24

“You went too far.”

“Self-control was never my thing. That’s your specialty.”

“What if I couldn’t undo this? What would we do then? Do you even use the space between your ears, or is it just for show?”

“At least I have big muscles and a strong spirit.” Tobias shrugged, rubbing his wrist. “The brat is a real monster. Maybe we have a chance at this.”

“You say that, yet I’ve been pulling all the tricks I have to restore this vessel and coax the soul back.” Madeline turned and scowled at Tobias. “Seriously, there had to be another way.”

“Maybe, but what if there wasn’t? I used the fastest solution I could, even if it was a bit messy.” Sighing, Tobias sat beside Vander. “Where do you think his soul went? Pretty sure getting it back shouldn’t be this hard after all you’ve done.”

Madeline glowered at him while maintaining in constant motion. “I’ve used all I have at my disposal, except this. If it doesn’t work, you might have just cost us everything.”

“I was here. I saw,” he muttered, raising his hand to block a spoon attack. His knuckles cracked under her soft hit, but a second later, his hand set the bone and fixed itself as if nothing happened. “Not nice. You must really be worried about this boy.”

“How are you not?!” If eyes could summon the pits of purgatory, she’d have sent him with but a blink. “No word for how many years? A thousand? Ten thousand? Maybe even longer than that, and you can’t hold back your idiotic, muscle-brained, stubborn way of tradition to just train him in the time available for one day. One!”

Tobias had the decency to look ashamed for all of two seconds before moving on. “What are you trying next? And with your skills, are you really that desperate?”

She stopped moving and fixed him in place with her glare. “Do you even know what I have to use in order to create the Soul Calling Elixir? If you don’t, don’t speak again. And if he never wakes, never speak to me again.”

Frowning, Tobias crossed his arms. “That serious, huh?”

“I only needed one more ingredient to make something that could break us out of here, but now you’ve left with no choice.”

“You’re gambling all that you have on a solution that may not work? Why don’t you save your efforts and wait for the last ingredient? That seems more reliable than this guy,” he said with a sneer. “His talent is monstrous, but only by doing what I did, how I did it, has he gained what he needed in order to become what we need him to be. His lack of drive, lack of spirit—that would’ve doomed us all and led us to believe in a false hope. If anything, you should be thanking me. When, not if, he wakes up, he’ll be somebody worth believing in. Someone worth trusting our existences with.”

“You better hope he wakes up. Now, shut your trap and let me focus, or I’ll shut it for you.”

An overwhelming aura weighed down on the self-proclaimed battle junkie. An insurmountable pressure from the one and only Demigod Alchemist, kin of the Heaven’s Child of Alchemy Zao Jun. Even he, a champion of Combat Emperor Guān Dì.

“Do what you have to. I just want to get back to the murim,” Tobias muttered as he walked away.

Within the hour, Madeline completed her concoction, a recipe passed to her by her father. She poured the Soul Stimulating Elixir down the soulless vessel’s throat and guided the energy, hoping for all she was worth that the boy would wake.

***

Like usual, golden sunlight beamed through the curtain’s cracks and into a man’s eyes. Wind outside rustled through grass and trees. Same old, same old. Just another day in Crossroads. Morning greeted him as he stretched, yawning wide.

“How long has it been, and still no change?” he muttered, scratching his chest. Something about the movement felt off, but he couldn’t tell what. Rather than worry, he basked in the warmth of the morning sun and took a few minutes to enjoy the quiet of morning before the bell sounded.

When the familiar ring-ting-ting reached him, he stood from the edge of the bed and slipped on his new boots. With the chiming of the bell came a new day of work.

“What’s on the agenda?” He stepped outside to see the half plowed field and heard Stubborn calling him lazy from his pen. Always rising with the early sun, he did. “I’m coming, I’m coming! Shush yourself, now.”

His rumbling groan didn’t halt until Vander had the beast harnessed up and ready to work. A trusty beast, he was. Always had been, always would be. As he led Stubborn to the field to finish up what he’d started the day before, he noticed the empty troughs for water and feed. He’d completely forgotten the barrels and the water run he needed to make.

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“How’d that happen?” he wondered aloud. When he racked his brain as to the reason why he hadn’t made the trip the day before, he felt uneasiness rise in his chest. His memory felt foggy, and the events after meeting with Tobias and Madeline left him suspicious. “Just what’d that woman put in the tea?”

The same scent of spices, freshly baked bread, and hearty broth tickled his nose. Thinking of food made his stomach growl like a true monster as it cramped in retaliation. Almost as if he’d not eaten a single thing the day before.

Foggy memories told him he had, but the cramping in his stomach disagreed. When he last felt the same sharp pang, many days passed without food. A season of scarcity, the first season he’d been taught to hunt his own food if he wanted to stave off starvation.

“Even if I didn’t eat yesterday, I shouldn’t feel this hungry. Just what’s going on?”

All that he remembered was needing to get the second half of the field plowed today so he could have it ready for planting the day after. He had to make his contribution to the village if he wanted everyone to survive.

He put the restless thoughts and uneasiness out of his mind and looked across the land he’d been given once he first joined Crossroads. “I’ll never get tired of this view.”

But something in his gut told him otherwise, a feeling he tried to ignore to get on with the day’s work. The stream’s flow heralded a fresh scent to waft across his plot. Any other day, he’d smile. Today, he frowned. He shook his head again as he approached the field.

The peace here seemed almost unbelievable, imaginary, unrealistic. Things he’d never thought he’d get to experience—why am I here again? When did I get here? What is this place? Better yet… who am I?

“Enough of that,” he muttered as he put Stubborn to work. “There’s work to do. Contemplating existential dread can come afterwards.”

They worked the fields, and he admired the old ox’s brute strength of will. He’d always said Stubborn had the temperament of a mule, just as hard working too. He took in the freshness of the fields as they broke up the blocky soil and constant background noise coming from the stream.

The feeling of the sun on his skin felt like home. If someone told him there was anything in Crossroads that felt better than the morning sun and fresh cold on his face, he’d call them a liar. He grinned like a fool and followed behind the ox as Stubborn worked the plow across Vander’s small plot of land.

Tending the field wasn’t for everyone, but it was for him. The satisfaction of hard work and payoff of invested time with a harvest that benefited all the people of Crossroads made his life one worthy of living. His contribution to the people, the cause of survival and harmony. Never in his life had he shied away from hard work. In fact, he enjoyed it more than he’d ever tell anybody.

The quiet of isolation was a plus to his little plot away from the rest of Crossroads. Stubborn and nature accompanied him throughout his days, the only companions he needed. That peace helped him focus his mind on the task at hand. All of Crossroads focused during the day, a heavenly paradise where everyone relied on one another as a community to complete each individual task.

But near the stream, youngins frolicked about. In the prime of their youth, they yelled and fought and hollered a ruckus that broke his focus. Now that he’d been taken out of the work, he decided the sun in the sky and his growling stomach meant lunchtime. Only a quarter remained, and they’d both work harder with something solid in their stomachs and some fresh water, a delightful and highly anticipated reprieve from the heat of the sun and hard labor.

Sighing with satisfaction, he wiped the sweat from his arms on his dirt stained shirt. Just to double check, he told himself, but the fact another day was halfway through caused that nagging in his gut to return.

“What’s going on with me today?” he mused as he led Stubborn back to his pen and patted the ox’s neck.

He removed the ox’s harness with care, setting it on the hook outside the pen, and went to fill the troughs. When he reached for a barrel, the emptiness reminded him of their lack of contents and the strange haze of memories from the day before. As such, he grabbed a barrel over each shoulder and set them outside the pen, making sure to latch it closed.

Click-clack-click.

“Be right back, bud. Stay here for me, and behave yourself.”

For as long as Stubborn was getting on in years, he worked better than any other beast of burden in their prime. Because of that, he deserved rest and proper treatment. So Vander grabbed the empty barrels, one on each shoulder, and made his way down to the river where the youngins played earlier in the day.

The man grabbed the two empty barrels, positioned them securely on each shoulder, and made his way to the riverside. The walk was short enough to hear the kids playing, and his work hardened body made the barrels weigh the same as a feather stuffed pillow. The path he’d paved crunched under his boots until the ground softened.

At the river, he set the two barrels down to roll his pants up to his knees. A quick glance in the river brought him to a dead stop. “What the…?”

Facing his reflection in the stream, a smooth face devoid of any discernible feature. Be it eyes, mouth, nose, even eyebrows, nothing was there. Just smooth skin. He touched his hands to his face. Unlike the reflection, he felt what had been missing.

“Whatever this is, I’m not liking it much.” He stepped back to look into the reflection again, but that featureless face remained. The head tilted as if curious and reached a hand forward. The first instinct the man had was to draw back and get as far from the stream as possible, but something drew his hand forward.

When the tip of a finger touched the water, the reflection’s hand snapped forward, disappearing in the forming ripples. Then it snaked through the surface of the water, gripped his wrist, and wrenched with ungodly might. The man couldn’t do anything as the reflection pulled him into the water.

He expected the embrace of the stream and the cold fresh water. Surprise, confusion, fear, anxiety, and more. A storm of emotions flooded his entire being as he passed through the ripples across the water’s surface as he was dragged to somewhere beyond, defying all common sense.

He clenched his eyes closed as he rushed through a thick goop. Thicker than mud and twice as feisty. Whatever dragged him along refused to relent, no matter how much he tried to kick and scream and beg for it to release him.

All at once, everything stopped. When he looked up again, a young woman stared back at him. “You really gave me a scare, Vander. Glad to see you survived.”