The next lesson of her rebirth Scoria Scorn put into practice was a simple one. She discarded the privilege of disgust, the long-held choice to avoid any and all physical contact with the plague's lesser servants, the ghouls. She had realized, very swiftly after regaining her flesh, that this held her back. The decision to move past it was eminently logical.

It took her almost ten years to implement.

It should not have been that difficult, but, somehow, it was. Objectively there was nothing significant to contact with the ghouls, at least not for a demonic cultivator. A mortal would see their flesh begin to rot away from the moment they initiated any touch, and an orthodox cultivator would burn through qi at an immense rate from the need to maintain a constant barrier against that leeching, but contact with concentrated demonic qi was meaningless to one who already held huge reservoirs of it within her body and soul.

The demons were, in fact, incapable of harming her. She could slowly beat a ghoul to death with a rock and it would simply move towards the nearest human-origin vital qi until immobilized. Experiments had been conducted during the war, proving this.

Demons did not deliberately harm each other, ever, and demonic cultivators were included beneath that crimson umbrella.

Nor was their skin physically disgusting, at contact. Scoria Scorn had handled countless hideous things during her many centuries of life. Toads, hagfish, placenta, and more had pressed against her skin. Ghouls were not like that. Like serpents, they appeared disgusting at first glance, but once contact was made it was a quite ordinary sensation. Taut and hardened, the skin of a ghoul most resembled that of a young rhinoceros in texture. Unusual, perhaps, but nothing that ought to provoke visceral disgust.

Had it been physical revulsion, that would have almost been easier. Even the exquisite senses of a powerful cultivator could be obscured using sufficiently thick gloves, but there was no means to block the qi sensation, or the dreadful mirror it raised against the hackles of her soul.

Scoria Scorn did not know the origins of the plague. It had been over seventy years old when she turned to its embrace at last, and the majority of its makers had already perished by then, their secrets lost forever. What she did know, what she could feel within her soul, was that it was alien.

The core of the plague, the fundamental qi and the tiny flecks that made up its core form, these came from somewhere else. Some world that never was, torn out of the infinite abyss of time and space beyond the darkness of the sky. A world where the dominant bearer of life, the one blessed to touch the underlying core of existence that humans called qi, was not human or even sapient, but a mindless vermilion wash.

A world where ascension was impossible.

The last limitation did not bother her, seeing as she'd never intended to achieve it. Nor did she mind a world devoid of humans. There was plenty to watch in the motions of the burning depths to keep her fascinated forever. Almost destroying her soul in that way sufficed as ideal evidence.

No, the true barrier, the source of innate revulsion, that was found elsewhere.

A ghoul resembled, visually, a human, or, at least, was recognizable as something that had once been a human being. But a ghoul was also nothing human.

The red-stained flesh contained no soul, no vital qi. Nor did nerves pulse under the skin or a functioning brain reside within the skull. The plague-shifted walkers were simply puppets compelled by their tiny masters, utilized as a convenient source of limbs and hands.

Scoria Scorn suspected, and feared, that the plague could manifest physical agents in other shapes, or as a shapeless, rolling, red mass. Frightfully, she believed that if the day came when it ran out of the residual bodies humanity had supplied it to manipulate, it would do so, generating flesh from red clouds.

Worse, far, far worse, was that she was halfway to such a state herself. She had taken the plague into her dantian, made it a part of her very soul. She retained her own existence, but the plague was not satisfied with that. It did not want just one part of her, it wanted it all. Ceaseless hunger was its best known and most easily comprehensible trait.

Having her own dao, she could resist that gnawing urge, and would. Forever, that was how long she intended to hold it back. Even so, she had no wish to contemplate the fate that would befall her if her dao was somehow lost or shattered. Lose that, and the plague would eat her too, until only a ghoul remained.

That was the singular doom awaiting a demonic cultivator who forsook their dao. It could happen, had happened, if only a handful of times, and even the least contact with a ghoul's flesh summoned endless visions of that hideous fate. A willful indulgence in waking nightmares, that was what such contact required, a lash upon the psyche that no barrier could block. Nothing could disperse the feeling that a soul-less once-human frame exuded across the intersection contact between plague-infested flesh mandated.

To inure, to inoculate, herself, Scoria Scorn worked slowly. She began by forcing herself to hold her palm against a ghoul's back. It was somehow easier if she did not look upon the face in those moments. In the beginning she would snatch her fingers back almost instantly, but she made the bones obey and repeated the move over and over.

Gradually, she increased the length of such contact until, eventually, she could manage an entire day of continual touch, with only a few minutes of break needed to recenter herself before beginning again. From there, she added a second hand. Then she took to gripping ghouls under their shoulders and finding ways of carrying them about while minimizing further points of contact.

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This was a greater challenge than she'd anticipated, for while the ghouls did not resist such handling, neither did they aid in it in the way any conscious human instinctively would. Carrying one was entirely dead weight, a human-shaped construct made of red clay, heavy and awkward. Nor were they entirely immobile. Crossing long distances, the demons would deliberately attempt to reorient towards new sources of vital qi as angles changed. In places with many sources, like busy ruins, they squirmed constantly.

The first time a ghoul did that, it twisted its horns straight into Scoria Scorn's face. Animal panic seized her in a way since it had not since choosing the demonic path over twenty six centuries before. She hurled the ghoul against the nearest stone wall in full fright, turning the thing to paste with the extreme force of her maddened reaction.

This was no great loss. Quite the opposite, the incident unlocked a critical piece of knowledge she needed, one that solved the central puzzle of how to locate hidden lands buried deep in the dark.

Ghouls, when it came to tracking, were incredible. They could trace the lingering sources of vital qi at a considerable distance even through solid stone, blessed as they were with the plague's absolutely unmatched sensitivity to that essence. Scoria Scorn could only grasp the barest echoes of that sense, though her awareness, spliced through the surrounding haze of plague, was growing. Though the ghouls could not pass through solid barriers, by turning and grasping they could indicate direction.

The pointing eyes of a single ghoul offered a largely useless sign within the complex three-dimensional labyrinth that comprised the great karst environments, but that was an issue that could be solved by moving the ghouls into proper positions.

Steadily, one red body hauled through the vast cavern network at a time, she assembled a series of sentinels capable of indicating direction in a manner similar to how blackbirds often coordinated their vigils to sound the alarm when a hawk approached. This, plotted out in a model she fashioned using iron shavings, allowed Scoria Scorn to triangulate the position of hidden lands with a precision that left her utterly astonished.

It would, she recognized instantly, work on the surface even easier than underground. She could plunder the remaining refuges of the world almost at will, supposing, of course, she could muster the forces necessary to do so. It was not enough to find hidden lands. Whether they lay above or below the earth, they were only useful to her if they remained within her power to overcome without any aid save that of the demons.

Locating a hidden land offered no insight as to what lay within. Not size, the strength of the defenders, or even the presence of humans at all. Nothing could be discerned without walking through the gateway, an act that invited immediate reprisal.

Gambles were unavoidable.

That did not stop her from expending every possible effort to tilt the odds in her favor. She spent years mapping out the locations of hidden lands scattered beneath the great continent, from north to south and east to west. During the journey she amassed a mighty collection of protective talismans, designed to be deployed in layers such that she might endure any initial blow and still flee. Further, she gathered up metals left behind and reactivated a forge she'd found abandoned in a cavern settlement that submitted to the march of time and death long ago. There she took up implements long neglected and wielded the hammer and tongs once again.

It had been thousands of years since she'd worked the forge herself. The destroyed old world had long provided an immense surplus of powerful artifacts superior to anything she could craft with her own hands. The plague had given her the qi and power of an immortal, but her smith-craft remained the skill of the cultivator in the second layer of the soul forging realm she had been when living under a different name.

Nothing she might scavenge, however, would properly serve the purpose to which she turned her efforts now. Knowing this, the fires were lit, the bellows stoked, and the anvil struck, bringing spark-light to the depths once again. Smoke filled the cavern, until it would have killed any number of mortals.

Multi-layered metal plating, heavily reinforced with bonds of qi, assembled in an overlapping pattern, one strengthened to channel, disperse, and absorb a single blow even if it should possess almost limitless power. She chose the attack used by Iay to slay her as her model, believing few could match that. The design was further arranged such that, upon being overloaded with qi in this manner, it would shatter, metal flying apart outward and instantly releasing her from its encumbrance that she might flee at full speed.

The resulting suit was absurdly heavy, with a mass nearly twenty times her own, more oubliette than armor. It put the hulking black monstrosity of steel plate Bloody Roam wore to shame, at least in the manner of bulk. It took the full exertion of her enhanced strength to move about in it, and even that was limited. It required a massive outlay of qi to simply walk, and flight was impossible. She had no illusions as to her ability to fight within such constraints, but had no intention of doing so. The entire construct had a single purpose: protect her from overwhelming force for a few critical seconds.

Such an artifact would be of little use on the surface, where a stronger foe would pursue, overbear, and swiftly slay her, but in the depths matters were different. She could move along the stones with the speed of a diving falcon and the fluidity of water, a feat few could match, and even enemy immortals might struggle with a high-speed chase in such confined quarters. With nearly three quarters of a century of effort spent exploring and mastering the environment, she believed that no one else possessed such knowledge of the dark world beneath as she had painstakingly earned.

It was not enough to give her confidence that the next step would be a clean success, but it sufficed to reduce the perceived risk down to something that her greed, her desperate desire to reclaim immortality, could overcome.

Prioritization helped further. The environment within a hidden land mirrored, at least initially, that of the source space it overlapped. Any gateway found within solid rock would be far less accommodating to mortals, or even most cultivators, than those centered upon wide cavern chambers. The ones with access to underground lakes, pools, or rivers, rare though they were, offered extraordinary enticement.

Stone, being lower risk, represented the obvious place to begin.

Tunneling towards such hidden gateways was tedious, and to wield pick and chisel herself at this stage of life would have been utterly humiliating if there was anyone to observe such manual labors. Thankfully, she had come to understand the ghouls well enough to recognize that they did not count as people, or in fact individuals of any kind.

The first such act of quarrying served as the perfect spice for her increasing avarice. She discovered that her route through the rock intersected with another, extremely ancient, tunnel, one long ago filled and obscured by technique and time to resemble natural stone. An imperfect deception, one her ability to sense mineral veins pierced instantly upon detecting severed seams. This confirmation, the proof that her mathematical scheme using the ghouls was more than imagination, quickened her swings until at last she unearthed the mirrored surface-that-was-not that served to mark out the entrance to a bubble of twisted spatial dao.

Of course, she still pushed the ghouls in to go first.

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