Exploration of the deep places demanded extreme patience. Formed by water, heat, and the motions of primal forces drawn from the heart of the Earth of such power that Scoria Scorn feared to contemplate them fully, the caverns far below were labyrinthine in the extreme. For every large room or gallery there were endless kilometers of twisting tunnels, and narrow and obstruction filled. Linked only by minute channels permitting a few water drops through at a time, and in some cases completely inaccessible without burrowing through considerable bedrock, they rejected speedy access entirely. Complex, overlapping layers of mineral qi coated these regions and producing distracting, puzzling patterns that severely hindered navigation, something only exacerbated by the irregular presence of water descending from above and heat rising from below.

A hostile place, one almost devoid of life save for that which was found within the watery pools where detritus infiltrated from above. The darkness, though perpetually bathed in the formidable flows of heat qi that rose from below, seemed to be unable to supply some critical component that life required to survive, at least familiar life. Stellar qi, the reborn demonic cultivator soon realized, with bitter irony, that was the essential missing piece. Its power, its light, was the reason the surface was glorious and fecund. Without it, the depths were reduced to desolation, leaving only tiny mud dwellers and strange coatings of slime.

Humorously, at least to Scoria Scorn, someone had developed a formation that transformed the furious mineral-based qi suffusing the depths, with its primarily metallic alignment, into purified stellar qi by deconstructing an alchemical treatise written by the Fifth Sage, Orday herself. Though the overall efficiency was terrible, transmuting not even one part in one hundred, the density of mineral qi in the depths was such that this sufficed to supply light and life to isolated cavern chambers.

Taking matters further, it soon became clear that the formation master responsible for this innovation had freely disseminated this knowledge among the desperate souls who sought refuge from the demon war by creeping down into the vast system of caverns beneath the bent highland region that lay north of the wet plains of her birth and south of the towering mountains that formed the highest range of the world.

Seeking out such places, she grew quite used to squeezing her way through narrow passages only to stumble out into wide chambers bathed in the yellow-white glow of the sun and filled with luscious plant growth. These formations, many of them constructed by the master's own hand, endured the ages quite well within the unchanging environment of the cave system.

The people who relied upon them for protection and nourishment had not been so lucky.

Though demons made for poor cavers, ghouls could contort themselves quite well but were at best poor climbers and could not repel at all, the plague itself could pass through any channel or portal that allowed water or air access. Many of the chambers that were made fertile by transmutation were left unguarded against infiltration by the tiny unseen red flecks that bore the world's true power upon their impossible-to-resolve tendrils.

Such hidden settlements collapsed when the plague arrived. The mortals were converted even as they worked, and the cultivators were forced to try and fight their way through a legion formed of family and friends in order to survive. Few such desperate stands succeeded. Villages, empty of people but with all their buildings intact and a garrison of ghouls staring at a cavern wall toward the nearest qi source kilometers distant, became a frightfully familiar sight to Scoria Scorn.

Such encounters were a source of great disappointment. The plague's victories meant none of the vital human qi she needed to regain her strength remained, and even the artifacts left behind in the aftermath of such struggles were never anything other than weak and trivial.

Others, properly warded against the plague, came to different ends.

Mortal humans were not meant to live within underground chambers surrounded by a pestilence that perpetually sought their lives. Nor were communities smaller than at least five hundred individuals, give or take, stable over the long term. Her father had known more about human breeding traits than anyone who ever lived, and though the knowledge that her sect pursued above all broadly disgusted her, Scoria Scorn had inevitably absorbed a great deal of it.

Many of the chambers she uncovered could not support more than a few dozen souls. Not enough. In time, various calamities brought them down. Disease, murder, madness, and even failed fertility all told their tales through the remains she discovered. In the depths, bones lasted many centuries indeed.

Some of the subterranean outposts perished swiftly, but many endured for centuries. Those with a shrewd cultivator ruler could survive as long as this master retained vigilance. Some managed to last over one thousand years. In one case, where the ruling cultivator lucked into a dantian-possessing heir, a settlement whose population never rose above forty individuals at one time managed to linger on for over two millennia, something a dying artisan had inscribed with pride into the face of a granite boulder.

But time, and tribulations, were equally merciless. Without reaching the spirit tempering realm no cultivator was likely to live beyond six hundred years, but without the support of a sect, and the protections and medicines those produced, the odds of surviving the tribulation needed to reach that realm were incredibly poor. Further tribulations grew even more difficult. To reach immortality alone and unaided was so rare it had been recorded on a mere handful of occasions across thousands of years of history. More than a few struggling settlements bore the scars left behind by Heavenly Lightning signifying the deathblow, essential formations shattered during a failure to breakthrough.

Scoria Scorn admired the striving, at least, and those settlements that perished in this way tended to hold at least one decent talisman or weapon.

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The presence of so many concealed pockets, she stopped bothering to maintain a tally after hitting two hundred, made the true prizes – the places where living humans remained – far more difficult to locate. It would have been all but impossible, if not for the strange ability to sense gaps in the plague's presence she had somehow unlocked during the time she spent without a body.

This bizarre sense, a connection to the very presence and absence of the plague that went beyond the mere touch of its qi, was elusive, confusing, and new all at once. It could not be controlled or directed, at least not yet, but the long years in the dark offered the perfect opportunity to train the ability. Crawling through the caverns, she attempted endless experiments linked to this curious plague touch.

She had the greatest success when she paired it to her trained capacity to trace, measure, and differentiate the various forms of mineral qi. Gaps in that qi revealed the presence of open chambers, watery pools, and areas converted into ancient hidden vaults. When the plague failed to touch such sealed spaces that meant it was either protected by formations or completed blocked against the passage of any substance no matter how minute.

Those secured fastnesses were prioritized above all, though they proved to be rare indeed. Despite working constantly, defying even the limited need to sleep that remained to her in the beginning, she found less than one secure location per year, and most were empty.

It took twelve years before she managed to reach her first real prize.

A vast chamber, naturally formed to be larger than most small towns, that had been expanded by careful labor to feature extensive alcoves along the edge devoted to farming under qi-empowered lighting, it held a compact community of almost two thousand souls. There were an impressive thirty-two cultivators in residence, including an elder in the spirit tempering realm equal to Scoria Scorn's current power.

Too powerful to attack directly, she overcame it using a simple stratagem. Closed off completely from the outside world for thousands of years, the chamber retained protection against the plague, but not against a mechanical strike.

Scoria Scorn dug out a chamber above the protected pocket of her target. Mining deliberately, she made the digging unstable, held in place only by carefully placed stanchions. Even with the immense strength and nearly continual labor she could output, it took six months to put everything in place.

It took only six minutes to collapse.

Millions of tons of rock, fractured into countless deadly boulders, brought the roof down.

Half the mortals died instantly in this avalanche. Embarrassingly, so did a third of the cultivators. The entire space was buried in dust and debris, and the convective heat unleashed by this motion sparked fires that only furthered the chaos.

In the madness that followed, the demonic cultivator descended and slaughtered everything that moved. Hundreds fell to her blade, and over a dozen cultivators, before their master emerged to defend his realm. These helpless victims, their qi drained and absorbed, gave her a critical advantage in the deadly duel that followed.

An advantage that, in the end, proved entirely unnecessary. The cave-dwelling cultivator's combat techniques were weak and his fighting experience non-existent. A rapid, unrelenting assault pushed him back against the cavern wall and immolated him upon the iron within the stones as Scoria Scorn unleashed the burning fury of the smelter through the conduit of the metallic ore. None of the lesser cultivators, including a woman in the thought weaving realm later revealed to be his consort, came to the aid of this naïve and pitiful sect leader. The black blade took his head and the demonic qi lacing her existence drank deep of his power as he passed.

A fate shared by everyone in the little realm. Unwilling to waste even a drop of qi, the demonic cultivator personally slew every remaining cultivator and mortal who had survived the collapse. She even pulled boulders free of those trapped and dying to claim them first. The wounded, the elderly, even infants, she spared no one.

This massacre earned her a layer and a half worth of increased strength. Substantial, but also insufficient. Any satisfaction that this victory offered faded quickly. There were gains to be had, down in the dark, but they were limited. Such scraps as the caverns retained might, with exhaustive time and effort, push her over into the soul forging realm, but immortality required more, far more. One hundred thousand mortals, or their representative cultivators, might suffice, barely, but twelve years was enough time to determine that no such grand prize waited within the karst.

At least, not where the dao remained flat and placid. The little sect she'd crushed beneath falling stones contained fewer treasures than most, their artifacts had been repurposed to the needs of survival long ago, but it unexpectedly possessed a substantial library. Only partially crushed beneath the barrage, it offered up numerous documents easily restored to legibility simply by scraping off the coating of rock dust.

The techniques described in the manuals were rubbish, low-realm trash copied from memory by cowardly librarians who fled underground long before the hordes even drew close to their borders, but the scholar's impulse had apparently persisted in the tiny community that came to be. These scribes, working generation after generation, had written out the settlement's history in remarkable detail. Stressing clarity, they had used the sect script, not even bothering with a cipher.

Reading this record while seated atop the shattered remnants of the sect while the fires she'd set to burn away the remains – she had no intention of leaving any evidence of her subterranean rampage behind – carried out their work slowly, limited by the air supply, Scoria Scorn discovered many things.

The Frequency Illumination Transference Formation, used to change heat into light, had been devised by an immortal named Xanlumin. This mysterious figure, not one recalled from either the old world or the demon war, apparently still lived, lairing within a hidden land to be found somewhere with the vast cavern system. Fifteen hundred years ago he had dispatched a series of messengers to seek out survivors and offer them a place to live within his secure refuge.

These, it seemed, had been largely rebuffed – rare was the cultivator willing to surrender independent domain – but all that mattered to Scoria Scorn was the long-hoped for confirmation that hidden lands did in fact exist deep within the earth. Within those, she knew, lay the strength she required. A surge of greed powered her to increased efforts.

All that remained was to devise a means to find such twisted bubbles within the rock. The traditional method of following hordes would never work, the ghouls simply could not congregate in such places, even if they could manage to trace the twisted and warped qi flows across such vast distances and gaps. It had not been simple laziness that saw the land beneath the earth ignored for so long.

But laziness had been a key barrier, one Scoria Scorn resolved, in the absence of brilliant insights, to overcome through endless, miserable effort.

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