“Get up, Yang Shao. There is still more to be done.” A man’s voice quietly called out from just outside of Shao’s blurred line of sight.

Slowly, painfully, Shao raised his eyes to see Shen Jian standing beside him. The green-clad cultivator surveyed the scene of devastation with sympathetic eyes that were, nonetheless, not surprised. The man had seen this happen before, of that Shao was certain.

Shao tried to choke out a few words, but his eyes once more caught sight of the pile of discarded trash that had once been his closest friends. The shock of seeing the image once more caused him to lean forward and vomit violently upon the ground. His body lurched with uncontrolled sobbing and emetic heaving.

“Yang Shao!” Shen Jian shouted with much more authority than the first time. Like an adult picking up a toddler, Shen Jian reached down and lifted Shao up by the back of his collar. The process of lifting Shao seemed to require no effort at all on the part of the older cultivator. “There’s still time for us to save some of your kinsmen and kill those responsible.”

With a look of a drowning man reaching out for a life-saving piece of driftwood, Shao turned to Shen Jian and asked, “You can find the people that did this?”

“When demonic cultivators consume life energy, they manipulate ki in a very specific and noticeable way. I can sense this manipulation from nearly thirty li away. Yes, I can find them.”

Shao didn’t understand most of what Shen Jian said, but he picked up on the most important part of the explanation. The massacre at Bluecrest was committed by “demonic cultivators,” and Shen Jian could help him track them down.

In a heartbeat, the debilitating sadness filling Shao’s heart transformed into cataclysmic, all-consuming hatred. The tears in his eyes dried immediately as if evaporated by the fiery rage filling his stomach. Though he had been supported entirely by Shen Jian’s hand a moment before, Shao’s footing on the ground became firm.

The young man turned toward Shen Jian and grabbed him firmly by his green haori. With eyes filled with hate and voice filled with vitriol, Shao said, “Help me find the worthless pieces of human shit that did this, and I’ll become your student. I’m going to tear them apart with my own two hands and deliver their mutilated bodies to whoever it was that had the misfortune of spawning such detestable parasites!”

Without waiting for a response from Shen Jian, Yang Shao turned and trudged toward the center of the village square. He looked once more at the pile of corpses, but this time his eyes were only looking for signs of disturbance. If there were many of those demonic cultivators, they would certainly leave a noticeable trail leading out of town. As Shao expected, he was soon able to find a significant disturbance in the dirt leading north out of the village square. It would take several hundred people traveling as a single group to make such a disturbance in the ground. Even someone as unskilled in tracking as Shao could follow the trail.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

“There’s no need to search for clues in the dirt,” Shen Jian said. “I’ve been sensing periodic ki surges from the northeast for the past few minutes.”

“Then shut up and lead me to those so-called demonic cultivators,” Shao spat.

The two cultivators took several steps in the same direction as the large path carved into the soft dirt underfoot. Almost automatically, Shen Jian turned his head back toward the corpse pile marking the center of the village square, and a strange expression appeared on his face. In quick succession, the older man performed a three-step routine that closely resembled a ritualistic dance or martial arts kata. On the third step, Shen Jian punched his arm forward, and a blinding bout of bright orange flame shot out of his extended fist. The torrent of flame struck the pile of corpses, causing the flesh to blacken instantaneously before being engulfed completely in flame.

In an instant, the discarded corpse pile was transformed into a funeral pyre that reached high into the air. Wordlessly, Shen Jian turned away from the conflagration in the center of the village square and continued following the path toward the demonic cultivators. Shao’s emotions were a roiling cauldron, and he didn’t know if he was angry or thankful for Shen Jian’s act of destruction. Instead of trying to parse the storm of thoughts raging in his mind, Shao tore his gaze away from Bluecrest Village and began to follow Shen Jian.

“You should probably know what a demonic cultivator is before we reach them,” Shen Jian began to explain. “They’re normal cultivators who grew disillusioned with the normal methods of cultivation and turned to evil techniques for self-improvement like consuming the spirit energy of mortal and cultivator alike.”

“Evil? Aren’t all cultivators evil?” Shao said with no hint of humor in his voice. His tone made it clear that he wouldn’t take it well if Shen Jian pointed out that Shao was a cultivator himself.

Reading the room, Shen Jian bit his tongue and stopped himself from responding with a light-hearted joke. Instead, he shrugged the comment off and said, “Disciples of the Shigong Sect and the Three Clans of Haishan have standing orders to kill demonic cultivators on sight. We can assume the people we’re hunting are desperate and, most likely, of the first realm. When a cultivator plateaus at…”

“Hold on,” Shao interjected. His eyes had been locked on the ground for the duration of Shen Jian’s explanation of demonic cultivators, and he spoke up at that moment because he noticed an inconsistency between their path and the direction Shen Jian was leading them. When their journey brought them north of the village far enough that the buildings no longer blocked most of their possible paths, Shen Jian began to diverge from the trail in the ground. The large, obvious trail left by hundreds of villagers continued to the northwest, but Shen Jian was walking toward the northeast. “You’re going the wrong way.”

Shen Jian looked down and saw the foot trail. With an uncertain expression, he said, “The ki disturbances are definitely coming from the northeast. Maybe their path curved over time.”

Shao considered the situation for a moment, and his instincts screamed at him that this was misdirection. The attackers must have known that there were two cultivators in the village. In fact, they must have timed their attack to occur exactly when he and Shen Jian were out of time. If Shen Jian was right and these cultivators were relatively weak, they would try to evade Shao and Shen Jian through any means necessary.

“We need to split up,” Shao commanded before turning fiercely in the direction of the foot trail.

“What are you…?” Shen Jian began to ask, but Shao couldn’t hear the end of his sentence. By the time Shen Jian reached the fourth word of his sentence, Shao had sprinted more than thirty cun in the direction of the dirt trail.