No matter where I looked, one fact screamed inside my mind: there was no way out.

  The feeble light of the arrays was enough to see that the tower of rubble blocked any access to the surface. There was barely a ring of cleared space between the masonry and the sheer cut walls. I walked in a loop, looking for a gap. I was surprised I managed to crawl out as a broken apart body, considering how tightly packed the broken pagoda was.

  “The wasp nest fills with mud,” the bricks sang helpfully. “The spring rain drowns the rat!”

  I couldn’t help but agree, and once I realised I was trapped down here, my thoughts maddened.

  Time to start digging myself out of the hole.

  I wrapped my hands and feet in blood and scrambled up the slope of rubble. Once my head bonked against the ceiling — or, I suppose, the floor — I clawed and dug with fevered anxiety. Rocks tumbled away from me. My swirling gloves splattered with how hard I ripped at the ground.

  I don’t know how long I dug, only that I couldn’t stop.

  Eventually, the ceiling gave way and tumbled all over me. I was buried, and flailed all the harder until I emerged in the moonlight, coughing up dirt.

  Only the shell of the pagoda’s first floor stood like a crown of stone around the filled-in pit of the facility. I punched a blood-formed fist toward the stars.

  “Yes!” I whispered as my breathing stabilized.

  My blood manipulation collapsed, and my oversized hand splashed onto the rocks to join the rest of the blood I’d thrown about so carelessly in my escape. I could feel it soaking into the dirt and masonry. Turns out there had been a lot of blood inside Ghost Fang’s gigantic ape corpse.

  A relaxed, flowery breeze blew over the collapsed rubble. Clouds swirled overhead.

  “Kid…”

  “Cabbagy?” I asked as I looked around. “Where are you?”

  “Over here…”

  “Oh no.”

  I crawled across the rocks and found a wilted leaf draped across the stones. It was faded yellow in the moonlight. Was all this that remained of Cabbagy? Had I come too late?

  I picked up the leaf and stroked it gently.

  “I’m so sorry, Cabbagy. To think that we only had such little time together. It is a tragedy, but I think it’s for the best. You’re finally going to a better place and —”

  “Look over here you fucking idiot!”

  I looked over and sighed.

  Cabbagy rested amongst the rubble. Somehow, shockingly, he was intact. Battered and spotted with yellow, but intact.

  “How?” I asked.

  “You know how!”

  I sighed again.

  “Don’t tell me.”

  “Did you think a mere building would be enough to take me out?” he said with a glare. “Did you think I would abandon a disciple who so desperately needs my attention?”

  “I’m not your disciple, Cabbagy.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, kid. Ever since I saw you lying in the mud of that village, I knew that you needed my help. It’s for that reason I deigned to bring you along on my journey.”

  It was too much.

  “I found you lying in the mud! I brought you along with me!”

  “Whatever helps you sleep at night, kid.”

  “I don’t sleep!” I screamed at him. “I don’t dream! I don’t need a fucking cabbage telling me what to do!”

  Despite my outburst, Cabbagy grinned.

  “I knew there was a shred of a man buried somewhere inside you, kid. I’m almost proud, but try to stop your voice from breaking next time you shout at someone.”

  I wanted to cry.

  I wanted to laugh.

  I wanted to throw Cabbagy into the night sky and never look for him.

  But my heart was too soft.

  Cabbagy didn’t have much time left for him in this world. It would not do for him to feel abandoned. His wife leaving him was enough, and though I wished to do the same, I could not bring myself to walk away.

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  So, I settled on picking him up and tucking him under my arm.

  The bricks sang a soft song of goodbye as I climbed out of the rubble and over the shattered remnants of the walls that still stood. The ground surrounding the collapsed pagoda was surprisingly peaceful. Moonlight fell through the clouds and lit the pine needles and patches of grass adorned with sleeping flowers. Whatever sense of malice and hostility this place might have had before was now gone.

  It was but one more ruin in a forest. Soon enough, vegetation would claim the stones and drag them down into the ground. Perhaps the facility too would eventually be filled by water and earth, eroded by worms and roots, until it was nothing but a few rabbit burrows with too straight lines.

  In time, perhaps, it would not even be that.

  My thoughts grew heavy, and I sat on a lump of masonry lying amongst some weeds. It had fallen from the pagoda, and a faded mosaic of red and gold faced the sky. I couldn’t be sure of the design — some parade of some emperor or something. As a merchant’s son, I had learned much about the history of art in the Heavenly Phoenix Empire, but I didn’t feel like dredging through those memories right now.

  “You look maudlin,” said Cabbagy.

  “I feel maudlin.”

  “Boo,” said Cabbagy. “You just defeated a true monster and rescued two promising beauties, and yet you spend your time sitting on a rock and staring at weeds. You should be celebrating.”

  I didn’t feel like celebrating.

  “Was Ghost Fang a monster?” I asked. “He was like me.”

  “An idiot?”

  “An experiment. A victim.”

  “Ah,” said Cabbagy with surprising tenderness. “Do you feel like a victim?”

  “They took my name. They took my past. They took my life. What am I, if I’m not a victim?”

  I expected him to make fun of me. I almost wanted him to. Even feeling some anger would be better than sitting with my thoughts like this.

  The pathetic rage that burned in the eyes of that slug had been too much. It felt like looking into a mirror and seeing only puke.

  “Do you feel that you are a monster?” Cabbagy asked. “You said that you were after eating that prick’s nose. Do you still feel that way?”

  “I don’t know… yes? No?”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Damnit, Cabbagy! I just ate a dead monkey after squishing a demonic slug that tried to call me brother. What else could I be?”

  “You are not a monster,” Cabbagy said firmly. “Nor are you a hero.”

  “What am I then?”

  “An idiot!” Cabbagy shouted so loud I fell off the rubble.

  I gazed at him from the pine needles.

  “What?”

  “You live under the gaze of the heavens. You live on the bounty of the earth. You live against the will of the hells. Men and women, mortals and cultivators, spirit beasts and foul demons, all of these are striving and struggling, and you are just one more grain of rice thrown into the pot.”

  “How does that make me an idiot?” I asked.

  “Because you are trying to figure out what you are rather than focusing on what you should do.”

  That… almost sounded like wisdom…

  Making up my mind, I knelt before him.

  “Cabbagy… no, master…”

  Cabbagy preened at my words.

  “Yes, my disciple?”

  “I know you said that a man makes up his own mind, but I’m asking you now… what should I do?”

  “Good, good, you finally show wisdom by asking for my guidance.”

  “Please.”

  A gentle wind swirled through the trees, shaking the evergreen needles with a sound like distant applause. Cabbagy rocked back and forth, deep in thought.

  “I know what you should do,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “You should track down those lovelies and take them both to bed. I saw the way they looked at you. Having your way with one of them is guaranteed, and doing it with both of them is within your capabilities should you continue to follow my advice. Of course, you shall place me on top of nearby furniture. I like to watch.”

  It is a testament to how stunned I was that I let him finish his speech uninterrupted. We gazed at each other for several minutes.

  “Surely, you can’t be serious.”

  “I am serious,” said Cabbagy with a straight face. “And don’t call me —”

  “Shut up,” I said as I placed my head in my hands. “Fine. You win.”

  “You’re going to go and —”

  “No! No. Of course not, you disgusting lech. I’m going to focus on what I can do.”

  “What a shame, kid. Here I thought you were going to —”

  “I know, but I refuse.”

  “I hope you’re not going to spite yourself just to spite me?”

  I glared at him, and he looked up at me with such innocence my heart almost wavered.

  “Don’t look at me like that.”

  “You would disobey your master?”

  “You’re not my master.”

  “Yeah, I am, kid. You already said it yourself. Can’t take it back.”

  I scowled.

  “That can’t be how it works.”

  “I don’t make up the rules.”

  No, I suppose he didn’t make up the rules.

  “Very well, master,” I said drily. “I hope you’ll forgive me if I cease this pointless conversation and continue with my mission.”

  “Ah, yes, that flower for the restaurant cutie.”

  “Please, don’t phrase it like that,” I said with a groan.

  “Whatever, kid,” Cabbagy said. “Now, get rid of those damned monkeys. I don’t like the way they’re looking at my leaves.”

  I looked up.

  Cabbagy was right.

  A troop of Howling Spirit Monkeys crawled toward me out from the pines. Fiery light no longer blazed in their eyes. No, now their hungry gazes simply reflected the moonlight.

  “I count ten,” I said as I looked around.

  “Twenty,” Cabbagy said. “You forgot to look in the trees.”

  “Hmm,” I said as I took in the new numbers. “Should I just run?”

  Cabbagy scoffed.

  “And waste such resources? Surely, no disciple of mine will continue with such an attitude.”

  I groaned.

  Showing him any respect had been a terrible mistake.

  “Ghost Fang is dead!” I shouted at the monkeys. “He doesn’t compel you to attack. Flee now if you wish to preserve your lives.”

  They kept crawling toward me. The same cautious advances that they had made before. It made me wonder how much Ghost Fang really controlled them, or if he merely rode them and watched through their eyes. It was a question I could no longer ask, but I didn’t regret killing the slug.

  Just like I wouldn’t regret killing these monkeys.

  They crawled closer, and my stomach growled.

  “Very well then,” I said as I tucked Cabbagy into my dirty robes. “You leave me no choice.”

  Blood swirled around my hands and formed my familiar gloves. My blood manipulation felt smoother than before. With a touch of my willpower, I grew my gloves until they became long fingers of bloody tendrils.

  “Very nice, kid,” said Cabbagy, his voice only slightly muffled from inside my robes. “It seems you did a good job at absorbing that wave of demonic qi.”

  I knew what he was talking about as soon as he put it into words.

  That energy that rushed through me had strengthened my control over my body, but more than that, it had expanded a space inside me.

  I hadn’t noticed the space before, for it had been too small, but now I felt how my gloves of blood flowed not from my body but from that hole.

  A storage space inside my soul — a reservoir for blood and flesh — and I had crammed it full of Ghost Fang’s corpse. The fallen demonic leader would be my weapon against the remnants of his army.

  I couldn’t help but grin at the monkeys surrounding me, and if there was a trace of a monster in my smile?

  So be it.

  “You know what, kid?” Cabbagy asked as the monkeys closed in. “I think you’re finally ready.”

  “Ready for what?”

  “To learn my Cabbagy Style.”

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