The guard stared at me, backing away across the cold and dirty warehouse floor, her pleas for safety breaking down into frightened, childlike babbling. After watching the blue flames die in her eyes, I knew this wasn’t a trick. Whoever spoke to me while her eyes burned was not the same woman I saw now.
As someone with voices in their head, it was easy to recognise the signs in another.
Pouring blood through my muscles until my skin darkened, I strained at my restraints. The guard let out a sob as the stone cracked and blasted away from my body. I struggled to my feet, and heavy iron weights slipped out of the wound in my abdomen. Grumbling, I shoved organs and training weights back inside my torso.
I didn’t know if the guard’s eyes could get any wider.
“Please, please, please…”
As my torso healed, I stalked towards her. She backed away until she was pressed against a large stack of crates.
There was a chance that she was pretending she didn’t have any qi, but I didn’t think that was the case. Whoever used her body earlier had shown that she could manipulate stone with ease, and she wouldn’t have let me escape those constraints if that was the case.
I squatted down and smiled.
“Who are you?”
“My… my name is Shen Wanjun.”
“Were you sent by the Shen Clan?”
“No, I’m a guard for the city…”
“Who sent you here? What do you know about me?”
She shook her head.
“I don’t know… I don’t know!”
I placed my hand on her trembling shoulder, and she flinched.
“Breathe,” I said. “I’m not going to eat you.”
She looked at me with wide eyes.
“You… you won’t?”
“Of course not.”
Now that I was close, I could smell that she didn’t have any qi. It was like the difference between boiled meat and seared meat coated in seasonings. Eating her body as it was might replenish my blood pool, but whatever those blue flames were, her qi was completely drained.
Besides, I was about as full as I could be after eating the assassins.
“I know that wasn’t you,” I said.
“You do?”
“I do,” I said, thinking of Ghost Fang’s subordinate monkeys. “Someone used a disgusting, demonic technique to take control of your body. They used you to get to me.”
She stiffened and clenched her hands. I quietly took her hands in mine and ignored the creak in my fingers as she squeezed.
“It’s alright,” I said. “You’re alright now, but I need you to tell me who they were.”
“I thought… I thought they were working for the Empire, and that they recruited me for a special mission against the Hidden Lotus, but now I see it was the other way around…”
“Who were they?”
“I don’t know who they were, but I know who they’re pretending to be.”
“Oh?”
“Guo Zimo, the Talisman Master of the Shining Mountain Sect. He’s a reclusive figure; nobody’s even seen his face! But everyone agrees that he’s one of the most righteous and orthodox members of the Black Tiger Kingdom sects. I was reporting to him, and he used my reporting talismans to take control of my body… oh, I don’t feel good…”
She leaned over and puked, and I pulled her hair out of the way as shock rippled through her.
The name ‘Guo Zimo’ meant nothing to me, but the fact that he was from the Shining Mountain Sect was a shock. That meant he knew about my facility. Had he been one of the demonic cultivators to experiment on me? Undoubtedly, he must know about Ghost Fang, and now he knew about me. I thought again of the talisman that flew away with my blood.
I shuddered to think what that could mean.
Nothing good.
If the Talisman Master knew I was here, then that meant I needed to get away from here as fast as possible.
Shen Wanjun was still puking thin bile.
“Are you alright?” I asked her in a tone of voice that told her I knew she wasn’t.
She looked up at me with sparks bleeding from her trembling eyes.
“No… my cultivation…”
“Can I help?”
She gripped my arm.
“He knows you’re going to Howling Blossom Valley,” she said quickly, before clenching over in pain. “There’s something there…”
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
“What’s there?”
“I don’t know, but something related to the Hidden Lotus. Something he didn’t want you to find.”
“Let me take you to a doctor.”
She shook her head, and her eyes flashed with light as heat rippled from her body.
“There’s no time,” she said sadly. “He’s killed me. Those talismans, he’s killed me… You have to run.”
She sobbed, and her tears glowed like molten steel as her cultivation collapsed inside her body. This wasn’t like the Flawless Blade’s collapse of identity, but a malicious reaction caused by a foreign source. We both knew the outcome: any second now, she would explode.
I clasped her hand and hugged her.
“It’s alright,” I said.
My skin singed as she leaned against me. A sudden stench of sickened qi radiated into the space.
“You should run…”
Her bones glowed through her skin, and smoke rose from my body as I caught on fire. However, the Talisman Master had done this to Shen Wanjun, it must be painful.
Fortunately, her pain didn’t last long.
She gave one last sob into my shoulder, and then the world went white.
I came to.
I wasn’t sure how long I had been out, and I looked around the scene of destruction.
There was a huge, flaming hole in the center of the warehouse ceiling, and my body was embedded on one of the structural beams. I dangled above the significant drop to the warehouse floor. My flesh slowly regenerated, coating my bones as I hung there, but I had no legs.
Below me, five more assassins moved in a search pattern through the warehouse. They must have thought I was simply another corpse, and I pulled on my qi reservoir to cover myself in shadows. Once concealed, I wriggled myself free of the beam and used my arms to swing my way across the beams of the ceiling like an ape.
The silos in the warehouse were dented by the shockwave, and a large circle of molten glass marked where Shen Wanjun’s body had detonated.
I couldn’t tell if the Talisman Master triggered her destruction to take me out, or if it was simply to remove the loose end that was Shen Wanjun. In any case, she was dead now, and I knew about the Talisman Master.
He would come for me, that was certain. What confused me was why he let her live at all. He must have known I would extract information from her, so why didn’t he simply snap her neck before he lost control?
Unless he wanted me to know?
A frown formed as I tried to parse out what his plans could be from the limited impression I had. It was impossible to know, but one thing was sure: I couldn’t underestimate him.
The way he incapacitated me without even being present…
I shuddered.
“Kid!” Cabbagy hissed. “Kid, don’t leave me here!
Cabbagy was still in his spot at the top of the silo, except the explosion rolled me over backwards, so his ass was in the air. I picked him up, and he let out a shriek as I pulled him into my shadows.
“Don’t surprise me like that!” he said as I dusted him off. “What happened? Why did she explode?”
“I’ll tell you about it as we get out of here. It’s time to leave Mountain Root City.”
“Finally, you’re talking sense. Also, you’re naked again.”
The shock of that was enough to distract me from everything.
“Fuck!” I shouted as I glared down at my naked, legless body.
I shouted so loudly that my voice carried beyond my shadows, and the assassins down below all went on high alert.
I cursed myself quietly and started to climb down the side of the silo using blood gloves for grip and a tendril to keep Cabbagy strapped to my back. The assassins looked for me, but my body’s ability to remain invisible to qi senses worked in conjunction with the stolen Plum Blossom qi to hide me from their efforts.
As I climbed down, I glanced at the rapidly cooling spot where Shen Wanjun exploded. Her death sat heavily on me. It was the same feeling that had stayed my hand from killing the Flawless Blade, and it was the same feeling that led me to eat Jiang Jian.
I couldn’t name it, but I would need to think about it. For now, I focused on regenerating my bones as quickly as possible. If I were going to run, I needed legs, but my arms would do for now. With blood gloves extending my reach, I ran out of the open warehouse on my hands while coated in stolen shadows.
###
A bead of sweat dripped from the Dreaming Blade’s forehead as he stood amidst the carnage. The scent of blood filled the night air, finally drowning out the unpleasantly sweet perfume that resulted from the Plum Blossom’s concealment techniques. Twenty-five black garbed bodies lay in various states of dismemberment around him. He heaved a deep breath, smelling the death, and flicked the blood from his jian before sheathing the weapon.
“You… you…” the City Lord blubbered as he sat on his ass at the center of the conflict.
The Dreaming Blade walked toward the politician with a stiff expression.
“They all died protecting you,” he said, “I suppose they weren’t very good guards.”
“That’s right, they died protecting me. I’m an important man. You want 50000? How about 100000? I’ll make you rich beyond your wildest dreams!”
The Dreaming Blade smirked as he stood over the City Lord.
“My wildest dreams?”
“Yes! Whatever you want!”
“I only dream of one thing.”
The City Lord sweated under the Dreaming Blade’s intense stare.
“Tell me, and I’ll make it —”
His voice cut off as his head rolled from his shoulders and thudded into the ground.
The Dreaming Blade flicked the blood from his jian and sheathed it once more.
“You are not the man who will fulfill my dream.”
He was almost out of qi, and there would be more assassins coming. Probably more guards would come as well. There were always people who protested the death of an authority figure.
He glanced down at the City Lord’s dying head. The moustached lips trembled, trying to form words without lungs. The Dreaming Blade watched until the light faded from the eyes, and then he leaped away from the garden. It would take days to restore the qi he’d saved up, and even now, he could feel the cracks in his core aching. The fight had taken more out of him than he expected, and any healing he might have achieved while resting was undone. Only his Heavenly Blessing kept his core together at this point, and if he pushed it again like that, he might lose his cultivation forever.
So he moved with only the physical ability of his qi-forged body. No movement techniques, and no qi. He didn’t float in the air, but simply moved with speed as he propelled himself across rooftops towards the city wall and the expedition meeting point beyond.
As he ran, a deep horn blew from the City Lord’s estate, and chaos reverberated through the city.
###
I listened to the horns as I stole across the rooftops of the Merchant District. What had been a bustling district was now transformed. Guards and posses of cultivators hurried through the streets while shadowy assassins leaped across the rooftops. There were no shoppers, and no shopkeepers. Any sense of civilian presence was completely gone. What could have possibly happened to cause such a state of affairs?
The assassins mentioned a kill order on me and my party. Was this a part of that?
I knew Chen Ai was safely out of the city, but I could only hope that my disciple had made his own way out. He would have been speaking with the City Lord and right at the heart of his power when…
I stopped crawling across the roof.
“Oh, damn.”
“What is it, kid?”
“The Dreaming Blade caused all this, didn’t he?”
Cabbagy thought about it for a moment.
“Yeah, probably.”
I sighed.
“Do you have any idea of disciplining unruly disciples?”
“Seriously? Do you think I’d have half the problems I have if I could discipline you?”
“Fair enough,” I said as I resumed walking.
“Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t have some ideas.”
Cabbagy listed off punishments as I dropped off the side of the roof and landed in front of a smithy. Light poured from the windows despite the closed doors. With shadows still wrapped around my naked body, I opened the door and stepped inside.
Time to collect on my order.
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