The core territory that once belonged to the Endless Mysteries Sect was bounded on the northeastern side by a set of rough hills sufficiently rugged that they'd been put into the sect's service as timber stands rather than being terraced for rice cultivation. The river, conveniently, cut through these hills directly, with the only obstacle being a wide and shallow lake lapping their northern boundaries due to a recent landslide-formed weir. Qing Liao halted at that lake for as long as he dared. While Amami Yoko floated in the center, meditating and recovering as much strength as she could, he patrolled the edges. Running a series of rapid circuits and taking advantage of the open sight lines to pick off ghouls at some distance, he managed to secure almost an entire day undisturbed for the water cultivator's recovery.

He discovered, during this process, that the members of the Great Waves Sect preferred to cultivate almost totally immersed in water. Amami Yoko floated in vertical suspension with her head tilted backward such that only her face remained above the surface. Even that concession to the need to periodically breathe was something she was able to ignore for hours spent entirely submerged, and one elders would eventually abandon entirely. Liao found it rather disconcerting to watch. His instincts kept screaming at him that the woman was silently drowning and would never emerge unless he swam out and grabbed her.

Despite his misgivings, the method was undeniably effective. Surrounded by water on all sides, Amami Yoko was able to draw in almost as much qi as she might have had she been using the Celestial Induction Method. That accomplishment, which Liao could feel directly as the hours passed, meant the peak efficacy of her cultivation method was among the best ever devised, though the geographic restriction was considerable.

Thankfully, the continual flow of the river through the lake provided a steadily renewing source of water qi. A still body of this size would have been depleted in no more than a handful of hours. That limitation had already revealed itself in the small still pools of the mountains.

She recovered sufficient strength as a result of this immersion that, when they made their next stop in the narrow canyon the river carved through the hills, Liao allowed her to stand guard. Sayaana claimed this was extending too much trust too soon but reluctantly agreed that the water cultivator's pledge would bind her. For someone who possessed such flexible techniques governing motion and combat she had a remarkably rigid personality. Sayaana suggested this was likely a consequence of growing up in a land that survived only through the application of absolute tyranny.

Liao, reflecting on this, considered that he believed the Twelve Sisters were as absolute in their authority as any ruler might be, but he conceded that, in a great many ways, they were notably circumspect regarding the application of their power. It surprised him, this discovery of the critical importance of the illusion of freedom and its power to shape lives and lands. One of the many philosophical nuggets Amami Yoko's presence had precipitated out of the wilderness.

Though it was not necessary for a pair of awareness integration realm cultivators with the capability of seeing perfectly well in anything other than absolute darkness, Liao nevertheless chose to time their approach to the former headquarters of the Endless Mysteries Sect in the morning, with the light of the rising sun strongly illuminating the Sunfire Islands. Geography had granted these lands magnificent morning vistas, and he simply felt better when maintaining something like an ordinary person's working schedule, at least as much as someone who only needed to sleep two hours each night possibly could.

As it happened, this choice proved to be almost entirely irrelevant. The moment the pair passed beyond the inner edge of the hills they found themselves moving through an expanse coated in a perpetual, smoky-gray, haze. This cloud-like cover was sufficiently thick that it turned the rising sun a frightful reddish-orange shade. Scenery familiar to Liao, who in his wanderings had witnessed the sky-shrouding power of wildfire many times, but his other senses failed to find a match for the dramatic visual backdrop. There was not even a hint of the smoky, burnt, and ashen scent that a fire would leave thick in its wake. Nor did a white-gray layer of ash cover the ground amid dark burn scars. Instead, this region was coated in short brown grass and stunted woody shrubs.

The qi flowing through the region was strange as well, twisted and weak, as if the haze leeched away light and life alike. The stellar qi that found its way through that blanket was meager, attenuated worse than even being underground. Everything felt lessened, withered.

"This place reeks worse than a black marsh," Sayaana hissed inside Liao's skull.

"The waters here are afflicted," Amami Yoko declared quietly a moment later. "Something has been done to this place, some alternation through the influence of a massive formation." Her amendment was confirmed by the remnant soul instantly, linked qi informing Liao of fierce agreement.

"This is the ragged edge," Liao recognized. He had learned a considerable amount of formation lore from Su Yi. Not enough to build anything but the simplest of assemblies himself, but his knowledge sufficed to recognize ambient phenomena. "A boundary space caused by fraying layering toward the edge of control. The full intended effect will only be found further in."

"Improper," Amami Yoko declared immediately with the formidable dedication of one who had lived in a land where maintenance was life. "How could the structure be allowed to degrade so far?"

"Time," Liao held back any admonishments he might have made, recognizing the ignorance that informed that statement. The warrior from beneath the waves was far from a fool, but she had lived for centuries inside a tiny little world and struggled to recognize that its methods were not the only ones that might suffice to sustain human existence. Listening to her was like looking back in time, a lesson he'd been taught preemptively by Sayaana long ago. One that, if the remnant soul had not been so careful, he would likely have perished while still grasping to understand.

"Whatever sustains this formation," it was difficult to grasp and study the twisting qi flows amid the haze, but Liao suspected a series of widely separated stone shrines, something he'd seen in many places on these islands. "Has been damaged by changes to the land. The river floods every year," he pointed to marks dug by rising water into the embankment in the hope that this would be something the water cultivator might recognize. "And the anchors tumble, grind down, or collapse entirely. I suspect the original reach of the formation extended out past the hills we just crossed."

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A frightening thing to contemplate, especially if the blanket of haze-forming power extended equally far south down toward the ocean. That was a vast area, many times larger than the Killing Fields. The effort to cover such a massive space, and to maintain that influence for twenty-seven centuries and more, would be tremendous. The power and mastery necessary could only be frightening.

Prior to the outbreak of the Demon War, the Endless Mysteries Sect had been led by one of the rare immortals who'd achieved the seventh layer of the celestial ascension realm. Though its numbers and influence never matched that of its martial neighbor to the east, the briefing provided by Zhou Hua suggested a sect of dark and fearsome reputation. That long-lost sect leader perished when the demons overran the Sunfire Islands, but that battle had unfolded without witnesses or survivors.

Liao, staring at a sky stained and grayed away, began to believe traveling to this place was a mistake, even though the haze did seem to somehow serve to repel the demons.

They continued to follow the river south for several hours. Travel proceeded slowly, at barely more than a mortal's swift walking pace, due to the limited visibility and distorted local qi. This path swung them west before shifting south once more, keeping them to the western margins of the sect's territory, far from its ruined heart. The surrounding land held evidence, even after millennia, that it had once been intensely farmed. Flattened and channeled in a way that drew out the floods, Liao could feel through his boots the echo of the once great rice crops that ripened for centuries on these grounds.

No buildings dotted the wide paddy plain. The people of the Sunfire Islands preferentially built of wood and bamboo, eschewing stone and brick. These materials had not endured against the shifting course of the river and the merciless passage of time. Instead, the evidence of previous human habitation was limited to a truly incredible number of stone lanterns. These monuments, which were instantly recognizable as the anchor points that sustained the formation, most lay at least half-submerged in the mud. Many were buried deeper still. Amami Yoko, able to sense their presence through the water, noted that many had worked their way down to the margin where the sea lapped against the bedrock far below.

Those carved stone monuments, each of which resembled a little hexagonal room placed atop a wide pillar, radiated a singular form of power. They took in surrounding qi from the earth and soil and projected back death.

The haze, Liao realized shortly after encountering the first of these stony filters, came from the countless tiny flakes of living things, tiny creatures too small to be seen carried on the wind. Spiderlings, pollen, spores, and countless other unseen flickering essences of life that had perished when brought into the grasp of the deadly formation.

It did not harm the cultivators. The damaged qi-channeling structure lacked the power to do so. It could not even block scavengers from plundering this bounty of dead matter that drifted down from above as fleshy ash. Crows and rats flocked to this border region, foraging openly under the gray shroud left behind by the blocked sun.

Such scenes of grim recycling came to an end when they reached the inner edge of the boundary zone and touched upon the core region where the formation still functioned as originally intended.

They struck this point while crossing a narrow island that had formed as the river was joined by a final set of tributaries from the north and west before turned to its terminal southward rush towards a modest bay visible not ten kilometers distant.

It was impossible to miss this transition. There was a line in the dirt where the brown grass ceased growing and then, not five steps further, the soil gave way to nothing save for white sand and gray pebbles. All sound died. There were no birds, no insects, no rodents, not even the sound of fish jumping in the river.

The haze vanished. Every scrap fell to the ground and washed away.

The sun blared down upon bare stones alone, gray-shaded, white, and empty. This desolate sandbar extended all the way out to the ocean.

A dead land. Lifeless. Not a scrap of qi from any living source could be found.

Qing Liao had walked through the ash fields left behind by volcanoes. They appeared lifeless on the surface, but even there scraps of qi indicative of slow but inexorable recovery could be discerned. This emptiness was different. It was far worse. Complete, absolute, annihilation.

He had seen such a phenomenon before. The desolated circles left behind by the all-consuming blizzard of Snow Feast were extremely similar. Somehow, he found this place to be even worse. The demonic cultivator ate the world in service to his unending gluttony. An abject horror, and pointless, but at least one whose process could be discerned, reckoned with. This land, it had simply been murdered. A formation sunk down into it so far that it had killed a portion of the earth itself.

The wild was gone from this place, as if it had never been. No legacy of the living remained. It echoed a world that had never lived, an airless sphere such as the moon high above.

And yet, in a wretched revelation that left Liao heaving and holding back bile in his throat, he knew exactly why this had been done. The haze held the answer. Those gray clouds contained not only the remains of countless tiny creatures of the wild, but the equally numerous fragmented corpses of the endless crimson flakes that formed the plague. Not only were there no demons in this dead space, but the touch of the plague had been scourged from the dead stones entirely.

The plague, it lived. Not as any thing should exist. Not in the way of any creature, no matter how strange, that Liao knew.

But it was alive.

A dead space, a world devoid of life itself, that could not sustain the plague. The formation that killed the wild struck it down as well. All things purged beneath the same baleful sword.

"There is still water qi in the river," Amami Yoko's announcement completed the terrible cycle.

The earth could not survive under that formation, but qi came from more than life alone. The killing power did not impede stellar qi any more than that of water. It offered safety to cultivators from the plague, though at a price Liao could not bear to contemplate. Even so, they were here, in this moment, and dared not neglect the boon before them.

Despite that, he found he had absolutely no desire to search further. "Let us move down to the coast," he suggested, speaking in a whisper out of some inexplicable mourning instinct. "We can recover there, and then leave this place. The demonic cultivators have not destroyed it, and I think we would do better to avoid any secret even they fear."

Visceral horror, in that moment, overcame all loss and desire for vengeance in the water cultivator. Amami Yoko answered with a single word. "Agreed."

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