My stomach did that weird dropping thing as the bridge collapsed out from underneath me. Chen Ai let out a startled shout as she slipped away into the void. The wooden slats fell away from us as the severed bridge swung toward the cliff face.

  The chasm floor lay thousands of feet below us. I would be able to piece myself back together after splattering, even with my flesh pool drained after fighting the Flawless Blade, but Chen Ai…

  She would join the splintered, bird-picked bones.

  And take Cabbagy down with her.

  We were falling, and there wasn’t much time before we fell too far. The bridge was close to us, but the cliff wall itself was still fifty feet away. As the bridge fell, it would swing toward the cliff and leave us alone in the void between mountains.

  This was a nightmare scenario, and the horror filled my mind with icy precision.

  I had to act.

  Good thing I liked making plans.

  “Kid!” Cabbagy shouted. “We discussed this!”

  Blood surged through my muscles so fast my skin glowed red. Fibers twitched as I drove my fingers into my stomach and ripped myself open. Chen Ai’s shout continued; she was falling close to me. I don’t know what she thought when she saw me mutilate myself. She probably blamed the Flawless Blade’s errant technique.

  That particular bastard was limp again, his use of qi having knocked him unconscious. In any case, even with a destabilized cultivation, his body was strong enough to survive the fall.

  Probably.

  I reached into my body and pulled out long loops of my intestines.

  There wasn’t time to aim. If I took even a moment to catch my bearings, it would all be over. I had to trust my gut.

  Blood slathered the tubes, filled them, and guided me as I flicked my intestines like ropes toward the falling cultivators.

  The large intestine isn’t that long, but the Flawless Blade — the dickhead — wasn’t that far away. The fleshy tube wrapped around his neck and tied itself in a knot.

  Chen Ai was further away and falling even further. My small intestine was around sixteen feet, and I stretched it to the limit with blood and prayers.

  My fleshy tube coiled around her ankle, and the pink tip tied itself in a bow.

  Now all three of us were tethered together, but we were still falling.

  “Creak,” said the planks as they swung above me.

  Were they too far?

  No.

  I couldn’t even think that.

  With my hands holding my intestines to prevent them snapping, I couldn’t use my favorite blood manipulation method of making gloves. So I bit my tongue and shot a tendril of blood up from my mouth. It stretched out toward the swinging wood.

  So close.

  My blood tendril touched the wood, and I gripped with every ounce of my willpower, and for a second, I latched onto the swinging bridge like a fleshy pendulum. My technique slipped, but I’d held on long enough to steal the bridge’s momentum and swing us straight toward the cliff face.

  The brutal wall of rock rushed at us faster than I expected.

  With no hands to grab, I reached out once more with my blood. My tendril shot forward about five feet ahead of me and hit the rock. I tried to latch on, but by now I was moving so fast the tendril tore and splashed, and I slammed into the rocky wall.

  My nose shattered, my skull cracked, I slid down a few feet, and my neck caught in a crooked piece of stone and snapped.

  This jerked us to a halt, and we all dangled there with only my broken neck saving us from plummeting to the ground.

  For a terrible second, the injury to my brain left me limp.

  The bridge crashed into the cliff above us, and planks and ropes sailed down into the chasm. Fortunately, they all fell behind us, whistling in the dark.

  The skin around my neck stretched with the weight of Chen Ai and the Flawless Blade dangling from my intestines. I was internally decapitated, and though from the outside I looked fine — for a very demented definition of fine — on the inside, my vertebrae were completely severed. The spinal damage stunned me, and I feared it might all be for naught.

  While Cabbagy and I had jokingly made this plan of using my intestines as an emergency rope, we’d never accounted for me holding up two people, a gigantic bale of snake skin, and Cabbagy himself by naught but the skin of my neck.

  My skin slowly tore, but then, by some miracle, the weight slackened.

  “We’re good!” Chen Ai shouted.

  My body control returned to me. Bone manipulation forced me back together, and blood manipulation re-inflated my face in time for Chen Ai to climb up beside me. She still carried her gigantic pack, as well as having the Flawless Blade dangling from her hip by the length of my intestine.

  “Damn you to every hell there is,” she said with a wild-eyed grin. “Now I owe you my life twice over!”

  “I was saving myself,” I said.

  “Sure, senior brother,” she said with a wink. “I believe everything you say.”

  “Crash! Break! Splinter!” shouted the planks as they hit the chasm floor, but their voices were quiet and muffled by the endless wind.

  ###

  There was around a hundred feet or so of craggy rock between us and the top of the cliffs. It was easier to climb than expected, especially with Chen Ai carrying most of the load. Her Ox Bloodline made her ridiculously strong, and she was still high in the Qi Condensing Realm, so climbing with all that weight wasn’t as much of a challenge as I’d feared.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  She was probably stronger than me when it came to raw strength, even if I was pumping my blood so hard my vessels burst.

  I still recalled that singular moment of immense strength as I ripped myself open. The panic of falling had pushed my blood manipulation to new heights, and my willpower was strained as a result.

  There was more than that occupying my mind, though. When I threw the intestines, I’d trusted in them to reach the targets… trusted my guts… but it wasn’t my blood that tied them into knots.

  For the first time, I started to wonder if maybe there was more to my abilities than simply manipulating blood and bone.

  We climbed past the shattered bridge, the last vestige flopping like a tongue of wooden slats against the cliff.

  “Clatter,” said the planks.

  “Creak,” said the ropes.

  “It’s a shame,” I said in agreement.

  “They’ll rebuild the bridge,” Chen Ai said comfortingly. “This can’t be the first time it’s fallen, and it’s not the only way to cross this chasm, just the fastest.”

  We reached the top of the cliff.

  I was still impressed by the grace with which Chen Ai moved. Her movements were straightforward and strength-focused, but even with her blonde hair spilled in her face and the towering pack on her shoulders, she pulled herself over the edge without looking awkward.

  I did alright myself and didn’t trip over the lengths of intestine spilling out from my sundered abdomen.

  Great stone posts were anchored into the cliff, and it was from these that the ropes dangled. Someone had carved the posts into lifelike trees, complete with textured bark and branches with individual leaves. Many had snapped or been weathered by the elements, but the details were startling.

  Of course, I didn’t have much attention to pay to the scenery, since I was focusing on pulling my body back together as discreetly as possible. We’d used my intestines to keep us together while climbing, so I had to wait until I was in full view before regenerating.

  Chen Ai didn’t outright stare as my intestines slurped back into my body, but I could feel her curiosity like a warm flame on my skin.

  “You have something to say?” I asked her once my stomach healed over.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she replied innocently.

  I glanced down at the still unconscious Flawless Blade. His eyes flitted wildly beneath his lids. Whatever dreams he was having weren’t nice.

  Good.

  Prick.

  Maybe I should kill him? But I’d instinctively saved him. My memories weren’t clear on what to do in this situation, so once more I kicked it down the road to deal with in the future.

  “Look,” I said. “I told you I don’t understand my bloodline, and that was the truth. But I’d appreciate it if you don't ask me any questions when we’re around other people who might listen in.”

  “I don’t really have a question…”

  “Oh?”

  Her eyes shone.

  “That was just incredible! And disgusting! But awesome! You reacted so fast. How did you even know to do something like that?”

  “I’ve had time to think of scenarios. Falling is a pretty common problem.”

  She looked me up and down.

  “Would you have survived that fall like you survived his blades?”

  “Maybe?” I said, not wanting her to know exactly how confident I was in my regeneration. “But just because I can fall, doesn’t mean I want to.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “Wow, senior brother sure is wise.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “I feel like a child in a lot of ways.”

  She nodded, but I feared she thought I was trying to sound even wiser.

  “The kid learned everything from me,” Cabbagy said from under my arm.

  “Yeah," I said in agreement. "Don’t get too impressed.”

  Chen Ai rolled her eyes at the two of us.

  “We should hurry on to Mountain Root City,” she said.

  “Should we tell the guards about the bridge?” I asked.

  “Well, there’s a good chance they’ll lock us up if we do that,” she said. “So, maybe, we lie? Or say nothing?”

  The street rat in me felt that lying to the authorities was a wonderful plan.

  Still, I had to be sure.

  “Do you think that’s wise?” I asked.

  “You want to talk to the guards?”

  Actually, no. I wanted nothing to do with anyone who might ask questions about where I came from, what I was doing, and who I was.

  “You’re right,” I said with a nod. “Lead the way, junior sister.”

  She grinned and started up the road.

  We left the broken bridge and made our way toward Mountain Root City.

  She led the way up the road away from the broken bridge. A forest lay between us and the city, but even through the trees, the city’s stone walls glowed in the moonlight.

  Chen Ai chatted about her previous travels to Mountain Root City. She’d been in and out a few times over the years, but her stories were more of a way for her to vent the adrenaline that came from surviving a near-death experience. It was a little odd she hadn’t been chatty like this after the snake, but I supposed being inside a snake was distinctly different from falling off a bridge.

  I couldn’t suppress a shudder at the memory of crawling back into the oozing, constricting throat…

  Nope.

  Not going there.

  Never sleeping was bad enough. I didn’t need to add waking nightmares to the experience.

  I tried to distract myself by making some mental amendments to my plans for falling. I’d done well this time, but I hoped to do better if it happened again. However, the trees distracted me. The forest was small and clearly tamed by the city, but I was interested to see that the trees glowed the same pale white as the city’s walls.

  On closer inspection, I found out why: the trees were all made of stone.

  “Wow,” I said as I poked a leaf.

  It was stiff as a statue.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Chen Ai said. “The mountain’s heart has an abundance of earth qi, but nobody’s sure if it grows these trees, or if the trees absorb the excess qi. Either way, it’s a marvel, and the fruit from these trees is a treasured export of the city.”

  I had an instant desire to know what one of those fruits tasted like, but when I looked around, Chen Ai laughed.

  “These are lesser trees. It will take centuries before they grow any fruit, and they’ll probably be cut down for lumber before then. Still, I understand your excitement, senior brother.”

  We continued, admiring the way the moonlight played on the trees.

  “It makes me a little sad,” Chen Ai said as we left the forest and neared the city gates. “Some people never leave their city or their clan compound or their village. They live and die in a tiny little world, when there’s so much more that they could see.”

  “Maybe they like it that way,” I said.

  “You think?”

  I thought of my parents, working the fields, their skin weathered by the seasons… their faces lost to rain, sun, time, and experiments. Even if I concentrated, I didn’t know what they looked like… only that they smiled.

  “People can be happy in small worlds or in large ones.”

  “Which do you come from?” Chen Ai asked. “How big was your world?”

  She continued walking as the question lingered in the air between us. For once, I didn’t fight the headache that pinched my skull as my conflicting memories sloshed inside my mind.

  Clouds marching from the horizon over the prairies…

  But I lived my whole life in the shadow of tall buildings that glowed with ethereal light.

  A carriage that was part office, part bedroom, part restaurant, with my father as a constant companion…

  But my father was an old farmer who never trusted riding in closed carriages because where would the farts go?

  The ever-present smell and smoke of the city like a shroud, like a hug, like the warmth of someone I’d never met but always longed for…

  But…

  “It’s hard to put into words,” I said as the headache resided.

  Chen Ai looked at me with an amused expression.

  “Oh? Here I was thinking you were just ignoring me for the last half hour.”

  Had my mind really swum for that long?

  The city lay before us.

  The walls stretched above us a good fifty feet. Now we were closer, I saw that it wasn’t a single slab of stone, but seamless planks of stone wood harvested from the forest.

  A guard leaped down from atop the city wall. He had a halberd in one hand and barely bent his knees to soften the landing. How strong did someone have to be to do that? Mid Qi Condensing, maybe?

  It sure would be nice to be able to detect qi.

  He wore armor of stone wood, with rough bark on the plates, but no helmet. His long black hair hung free down his back.

  “Do you have traveling documents?” he asked in a bored, official tone. “If you don’t, I’m afraid we’ll have to turn you away or detain you until you can be processed. Since the city’s busy with the auctions, that might take a few days.”

  “I have my documents,” Chen Ai said as she produced a wooden seal with practiced motions.

  The guard looked it over before nodding and handing it back.

  He turned to me and sneered at my bedraggled appearance. My plain robes had been clean a few hours ago, but now they were torn and bloodstained. He stepped closer, clearly trying to intimidate me as he asked the question I was dreading.

  “What about you? Where are your traveling documents?”

  Damn.

  Should I lie? Or tell the truth?

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