Chương 183: The Sacred Grove

The path up to the shrine was winding and it went through really thick forest, every step brought us further away from the village where everything felt safe and normal and into territory that felt much older and stranger than anything down below.

The trees in this part of the forest were ancient looking, their trunks so wide that you would need three people standing side by side with their hands linked together to even get around one of them, and their branches stretched upward into the canopy above so high you could barely see where they ended.

"These trees..." Su Yue said quietly, pressing her palm flat against one of the biggest trunks.

"They're completely saturated with spiritual energy." She was not wrong about that at all. I could feel it myself, the way spiritual energy had soaked into every single fiber of wood and every leaf and every root system going deep into the earth, these were trees that had been growing in the presence of extremely concentrated spiritual energy for what must have been hundreds of years at minimum.

"The Sacred Grove," I said out loud, and there were memories that did not quite feel like my own rising up to the surface of my mind as I said it.

"That's what the village elders always called this place. Children were never allowed to come play here because they always said the trees would eat anyone who didn't treat the place with the proper respect."

"That's just stories people make up to keep children from wandering into dangerous spiritual zones," one of the Heavenly Jade disciples said dismissively, this was Ming Yue, the practical one who had been asking about beast numbers earlier during our discussions.

"Most stories have at least some truth in them," Liu Chang replied and his voice was mild and calm as always.

"Especially ones that have survived being passed down for many generations of people." I nodded my head in agreement and more of the original Ke Yin's childhood memories were floating upward into my awareness as we kept walking.

"There used to be actual ceremonies held here, before the last imperial dynasty came into power and changed things. Local spirit mediums would come up here to communicate with the forest spirits, they would make offerings to them asking for good harvests for the farming season."

"Local superstition, nothing more than that," another Heavenly Jade disciple muttered under his breath, but despite saying that I noticed very clearly that he was keeping himself as far away from the trees as the path would physically allow him to go. The spiritual saturation of the grove became noticeably stronger the higher up the path we climbed, until even just breathing in the air of the place felt thick and heavy with energy that pressed slightly against the senses.

"Master," Azure spoke up, "the way spiritual energy flows through this place resembles formation work, but the scale of it is so much larger than anything that would normally be constructed." He was right about that and I was already seeing the same thing myself.

The more carefully I paid attention to it the more obvious it became that the way spiritual energy moved through the grove was along very specific paths and it created loops and cycles in the air and earth around us that could only have been deliberately and artificially arranged by something or someone with real intention behind it.

"This place is very old," Yan Ziheng murmured, his formation trained senses were picking up exactly the same patterns that I was detecting myself.

"These energy pathways have been reinforcing themselves continuously for centuries at least." We finished climbing and emerged from the grove into a small clearing that sat at the top and there it was, the shrine that Chu Feng had told us about. Although calling it a shrine might be giving it more credit than it really deserved at this point.

What was actually there was a roughly circular stone platform that measured maybe thirty feet across its diameter, and around the edges of it were the crumbling ruins of what had probably once been walls or columns of some kind standing tall. Whatever the original structure had looked like it must have been impressive at some earlier point in its existence, but now it was almost entirely rubble with only a few partial walls managing to stay upright.

Nature had moved in to reclaim most of it over the centuries, vines had crawled up and over every stone surface, small trees had forced themselves up between fallen blocks, and a thick carpet of moss covered everything it could reach. But the spiritual energy that sat over and through this place, that was different from the physical state of disrepair all around us.

"Something strange is happening here," I said, bending down to get a closer look at the stone platform itself.

"The physical structure of this place has fallen apart but the spiritual architecture underneath all of this is almost perfectly intact and preserved."

"Spiritual architecture?" one of the Yan Clan disciples asked, clearly not familiar with the term being used in this context. I pointed toward the patterns carved directly into the stone surface beneath our feet, they were barely visible under so many centuries worth of plant growth pressing over them but they were still there if you understood what you were looking at and where to look.

"These carvings are not just decoration put here to look nice. They are formation anchors, but the style of them is unlike anything I have ever personally encountered before, the design methodology is very ancient."

"How ancient are we actually talking about?" Liu Chang asked and he moved to look more closely at where my finger was pointing toward. I was tracing one of the patterns with my fingertip, making sure not to accidentally channel any qi into it in the process, when Yan Ziheng cut in and saved me from having to guess.

"Based on the design principles being used here," he said.

"This predates the imperial period. Possibly by a significant margin."

"Pre-imperial formations? Here of all places?" Ming Yue made no effort to hide how skeptical she found this idea.

"In a village this size and this remote?"

"The size and importance of a location do not always have any relationship to each other," Liu Chang replied.

"Many of the most powerful cultivation sites were placed in remote locations and with specific purpose." He was correct about that and I knew it well. The most dangerous and significant places very often presented themselves in the most ordinary and unremarkable ways. A crumbling old shrine sitting in the forest above a farming village could hold more significance than a major sect's main fortress, the only thing that mattered was what secrets and history it contained within itself.

And speaking of secrets, I had been observing Chu Feng quite carefully through all of this and his behavior was continuing to interest me. He was keeping himself toward the back of the group and letting other people take the lead in actually examining things. The desperate urgency he had shown earlier when pushing so hard for us to investigate this place had evaporated, replaced now by casual detachment.

"The qi disruption patterns you described to us," Liu Chang said, turning toward Chu Feng directly.

"Where was it that you first noticed them?"

"Oh, uh, they seemed to be strongest somewhere around the center area," Chu Feng answered and he gestured toward the middle of the platform.

"But they have probably already dissipated by now. Qi patterns can be very unstable things and hard to predict..." I walked to the center point of the platform and channeled a careful small amount of qi to heighten my spiritual perception of the area. The formation patterns in this central location were more complex and elaborate then those further out, forming concentric circles that spiraled progressively inward toward a single point, and at that point was...

"Something feels different about this spot," I said, kneeling down onto the stone and using my hand to clear away a section of thick moss. Underneath there were more carvings written in archaic script that Azure was struggling to decipher.

"Are you able to read what it says?" Liu Chang asked, coming to stand nearby. Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

"Only parts of it," I admitted.

"There is something about 'sleep' and about 'cycles' and something that seems to mean 'renewal.' The rest of the inscription has worn down too much over time to make anything out clearly."

"Master," Azure said quietly, "the spiritual resonance coming from this location reminds me of something else, but I can't figure out what it is." I understood the feeling he was describing. There really was something recognizable about the energy patterns here, but I also couldn't figure it out. The other teams had spread out across the shrine and were working through different sections of it methodically.

The Heavenly Jade disciples were focused on studying the walls that had partially survived, the Yan Clan group seemed more drawn to examining the surrounding area beyond the platform edge. The Azure Peak members under my direction were going through the platform itself corner by corner without rushing. I watched them all going about their work while I sorted through more of Ke Yin's childhood memories about this place and what they contained was interesting.

The shrine had never been completely abandoned, not even after the imperial government had officially outlawed local spirit worship and made it a punishable thing. People from the village had still been coming here, not openly and not in daylight, but they came with things like food and wine and incense burned in whatever containers they could bring.

"The villagers have continued using this place," I said in a quiet voice meant only for Liu Chang to hear.

"There are stories. About people who came here and found whatever it was they needed to find, lost things turning up again, people sick who recovered when they should not have, that kind of thing."

"Superstition," Ming Yue said from across the platform, apparently her hearing was better than I had accounted for.

"Or coincidence at best and nothing more."

"Perhaps," I said, not committing fully to either position.

"But I remember..." I paused here and chose my words with care like what I was about to say as a personal memory belonging to me rather than to someone else.

"When I was still very young there was a severe drought one season. The crops were failing badly and things were becoming desperate. The village elder made the journey up here one night alone and made an offering. The following day rain came in exactly the distribution pattern that would save the most critical fields and not the ones that were already lost."

"A single coincidence does not prove anything," Ming Yue argued back, but I noticed with some interest that she had stopped what she was doing and was now looking at the shrine platform with more attention than before.

"No it does not," I agreed readily.

"But it wasn't an isolated incident. Something of this nature occurred every few years without fail. Small things in the greater scheme of things, but they happened consistently enough and reliably enough that people kept returning here, kept making their offerings, kept the tradition alive even when the authorities told them they should not be doing any of it." Liu Chang nodded slowly and with evident thoughtfulness.

"A location with concentrated spiritual energy like this one develops its own patterns and cycles over a long enough period of time. The energy accumulates and creates rhythms that become responsive to certain repeated actions."

"Like a formation that assembles and maintains itself over time?" Yan Ziheng asked.

"Something that functions like that," Liu Chang replied.

"Although typically much less precisely structured then deliberate formation work. More organic in the way it operates." I got back to my feet and brushed the dirt from my robes. We had been examining the shrine for close to an hour at this point and I was more or less certain that we weren't going to find anything significant here today. The spiritual patterns were unusual and worth studying further, but because whatever Chu Feng had claimed to sense or had actually sensed was not in an active state right now.

And as the investigation began winding toward its natural conclusion, he was doing a convincing enough job of performing frustration and disappointment for the group.

"We should return to the village," Liu Chang said at last.

"The beast wave is not going to delay itself while we spend more time here."

"Maybe if we had come to check this place when I first brought it up the situation would be different," Chu Feng mumbled.

"We followed the correct protocols," Liu Chang replied.

"The safety of the village population had to be our first priority."

"Protocol," Chu Feng made it sound like something unpleasant he was being forced to taste against his will.

"Sometimes following protocol is the exact thing that gets people killed." That was actually not an unfair point to make when examined honestly. Even if everything about his behavior was performance and deception, the underlying argument he was making about the limitations of rigid procedural adherence wasn't wrong on its face, and what caught my attention the most was that there was real bitterness in his voice.

Whatever he was actually doing here and whatever his real motivations were, there were personal stakes involved for him that went beyond simple manipulation. The teams began making their way back down the path toward the village and I lingered alone for a moment by the ancient shrine, looking at it one more time and trying to commit the formation patterns I could make out to memory with enough accuracy to examine them properly at some later point.

"Master," Azure's voice brought me out of my thoughts, "Chu Feng is watching you right now." I shifted my position just slightly and in doing so caught a clear glimpse of Chu Feng looking away from me very quickly. He had stopped at the clearing edge, apparently needing to retie one of his boots, but the spot where he had chosen to stop gave him a direct line of sight to where I was standing. Now that was interesting.

As we descended back through the Sacred Grove, I found myself questioning whether I was simply being too suspicious for no real reason. Maybe Chu Feng had sensed something real at this location and was genuinely disappointed that whatever it was hadn't been active when we finally came to investigate. Or maybe his strange and inconsistent behaviors were simply the natural expression of who he was as a person. Cultivation had a long documented history of doing unusual things to a person's personality over time.

Spend enough years working directly with the fundamental forces of reality like how cultivators did, and developing pronounced eccentricities as a result wasn't surprising at all. There were alchemy elders who held extended one-sided conversations with their cauldrons as though the equipment was a valued companion, and an equal number who insisted on performing every significant action in groups of nine because of what they described as numerological favorability.

So maybe Chu Feng was what he appeared to be on the surface, an unusual cultivator with significant trust issues and some complicated history behind him. There was certainly no shortage of that type among any sect's membership but...

"You're still suspicious of him," Azure observed.

"Is it that obvious?"

"Only to someone who can directly monitor your physiological responses." I found the corner of my mouth pulling upward slightly at that. The trees began thinning out around us as we descended further and the spiritual pressure that had been pressing against our senses eased off as we left the Sacred Grove proper behind us.

Through the remaining trees ahead the village was becoming visible, familiar buildings and ordinary sights and the everyday life that felt impossibly fragile and vulnerable when you held in your mind at the same time the knowledge of what was moving toward it through the wilderness. Thousands of spirit beasts driven into some kind of frenzied mobilization by a force and reason that nobody had yet been able to determine or explain.

Somewhere among them more than a dozen high stage beasts that each individually possessed the destructive capability to bring down solid structures with a single focused strike. And standing against all of that, a small group of cultivators attempting to place themselves as a barrier between that approaching force and a village full of ordinary people who had no ability to protect themselves. People that included the family I had accepted as mine when I stood in front of their shop earlier that same day.

The village was already well into its evacuation preparations by the time we arrived back at its edges. People were moving through the streets gathering essential belongings and securing their livestock and organizing to make sure that the youngest and oldest members of every family were ready and able to move when the order came down to go to the designated shelter locations in the mountain caves. They had done this before.

Beast waves weren't so common that people forgot life between them but not so rare that the response procedures had ever been allowed to go completely forgotten either. Every child grew up learning the evacuation routes by heart, every family maintained a prepared pack of essential supplies ready to grab and carry, every household knew what needed to come with them and what would have to be left behind.

"All defensive preparations are in place," Su Yue reported when we reached the central area of the village.

"Steam barriers are fully charged and ready, formation arrays are active and confirmed functional. Now we wait." Waiting was always the most difficult part of any situation that led toward conflict. That had always been true and would continue being true. I looked back one final time toward the mountain where the shrine sat, just barely visible now through the haze that evening was beginning to lay over the landscape.

Whatever secrets that place contained within its ancient stones, whatever the truth of Chu Feng's actual motivations and intentions were, those questions would have to exist without resolution for now. There were more immediate concerns demanding our attention and energy. A beast wave was approaching. And regardless of what Chu Feng was or wasn't, regardless of what he was or wasn't planning, all of us together would have to work as one to survive what was coming at us. That reality didn't require me to trust him.

Maintaining a careful level of wariness toward something uncertain was simply another tool, and unlike most tools it didn't need storage space and never became depleted through use. And that particular tool was currently operating at its full capacity with no signs of stopping. There were really only two possible outcomes to being wrong about Chu Feng in this situation anyway.

Either I was correct about him and the wariness I was maintaining would help us identify and respond to whatever he was planning before it became catastrophic. Or I was wrong about him and the worst consequence would be spending the entire beast wave keeping a suspicious eye on a perfectly harmless but somewhat strange and inconsistent cultivator. Between those two possibilities, being wrong was something I could accept without difficulty.

Provided, naturally, that there was a version of events in which any of us survived the next several days long enough for it to matter.