A pit formed in Shao’s stomach as he realized the significance of Shen Jian’s statement. The older cultivator had treated everything like a joke ever since he arrived in Bluecrest Village several days before, yet his face expressed actual fear as he told of the imminent attack on the village.

“We need to get back!” Shao said without hesitation.

“Wait. You’ll need your weapons.”

In the second Shao had allowed Shen Jian to leave his sight, the man had crossed the distance to the brown bull’s bloody corpse and removed Bolin’s steel dagger from the creature’s flank. He tossed the knife over to Shao in a smooth underhand throw, and Shao plucked it out of the air with ease.

An instant later, Shen Jian had moved more than a dozen cun over to the destroyed iron staff. Wordlessly, the green-clad cultivator gripped both halves of the staff in his hands and stuck them together. The iron staff glowed a dull orange where Shen Jian pressed the two halves together as if it had been heated in the heart of a blacksmith’s forge. The cultivator pressed one hand to the glowing metal and smoothed it over so that the entire staff became one continuous length of metal.

Seconds after the older man was done molding the staff into a better shape, the orange glow subsided. He spun the iron staff on one finger to test its weight before tossing the massive staff over to Shao like it weighed nothing at all. Shao caught the iron staff in both hands. The momentum knocked the air out of him and pushed him back a few steps, but he did not complain.

In any other circumstance, Shao would have commented on the strange sacred art Shen Jian had used to reforge the iron staff in seconds, but his thoughts were focused entirely on his village. He didn’t know what was attacking his village, and he didn’t know what Shen Jian had sensed to put him on edge like that, but he knew the problem was serious.

Faster than a horse galloping at full speed, Shao sprinted through the forest back to his village. He held his iron staff firmly in both hands, ready to kill whatever he had to in order to protect the people he had lived with for all of his life. The words of Gongsun Bolin played in his head over and over as he ran. Shao was the only one who could protect the village in a world of divine beasts and uncaring cultivators.

He also recalled Shen Jian’s words. The Dao would not allow him to “languish in obscurity.” Had the Dao - the primordial force that guided all things to their proper place - decided to punish him for his refusal to become Shen Jian’s student.

Speaking of Shen Jian, Shao looked around and realized that the green-clad cultivator was nowhere to be seen. They must have gotten separated in the forest, and Shen Jian must have fallen behind in the unfamiliar environment. Shao didn’t particularly care. If he could kill a Zhouji, he was sure he could beat whatever was threatening the village.

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Even at such a speed, it still took Shao a painful fifteen minutes to reach the village. In their hunt for the divine bull, the two cultivators had traveled more than five li away from Bluecrest. Eventually, Shao reached the outskirts of the village carrying with him the momentum of a runaway wagon. He was forced to dig his heels into the ground in order to stop himself from crashing into one of Bluecrest’s flimsy wooden buildings.

With his momentum halted, Shao focused his hearing to listen for the sounds of combat. Momentary relief flooded through him as he realized that he couldn’t hear anything. This relief transformed into terror when he realized he couldn’t hear anything; he couldn’t hear the normal day-to-day conversations coming from the village square, and he couldn’t hear the shopkeepers selling their wares near the docks.

Shao frantically ran down the same dirt road that he always took when he left the village. It was the same road that Shen Jian walked down when he arrived in the village. That road, which carried so many memories for Shao and represented in his juvenile mind the opportunity for adventure, was littered with corpses.

Once Shao reached the forge, all of his greatest fears were realized at once. The bodies of more than a dozen men were piled haphazardly outside of the Gongsun family forge. That must have been where the villagers put up some paltry resistance against the attackers, Shao thought numbly. Most of the men in the village militia laid there, dead on the ground.

Though Shao should have recognized every corpse there, the damage dealt to their inert forms made it hard to determine their identities. Limbs were torn off, viscera was splayed across the road, and blood suffused into the dirt below. A powerful nausea filled Shao as he realized that their corpses resembled the corpse of the divine bull presently decaying in the forest five li to the west. There was no doubt in Shao’s mind; those men had been killed by cultivators.

Shao spotted one of the corpses lying against the forge’s outer wall. Unlike most of the others, this corpse had managed to keep a grip on its weapon, even after death. The corpse had been torn apart at the midsection, causing its intestines to trail behind it like ribbons on a parade float.

Some grim compulsion pushed Shao toward that corpse. He knelt down and looked at the corpse’s face. It was only when Shao’s face was a hand’s breadth away from the corpse’s visage that he knew he was looking at the body of Gongsun Bolin. The man who put his trust in Shao and painstakingly forged the weapons used to kill the divine bull died defending his village.

Shao wanted to collapse into a ball and cry, but the knowledge that there might be more villagers that he could save pushed him forward. Slowly, he trudged forward, desperately straining his ears to listen for the sound of survivors.

Eventually, he forced himself to turn the corner to the village square. In the center of the village square was a pile of corpses, killed messily like the ones near the forge. There must have been more than a hundred bodies lying there, though it was hard to get a decent count. The destroyed corpses had been thrown into a pile nearly as high as a man, making it hard to determine where one corpse ended and another began. The villagers, once individuals with their own fears and aspirations, had fused into a charnel mass of flesh and suffering.

It was all too much for Shao to take. Seeing this testament to depravity, Shao fell to his knees and wept.