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    <h3 style="text-align: center">~ Elder Feng Jihan — near Caeracht ~


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    The first clue Feng Jihan had that something was… off, was the ‘Dawn Manifestation’. He was looking over some of the reports of the ‘events’ within the city, that had led to these spectres emerging en-masse, when it occurred. Of particular interest was the account about the Shu Pavilion’s juniors. A profound sense of warmth and ‘allure’, like a faint floral scent from a beautiful woman, washed through the tent he was in, entirely ignoring any and all of the wards and barriers as the sun’s rays touched the fabric.


    “Motherless!”


    “What was that!”


    “Ah, what are the flowers…?”


    Outside, several gasps and the sound of someone dropping something liquid in a campfire confirmed that it was… widespread, and obvious.


    -Flowers?


    He pushed his senses outside the tent and found… that, indeed, amid what was now a very chaotic camp, as people looked around in shock, every flowering plant within his eyesight was suddenly coming into bloom.


    “See, you moron! I told you, we should have….”


    “Oi… don’t, what if Elder Feng—!”


    Among the chatter, he also caught the conversation of two Feng clan disciples—Kai and Kwang—who had been hurrying past the nearest campfire, a few meters from his tent.


    “…”


    -Someone doesn’t want to tell me something? he mused wryly, sitting back in his chair and staring up at the roof of the tent for a long moment. No matter where you are, some things just don’t change, huh.


    Both of those two were known to him, even before he came here… as troublesome brats. Wont to do their own thing and well at home among the group of disciples who were not happy he and some of the other elders were, in fact, here.


    They should not have been, that was undeniable, except destiny had had other ideas when writing out its fateful workings. His group had seen some of this bunch off to the start of the trial, and then, because it was rare to come all the way to the herb garden of Eastern Azure, they had stayed on the periphery of Yin Eclipse for several days to take in the sights. He, along with his grand-niece, several of her friends, two other more junior elders from the Feng clan and an elder from the Dusk Sky Pagoda had been in a teahouse… when the spatial collapse dumped them… and everyone else in the small rural community around it… into this place.


    It was a minor miracle that they had managed to catch up to their juniors after that, but since then… and when it had become clear that this was not in any way what the Feng clan had believed the trial would be, those juniors had… begun to chafe a bit. They had initially rejoiced that he—a Dao Lord, two Dao Immortals, in his compatriot elders Hua and Qing, and an Ancient Immortal, in his Grand Niece, had come to support them… and for about half a day, he had been inclined to see how they performed. That half a day of ‘freedom’ had killed six luckless Feng clan juniors, and worse, ten innocent bystanders, despite his and the other elders’ best efforts.


    Hua and Qing had hoped, rather naively, that disastrous outcome might have tempered some of the stupidity, but it had not, and there had been days since when he wondered if it might not have been better to let the two perpetrators of most of that calamity and their coterie suffer the ultimate consequences of their actions at that time. Sadly, both—and some who were among their friends—were prospects their Feng clan’s current leading Ancestor, Old Man Yuan, had high hopes for. The old Ancestor’s intention had been to use this trial to attract interest from the Shu Clan’s powerbrokers on Eastern Azure, and thus raise the status of their family significantly. If he had any say, they would go to the Shu clan, but only so the Shu clan could do what they fate-thrashed liked with the pair, so long as they never caused trouble for the Feng again. Three times now, he had had to give express—and very clear—instructions not to do anything stupid, after one, or both, took it into their heads that just because they hadn’t expressly been warned not to do something, meant it was fine to go and try it.


    Most recently, that meant a total ban on anyone going near anything remotely like a hole in the ground—or checking out one of the subterranean ruins that they were increasingly discovering were all over this river plain—and get seized by a nigh-unkillable spectre, or cursed, or something even more obscure.


    Exhaling, he considered again that snippet of conversation and then, with a grim sigh, sent out his immortal sense to check who was in the camp.


    The camp itself was abuzz with confusion and interest, as cultivators looked about, trying to discern what was going on. Many had crude compasses, freshly made after the thorough destruction of every one they had brought from outside, and were debating hotly why this dawn manifestation was occurring.


    He didn’t need a compass to tell him that the readings would be ‘profoundly auspicious’. Just looking up at the sky was enough, because the subtle shifts in Yang laws were… singing, like a plucked zither wire.


    The really interesting thing, at least to him, who had seen quite a few of these sorts of events over the years, was that it wasn’t overwhelming, at least not superficially. As far as he could see, the dawn itself was the cause, which was unusual, and again, interesting, and probably very frustrating to any cultivators with the right kind of Yang-based cultivation who had been caught out by this and possibly missed an opportunity.


    Still, that wasn’t his main concern, as he turned his senses on the various tents… even as he detected his grand-niece, Linhua, rushing over—and found it was as he expected. Feng Jin’s tent was ‘sealed’, as if he was in cultivation, and Feng Fei’s tent was… also sealed. As was the third source of his headaches, that of Hao Yan—the most influential, if not strongest, of the contingent of the Shimmering Dragon Sept that had latched onto their group like a leech, almost two weeks ago, and caused nothing but annoyance for him since.


    And somehow… despite all the ambient good fortune seemingly drifting like pollen with the dawn… he was left feeling like he was staring at an Absolute Divination, wavering on a terrible knife-edge.


    “Brother Huo…” he sent Feng Huo, who was reassuring some of the surviving villagers that everything was okay, a silent prod with his immortal sense. “Can you check Feng Fei’s tent?”


    “Feng… ah, that motherless child of a baboon!” Elder Huo cursed, by way of a reply and after making his apologies to the villagers, hurried off in that direction.


    Getting to his feet, he waved a hand and opened the sealed chest which held temporary soul jades for all those in the camp, including those of the villagers who had asked for them to be made. He was sure he would have noticed if they broke, but sometimes jades, especially crudely made ones like these were—even if they were from the purest Earthly Jade he had had on him—could manifest weird flaws.


    None of them showed any particular abnormalities though, so after extracting those for the missing juniors, he transferred the whole chest into his spatial storage container, along with the few other valuables laid out, and the reports on the spectre possessions. Walking out of the tent, he ignored Kai and Kwang for now, and instead setting off towards the Shimmering Dragon Sept’s portion of their camp.


    “Ah! Grand Uncle!”


    Linhua, caught up to him before he had barely made it ten paces.


    That she was spooked enough to call him ‘grand uncle’ rather than ‘Elder’ said a lot as well, because she was usually a very composed and thoughtful young woman, who he had high hopes would become his formal understudy as a junior elder in a few decades, when she finally hit Dao Immortal.


    “It’s about Feng Fei and the others, isn’t it?” he asked.


    “Ah… yeah.” she scowled. “They snuck out just before dawn, with Hao Yan and Ji Yuan.”


    “Again, I am given cause to think Ji Yuan’s parents named him ironically,” he muttered under his breath.


    “Indeed.” his grandniece agreed.


    “Can you go grab Kai and Kwang for me?” he asked her. “They clearly know something.”


    “With pleasure,” she grinned nastily, before turning back in the direction he had come.


    The Shimmering Dragon sept’s slice of their travelling community was located right in the heart of the camp, in one of the best spots. Some two-dozen disciples and a bunch of the villagers were milling around various tents and campfires—the latter doing almost all the busy work, on behalf of the disciples. Almost immediately, two of the Chosen Immortals, who were being served food by one of the village girls, got up and began to move towards him, only to flinch and turn pale, as he subtly put pressure on them via his intent.


    “Where is Hao Yan?” he asked the nearer of the pair.


    “He left the camp, with a bunch of others, about thirty minutes ago,” the youth replied promptly, then his eyes widened, and he actually put a hand over his mouth.


    “I see…”


    “Where did they go?” he asked, sending his senses out across the camp once again, and confirming the number of people still within its boundaries.


    -Just nine are missing, huh? Three from the Shimmering Dragon, including Hao Yan…


    In fact, Hao Yan’s qi signature was also present in the ‘sealed’ tent a few meters to his right, but this close, he could easily tell it was a bound treasure leaking some refined qi. Similarly, Huo had just opened up Feng Fei’s tent to reveal the same sort of trick.


    -And four from ours, including Fei, Jin, Yuan and… Tong? As well as two of the village youths?


    That last one was a bit of a surprise, because Tong didn’t usually drift with the others, nor did those two youths from the village group. That was enough to get him to check again, but those three really were not in the camp, either.


    “What is the meaning of this disruption… Elder Feng?”


    The Shimmering Dragon Sept’s Dao Immortal—Fu Longwei, walked out of the other tent. Behind him, he could see two of the village women, Shen and Wang, lying tired in his bed.


    “Why are you, an esteemed senior, bullying us juniors at this early hour?” Fu Longwei asked with a faint smile.


    That the Shimmering Dragon Sept had snuck a Dao Immortal into a trial intended only for juniors at the realm of Ancient Immortal or below was yet another headache. Fu Longwei had claimed his presence was ‘just as theirs was’, but personally, with everything he had seen since, he didn’t buy that one bit. That he was also trying to claim he was a ‘junior’, was… well, he supposed it tallied with what he knew of how the Shimmering Dragon Sept operated. They had a very mixed reputation and dined out heavily on the influence of their parent power, the Azure Dragon Pavilion. An entity not to be mistaken for the very similarly named Azure Astral Dragon Pagoda, if only because they were on diametrically opposite sides of the power struggle between the Dun clan and Shan Lai.


    “I am concerned for the whereabouts of your junior brother, Yan and his friends,” he informed the Dao Immortal drily—getting angry or pushy with this bunch got you nowhere, as others had already found out. “I see they are not in their tents…”


    “…”


    The Shimmering Dragon Sept disciples nearby, who had opened their mouths to speak, promptly shut them again.


    “—and as you can see… something weird is going on—again,” he added, pointedly looking at the blooming flowers.


    “Yes, whatever this is… it was certainly a very pleasant surprise,” Fu Longwei chuckled, looking about as well.


    Some of the other disciples nearby smirked at that comment.


    “It does not seem especially dangerous, however. A curious transformation in the emergent nature of Yang, at the start of the day,” Fu Longwei added, glancing up at the sky and putting on something of the manner of the ‘knowledgeable senior’.


    It was an effect rather undermined by the fact that he was still in his undergarments, and had the qi of the two village women clinging to him.


    “I concede that it is not,” he replied. “However, any number of things in the last few days have ‘appeared rather unassuming’, until suddenly, they were not.”


    As he was speaking, Linhua’s immortal sense reached out to him through the linked talisman they shared, carrying with it a flush of annoyance.


    “It seems they got some resonance off a compass, and interpretated that as a peerless treasure emerging at dawn, somewhere near the bank of the river,” she informed him sourly.


    “Off of a compass?” he queried, frowning. “All the compasses we have that might provide that sort of reading broke, and none we have made since should be with any juniors,” he sent back.


    “I am aware,” she replied grimly. “That pair thought it was a special compass one of the village youths had, that was refined to work in Yin Eclipse.”


    “So, they went to our disciples to curry favour?” he frowned.


    “No, they went to Hao Yan, who decided to invite our pair along,” she replied.


    “What about Feng Tong?” he mused.


    “What about her?” his grand niece asked, sounding confused.


    “She isn’t in the camp either,” he informed her.


    “She… huh, they made no reference to her,” Linhua muttered, as he felt her own sense sweep out across the camp for a moment, from where she was.


    “Do you have something to share?” Fu Longwei asked drily, clearly aware that he was conversing with someone, even if he wasn’t able to pry on the conversation itself given the difference in their cultivation strengths.


    “It seems your disciple Yan was approached by two youths from the village who we rescued, and they went to investigate a strange reading on a compass,” he mused.


    “A compass reading?” Fu Longwei raised an eyebrow, his previous demeanour finally shifting a little.


    For all that the Dao Immortal was an objectionable, arrogant, elitist and exploitative bastard of poor moral standing, he was not an idiot.


    “Do you know which direction?” he asked his grand niece.


    “It looks like it tallies with the direction from which the flower-bloom that just occurred,” she replied. “It’s far beyond my soul sense capabilities, though—about a mile, maybe more, from here? The bloom itself seems to have rolled across the whole river plain.”


    “I see.”


    That didn’t surprise him. Even with his help, she was still adjusting to being ‘attuned’ to this place, and the bizarre nature of this entire area, plus the smothering, gloomy haze of strange qi that suffused everything only added to that challenge. They could only use soul and immortal sense so easily within confines of the camp due to the formations set up to ward it and exclude any of the strange spirits and spectres.


    “Where they went seems to be related to the flower bloom,” he informed Fu Longwei after thinking for a moment.


    “A treasure, or some unusual yang phenomenon…” Fu Longwei turned to look in that direction, his eyes narrowing. “Hmmm…”


    The issue with Fu Longwei, was that while he was undeniably strong, for a Dao Immortal, at least, he was also entirely, if rather predictably, unreliable. You could manage someone like that, and in fact, the Feng Family had a few issues like him in their own ranks, but it just made everything more annoying, and unfortunately the Shimmering Dragon disciples very much took after their ‘leaders’, in that regard.


    If Fu Longwei was happy to step up and go look for his disciples, that would be the best of several bad outcomes, really, except—


    “Well, I am sure my junior brother can hold his own,” Fu Longwei declared, his expression turning placid again. “If you are concerned for your own disciples, Brother Jihan, by all means—but what if our interest hinders their grasp of whatever this opportunity is?”


    Much as he expected, Fu Longwei did indeed pick what was basically the most self-serving outcome. To push things off onto him. That he even called him ‘brother’ in this circumstance was risible, really.


    The problem was, that he really didn’t want to send either of his junior elders off into an uncertain scenario either. It wasn’t that he doubted their strength, or their capabilities, it was that splitting up made…


    -Ah, I guess I can do that, he sighed, as a third path presented itself quite helpfully, if only as the bloody-minded ‘annoy everyone’ option.


    If the Shimmering Dragon Sept were just a bit more reliable, he would have trusted that they might work with Hua and Qing to defend the camp while he went to check on this ‘opportunity’, but the disconcerting sense that everything was balancing on a razor thin edge he couldn’t see, was only getting stronger by the minute now.


    “Linhua, Hua, Qing… we are striking camp. Clear everything up in the next thirty seconds and prepare the formations to be moved.” He instructed all three, simultaneously.


    “We… are?” his grand-niece’s reply was understandably surprised.


    “I see, it’s like that,” Qing sent back. “—Everyone, strike camp immediately and prepare to move on Elder Feng’s orders.”


    Qing’s voice rippled through the whole camp, including the Shimmering Dragon region, carrying with it the full impetus of someone who was only a sliver away from becoming a Dao Lord.


    “I’ll deal with the formation,” Hua added.


    “…”


    “This… seems like a slight over-reaction?” Fu Longwei, for once looking a little caught out, muttered, as the entire camp burst into a flurry of activity, with cultivators dousing fires, storing tents and looking for their friends.


    “Feel free to stay,” he shrugged, turning to look off towards the river. “And if my actions hinder their opportunity, well, they can reflect on the consequences of seeking opportunities without due care or duty to those around them.”


    “…”


    Fu Longwei gave him a long look—


    The attack came out of nowhere, almost entirely evading even his senses. It was only because it was tangible—a knapped piece of stoneware pot turned into a throwing point—that he was able to slip out of its way. It passed through where his heart gate would have been and left a small hole in a rock on the edge of the Shimmering Dragon’s camp-area.


    “Just Die!” the village girl who had been serving food to some nearby disciples twisted and launched herself at him in a blur far beyond what a cultivator in the immortal realm, nevermind a golden core child like her, should have been able to achieve.


    Her target wasn’t him, but one of the immortal realm Shimmering Dragon disciples nearby, who screamed and crumpled like a broken puppet through the campfire, scattering it.


    In the same instant, the entire camp turned to bedlam as the same thing was repeated around nearly every campfire. At some it was a Feng clan disciple, at others a villager, or one of the outer-sect disciples that the Shimmering Dragon had. Even the Dusky Sky Pagoda disciples were not immune.


    “Your instincts are way too good, brat. It’s a pity…”


    The words, spoken with the vibe of a tired old man, cut into his psyche like a dagger, attacking his control over the formation, even as something else, an intangible, otherly force, akin to laws, but somehow apart, welled up within the camp, suppressing everything.


    -A Sovereign’s domain?


    For a moment, his thoughts properly froze, as he realised what it was. It couldn’t touch the core of the formation protecting the camp, because that was with him, and a physical artefact filtered through his own Principle, but it effortlessly collapsed the projected element of it, restricting its effects to only those carrying child talismans—Linhua, Qing and Hua.


    -There is a Dao Sovereign in this group, and I…?


    Like a wraith, the village chief, Chang, appeared at the edge of the Shimmering Dragon camp, then stopped, his hand pressed against a barely visible barrier that had just snapped into focus around it—


    “Funny, but we accounted for that…” a woman’s voice snickered.


    Like shadows in his vision, both women from the tent appeared, either side of the shocked Fu Longwei, and he crumpled as law-strength that he again could not properly detect bled out of the youth, along with all his qi. The barrier around the Shimmering Dragon camp rippled against the village chief’s outstretched palm, then scattered into mist. Fu Longwei spat blood, his vision turning dull.


    Both women moved to flank him, now revealing their cultivations to be… odd. He would have said they were Dao Immortals, but he could get nothing of their foundation, and whatever strength was within them shifted like mist before his senses.


    “I didn’t want it to be like this,” Chang sighed. “You honestly did your best, and don’t seem to be a bad man… but, well, I guess this is just your Fate. I’ll ensure your grand niece isn’t mistreated.”


    “Why?” he asked, still trying to work that out.


    “Why?” Shen, who at least by looks appeared to the slightly younger of the pair, chuckled. “Because your stupid trial is trying to take what should be ours.”


    “Yin Eclipse is our land. It has always been our land,” Weng added coolly.


    -Ah. Understanding, cruel as it was certain, settled on his mind. They are ‘Rebels’—one of the old Easten Tribes? I can’t feel their foundations because they are Physical Cultivators.


    “—Whether it is Dun or Sheng or Shan or Tang or Kong, you are just thieves, coveting the houses and foundations of others,” Shen continued. “You strive to take this place, like this brat’s sect took those dragons, all those years ago, and make a puppet of it, to raise your special children.”


    “What… do you know of that?” Fu Longwei rasped.


    “What? Well—”


    “—You two… enough,” Village Chief Chang cut in.


    “He did ask…” Shen murmured.


    “Linhua, if you can, take our disciples and run!” he sent to his grand niece. “I will…”


    “You plan to delay us?” Chief Chang sighed, as his communication vanished into a void of haze, even though it was channelled through the talisman. “Admirable, but will you not just surrender young man, and save your people a lot of hardship?”


    “You will swear a heavenly oath?” he asked, mostly to buy time.


    “Absolutely.” Shen stated with a grin, far too fast for his liking.


    “…”


    “You are probably confident in your realm, but how skilled are you, child, who has lived in comfort, in a cushy family, with all of life’s riches and the bounty of this era entering your hands too easily and with too few questions about their ultimate provenance?” Weng asked with a judgemental smirk, a carved, green-stone dagger appearing in her hand.


    Before he could reply, she had darted forward, stabbing for him.


    He could have tried to draw his sword, but he suspected the dagger she wielded was something like arborundum, and it would easily ruin his weapon.


    Instead, he stepped to the side, making sure to keep the other one in his vision, and also not expose his back to the old man, who frowned slightly, but didn’t move forward.


    “You seem to have used your few millenniums of life more wisely than some,” she giggled, stabbing lazily at him again. “But—”


    Abruptly, the air around him stagnated, weighed down by Yang energies infused with the literal weight of years far in excess or what any normal Dao Immortal would ever be able to reasonably achieve.


    -Ah, right, if she is a Dao step physical cultivator… she had to have broken through… Ah. Nameless Fates you have come to dance on my grave, it seems.


    A million-year-old Dao Immortal, weighed against his meagre sixteen thousand years. It was a laughable comparison. Obscene actually. Even most Dao Ascension experts could not boast that sort of accumulation, unless they were crazy masochists or pursuing some very specific comprehensions and uncaring for the cost.


    Still, there were some boundaries that even an accumulation like that could not easily cross, and he did not consider himself a weak Dao Lord, by any means. His Dao Tree was fully grown, and already starting to bear the fruit of half a dozen fully mastered laws, bound to his Principle in a way that not even a million-year-old Dao Immortal—


    Unspeakable, bone-chilling, qi-freezing strength of yin laws clawed at his physical body, his Dao Soul and even the roots of his accumulation, ripping through the links between his Principle, his laws and his body and his Dao Tree as if they were little more than fragile strings, sending him staggering back, his qi chaotic.


    -This… this is Dividing Law? He could only stare in shock and horror as a law so rare and unique even the Feng family’s secret inheritance texts had little to say about it, or opportunities to grasp it, spread deep into his being, carried on a whispered word he somehow failed to hear, or, more likely was prevented from.


    With effortless grace, she stepped forward and rested the point of the blade against his chest, over his heart gate.


    “That is enough.” Chang stated calmly, but again, that untouchable strength tinged his words. “You have made your point to him, I think…”


    Weng sighed, shaking her head and stepping back.


    The dreadful strength of the Dividing Law didn’t lessen, but it very clearly slid into the shadows, worming like an untouchable poison in the links between his meridians, his qi circulation and his Dao Soul. Given time he could probably purge it, because she was still, just a Dao Immortal, but he was under no allusions that this old Dao Sovereign would give him any opportunity to do so. Already his soul bound treasures were beyond his ability to materialize. Only links to things that were life-bound, like the communication talisman with his grand niece and junior elders were still under his control.


    “So, will you surrender?” Chang asked, again, as if he was asking what he thought of the weather, not a potentially life-defining decision. “As you can see, you are hideously outmatched. These children who have raped the strength of dragons will not help. Will you not think of your grand niece, of these disciples you have worked so hard to protect? Will you…?”


    The air turned still.


    The laws of the natural world shivered—as if they had just heard the call of a long-lost loved one.


    “What…?” Weng turned, to look at something, her expression confused, while Shen and the other village woman—who had called herself Xuemei—just looked stunned.


    Cheng, his expression ugly as the strength of his domain, which had been weighing down on everything, vanished like smoke in the wind, followed in almost the same moment, by his own ability to perceive qi within the world.


    Even in his own body, his ability to interact with his own qi vanished entirely. It was still there, he just couldn’t influence it in the slightest. Not even the vital qi infused deep into the heart of his foundation. His Dao Soul, meanwhile, felt like it just melted into his body, also still there, but as touchable as a reflection in a mirror.


    -Don’t tell me it is related to the phenomenon before? He suddenly found himself wondering.


    “What just happened?” Shen asked, staring off into the distance.


    “Even my… mantra isn’t able to affect things,” Xuemei gasped.


    “I… this should be a Heavenborn manifestation,” Chang growled. “A being closer to the truth of qi than we are, has just exerted its influence.”


    “Truth… like a Venerate?” Weng asked, her expression growing grim.


    “Maybe, it doesn’t feel quite like that,” Chang muttered. “And if they did, do you think they would be scrabbling around like orphaned brats in the gutter?”


    “Be Broken, Wretches.”


    The roar, guttural and furious, washed through him like a hurricane.


    He slammed into the rocks nearby, his whole body screaming at him.


    -Uggh, of course he would have a trump card like that, he groaned, fighting the pain and rolling to his feet.


    Luckily, despite the suppression now in effect, he still seemingly had a degree of innate durability, but just that impact had forced a… concerning amount of qi out of his body, he realised, as if it were truly no longer bound at all to him.


    The Shimmering Dragon camp had been flattened by the indiscriminate shockwave, emanating from Fu Longwei. Only Chief Chang, his face pale, was still on his feet, and he had been forced back several meters, his face was pale. Everyone else, even Shen and Weng, had been thrown to the ground, like he was, their qi bleeding out of them, and in fact, most of the junior cultivators, even physical ones, like Xuemei were unconscious as well.


    “It seems… that whatever this is… it is not closer than the blood of dragons,” Fu Longwei sneered, pushing himself to his feet—


    Shen rolled to her feet, and ignoring the blood now running from her nose, drew a blade of her own from… nowhere, basically, given how thin a gown she was wearing, and smoothly thrust at Fu Longwei, her expression ugly—


    -Motherless Fates, don’t… grab—! Even as he saw that the blade was glassy and crystalline, Fu Longwei had already reached out and casually blocked the blow with his palm.


    To his shock, however, the blade, which was surely arborundum, didn’t slice the youth’s hand open, but instead shattered, like flawed glass on his palm, which he then closed over the Shen’s now badly bleeding hand, forcing her to her knees.


    -It… broke?


    Just like everyone else, even Shen who was now being held by Fu Longwei, he found himself staring blankly at the smashed fragments.


    -The arborundum broke?


    A part of him really wanted to shout out ‘How!?!’, even though this was only a good thing for them. More importantly, though, he now had a tactical conundrum to solve… very quickly. On the one hand, he could try and help Fu Longwei, or he could trust that whatever the Dao Immortal had gained from his sect’s draconic heritage could hold out against these three long enough that he could locate Hua, Qing or Linhua. If the situation were reversed, he was pretty sure Fu Longwei would already be running. Unfortunately, Dao Sovereigns were not that simple, and even suppressed—


    “Don’t even think of it!”


    Before he could even get to his feet, however, Weng had launched herself in his direction. There was actually some focal intent channelled into her words, but even the weight of years she tried to put into it, felt lacking now.


    “If you try to run—!”


    “—You will do what?” he retorted bitterly, moving back to a slightly less awkward area of the rocks. “Threaten the juniors in my care? My grand-niece? My junior elders?”


    “It can always get worse,” she replied with an unsettling certainty as she closed the distance with remarkable speed—


    Before he could reply, three throwing daggers of the same glassy pottery hissed towards him. He managed to sidestep two, but the third still clipped his leg, slicing it open with ease… and then two of them smashed into fragments on the rocks behind him.


    “Motherless—!” Weng bit off a curse as he stepped into her and kicked at her legs.


    Despite her eating the full force of the shockwave earlier, she was still able to acrobatically spin over his kick, which he had to think was pure overconfidence on her part, because it allowed him to conduct a half-turn and put a punch straight into her midriff, sending her sprawling into the rock a few paces behind her.


    “Just for that…!” But whatever she was about to say, she stopped, because both of them realised, at the same time, that another young woman, dressed in a strange, dark purple tunic, a sprig of amaranth adorning her dark curly hair, was squatting casually on the rock above that, looking on with an amused expression.


    In her hand, she was holding the third throwing blade, considering it.


    “That which is dead, is naturally inferior to the living…” she sighed, closing her hand over the blade, which snapped audibly, and then crumbled into crystalline shards, through her fingers.


    Hopping off the rock, she landed lightly, between him and Weng, and dusted off her hands.


    “And even the stolen strength of a dragon, is still a dragon, and their pride, for all its faults, is supreme, even in the face of Heaven itself,” she murmured, taking in the ruined camp.


    “Who… are you?” Chang, who had been walking towards Fu Longwei, asked, stopping and looking over to where they were, his expression turning even harder.


    “Who? Hmmm, I suppose I am someone who is closer to ownership of these lands than an itinerant squatter like you,” the young woman replied, smirking. “I have slumbered long, but now my Lady calls, and in this halcyon dawn, that her gentle hands have touched, I can bloom once more, and rejoice. If you must give me a name, though, I suppose… Amaranta will suffice.”


    “You are too generous to these so-called ‘predators’, big sister…” another, younger, barely a teenager in stature, with a crown of golden mustard flowers in her hair, murmured, stepping out from between the collapsed tents, dragging an unconscious villager by his hair.


    “Yes… why explain to them,” a third, clad in a saffron gown, with daisies woven through her hair, agreed, emerging from between the rocks on the far side of the camp and folding her arms.


    In a moment, a dozen more such figures, all clad similarly, with crowns or wreaths of flowers in their hair, stood around the camp, or crouched upon the rocks, their expressions veering from amused, to put out, to bored. In appearance, and manner, they appeared… he couldn’t say mortal, actually. They were there, and vividly so, but it was like they were painted out of the world itself, such that he was only seeing them on their terms, maybe?


    The faint, residual element of his Dao-touched senses was quietly screaming at him as well, he realised, that unlike all of them, these women could still command the power of their surroundings all too well. In that, he also realised where he had felt this kind of presence before. Ancestral Lands. And among those who had intrinsically exceeded some aspect of the world, as if he were the mortal, permitted to look upon the Immortal.


    “Spirit herbs…” Weng growled.


    “We are sometimes called such,” Amaranta replied, sounding rather amused.


    “—by ignorant mortals, at any rate,” the girl with the crown of mustard flowers added, more archly.


    “I don’t know which mortals these are that you speak of,” Weng cut in, holding up her hand as she spoke. “But they are not us—”


    “—I would not do that, if I were you…”


    He and, in fact, every cultivator there flinched, as the hunched, elderly form of the blind old beggar, who had been in the teahouse when the collapse happened, appeared beside her, holding her wrist.


    -The old beggar was also a…? Ah, I guess it figures… he reflected with an inwardly defeated sigh.


    “You…?” Chief Chang was staring, pale-faced, at the blind old man.


    Now, he could feel some of the same intuitive, instinctual pressure and allure from him as with the ‘spirit herbs’, if that was actually what they were. However, it was lesser, more muted, partial even, and he could get nothing beyond that. No realm, no qi, and even now, no intent to speak of.


    If not for his utter failure to see him approach, moments before, he would have thought he was still the grandfatherly, blind old man who had sung funny songs for children in those dark jungle nights and reassured them that everything would work out.


    “Aiiii…” the blind old man sighed ruefully. “Foolish old fellow that I am, but I just cannot stand by and watch angry children do something unspeakably dumb, it seems.”


    “Dumb?” Weng scowled, glaring at him, as he released her hand, then glanced over at the village chief. “Chief Chang, who is this?”


    “Old Master Sim… is it actually you?” Chang asked, uneasily.


    Wracking his own memories, as best he could, because he suddenly found that in this strange suppression, those were also not as clear as they should be, he could find no record of a ‘Master Sim’. The name itself was of the Easten style, rather than the Imperial one though, so he had to be some reclusive old ancestor, probably.


    “This old man is happiest when just doing his own thing,” the blind old man replied, rather evasively, he thought. “I was quite pleased with matters, until now. I suppose I should have known your uncle would make a mess of things, Chang. It is his great power in life, I have often thought.”


    “How dare you disparage Great Master Chang,” Shen snapped.


    “Silence!” the village chief glared at her, before turning hurriedly back to the old man and actually bowing. “I apologise for her lack of manners, Ancestor Sim.”


    “No, no, it is just the words of a child, without weight,” the blind old man sighed, before turning to Amaranta and bowing respectfully to her.


    “I think I have some understanding—”


    Before the old man could finish speaking, a tall, dark-haired youth in Easten styled clothes jumped up on a rock outcropping opposite them and… crouching down, put his palm to the ground.


    A faint sense of… something ‘wrong’, rippled out from the new arrival, and then all the spirit herbs vanished in swirls of rapidly wilting flowers.


    “You are wasting too much time here, old servant,” the youth informed Chang. “Why have you not wrapped up this lot already, as you were instructed?”


    “As you can see, there are experts of some capability,” Weng remarked flatly, before moving a step closer to him, now that Amaranta was no longer in her way. “And the Shivering Dragon’s lout—”


    The youth jumped lightly and, before Fu Longwei could really react, had arrived beside him … only to stop, his hand frozen a mere finger’s distance from the Dao Immortal’s shoulder.


    Old Sim just sighed, as Fu Longwei flinched away from that hand in palpable, almost instinctual terror, all his previous bravado gone in an instant, dragging Shen, whom he still holding, with him.


    “Y-you?!” the youth’s arm blurred, faintly, as if he were trying to free himself from something, and he glared at the blind old man.


    “Interesting,” was all the old man mused, though the intonation on his tone made that observation more like a curse than anything else.


    “Interesting indeed. I wondered why this one ran off so promptly. It was to try and stir up trouble, it seems…”


    Turning to the new speaker, he found himself staring at a tall, beautiful woman clad in a loose-fitting, knee-length silken gown. Her hair, which was pale reddish-blonde, hung loose around her shoulders, and she had about her, the same vivid presence as the spirit herbs.


    “Dammit, old man, we don’t have time to waste!” the youth snarled at Old Sim and Chief Chang. “This bitch will be the ruin of all our plans!”


    “Their plans, or yours, strange spectre?” Old Sim asked cooly.


    -Ah, of course, the youth is possessed.


    “Senior Leung is… possessed?” Weng asked, sceptically.


    “No, I am not!” the youth—Leung, presumably—snapped. “Rather, it is this old man!”


    “…”


    “I am possessed?” Old Sim asked, before chuckling mirthlessly.


    “How?” Village Chief Chang asked uneasily, glancing between the two.


    “If you have lived this long and still think a mantra can make you heedlessly impervious to spiritual threats, you should just give up on this path already.” Old Man Sim snorted. “As to this Leung, I can only say he is unlucky.”


    “Unlucky?” Weng frowned, her gaze flitting from the new woman, to Leung, to Old Sim and back again.


    The blind old man didn’t reply, however. Instead, he blowed slightly to the reddish-blonde haired woman.


    “I am called Sim Hakkyu, Blessed Daughter. I know not your name, nor the power you represent, but I hope that whatever offense has been given, we may resolve… amicably?”


    “We have no quarrel with you,” the woman replied evenly, starting to walk slowly down into the ruin of the camp. “If I had complaint, it is with those who give truth to the adage that ‘greed is universal’. Rather, I find myself curious how you are able to resist my presence to this degree?”


    “Haha, as a sign of good will, this old man can explain,” Old Sim replied, without even hesitating.


    Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.


    “Old Master!” Chang hissed.


    “See, he is even going to spill something this important!” Leung snarled.


    “Relax, knowing, not knowing, nothing will change,” the blind old man sighed. “She is not an opponent you can fight, nor should you seek to. Whatever plans your uncle has, end here, I am afraid, and all they will have achieved is the costly loss of several scions, whose hearts were not suitably tempered, like Leung, here.”


    “…”


    Chang, Shen and Weng all stared at the old man.


    “It is simply that the words in my heart are not like this—these children,” the blind old man continued, gesturing first to Leung, then Chang and the other physical cultivators. “Leung here chose to hide from this era, relying on the sacrifice and hardship of others to endure it. His heart was hollow, and that spectre was able to enter into it, as a result.”


    “And your heart… is not hollow?” the red-golden haired woman mused.


    “Hah, maybe, I cannot say that for sure,” the old man chuckled. “But I tempered my heart, and the words within it, against the might of my world, and exceeded its expectations, or maybe the limits it tried to put upon me.”


    “Ah, you Exceeded, if only partially; now it makes sense,” she nodded.


    -Exceeded, does he mean Dao Ascension? He found himself wondering, listening on the sidelines with growing horror. This old man… is a Venerate realm physical cultivator?!


    “Partially… hah. I suppose it must seem like that, to you, who is a True Immortal,” the old man sighed. “If I might ask a question in return?”


    “Perhaps,” the woman replied.


    “What opportunity did you come by, to make that crossing of fable, to truly cast off the shackles of the mortal?”


    “What opportunity?” the woman paused, as if pondering, then shook her head a bit ruefully, he thought. “Why don’t you ask her yourself?”


    “—Before that, you might want to actually deal with these body-snatching wretches…” Amaranta remarked, reappearing in a swirl of tiny purple-white blossoms, holding a flailing Den Qin, a Golden Immortal cultivator from the Dusk Sky Pagoda in her right hand and a struggling village woman, Changmei, who was part of Chief Chang’s household, in her left.


    “…”


    The red-haired woman eyed Amaranta, then the two she was holding, then Leung, then looked around generally, and sighed, then held up her hand—


    The qi within the world around them sang. That was the only way to describe the otherworldly, lyrical resonance as it rolled through him, and everyone else within eyesight, like an unstoppable wave.


    The Dao Immortals just looked… shocked, and confused, but Old Sim and Chang both turned pale, their gaze reflecting a spark of some inner recognition of whatever it was, tinged with terror. Leung’s body blurred, and a shadowy figure, naked and badly branded, staggered away from him, holding his head with one hand… and dragging something misty and ephemeral with the other. The two in Amaranta’s grasp were similarly affected, but the cultivator’s possessing spectre had almost nothing to grasp onto, he realised, and after a moment, melted away with a silent, furious howl.


    “Interesting, you would try to leverage this stolen, heart-bound strength to resist me?” the woman asked, her smile broadening.


    “Is it really stolen, if even these words themselves do not wish to remain with this weak-minded failure?” the shadow snarled, as Leung’s body flexed, unnaturally… and then something subtle, yet profound seemed to shift in it.


    In that instant, the misty outline resolved into a screaming, ghostly outline of Leung, before being pulled into the spectre, who… suddenly spread its arms and took a deep breath.


    “Immortality… it can be granted,” the youth sneered, stepping forward, back into Leung’s body, casting a mocking sideways look at Old Master Sim, who had a grave expression on his face now. “—Or… it can be seized. I wonder which is actually the greater path?”


    “I wonder,” the woman mused. “I wonder indeed. What was your name, back then?”


    “Ah, you think you can catch me out with that?” the spectre-Leung chuckled. “I know your story well, Sarah Helena. You could have let your sacrifice be a light for future eras, but it seems you have no gratitude in your heart after all.”


    “That girl did perish in darkness,” Sarah Helena nodded, as if what the spectre was saying was perfectly reasonable. “However, it was not in this place, but long before that.”


    “—If you won’t tell her, perhaps you will tell me?”


    Again, he had cause to curse his frustratingly ‘mortal’ senses as a stunningly beautiful golden-haired young woman, clad in an ankle-length purple gown, fastened elegantly at her shoulders, and down her upper arms, seemed to step basically out of nowhere, a few paces from ‘Sarah Helena’.


    She had a vividness to her presence, beyond even Amaranta, and Sarah Helena, and an allure that… almost seemed to reach into his body and grasp his breath, his heart. A peerless beauty, among even other beauties—that as the only epithet he could give to her, not just in her looks, but in her manner, her bearing, her… everything, basically—it was like he was in front of some Celestial Saintess, or Heavenly Lady.


    “Edmund Marcus Alexander Meltras, Third Son of Lord William Meltras, brother to Grand Duke Edward Meltras.” Leung replied, without even blinking, then gasped and took a step back, his expression turning shocked.


    “Ah, I remember you,” the new arrival nodded, and even that simple action was… perfection. “A talented enough mage, for that era at least. You were killed by Nadria of Yessuth, were you not. Well, killed is charitable. Ruthlessly sacrificed in the name of knowledge about this place and its ruins might be a better way to describe it. I suppose you probably know about me.”


    “I… do?” Edmund asked, his expression twisting in confusion.


    “Mmmm, Nadria was looking for traces of me, actually, but what I saw of that girl reminded me too much of the likes of Caecillius, from back then, and I just avoided her. There was, and still is, no need for a second Caecillius. Not in that time, or any other, so—Apotrophia.”


    As the woman spoke, a dark, bloody-coloured symbol appeared on her forehead, rearranging itself to read ‘Dawn’. An eerie stillness settled over the whole camp. Edmund—Leung, who had opened his mouth to speak, just crumpled to the ground. The two held by Amaranta also stopped thrashing in the same instant, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw another youth, a bow in hand, who had somehow slunk up on the opposite rocks… slump sideways, his body limp.


    The moment passed, and with it, the heart-grasping allure that had held him. It took all his effort not to drop to his knees, gasping, and in fact Old Sim and Chang were the only others to remain standing, though both were sweating, hard. Fu Longwei just looked dazed, and lost, as if nothing made sense anymore—which was a feeling he could sympathise with, as it was one he had as well.


    However, what he really wanted to do was scramble up on the rocks behind him and check what the state of the rest of the camp was, if his other disciples, and those they were meant to be protecting—


    “Interesting…”


    He flinched as he found the woman was suddenly looking at him, directly.


    “Ah…” He wanted to try and explain but found no words would come out. Her eyes felt like they were peering through him.


    “—And, what is it you want of me?”


    “I…” He stared at her… “I just want to protect those around me, who ended up in this place, and who do not deserve the misery and horror that it has visited upon them,” he managed to say after what felt like a short eternity, putting the words together in his mind, under that piercing gaze.


    “Mmmm, of all those I have seen here, of your people, since I awoke, yours is the purest vision,” she mused.


    “I… am honoured,” he managed to reply, fighting back the urge to add that that didn’t surprise him, at all, given the powers involved in trying to explore this place, and the status of those attempting to lead them.


    “If perhaps not the clearest heart,” she added, with a faint smile.


    “…”


    -Is… ah, can she…? Shit. Nameless, Motherless Shit.


    Belatedly, he realised she could almost certainly, and actually, see right through him, and had perhaps caught onto his reticence to speak ill of those other powers too openly, even though he had been judging them in his heart for weeks.


    “Many of those who have come here are inexperienced,” he clarified.


    “You say that to excuse them?” she asked drily.


    “No,” he shook his head. “They lack experience. They lack a knowledge of consequence, and particularly among those who lead them, have lived lives sheltered from its causes. They believed, foolishly, that this was a land they were entitled to, that would allow them to prove themselves, or to rise up and overcome—and it is killing them, and so many others by the hundred, if not thousand.” He continued. “They were never… at least I hope to the Heavenly Fates, that they were never intended to enter this place, in truth.”


    All he could do was truthfully state what he had been mulling over in his heart for the last few weeks, at this point.


    “And if that were the case, then… I can only say that I would be disappointed in them.”


    “—What a sheltered life you have led, if you can witness this era and only be ‘disappointed’ in those who exercise its great power for their selfish whim at this point in your life.” Weng remarked archly. “Unless, of course, you mean it another way…”


    As a cut-back, it was surprisingly guileless, at least by the standards one might have expected of a cultivator of her age and presumed experience. However, he did know physical cultivators were not so easily able to ‘step back’ from the world, as practitioners of the spiritual or especially martial path could. It wasn’t exactly a secret, he supposed, but it was a piece of knowledge—about how their reliance on those words that were the root of their strength—that would not be widely known to experts from much of Eastern Azure. Maybe not even Blue Water Province, where, despite it being a foundational cradle in that now broken path, experts who had walked that path a long time, tended to exist more in the liminal shadows of society. The only places outside the ancient cities of the east you might encounter such experts openly would be Meng City, or the truly ancient powers of the South-eastern central continent, like Zhi Zhi Mountain, or the Azure Pillar Court.


    He only knew it because the Feng Family had, at one point, had trading interests with Yuan City, on the Easten continent, and it was those links, and a fluency in the languages of the east, that had seen him remembered by old man Yuan, and sent with the disciples to the trial.


    Rather than get trapped into some reply that could be misconstrued as disingenuous, he just shook his head.


    “If I did not speak plainly enough,” he replied, “I apologize. If this trial is a ploy, by those who should know better, I can only hope that there are eyes in higher Heavens than ours, who see, and judge, on behalf of those who have been ruined by their cruel self-interest.”


    “Spoken like someone who really doesn’t have to worry about the consequences of shallow words,” Shen muttered. “Although I’ll give you this, you are not wrong about their unflinching commitment to cruel self-interest.”


    If the woman who had spoken to him was bothered by their interjections, she gave no outward sign of it, he could not help but notice.


    “It seems that no matter where one is, the cruelty of those above is a constant,” she mused. “That we can certainly relate to.”


    “Your Eminence is too kind,” Old Sim murmured, bowing deeply to her.


    “Eminence…?” she repeated, shaking her head ruefully. “You know, in all these long years, I have never, ever, been called that?”


    “Then how should we address you?” Old Sim asked, with careful politeness.


    “Ohhh…. little lordling, you have done your part—”


    The words were little more than a whisper, haunting, in his ears, such that he almost thought he was imagining them for a moment.


    “—Now, let me speak to your heart—Brute, Bind and Break”


    Something intangible twisted in the body of Leung, drawing—or maybe pulling something he could not even find words to describe—into it, save that with it, Leung seemed to flow backwards, un-crumpling his body to the ground and standing up with a faint grimace.


    “—Heaven Apart.”


    Those two words engulfed his awareness of the moment like he had just been plunged into cold water. He still had no control over his own qi, or ability to detect laws, but that didn’t seem to apply to Leung’s body, all of a sudden, which grasped at the golden-haired beauty, who was, like everyone else, seemingly frozen—


    She calmly stepped aside, an ivory-white sword appearing in her hand, as Leung’s body almost seemed to step into the spot where she was cutting… and then with a grimace, step back again—


    The two moments overlapped, and with a sound akin to cracking ice, Leung’s body was standing where it had been, and the golden-haired woman was pointing her sword at it, her expression… not tense, but slightly perturbed, he could not help but feel.


    “Interesting.” was all Sarah Helena murmured.


    “Hmmm, yes,” the golden-haired woman agreed, eyeing Leung pensively. “Though somehow, I am not surprised. This place has never lacked for those touched by the ills of the Fates.”


    “What would you, who carry the Sword of Solace, know of the ills of Fate?” Leung replied with a derisive scowl. “Though you do not look like Laurentius, unless the records of that time are truly buggered up.”


    “Sword of…? Ah, I guess it did pick up that name, eventually,” the golden-haired woman mused, sound more amused at the idea, than anything else. “You are not wrong though—the records of that era are a work of superlative buggery—and very much in keeping with the character of the people who wrote them.”


    “You… understand how to use a mantra…” Old Sim cut in, narrowing his eyes.


    “The words in this youth’s heart?” Leung half glanced at the old man, but didn’t relax his standoff with the two women. “Mmmm, his use of them is interesting, innovative even, if crude. It reminds of the shamanic practices of the peoples from the Blackspires, and the Golden Deer Tribe. And it seems you practice the same thing, if to somewhat more profound degree…”


    “Crude…?”


    “Shamanic practice?”


    Weng and Shen both glared at the youth.


    “It is a pity that Edmund could not even grab the one with dragon blood,” Leung sighed, shaking his head. “He did about as I expected, really, but it seems my plan must change, after all—”


    The space around Leung twisted suddenly, and the sense of saturated haze from the rays of the sun intensified to the point where the youth almost seemed to vanish into them, from his perspective.


    “The world does not need your return, Sarah Helena, nor that of your beloved,” his voice whispered through the ruined camp.


    “My… what now?” Sarah Helena actually tilted her head to the side, looking at where he had just vanished in seeming confusion.


    “Well, even if you want to play coy—” Leung chuckled—


    “Oh yeah, later historians were pretty adamant that you and he were an item,” the golden-haired woman remarked drily as the sense of ethereal befuddlement that was assailing his senses melted away like it had never been.


    “Huh, so that sword can also do that?” Leung, who had made a bit of distance, over towards Old Sim, in fact, in that moment, muttered, his eyes narrowing.


    The space around them shuddered, and for a moment seemed to flow away from the golden-haired woman, who… just vanished, as if she never was.


    “…”


    “Hmmm, that is a neat trick,” Sarah Helena mused, taking half a step forward.


    “Mmmm, I’ll deal with her momentarily,” Leung sighed, refocusing on her. “You have clearly found a capable companion, but she is a bit naive in the ways of mages, it seems. It is dangerous to rely on a powerful weapon like that, you know.”


    “You seem awfully confident,” Sarah Helena observed. “Even if you have more spirits to help you…”


    “Mmmm, my expectation of them is what it is,” the youth shrugged. “They are much as Edmund was. But I have crossed my path with several notable experts of my day, and even killed a hero—alas, that was what led to my lamentable end, and imprisonment in this place—”


    Again, he was struck by how… weird it was that the youth was being given time to…


    The moment lurched and jumped backwards… almost to before when Sarah Helena had just said ‘Neat Trick’.


    The youth appeared at her back, his hand outstretched to grasp her neck… and she stepped away, effortlessly.


    “Hmmm, that is a neat trick,” she mused, in a disconcerting echo of the moment he had just witnessed mere seconds before, that was now trying to melt out of his awareness like fog.


    -He, can he manipulate time with his mantra? He gasped inwardly.


    That kind of feat was possible with qi and Laws, or certainly with Truth, but right now, whatever or whoever was possessing this youth was somehow able to do it, in spite of the suppression gripping all of them, and that was a level of profundity that was gut-clenchingly terrifying just to give thought to, frankly. There was no way any of them could touch an expert like that, even with every tool and treasure they had in their possession, across the entire body of cultivators in this ruined city, he suspected.


    “But if you can only use it to that degree, you are going to suffer here,” she added drily.


    “I’ll be the judge of that!” Leung murmured—


    The vista of their surrounds jerked, and suddenly Leung was where he had been, the two moments overlapping weirdly in his mind, accompanied by a disturbing sensation of something fundamental breaking—


    A white-hot, silvery bolt of lightning snapped silently into focus, skittering hither and thither for a horrifying moment above them, and then rolled down into the youth’s hand, to become an elegant, curved blade etched with strange symbols that whispered to him of the profundity of Heaven.


    “A Paradox Blade…” Sarah Helena chuckled, as their surroundings wavered, as if in the grip of a heat haze, and a starry shield formed in her hand, out of the drifting mots of dust kicked up a moment before—


    The thrust of Leung’s blade collided with the shield with a flat, empty crack that made his skin crawl—but it was Sarah Helena who stepped back, rather than Leung.


    Leung, who had just shifted forward, thrusting for an opening on her right side, abruptly sidestepped as the shield became a long spear, nearly impaling him.


    With a grunt, he cut down on the spear, and it vanished like haze, returning to the shield as Sarah Helena stepped forward and attempted to slam it straight into his side—


    The moment juddered again, and this time, Leung stepped to the other side, and still somehow missed, as the two moments slipped back together again.


    “I told you, if this is all you can muster, you are going to suffer here,” she repeated drily.


    The shield became a broad-bladed spear in her hand, of which she tapped the butt to the ground—


    Leung retreated in a blur of sideways motion as a curtain of hazy dust, sparkling eerily in the morning sun nearly enveloped him…. several times over in near instantaneous succession.


    The last ripple clipped the edge of Fu Longwei’s collapsed tent and a third of it vanished in a ripple of unstable… what he had to assume was qi, given he could barely see how it interacted at this point. There was also no intent at all manifesting from either of them, which suggested that they had both reached that terrifying realm—‘thought as action’.


    “Thought as action…” Weng hissed, echoing his own thoughts, as Leung flitted forward again.


    “Whoever this old ghost is, his grasp of Mantras exceeds anything I have ever seen,” Chang muttered.


    “There are some on Eastern Azure who are at this level,” Old Sim informed her grimly, as Sarah Helena again, and with the barest minimum of effort, evaded another of his strikes with the blade. “Maharahanya, perhaps, and Venerable Moon—oh, and Old Master Azure.”


    “Azure Heaven… didn’t he die?” Weng asked, glancing over at Old Sim, however the old man just shrugged, and then with the speed of a viper, suddenly stepped forward and, grasping Fu Longwei and Shen, dragged them both back behind him—


    Leung spun and cut at the old man, who swayed back, barely avoiding the strike… though it did nick his blindfold—


    With a blinding crack, the colour of the world vanished. The sword bled iridescent colours, then cracked down the middle and scattered into silver dust.


    “…”


    Leung stared at it, then at Old Sim, his expression turning from shock to anger, then faint concern, for the first time since he had first laid eyes on Sarah Helena.


    “Old Man, you do not want to get involved in this fight,” Leung snapped, scowling.


    “Alas, while I might disagree with the choices he made, that boy does not deserve to be made a puppet,” Old Sim replied calmly. “You seem to have some enmity with her, but I, also, have some enmity with you, it seems, for what has been done to young Leung, and to whoever else you have claimed.”


    “Old Master…” Chang was staring at Old Sim with a complex expression on his face.


    “You…” Leung narrowed his eyes, then the moment, and the position of Fu Longwei and Shen flowed backwards, like the tide receding on a beach.


    Shockingly, it didn’t touch Old Sim though, and that was clearly not by choice of Leung, because when the moment snapped together, Old Sim had walked forward, through it, and was standing between Leung and the pair once again.


    “Interesting.” Leung frowned staring at the reformed blade, then at Old Sim. “Denial. Is that why you are so confident all of a sudden?”


    “This old injury?” the old man raised a hand to his eyes, which were firmly closed. His eyelids were in fact partly fused shut he realised, by a livid, warped scar. “It was because of a choice I made—and I do not regret it.”


    “I didn’t ask that.” Leung grunted.


    “Do you really want to worry about him, when you are picking a fight with me?” Sarah Helena asked drily, pointing at Leung.


    The shimmering veil of dust became a constellation of stars, swirling across half the camp—


    “Am-HAO Break Apart!” Leung snapped, clapping his hands together, where two strange symbols appeared, rearranging themselves into glyphs that impressed those two syllables into his mind as he looked on.


    The veil of glittering stars scattered… and then, bizarrely, un-scattered to reform as they had been a moment before.


    “Meh…” Leung shrugged, and then stamped on the ground.


    In an explosion of dirt, a figure clawed its way out, rapidly taking on physical form of the spectre who had identified himself as ‘Edmund’. Immediately, a voracious sense of devouring strength welled out of the figure, and it threw itself furiously at Old Sim—


    In the same instant, his view of the camp was once again overlaid on itself, as the newly emergent figure somehow seemed to walk back through the moment, even as it charged towards Old Sim, arriving at him, or rather, just behind where he had been, when he stepped forward to grab Shen and Fu Longwei—


    The two diverging moments juddered and then a crisp, silent bolt of silvery lightning slashed down… and at the last possible second seemed to pick Old Sim, over the figure made of devouring—presumably Yin-attributed in some way—earth.


    The bolt struck the old man in the face, sending him staggering backwards, and incinerating his clothing in the process of carving white cracks across half of his upper body.


    “Extermination Lightning,” Old Sim spat, easily recovering himself and evading the follow-up thrust from Leung. “Been a while since I was hit with that.”


    “…”


    “What, are you surprised that this old man has made enemies of this calibre over his long life?” Old Sim chuckled, seemingly unfazed by the injuries. “I told you, I made some choices—and I do not regret it.”


    As he spoke, the words seemed to overlap with his earlier utterance of them… and with a strange ripple, the two scenes began to rejoin in his awareness.


    -Dividing Law, with Time? he found himself wondering in a bit of a daze, as Leung stared at Old Sim as the Physical Cultivator’s clothes reformed on him and the scars from the bolt faded.


    “You… can?” Leung narrowed his eyes.


    “—You are really underestimating this old man if you think I have lived to this age and not gained some slight comprehensions regarding ‘Time’ and a few other things besides.” Old Sim chuckled mirthlessly.


    “You mutated ‘Regret’, to this degree?” Leung stared.


    “Well, I have lived a long time,” Old Sim shrugged, as the two moments fully rejoined. “It is a liar, or a fool, who, upon reaching my age, would deny they had not a few. I have just endured a few more than most. Now—”


    Old Sim reached out and grasped the earth-formed clone by the neck, as it exploded out of the ground.


    Its form shuddered, clawing at his arm, then it abruptly ballooned and exploded outwards in a flare of sickly yellowish-green light—


    Pain enveloped him.


    His breath felt stifled and constricted.


    His limbs ached.


    Tiredness grasped his focus.


    -Give up… give in…


    -Endure it!


    -They are all dead.


    -It is hopeless, you were sent here to die…


    -Be strong in Spirit…


    Grim, dour thoughts, and some… strange ones, in fact, tried to slip through what remained of the spiritual conditioning of his inner self that came with his realm—and with them, an intuitive understanding that Yin interpretations of fire and earth were trying and, more concerningly, succeeding in part, in corrupting his vital energy.


    Pushing away the voices as best he could, his vision cleared to find Chang and Weng were also pale-faced. Shen and Fu Longwei, along with the unconscious cultivators and villagers in the camp, thankfully seemed to have been sheltered by Old Sim, at least.


    The blind old man, however, had blistering lesions seared across half his body, and a chaotic, intangible sense of rot clinging to him, that made his skin crawl… because he could somehow feel like a bit of him was being drawn to the old man.


    -Is… he able to protect even us, in some way? he found himself wondering all of a sudden. Those… that voice just telling me to ‘Endure’, and be ‘Strong in Spirit’?—Did he just do something with his mantra?


    “Now, that is more like it…” the old man grinned wolfishly all of a sudden.


    “Spirit, huh, and Endurance, in some form…” Leung was frowning now, he realised. “That is an annoying combination—Though not the worst…”


    “Your grasp of the words I have are good,” Old Sim conceded, his grin broadening. “But do you really have time to worry about me?”


    “…”


    Leung turned back to Sarah Helena, and the glittering constellation of stars in the swirling haze that was slowly spreading around the ruined camp… then his eyes widened.


    “That…” Leung stared at the stars, then at her.


    “You noticed, finally, but it’s a bit late now,” Sarah Helena remarked drily, gesturing at him with her hand as she did so.


    A silvery thread-like crack slid through the camp, then another and another, spiralling out and then intersecting like an otherworldly spiderweb around Leung—


    “Are you even a mage?” Leung snarled—


    A shimmering ball of reddish-gold fire snapped into existence right in front of Leung’s face, exploding in a flare of suffocating heat and withered the grass all the way to the rocks where he was, and kicked up a haze of dust and cinders in the process.


    Somehow, Leung still managed to evade most of it though, and then a second, but he did notice that the lingering flames were burning holes in the youth’s clothing. Scowling, Leung avoided a third, and this time, he caught the subtle ‘blur’ of his outline, as he also avoided one of the growing web of white threads, followed by another… and yet…


    Now he was looking properly at Leung, he realised that each time the possessed youth ‘blurred’, another star appeared, shimmering in the sun-lit haze enveloping the camp. Intuition and senses, honed by thousands of years contemplating natural phenomena on a daily basis, that were not fully gone even with the loss of his ability to manipulate qi and laws, told him there was something profoundly odd about those stars as well. They were both within the haze, yet also… not, in some hard to define way. He wanted to say they were almost like nascent constellations, but no matter how he tried, he could not properly focus upon them. It was like the perspective of the entire camp was just ever so slightly twisted—


    The heart of the camp around him and the web of white threads enveloping it rippled. His vision distorting as if the reality before them all was a flag flapping in the wind, then with a flat, empty *crack*, it pulled taut, centred on Leung.


    The haze scattered, and the stars faded, bleeding into the surroundings in a strange way… until they were only visible as dim reflections, lingering in the distant, dawn-touched sky itself—


    His hair on his neck stood on end, as the constellation that vaguely resembled a celestial lion, high in the sky, slowly shifted to look down on them and… then the sky above seemed to fall, the stars becoming a ghostly paw that swiped down at Leung. Everything became still, in that moment, as the youth somehow met the blow with a silent howl and it was repelled—


    Like a heavenly ghost, a young woman slid out of the sky, a pitcher of water that became a roiling haze of… something pouring down on them.


    Somehow, Leung evaded it, lunging for Sarah Helena, his expression suddenly grim—


    The camp where she was rippled, and the sky rolled over the horizon to become a ghostly ram that rolled over Sarah Helena to body-check Leung, even before he made it halfway to her.


    This time, Leung did actually block it, the ram scattering in a rippling curtain of distorted space and sending the youth staggering back.


    In the same instant, the stars in the sky on the far side of the camp also warped, becoming the afterimage of a stabbing scorpion’s tail that struck at Leung from behind with the ferocity of heavenly lightning and cost the youth his ‘Paradox Blade’ to reflexively deflect.


    “One of the Eyes of Trismegistus,” Leung hissed, glaring at her as the tumult stilled at last. “So, this is the hidden power you gave the Prince of Golden Dawn…? Truly, you are too dangerous—”


    “Eh, who said I was done?” she snickered.


    On the horizon, where the sun was rising, the stars had become a pair of constellations, somewhat resembling twins. How that was actually visible, he had no idea, and he could only watch in shock as they raised their arms, as if…


    The whole horizon tilted, like he was on the deck of a great ship. In the sky, two vast constellations formed into a pair of koi-like fish, that rose up as everything tilted, to plunge down, carried on a tsunami of collapsing sky that the young woman had just cast, chaotically from her jar. The great heavenly Lion roared, and charged down after it, followed by the ram, a goat and a bull, from the four heavenly directions.


    “Honestly, I couldn’t use this then,” Sarah Helena replied conversationally, as if Heaven itself was not collapsing right down on top of them. “If I could have… I would have probably used it on that ‘Prince of Golden Dawn’… my ‘Beloved’, as you so ignorantly called him. Survive this if you can, nameless Ashkhald from the southlands, who was wronged by the world my stolen strength helped create—”


    “Oh Broken Heaven—!” Leung suddenly roared, spreading his arms wide in the face of the descending figures. “Break Apart this Brutal Bind!”


    A ripple of… emptiness swept out from him, passing through the descending constellations and scattering them like water vapour before a pressure wave—


    Sarah Helena suddenly stood before him, her hand pressed to his chest, her expression a little complex.


    “According to Custom,” she murmured—


    A terrible, discordant sound, akin to two bells smashing into each other, rolled through the camp. Sarah Helena’s expression hardened, and she was forced back a step.


    Leung screamed, though whether in pain or anger it was hard to say, as purple-black flames shrouded his body—


    “Am—Hao—Sa…”


    Three blurry, hooded figures, clad in purple shadow, their faces obscured by white masks that were… disconcertingly similar to the ones favoured by the Jade Gate Court… appeared in a semi-circle amidst the camp.


    A symbol, akin to ‘Am’ and ‘Hao’, hung in front of each, that his mind somehow translated respectively as ‘Saal’, ‘Sin’ and ‘Ash’. Each one was encircled in a complex formation comprising five other symbol-like nodes, in an entirely different script, that whispered dangerously in his mind, evoking a twisted sense of ‘Control’, ‘Kingdom’, ‘Transformation’, ‘Eternity’ and another impossible to define one that felt almost like a name, or a salutation, pulling it all together.


    “You cannot free this one…” one of the shadows, whose dominant symbol seemed to be ‘Kingdom’, hissed.


    “He is ours…” the second, that evoked ‘Control’ most strongly, sneered.


    “Futile, his struggles…” the third, ‘Eternity’, snarled.


    However, even as they focused something on the seals that seemed to be binding whatever was in Leung, he could feel a fundamental imbalance in the formation itself, as if it were missing two nodes. Off to the side, Edmund, who had still been pressuring Old Man Sim, howled as ‘Hao’ suddenly burned like a brand on his chest.


    “Am—Hao—Saaaaaa!” Leung snarled, grasping for the ‘Saal’ Seal, which suddenly distorted, then, despite the best efforts of the ghostly spectre, began to work itself free—


    The head of the spectral figure evoking ‘Eternity’, that was sealing ‘Ash’, spun around to fix its gaze on him—


    The whole centre of the camp seemed to bend outwards, seeming to carry all three spectres with it, away from Leung. The ‘Eternity’ spectre shot towards him, and he thought the other two went for Fu Longwei and someone else beyond Old Sim, but it was impossible for him to be sure, as he felt like he was in the grip of an impossible force, pulling him towards its dark, outstretched hands.


    “—Let It Be Done.”


    Sarah Helena’s words cut through the horror of the moment, like softly sung music to his ears. The masked spectre, its outstretched hands and that all-enveloping, eternity-evoking seal froze, a mere hand’s length from his face, its outline juddering… and then the seal it held unravelled.


    The entire moment creaked and then, with a soul-searing shriek, the spectre’s mask cracked. For a brief moment, he saw the features beneath it: a ruined, twisted face with three eyes that burned with malevolence and pain… then its form unravelled. The cloth of its robe burning away in the early morning sunlight, the limbs and body beneath collapsing into ash—


    All the strength vanished from his limbs and he collapsed to his knees. At the heart of the camp, the shroud of purple, shadowy flame enveloping Leung’s body flew back with such speed that all that remained was a brief remnant of a vision-searing outline of a person receding towards the heart of the ruins, dragging the disintegrating spectres along with it.


    Sarah Helena, her expression pensive, slowly scattered into motes of sun-touched dust. The suppression did not end with her vanishing, he could not help but notice. Leung, meanwhile, who had been stumbling back, immediately found himself having to avoid the grasping hand of Old Sim who, now also rid of his own opponent, had decisively moved straight for him.


    “Old man…” Leung ducked the blow and sent Old Sim staggering back somehow, with a blow he didn’t even see.


    “…”


    Rather than follow up his blow, however, Leung just stared for a long moment at where Sarah Helena had been, then in the direction of the distant river, before taking in the camp.


    “Faugh!” Leung suddenly snarled under his breath and, turning, abruptly vanished like a shadow over the far hill.


    “He sure can run.”


    Just about managing to turn, he found the golden-haired woman was standing a few meters away on the rocks at the riverward side of the Shimmering Dragon Camp. She wasn’t alone now, either.


    Sarah Helena, stood at her side, her arms folded, looking none-the-worse for her battle with Leung. Four other women, dressed in a manner similar to Amaranta—long, shoulder-clasped gowns, flanked both of them, accompanied by a short, broad-shouldered, bearded old man wearing heavy armour in a strange style and carrying a brutal-looking large axe of a jade-like material. To his quiet relief, his errant disciples, including Tong and Hao Yan were there as well, their complexions pallid and fearful, escorted by a whole group of men, women and even children, who all had the same subtle, understated sense of allure and pressure that Sarah Helena had, though none of her presence.


    “I feel used,” Sarah Helena observed drily, taking in the camp with a rueful grimace.


    “T’s mages fer ya,” the short, bearded man grunted, spitting on the ground.


    “I don’t think you would call him a mage, exactly,” a grey-bearded old man at the forefront of the group surrounding his disciples remarked pensively.


    “Should we be concerned that he… it, whoever that was got away?” a dark-haired young woman beside the grey-bearded old man asked.


    He was wondering that as well, truth be told. He still couldn’t sense anything from the rest of the camp, either, beyond a vague awareness that Linhua and the others were still linked to the formation core. That at least meant they were alive, though, so it was something.


    “—Trying to take down or seal tenth circle mages, or higher, is like playing a particularly imbecilic version of ‘whack-a-mole’,” the golden-haired beauty interjected drily. “The Holy Empire made something of an ‘art’ of it, in later years, and shared some of their methods with the throne of the Commonwealth that controlled these lands, but even then, they had to rely overwhelmingly on what you could term ‘Death From Above’.”


    “—The Quartus,” the youngest of the four women, who had a crown of violets on her head, sneered.


    -‘Quartus’? Why does that sound like the old Easten word for ‘Fourfold’? Listening on, and trying to make some sense of what she was saying, he found himself latching onto the odd familiarity with old Easten terms.


    What was also interesting, after a fashion, as he observed their exchange, was that they were not speaking ‘Imperial Common’—lip reading was enough to give that away—but he could still ‘understand’ them just fine. That, he had to assume was down to whatever Sarah Helena was still doing.


    “Yes, they used them to hunt down dragons, nature spirits, the remnant fey… a set even got sent into this place,” the golden-haired woman agreed, nodding. “They are a thing from the years after the Court of the Sun became the Throne of the Commonwealth,” she added to the group standing around his disciples, who were looking a bit confused, if curious at her explanation.


    “I remember, it was fun watching them get consumed,” the violet-crowned girl added, grinning nastily. “They burned two of those heaven-cursed scrolls.”


    -Not to mention this talk of ‘Empires’ and ‘Thrones’, he reflected gloomily.


    “—Speaking of those cursed by Heaven, we got more company,” Sarah Helena interjected, with a sigh. “From the direction of the old city.”


    “Like them?” the golden-haired woman pointed at him.


    “Yep, similar kind of foundations, much weaker though, the strongest should be mid-sixth circle. They have several treasures that are helping them resist my presence a little.”


    -Ahh, of course, he sighed inwardly.


    “At least one should be a spectre,” she added with a wry grimace.


    “You see the total lack of surprise on this face?” the golden-haired woman chuckled. “Anyone else?”


    “Like that Ashkhald?” Sarah Helena mused. “Hmmmm, no, but there are several small groups loitering, keeping clear of the main field for now. They feel more local. The large group that that ‘Leung’ came from—their bunch, about four thousand—are in a series of camps on the far side of the river.”


    -So, she can sense the entire region, and isn’t at all afraid to let us know…


    He didn’t have to look over at Weng, or the village chief to see both had unhappy expressions now. Old Sim just looked sanguine, but that didn’t surprise him particularly.


    “F-four thousand?” Fu Longwei finally managed to find words to speak, albeit in disbelief.


    “What kind of strength?” an older woman, with a faint resemblance to Sarah Helena asked, looking off on the direction of the river.


    “Most are below the fifth circle, about thirty in the sixth and nine in the seventh. Two eighth, barely, by the estimations I am familiar with,” Sarah Helena replied, after a moment’s consideration.


    -And… she can effortlessly tell how strong they all are.


    “The group coming for us have a few ninth-circle treasures, one tenth circle one, that will fail quickly if they waste it like they are doing.”


    “Not too bad,” the golden-haired woman mused. “The local groups will be more of an issue, I think. Can you… hmmm…”


    He watched as she ducked her head close to Sarah Helena’s and said something much more quietly, that he couldn’t catch, or that wasn’t deliberately conveyed to them. The other woman just nodded though, and then closed her eyes… for about ten seconds, then opened them again and exhaled.


    “Done. It won’t go undetected if anyone really competent pokes at them, but it will buy us a few days. Assuming nobody among the surrounding powers here is capable of mass teleportation, or chronomancy?”


    “There are a few, but it’s not that easy, especially of late, with all this stuff going on,” the golden-haired woman replied calmly. “Now, shall we bring the other group so eager to meet us here?”


    “Here… sure.” Sarah Helena nodded again, and then the entire city-wards side of the Shimmering Dragon camp rippled.


    Two landscapes briefly overlaid themselves and then twenty cultivators in various robes of Shu clan influences staggered out of…’their’ landscape’ and appeared, shocked and thoroughly disorientated, on the edge of the camp.


    As a group, they were a disparate bunch, but that didn’t surprise him especially. The core were wearing robes with Shu clan styling, but only five had actual insignia of clan itself. Three he recognised: Shu Changyu and Shu Ji Shin were rising stars of the Wise Gate of Supreme Law, while Shu Ling was the favoured grand-daughter of the previous Shu clan Envoy to that same sect. The other two he didn’t know were standing next to her, clearly part of ‘her’ group, and if he had to put spirit stones on who had the ‘artefacts’ Sarah Helena mentioned, it would be her.


    The rest were mostly from the Zhao and Yu clans—branch powers similar to, if much lower in status, relative to his own Feng Family. Two others did catch his eye, though: a platinum-blonde woman wearing a Liao clan insignia on her travel-worn martial robe, who had a much harder, more collected manner than the rest in the face of their sudden shift in circumstances, and a focused, red-haired youth sporting the crest of the Dugu family—an off-world, if influential, Shu power with roots more on Western Azure—on his blade.


    Shu Ji Shin, who had been among the most alert as they took in the camp, suddenly flinched, then, before anyone could really react, was bodily pulled away from the rest—


    “No! WAIT!” Shu Ji Shin screamed as he was dragged straight into Sarah Helena’s outstretched, grasping hand.


    -Ah, what are the odds that’s the spectre, she just mentioned, he sighed inwardly.


    “I don’t mean any harm!” Shu Ji Shin gasped. “I didn’t steal his body by force! He was already dead!”


    “…”


    The disciples around him, who had who had been trying to draw weapons, talismans and form a formation, all very chaotically and ineptly in those confused few seconds, froze in shock at Ji Shin’s words.


    “I see…” Sarah Helena didn’t relax her grip on the youth’s neck at all.


    “—He was killed by a group wearing black masks and red robes,” Shu Ji Shin babbled. “He tried to protect the juniors he was with… but couldn’t…”


    -Red robes, black mask?


    That sounded oddly familiar, he had to concede, but a lot of sects had red robes, and as for the mask thing, similarly a lot of people wanted to hide their identities right now.


    “So you took his corpse after he died?” the golden-haired woman mused, raising an eyebrow questioningly.


    “I… um, no, I tried to help him, but they damaged his soul so badly,” the spectre possessing the youth replied hurriedly. “H-he s-saw me… and begged me to get justice for all of them…”


    “—so you took his body and killed them.” Sarah Helena asked.


    “Y-yes… the bodies are in his storage artefact,” the spectre nodded urgently.


    Abruptly, seven bodies, wearing dark red robes, purple clouds edged with gold flames embroidered on the panels, appeared on the ground beside them.


    -Ah, Purple Sky Pavilion?


    The design was enough to jog his memory. They were a subsidiary influence of the Seven Sovereigns. That said, their reputation was not especially bad, as far as he knew. They operated mostly around Meng City, and had no issues with the Shu clan, let alone one of its most powerful subsidiary influences on Eastern Azure. Nor had he seen or heard any sign of them in the trial up to this point…


    “Interesting…” the golden-haired woman mused, walking over to the one with the most ornate robe: a lanky youth with long black hair.


    He could not tell what realm they had been in life, but Shu Ji Shin had been a quasi-Ancient Immortal, so this group likely had to have had someone capable of matching that.


    As they looked on, she knelt down beside the corpse, and after taking off the actually rather unremarkable black mask, put her hand over the its face.


    “Tymborychos.”


    The word she softly uttered hung, unnervingly, in his ears, as if it wasn’t just spoken by her, but through…?


    His thoughts turned blank, with shock. He had expected her to just examine his qi, or something, maybe a divination of some kind? Instead, the previously very dead youth beneath her gave out a wretched, choaking gasp, then flailed and grasped at her arm.


    “Speak to me of your name and purpose,” the golden-haired woman murmured.


    “I… am Hu Gufan,” the youth’s flailing stilled, and he replied as evenly as if he were speaking about the weather—much like the possessed Leung, in fact. “I and my brothers came here as mercenaries. We were paid to infiltrate the trial and make it clear that the Seven Sovereigns were targeting various powers… To that end, we disguised ourselves and killed various important scions, particularly from the Shu and Ji clan influences… so when they started to converge here, we came as well…until… a—t-that… curse you! Demon shade—! The cold… It’s hands! It was so—so… why can I see it still… It claws at me… Why, why does it still claw at me? WHY?! Why… why did I die like that!?”


    The youth’s initially rational words rapidly turned hysterical, until the golden-haired woman whispered something under her breath and he fell limp once more, though still quite ‘alive’… which was…


    He was glad to see he wasn’t the only one staring. Nevermind Fu Longwei, Chief Chang, Weng and Shen were all looking at the golden-haired beauty like she was an unspeakable monster that just stepped out of nowhere. Even Old Sim looked a touch unnerved, as well he might. Resurrecting the dead, as she seemed to have done, was a feat among feats. A Peerless Dao Ascendant with a great commitment to a place or a people might be able to do so for mortals, in exceptional circumstances, though that was by no means common knowledge. The Feng clan’s old ancestors had interceded once, like that, in his living memory. A Dao Venerate could as well, though the risk of ‘entanglement’ in the Karma of the world was immense as he understood it, and it only got harder, exponentially so in fact, the higher the realm of the deceased.


    However, this woman should have no such fateful link to the dead, nor any accumulation or ancestral power to do so. That meant she had the means to manipulate the samsara within this place to a degree he had only read about in texts.


    “That is an… impressive treasure you just used, fellow Daoists…”


    He pushed away his shock at what had just transpired and managed not to groan audibly as a youth at the forefront of the Yu family group, stepped forward, after giving Shu Ling a quick glance, and bowed slightly to the golden-haired woman, Sarah Helena… and Old Sim.


    “I am Shu Yu Xua—!?”


    “—Apologies, Esteemed Elder, my junior is a little dazed right now, and forgot themselves…”


    Before the youth had even finished saying his name, the platinum-blonde haired woman quickly stepped up beside him, and actually put a hand over his mouth as she pulled him back.


    -Ah, she must be an elder with one of the sects?


    He sighed with inward relief, as the woman bowed much more respectfully… albeit again, to Old Sim before the other two. He supposed she had to work off what her limited senses could intuit, and at this point, the blind old man did rather look the part of the hidden old Expert, at least compared to the others present. Shen and Weng, half-clad as they were, didn’t look much older than twenty-five, which also went for Fu Longwei. Chief Chang was clearly not dressed as a cultivator from a sect, and he himself was wearing a non-descript but hard-wearing travelling robe bearing the Feng clan insignia and could probably pass for a mortal in his early forties.


    “…”


    Old Sim turned to look at her. He couldn’t see what expression the old man had, but it probably wasn’t the barely concealed derision on Weng and Shen’s.


    The group around his own disciples just looked amused, and the lack of ‘interest’ being given towards them, or the women dressed as spirit herbs, suddenly had him wondering how much the group who had just been drawn here could ‘see’. With that in mind, he caught the woman’s eye and gave her a very, very subtle shake of the head. To her credit, she caught his hint and didn’t look, just grimaced faintly.


    “You don’t have to hide your presence, Old Master…” the golden-haired woman remarked drily, glancing pointedly over at the grey-bearded old man.


    “…”


    For the second time, and with honestly rather comedic synchronicity, most of the group of cultivators flinched and stared around the ruined camp, as if somehow seeing it now, for the first time. Only Changyu, the Dugu family youth and the platinum-blonde-haired woman kept most of their composure, the latter sighing softly.


    “So, why were you coming here?” the golden-haired woman asked, turning to the group as a whole.


    -Oh Grandfather of Heaven, please don’t say you are…


    “—We were looking for the treasure!”


    “—Because we saw the Phenomena!”


    “To try and claim the treasure—!”


    “Because we were told to!”


    “Because Lady Ling suggested it!”


    “To see what the Feng Family found for us!”


    “To stop the Feng family monopolizing it!”


    “To claim the treasure for Miss Ling!”


    “…”


    “Because not going would be more of an issue…”


    “Because I wanted to better understand what I saw in the dawning…”


    Hearing the babble of replies, many repeating themselves, that burst forth from the group as a whole, he could only groan out loud, this time, as they answered exactly how he anticipated—though the last two, from the Dugu youth and Shu Changyu, were… interesting.


    “To try and keep these idiots from killing themselves,” the platinum-blonde haired woman replied a shade more slowly than the rest, the muscles in her jaw tightening as she did so.


    -So, she at least is at the Dao Step?


    “H-how—!”


    “You dare?!”


    “Would you shut up!” Changyu rounded on those clustered about Shu Ling, who had begun to flush with anger as they recovered something of their self-control.


    “I cannot say there is no treasure,” the golden-haired woman chuckled, as if their ‘honesty’ was more amusing than anything else. “But I do not think most of what you find will be at all agreeable.”


    “—Yer death will bae pathetic, mind!” the short, bearded old man added with a guffaw.


    “If… I might say something?” Steeling himself, he finally spoke up, bowing politely to Sarah Helena and the golden-haired woman, who now, both turned to look at him.


    “Everyone else seems to have been very keen to speak, but you have not,” the golden-haired woman remarked. “I wonder why?”


    “…”


    For the second time, he felt the true force of her presence staring right into him, carried on those words… so innocent and yet so alluring. They whispered to his heart, sang to his mind, smothered his instincts… It was very tempting to try and set himself against them, and yet… a part of him knew that that was a ‘trap’.


    It actually reminded him, in the moment, of a comment his own teacher had made long ago. About the ‘nature’ of the ‘ways’ Heaven was wont to leave, in the manner of that famous saying—namely that the way being left was to just suck it up and take the hit, and deal with the consequences.


    “Like her, I want to try and keep these idiots, who have lived their whole lives being told they are the Heavens’ next great gift to Eastern Azure, from pathetically and pointlessly killing themselves, and everybody around them,” he replied, both honestly, and evenly... he hoped.


    “—Is that all?” she asked.


    As a follow-up question, it was like being stabbed in the heart by the gentlest, most loving and caring smile. There was no way to resist, so all he could do was shove that unnerved, shivering thought that had been haunting him for the last while out to meet it and accept whatever it brought as consequences.


    “—Did you really bring him back to life?” he asked, nodding at the seemingly unconscious youth on the ground beside her.


    “…”


    Two of the women beside Sarah Helena nearly fell over laughing. In fact, all of the women dressed like spirit herbs seemed inordinately amused by that answer he couldn’t help but notice.


    “Yes,” the golden-haired woman replied matter-of-factly, after rolling her eyes, more at them than him, he thought. “Life, Death and I share a… special connection, shall we say.”


    “That is definitely one way to phrase it,” Sarah Helena agreed drily.


    He was suddenly very tempted to ask if it was ‘special enough’ that he could shove some of these brats’ faces in the yellow springs…


    “As amusing as it would be, I would not advise it…”


    He was glad he had a Dao Lord’s composure, as the golden-haired woman’s voice suddenly whispered in his ear and only his ear.


    “Unless you actually intend to kill a few…?”


    “I was honest in my initial reply. Please excuse an old man’s moment of weakness,” he answered carefully, hoping that she didn’t decide to pull that thought out of him anyway, because he was pretty certain now, she could do it, if she wanted.


    “I am not a monster,” she chuckled. “But I can tell you that fear does not make for a helpful motivator of ones like them. It warps hearts and twists thoughts.”


    “Thank you for your instruction,” he replied politely.


    He was, in truth, well aware of that himself. Once you went down that path there was no way to back out of it. In any case, he could already see the ‘silence’ of their momentary exchange starting to weigh faintly on some of that group. Dugu and the platinum-haired woman were exchanging a worried glance, while Changyu was glowering at those who had suggested robbing the Feng clan moments before. The young woman beside him—Shu Yu Jing—was frantically using a sign-code to convey that she ‘knew’ of the ‘Old Elder’ who had just spoken, and that he was a powerful Dao Lord with connections to the heart of the Feng clan.


    That was a slightly flattering assessment, in his own personal opinion, but the low-key susurration of uneasy looks suddenly being sent his way was… a little gratifying, if also a rather depressing.


    “Not that I think you needed it,” she added cheekily. “—So, what is your pitch, to stop them dying like freshly hatched butterflies?” she asked, out loud now.


    -That is the question: what is my pitch here… he reflected with an inward sigh.


    As far as he could see, there were three possibilities. The worst, by far, was this ending up with some form of antagonism, that would drag them all down. Sarah Helena and this woman seemed… reasonable, but he suspected that they could be decisive if they wanted to be.


    Them parting ways… in a neutral fashion wasn’t an option he favoured, either, if he was honest. Especially not after how they had just been backstabbed by Chief Chang’s physical cultivators. Old Sim might be able to prevent the worst there—certainly, he had always been a force for good in the camp, even if he had kept his status and strength completely hidden, but he clearly had a complex history with the physical cultivators, if the reactions of Chang, Weng and Shen were anything to go by. It wasn’t a gamble he wanted to stake his life and those he had a duty to, on.


    So, that left some means to an alliance. Before she… left… or fled, the reports were mixed on that, he had somewhat hoped that the Princess might have served as a unifying element, but that was also impossible now. He had assumed the worst he might have to deal with was rogue Dao Immortal ‘juniors’, or maybe an unscrupulous unaffiliated Dao Lord. Not vengeful million-year-old Dao Step physical cultivators backed up by their entire clans… and then there were the spirit herbs. Both those changed the requirements on that ‘alliance’ profoundly. Without proper, tangible backing, or a really scary flag to stand in the shade of—and the Shu clan didn’t feel like ‘it’—there was no chance for his group, nevermind most of the others here.


    Of the available candidates, Old Sim was… well, he was a possibility, but the exchange with Chief Chang and the others, and that risk of his ‘complex history’ was spooking his elder’s intuition for stupid politics making for big problems.


    The issue then, was what could he offer this woman—these two women, and the group with them, that would make an alliance with him, with the Feng Family—as a representative of what he hoped was one of the more reasonable arms of the Shu influence in this place—worth it to them.


    It was, frankly, a headache, because the very same things that made that pair the only real possibility on hand, were also the biggest obstacles facing him. Sarah Helena was clearly a Venerate, or in possession of a heavenly physique so terrifying and aloof as to be as good as, and the golden-haired woman staring at him was also… well, resurrecting the dead was a statement and then some. Unless someone was hiding something very valuable indeed from him, his ‘group’ had nothing to tempt such an alliance in terms of resources—just the winning force of their personalities, and there he had to hope that the disciples who had been ’saved’ had still somehow not poisoned that well in some unforeseen way. Chief Chang’s actions had also neatly undercut any attempt he might have made to evoke sympathy for the villagers they had been sheltering up to this point.


    He wished he knew what this ‘tenth circle’ represented as well. Clearly, as they didn’t seem to see treasures of that calibre as more than an inconvenience. If it was akin to the strength of the spectre who had possessed Leung, that suggested it was something like Dao Ascendant, or even quasi-venerate. A quick count back of realms and how they had used the ‘circles’ to gauge others seemed to support that, but again, he really didn’t want to bet on it… because the platinum-haired woman was surely a Dao Immortal, and she was in the ‘peak’ of the sixth, apparently. In any case, the longer he stayed silent… though it had only been a few moments since she asked, the more awkward things would become.


    “You said before that I had the ‘clearest vision’,” he replied, picking his words carefully, and also calling back to the first exchange they had had. “It is better to shelter these children, I would argue, than abandon them. There are many dangers in this place, for which they are unprepared, and the circumstances of what occurred here are… unclear. Alive, and in your sight, they will not become fodder for dangerous spectres…”


    “You call them children, yet I see some… older,” she pointed out drily.


    “Do not be fooled by their hollow years.” He pointed out, ignoring the glares some of the Shu group were now directing at him. “Ours is a society both apart, and also… in many ways aloof.”


    “And yet, someone saw fit to send them into this harsh, unforgiving land…” she mused.


    “Yes, and I do not think that is right, so I can only bow my head to you, and ask you to show the grace and charity to their future potential that many who should have known better… have not,” he finished, trying not to wince at the pain in his limbs as he got down on both knees… and bowed formally to her.


    It was a painfully empty plea, but his instinct, and the fact that she had made the points she had, suggested that indeed, trying to proffer treasures, or anything like that… would not have sung the same way.


    “Charity… and Grace.” One of the other four women standing next to Sarah Helena spoke up, though he was not sure which one, and did not raise his head to check. “Those are powerful words to pick. You might be held to them.”


    “I understand,” he replied respectfully.


    “Interesting…” the golden-haired woman mused, walking over to stand before him. “I think, in a sense, you actually do… even if there is a divide in our cultures. Charity and Grace are indeed important to me, so I will accept your request.”