He clung to Li’s neck as the dragon turned suddenly to the side, then swooped around and landed awkwardly among the shelves, knocking over several more as she drew in her wings. The air was already thick with ki, and Kaz felt like he could see flashes of memories passing in front of his eyes. This core was from a young female who had died on her spirit hunt, killed by a woshi after she tried to drink from its pool. That one was from a weaver, who had spent many long hours spinning niu fur into thread, then cloth, her ki preventing the fibers from breaking and the cloth from fraying as she worked.
Blinking, Kaz managed to say, “What happened?” Li gave him a look that told him it was a silly question, and he turned to look in the direction they’d been flying. A white wall loomed there, nearly indistinguishable from the floor and ceiling in the directionless light. In the center of the wall was a door, with a bloody handprint in the center of it.
Kaz shuddered at the thought. Nucai had spent his many long years searching for one thing: a way to ascend, to leave this world that he hated. When his cultivation stalled, he approached Qiangde, who he had learned about when he became the Royal Scholar and gained access to the royal family’s secret archives. Nucai finally managed to break through to Late Core Formation thanks to what he learned from Xion and their experiments with fulan, but the very day after he reached Golden Core, Qiangde had used him as a test subject as well, giving Nucai a beast core, and thus forever denying him ascension. At least, forever unless Nucai found a way to survive the removal of that core or prevent it from functioning.
And that was exactly what he had done. Applying the same techniques he used on his own test subjects, Nucai coated his beast core in wei, preventing it from halting the cultivation of his human core. He only survived because of his high cultivation and what he’d learned from Dongwu. He knew he wouldn’t live through actually removing the core, so there it remained. As a result, his cycle was a twisted and painful thing, and certainly not something Kaz wanted to mimic. Besides, there was an easier way.
“Wei blocks ki and almost all mana, so that’s not the solution,” Kaz told Li. “Can you move closer?” He stood up, perching on Li’s back as she sidled closer to the door. Nucai was tall, and Kaz had to reach high overhead to place his hand in the bloody handprint. Unfortunately, his fingers were still too short, as anyone’s would be, thanks to the extra joint in Nucai’s fingers.
But Kaz remembered what it was to be Nucai. Not much, and the images of Nucai’s past were already fading, but the memory of crouching over the desk, fingers wrapped around his pen as words flowed onto the page… That was a visceral memory he didn’t think he would ever be able to forget.
He flexed his fingers, focusing on that memory, and when he opened his eyes to look at the door again, a pale blue copy of Nucai’s hand was attached to the end of his arm. His fingers pressed into the shallow divots carved into the door in a precise pattern, and it swung open silently. Kaz quickly snatched back his hand, shaking it as he thought of his own much shorter, much furrier appendage, and was relieved when it returned to normal.
Li turned her head, watching him with something that might have been admiration.
Kaz chuffed. “No. I think it’s a me thing. But I hope I don’t have to do it often.”
Li puffed out a ring of water vapor.
That was a terrible thought, but the moment of humor allowed him to relax a little, releasing some of the tension that was gathering in his shoulders and back. Everything was so much more now, though he was almost certain that the wei all around him was actually blocking at least some of it. Still, he could feel all of the kobolds in a way he couldn’t before. If pressed, he could have said exactly how many there were, and where each tribe had settled, including the Fallen outside the mountain. He even knew, somehow, that Katri was still in the den where he’d left her, even though she’d said she might try to take the Longknives deeper soon.
Somewhere beyond the door, a short, pained howl began and ended far too suddenly. Li took off so abruptly that Kaz, who was still standing on her shoulders, nearly fell. The passage beyond was short, and for the first time since Kaz began tracking Nucai, he found himself surrounded by stone, rather than smooth white walls.
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Nucai knelt at the base of the blue one, hacking at it with a knife. Behind Nucai lay the still, sprawled form of Xion. A pool of blood surrounded her, and her muzzle was open as she gasped for air. On the floor beside her lay the shattered remains of another knife, this one glittering with mithril. Kaz hadn’t even been aware that mithril could break.
As Kaz and Li approached, Xion’s head rolled to the side, and she stared at them with eyes that were far calmer than Kaz would have expected, given the fact that a large chunk of her right side was missing. He had no idea how she was even still alive. She gave him a tiny nod, then closed her eyes.
Kaz leaped from Li’s back, already aware of what Nucai was doing from the memories he retained. This was far from the first time Nucai had harvested this crystal, after all, though he’d never before dug so deep.
“Nucai!” Kaz barked, and Nucai turned to glare at him, pale amethyst eyes far from cold for once.
“Why won’t you die already?” the ancient being snapped. Laying one hand against the crystal, he pointed the other at Kaz, releasing the most powerful ki-bolt Kaz had ever seen. Kaz dodged, and it slammed into the wall behind him, spraying pieces of root and shards of stone into the air. Some struck Kaz, doing no harm, but he felt Li flinch as a few of the sharper ones struck the more delicate skin of her wings.
“I’m not the one who’s going to die,” Kaz said, drawing on his core. Unfortunately, he didn’t dare risk hitting the crystal, so first he would have to get Nucai to move away from it. But how?
And then Li was there. She had flown up into the air, then circled around to the other side of the column. Rather than trying to use what Nucai had called a dragon veil, she instead wrapped herself in Fire, using the technique some long-dead Magmablade created, and Kyla had rediscovered. Nucai was watching Kaz, so he didn’t even notice the hazy shape that shot toward him.
Li struck Nucai like a lopo tongue from above. The male had a shield around him, but the force of Li’s attack simply knocked him and his shield across the cavern. Li made no effort to soften the impact, and Kaz distinctly heard bone crack before she let out a whistling roar of pain. But Nucai was away from the column, and it was Kaz’s turn.
He could have used his ki. He and Nucai had been roughly equal in power, with the older male having some small edge, likely simply as a result of his many, many more years to grow. But Kaz was the Dog now, and unlike the Rabbit and the former Dog, both of whom had been badly injured when they were taken, Kaz was freshly reborn.
Rather than throwing a bolt at his enemy, Kaz filled his own body with ki, then attacked. His claws blazed, slicing through Nucai’s shield like a knife through the soft brown fat of a young rabbit. He was the flame-tailed fox, with agile body and fast, sharp teeth. He was the wild dogs who roamed the broad plains, lean and deadly as they stalked their prey. He was a jackal, and a coyote, and a direhound, and the last of the Howling Moon Wolves, who stopped and turned their heads, then lifted their muzzles and began to howl as one.
Kaz’s blows were vicious, and calculated, and irresistible, and though Nucai put up a fight, in the end he was not, and never had been, a warrior. In spite of his high cultivation level, Nucai had lived so long only through guile and manipulation and lies. He quite literally fell to pieces beneath the onslaught, and when Kaz was done, all that remained was a grisly pile, with not one, but two cores exposed by dozens of blows. Kaz lifted his paw, and crushed both of them into bloody shards that couldn’t even pierce his skin.
Only when he was well and truly certain that Nucai would never bother him or his people again did Kaz step back, turning toward Li and the towering crystals. His dragon lay curled against the blue column, both of her front legs bent at unnatural angles. Still, as Kaz approached, she looked up at him and blew a little cloud of vapor into the air.
Kaz shook his head, kneeling beside her. “Soon, but not yet,” he told her. The Rabbit needed him, but his bond to her was stronger than it ever had been before, and he knew she could wait a little longer.
Gently, he touched Li’s closest leg, wrapping the torn muscles and broken bone in blue ki. Fire stopped the bleeding that lay beneath the skin, and Water pushed the broken bone back into place. Metal pinned the pieces together, Wood began the healing, and Earth stabilized it all, holding the repair together. It wasn’t fully healed, by any means, but he thought it would be within a few days, so long as she stayed off of it.
He repeated the process with the other leg, then stroked Li’s neck gently before turning to Xion…no, Dongwu. He wasn’t Nucai, and this wasn’t the girl he’d trained from a young age to worship and admire him. But perhaps she wasn’t Dongwu any longer, either. Perhaps she had finally earned the name she’d given herself. Shom.
Whatever her name, she was in bad shape. If it weren’t for her powerful core, she would have bled out almost immediately after taking such an injury. It looked like she had cauterized the wound with her Fire ki, however, which had stopped the bleeding but must have been incredibly painful.
As Kaz peeled back her leather shirt, she opened her eyes and smiled at him again. “I…tried,” she said, through a mouthful of blood. Kaz wished he still had something to wipe it away, but his pouch was empty.
“I know,” he said, sinking his ki into her body, though he kept it far from her cycle. That cycle was a distorted mess, blocked by her injuries, causing a massive backup of ki near her central dantian, so almost no ki was able to return to her core. “You broke his knife.”
She managed a small nod. “Was going to…kill the Rabbit. Take her core. Couldn’t-”
“I know,” he said again. Her liver was damaged, and the little organ that sat beneath it was all but torn away. There were several holes in her intestines, and a good chunk of the larger one was completely missing. There was nothing he could do about the muscle and skin that had been destroyed, but he quickly began to patch all of the holes, and bring the ends of the intestines together. He used blue ki to bind them to each other, and vaguely wondered what Rega would think if she could see him now.
When he had done all he could, he sat back, immediately jumping forward again as his tail brushed against something behind him. Turning, he saw that Li had shrunk and made her way over to curl up nearby. The dragon’s eyes were closed, but when she felt his attention on her, she opened them again.
Kaz nodded. “She’s alive, but not for long. Her energy was bound into keeping the Tree alive, and with everything that’s been done to it, it’s draining her.”
Kaz drew in a deep breath, then closed his eyes, allowing in just a little bit of the information that was constantly pounding at him. There was an entire world of dogs that he was now responsible for, and he could feel every one. That was…a lot, but if he let in just a little bit at a time, he could see only those who were closest, or with whom he was most familiar, and as he focused on one particular one, he knew what to do.
“We’re going to make a new Tree, and then let this one die,” he said.