They ran like the wind, qi quickening their steps and trees passing by in a blur of brown-barked trunks and green needles. As strangely drab as it was to run through a forest without the usual carpet of rainbow petals, Calvin found himself appreciating the region's strange ecology. Dry brown needles and the occasional green shrub did little to hide hazards on the forest floor and the trees grew further apart than he was used to, significantly easing their passage.
They ran in a staggered line a few strides apart, Wallis leading the way and Lulu bringing up the rear. Wallis was the slowest of the trio so he set the pace, a blazing sprint that put their speed on the way to Nine Pine Gulch to shame and used qi as quickly as it regenerated. They did not bother with stealth, leaving a clear trail of deep footsteps, displaced needles, and occasional broken branches in their wake. Calvin and Lulu could have gone faster still, but they would already be significantly outnumbered when they finally caught up with the cultists. It was better to arrive a little later but with their full strength than earlier but one at a time.
As he ran, Calvin focused on his spirit. Four gates turned within his qi nodes and he worked as quickly as he dared to form a fifth. Only the first two felt particularly stable and most were made from regular qi, not barrier qi as they should have been, but that was alright. It was starting to get dark, the sun low on the horizon when it could be seen through the trees, and they couldn’t be more than another hour away from the village. They would last long enough.
Calvin was so distracted that he was nearly too slow to spot the threat in time. Lulu cried out in alarm and his half-formed gate collapsed back into raw qi as the deep shadow cast by an ancient tree ahead of them warped and bulged on the ground, darkening until for a moment it resembled nothing more than a starless sky. Then something massive tore its way from the darkness and leapt straight for Wallis, a crimson-eyed shadow with an open maw of sword-like teeth and wicked silver claws glowing with a corona of bloody qi.
Wallis saw it only an instant after they did, but he was too close and moving too fast. He pushed off the ground at an angle, altering his trajectory, and a sheen of metal qi snapped into existence around him like a suit of armor, but he was still directly in the path of the beast’s enormous jaws.
Calvin moved.
The ground beneath his feet exploded, dirt, moss, and dry pine needles spraying behind him as he launched himself forward with the full strength of his cultivation and the yang technique of the Eight Peaks Martial Arts. Right before impact a silver sheen covered the right side of his body and he slammed into the beast’s side shoulder-first like a battering ram. There was a tortured shriek like metal scraping against metal and bristly, metallic fur like a bed of nails gave way beneath the force of the impact, launching it back even as its jaws slammed shut a scant few inches from Wallis’s face.
All three of them skidded to a stop in a half circle facing the beast and Calvin finally got a good look at the monster they had likely originally been sent here to hunt. He had to admit, the survivor’s description had been more apt than he’d given it credit. Fur, red eyes, and giant teeth really were the demonic beast’s defining features.
It was huge, an amorphous shadow of fur so black it seemed to swallow any light that touched it and made it hard to judge its true size and shape. At night it might have looked like little more than a specter, but in the dying light of the setting sun Calvin thought it might be some manner of wolf. It certainly had four paws tipped with vicious claws and its jaws and snout had a certain canine shape, though its appearance didn’t match any of the local breeds of spirit beasts that he was familiar with. It was much too big and shadowy to be a chameleon wolf, too small to be a titan wolf, its build too bulky for a peak wolf, and its abilities utterly foreign for a blaze wolf. Perhaps some demonically warped variant of a reaper wolf, or something from elsewhere in the empire that had wandered far, far from its native range?
Calvin’s hit had knocked it back, bowling over one of the smaller pines, but it had landed on its feet. Now it watched them even as they watched it, malice and bestial cunning gleaming in its bright eyes. It was hard to judge if it was injured at all by the exchange. Calvin had felt something give way, but its dark coloring made it nearly impossible to tell one patch of fur from the fur around it, and its whole body looked nearly two-dimensional.
The beast bared its teeth and growled softly, a primal sound that sent a shiver down Calvin’s spine and carried with it a dense aura of blood and violence like a cultivator flaring their qi. He tried to judge its strength, but there was something odd about its aura that made it hard to quantify. It felt deep, deeper than any Foundation realm cultivator he’d ever encountered, but hollow like an egg that had been sucked dry of all but a drop of white. More than that, it felt…foreign. An instinct at the very root of his consciousness screamed that something about this beast was wrong and did not belong.
Calvin felt the Scroll react in the back of his mind, and wished he had a moment to see what had changed.
Calvin was distracted from his observation of the demonic beast by a pained groan from Wallis. Flicking his gaze to his left, he found his fellow disciple holding his hand against his side, though his outer robe appeared to be intact and Calvin could see no sign of blood.
“Wallis?” Lulu asked from his right, concerned.
Wallis’s voice was tight. “It caught me in the side with its paw,” he bit out, “think I cracked a rib.”
Calvin frowned. A broken rib was not a serious injury, but it would badly limit Wallis’s movements until he could focus long enough to heal it. That would only take a few minutes of focus, but with the beast right in front of them Wallis didn’t have a few minutes and protecting him would only put the rest of them at risk. Not to mention, every moment they wasted here was a moment they were not dealing with the real threat: the cultists.
And if they’d sent this beast to cover their trail, it was possible they knew that someone was coming for them and would accelerate their plans. Perhaps there was a subtle detection formation they’d missed back at the farmstead, or maybe the Foundation realm cultist they’d found had something like a soul lantern that had gone out when they killed him.
Calvin flared his qi, feeling for the way it clashed with the demonic beast’s lingering aura. He judged the strength he’d felt when he’d crashed against it, the speed of its ambush, and the force needed to hurt Wallis through his robe and defensive technique.
Calvin made a decision.
“Go,” he ordered curtly. “I’ll handle the beast.”
Lulu didn’t take her eyes off the beast, both hands on her spear. “Calvin, don’t be stupid.”
“I’m not,” he retorted, “I’m being practical. The cultists have probably already reached the village and are doing heavens only know what to those mortals. Every moment we waste here is a moment they have free rein. I’m faster than either of you, and Wallis shouldn’t go alone.”
Lulu wavered. “Are you—“
“Go!” He flared his qi, letting the aura of his Foundation permeate the air around him and pressing down on the wolf with the full weight of his cultivation. Its eyes, which had been panning towards Wallis, snapped to him, immediately identifying the largest threat.
Lulu needed no more convincing. “Wallis, let’s get out of here. Calvin, cover us!”
They turned and ran, heading in the same direction they’d been going before they’d been interrupted, though somewhat slower. Most likely they’d make some distance, stop briefly to give Wallis time to heal himself and take an emergency pill or two, then continue onward with renewed energy. The beast glanced after them, but Calvin took a single step forward and its attention immediately snapped back to him.
Calvin took a deep breath, feeling the fast moving streams of qi rushing through his channels like rivers of boiling water flowing just beneath the earth’s surface, ready to erupt into geysers without warning. He’d always thought of his qi as warm and soothing, calming his nerves like the bath he’d taken the day before he applied to join the Eight Peaks sect to cleanse the dirt of the road from his body and make him look less like an unwanted bum and more like his image of a young cultivator. Ever since he’d absorbed the phoenix figure into his spirit it had slowly begun to feel hot, almost searingly so at times. It didn’t necessarily hurt, but it was uncomfortable at times.
Calvin was not afraid of a little fire, but he was certainly reasonably cautious of it. It only made sense; fire could be dangerous, even to a cultivator.
Calvin remembered the words on the mission scroll, the detached report of an entire town of mortals torn limb from limb and half-eaten. Calvin remembered the seemingly endless parade of bodies as they were carried to the pyre, many bearing gruesome wounds that matched this creature’s fangs and claws. Calvin thought of the cellar, and the brutalized women he’d left there to die.
Right now, Calvin appreciated feeling just a little more dangerous.
“Don’t think about them,” he commanded mockingly. “Your opponent is me. And I’m not some helpless mortal.”
Not anymore. Never again.
The beast seemed to understand the spirit of his words if not their meaning. It crouched down low and opened its maw, a tongue the color of freshly spilled blood and covered in hooked barbs like a cat’s tasting the air. It growled again and its body rippled, the beast seeming to double in size as its impossibly dark fur stood on end. A long tail that had previously blended in with the rest of its body swept out in an arc behind it and casually tore through a tree with a trunk too thick for two men to wrap their arms around with a sound like a thousand razor-sharp teeth tearing through wood.
The tree crashed down onto the forest floor, shaking the ground, but Calvin was unfazed. “How very impressive. Mortals, trees, what will you slay next, a sack of—“
In a movement faster than the mortal eye could follow, the beast pounced. Ready for it, Calvin shot away, striking the side of its head with a kick as he avoided its snapping jaws, and the battle was met.
It did not take long for Calvin to realize that Lulu might have had a point after all. The decision to send her and Wallis onward had been calculated, but there had been a minor mistake in his starting variables. Namely that, while he was slightly stronger and faster than the beast, the thing was enormous and covered in thick, metallic fur that made it extremely difficult to hurt in any meaningful way.
He dodged out of the way of a paw swipe that left foot-deep gouges in the earth and ducked beneath the sweep of its tail, retaliating with a sweeping vertical kick that trailed a corona of fire—orange along the edges and purple-white at the core. The beast shifted its weight and his kick impacted its side rather than the—theoretically—more fragile place where its back leg met its torso. It felt like a mortal kicking a brick wall, if the brick wall was covered in metal spikes that screeched against the metal qi protecting his shoe from being shredded.
The beast did not react to the strike, though at least the fire that followed seemed to do something. Black tar splattered away from its fur and sizzled where it hit the ground, leaving a barely-visible patch of thinned fur. That had been encouraging at first, but of course it wasn’t that easy. After less than a heartbeat the beast’s fur rippled and the mark was gone as though it had never been. He thought it might be replacing damaged patches with ‘fur’ from the rest of its body and could eventually run out, but if so he’d done so little damage that it was impossible to tell the difference.
The beast did not take the hit lying down. It attacked with renewed ferocity, pushing him back with measured snaps of its jaw and strikes from all four of its paws and its tail. He avoided all of them, as well as the follow-up leap that sought to crush or shred him beneath its bulk.
Calvin landed some distance from the beast and as it rose back to its feet, the two regarded one another with matching looks of frustration. The demonic beast could hurt Calvin, but it couldn’t hit him. Calvin could hit the demonic beast, but he couldn’t hurt it. It was an impasse that seemed to favor the beast, but an impasse nonetheless.
Calvin flared his qi, using the faint feedback of his aura interacting with qi in the environment to assess his surroundings. He didn’t think there was anyone else nearby. Lulu and Wallis were probably miles away by now, and they were in the middle of a backwater nowhere. The closest major settlement with a true cultivator presence was Sapphire Tooth City several days to the north and he was pretty sure even a Soul realm cultivator couldn’t extend their senses that far, much less the Core realm ‘elders’ that called the city home. And he sorely hoped the true elders of the Eight Peaks sect had better things to pay attention to than a single Foundation realm disciple near the edge of their territory.
Unfortunately, Calvin was not the only one frustrated by his lack of progress, and he proved to be the less decisive party. Instead of charging in at him once again, the wolf—and Calvin was increasingly sure that it was some sort of wolf—tilted its head back and howled, an earsplitting sound that carried with it a wave of terror and desperation that clawed at his mind.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Calvin immediately flared his qi higher in response, clamping down on his spirit to prevent the foreign energy from worming its way in, but the beast’s technique was not the same as the yin-based enthrallment he’d experienced in the past. It was not a subtle, insidious threat, but a straightforward assault that he was ill-suited to combat. The foreign emotions battered at his mind like waves against a cliff, and his vision flashed as an all consuming desire to surrender, to just lay down and die, to bare his throat to the wolf’s waiting teeth nearly overwhelmed him.
He was weak, a voice that sounded like his own whispered in his ears. He was nothing. Death was inevitable. Memories flashed behind his eyes in a pounding waterfall that made his head feel like it was about to split in half, passing by so quickly he barely saw more than a flicker. His mother’s face, so calm and peaceful in death. Stepping out of a senior’s way, averting his eyes and bowing his head.
Fiery qi burned his skull from the inside out and Calvin barely rolled out of the way of a descending paw, surprised to find himself kneeling on the forest floor with his hands clutching his head. Something hot and sticky was dripping down his lips, cheeks, and chin onto the forest floor, and he could barely see past a bloody haze. Inside his spirit, a single gate turned, its motion seeming oddly sluggish and stilted like it was trying to push tar rather than water. An oppressive weight like a lead blanket wrapped around his spirit, and though he lay on the ground in open air he felt like he was in a tiny cave deep beneath the earth, crushed beneath a mountain of earth and stone.
Claws flashed and Calvin interposed his crossed arms between his face and the blow. The film of metal qi he managed to summon shattered like a pane of glass and he cried out in pain as something cracked in his left arm and he was driven down into the earth. He desperately threw himself into a roll and massive jaws snapped shut just inches from his ear, so close that he could smell the rot and death carried on the wolf’s hot breath and hear the metallic click of its teeth.
Melancholy regret warred with the unnatural helpless terror of the wolf’s technique. Calvin didn’t fear death, though he certainly did not seek it, but this was so…pointless. Such a waste.
He’d been given a chance that ancient clans and Great Sects would war over, and here he was just throwing it away.
Instinct more than any training got his hands under him and he pivoted away from a probing claw. It was hard to make out any sort of features on the beast’s impossibly black coat, but Calvin thought it looked surprised to see him still moving. It stood over him with a single paw raised like a cat battering around a mouse, jaws hanging just slightly open and the tip of its tongue tasting the air. Its red eyes looked almost like burning stars against the night sky that was its fur, its teeth the silver light of the moon.
He’d been such a fool. Sending Lulu and Wallis onward had not been a mistake, but his actions after were. He’s been too cautious as he always was, forgoing his greatest asset in fear of some hidden observer discovering its existence. But what good was a weapon if you didn’t use it, and what good were secrets to the dead?
Though he could only use its most basic technique, the Nine Rotating Gates was a martial art the likes of which he’d heard of only in myths and legends. If he’d been less reluctant to use it, less used to sticking to just the sect’s techniques and stances, would he be in the situation he was in right now?
Maybe. The wolf’s howl technique had come out of nowhere and completely overwhelmed him. Perhaps he could have spun it away with [The Gate Turns in Place], but he doubted it. Not with his current mastery of the technique. The beast’s attack had been like nothing he’d ever experienced, neatly circumventing the ways he expected to defend against a mental or spiritual assault. If he survived, this would be a valuable learning experience.
But that didn’t matter right now. Maybe the outcome would have been unchanged, but he would know that he’d done all he could. Given it all he had and proved that it was not enough.
It was too late now. The single remaining gate in his spirit felt like it would shatter at the slightest pressure, and he was in the wrong position besides. A master of the martial art could use its technique anywhere and at any time, but Calvin was a long way off from mastery. He at least needed his feet beneath him and a moment to prepare himself.
He doubted this demonic beast would oblige him quite so much.
He’d been so carelessly arrogant since he’d stabilized his Foundation, even with his losses to Lulu during their spars along the road.
The wolf batted at him again, a probing strike that tore up the ground where he'd been lying a moment before. Calvin twisted away, but that only brought him closer to the wolf, herding him towards its other front paw. He stared up into crimson eyes and saw his own face reflected in them—pale, streaked with fresh blood, and utterly pathetic.
A wild idea suddenly appeared in his mind. He remembered the way the fire from his kick had damaged the beast’s fur like little else he’d done had. He thought of his conclusions from only moments before—that secrets were no good to the dead and that it was extremely unlikely that anyone was watching this place. And he remembered one other experience, a moment of overwhelming terror and simultaneous delight, and the event that had triggered both emotions.
The wolf raised its paw, claws shining in the last light of day, and Calvin did not move. Instead, he focused on his spirit, reaching deep inside himself and feeling for the foreign presence that had made itself at home within the very heart of his cultivation.
He pushed on it, trying to expel it from his spirit the same way he’d absorbed it only a scant two weeks earlier, but it didn’t budge. The figure stood still as the statue it was, eyes closed and wings furled, even now dripping a slow, steady stream of liquid fire into his Foundation.
‘Please?’ he asked silently, not knowing what else to do.
The Figure of the Seventh Imperial Phoenix regarded him coolly with its gemstone eyes. It fluffed its feathers and shifted its footing, pain stabbing through his spirit as its talons seemed to dig into his central qi node like golden razors. Something brushed his thoughts, a question he couldn’t understand asked in a way he knew instinctively he was far too weak to truly comprehend.
Calvin hesitated. There were deaths worse than just being crushed and eaten by a giant demonic beast. He’d seen that clearly with his own two eyes in just the past two days. But this did not seem like one of them, and whatever the future held, where there was life there was hope. Tomorrow always had the potential to be better than today, and it was everyone’s role to make that future a reality.
‘Yes,’ he answered.
The phoenix spread its golden wings and something in Calvin’s spirit tore as it launched itself from his qi node, assuming the same spread-winged form it had had when he received it from his reward token. It burst from his chest, leaving a circle of blackened skin in its wake and burning a hole through his inner robe with its passage, and floated up to hover several feet above him, interposing itself between him and the descending claws.
The first wave of purple-gold light turned twilight into high noon, so bright that Calvin felt like he was a mortal staring directly into the rising sun. The wolf recoiled, rearing up onto its hind legs like a horse and staggering back, its back crashing through a tree and reducing the pine to shredded splintters and woodchips. When it reached him, it felt like someone had poured a whole tub of hot water over him, the constricting weight of the wolf’s technique melting away before it like snow beneath a summer sun.
Calvin wasted no time scrambling to his feet. The ground beneath him was suddenly bone dry, pine needles smoldering and the soft moss that had briefly cushioned his back crumbling like fine sand under his shoe. The blood that had seeped from his eyes and nose had fully skipped the tacky, wet stage and turned into a crust that pulled at his skin and cracked when he moved.
The second wave of light came only a moment later, preceded by a rippling heat haze like that which formed over a roaring bonfire. Calvin shielded his eyes with his arm but was still blinded, feeling like he was standing right next to the intense blaze they’d built to burn the innermost ring of bodies. It should have been worse, but the light seemed to part around him, only a fraction of its intensity crashing against him before it continued on.
Through the afterimage still filling his vision, Calvin squinted at the wolf. It had fallen on its side and it’s impossibly black coat of its fur looked…melted, for lack of a better word, something like slag dripping from its sides and hissing as it hit the ground. It almost looked more like a wax statue than a living thing, parts of its body sloughing away beneath the brilliant light pouring off the phoenix figure.
The air pulsed, and a third wave of brilliant power flooded from the golden statuette. Calvin wasted no time squeezing his eyes shut and burying his face in the crook of his elbow. A horrible, blood-curdling screech tore at his ears and a half-formed technique tried to seize his mind, but it was barely stronger than the working of a fresh Gathering realm cultivator, great pieces of it burned and melted by the figure’s light. It shattered against Calvin’s spirit and the fragments boiled away in an instant.
Calvin took a breath and the air was so hot it felt like it was burning his lungs, yet at the same time the qi that flowed into his spirit was so rich and dense it put the vaguely violet-tinted qi in his channels to shame. Though the figure’s inscrutable attention was focused on the demonic beast, just standing so close to it made Calvin feel as though he too was going to melt. He could imagine his skin bubbling like that of the corpses they’d cast upon the pyre, fat melting and muscles turning to scorched charcoal.
A faint whiff of smoke reached his nose, and Calvin was reminded of the bed of dry needles that covered the whole forest floor. He vaguely remembered hearing that in most provinces, wildfires were a serious danger to mortal settlements. Calvin had never heard of that being an issue in Vivid Rainbow Cliffs, but he also never seen a forest without so much as a single Rainbow Raindrop Birch anywhere, and those trees and their endless petals were famously difficult to burn.
A horrible, giddy laugh tore its way from his throat. Oh wouldn’t that just be the cherry on top of this cake. To stop the demonic cultivators preying on the region's mortals, only to reduce their farms and villages to ash and clog their air with deadly fire and smoke.
Calvin took a step forward, trying to get closer to the figure so he could withdraw it back into his spirit, but he needn't have bothered. Barely a moment after the thought crossed his mind, the figure swooped towards him and crashed into his chest like one of Wallis’s straight punches, sending him staggering backward and nearly knocking him off his feet. A moment later it was gone, leaving only a second burn on his skin and nearly doubling the size of the burnt hole in his inner robe.
A panicked, wholly mistimed thought suddenly seized him and Calvin looked down at his chest. He let out a huge breath of relief when he realized that it was only his usual clothing that had been damaged, not his sect-issued robe. He’d never been more glad that he liked to wear his robes open at the front. Now that would have been hard to explain.
He shook himself, blinking rapidly to clear the spots from his eyes. He was, quite literally, not out of the woods yet.
The first thing he saw was the demonic wolf. It was still moving, and he was instantly on guard, though it looked little like the fearsome beast that had nearly killed him just moments before. It lay on its side in a circle of blackened earth, its bulk seeming to have melted away until it was barely bigger than a common hound. It tried pitifully to rise to its feet, but lacked the strength to do so. Its paws and head had shrunk, but not nearly as much as the core of its body, looking grossly oversized on its practically skeletal torso.
The beast looked at him, and there was burning hatred in its gaze, a disdain for all that lived that blazed like a pyre even in its reduced state. Calvin met its eyes and it growled low in its chest, the sound carrying a shadow of the technique that had nearly killed Calvin, but it was far too weak to affect anyone with a spirit stronger than a mortal’s.
It looked weak. Pitiful. Pathetic. As though a slight breeze would be enough to bowl it over.
Calvin wasn’t taking any chances.
A single gate turned within his spirit, cracked but whole even now. The phoenix figure perched above it once more, jeweled eyes closed and feather’s folded, looking for all the world as though it had never left. The trickle of dense, fiery qi dripping slowly but sure into his Foundation had resumed as well, unchanged from its previous rate and potency. Calvin couldn’t help but eye the statuette with newfound wariness and respect. It was one thing to know that a treasure was powerful. It was a whole different matter to see that power first hand.
For the moment, he put aside the whole matter of the phoenix figure. He would deal with that later. Hopefully much later.
He martialed his qi, his spirit aching as he did so. He inhaled, the air rich with the fading aura of fire and life so intense it made the deathly, bloody qi at the center of the corpse formation look like fresh air. It burned his lungs and skin, but his spirit welcomed it like a medicinal balm on a bruise. Even without having integrated the altered qi into his Foundation, he was already growing used to its slowly changing attunement.
He cautiously approached the wolf, circling the smoldering ring of clear ground that had formed directly beneath where the figure had briefly released its power. It didn’t seem liable to ignite, all the present fuel consumed in an instant but contained enough that he hopefully wouldn’t need to worry about a forest fire. A few of the nearest trees looked a little…charred, formerly green needles now yellow and dry like tinder and bark scorched in places, but nothing was on fire. That was good.
He stopped at the edge of the ring that had formed around the wolf’s fallen body. A thick layer of tar-like residue coated the ground, bubbling ominously, but it did not seem to be spreading any further and seemed mostly inert to Calvin’s senses. The wolf’s eyes followed him, but it didn’t move from where it had fallen, and he could vaguely make out struggling muscles moving beneath its amorphous fur.
Calvin breathed in and out in the pattern of the Nine Gates, slowly but steadily preparing himself. His qi rose, churning faster and faster within his channels. He fell into a stance, one hand forward, one hand out to the side, eyes half closed.
The Nine Rotating Gates was not primarily an offensive martial art. It excelled at defense and redirection, using an enemy’s strength against them and grinding them down over the course of a long battle. Techniques such as [The Gate Turns in Place] did not merely negate an enemy’s attacks, they used them as fuel, converting offense into momentum that could then be fed into further techniques.
But it was a profound martial art, with depths beyond Calvin’s understanding, and it included strategies to defeat any foe. Waiting to be attacked before you could respond in kind was not always a practical choice. Sometimes you had to take matters into your own hands.
And not needing to spin around like a top could be a valuable advantage when one didn’t want their extremely unusual, Very High quality martial art to attract any attention. Even if it did require an impractically long time to prepare at his current level of comprehension and cultivation.
Calvin twisted his body and took a single step forward, bringing his hand forward.
[Open the Gates]
A rippling bar of translucent violet power tore through the crippled spirit beast’s head, flesh turning to oily black smoke in its wake. The beast cried out, a sound somewhere between a howl and the scraping of blade against blade, and pounded its tail against the ground, and then fell still. Calvin continued to pour qi into the technique, more than he had used throughout the whole rest of the battle, until smoke began to rise from the beast’s corpse, flesh dissolving into qi. The demonic beast’s aura began to fade, the prickle on the back of his neck finally vanishing.
He kept his hand pointed at it, qi churning. In the back of his mind, he felt an itch as new ink began to spread across the surface of the Scroll. Only then did he finally allow himself a moment to relax.
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