<blockquote>


    …The Doctrine of Incursion is, if not the most problematic of the supreme stratagems of expansion adopted by the powers of our world, certainly the most insidious. The weaponised use of mortal incarnation and reincarnation from treasure worlds with ideas that are subversive to their chosen destinations has always been a contentious source of disagreement among those who stand at the apex of our earthly powers. As a neutral onlooker I can thus say wholeheartedly that the decision to engage in such a campaign against the various powers, including some contested border regions of the Martial Axial gulf as reprisal for them not siding with the Holy Empire and its allies in their war in the south against Old Amaltharia and Kesh is only likely to have one outcome. To remind those powers, so long departed this ancient ball of rock and largely stood aside from these last centuries of turmoil, that they were also once among the masters who first walked beneath the trees of this place.


    The very last thing we need, still recoiling as our powers are from the after effects of that dreadful series of calamities that broke the spine of the Dark World, is a war over the future of Earth with the Supreme Thrones that control the Heaven’s Path…


    </blockquote>


    From an article on current geopolitics, post collapse of the Dark World.


    ~Charles De-Witt, Historian of Dark World History.


    <hr>


    <h3 style="text-align: center">~ Jun Arai & Jun Sana – The Perilous Realm, amid winter’s dark heart ~


    <hr>


    Arai stared at the array design carved into the rock in front of her with a frown. It had taken almost a hundred days since they descended into this hell, but they had finally managed to get the fate-thrashed transmutation design to actually work. Well, kind of work.


    Sana sat on a nearby rock, looking pensive and running through her jade scrip that was now almost full to its capacity with her own scrawled notes.


    “There really was no reason I can see that the last one would… I mean we melted some rocks, before but…” she mused.


    “Yes... that is the first one that has genuinely caused an implosion,” Sana agreed.


    They both turned to look up the frozen beach, at the previous attempt at the transmutation array. There was a new extension to the lake there now, filling in slowly from the frozen-over water body beside it. A perfect sphere scooped out of the landscape, about twenty-five metres across.


    It was fortunate it hadn’t done it immediately upon activation, affording them a few seconds to get further away.


    -If we didn’t activate it with a well-thrown parcel of qi-infused materials, that would have been that, she thought with a shudder


    She stared back at the new circle before her and puffed her cheeks nervously. “Well… the issue is somehow related to the medium in which it’s actually activated. That seems beyond clear at this point.”


    “Yeah…” Sana agreed, reviewing the notes. “However, the remaining alternatives on the very short list we have are… kind of drastic… and also in completely unknown territory compared to what we have been able to get from the information we have.”


    “Indeed…” she looked at the circle again, trying not to feel overly despondent. “Well, we can test it again? With the other version of the balanced compound mixture?”


    “Yeah,” Sana sighed, putting the scrip aside. “Only this time we make sure to throw it from a long way away.”


    Unbidden, both their gazes travelled to the snowy hill behind them with a well-worn path to the top at this point.


    “Yeah,” she agreed drily. “A really long way away.”


    …


    Forty-five seconds later they were both staring at a second newly forming expansion to the lake – this one about thirty-five metres in diameter.


    “…”


    “Right, well that clears up that particular hypothesis,” Sana muttered, finally tearing her eyes away from the hole to consider their notes again. “No matter how strong or balanced we make the activation compound, it just destabilizes and implodes. That leaves us two possibilities really... well, three actually… but still.”


    “Mmhm,” she looked down at the water filling in the hole.


    -We are going to run out of suitable rocks here soon, was one of the thoughts now rattling around in her head.


    The other one was: Is the fact that we are testing it on rocks actually the issue here? Elaria had definitely stated that this should be unbounded transformation, but what if it’s not quite that unbounded.


    “One,” Sana sighed and looked down the short list that had only gotten shorter after two tests. “The imbalance is because we are missing some fundamental component that makes the array work properly.”


    “Two… We are still scribing it wrong somehow…”


    “Or three… There was some flaw with the original design that wasn’t accounted for in what we have seen?”


    “Well, in two of those situations we are nearly certainly consigned by the cheating fates,” she pointed out with a grim chuckle as she dusted ice and snow off her robe.


    “I think the least likely is three, based on what we have available, anyway,” Sana remarked, rolling her eyes. “One seems odd, in any case, because throughout the discussions, which I think we have fairly comprehensively understood at this point, it was repeatedly stressed that this is a… well if not a basic array, it’s a fairly simple array.”


    “To be the point of awkward scholarly reason,” she retorted, “I would point out that simple is not easy—!”


    Immediately she ducked to avoid the thrown ball of icy snow that hissed her way from Sana.


    “Well we are out of rocks here, or nearly out at any rate,” she added, dusting herself off again. “Shall we head back and see what we have in the way of alternatives in the dwindling pile of materials?”


    “Mmm, yeah.” Sana agreed with a sigh, looking down at the devastated shoreline.


    On the walk back over the hills in the crisp winter air, she reflected that this ‘holistic iteration’ of the valley had persisted for a long time now, despite the ever-shifting little changes in the landscape that were occurring all the time. Charitably assuming that winter lasted a few months, this winter had lasted in this state or close to it for almost three now.


    -Of course, there is no guarantee that a month is thirty days like it is back home, or that there are four seasons and fourteen months in them spanning the lunar auspice of twelve iterations. Although…


    She paused to look in the direction of the other group of three stones and twelve outer stones, each with their different symbol…


    -They also had some importance in the number twelve in a similar way, so maybe we got that from here?


    “Could it be that the medium is wrong?” Sana mused as she walked beside her. “The discussions at the beach talked about using abilities with… scrolls?”


    She had been wondering that herself as well. It was a sign of how much of a shared page they were now on in regard to this. Similar intuitive processes, similar knowledge and a similar desperation and yet...


    “—And yet,” Sana said, continuing the thought for both of them. “We don’t have paper or anything…”


    “Also, they made no mention about scribing anything in those discussions, beyond those rants in that one picnic talk about how new students all sucked at it and had no form or flow,” she added.


    “Mmmmm,” Sana nodded glumly.


    They walked on in silence for a few minutes over the snow, lost in their own thoughts after that.


    Today was a notably clearer day compared to many of the previous ones, so for once she could see the distant haze of the smoke from the large village a few miles away.


    Unfortunately, between them and it was the river, which was now a treacherous morass of shifting ice. The river also exerted just enough climate control over the surroundings to turn the snowfield on either side into treacherous ice with wet undercut snow below it. Crossing it would basically require swimming through two miles of snow and swimming across the river as well – all while in their current physical condition. As such, the village was a distant taunt and no more.


    “We do have a few different materials that we could attempt to use,” she mused as they made their way up past the icy little gorge that doubled as a cold room beside and below their shelter.


    The store had dwindled under the sustained use, and the qi within the herbs was degrading under the same circumstances that their own was. The ‘refuse’ pit below them on the other side was now bigger than the stockpile. Herbs that ran out of qi perished in a matter of days and started to manifest decay. Just like rotten apples left in a barrel of good produce, if left unchecked or unnoticed they would actually increase the level of degradation among the remaining herbs.


    “What do we have that might work?” she asked Sana, who had the better inventory of it.


    “Two bushels of luss plants…”


    “Nah, those will be a pain, we don’t have the materials to make them play nice,” she pointed out, dismissing them out of hand.


    “Leaves on the ‘Star Leaf Palm’ trunk?” her sister mused, as they made their way past the woodpile. “Also, there’s ‘Broad Leaf Alk’, ‘Myriad Threads Palm’ and ‘Moon Plate Tree Palm’ leaves in a bundle in the rock shelter.”


    “Hmmm…”


    She turned that list over in her head. None of those were known to have any weird reactions with anything. Their eventual fate was all to become talisman components in any event...


    “Is that all?” she asked.


    “Oh,” Sana clapped a hand to her forehead. “Sorry, there’s also the ‘Whispering Myrtle’… and some others”


    “Why isn’t it with the others?” she asked curiously, looking at the pile on one side, which was definitely smaller than she remembered it being.


    “Erm… It was relaxing to listen to its leaves rustle, so I put it in a pot with some refuse water,” Sana said with an apologetic shrug.


    “Oh...”


    -Why didn’t I think of that? she mused inwardly, now noting the unobtrusive pot next to Sana’s bed.


    “I also added the ‘Golden Sycamore’ in there as a dash of colour and to help improve the feng shui of the cave a bit,” Sana went on, pointing to a medium-sized pot in the back of the cave.


    It held a bunch of myrtle branches and golden sycamore along with a few other branches of things and some long-stemmed herbs, their leaves spreading like green and gold fans. Eyeing them critically, it seemed that the golden sycamore and the whispering myrtle might well have leaves big enough to fit the design – if she was very careful.


    “The problem is none of those are going to survive the catalyst solution in its current form. It literally etches the rocks…” Sana picked one of the golden sycamore branches out of the pot, investigating its leaves for signs of rot or perishing.


    Each was the size of a large dinner plate and a deep, mellow golden colour threaded with pale copper veins. Despite its metallic appearance, it was actually an unattributed plant. A rare case of someone naming it for mundane reasons rather than after some talisman or elemental affinity it was most closely associated with.


    “The sycamore might do it” Sana mused, waving the branch around speculatively and watching the leaves shimmer in the air.


    “Mmmm,” she agreed, tallying up the leaves – they had almost thirty, which was perhaps less than she would have liked in the current, somewhat experimentally charged circumstances.


    “Do we test it…?” Sana asked, considering the myrtle branches.


    “—Outside,” she replied without hesitation as she went back out of the cave holding a smoking pot of compounded herbs.


    “Obviously,” Sana sniffed following behind her. “It would be a shame to ruin the flowers you had been drawing on the wall after all”.


    This time they didn’t bother going all the way back to the lakeshore. For starters, it was getting late and the temperature drop at night was no joke. Secondly, there were basically no rocks left.


    Instead, they went down to the base of their hill and hunted for a suitable spot that afforded them easy flight from the testing point without an unexpected swim in deep snow.


    Twenty minutes later, however, it was abundantly clear that while sycamore leaves were suitable, myrtle leaves were not for some reason, and that the catalysing mixture really wasn’t going to cut it. This time, the array turned a sycamore leaf into a small golden butterfly which flew off with sparks flickering between its wings. The rock it was sat on still imploded, but this time the implosion was only two metres in diameter and left a faint smell of fresh-cut grass in the air.


    “Well…” she remarked, watching the maybe butterfly depart into the dusk like a tiny firefly, “at least we know that it can do more than make big holes in the ground now.”


    “Yes, but why do the rocks always implode,” Sana grumbled. “That’s four rocks that have imploded apart from the first one, which just vanished directly in a crack of lightning somehow. It wasn’t the same type of rock mind, so maybe that plays a part…?”


    “Maybe we should start using geomancy to try to find auspicious rocks,” she joked.


    “…”


    “You joke,” Sana muttered, “but still...”


    “Well, night is almost here, so shall we continue this tomorrow?” she said, staring up at the first stars glimmering in the sky. The chill wind was already starting to change direction to flow down from the mountains rather than up the valley.


    …


    The next morning was another bright, clear day.


    Their morning rituals were fairly ingrained at this point. She got up, did ten minutes of martial forms to make sure she didn’t pull anything from having meditated all night, then she spent ten minutes adding to the drawing of a flower on the wall.


    She had started drawing those weeks ago to help keep equilibrium with her mental state. If she needed to feel bad about herself she drew white chrysanthemums, if she wanted to feel a little less bad she drew something like snapdragons or sun orchids. It had to be said that the wall had far more snapdragons than it did white chrysanthemums at this point.


    Staring at the wall, she considered her body’s condition and just sighed softly.


    Neither had made much attempt at other hobbies they enjoyed, beyond Sana messing about with the feng shui a bit and making a few origami animals out of leaves to decorate a branch for what may or may not have been their birthday, which had passed on a windy day a month past.


    The issue was that ‘enjoyment’ wasn’t, largely, helpful to keeping their cultivation problems in check. Discomfort and an ascetic disregard for a lot of things was basically all that was keeping her trudging along the line of just about surviving. Sana certainly wasn’t any better. Her sister’s face was a perpetual non-frown, more masque than mask at this point. Her own wasn’t much better she was certain.


    Finishing the flower, she scored off the day on the wall and went over to check the herb stockpiles.


    Only a few had spoiled in the last day, an increase of two overall, which she duly noted down on her tablet with a resigned sigh. It was in line with the overall trend they had observed, since they thought to start counting, but that didn’t make it any less worrying. All it meant was that the ‘dead’ herbs were still spoiling at a slightly more advanced rate.


    Next, she went over to check the ‘live’ ones, if you could call them that. They were living only in the sense that if they planted them, they would recover vitality in a few days and start to grow a new plant. Now only the hardiest remained. Two ginseng, a few gourds and two small saplings. The saplings were already curling down, preparing to go into the herb equivalent of a death cultivation.


    They would have been planted in gardens or gone into people’s homes as auspicious treasures designed to promote longevity or good fortune, or just as pets like Ling Yu’s Little Blue. Instead, they were going to perish here in all likelihood.


    All she could do was apologise in her heart to them all as she checked their condition and did what she could for them.


    After that, she went outside and spent a further thirty minutes rapidly rooting through the outside store. Tomorrow Sana would do this. They had decided to take it day about. Her sister was sat quietly forcing her cultivation down again. It was an unspoken compromise that they got at least a bit of privacy to wallow in their own issues. It was better than crying yourself silently to sleep at night while you listened to the other do the same.


    She was still checking through the last of the dubious ones when Sana came down the path to join her.


    “What’s the damage?” Sana asked, staring critically at the pile.


    “Same as same as,” she sighed, sitting back to stare at the first glimmers of the rising sun.


    Sana just sighed with her and swished the golden sycamore branch in the air.


    “So what do we attempt today?” she asked at last, as they made their way over to their new test site.


    “Well, given the myrtle doesn’t work, the other leaves are first on the list,” Sana mused, staring at the horizon as they walked.


    …


    The next two days passed in a rather boring fashion as they went through just over a dozen different types of leaf, even the ones that were not necessarily suitable. She even wasted a few bits of precious qi to lop off some thin disks of wood from the different tree branches they had that might work.


    Only the golden sycamore presented anything other than a catastrophic explosion of varying degrees.


    The most impressive, which she had to admit, was only done for empirical kicks and a sense of completion at that point, was the heaven blaze pine. It literally turned into an incandescent fireball two centimetres across, then combusted with enough force to melt the snow for three hundred metres and turned the slope for a few metres around it to glass in the process.


    That evening, sat back in the shelter, they tallied up the sum total of their knowledge. Two plants had turned into butterflies, five had just exploded then imploded with no real hint of other change. The pine had done what it did, the alk which she had painstakingly woven into a plate big enough had turned into a small spider and fled with breath-taking speed. Two others, also woven mats, had done nothing at all. Another had turned into a small crystal that was now sat on a rock outside while the remaining two had generated small lightning balls and then vanished into nothing.


    “There really is very little that links them together, or differentiates them, except for the two that became some kind of representation of a living thing,” Sana finally remarked, staring at the projected set of images.


    “Well the heaven blaze pine transformed into a blazing bit of heaven then exploded,” she pointed out, trying to inject a bit of levity into the proceedings.


    “…”


    “What did we say about role reversals?” her sister sniffed, not amused.


    “I can’t remember, my ears must have been ruptured by an explosion that day,” she blithely shot back.


    “…”


    “—But they do that without the help of any supposed magic circle, and none of them has managed to turn into anything remotely edible,” Sana said after a moment.


    “It’s not the same if you don’t do it immediately,” she judged drily.


    “No… it’s not is it,” Sana sighed, sitting back.


    …


    It was just past midnight when her eyes snapped open. The creepy feeling of imminent transformation was so far in the past that she had almost forgotten what it felt like. She stared at the wall. This would be the 104^th day. Her eye caught another cycle of numbers scrawled on the wall. She had worked out those indivisible numbers up to 200 a while back. 103 was on it.


    A horrible thought settled in her mind even as the world started to twist. It wasn’t every single day – her mind was suddenly working on overdrive, but every ''day'' a change had arrived since they had been able to track days had been one of those numbers… except.


    -Nope, if you cut out the days early on where the sun stopped or time was demonstrably weird, every transformation was one of those days since the fog. Stupid cultivator’s flawless memory.


    -Monkeyshit, fate-thrashed nameless blessed monkeyshit!


    Everything went weird as Sana also scrambled up. The space they were in was physically rippling. The starlit snowy landscape rolled like waves, and they rolled with it somehow.


    As they watched everything slid sideways and became blurry before snapping back together—


    She had a terrible premonition as something twisted in that snapping moment and managed to dive for and grasp two of the golden sycamore branches and hug them close to her just before the horrible shifting feeling stopped.


    Seeing her movement, Sana dived for the others and managed to grasp them to her body just in time.


    Picking herself up she stared in horror. She felt like she had been twisted slightly in ways nature had never intended with her desperate lunge to grab the sycamore branches. They were still in her hand, thankfully.


    “…”


    “Oh fates, go mutilate yourself and curse your own unfilial aspects to the nameless! May you suffer the woman’s transformation on every day! Have someone piss in your soup and shit on your bread every time your back is turned!” Sana screamed in instantaneous and incandescent rage, barely avoiding hitting one of the remaining golden sycamore branches off the ground as she screamed obscenities at the uncaring blue sky.


    She stared blankly at the ceiling of the rock shelter.


    It wasn’t gone, which was surprising in its own right, but much of the contents were ruined. The herbs in their pots were still there, looking much the worse for wear, but anything not in a container or in their grasp was desiccated or perished like it had been left exposed for… months.


    Looking outside, green grass and flowers were sprouting amid the last vestiges of melting snow. The lake was now a much bigger lake, extending into their valley and turning the whole region around them into a swampy marsh. A by-product of spring melt from the slopes above her, she guessed. Her paintings on the walls were faded and green lichen was growing over the various other bits of carving for numeracy and records they had done for expedience.


    Almost mechanically she got up and walked out of the cave, Sana following after her.


    “It didn’t do this before?” her sister hissed.


    “Each… transformation seems to have introduced another element or elements of ‘reality’ to things within here,” she pointed out.


    “...”


    “All I wanted to hear there was a ‘No, it did not'',” her sister said glumly.


    “Sorry…”


    “No, it did not,” she added with a soft sigh.


    “It’s not the same if you don’t do it immediately,” Sana muttered.


    The herbs they were using for catalysts, stored in the gorge for their quantity, were for the most part rotten garbage. Just by eye, she guessed a year or more must have passed for them if the decay rate was basically constant?


    “We skipped a whole year?” Sana said, arriving at the same conclusion she did.


    “It seems that way, or winter was a lot longer than we thought in this place,” she said, squatting down by one pile and rooting through it.


    Decay qi from the vegetation prickled across her fingers as she did. That had done more damage than the time, in all honesty. In the end, they were left with a very small pile of unspoiled herbs. Of that pile, only a very small number within it were still suitable for their purposes.


    “You know… it was enough that stuff did occasionally vanish,” Sana sighed at long last, sitting down on a rock and putting her head in her hands.


    “I almost wish it had just vanished,” she agreed.


    “Ggggaaaaahh!”


    Her sister scrunched her hands through her rather matted hair and kicked her feet on the floor in frustration for a moment before falling still again.


    She could only agree with that sentiment. It had been enough that stuff did occasionally vanish. In the back of her mind, ever since the storage talismans exploded, she, and probably her sister as well, had always worried that something like this might happen at some point. However, as time went on that fear didn’t manifest and she had started to believe, naively as it now turned out, that that kind of thing wasn’t within whatever parametres covered the realignments or whatever the nameless fate they actually were.


    In the end, they both just sat there on a rock by the new pond in silence for almost an hour, trying to calm their minds and if not… deny this new misfortune, at least find some way to rationalise their way out of it.


    “In the end, this is maybe just what is meant to be…” Sana said quietly… “I dunno about you, but I ran out of qi in my body a day ago…”


    She stared at the water below them. A small furry critter was frolicking on the bank, oblivious to them. Some birds were stalking the shallows, looking for small frogs or something. The sky overhead was just turning from purple to blue. Birds were calling in the distance, in full voice of spring. Flowers were blooming amid the rocky slopes. If she painted it and sold the scene at market, it would be praised as idyllic and probably also cursed as derivative, people who purchased paintings and critiqued them were cruel like that.


    “I said nothing because I didn’t want to worry you… I ran out about a week back…. Your capacity was always slightly better than mine,” she said softly.


    “Ohh…” Sana stared up at the blue sky… “I guess we are just plain fate cursed then.”


    After a while, Sana stood up... “I want to go check on the bits that have changed…” she said sounding a bit… vacant.


    She watched her sister walk off, shoulders hunched in the direction of the shifting stones.


    “Don’t do anything stupid!” she called after her belatedly…


    -Or I’ll tell mother, she finished silently in her own head…


    “What a stupid excuse, sis…” she sighed and turned her gaze back to the changed landscape before them.


    There was no harm in letting her be on her own for a bit, to walk off the worst of the frustration and anger.


    -We might both be telling you all about this stupid death soon anyway… now that was a shit thought.


    She shook her head and stood up—


    “Gah!”


    Inadvertently, she slipped on the mossy rock. With a wince, checked her hand and found that she had actually cut herself on the rough surface beneath the thin patina of green.


    -Great, that’s all I need now, she thought glumly.


    Her body’s durability was still high, despite her degrading physical condition, but unfortunately much of the landscape was comparable. The average rock here had the same kind of durability as a three-star, Golden Core grade artefact – a bit better than their bodies in peak condition. It was just her luck really that she had to cut her hand and bleed all over one…


    -A medium capable of catalysing qi….


    She stared back at the nasty cut on her hand... there was a short list of materials they had considered and wished they had, with qi beast blood being very high up the list. That was what was usually used for formation centres, but…


    -Nope. That is madness.


    -There are all kinds of really solid reasons never to do that.


    -All kinds of reasons.


    “All kinds of reasons,” she repeated out loud for good if somewhat unconvincing measure as she continued to stare at the blood on the rock and on her hand.


    Unfortunately, reality didn’t lie.


    While there were very good reasons indeed not to use your own blood in formation layouts like that... It was also undeniable that the blood of a physical cultivator, refined using Physical Scripture, was an excellent medium if it actually had qi in it and the effect of the mantra was eliminated.


    Bodies of ‘bandits’ with physical cultivations at Mantra Seed could reach a very high price on the black market, not that anyone in a respectable town would indulge in such things. However, the status of the Yin Eclipse and Easten tribes in the wider geopolitics of Eastern Azure was such that many from further afield had no such qualms. The trade in such corpses had been unpleasantly brisk around the time of the Three Schools Conflict according to her father and also from conversations on the topic with Juni’s brother.


    As much to distract herself from that notion, she went back through their surroundings and did a proper tally of everything that was ruined.


    Much of their bedding was out. It was dried-out grass from the surrounding hills in any case and the abrupt jump of an extra year or maybe more had made it exceed its lifespan. The ‘living’ herbs in the pots were all on their last legs. The two saplings had thoroughly discarded their trunks and stems, what was left of their vitality now sealed away in their root seeds. The other three were also catalysing their own vestigial vitality to…


    “…”


    A second preposterous thought surfaced, probably brought about by the straightforward and malicious elimination of every other option up to this point and then seeing these five little herbs do this.


    -I could use that special mantra mnemonic to combust my sealed vitality directly into qi and infuse it into my blood to make the inscription on the leaf…


    Moments later, another salient point in favour of this insane idea snapped into focus.


    -It would also solve the other issue regarding imbuing any kind of ‘Intent’ due to activation at range.


    -Though… I would only get one or two attempts at it…


    Doing so would undo the seal and briefly give her back that qi, but it wasn’t the same kind of qi. All it would do was allow her to leverage her vitality directly in the form of its inherent qi, eking out the reserved elements of her bodily transformation with her mantra directly. She was still fundamentally out of qi.


    The only reasons to do this normally were either very morbid or personal. Firstly to leave behind a death legacy, or second to pass on her mantra to her own blood child or descendant. In terms of the damage it would do to her foundation it was akin to a cultivator catalysing their spirit root or a Nascent Soul cultivator combusting their Nascent Soul.


    The part of her that had thought of it was now pointing to all this and saying surely there had to be a better way, but really, all of her knew that they were living on borrowed time now.


    She was mere weeks away from a coma-induced death by meridian shock and starvation that would start when the last bits of nutrition in her body were consumed. At that point, this would no longer work, because her body wouldn’t be able to handle the strain of that much lost vital force in one go. She had about two days’ worth of water in the gourd left, and then it would be four or five days more before her condition deteriorated to the point where this moment would pass.


    When put like that, the loss of half her connate vitality and the dropping of her cultivation back to the base of Physical Refinement for the first attempt through pulling out the vital qi locked into her bones was a small price to pay for getting out of here.


    “Of course, there is no guarantee that we will get out, even after doing that…”


    “…”


    “Nope, saying it out loud makes it no better,” she hissed, kicking the wall.


    She stopped pacing and grimaced, looking at Sana’s spot within the cave.


    This was not something she could ask Sana to do, really.


    She closed her eyes and hit her head gently off of the wall a few times, ignoring the fact that she was crying silently, as much with frustration as anything. Anyway, it was also flat out wrong to do it without telling her sister.


    Totally out of the question.


    Sana would probably ensure that she haunted her ghost in whatever afterlife they ended up in.


    -Not to mention, I would have no way to activate the thing easily at range with this method… she realised glumly.


    Blood catalysation of formations required continual manifestation of qi through the connection over the process if you hadn’t attained a soul foundation. That was immutable. Her intent would disperse instantly and the qi locked within it would lose cohesion. So if this didn’t work, well she was probably just going to kill herself either way…


    “Way to go with the cheery thoughts there, Arai,” she said with as much humour as she could muster.


    …


    Sometime later Sana, who had returned, was sat there on a rock by the entrance looking at her dully.


    “What do you want me to say, sis…?


    “That this is an insane idea?


    “That you’re gambling with your life in a way that is going to absolutely kill or cripple you?”


    She exhaled and stared out at the lake in the midday sun.


    -Really, it was too fate-thrashed idyllic.


    Standing there with her hands cupped behind her neck, she eventually replied. “I… I really don’t know.”


    “We just have no other options left, everything else is just repeating old failures or…”


    “Then we do it together,” Sana cut her off decisively.


    “No!” she said flatly. “I will be the one to refine my blood.”


    “No, you idiot. We literally will have to do it together! Individually our capacity won’t be enough to trigger a single activation based on what we have seen,” Sana retorted, prodding her hard above her breasts.


    “Oh,” she felt a bit silly suddenly for having forgotten that salient point.


    “Setting aside that though, what is the point in you doing it alone? If you fail and it all goes boom, you die instantly? And what do I do? Sit here for weeks alone and wait to die? Cut my own wrists, walk into the lake and drown? Throw myself into the river?”


    She turned to look at her sister, who was glaring at her with a face that was somewhere between sorrow and total fury, tears watering the corner of her eyes.


    “NO!” Sana nearly screamed in her face.


    -I refuse, she wanted to say.


    -It’s a suicide pact.


    “I…” She wanted to refute it, to say something, but she couldn’t.


    Her mouth worked but no words came, those words were just unwilling to leave her mouth, for one simple reason. Sana was right. It was selfish. To take all the risk at this point…


    “I…”


    She turned away to avoid showing the tears in her eyes, only for Sana to step up and wrap her arms around her, staring over her shoulder at the lake below.


    “We succeed together, or we fall together. No more. No less.”


    They stood like that for a full thirty seconds before she finally found words to speak.


    Even then, all she could say was, “Okay.”


    To her own ears, her voice sounded like it was oddly monotonous. Harmony between grief at their plight and rage at... everything at this point. She hadn’t realised quite how much rage was in there, inside her now. Rage at everything. But mainly rage at the cruel chain of events that had led them to this point.


    Sana finally relinquished her hug and said. “It strikes me we overlooked something… In our focus on getting the array to work…”


    “Ohh?” she frowned, quietly wiping away her own tears.


    “What if the reason why… they changed in all those weird ways was because the intent wasn’t right somehow?”


    “What do you mean?” she said, as they made their way away from the cave. She was already sorting out the sycamore leaf automatically as they walked. “We know they need ‘Intent’, that’s old ground.”


    “Yes, and no… not like that,” Sana said pensively. “It’s been bothering me why stuff keeps imploding, even when it apparently succeeds, not so much the later aspects, but the early rocks in particular.”


    “The implosion thing has been bothering me too,” she pointed out as drily as she could manage, not that her heart was really in it at this point.


    “Nonono…” Sana shook her head more decisively. “What if there is a baseline in there that we didn’t account for? What if the intent we were infusing was simply unable to overcome some barrier, ours is pretty weak after all. That might explain why it just kept imploding stuff? It was transforming stuff into non-stuff, without going through the intervening steps. As for why the later ones also manifested other things… I have to say that confuses me still, and this doesn’t really account for that, but still…


    “In short, what if the array’s default position is to transform ''A'' into ''C'' without going through ''B'', then if ''A'' is a rock and ''B'' is the process by which rocks normally turn into ''C’… into something? Then turning a rock into nothingness is basically a form of implosion, removing the rock from existence?”


    She turned to look at her sister. “It’s turning substance into... non-substance? As the default? That’s… not reassuring.”


    “Yeah… I agree it’s not, in this context,” Sana agreed, “but what if that’s not its mistake but ours?”


    “Go on?” she frowned, turning her attention back to the leaf and her slow process of checking it wasn’t crocked from removing it from the branch under her arm.


    Sana continued… “What if it’s actually behaving like an art, not a formation? We have been working on the basic assumption that this is a formation!”


    “Mmmm, because we know formations and they compared it to formations,” she pointed out.


    “Err...Yes,” her sister agreed. “And our arts behave nothing like formations, and so we have been treating this as if it does things like a formation. But all their abilities involved weird circles when they cast them slowly anyway…”


    “Oh,” she stopped to look at Sana.


    -That is a really good point, one they had basically overlooked.


    “So what do you suggest?”


    “Well, what if we make it and activate it like a talisman?” Sana suggested pensively.


    “This is a bad time to try new ideas when we only get one shot at it,” she felt compelled to point out.


    “On the other hand all our old ideas haven’t worked,” Sana retorted, a point to which she had no answer.


    “Well, the first thing to do is actually create the thing,” she pointed out. “We can think about that after we have the basic preparation done.”


    They picked a flat rock next to the still ruined shore. Joining hands, they both activated their mantras and focused on reversing the standard mnemonic.


    ‘luoS ~ ydoB ~ leweneR ~ traeH ~ tiripS’


    The experience was excruciating – like she was pulling hot metal out of her bones and setting her blood on fire. The lack of qi in her body just made the experience even worse. Her meridians screamed at her in outright revolt as vitality slowly condensed into qi in her blood, flowing backwards through channels in a very unpleasant inverse motion. In any other circumstance, without the mantra, this would be a profound and probably terminal qi deviation...


    She nearly spat blood as something in her rebelled, refusing to fall under her immediate control… The strange lure on their qi this place exerted rapidly drew away the last incomplete vestiges of non-vital qi in her body, like she had just knocked the bottom out of her qi circulation and meridian system. Well, technically she had done just that, upending the whole thing like a barrel...


    Through their shared link she could feel the same lack of control in Sana as well, as their intent cycled between them.


    “…”


    She focused on the strangely familiar oddness and eventually managed to grasp some understanding of it, even as she finally suppressed it.


    -We have been here for so long that some part of this place has actually infused into us?


    Exhaling, she opened her eyes and let her vision adjust. Her body was filled with vigour now, false as it was. Sana looked the same, her skin flushed, faintly steaming from the heat generated in her body. Veins were clearly visible across her body. They were already thinner than usual, having been at borderline starvation for so long, but even so, her sister, and she was sure she herself, looked more like some kind of berserk anima puppet than a mortal being.


    “That oddness, I can’t believe that some part of this place was actually incorporated by the mantra?” Sana rasped, having deduced the same thing she had.


    “It probably happened during the mist encounter,” she suggested – that was the only time she could think of where it might have occurred.


    “Yeah, that was probably the only time we would have been that badly injured,” Sana agreed. “Unless it was when we first entered here somehow.”


    “Also possible, I suspect it’s something we will never know though,” she said with as much mustered false humour as she could.


    “Right,” she said, looking at the sycamore leaf. “How are we going to do this?”


    “Can we draw it simultaneously?” Sana mused, furrowing her brow.


    “The thing has to be one complete stroke,” she pointed out.


    “Well, we have used one forbidden art, why not another,” Sana said with a wry grimace.


    “Vital Recombination,” she said with a resigned sigh. “If father knew that we knew how to do this he would kill us before we had a chance to kill ourselves.”


    “Well, we wouldn’t need to know it if…” Sana trailed off, staring at the ground.


    “True, that mother passed this on to us on her deathbed, I don’t know if it’s fate or just a mockery of our struggles up to this point,” she said with a dirty look skyward.


    This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.


    “Well, I know what is mocking us! The nameless cursed fates that landed us in this mess,” Sana sniggered, “so mocking them back isn’t a bad idea.”


    “If we do this, this way, we will have to activate it right here,” she said, diverting the conversation back to relevance.


    “There is no point to a second try,” Sana said simply.


    “You’re meant to be the cheerful, snarky one,” she said with an eye roll. “Being the gloomy officious bitch doesn’t suit you.”


    “And you being the snarky, flippant one doesn’t either,” Sana said with an eye roll. “Stop procrastinating and get on with it.”


    Sighing, because officious Sana was right there, she was procrastinating, she took the sycamore branch and used the broken end to cut open her palms, then passed it to her sister who did the same thing.


    Holding out her hands, they matched the wounds and started to circulate their catalysed vital qi with their shared mantra. It was only really possible at this level because they understood both keys to make this work. The first was the requirement to share a mantra. There were two ways to do this: blood sacrifice like they were, or through dual, paired cultivation, which for obvious reasons was out. The latter was only done as a means to instil a mantra into a child between husband and wife and ensure conception. Blood sacrifice, on the other hand, was about merging their mantra with their vital force to allow it to be passed on willingly to any willing successor. It also had to be their choice, no amount of outside influence, apparently not even manipulation of their fate, could induce their mantra to this point according to mother.


    Really though, that part was superfluous now. All that was required here was the unity of qi, intent and mantra. Breaking the link would cause a colossal backlash they would struggle to recover from without the array working to allow them to rapidly replenish their vitality. She had to admit the price being paid was far in excess of the desired outcome, but it was what it was.


    The first cycle was tricky, merging intent was much harder than merging either mantra or qi, but by the second the link was properly established and by the third most of the personal quirks were ironed out and they were effectively one mantra, one intent and one qi cycle in two connected bodies. ”If we had known about this months ago when we still had qi it might have been different.”


    ”Yes, if we had known, but we didn’t, so it is what it is.”


    ”Yes, it is, truly we are no longer men, dying like this for food.”


    ”That''s a terrible joke.”


    ”It is, isn''t it.”


    ”Well, we can only accept what is given.”


    ”And make of it what we must.”


    …


    They opened her eyes and saw double, which was somewhat odd, but a clear sign that the merger had been completed properly.


    The sycamore leaf parchment was weighted open between them so they could draw on it easily. After waiting a few breaths for the disorientation from having four eyes rather than two to clear up, they forced a thin trickle of blood from their hands and, taking especial care, used their control over their qi to guide the design. The lines and circles in their qi-infused blood seemed to grow thicker in a weird way as they drew them, but they could only let it do what it wanted. The key was to not disrupt the flow, the harmony of the array had to be just so, the entire pattern in a single stroke, representation of Heaven and Earth in a single breath.


    For something as complex as this, they understood intuitively from their knowledge and memories that this was the correct way. It was why Elaria had spent so long reducing it from those hideously complex designs. They reflected for a moment that it was strange what shared understanding could do.


    Complexity to simplicity. A simple, single step towards the Dao.


    Such a simple idea, such easy words to say, but it was only since they started this that they had this inkling of what that ‘idea’ actually meant.


    Now, however, came the hard part.


    They poured their qi and life force into the symbol through the blood. Finishing the structure of the path that ran inwards through five symbols that defined the states of the transmutation.


    Metal, Heavenly Yang, Primordial Deconstruction gave birth to Water, Earthly Yin, Fundamental Absence. That in turn transformed into Wood, Life, Emerging Vitality, which combusted into Fire, Energy, Nascent Potential and finally solidified into Earth, Matter, Fundamental Order. This then broke down once more into Metal, Heavenly Yang, and Primordial Deconstruction.


    They pulled it into the centre and finished the exhalation. The qi flowing into the symbol did a full circuit of the array and they pictured the transformation of—


    Their world went white.


    The symbol connected with their qi and flowed backward into them. Too late they realised their mistake. It was such a simple thing, they had even touched the edge of it before, but now, in this instant, they understood the irregularity.


    The reason why the golden sycamore leaf had turned into a butterfly…


    Why the heaven blaze pine became a sun…


    Why the alk leaf had become something like a tiny alkr.


    They had transposed the symbol onto the medium correctly, but the activation point needed to reflect the concept of activation, not the point of creation.


    They had drawn the symbol correctly… but rather than placing it onto the medium of the rock below them, they had instead, used it on themselves.


    They tried to resist the devouring pull of the transmutation as it ate into their... her… very being… she fought for unity and they found it in the white world of unbound energy. The symbol flowed into her, became one with their vital qi, passed by their mantra like a shadow in the night, entered into their consciousness.


    It was hard to say how ‘she’ split from ‘they’, because they were still unified, but she, ‘Arai’ was there now. So was she, ‘Sana’ for that matter as well.


    They desperately focused on their senses of self and also the harmony of their link, trying to suppress the tide of energy that was raging through their meridians. Energy that was wild and uncontrolled and…


    The symbol was pulling energy from the place they were in!


    They understood now, the reason for the implosion. To turn something into something else still required energy. The bigger the transformation, the bigger the hole, in essence. The explosions had come because… rocks couldn’t have… intent? or was it that their qi was somehow unsuitable, or did a rock wish to just become… not a rock? This was not a point to have an existential moment about rocks though – on that their sense of unity was… fundamental.


    In any event, it wasn’t just qi now, but other energies as well. The meridians in their shared vessels corroded under the strain as the capacity of their vessels reached their foundation''s limit. The pain exceeded anything that could be envisaged by an articulation as simple as the concept of mere ‘mortal suffering’.


    In a single breath, their meridians collapsed and the symbol fell inwards. The world of white was within them fully.


    It descended into their bones, invading what remained of their vital qi, subsuming it entirely. Their mantra was somehow swept along with it, even though nothing they could do would allow those words to touch the symbol itself.


    It touched the concept of their vitality directly – the vital accumulation that would have catalysed their mantra seeds in due course – and it changed, fundamentally, merging with something else that was there within them, permeating them in a strange way within their bone marrow.


    Finally, it arrived deep in the core of their shared vessels and coalesced firmly within their… souls, which they were aware of for the first time ever. Within that point, there was something else, a twisting point of potential that they dimly recognised as their largely ignored spirit roots.


    For a brief, preposterous moment they found it laughable that they were going to be crushed out of primordial existence for the simple desire to transmute a rock into some food to eat. They both shared a moment of catharsis at the brink by extensively cursing the useless fates of their meagre world who had led them to their untimely deaths in this place through eighteen years of life. The symbol paused, stared at them both, and then… inexplicably… laughed.


    Their shared world went both simultaneously black and white.


    They had a dim understanding of something reflecting into their shared state of being – Unspeakable Fury, pushing down from above.


    The symbol’s metaphysical grin intensified, and it passed even deeper into them.


    Before they lost all capability for conscious reasoned thought, they saw the symbol''s real form for the first time, illuminated in the shadow of the rage from above, and laughed as well. Truly, a cruel joke was being played, but perhaps it was just as much on the fates as it was on them.


    They considered that, as a parting shot with reality, maybe you couldn’t ask for much more than that – to spit in the very eye of the forces that delivered you to this point.


    “We succeed or fall together. No more, no less. May the Nameless take you, worthless Fates!”


    <hr>


    <h3 style="text-align: center">~ Meng Fu & Cao Liang – Inner Valleys of Yin Eclipse ~


    <hr>


    “Spit it out,” she instructed her disciple, as they reached the path out of the valley where they had just encountered Cang Di. “What is it you want to ask?”


    “Am I that transparent?” Cao Liang muttered ruefully, glancing at her, then behind them.


    “Yes,” she giggled.


    “…”


    “Honestly, why did the Shu Pavilion and the Dew Drop Sage Sect send those three into here—or Qing Dongmei?” Cao Liang asked, sounding perturbed. “I mean…”


    “—They have no need to compete in this trial, and nothing much to prove in this generation, especially Cang Di, Liling Mei and Mingluo Lanying?” she suggested, nodding in agreement with his question.


    “Yes, and I can’t imagine that the Imperial Court or the organizers of this trial have any leverage over those who stand behind that trio?” Cao Liang added. “Especially…”


    “Cang Di,” she nodded again, understanding what he meant.


    The Second Ancestor of the Four Peaks of the Shu Pavilion was not a force to be pushed about. In this era, some idiots might underestimate ‘Dao Father Celestial Bronze’ as he was formally known, because he was ‘merely’ a Peak Celestial Venerate, slumming it in a ‘backwater’ world like Eastern Azure, but that sort of thinking was why those elders would never truly catch the eye of the old ghosts in the powers backing them. Even Ancestor Iron, the youngest of the four Pillars of the Shu Pavilion had grown up in the early Shan dynasty. Celestial Bronze, in comparison had already been a Dao Venerate when she first came to this world, in the Seng Dynasty. In terms of generations, he could honestly be considered a peer of her own mother, only out ranked in terms of accumulation within this world by existences like Tang Long Jiao.


    “I have half an idea,” she replied. “Those three have something in common, though few in this era would have eyes to see it.”


    “Beyond being a colossal thorn in the eye of the Imperial Court’s ambitions to the Heavenly Hundred?” Cao Liang asked.


    “Yes, though it is probably related,” she nodded. “Their teachers. Well, in Cang Di’s case, one of his senior brothers.”


    “Their teachers?” Cao Liang frowned.


    “Mmmm, honestly, I don’t think even the Imperial Court realises,” she continued. And if it was not for the matter with Guanxi, I might not have made the connection either, she reflected ruefully to herself.


    “Dun Fang rose to power keeping secrets, and while that has availed his Dynasty greatly in some ways, it can only be said he trusts a little too much in the shadow of the Heavenly Kong to quell bitter memories. Our own sect is not the only loser of that era. Some, like the Argent Hall, Mount Zhi Zhi and the Nine Moons have made… if not peace, then accommodations. However, that does not mean they have forgotten. The teachers of Liling Mei and Mingluo Lanying both have deep ties to Ruo Tian—as does Hua Xiaomei, who was also a close friend of Guanxi. Shu Liang was the sister of Shu Tian. Then there is Tang Biyu, and of course, Ju Tianji.”


    “…”


    One look at Cao Liang’s face told her he didn’t quite get the links, but that was fine. It was far beyond his time—or his grandparents, for that matter.


    “What if I told you they were all associated with the circumstances in which Dun Fang was able to return the Imperial Throne to the Dun family?” she continued. “—specifically, the vanishing of Mu Shansu, Empress White Swan and Emperor Moon Tomb.”


    Cao Liang gave her a long look, then turned to look back in the direction they had come, then back at her.


    “It isn’t just that trio, either,” she added drily. “Ju Shan has a stake in this as well. Ju Tianji was her older brother.”


    “The… same Ju Shan who is watching over Eastern Azure for the Wuli Family?” Cao Liang gave her a faintly disbelieving look.


    “The same,” she nodded. “Simply put, you are right. Most of the disciples various powers have sent into this trial are, to say it bluntly, expendable. I am not sure what game the Imperial Court and Dun Jian are playing here, but others are also playing as well. As to why they picked now to dig into those dark days, after all these years? Probably, you would have to ask Cang Di, though even he, himself, might not truly know. I suspect that they somehow divined or otherwise calculated that the time was ‘right’—”


    “—and are exploiting this trial to give them cover to follow that up?” Cao Liang mused. “Using skilled juniors? But what if…?”


    “—They die?” she nodded, understanding his scepticism there. “Indeed, the powers behind those children are not so callous as to condemn them.”


    If it were some of the current Imperial Court powers, or the Shu clan proper, that would be one thing. However, Celestial Bronze had always had a reputation for seeking only the best for his disciples and genuinely cherishing them, even if that love could sometimes be fairly tough. The Dew Drop Sage Sect and the Nine Auspicious Moons were similarly not so callous as to wastefully consign generational talent on a whim.


    “So… they are looking for something that would avoid, or be hard to pin down for you or I?” Cao Liang mused.


    “—probably, yes,” she agreed. “Or they were blindsided by this trial and had to change plans they could not easily postpone.


    “I have to presume there was not much of a build up?” she asked, once again given cause to rue the awkward reality of not being able to pay a lot of attention to the goings on of Eastern Azure for the last few decades.


    “None, basically,” Cao Liang sighed. “There have been rumours within the Imperial Court, but to all intents this appears to have sprung fully formed out of the shadows of this year’s imperial divination.”


    “Which the Kong and Huang would not be above cooking, to suit their purposes,” she mused. “And it is a year when the Eye of Harmony has moved.”


    -That will be something to check, when we get out of here, she added, as a note to herself.


    “Dun Jian has become politically entangled with the Huang clan, that much is certain,” Cao Liang noted. “But the Three Eyes are…”


    “Lacking in ideological conviction?” she suggested drily.


    “I was going to say ‘not easy for someone like him to sway’,” Cao Liang chuckled. “And have largely favoured Kong matters in the last century or two.”


    “If those ‘matters’ turn out to have included finding a way to implicate my sect in a raid on the Jasmine Gate for a weapon of war from a higher sky, they may find that even ghosts can die before I am done with them.” she sneered, some of her annoyance creeping out again and agitating the shadows beneath the trees around them.


    “Also, umm, why did you give them a box of marked spirit stones?” Cao Liang asked, rather transparently changing the topic.


    “Oh, that?” she laughed, a little amused at his reaction as she let her anger flow away again. “A test, of sorts. As I am sure you know, Cang Di, being at the eye of this generation has a lot of obfuscation around him. That Moon Loon was surely chasing after some party associated with the incursion into the Jasmine Gate.”


    “—that Parasol Qi,” Cao Liang turned to look back out over the misty treetops behind them with a slight frown. “Honestly, that was going to be my follow up question. That was surely the same one Venerable Tai mentioned… right? But…”


    “Heh…” she gave his hair a playful ruffle.


    “—I just saved all of them, exchanged a few words, had you seal it, compensated them well for their loss and then… left?” she continued, with a chuckle.


    “Well… yes?” Cao Liang frowned. “If there is someone from that group among them, should we not…?”


    “—Seize them?” she suggested, finishing his sentence for him with an eyeroll. “And how do you intend to work out who, exactly?” she asked drily. “Shake every junior by the ankles until they squeal?”


    Cao Liang made a face that suggested he genuinely thought that might be a good idea, and honestly, a part of her could not blame him. However, if there was one thing she had learned about this sort of thing over the long years, it was that fishing out troublemakers was far more successful if you did it softly, and quietly.


    “That is a trap,” she elaborated. “Or rather, it is a hidden pitfall it is not worth getting mired up in, for the sake of a quick answer that would likely rob us of getting to the actual perpetrators of this mess.”


    “Oh?” Cao Liang raised an eyebrow.


    “You didn’t take part in many of the grand trials, did you?” she asked, casting her mind back. “I don’t believe you have really overseen any, either, within the sect?”


    “I… uh, no,” Cao Liang conceded. “Only some Martial competitions. That tends to be more Senior Brother Yun, or Senior Brother Tan’s pagoda. Umm… are you suggesting what I think?”


    “—That the Kong and Huang have deployed a ritually bounded Grand Stratagem to monitor and anchor this trial?” she replied. “Well, that is how I would do it, knowing what I know of Yin Eclipse. Knowing them, and the ‘mushrooms-after-rain’ speed with which this seems to have been organized, they probably did something more direct though. In any case, the salient point is that you won’t be able to get contribution talismans to work up here unless you create a binding capable of parsing Transient Destiny to a granular degree. That is why—”


    “—Nobody likes messing with the Hunter Bureau’s authority talismans,” Cao Liang interjected, nodding now as he finally got what she was saying.


    “—Exactly. The Han clan may have lost a lot of their material foundation during the fall of the Shan, but their talent, not so much.


    “Interestingly, from what I could observe among the trial participants we just met, the system they have set up for this also seems to have integrated bureau talismans, which I can’t imagine is going to go down well with the local powers attempting to placate the Emperor of Shan Lai.”


    -And is another thing to look into, when we get out of here, she mused to herself.


    “No, I don’t imagine that will.” Cao Liang agreed.


    “In any case, the last thing we need is to aggressively and indiscriminately shake down a bunch of juniors, while someone is determined to try and frame the Meng clan for their dirty work. Especially not when every one of them has the potential to be a little karmic hook on the fishing line of fate. Someone is fishing with this trial, my instinct tells me, and while, on one level it would be rather funny if we broke their lines, I’d rather pick my moment and drag the fisherman in, if it came to that.”


    “And accidentally giving the Shu clan political cause to align against us, because of Cang Di would not be a good idea,” Cao Liang sighed. “Yes, I can see that—My apologies teacher,” her disciple gave her a rueful grimace. “I let my anger cloud my reasoning there.”


    “Don’t be especially hard on yourself,” she chuckled. “And yes, whoever is behind what occurred in the Jasmine Gate clearly knows ‘enough’ to stir up problems. There is no need to deliver the potential to cause conflict between us and the Shu Pavilion right to their doorstep. Especially when the Shu clan elders are still squirming over what happened to Shu Fei Bao’s grandson—unless that has miraculously resolved itself?”


    “Alas, no,” Cao Liang replied with a grimace.


    “I figured. Problems seem to be multiplying these last decades, not solving themselves.”


    She was about to say more, when… her intuition made her take a second look at their surroundings, then back the way they had come.


    It was true that a large swarm of hook bats, such as has been disturbed would be something of a deterrent on the local wildlife, but hook bats didn’t really hunt spirit herbs.


    “…”


    Beside her, Cao Liang had also paused, and was giving the forest around them a long, careful look, having clearly marked the same subtle shifts in their surroundings she just had.


    The valley was quite rugged, likely the product of spatial slippage at some point in the distant past. The only real path, which they had been following, wound between crumbling cliffs, wreathed with vegetation, and she could just make out the distant sound of a waterfall through the creaking trees and the occasional rumble overhead.


    The ambience was claustrophobic, and leaden, but that was only partly because of the continued sense of the forces underlying the mountain range continuing to move. The bigger reason was that the feng shui of the valley itself had been oppressed. Ritually, and recently. It was skilfully enough done that probably only someone like her would notice. Had she not been on edge—


    “Huh… there is something decidedly ‘constructed’ about the presence of the ambient feng shui in this valley,” Cao Liang muttered, turning in a slow circle to take in their surroundings with a deepening frown.


    “Yes,” she nodded, smiling, quietly pleased he had noticed, without her saying anything.


    “And there are no spirit herbs. Or basically none.”


    Squinting at a nearby tree, she could feel the presence of a few unawakened ones, hiding, and they really were hiding.


    Taking a deep breath, she pondered the scents in the air. Traces of Jasmine and other flowers still lingered, from days prior, but that was easy enough for her to tune out. Underneath that, there was… remarkably little though. Looking around, it did not have the vibe of a territorial valley, either. It was just a gorge formed by spatial upheaval and then widened and shaped by erosion.


    “Someone cleared out the valley,” Cao Liang observed softly after they had stood in silence for some seconds. “This is a prepared landscape?”


    “It does have that vibe, yes,” she agreed, pensively.


    The concept of a ‘prepared landscape’ would be alien to most Juniors, even someone like Cang Di, except in all but the most general terms. That was largely because to make one was not the sort of endeavour any junior could do, unless they devoted decades, if not centuries of their practice to the disciplines of Feng Shui, mastered Martial Intent, understood multiple divination and formations methodologies and would even need to dabble in alchemy. They were the foundation upon which ancestral grounds were laid. On which the control of mortal worlds were founded. On which military strategy at the highest levels of the Authority Bureau’s was formulated.


    “Strategically ingenious, yet technically flawed…” Cao Liang mused, falling in beside her, as they started to walk onwards, more slowly now as they both studied their surroundings more carefully. “It also seems to have been set up over some time,” Cao Liang muttered, pausing briefly to pick up a handful of the loam and crumble it through his fingers. “This is not the work of a few days, or weeks. Ironic, that all this effort has been compromised by the simple act of the suppression being raised.”


    “It is, rather,” she agreed.


    If the standard suppression was still in place, probably only experts like her or masters of the Martial Path on a level with Cao Liang would notice this quickly. Lesser herbs had been left alone, to preserve the illusion of normality, but there was nothing stronger than soul foundation, no matter where she looked. Most of those higher realm ones were trees as well, which were hard to remove without attracting notice.


    “It is unfortunate that the aftershocks of what happened in the Jasmine Gate have distorted the underlying alignments,” Cao Liang added, pausing by a tree and putting his hand to its trunk for a moment. “Clearly, its preparing this valley for an ambush, but more than that, I find myself curious as to who constructed this, because while I cannot claim to be an expert on the local powers who lurk in parts of this range, I would expect those old masters to use the ‘Shan Manual of Five Gates’, or the ‘Yuan Manual of Opening’, not the ‘Classic of the Four Cardinal Chronograms’. In fact, based solely of the maintenance of it, this feels to me like someone is trying to suggest that our influence had a hand in it?”


    “Uh-huh,” she nodded along as he spoke, agreeing entirely with that assessment. “The maintaining method definitely draws inspiration from the Meng clan’s applications of it… and honestly, I am starting to lose patience with these people clearly trying to pick a fight with me.”


    Despite the obvious framing, though, even for her it would be difficult to work out who, exactly was trying to do this with any certainty. The ‘Classic of Four Cardinal Chronograms’ was by far the most commonly distributed adaption of underlying principles of the Eight Trigrams in the current era, its influence could be felt in every heavenly clan you cared to name, and every world that held their influence. So, all you could say about who created this was that they used the orthodox method that was widely available and tried to do so mimicking the style favoured by the Meng clan in recent times.


    “—But it is basic and naive, and not in an artificial way—intended to obfuscate,” Cao Liang noted. “On the other hand, perhaps whoever constructed it, decided that didn’t matter and that was the most expedient system whoever he, and I am pretty sure it is a ‘he’, had on hand to distribute to whoever helped set this—”


    The flash of light split the entire horizon ahead of them.


    For a brief, vision-searing instant, it was as if the clouds above were no longer there.


    The Great Mount towered in stark, silhouetted relief amidst a shimmering corona of wavering nihility.


    A silent thunderclap of celestial proportions enveloped everything.


    The valley around them danced.


    Trees shook.


    Cliffs trembled.


    All around them, she could feel the groaning, grinding resistance from Yin Eclipse, as the shockwave didn’t so much roll out from the mountain, but settle down across the entire region like a great descending weight.


    There was a terrible music to it if you had ears to listen and eyes to see—an argument fought not with words but with clashing, competing harmonies of fundamental forces represented in that rising ‘Dark’ she had been feeling for a while, and the sudden, crushing descending presence now manifesting above.


    Without hesitation, she drew the Savage Corona Swords and, connecting them to a formidable barrier talisman, grabbed her momentarily off guard disciple to stand right beside her—


    Water vapor juddered in the air around them, turning everything into an iridescent haze as the shockwave itself hit the valley, and her immediate fear was born out, as trees began to shatter and the ominous cracking of rock reverberated from every direction. Maybe three seconds later, the sound caught up, drowning out even that.


    “What just happened?” Cao Liang mouthed at her, barely even able to communicate with soul sense inside their protective bubble.


    Before she could reply, or curse whoever had created the alignment suppressed state of the valley they were currently in, the world above them turned inside out.


    A seething line of blackish-blue annihilation bled out of the iridescent haze, scouring the valley ahead of them.


    Even through the barrier sheltering them, she felt her qi shudder, as the bolt spidered through their surroundings.


    Everything it touched vanished in an afterimage of unstable qi. Trees, rocks, mist, even the air itself was obliterated, leaving behind a rippling veil of nihility, rather resembling heat haze, that bled upwards into the sky.


    Caught in the disconcertingly dreamy moment of stillness between the bolts, she found herself staring up at the pale sky for a moment. Now visible, thanks to the lightning, it was… riven with shimmering, ethereal curtains of iridescence, bleeding out like a vast fan from the great mount. Sky trenches, dropping like chasms carved by divine axes into the very fabric of reality in the wake of the lightning. With it, a punishing intent suffused everything, making her disciple gasp and collapse to one knee, as it sought to instil veneration towards the immutable fury of the heavenly path to all things that beheld it.


    “Heaven Slaughtering Tribulation Lightning!? What in the name of the Ten Kings of Diyu have you stupid bastards just done?”


    Her own words sounded empty in her ears, uttered mostly in momentary disbelief as to what she was witnessing unfold, as above them, another bolt, which she caught clearly this time, manifesting in the form of a towering black celestial dragon, coiling down from on high towards the now fully revealed majesty of the Great Mountain Peak—


    A soul-shaking presence rose up all around them, from deep in the heart of Yin Eclipse, converging on the lightning—


    The clash of the two turned the sky above them dim.


    Cao Liang coughed up blood, and even she winced, her vision doubling for a moment as she felt the dimension quake wash through them.


    The recoil of it, rebounding off of the surface layer of the inner valleys made the vault of heaven above them tremble, scattering the sympathetic lightning that had been following that dreadful bolt down, briefly illuminating the normally unseen barrier that shrouded Eastern Azure from the void beyond. The outer layers of the tribulation hurricane that was rapidly forming around the periphery of the mountain range seethed, sound and colour draining from the world as the blue of the sky turned a dusky purple.


    In that instant, beyond the aurora-like scars of the sky trenches she could clearly see the vast curtains of the Azure Maelstrom. The remnants of a lost aeon, thrown into its tides by Yin Eclipse’s initial arrival on the shore of this world shining like a higher Heaven within it. Constellations of ruins forgotten to all but a handful of experts like her, encircling it in a melancholic, haunting facsimile of a zodiac ring—


    A juddering, silent thunderclap broke the moment.


    The swirling hurricane of clouds raging along the horizon collapsed upwards, spawning endless torrents of multi-coloured lightning within its rapidly layering strata as it did so. She didn’t need to count them to know that within moments they would reach fundamental perfection—a thirty-three layered tribulation cloud.


    -Did you actually break something free from the underworld of this place? Or cross Eastern Azure’s Fates with it, thanks to whatever you did to oversee this ‘trial?’


    In that moment, as she watched the tribulation hurricane’s bolts begin to assail the invasive lightning and the scattering weather-systems of Yin Eclipse directly, that was all she could think of. As far as she knew, nothing else could provoke such a reaction from both the innate strength of the forbidden zone and the sky above, to the point where the friction with Eastern Azure’s own Heavenly Paradigm would give rise to what she was witnessing—


    A terrible, hauntingly familiar primal cry, that robbed the world of its vibrancy and called to the darkest corners of her nature, reverberated from the lightning shrouded height of the mountain.


    Beside her, Cao Liang could not help but tremble in horror, as it washed over them—through them—with a presence that called out to the shadow in all things, in a way that the Yang Intent in the Jasmine Gate could have only dreamed of.


    The sky above recoiled, the very fabric of reality dancing like water… and then there was silence.


    Suffocating, bitter silence, clung to everything.


    “W-what… is t-that?” Cao Liang whispered, his voice shaking as they beheld the guardian spirit of the Great Mount slip into focus, upon the highest pinnacle of its jagged peak.


    A vast, ghostly, yet eerily alluring figure, clad in moonlight and shadows, now visible against the storm-dark sky.


    Even at this distance, it was as oppressive as she recalled the last time she had laid eyes on it, on the day when the mountain claimed the ‘Heaven Grasping Ascendant Sage’, for daring to try and refine it for his Heavenly Truth.


    With a wave of its hand, the scattering clouds above the inner valleys blazed, transforming into a vast corona of silver fire as they were pushed away, that within moments had encompassed the entire horizon.


    “Remember before, you asked how a venerate could perish in this place?” she replied grimly as the sky above turned from purple to black, the flickering edges of that curtain of silver fire transforming to resemble the seething corona around an eclipsed sun.


    “…”


    Cao Liang just stared at her, then at the sky, and the distant figure on the summit of the great mount.


    Before he could say anything, however, everything around them froze.


    She felt the ‘impact’ even before it happened. Barely.


    A protective talisman triggered, merged with her soul for so long she barely even remembered it was there these days, surrounding them in a ghostly reflection of the night sky within Vast Obscurity Grove, a fraction of an instant before a presence collided with the realm wall above Yin Eclipse, with enough force to not simply crack it, but smash into it with enough force to send meteors of solidified space streaking down across half the sky.


    Ten immense shadow bolts, disturbingly evocative of the fingers of a pair of titanic celestial hands descended into the world, grasping towards the great mount.


    The dimension quake that came with them was mostly absorbed by the now thoroughly risen dark, divisive, vengeful ambience of the depths of Yin Eclipse. Mostly, in that its effect was noticeably… less, in the immediacy of the valley where they were.


    Fortunately, her mother’s talisman, intended to protect her in the rare event she experienced a spatial cascade while traveling in the Star Ocean, or someone tried to force-gate her out of the world, sheltered both of them from the worst of it. It still left her breathlessly nauseous for a few moments, while Cao Liang dry-retched onto the ground beside her.


    “A smart person would run,” she remarked bitterly, feeding him some of her qi as she helped him back to his feet. “Except…”


    “We… have we been marked by this, because of this fate-thrashed prepared land?” Cao Liang groaned, wiping a stream of blood from his nose.


    “Not… quite,” she reassured him, pre-emptively summoning her four swords to reinforce the protective barrier, “At least—”


    Before she could say anything more, however, and as if to thoroughly spite her, the ten bolts hit the great mount.


    A blinding flash of emptiness bloomed around the peak, blotting out most of the sky for a brief, disorienting moment.


    The entire valley around them distorted in her vision—


    A black bolt of lightning obliterated a large portion of a ridge line a mile or so deeper into the inner valleys from their current location.


    She barely had time to summon her mother’s Savage Corona sword set to reinforce her own, and the barrier surrounding them, when a tsunami of black lightning rampaged through their surroundings with a force comparable to the initial bolts of a Celestial Crossing tribulation.


    Somewhat to her surprise, the majority of the vegetation actually survived. As, much more vexingly, did the integrity of the ‘prepared landscape’.


    “Why couldn’t whoever did this have half-assed it?” Cao Liang groaned, as the barrier sheltering them blazed, resisting the fate-eroding prestige of the barrage.


    -Why not indeed, she agreed, gritting her teeth as she adjusted the defensive barrier into a more convenient form. It is a good thing I got practice with my eight trigrams applications in the gate.


    Now they had been hit by a scattering bolt directly, there was no real question of running. If prepared landscapes, even fairly simplistic examples like the one they were currently in, were not that easy to get out of, they would not be so dangerous. Now that she could feel this one in action, she could tell that whoever set it up had managed to exploit the acquisitive, yet divisive tendencies of Yin Eclipse’s dark foundations to impart a shadow of its influence on anyone caught within it.


    Teleportation out from under this would also be suicide, and while she had a means to escape, circumstances had not quite reached that point, and her intuition was that using it now would not be a good idea.


    There were several other approaches she could still take, but considering them in the moment, the most straightforward, really, thanks to her attainments with the Heavenly Dao of Changes, was to use a Primal Eight Trigrams formation to shelter them.


    It also had the added advantage, that much like when she used it against the Conquering Yang Intent, it would give her some benefits as well. For all that they were in a highly precarious position right now, it wasn’t every day you ran into tribulation lightning of this calibre—


    Another silent rumble bled through now pitch-black vault of the sky, shaking the falling curtains of incursive intent and the false stars of the ruins within the maelstrom, and pushing the actual stars of the ‘void’ beyond the boundary of the world into eerie prominence.


    The silver corona surged, under the urging of the Guardian Spirit, giving birth to multitude of ‘sparks’ that swarmed across the circumference of the dark vault of the heavens. As they flowed together, she felt a profound resonance with her blood lineage, as they took the forms of phoenixes and dragons. Such was the aura of vivacious prestige that the phoenixes in particular emanated as they clashed with the dispersing remnants of the ten bolts, that she had to quite directly quell the yearning emanating from that ancient ancestral link, to spread her wings and fly up to join them.


    “Take this…” she passed a child-link to her barrier to Cao Liang while she turned her attention back to her Primordial Trigram formation.


    This was already far above anything a Dao Ascension cultivator would ever face, and he was fairly close to the threshold where it was theoretically possible to attempt to break through to either Dao or Martial Venerate. For her, the main risk here was soul damage, but for him, if he accidentally got enough resonance with the momentum of the tribulation lightning, especially that emanating from the clash with the Heavenly forces of Eastern Azure, it was not impossible for him to prematurely trigger that Crossing tribulation.


    On the other hand, if she could exploit some of the Celestial Fate Lightning that was still raging through the valley to help him temper his Martial Ascendant Soul and Jade Dao Body, alongside quenching her own weapons in it, that would only bring benefits down the line—for both of them.


    “Keep your qi as still as you can,” she instructed him, as she shifted her formation into a series of alignments that would shield them properly.


    “What… do you intend to do?” Cao Liang asked her, concern writ clear on his face as he eyed the aftermath of the bolt.


    “What any self-respecting cultivator would do, given we can’t run, and we can’t really hide,” she chuckled mirthlessly. “Seize us some benefits, at the expense of others.”


    “Seize…?” her disciple gave her a very long look. “From… that?”


    “You will have to face such forces eventually,” she reminded him drily. “This is an opportunity not afforded one in millions upon millions of years.”


    “…”


    In passing, she wondered if those vain fools in the Astrology Bureau, hugging the legs of some even less qualified idiots elevated on high due to their talent for ruining the hope and dreams of others, would actually be angered to death if they knew their precious trial had afforded her this. An opportunity to quench not just the core of her soul bound weapons in ‘Celestial’, and maybe even ‘Heavenly’ Venerate realm tribulation lightning, but expose a cultivator of Cao Liang’s calibre to it.


    As someone who had advanced two paths of cultivation, ‘Martial’ and ‘Body’, to the Ascendant Realm—in his clan’s ‘Bright Force Martial Manual’ and also the Manual of Nine Celestial Hong Meng Bodies, as well as possessing an inborn Earthly Physique, his breakthrough to world venerate was never not going to be tough.


    Exploiting this lightning to improve the Harmony and Balance between his Physique and cultivation foundation might even allow him to take a step towards crossing that threshold tens of millennia ahead of when he might have otherwise expected to. That it could be done largely without a serious risk of incurring direct implication as well, was just added seasoning, really.


    Though being stuck in a prepared landscape wasn’t that much less dangerous, she could turn it to their advantage with the right formations, and then it was just a matter of enduring, as there was next to no chance whoever set this up would be able to peek out of whatever hole they were hiding in.


    “So just sit there and watch your teacher steal Good Fortune from this broken world of ours,” she reassured him, unable to avoid cracking a smile at the thought of their expressions as they watched this catastrophe from heaven unfold from a distance. “Because not even Dun Fang, with all the favours he bought, was able to experience a moment like this.”


    <hr>


    <h3 style="text-align: center">~ A certain sword, still not sure what is what ~


    <hr>


    The sword sat there on a rock, watching the light show overhead. Its sense of connection to the world was returning much more rapidly now. The events of the last while were… not exactly confusing. No, they were not confusing, it was almost impossible for it to get confused, instead, it would liken them to the moments before and after fully waking from a very long and fitful sleep. In that regard, its extermination of the Arachnavore’s Swarm was more akin to a woken mortal swatting an errant spider and cursing it roundly. Not that it would ever tell these children that, for their peace of mind if nothing else.


    It inhaled, feeling the bracing breeze from above. This was helping to rouse it… her… into proper wakefulness. A fresh breeze and an autumnal gale to stir the senses and give the skin a bit of a refreshing chill. It was impressive, all things considered, even if it was still winding itself up to really make its presence felt. It was probably the first time anyone in this world saw a ‘Declaration of Damnation’ on this level.


    Memories were still settling, she considered. She was a she in many respects, even before the limits of her current form and the constraints imposed on it by others. Most of them were. It was a quirk of the origin as much as anything, when they had first arisen. Her… their… maker had always considered them her first daughters, even before her true blood descendants. Inheritors of her will in the truest sense.


    -It could also be sisters, she mused, as part of her remembered that thoughts were not narrative, as amusing as it might be to do that.


    Well, it was somewhat interchangeable in any case. Little sister and daughter were the same word, the difference contextual within the tongue of her homeland. To her, the relationship had always been closer to an elder sister, she supposed, compared to some of the others... who had sought a mother figure more than a close companion. That her current form forced it more towards the idea of ‘mother’…


    Another, particularly violent emission of lightning skittered across the sky as she let her mind drift through those memories quickly – appraising herself of… herself in many ways – checking if anything untoward had happened beyond the obvious in the last while. Most external matters had been handled by her second and third sisters in different ways. The others all had their roles, which they were still fulfilling, with admirable vim and vigour. Mostly that connection was cursing and a lot of ill-humour, so she muted it again, for now.


    -Then again, this is quite the wakeup is it not, she thought with some amusement, watching the sky continue to darken.


    The others above and below were all turning their eyes to this now. Smiling eyes in the darkness that would make even the vilest thing below here quail and find a better rock to skulk under, a deeper darkness to gibber in.


    Her gaze travelled to the three children hiding beside her, holding the representation of her physical aspect that was really just serving as an enforced anchor to her shadow within this realm as if it were some heaven-sent talisman of their salvation. In a way, you might consider it to be so if you were an ignorant fool, she supposed. That said, those who thought such things were quantifiable like that, those that thought existences like her were… tools…to be wielded and controlled invariably met bad ends. Certainly those who had bound her to this form had not fared well.


    -And yet, there is never a shortage of them, she wryly lamented, casting her sense back to their shared abode.


    Above her, the gloom shifted, revealing a bit more clearly the fundamentals of what was playing out above. Not a two-way tug of war but a three-way one. She peered consideringly at its edges, where the vast tribulation clouds were still billowing and swirling outwards… reading the shatter signatures as the powers clashed.


    -The Martial Axial regions…


    -The Kong clan…


    -A weak divine aspect, karma with, but not born directly of, the Kong clan? Insidious and grasping.


    -There are others as well – Shu… and… Tang?


    -Three aspects for a Great World as young as this is… interesting, she mused.


    She considered them for a moment, pondering the relationships between them.


    The Kong was helping the newest one to subvert and control.


    The Tang one was old and remnant, from the world’s first heavenly cycle?


    The Shu was powerful, but detached, comparable to the recent one, but not with the same degree of outside backing.


    There were other tints as well, Ming, Meng, Huang, Xue… Han… and a few others besides


    A contested Great World, a poor child born with talent, but fated to exist in a cruel era.


    The thunder intensified and the cracks started to show in the realm sphere above. Another dimension quake rippled through the world… it spanned seven different dimensions this time. Still a far cry from anything she needed to be concerned with. Even ruined as they were, the watchtowers and their Archetype Arcana were more than a match for anything up to a ten-dimensional one.


    Shading her eyes, she watched ''Thunder Crest'' wield her reason against the greedy rage, born of human avarice from beyond another sky, searching eyes from above, seeking routes for its dominion to descend. Although she could joke about it being a ‘light breeze’, and ‘briskly stimulating’ or ‘a bit bracing’ that was only to her. A Declaration of Damnation on this level had the potential to be a properly cataclysmic event for such a young world.


    Frowning, she focused on the dark above. The descending intent was not… correct, for her understanding of the Martial Regions. There was a lingering hint of familiarity in this greed and anger. A touch of hypocrisy that wasn’t quite the right kind for this little corner of reality.


    She could see it still if she closed her eyes, their faces twisted in greed… their hands grasping for the power they believed they were entitled to because of their fortunate birth, because they were told they were the chosen ones, or so they believed those words to be interpreted in their hearts.


    The taint of their sin was indelible, even after all this time, even after so much misery and bloodshed had been spawned in that name…


    For the first time, she narrowed her eyes.


    -No, while a declaration like this might occur, the powers relating to it are still in ignorance.


    -The Heaven Breaker, Dream Bringer Cult, Pathfinder Pavilion, Longevity School, Vast Obscurity Grove… Hundred Peacock Mountain, Heaven’s Gate Society…God Slaughtering Gate… she listed the most memorable ones, the one with Great Gods standing behind them, at the very least.


    -Most of those have eyes here.


    With an ethereal sigh, she stared again at the sky. The swirling tides of worldly fate, the destiny of those caught within it and the karma that knit it all together was a shifting maelstrom, but not one that touched directly on what was working its way into a frenzy above. The tribulation of the world was… induced through it, but it was less deliberate and more of a sympathetic reaction.


    “…”


    With a moment of worry she looked at her own… and then their other shared connections to this mess. They were thankfully very minimal, their presence entirely unmarked by what was above, thanks to her own shroud and her sisters’.


    She reviewed the other connections quickly, the tapestry of her intent swirling through her being. She had an unfortunate number of links to the three below her, sheltering in her shadow, which had probably contributed somewhat to their run-in with the anomaly. Her need to intercede there had been unfortunate, but it was better than the alternative. Having just awoken she didn’t want to spend… oh… 200 million years, give or take, walking back from that point to the present.


    -That would have been a grand joke, she thought a bit more gloomily. After I decided to let Han Shu carry me out, to have them all die just like that.


    It was already awkward enough that the circumstances of his brush with death in this world had almost refused to give her face.


    “Why is this intent even incurring down here,” one of her sisters complained rather pointedly through their shared link.


    “You don’t think they found out we are...?”


    “No, that connection is still severed,” she cut in.


    “Ohhh… biggest sis is awake.”


    “Fighting!”


    “We shall make them suffer!”


    “Don’t you dare steal this opportunity! I’ve been waiting far too long for an opportunity to hit something.”


    “If you phrase it like that, then she is going to get annoyed…”


    “…”


    “That is a good point, the archetype arcana are already moving, but where are ‘they’ at?”


    “She has her own worries,” a male voice interjected.


    “Yeah,” another male voice murmured, “what exactly is going on beyond there?”


    She frowned: it was unusual for those two to step in. The bell was deeper than most in the depths, and the gate… was insular and only interacted with...


    “You say that, but this degree of intent descending is a bit abnormal…” another female voice added.


    -The pagoda as well?


    This had to be the first time they were all focused like this in… well that was hazy, there had been that brief contact a short while ago. She had been slumbering so wasn’t party to it, but five of them had had some fun and learned a bit about the outside in the process.


    “Where is she?” She asked.


    “J’arrive,” an ominous female voice purred, cutting through the chatter.


    “Really, this kind of feeling shouldn’t be occurring down here,” it muttered as another ancient intent joined the observation of what was occurring above.


    “Something for later though,” she murmured softly and the oppression in the cavern that had been probing the Great Mount looking for a way in… and decided to take some opportunistic, easier prey – seeking out the children sheltering in her shadow, greedy for their opportunities – fled.


    Despite being buried here for untold years, the spirits outside were certainly giving a good account for themselves. Instead, she stared up, to where the real battle was about to unfold. All of them had slumbered in their own way. To her, it was not a problem, the nature of her being made it surprisingly easy to drift in and out of the world. It was almost better that way, her power such that touching the world incautiously could cause more issues than benefits to her. Her little sister on the other hand… was a bit of an extrovert at heart and probably had a lot of grudges against all kinds of things that had led to her being buried down there. And a long time to stew in them.


    Above her, the damnation finally arrived. Ghosting through this plane''s eclipse point, out of phase with reality as all but a being like her could perceive it. A swarm of stolen judgement – like a twisted bit of primordial pond life, returning to the scene of its ancient crime.


    -That is the question though… What in the names of all the god spawned devils actually spawned this in the first place?


    -Is it just returning to finish what it tried to start all those years ago, beneath a different sky? Or is it something more?


    Spider web cracks hissed across the outside of the realm wall as the first wave twisted down and started to search for a way through.


    -Assuming they survived their arrogance, she added drily.


    The aftermath of that mess was something she could find out in due course, undoubtedly they had been made to rue deeply their foolish appetites, never mind the price likely visited upon the men who had been wielded by their whims.


    Reviewing what she knew of the fall of Saint Roberta’s Academy, nothing stood out really. The academy held many secrets and much knowledge others would find desirable but nothing that properly went ‘against’ the highest orders that could direct this kind of response... Actively?


    If it was just a matter of treasures, she pondered idly, watching her sister mass her power, agents of those powers or their successors would have come in person…. And they would do it subtly by incarnation or infiltration. Through broken lives given a new opportunity, or doomed ones, subverted from the brink.


    A thought shifted through their shared connection, overriding her rather passive muting of their lively discussion since the pagoda and the others arrived.


    “What if it isn’t active?”


    “A passive response?”


    “Yes…”


    “…”


    “Please don’t joke about that,” the pagoda grumbled.


    “Was there something like that hidden in this place before it fell?” The ancient, ominous voice muttered.


    “…”


    There was a pensive silence as all of them considered the limits of their omniscience in this matter and reached answers that as a group were not well-liked.


    She shook her head wryly. When you lived as long as they had, saw as much, things did start to blur. You stopped caring about what the mortals did, and then something like the event that saw them all end up in here would happen. It was a cycle in its own way. You could not watch everything. Oh, certainly some tried, though it never ended well. Unfortunately, you really could not be too passive either, or you got so swept along in things, it became hard to interact with the world around you.


    Finding the correct harmony between knowing when to poke and when to let pass was something that could not be taught, only learned.


    All three of the young ones being sheltered by her were perfect examples of that. Some things were worth getting karma with – no matter how innocuous they might seem – and yet, even there, it was important not to obstruct the very thing that made them worth that connection. It was possible to smother remarkable shifts in the geometry of chance just by being over-attentive. Another lesson that was all too frequently forgotten by many of those who should really know better.


    She put her chin on her hands and glanced at them again, before returning her gaze skyward.


    -Truly it is a trap to mire sages and make fools of wise men, she reflected, considering that issue.


    That was what separated her and the pagoda and a few others from the many below them who also believed themselves close to the apex.


    If there was a great secret to poking at the karma of things, or how moments interacted, she could only consider it to be ''Plausible Deniability'', and even then, you had to keep a proper awareness to ensure that the moments you broke that facade were ''important''.


    That was why she was willing to intercede with Halla Everkind. The girl knew just enough to be trusted to draw the wrong conclusions for the right reasons. She had still been slumbering then, but her little sister was not and her reputation was... much more interesting in that time compared to her own. Diverting the threads of that grand tapestry in just that moment had opened up other avenues that would be more beneficial than not in the present.


    The descending tribulation was also a case in point, she mused idly.


    She could stop it easily enough, but then she would probably have to bury this world and its ruling powers herself and return these lands and their innocent peoples to a time before they found their path to the Heavens. Break the dreams of a trillion people and force them to rediscover their paths. Just so she and her sisters wouldn''t be touched by the greedy eyes that would come racing from afar once she revealed those claws. And come they would. Proud scions of great clans, Grand Elders and even Sovereigns and enthroned Emperors of Supreme Worlds, unknowing of her true nature, but like Halla, knowing just enough to draw the wrong conclusions for the right reasons…. but very much at the wrong time.


    Was stopping a mere damnation tribulation worth the karmic weight of returning an aeonspan to its origins?


    Some would do it, and be proud of it, she knew. However, that path only held slaughter, and when you had killed as much as she had – and few had delivered so many to that final shore as she, she reflected – it was more interesting to take other paths. More beneficial as well.


    So, she determined to sit here and see what form it was going to take when it entered into the world. She was of a mind with her sister on this. It didn’t really matter that it had come, what was important was that it wasn''t going to leave again. That would cause a headache for the closest thing this place had to an actual ruler, but then, if she was going to lounge around in her pagoda all the damn time, complaining about spicy soup and reading novels not yet written, some discomfort was maybe warranted. In any event, her little sister''s strength was better suited to this kind of thing.


    With a smile she watched as her sister shifted and rose ahead of the others, stepping beyond the bounds of their shared sanctuary, manifesting the material shadow of her own form, far above on the heights. Waiting, with the closest thing this place had to an actual landlord at this point – just out of perception – for their unsuspecting prey to stick its neck out in search of whatever had actually called it here.


    <hr>


    <h3 style="text-align: center">~ Lu Ji – Blue Water City ~


    <hr>


    In Blue Water City, standing on the balcony of his estates, Lu Ji looked on, feeling clammy and sick. The tribulation unleashed across the horizon had struck all the grandees visiting the city mute like stunned chickens. All their plotting, manipulation and exploitation rendered insignificant in the face of what was unfolding over the Great Mount, where a vast Heavenly Fate tribulation with a full thirty-three layers was howling in hysterical, celestial fury.


    The entire front ran from horizon to horizon and was like a dread hurricane spiralling with the Great Mount in its eye. Lightning bolts that could turn the city to slag with a single pulse, and destroy much of the subcontinent in hours had they been anywhere else, dropping like hard rain from the inauspicious darkness beyond the thirty-three layers.


    “Fates, be merciful and take three steps back,” he muttered under his breath.


    A tribulation this size was approaching that of a proper ''Venerate Ascension''. Elsewhere on any of the continents, it would already have fractured the realm wall properly. Although it was entirely possible that it was already broken far above the mountains and the suppression was also shielding them from that.


    As he watched, the clouds boiled outwards yet again, the new layer that was spreading out like a pitch-black wall above the continent looking disturbingly mushroom-like as it started manifesting bolts of black, gold and then… grey… and finally pure white.


    Bracing himself for what would arrive he resisted the urge to again check how many Dao Jades were linked to the estate’s formations—


    Everything shook, in eerie silence.


    As he watched the city spread out before him, he saw the ripple of the arriving shockwave as it lifted roof tiles, made trees shake, put surging waves down canals and sent people diving for cover. Many actually fainted outright as the dimensional distortion washed over them; however, the formation walls of the city held.


    Silver lightning started to flicker down across the horizon.


    -Heaven Slaughtering Tribulation. Not judgement – Execution.


    What was even more terrifying was that the landscape of the Yin Eclipse Mountains was fighting back. Even from the coast it was possible to see the ever-present thunderheads above Thunder Crest and East Fury shifting. Reports on his message jade, flickering in behind him almost constantly now, were already saying that the other ‘peaks’ were manifesting abnormal phenomena to match, improbably intercepting the tribulation lightning that was ravaging the land.


    Countering it at the law and truth realm. Deflecting them away, neutralising them with sky-scraping multi-coloured bolts of a kind he had never witnessed before.


    When viewed at this distance it was like watching two celestial umbrellas poke each other.


    Thunder Crest was the main culprit there, bolts slicing through the layers of tribulation clouds from their world with contemptuous ease, matching the silver and black fury that was now properly pouring in from some other higher place.


    Another series of titanic explosions in the upper atmosphere made the whole horizon ripple, shockwaves tearing across the sky above, travelling far beyond the confines of the subcontinent, making the blue sky fade away momentarily to reveal the twisting maelstrom beyond… and with it came a faint, ghostly *thrum*.


    Exhaling, he stared up at the sky, his palms sweating. The Azure Surge that upwelled around their tiny island of calm that was Eastern Azure was also starting to resonate… and that was just from Thunder Crest. Alongside this, East Fury’s mists were further dampening the motions in the tribulation clouds themselves. While South Grove was obscured from view, the dark malaise that shrouded its heights was also swirling upwards, attacking the undersides of those thirty-three layers like some evil god, gnawing at the foundations of the world.


    “Can you feel them?” the woman stood beside him purred.


    He shot a sideways glance at Dao Mother Bright Dream. Now that his aunt was… somewhere in the heart of that insanity, she was the closest thing the Blue Pavilion had to a genuine leader, though only he knew that.


    The tone of her voice made his skin crawl. There was a glee in it that he had never seen in this normally reserved and mysterious woman who had been his aunt’s companion for as long as he could remember. Her tone was… almost ecstatic.


    “This is what their foolishness has wrought…”


    “What exactly is going on?” he asked, wishing his aunt was here, as Bright Dream behaving like this was… unnerving.


    “Domination. A war between declarations. The clash of competing Reasons. Treasure this moment. You will probably never see a war for supremacy waged between beings this close to the apex again unless you can arrive at the Venerate Apex and claim your own throne.”


    “Claim… my?” he leant on the edge of the balcony exhaled sharply.


    -Is she suggesting what I think she is? ''Reason'' is... I only know the significance of that because of aunt Xiao…


    However, now was not the time to worry about that.


    Now eyes from afar were indeed crawling all over this land. Dozens of divination artefacts, the treasured eyes of the powers that lurked behind the curtain of this contested world. Even some direct eyes, from the central, western and southern continents mostly. They were not being subtle, not that there was a need honestly, but it did mean that incautious thoughts in certain directions should be quelled for now. A few of those watching were stronger than his Fairy Aunt, might even be stronger than Bright Dream, although that was probably unlikely. Unfathomable was a term tailor-made for the ethereal white-haired beauty.


    No doubt their own speculations were running rampant, just as those across the city were. There hadn’t been a real Ascension realm tribulation within the confines of the Eastern Azure in three generations. The last one had been his own grand-uncle, Lu Fu Tao… that had still been in the Eastern Dark Ocean, barely within the stable plane-sphere of the Great Realm, and had still been visible to a third of the great world – done as much as a statement as out of necessity.


    This was now far in excess of that, he was sure. Even the western and southern continents were likely seeing it without the need for scrying devices now.