Ran Qin plucked her pipa, and the elegant sound filled the air, the ballad sashaying through my mind as the grey stone’s memory overlapped with the lyrics.

  “Does anyone know the origin of that song?” I asked.

  “You might as well ask the origin of the moon!” Chen Ai laughed drunkenly, slapping her knee and almost falling off the log.

  “Don’t get too relaxed, junior sister. We’re still in a forbidden zone.”

  “Of course, expedition leader,” she said with a mockingly formal bow. “I shall show restraint after surviving a fight with a demon.”

  I couldn’t help but grin.

  She was right.

  We survived a terrible encounter, and it was only natural that people relaxed after. The creaking sound of the monster’s twisting flesh would certainly haunt my nightmares if I ever slept… I wondered if it tasted like dried meat?

  No, don’t salivate in front of people!

  Ran Qin paused in her playing to delicately sip liquor from her cup.

  “I don’t know the song’s exact origins,” she answered my question. “My music teacher told me that the Ballad of the Moon’s Kiss has been played in some variation or another for over four thousand years, but it certainly started in the south.”

  “The south?” I asked. “What makes you so sure?”

  “Well, ‘sure’ is a stronger word than I would use when talking about anything that old, but the shape of the Endless Depth Lake in the center of the Star Scraping Mountains would suggest that if this event ever happened, it was there.”

  Star Scraping Mountains…

  The name jostled a memory of sitting on the docks of Shadowlight City and watching the merchant ships coming in from the river, loaded with goods that glittered like the night sky. My friend, before her illness took her, would point out the ships and caravans and tell me where they came, painting a map of the world with gestures in the air.

  The Black Tiger Kingdom existed in the upper middle of the Heavenly Phoenix Empire. To the North lay the true upper kingdoms, who experienced brutal winters and defended the frozen border.

  More kingdoms lay to the south, and across the center of the Empire lay the Star Scraping Mountain ranges, which could only be climbed by steep, secretive routes, or circumvented by the imperial-controlled canals and rivers that cut between the peaks.

  The kingdoms south of those mountains were known to be hot and strange, and I had foggy memories of spending my street rat days watching the caravans from those exotic locals enter the shrouded gates of Shadowlight City

  It felt as though I zoomed out from where I stood, and were it not for the weight of my heart, I might have kept on floating, trying to catch the illusion of memory.

  The campfire crackled and spat sparks, and I sat on a rough log beside my laughing junior sister. A world away, a life away, and she passed me the liquor, and I drank until I coughed.

  I asked a few more questions about the ballad, but nobody knew anything that wasn’t hearsay, and answers quickly started contradicting each other. The music resumed, and I ate enough fish to look like I wouldn’t eat anything else that night.

  Little did they suspect…

  Despite the circumstances, it was a pleasant evening, especially after Ran Yaliu and Song Shuai returned with pouches full of herbs and slightly mischievous smiles.

  The only sore point was Shen Botao, who refused to let anyone look at the wound across his chest. He insisted he was fine and simply needed to cultivate, and when he retired early, we spared him a shift watching the camp.

  He was young and probably more out of his element than anyone else, but his behavior didn’t match Chen Ai’s first impression of him. It was just further proof that I really couldn’t be sure about anyone in this expedition.

  ###

  Chen Ai’s drunken snores purred through the camp as I swapped my watch with Ran Yaliu. I crept into my tent, and, for a moment, it almost felt like I was back hiking through the forest towards Sleeping Ruin Pass. It was moments like this that I felt Cabbagy’s absence.

  I had to trust that my master could look after himself, and part of that trust was doing now what I knew he wanted me to do. While inside my tent, I activated the Plum Blossom stealth technique and I rushed away from the camp under a petaled cloak of shadowy qi. The technique softened my footprints, and I stole past Shen Tongtong as she scanned the area with her bow drawn. It was slightly unsettling that she didn’t detect me, not that I expected the stealth technique to fail, but that it meant someone could just as easily sneak into the camp…

  I needed to have a word with them after I got back, but, hopefully, this would be the last time I snuck away at night -- or snuck away at all. Pale trees stuck out like bones, their black shaggy leaves glossy in the moonlight. A faint scent of decaying leaves and dirty hair filled my nostrils, and I tried not to think about how much the foliage looked like countless people had been scalped. Even though I -- sometimes -- ate people, I was still capable of squeamishness.

  My steps became leaps as I pumped blood through my muscles, and qi flowed readily from my reservoir. In moments like this, I almost felt like a true cultivator. Still, despite the shadowy qi being housed inside my… wherever it was housed if I truly didn’t have a soul… it still felt as stolen as a robe tailored for someone else.

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  Despite this, I continued my earlier experiments as I ran.

  After all, I had qi, so there was no reason why I shouldn’t be able to use that qi like a regular cultivator.

  Ok, there might be a lot of reasons, but I chose to be optimistic.

  I drew on my reservoir as I darted between the trees, and the qi instantly reinforced the cloaking technique. My first steps were to experiment with that automatic process. If I could disrupt that, then, hopefully, I could direct the qi as I chose.

  Cold droplets sprayed up from the dark, churning waters as I leaped across the pillars sticking out from the river. The decaying wood appeared to be the foundations of some long-collapsed bridge. I knew it wasn’t constructed by the same people who built the facilities, because their structures didn’t fade.

  Though I had to wonder, did those demonic cultists build this entire valley, or were those formations I’d touched in the wire throne woven into a pre-existing space? If I knew more about hidden realms, or even regular valleys, I might be able to say, but as it was, it was another question on the pile. Hopefully, the corpse of the demonic spawn would provide some answers to some questions.

  I approached and pulled on the shadowy qi, trying to stop it from forming the technique so I could use it to detect if there was anything out there… but all it did was cause my stealth technique to stutter as shadows pooled at my fingertips, spinning like blossoms folding and unfolding. I dismissed them. There might be some use in that, but right now I needed to focus on my stealth.

  While I was confident that nobody followed me, I needed to do my best to remain hidden.

  Keeping myself invisible, I hunkered down beside the corpse.

  There were some small creatures chewing at the greying flesh. They looked like puppy-sized rats, but when they opened their mouths, long prehensile tongues emerged that had little mouths on the end. These tongue mouths chewed at the demonic spawn’s flesh, and swallowed in long bulges down into the rat’s body.

  I felt a slight amount of demonic qi radiating from them, but that had more to do with their meal than their inherent nature. They weren’t cute, and there weren’t too many of them, so I kicked one hard enough to break its spine and send it flying into the night. The other screeched and ran away, leaving me and my meal alone.

  Well, not entirely alone…

  “I know you’re there!” shouted the eldest saber as I started stuffing the cultivator into my face. “You might as well just come out now.”

  I hope I sounded more confident when I bluffed like that…

  Deciding to ignore the saber, I started eating the demonic spawn. The flesh tasted surprisingly sweet, and it came off the bone easily, so soft it almost slipped through my fingers. The remnant boiling blood had slow-cooked the creature while I waited, and I wasn’t disappointed. I tried to remember if Ghost Fang had been this soft, but that culinary memory was tainted by the texture of fur.

  I did make a mental note to start keeping a pouch of salt and other seasonings on me, since that could only help.

  Each mouthful filled me with the fiery heat of demonic qi as though I were swallowing coals. The power pulsed through my body, strengthening my muscles, blood, and bones, but it was obvious to me that I’d absorbed the majority of the demonic qi earlier when I killed the beast. The remnants I devoured now weren’t enough to dislodge the seals on my flesh and bone reservoirs, but I felt myself becoming stronger and tougher.

  How much more would I need to eat to equal a Foundation Establishment realm cultivator? It felt like the growth I’d experienced at first was slowly diminishing, which only meant I needed to eat more…

  If such were my fate, then I would oblige.

  It was so soft and easy to tear that the large, muscular corpse quickly vanished, which perturbed the sabers.

  “What’s happening?” asked the youngest saber. “Why is he evaporating?”

  “We must have failed him,” said the eldest saber sadly. “First, we failed him in life, and now we failed him in death.”

  “Depressing,” added the middle saber.

  I felt bad listening to them agonize and criticize themselves, so I reached out to the eldest saber and focused on halting the stealth technique. This time, I split the qi flow, so while I maintained the stealth technique, I pooled shadow around my fingertips, and when I touched the saber’s hilt, my technique rippled down the weapon and tucked it within my shroud.

  “Wow! What is this? It’s you! Brothers, it is the man who spoke to us earlier.”

  “Yeah, it’s me,” I said around a mouthful of demonic spawn. “Sorry for killing and now eating your former master.”

  “Such is the nature of the world, and I shan’t hold it against you.”

  “You’re too kind.”

  “By the way,” said the eldest saber. “We saw you with that jian.”

  “Talentless,” said the middle saber.

  “You are fucking terrible,” said the youngest saber. “Which is why you should use a saber instead!”

  “Exactly.”

  “What do you say?” said the eldest saber. “Take us with you?”

  “All of you?” I asked.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t have three arms.”

  “Do you hear that, brothers? He’s worried about arms. My boy, we’ll teach you how to grow a third arm!”

  “We can even teach you how to grow a third leg!” added the youngest teacher. “If you know what I mean… get it?”

  “Stop,” said the middle saber.

  “Did you shape the demonic spawn?”

  “Yes,” answered the second saber with another single-word reply.

  “We’re the ones who made him the fine man he turned out to be! Too much of a dervish for my tastes, but still, a fine warrior. So, how about it, my boy?”

  Though the eldest saber seemed trustworthy, even if his brothers were a bit quiet and rude, I couldn’t be sure how true his statements were.

  After all, in my experience with demonic cultivation, the bodies were altered by shards of grey stone, and not by swords.

  So, I continued eating and hunting for the prize that was the stone, but even as I started on the offal and scraps of skin, there was no stone.

  Had I eaten it by mistake? No, I would have experienced whatever memories it contained. Had I dropped it to the ground? After digging through the blood-soaked grit and quartz, I concluded that I hadn’t dropped the grey stone.

  My panic rose.

  “Where could it be?” I murmured to myself.

  “Where could what be?”

  “The stone that shaped…”

  I glanced at the eldest saber as it waited expectantly for me to finish my statement. The sabers claimed that they were the ones who shaped the demonic spawn, and now that I examined them…

  The oversized sabers all had the same design, each with intricate carvings of a single eye on each hilt. Something about that eye caught my attention. It was a lot of work for the design of a demonic spawn’s weapon, especially since the sabers actually watched me from their blades instead of their hilts. This needed investigation, so I took the eldest saber and worked to free the wrapping on the handle, and started unwinding.

  “I say!” spluttered the weapon as I undressed him. “This is highly inappropriate!”

  “Indecent!”

  “You’re stripping him bare, and you’re not even wielding him!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said as I let the leather thong fall. “But I had to be sure.”

  Hidden under the binding, and inserted in a gap in the tang, sat a polished piece of grey stone. Carved into the grey stone was a symbol of an eye.

  A grin stretched across my face: I’d found my prize. What memories might it contain?

  Take it!

  “What are you doing, kind sir? Good sir? Please!”

  I ignored the saber’s protests as my shadow-wreathed fingers reached for the polished stone.

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