Calid and the group of students moved through the forest, dodging the traces of demonic qi, fires, and worse things in the area until they finally found a place to hide for the time being.
A base of operations that could be well defended.
That came in the form of a cave.
Calid and group walked in and immediately frowned. The place smelled of bat droppings and severe disappointment.
It sat in the base of a limestone ridge half a league south of the burning tree line, hidden behind a curtain of hanging moss that had clearly been growing undisturbed for decades, centuries, or possibly since the dawn of whatever geological epoch had decided this particular fold of rock deserved a damp interior and no ventilation. The entrance was narrow enough that two people couldn't pass through it side by side, which was either a defensive advantage or a fire hazard, depending on your priorities.
Calid's priorities were very clear. "Inside. All of you and don't touch the walls until I've checked them."
The students filed in with a shuffling, hollow-eyed compliance.
Lin Mei went first, sword still in hand, because she had picked it back up at some point during the march south and appeared to have no intention of putting it down again for the foreseeable future, or possibly ever. The boy with the bleeding ear, whose name Shao Wen's memories eventually coughed up as Feng Jun, went last, walking backward for the final twenty paces and watching the tree line with intensity.
The cave opened into a space roughly the size of a modest lecture hall, which Calid found oddly comforting.
The entrance was low enough that he had to duck, and the floor was uneven limestone covered in a thin layer of sediment that had never been walked on by anything with fewer than six legs.
It would do.
It would have to.
"Sit and drink if you have water and eat if you have food. Do not cultivate, do not circulate Qi, do not do anything that produces a spiritual signature larger than a sleeping mouse. Which means no spiritual signatures at all."
Seven of the nine sat immediately.
The remaining two, Lin Mei and a broad-shouldered boy whose name was Chen Bao and whose primary contribution to the evening so far had been carrying an unconscious companion across his shoulders for the entire march without complaint, remained standing.
Lin Mei because she was watching Calid with an expression that suggested she had questions and the questions had questions.
Chen Bao because the unconscious companion was still on his shoulders and he was waiting for someone to tell him where to put her.
Calid pointed to a flat section of floor near the back wall. "Put her there, gently."
Chen Bao laid the girl down with a care that spoke well of his character and poorly of his knees, which cracked. He winced, straightened, and then sat down next to her with the finality of a man whose legs had just submitted their resignation.
Calid stood at the cave entrance and looked out through the moss curtain.
The northern sky was still burning. The orange glow had spread east and west now, painting a band of false dawn across the horizon that would have been beautiful if it hadn't been made of someone's home. The Qi in the air tasted of ash, char, and the lingering signature of demonic cultivation methods that corrupted ambient energy the way oil corrupted water.
He could feel movement out there. Distant and scattered hunting parties that were sweeping the forest in patterns that Shao Wen's tactical memories recognised as standard pursuit formations. They were being thorough. They were being patient. They had time, because the sect was destroyed and the Patriarch was dead and there was nobody left to stop them from taking as long as they liked.
At least until the other sects finally considered the Heavenly Demon far enough to come out of hiding.
Shao Wen's memories did not paint the political nature of the sects in a good light.
He shook his head and turned back to the cave.
Nine faces looked up at him from the dim interior, lit by the faintest ambient glow of residual Qi that clung to their robes and skin like phosphorescence. Nine students of a dead sect, ranging in age from perhaps fifteen to twenty, battered, bloodied injured, and running on fumes and fear.
He needed more than just nine if he was going to rebuild his academy.
Nine was a start, and nine was better than zero, but Shao Wen's memories contained a roster of the White Clover Flame Sect's disciples that numbered in the hundreds. Even accounting for the catastrophic losses of the evening, there had to be more survivors out there in the burning dark, hiding in hollows, ditches, and behind fallen trees and boulders, waiting for someone to tell them what to do.
The White Clover Flame Sect was not a large sect.
It focused on quality over quantity, not that its quality helped it in the end against an army that was ten times its size and lead by the strongest being alive currently.
That meant the disciples were still out there getting hunted down by monsters in human skin.
The problem was that Calid couldn't go get them.
His body had made its position on further exertion abundantly clear during the march south, through a series of increasingly urgent internal memoranda involving chest pain, greying vision, wobbly legs, arms too heavy to carry, and the taste of blood that kept coming in bucket fulls. He had perhaps one more fight in him before something important gave way, and 'something important' in this context meant the structural integrity of his torso.'
At least until he built himself proper crutches to carry his weight.
Now thought? He needed scouts and runners.
He needed to give them a way to call him if they found trouble too though.
Calid knelt on the cave floor and picked up a pebble. It was roughly the size of his fist, smooth limestone and unremarkable in every way. He turned it over in his fingers, feeling the Qi in the air around it, the slow, ambient current that flowed through everything in this world.
Then he began to work.
The matrix was laughably simple, by his standards, a few nodes of resonance matrices keyed to a specific frequency, with a single-action trigger that would collapse the structure and release a burst of shaped Qi detectable at range to a base stone. The magical equivalent of snapping a glowstick and it causing another stone light up in a specific color for that stone.
In mana, he could have inscribed it in four seconds. In Qi, with the energy's persistent reluctance to hold proper sharp angled shapes, it took him nearly two minutes of patient coaxing, adjusting node angles, widening connection tolerances, and letting the energy find its own path through the matrix.
The stone warmed in his palm.
A faint line appeared on its surface that was barely visible and tracing the primary resonance channel.
He made eight more, the process was far quicker now that the Qi had an example to follow.
By the sixth, his hands had developed a tremor that he controlled by pressing his fingers harder against the stone. By the eighth, the tremor had migrated to his forearms. By the ninth, his vision had gone soft at the edges and the copper taste was back with reinforcements. That included the main stone that would glow if the others would break and signal him were to go.
He set the stones in a line on the cave floor.
"These…" he said, and the students leaned forward with the collective attention of baby birds who had just heard a worm being discussed, "...are calling stones. Crush one in your hand and I will know where you are and that you need help. The range is limited—" he paused to calculate and convert mana-based distance models to Qi propagation rates and arriving at a number that was depressingly small. "...perhaps two li. Do not go further than that."
Lin Mei picked up one of the stones and turned it over. "Elder, this... what formation is this? I've never seen inscriptions like these."
"You wouldn't have."
She waited for elaboration.
Said elaboration did not arrive.
That would be once he officially created the academy and started teaching.
"I need volunteers," Calid continued. "Groups of two. You will move through the forest, find survivors, and bring them here. You will not engage demonic cultivators. You will not attempt heroics. If you encounter a force you cannot avoid or escape, you crush the stone and you hide. Am I understood?"
The group hesitated for a second before they nods. Some eager, some reluctant, but all of them looked exhausted.
"Lin Mei, you will lead the first pair. Choose your partner."
She chose Feng Jun, who looked like he would rather have been chosen for literally anything else, latrine duty, root canal work, voluntary exile, but who stood up and took his stone without saying anything, because Lin Mei had chosen him and arguing with Lin Mei was apparently something people in this sect learned not to do early.
"Chen Bao, second pair. Choose."
Chen Bao chose a wiry girl named Su Lan who moved like a cat and had said exactly zero words since Calid had found them.
She took her stone, tucked it into her sleeve, and was at the cave entrance before Chen Bao had finished standing up.
"Third pair." Calid pointed at two boys who looked enough alike to be brothers, and Shao Wen's memories confirmed they were, "...you take an easternly sweep of the area. Stay within the tree line."
The brothers, Wei Ping and Wei Han, took their stones with matching expressions of grim determination that would have been more convincing if Wei Han's lower lip hadn't been trembling.
"Go, quietly. Return before the sky lightens, with or without survivors."
Six students slipped through the moss curtain and into the dark.
Three remained from the original nine. The unconscious girl, a boy with a splinted arm who couldn't run, and–
The youngest.
Calid had been aware of him since the clearing.
He sat in the deepest corner of the cave, knees drawn to his chest and arms wrapped around his shins. He was fourteen, perhaps fifteen, with a round face that hadn't yet decided what shape it wanted to be when it grew up and eyes that were too large for his head in the way that suggested he would either grow into them magnificently or spend his entire life looking perpetually startled.
His name, according to Shao Wen's memories, was Liang Hao. Outer disciple at the Qi Condensation, Early Stage. Unremarkable in every measurable way except one: he had, during the battle in the clearing, positioned himself directly behind the two wounded students and spent the entire fight holding a Qi barrier over them that was so faint it was nearly invisible.
Nobody had asked him to do it neither had they noticed he was doing it.
Calid had noticed as soon as he saw them. "Liang Hao."
The boy's head came up. His eyes were red-rimmed and his cheeks were streaked with dried tear tracks that he'd clearly tried to wipe away and failed. His hands, still wrapped around his shins, tightened.
"You will stay with me."
The boy opened his mouth and thought better of what he was about to say. "I… yes, Elder."
Calid lowered himself to the cave floor.
He had work to do on his body.