reward for the core, in his earlier shatterpoint had only been about six thousand contribution points as well, and however the Imperial Astrology Bureau had set the whole thing up, it didn’t like calculating shared ‘loot’, only kill contributions.


    That was also why he was giving the pills and jades to the others to share around. It was better that it wasn’t all ‘seen’ to come from him. As a system, he could not shake the feeling that far too much about this whole trial felt unduly weighted towards putting targets on backs.


    “Beware the Jade Gate Court, huh…”


    “Pardon?” Dongmei, who had still been connected to him by soul sense asked.


    “Ah, she gave me a warning about them,” he replied.


    “Seems a pretty common sense warning,” Dongmei observed with a mirthless smile.


    “—Do… you have a moment, Brother Cang?” he glanced around to find Yan Fei had extricated himself and come over to join them.


    “I’ll go help Lanying, Ying and Tuli,” Dongmei murmured, giving him a nod.


    “Sure,” he agreed, turning to Yan Fei. “What is it?”


    “Um… I am pretty sure that expert with the woman was an old ancestor from the Seven Sovereigns,” Yan Fei informed him, uneasily, glancing at Dongmei as she walked over to the other Nine Moons disciples. “There is no way that was… a Saintess Candidate from the Meng clan, right?”


    “…”


    -I guess he is not an inner disciple of the Four Peacocks court for nothing, he reflected, giving Yan Fei an appraising look.


    Given that power’s proximity to the remaining mainland territories of the Meng Clan and particularly Meng City, he supposed if anyone in this group was going to make that connection this quickly it would be him.


    “I think you are not wrong,” he replied carefully, after mulling over what he could say and considering the options for a moment with Shatterpoint and what he could safely share without causing problems. “They are likely investigating matters from the last week. There have been a lot of rumours about the Meng clan doing this and that, after all.”


    “Yeah,” Yan Fei agreed. “But that was Parasol qi, you don’t think that…?”


    “If they wanted to kill us, they could have let the hook bats do it,” he pointed out wryly.


    “True,” Yan Fei sighed. “There is just… something about all this that feels off, you know what I mean?”


    “I do,” he agreed, his gaze drifting over to where Din Ouyeng’s group was, not really engaging with the largely pointless discussion about what had just occurred, and how it was going to impact their trial scores.


    “You would not think we nearly all just died, would you?” Yan Fei added, with a grimace, following his gaze back to the main group.


    “No, no you would not,” he agreed with a deeper sigh, before producing one of the pills Hong Li Fu had given him and passing it to Yan Fei.


    Each one was a peerless purification dan, stamped with the ‘Vast’ symbol, telling him they came from someone in that peerless celestial power itself.


    “Anyway, take this and refine it,” he suggested, as Yan Fei eyed the priceless pill with a shocked expression. “Just in case. Both the yang energies in that Moon Loon and the Parasol Qi are dangerous, and even though you unbound your sword there might be some residual damage.”