Liang Feng’s hand was still on his shoulder.

  Yan Qiu looked down at the village. The beasts were moving between the houses and the red mist hung over everything and the bodies were lying in the streets where they had fallen, and one of them had a face he knew.

  He shrugged the hand off and started down the hill.

  “Yan Qiu,” Liang Feng said behind him. “Stay close. We will go together.”

  He heard the words but he was already moving. His sword was in his hand before he reached the first house and he did not remember drawing it.

  A beast came around the corner of a collapsed fence. He cut its throat and kept walking. Another was crouched over a body in the middle of the path, and he drove his sword through its skull and pulled it free without slowing down.

  He was sad and thrilled and warm all at once, and the three feelings sat together inside him without canceling each other out. His body moved through the Broken Jade Sword Art on its own, one form flowing into the next, and his qi pushed through the blade at every transition. He killed a third beast in the lane behind the storage shed and a fourth near the well, and each one went down faster than the last.

  He recognized the bodies as he passed them. Faces he had grown up seeing every day in the village, people whose names he should have known but could not pull up fast enough because there were too many of them. He recognized the man near the square, the one he had seen from the ridge. He recognized an old woman near the eastern houses. He recognized a boy who could not have been older than ten, lying in a doorway with his arms over his head.

  Some of the bodies did not belong here. He noticed it after the fifth or sixth one. Their clothes were different from what anyone in Blackroot wore, different materials and styles he had never seen in the village. They were lying in the streets alongside the villagers.

  Liang Feng and Shu Yingyue caught up to him near the center of the village. They had been clearing the western side while he pushed through the middle, and Shu Yingyue had blood on both her swords.

  “Stay with us,” Liang Feng said.

  Yan Qiu stopped. He was breathing hard and his hands were tight on the sword. He looked at Liang Feng and nodded.

  “Some of these bodies are not from here,” he said.

  Liang Feng looked at the nearest stranger, a man in clothes too fine for a farming village. “Travelers?”

  “There are too many of them for that.” Yan Qiu looked around the square. “And half the people I knew are missing. I have not seen their bodies anywhere.”

  “Could they have left before the attacks got worse?” Shu Yingyue asked.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  “My parents did. Weeks ago.” He paused. “But the village chief’s grandson died fighting the beasts here. My mother wrote me about it. I have not found his body.”

  Liang Feng was quiet for a moment. “The beasts are getting stronger the deeper we go. The mist is thicker too. Let us keep on moving.”

  They pushed further into the village. The beasts came in pairs and groups now, and they were bigger than the ones near the edges. Yan Qiu killed them and kept going. His sword arm did not tire and his qi held steady and the warmth in his chest grew with each one that fell.

  I should not feel like this.

  He kept killing anyway.

  After a few more streets he stopped counting the missing. It was more than half. The bodies he recognized were outnumbered by the ones he did not, and the strangers were scattered everywhere, mixed in with the villagers as if they had all died together. Whatever had happened here was not just beasts overrunning a village.

  He told Liang Feng.

  “The numbers are wrong,” he said. “There are too many strangers and too few villagers. And the people I grew up with, most of them are just gone.”

  Liang Feng’s eyes moved across the street. He did not answer right away.

  The mist thickened as they reached the northern edge of the village, near the tree line where the fields met the forest. The qi in the air was heavier here, pressing against Yan Qiu’s skin. The beasts they found were waist-high and took real effort to put down, and Shu Yingyue had to use both swords on one before it stopped moving.

  Shu Yingyue went still. Her swords came up and she turned her head slightly, listening.

  “We are not alone,” she said.

  Liang Feng stopped. Yan Qiu stopped beside him. The three of them stood in the mist and the only sound was the wind moving through the empty houses behind them.

  Yan Qiu heard footsteps coming from ahead of them, light and measured, and they did not belong to beasts.

  Three figures walked out of the red haze. The one in front was a man in dark robes with his hands clasped behind his back. The two behind him were younger, dressed in grey, with weapons at their hips. They moved without hurry, as if they had been standing there the whole time and had only now decided to show themselves.

  The man in front looked at the three of them. He smiled.

  “Seems like some flies have entered here,” he said.

  The grey-robed figure on the left glanced at his companion. “Just clean them up.”

  Yan Qiu tried to read their cultivation. He pushed his senses outward, reaching for their qi the way he had been taught, and hit a wall. He could feel the pressure of it, dense and heavy, but he could not measure it or see past the surface. It was like trying to look at the bottom of a lake that had no bottom.

  He looked at Shu Yingyue. Her face was blank and her grip on her swords had tightened until her knuckles were white. She could not read them either.

  Liang Feng could.

  The color left his face in the space of a single breath and his jaw locked tight. He had not moved or reached for a weapon or shifted his weight. He was standing completely still, and Yan Qiu had never seen him do that before. Liang Feng always had a plan and always moved first.

  “Everyone,” he said. His voice was low and flat. “Run.”

  They turned and ran.

  The grey-robed figure on the left moved. Yan Qiu did not see it happen. There was no blur or rush of wind or sound of footsteps closing the distance. One moment the man was standing behind his leader and the next he was beside Shu Yingyue, and his hand came down in a short arc that barely looked like it had any force behind it.

  Shu Yingyue screamed.

  Her left hand separated at the wrist. The sword it had been holding hit the ground with the hand still wrapped around the hilt, and blood sprayed from the stump in a bright line across the dirt. She stumbled forward and caught herself, pressing the stump against her ribs with her remaining hand. The scream cut off and turned into hard, ragged breathing through her teeth.

  The grey-robed figure was already back in his original position. He had not drawn a weapon.