Chapter 239

  Legend of the Masked Children (IX)

  The world was pretty, Light thought.

  The looming pavilions of the city faded like smoke and were instead replaced by a milky-white haze. It was calm and pretty, like a stone garden.

  She stepped out onto the stage, as it were, and waited until the shadows, like tendrils, began forming into a figure. One, two, ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred...

  She couldn't count past that, growing frustrated and pouting. She'd have to get that silly Master of hers to teach her numbers--what if she got embarrassed like this again?!

  There were a lot of them.

  So, so, so many of them that they swarmed the entire world.

  Why did they come here? That was what she pondered inwardly. It couldn't be that they came here to die--that would be silly. But there were so many of them--literal thousands swarming the city. She felt them, all of them, but also... not.

  She was rather well-versed in seeing Life Qi everywhere--and though they all had it, it was in disarray. Odd. Imperfect. Altered.

  But she didn't think too deeply on it--it was not her place to think. As Senior Brother said, all she had to do was make them go to sleep.

  He was silly, too, she giggled--they wouldn't be going to sleep! They'd die! Dying is very different than going to sleep, after all. She wished her mama and papa went to sleep instead, but... they didn't.

  And neither would anyone here.

  She heard them talk, wondering why there was a child. They were relaxed and confused in equal measure, and she loathed it; she loathed her own small body, that it made her seem inconsequential. Whenever someone looked at her silly Master, they knew that the man was dangerous beyond measure! And smart, too! But not when they looked at her.

  She had to prove it.

  They were all weak. Or, at least, they were all much weaker than Senior Brother.

  She tilted her head to the side when she saw one of them walk up to her, taking off his mask.

  It was an ugly man--nowhere near as handsome as her Master--with squirmy eyes and a fancy nose and lips so thin they only ever spoke lies. She didn't like how he kept standing, looking down on her.

  "Little girl--" a head blew up just like that into a shower of blood and gore. Fragments of skull flew out like arrowheads, slamming into nearly twenty other figures and killing them on the spot.

  "WHO'S THERE?!"

  "GET INTO FORMATION!"

  Panic set in rapidly as they all corralled together, though, funnily, nobody was looking at her. But... she didn't find it funny.

  She was insulted.

  And she was angry.

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  Growling, her twilight eyes turned crimson red as she extended her right arm and opened it, palm facing them. A shroud of annihilating colors appeared in the shape of an inferno. It grew until it consumed the world, falling toward them like a tidal wave.

  They didn't think she was capable of hurting them.

  They thought she was just a girl.

  Harumphing, she watched with glee as the inferno consumed everyone until there was nothing but ash and smoke.

  "Hah!" She wiped her hands just as the world came undone, pulling her back to the city. She saw many battles unravel, but her eyes immediately scanned upward, looking for her Master at the highest platform--but he wasn't there.

  Her heartbeat quickened as she, panicked, began looking everywhere; Master was weak and fragile and frail, and she had to protect him! But how can she protect him if she can't even find him?!

  **

  I've made my decision.

  I hate this world.

  Okay, it's not as much a decision as it is a statement of my current sourness, but still. I just watched a guy get brutally decapitated by an axe twice the size of his skull and was just near tossing my guts out until a calming effect swept through me. Seriously, those many arts are working overtime to make me function.

  I tried not to directly fight and more so simply help people escape; whenever it felt a bit too dangerous, I'd use the Shadow Steps to dodge or retreat, and thanks to having it upgraded, I could move to practically any shadow I could see.

  Thankfully, I had a crapload of Qi-replenishing pills floating around in my spatial rings, a lot of which came from old Gu himself, actually. Each pill would replenish about 20% of my reserves, which is how I've been constantly using the Steps to move around.

  If I had to fight, I'd use a sword and dip and duck between strikes, aiming mostly for the limbs; though I wanted to go for the neck or the heart, I just couldn't find it fully in myself to commit to it.

  All of it was moot, anyway--Lao Shun was always somewhere nearby, and he'd intercept anyone stronger than me (so, basically anyone above the middle Spirit Manifestation Realm, as he believed I was in the mid stages of it), and if that wasn't enough, I also occasionally took note of Long Tao creeping in the background, silently taking out whoever he wanted.

  Stopping and pulling back, an arrowhead shot just past my nose, almost nicking it; it wasn't a normal arrow, far from it, but one made purely out of Qi. It buzzed almost like plasma would, and it shot through the nearby building, tearing a hole in the stone with such ease you'd think it was water from a jet hitting paper.

  That was like the tenth one, and before I could even look over to see who shot it, I heard a distant grunt and a whimper, followed by the thud of a body falling down.

  "HELP!!!" I heard someone scream and put the near-death experience at the back of my mind as I rushed over.

  We'd already left the confines of the colosseum as the battle spilled out into the streets of the city. We just emerged onto the main one when I saw a toppled building that I recall being a two-tier restaurant just a few hours back. Underneath the rubble, there were many dead, but quite a few that were still alive, too.

  I rushed over and started pulling the rubble off them, vaguely registering that Lao and Long Tao were handling quite a few cloaked figures that tried attacking me.

  Of the seven that were still alive, only two could barely limp, and only four were even at all conscious at this point. Knees bent backwards, ankles wholly torn from the feet, missing arms, dents in the chest the size of a goblet...

  Putting an elderly man and a young woman on top of each other in my left arm was hard enough, but trying to do the same with two unconscious kids was almost impossible until the two who limped helped me. I honestly didn't even know where to lead them; previously, whenever we'd save someone, I didn't have the time to think too deeply about what to do next since there was always another one nearby who needed saving.

  Instinctively, I moved toward the basement where Madame Zhu's daughter rested; it was close and hidden well enough that it was the safest place I could think of on my feet.

  ... this was hell, in more ways than I want to admit.

  Watching massive towers topple, walls crumple like paper, and countless die in a show of unending stupidity... why?

  Even if they wanted to retaliate, why are they attacking the entire city? Why did they send literal hundreds (if not thousands, honestly) of cultivators to attack? This isn't merely retaliation--this is a legitimate war, and nobody can prove me otherwise.

  Sure, Long Tao screwed up by 'letting' it happen, but, honestly, it wasn't as though we could have just let the vine be.

  But this attack? There's no rationale behind it.

  Even for as cold and apathetic as this world can be, I don't believe for a second that all of this was done merely out of hurt pride. This many people dying for pride?

  No.

  I can't accept it.

  I never will.