1

My swollen tongue slid over cracked lips. I snagged a thin layer of dead skin with my teeth and spit it out. It stung.

A slow river. A shrinking stream. A single drop. I longed for anything to quench my thirst, but scanning the downward path, I found nothing. This land I trod was drier than a sky serpent's shed scales. 

The winding mountain path carried me through forested hills and turned out of sight. The sun's rays found a way to torture me, weaving through the branches, stalking me.

And then like an answer bestowed on me from the Ancestors, I beheld a pond. 

My sigh of relief turned sour in a mere breath, spoiled by the stagnation. The stench of the water was far more pungent than cattle droppings. It was a cesspool of insectoid carousing, the kind that produced winged blood-suckers. The only water I had discovered in a day and a half was of course corrupted. 

Out of habit, I clenched the hilt of my double-edged jian. My knuckles split and bled a little more. 

Such is the life of a youxia, wandering evermore, forsaken by master, by clan, and even by nature herself.

The high pitched buzz of a large mosquito grated my ears. The mosquito landed in between the claw track scars that raked the side of my face and injected its needle nose. I slapped at it, expecting to find the mosquito flattened on my calloused palm. It eluded me.

I closed my eyes, breathing deep. The buzzing wavered like the unconfident erhu player I’d heard at the last wine house, whose unsteady bowing hand could not fiddle, and his stringing hand lacked the precision to finger a pure note. I almost sliced his instrument in half. Oh, what I’d give for a sip of fermented mijiu.

My jian flashed forward, then back into the sheath. The halved pieces of the bloodsucker drifted to the ground. I grinned. Sword mastery never died.

More buzzing droned and grew tenfold, as if the remaining mosquitoes sought vengeance for their fallen brother. They smelled life throbbing in my veins. I jogged along, not willing to give up any more blood to them.

The trees grew dense, though they were all but dead. Less and less light penetrated the old woods, despite the branches being bare, the bark cracked, like scabbed skin. I paid special attention so that my wooden clog sandals did not catch in the splits of the dirt road, for it would surely send me sprawling.

Further down the hill I came upon another putrid pool of stale water and another cloud of mosquitoes. 

And that's when I heard it. The grave cry of a tortured, demonic soul whined like a squeaky wagon wheel on a rocky road.

“Yokai,” I growled. “But what kind of demon?”

The echoing screams of the spirit crawled over my neck and down my back. Waves of cold fear dashed against my confidence.

My hand instinctively clasped the jian hilt. An old proverb invaded my mind, compelling me to recite it. “To subdue the enemy without fighting is the peak of skill.” I quickened my steps until I was running downhill.

Though it was my way of life, the jian was not the answer to every conflict. Better to have no conflict at all. Especially when crossing the path of a wilderness yokai. Further down, I neared a third stagnant pool. I realized the pools were the remains of decomposing terraced rice paddy fields, clearly neglected for some time. 

The further down I descended, the thicker the odor became. Each terrace pool was worse than the last, as if the liquid itself taunted me. Here water sat in abundance, yet undrinkable. My tongue shriveled like a sunbaked cherry. 

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Terraced rice fields were unforgiving work. It took diligence to simply sculpt the land, and after all that, you still needed the patience to wait weeks, even months for crops. I would never understand the life of a farmer. Putting all of their hope in the handle of a plow. It required too much wishful thinking. I’d rather rely on the rewards garnered by the edge of my blade. 

My own years of training came to mind, the shaping I endured from childhood to maturity, sharpened into a weapon for my master. And then, in a moment, after one foolish mistake, all my favor fled, and my warrior title was stripped from me, replaced with nothing but shame.

All my years of shaping and service wasted.

Much like the remnants of the rice field. All this work to reshape the land ruined. 

The demonic yokai screamed again, this time further in the distance, but no less menacing.

I made the mistake of glancing over my shoulder to check for the demon and my clog sandals sunk into a fissure on the path. I tumbled head over heels and rolled several times before coming to a stop on my back. Overhead the gray sky weighed down on me.

Laughter met my groaning. Squinting and bearing my teeth, I dared the laughter to fall on my ears again.

On a stump just off the beaten path sat a cross-legged bald monk. His fingers contorted, forming the Om chakra. He feigned meditation, but I could see the edges of his lips curling up as he stifled a snicker.

Rage compelled me to my feet. My jian jumped into my hand. “Mock me again, monk,” I rasped. 

“You’re the one trying to take the easy, cursed path down the mountain. Serves you right. You should have known not to tempt the dorotabo.”

Dorotabo. The name of the muck yokai echoed in my mind. I had not given much thought as to what type of demon haunted the fields of the forest. Of course a demon of the mire was behind the rice field destruction. I wondered if the dorotabo manifested after good cropland had been laid to waste, or if the monster corrupted the land itself when it made the rice field its abode. Which came first, the dragon, or the hatchling egg? 

“I did not know a curse resided on this land. I’m not from here,” I said. 

“Obviously.”

I growled. “Grant me some water, monk.”

“I crave no earthly elements. I do not have what you seek.”

“I’m trying to find my way through to—” 

The monk cut me off. “As long as your mind dwells on earthly things you cannot transcend beyond your mortal shell to find what you thirst for.” His nasally, enlightened words cut me to the quick. I did not want to admit he had uncovered the heart of my issue. Perhaps intuition informed him that as a wandering warrior, I was most likely a shameful youxia. 

He chuckled.

“You laugh at my earthly plight from your high loft?”

“Humor is healing for the soul.”

“So my hurt is your humor,” I barked. “Let's see how fast you heal after my sword tastes your flesh.” 

2

He dipped his head under my jian’s edge. 

A walking staff leapt into his hands from somewhere behind the stump. He struck me on the head. As I reeled back, he jutted his thumb into the center of my forehead. My inner sight was opened and I fell through mist and darkness. 

A black void speckled with pinpoints of sparkling light surrounded me. A shooting star whizzed past, forcing me to lunge out of the way. Across from me hovered the monk in an ethereal body. His entire being seemed to be made of light and void, like a constellation. He jabbed me with his staff. Confusion racked my mind down to my core essence, until I surmised he had projected both of us to the astral plane. 

We danced through space and time, our clashes crumbled planets and sliced through stars. My ethereal jian locked against his mystic staff, his glowing face was a breath away. I head-butted him and my laughter echoed into eternity. With a flick of his wrist he flung the staff and grew into a tiger of pure star fire. It roared and I fell, passing through a thick nebula. Colors I could not comprehend coalesced around my soul. 

My scarred face burned as if a dormant fire lay beneath the skin. In the recesses of my mind I knew that the creature that gave me that scar left a remnant of itself within me. But I dared not summon the source of my shame. So I yielded.

The tiger pounced, forcing me through a black hole. I fell up, stretched into myself, and shrunk in all directions. 

When my face collided with the dirt path again I almost did not register the pain. Almost. 

While my head spun, the monk sat back down on the stump and resumed his meditation. 

I dusted off my robes and patted the dirt from my loose trousers. “All illusions and nothing more,” I said. “I just remembered, I have my own water. Here.” I mustered up the last of the liquid in my throat and hawked it at the edge of the stump, just missing the monk. Before he could react, I sheathed my blade and stormed off. Parched, I pretended not to hear his smug snickering.