"The World Spirit is the Room with everyone in it."

  From the Dialectical Mysticomaterialism Sutra

  Before long, they finished their fried noodles and paid at the counter. They bowed to Praxuntrang one more time, who still avoided Xing's direct gaze. and they made their way out.

  "Be careful, Uncle Koago, Miss Xing," warned Praxuntrang.

  Koago paused. A long moment. Anxiety crept up on Xing. A budding regret. "Why is that, Trangie?" Koago finally asked, turning around and offering a slight smirk, but an all too serious one.

  Praxuntrang shrugged. This news did not affect him directly, so it only half concerned him. "Received word recently. Explosion on the National Highway, from the east. Farmer's autocar was destroyed. Said they were bandits that attacked."

  Koago said: "What happened to the bandits?" He shot Xing a look. Xing watched Praxuntrang eagerly.

  "Well, they couldn't find any of the bodies anymore. But the four daughters were found safe at the side of the road. Heard from one of the watchmen that the Village Chief found 'em."

  Koago nodded. A dappled dot of appreciation. "Thank you, Praxuntrang. We appreciate the warning. A good kid Tononggong has raised."

  "May light guide your path, master."

  Koago offered a small smile. "Until all beings are free."

  ---

  Koago brought Xing to the outskirts of Kabini Town. There, upon a hill, surrounded by a copse of strangler figs and weeping willows, signaled by a patch of swaying flowers, was a house. The house looked more like a temple complex than anything—thick hardwood pillars with depictions of long stories and flowers and dragons carved onto its reliefs. Raised a few meters off the ground, so one had to ascend to it from a front stairs. And multiple houses connected to each other by raised bridge-hallways.

  They'd left the carabao behind. They wouldn't need it. But they traveled with their weapons anyway. Or at least, Xing did.

  As they approached the beautiful temple-house, she said: "Master, if it's all right with you. I've a concern."

  "Speak freely, my disciple."

  She put a finger on her chin. "The Darkness Cleaving Sunrise is a beautiful weapon but I must admit. I've some trouble appropriately applying the principles and philosophies of the DiaMat Sword to it. It feels a bit too... imbalanced for it."

  "A single cleaving movement," said Koago, nodding. "Is still dialectical. But you have the right of it—though it can be done, the DiaMat Sword is not a martial art for cleavers. It is not for axes, sword-axes, and so on." He looked a bit more suspiciously at the empty temple-house as they neared. "But all your DiaMat Sword training is simply to get you ready for your next Martial Art. Devil Tiger Fury."

  Xing grinned fiercely. "I like the sound of that one, master."

  "It is simpler to learn than DiaMat Sword," said Koago. "But to wield it well requires you to have cultivated your Killing Intent. Your willingness to commit violence. And despite all the rage boiling your blood, you did not have the required Killing Intent to learn it when I took you in." He paused for a moment and watched Xing. "Perhaps... you do now, however."

  "I do, master. I do!"

  Koago smirked. A soft, endeared laugh wisped from his lips. "We shall see. We shall see. But first...?"

  They both arrived at the foot of the hardwood stairs—itself intricately carved with dragons for handrails. But the temple-complex was eerily quiet. "Strange," said Koago, raising an eyebrow. "Usually Tsu Hwan would have multiple servitors and aides running around. And yet... there are none...?"

  A pallid and sickly wind descended upon the copse of trees. The dead wood swayed. A bell somewhere rang, and the heavy cold wind sent a nearby gong thrumming.

  Xing felt the hairs on her back rise. She felt watched. She reached behind her and held the dragon headed handle of Darkness Cleaving Sunrise for comfort. It has been a long time since anyone has held her hand. She knew that she would never find Love in this world. It had never bothered her, but it glimpsed her brain for a sudden second, just that once. A strange thing to be worrying about, to be sure.

  Koago closed his eyes and expanded his awareness. Like a spirit, his deep trance meditation allowed him to sense a large area around him. He saw everything in a field of black, saw different creatures and things in wisps of blueflames.

  And then there. Voids where life ought to be. Dead things. Wretched things. Reanimated by something. Or, perhaps, kept animated by something.

  Xing spun around as a humanoid thing lurched from the bushes. Its body kept together by silver-shadow tendrils. Strange magochemical sutures. It wore the vestments of Tsu Hwan's servitors—blue silk brocade with white cloud patterns. With fingers longer than a human's, pestilent and festering with maggots, it reached out and lunged, grasping for Xing.

  Koago spun around. "Xing!" His hands were already mid-mudra.

  The past Xing would've floundered. Hesitated. But this new Xing—this Xing reborn—was fueled no longer by anxiety, but by non-hesitation. In righteous, indignant vengeance, she is carried by the wings of her Killing Intent.

  And in her state of non-hesitation, she spun. Unsheathing Darkness Cleaving Sunrise. Flowing beautifully into spinning cut, comboed into a pirouette away. Darkness Cleaving Sunrise's peerless silvered blade clove deep into the reanimated thing's chest. It found no heart.

  And yet pain is Real. And so it flinched, fell backwards suddenly.

  Koago's tongue twisted into a cursing mantra. And then suddenly spikes of pure starfire manifested above the supine reanimated thing. With another mudra, Koago moved the starfire spikes into the thing's heart.

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  It screeched a harrowing screech. The screech of both release and of pure, pure agony. A screech that sounded so bestial that only a human could have possibly extruded it, from broken and ripped up vocal cords.

  Xing cringed away. The hairs on her skin rose still.

  That screech did not end. More joined its chorus. Master and Disciple turned around to find they were surrounded by 3, 4, no 6 of these same corpses. Indomitable, unwavering, inevitable like death.

  Koago said: "Xing, let your resolve be tested. Pray, be steel!"

  "May my dance of violence be divine before the eyes of the Omniscients."

  Koago manifested his umbrella once again, as Xing surged forward and swung up and then down. She had to move the sword-axe like she was moving a longstaff. Most of the weight was on the blade, so the distribution of that weight made it nigh impossible to be able to perform DiaMat Sword technicks. She had to rely on pure muscle memory and the transferable skills of the martial art.

  Her cleaving strikes were given the proper power generation, thankfully enough. She felt it out according to what her body demanded of her. She spun and carried the wide cleaving arc of Darkness Cleaving Sunrise and it cut deep into two of the reanimated's bellies. Viscera—spoiled, now. Blackened. Touched by the ancient god of entropy—spilled out into the battlefield. The two reanimated continued, marching forward, without the privilege of pain.

  Xing simply continued her cleaving strike into one that went straight up as she spun, like a ballerina or an opera dancer. The blade cleaved up, splitting an incoming reanimated's skull in half.

  That did it. It seems as though some manner of reanimation mantra or device resided within the Reanimated's head.

  The other reanimated saw the glaring flaw in her defense. After her spinning cleave, she had to follow through. She did not have the sheer brute force to dictate the cutting lines of Darkness Cleaving Sunrise.

  And so the Reanimated lunged and its pestilent fingers and rotting teeth and bleeding gums and maggot infested cheeks found purchase upon Xing's supple, sunkissed skin.

  Pain pierced through her. She gasped in the sudden agony as she immediately spun again to throw the Reanimated off of her. Xing quickly kicked the sword-axe's blade up, sending it cleaving in a wide vertical arc again—catching and sundering the thrown off Reanimated in two.

  From both stumps erupted flailing silver-shadow tentacles. Looking for purchase. For union. For each other. When they couldn't conjoin in a matter of seconds, they slowly melted away, no longer powered by an active magick.

  Xing let the sword-axe spin in mid-air for a moment, before catching it and stabbing it into the ground. She turned to her master but Koago was already dispatching the three Reanimated corpses that lurched toward him with three summoned laser-needles of Cleanfire. These cleanfire needles bored into the broken skulls of these Reanimated, abomination to their Darkly powered selves, and then quickly dissipated.

  The Reanimated fell to the floor. Their corpses now inert, nothing but latent consciousness for entropy to begin its process of degrading it back into the All.

  Koago looked more confused than distressed. He closed his parasol and turned around. "Disconcerting."

  Xing scoffed. "Ya think? What manner of primeval infernalism arises here, master? What has happened to the vaunted member of the Black World you so claim...?"

  Koago looked at the house. "We must find out. Stay close to me, disciple. Danger abounds here, in this temple complex."

  "You mean... we are to enter inside? Gallivant like tomb raiders?"

  Koago nodded. "It is the only way."

  The Owl Assassin paused for a moment and performed a mudra where both of his hands outstretched all fingers, except for the ring finger which was held back by a thumb. These two hands met at the handheel, held vertically, above and below. Koago exhaled and immediately entered into the Deep Trance, and he let his awareness probe through the entirety of the house once more.

  At the edges of his awareness he was assailed by the overwhelmingly paranoid feeling of being watched. As if eyes had grown in the insides of his spiritual viscera. With a gasp he pulled himself out. He said: "The Dark lingers within. And yet..." It was unmistakable. Right before Koago pulled out his awareness, he could feel the telltale cinnabar presence of the Iron Alchemist Tsu Hwan. "The alchemist yet abides within."

  Xing sighed. "So we are to save him?"

  "What other recourse have we?"

  Stepping upon the stairs that led into the elevated front porch of the stilt house complex filled Xing with dread inexorable. Budding and building, like a slow and black flame. The terror as they stepped carefully through broken floorings avoided fallen over posts from hallways was cold. Ice needles prickling her flesh.

  Even the stilt house complex—made of multiple interlocking hallways and houses and longhouses—seemed to open its mouth to quiet. To no-word and no-sound. The houses and longhouses each had wraparound verandas, each one with what looked like low tea-tables and coffee tables. But even these were broken, destroyed, or eerily kept still and stagnant. As if ghosts yet drank upon them, and one must not even look in their direction.

  The smell of blood and corpses and blood-jasmines penetrated the air. A feuding collage of clean sanctuary trying to keep out the vestiges of the Undead, ignorant to the truth that the undead are already within or inside.

  Even the architecture seemed to have preternaturally lamented its current state. The railings and reliefs of the pillars and stilts and poles, of the eaves and the lintels, depicted scenes of screaming and crying women and men reaching out to both the heavens and the hells to find a savior to save them. This was an incomplete story—there would be a warrior-hero that would save them. There always was, that was the way of legends in past class society. The blood-splattered wood engravings and grime-caked linocuts almost said: NO. THERE ARE NO HEROES HERE. ONLY DEATH.

  The doorframes had the face of Death framing them.

  "What... has happened here?"

  Koago was silent for a moment. Xing noticed that he moved without making noise with his feet. Has the master so truly perfected his Lightness? When Koago finally spoke, it was in a hushed tone: "Much of Magick in the Utter Islands is said to arise from the channeling of the Dark. Even Alchemy, ultimately, touches the Dark."

  "The Dark...?" Xing a centipede of ice crawl up her neck just at the mention. "What... is this?" She has never versed well with magicks. Any kind of witchcraft was occult to her, and her parents had warned her about dealing with such things. 'Once you see them, they can see you' was a common phrase. That always caused a black knot to form at the base of her neck, and caused her to look away at any instance of the supramundane.

  But... those things that attacked her. Weren't those essentially undead? She was dealing with the supramundane, now. What was she going to do with this understanding? With this realization?

  Xing shook her head. Now was not the time to think about this, she knew. Keep moving forward, Xing. There is more ahead.

  "It is difficult to explain, I suppose," said Koago. "In the realms of Magicks—which includes modern natural science—the Dark is anything that cannot yet be understood. It is the Void in human understanding. But it is also a very Real thing. It reaches out and lashes at things that try to cage it. Contain it. It is a force alive and it causes things to be reanimated, causes undead to move, grants psychophysical gifts and curses to beings. It is the sheer force of hyperchaos, for good and ill. The paracausal. The contingent, upon which universes begin and end."

  "It is a force...?"

  "Perhaps the force from which all other forces arise," said Koago, nodding, looking about him like an owl.

  "This is beyond me right now, I think."

  "It's not difficult to understand, disciple," said Owl. "But to do so, you must think less."

  They entered into another square house with raised tables and another set of stairs that led to the outdoor cooking area. "The kitchenhouse," said Koago, squinting. Spices spread out across the tabletops. Rotting meat filled the cutting boards.

  Then, a scream from behind Xing.