Crossing that short distance over the ocean took no more than ten minutes, but it proved sufficiently tiring that Liao kept his mouth shut, breathing heavily through his nose alone, throughout the journey. He had countless questions, but all of them had to wait. The entire potency of his senses, expanded well beyond mortal human limits, was needed to chart the paths of the Stellar Flash Steps adjusted to motion while cradling an adult woman in his arms. This demanded constant alterations to his balance and qi distribution, not an easy thing to achieve while moving over water at a speed that would not shame a swordfish with adrenalin pumping through every nerve.

Thankfully, some combination of relief, disbelief, and exhaustion kept his unexpected passenger equally silent throughout the course of the short trip.

The tiny islands jutted up from the sea lonely and stony. The largest of them resembled a massive tooth bursting up from the jaw of an immense, submerged, city-sized crocodile. The others were much less spectacular, being no more than lumpy rocks or short cylindrical stacks emerging a mere few meters above the crashing surface of the waves. There were seals there, and a great many white-and-black shorebirds of a type unknown to Liao rested higher up, but no sign existed that humans had ever built anything in such a small and isolated place.

Ignoring the main tooth-like island and its many loud birds, Liao jumped up onto a small and innocuous little rock just to its southwest instead. A quartet of seals rolled into the surf in protest of his arrival, leaving the two humans otherwise alone amid lightly rolling waves thereafter. There was no soft ground of any kind, so Liao was left to choose the flattest section of rock he could find as the place to put the water cultivator down. He laid her on her back, gently and propped up so she could face him without straining her neck and then crouched down among nearby stones where he could easily meet her gaze. The somewhat constrained nature of this seating position would have bothered him as a mortal but was easily ignored by the qi circulating through his form.

In doing this, Liao could not help but study the woman's face. She was pretty and unearthly perfect, of course, with fine bone structure, blemish-free skin, hair, and eyes. She was also different. Pale but tan, with dark eyes and black hair pulled up in a rising, elongate bun, the variances were subtle, but easy enough for cultivator eyes to spot and integrated senses to categorize.

Her chin and nose were sharper and more angular than those of the people of Mother's Gift. Her eyes likewise molded to a tighter, hard-edged bound, rising at the outer corners. Most noticeable of all, she had a small tattoo inscribed in rising motion above the left eyebrow toward the center of her forehead. This depiction shaded in pale blue-white was shaped into the abstracted form of a crashing wave.

Such differences marked her as coming from a people apart from those Liao had lived among his whole life. Not one as distant as Sayaana's origins – the northern-born remnant soul offered the only true point of comparison he possessed – but still notably different.

The rest of her form, and Liao could observe almost all of it given that the single-piece short dress-like garb she wore covered only the chest, abdomen, and waist with a minimal flap below in front and behind, was highly athletic. A swimmer, surely, for her physique brought to mind the frame of fisher girls who harvested the lakes of Mother's Gift only much more pronounced. The outfit, which appeared so impractical on land, exposing the limbs to thorns and insects as it did, made sense for one working in water for most of her waking hours.

This study, brief though it was, did not go unnoticed. Sharp, discerning eyes examined him in turn. They flowed across his scalp and chest, pausing to study the headband with its immense turquoise centerpiece that rested there and flowing across the numerous pieces of ancient gold jewelry that served as his assembled storage. These things seemed to shock the woman who, in stark contrast to the cultivators of the Celestial Origin Sect, carried no qi-empowered gear save for her swords. She wore no jewelry, had no talismans sewn into the weave of her garments, and her black hair was bound only by a thin ribbon, with no constellation of hair ornaments such as other cultivator women habitually wore. Nor was that black ribbon the expected silk, but instead was fashioned from what Liao, with the sharp eyes of a leatherworker, recognized as strips of dyed turtle hide.

Even the swords, he recalled the weapons prior to their entry into the storage ring, had been remarkably lacking in decoration, purely functional implements.

For several long breaths they stared at each other in silence. The water cultivator managed, with some effort, to lever herself up to a proper sitting position, though even such a simple movement clearly strained her exhausted form and left her in considerable pain.

Qi depletion, Liao recognized, the crash that followed after exhausting the dantian and burning out the very reserves that circled through the blood, bones, and muscles. It was, in a sense, its own form of severe injury. Blood might have ceased to flow from her many surface wounds, but the true damage went deeper and would take far longer to heal. Many days, or more likely weeks, would be needed before she could move properly or fight again.

Recognizing this, he took the opportunity to speak first. "We will need to move again, soon." He was not blind to the continued pursuit by the demons. They could be felt converging on their position below even now. "But we have at least an hour, perhaps as much as two." He knew his own pace well, and that of the foe, or rather Sayaana did, but the depths of the water surrounding them remained a mystery, introducing considerable variability.

Standing up, briefly, he bowed his head and bent forward, deep but not horizontal, as was appropriate between cultivators of the same great realm and bent his neck at the end in deference to her superior accumulation of layers. "I am Qing Liao, disciple of the Celestial Origin Sect."

Slowly, the female cultivator drew herself up until she sat with legs beneath her, knees pressed down to the stones. She placed both hands over her waist, palms in and fingers intertwined, and bowed all the way down. Her body bent smoothly, ceasing seamlessly until her forehead touched the rock below. "I am Amami Yoko, disciple of the Great Waves Sect." She rose up and made the strange bow, not a kowtow but similar in its extreme subservience, once again. This time she held her head in the position of abasement while she spoke. "As you have saved my life but hold an inferior stage upon the current of Heaven, I pledge my leal service to you for seven years. Know that if you should set me against self, sect, or the Heavens themselves you forsake all honor and the debt is voided."

"I see," Liao murmured, open-mouthed. That, he had not expected at all. The words, accented though they were, had a rote quality and cadence. She had not simply made them up on the spot, they were memorized, ceremonial. If she truly believed them, it was possible this woman's dao would hold her fast to that pledge, though that was not something he was prepared to trust, not yet.

The name, at least, confirmed that she was foreign to the heritage of Mother's Gift. Yoko, perhaps, resided at the very end of plausibility for a girl's name, but there had never been and never would be an Amami family within the bounds of his homeland. Hardly a surprise, that someone from a distant land millennia removed would have diverged. He counted it a great blessing from the Celestial Mother that the sect speech had not shifted too far to permit proper conversation. Still, that variant nomenclature offered a caution. Sayaana's mores still surprised him, sometimes, and she had been immersed in Mother's Gift for centuries before they met.

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Easy as it might be to treat Amami Yoko simply as a fellow sect member, that, he recognized, was a trap that must be avoided for both their sakes.

"We can worry about debts later," he deflected the responsibility of the relationship her oath demanded for the moment. "For now, the demons are after both of us. We need to find a way to lose them. Do you know of a safe place we might reach?"

"No," Amami Yoko shook her head sharply even as she settled into a more comfortable sitting position. "Only home was safe, and it is," she turned away, facing only the empty waves. "Lost."

One sentence, and a thousand questions resolved unspoken. She was from a hidden land, surely, this wave-marked disciple, and had escaped its destruction by fleeing into the Ruined Wastes. The same tale as Sayaana's but while an immortal might outrun the demons indefinitely, a disciple in the awareness integration realm would eventually collapse as a fox before the hounds. The events that had unfolded on the volcano's slopes required no further explanation.

"How many days?" Liao asked. For no reason he could name, that quantification felt important.

"Forty-seven," Amami Yoko's soft whisper faded like the receding tide. "I was at sea for much of it, that felt safe, but I came ashore when I could swim no more. I thought a small place, surrounded by the ocean, would be secure. It was, for a while, and I recovered some, but it took them only eight days to find me. Four days fighting since, in spurts. I was certain I would not see a fifth."

There was something terrifying about the fatalism that infected those words. Amami Yoko stared out at the sea as if oblivion was all that awaited her, and that she would not mind meeting it. Doom surrounded her. It swirled through her dampened qi, sorrow layered throughout all of her being, depths to surface.

Rather than press for details, Liao focused on the other half of the answer. "Forty-seven days?" he recalled the great globe hanging in the sect library. It seemed that she'd come from the east, given the motions of the demons, but there was nothing in that direction but ocean. "Is there a hidden land upon some tiny island?"

"The Great Waves Sect occupied the Nine Peaks Range," the forlorn eyes gazed outward into the vastness of the empty ocean. "Which lay atop undersea mountains, beneath the waves."

"Beneath?" Liao's jaw dropped. A hidden land under the sea? The thought demanded inquiry. His knowledge of the spatial dao, admittedly rudimentary, suggested no reason why this could not be so, but he had never even imagined the possibility. Eyes wide, he too scanned the ocean and considered its vastness. Traveling had taught him to internalize the simple lesson visible on any globe but often ignored by most humans. The world contained far more ocean than land. How many hidden lands might lie below the surface of the blue?

"How could the demons attack such a place?" The ghouls could not swim, not truly. A gateway hanging in the open water might as well be floating high in the sky for all that they could access it.

"No demons, just traitors," Amami Yoko sat still and frozen. The words were at the edge of silence, required cultivator sensitivity to resolve. "Four of them, all ice and cold. Wave Sword, our sect leader, ordered all non-elders to flee. We rushed out through the gateway, unopposed, but there was a fifth one waiting, a woman cast in iron slag. She attacked without declaration or mercy. I gave the order to scatter, and we fled in all directions. I lived. I do not know what happened to my sectmates. I have not sensed any since."

Short as the description was, it was simple enough for Liao to parse it and stamp the story into the backing of his memory. "Four and one," he confirmed. "I know which traitors they are. Desolation Gale, Ice Wraith, Ocular Shard, Snow Feast, and Scoria Scorn." Grand Elder Itinay had made him grimly familiar with the history of this noted group of foes. "They were deflected from my homeland. It seems they went east."

One mystery, a troubling piece of speculation that had lain unsolved for two decades, now resolved. Stymied by the flood, the icy quartet had been led to easier prey.

"Those for ice monsters would never conceive of this sort of campaign," Sayaana spoke, previously silent throughout this exchange, from inside his skull. "If the traitors found a way to locate gateways floating in the ocean, it had to be that reborn iron witch." Danger and anger alike warred within those words.

"You drove them off?" Amami Yoko's head shot around, and her sharp eyes narrowed to slits. "How? Where did you come from? How did you even reach me through so many demons?" Loss transmitted through her shaking frame filled each of these questioned with unfocused anger.

"With a flood, far to the west, and because they cannot sense me," Liao responded rapidly to each in turn. Rather than allow rumination on such matters, he pushed ahead. "It will be difficult, requiring much endless effort, but I will take you home. It is the only safe place I know, the only place we can go unless you are blessed to know another." There was a protocol for bringing survivors back to Mother's Gift, one Itinay had made him learn. Liao had never thought to utilize it, but it seemed the Grand Elder possessed greater foresight than he.

"I was told, ever since I was a child, that there are no safe places beyond the sea," Anger drained out of the athletic form as rapidly as it had been summoned. "As I cannot go home, I will follow you, but how far can it be? The demons track us everywhere."

"Not me," Liao had never appreciated his immunity so much as he did looking across the stones to this devastated woman. A stronger cultivator than he was, and a better fighter by far, yet in the Ruined Wastes only oblivion awaited her while he could wander as he wished. The perspective was almost overwhelming, and only the need to evade pursuit kept him from losing himself to the reverie. "What they cannot sense, they cannot track. It makes things much easier. We are thousands of kilometers from Mother's Gift, but, though the journey will be hard, I believe it can be done."

"If the demonic cultivators turn around and search for survivors, that is a lie," Sayaana's assessment was unsparing. "But if it's just demons, you might be able to do it. Awareness integration realm, and a warrior, there's no better survivor coming over the horizon."

"Thousands of kilometers," Amami Yoko shook her head sadly. "I can hardly believe that. The Nine Peaks Range was no more than one hundred from end to end." She turned her head and stared upwards at the great tooth of stone that rose to her right. "But, I suppose I have nowhere else to go, better to follow any trace than swim blind. Whether I stay here and slay demons or kill them along the way, it makes little difference. Do you think," she leaned forward, her face suddenly shockingly close to Liao's own. Dark eyes like bottomless pools leaked salt-saturated tears. "That the traitors will attack your home again?"

Vengeance, so central to the motives of many cultivators, of the Grand Elders, of all those in the sect who'd lost friends and lovers to demon incursions, was an impulse Liao struggled with. Sayaana claimed it was because the world had blessed him, not wronged him. The green-tinged remnant soul had taught him of the desire, however, given her own hunger to slaughter all that had laid waste to her home.

"I do not know," he answered the water cultivator cautiously. It would be easy, but Liao would not offer false promises to this woman he'd just met. Devastation and loss were not healed by easy lies. "But the Twelve Sisters, who lead the Celestial Origin Sect, intend to slay all the demonic cultivators. If we are able to survive this journey, I'm sure battle will eventually reach your swords."

"That is fair," Amami Yoko pulled back and bowed again, though she only bent her neck this time. "I suppose it will suffice for now. Thank you."

This acknowledgment felt to Liao like an opportunity, and he seized it swiftly. "We should keep moving. There are several small islands to the northwest we can use as stepping stones before returning to the main, larger islands. Skipping from one to the next, we ought to be able to string out the demon hunt and then escape westward."

"I will serve," the water cultivator struggled, and then failed, to rise to her feet. "But for now, it seems I am fit to function only as baggage."

Liao made no comment regarding that declaration. He simply picked her up and ran over the waves yet again.

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