They hopped from island to island throughout the afternoon. At each stop Liao paused briefly to meditate, seeking to sustain his strength by drawing in stellar qi. From the northernmost island they tracked west, racing over to a mountainous peninsula. As twilight loomed and turned to moonlight, they crossed over this sharp range.

Still adjusting to running with Amami Yoko as his burden – he'd shifted to carrying her on his back, but this still presented balance problems given her greater height and longer legs – Liao relied upon Sayaana's overlapping utilization of his senses to guide him past groups of converging demons. Thankfully, it seemed they had passed over the bulk of the pursing hunters while atop the waves. Despite this, he did his utmost to minimize pauses. The goal was simple and essential. They needed to entirely outrun pursuit. Otherwise, the continuing motion of vast numbers of demons would surely draw the attention of demonic cultivators in time. Distance would only offer protection for some indeterminate interval.

After passing over the peninsula in the night, Liao pushed westward further by running across a second wide bay. This leg of the escape concluded when he reached a large river delta on the opposite side, where water rushed down to the ocean from an origin in high mountains to the north. Using the river as a road, he followed its course through narrow valleys until they reached a point deep in the mountains. Only then, having penetrated sufficiently far and surrounded by thick alpine forest, did he dare to turn west. The high peaks to his left reached above the tree line to expose open spaces where snow lingered despite the late spring date.

The pair met the sunrise atop one such peak. Not a volcanic cone like so many of the mountains on these islands, but a more typical peak formed of a series of summits along a long and rambling ridge. This range continued northward before finally terminating in the central spine of the island. Slumped down among the mix of rocks and the twisting, shrunken growth that combined the alpine heights, Liao finally let Amami Yoko drop from his shoulders. Seated there, they turned east and watched the dawn bring the sun rising up above a massive, almost perfectly symmetrical white-capped cone of a grand volcano that lay to the east.

"I have seen that mountain before," Amami Yoko announced unexpectedly. "The sect leader had a painting of it, one that was composed from a vista that, if not this place, was close by. It was one of the few fragments of the old world he'd managed to preserve. Are these the Sunfire Islands then? That was my goal when I began the swim westward, but I had nothing to follow but old stories."

"That is what the maps say," Liao answered, uncertain if he dared project confidence in this circumstance. It was strange to be in possession of so much more knowledge than another. He was used to the reverse, having long been on the receiving end of long lectures from Zhou Hua rather than explaining any topic. "And there are ruins in the right places, but time has changed these lands. I have been wandering east for some weeks but found no sign of survivors. Did your sect leader come from here?" Asking a question of his own seemed a safer approach than venturing a more exhaustive answer.

"Yes," the water cultivator grimaced slightly before relating the rest. "He was part of a small sect, the White Wave Riders Fellowship, and refused absorption by the Supreme Sword Sect. He went into exile out to sea, obtained immortality, discovered the Nine Peaks Range, and founded the Great Waves Sect there. He began with only a handful of exiles and outcasts for followers and was always reclusive. He did not even learn that the Demon War had begun until long after the enemies had swept past our land and any choice to take part would accomplish nothing. He declared, after, that the wave of the era had ended and that the sect would wait until a new one arose. This crash, it surprised us all."

"A self-serving story," Sayaana commented, he words for Liao alone to hear. "A few dozen immortals more, had they stood with the Orthodox Alliance, would have turned the tide, but I suppose this one cannot be blamed for her master's cowardice."

Liao, for his part, broadly agreed with the remnant soul – Grand Elder Artemay had said as much to him before, and he believed it – but would not allot such a failure to cowardice alone. It the master of the Great Waves Sect had truly been an exile, then it was no small thing to ask that man to stand alongside those who had cast him out, to fight and die on their behalf.

A single glance at Amami Yoko provoked such grim considerations. He intended to save this woman's life, to use his strength to do it, and would risk much for that goal. It could be felt down to his core. At the same time, he recognized, recalling the fight at the caldera, that to offer much was far from offering all. He would fight for this woman's survival but not sacrifice himself.

Was that cowardice, or merely prioritization? After all, if he fell, was she not also doomed? He did not know and doubted he would ever be certain of such things until facing Heaven's judgment.

"The Supreme Sword Sect was destroyed in battle," he told his new companion instead of interrogating her past. "I saw the ruins on my way to find you." "It seems you truly can wander about as you will, can't you?" Amami Yoko directed her words at him with the singularly sharp-edged gaze her foreign eyes were capable of supplying. "I thought that some twisted bit of bragging, before, but you look out onto this land without fear. How is that possible?"

"Oil and water, the plague and I," Liao offered this partial truth in reply. "Never to mix. There is nothing more to it, it is simply an aspect of my nature. It is not," he frowned slightly, doing his before to avoid provoking the growing envy he saw on the warrior's face then. "Without costs."

"It seems a wondrous thing, from where I stand," Amami Yoko stated, proving that the caveat found little purchase. "Before those four scourges came, I had ventured beyond our borders only three times, and only once to the surface." She turned back, looking east toward the vastness of the sun once more. "I am farther from the ocean here than I have ever been. It feels strange, alien. I do not know if I am suited to live on solid ground."

This was a problem Liao had not anticipated. "I am afraid my home is over a thousand kilometers from the ocean," he admitted, doing his best to be honest. Somehow, he felt sure this woman set much store by truth, no matter how harsh. "There are lakes and rivers, but no vast expanses of water, not even such as the bays we just crossed." He stared down toward his feet, briefly. "If I knew of a safe place anywhere in the ocean, I would do my best to take you there, but until yesterday the very idea of hidden lands within the waters seemed impossible."

He felt Sayaana's strong agreement with the final portion of that statement. The remnant soul, though perhaps more widely traveled than any living being not a demonic cultivator, had never encountered such a thing even after centuries of wandering. Though Liao supposed that if the residents almost never came up to the surface, that was perhaps to be expected.

Even the tales of the old world, of strange and wondrous journeys across the sky and to the moon, contained few records regarding the ocean depths. Humans were not creatures of water. Liao considered himself a man of the wild, and found his home in the forest effortlessly, but even diving down below the reach of light in lakes transported him to a fundamentally foreign space.

To pioneer a life lived wholly beneath the waves would require, in his understanding, a very strange dao indeed.

"I can endure," Amami Yoko's response declared this with fearsome resolve. "Service demands it, as does vengeance. But," the passion dissipated just as swiftly as it had been summoned. "I do not know what I will be worth in such a place, or even now. As I am, I am not even a match for the strength of a trained mortal. My cultivation is based upon the Primeval Liquid Absorption Technique and relies upon water qi. I can absorb some from salts, and as you carried me up the river I was able to draw in a little, but to regain fighting strength I must immerse myself entirely. Days, if not weeks, of continual cultivation will be needed."

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A short speech, but it did more to highlight the limitations of other paths than any lecture on cultivation Liao had ever attended. Stellar qi, being everywhere, could be gathered at any time. Despite this, he considered the positives. Water was abundant and widespread.

A lake might serve the woman less effectively than the ocean, but it would still offer the necessary qi, if time could be obtained. "There is plentiful water in this land. Rivers, streams, lakes, and springs abound in these mountains." He had passed over a great many on the way. "The true difficulty is time. If we stay in one place for more than a few hours, the demons will converge and we will have to fight and run again. To find weeks, or even days, for recovery, means somehow finding a safe place. I do not know," the very idea sounded absurd, impossible. "Where such a thing might be. Yet it is necessary, I cannot carry you the whole way." He doubted his strength would suffice over the hundreds of kilometers of ocean they would need to cross, or other challenges to come. "Before this is done, we will both need to fight." He knew that much to be true, absolutely.

These words caused Amami Yoko to lapse into silence. He guessed what the origin of that withdrawal might be with some confidence. Helplessness was a state few cultivators could willingly accept. It seemed this was constant even across the teachings of very different sects.

Unexpectedly, a potential answer came through words spoken inside his skull, though the voice of Sayaana conveyed uncharacteristic hesitancy. "The twisted land we passed, the home of the Endless Mysteries Sect. There may be shelter there, though it will be dangerous." The remnant soul paused, and continued with cold ferocity. "Be careful how much you gift to this one, especially until we know her better. Those who cannot keep pace on the trail can be aided only so long."

Liao wanted to reject that statement out of hand but knew he could not. He had, on that little island, already made that choice. It was not one he welcomed, applying such a limited and constrained valuation to Amami Yoko's life, but that truth, reflected through action, could not be denied.

Should they be surrounded, he would break through without her. Should a demonic cultivator come, he would hide and watch her die. Cold logic, a thing he'd long associated with Grand Elder Itinay, had lodged within him. It too was a thing born and grown in the wilderness. Here, mothers abandoned even their children, in hard times. As his cultivation advanced, Liao found it ever more challenging to deny such realities, dark and light. Awareness swallowed all regrets.

What such realizations meant for his dao remained to be seen. It would not, could not, contain all things. Life was not limitless. Yet, though it would be hard, though it carried grave dangers, he nevertheless decided that saving this woman washed up out of the ocean was something he wished to add to it. Humans could be kind in a way the wild was not. That was a lesson he'd learned as a child, one he refused to forget. Considering the foreign warrior, desperate but unbroken, it was something he determined to weave from imagination to truth if any amount of effort would make it so.

And so, he accepted Sayaana's frightfully suspicious suggestion.

"There are ruins to the west," he spoke after a stretching silence. "The Endless Mysteries Sect was based there, once. I saw strange things as I passed by, and the demons seemed to avoid that place. There is a large river there," Liao, standing up and stretching on his toes, could follow the line of the land and, by combining his enhanced sight with his hard-earned knowledge of mapping and orienteering – learned through countless trips across the basin during the flood years – discerned that the very same river flowed southward from a point directly west of where they presently stood. "That river." He pointed to a gap in the correct direction, beyond the next set of mountains. "In that valley. We can follow it, allow you to regain some strength along the way."

"I do not see this thing you mean." Amami Yoko looked westward, squinting hard, eyes focused. She sounded vaguely ashamed, and when she spoke next did so only haltingly, with many pauses. "I do not understand this place, this land, at all. Earth, forest, rivers, to me these are things from books and stories. I know of them, but I do not know them."

Slowly, moving weakened limbs with care, she drew out her paired swords. The weapons were, despite their plain nature, clearly very fine. They were also, Liao realized now with time to study them, not made from steel as he'd initially assumed, but from a curious copper alloy that polished up to the same silvery sheen. Though light did little to reveal the difference, it could be parsed through the absence of the tangy scent of iron qi.

"The Great Waves Sect had nine sacred swords, one for each of the nine peaks, forged using ores extracted from within their slumbering cores," Amami Yoko's hard and formal voice softened slightly as she began to relate this story, and her eyes grew wistful as they stared at the weapons. "The sect head forged them himself, shortly after he founded his refuge. He wielded the first, and greatest, of the swords, but to foster the twin blade style he devised for use by the Great Waves Sect both above and below the waves the remaining eight were given to the four strongest warriors among his followers."

She rose up then, extending to her full height and showing off the tightly muscled form that endless hours spent swimming had fashioned across her highly athletic frame. "I was the fourth, in the most recent reckoning. These are Kura," she raised the sword in her right hand. "And Shuruya. The weakest pair in the set."

Though she proclaimed them as the lesser components of a greater fellowship, the swords, when examined up close, were potent indeed. They possessed a form of metallic qi that combined sharpness, hardness, and flexibility in a way Liao had never previously encountered. Their craftsmanship, though utilitarian and utterly lacking adornment or embellishment, was impeccable. It seemed the defeated immortal had been a skilled swordsmith, as befitted his origins.

Those swords would be a grand treasure to a soul forging realm elder, and it would not shame an immortal to carry them. This was not immediately noticeable, suggesting that the sheaths were themselves artifacts bearing some form of ritual seal that served to conceal some measure of the swords' power when not drawn. The idea of a woman merely a few layers above him carrying such weapons was shocking to Liao. To have anyone in the awareness integration realm as the fifth strongest in a sect was deeply troubling.

Sayaana was not similarly surprised. "In small hidden lands, the resources needed to forge the pills that ease advancement are few. Losses are far more common than among your own. I carried a bow far in excess of my cultivation for centuries," she noted this unhappily, full of echoing sadness perfectly resonant to the circumstances of the ocean-born warrior.

"These swords belong to the sect," Amami Yoko's usual stern formality returned swiftly. "They are the only thing you may not demand of me during my service. In all other ways, I will obey."

Liao did not like the absolute nature of that assertion, a confirmation of all he'd suspected was tied to the vow she'd made initially. Humans should not rule each other in such absolute, explicit ways, like a farmer owned his cattle. They were people, not animals. That was the great truth of qi, one whose teachings stretched as far back as the First Sage. Still, he could not fail to note the utility of this relationship in the moment. He doubted, absent such a debt bond, that this woman would readily obey his orders otherwise. Given her admitted inexperience on land, that would be disastrous.

It was only seven years, a short time indeed. He would worry about the consequences after he successfully returned her to Mother's Gift alive. That would be soon enough, he hoped.

"Of course," he did his best to sound courteous in reply. "I could not use them anyway. I am no swordsman. Nor are they suited to the sword arts of the Celestial Origin Sect. Besides, you will need them in the coming days." They had, he recognized as he said those words, lingered long enough. Points of demon qi were beginning to turn and lurch in their direction.

"I'll need to carry you again," Liao noted as the swords disappeared once more. Amami Yoko could walk, now, but only at the pace and endurance of a child. Nowhere close to sufficient to meet their current needs.

This need, surely anticipated, drew out a tight nod. No cultivator, and certainly not a proud warrior, enjoyed being reduced to baggage. "This is an injury," the rationalization followed aloud. "Earned in battle. I will accept evacuation."

Picking up the refugee once more, Liao began another long run over the mountains.

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