Ichika and Ken seemed to think finding the ruins of a sect was a much bigger deal than finding the ruins of a whole town, which didn't really make sense to me. The sect only took up the top of a big hill, and the town was easily ten times larger. But Ichika was all kinds of disturbed by the discovery of the sect.

She paced the rock-strewn ground, muttering to herself. The other cultivators discussed amongst themselves. And young Hana wandered over to me wrapped in about five times more canvas than was strictly necessary to protect her body from the rain.

"What's going on, Mistress Lynn?" she asked.

"I have no idea. Oh… and no more 'Mistress'… apparently you can't be my disciple until you're a cultivator. Mistress Ichika was very clear on that."

"Right… right." Hana frowned, her face drawing into her little cowl of canvas. "I'll try harder, Miss Lynn. Aren't you cold?"

"I'm not even wet," I said. "Huh." My clothes were damp, at least the upper layers were, but my skin and hair were dry, the rain beading up and sliding right off. What little water remained evaporated in steamy wisps. "Neat. Must be a cultivator thing…"

Except Big Shilei was visibly soaked. He stood with the other men, utterly unbothered by the rain, but it dripped off his bushy black eyebrows and the broad tip of his nose and his little braid thing adhered to his back like a furry snake. They stalked off to look over the various fallen buildings.

Hana and I explored the place a bit, too. The ruins of several large stone buildings remained, as well as the outer and inner walls. Apparently, the inner walls served to separate the 'outer sect', who received the public teachings of the sect, from the 'inner sect', who were recipients to the sect's secret martial wisdom. This must have been a smallish sect, because there was no delineation between the inner sect and the monastery or 'core' of the sect, where the really juicy secrets were kept and the sect bigwigs lived.

There were a few big holes in the ground where wooden structures had rotted away… or maybe those were craters from catastrophic impacts. I only ever took the one archaeology class at CalOc and we didn't cover stuff like this. There was one thing that I thought was notable, though…

"Huh…" I paced over to the edge of the sect ruins, hopping on top of the crumbling, ten-foot walls and peering down the hillside. It was a big hill, probably close to a thousand feet tall. A small mountain, really. The outer walls probably stood around the nine hundred foot mark, with a decent uphill climb to reach the inner walls. And, as I looked down the hillside, I noticed something odd…

No vegetation continued past the eight-hundred-foot mark on the hill. The treeline stopped, but so did the sparse berry-laden shrubs, the little winding vines, even the rugged grass that grew in clumps wherever the trees didn't cover the sky. All of it stopped, leaving nothing but exposed rock that might have once been garden terraces. The soil had all eroded away.

I closed my eyes and sensed the qi around me - I was getting better at sensing it and didn't need to commit to full meditation anymore. Simply concentrating would bring it to the fore…

Weird. There was always a dominant local qi, even if it was small. Usually more like three or four types. And I should definitely have been able to sense the green qi from the forest below us. Instead, I got… nothing. Well… not quite nothing. I got thousands of tiny threads, almost too small to detect. And their colors were so faint, as if they'd been stripped of all but the barest remnants of identity. It was kind of sad, like the vitality had drained right out of the world and left only enough color to limp along as an empty husk.

"Come on, Lynn, we're leaving," Ichika said.

"Did you find out what happened?" I asked. I opened my eyes and only then noticed that I'd become completely soaked as I turned internally to sense the world's qi. Annoying. Of course, the moment I thought that, the water started evaporating right off my skin, engulfing me in an awkward fog before slowly dissipating and leaving me mostly dry once more.

"Is… was that a technique?" Ichika asked.

I shrugged. "Since I'm still not super clear on what a 'technique' is… maybe?"

Ichika sighed. "Well… to answer your question, Lynn, no. We haven't discovered what happened, beyond that it must have been sufficiently bad to leave the local qi disturbed all these years later. But the rest of us agree that it's not normal and we'd be better off making camp away from here."

"Makes sense to me. Are we stopping for the day?"

"Since we haven't really got anywhere to be, yes. I…" Ichika nibbled on her lip, clearly debating some matter of great import. I didn’t try to force the issue. "I'd like to try some cultivation, though. And, given the current surroundings…" she looked at me pointedly. "If you would be so kind as to mix up some of your cultivation aids…"

I hopped off the wall, excited enough that I was bouncing on my toes. "You're asking me to make you a smoothie?"

Ichika grit her teeth. "Yes. I would like you to make me a smoothie, Lynn. If you please."

I'd been picking everything that looked edible along our trek and nibbling on most of it just to be sure - I couldn't be sure what might be toxic to Hana, so we had to be a lot more careful with what she got. But a cultivator could eat pretty much anything that tasted good, and there was plenty in the forest that tasted good. I even founds some damn good truffles, though I wasn't about to put those in a smoothie. Hmm…

To work on: mocha truffle smoothie recipe? Still need: something like chocolate.

We tracked back down the hillside, most of us letting out an unconscious sigh of relief when we reached the treeline. Below, in the ruins of the town, we found the remains of a stone building with a large enough overhang that we could set up a fire circle outside of the rain, though it wasn't big enough to fit the tents under.

Ken was the fire master as usual - even though he was still in the late body refinement stage, he already knew a fire technique. Presumably, it would be quite powerful once he advanced further… if he advanced further. I had faith in him, even if he could be grumpier than Big Shilei. He grumbled a bit before arranging the tinder and kindling and starting a fire with a little pop of fire qi.

"What's wrong?" I asked him.

He looked in my direction, slightly annoyed. "Unlike you, most of us can't just cultivate out here. It takes us a lot longer to get our qi back up. Until late qi refinement, internal qi cycling is very slow, and it can still be perturbed until core formation…"

"Core formation… that's the, uh… fourth stage?" I asked - I must have asked Ichika and Big Shilei a million cultivation questions, but it was always good to cross-check with other people.

"Right. So I hope you'll appreciate if I'm a bit annoyed about being the only one who knows how to make a fire…"

"Oh! I know how to make a fire!" Hana butted in. She squatted in front of the fire and reached out to warm her hands.

"You?"

"Not a qi fire. I took a wilderness class and we learned to make a fire with flint and steel! Mother even gifted me this mechag." She pulled up an elaborate leather pouch from near her waist, removing a small block of gray flint. Hana took a melancholic look at the pouch and winced, perhaps thinking of home. She'd run away on an impulse, but I didn't get the impression that her home life was all that intolerable.

"So the mortal girl can make fires. I guess I'm good for literally nothing, then," Ken huffed. Honestly, he could be like a big baby.

"That's not true," I said calmly. "You're still the number one fire guy, obviously. Plus, your horse is usually in the lead. You're basically the group leader…" when he gave me a skeptical look - for some reason, Ichika was pretty much the final group authority, even if she sometimes ceded it to others - I revised my approach. "You're the pathfinder, I mean, and your eyes are super sharp. We'd have no idea where we were going without you, really."

"Yeah." Ken sat back and let out a slow breath and had to hide his smile. "Yeah, I guess that's true."

"Plus, you're great at making stew," I added.

"Yeah, I get it. I'm good for a lot." Ken waved me off.

Hana and I sat a bit away from the fire, seated in the lotus position, which I was teaching her to associate with meditation. While there was nothing special about the position, it was always good to add different physical and mental cues to your preparation to help get you into the right state of mind. I smiled - Ichika had situated herself nearby to observe. That was good!

"Okay, Hana… close your eyes and relax. Notice the sensation of your breath as it comes in and out… is there more in one nostril than the other? What does it feel like in your lungs? In your throat? Is it different than the air outside? Notice the sensation and accept it - the experience is no more and no less than the sensations that compose it. Now, take a few seconds to carefully register what your body is feeling, from your head to your toes. Good…"

We proceeded like that for a bit - I could basically guide a meditation session on pure autopilot at this point and, audaciously, could even meditate while doing so. My understanding from Earth was that this wasn't possible, but clearly things were different in cultivator land.

As my voice droned on, I turned the bulk of my awareness internally, toward the gradually-increasing clutter that was my dantian…

Well, maybe clutter was a bad word for it. No, it was more crowded than cluttered - a series of qi-thread tori built along my inner light, followed with one or several rings of braided qi within each 'shell'. At first, I'd just stuffed qi in there into random tangles, and then I'd sort of partitioned it out into vague regions so opposing types wouldn't clash. Then I got the brilliant idea to… well… do exactly the same thing I'd done to start with and thread the qi into rings of many individual threads.

It was a lot harder when I couldn't use my inner light to just bring everything toward me and let the qi sort itself out. This took a lot more nuance, but I'd been getting a lot better at bringing in individual strands and getting them to do what I wanted. The process was a lot slower, but I could cram a lot more qi into my dantian this way than simply stuffing it in randomly… of course, now I thought I'd discovered an even more efficient way to do things:

If one braid was efficient, wouldn't a braid of braids be more efficient? I could fit so much qi into my dantian! I wasn't sure what I'd do with all the qi, but that was something to figure out when talking to my cultivator friends. While deep in meditation, my main goal was to get the qi to be as dense-but-stable as possible.

And pretty. That was also important. I wasn't about to fill my soul with energy, only to have it looking like crap. So… braids of braids of qi. To get started, I'd have to carefully open a ring and twist it around another ring… no, that wouldn't work. The rings wouldn't braid right if they were closed. I needed to treat it like hair braids. Fortunately, I knew a few ways to braid four strands of hair. I could take four rings of qi, line them up, and then braid them together! Perfect!

I got started and quickly came to realize that it was more difficult than I'd expected to take a ring of tightly-woven qi, open it, and just keep it that way. It took a lot of careful concentration and resonance within my inner light because it was all under tension, and it wanted to spring out into crazy patterns the moment I snipped the ends. Maybe I'd have to start with only two strands and work my way up to four? I…

"Shit… shitshitshit," I muttered. I lost control, just for a second, but that's all it took. The entire qi ring I'd been working with disassembled itself and went spewing out into space at speed. I resonated my inner light to keep it close but only managed to retain maybe a quarter of the total qi. Not a total loss, but quite a 'whoopsie'.

"What was that?" Ichika hissed.

"Just a little housecleaning," I said, taking a deep breath and working past the nausea that accompanied the sudden release of previously-incorporated qi. It was all about willpower and positivity - whatever mistakes I made became learning experiences.

"I felt that!" Hana said, ruining her own meditation to impress me.

"I think the Jade Xuanwu Emperor felt that, and he's been dead for four thousand years!" Ichika said. "Are you alright?"

I released my breath, the roiling qi within me slowly stabilizing. I carefully took stock of what 'unbound' qi I had available and prepared to make work with it. Maybe a less-ambitious project to start with. First, I could-

Something rippled deep within the world's qi. Even muted as the local energies were, I felt it burbling up like a great distortion. It felt… sick, like the whole world was roiling in the nausea I'd just experienced. It was the feeling of something old and horrible awakening.

"Something's happening," I said, my eyes shooting open.

"Something up on the mountain - look!" Ken said. He pointed off into the dark, through the sparse cover of trees and to the feeble glow in the distant night. A pale blue smudge like a nebula in the night sky, only it was right where the Heaven's Abyss mountains stood. And the smudge was moving.

"Whatever it is, I think it's headed this way," Monkey Yang said. "We need to leave. We need to leave now.".

--------

I found it a bit weird that we were packing up to leave because of a pale blue smudge in the distance, but I guess that if something could detect my little outpouring of qi from that far away, we probably didn’t want anything to do with it. I helped roll the tents and pack the cart while Yang and Ken got the horses ready. Within about three minutes, we were ready to get the hell out of Dodge.

"I don't even understand why we're leaving," Hana said. "What's so bad? I mean… I barely even saw the blue and it isn't there anymore…"

"Quiet, girl," Shilei hissed, a departure from his usual equanimity. "We're going to move… very quietly… and hopefully, whatever it is will hone on our campfire and not pursue us further. Nobody use any qi…"

"Sorry… I didn't know anything would happen," I whispered back - and even that earned me a stern frown from the big man. Even though he'd whispered just as loud! Uncool, Shilei. But it did impart the seriousness of the situation.

And I knew that, even though I couldn't see whatever was out there, it was still there… and I was pretty sure it was getting closer. There was something off about the qi in the air. The normally-diffuse qi was abuzz, but abuzz in the way that static buzzed on the radio out in the mountains - a frenetic fuzz so finely-threaded that even I would struggle to cultivate with it. With Hana on the cart, Shilei and I on foot, and the other three mounted, we started to move.

Unfortunately, it's impossible to be sneaky or even particularly quiet when you've got five horses and a full cart intended for in-town merchant deliveries. The horses clopped and cracked through the nettles underhoof. The cart creaked and squeaked. And even Hana's breathing was annoyingly loud - she couldn't help it, but that didn't make it less annoying.

"Breathe quieter," I hissed.

"I'm trying!"

I rolled my eyes. Mortals!

We moved for about five minutes, creaking and cracking through the pine-strewn ruins of the abandoned city. The eerie blue light from the mountain became a smudge on the horizon, glowing over the treetops like a stadium at night. Finally, just when I was about to suggest that we stop and hide, Yang suggested the same thing.

He rode back to the cart, frowning at the distant light. "We figure we're far enough. We're gonna stop and try to wait whatever this is out… probably just a territorial spirit beast. No wonder we haven't seen anything else if it's this territorial."

"Ichika suggested this? This seems like a prudent plan," Shilei said. "But let's leave the horses harnessed for a while…"

"That's the plan. Stay put and stay quiet… and stop breathing so loud," he said to Hana.

"I'm really scared, Mister Yang…"

Monkey Yang just nodded and looked off into the distance, one hand absently stroking his frightened horse. Its breathing came out in little snorts louder than Hana's, but I wasn't about to point that out. For all I knew, they might even blame me for what happened, even though I'd thrown off half as much qi half a dozen times and all anybody told me was that I probably wasn't cultivating right.

The wind sighed through the trees and whispered over the old, mossy stone. There was the occasional creak of leather as the horses looked about, but it didn't stand out above the creak of branches in the wind. And, in the distance, the pale blue glow in the sky seemed to fade. I let out a breath I hadn't even known I was holding, relieved. And then I heard it.

A whispering. A chittering. The susurrus of something that wasn't quite language but also wasn't quite not language. Something that simultaneously buzzed at the edge of hearing and grew in intensity by the second. Then the first of them floated through the ruins… and I mean floated through the ruins, as if the solid stone was no more than a minor inconvenience.

It was a thing, glowing softly, not very bright at all and easily ninety percent transparent. Whatever form it had was hard to make out - things that looked like long tentacles sweeping along one moment and then merging back into the amorphous form the next. Things like beady black eyes popped in and out. Things like wings, one at a time, formed and dispersed, slowly flapping as if through a viscous jelly. It swept in our direction and then westward, wavering like a jellyfish stuck in slow turbulence…

As it drew closer, I realized two things. This thing… was it a spirit beast? It wasn't alone. I spotted two more even further off, sweeping along the terrain, passing through trees and crumbling walls, the sound of whispering and chittering preceding them. And tapping.

Taptaptap… taptaptaptap… with a little gasp of horror, I realized that the 'tentacles' that the things occasionally produced and retracted weren't tentacles at all. No, they were humanoid fingers, each about the width of my wrist, each with at least a few dozen joints, writhing like a serpent and tapping against the surfaces, scraping against stone and thunking against fallen trunks. When I gasped, the nearer one paused, swept in our direction, and then swept back.

Whatever these things were, they were looking for us. And I was pretty sure it would be bad news if they found us.

Then one of the cart horses fidgeted, shaking its harness with an audible creak of leather and wood. That sure got the thing's attention. The sound of chittering increased tenfold and the specter swept in our direction. The fidgety horse noticed it approaching and spooked with a whinny. The two cart horses full-on panicked, bolting in opposite directions and pulling the harness free from the cart with the crack of wood.

They were still harnessed together, though, and panicked, veering off and crunching through trees. Suddenly, a lot of creepy spirit things burst out from deeper in the woods, streaming toward the two horses with impressive speed. In the chaos, I grabbed Hana and pulled her off the cart, putting my hand over her mouth to muffle her scream. I watched in terror as the horde of spirit things chased the terrified horses down and passed into them.

The two horses collapsed almost in unison, and for a few seconds the night was dark and silent except for the low whisper-chittering of spirit things. Then the horses each let out a sigh, their bodies going limp, and the spirits began to rise up out of them. Part of me knew that they'd just devoured the souls right out of the poor beasts. Their bodies were still breathing, but nobody was home.

The spirits rose up out of the comatose horses and drifted outward, searching once again… searching mostly in our direction. They'd find us in seconds.

Big Shilei made a gesture, barely visible in the shadows beneath the cart. He was suggesting that we split up and make a run for it - surely, they couldn't chase us all at once. I wondered why we didn't just martial arts the things, but I guess with a ghost that can fly right inside the body of a living horse, there isn't a whole lot of point in punching or kicking it. He gestured again - he was offering to take Hana.

"Big Shilei's going to carry you out of here. I'll make a distraction," I whispered right into Hana's ear. She shook her head, but it wasn't her decision to make. Despite my cultivator's strength, the big man was as strong relative to me as he'd have been if neither of us were cultivators, maybe slightly more. And he actually knew how to fight, whereas creating a distraction and running away was much more my forte.

I pushed Hana into his arms and peeked over the cart… immediately drawing the attention of one of the spirit things, whose beady, black eyes swiveled toward me. It let out a horrifying chitter-shriek and three huge, many jointed fingers shot through the cart and toward me.

"Oh hell no," I blurted and dashed away. Looking over my shoulder as responsibly as I could, I counted… well, I didn’t look over for long enough to count. There were multiple spirit things after me, and they were gaining. Fast.

I felt something inexplicably wrong as a big, ghostly finger passed through my body, pushing against the qi in my dantian, trying to invade. Unlike the horses, though, I was a cultivator and my soul held - for now. Unlike Hana… shit! If one of those things got her, they'd have her soul in no time flat. Ken was right: the wilderness was really unsafe for regular people.

Scratch that. It was really unsafe for cultivators. It was really, really unsafe for 'mortals'.

More fingers pushed at my dantian, from much closer this time, and I did the only thing I could think of to escape psychotic ghosts in hot pursuit: I ducked…

And, amazingly, it worked. The spirit things zoomed right past me via some unearthly momentum, taking a good few seconds to reorient during which I dashed off at an angle. So… that worked. Now, I just had to hope they tired before I did.

Did spirit things get tired? I had no idea.

Even if I was a badass martial artist, I wouldn't be able to kick, punch, or poke these things. But if they ate souls and were trying to get at my qi, that meant they could probably be hurt by spirit attacks. Unfortunately, I didn't know any qi attacks. Shilei and Ichika had both tried to teach me - they were also in the third realm and capable of such feats. Theoretically, so was I. But I would only be capable of the most basic techniques until I learned how to separate the individual types of qi within my dantian and shape them.

Maybe I should have put more practice into doing that instead of making pretty qi patterns as dense as possible. Oh well- there was no use in bemoaning the point now. I dropped flat onto my stomach and let the spirits swoop by again. They seemed to be learning, taking less time to stop and double back after me, though I suspect they weren't that bright and there wasn’t much they could do about ghost momentum in flight, because after four dodges, the trick was still working.

But I hadn't lost any of them, either. There were at least eight of them, now that I'd got a few good looks. I summoned the free qi I had - the qi not bound up in dense braids - and imagined expelling it in a great blast. Just when I thought the spirits would be getting close again, I pivoted and threw out a rapid punch with a shout.

"Hah!" I screamed - only the qi didn't blast out of my fist. It shot straight out of my dantian, basically from inside my lower abdomen, right between my belly button and my uterus.

Still… I couldn't complain about the results. The eager chittering of the spirits devolved into a high-pitched shriek and at least three of them exploded into luminous blue powder. The others devolved into a feeding frenzy of spirit feeding, gobbling up every remaining scrap of qi before turning back to me.

By which point, I was off and away again, tearing through the forest. If I could just cultivate for a few minutes, I could stuff enough energy into my dantian for two or three more blasts. As it was, I'd tapped myself completely dry. Everything else was bound up in qi braids, and I had no idea if I could harness the energy if I deliberately destroyed my cultivation. Ichika had emphasized that destroying my cultivation was only to be done in the most desperate circumstances…

Though, to be fair, she didn't quite grasp the difference between reorganizing my cultivation and destroying it. I probably didn't explain it to her well enough.

I dropped to the ground yet again to avoid the remaining spirits… about five of them now… when I heard a scream in the distance.

I didn't think Ichika would scream like a little girl, which left only one likely candidate…

"Hana!"