The phenomenon of hidden lands was at least as old as cultivation itself, perhaps as old as the world, for they could form without any human activity at all. Such natural hidden lands took shape through knotting and splitting in the immense flows of qi that naturally moved across the planet in accordance with climate, tectonics, and other mighty unseen forces. How this caused a copy of a space to mold itself on top of an existing one required extensive understanding of qi flows and innate formation structure, but the evidence could simply be walked through. Most who were not advanced theorists thought of hidden lands as a bubble atop a pond, touching at one point, just before release to the sky. Like bubbles, most naturally occurring lands would dissipate and vanish in time, but human intervention could stabilize them.

  Extending this metaphor, in a manner that tended to terrify those who lived within the confines of hidden lands, the bubbles could also be popped.

  It did not happen often. Demonic cultivators had little interest in destroying their prize before it could be drained of every scrap of qi it contained, but those who defended them sometimes invoked fail-safes to rob the blood-hunting hordes of exactly that prize. This was especially common in those hidden lands created during the Demon War, and many of those precious bubbles had been popped in the intervening centuries. Nothing remained but snarled qi to mark where they had once been.

  Created through the act of an ascended cultivator, Mother's Gift possessed durability and defenses many other hidden lands lacked. A series of carefully arranged formations obscured the convoluted qi flows that allowed it to exist. Ritual inscriptions scattered throughout the bordering mountains utilized bindings and signals to confuse demonic senses and send the ghouls wandering elsewhere. There were even memory traps designed to confuse demonic cultivators as to their location in reference to the rest of the world when in proximity to the access point.

  Scouts cloaked under veils able to absorb all qi released by their bodies maintained these formations and patrolled near the entrance regularly. The vigil was kept constant, a duty never neglected.

  All these measures and more, including layers of esoteric protections known only to the grand elders, served to keep Mother's Gift hidden from the demon-dominated world beyond.

  But the demon plague was an extremely insidious thing. Its tiny flakes rode the wind, sensing qi as they coated all things in the Ruined Waste beneath a thin, almost imperceptible, crimson film. Ordinary qi flows, drawn from all ambient sources, sustained them, but only greater strength, gathered and condensed by conscious effort, could serve as fuel for the plague's growth. Primitive but potent senses, unconscious and bio-mechanical while still attuned to the essential essence of cultivation, detected such concentrations. If the plague could reach them simply by shifting through the ambient environment using wind, water, or earth, so much the better. During the war, it had consumed the world that way, all exposed space long ago discovered and infiltrated.

  The remaining concentrations were blocked, separated by the twisted qi of hidden lands and locked by ironclad formation walls that prevented the access of tiny microbes propelled by malformed essence drive.

  The swarm could, however, release a signal demonstrating its frustration upon sensing food it could not reach. That pheromone diffused across the world and slowly drew in the plague's greater limbs, the demons. A path to break through walls that blocked the films. Far worse, the shifts in motion of the demon multitude alerted demonic cultivators to the presence of an undetected prize. Efforts to disrupt such coordination might succeed, for a time, but the steady release of signal by the plague itself would, over many decades or even centuries, inevitably call forth a horde.

  A mindless horde could threaten a small sect, for even if elders could not be overcome they could slay only so many demons at once, leaving lesser cultivators and mortals unprotected, but those that acquired the support of demonic cultivators were infinitely more dangerous. These were the forces that destroyed hidden lands and extended the slow march of the world toward nothing but red-tinged wilderness devoid of conscious thought.

  It had been over a century since Mother's Gift faced such a threat, when the Ember Whip, once a student of the Scourging Wheel who slew Sayaana, dared to lead an assault upon the Starwall. Having reached only the first level of the celestial ascendancy realm, and without any subordinates to aid her, she was sliced in twain by Aorkay's axe after a struggle measured in mere seconds.

  Despite this, the damage inflicted by the over three hundred thousand demons she'd led into the Killing Fields had been immense. Nearly two hundred cultivators fell in battle, numbers only recently restored in full. That a horde once again threatened the land after just passing this milestone might be called fate by some, a truth buried in the infinite complexities of the dao no earthly mind, not even an immortal's could ever truly grasp.

  The demons came mostly from the east. They were thick upon the lower plains where one of the heartlands of the old world had existed, before the war. Following the rivers, they made their way through the circuitous paths of the high valleys and narrow gorges that were unremarkable save for their visually stunning geology. The slow gathering, witnessed from above, of the red forms, was rather like a swarm of ants stutter-stepping their way to encircle a carcass. The red forms appeared tiny, and were scattered widely, spread out across a space of hundreds, thousands, of square kilometers. They often advanced forward no more than a few meters each day.

  But they still advanced, for the plague signal, an unmistakable gradient of qi concentration, led them on without room for doubt.

  As the demons moved, thousands strong and growing in number day by day, a pair of ashen gray eyes looked down upon them from a high mountain perch. Though distant from the nearest demon by many kilometers, all were observed with precision. The slender and lanky man-sized ghouls, over-sized ape-like ogres, and lumbering elephantine giants; three common states occasionally augmented by some mutant intermediate form, all yielded to that piercing vision. The degraded and feral minds could not resist the signal given by their master disease. Less than animals, they were nothing but fleshy puppets of a thing that worked in chemicals and qi, devoid of words and reason.

  The observer knew these truths intimately. She also knew she was different. As far as she was concerned the plague served her, not the reverse. The blight was a tool, a living artifact of almost impossible complexity and power, but still a creation of cultivator hands and minds. A self-deception that, but one crushed down so deep in her core an admission of the true state of affairs would tear apart consciousness and dantian alike.

  She watched the horde gather from on high, face veiled and skull hidden beneath a wraparound helm of dark metal that obscured everything but almond-shaped ash-laced eyes. Those orbs lacked division, presenting instead a constant swirling storm of many-shaded smoke descending perpetually across their surface. A vision of decay falling from above. Armor forged in blue-gray metal cloaked her body, padded with layers of dark silks and bound in place by a blood red sash wrapped about her waist. Charcoal metal gauntlets secured the hands that grasped a long, slender, single-edge blade of glowing golden alloy she carried bare to the sky.

  No part of her skin was visible, nothing but the swirling, smoke-cloud eyes. At least two layers, usually cloth and metal in tandem, covered every other speck of flesh. Millennia ago, the soul within that cloaked presentation had been born under the name of Sok Chan, but that woman had ceased to be when, after her cultivation growth stalled out completely and death approached, she'd chosen betrayal and demonic allegiance. Now, with her immortal body achieved through plague-aided soul forging hidden from the world for reasons she never revealed, only Scoria Scorn remained.

  Her elevated perch afforded excellent visibility. Holding it, she'd stood in place for weeks, never moving. All the better to watch as the demons slowly made their way westward and upward from the plains. This still state was no burden. The mind of a celestial ascendancy realm cultivator could find fascination in any process, no matter how slow. Distractions would not overwhelm her, and there were few enough of those. The demon plague sustained her entirely. She needed neither food nor drink, and even air need not fill her lungs so long as qi was present. Even the normally ceaseless burden of cultivators, the need to circulate and compress their qi that strength might be maintained; the plague had eliminated that difficulty by binding her circuits to its own.

  One of the unexpected fortuitous benefits of the decision she'd made, long ago.

  Despite such capabilities, she was not, and had never been, a creature of endless patience in the manner of some immortals. The demons were taking a long time to come together, too long in her estimation. When driven by the full force of the plague's influence they could move at great speed, for like her they required nothing by the disease's presence to sustain them. However, this horde was spread wide, dispersed across a distance that stressed the signal's gradient to its very limits. What should have been, had once been, a matter of weeks, would now take many months, almost a full year.

  From her position on high, observing a vast swath of narrow river valleys, Scoria Scorn could take all this in at an empowered glance. Matching her sight against the perspective provided by two and a half millennia of following such hordes, she was able to perform the mental arithmetic and derive a most unwelcome conclusion. It produced a realization that troubled her profoundly.

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  The demons were running out.

  It seemed inconceivable, at first. When the Demon War began the world had contained over one billion mortal souls. She knew this well, for she had conducted long-distance trading in her prior life.

  The plague had taken almost all of them. No more than a few million, not even one in one hundred, had escaped the plague's touch and the transformation that followed; the reconfiguration of flesh that followed the replacement of fundamental qi with a new source. The decades of the war had claimed many of them, of course, but those numbers had been replenished by feasting on those newly born during the conflict and the populations torn out of hidden lands cracked apart.

  After the war ended and resistance across the face of the world ceased, the plague triumphant from sea to sea across seven continents, the demonic population had been no less than five hundred million. Surely that sufficed to crush the several score hidden realms left behind by those who fled. There were more than a million demons per realm, at the very least. Far more than necessary.

  Or so they'd thought in those heady days of victory. A hideously short-sighted oversight, one that a group of immortals ought to have been above making. Of course, they were a biased group, Scoria Scorn was not blind to that. Impatience, frustration, desperation, madness, these reasons led them to the demonic path. They had not been the great sages of the day. Two and a half millennia sufficed to provide enough self-awareness to admit this.

  Sometimes that was helpful. Other times, such as the present moment, it simply left her grumpy.

  Demons could not reproduce. That was, fundamentally, the core problem. The plague could feast on qi and make more endless crimson film, but new demons only came to be when additional humans were converted. The remaining supply of mortals was tiny, scattered, and protected by the might of many potent cultivators. Every assault, even those that succeeded completely, depleted the total demon population, often by many tens of thousands.

  But those losses had been anticipated, calculated, and every aspect of the battle record accorded with the ancient estimates. In some cases, such as battles led by especially aggressive cultivators, the ratios were even superior to expectations. They had predicted human resistance with, if not perfection, at least more than suitable competence.

  What they had forgotten was more fundamental. The world was not a place of constancy. Time brought about change, and change could kill. Kill in ways no one had expected.

  Demons did not need to eat, drink, or breathe. The plague, their contact with its globe-spanning qi network, sustained them. Beyond that, they were strong but far from invulnerable. Immortal cultivators, able to step across mountain ranges in moments, tended to forget the might of natural forces simply by only ever witnessing them from afar. They had not considered those in their calculations.

  And no one had ever realized just how much nature raged and scourged over the course of twenty-five hundred years.

  Demons died buried beneath sandstorms, severed from the sustenance of the plague. Hurricanes picked them up and smashed them against the shore, battering their bodies to mush. Tornadoes simply torn them apart outright. Earthquakes crushed them beneath huge walls of rock. Worst of all were fires, and their greater cousins volcanoes. The moving walls of heat and smoke could wash over areas of truly immense size, and claim demon lives by the hundreds of thousands in one inferno.

  Lacking a reason to recognize natural phenomena as a threat until the flames flicked against their skin, demons did not evade the flames as animals did, and by the time they moved it was always too late. Many would not run even then, for as the smoke burned away the film-based connection to the plague they would simply lie down in place and burn away, mindless.

  The world's small islands, once choice positions for sect headquarters and often left swarming beneath bloated hordes, were now all cleansed of the demons. Stripped away of red forms by the mercurial but inevitable wrath of the sea. Huge swaths of grassland, where fire came again and again in lengthy but measurable cycles, had been similarly emptied. In the arctic regions, glaciers – not slow-moving when taken on a scale of centuries – had reduced demon hordes to naught but lines of mashed gore. Though other regions had performed better, the situation remained a problem, one that could not be easily overcome.

  Scoria Scorn suspected, based on careful calculation, that less than one hundred million demons remained. Perhaps no more than seventy-five. Barely enough to provide every remaining demonic cultivator with a million-strong horde of their own.

  Though that was still a very large number it no longer felt like enough.

  The slowed rate of assembly was a manifestation of these low numbers. One that presented a new sort of tactical problem, something she'd realized after spending many days staring down from on high. Her vigil, originally begun out of anticipatory curiosity, was gradually revealed to be of immense importance.

  Extending her senses to their fullest extent, feeling the resonance of plague-bent qi within her dantian, she could detect demons, especially the rare and powerful giants, from hundreds of kilometers distant. A far greater range than that across which even the most powerful cultivator could detect another. This was a weapon the demonic cultivators had been using since the war began.

  Ultimately, the problem was one of mathematics and mobility. The strongest giant could defeat, one on one, a weak thought weaving realm cultivator. A horde, with thousands of demons, could overwhelm even awareness integration disciples easily and potentially trap and slay spirit tempering elders should they exhaust their qi. Against those in the soul forging realm, however, demons were little more than wheat before the scythe.

  A single celestial ascendancy realm immortal, given a century or so and no cultivator opposition, could plausibly eliminate every remaining demon from the planet.

  Not that such a thing would ever happen, while Scoria Scorn and her fellows existed. After all, the entire point of the demons was to serve as battle fodder for their cultivator superiors. A tool to drive their enemies into inferior positions where they could be trapped, overwhelmed, and harvested of their precious qi. That had been the scheme from the very beginning. She knew this better than most, having been in the second layer of the thought weaving realm when the war began. Few indeed had ever matched such a meteoric ascent, and no other among those survived.

  The resource that was living cultivators was not to be wasted.

  During the war there had been demonic cultivators of all realms and layers. More than enough to keep the orthodox fools honest and reinforce the weaknesses of the demon horde.

  Such glorious demonic armies were long gone, slain by time. The plague made demons immortal, but not those who fought to retain their reason even as they stole its power. Just like their orthodox opponents, those who failed to forge their souls and manifest immortal bodies would eventually perish. Two and a half millennia had done for even the most durable of those; their decayed corpses crumbled to feed the plague. Now the immortals led the demons without any cultivator subordinates.

  No mortals left in the world save the populations of hidden lands trained to hate and fear the plague from birth who suicided rather than take the plague into themselves. Scoria Scorn, like most of her comrades, no longer even attempted to conduct conversions. She had no desire to split the remaining drops of qi between additional dantians. Normally it did not matter. Their power was more than sufficient to overcome any resistance.

  But the world was vast, and a few score immortals could not be everywhere at once. Coverage would be severely limited even if they acted in perfect concert, an idea so laughable it remained never proposed even as an ever-increasing number of demonic cultivators made the same calculations Scoria Scorn had and recognized their seemingly infinite hordes were displaying a distinct weakness in numbers.

  As such, she knew she had to keep watch over the assembling horde, it was the inevitable conclusion. Otherwise, the intervention of an outside force might slip past the eyes of the plague and the demonic cultivators alike. An immortal could set the assault back by months in minutes, but none appeared. There were no sudden deaths of hundreds of demons. No blasts of untainted qi exploded across the wilderness. The gathering of an immense force, nearly five hundred thousand demons, gathered into a vast mass, its edges tightened by considerable cajoling, and slowly spiraled inward towards the hidden entrance of the concealed lair of a new group of survivors.

  Visual discovery of that entrance was impossible, of course. Even if it was not buried beneath a layer of concealing formations as it surely was, this landscape of river-carved plains surrounded by sharp ravines and ridges was a chaotic mess of impenetrable vegetation. Cultivator eyes were little better at seeing through trees than mortal ones.

  The region had been a fertile land once, a valuable province on the western edge of a small inland sect alliance. Long ago the ground had probably been cleared and covered in farms, but time had erased such things. Even once mighty stone and concrete structures could no longer easily be found. Buried beneath new growth, they were reduced to little more than irregular mounds. Surviving ruins, and there were surely many, for cultivator-laid masonry could resist far more than burial by dirt, were hidden beneath the earth, in caves, or in secluded places where plants could not take hold.

  Scoria Scorn had explored many such left-behind monuments. She bore artifacts liberated from a dozen of them, and had plundered more only to find nothing worth keeping. Troubling work, peeling back the dangerous formations left to prevent exactly such pillaging. Some were even powerful enough to endanger her.

  She no longer conducted such searches. Protections were claimed by time the same as everything else, leaving the prizes ripe for the taking. Let the others risk themselves. Some, fools all, had even died that way.

  Whatever formations protected the entrance to the hidden land the demons sensed were strong, thoroughly maintained. The complete lack of any qi fluctuations deep within the earth was evidence enough of that. Even in a few daring, darting, jolts to the forefront of the horde, something empowered by the extraordinary swiftness of her Earth Veins Magnetic Spin technique, she discovered nothing. Whoever lay on the other side was formidable, thorough, and careful. They had left no opening, not even deep below the ground, a space many cultivators forgot to consider as a path.

  History suggested as much. Scoria Scorn was new to this region. It had been unclaimed, opened by death not so long ago. That had happened many times, removing even notable names from the roll. She recalled them carefully, and with no small amount of worry, for they included those with cultivation distinctly superior to her own.

  Insufficient demons, formidable protections, past losses, all these things and more mixed together, forming a potent joined river of malaise in her meditative coordination. She was not simply nervous, jittery before a major attack, this was a real, legitimate concern. Half a million demons was formidable, but she'd only feel comfortable with twice that. It would not happen, she recognized that too. The ghouls were simply too scattered. It had been an accomplishment to bring this many together.

  Instead, altering the balance required an appeal not to the plague, but to her peers. Not any sort of discussion she desired, given the nature of those beings, but she had not survived twenty-five hundred years in the wastes without developing a surplus of a caution and a willingness to undertake the unpleasant.

  The gathering was not finished yet, there was still time, and she was not without leverage in making a final appeal. It was time to make the first real move of the campaign.