Wu Hao remained sitting, unable to move. The last of his qi had long since slipped from his body, leaving him cold and little better than dead.

  Breathing heavily, he closed his eyes. The pain that was spreading through his body was immense. Everyone except him was dead, and he sat dying in a patch of filth, mud, and gore. Some of the blood that had splattered was his own, but most of it wasn't. He couldn't feel his fingers, his eyes were caked shut with sweat and blood and tears of relief, and loud, bloody coughs wracked his body.

  He didn't have the power left in him to move. Nonetheless, he wasn't willing to die.

  Footsteps appeared at the edge of his hearing, and he wondered for a moment if he wasn't imagining them.

  But that'd never happened before. Previously he hadn't seen anything before dying; at best he'd had time for a single thought or movement before his clock ran out and he awoke.

  That didn't seem to be what was happening now. It wasn't the afterlife because the afterlife wouldn't hurt like this.

  The footsteps came closer, though calling them footsteps probably wasn't entirely accurate. Wu Hao knew by heart the sound of feet hitting the dreck and the mud, and this was much more like the sound of the cultist's movement technique that allowed him to hover slightly over the gully.

  Then the footsteps stopped, and Wu Hao braced himself as much as he was able to.

  "Disappointing," he heard a voice say, then sigh. "Xing Zhao, you fool."

  Wu Hao tried to struggle up, but trying to control his muscles felt impossible. Even twitching paralyzed him with pain. Every nerve in his body felt like it had been torn, every bone in his body felt like it was broken. His dantian screamed in protest when he tried to draw even a little bit of power, and he could feel clearly that it'd been permanently ruined.

  He was doomed, but something in him refused to simply give up. Deeper than rationality, there was a core part of him that refused to accept defeat, no matter what, or when, or how. Death could take him, but defeat never could.

  But the dagger that he'd expected didn't come. A single finger touched his forehead, and pure power spread through his veins. Parched, cracked, destroyed, it didn't matter: they came back to life with the injection of this stranger's qi.

  Wu Hao gasped, in sheer relief. That single droplet of qi ran through his body easily, rushing through every vein, every meridian. He could feel it, feel how pure it was - totally unlike his own, which had been locked away, this qi spread freely and easily wherever it wanted, without any barriers that could hold it back.

  Then the disgust took over. The qi was pure, yes - but pure what, exactly, he couldn't say. There was something to that touch that made him feel filthy, more than the hours that he'd spent face-down in the latrine or the dirty rags he wore.

  If the cultist's qi had smelled of death, this new man's qi smelled of nothing that Wu Hao could identify. It wasn't that there was no scent there, or that the man made an effort to hide it; Wu Hao just had no idea how to describe the scent. It smelled pungent, though, and somehow unnatural.

  A hand helped him up, and with immense difficulty Wu Hao opened his eyes again. A smiling face met his eyes, one that looked about the same age as Father, whatever age that actually was. Forty, or maybe fifty? Qi made things like age hard to tell. The other man had white hair, though, which shone like moonlight under the morning sun. His red eyes looked like two brilliant rubies, and they were fixated on Wu Hao's own.

  The other man was handsome, and his face looked unblemished by hunger or by combat. He didn't have the scars that the other Demon Cultist had, his clothes were clean and looked like they'd been tailored for him. Two long daggers hung at his hips, twice as long as the other cultist's had been and sheathed in very expensive leather.

  In contrast, Wu Hao must have looked like an utter wreck.

  But all that didn't matter.

  On the chest of the man's robes, a symbol stood out, clear as day. It was a red eye. That wasn't all, though. Another ring surrounded the eye, placing it in the middle of what would become a concentric spiral.

  So not just someone in the Demon Cult, but someone who had become a higher-level member of the Demon Cult. A missionary, Wu Hao thought that he was called, but he was half-delirious with pain.

  "Rest easy," the missionary suggested.

  In response, Wu Hao raised what was left of his knife. He hadn't realized that he was still holding onto it, and it was broken anyway, but he nonetheless tried to raise it, uttering a growl of pain.

  The missionary sighed, plucked it from his hand and threw it away easily. Wu Hao nearly collapsed then and there.

  "You've done well," the man said.

  Through cracked lips and a dry throat, Wu Hao spoke - though he wasn't able to say anything that wasn't an indistinct gurgle of pain and anger. Even he himself wouldn't have been able to decipher what he said.

  The man nodded, like he'd understood.

  "Come," he said. "I'll take you to the camp."

  Wrinkling his nose at Wu Hao, the other man raised a hand and brought out just a little of his qi, letting it swirl along his finger as he poked Wu Hao in the exact region where his core sat.

  More qi came flooding in, bizarrely pure and sickeningly sweet. It didn't feel like it belonged, like it was invading every inch of his body, and he wanted to retch.

  But it did allow him to stand.

  He nearly collapsed again, but grit his teeth and managed to force himself to his feet. A stiff breeze would have pushed him over and his core would still be ruined, but at least he'd die on his feet.

  The missionary gave an approving little chuckle, then placed his hand on Wu Hao's shoulder.

  "Don't resist," he ordered. "That would make this more of a hassle."

  And then he took a step forward, hand clamped around Wu Hao's shoulder and pulling him along with all the ease of plucking fruit from a tree. The surroundings blurred around Wu Hao, so fast that he felt almost dizzy, but three steps later his sight began to resolve into real shapes again.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  He stood in a small camp - smaller than that which he'd come from. It spanned several large military tents, enough to house Father and the Uncles. They weren't as big, though, and they didn't scream importance the way that Father's tent did. An eye decorated each of the tents, and otherwise they were bare.

  The way the tents had been organized spoke to two things - to a clear organisation at work, which had dictated where each of the tents would stand and where each of the people in the camp would be quartered, and to having stayed there for a while now. This wasn't a one-day camp, meant to be broken up the next morning and carried to the next site, this was a camp meant to stay up for multiple days.

  It wasn't that there were many people around, but all the ones he did see were clad in the same robes as the cultist that he'd killed had been. The eye symbol decorated their clothing. All of them, no matter age, were at least second-rate martial artists.

  All of them bowed to the man escorting him.

  It was ironic. He'd given many lives to try and get past the obstacle blocking the path to this place, but in the end he'd entered it this easily. He doubted he'd be slaughtering everyone here, either, the way that Father had commanded them to.

  A gully led down from the hill, back where they had come from. Back where Wu Hao had left the corpses of the rest of his group.

  He'd go back, he suddenly thought. If nothing else, 732 deserved a burial on proper ground. The rest of them, too, probably.

  That was if he could make it back at all, though.

  "Come," the missionary said, releasing the grip on Wu Hao's shoulder. Wu Hao grit his teeth and, under the man's watchful eye, took a shuddering step and received a nod in return.

  "This way."

  He was led to a tent. Its interior had been thoroughly and neatly organized; each thing had its clear place. The bedroll had been tightly packed, a lamp sat in what looked like the exact middle of a table. The entire tent was like that, as if places had been calculated with a ruler and an inch of deviation would be heavily punished.

  The missionary picked a chair and sat, hands clasped in a prayer-like pose. He'd unhooked both daggers and had lain them on the table, spending a moment to ensure that they were perfectly aligned, and gestured at Wu Hao to sit across from him.

  Wu Hao staggered over to one of the stools and practically fell onto it, grimacing at the spikes of pain that still wracked his body occasionally.

  "What do you want with me?" he asked, though he was forced to clear his throat first to be able to speak at all.

  "That's not a bad question," the man said. "Although I would have assumed you'd ask my name first, no?"

  Wu Hao would have shrugged, if he'd felt up to it.

  "I'm Huo Shanliang," the missionary explained. "I am a member - and a believer - of the Order of Divine Power."

  He smiled. "What you would probably call the Demon Cult."

  Wu Hao nodded. "Go on," he rasped. "Answer my question."

  "I have a theory," Huo Shanliang said, eyes turning to study the fabric of the tent as if he was looking far away. "What is the most important part of becoming truly strong? Not being strong, mind you. Becoming strong."

  If he wanted Wu Hao to guess, he was disappointed. He recovered quickly, though.

  "Some tell me that it is talent," Huo Shanliang explained. "Others say it's effort. Or both. But I - I think differently."

  He laid his hands on the table and smiled that razor-thin smile again. It didn't reach his eyes. "I think it is insight. Insight is -"

  "Get on with it," Wu Hao rasped.

  Huo Shanliang's smile disappeared.

  "You're quite rude," he said quietly. "I won't make a habit of tolerating that."

  Qi swirled around him, contained in an aura of power that hovered around him deceptively tightly. To Wu Hao's senses that same odor still leaked slightly, though, and now it was far more concentrated. It was at least as much qi as Shizhen had used to intimidate him with once, if not more, but contained so tightly that he wasn't left with any impressions.

  Then, though, Huo Shanliang took a breath, held it, and exhaled. The shimmering qi disappeared slowly, drawn back within his skin. "But yes. You have an admirable insight. I wish to take that and mold it, if you will. I do not make idle promises, but I can make you a true force to be reckoned with."

  A long moment of silence passed.

  "My core is broken," Wu Hao said.

  "And?" Huo Shanliang asked. "Before the Lord, such things are meaningless."

  In response, he stared in disbelief.

  "It's broken," he repeated. Unspoken, but still communicated, was that there was nothing that could be done to fix him.

  Huo Shanliang hummed, then spoke. "We can fix that, though."

  "How?" Wu Hao asked. In his excitement he nearly stood up, but as he tried he felt the muscles in his legs nearly give. He fell back down, ass hitting the stool and nearly bowling it over.

  But as he did, another question occurred to him, one that hit Wu Hao like a punch to the gut.

  Why was Huo Shanliang going to these lengths?

  Could - and the thought was difficult to swallow, but it wasn't impossible - could the Demon Cult know about his multiple lives?

  No.

  That couldn't be it. Otherwise he wouldn't have been given multiple attempts to try and kill the cultist at the gully. There was no point.

  Unless it'd been a test.

  But -

  As his mind kept going in circles, though, finally he glanced up and saw Huo Shanliang studying him, face propped on his hand.

  "Join us," Huo Shanliang said, extending a hand as if to illustrate his offer further. "Join the Order. We - No. I will make you great."