Calvin had to give the cult leader credit. He might be a butcher, torturer, more than likely a rapist, and altogether the exact sort of unrepentant monster that righteous sects like the Eight Peaks liked to point to when their own abuses and inequities came to light, but he was also an extremely capable cultivator. His aura was thick and heavy, hinting at the impressive Foundation that empowered it, and he used his qi with an effortless, enviable smoothness that spoke of extreme mastery or perhaps a significantly higher quality spirit root than the Very Low quality earthly root Calvin possessed.
He was fast, fast enough that Calvin struggled to keep up even with repeated usage of his movement technique. He had a movement technique of his own, one that was in some ways superior to his own yang technique, though clearly far more costly in terms of qi and stamina. Bloody mist would occasionally form beneath his feet for a few steps at a time whenever Calvin got too close, granting him bursts of speed Calvin simply could not match and silencing his footfalls. It also seemed to have a secondary effect of wiping away any traces of his passage, and Calvin wondered if it was an evolved version of whatever technique the whole group was using to travel around without leaving an obvious trail.
He was also not content to simply allow himself to be chased down, occasionally slowing slightly to use an offensive technique or set a trap. Puddles of blood formed in his footsteps, erupting into clouds of crimson mist that sought to drain the life from anything they touched when Calvin got too close. Tiny knives of crystalized blood flew at him like swarms of stinging gnats, reducing trees to sawdust and tearing up the road behind him when he avoided them or burned his way through the center of the cloud.
And then there were the less overt attacks. Droplets of blood from the still weeping wound on the cultist’s palm would occasionally release pulses of the same spiritual attack he’d used on the whole group before running away when they hit the ground, though thankfully with a significantly reduced intensity. They weren’t powerful enough to penetrate Calvin’s spirit, but they clawed and scratched at him like a cat trying to get through a heavy wooden door, a constant bombardment that set his teeth on edge and slightly disrupted any external technique he tried to use.
Calvin had to wonder if perhaps the demonic cultivator had offended the wrong elder back at his sect and had been sent to Nine-Pine Gulch as a sort of suicidal exile. One last chance to prove himself, or else make himself useful in his final months. It would explain why he was unwilling to surrender, and why his sect would discard such a talented junior.
A burst of golden sparks launched Calvin into the air, up and over the veritable fog bank of bloody mist that erupted in front of him. He twisted in mid air, fire sheathing his leg as he shattered a javelin of blood with a sharp kick. He hit the ground a moment later and rolled, avoiding the wide crescent of crystalline knives that scythed down the road at chest-height. Another burst of yang qi and he was back on his feet, sprinting down the dirt road with his eyes locked onto his quarry’s distant back.
The man was starting to get desperate. Well, even more desperate. That was good. Desperate people made mistakes, and that was important because otherwise Calvin might have been in serious trouble. Because while Calvin was relatively certain of his ability to overpower the cultist in a fair fight, this was not an organized duel and he was in no way at his best right now.
There was a reason he’d tried to eliminate the man with a single surprise attack. Though he’d healed his physical injuries and taken a qi recovery pill after his nearly disastrous battle with the demonic hound, there had been little he could do about the damage to his spirit and he had not recovered nearly as much qi as he’d expended, especially since he’d used a not insignificant amount of power to reach Amber Crossing in time to support Lulu and Wallis. He wasn’t exactly on his last legs yet, but he was a lot closer to exhausted than he was fully comfortable with.
The cultist meanwhile had been practically fresh as a daisy. He’d traveled to the town at a speed a bunch of barely trained Gathering realm cultivators could handle and seemed to have mostly hung back while his subordinates fought Lulu and Wallis. The mental technique he’d used had likely been more costly to use than defend against, and trying to summon the hound had also looked like a very draining technique, but the shield had taken barely any power to form, drawing on externally stored strength rather than his foe’s qi reserves. Altogether Calvin guessed he’d had as little as half the remaining qi as his opponent had when he’d taken off running.
Thankfully the cultist didn’t know that, and this chase had done a great deal to equalize things. Blood techniques were notoriously power hungry and often drained the user’s vitality and stamina in addition to their qi, and the black-robed cultivator had been throwing around a lot of techniques. Each cloud of mist, each swarm of knives, and each shed drop of blood were draining him dry bit by bit. Meanwhile Calvin had mostly just used the yang-aligned movement technique of the Eight Peaks Martial Arts, a technique so notoriously light in its energy demands that even women with yin-aligned constitutions like Ariadne could use it a handful of times in quick succession. It allowed him to both mostly keep up with his target and avoid the frequent attacks and traps, with only the occasional need for a more costly fire or metal technique to power through a technique he couldn’t avoid.
The only downside was that they were getting further and further away from Amber Crossing, and with it Lulu and Wallis who were even now engaging with many times their own number of murderous, crazed demonic cultivators. Under ordinary circumstances, Calvin would have squarely favored his friends over the rabble his quarry had gathered, but the man’s technique had upended things significantly. They had managed to at least partially resist the mental assault, but how long would that resistance last? Would the technique weaken over time and distance as its user fled, or strengthen as its claws sank deeper and deeper into its target’s minds and spirits? Calvin didn’t know, and he doubted its user would be forthcoming. Equally importantly, how long would his impaired friends last against their foes, who seemed to have immediately succumbed to the berserker bloodlust the technique inspired?
Those thoughts itched at him, spurring him forward, but he did not let them break his composure. Two uses of his movement technique—and his target needing to slow to launch that blood javelin back at him—had closed the gap between them to less than a hundred meters, which he’d found was much too close for his target’s comfort. Practically on cue, bloody mist formed beneath the cultist’s feet and he shot forward, nearly doubling the distance between them in a handful of moments. Calvin watched the technique disperse and hid a smile.
Five steps. The first time his foe used that technique, he’d taken eleven before it broke beneath him, but that number had dropped precipitously since then. The last three times he’d managed to hold it for six steps, but now he was down to five. He was slowing, weakening. Draining his qi and his stamina in a mad rush to escape. With each use it took less and less time for Calvin to catch back up, repeated blood techniques draining physical stamina in addition to qi.
It was almost time to end this. As much as the chase favored him, it would be foolish to allow it to continue for too much longer. Who knew what sorts of traps and hideyholes a demonic cultivator seeking to oppose a Great Sect might have prepared ahead of time? He’d give it just a few more minutes, allow the man a short while longer to bleed himself dry before closing in for the kill.
Calvin kept his eyes peeled, keeping half an eye on his target’s back and the rest on the road ahead and the woods on either side. Most of the traps he’d avoided so far had been obvious things, stains of crimson on the dull brown earth that radiated qi like heat off a fire, but others had been crafted with more care and effort. He was glad that the man had chosen to follow the road (as much as it could be called a road) instead of cutting through the forest—it made following much easier. He just hoped this wasn’t already some manner of trap. This man needed to die, and it would be the height of embarrassment to be given the slip by a decoy of some sort.
Unfortunately, Calvin wasn’t the only one who’d realized that this chase favored him, and he was not the first to act on that knowledge. In the distance, the cult leader suddenly spun around to face Calvin, making use of the temporary distance he’d bought with his movement technique to ready himself. He raised both arms, fingers intertwined and palms pointed towards Calvin, and flared his qi, snakelike ribbons of blood coiling around his bare arms where the loose sleeves of his robe had fallen back to pool around his elbows.
Calvin tensed, prepared to dodge or counter at a moment’s notice even as he continued to dash forward, but the technique the cultist was preparing was not immediately offensive in nature. A seemingly endless torrent of blood began to flow from beneath the man’s robe, up along his arms, and then spill down his hands to pool on the earth before him. In moments the blood at his feet grew from a tiny puddle to a wide pool some eight feet across. More blood continued to flow, far more than a single body could contain, but instead of growing larger still, the pool seemed to grow deeper and darker, the surface of the pool oddly still and lustrous even as more blood poured into it in a gruesome waterfall.
Calvin slowed slightly, moving to the edge of the road such that the pool was no longer directly between the two of them. For the third time in as many hours he cursed his lack of a proper ranged technique he could use at a moment’s notice. It was a glaring weakness he’d never given nearly enough credence. Most of the fighting he’d done since he’d become a cultivator had been sparring done in the relatively cramped confines of a training ground or campsite. On the handful of other occasions he’d either been able to easily overpower his opponent or had a group supporting him. It had been a hole in his skillset, but not a significant enough one that he judged it to be worth the contribution points needed to find and then purchase an appropriate technique from the Sect. Especially since eventually he would master the techniques of the Nine Rotating Gates method to an extent that he could use them as he pleased.
Now, with nearly two-thousand contribution points to his name and a pressing need for a way to target his opponent from a distance, he felt rather silly. How much would it have truly cost him to pick up just a simple, Foundation realm technique? A few hundred points? A thousand? A trivial expenditure in the grand scheme of things. But instead his only real way to engage a target from any distance further than a handful of strides required far too much preparation to use in most battles.
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There was another flare of qi and the surface of the blood pool rippled and bulged as something began to rise from unseen depths. A moment later a smooth expanse of off-white stone broke the surface, blood running off it like water from an oilskin. Calvin staggered as a nearly overwhelming aura of blood and death slammed into him with all the subtlety of a landslide, thick as mud and cloying like rotting meat. As quickly as it appeared it withdrew, leaving behind only a subtle wrongness that made skin prickle and hung low to the ground like a deep fog hiding grasping roots and leg-breaking burrows.
The altar––for what else could it be––rose slowly, inch by terrible inch emerging from the blood. It looked like a plain, unadorned block of pale stone, chisel marks visible on its sides as rivulets of blood ran down them like channels, but the aura it radiated was unmistakable that of a powerful treasure. Perhaps once it had been just a rock, a single block taken from a village wall or imperial road, but death and pain had seeped into every pore and particle, transforming it from ordinary stone into something grotesque. Its surface was the color of sun-bleached bone and it was immediately obvious that this was the missing piece of the twisted ritual for which the populace of Wide Hill had died.
Calvin didn’t waste any more time. He’d given his foe a chance to surrender. Several chances even, and had been squarely rebuffed each time. That was more than enough to cover him if his foe turned out to be someone important. The Eight Peaks sect was righteous, not merciful, and allowing an enemy to finish preparing the ground on which you fought was stupid. He just hoped the technique he was watching was as costly in terms of qi as it looked. If that was the case, his foe might very well be on his last legs.
He steadied himself, burning away the lingering traces of the altar’s influence and the cultist’s mental technique. He thought once more of the cellar full of bodies and plunder, the last remnant of many thousands of helpless mortal lives. He’d already let this man keep breathing for much longer than he deserved. Three gates turned within his qi nodes, his qi flowing with a strong, steady current. The phoenix figure watched the world with its gemstone eyes, its golden feathers shimmering as though lit by flickering candlelight. The young cult leader’s head was tilted down, eyes narrow slits and the symbol on his forehead blazing like a baleful sun. He seemed utterly focused on his technique, blood continuing to flow from beneath his robe and onto the earth.
He exploded forward in a burst of golden sparks and lavender-tinted flames, pouring qi into both techniques until they strained to the very limits of what they could handle. The air around him shimmered as it became super heated and blackened craters in the earth marked his passage. A wave of blood rose from the edge of the pool to meet him, rising up over his head and cresting down as though to swallow him whole, but he was undaunted. He took one final step, dirt spraying out behind him as he kicked off the ground, and twisted his body as though intending to meet the wave shoulder-first, fire blazing around him like a winter cloak.
His current efforts might have been sufficient to break through the cultist’s technique, but they also may not have been. Calvin knew little of his opponent’s methods and techniques, and could only roughly judge the quality of his Foundation. Perhaps with more experience he would have been able to instinctively gauge the relative strength of the techniques in question, but he could count the number of truly serious fights he’d engaged in as a Foundation realm cultivator on his hands with fingers to spare. A few hours ago, he might have taken the risk, confident in his training and techniques. After nearly dying ignobly to a half-crippled spirit beast, he was no longer willing to be so reckless.
An instant before he met the wave, Calvin shifted his body in mid air. Maintaining two techniques simultaneously already strained the limits of what he could manage, so he fully released his focus on his movement technique––he was already moving as quickly as it could accelerate him, and he was practically on top of his opponent. Instead, he called upon the fundamentals of a different technique, drawing on just the meanest fragments of what it was truly capable of. Even just that tiny measure nearly made the fire around him slip out of his control and sent a sharp spike of agony through his skull, but it was only pain.
[The Gate Turns in Place]
The wave crashed down, blood burning and boiling where it met his flames, but the bulk of its impact parted around him like a river around a stone, crashing down upon the dirt with earthshaking force. He completed a single revolution in an instant, spraying droplets of blood in all directions, and continued forward without slowing. The cultist tore his gaze away from the altar and began to turn his head, eyes widening with shock and fear, but he may as well have been moving through tar for all the time he had to react.
Flames flowed up Calvin's right arm as he swung it forward, condensing into a liquid blaze that for a moment turned twilight into noon and cast stark shadows across the earth. With the ease of long practice, he slipped into the fifth stance of Fire Peak, qi flowing smoothly through his body and resonating with the technique solidifying around his fist. He focused the force of his charge, narrowing it down to a single devastating point.
[Fire on the Peaks]
His fist struck the cultist’s jaw like a battering ram, bone cracking like cheap crockery beneath his knuckles. The fire he’d gathered, sufficient to slay a cultivator in the early stages of the Foundation realm in a single strike, burst forward, turning the hood of the cultist’s robe to ash in an instant and clinging to any patch of exposed skin it could find like glue. His head snapped back, the technique he was maintaining crumbling, and he was launched away like a ragdoll, crashing through two trees and cracking a third before collapsing to the ground.
Calvin followed only a step behind him, continuing to press the attack. The moment he’d struck the cultist he’d realized his attempts to take him out with a single surprise attack had been doomed from the start. He had felt bone crack, but the young cult leader’s neck had not snapped, his skin had not ruptured, and his skull had not been caved in. His body was durable far beyond what was typical for a cultivator at his level of advancement. No doubt he practiced some form of blood-based body tempering––such methods were extremely efficacious up until at least the Core realm. Still, his opening strike had certainly not gone to waste. He’d definitely injured his foe, as well as disrupting his technique and getting him away from his pre-prepared blood pool.
By the time Calvin reached him, the demonic cultivator had already begun to stir, giving further credence to the quality of his body cultivation, but he was disorientated, clumsily trying to push himself upright with his elbows. The hood and upper shoulders of his robe had been mostly burned away and the pale skin beneath was pockmarked with shiny burn scars, some patches of flames still stubbornly burning away. His dirty-blonde hair was melted and scorched in places, as though he’d begun going bald in patches, and the once glowing mark on his forehead looked almost completely inert, glowing so faintly it might have been nothing more than a trick of the light.
He began to try to say something, but Calvin had most certainly broken his jaw with his first strike, so all that came out was mangled gibberish. That, or perhaps he really was just spouting gibberish.
Calvin slipped into the third stance and lashed out with his foot, rolling flames trailing in its wake. At the last moment the cultist twisted away, and Calvin’s foot struck his shoulder instead of his head, bone cracking with a sharp snap, and sent him rolling across the ground, fire hungrily licking at his skin and clothes. He cried out, but instead of pain all Calvin could hear was hoarse laughter, cruel and mocking. Once again he began to push himself up, his oddly shaped knife appearing in his hand from seemingly thin air.
“Ha, ha, ha! That barely even––”
Calvin stomped on his head, smashing it down into the dirt. Once again he felt a satisfying crack, but now that he was right next to the man he could see that he was healing rapidly, burns fading into clear skin before his very eyes and the imprint of his fist in the man’s cheek smoothing back into a sharp, aristocratic cheekbone.
“––hurt. You’ll have to do––”
Calvin stomped again, this time on the arm holding the blood knife with its spine handle, and followed it up with a sharp kick that sent the blade spinning away into the undergrowth.
“––better than that, Sect––”
The cultist’s other arm began to rise, the carved symbol on the pack of his hand flickering, and Calvin grabbed his wrist, squeezing down as hard as he could and pouring fire into his fingers, focusing on the bits of his qi that had had time to mix with the Phoenix’s dense droplets of violet power. The all-too-familiar smell of burning hair and baking flesh filled the air, and the cultist’s taunts turned into a strangled scream of true pain.
“Agha! No! It's not supposed––”
Calvin kicked him in the chin, snapping his head back against the ground, then stomped down on the side of his head even as he bent down to wrap his fingers around the blonde-haired cultist’s neck. The symbol on his right cheek, which had survived his punch completely unharmed, was slowly beginning to dim, but who knew how long it would take to fully exhaust the no-doubt tremendous amount of qi invested in such a potent healing technique? Every passing second was another chance for the cultist to turn the tables on him with yet another secret technique or a hidden life saving treasure.
But there was a limit to every healing technique.
Metal qi sheathed Calvin’s fingers, and a guttural cry tore from the cultist’s throat, meaningless words and promises pouring from his lips.
The cultist’s skin and muscle was tough, but it was still skin and muscle. Blood spurted, gallons and gallons of it which soaked into his under robes and stung his skin, but sloughed off his sect-issued outer robe without leaving a mark. Inch by inch, Calvin closed his hand into a fist, pressing down with his purlicue like the blade of a butcher’s cleaver. Flesh mended almost as quickly as it was cut, but it could not heal through Calvin’s hand.
The cultist’s screaming and begging cut off as Calvin cleaved fully through his neck and wrapped his fingers around his spine. Twitching muscles and veins tried to crawl up Calvin’s hand but he burned them as quickly as they regrew, draining his remaining qi at a precipitous rate. Then, with a wet crunch, the cultist’s spine gave way and his desperately flared aura collapsed into a hollow shadow. Calvin swung his hand and a blonde-haired head rolled away from its body, mouth still open and blood staining its teeth.
Calvin stared at the hollow-eyed face. The symbols on its cheeks and forehead were gone, leaving only meaningless splotches of dry blood in their wake. It felt too easy. Too clean. But the flow of knowledge from the Scroll was clear. This really was the body of a peak Foundation realm cultivator.
Calvin silently licked his lips, then spat out a wad of bloody saliva in disgust. All that power and no idea how to use it. How ironic.
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