Traveling through the lifeless landscape was bizarre. It was flat and empty. Loose sand covered the ground and boulders, deposited by the many centuries of river and tide action, lay scattered about seemingly at random. Occasionally some piece of stone lying on the empty plain was recognizable as an item worked by human hands, usually some fragment of a pillar. Beyond these rare remains, only the countless stone lanterns served to signify that humans had ever lived here. Otherwise, it was desolate on a level that outpaced even the wastelands of ash fields. The sun, shining down through an empty sky, reflected its brightness off the sand back into their faces. Though strengthened cultivator eyes ignored this glare easily, the luminosity served as a constant reminder of the alien nature of this place.

"The water is different," Amami Yoko, her direction drawn to other vistas, noted somberly. "The color is strange."

A single glance sufficed to place Liao fully in agreement with that statement. The river here ran almost crystal clear, as if it were a high mountain stream formed entirely of melted snow and not a delta about to discharge into the ocean. Despite this, beneath the surface it possessed a strange, softly greenish shade. Running her hand through this layer, the water cultivator revealed the presence of needles, leaves, and a great deal of dirt carried in that current. This detritus was remarkably well preserved, untouched by the myriad tiny lives that would normally reside in the waters and tear it apart.

A deeply unnatural framing. The remains of life rushing along on the waters of death.

"Rivers contain life, just like the ocean," Liao noted, feeling oddly sick looking at that twisted waterway. It was, in some way he could not define, somehow a greater violation than the land of death surrounding it. "It seems that killing it is visible even from above." It was a rare day that he uncovered a hidden truth as to the nature of the world that he would rather have not known.

The ocean-born refugee nodded at this. "There are things, bubbles of poison, that can rise from the depths and kill a portion of the waters, for a brief time. Perhaps that would appear this way, if viewed from above."

Liao simply nodded at this. It was a reminder that this woman came from a strange place indeed. His desire, his need, to ply her endlessly with questions regarding her homeland grew step by step, but he suppressed it still. It was not the time. Thankfully her formal nature offered an excuse to avoid inquiry.

Not wanting to walk into the heart of the formation, Liao chose a path that led them down the long sandbar-like island that rose up between the two branches of the river delta. This had the side benefit of placing water between them and any threats, a small source of reassurance. Amami Yoko walked beside him down to the edge of the bay, able to keep the relaxed pace he set without difficulty.

As they moved, Liao kept his head on a constant swivel, watching for threats, but also for the shadowy profile that revealed trees in the distance to the west. By gauging the distance to vegetation, and the edge of the formation's influence, he was able to form a crude outline in his head as true extent of this bubble of death. "The heart of this lies somewhere to the southeast," he determined as they approached the shore. That would place it in the water, or perhaps on a small island. He could not determine which one, as a peninsula of denuded and lifeless hills blocked the view. "We need not go that far. Will the edge of the bay suffice to restore you?"

"Yes," Amami Yoko nodded, displaying equal hesitancy to approach the center of this space. "The pulse of the tide refreshes water qi across the ocean. I should be able to regain my full strength here, though it may take some weeks."

"I have food, and purification pills." The latter mattered far more, Liao knew. Though fuel was important to recovery, cultivators of their status needed very little, able to derive almost the totality of their nutrition from water and qi alone. The power to purge foreign qi, taken in by mistake, represented a much more critical component to rapid recovery. Though he supposed that this space, being dead, might have naturally purified many sources of qi, sickening as the conception was.

The warrior paused in the face of these words, blinking rapidly as she stared at him. "You would simply gift me your pills?" Sudden shock fractured her normally formalized speech patterns.

"They are only ordinary purification pills," Liao found the question bizarre. "I take one at the beginning of each week." He'd kept that schedule ever since entering the awareness integration realm. "This storage bracelet," he tapped one of the silver bands tied to his chest. "Contains nearly one hundred. It is nothing of consequence."

The things were foul tasting in any case, and one of the side benefits of becoming an elder and no longer needing food besides powdered supplements would be the reduced need to take the things. Some elders, he knew, paid a premium for candy-coated versions of the pills so that they could continue to enjoy the luxury of cuisine.

"How can your sect offer so much?" Amami Yoko's sharp eyes widened, and the crack in her demeanor widened into a massive fissure. "I received such pills only when preparing to advance. Impurities must be purged as part of one's regular cultivation."

"But the ingredients are common." Liao understood that certain pills, especially powerful enhancements and advanced medicines, required dozens of rare components to produce, but the substances used to form basic purification pills were widespread and abundant. He had, after all, discerned and formulated a crude facsimile from herbs and earth he gathered in the bamboo forest. Though no alchemist himself, he could craft the pills himself if he borrowed a furnace. Students practiced their skills with this recipe, working to master the steps of alchemy. "And the formula is simple. I could find everything necessary to brew a batch searching in those hills," he pointed to the west. "For a day or two."

Those words, though they were nothing more than common knowledge in the Celestial Origin Sect, caused the athletic water cultivator to go perfectly still. "Plants are not seaweeds, seaweeds are not plants," she whispered this several times, repeating it like a mantra. Her legs locked in place, and her fingers wrapped about the hilts of her swords until her knuckles turned white. "The sect head told me, many times, that though the sea supplied us with a great bounty, it had many limits, limits not even an immortal could overcome."

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

She shook back and forth, slowly. Not the jarring, crackling shivering of a cold and terrified land dweller, but a sinuous, serpentine convulsion. "I did not believe. I thought the sea was limitless, but now you tell me that something I called a rare treasure is commonplace to you. The metals too, that must be the same. I thought all that you carried was a mark of favor, something granted you as your sect's chosen scout, but I suppose that such treasures are ordinary to your sect too."

Liao had noticed that, aside from her swords, Amami Yoko possessed no metal equipment at all. Her clothes were woven out of strips of treated hide. They were exquisitely dyed, but the fastenings holding her garments together were formed of carved bone and shell. Several pieces of string holding in place decorative flourishes were, as discerned through the keen experience of one who worked textiles, woven from human hair.

It was clear that life under the seas left even elite cultivators impoverished compared to those residing on land.

"It would be difficult to forge metal without charcoal," Liao reasoned aloud, determining at least one challenge immediately. "Things are different on the surface. Humans are not aquatic animals, we were never meant to live below the waves." He imagined a submerged realm might be interesting to visit – he had broadly enjoyed all the submerged time he'd spent hunting for sharks – but the challenges attendant to surviving in such a place, especially for mortals, quickly overwhelmed his imagination.

"The plague made us do many things that should never have been necessary in order to survive." Even living in Mother's Gift, pleasant though it might be, still represented a form of imprisonment. As the only one granted the freedom to walk through the bars, he had come to know this truth intimately.

"I hope seven years will be long enough to understand," Amami Yoko whispered. The full meaning of those troubled words were not immediately clear to Liao, but they seemed to steady her.

"Running from demons is not the best way to see the world, unfortunately," he tried to make a joke of it, but this drew out only a grimace. While carrying her he had done his best to point out some things, but at the speed of cultivators on the run there was little chance to appreciate the scenery. "For now, we need to focus on recovering your strength. I do not like this place, and it seems any safety it offers will not last long. There are no demons here because this land is dead, but," he looked over to her. "You are very much alive. They will likely sense you in time and come here."

This warning was one the warrior agreed to readily. Without further pause, they moved down to the water to begin.

Amami Yoko swam some distance out into the surf to cultivate, which was gentle here in the shallow confines of the bay. There she could find a space deep enough that she could float with only her face showing and her toes above the seafloor. Contact with sand or mud, apparently, greatly accelerated the uptake of impurities. Liao, by contrast, chose to remain on shore, just above the tideline. He saw no reason to get soaked unnecessarily. Within the confines of this strange, lifeless formation he held little worry that the demons would climb up from deep water.

The resulting arrangement placed them over one hundred meters apart, but that was not so far that they would be unable to react swiftly in tandem to some unexpected surprise. Adopting the lotus pose to cultivate, he placed his bow across his knees, looked up to the stars, and waited.

Not focused cultivation this practice, that would be far too dangerous even with Sayaana to keep watch using his senses, but instead an extended effort to draw in stellar qi and saturate his dantian, tissues, and brain. Not only did he seek to refill his reserves, he worked to restore his form to the peak of health and readiness. He cleansed accumulated impurities, shifted his qi in a massage across weary points to remove injuries, and allowed his mind to relax and lose itself in the whirl of stars until tensions dissipated.

The rest of the way home, he believed, would have to be faced with constant focus. If he was to successfully escort the water cultivator across such a vast and unfamiliar landscape, his peak condition was required. Nothing could be neglected.

Cultivating inside the regrettably dead space was just as strange an experience as he'd anticipated. The abundance of stellar qi remained unchanged from that of any other open space, but the absence of life meant that there were fewer distractions present. Qi remained in the ground, the water, and the air, but it was only ambient loose backdrop essence produced by the base environment. All of the concentrations, the points of brightness normally sourced to living existences, were gone. Whether it was the mighty, solid presences of great trees or the tiny flickers produced by nearly invisible little insects, all had been scoured clear. Even the plague itself, the red alien film that overlaid everything the Ruined Wastes, had somehow been purged.

The result was oddly pure, and it made gathering in stellar qi easier than it often was. Closed door cultivation chambers sometimes utilized sterilizing formations for this purpose. Designed to remove the influence of mold, pollen, and other obstacles from the air until a truly pure environment remained, they had a similar effect. He suspected, without anything other than intuition to support it, that the vast formation enclosing the bounds of the Endless Mysteries Sect had been built up from that general principle. This made it somehow less terrifying, thinking of it as an ordinary thing merely vastly increased in size.

Liao hated the murdered landscape, but he also recognized the potency of it. Whoever had built this overlay had succeeded in killing the plague. The difference from the surrounding environment of the Ruined Wastes was immediate and palpable. The plague, alien and awful though it was, lived. A thing long suspected, the land of death confirmed it as absolute truth. Cultivating there on the shore, he grasped this truth tight and buried it deep down near his core.

Life, but not the life of the world, of the earth. The true origin remained unknown, as did how it preyed upon the vital qi of humanity alone. A critical key, that mystery, one Liao suspected he would need to solve. Immune as he was, perhaps the answer lay within him.

Nothing to broach here and now, however. Recovery was the order of this interlude. Whatever scheme had brought the Endless Mysteries Sect to murder this land had not, in the end, saved them. Indiscriminate death might destroy the plague, but it was not the solution he required.

Days passed. Liao recovered first, being only modestly exhausted. Amami Yoko took longer, nearly two full weeks, nineteen days suspended in the crystal-clear bay. Gradually, the waters and the working of her qi returned her to the fullness of her ability, one that measurably surpassed his own.

Liao felt no fear at this shift. He did not, could not, fully understand the refugee from beneath the waves, but the vow, the bond she had declared, in that he held no doubts.

The demons, however, did not remain idle. Eventually one red-headed monster sensed Amami Yoko's growing qi and stepped through the haze.

The land beyond, though dead, responded to that provocation with unholy fury.

Next chapter will be updated first on this website. Come back and continue reading tomorrow, everyone!

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.