The cultivators took up position in the open water above the flattened cone summit of the sixth peak. Their hands went to their weapons as they extended their qi senses into the dark water and searched for heavy bodies descending from above. They clustered together above a stony shelf covered in thick sponge growth, close enough to share hand signals when the time came.

Senses extended upward as she floated in vertical profile, Amami Yoko waited patiently. She marked out the time by measuring the progression of the depth's chill across the surface of her skin. The need to pulse her qi to drive it out passed at regular intervals, a suitable method of timekeeping. Ten minutes, then twenty, then thirty, and finally thirty-six.

She felt the whales descend. Three sources of qi, the powerful and heavy life force of the multi-ton animals plunging down from above. They dropped down almost frictionless, like loosed lead weights. Two were adult presences, the other a juvenile she guessed was in the fourth year of life. Two males and one female, a distinction she'd learned to recognize long ago when sensing the creatures of the deep. Their trajectory, which her enhanced cultivation discerned well in advance of the other seeking hunters, was to the east, along the long and broken slope of the peak there.

"We will take the males," she flashed her hands through the necessary symbols while holding the glowing ball behind them for light. "Leave the female. I will take the juvenile myself. The adult is yours."

It was a reasonable division. The other hunters could not match her pace, making it more efficient for her to attack alone. The adult, though larger and stronger, was also the more predictable foe. The male, once confronted, would charge and then attempt to flee though the gap. The others knew this and could counter appropriately.

A juvenile might do anything. Her advanced capabilities would serve better in that conflict.

Separating from the other hunters, she swiftly moved east toward the edge of the submerged caldera. Tracking the qi of the juvenile whale as he dove down through the inky black, she kept his presence fixed in her awareness. She left the glow ball with her subordinates, choosing to attack in total darkness while relying on her enhanced senses to feel qi, water currents, and pressure waves. The whale, bulky and moving at speed, was unmistakable, a beacon guiding her forward.

She swam using her legs only, kicking carefully in slow motions designed to minimize perturbation and to prevent the whale from panicking at the detection of a foreign, human, form. The clicking communication it used to sense its prey filled her ears, and the whale would learn from those echoes that she was present. Those same pulses, passing across cultivator skin, offered a direct path to trace back to the target.

The intervening distance collapsed swiftly.

Hands on the hilts of her swords, the hunter did not yet draw the weapons. She waited, drifting closer as the whale dropped to mere meters above the seamount and switched from powerful propulsive diving action to a much slower, gentle sculling motion that carried it back and forth just above the delicate fringe of corals and sponges extending from the bottom. It remained too far away to see clearly, though bioluminescent flashes illuminated the shadow of its bulk in the distance. Qi resolved such signs further, filling in many details as the whale slowly drifted among the gathered fish and squid of the depths. Toothless save for the partially developed tusks these animals used in mating fights, the beaked whale waited with its long-snouted mouth closed. It sat ready to snap open that vast maw and suck in anything that foolishly drifted too close.

A most efficacious and bloodless hunting strategy. Amami Yoko could not mimic such swift gulping maneuvers, but she did hope to emulate the bloodless nature of such kills. Cutting open prey in the deep sea inevitably meant sharing much of the catch with the denizens of the midnight realm during the return journey. Strength and skill, she believed, would allow her to eliminate such losses.

Though taking down four hundred kilos of muscle, bone, and blubber without slicing it to pieces was a serious challenge even for a cultivator in the awareness integration realm.

However, she had one secret weapon in this case. The whale was not a fish. It could not draw life from water alone. It breathed air. Just as she might, were she incautious, it was not immune to drowning in the deep. Not an easy thing to accomplish, for this animal held all the strength it needed in its blood, not its lungs, and that was not easily removed.

But difficult did not mean impossible.

Closing to a mere fifty meters, no great distance when faced with a growing animal nearly five meters in length, Amami Yoko kicked out hard, snapping her knees together and creating an obvious pressure wave that demanded response. The next move belonged to the juvenile, and everything depended on the whale's choice.

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Careful and cautious animals with much to fear from large deep-dwelling sharks and their own killer cousins waiting near the surface, they most often chose to flee when confronted alone.

Amami Yoko gauged her distance carefully. She was close enough to charge and launch a deadly qi-empowered draw cut. If it were a chase, she could still connect the necessary takedown strike. Despite knowing that option existed, she held out for more. Greedy, perhaps, but the hunter always seeks the trophy in addition to filling the cook pot.

The young whale, curious, little familiar with humans, and perhaps a bit foolhardy, did not retreat. Instead, propelled by potent strokes of his mighty flukes, he advanced directly toward the strangely shaped floating creature that dared to push at him. Rampant clicking, loud enough to seriously threaten the eardrums of a mortal listener, accompanied this abortive charge. Small dark eyes, providing poor vision at the best of times and currently completely blind in the dark, told him nothing of the woman in blue and white that floated in front of him, but the whale knew full well the human was present.

As the echolocation image resolved, something in the whale's mind, perhaps instinct, a prior encounter, or the teachings of his parents, provided recognition that the four-limbed being before him was dangerous.

Flukes churned, and the massive body accelerated hard. Four hundred kilos moving at a speed that no mortal human runner would have found shameful, drove down toward the much smaller pinkish form with immense force. Moments before impact the long snout opened wide, using the water itself to haul the target into a brutal blow against the heavy and immensely solid jawbones. This rushing surge was audible even in the nearly silent depth environment.

And exactly what Amami Yoko had waited for.

Channeling her qi precisely at the moment of maximum suction, she invoked the fluid, liquid shifting swiftness of the Sweeping Current Glide. Pushing off the water with pure and direct qi force rather than the power of any limb, she rotated in three dimensions. Rising upward a few critical meters, she twisted past the now wide and gaping fleshy mouth until she passed over the top of the whale's dark head, its skin less than a meter from her wrist.

Arms snapped out. Twin swords, still sheathed, ripped free of her waist sash. Contorting her body, she slammed the weapons down, hilt first. Reinforced sword pommels, backed by the dense strength of cold steel, carried the full force of the cultivator's mighty blow – one stronger than the whale's own charge – directly into the mounded ball of fleshy, fatty tissue that formed the crown forehead.

Struck directly in the melon, the absorbent organ that processed the strange detection clicks, the whale was plunged instantly into a daze. Dizzy, disoriented, and disrupted, its fins and fluked failed to coordinate. Muscles spasmed under the confused influence of overstimulated nerves. Desperately seeking to escape, it could only roll back and forth helplessly while singing out low notes of terrified agony.

The whale's family, one fled and the other slain at the hands of the rest of the crew's attack, had no ability to offer aid.

Nothing was present to stop Amami Yoko as she wrapped around the snout and skull in a bear hug and began to forcibly pour her qi into the whale's tissues. She sought neither head nor heart, but conducted instead a far more precise action, one nurtured by her mastery of water qi. Reaching into the whale's blood, she found the telltale qi that belonged to oxygen and simply forced it out.

A simple process, pure qi displacement, nothing more. It relied upon control, effort, and her own supply qi of, a thing of skill alone. Amami Yoko possessed all three in abundance. The whale attempted to resist, thrashing about in the hopes of throwing off the clinging cultivator, but disorientation limited it, it was unable to find the slope below that it might squeeze the woman between body and mud. Without that, there was only open ocean.

Soon, as oxygen fled the body, primal instincts took over and the whale used all its remaining strength to race upward toward the surface. The hunter only smiled as this occurred, since it reduced the distance she'd need to haul her prize back for butchering.

The whale made it less than halfway to the surface, barely into the space where the last gasps of blue light from above descended. A final, desperate attempt to breathe in seawater signaled the end. Amami Yoko felt the spark of qi extinguish moments later. She offered a single line of prayer to acknowledge the sacrifice of the animal and her success on the hunt before placing her shoulder beneath the whale's right pectoral fin and beginning to kick her way back up to the floating platform in the twilight zone that was her home.

Two whales in one day, for the rest of the crew had also registered success. Most of the adult's blood and a good portion of the carcass were lost during the ascent, but it was still a most enviable catch. The meat would feed many mouths in the sect. The blubber represented a critical fuel source. Bones and hide were needed to repair the compound itself. Nothing would be wasted, not even the fighting teeth clinging to the sides of the jaws. In the Nine Peaks Range no material could be left behind. Every scrap helped to sustain a life.

Amami Yoko did not participate in the butchery. That task was left to mortals. Nor would any of the whale's flesh ever pass her lips. At her level of cultivation, she survived at full strength on a modest diet of seaweed. Instead, she spent the afternoon bells swimming in the deep blue, just above the floating compound. There she practiced her sword forms and let the ocean's endless supply of qi fill her back up once more.

It was another day, like thousands that had preceded it and thousands more still to come. She was content with that. The ocean would guide her to the heavens in its own time, following the currents. It had been swift so far, and privately she hoped that surge continued to propel her.

Fight, feed the people, and dive the deep. It was a pattern of life that served her well. She neither sought nor required change and was content to let the ocean carry her along in its steady embrace.

But when the alarm sounded she was the first to be found with sword in hand.

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