The two fell on the Yuu encampment like a comet and its shadow. Liren blazed across the sky, hammering the ground with her qi, quickly picking out the Shamans and the lone Grand Shaman. Tian silently sent his darts down through the smoke holes at the top of the ger, ripping apart the Shamans inside. The Grand Shaman leapt out of her tent, waving a wand trailing ribbons of silk. Tian assumed she was swearing. He didn’t recognize the words, but the tone was clear enough.
“WRETCH! PAY FOR YOUR SINS!” Liren’s cry echoed off the walls of the fortress. Tian could feel the breath of cultivators within. There was a Heavenly Realm cultivator in there too, the strength of them pricking at his skin. Not someone to tangle with, if they could avoid it. The master of the fortress didn’t move. Why would they? That’s not how this game was played. He was behind an array. No reason to move unless there was an advantage to take.
The Grand Shaman swung her wand, and brilliant strands of green and yellow wove together, vines reaching for the blazing sun above. Even as far away as he was, Tian could smell the sun and grasslands, and the barest taste of something acidic dancing on the tip of his tongue.
Something tugged at his heart. The darts returned to his sleeve, the blood unable to stain them. Killing the shamans felt wrong. Necessary, perhaps, but wrong. The thought surprised him- he certainly didn’t care for them as people. Perhaps it was that they couldn’t fight back. The Grand Shaman, however, was a genuine danger. Liren dove through the twisting ropes of light the Grand Shaman launched at her, spear leading the way. Not without cost. He could see the blazing qi around Liren dimming fast.
“But how is this using spirits? This just looks like a spell cast with qi.” Tian raced over, recalling his darts into his sleeve.
Tian swept in from the side, silently striking out with his staff. The shaman didn’t look in his direction, but just for a fraction of a moment, Tian thought he caught her smirking. It was warning enough. He let his staff’s momentum keep moving forward, but he threw himself hard to one side, tumbling across the camp ground and ripping through the ger as he passed.
His senses locked on to the being that manifested next to where he would have been if he hadn’t dodged.
“A ghost. The ghost of a shaman, it looks like. A proper spirit.”
With a grunt and a flex of his will, Tian recalled his staff to his hand. He couldn’t send it out like a flying sword, but he could manage this much. The spirit was carrying a weapon of his own- something between a staff and a spear, with a flared cobra at the top of it. The whole amalgamation was about eight feet tall, considerably taller than Tian’s staff. No matter. When hadn’t he fought against people with longer reach than him?
The spirit juddered, then vanished. Faster than blinking, it was in front of Tian, swinging down with its cobra-headed staff. Tian snorted and raised his own staff to block, the familiar steps of the Moon Crossing the Lake dissipating the force of the impact as Tian drifted backwards. Spirit or not, the cobra-headed staff was heavy enough. Tian’s form shimmered in the afternoon sunlight, white hair floating over ragged white robes, his skin the color of milk or jade. An observer would be hard pressed to say which of them was the ghost.
Back and forth through the campground they flowed. Tian took care not to strike at the mortals. To his mild surprise, so did the spirit. He managed to lock eyes with the dead thing for a moment, and the two reached a silent agreement. Immortal battles should be fought between immortals and those with the power of immortals. No need to sweep up the mortals in the storm of their violence.
The rhythm of a staff battle was quite different than that of a rope dart. The rope dart was all about momentum and striking suddenly from strange directions. Someone with less than immortal strength and reflexes might even need to stay planted as they flung the dart about. Staff play was almost entirely different.
The staves swung high and low. Long sweeps became sudden lifts, trying to catch the other’s weapons before descending again with sledgehammer force in a crushing chop. The pole retracted swift and soundless, before exploding forward into a spearlike lunge. Up and down, front and back, the feet never stopped moving and neither did the hands. Tian’s heavy staff slammed into the long staff used by the spirit, a brutish strike with hidden depths. His art made the blow even heavier, heavy enough to bury the ghost.
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In theory.
The ghost groaned under the weight, but didn’t break. The staff flexed like a long piece of bamboo, but held. The head of the staff twisted, stretching and moving like the snake it was modeled after. Binding his staff, then lunging for him with long fangs dripping ghostly poison.
“Snake Head, Vine Body. It’s moving like Snake Head Vine Body!” Tian had used his old rope dart art to the point where it was simply part of him, something he could control without conscious thought. Yet, he had never seen the Snake Head represented so perfectly, nor had he imagined the Vine Body coming from an actual piece of wood. This wasn’t some poetic representation, it was the living thing itself.
Tian felt something jolt inside him. Unconnected thoughts connected rapidly, forming a lattice of understanding. Not quite enough to stand on, yet but-
The snake bit him. It was agonizing. Then the Hell Suppressing Sutra roared into life, grabbing onto the spiritual venom like a baby snatching berries and shoving messy fistfulls into their mouth. The latticework wisdom collapsed, but Tian didn’t mind too much. He could rebuild it again, now that he had seen its shape.
“Teacher said I wasn’t a genius. I am so petty, I thought it was an insult rather than a statement of fact. How in the hell did I forget something so fundamental?”
The Supreme Virtue Hell Suppressing Body Refining Sutra. He might not be battling an evil spirit, but he was certainly battling a ghost. Tian grabbed the cobra three inches behind its head, and held it firmly. A small, but heavy, foot snapped out and slammed through the ghost’s knee. The ghost looked alarmed. Tian could feel that some of the spiritual body “stuck” to him. Tian’s smile showed a lot of teeth. The cobra desperately pumped more venom into Tian, but it was useless.
The rest of the battle had no surprises. Once he realized he could grapple the spirit and crush it in his hands, it lost most of its ability to resist. Tian even stowed his staff, preferring to simply absorb the blows and concentrate on tearing off pieces of the spirit. One combatant grew weaker with every exchange. The other, stronger. In the end, all that was left was a long piece of vine, carved with strange symbols and anointed with unknown oils, that had once been a serpent-headed staff. He stowed it carefully away, then raced over to Liren.
Liren, for her part, flew up into the sky with the screaming shaman. Tian couldn’t see what happened to the wand, but Liren’s hat had been burned away at some point, as had her shoes. The golden inner robes were doing their job very well, but they only covered so much of the body. The shaman didn’t seem to be in any fit state to appreciate them.
Liren had her by the neck. A quick jab of her finger punched a hole in the shaman’s jugular. Two quick rips opened the veins in her legs. Tian could see ghostly hawks whirling around Liren, tearing at her. Their claws left long scrapes across her face and head, too shallow to do lasting harm but bleeding like mad. Which was, Tian thought, an unfortunate omen.
Liren smashed her palm into the shaman’s back, shattering her spine and ribs, pulping the organs, ensuring death was instant and inescapable. She released the shaman’s neck at the same time, sending the corpse flying across the camp, trailing streamers of blood behind it. The Yuu believed a shaman’s blood, spilled on the steppe, could give rise to malevolent spirits. They would have a hell of a time settling down this one.
“Look inside her tent, Zihao!”
Tian did. It only took a glance. It wasn’t as bad as what he saw in heretic camps. Really, it wasn’t. The people wearing iron collars covered in scars and lash marks could be said to be living well, by the standards of those captured by heretics. He knew perfectly well that slaves were all through the camp. Most of them were not even in chains.
It really wasn’t any surprise at all that there were slaves in this tent. Or any of the tents. Maybe all the tents! How strange, his breathing had become rather labored, and his eyes were going dim with all the red creeping in. He learned something new about the Heavenly realm. It made you want to kill everything and everyone, sparing not even the chickens or dogs!
He exhaled. Held it. Inhaled. Held it. Exhaled. “How far are we from the Kingdom? How long would it take them to travel there, if they took all the horses?”
“If they can ride? Maybe a week. Maybe less. We aren’t that far from “The Kingdom” but it would probably take them… I don’t know, half a month to get clear of the steppes, maybe.” Liren shook her head. “Too far. They would be run down fast, and even if they can ride, they can’t outfight organized tribes.”
“Maybe, but I wonder how fast and far they could travel if they had literally all the horses. An easy way to buy themselves into Burning Flag City too. Or somewhere further north.”
Tian felt Liren’s qi suddenly blazing, a fierce joy in her. “We expand what we were already going to do. Kill shamans, and free slaves. Any tribes or caravans caught with slaves lose all their horses and wagons. It might be revolting to kill mortals, but I have no problem leaving them stranded! Horses are valuable. A nice little way to set them up when they return to civilization, and we can pass along the message that we are more than willing to kill any rat-bastard cultivator who dares support this system. And if the lord of the fortress doesn’t like it, he can come outside of all his wards and fight me about it!”
