Chapter 14 | Traps Thenceforth
The forest shadows felt longer and with more black then ever before.
Lin mei knew that it wasn't the case, but it still felt like it as their nine figures slipped through the undergrowth in paired formation and fifty yards of spacing between each pair. Moving northeast at a pace that balanced speed against silence. Lin Mei and Lin Shui took point. Duan Rong and Tao Shen held the middle. Fang Yue ran alone at the rear because her partner was the silence itself and it kept pace admirably.
The monitoring web's data faded as they left its range and Lin Mei's own spiritual sense took over
It painted the forest in cruder strokes.
She could feel the five fleeing signatures ahead, closer now. Their panic a tangible thing in the Qi, giving it a sharp, acidic quality that cut through the ambient flow the way vinegar cut through oil.
She could feel the eight pursuers too.
Their Qi was different. Oily and carrying the demonic taint. They moved in lazy patterns, arrogant and seeing no reason to be focused.
Lin Mei angled east toward their destination.
The plan was simple because reality had been particularly unkind to complicated plans recently. They would circle ahead of the pursuit, position themselves on the eastern flank where a line of fallen trunks provided cover and elevation, and hit the crescent from the side when the pursuers' attention was fixed forward on their prey.
Eight mid-stage Qi Condensation against three injured Foundation Establishment cultivators, one sword genius, and four Qi Condensation disciples.
They had the numbers and strength of cultivation on their side.
It would be an easy strike, recover the disciples, make sure they left no trail, and then vanish back toward the safe zone.
They reached the flank position in a dozen minutes.
The fallen trunks lay in a rough line, a few massive pines that had come down in some previous storm and now formed a natural barricade that was chest-high and had gaps between them that served as holding positions. The undergrowth had grown up around the bases, providing additional concealment. The ground behind the trunks was firm, dry, solid, and slightly elevated, giving a clear sight line across forty yards of open forest floor.
It didn't take long for things to reach a boiling point.
The five runners burst into view first.
Three boys, two girls, all wearing the shredded remnants of white robes. The youngest couldn't have been older than thirteen. The oldest, a boy with a face that was more blood than skin, was half-carrying, half-dragging a girl whose left arm hung at an angle that arms did not voluntarily choose. They ran with the stumbling, graceless desperation of people whose legs had stopped taking orders from their brains and were operating on pure animal reflex.
The eight pursuers came into view a few seconds later.
They sauntered after them, Qi helping them keep up without expending physical energy.
That was the detail that made Lin Mei's grip on her sword hilt tighten until the leather bit into her palm. They sauntered with smiles and laughs. Eight demonic cultivators in dark robes, red eyes catching the grey morning light, blades drawn and held low, walking at a pace that said they could close the distance whenever they chose and had chosen not to.
The fear was the point.
The bleeding, stumbling, suffering, crying flight of five children through a forest that offered no safety was the entertainment, and the killing, when it came, would be the dessert.
One of them flicked his blade.
A thin arc of dark Qi crossed the distance and opened a cut along the oldest boy's calf. He stumbled, caught himself but kept moving.
The girl he was carrying screamed and half sob half shout thing that made Lin Mei's chest nearly explode.
The demonic cultivators laughed.
Lin Mei's vision narrowed.
She raised her fist and the nine figures behind the fallen trunks tensed.
She dropped the fist.
They moved without hesitation and hit the crescent from the side.
Lin Shui moved first, because the concept of waiting for the signal was something she interpreted as the signal is me moving. Her blade caught the nearest demonic cultivator across the back of the neck before he had finished turning his head. The cut was clean and final. He dropped without a sound, which was more courtesy than he had shown his victims.
Duan Rong and Tao Shen hit the centre of the crescent together, their Foundation EstablishmentQi flaring in a combined pressure wave that staggered multiple cultivators and sent another one stumbling into a tree. Fang Yue materialised on the far flank, her sword already wet, and a second demonic cultivator folded over a wound he hadn't seen coming.
The Qi Condensation disciples, Feng Jun, Wei Ping, Su Lan, and Chen Yi, poured through the gaps in the fallen trunks and engaged the scattered remnants of the formation with a desperate energy to save their sect brothers and sisters.
Lin Mei took the leader.
She knew he was the leader because he was the one who recovered fastest, the one whose red eyes found her through the chaos with the an assessing calm even in the chaos of an ambush. His blade came up in a guard that was too fast for mid-stage, and when their swords met, the impact jarred her wrists and sent a shock up her arms that made her teeth click together.
He was stronger than mid-stage should have been.
Late-stage, maybe. Or mid-stage with a body cultivation method that traded precision for raw physical power.
Lin Mei disengaged, reset, and came in again from a lower angle. Her blade found his hip guard and skidded along reinforced fabric. His counter nearly took her face off. She ducked and felt the wind of the blade pass over her scalp. Then drove her pommel into his solar plexus.
He grunted, stepped back, and smiled.
Lin Mei hated the smile.
She hated it with a passion that surprised her, because it was the same smile the scarred man in the clearing had worn when the elder had saved them, the same smile every demonic cultivator she'd ever seen had worn, the smile that said this is fun for me and it's going to stop being fun for you very soon.
The fight lasted forty seconds.
In those forty seconds, six of the eight demonic cultivators went down. Two dead, courtesy of Lin Shui, whose blade moved faster then Lin Mei could keep up with. Three unconscious or disabled, courtesy of the Foundation Establishment cultivators whose depleted reserves still outclassed anything at Qi Condensation.
One surrendered, which was unexpected and was handled by Feng Jun sitting on him.
The leader and one companion broke free and ran.
Lin Mei let them go, because chasing runners through unfamiliar forest was how you turned a victory into a significant defeat… More importantly, she had five rescued disciples to collect and a corridor to get back to.
"Grab them! Move! We go now, now!"
Su Lan and Chen Yi reached the five runners first. The oldest boy collapsed the moment friendly hands touched his shoulders, his legs finally receiving the memo that the emergency was over and responding by ceasing all operations immediately. The girl with the broken arm was lifted by Tao Shen, who carried her with the careful efficiency of a man whose own chest wound was reminding him what carrying people felt like.
The youngest, the thirteen-year-old, stood in the middle of the open forest floor and stared at Lin Mei with eyes that were too large, empty, and too old for a face that still had baby fat on its cheeks.
"You're safe," Lin Mei said. "We're White Clover Flame disciples. Come with us."
The boy blinked and mouth moved. No sound came out.
Wei Ping picked him up and put him over one shoulder without asking, because asking would have required an answer and the boy didn't have one.
"Formation! Pairs! We move—"
The Qi shifted abruptly that caused every to freeze.
Lin Mei felt a change in the ambient pressure that bypassed the senses and went straight to her chest.
The forest, which had been full of the sounds of their brief, violent engagement, went quiet.
Lin Shui's head turned northeast.
Her sword came up.
"Mei." She said only one word, but that was all that was needed because the tone of it spoke for her.
Lin Mei extended her spiritual sense and the blood drained from her face.
There were large signatures coming toward them. Northeast, east, southeast. Moving in from multiple directions with the coordinated precision of a net being drawn closed.
Not eight or twelve which they could have handled easily.
She counted again because the first number had been wrong.
It had to have been wrong.
The first number was one that belonged in nightmares and the sects library textbooks under chapters with titles like 'Overwhelming Force' and 'Acceptable Losses' and 'Situations From Which There Is No Recovery'.
The first number was not wrong after two more counts.
Twenty demonic cultivators, moving in formation that dwarfed the one they'd just shattered, closing from multiple directions with the patient, professional discipline of a force that had been waiting for exactly this. Waiting in the trees, suppressing their signatures, letting the eight-man patrol serve as bait.
Letting the ambush come, the rescuers commit, and then springing the real trap on the people who thought they were the ones doing the trapping.
Lin Mei's stomach dropped through her feet and kept going.
The two runners, the leader and his companion, hadn't been fleeing.
They'd been signalling that it was time.
"It's a trap! Fall back! Everyone fall back to the corridor! Now!" Lin Mei felt her head throb and the world collapse around her.
She led her sect brothers and sisters to their death. Trapped them and now they were going to run back toward the hidden ridgeline because that was the only thing she knew to do right now. Hoping beyond hope that the Patriarch would wake up, it was their only way to survive now.
They ran as hard as they could.
There was no formation, paired spacing, clean techniques to hide their presence, or careful silence.
There was Lin Mei grabbing the oldest rescued boy by his collar and hauling him upright, and Tao Shen shifting the girl with the broken arm to a fireman's carry, and Wei Ping adjusting the thirteen-year-old on his shoulder, and all of them running south through the forest with the demonic crescent closing behind them at a pace that was faster than walking and slower than sprinting, because the demons were herding again, and the prey was bigger this time, and the game was the same.
Lin Shui ran at the rear for stretches, her sword held in the guard the sect called Autumn Holds the Gate, the same defensive form Lin Mei had used in the clearing two nights ago when she'd been prepared to die for an elder she thought was crippled.
The first demonic cultivator to close within striking distance learned that Lin Shui's version of Autumn Holds the Gate was less holding and more slamming shut with prejudice. His blade met hers and shattered. The follow-through opened his chest from shoulder to hip, and he fell without a sound.
Lin Shui was already turning to meet the next one.
But there were twenty of them… nineteen now… and the crescent was tightening.
Dark Qi techniques began flying. Bolts of shadow, arcs of corrosive energy, the oily, rot-scented attacks that demonic cultivators favoured because they were cheap by Qi attack standards and deeply unpleasant to be hit by. Duan Rong deflected two with a Qi barrier that cost him visibly, his face going grey and his bandaged ear starting to bleed through fresh wrapping. Fang Yue cut a third out of the air with her blade and took a glancing hit from a fourth that left a black mark across her forearm that smoked.
They never stopped running.
The corridor was closing in with every second that passed
The demonic crescent split with half continued the pursuit from behind and the other half peeling east and west. To flank and cutting off any potential angles of retreat. Turning that possibility into a funnel that pointed directly at the gap between the limestone ridges.
Lin Mei saw it happening and couldn't stop it.
They were being herded toward their own base and their own people.
The demons were going to follow them right through the concealment array's perimeter and find fifty-seven cultivators huddled in a corridor that had just become a killing floor.
She made a decision.
"Into the corridor! Defensive positions at the approaches! Foundation Establishment cultivators, you hold the lines! Qi Condensation cultivators, support from the ridges! Move, move, move!"
They burst through the northern approach at a dead sprint, and the corridor erupted into controlled pandemonium.
Zhao Ping was already shouting orders from the hub stone, her cloth-wrapped face turning to track the incoming signatures through the monitoring web. The Foundation Establishmentcultivators at the formation nodes pulled their hands free and drew weapons, their faces set in hard lines as they prepared to fight for their lives, injuries be damned.
The five rescued disciples were passed hand to hand down the corridor, deposited against the eastern wall among the other wounded, and immediately forgotten by everyone except Liang Hao, who appeared beside them with water and strips of clean cloth and the round-faced determination of a fourteen-year-old who had found his job and intended to do it regardless of what the rest of the world was doing around him.
Lin Mei planted herself at the northern approach.
The gap was two people wide and the limestone walls rose on either side, fifteen feet of rough stone that channelled any attacker into the narrow area. Duan Rong took position at her right shoulder. Tao Shen at her left. Fang Yue behind them, ready to rotate in when someone fell or needed a break.
The three of them would take turns hitting the small gap to make sure no one came in.
Lin Shui climbed the eastern ridge in seconds and took position at the top, her sword held high and silhouette sharp against the grey sky.
The first wave hit the northern approach thirty seconds later.
Five demonic cultivators, shoulder to shoulder, blades drawn, and dark Qi flaring around their hands and weapons. They came through the gap at speed, expecting to overwhelm a defensive line through sheer momentum.
The gap disagreed and the disciples concurred.
Two people wide meant two attackers at a time, and two attackers at a time meant Lin Mei's sword and Duan Rong's blade met them in a space where flanking was impossible and not viable tactics.
Lin Mei's blade took the first attacker across the forearm. His sword dropped.
Duan Rong's follow-up caught the second in the shoulder, driving him back into the third, and the gap became a tangle of bodies, steel, agony screams, and profanity.
Lin Shui's sword descended from the ridge top. The fourth attacker's defensive technique shattered, and the blade continued through it and through him and into the limestone beside him. Leaving a deep cut in the stone that would be there long after everyone involved had become a memory.
Lin Mei gave Lin Shui a momentary look of surprise.
I-I didn't know she had unlocked her Blade Aura…
She shook her head and focused back on the battle and the danger of dying to a stray strike.
The fifth attacker looked at the groove and its occupants for a moment, then retreated.
Chapter 15 | A Cry For Help
The first wave broke, but the second wave was smarter.
They didn't come through the gap.
They came over the ridges. Climbing the rough limestone with Qi-enhanced grips and pulling themselves up the fifteen-foot faces with a speed that made the height irrelevant. Three came over the eastern ridge, two over the western, and suddenly the defensive line at the approach was flanked from above.
Lin Shui met the three on the eastern ridge alone.
Her blade moved in katas that the sect's sword manuals had names for, River Parts the Stone, Crane Descends Through Mist, Autumn's Last Branch, but the names were nothing but theoretical because they weren't a sword sect and the reality was a fifteen-year-old girl fighting three grown men on a narrow ridge top with a drop on one side and death on the other.
She killed one and wounded another.
The third got past her.
He dropped into the corridor from the ridge top, landing among the Qi Condensation disciples with a grin and a blade that dripped dark Qi.
Feng Jun hit him with a calling stone.
It caught the demonic cultivator in the temple forcing the grin went away, and the cultivator turned toward Feng Jun.
Su Lan was there with a blade she'd taken from one of the earlier kills, and the cultivator stopped being a problem because she decapitated him in front of everyone without a second of hesitation. The youngest among them stared with shock even after everything they'd seen, a head rolling on the ground still blinking was not something they had gotten used to.
The western ridge produced its own crisis.
The two climbers crested the top and dropped into the corridor's western side, where the Qi Condensation disciples had been positioned as support. Chen Yi met the first with a technique that Calid would have recognised as a basic compression form that was badly executed and just barely sufficient to stagger the attacker long enough for Wei Ping to drive a sword through the gap in his guard.
The second climber got further.
He made it ten feet into the corridor before Fang Yue appeared and ended his advance with a single thrust that was so clean it could have been used as a textbook illustration under the heading 'Efficient Application of Lethal Force'.
The third wave brought the southern approach into play.
Lin Mei heard it before she felt it, the crash of bodies against the rockfall that blocked the southern gap and the scrape of boots on stone. Plus the grunt of effort as demonic cultivators hauled themselves over the obstruction and dropped into the corridor's southern end.
"Zhao Ping! South!"
The blind cultivator was already moving. She had pulled two of the remaining Foundation Establishment cultivators from their formation nodes, the ones with shattered ribs and spasming meridians, the ones who could barely circulate Qi, and positioned them at the southern rockfall.
The southern line barely held as they fought for their lives harder than ever.
The fighting became a blur of steel, Qi, dark energy, and the sounds that combat produced when it occurred in a confined space between limestone walls, sounds that echoed and amplified and layered over each other until the corridor rang.
Lin Mei fought at the northern approach until her arms burned and her sword grew heavy. The gap in front of her was slippery with red blood, viscera, soiled and released intestines, and worse things she did not think about. Duan Rong fought beside her until a dark Qi bolt caught him in the side, punching through his guard and his robes and the skin beneath. He staggered back with a sound that was half gasp and half a grunt of a man who had just received his second significant injury in a couple days and was running out of places to be injured.
Tao Shen pulled him back and took his place.
Who held the line for ninety seconds before a blade found the edge of his barely-healed chest wound and reopened it. The attacker certainly hadn't intended it but achieved regardless.
Fang Yue rotated in.
She held the line and killed a couple before she took a cut across her thigh that she ignored with detachment and continued to fight.
The Qi Condensation disciples fought on the ridges, in the corridor, at the approaches, with blades, techniques, stones and, in one memorable instance, a tree branch that Wei Han had picked up and was wielding with more enthusiasm than skill but enough of both to matter.
Yet, no matter how many they killed, more of the demonic cultivators kept coming.
Not in waves now, but rather in a steady, grinding surge of bodies replacing bodies at the approaches, climbers replacing climbers on the ridges, the twenty becoming a rotating force that tested every point of the defence and probed for the weakness that would let them pour through.
Lin Mei's spiritual sense, stretched to its limit, caught new signatures at the edge of her range.
More of them that were coming from the northeast.
Another patrol, drawn by the noise and Qi disturbance. Gleeful for the unmistakable signature of combat that propagated through the ambient energy the way blood propagated through water.
She counted nearly thirty more since the fighting kicked off and the number kept climbing
The total force converging on their position was approaching fifty demonic cultivators not counting the ones they had killed.
Worse yet, the number was still growing, because every patrol within a li was turning toward the sound of fighting the way moths turned toward flame, and the flame was getting brighter with every passing minute.
Lin Mei's sword arm trembled.
Her Qi reserves were dropping precipitously. Each technique costing more than the last and deflection drawing from a well that was not bottomless and was, in fact, approaching a bottom that she could feel rising toward her. It made her meridians ache and core tremble dangerously close to damaging it permanently.
Duan Rong was down and propped against the eastern wall, his hand pressed to the wound in his side. His face the colour of ash. He was conscious and his eyes tracked the fighting, but his body had fought till the end until he no longer had the strength to pick up his arms.
Tao Shen was down beside him with the chest wound reopened fully, the bandages soaked through, and his breathing had the shallow, rapid quality of someone whose lungs were negotiating with fluid for space.
They were dying if they didn't get help.
Two of the Qi Condensation disciples had been dragged back from the ridges with injuries that the recovery formation was working on but couldn't fix fast enough. A third sat against the wall, staring at a hand that was missing two fingers and hadn't yet processed the information.
On the eastern ridge, Lin Shui fought.
She had killed four and wounded six. Her robes were torn in places that suggested near misses measured in fractions of inches, and her sword arm moved with the same fluid precision it had started with, because genius didn't tire the way talent did, but even genius had limits, and the limits were approaching at the speed of fifty converging signatures.
The first of the reinforcements reached the northern approach.
All of them were fresh and eager.
They hit the defensive line without preamble.
Lin Mei met the first attacker and her blade turned his aside and her counter found his ribs and he fell, but the second was already there, and the third behind him, and her arms were heavy and her Qi was thin and the gap was two people wide but the people filling it were endless.
A blade got through and caught her across the left forearm, a shallow cut that burned with demonic Qi contamination. Her grip on her sword loosened for a half-second that nearly cost her everything. She recovered, reset, parried, countered, and the attacker fell, but her left hand was numb from the elbow down and the numbness was spreading.
"South is buckling!" Zhao Ping shouted. "Five through the rockfall, two on the ridge. I need bodies!"
There were no bodies to send.
Every person who could hold a weapon was holding one.
Every person who could stand was standing.
The corridor had become a box of desperate, bleeding, injured, and exhausted people fighting on all sides against a force that outnumbered them, outpowered them, and showed no signs of stopping.
Lin Mei's vision tunnelled.
She could see the northern approach, the bodies in the gap, the next attacker coming through, the blade rising, the dark Qi coiling. She could hear the fighting on the ridges, the clash of steel, Lin Shui's blade singing its high, clear note. She could feel the southern line bending, the Foundation Establishment cultivators there giving ground inch by inch because they had no inches left to give.
She could feel, at the edge of everything, the moss curtain at the southern end of the corridor, hanging still and undisturbed over a space where a man lay unconscious and unreachable. His body working through a process that could not be interrupted, his mind somewhere beyond the reach of shouting and steel and the desperate need of the people who were dying in his name.
A demonic cultivator broke through the northern line.
He got past Lin Mei and the gap into the corridor proper.
His blade found Feng Jun's shoulder before Fang Yue's sword found his spine.
Feng Jun went down, his calling stone rolling from his grip across the blood-slicked limestone.
Liang Hao caught it.
The fourteen-year-old boy, round-faced and wide-eyed, caught the rolling stone in both hands and held it against his chest and looked at Lin Mei with an expression that contained no question and no hope and no fear, only the simple, terrible understanding of someone who had come to a final understanding of their fate.
Lin Mei killed the next attacker through the gap.
Her arms screamed and left hand couldn't feel the hilt.
Her Qi reserves were a puddle where a lake had been.
Another wave came without a break. The demonic cultivators rotated fresh fighters to the front without hesitation. They could smell blood and the battle was almost over.
Lin Shui dropped from the ridge.
She landed in the corridor, her sword dark to the hilt, breathing finally visible, and chest rising and falling in a rhythm that said even genius had found its edge. She took position beside Lin Mei at the northern approach, and the two sisters stood shoulder to shoulder in the gap, and their blades moved together in a harmony that was not taught but born, the older sister's strength and the younger sister's precision weaving a wall of steel that held—
A technique hit the eastern ridge in the form of a massive bolt of concentrated dark Qi.
It was thrown by someone in the tree line who was stronger than a Qi Condensation cultivator, and possibly the strongest cultivator in the attacking force. It struck the ridge top and blew a section of limestone into gravel. The blast wave knocked a number of disciples off their feet and sent a shower of stone fragments across the corridor that cut skin, cracked against blades, hit bodies hard enough to bruise, and made the air taste of powdered rock and settled old dust.
The concealment array's northern nodes shattered.
The silence formation's perimeter collapsed on the eastern side.
The Qi suppression array flickered and died.
Fifty-seven, no, sixty-two signatures blazed into the ambient Qi, visible to every spiritual sense within a li, a beacon that said here, here, we are here, come and finish it.
More signatures turned toward them.
Lin Mei's sword caught a blade, turned it, and her counter went wide because her left arm had stopped responding entirely.
She stepped back and Lin Shui stepped forward, filling the gap, her blade a blur, buying seconds for her to recover.
The corridor was shrinking.
The world was shrinking with it.
Everything was shrinking down to a gap two people wide and the sound of steel, the taste of blood and copper and limestone dust, and the moss curtain at the southern end of the corridor that hung still—
Lin Mei's knees hit the ground.
She didn't remember deciding to kneel.
Her legs had simply arrived at a conclusion independently of her brain. The conclusion being that standing was a privilege that had been revoked due to insufficient resources and energy funds. Her sword point touched the limestone. Her left arm hung dead at her side. Her Qi reserves were gone, not depleted, not low, gone, the well dry, the riverbed cracked, and the last drop spent on a deflection that had saved her throat and cost her everything else.
Lin Shui stood over her.
The younger sister's blade held the gap alone, moving in patterns that had no names because the manuals hadn't imagined a situation where a fifteen-year-old girl would need to defend a two-person-wide gap against a rotating force of over sixty demonic cultivators, and growing, while standing over her fallen sister in a corridor full of bleeding children.
Lin Mei looked south.
The moss curtain was still without an ounce of Qi.
Her mouth opened.
Her voice, when it came, was raw, cracked, stripped of command and authority and the wire-tight control she had maintained for two days and two nights and every minute of the battle. It was the voice of a nineteen-year-old girl who had been given a job too large for her shoulders and had carried it until her shoulders broke.
"Patriarch! Please wake up! Help us!"
A single pulse of Qi erupted from the hanging moss and everyone stopped for but a moment.
Even the demonic cultivators hesitated and froze.
Lin Mei stared as eyes filled with bright white flames snapped open and the body of the old, beaten, crippled, shattered core Patriarch rose slowly as though he hadn't noticed what had been happening… or maybe that it was that far beneath his notice because the situation was not that terrible now that he had come.
Everyone turned as he walked past the hanging moss and branches.
He surveyed the landscape and a frown graced his aged visage. "Mongrels. One and all of you who dare attack my students. Die!"
A massive circle of qi in complex shapes erupted from above him dozens of feet wide.
From it came death.
Chapter 16 | Mongrels, Die!
The first thing Calid Asigoth became aware of was that he was no longer in pain.
This was so unusual and so fundamentally at odds with every waking moment he had experienced since arriving in this world, that his brain refused to process it and instead filed the sensation under 'probable hallucination, revisit later.' He had grown accustomed to pain and now it was all gone without a trace as though it had never been there.
The grinding sharpness of fragments cutting things that should not have been cut and the deep ache that had taken up permanent residence in his sternum gone.
It was now replaced by a sensation so foreign that it took him several seconds to identify it.
His body was comfortable.
This was deeply suspicious, Calid found.
He blinked as words assembled themselves in his perception with a crisp certainty. Taking up space without asking:
[Core Elimination: COMPLETE]
[47 Core Fragments: Dissolved]
[Dantian Status: Clear, Reconstruction Initiated]
[New Core Formed: Qi Initiate, Early-Stage 1]
[Qi Reserves: 100 / 100 (Full)]
[Body Condition: Restored, All internal haemorrhaging resolved, meridian atrophy reversed, organ laceration repaired]
[Soul Integration: 97%, Near Complete]
[Experience Buffer: EXPIRED, 645 points lost]
[Experience Allocation System: ACTIVE]
[Current Experience: 0 / 10,000]
[Next Threshold: Qi Initiate, Mid-Stage 1]
Calid blinked hard at the notification. It helped that his other senses hadn't caught up, no sound or touch outside of his body had returned yet.
Then he read it a couple more times, because the number at the bottom deserved the particular kind of sustained attention one normally reserved for bills that seemed too high and medical diagnoses that seemed too creative.
Ten thousand experience points. Does that say ten thousand?! To reach the mid-stage of Qi Initiate? Are they kidding me?
Qi Initiate, which was, according to Shao Wen's memories, the preliminary tier below Qi Condensation. The tier that children occupied. The tier that the youngest, most inexperienced disciples passed through on their way to being considered actual cultivators, the way a tadpole passed through having a tail on its way to being considered an actual frog.
He was below the bottom rung of the ladder, no. He was below the ground the ladder was standing on.
He was, in cultivation terms, the dirt beneath the foundation of the building that housed the room that contained the ladder. Now the system was cheerfully informing him that climbing from dirtto slightly higher dirt would cost ten thousand points of experience that he currently did not have and had, in fact, just lost six hundred and forty-five of due to a buffer expiration policy that would have made the most vindictive university bursar weep with professional admiration.
It had taken a lot of work to get just the six hundred experience, he couldn't imagine what it would require to reach ten thousand.
Nor could he begin to imagine what Foundation Establishment would cost.
The strongest of his current students operated at that level, and the distance between where he stood and where they stood was the kind of distance that cartographers represented with the phrase 'here be dragons' and a tasteful illustration of something eating a ship. Mostly because it was undiscovered and they'd rather not think about it anymore.
Calid set the notification aside.
He'd leave it for a later time to study and figure out. It would be perfectly placed for quiet evenings with a desk, a quill, coffee, and the luxury of not being unconscious in a hole.
What mattered now was the core itself, and the core itself was—
He turned his attention inward and found it; a sphere spun lethargically.
It was tiny, barely the size of a pea, sitting in the dantian space where forty-seven jagged fragments had been grinding his organs into a state that medical professionals would describe as 'incompatible with continued existence.' The sphere was smooth like a marble and spinning in a slow, steady rotation that drew ambient Qi inward through meridians that were no longer dry riverbeds but actual functioning channels carrying actual functioning energy.
The Qi inside it was warm and he understood that the comfortable feeling came from it arriving and finding its purpose and place in the core.
Said core was full to the brim as the system had said, and it was right.
A hundred out of a hundred, which sounded impressive until you considered that a hundred out of a hundred in a pea-sized container was roughly equivalent to filling a thimble and declaring yourself the owner of a lake.
But it was his thimble.
His core, his Qi, his channels, his meridians flowing with energy that responded to his intent without the grudging reluctance of ambient manipulation. He reached for it and it moved without fighting back… obediently, flowing through the channels with a speed and precision that ambient Qi had never managed, because this was internal energy, refined and personal, and it knew who it belonged to.
Calid found the difference was staggering.
His Qi scaffolding, the external framework that had been holding his body together, was still there and humming against his skin.
But now it had a foundation to anchor to.
The partial armour matrix, which had been running on ambient Qi and prayers, suddenly had an internal power source feeding its nodes. Said nodes responded by brightening, stabilising, strengthening, and settling into their spiralling channels with the satisfied hum of machinery that had finally been plugged into a proper mana outlet after days of running on mana batteries held together with ropes.
He flexed his fingers.
They moved with a crispness that made the previous days' performance feel like he'd been operating the body through a series of pulleys and levers and a very long stick. His knees held without negotiation or complaint. Not even with the faintest suggestion that they might prefer to be doing something else.
His spine was a column instead of a suggestion.
The matrices he could build now—
Even at Qi Initiate, Early-Stage 1, with a core the size of a legume and reserves that a serious cultivator would consider a rounding error, the combination of internal Qi and external manipulation opened doors that had been firmly shut. Compression matrices with actual focal precision. Deflection planes with edges sharp enough to cut rather than merely redirect. Dispersal webs that could be deployed and maintained simultaneously rather than sequentially.
He could build proper matrices now.
Low-tier, certainly and nothing that would impress a review board or earn tenure at any institution worth attending.
But proper, functional, and reliable constructs that didn't leak efficiency at every node and didn't require him to spend two minutes coaxing the energy into shapes it found philosophically objectionable.
Fire included.
He was, by any honest assessment, still extraordinarily weak.
A late-stage Qi Condensation cultivator could crush his new core with a firm handshake and moderate intent. A Foundation Establishment practitioner could do it by looking at him with disappointment. Anything above that could do it by existing in his general vicinity with insufficient care for the wellbeing of nearby pea-sized cores.
But he was no longer nothing.
He was something, and something, however small, fragile, and laughably inadequate by the standards of a world where people punched mountains and mountains lost. It was infinitely more than nothing, in the same way that owning a single match was infinitely more useful than owning no matches when you were standing in the dark.
Calid opened his eyes.
Green-filtered shadow from the moss curtains met his gaze.
The limestone overhang above him remained unchanged and indifferent to the sixty-eight hours that had passed beneath it.
He had been unconscious for nearly three dayswhile his students—
His hearing returned in a single explosion and wave of screaming and shouting and agony filled cries.
It hit him like a boulder thrown by a giant.
Dozens of voices, layered and overlapping, filling the corridor beyond the moss curtain with a sound that Calid had heard before in wars, collapses, and the aftermath of experiments that had gone wrong in ways that required new vocabulary to describe. The screams of the young, the ones that contained surprise and outrage and the discovery that the world could do this, would do this, was doing this right now while they bled and broke and called for help that wasn't coming.
Groaning, sobbing. The wet, ragged breathing of people whose lungs had been punctured and they did not understand why they were struggling to breath.
And underneath it all, woven through the screaming, laughter.
Delighted laughter.
Laughter of people who were enjoying themselves.
Who found the screaming entertaining and the bleeding amusing and the dying a pleasant way to spend a morning. Something that carried the oily, rot-scented signature of demonic Qi and the particular cruelty of predators who had cornered something small and were in no hurry to finish.
His Qi sense expanded outward through the monitoring web's remnants and through the ambient energy. Through the new core's connection to the meridians that threaded his body and reached beyond it.
The picture assembled itself in fragments that were each worse than the last.
The concealment array was shattered. Its nodes were dark, channels broken, and the careful nothing interesting here reduced to rubble and silence.
The silence formation was gone on the eastern side. Sound poured through the gap and into the forest that was a beacon of combat that was drawing every patrol within range.
The Qi suppression array had collapsed entirely. Sixty-two signatures blazed in the ambient energy that was exposed and screaming their location to anything with spiritual sense and a reason to look.
The corridor was surrounded by these monsters.
There were demonic cultivators on the ridges, at the approaches, in the gaps, climbing the limestone faces, pouring through the northern entrance, scrambling over the southern rockfall. Dozens of them, their signatures oily and red-tinged, pressing inward from every direction with the grinding pressure of a vice that had been given all the time in the world and intended to use it.
And his students… they were currently fighting for their lives while he had been unconscious.
All of them.
Every disciple who could hold a weapon was holding one.
Every disciple who could stand was standing.
The Foundation Establishment cultivators were scattered across the defensive positions, their Qi signatures flickering and dim, reserves spent, bodies pushed past every limit that bodies were designed to have. The Qi Condensation disciples fought on the ridges and in the corridor with blades, techniques, stones, and desperation.
Lin Mei was on her knees at the northern approach.
Her sword point rested on the limestone and left arm hung motionless at her side. Her Qi signature was a candle flame in a hurricane and one breath from going out.
Lin Shui stood over her sister while her blade held the gap alone, moving in patterns that were fast and utterly insufficient against the force arrayed against her. Her robes were cut in four places, breathing was ragged, and her Qi reserves were a fraction of what they should have been, and the fraction was shrinking.
Duan Rong was propped against the eastern wall with a wound in his side leaked through bandages that had been changed and soaked through and changed again and soaked through again. His face was pale and sickly. His eyes tracked the fighting with barely any consciousness in them at all.
Tao Shen lay beside him.
Every single one of his students had been hurt by these cruel monsters.
Calid saw all of it in less than a second and finally, he rose.
The process of standing, which had been a negotiation, a philosophical position and a feat of engineering was none of those things now. His legs straightened and spine aligned. His knees held. The partial armour matrix hummed against his skin, fed by internal Qi for the first time.
He pushed through the brush and parted the moss curtains.
Then stepped into the corridor.
The effect was instantaneous.
Lin Mei saw him first. Her head turned from where she knelt at the northern approach, sword still touching the ground, dead left arm still hanging, and her eyes, which had been the eyes of a nineteen-year-old girl whose shoulders had broken under a weight too large for them, went wide.
Her mouth opened, but no sound came out.
Lin Shui's blade paused for a fraction of a second as her head turned, just enough to see him over her shoulder, and the fraction of a second was all she allowed herself before the blade resumed its work, because the gap still needed holding and genius did not take breaks regardless of what walked out of moss curtains behind it.
The Foundation Establishment cultivators at their positions turned.
The Qi Condensation disciples did the same.
The demonic cultivators felt him too.
The ones at the northern approach, pressing against Lin Shui's blade, hesitated.
The ones on the ridges paused mid-climb.
The ones at the southern rockfall stopped pushing.
The laughter, the low, wet, delighted laughter that had been the bass line of the entire assault, cut off as though someone had found the switch and flipped it.
The corridor went silent.
Dozens of disciples and an unknown number of demonic cultivators, all of them, every single one, looking at the old man who had just walked out of a moss curtain at the southern end of a limestone corridor with his spine straight, his hands visible, and his eyes open.
Nay.
His eyes were burning as Calid discovered the existence of a new source of power he had never known existed.
The Dao and Intent of an Elder still rested within his body.
Memories of what they were and how they acted flooded his mind from Shao Wen's experience, but he cared not for their benefits. What he cared about were his students and the agony they had suffered at the hands of monsters.
His Qi rumbled, a second Dao mixing with the White Flame Clover Dao that had been Shao Wen's.
His own Dao, made from centuries as one of the most powerful Archmages to ever exist.
The Ruiner of The Seventh Mage War's eyes blazed a stark bright. The Ascendant Archmage surveyed the battlefield in a slow pace as he catalogued every ounce of damage
From Lin Mei's arm and the demonic Qi contamination that blackened the veins between her skin to the youngest disciple.
He saw the blood on the limestone.
He saw the bodies in the gaps.
He saw the children, his children, his students, his charges, the disciples who had knelt before him on cold stone and trusted him with their lives. They were broken, bleeding, dying in a corridor that he had built to protect them while he lay unconscious behind a curtain of moss.
Something moved in his chest that had nothing to do with Qi.
His Qi leaked and with it the Daos and Intenterupted from within him without conscious thought.
Pressure slammed into every single person in the corridor. Lighter upon his disciples but showing no mercy to those that had harmed them. Invisible and carrying no technique because it did not require it. This was the domain of the powerful and mighty. The domain of the elite amongst the world and not anyone below the highest echelons of the sects, palaces, battlehalls, and pavilions (all sourced from Shao Wen's memories).
The demonic cultivators standing closes fell unconscious and those further took steps back.
They didn't decide to, their legs made the decision independently.
Calid's gaze settled on them.
"Mongrels. One and all who dare attack my students."
The Dual Daos and Intent pulsed and drove them back a few steps.
His disciples watched with wide eyes and that lost glimmer of hope rekindling back to life.
"Die."
A massive circle of Qi matrices erupted above him.
Dozens of feet wide and dozens of matrices put together and hanging in the air.
Complex shapes wound through it all, interlocking, and spinning through one another.
This was what an archmage was capable of even with little Qi in his core. Knowledge made person as he filled it with compression matrices, deflection matrices, Qi dispersal webs, focal points, and then spears of superheated flames. Nodes curved and spiralled in patterns that followed the Qi from his core's natural flow while bending it to purposes the energy had never been asked to serve.
Channels branched and reconnected in recursive loops that fed power back into themselves, amplifying, compressing, focusing within seconds. And even if it took longer, everyone had been frozen by the scene before them which they could not understand.
It was not elegant.
It was not beautiful.
It was not the kind of spell that won prizes or impressed review boards.
From it came death.
Chapter 17 | An Elder's Anger
Calid dropped his arm.
The matrix roared to life in all its glory.
The massive web of interlocking spell constructs overhead spun counterclock wise and then contracted to a point of density that made the air vibrate and scream like the undead and banshees, then unfurled.
The Qi dispersal matrices went first.
They expanded outward in concentric rings that passed through the corridor, over the ridges, and into the tree line beyond with a silent, invisible power that nobody could point at and see coming but everybody felt immediately. Every demonic cultivator within a hundred and fifty feet discovered, simultaneously and without warning, that their Qi had stopped working.
Nay, all the Qi within that sphere vanished.
For moments, the monsters that had been powerful demonic cultivators were nothing but mortals.
The dark energy coiling around blades unravelled like smoke in a gale. Techniques that had been mid-cast collapsed into nothing. Defensive barriers, passive reinforcements, talismans offered definition by Shao Wen's memories, and even the ambient hum of cultivation methods that traded sanity for murder, all of it simply ceased, as though the universe had received a formal complaint about the existence of demonic Qi in this particular area and had decided to uphold it retroactively.
A cultivator on the eastern ridge, mid-swing, felt his blade go from supernaturally sharp instrument of death to heavy piece of metal being held by a man whose arms were suddenly very tired and the blade was not meant to be carried by limbs unaided with Qi. His eyes went wide and mouth opened.
The sound that came out was not a word in any language Calid recognised, but the emotional content was universal.
The compression matrices fired next.
Twelve of them, staggered in a cascade that rolled outward from the corridor's centre. Each one targeted a cluster of signatures, pinning them to whatever surface they happened to be occupying at the time; ground, ridge face, rockfall, tree trunk, the back of a colleague who had been standing in the wrong place at the wrong time and was now load-bearing in ways he had not anticipated.
The demonic cultivators went flat against their will.
Some of them against the soft earth, others against limestone, slamming their faces.
They couldn't move, circulate, nor could they breathe properly.
Then the fire came.
Calid had not used fire before with Qi.
He had not had the reserves, core stability, understanding of how Qi worked, or the conversion efficiency to attempt thermal matrices with Qi. Mana-based fire constructs were among the first things taught at the Academy, right after 'don't touch that' and slightly before 'I said don't touch that, now look what you've done.' The principle was identical across energy types: compress, accelerate molecules to generate heat, provide energy, form into solidifying matrices, release, and let thermodynamics handle the rest.
The Qi did not resist for the first time since he had arrived in this world. It did not attempt to hesitate, negotiate, or express philosophical reservations about the shape it was being asked to assume like usual. It flowed from his core through the meridian channels, out through the matrix architecture overhead, and into the focal points of dozens of lances that crystallised in the air above the corridor.
Said flaming lances were the white of metal heated.
They hung for perhaps half a second.
Every demonic cultivator who was still conscious looked up in that brief moment–
And then the lances fell in groups of three and four, each cluster targeting a pinned signature with precision that had locked on to the flecks of demonic Qi and targeted it, another portion of the interlocking webs of matrices. The first volley struck the cultivators at the northern approach, multiple lances per body, punching through the compression field and into flesh that had no Qi reinforcement, defensive technique, working armor, or barrier of any kind between it and superheated constructs that did not care about the distinction between demonic cultivator and kindling.
The lances themselves were silent in the ambient screaming of his massive web of matrices behind him.
Nothing but a series of sharp, percussive thunks.
The shouts of agony from the demonic cultivators was a different thing entirely.
The lances slammed themselves into them with extreme force, pinning them to the ground and not vanishing because it was using them and the Qi in their cores, of which the demonic cultivators had no access to, to fuel themselves and make sure the job was done. Five or six per body glowing white and radiating heat that made the air above each body shimmer.
Volley after volley followed to make sure none escaped.
Those that were at the edges of the compression matrices and trying to escape were hit in the back. Those that tried to fight the pressure were slammed into the ground with multiple lances of white flames.
The lances continued to fall until every body on the field had a dozen of them protruding at angles that would have made a porcupine feel inadequate. The white glow illuminated the corridor, the ridges, and the surrounding forest in a light that was clean and utterly merciless.
Then the light began to fade.
The lances dimmed from white to yellow to orange to a dull, sullen red, and then to nothing, dissolving into wisps of Qi that rejoined the ambient flow as though they had never existed. The compression matrices released and the dispersal webs contracted and collapsed. The massive complex web of matrices overhead spun down, its interlocking shapes separating and dissolving one by one until the last nodes all winked out and the sky above the corridor was just sky again.
Grey, overcast, and profoundly unimpressed.
Calid stood in the corridor's centre.
His hands were at his sides and breathing was uneven in the burning anger that had consumed him. His new core, the pea-sized sphere that had been full to its laughable brim five minutes ago, was now completely empty and only the willing assistance of external Qi had been what continued to power the massive thing he had created in a whim.
While it was easier to create the matrices with his own personal Qi, the hard limitation of his core was something he hadn't considered in a moment of wrathful vengeance he needed to have to save his disciples.
I can't do that again. Next time, what if the external Qi does not respond as willingly? Do I end up killing myself–
The System pinged him.
[Combat: 23x Qi Condensation (Mid-Stage) Eliminated] x (70)
[Combat: 14x Qi Condensation (Late-Stage) Eliminated] x (80)
[Combat: 8x Qi Condensation (Peak-Stage) Eliminated]x (100)
[Combat: 4x Foundation Establishment (Early-Stage) Eliminated] x (200)
[Combat: 2x Foundation Establishment (Mid-Stage) Eliminated] x (225)
[Total Eliminations: 51]
[Experience Earned: 4,780]
[Spell Matrix Constructed: Cascading Dispersal Web (Area Denial, Multi-Target)]
[Experience Earned: 340]
[Spell Matrix Constructed: Recursive Compression Array (Pinning, Multi-Target)]
[Experience Earned: 410]
[Spell Matrix Constructed: Thermal Lance Battery (White Fire, 24-Point)]
[Experience Earned: 580]
[Total Experience Earned: 6,110]
[Current Experience: 6,110 / 10,000]
[Rank: Qi Initiate, Early-Stage 1]
[Next Threshold: Qi Initiate, Mid-Stage 1]
Six thousand, one hundred and ten.
Out of ten thousand.
For killing fifty-one cultivators and constructing a few spell matrices of a complexity that would have earned him at minimum a published paper and possibly a small grant at any respectable thaumaturgic institution. Nothing more. This wasn't anything special, nor was it anywhere as complex as what he was planning for once they finally found a proper base of operations.
More importantly, he was already sixty-one percent of the way to Mid-Stage 1 of Qi Initiate.
Mid-Stage 1, which was itself only the second step in a tier that contained three stages, early, mid, and late, before he could advance to Early-Stage 2. Which was the second tier of Qi Initiate. Which was itself the preliminary realm below Qi Condensation. Which was the realm that children occupied and had nine of the three tier formates within it. Which was also the realm that the youngest, most inexperienced disciples in his corridor had already surpassed.
The difficulty of his advancement stretched before him, but it wasn't the impossible mountain it had been before this.
Calid dismissed the notifications.
He would study the progression curve later at a better time.
Optimally when the corridor wasn't decorated with cooling bodies and his students weren't bleeding.
Calid turned and looked toward them.
The corridor looked like the aftermath of something that history books would describe in passive voice to avoid assigning blame. The limestone walls were scarred with blade marks, Qi burns, blood, and the dark stains of demonic techniques that had splashed against stone and left residue that smoked faintly in the morning air. The eastern ridge had a section missing where what appeared to have been a large, dark Qi bolt had blown it apart, and rubble lay scattered across the corridor floor in chunks that ranged from fist-sized to that used to be part of a wall.
The formation lines he had inscribed two days ago were obliterated.
The concealment array, the silence formation, the Qi suppression array, the recovery formation, all of them reduced to scratches in dirt that had been walked over, bled on, destroyed, and fought across until nothing remained of the careful work except the memory that it had once existed.
The monitoring web's hub stone sat in the corridor's centre, cracked down the middle and its faint glow extinguished.
Calid surveyed the damage to his students accompanied by a sensation in his chest that made his chest squeeze within the cage of ribs it was currently sitting in. This was a feeling he hated, yet, had experienced many times in his five centuries alive. Time and again it would happen.
Lin Mei knelt at the northern approach.
Her left arm hung at her side, the veins between wrist and elbow blackened with demonic Qi contamination that had spread since the initial cut and was now tracing dark lines up toward her shoulder. Her face was grey, breathing shallow, and Qi signature a flickering ember.
Lin Shui stood beside her sister, battered and beaten.
Duan Rong was propped against the eastern wall.
The wound in his side had soaked through multiple layers of bandaging and the stone behind him was dark with what had seeped through. His remaining ear was bleeding again and face had passed through grey and arrived at a colour that Calid associated with parchment that had been left in a damp room for too long.
His eyes were barely open.
Tao Shen lay beside him.
Fang Yue sat against the opposite wall, her sword across her knees, a deep cut across her thigh wrapped in a strip of robe that had already turned dark. She was conscious and alert enough to watch Calid with eyes that held no expression at all, which was somehow more concerning than any expression would have been.
Zhao Ping, the blind cultivator, sat beside the cracked hub stone.
The Qi Condensation disciples lined the walls.
Cuts, bruises, burns, broken bones, Qi depletion, and the thousand small injuries that combat distributed with democratic indifference. All of them struggling to figure out what to do and how to do it in these trying times, listlessly standing there with swords and Qi in hand even when they had precious little.
Calid counted them.
Sixty-two disciples with five dead and eleven in critical condition.
Twenty-three with injuries that required immediate treatment.
The rest battered, depleted, and running on the fumes of fumes.
I need to take care of the critical first and then I can worry about everything else after.
Chapter 18 | Necessary Triage
Calid knelt beside Tao Shen.
The boy was the closest to the edge, consciousness fading in and out
"Don't speak," Calid said, pressing his palm flat against the young man's chest beside the wound. "Don't circulate or do anything except breathe, and do that gently."
Tao Shen's eyes focused on him. His mouth moved, producing a sound that was mostly air, partly gratitude, and entirely insufficient as a response to the instruction don't speak.
Calid focused and did his best to build a recovery and regenrative array.
He was not a healer.
He wanted to be absolutely clear about this, if only to himself, because the distinction between 'I can build a matrix that accelerates natural healing processes' and 'I am a medical professional'was the distinction between 'I own a fire extinguisher' and 'I am a firefighter,' and conflating the two led to overconfidence, house fires, dead victims due to hubris, and malpractice suits.
What he could do was create an environment in which the body's own repair mechanisms operated at enhanced efficiency while being aided by the help of medical attention. A recovery formation, scaled down to individual application, that gathered mana, ambient Qi in this case, concentrated it around the wound site, and fed it into the damaged tissue in patterns that encouraged cellular regeneration, blood clotting, tissue repair, and the general principle that organs should remain.
The matrix took shape under his palm.
The little Qi he had left flowed from his core through his meridians and into the construct.
The effect was immediate.
Tao Shen's breathing steadied and the wet hitching smoothed into something more regular. The bubbles at the corner of his mouth stopped forming, but the wound didn't close, Calid's matrix couldn't do that, not at this level or with these reserves, but the bleeding slowed from active haemorrhage to seepage, and the Qi signature stabilised from flickering to dim but steady.
Calid moved to Duan Rong.
Disciples that were healthy enough, surged to take over after Calid moved on from Tao Shen.
The same matrix, adjusted for the wound's location and the additional complication of the ear. The healing array settled over both injuries and Duan Rong's colour improved dramatically. Duan Rong gave him a semi-conscious nod of gratitude before he let himself relax and stay propped up on the rock walls.
Calid nodded back and then moved down the line.
Each Foundation Establishment cultivator received a dose of the healing array tuned to their specific injuries. Once Calid had the base of the spell matrix, adjusting it did not require his own Qi any more, the ambient Qi in the air was willing enough to follow after being given an example to do so. The two Foundation Establishment cultivators with Qi-burned eyes received matrices focused on meridian repair in the optic channels. The one with shattered ribs received a stabilisation construct that held the bone fragments in alignment while the recovery Qi did its work. The one with the leg wound received a compression matrix so precise it functioned as a tourniquet and a healing accelerant simultaneously.
All of them had an underlying node for isolating and removing all demonic Qi that might have lingered in their bodies.
Then the Qi Condensation disciples.
"Lin Mei," Calid said.
She looked away, unable to look at him directly. "No. The others require healing more than I do. I… This was my fault. All of it…"
Calid frowned and made a mental note to return to this topic.
Her fault?
Calid had noticed there were more members between the disciples, and dead bodies of disciples, than previously. He could make a pretty good educated guess on what might have happened and the subsequent fall out there after.
But later… there were disciples that needed healing urgently.
Feng Jun's shoulder. Wei Ping's forehead. Su Lan's bruised face, which turned out to have a hairline fracture beneath it that the healing array identified and began addressing. Chen Bao's knees, which received a matrix that was less healing and more structural negotiation, convincing the joints that continued service was in their best interest and that early retirement was not, in fact, an option.
Lin Mei was last mostly because she refused any healing until the others got it first.
He knelt beside her and took her left arm in both hands.
The demonic Qi contamination was worse than it looked, which was saying something, because it looked like someone had drawn a map of her venous system in black ink and then set the ink on fire. The dark energy had penetrated past the skin, into the muscle tissue, and was working its way along the meridian channels toward her core with a patient, methodical progression.
This one felt worse than the ambient demonic Qi that he found in the bodies of the rest.
He considered it while he built a different matrix for it.
Must be the difference between Qi reserves actively fighting the demonic Qi corruption and when you're completely out like Lin Mei is.
A purification construct formed around the outside of the matrices he made. It was adapted from the dispersal webs he'd used in combat. Where the combat version created dead zones that denied Qi to everything within the boundary, the purification version was selective, it identified the demonic Qi by its signature, isolated it from the surrounding tissue, and broke it down into component energy that could be safely dispersed into the ambient flow.
The process was slow.
The demonic Qi was far more embedded in her arm than anyone else. It resisted dissolution and clung to the meridian walls, latching itself in tissue, and fighting every inch of the extraction with stubborn malice.
Lin Mei's jaw clenched and she closed her eyes tight, but she didn't make a sound.
"Almost done," Calid said when he noticed her break quickening.
It was not almost done. It was perhaps forty percent done, but almost done was what you said to students who were in pain.
The black lines retreated slowly.
The contamination pulled away from the shoulder, down through the upper arm, past the elbow, and concentrated in the forearm where the original damage had originated from. Calid's purification matrix bore down on the remaining pocket, compressed it, broke it apart, and dispersed the fragments into the air where they dissolved into the ambient Qi and ceased to exist.
Lin Mei's arm twitched.
Her fingers moved in a sequence that was less testing motor function and more confirming that the limb still accepted commands from central management.
She opened her eyes and looked at her arm, then at Calid with wide eyes. "Thank you, Patriarch."
"Don't thank me. Thank whoever taught you to hold a defensive line with one arm for—" He paused, calculating. "How long was the battle?"
"I didn't keep track..."
"Roughly."
"...a long time, Patriarch."
Calid filed that to under things to address laterand stood.
The corridor was quieter now. The healing arrays hummed at each patient, soft green-tinged Qi cycling through the constructs in patterns that were visible as faint luminous tracery against skin and bandages. The effect was not dramatic, nobody was leaping to their feet or declaring themselves fully recovered, but the bleeding had stopped, breathing had steadied, and the quality of silence that meant people are dying had shifted to that of people are resting, which was a different thing entirely and one that Calid preferred.
He turned to check the perimeter.
His Qi sense swept the surrounding forest through the remnants of the monitoring web and the ambient flow. The signatures of the dead cultivators were fading, their Qi dispersing into the background. No new signatures approached from any direction. The patrols that had been converging on the combat signature had either arrived and been killed or had not yet arrived and were, presumably, reconsidering their travel plans.
Most importantly, there were no demonic cultivator equivalent to elders coming…
Which Calid was suspicious of, but did not know why.
More importantly, corridor was safe for now.
Calid's gaze drifted back across his students and settled on Lin Shui.
The girl had finally lowered her sword.
She sat against the eastern wall, blade across her knees, eyes closed, breathing in a controlled rhythm. The cuts on her robes had been bound with strips torn from someone else's sleeves, Liang Hao's work, probably, the boy had been busy, and the blood had dried to dark lines that crossed her white robes like calligraphy.
But there was something else that surrounded her person.
Calid narrowed his eyes and extended his Qi sense toward her, gently.
Her Qi signature was normal. Qi Condensation, late-stage, dense for her age, refined in the way he suspected geniuses were.
Underneath it, threaded through the Qi, was something that was emphatically not Qi.