Xiuying

  Xiuying booked it back to Qigang’s place, the doctor, Gu Chi, slung over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

  She knew her shoulder wasn’t the most comfortable riding place, not at the pace she was moving and for a man as soft as the healer was, but the doctor bore the discomfort with quiet resolve. Xiuying was thankful for that. Whiners were the worst, and dealing with one would have been doubly annoying right now.

  Especially since the need to bring the doctor back was why she’d had to leave Deng Mu’s corpse out there.

  That thought sent a lance of pain piercing through her heart.

  Deng Mu, dead. Gutted by creatures corrupted with Wild Qi in ways that Xiuying hadn’t even known was possible.

  She’d found his body many li from the outpost, a trail of corrupted corpses marking the path his battle took, up until his injuries got too great and he hid. That’s where he’d died, in a tiny, hidden crevice in the mountains, hoping no doubt that he would live and inform the world of the evil growing right under their very noses.

  It had taken Xiuying hours to find his corpse. And now she’d left it out there, in the same hole she’d found it, because she needed to get back as quickly as possible, and she only had so many hands.

  A whiner Gu Chi might not be, but she doubted even he would be okay with sharing her shoulder with her comrade’s mutilated corpse. And there was no way in hell she was leaving the doctor to get back on his own.

  Deng Mu had not been weak. Thirty years the man had been a soldier, and for every day of it he’d trained diligently. His cultivation may not have been the best, but his skill in combat had been honed to a keen edge that hadn’t dulled the slightest bit in the years she’d known him.

  If these things could do that to him… she needed to get back to Qigang now, they needed to discuss next steps.

  Qigang’s house was empty, save for the servants, whose unease Xiuying could almost smell.

  From them she learnt that Qigang, Yi, and the constables had split up to go searching for the missing hours ago, and none had yet returned.

  The constables not being back didn’t surprise Xiuying, she didn’t know their names so she hadn’t written them, but Qigang was a little worrying.

  She knew he’d received the note, because the messenger parrot she’d sent had returned to her to confirm that it had delivered its note, like it was trained to do.

  Qigang was much faster than she was, he should be here already. That he wasn’t didn’t fill Xiuying with confidence.

  To make things worse, she’d only written him, assuming that Yi would be with him.

  Deciding to fix that mistake, she wrote to Yi, and Qigang again, telling them to hurry back.

  The parrot returned hours later with both notes untouched.

  Few things can keep a messenger parrot from finding someone… the most common was death.

  Xiuying wanted to believe that whatever was out there was no match for a cultivator of Qigang’s might, if only to calm her growing unease, but she had to be honest with herself. She’d fought Qigang, and powerful cultivation or not, the man was not much of a warrior.

  Against corrupted enemies with a number advantage and a clear penchant for ambushes, the man might not fare well, even with all his power.

  Xiuying shook off the thought like a nasty fly perched on her face.

  No, a warrior Qigang may not be, but that didn’t make him weak, or stupid. He was fine. He had to be.

  Fine or not however, the fact remained that the man was missing, at a time when every cultivator and their grandmother was needed at the ready.

  Xiuying had to find him, and since the messenger parrot couldn’t do it for some reason, she would have to do it the old-fashioned way.

  See, the parrot had found Qigang once before, when it had delivered the first note to him. The bird still remembered where, and all it took was a simple command for it to lead her there.

  Xiuying left Gu Chi behind this time.

  The doctor looked like he wanted to protest this decision, but thankfully he had enough sense to know that his presence would be more hindrance than help at this point. After all, Xiuying doubted that he could even treat Qigang if he turned out to be wounded.

  It didn’t take too long to reach where the parrot had met Qigang, but by the time she did, the sun had dipped below the horizon, leaving the world in shadow, but not even the shadows, and Xiuying’s less than stellar tracking skills, could make her miss the clear trace of Qigang’s heavy footprints pressed into the rock.

  Xiuying looked off in the direction they headed, then she pulled out a light crystal to light her way, steadied herself, and followed.

  Wherever he was, she would find him.

  —?—

  Xian Qigang

  Passing through the portal is an odd, smooth experience that I likely would have failed to notice if not for how much my surroundings change.

  Stepping into the hidden realm though, is the complete opposite.

  You know that jarring, unpleasant feeling you get when you walk out of an air-conditioned building into the sweltering summer heat? Where, for a split second, it feels like gravity is twice as heavy and you feel an urge almost to shrink back from the world?

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  Take that feeling, and multiply it by a hundred, that is what it feels like to walk into the desolate world that is the hidden realm.

  Sun blotted out by an ash filled sky, all signs of life eradicated, and a dog-like monstrosity the size of an Arabian stallion lunging at me from the side with fang-filled maw open wide.

  Wait, what’s that last one?

  The creatures teeth are almost at my throat when I react, and I react in the most typical way to the monster’s sudden attack; I raise an arm in its path.

  Fangs the length of my fingers and more sink into my flesh, and I scream as first my skin and muscles tear, then they begin to burn.

  Simply as an act of self-preservation, my inner star explodes, blasting out a conflagration of golden-orange fire around me.

  It’s enough to knock off the beast, but unlike it usually does, where my qi so easily supresses everything around it, this time is different.

  The Wild Qi pervading the desolate world around me seems almost to rejoice at the presence of my qi, and my fire, brilliant and—until this moment, I’d thought—unstoppable is consumed, feeding the corruption of the hidden realm.

  Barely phased by my wild counter to its attack, the monster charges again, coming at me with blinding speed.

  Weight of The Emperor’s Will

  The pressure of the technique slams onto the creature, sending it crashing into the earth as more weight than even a musclebound abomination like it can bear settles upon it.

  The monster kicks and thrashes, but it isn’t going anywhere, which is good for me because my bitten arm is burning like hellfire and I really need to take a look at—something long and harder than steel cracks into my temple so hard the world goes dark for a second.

  I stumble, but recover quickly enough to catch myself before I fall, and my vision returns just in time for me to see the dog coming for my throat.

  My hands flash out and grab it by the jaws.

  The monster’s weight isn’t an issue for me, but its strength is considerable, as is the searing pain in my right forearm and the acidic saliva from its mouth charring my fingers in real time.

  That doesn’t matter though, because I have it now.

  Glory of The Sun

  An uncontrolled blast of fire from me, this creature could tank without issue, but let’s see it try that nonsense in the face of the full, concentrated power of my technique.

  The dog screams.

  It sounds nothing like what a dog, or any animal I’ve ever heard of, would produce, but while the volume and timbre of it are quite uncomfortable, it’s nothing compared to the revolting stench of its cooking flesh.

  With the birds, they’d turned into ash so fast that there’d been nothing to smell, but the dog doesn’t burn that fast, and I’m left with a front row seat to the sensory horror of my actions.

  It takes less than a minute for the dog to die. It could have been a thousand years.

  I pull back from its charred corpse, more than a little shaken, then I hurl.

  Someone scoffs behind me. “Pathetic,” he says.

  I freeze at the voice, then, slowly, resigned, I turn to face him.

  The man wears robes of the deepest blue, beautiful and regal, not that they help his appearance much. His skin is pale beyond death, and black lines like disease in his veins run in a network across every visible bit of skin, including his face.

  His eyes are a bright, almost glowing yellow, like the monster dog’s had been, but not even these changes could stop me from recognizing that face, not with how many times I’ve seen it, both in the mirror and on the many paintings hanging on the walls of the manor.

  “Hello, Thief,” Xian Qigang says with a look so venomous that it should knock me dead.

  There are a thousand things I want to say, a thousand truths that want to come pouring out now that the lie I’ve worn like armour since that first day I woke up in Qigang’s bed is about to come undone.

  I swallow it all down and ask the relevant thing. “Where’s Meng Yi?”

  Xian Qigang grins evilly, and it seems so odd, watching my face make that expression.

  I could never make that expression.

  Without any sign of an order given, a portion of the air behind Xian Qigang comes undone, and Meng Yi is revealed.

  Her clothes are torn, one eye swollen shut in a bruise, a leg looks broken, and a creature like a mutant roided up gorilla has her in a bear hug so tight it looks half a PSI from turning her bones to dust.

  In her one open eye, I see her fear as she looks at me. Fear for herself, true, but also fear for me.

  Caught in such dire straits like she is, and she somehow still has the emotional bandwidth to worry about me.

  Heat begins to gather in my chest, not just from my cultivation, but also from anger at the state of Meng Yi. At what these monsters have done to her.

  I eye the gorilla, wondering if I can move fast enough to kill it before it crushes Meng Yi, and that’s when Xian Qigang turns into smoke and appears beside Meng Yi.

  Still staring at me with that awful grin, he reaches for one of her hands.

  I know what’s coming a second before he does it, as he takes of her fingers and CRACK! snaps it like a twig.

  The only sign Meng Yi shows of noticing the injury is a blink and a momentary clenching of her jaw.

  I scream.

  Xian Qigang snaps another finger.

  My qi flares, my body coiled to blast forward at the bastard.

  Xian Qigang snaps a third finger.

  I get the message then, and I stay still, silent, calming my qi with every iota of my will.

  Xian Qigang watches me for several seconds more, still with that damn grin.

  Finally, seeing that I’ll play ball, he pats Meng Yi’s hand and drops it.

  “I guess even a thief can learn,” he says.

  “Let her go,” I say. “You have me. Let her go. You can have your body back. Just please, let her go.”

  Xian Qigang tilts his head at me curiously, then he bursts into smoke again and appears right in front of me.

  “Do you really think that if I could take back my body, you would still have it?” he asks, unsettling yellow eyes burning into me.

  He punches me. Hard enough my head rings.

  Unprepared for the strike as I am, I fall, and when I catch myself with my right arm, pain explodes from it throughout my being.

  Right, that’s the arm the dog bit, and I’m pretty sure that the awful feeling spreading through it by the second is Wild Qi corrupting my very being.

  “Answer me, you thieving animal!” Xian Qigang screams, kicking me in the ribs hard enough that something cracks. “Do you really think that you would still be in there, if I could drag your disgusting patchwork soul from my body?”

  “Huh?” he kicks me again.

  “Answer me, you filthy cur!” Kick. “Do you?” Kick. “Do you!?” Kick.

  The blows finally cease, and with pain radiating through every corner of my being, I stare into his eyes with hate I can barely contain. “No,” I say. “I don’t.”

  “Exactly,” Xian Qigang says, all of his previous unhinged rage seeming to vanish like the smoke he turns into.

  He smooths his hair, then shoots me that grin again.

  “I don’t appreciate your tone though,” he says.

  With another burst of smoke, he appears beside Meng Yi, and I’m sprinting at him even as he reaches for her arm again.

  Something wet and flexible wraps around my ankle with strength like a steel cable and I’m lifted off the ground.

  In the next instant, another dog monster, exactly like the last one, leaps at me and latches its teeth around my right thigh, and I feel its fangs pierce deep enough on both sides to grind against my bone.

  My flesh sizzles as its acidic saliva gets to work, corruptive qi pouring into me.

  Still connected to the dog by its maw around my leg, I feel a whole new level of pain when I slam into the ground with its fangs still grinding into my bone.

  My femur snaps.

  My vision darkens with the pain, and it is in the middle of that agony that I come to a realisation, I’m going to die here.

  My qi was barely holding back the corruption from the Wild Qi in my arm, and now there’s more in my leg. Worse, with my femur broken, I can already feel it seeping into the bone.

  As it stands right now, my cultivation is already working on overdrive simply to slow down the inevitable corruption, and yet I still have enemies to fight. One of them using me as a chew toy in this very moment.

  I’m going to die here. And then Meng Yi is going to die too.

  I’ve failed.

  Meng Yi’s voice rings out with perfect clarity. “Eat the pepper!”

  Huh? The pepper? What is she talking a…

  Oh, fuck me.

  243-Year-Old Ginde Pepper [peasant rank]

  With a thought, the pepper appears in my mouth and I don’t even bother to chew.

  I feel the fruit slide down my throat as I swallow, a trail of heat left in its wake.

  The heat settles into my stomach, and that’s when the sun within me truly begins to burn.