The blades drew closer. Chen Ai and the other expedition cultivators bunched together as the trap accelerated, Ran Cong’s bloody corpse feeding the shifting grass with every drop.

  “We have to destroy the grass!” Chen Ai shouted.

  Shen Tongtong and Shen Botao responded quickly, launching arrows and roots of earth at the approaching blades. The grass shifted, wavering in the wind, and the arrows passed between, booming like a panicking heart. Each explosion shook the air, and smoke drifted in the distance, but whatever flames rose achieved nothing.

  Shen Botao’s roots tore at the earth and disrupted the blades, but it only created holes in the encroaching spiral.

  Ran Yaliu was too busy tending to the flowing gash in her side, and Ran Qin helped her with shaking hands. The normally composed Ran women seemed utterly disturbed by the death of their young master. There was no time to berate them.

  Chen Ai focused all her mind on channeling grass qi into her club. The heavy metal resisted her wood-based qi, and so she focused more on the relationship between the dense weight and her strength-based cultivation.

  Song Shuai clapped with deafening thunder and appeared high in the air, his spear twirling above his head as he rained lightning down onto the grass. The electricity struck the grass and dispersed, causing some flames, but the grass shone with an internal light as it resisted the electrical attack.

  Chen Ai tuned out the others.

  She would only have one shot at this.

  This is a tool, she chanted internally, and I am a beast of burden. I will survive, because I am strong. An ox shall not be felled by grass!

  Sparks struck Chen Ai’s skin as the razor-sharp grass drew close. Everyone was close pressed and trying their hardest to lash out with qi and weapons, but for every blade they struck down, three more grew.

  She raised her club above her head, her muscles bulging, singing in her mind as a roar escaped her lips. Blood and qi, sweat and tears, strength and survival. She raised the heavy club high and slammed it down into the ground.

  An awesome wave of grass qi and brute intent splashed away from her. The expedition cultivators were flung into the air, only Song Shuai and the old Shen swordman stabbing their weapons into the ground quickly enough to anchor themselves. The shockwave passed on and tore through the grass, disintegrating the blades with a ruthless application of grass qi. A cleared space of raw earth spread around her as clods of dirt and grass rained down. Chen Ai staggered, her qi feeling momentarily drained, and the club heavy in her hands.

  But she had pushed back the blades.

  Churned earth replaced the torn-out grass, and Shen Botao hit the ground with his hands twisted into gestures. Stone roots bulged and spread, forming a wall around the expedition and preventing the bladed grass from coming any closer.

  The last dust fell as the cultivators breathed and groaned.

  “Is everyone alright?” Chen Ai asked.

  One by one, the expedition sounded off that they were fine.

  Though they’d all escaped the touch of the blades, they were heavily bruised from Chen Ai’s brute force technique. Ran Cong’s body was nowhere to be seen; the combination of dissection and explosion scattered any remnants.

  Only Ran Yaliu had any true injury, but Ran Qin finally staunched the bleeding with bandages from Chen Ai’s pack.

  “There are some Leaf Dew Pills in there,” Chen Ai said from where she sat on the ground. “They should enable all of us to recover our qi.”

  Shen Tongtong nodded, her combative personality temporarily sheathed as she found the jade pill bottle. The pills inside were small and bright green, like frozen peas, and Ran Qi distributed one to each of the members.

  The cultivators all swallowed the pill and cultivated, hastily recovering what qi they could. Nobody spoke, but Chen Ai could see in their eyes that the gesture was appreciated. Most of the expedition's provisions were lost in the landslide's chaos. She suspected that everyone had their own private stash of cultivation items, but by sharing hers, she made some efforts to heal the damage caused by leading everyone into a trap.

  No doubt something else would come for them. They had let their unmolested journey through the jungle lull them into a false sense of security. She couldn’t forget that this was an Imperial Forbidden Zone, and they had already lost a member. It was only day one.

  Chen Ai wanted to close her eyes and sleep, but she forced her gaze to scan the grass while everyone else rested for the moment. She leaned on her grass affinity to draw qi out from the pill while splitting her focus.

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  It was amazing that her senior brother could always keep such tight control on his qi that she never felt it. He never ran out of qi or even let a trace of it slip beyond his control; no matter if they were hiking, fighting, or drinking. That control gave him the confidence to speak back to a Nascent Soul realm spirit beast, and she had to believe he was still alive. If he were still alive, then his confidence was founded in reality, and that meant that her belief in him was correct. She could aspire to be like him and draw on that confidence to lead the expedition towards the temple.

  They would survive.

  ###

  “Well done, junior sister,” I whispered to myself.

  In the floating images, dust fell around the group of cultivators as they recuperated. The tall grass swayed around them, but only with the gentle breeze. The strange circles and paths were gone, banished by the powerful wave of Chen Ai’s qi. The wires embedded in my flesh allowed me to easily guide the viewports so that I could check in on my junior sister’s condition. My willpower flowed easily into the blood pooling on the ground as I split my focus.

  The Butcher Bird, however, was entirely concentrated on the displayed images.

  “Fascinating.”

  The air shimmered, and yellowed scrolls of paper floated around the Butcher Bird like autumn leaves. Multiple brushes floated, making corrections and writing new characters as the spirit beast noted the results of the experiment.

  I forced myself to smile, and after waiting what I hoped was long enough, I interrupted.

  “Did that satisfy you?”

  The Butcher Bird twittered.

  “True curiosity is never satisfied.”

  I almost groaned, but I had to admit the spirit beast was correct. That non-answer had done nothing to quench my own curiosity.

  “Did you get what you wanted out of the experiment?” I rephrased.

  “I wanted to know how a pure grass cultivator would respond to the challenge presented by the Dancing Blade Fields.”

  “So you trapped my junior sister in a formation?”

  “The Dancing Blade Fields are not a formation,” said the Butcher Bird derisively. “These formations you feel in the chair are just the crude instruments I use to awaken the art that is my experiments.”

  It was true that I could feel formations through the wires sunk into my flesh. The sensation was strange, as though I reached a stick out into a dark room and probed at things, guessing at what they were based on sound and texture and weight, but, slowly, an image formed out of the vast network of formations that governed Howling Blossom Valley.

  There was something ominous about the Butcher Bird’s words, and it was with dread that I dared ask the implicit question.

  “What are the fields if they’re not a formation?”

  “The Dancing Blade Fields are a genius loci,” said the Butcher Bird as it puffed out its chest. “I took the spirit of a test subject and wove it into the grass fields, creating a space that can think and react. The formations are simply a means of waking that spirit or putting it to sleep.”

  “What do you mean you ‘took a spirit’?”

  “Let me show you! Feel the controls for displaying the valley, and steer them to the north.”

  The Butcher Bird was so caught up in explaining its experiments that it was ignoring the ‘game’ of questions. I decided not to bring it up and followed the monster’s instructions. The images flashed and flickered through the various biomes of the valley, showing flowering jungle, twisting rapids, the steps of the temple, and a strange system of caves. One image showed a similar bird to the Butcher Bird, small and grey, trapped in a cage.

  “What is that bird?”

  The air shimmered.

  “That doesn’t concern you! Focus on the north. Find the tree.”

  I did as I was told, and soon the images floating before us showed only the Howling Blossom Valley’s incarnation of the Myriad Tree.

  Even after the things I had seen and done, this sight made me sick to my stomach.

  The strange red blooms of the tree I’d seen in the distance were people.

  The tree was taller than any building, with thick boughs that grew at straight angles. Spikes adorned the dark branches, and no leaves grew. Humans were impaled on the spikes. They wriggled, still living, their eyes blank with decades of pain as their blood flowed around them in strange looping patterns that resembled the petals of a flower. There were more than I could count.

  The Butcher Bird directed me to look at one in particular, a woman as pale as a corpse with dark black hair that hung around her face as though wet. Blood spilled from her to form the petals, but she hung limply without any twitches or trembles.

  “I used her soul to create the Dancing Blade Fields. It was quite difficult, but I’ve had enough time to work out the kinks in my techniques, and the results are becoming far more consistent.”

  “That woman has no soul?” I asked quietly, horrified and curious. “Like me?”

  “Not like you. The soul is the animating force, and, as you can see, she is not animated. That is what allowed the Dancing Blade Fields to move and to think. Would you like to see the opposite?”

  “What do you mean?”

  A few more directions of the image showed a wriggling outline of light stuck onto a dark branch. There was a specific pain that came from looking at this strange lightform, and tears welled in my eyes as I gazed through the viewport.

  “What is that?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  “That is a soul,” replied the Butcher Bird proudly. “I can’t tell you how difficult it was to remove the body and leave the soul intact, but after a few hundred trials, I managed to complete it successfully. There’s been a few more successes, but I’ve always been proudest of my first.”

  “What did you do with the body?”

  “That’s actually truly fascinating! I wondered how a body could be animated without a soul, and I spent decades with fruitless attempts to use pulleys and string and blood sigils, but, eventually, I realized that the answer was lying quite literally under my beak!”

  The Butcher Bird stared at me intently. I could feel a tension in the air, and, through the formations, I could feel that Chen Ai and the expedition were moving once more through the tall grass. It took a couple of minutes, but I realized the Butcher Bird was waiting for me to ask what the answer was.

  It was too much like talking to an eccentric about their obscure hobby, only with the added threat that it might impale me and everyone else on a tree and harvest our bodies and souls for experiments.

  “What was the answer?”

  “A shame, I would have hoped you could guess that. After all, you use the same source.”

  I frowned.

  “What do you mean?”

  The Butcher Bird twittered.

  “My masters were attempting to pierce the veil between worlds, and so I used their experiments to further my own. In place of a soul, and with a perfectly intact vessel, there was only one suitable source of animation: demonic qi.”