In the darkness, Jack bent and straightened a leg. By his count, it took him at least a few hours to do so. He repeated this exercise for at least a dozen days now with various body parts.
The man that captured him would take Jack, and others like him, out of the pouch every now and then to monitor their progress. He tried to teach them some kind of formation they were supposed to use when commanded to attack, but to Jack's eyes, it looked just like human wave tactics.
In one of these short checkups, the man referred to himself as Bai Xiatuo and would talk about how Jack and the others were going to help him out in some grand revenge scheme oh his.
The existence of others like him first surprised Jack, but then he figured that the reason that Bai Xiatuo abducted the other spirits, as he called them, was the same as for why he took Jack.
Some older spirit puppets in the group could move without any problems, but most couldn't even move faster than Jack and kept slowly staggering around.
The most frightening aspect of their little excursions out of the pouch happened when Bai Xiatuo decided to give them an order. It didn't matter how much Jack resisted, or tried to disobey, something compelled him to obey.
A small voice in his consciousness kept whispering to give in, to listen to his Master, that everything would look much clearer if he just stopped resisting. He could see it in the behavior of the other puppets too. Where once a slight twitch of a muscle represented a tiny bit of defiance to the orders, over time only obedience remained.
Jack didn't care. He didn't care about Bai Xiatuo, his schemes, the other spirits, the whispering voice of the puppet, anything other than moving his new body. He kept doing it during the whole day, every day.
He discovered that he could enter a state similar to sleep in the puppet, but when he did that his old buddies from the war would visit him in his nightmares.
Even if he wanted to sleep, he wouldn't do it. He could feel the whispering becoming louder every time he allowed himself to lose his focus. So he didn't. It wasn't anything new to him, not after the war at least.
A long time passed. Days blurred into one another for Jack, but most of the puppets could move with fluidity by now. As if they were born in the puppet body, so could Jack. All of them would jump at the voice of Bai Xiatuo like prized trained hounds, so did Jack. He decided to bide his time and wait for an opportunity.
On a day as any other, Bai Xiatuo released Jack and the other spirit puppets from their pouch.
Jack expected another round of gossip and training when a wall of brown light smacked him in the face. He could see a man standing in the middle of the brown light, radiating it.
What's more, when he took a look around he found out that they all stood in the middle of the sky, at least a klick in the air. But it felt like they stood on solid ground, Jack looked closer at his feet and could feel the dark energy there holding him up. He instinctively felt that the puppet could stand, even jump around, on such energy without any problems.
"Not a bad number of high-quality spirit puppets. Too bad I found a rich vein of earth fire in this desolate land. If you came before that you might have given me a decent fight." the man covered in flickering brown light said, somehow Jack could hear him as if he stood right next to him, even when he floated at least 300 meters away.
"You are not the only one that has grown stronger, Bai Shetai." Jack heard Bai Xiatuo's voice from behind him, just as he started to turn his head to look at this captor of his he heard the order to "Attack!" and all he could do was to follow the order given and charge with a roar at the other man, Bai Shetai presumably, with his companions.
Earlier in the training, Jack found out that if he wholeheartedly committed himself to obey an order, he could do minor changes to how he executed that order. He just had to convince himself that his way was the best way his Master wanted the order to get done.
As he charged at Bai Shetai, Jack concluded that this would probably be his only opportunity to break away. The puppet's voice started to sound more and more reasonable by the day, and if he didn't want to become a pet he had to take this chance.
Jack ran in the middle of the pack of the charging spirit puppets, so when the first few of them made contact with Bai Shetai and were subsequently torn to shreds by his bare hands, he decided that it was probably time for plan B.
While he tried to come up with said plan B a dark shadow covered Bai Shetai from the sky. Jack threw a quick glance back and saw a huge black flag projecting some kind of energy of its own everywhere that had a trace of the brown energy.
When the next wave of puppets attacked Bai Shetai he seemed slower by a hair and even allowed a puppet to score a slash against his chest, tearing off the cloth that covered it and revealing the slabs of muscle underneath.
A slight slash over his right pectoral muscle looked like it might bleed sometime soon, but in a blink of an eye, it closed on its own.
Bai Shetai tore the offending puppet to extra small pieces.
One more wave stood in front of Jack, then he would have to charge. And he had no plan B.
Just as Bai Shetai finished the destruction of the third wave, a buzzing that Jack heard ever since the order to Attack was given, stopped. When he thought about it for a second it sounded a bit like the mumbling that Bai Xiatuo did earlier when he bound his spirit to the puppet.
Right after the sudden silence, a large portion of the midnight dark energy formed into something that looked like a claw from a demon and moved as quickly as lightning to grab Bai Shetai.
Jack, who was in the middle of his suicidal charge, rejoiced. He even had hope that he might survive. A split second after that, Bai Shetai tore his way out of the grip of the demonic hand.
Left with no more time to think Jack allowed his instincts to take over and let out a "Hooah!" roar from his bestial mouth.
Bai Shetai flicked an eye at him and threw a backhanded blow at Jack's head as a response.
Jack strained with his entire force of will and managed to convince himself that a better way to attack wouldn't be to go for the neck, but for the leg.
In that way, the front end of his huge body ducked under Bai Shetai's slam, but it still caught his lower back.
Bai Shetai's eyes flickered for a moment, but then he moved his focus back on the other beasts attacking him, and his brother who looked like he was preparing another little surprise for him.
Jack only heard a *CRACK* and then a wave of pain washed over him, along with a twister of colors as his perspective kept shifting at a speed of twenty meters per second.
After at least a minute of this, his body slammed hard into something harder.
It took everything Jack had to not pass out from the pain; the still ringing command to Attack helped out a bit.
After a few seconds, he found out that he lay in a deep hole in the ground. His crash broke a couple of meters of hard rock ceiling and buried him in an underground cavern.
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He tried to move his body, but only his front legs worked somewhat, he couldn't even feel his hind legs. Even so, he could still feel his Master and remember the command to Attack. So he slowly dragged his massive bulk with his barely functioning front legs towards his Master's presence.
While doing this he took a look around the cavern, and couldn't find any exits no matter how hard he looked. When he crawled to the wall where he could sense his Master in the distance he couldn't go any further. Even his once endless strength failed him in an attempt to break through the rock wall.
While his body scratched at the wall on autopilot, Jack celebrated silently in the deepest corner of his being 'Yes! Plan A was a success! Who mentioned a plan B? Plan Bs are for losers.' he even danced a little imaginary jig in his mind.
After a short minute of celebration, Jack sobered up and proceeded to the second stage of his plan.
He tried to convince the voice inside of the spirit puppet that the best way he could continue serving his Master's orders was to leave the puppet and fly to him where he could be given another puppet body and could continue the Attack.
No matter which way he phrased it the voice wouldn't allow him to do it. Jack had a hunch that no matter what he said the voice wouldn't believe him as long as he didn't give himself over to it fully.
He considered his options, and couldn't find another way out. So after a round of psyching himself up with the mantra 'I want to go to my Master. I have to fly to my Master.' he gave the last part of himself that he held back all this time over to the voice.
As soon as he did, the voice simply released him from his spirit puppet prison.
Jack shot out of the puppet like a cannonball and was halfway to Bai Xiatuo when he came to an abrupt halt. The sane part of his mind managed to wrestle control away from the servant part just in time. Without the influence of the puppet's voice, it became much easier to think straight.
He stared at the mixture of burning brown and midnight black energies in the horizon, a tiny feeling of longing appeared, but Jack quickly snuffed it out and turned to run in the other direction.
'It turned out that all that time learning to control the spirit puppet wasn't for nothing.' he thought as he flew away with the speed of the wind…
Back in the soul puppet strewn battlefield, after days of battle, there was no more midnight dark energy left in the sky, only the brown energy reigned, now lighter by a few shades.
Bai Shetai stood over his immobilized brother's body and said "Enough, brother. I do not wish to kill you, and you cannot kill me. Let us bring this to an end."
He extended an arm to his brother in a hope that he would take it and end their feud.
Bai Xiatuo stared at Bai Shetai with hate in his eyes for a few seconds, blinked, and sighed. His head dropped down to the rocky ground as he laughed out loud for a few seconds.
He looked back up at Bai Shetai and said "I will make you pay for what you did." as he grabbed the extended hand to pull himself up.
Bai Shetai started "I told you countless times already that you should just ask her about it and everything would…"
A blade made out of pure darkness slid out of Bai Xiatuo's left sleeve and in one fluid motion he stabbed Bai Shetai in the gut. The blade disintegrated and flew into the wound, the flesh around it started to turn grey at an alarming speed.
Bai Shetai stared at his brother's hate-filled eyes with sorrow and confusion, then he raised his hands to Bai Xiatuo's head, looked into his eyes for a second, and tore his brother's head from his body.
He focused all of his remaining energy on the stab wound, gave his brother's corpse one last look, and limped out into the sunset.
After a few days of flying, Jack felt the death of his captor, and that small part of him that still considered him his Master gave up on his mindless jabbering to go back and serve him.
But as time passed on he felt himself getting slower and slower, a strange kind of fatigue caught up to him. 'Crap, how do I stay here in this form?' he suddenly thought when he snapped out of the feeling of freedom that carried him on his flight for the last few days.
All the time in captivity he clung to the hope of running away. Now that he had his freedom, he didn't know what to do, nor how to survive in this world. He could even see tiny parts of his gaseous ball flake away into nothingness when he concentrated his sight on his body.
Just as he sensed the first hints of despair start to creep into his mind, he felt a slight tugging at his being somewhere to his left side, or on what he perceived as his left side.
He mustered all of his remaining energy and sped towards that tugging.
In a quarter of an hour, he found himself flying over a small village made out of a few dozen huts.
He flew straight down towards one of the huts.
In it, he heard the pained cries of a woman and a couple of other female voices that sounded supportive.
'She's giving birth.' Jack thought with wonder as he entered the hut. He felt the tugging coming from the crying woman's bulging belly.
'Wait, can I…' he stopped thinking and flew straight at the belly. But something repelled him straight through the wall, and almost a klick away from the village.
He shook his being a few times and flew back to the hut. In it, the woman's cries were getting louder.
Jack took his time to observe the situation. When he focused his perception on the people in the room he saw a microscopic film of something on their bodies. He somehow knew he had no way to get past it. So he decided to wait it out.
Just as the woman's cries neared the crescendo, Jack felt something in the air above him.
He quickly flew out of the hut and stared at the sky. There, a rift spanning dozens of meters appeared.
Jack could feel the familiar pull from it. He felt an instinctive kind of certainty that if he flew into that rift he would return to the River of Souls from which Bai Xiatuo took him.
Just as he debated with himself whether he should do that, a tiny pure white ball flew out of the rift and headed straight for the hut he hovered over.
At that moment Jack let out a primal "NO!" scream from his entire being and flew straight at the pure white ball.
He didn't care what he had to do; he wouldn't let his second chance at life slip through his fingers.
His dark grey ball slammed into the tiny white ball like a truck and flew with it into the sky.
Jack felt immense pain from the contact but was sure that the smaller ball had it worse. He focused all of the might of his will on destroying the pure white ball.
Just before it puffed out of existence the white ball let out an indignant scream that shook Jack to his core. It almost made him dissipate as well. But he hung on and dragged his tired and wounded ball back to the hut.
In it, the women started to raise their voices in what sounded like panic. The baby wasn't moving.
Jack looked at its tiny body and saw no protection from him. He gave it his all and flew straight into the baby's body, losing his consciousness in the process.
The baby started to cry.