Shen Wanjun peered through the cracked doorway in the back of the warehouse with an expression of absolute horror. Fantasies about serving the Heavenly Phoenix Empire and uprooting the Hidden Lotus saw her through her day job as a guard, but she’d never truly understood how that would look.

  Now she knew, and she wished she didn't.

  The plain-looking man she’d been following for days, the one who smiled easily and walked around with a cabbage tucked under his arm, had been cackling in a room painted with blood as candles flickered and demonic qi curdled the air.

  It was a sight that sent a chill down her spine and froze her body. After everything she’d seen as a guard, even after collecting the remains from cultivator duels and wild spirit beast attacks, she’d thought she’d seen everything.

  She thought she had a tough constitution.

  But she’d never seen something so truly evil, and it shook her to her core.

  It only made the Plum Blossoms look even more elite when they maintained their synchronized discipline and killed the demonic cultivator.

  If only he stayed dead.

  Shen Wanjun wanted to scream when he rose back to his feet. She wanted to run when he leaped onto the youngest assassin and squirted acid onto her face. Her body wouldn’t respond. She wasn’t sure if it was fear or the ritual or her duty, but something kept her rigid in that doorway as she watched the horror unfold.

  Until the demonic cultivator vanished using the Plum Blossom’s signature concealment technique. For a fraction of a second, the smell of flowers overpowered the smell of gore, and it brought Shen Wanjun back to her senses.

  “Seal the exit!” shouted the assassin leader. “We must kill the demon!”

  Shen Wanjun didn’t hesitate.

  Her cultivation lent her the strength to slam the doors shut, and with a twist of earth qi, she drove spikes up from the warehouse floor to barricade the door. The action was a reflex, she told herself, and the Plum Blossoms could get out once they were done killing the demon.

  But, just in case…

  She added some more spikes for good measure and congratulated herself on containing the threat to the Empire.

  ###

  The door slammed shut, and now the only light came from a lone candle and the faintly pulsing sigils. I moved through stealth, wrapped in shadowy qi I’d stolen from the assassin I killed. The use of qi felt almost instinctual, as though I was guided by muscle memory, and I silently thanked my weaponized self for the power he’d granted me.

  Having only drunk the assassin’s blood, I didn’t have as much of her qi as I wished. If I could eat her flesh, I would have more, but I would have to make do with what I had. Four assassins remained, and one by one they vanished into shadow. The technique let us move without a trace, and we must have all been circling the room, hidden from each other.

  I had no way of finding them, so I focused on the ritual.

  Making my way to a spot in the room where the pattern was still half-erased from the flash of black fire, I gathered my blood in my fingertips and burst out long tendrils that sprayed new sigils onto the floor. The moment my blood left my body, the assassins appeared.

  Three swords thrust into my invisible body, the skilled eyes of the assassins allowing them to know where I stood by the arc of my tendrils. The blades struck my torso, and besides splitting my focus on maintaining my body and the tendrils, I was fine.

  Each stab triggered a Mustard Oil Bomb, and acid sprayed out towards the hidden assassins.

  This time, they were moving instead of still, and only one assassin was caught by my acid, but it wasn’t enough to make her break stealth. The blades flashed again, and I dodged away, dodging their half-hidden strikes until the pattern was finished.

  Demonic qi surged as the ritual raced towards the conclusion.

  I pressed against the wall and waited.

  To all appearances, the room was dark and empty.

  The assassins coudln’t find me without my blood tendrils, and I thought I was safe, until a thin wire swept through the air. Only the flicker of candlelight illuminated the garotting wire that whipped out like the searching antennae of a blind cave creature.

  I barely leaped in time.

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  The wire whipped past my legs and would have struck my knees if I hadn’t grabbed a hold of the wall with the tightest wrapped blood gloves I could manage. The shadowy qi in my reservoir perfectly wrapped around this amount of blood and blended me into the darkness.

  Even as I hung there, another wire extended out in an overlapping search pattern.

  I limbed up the wall as quietly and as quickly as I could. The wires whipped through the air, and only by rapidly moving towards the ceiling could I avoid detection. I gripped the roof with blood-wrapped fingers and toes as though I were some sort of demonic cockroach.

  The wire extended out, and though I could see the source, I doubted I could take out the assassins without disrupting the ritual. I was fortunate they avoided the sigils out of fear of the ritual, but more than that, I was, ironically, thankful they possessed such skilled footwork to do so.

  But such fragile sigils made a direct attack on them out of question since it could alter the ritual too much. After the black flame destroyed the sigils, the entire process was incredibly unstable…

  I took a moment to realize how much knowledge had flowed into my mind since meeting my weaponized self. There was a whole new field of information and interpretation in my brain. Another set of memories with which to look at the world.

  Since I couldn’t drop down and strike at them, I made a new plan.

  My blood reservoir was almost drained, and I didn’t have much shadowy qi left either, but I drew on both as I conjured a blood tendril that extended only a few inches from my hand like the wet tip of a brush. With quick, sweeping gestures, I wrote a series of sigils and poured the last of my stolen qi.

  My shadowy technique collapsed like the opening petals of a flower.

  “He’s above us!” shouted an assassin.

  Scarlet light filled the room as the ceiling pattern synchronized with the pattern on the floor.

  The assassins appeared one by one in the air. They sailed up toward me, bodies slack, eyes rolled back in their head, before bouncing off the ceiling and crashing back into the floor like discarded dolls. I let out a sigh of relief and dropped down after them.

  It had been tricky, but once the ritual was stabilized, I redrew the pattern so that it would include the three assassins. When the scarlet light burned, their souls left their bodies, and they became nothing more than puppets without strings.

  The door remained sealed shut, so I quickly checked the progress of the ritual. With all the stolen assassin qi I’d pushed in, it was almost complete. Keeping my eye on the entrance, I squatted over one of the still breathing bodies and dislocated my jaw.

  ###

  Shen Wanjun paced on the warehouse roof and muttered to herself, trying to build up the courage to do something with the small tab of paper in her hand. She gazed out at the view of the city, which, from the top of the warehouse, sprawled away in the distance like glimmering lights.

  With a nod to herself, she swallowed the talisman.

  It activated inside her body and drained her qi. Blue flames flickered into the shape of the Talisman Master of the Shining Mountain Sect. He sat on a mat cross-legged and gazed at her, his body larger than hers so that his head remained at the same height as hers.

  “What do you have to report?”

  “It’s him,” she gasped, not even trying to subvocalize. “The man I’ve been following is a demonic cultivator. He’s currently fighting a full flower of the Plum Blossoms.”

  The Talisman Master leaned forward, his entire posture radiating interest despite his face hidden by a mask of swirling paper.

  “Did you see him?”

  She shuddered.

  “Yes.”

  “How strong was he?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s kept his qi contained the whole time I’ve been tailing him, but during the ritual, I felt an overwhelming presence of demonic qi.”

  “There’s a ritual? What are you saying? What’s going on?”

  Her heart pounded, her mouth was dry, and her body wouldn’t stop trembling. She tried to straighten out her thoughts, but…

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He’s performing some kind of ritual, and he ate one of the women; he just ripped her head off and drank her blood like some kind of monster…”

  “Shen Wanjun!”

  She flinched at the tone in his voice.

  “You have to get it together. You are the only one there, and so I need your help. Can I count on you?”

  “Yes,” she said with a sniff. “You can count on me.”

  “Good,” he said gently. “I know this is hard, but we must act fast. You should have more of those communication talismans. Please, eat another one more.”

  “You told me never to have more than one at a time.”

  “Taking two will let me assist you more, but it will drain your qi twice as fast. It’s not ideal, but it’s our only option.”

  If her qi drained twice as fast, then she wouldn’t have long. These communication talismans devoured her qi, and she’d barely been able to recover since the last one she used. The higher her cultivation, the more horrible it was to completely empty her dantian.

  “Hurry, Shen Wanjun!”

  She swallowed the paper and felt it spread like heat through her body. The Talisman Master stood, his body of blue flames trembling against the night sky, and he strode towards her.

  “What are you doing?” she tried to say, but her mouth wouldn’t work.

  He stepped inside her body, and blue flames filled her vision. Her qi surged and twisted, and her body followed as the Talisman Master hijacked her body and leaped over the side of the building. She hit the ground nimbly despite the weight of the armor.

  “Stop!” she shouted, but there was no sound, and her mouth didn’t move. “Don’t go back in there.”

  “Just relax,” the Talisman Master said with her lips and voice. “This is for the good of the Empire.”

  She moved quickly through the warehouse until they reached the door. With a sweep of his hand, he commanded her qi, and the earthen spikes sealing the door crumbled into sand. The door disintegrated shortly after, and a wave of demonic qi rushed out.

  Trapped inside her body, Shen Wanjun screamed as the putrid qi washed over her. The Talisman Master kept her rigid at the door, and they looked in together at a scene of gore.

  The young man stood in the center of spiralling patterns of blood. In one hand, he held a cabbage up as though studying it in the light. Shadows flowed around his body as though he were a nightmare seeping from the dark, and around his feet lay bloody, chewed skeletons.

  Now she knew what happened to the Celebration Flame Sect cultivator. Despite the rising nausea in her mind, her body remained unaffected.

  “I’m sorry,” said the blood-smeared demonic cultivator, his eyes burning in his socket. “I can’t let you leave after what you’ve seen.”

  Bloody tendrils flowed around the demonic cultivator’s fingers as he prepared to fight.

  Ignoring the threat and promise made by the corpses, Shen Wanjun’s body stepped into the room and sealed the door behind her with a twist of earth qi.

  “I’m not leaving,” said the Talisman Master through Shen Wanjun's lips. “Not until I know everything about what you are.”

  (find out on Patreon! 29 chapters ahead)