They swam south, moving across the surface of the bay with quick, powerful strokes. The waters, dead and calm, were eerie, motionless, and strangely cold. Clear save for the greenish stain of grit, the eye could see a long way through the waters all the way to the desolate sands below. An ocean killed just as thoroughly as the land.

Even in the waters, the lanterns remained. Whether they had been sunk into the bay to maintain the formation or simply been dragged there by wave action, Liao could not know. Thankfully, it made no difference. The stone puppets were far too heavy to even attempt swimming, and though the bay was frightfully shallow in many places, there was nowhere they passed that had such lacking depth that the stubby arms were able to reach up and strike.

Amami Yoko, to both Liao's expectation and chagrin, outpaced him in the water immediately. The water cultivator was dressed for swimming, possessed vastly superior natural technique to his own, and her movement technique flowed with and through the motions of the liquid rather than fighting them as the Stellar Flash Steps did. Light preferred the absence of obstacles.

Thankfully, the warrior was fully aware of this from the start and moderated her pace down to one Liao could manage to match. She said nothing as she did this, but he suspected the initial surge of speed that threatened to leave him behind had been nothing more than a demonstration to sustain her pride. That she openly accepted his choice to swim rather than run over the waves surprised him at first, since the latter was easier and faster, but it seemed she understood the needs of stealth well enough.

They traveled nearly forty kilometers southward, most of this spent slightly submerged, until they arrived at the southern edge of the bay in mid-afternoon. A simple journey, one managed at a steady pace to avoid the depletion of their reserves, so recently restored. It was also, unfortunately, useless.

Liao felt the mistake before he saw anything. The demons had sensed activity not simply at one point, but everywhere along the formation's edge. The entire vast circle had become a battleground, and the beaches of peninsula they hoped to use as an escape route were filled with ghouls and puppets brawling across dead sand in a violent but strangely bloodless battle.

There would be no easy breakthrough in this space.

Acting on instinct, Amami Yoko turned southwest as she sensed this. The water sought the main channel in the bay's center and the path to open ocean beyond.

It was a sound strategy, but also an obvious one, and they discovered that countermeasures existed.

A metal chain hung draped across the bay's mouth, forming a net of links from surface to seafloor that crackled audibly as terrible quantities of lightning qi danced back and forth through its wiring. Sayaana cried the warning first, inside Liao's skull, but it was not needed. Amami Yoko stopped and surfaced seconds later, still fully half a kilometer from that deadly barrier and the thrum its embedded charge inserted into the water.

"We have swum into the net, and it is closing," the athletic cultivator noted with audible frustration. She did not seem the least bit tired, despite hours of swimming, but her patience had clearly frayed. "Cut our way through?"

It was the obvious, if most dangerous, move. Liao distrusted it immediately. Too much effort had been expended to create this complex, overlapping array of defenses and to keep them functional for so long. The answer could not be so simple as shattering them. He did not believe this formation's weapons were limited to stone lanterns, nor that any others they could not find would differentiate between humans and demons.

"Every formation has a focus point, where it is vulnerable to disruption," he recalled the teachings Su Yi had shared. "The larger the formation the more obvious, and vulnerable, the focus," the beautiful elder's wicked smile had done much to inscribe those words deep into memory. "The more likely it is to be in the center."

"I think," Liao turned to Amami Yoko as they treaded water before the sparkling chain. "We should destroy this formation. The backlash will scramble local qi flows, perhaps enough to allow us to avoid the plague's attention entirely while we leave these islands."

The ocean born woman, who possessed a natural ease while treading water in the empty bay that Liao could never hope to match, held silent for a brief moment. Her face, still and unmoving, offered no insights as to her mood. "I would rather fight," she spoke at last. "But if I am exhausted again, we will have come this far for nothing. If you believe the undercurrent preserves our strength the better, then perhaps it is a superior path. In either case I will follow your order."

Such trust was difficult to hold, being both heavy and shapeless. Over a century by himself had not made Liao suited to carrying the hopes of others, at least not openly. He'd arranged the great flood in secret. If he'd failed, only the elders would have known. To carry this woman's life, one whose cultivation had advanced beyond his own, in his hands left him nearly paralyzed with thoughts of failure.

Thankfully, he was never entirely alone. "I think the formation's center is northeast, somewhere amid those small islands," Sayaana's voice echoed through his skull and pulled him back into the familiar and welcome world of practical needs.

"Then let's break the formation," Liao decided, trying to project confidence aloud despite deep hesitancy beneath. A moment later, as he glanced west once more, he found a reason to firm up his resolve. "For now, those puppets are thinning the demons out, a little." Stone fists could surely shatter ghoul skulls. "No reason not to give them a little extra time."

This time, Amami Yoko's nod of support was significantly deeper. It seemed the water cultivator was unlikely to ever object to any course of action that resulted in additional dead demons. A dangerous attitude, probably, if pursued above all, but considering the price she'd paid to be put upon that path it was not something Liao had the strength to rebuke. He had not the right, not yet, perhaps not ever.

Silently, they turned about and reversed course, now swimming northeast. They could feel the battle in the distant background, the pulse and pull of qi quivering along the edges of the formation as the mindless combatants struck at each other over and over. Two legions of death locked in conflict.

Liao could not truly observe the nature of the formation flows that carried essence through the water, land, and air. He could feel them, slightly prickling along the edge of his scalp and the base of his spine, but the insights such twinges offered remained stubbornly obtrusive. Amami Yoko, four layers further into her integration and blessed with a lifetime feeling the subtle currents that passed through the far denser liquid medium, was able to breach this barrier. By sinking down to the bottom and wriggling her toes in the sand, she could orient along the lines of energy created by the formation's qi channels and follow the flows of power that circulated around and around from the source at its center out to the countless lanterns at the edge and back.

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For his part, when mimicking this action, Liao could only discern the nature of the formation's draw, a mechanism he now knew well. It was the same, in principle, as Snow Feast. Kill everything in a space and extract power by absorbing the qi of the slain. The vast ragged edge region, haze-coated and dying, served to source the strength the formation needed. A drain upon the landscape, vast and brutal, in order to provide the necessary power to sustain the bubble of death.

"Those lanterns, they must be draining the reserves, and fast," Liao whispered to Sayaana, seeking her assessment.

"Yes," the remnant soul agreed swiftly. "But who knows how many centuries worth of qi is stockpiled here? This place, the powers gathered here, we don't know them. Be very careful."

Good advice, though difficult to enact while swimming towards the formation's heart.

They shifted from the main bay eastward, into a small, pocketed extension of the shallows. The aperture of this side space was narrow, and three mid-sized islands filled it further as they squatted nearby. These were nothing notable, being flat and empty without any vegetation to provide them character. It was obvious enough even to Liao's untrained eyes that the absence of plant cover meant storm surge swept over the rocks and sand regularly. The resulting surfaces were clean and barren, covered in more of the empty white sand that filled this dead zone.

"The central island, nearest the peninsula," Amami Yoko directed, reading the formation web, and Liao followed with a single nod of acknowledgment.

He expected a fight, more stone lanterns at the very least, when they exited the surf, but was surprisingly disappointed. A single stone lantern charged down the beach and practically impaled itself onto the outstretched sword point that the water cultivator placed in its path, but this automaton was alone. There were no other puppets or obstacles. Liao suspected that the one exception had somehow been transplanted here by the storms.

Amami Yoko sliced the jade out of its head with a minimalist effort, smooth and almost casual. The look she gave the fallen construct was almost piteous.

"The waves are strange here," she noted, perfectly calm in her words, as if the destroyed puppet was of no consequence.

Liao supposed that was, in some sense, true. Individually, the lanterns were less of a threat than ghouls, given their clumsy nature and notable weak point. Even the demons were minimal threat to those of their cultivation, unless gathered in great numbers. However, he suspected the constructs were significantly more damaging to the demons in return. Enlarged claws and teeth were poor tools to rip through stone and reach the jades and attempts to simply tear the lanterns apart would allow them to reach their foes. Nor could the demons pinpoint the center of the formation, they could only overwhelm using their numbers.

He could only hope both sides would savage each other.

"You're right," he agreed with the observation almost immediately. He could feel it, below his feet. It was harder, with no living matter to present a threshold, but the gap there was clear enough. "This island is full of holes." Someone had cut a fortress downward into the stone, one that extended down as far as his senses could reach. "Whatever generates the formation must be below." He could almost sense it, an exceedingly powerful qi source tingling at the edge of his awareness. It reminded him of the fenghuang sculpture he'd recovered before. The nature of the qi, however, the essence that empowered this web of death, was strange and unfamiliar. He'd never encountered anything similar before.

"Dangerous, to carve out below the waves," the ocean born cultivator said this with cold certainty, the echoes of some distant, still-vivid tragedy. "Though it is shallow here, so I suppose it would be easier. I will search for an entrance."

Finding the access point in a field of undifferentiated sand layered into low and empty dunes by wind and wave was not easy. Whatever seal protected the cavities below was surely watertight, making it impossible to trace rain channels toward the location as Liao had often done for other subterranean chambers. Instead, he took a shovel from his storage rings – he never traveled without that tool, now – and ran it through the sand with the steel blade submerged. In this manner he sought to find worked stone that might conceal an aperture.

Amami Yoko, witnessing this, matched the process with her swords. Liao initially thought to warn her against this but swiftly realized that master smith forged and water qi reinforced metal would not be degraded in the least by a little sand dragging. The weapons emerged between turns completely untouched by the grit below.

He appreciated the help but noticed that while the water cultivator utilized a spiral-based search pattern that covered area effectively, she paid no attention to the island's topography as she moved over the dunes, ignoring shifts in depth above and below. While Liao knew that few had the experience to read the shapes and contours of the ground as he did, schooled both by Sayaana and decades of travel, Amami Yoko lacked the natural understanding of slope, hill, and gully even a village child possessed.

It was as if she had no experience with the ground at all.

"Did you not grow up on the seafloor?" he dared to ask after she sloshed through a dune and almost fell when the sand gave way. "Is it so different on the surface?"

"The seafloor is deep, dark, and deadly," Amami Yoko shook her head in sharp negation. Her expression was mask mingling seriousness and sorrow. "Only powerful cultivators can travel there and only do so to seek rare materials. The Nine Peaks Range encompassed nine seamounts whose peaks reached far from the floor, but not even halfway to the surface. We swam over them to harvest strange creatures and to cultivate using the strong qi the currents washed over them, but we lived on platforms near to the surface in the layers where the light remains strong." She looked down at the sand, white grains collected between her toes. "To walk on land, not floats, is new."

There were no words, no framing, to answer that, not yet. It lay too far beyond imagination. Yet even as he thought this, Liao was seized by a desire to drift beneath the waves and witness the mountain ranges hidden beneath the sea.

Scratching along the sand as his thoughts drifted, Liao eventually noticed a small depression. There, pushing his shovel down, he found a cinch, a point of bonding where the steel skipped from stone to mortar and then to stone again. "Here," he called to his companion, though only after he had already begun digging.

He remained unused to traveling with others.

Such neglect did not seem to bother the warrior. She joined in swiftly and without complaint, though her lack of tools limited her participation mostly to gathering sand up in the sweep of her skirt and carrying it away. That this action readily and totally exposed her undergarments induced no hesitation. A pointless thing to try and hide from someone who had spent days carrying you, but Liao nevertheless noted the lack of verbal comment. It seemed life under the sea induced considerable shifts in the rules of modesty.

Despite her lack of caring, Liao avoided looking at Amami Yoko much. His tastes, such as they were, tended toward the pale and willowy, not the tanned and athletic, but as a cultivator in the awareness integration realm, the ocean born warrior inevitably presented an idealized representation of the type, one intrinsically appealing to almost any man. To leer would be crude, a callous betrayal of the power she'd granted him over her, and therefore he worked hard to avoid such disrespect.

The sand, being dry and dead, was light and easy to move. However, this also meant it spilled readily down into cleared areas. They had to move away a considerable quantity of the surrounding dune material before the stone below stayed exposed for more than a few seconds. This was not challenging given the strength and endurance they possessed, but it was time consuming.

That was not, for the moment, a problem. Time would only press them should the ghouls annihilate the defending lanterns. That fate was surely inevitable, but it was unlikely to be swift.

Set into the base of surrounding rock, the door they uncovered was a singular stone slab structure, mortared in place and bound by thick bronze hinges. To open it would have required a whole team of mortals, with ropes, bracing, and ideally oxen. Amami Yoko cut through the mortar with a single flicker-snick slash of her swords and Liao, finding no embedded protections, simply bent his knees and pulled it open.

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