For all that Calvin had stressed the importance of starting as soon as possible, it took over an hour to get everything ready. Ultimately that might have been for the best as it gave Calvin some much needed time to center himself. His role in the coming work would be critical, but his thoughts were unsteady.
While the others, mortal and cultivator alike, gathered firewood and built a pyre, Calvin sat cross legged on top of the wall, eyes closed and awareness focused inward. A trio of formation flags waved gently in the breeze around him, carefully arranged in an equilateral triangle just big enough for him to sit comfortably within. They were something Wallis had had in his bag, a portable version of the formation Calvin had set up around his meditation chamber designed to filter contamination from the ambient qi, and Calvin was extremely glad to have them on hand.
The flags weren’t perfect, nor even as good as the immobile formation he had in his villa, but sitting within the triangle turned the air from actively unpleasant to just moderately uncomfortable—a difference that felt like night and day. Calvin could have kissed Wallis when he’d brought them out.
He breathed in the fundamental pattern of the Nine Rotating Gates; in for a count of three, hold for a count of six, out for a count of nine. The exact rhythm had become less important since his advancement, the single Gate he could now maintain nigh-indefinitely ensuring the stable flow of his qi even without it, but it helped him focus and relax. He’d been using that rhythm while meditating for so long that just switching into it instantly helped him assume a more appropriate state of mind. Plus, it was perfect for an area where the qi was so contaminated that even the formation flags could only do so much, giving him plenty of time to filter out and expel the impurities he would otherwise be taking in with every breath.
His qi reserves felt comfortably full, but he still took the effort of absorbing whatever he could gather from the rather thin ambient qi. It wasn’t much—the fact they’d managed to create such a powerful effect in such a qi-poor area was as horrifying as it was impressive—but he was about to use up a lot of qi and every bit counted. The exact volume of a person’s qi reserves tended to be somewhat malleable. At the moment he couldn’t regenerate much qi, if any, just from cycling naturally, but he could still actively absorb and integrate some amount from the world around him.
He looked regretfully at his nodes and channels full of lavender qi. He’d reached the point where it was about time to integrate this level of attunement into his Foundation just this morning, but that was a lengthy, delicate process. It hurt to throw away progress by using up the attuned qi, but he’d known there was a risk of that outcome when he accepted the mission. At least it was only really a week of on-and-off cycling. He expected it would take years and years to fully attune himself to the Phoenix’s qi, and a lost week did not matter too much on that time scale.
A soft thump heralded Wallis’s arrival and Calvin opened his eyes to find the older cultivator standing a few steps away, watching the work going on below. The men had built an impressive bonfire in the gap between the road and the field of bodies, flames licking the sky and heat bathing Calvin’s face even from a significant distance. The pile of wood to feed the bonfire had also grown, bits taken from the ruined village mixed with dead wood from the surrounding forest.
Though the men were avoiding getting too close, Lulu stood just feet from the edge of the flames spinning her spear, her robes flapping around her as she fed the flames with air and qi. The fire directly in front of her was bright enough that it probably hurt to look at with mortal eyes, and the heat would have cooked a man alive in moments, but she looked perfectly at ease.
“The men found a shovel and some buckets in the village,” Wallis reported dispassionately. “That should make things easier on us.”
Calvin nodded, though Wallis wasn’t looking at him. The idea of shoveling piled organs into buckets was not a pleasant one, but it was better than carrying them to the bonfire by hand.
Wallis turned a coin between his fingers, a silver sovereign by the look of it, rubbing his thumb across the stylized depiction of the Imperial Dragonflame in its ornate brazer. “This is so fucked,” he said quietly. “It isn’t what I was expecting at all. I’m sorry I dragged you into it.”
Calvin shrugged his shoulders. How could he tell Wallis that he was glad he was here, that he was going to make a fortune on this mission if everything worked out, and that he was relieved that it was him here with Wallis and Lulu and not one of the less reliable disciples they usually tried to avoid taking missions with? Sure it wasn’t what he had signed up for, but Wallis hadn’t known that going into things. That was one of the risks you took accepting emergency missions.
Instead he stood up, rolling his shoulders in a habitual yet unnecessary stretch. “Lulu’s almost done?” he confirmed. That was the most likely reason Wallis would have come up here.”
“Yeah…” Wallis exhaled, “Almost. She said she only needs a few more minutes.”
Calvin silently looked out at the hundreds of bodies that needed to be cleansed and burnt. “Then I’d best get started. We have a long day ahead of us.”
“And a longer night.”
Calvin jumped down from the wall and made his way to the edge of the circle. The man lying in front of him had been middle aged with a well kept beard of light hair graying around the edges. He was muscular and weathered, and Calvin wondered who he had once been. A farmer perhaps? Or a smith. Or a mason.
He was dead now all the same.
Calvin closed his eyes and focused his qi. It had been several months since he’d last had a reason to use it, but it was not a truly difficult technique. Simply a qi intensive one. It was not meant to be used in combat, and so could afford to be slow and clunky, all the better to allow any Foundation realm cultivator to make use of it with only a few hours of training.
[Sunlight Bathes the Peaks]
Calvin’s qi poured into the technique with an eagerness that shouldn’t have surprised him. After all, while the sect technically classified the Sun Shines and Grass Grows on the Eight Peaks as a five-elements method, it was well known to be particularly compatible with cultivators attuned to elements such as light, fire, wood, yang and others with a connection to purity and growth. Appropriate for a technique designed to prepare a field for growing spiritual herbs.
The air around him grew warmer, but this was not the wall of scorching heat radiating from the pyre, but a gentle, nurturing warmth that cut through the grim shadow lingering over the dead village. He breathed in deeply and the air that filled his lungs felt fresh and gentle, rich with the scent of fertile soil and growing things rather than heavy with blood and death.
Calvin opened his eyes and tilted his head back. A ray of sunshine fell from the cloudy sky above, illuminating a circle around him some ten feet in diameter and playing across his face. At his feet, green shoots pushed through the mud, trampled seeds given new life by his technique. Though he’d never particularly liked being out in the sun too much, right now it felt wonderfully soothing, clearing away some of the lingering morass and making the misery that surrounded him feel just a little bit further away.
Calvin would have liked to spend some time just enjoying the moment, but he had a job to do and every second he wasted was a not insignificant expenditure of qi. He took a step forward, then another, the ray of sunlight following him like an actor on a stage. Where the sunlight met the circle of bodies, the air seemed to crackle and pop, bright sparks of qi flashing in and out of existence as his technique clashed with the aura of blood and death, burning if away or pushing it back. The amount of qi he needed to channel into the technique rose, but remained at a manageable level.
He turned to his left and began to walk slowly around the ring, feet a scant few inches from the edge of the outermost circle of bodies. He moved slowly and deliberately, maintaining his concentration on the technique. Activating it initially took significantly more power than keeping it active, and it was questionable if he had enough qi for this in the first place. Qi of blood and death fled in front of him and rushed to fill in his wake, but it was noticeably thinner, repulsed by the sprigs of grass that grew in his footsteps and the lingering warmth of the sun.
The first circuit didn’t take long, no more than fifteen minutes, but it felt significantly longer. The qi here fought his technique in a way he’d never experienced before, scrabbling at its edges like a swarm of hungry rats at a door. In addition to the qi spent to maintain the technique, he had to constantly reinforce its edges or risk the entire technique unraveling from the outside in. And the bodies…well, Calvin had certainly been right that they would have to be burned. They were like furnaces, belching out clouds of foul contamination whenever the light tried to purify them in a way that an ordinary dead body should not have.
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If the bodies on the outer edge of the circle were so bad, Calvin dreaded to think what dealing with the ones further in would he like.
Wallis was waiting for him at the spot he’d begun, a pair of wide-eyed mortal guards standing some distance behind him. “Is it safe for the mortals to begin, brother?” he asked loudly enough so the men could hear.
Calvin nodded. He paused for a moment, then stepped over the dead man at his feet and continued onward, now walking on the inside of the first ring. The two men rushed forward and at Wallis’s direction grabbed the corpse’s arms and legs, hauling it off towards the pyre. They wore leather gloves and their hands were wrapped in bandages—hopefully that would be enough to protect them.
Wallis gestured and two more men rushed over from further away, grabbing the next body and dragging it off. Wallis sheathed his hands in metal qi and carried the third in line away, the dead weight looking no heavier than a beggar’s coin pouch in his hands.
Calvin put the men out of his mind and continued forward. At least for now, they had their jobs, and he had his.
The cleanup ended up taking significantly longer than Calvin had initially predicted, extending into the late afternoon of the next day. By the end of it, Calvin felt as wrung out as an old rag, and neither Lulu nor Wallis—nor their mortal helpers for that matter—looked much better.
The primary delay was his own fault. He’d underestimated the difficulty of his task, or perhaps overestimated his own capabilities. Even working from the outside in and destroying the bodies anchoring the formation as they went, it often took two or more passes to cleanse an area, and the radius of his technique shrank down to nearly nothing in the intensely charged center of the circle. He’d had to stop more than a dozen times to rest and meditate, and it would have taken even longer without Wallis’s formation flags to help him recover his qi. Even now the land the abomination had taken place on was tainted, the fresh sprouts that had grown in his wake dying and withering in a matter of hours. However it was no longer catastrophic and should fade away in the coming days and weeks without anything to anchor it, the infection not having been given enough time to take root.
Of course that was not the only problem. The bodies in the two outer rings had been dealt with without too much trouble, even when the mortals could no longer help directly and it was mostly up to Wallis and Lulu to carry them to the waiting pyre. Then they’d gotten to the circle of women and girls, and things had gotten…interesting.
Some of the bodies screamed as they burned, hollow voices begging for mercy. Others refused to burn in regular fire, requiring the three of them to take turns pouring qi into the pyre to overcome whatever corruption had taken root.
The worst were two particularly young girls. They couldn’t have been more than nine years old and looked so similar they must have been twins in life. In death, they were well on their way to birthing some manner of twisted spiritual horror of yin, blood, and death that had escaped his detection during his first pass around the circle. It erupted from their bodies as they burned, crying out in a chorus of children’s screams and sobs, a hideous amalgamation of flailing limbs and faces.
Though only radiating the aura of a spirit in the middle stages of the Gathering realm, the creature was fast and wily and its ethereal body was nearly immune to physical force. Only sheer dumb luck had saved one of the mortals who’d gotten a little too close to the pyre, and it had taken the combined efforts of all three of them to bring it down as it desperately tried to reach the veritable feast waiting for it in the center of the corpse circle.
After their experience with the spirit, they took no chances with the rings of children, mothers and jumbled organs. They didn’t bother with shovels and buckets, nor dragging corpses to a now distant pyre. While Calvin purified the air and ground with his technique, Wallis and Lulu piled wood on and around the bodies. Then they each took a corner and set the entire thing alight with qi-fueled fire, continuing to pour power into it until everything in the ring was reduced to fine ash. For good measure, Calvin then went over it one last time with the cleansing technique—just to be sure.
And then it was done. Or at least this first area was.
All eight of them––mortals and cultivators alike––had retreated to the opposite side of the ruined village from the bloody field and the bonfires, where the smell of burnt flesh and death was slightly less prevalent and the ground soft with green grass and wildflowers. They had tents, but no one had the strength or desire to pitch them. It was warm enough without them, with no sign of approaching rain. It was a beautiful night, the sky clear but for the slowly dispersing haze of dark smoke and the stars shining like an endless river of jewels.
Lying some distance from where Lulu had fallen asleep with her head pillowed on Wallis’s shoulder, the older cultivator drifting off soon after her, Calvin silently watched the sky. He was tired––physically, spiritually, and mentally––but sleep felt a thousand miles away. And perhaps it was best for someone to remain awake anyway. There were enemies about, and it was entirely possible that someone would return to investigate what was happening at the site of their massacre. He doubted it––it would be foolish for any of them to circle back to the scene of the crime––but one could never fully account for stupidity.
There was still a lot of work ahead of them. He’d checked the quest the Scroll had given him once they’d finished and there had been no change in the status of his objectives. That meant one of two things. Either they had not been sufficiently thorough here or this was not the only patch of ‘death-blight’ that needed cleansing.
He personally expected it to be the latter. He had a really bad feeling about what they’d find when they went to check on Stone Pine.
But that would have to wait. They’d already decided that they would be going after the demonic cultivators next. Better to cut the problem off at the root rather than risk them committing more atrocities––and potentially empowering themselves––while they scrambled to clean up the messes they’d caused. Dealing with this slaughter had only taken precedent because they were already here, and who knew how long it would have taken to eliminate the cultists and come back? But Stone Pine was half a day’s travel away. Whatever was waiting for them there had already had several days to stew. A few more couldn’t hurt that much, right?
Calvin really hoped that was true.
He sighed heavily and folded his hands behind his head. He wondered how things were going back at the sect. Assuming nothing had gone wrong, the noon-star berries should have been fully harvested by now. He was looking forward to those. Hopefully the formations he’d set up to automatically water his herbs were working correctly. His little private garden would suffer from nearly a month without his direct attention, but it shouldn’t be too bad. He might trust Mei and Jane to tend to and harvest the fields around his villa and deal with him in good faith, but not so far as to let them into his home and ask them to care for his herbs while he was away. At the end of the day, their relationship was purely a financial arrangement. He had no doubt that if they thought they could earn more by working with someone else, they would abandon him in a heartbeat, and it was best not to tempt them.
He hoped Gwen was doing well. In the note he’d written for her, he’d instructed her to keep her head down and focus on her cultivation. He’d included a few more tricks he thought might be helpful for her, things he’d only thought of after they’d gone their separate ways. It was a shame this mission had come so soon after their meeting. If he’d had even one more week he might have felt comfortable asking Gwen to move in temporarily so she could care for his herbs in his absence. As much as he was leery of anyone knowing what he had in his garden, his desire to see what affects her strange affinity for spiritual herbs might have when starting from a superior base was much, much stronger.
But that was life sometimes.
He wondered if Cao Yunfei was giving her any trouble. On one hand, he hoped he wasn’t. He’d done enough damage as it was. On the other hand…
Sparring with Lulu (in the rare moments she could be pulled away from Wallis’s side) had been invigorating and extremely illuminating. There had been a time not long ago when he’d been lucky to win one match in ten against her. She was simply too skilled, too experienced, too familiar with every tool and trick available to the average Eight Peaks Outer sect disciple. Now though, after a few practice bouts to get him used to his new strength, the situation had changed. She still won more than she lost, but it was a close thing. Lulu had thousands of hours of training and experience that Calvin simply could not match, but the difference in their cultivation had become extremely apparent.
Calvin was faster than Lulu. Calvin was stronger than Lulu. Calvin’s qi was more potent, his techniques more powerful, and his body more durable. That was the tyranny of cultivation. The gap between realms was vast, and even within a single cultivation realm the difference between someone at the early stages and the peak could be nearly as great. Calvin had heard stories of a single Soul realm cultivator exterminating entire armies of Core and Foundation realm cultivators, tearing out entire clans and sects leaf, stem, and root.
Calvin had no idea of the specifics of Lulu’s Foundation, but he was certain it was inferior to what he’d obtained from the Nine Rotating Gates method. He suspected she currently had five or six qi nodes in a semi-stable configuration. That had been enough to propel her to the upper echelons of the Outer sect’s combat ratings.
He had even less of an idea of the state of Cao Yunfei’s cultivation, but he doubted it was much better than Lulu’s. More than likely, it was worse. And unlike her, he didn’t have a decade of endless training, sparring, dueling, and even fighting for her life to fall back on.
He had a good feeling about his upcoming duel.
Perhaps it was only the lingering remnants of what had happened in this place speaking, but at that moment Calvin would have welcomed a good reason to rub Cao Yunfei’s nose in the dirt.
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