The trip back to Amber Crossing took significantly longer than the mad chase after the cult leader. Calvin’s pace felt positively glacial, little better than a mortal’s run, but that was about all he could manage. He was exhausted and his qi nodes and channels were closer to empty than they’d been in months. He didn’t even have enough qi to maintain a single gate like he’d been doing nearly continuously since his breakthrough to the peak of the Foundation realm. Using any qi to reinforce his body beyond its baseline would have compromised his ability to regenerate qi at a meaningful rate. Back at the sect that wouldn’t have been an overly serious problem, but the qi in the air here was so thin that it was difficult to absorb without sitting down and meditating, and even then he’d need something like Wallis’s formation flags to speed things up or it would take days or even weeks to fully refill his spirit. He couldn’t afford to be out of commission for nearly that long, which meant focusing exclusively on cycling what little qi remained within his channels to help it regenerate.

  He didn’t know how much good he’d be even when he did make it back to Amber Crossing, but he had to try.

  His heart seized in his chest when he saw Lulu coming down the path towards him when he was barely half way back to the village, her lips drawn into a narrow line and Wallis conspicuously absent from her side. She looked rough, dried blood splattered all over her skin and clothes and slowly healing wounds visible on her cheek and left leg. She ran with her backup spear in her hands, its shaft stained a deep, ruddy red and the tassel that typically hung just below its head missing entirely. Dust whirled in her wake as she sped her passage with the wind-based movement technique she favored.

  They both slowed to a stop, halting with only a few feet separating them. Calvin wanted to sag down onto the ground, but Lulu stood rigidly, body tensed like the over-wound string of a zither.

  “Where?” she demanded, voice sharp.

  “Dead.” He took a shaky breath, fearing the worst. “Wallis?”

  Lulu’s whole posture changed, tense muscles relaxing. She exhaled explosively and her flared qi withdrew. She stabbed the tip of her spear into the dirt and leaned heavily on the shaft. “He’ll be fine. A few cuts and scrapes. Broken leg. Nothing serious.” She closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against the shaft of her spear, leaving a fresh red mark on her already blood-stained skin. “The rest of the demonic cultivators are taken care of. He’s dealing with the mortals.”

  Calvin felt as though a mountain had been taken off his shoulders. He laughed weakly, half-giddy with relief. “Oh, fuck. You had me worried.”

  Lulu opened a single eye, looking at him through her dark lashes. “I had you worried? You’re the one that keeps running off on your own. Here I was, all ready and excited for a real fight—“

  Calvin waved his hand dismissively, his bones feeling as heavy as lead weights. “You didn’t miss anything. All power, no technique.” He sighed heavily, suddenly feeling every hour of the last few days. “Like putting down a rabid dog, except with a lot more blood and screaming and demonic techniques.”

  Lulu raised an eyebrow. “Yeah?”

  Calvin gestured vaguely at himself. Though he’d done his best to wipe away the mildly caustic blood and discarded his utterly soaked through and unsalvageable inner robe entirely, it was impossible to fully erase the aftermath of decapitating the cultist with his bare hand without a change of clothes and a long bath—or at least an equivalent technique. “He had some crazy regeneration, even for a blood cultivator, and no idea how to leverage it. I cut his head off and broke his spine. That seemed to do the trick, but just in case I then chopped off his arms and legs, dispersed his spirit, and burned out his heart.” He smiled toothily. “You know. Just to be sure.”

  Lulu met his smile with one of her own. She was missing an incisor, but Calvin could already see the tip of a regrowing tooth poking through her gum in its place. Before reaching the Eight Peaks sect, he’d heard from other wandering cultivators that regrowing teeth was very hit and miss. There were plenty of loose cultivators, especially the masses stuck in the earliest stages of Gathering, with missing teeth—lost as mortals or knocked out in duels or battles. Thankfully, it was one of the minor maladies easily dealt with with an application of [New Growth on the Peaks], the sect martial arts wood-aligned technique.

  “Good work,” she praised, and Calvin’s smile widened slightly, losing some of its vicious edge.

  “Thanks.” He looked down at the ground, suddenly feeling bashful. “I’m sorry for running off. I shouldn’t have left you two alone.” Why had he gone after the cult leader, leaving Lulu and Wallis partially ensnared and facing down nearly ten-times their number of enemies? Heavens above, it was the stupid wolf all over again. He’d had no plan, no real assurance of success, no—

  Lulu barked a laugh, waving her hand dismissively. “What are you apologizing for? You got him, and we were totally fine. Who knows how long it would have taken us to track that anemic snake down if you’d let him get a lead on us? And it doesn’t even sound like I missed out on a good fight.” She shrugged, rolling her shoulders and running her fingers through her hair like a comb. “If you’re really all broken up about it, just promise to duel me a few times when we’re back at the sect, ‘kay? Real duels, I mean, not just a few moves around a campsite.”

  That wasn’t his point at all, but Calvin was much too tired to really think about things, much less argue with Lulu. Plus, he was starting to realize that he was sorely lacking in any sort of real combat experience. He was absolutely confident that he’d messed up, both against the Hound of Conquest and the cult leader, but what exactly he’d done wrong—and how he could do better next time—was beyond him. Reviewing the fights in his head later would help, but perhaps so would a little more experience. “Sure,” he agreed readily. “I could use the practice.” He paused suddenly. “Just uh…don’t expect them to end like sparring with Wallis usually does, okay?”

  Lulu laughed and clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to fracture a mortal’s collarbone. “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it. You’re cute and all, Calvin, but you’re a little young and Wallis is the man for me. Now if it was both of you…” She winked. “Maybe try again in ten years.”

  Calvin knew he shouldn’t take the bait, but he was soaked in blood and could use a little levity. He scowled dramatically. “I’m nineteen years old, a man grown.”

  She reached up and pinched his cheek like he was a baby. “And I’m old enough to be your mother, little rainbow. If I hadn’t ignited when I did and run off to join a sect, I might be looking for a strapping lad like you to make good women of my daughters.”

  They stared at each other for several long seconds, faces serious, and then Lulu’s composure broke and she began to cackle so hard she had to clutch her spear to stay on her feet. Calvin joined her a moment later, relief and amusement parting the dark clouds circling his thoughts. They weren’t done yet. The Scroll hadn’t updated, which meant there were still cultists to kill and blight to cleanse, and though he dreaded what he’d find when he did, he’d promised to come back for the poor women he’d found in that farmhouse cellar and he meant to keep that promise. But right now, laughing with Lulu, the pale light of the moon and stars shining down on them from a clear sky, none of that felt quite as bad as it could have. And, though he didn’t dare put the feeling into words, deep down he thought the worst parts of this mission were behind them.

  As if on cue, he felt the Scroll shift in the back of his mind, fresh ink spreading across yellowed parchment, and his next laugh felt abruptly forced and mechanical. “Codex,” he mumbled urgently.

  It took a moment to find the change, but when he did his legs decided to follow Lulu’s lead and give up on him, and he didn’t have a handy spear to clutch onto like she did. He dropped to the ground, stretching out in the dirt like it was a silk bedspread and laughing till his chest hurt and he had to struggle to breathe. “Calvin, Calvin,” Lulu chided him in a wizened voice, “grown men don’t roll around in the dirt. You’ll get your nice wedding robes dirty.”

  In that moment, nothing had ever seemed funnier than the idea that he was somehow going to get his clothing even more dirty after everything it had already been through.

  “Fuck you, granny,” he choked out.

  “In your dreams, whippersnapper!”

  Okay, maybe some things could be funnier than that.

  They did eventually head back to the village, not wanting to overly worry Wallis when there was no need to. Lulu had plenty of questions, but Calvin didn’t want to go over things twice so instead she filled him in on the parts of the day he’d missed along the way. Things had gone pretty much the way he had guessed they had, though Lulu was able to clear up a number of questions he’d had.

  “So they just started dropping after a bit?” he confirmed.

  “Yup. Those marks on their foreheads would light up, and next thing you know they’re shriveling up like slugs in a salt mine. At first I think it was just the injured ones, you know, but then at the end they just started dropping one after another.”

  Calvin wrinkled his nose in disgust. “So that’s how he was doing it. Draining his own disciples dry to keep himself alive. I was wondering how he was keeping up so many blood techniques one after another.”

  “Can’t say I know much about blood cultivators, but that sounds plausible enough to me. Bleh.” She spat on the ground. “That’s nasty even by demonic cultivator standards. I hate being lumped in with that sort of disgusting behavior, even tangentially.”

  If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  Calvin rolled his eyes. “By imperial decree, dual cultivation and related arts are classified as unorthodox, not demonic, unless the act causes permanent, substantive damage to the body or spirit of only one party. It’s an important distinction.”

  Lulu swatted at him half heartedly. “It’s a legal distinction, not a practical one.”

  Calvin fixed her with a serious stare. “Lulu, if you’d gone down into that cellar, you wouldn’t be saying that. What you and Wallis do together of your own free will is your choice and you need to stop listening to anyone who says otherwise. Cultivating is cultivating, whether you’re using your spirit to do so or helping things along with someone else’s. Killing and torturing mortals is a whole different story. They’re just spouting off all the nasty things people say about One Desire Pavilion.”

  Calvin didn’t know much about Vivid Rainbow Cliff’s predominantly female Great Sect, but quite a number of his fellow disciples had strongly negative feelings towards the unorthodox sect and its disciples. Calvin couldn’t be sure, but he suspected that had something to do with Eight Peaks disciples being barred from the Pavilion’s extremely successful lines of whore houses, brothels, and finer establishments that were ubiquitous in nearly every major population center in the province and its neighbors. He didn’t particularly care about the attitudes themselves, but he did care when they affected Lulu, who’d fought quite a number of duels over her in-your-face relationship with Wallis.

  Lulu smiled thinly and continued telling him about the end of their fight with the remaining cultists with no further comment.

  When they finally made it back, they found Wallis directing a group of mortals as they built a pyre, the stripped down corpses of the demonic cultivators lying nearby in a crude pile that passing men would occasionally kick or spit on. Lulu and Wallis had arrived before the cultists could truly get started on their atrocities, but they’d still had enough time to kill some dozen of the mortals and toy with several times that number, not to mention many had been held under what Calvin guessed was a modified version of the mind-altering technique the cult leader used that trapped them in mental horrors—presumably to stop them from causing trouble or trying to run.

  Some distance away, a much neater pile had been made containing what had been taken off of the cultists. The clothing and gruesome trophies some of the men had been carrying would be burnt with the bodies, but many freshly taken spoils could go right back to their former owners and there were also a handful of interesting cultivation-related resources that the three of them could claim for themselves. Lying on a thin sheet beside the remains of Lulu’s primary spear was a small array of pills, dried herbs, seeds, a tiny mound of spirit stones, and a handful of other trinkets radiating weak qi signatures. Some would need to be destroyed along with bodies, but others were a nice little bonus to divide amongst the three of them.

  Calvin’s fingers itched to get his hands on them. There was most likely nothing worth more than a handful of points, but who knew what sort of goodies one of the cultists might have stumbled across? The three of them had found a few things themselves along the way despite the short time they’d been in the area and their focus on speed—a small lump of spiritual amber, a seventy-seven year blueberry, and a bone-gnawing sundew whose location they’d marked for themselves—and the cult had been operating in Nine-Pine Gulch for what was likely several months at the very least.

  Wallis noticed them immediately of course, breaking off from the mortals to meet them as they approached down the road. He walked slowly, but smoothly, and Calvin was sure none of the mortals had realized just how bad his condition actually was. Lulu hadn’t lied when he said he was just dealing with some scrapes and a broken leg, but she hadn’t shared the much more important fact that Wallis was completely drained dry. He had barely enough qi to stand, much less heal himself. If Calvin’s remaining reserves were scraping the bottom of the barrel, Wallis had chopped right through and started digging.

  He was starting to suspect things had been a lot more touch and go without him than Lulu had made it seem.

  The moment he had his back turned to the mortals, Wallis’s face lost its serene refinement and twisted into a pained grimace. He walked forward just far enough to be out of a mortal’s earshot and stopped, folding his shaking hands in front of him and waiting for them to approach.

  The two of them stopped just a few steps away, and Calvin looked Wallis up and down. “You look like shit,” he told his friend frankly. He’d seen corpses—lots of them actually, and recently—less pale than Wallis’s face was in that moment.

  Wallis smiled weakly, returning Calvin’s brief examination. “You don’t look much better. That shade of red doesn’t match your sect robes or your complexion.” He shifted his weight and his teeth snapped shut as he held in a pained exclamation. “Fuck, shouldn’t have done that,” he mumbled through clenched teeth. He exhaled slowly, then took a deep breath. “Since you’re back, I take it the weedy little shit is dead?”

  “I sure hope so. Cut off his head, broke his spine, cut off his limbs, burnt out his heart, and then dispersed his spirit for good measure. If he survived all that…”

  Wallis shuddered and made a superstitious gesture to ward off evil spirits, overlapping three fingers from each hand to form a grid with four gaps. “Don’t even joke about that.”

  “Sorry.”

  Wallis shook his head. “It’s fine, it’s fine. Leg’s killing me and I feel like a stiff breeze would knock me over.”

  Calvin frowned, gesturing vaguely towards Wallis’s leg. “How bad? Do you need—“

  “Save your pills. I’ll be fine in a day or two. I forgot what it feels like to not have enough qi to numb my nerves and walking on it hasn’t helped any, but it’s not that serious.” He brightened slightly, his eyes gaining a faraway look. “Like mum used to say, ‘if you can’t see the bone, it can’t be all that bad’. Lulu set it for me, and I’m not even bleeding anymore. We’ve done worse to each other for a laugh.”

  “If you’re sure.”

  “I am.” He closed his eyes and took a few long, deep breaths. “Are they still looking at me?”

  Calvin looked past Wallis towards the gathered mortals. Nearly half of them were openly staring at the three, and the rest stole looks whenever they could while working. “Yeah,” Calvin confirmed, echoed a moment later by Lulu.

  “Fuuuuck,” Wallis breathed, “I just want to sit down.” He opened his eyes and fixed Calvin with a desperate stare. “At least please tell me he had something nice on him. Some mid grade spirit-stones, a spiritual weapon, a nice beast core, anything.” Something to make this whole disaster of a mission a little bit less of a disaster. “The thugs had a few trinkets I’d like you to take a peek at, but nothing that really stands out to me.”

  “Well…” Calvin began, and both Lulu and Wallis leaned in towards him as he reached into his robes, “maybe.”

  Lulu scowled. “What does that mean?”

  Calvin drew out a silk bag—one of the ones the sect used to distribute monthly resource allocation—and knelt down, setting the bag onto the ground. It was rather full, the drawstring barely able to close, but the silk was woven with a formation that prevented the items inside from radiating any qi. “Exactly what it sounds like. He definitely had some interesting stuff, but it’s hard to say for certain how nice it is. I’ll let you guys decide for yourselves.”

  Lulu opened her mouth, but Wallis shushed her before she could say anything, eyes glued to the bag. Calvin played it up, slowly tugging the mouth of the bag open and then reaching inside with one hand to draw out…another bag, this one made from simple hemp and marked with a formation drawn in dried blood that did nearly exactly what the silk outer bag did, though via different principles.

  “Here we have lot number one,” he announced the way he imagined an auctioneer might. Calvin held the bag up, ensuring both Lulu and Wallis could see it, then shook it lightly. Inside, smooth stones clicked softly against one another. “Spirit stones, I think, as requested. Mid grade, at least twenty or thirty.” Wallis grinned and Lulu instantly brightened, bouncing on her toes. “It’s blood-sealed, but once I get some qi back I should be able to burn it open.”

  Wallis nodded appreciatively. “Not bad at all. I take it that’s not all?” He didn’t question Calvin’s ‘guess’ at the contents of the bag. Both he and Lulu had come to trust Calvin’s judgement when examining natural treasures and other valuables they came across. He was pretty sure they thought he had a specialized information gathering technique or bloodline, but neither had ever said anything to him or speculated within his earshot. It was simpler that way.

  “Yup.” Calvin reached back into the bag, this time withdrawing a slightly bloody silk handkerchief wrapped around a fist-sized object. Unlike the bag the handkerchief was a totally mundane piece of fabric, but untreated silk was notoriously qi resistant for a purely mortal material and Calvin didn’t particularly want to touch this item any more than he had to.”

  He set it on the ground and carefully unfolded the corners of the cloth, revealing the spine handle of the cult leader’s oddly shaped knife. He didn’t bother hiding the distaste in his voice. “Lot number two. A genuine low-grade demonic artifact.”

  Lulu whistled softly and Wallis cursed. “Seriously?”

  “Yup.” He’d only brushed the tip of his finger across the handle, but even just that little touch had told him more than he ever wanted to know about how the accursed treasure had been made. The scroll called it a Would Be Bride’s Lament, Very Low quality, and it almost made him wish the scum who’d made it was still alive so he could kill him again.

  “Well, first call on not carrying that thing, but points are points!” Wallis declared after a moment. The sect had a standing bounty on items like this one claimed from fallen enemies, though Calvin was slightly dubious of why the Eight Peaks wanted so many demonic artifacts. He hoped it was just to incentivize getting them out of circulation, but that seemed…unlikely.

  Calvin carefully refolded the handkerchief and set it aside before reaching for the third and final item in the bag. He didn’t announce this one, simply laying it across his palm and raising it up for Lulu and Wallis’s examination. It didn’t look like much, a smooth length of metal less than a foot long and only slightly thicker than the haft of a spear. It was unmarked and unadorned, with no visible seams, and the metal was the dull gray of weathered zinc. It radiated no aura and practically screamed boring, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

  Lulu gave him an unimpressed look. “A stick.”

  Calvin smiled back at her innocently. “Try to bend it,” he requested.

  Lulu shrugged and took the stick in both hands. Even without active qi enhancement she was frighteningly strong for a slender young woman, enough to snap bones like twigs or bend a sword into a pretzel. But when she tried to casually fold the stick in half, she failed.

  Lulu frowned and adjusted her grip, trying again with significantly more force. She strained, muscles flexing visibly, but her fingers left no marks on the metal and it didn’t bend so much as a single degree.

  Lulu dropped the stick. “Woohoo, an unbendy stick,” she declared with negative enthusiasm. “You really know how to find them, Calvin. Come on, let’s get back to work.”

  Calvin carefully picked the stick back up. “Lulu,” he asked innocently, “what sort of mortal metal would you be unable to bend even a little?”

  She looked at him like he was stupid. “Mortal metal? I mean if you had a thick enough bar of tinsteel that might be a bit tough, but that would be silly. That’s a stupid question. I might not be at the peak like you are, but I’m still a Foundation realm cultivator.” She sounded genuinely offended, and out of the corner of his eye Calvin saw Wallis grimace, pinching the bridge of his nose and closing his eyes.

  Calvin raised the stick in the air and waved it in the air in front of Lulu’s face. “And does this little stick look like a tinsteel log?”

  Lulu blinked rapidly, and Calvin saw the exact moment she broke the insidious, though thankfully fragile, mental compulsion that had snared her the moment she’d laid eyes on the metal rod. “What the fuck is that,” she snapped, taking a step back.

  Calvin focused once again on the absurdity the Scroll was showing him, words that he’d done his level best to block out from the time he’d found the metal rod crudely implanted inside the cult leader’s ribcage until now. Realm Sea Capsule - Customized (Zerian Technologies Inc) (Degraded), High quality. He could not comprehend any more than just the name and quality, the seemingly endless flood of information offered by the Scroll simply too dense to pick apart even the most surface layers, but that had been more than enough to instantly snap him out of the capsule’s technique when his fingers absently brushed one end of the treasure.

  “Some sort of container, I think,” he said quietly. Lulu frowned and he shrugged his shoulders. “A very, very, very nice box.”

  Wallis, ever practical, broke the ensuing silence. “Can you open it?”

  Calvin shrugged. “Probably not.” Not yet. Maybe not for a long time. But someday…

  Wallis sighed heavily. “I know that voice. We’re not selling it to the sect, are we?”

  Calvin shook his head. Not if he had any say in the matter, and he did. He thought about his upcoming reward tokens, unclaimed and unearned both. “I’ll make it worth your while. On the heavens.”

  Wallis was quiet for several long seconds, then he sighed again. “Fair enough. I guess that's what I get for giving you first refusal. Well, end of the day we’re still making out pretty well.”

  Calvin blinked, then snapped his fingers. “Right, I knew I was forgetting something. I know what will make you feel better.” And then he reached back into his robe and withdrew the beast core, letting it roll down his palm and onto his fingers. In the darkness, the gleaming orb looked almost like the night’s sky in miniature, the swirling lights within a distant galaxy.

  Calvin was treated to the sight of Lulu’s jaw dropping open like a trapdoor, and Wallis—ever composed and quiet Wallis—swore like a copper-a-night whore, loud enough that at least some of the nearby mortals must have heard him.

  “What the ever merciful fuck Calvin?!”

  QuestionableQuesting!

  Patreon.com/ThatGit!

  discord where I post updates and announcements about my writing and answer questions! Other people even sometimes say things in it!