The next morning a giant rotting bird slammed to the ground outside Depot Number Four. It lowered its long beak to the ground and vomited out a mass of wretched people. They were covered in boils and tumors, some bigger than their heads. Tian watched them come screaming out.

  “Save us, save us!”

  “Please, it hurts so much! Medicine! Please, medicine!”

  “Immortals, mercy, mercy!”

  Over and over they screamed and pleaded as they ran for the gate. The guards shared an ugly look and stepped sharply back. One pressed the alarm, the other placed a spirit crystal on a formation carved into the wall. A ward sprung up, wrapping the depot in a faint blue dome.

  “Stay back! Stop where you are!”

  The pitiful people didn’t listen and ran directly at the gate. One of the guards swore and knocked an arrow to his bow. Raised it to his eye. Loosed the arrow and buried a yard of fine ashwood in the skull of one of the people rushing over.

  Tian had been attracted by the giant bird and the noise. He got over to the wall in time to see the mortal explode into a cloud of purple gas that rapidly shaded into black. It drifted forward as though possessed, falling on the blue barrier. The barrier visibly started to corrode. And the other tumor ridden mortals kept coming.

  “CORPSE POISON! NECROMANCER!” The guard yelled.

  Tian swore and dove off the wall with a flip, landed feather light on his toes, and leapt for the quartermaster’s quarters. “I’ll get the supplies!” He yelled.

  The Depot had a sizable guard force, but during an attack, sect members had standing orders to provide all necessary assistance. Tian was capable for a Level Five, but against a necromancer who could create clouds of corpse poison, he didn't even qualify as a capable ant.

  Plus there was the bird. That had to be at the Heavenly Person realm. Runner was about the best job he could do at the moment.

  “Quartermaster Wu! Necromancers!”

  “Catch!” She tossed Tian a ring, then rushed back to her shelves to yank out even more stuff. Tian kicked off the counter, reversed his momentum with a flip and a twist, then sprinted back to the wall. He rushed along the line of archers and flying sword wielders, as they quickly butchered the mortal victims. Each grabbed the equipment they needed- peachwood arrows, gold ointment to coat swords, black dog blood to pour over contaminated soil or equipment, or even on the undead.

  Tian didn’t know why the blood of male black dogs was particularly rich in yang qi and perfect for countering ghosts and the undead. But it was. So he delivered it to his brothers and sisters, then dumped a big pot of it over himself. Coated himself in blood. Then he started looking at the battlefield.

  The mortals were just delivery systems for the corpse poison. Tian had heard rumors about thee horrible stuff- powerfully yin and corrosive, it dug through flesh and rooted in the bone marrow as it destroyed the body. Ordinary antidotes were completely ineffective. Generally found in the claws and teeth of zombies. Just a scratch was enough to send you to hell.

  It wasn’t so easy to make a strong zombie. It took an immense number of spells, charms and potions to refine even a single Earthly Realm zombie. A Heavenly Person Zombie was beyond Tian’s imagination. As was whatever hellish thing was going on with the mortals. The poison clung to their naked bodies in fleshy sacks the size of heads. They swung with an ugly weight, and the instant the host died, they exploded. The poison always drifted towards the base. Always. And the barrier was dissolving fast.

  Tian didn’t know how to shoot a bow or use a flying sword. Or a regular sword for that matter. It had never seemed useful or even possible before.

  The barrier finally dissolved in a crackle of poison.

  Ranged weapons seemed really useful now.

  The giant bird vomited out green furred creatures. Humanoid. Muscular. Tall. Dozens of them.

  “Zombies! Green furred zombies!” Someone yelled.

  They were all moving like they were in the Heavenly Person realm. Tian’s role in this fight was now, officially, ‘victim.’

  “I can’t run. My brothers need me. But I can’t be a burden to them either.” Tian’s mind raced, trying to think of what he could do to help. The zombies roared and hunched forward.

  “Cover, cover!”

  Tian jumped off the wall and hit the ground. If the Inner Court disciples were ducking-

  There was a soft sound, like rain falling on leaves, then screaming. Tian knew what he could do. He rushed over and grabbed a Senior Sister who had crashed into the dirt next to him. She was screaming and thrashing, trying to cut away the piece of green hair lodged in her chest like a needle. Trying to cut away the purple-black poison spreading from it, like ink dropped on clean paper.

  He got one of her arms over his shoulder, and grabbed her waist. He stood, pulling them both up. She didn’t fight him, letting him carry her away from the wall and to the hospital building. The doctors were already busy. He didn’t stay and watch. Tian put her on a stretcher on the ground and ran back to the wall. This senior sister hadn’t been the only one to fall.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Tian grabbed a senior brother, this one in much worse shape and dragged him back. He wasn’t moving any more by the time he got to the hospital, and he saw a doctor flick a paper talisman onto his forehead. The red cinnabar burst into flames, but the yellow paper it was on remained intact. Black gas started rising from the corpse, and was purified by the flames. Tian thought his senior brother looked more comfortable in death when it was done.

  “Here- take these. If someone looks dead or near dead, smack them on their forehead and run some vital energy into it.” A martial uncle he didn’t recognize shoved the talismans into his hand and pushed him out the door. Tian ran back towards the wall. There were more people he needed to help.

  Along the way, he pasted five of the talismans on foreheads. His brothers and sisters were dying faster than he could get them to the hospital. He wanted to throw up. He used Light Body, Heavy Hands instead. It seemed to help. The noise was impossible. Screams, the roars of the zombies, the crashing, crackling, hissing, thrumming noise of flying weapons and spells.

  “Zombies attacking in the morning. What is that about?” He muttered, dragging a brother missing an arm.

  “It’s the Wasteland, kid. Zombies that can only fight at night? That’s soft country living. Hahaha.” The laughter was lost in a wave of black vomit. Tian noticed it steaming on the dried dog’s blood.

  There was an explosion behind them. Tian tried to run faster. An alarm bell was ringing, different from the one before. The brassy notes stabbed him in his nerves, making him want to run, to fight, to do anything so long as he was moving. He rushed the brother the rest of the way in and dropped him on a cot. He turned to sprint out again, but one of the doctors stopped him.

  “Stay. The wall is breached. You can’t help out there.”

  “I can paste the talismans at least!”

  “Put it on your own damn forehead then, because you will die before doing anything useful!” The doctor slapped him, hard enough to make Tian see stars. Tian couldn’t even flinch before the hand crossed his face. The gap between Earth and Heaven was just that great.

  “Stay put. Be an orderly here. See her, with the saw? See the bucket of limbs? Go take it to the incinerator! Make yourself useful!”

  Tian gave the doctor a filthy look and bit out “Yes, True Disciple. I will.”

  Tian took the polluted limbs to a furnace in a thickly walled room. There was no chimney, he noticed. Things went into the furnace, and not even heat escaped. Even the smoke was incinerated to nothing. He poured the limbs into the funnel and turned to go back.

  “Bucket too.” The Senior Sister manning the furnace snapped.

  “What?”

  “It’s contaminated. It goes in the furnace. NOW!”

  Tian tossed it in. There were five more buckets waiting by the time he got back. Black flesh wriggling, faint wisps of black smoke rising from the corruption. He grabbed a bucket in each hand and ran. Slung the whole bucket into the furnace without pouring anything out, repeated with the second bucket, turned, caught the approving nod, and raced back.

  It was only a few more trips back and forth before he had to drag entire bodies in. The doctors made him slap yellow paper talismans on his blood soaked body, then lift the bodies and haul them away. Using his light body art to hoist them effortlessly into the big funnel. Brothers and sisters, all turned to nothing before they could be turned into weapons against them. Brothers and sisters who had been turned into things by the necromancers.

  Tian recognized a brother from the West Town Temple. Poetry Saint Zhu. Tian hadn’t known he was here. He remembered how gracefully the senior brother moved from tree branch to tree branch, demonstrating his light body art. How he seemed to lose himself looking at a blank page, brush in hand.

  No time to grieve. No time to think. No time to be horrified by the pain and fear on his brother’s face. Up, over, and down the funnel and into the fire. All dreams of immortality reduced to a residue of poetry.

  The hospital was rocked by an explosion. Then another. Then a third. There was a bird call, high and fierce.

  “And that’s that.” One of the doctors snarled. Their hands moved so fast, it looked like mists of long silver needles were falling over his patients, each piercing an accupoint, each touched by exactly the necessary amount and type of qi. The kind of focus that required in the middle of a battle… Tian wouldn’t have believed it if he wasn’t seeing it.

  “What is what, Doctor?”

  “Shut up and work, Orderly!”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  There was a sound, a song played on an instrument he didn’t know. Tian felt Advent of Spring violently stir within him, wanting to circulate on its own. It sounded like spring rains falling on forest ponds, and the way plants gathered up warmth and water and exploded upwards, reaching for the sun. Yin accumulation becomes Yang growth. It was a tune that seemed to be one with the rhythms of the world. Tian couldn’t explain it more than that. It was a tune that played out spring in nature.

  The screaming roars of the zombies made it plain that it was something else entirely for them.

  Tian shut up and worked. There were still bodies to haul, and buckets of limbs to toss. Every few trips, his protective talisman would need to be changed. The toxins corroded it, no matter how fast he worked. The furnace operator wouldn’t let him leave the room without a fresh charm paper pasted on him.

  He was covered in blood and corrupted liquids that had leaked from his brothers and sisters. The black dog blood was lost under layers and layers of filth. He looked like a demon. He felt like one too.

  A long chime rang across the depot. “Sweep teams, confirm the all clear. Wounded are to be taken to the hospital. Pursuit teams, run them down. Deploy the Outer Court to sweep the surroundings for hidden enemies. Recall the Blade team.”

  Tian heard the words as though the speaker was standing behind him. A woman’s voice, calm and strong.

  “Direct Disciple Shang, Ladies and Gentlemen. One song to Heaven, one song to Hell. It’s even the same song. If she wants it to be.” A half dead looking doctor shoved a pill in her mouth as she poured a potion into the gaping wounds on her patient.

  “True Disciple? Permission to leave and obey the orders of the Direct Disciple?”

  “Eh?” One of the doctors blinked at him. “Don’t be stupid. We need you here.”

  “He’s not. It’s a direct and explicit order. And Direct Disciple Shang is strict. Rip the talisman on your chest without taking it off your chest just as you step out of the hospital. Stay safe. Don’t make more work for us.” He was pointed towards the door.

  Tian did as he was told. A soft blue fire rolled over him, clearing away all the gore and horror, leaving him looking fresh as a lotus. Somehow, he still felt the blood on him.

  The gate had been blown open, and long stretches of the depot wall were down. Tian ran towards the gap.

  “HEY YOU!” A True Disciple yelled. “Where the hell are you going?!”

  “Reporting to Senior, West Town Outer Court Disciple Tian Zihao obeys the orders of Direct Disciple Shang and is going to fucking murder every last heretic motherfucker that hurt his brothers and sisters!”