There was, as far as Scoria Scorn knew – and she and her fellow demonic cultivators had studied the matter in exhaustive detail – only one way to hide something from the plague. This could be implemented in various ways but ultimately relied upon the same process. Access to an area had to be blocked completely, barring the ability of the tiny unseen flakes that made up the plague’s primary mass from reaching into a space. In the simplest sense, any solid object, completely sealed, served as a barrier. She had, herself, crafted hollow steel balls with no plague within as a demonstration.

  Doing such things on any real scale was impossible. The plague moved through the air and water, it found its way between grains of sand and soil and through even the smallest crevices. Impermeable barriers of any size could never be manufactured physically, they required formations instead.

  In the case of a hidden land, this was easy. The distortion of spatial dao made the region rather like a glass bottle, the plague could enter only through the narrow open point, and this was easily blocked. Otherwise, the formation needed complete spherical coverage.

  This imposed tight restrictions on size, as even an immortal formation master would struggle to set up a sphere with a radius of more than five kilometers. More crippling, such massive formations demanded considerable qi and spread-out resonance diffusion of the qi they transformed in all directions. To a cultivator, such a construct was like a giant beacon visible from beyond the horizon. Demonic cultivators were very good at detecting such emanations. Their enemies had used small formations intensely during the war to scout and defend. They’d hunted and scourged them in turn.

  No anti-plague formation capable of covering more than an individual could survive undetected on the surface of the earth for more than a handful of hours. Even a horse-sized cleared patch would trigger reactions among the scattered demons that the demonic cultivators knew to investigate. It was believed, with vast amounts of evidence backing it up, that no such formation-based redoubts existed any longer.

  On the surface.

  Standing in gray mud hundreds of meters below that level, Scoria Scorn was surrounded by evidence that formations sealing away the plague could indeed persist undetected. Her cache had been tiny, lodged in a room that even a peasant household might well have found small. Yet even that space could sustain a cultivator in the spirit tempering realm indefinitely.

  She had no desire to spend centuries in a frigid pit in the dark, but she also knew that even such barren environments as this could be transformed. Beliadra, an orthodox immortal who perished from a failed attempt at ascension shortly before the demon war began, had taken an orb of transparent crystal from deep within the earth, carved it into the shape of a palace, filled it with every possible luxury, and set it high in the sky to circle the world as a second tiny moon.

  Her father had visited it, once. He’d counted the Lady of Auroral Mists as one of his most prominent bedroom conquests. The Entwining Blight had shattered it into a thousand pieces when the Orthodox Alliance tried to utilize it as an advance base. The plague, Scoria Scorn recalled in a sudden, critical, piece of recollection, had never breached those mirrored halls.

  The implication was clear. A remote region, isolated from all things, might well be sealed and secured. Perhaps not so well as a hidden land, but at least nearly so. On the surface or in the sky such things could be easily spotted and destroyed. Not so something buried deep underground.

  Over a decade spend as a bodiless being trapped beneath the earth had revealed much to her. Stone descended to depths she had never imagined, far further than she thought possible. Nor were gaps rare. They were many, found in places that had not seen the surface in long eons.

  She was not the only cultivator to study earth and metal. It had been a common fascination. Others would have learned of those deep refugia, and, when the war came, fled to them. A least a few, perhaps, she dared to hope, many.

  Such places would not be easily located, cloaked by mountains of stone as they were, concealed by the vast layers of iron and earth qi. Even those that could be discovered, she recognized, would largely be empty. Cowardly elders would have lived out their centuries beneath the earth only to expire of old age or perish beneath the wrath of heavenly lightning – a scourge that needed no access to the sky to strike. Others, the most potent, would be defended by immortals she could not challenge, not yet.

  Discouraging thoughts, but not enough to dissuade her, not entirely. To a demonic cultivator in the celestial ascendancy realm a lone spirit tempering realm cultivator or below offered almost nothing to be gained. Not worth the effort of spending centuries delving in the deep beneath the earth when there were hidden lands with far greater prizes to discover.

  To one in her reduced state of power, the math changed. She did not need so much, not now, to creep back toward immortality.

  Critically, she also knew she possessed the relevant skills to properly search such deep places. Attuned to the qi of iron and stone, she could search the depths with an efficiency few still living could match. Her discovery of this cave had not been an accident, nor a personal first. It was isolated, which had been useful then, but she knew there were many such places, some that had been found long ago.

  It was a simple plan, and for now only partly formed, but it offered a measure of hope in the endless darkness that she could find her way back to power.

  Such schemes also offered a direction forward. She could not remain in this place, not for long. Unless he had moved in the past dozen years, something highly dubious, Bloody Roam rested upon his rubble throne formed from ancient conquest only a few thousand kilometers to the southeast. As he was on the same continent as she was, he was far too close.

  Scoria Scorn could practically hear the terrible creak of that black armor every time she closed her eyes to think. To move even a centimeter closer to that dark doom was not a choice she would tolerate.

  North, instead, that was the pathway that beckoned her. North following the seemingly endless mountains toward the arctic sea that lay atop the pole of the world. Once there, she could turn west and cross the narrow ocean passage to the great eastern continent. A short flight, over that frigid ocean, one that would minimize the chance of detection by any observer.

  Once there she could turn south again. A long journey, one that would bring her past the place where she’d perished and to the lands along the southeastern extremes of the continent, near to the land of her birth. Ironic, perhaps, but a necessary maneuver. Those lands possessed perhaps more caverns than anywhere else in the world, and the people who would have sought to hide within them were many.

  She would test her searching method along the way. Perhaps, in the vast north, she’d manage to find someone still alive. Any source of greater strength was welcome.

  A motive, in any case, this path. One that would allow her to join revenge to all the other simmering desires that swirled through her dantian and fueled the necessary drive to continue.

  Such resolve was very much in demand. The climb out of the cave offered a brutal, grim assessment of her current capabilities. The narrow fissures comprising the long, twisting passage were far to constrained to allow the clumsy flight her spirit tempering realm form could manage. Instead, she had to slither and squirm over walls coated in cold gray mud, grasping and pulling using qi to anchor her body in the absence of proper handholds. Though the strength of her fingers allowed her to claw her way into the walls directly and wrench her body upwards, this soon became exhausting. Not to the flesh, which could easily endure such privations, but to the limited reserves of qi she now possessed.

  Fatigue, the increasing press of weakness and decline that impacted her body, was an unfamiliar feeling. Outside of the handful of rare instances where she fought a peer opponent, she had not felt such drain since the Demon War. Overcoming this weakness required pausing to cultivate and restore her reserves. It took effort, labor.

  She felt almost like a peasant, a disgusting impulse.

  She recalled placing the coffins, a trivial task, notable only for the mess and tedium it inflicted, not the effort it demanded. On the way out she recognized that, had she tried to haul one of the coffins back up without rope and spikes it would have been brutally cumbersome, a true strain upon her strength.

  Such weakness was not to be tolerated. It would be remedied, no matter how many people must die in order to rectify matters and restore her proper strength. Mortality, as a status regained, served as a punishment almost worse than disembodiment.

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  This spurred her efforts. At the conclusion of every fissure, when she reoriented, she practiced by extending her senses through the veins of metal that suffused the earth, as far as she could reach. Using that metallic sense, she sought out every gap and rift. Every last trickle of water and pocket of broken stone. Visualizing with great care, she assembled a model of the cave structure in her mind. It reminded her of designing jewelry.

  She’d been good at that, once.

  This search did not uncover any hidden human existences or buried artifacts, as expected. Unexpectedly, as she approached the surface, she found a number of qi sources in spaces she’d believed completely empty. Tiny things all, spiders, crickets, and, once within one hundred meters of the surface, a series of small salamanders all materialized in the echo of her searching projection. This offered a level of precision she’d never previously achieved.

  Sealing away the touch of the surface in her mental construct, she unlocked an image of the depths unmatched in detail and scope save that made during the time spent bodiless. By the time she crawled out to the surface in the darkness of a cloudy night she could feel the full volume of the cave beneath her feet without even closing her eyes.

  Orienting herself against the magnetic currents that webbed the sky, she began to make her way north. Walking, not flying, a trade of speed for security. She followed the spine of the mountains. Aside from occasional diversions to drink from small streams or alpine lakes she ignored the surrounding world. Her mind was focused on all that lay concealed below.

  It was autumn, and as she moved north at the rapid pace her cultivation allowed, she intersected swiftly with the bitter alpine winter and its tree-burying blizzards. Neither snow nor cold served as much hindrance to her pace, she continued to walk at a speed that would have challenged most mortals’ best sprints without any difficulty. It did make her search somewhat more cumbersome. The vast blanket of watery qi provided by the thick blanket of snow obscured her connection to the stony bones of the mountains. She had to dig down beneath that layer to touch the rock below.

  Not truly a challenge. She developed a spiral twisting motion that used her body like a drill to accomplish this. If anything, this provided a welcome break between the lengthy walking. Otherwise, she covered hundreds of kilometers each day.

  Rather than being worried by blizzards, freezing cold, or the slick coating of ice beneath her strides, she focused her vigilance upon the potential presence of other demonic cultivators. Though she watched the skies every day and extended her qi senses as far as she could, nothing occurred. The whole length of the journey passed unnoticed.

  These northern mountains, and the taiga and tundra surrounding them, had been sparsely settled even at the height of the old world. Even with farming techniques devised by cultivators, tearing food from these soils was greatly challenging. Such hidden lands as they possessed were weak. Most had been plundered long ago. The chilly wastes at the top and bottom of the world were largely ignored, left to serve as the haunts of those demonic cultivators with cold-aligned daos such as Black Howl.

  His terrain, which lay beyond the narrow icy straight, was now vacant. On this side of the world, and near to the pole, the arctic was the domain of Ice Wraith. A strong, if rather bland, woman obsessed with her namesake substance, she haunted the polar ice flows and claimed perhaps the largest territory of any cultivator.

  Thankfully, the chance of stumbling across that woman was minimal unless one had the temerity to fly over the pole. Scoria Scorn, walking, caught no sign of her. It seemed fate was not inclined to induce a confrontation at this turn of the seasons.

  Caves, her proper quarry, she found to be far more abundant than cultivators. Unfortunately, the riches she had hoped to uncover proved far more elusive.

  The caverns carved and cracked into these northern stones were wretched things. Narrow crevices and fissures formed bent and fragmented passages that descended deep into the rocks, but they were slender, erratic things. Most of them offered no egress to the surface at all. Her qi senses could find them, and cultivator strength made tunneling into the hidden recesses possible, but little was to be found within these shards of empty space buried below the mountains.

  Little, however, was not nothing. The deep caverns were numerous and though they were individually small, the total space they encompassed beneath the mountains and tundra represented a vast range of hidden resources. Those fleeing the ravages of the Demon War had utilized such places as refugia after their sects collapsed.

  Scoria Scorn found supply caches, cultivation chambers, and even carefully crafted underground dwellings capable of providing a comfortable lodging to small numbers of sheltered occupants.

  But time had won the battles the demonic cultivators never fought.

  Over and over, she dug her way down through plugs of rubble, loose stone, and mine tailings – often enough that she molded a recovered spear into a shovel specifically for this purpose – to find hidden chambers filled only with crumbling or burnt bones. Two tales, each with the same ending, played out in the deep spaces again and again, easily discerned from the wreckage. Those who had fled to the gaps below either waited out their days in the dark until old age claimed them at last, or they challenged the heavens in the hope of advancement and failed. Tracing deaths in the marks of heavenly lightning upon rocks buried a thousand meters below the surface was a surprising aesthetic, but the impact burns found on skulls that turned to dust at a touch were unmistakable.

  Some of those who escaped the war had sought to deny this lingering ending using formations and rituals, of course. Bodies laid beneath stasis formations or ritual sleeping shrouds were common, but these too expired. It seemed that the mastery necessary to truly resist the march of years belonged only to those in the celestial ascendancy realm. Lesser cultivators could delay the approach of death but not defeat it.

  A considerable disappointment, but Scoria Scorn was not greatly surprised by this. Flesh was fragile, metal endured. She did manage to gather some useful artifacts cast in stone and steel that the various high-ranking disciples and weak elders had left behind after their expiration. Most were simple protective talismans, but one was a useful anklet that allowed her strides to proceed perfectly level over any snow.

  Desultory though such results were, it was at least evidence that the strategy offered some rewards. It would take time, and the search of hundreds or even thousands of caves, but she was sure she would find survivors.

  During the solstice, when Ice Wraith habitually journeyed to the north pole to conduct some blasphemous frigid ritual demanded by her dao, Scoria Scorn took the opportunity this absence afforded to fly across the narrow passage and leave the western continent behind. In doing so she left behind tundra and grand mountains in favor of seemingly endless larch forest taiga; an ocean of frozen poles covered in frost. Bland and repetitive terrain, it offered few distractions from the need to keep her senses directed downward and hunting for hidden caves. Wolves hunted reindeer over the snow through those woods, occasionally growling at the human who dared to walk among them before fleeing from the horrific qi she exuded.

  She crossed thousands of kilometers on this journey, all of it empty of any surface signs of human activity. The few settlements that had once existed here had long since been overcome by the forest’s regrowth. It was here, in the primal wild, that her vigilance was finally rewarded.

  In a deep cave buried beneath otherwise innocuous tracts of forest, Scoria Scorn discovered a still-living woman laid out on a stone bier beneath a stasis formation. She was surrounded by blue lamps that kept the room perpetually lit and served to conceal her natural qi respiration. The stasis ritual had been laid atop a shroud of thick felted reindeer wool laid over the body.

  The demonic cultivator did not learn what the woman looked like until after she chopped off her head and consumed her qi.

  Only in the awareness integration realm, this victim offered no more than a mild boost towards her next layer, but every fraction counted.

  Her face, bearing the distinctive features of those who had once called this vast forest their homeland, told a much more interesting story. The concealed cultivator wore distinctive clothing made from the black-furred reindeer bred only in the Dark River Refuge. That hidden land, once the home of nearly thirty thousand souls, had been destroyed eight hundred years earlier by Black Howl and the Scourging Wheel. It was a story Scoria Scorn knew well, for the wolfish cultivator liked to repeat it at every opportunity.

  The two demonic cultivators, savage warriors both, had allowed most of the Dragon River Sect’s members to escape while they fought the group’s unexpectedly potent immortal patriarch. Black Howl claimed that either the demon horde or the brutal cold killed all those survivors. A symbolic version of the story carved into wall declared this a falsehood, an error allowed by the wolfish warrior’s general sloppiness.

  Many of the survivors had hidden underground, preserved by the methods of a potent ritualist elder while he searched for a new home that might protect them.

  A home he never found. The image carved onto the walls, complete with distinctive headgear featuring reindeer horns, was familiar. Scoria Scorn had killed that soul forging elder herself, six hundred years ago. He’d been wandering about among the limestone formations in the southern portion of the continent between her birthplace and the towering mountains of the great plateau.

  At the time, she’d had no idea how he’d gotten there or what he’d been seeking. Now she did. He’d been looking for caves, perhaps even a hidden land buried below ground. Avarice spiked within her as she contemplated what he might have found. All the treasures of those vast caverns would fuel her cultivation.

  For a dozen years she wandered south, hunting and slaying far beneath the earth. Her victims were few in number, no more than two score all told, but there were enough elders among them to push her strength to the seventh layer of spirit tempering. Almost real strength, almost. The speed, at least, sufficed to purchase her some peace of mind. She would find the prey she needed before old age claimed her.

  Throughout this process, she found further haunts left by the aged formation master. He had believed there was a hidden land to be found, deep beneath the earth in the region where the great mountains bent southward. As her power grew, death by death, Scoria Scorn moved into agreement with that viewpoint. She turned her eyes to the great caverns of the southeast, convinced they must possess the strength necessary to restore her immortality.

  She would regain that height. The price was meaningless.

  However, she would not proceed directly. The hidden land of the Twelve Sisters lay along her path, and she saw no reason to let considerations of vengeance pass unaddressed. Those who had killed her would not escape the consequences of her attention.