After I finally found the bowl, I considered checking in with the young mistress. But the more I worked over the various ways that conversation might play out in my mind, the less I liked it. Meng Daiyu just acted too familiarly with me compared to the other elders for me to want to risk any more conversations than I had to. She seemed to treat me like a very distant martial uncle, someone who'd acted as her dao protector before, but that she didn't particularly care to interact with.

  She'd directly told me to bugger off, wanting to keep whatever she was doing with that revenant and the formation flags to herself. My money was on some sort of absorption technique. Elder Shi's disciples seemed far more the sort to collect undead like Pokemon. The young mistress seemed to expect me to fulfill the letter of my duties while being a minor recalcitrant nuisance to her in particular, and material property in general, and I saw no reason not to do exactly that. If she needed me, she had one of Elder Liang's talismans.

  I suspected that if anything, blowing up a trial formation and breaking some buildings had reinforced my cover with her.

  Instead, I opted to find an unoccupied building. It wasn't that hard. I picked out some of the smallest little floating outcroppings orbiting around the larger islands, the ones with modest looking single room buildings atop them. It only took two tries to find one that was completely empty, not a single ominous looking corpse lying around waiting to spring into unlife. Even for how sparsely populated many sects were, this place was not filled with anywhere near as many bodies as it should have had occupants.

  There were so many unknowns still here, but I was starting to build a picture. To me, it looked like this place had already been decimated, before whatever horror turned it into a living tomb. A war or other hardship greatly reduced their population, culled their higher order cultivators. Then they retreated into this formation as a final measure of defense, fully isolating themselves from the outside world. Only to for it to fail horribly, the seeds of their doom already planted within. Some sort of curse or infiltrator perhaps, that the weakened sect didn't have the resources to detect or defeat.

  The one glaring flaw I saw with that theory was why they didn't give up and bring down the barrier at some point. Surely, as the bodies started mounting, someone with authority would have considered whether it was better to risk the danger without than whatever hell the sect had descended into?

  There wasn't much point to this speculation. Hopefully I would have first hand answers soon.

  I paused, as I wiped the slowly drying blood from my face with a half-detached sleeve. Perhaps I should treat the Ghost Immortal with a little more caution. They were clearly positioning themselves as the last remnant of the lunar sect. But if they had some level of access to the memories of anyone who had recently used the formation, they could just as easily have been the very thing that murdered them.

  Most damningly, it clearly explained why they wouldn't have lowered the barrier. If the threat had usurped control of the formation, they wouldn't have had the option.

  I wiped the drying blood off my face with a sleeve. This robe was yet another write-off. Still, I had hundreds. It would be nice to have clothing that would survive a fight though, or better yet, real armor. I'd thrown the scraps of that opalescent robe in my ring, but I'd put enough rents in it that it would never serve as a full garment again.

  Fully clothed and slightly less disheveled, I pondered the choice before me. Bowl, or rings?

  Rings. The safer choice.

  One at a time, I passed qi through them. Two of the rings yielded up their contents without resistance. The third felt like a solid knot to my qi. It wasn't a rock. There were places, that a sufficiently tight stream of qi could be pressed, like the folds of a knot. But no matter how I manipulated it, where I put pressure, it didn't shift or yield.

  I set the third ring aside, and focused on the other two. If there was a trick to instantly understanding the contents of a storage ring, I didn't know it. Instead, I simply removed items as I found them, categorizing them by the way they felt to my qi-sense, then stored them anew and tried to avoid pulling the same thing out twice.

  It wasn't the fastest process, but I quickly began sorting things into categories. There was plenty of clothing, robes in mostly shades of white and blue. Few were of particular quality, but I saw more embroidery than I did from most modern sects. They felt fragile to my hands though, as if they were ready to fall apart. A few weapons. Two swords, a war-fan with iron-ribbing, and a ornate quarterstaff of ivory wood that looked valuable.

  The most interesting thing, wasn't what I found, but what I didn't. A complete absence of almost anything I would consider a consumable. No food. Not a single spirit stone. Only a few weak paper talismans of unknown purpose, even more degraded than the robes.

  A few manuals, but they were in the same condition as the talismans, barely readable. An effect of the ambient curse? Or just a weaker protection against the passage of time than my ring?

  I set them aside. The quarterstaff and the ring with security features should be worth something at least.

  They were another point in favor of a long siege though. The cultivators here had eventually consumed every spirit stone they had trying to hold on. Or, their maddened senior had stolen them and put them all in her ring.

  I pulled out the bowl, gently enveloping in qi. It felt pure, almost holy. I wasn't even sure what that meant; I'd never been a religious man. I'd been raised too catholic, and bounced backward in the opposite direction as a young man. But the bowl felt solemn. Like an well kept grave on an untouched mountain. It's qi was tightly contained, but the untainted light it emanated stood out like a beacon. It pressed back against the bloody light seeping in through the broken windows.

  I felt a tension I'd barely noticed slowly ease. Suddenly the idea that the Ghost Immortal was behind the death of the sect seemed just a little less plausible, a little more of a reach. The idea of killing the Glass Flowers here to simplify the situation a little less tempting. The air here wasn't just foul, whatever had corrupted the sect wasn't gone yet.

  I'd have to pull the young mistress out before anything unfortunate happened. It explained why the Glass Flower elders kept stepping out for breathers.

  I poured qi into the bowl. Not a great deal of it, I was already running low. The bowl drank it in, then characters flashed across the surface.

  Unrecognized

  I smiled. That was something I could work with. This had to be the terminal. Some sort of qi-computer, or qi-control panel. The Ghost Immortal had been confident I should be able to reach them through it. That meant it couldn't be completely locked down to authorized users only. I pushed in more qi, but resisted letting the device drink it in. The little thread of power wavered, pulled in two directions at once. Feeling around, I poked at the internals.

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  The bowls internals felt sharp and cold, ticking and rotating like invisible clockwork. Clean hard logic that threatened to slice my little thread of qi if it moved in a way that contravened them. I followed them, the thread taking mind-bending turns in accordance with rules I didn't understand, only felt. Eventually, I found something else. A small knot of qi that was neither mine, nor the unfeeling light of the terminal. The previous user?

  I stabbed it. Treating my power like a blade hadn't served me wrong so far. A gentle upward sweep broke something vital, and the knot fell apart.

  New characters flowed across the screen.

  Creating New Session

  I flailed blindly, trying to tie the small thread of qi my qi into a stable form like the previous user. Like the revenant I'd put down. The first two attempts dissipated, before I had an epiphany. I'd created stable structures of qi before, hadn't I? They'd just threatened to kill me.

  It was far trickier to tie a knot with external qi. The stuff liked to knot, but external qi had a sort of impetus to spread out in every direction, like ink across a page. My attempts to create one in the air around me failed, so I resorted to trying it within the bowl. It was surprisingly intuitive. I just repeated one of the many different cycling patterns I'd already discarded as a failure. A simple figure eight, then a line through both center loops.

  'Shapes with a line cutting through them' had been a whole category I'd tried for brute forcing a cultivation method. They'd all ended in violent expulsions of blood and qi.

  Here though, it worked exactly as I'd hoped. The moment the cross line reconnected with the figure eight, the whole thing looped back on itself. It accelerated, every line and curve shortening as the qi moved faster. The whole thing cinched itself shut even as I cut the flow of power, forming an ugly sort of mass that at least maintained it's form.

  More characters began flowing across the surface of the bowl, rapidly filling the small space and disappearing off the screen of liquid light. Messages ever so familiar, yet drastically different.

  New User Registered

  Session Created

  Seeking Unity

  Connection Established

  Warning - Non-Standard External Dharma Found

  External Connection Registered - Transferring Session

  User 'Anchor' is Now Session Host

  User 'Anchor' has changed their name to 'The Last Rabbit'

  Space Configured

  Initializing Space

  The white light pouring from the bowl shifted, becoming more opaque. It coated the walls, formed translucent panes across the empty windows. The surface of the bowl bubbled, black characters falling and fading as it's surfaced bulged outwards. The watery light popped, and a star rose from beneath the surface.

  The star flashed, and I was suddenly no longer alone. The figure before me was as translucent as the new windows, clearly an illusion.

  "I see you're not wearing the young mistress's face anymore." I said.

  "The dreaming chambers have a limited capacity for novel visualization. They pull almost entirely from the memories of the subject within, and choose most of their content before spinning up the illusionary domain. I'm sure one of my sisters could have done better, but I'm no mistress of formations."

  She frowned, brow furrowing. She gave a single sad little laugh, like the last leaf falling from an autumn tree.

  "Well, if any of them still lived."

  We fell into silence at that. I'd had a plan for this conversation, but she'd completely sidetracked it. I had no idea what to say to that.

  I stood up from the bowl, inspecting the woman standing before me. The alleged immortal, the only known survivor of this place. She was short, for a powerful cultivator. Five foot eight perhaps, coming up roughly to my chin. Instead of a Daoist's robes she wore a tunic and pants, a martial artist's unform. Her white hair was cropped short, with a single stark black streak across the bangs. Not a trace of power emanated from her. Either she was far beyond my ability to sense, or more likely this was a simple visual and audio illusion, with no substance at all.

  She looked more like a disciple than an immortal. Then our eyes met, and I shivered. Ink black sclera, with veins the shone like stars. Her pupils were far off center. It took me a moment to parse the inhuman appearance, to realize that her iris wasn't an iris at all, but an image of the current phase of the moon. A waning gibbous.

  I looked away first.

  "So, who exactly are you?" She asked.

  "I should be asking you that question." I countered.

  "Would my name even mean anything to you? How long has it been now, that we've been sealed? A millennia? Two? I've no doubt Heaven scrubbed every trace of us from history. They're good at that."

  The words spilled out of her in a flood, a dam broken. I remained silent, letting her speak.

  "I've had a lot of names over the years. Ye Qing. The Loyal Rabbit. The Keeper of Solace. Chang Xin. The Sage of Fierce Joy."

  None of those meant anything to me. The mention of Chang and rabbit didn't escape me though. It was far too early, to inquire about how her history matched up with the mythology I knew.

  "I am the sole surviving member of the Lunar Solace Sect. She who broke herself in battle against the First Hound of Heaven, and remained behind when her sisters marched to war against the greatest of tyrants."

  She grew more agitated as she spoke, pacing tight circles around the small room.

  "The disciple who watched from afar as her mistress fought to break the order of the world and lost. The failure who gave everything and yet could not even protect her youngest sisters. Who watched helplessly as they fell to corruption, denied even the release of true death. That is who I am." She hissed, turning to face me once more. "I've seen the memories of your generation. The world you remember looks nothing like theirs. You are not powerful enough to have endured from a higher era. Now tell me, who is it that stands before me?"

  I froze. I'd wanted to avoid this. Steer the conversation away from my own origins, focus on what we might do for each other. But she'd offered me so much about herself. To give her the truth would be to give her the means to destroy me. But, I already had what I needed to take her with me. I had no doubt the real elders of the Pathless Night would leap at the chance to bind a bodiless and weakened immortal to their service.

  She'd introduced herself as a heroic figure, but opposed to Heaven. She already knew there was something abnormal about me.

  "I'm an imposter." I said simply. "By some strange accident of fate I do not understand, I took the form and position of Elder Hu Xin of the Pathless Night Sect."

  She stared blankly at me.

  I knelt, then pressed my head to the floor. Pride was a weakness I could not afford. If I was going to do this, make vulnerability my angle, I would give it all I had. And I had no shortage of it.

  "What are you-"

  "I have no idea what I'm doing." The desperation in my voice was far from feigned.

  "You don't need to-"

  "Please help me." I cut her off. "Please help me protect those who have put their faith in me. Help me ensure my fraudulent teachings don't cripple their cultivation. Help me protect them from the wrath of the sect when I'm discovered."

  I waited a beat, letting her mind draw the inevitable parallel with her own sisters. It was low, but I was not above it.

  "I'll do-"

  "Enough." This time I was the one cut off. Her voice wasn't angry though. The earlier edge had left, replaced with a quiet exhaustion. "Rise."

  I stood up. I'd been about to promise her the moon, swear to do anything to help her recover her strength. But that would have been a lie, and I didn't mind being cut off before I uttered it. I wanted to help her, but blind faith was a luxury I couldn't afford with stakes like these. A choice between me and her, or Su Li and her, was no choice at all.

  "When I was young, I had a bad habit of rushing headlong into every conflict. Always the first to stand against evil. I brought a great deal of trouble to my lady's feet in the process. I'd like to think I've matured a little in the intervening years. My sisters would have disagreed."

  She gave that sad smile again.

  "But then, they're hardly in a position to talk. They chose the bleakest mountain of all to plant their banners upon."

  "Let's begin again." She said. "With a little less intensity. I am the Immortal Ye Qing, and I would like you to help me free myself from the prison I forged in a futile effort to protect my sisters."

  "I am Hu Xin." I said, meaning it. My other name was dead, so long as I needed to keep living this one. "An imposter of an elder with little comprehension of the Dao, and less still of the sword. And I would desperately like to trust you."