Mu Min and Qian Ling exchanged a look. Though the last of the demonic qi had faded, a residue remained as an unsettling presence on Qian Ling’s skin, lips, and tangled in her hair. She kept looking in the direction of the pagoda as the scream died.
“I need to know what that was,” Qian Ling said.
“I can’t move,” Mu Min said. “I can barely stand. If you want to go back, I won’t stop you.”
“But you don’t approve?”
“Since when has that meant anything to you, young mistress?”
Qian Ling bowed deeply to Mu Min.
“I am unworthy of your friendship.”
Mu Min blushed.
“Stop that, it’s unseemly.”
“There’s nobody here to see.”
“That makes it worse, actually.”
Qian Ling straightened out and smiled.
Mu Min didn’t meet her eye, but nor did she protest as Qian Ling lifted her friend onto her back and started back towards the pagoda. That roiling wave of demonic qi could have done anything when it reached Ghost Fang. There was a chance that Ghost Fang was even more powerful — possibly even comparable to a peak Foundation Establishment cultivator.
Obviously, Qian Ling needed to know this if she was going to report back to her sect. It would also be helpful for her to know what became of the Hidden Master. He’d told her to rush back to her sect… and she’d thought it a warning at first, possibly a threat… but now she wondered why she listened to what he said at all?
There was a mystery, but she would solve it.
A sound like thunderous, crashing violence reached her through the trees as she neared the source of her confusion. It didn’t take long to run through the pines — the spirit plum had restored her enough that she could sustain her movement technique — but when she reached the treeline where the pagoda should stand, she found only…
###
The wave of demonic qi rushed out from the open, cracked-open demonic facility with the ponderous weight of a tolling bell. It raced over villages and seeded perverse nightmares in the sleeping mortals. It passed over farms and rotted eggs under nesting chickens. It passed over the river, and fish floated to the surface. It passed through the pines, and the shadows flickered with hunger as monkey corpses stirred.
With every act of evil, the demonic qi diminished, and as it rolled away from the broken mountain peak, it diluted itself into an ever-expanding fan. The faint edge of the wave passed to the edges of Twisted Pine Valley, near the entrance to Sleeping Ruin Pass, and reached a broken pagoda standing five stories tall.
There, the demonic qi crashed against something shaped like a human and something shaped like an ape. Here, the demonic qi found purchase, and it spiralled like a hungry cyclone as both somethings absorbed the malignant wave and lit up like beacons in the night.
###
Ten minutes before the wave arrived, an awkward silence reigned in the pagoda. Even the great pine stood still in anticipation. The effect was oppressive enough that Ghost Fang almost believed that the lying demonic cultivator standing before him was actually of the World Severing realm. Only a being of such great power could cause the world to be completely still like that.
The noxious fumes from the cracks in the ground flowed up in perfectly straight plumes for the first time that Ghost Fang could remember.
Then the wind started again, the great pine creaked, and confidence flooded Ghost Fang’s demonic body. The man was just pretending! He wanted to use Ghost Fang! Ghost Fang would not suffer such disrespect!
If he shouted these thoughts loud enough into his mind, he might drown out the pounding of his heart.
“How can I serve you?” Ghost Fang said as he quietly drew on his astral qi in preparation for his great deception.
“Do you know about a facility to the south?” asked the demonic cultivator with what they sadly thought must be an intimidating voice. “The one that opened recently?”
Huh, that facility opened recently?
That would explain the wave of qi Ghost Fang felt a few days ago. The one that spurred his current attacks against the villages. There was something so motivating about the onrush of demonic energy.
He’d craved more of it.
“I know about that facility,” Ghost Fang said as he began weaving the technique in his mind. “What do you want to know?”
“What were they doing there?”
Ghost Fang almost cheered, but instead, he formed a confused frown on his face as he balanced the working of astral qi. Unlike the more tangible elements, which required focus and imagination, astral qi required a clear mind, for it was so close to dreams already that any hint of imagination could warp the technique into an infinity of directions. Since the demonic cultivator hadn’t even reacted, Ghost Fang continued his plan.
Stolen story; please report.
It was a marvelous plan that had served him well in the past.
Step 1: disorientate.
“They?” he asked with dripping sincerity. “What do you mean by they?”
The demonic cultivator frowned.
“Oh,” he said. “I mean —”
Step 2: destroy.
The demonic cultivator was caught in his lie, and so his mind became unbalanced. Right when the liar tried to figure out what to say, Ghost Fang’s astral technique completed and shot like arrows from the ape’s burning eyes.
The astral darts only needed to clear twenty feet.
The demonic cultivator remained unaware as the darts raced toward him. He was trying to think of some kind of new lie, but it was too late! Ghost Fang’s Mind Flensing Harpoon was unmatched!
The unexpected look on the demonic cultivator’s face was too much. Ghost Fang could barely contain his amusement. In the split second before the darts struck and demolished the demonic cultivator’s brain, Ghost Fang caught his eye.
Ghost Fang’s heart stopped dead as he instantly realized his mistake.
He’d let a grin creep onto his face.
The demonic cultivator knew.
Before the darts could penetrate the human’s mind, a wave of thick, terrible demonic qi rushed out of the forest. Ghost Fang’s mind recoiled at the sight.
Those few days ago… the signal that awoke his mind from the half-slumber… he’d thought the wave of qi came from the facility, but now he knew his mistake.
It was this man, this monster before him, summoning this demonic qi like a vortex.
Too late to cancel his technique, the twin psychic darts struck the demonic cultivator, forming a link between their minds, right as demonic qi rushed over him
It had all happened in less than a second, but Ghost Fang knew he had doomed himself.
###
Ghost Fang stared at me weirdly — well, weirder than normal for a seventeen-foot talking ape with eyes made out of silvery fire. I didn’t know what he wanted, but I was sure it was nothing good.
Now that Qian Ling and Mu Min had left, we could finally talk freely about the facility I woke up in. I’d hoped that Ghost Fang would provide me with the answers I needed, but he seemed to be dodging my questions.
“Do you know what they were trying to do there?”
“They?” Ghost Fang asked innocently. “What do you mean by they?”
Oh, shit. I was supposed to be pretending that I was a demonic cultivator! This was all so confusing.
“Lie, kid!” Cabbagy whispered. “Gaslight!”
I knew I’d lied before in my past lives. Two of them were a street rat and a merchant, and I desperately searched my memories for some kind of instincts.
“Oh,” I said with a frown. “I mean —”
Ghost Fang leaned forward, grinning creepily, as his eyes flashed. Something brushed against my mind like a feeling of finding a cobweb in the night with my face.
I met Ghost Fang’s eyes and knew he was doing something, but then, I felt something tap against my back, and, in the same split second, my mind was overwhelmed. Not pain, but something wrested away my control over my body as though my willpower were but a piece of straw in the path of a hurricane.
Energy surged into me from the outside world. I couldn’t detect the source or the nature, only that it saturated every scrap of my body with intense heat.
My bones snapped, and my muscles tore.
My blood boiled, and my organs burst.
My nerves flailed like wires and sliced apart my flesh.
The incandescent energy rushed through me, soaking me — I had a moment to think that it was like the time I’d absorbed the qi from digesting Ren Feilong’s face, but this was the difference between a match and a kiln.
A hammer struck my chest with a god’s anger, and only later did I realize it was my heartbeat.
My body tried to speak, to scream, to protest this loss of control… but there was no voice, no tongue, no teeth, and my body continued to till itself, shifting and spinning around an axis I couldn’t identify. If I hadn’t already been burned alive, eaten alive, and fallen off a mountain, I think the experience would have driven me crazy.
Still, it was a close call as eyes split and melted and sank into my head.
Good thing I couldn’t even imagine what this would have been like if I could feel pain.
Despite my face turning into goop, I could still see with that strange sensory ability I had when I was pure skeleton. Through these non-eyes, I saw Ghost Fang, and despite everything he did and everything happening to me, I almost felt bad for him.
###
Ghost Fang never experienced such agony. Not even during his days in the facility as a test subject, and he knew the exquisite mental torture that came from being an experimenter turned into an experimentee.
Every other time he used his Mind Flensing Harpoon, he crushed the minds of his opposition. No monkeys ever stood a chance, nor the mortal villagers, or even the few cultivators he’d fought before. He hadn’t used the technique on the two female cultivators he fought earlier — but he’d won without that trump card.
All signs showed that the demonic cultivator had no defences — mental or otherwise — but the second Ghost Fang attacked, he was crushed under a storm of feedback unlike anything he’d ever experienced. Demonic qi surged through the demonic cultivator. Pure chaotic energy that broke his body apart and reformed it over and over again.
Such torment was unimaginable, and the feeling of having flesh torn, bones broken, and veins burst, all to be repaired and shattered again… all of it was conveyed up the psychic link of the Mind Flensing Harpoon.
What should have been a technique to ensure victory, now brought about his defeat.
Ghost Fang tried to resist.
But…
How do you brace yourself against the pain that comes from another body?
How do you anticipate injuries that aren’t yours?
He rolled around on the ground, his mind blank with agony, blood dripping from his clawed fingers as he scraped at the fume-spewing cracks in the ground, desperately trying to dig his way back to safety.
###
I watched as Ghost Fang flailed on the ground, gripping at his skull as boiling blood poured from his eyes, nostrils, mouth, and ears. He screamed, flailing, twitching — almost as though it were his bones and muscles and organs that burst and broke and reformed only to shatter again.
The moment lingered, and Ghost Fang’s howls echoed through the pagoda, and then the rushing energy passed.
I stood there, heaving for air, barely able to even keep standing. My flesh no longer changed, but the odd sensation of twisting and churning remained like an echo. Though in control, my willpower hung by a thread.
Ghost Fang continued to thrash about on the ground. His huge limbs boomed as they struck the tiles, spreading the cracks and causing bricks to fall from the floors above. The silver ape twisted with such a frenzy, his muscles pulling so hard, that I feared he might —
A horrible snapping echoed as Ghost Fang’s arms ripped themselves out of their sockets. His leg twisted until the bone stabbed through his shin. Blood poured from his fanged mouth like a babbling brook.
“Poor sucker,” Cabbagy said from where he sat on the ground. “Careful that he doesn’t take you down with him, kid.”
I blinked, still recovering and barely able to stand.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
As my question floated into the air, Ghost Fang’s back arched until he almost stood before slamming down in a spasm of pain. His seventeen-foot body struck the cracked tiles like a hammer. The thump echoed through my ribs and sent a long fissure racing from the floor to the pagoda walls. The crack snaked toward the sky, and, with a groan like a landslide, the upper stories of the ancient pagoda flinched.
And collapsed.
“That’s what I meant,” Cabbagy said.
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21 advanced chapters for ten dingles.
