CHAPTER

12

NOT TO FIGHT

JIEYUAN

—∞—

What came next wasn’t the wet, crunching sounds of flesh being torn and bone being shattered—the sounds you’d expect to come from the collision of a fullgauntlet and a face—but the dull ring of metal meeting metal.

Daojue’s own fullgauntleted hand was wrapped against Meiyao’s, holding her fist not even an inch away from his face. Holding it in place, firmly, steadily. Daojue had snapped his hand up so quickly Jieyuan only barely saw him move.

Daojue stared down at Meiyao, his hand still clenched around her first. Meiyao stared back up at him, her fist grasped in his hand. From Jieyuan’s position a little off to the side, he could see the side of her face as she glared murder at Daojue, green eyes aflame. And Daojue’s face as he stared down at her with those cool, steely violet eyes of his.

A beat. Neither moved. Just stood there, like they were locked in place. Two beats. Three.

Meiyao jerked her arm back, wrenching her hand away. She didn’t retreat, though. She stood her ground not even a foot away from Daojue. Both hands now on the hilt of her finesaber, holding it down by her side but with such visible tension that it was clear she could have it up and swinging in an instant.

Daojue, for his part, without taking his eyes off Meiyao, plucked his spear from where it’d been stabbing the onyx gleam wolf he’d killed, and got it in a one-handed grip, blade facing down, shaft half-cradled under his right arm.

“Retreat,” Meiyao said, slowly, voice frosty. “Retreat. That’s what I said. Retreat. What were you thinking?”

The surprise from Meiyao’s abrupt attack had long since faded, and Jieyuan wanted nothing more than to butt his way in, to get involved, to join Meiyao in giving Daojue a piece of his mind and then some. The fire inside wanted out. Wanted release. It burned in his muscles. Pumped between his ears like bellows. He wanted to punch Daojue’s face in. Could see, his fist striking just like Meiyao’s, except there’d be blood flying, splattering.

He stepped forward, more than ready—excited, really, burning with it—to jump back into the fray. But then he stopped dead as a chill wrapped around him, running up and down his spine, freezing his nape. The very same cold caress he’d felt earlier that day, when Yunzhu had tried molesting Daojue in Ruby Square. And it gave him a startlingly clear impression that getting involved would be a very bad idea. His last idea, even.

Daojue had no reply, and Meiyao didn’t wait for one, either. And whatever it was that he was feeling, she clearly wasn’t. Either that, or she could brush it off much better than he could.

“You rot,” she spat. “Come on, then. Tell me. Are your eyes rotten? Did you not see the other two wolves? Or maybe your ears are rot, and didn’t hear my call to retreat? Or are you neither deaf nor blind but simply out of your rotten mind?”

Meiyao raised her finesaber a fraction higher. Daojue had no reaction.

“Because if it’s your rotten eyes you’re not using, I’ll carve them out of you,” she said, whisper-low but with the hardness of winter’s steel. “If it’s your ears, I’ll rip them off. And if it’s your brain, if that’s what you’re not using, then surely you won’t mind me putting my rotting saber through your rotten skull.” Meiyao bared her teeth, lips pulling back viciously, eyes narrow and wild, outright snarling at Daojue.

Now Daojue was moving too, slowly, drawing his spear up. The chill grew stronger, colder. And Jieyuan was struck by the notion that this situation called for fixing, not breaking. But he couldn’t. He was in no condition to play peacemaker. Not in the right frame of mind. Far from it. Already it was taking him all he had to stay his hand. His heart was still hammering, and right now all he wanted was bloodshed. To let loose, to just kick and punch and stab.

He took a deep breath. Then another. A little more clarity pierced through the anger. He looked on. Daojue and Meiyao, facing each other, both ready. And the feeling only got stronger. The feeling that even if he held himself back, that wouldn’t be enough. That doing nothing wasn’t enough. Rather, he needed to do something about this. Fix it. Neither Daojue nor Meiyao would give up ground. They might very well fight to the death. He couldn’t let that happen. He needed both of them. For the Hunt. For the Mysteries. For his future. But he knew, knew, that if he moved, he wouldn’t be able to resist, he’d give in and he’d only make it all that much worse—

“Calm down,” he whispered. Commanded.

Chroma vanished from his soulprism. And so did his rage. Cool clarity replaced it. He shivered. Heavens, but he’d have to thank Maeva later. Or at least his hallucination of her.

Now for Meiyao and Daojue. Jieyuan struck out with his spear, the blade piercing the air between Meiyao and Daojue. He held it in that position, the blade hovering there, in the middle of his two teammates. “So. How about we don’t kill each other? What do you two say to that? Sounds good?”

Meiyao turned her head to face him, slowly, but keeping Daojue in her line of sight. “What?” she demanded, eyes flicking from Daojue, to the spearhead Jieyuan had placed right in front of her eyes, to Jieyuan himself.

Daojue similarly turned a fraction to look at him, and his teammate had that terrifying, fathomless look in his eyes that promised nothing good and everything bad.

“This? All of this? It’s stupid. Won’t do us any good,” Jieyuan said, holding his spear steady. He kept sacrificing chroma to Absolute Will Command. That was the only reason he still had his cool. And even then, even calm as he was now, he was still very much so tempted to throw down with Daojue. It felt so wrong, so hypocritical of him to try and mediate things. But cold reasoning was what was driving him now, moving him. “We’re here to hunt beasts, not each other. So, like I said, let’s not. All right?”

“Are you serious?” Wide-eyed disbelief bled into Meiyao's tight-jawed rage. “He just—”

“Oh, trust me, I know,” Jieyuan cut in. Deciding it’d be worth the risk, he let his spear drop slightly and took three large strides, placing him directly between Daojue and Meiyao, his body almost touching the both of them on either side. He had his back facing Daojue, trusting that if Daojue would’ve taken the initiative to attack, he’d have done so already. And that Daojue wouldn’t attack someone with their back turned to him. Out of all the impressions he’d gotten from Daojue so far, backstabbing and sneaky weren’t among them. No, Daojue was as straightforward as they came. Jieyuan did his best to ignore the frosty feeling that still lingered in his spine. “But even if you two fight, even if you beat him black and blue, that won’t do you any good. Or do you really think a good beatdown is what it’ll take to get Daojue to change his ways?”

Now that he’d cooled down—forcefully as it was—he’d started doubting that there was anything they could do to that effect. Metalsoul was the most stubborn alignment, and Daojue elevated his stubbornness to an art form. Jieyuan also didn’t say that he doubted Daojue would be the one to lose if a fight broke out. Knew better than that. Meiyao was good. Borderline peerless, really. One of the best he’d ever seen. But not the best. Meiyao was second-best. Daojue was best, something else altogether. Jieyuan wouldn’t be confident about their odds even if he and Meiyao teamed up. If he told Meiyao as much, though, he suspected she’d run her saber through both him and Daojue at the same time. She was certainly close enough for it.

“I…” Meiyao shut her mouth. She glared at him, and then at Daojue, still visibly incensed. She tensed, and so did he, readying himself. But then she slammed her saber back in its sheathe. “Rot you,” she said, and Jieyuan wasn’t sure whether that was for him or Daojue. Both, probably. But the chill he’d been feeling was gone.

She spun on her feet and stalked off in the direction she’d come from, feet slamming hard and loud against the crystal ground.

Jieyuan, still tense, glanced back at Daojue. His teammate stared down at him. Sure enough, Daojue’s eyes were still those fathomless pools, and whatever apprehension he’d felt at Meiyao attacking came nowhere to what he felt as he locked gazes with Daojue, even though that deathly chill from earlier had vanished at some point. But all Daojue did was split his spear, sheathe its halves, and turn back around to regard the corpse of the gleam wolf by his feet.

Like that was the end of it and Jieyuan wasn’t even there. It was a very good thing Jieyuan hadn’t stopped powering the Command just yet. Beneath the layer of calm, he could still faintly feel the rage bubbling. No matter what he said, he still wanted more than anything to lay into Daojue himself, even if he did believe—even if he did know—that it wouldn’t do anyone any good. Anger and reason were as unlikely a pair as any.

He wanted to do something about it still, didn’t want to just let the matter go, but nothing came to mind. Even his Command-sharpened mind couldn’t come up with something that wouldn’t end up causing more problems than it’d solve. He couldn’t risk outright alienating Daojue or Meiyao. Not when he might very well need one of them—if not both of them—to get to the bottom of the Weave Mystery.

Paying Daojue no further mind, he looked off into where Meiyao had gone. She’d returned to the place where she’d killed her onyx gleam wolf. She was half-bent over the head of the corpse, her saber singing in the air as she cut at it. Her strikes were steady, deliberate. He watched as she removed some teeth from its mouth, then its tongue.

Refiner, he reminded himself. The body parts of chromal beasts were as much an ingredient in refining formulas as chromal plants were. And that also reminded him he’d yet to collect his own hunt token—the proof of hunt—from the onyx gleam wolf he’d killed.

With a tired, heavy sigh, Jieyuan made his way back across the trees to the wolf he’d killed. He found it just as he’d left it, lying slumped on the ground in a pool of its own blood. The dust beacon had started dissipating, but only barely. It’d linger for a while still. He crossed back into the threshold of the beacon dust cloud, holding his breath again, and came to a stop by the wolf’s corpse.

Then he released the Command.

It took all his effort to keep himself still as the Command-imposed calm left him. He took a deep breath, then another, then three—then he noted the sweet scent feeling his lungs, remembered where exactly he was, what exactly he was breathing in, and stopped himself midway through a fourth breath.

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He could’ve laughed. Almost did. Some of the anger bled away, the edge of it wearing out. He’d killed a third-sign Redsoul beast—had done it as a second-sign—and here he was, not celebrating but troubled over his teammates and now hoping he hadn’t just breathed in enough poison to send himself into wretched, burning agony.

Biting his lip, Jieyuan forced himself to focus on the wolf, on the corpse. He eyed the gap running along its back and wondered whether he could use that, but decided against it. After a moment’s consideration, he placed one fullgreaved foot under the beast’s bulk, burrowing it between the wolf’s stomach and the floor until most of his foot had disappeared out of sight. Then he called on his aura to augment his strength and kicked up.

His leg strained with the effort, but he managed to kick the beast’s side up and off the ground. The hulking corpse swayed as it lingered for a moment lying with just one side on the ground, before tipping back in the other direction. There was a wet, squelching sound as the corpse rolled over in the pool of its blood, some of it splattering Jieyuan on his legs. And some sharper, brighter noises as the crystal coating it scraped against the gleamstone on the ground. But now the beast was in what he’d judged to be the right position, its back against the floor and its stomach to the skies.

Jieyuan ran his eyes over the corpse’s underside, studying the literal gaps in its armor. The one cutting the entire length of the beast’s underside seemed the most promising. He wasn’t sure how to go about this, hadn’t done anything even remotely similar to it before. He was a merchant’s son, not a butcher’s. But he reckoned he could figure it out.

Drawing on his aura again—he was running low on his natural strength now—he kicked off the ground and into the air, landing on top of the beast’s stomach. Most parts of his body still ached something fierce, sending stabs of complaints with every movement he made, but as with all pains besides the Pains, it was nothing he couldn’t outright ignore.

He aura-lashed himself to the wolf’s corpse so that he wouldn’t have to worry overmuch about his balance. Onyx gleam wolves were big, but not so much he could just prance around on its stomach, just big enough for him to spread his feet a tad while on top of it.

He reached out with his soulsense. Gleam beasts all had a gleam core—a roughly sphere-shaped core of gleamstone—inside them. That was the hunt token they were supposed to retrieve from the beasts they’d killed during the Gleamstone Hunt. He’d read the location of the gleam cores varied from race to race of gleam beasts, but they tended to be near the chest. Near the heart.

It took him a while, but he eventually found it. A very small, third-shade red round shape, just beside the much bigger form that was obviously the beast’s heart.

Jieyuan shifted his hold on his spear, slipped the blade right into the fleshy line over the corpse’s chest, and then threw his weight into it. The tip of the blade sunk out of sight. Jieyuan put pressure on it until he couldn’t see most of the blade anymore, then squaring his shoulders began pulling the shaft towards himself. Blood bubbled out of the cut as he widened it.

Though the spear was at the same soulsign as the beast, this wasn’t nearly as easy as he’d thought it’d be. Soon he was gritting his teeth while pulling back. Probably there was some easier way of going about this. This would have to do, though.

Midway through the beast’s stomach, he reckoned that was enough, and pulled the spearhead out with a wet sound and another little spurt of blood. He waved the spear away from him in a quick, snappy arc, and the blood coating the blade splattered out. He then split the shaft and slid the spear-halves back into their sheathes.

Next, he knelt down on top of the beast, grabbed onto its gleamstone coat on either side of the cut he’d made on its chest, and started pulling in opposite directions. It gave with surprising ease, but only up to a point. He stared down at the larger gap he’d torn open, looking like a gruesome crystal window into its body. Thick dark meat coated the beast’s rib cage. The rib cage, which was very much so in his way, and with much thicker ribs than he’d expected.

Now there was the question of how to get to the gleam core. Hack away at the ribs? The gaps between them didn’t seem big enough to stick his arms inside.

“You should’ve cut it open from the back.”

Jieyuan turned around. Meiyao was standing just outside the threshold of the lingering beacon dust, leaning against the trunk of a crystal tree.

“The gaps between the bones are wider there,” Meiyao said, nodding down at the corpse. Then her bright green gaze was tracing his body. “You really did a number on yourself, didn’t you? Tough fight?”

He looked down at himself. The arms of his robes… well, his robes didn’t really have arms anymore. That first tail strike had already ripped them open beyond repair. The right arm was the worst, what with the gleamstone wolf having used it as a chew toy. What was left of his robes there was nothing more than the black and red stripes of his outer and inner robes.

“Something like that,” he agreed. In comparison, her robes were for the most part pristine. All that looked out of place on her was her ruffled hair—and it didn’t take away from her appearance any. By this point, Jieyuan doubted Meiyao could look worse even if she tried to.

He tore his eyes away from her, and without even thinking, used his cleansing ring to tidy himself. The moment he felt the refreshing surge of it wash over him, he remembered that he’d still have to dig through the onyx gleam wolf’s corpse for its gleam core, so he’d be getting himself all bloody again in short order. He’d wasted his chroma for nothing—and it wasn’t the insignificant amount it usually was. The blood of a third-sign redsoul beast took much more chroma to vanish than mundane dirt and sweat.

He swallowed back a groan. He really needed to get a handle on himself around Meiyao. At least he didn’t go so far as changing his robes. He’d brought two spare robes with him in his glyph-stretch pouch—it was standard practice for cultivators to bring at least one change of clothes of robes when venturing out of the sect or when they knew they’d be getting into fights—but he didn’t need to replace his current ones just yet. Only the arms were ruined, so they were still serviceable enough. If he went around changing his robes every time they got torn up some, he’d use up all the ones he had long before the Gleamstone Hunt was over.

“That’s Rongkai’s dust beacon you used, right?” Meiyao had her eyes on the red haze around him. “The one infused with Cultivator’s Agony?”

“Just the one.” Jieyuan considered Meiyao for a moment. She seemed to be in a much better mood. Talkative, even. “Say, earlier, when you were fighting, I saw—”

Meiyao immediately took on a guarded expression and narrowed her eyes at him.

To press, or not to press the subject? Jieyuan didn’t take long to decide, letting the rest of the words die in his throat. Whether her glowing and that red haze had been some realmskill of hers and what it did wasn’t something he needed to know. It’d be nice to know, both to understand her situation better and so he could account it in future battles, but it wasn’t worth risking this olive branch she was offering him right now. Though why she wouldn’t admit to having a realmskill was curious all on its own. “Never mind.”

Meiyao kept her eyes fixed on him for a while longer. Then she pushed herself off the tree and walked into the beacon dust. Jieyuan watched on as she approached, confused and just a mite wary. She didn’t look as closed off, but she didn’t look exactly friendly, either. Just… stony. Daojue-like.

She jumped onto the gleam wolf in front of him. “Watch,” was all she said before she unsheathed her saber, briefly inspected the gash he’d torn wider on the wolf’s chest, then stabbed her saber between the beast’s ribs, at an angle. Then, she crouched and leaned one elbow against the flat side of the blade, pushing back against it. The saber, in turn, pushed away the rib it was pressed under, opening a gap. Jieyuan saw a little more of the beast’s insides then, but he couldn’t tell much what was what among the mounds of flesh and viscera and blood.

One arm still pressed against the saber, Meiyao stuck her other arm inside the gap she’d widened between the ribs, sinking it a little past the elbow. No hesitation whatsoever as she put it in. Barely a moment later, she removed her arm, the cloth around it dark, drenched with blood, her fullgauntlet slick with it. In her hand was a small, round piece of gleamstone, about the size of a fingernail. Like the hand holding it, the stone was thoroughly bloodied, but there were a couple blood-free spots on it that revealed a glistening, dark gray surface exactly like the onyx crystal coat of the onyx gleam wolf. She tossed it to him, then pointed down at the wolf with the blood-soaked arm that had just been elbow-deep in gore. “Mind if I take some parts?”

Jieyuan wiped the gleam core on his robe, checked it wasn’t all bloody anymore, and put it away in his glyph-stretch pouch. “Have at it.”

Meiyao nodded, hopped off the wolf, and made her way around over to its head. Jieyuan jumped off after her and stood a little to the side, watching her work. Watching her, really, ruby robes and brown hair and all, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to stop right now.

He did pay some attention to what she was doing, though. It was hard not to. Meiyao was all precise movements. There was little doubt that she knew what she was doing. He’d briefly watched her extract parts from the wolf she’d killed from a distance earlier, and now that he had a front-seat view of the action, it only looked all the more impressive. Even more so in this place, in the Gleamstone Forest. As much as he was a cultivator now, the wonder he’d always felt for the chromal world had hardly faded, and the Gleamstone Valley was easily the highlight, good and bad, of the chromal world so far.

Meiyao did quick work of the corpse. Once she was done, having collected the beast’s eyes, tongue, nails, and some other parts Jieyuan wasn’t quite sure what they were supposed to be, she beckoned him over, and they left the dust cloud together.

They found Daojue meditating close to where they’d left him, legs crossed and eyes closed under a tree near the first wolf.

Meiyao sent a glare Daojue’s way, then huffed, gave Jieyuan a curt nod, and stalked off. She came to a stop under another tree, one a good distance from Daojue’s but still well within sight of it.

For his part, Jieyuan avoided dwelling too much on Daojue as he headed to a spot about halfway between his two teammates. Somehow he had ended up as the reasonable one of his team, and wasn’t that a thought? Him, the Firesoul, playing peacemaker. That rubbed him wrong in all sorts of ways. Meiyao was the Woodsoul here, not him. He should’ve been the one picking fights and starting trouble.

He was halfway to the spot he’d picked out when he stopped, recalling something. Hadn’t Meiyao said they’d have someone watching over them during the Hunt? A senior protector, even. Frowning, he looked around searchingly. He couldn’t detect the presence of anyone around, but that didn’t mean much. The range of his soulsense was pathetic, and there wasn’t a single tenth-sign redsoul who wouldn’t be able to hide from a third-sign.

Did their watcher not intervene because they thought the three of them had it handled? If so, that was an awful lot of faith the elder had in them. Jieyuan certainly wouldn’t have taken the risk in their place, not with the three of them fighting in separate locations. If something had gone wrong, he doubted even a tenth-sign redsoul would’ve been able to rescue all three of them in time. For all an elder of the sect would’ve been able to annihilate an onyx gleamstone wolf in literally under a second, at least in plain-space time, they couldn’t be at multiple places at the same time, and he didn’t think a tenth-sign redsoul’s speed would have sufficed.

That was something to check with Meiyao… Jieyuan glanced over at her, at the frown she still wore as she meditated with her eyes closed. Later, he amended. When she’d cooled down a bit more on the Daojue business. She’d warmed up to him quick enough just now, and Woodsouls weren’t known for holding grudges. He squinted his eyes up past the shimmering ceiling of crystal branches and leaves above, taking the sun’s position, then calculating how much time he’d need to recover. Tomorrow it was, he decided.

He glanced from one of his teammates to the other again. They’d also have to discuss proper arrangements for setting up camp. They should be mostly safe here in the Second Ring—it was unlikely they’d come across another third-sign redsoul beast here so soon, and they shouldn’t have much trouble with any second-sign beasts that might pop up, not when they’d just killed a third-sign one each—but they’d have to be more careful in the Third Ring. This was something he’d been planning on leaving for Meiyao to handle, what with her having taken the lead in such matters so far and being a Woodsoul, but now he knew better than just to count on that.

Because Daojue, it seemed, had the power to sour even a Woodsoul.

Jieyuan sat down under the shade of the gleamstone tree he’d picked—if he could even call it a shade, considering there wasn’t a proper shadow under it with how both the tree and the ground were glowing—leaning his back against the trunk. He quickly went over his plans. First, Void Communion. Then some harvesting and attuning chroma, because he’d put a dent in his soulprism. Most important of all, though, he’d have to make some time to talk with Maeva and go over some of her ideas for Absolute Will Command.

His realmskill had done him more harm than good in his first real fight—sacrificing almost a tenth of a prismful of chroma was in no way worth the brief second he’d managed to slow the onyx gleam wolf for and the insignificant wound it’d received—and he hardly cared for a repeat of that. He’d gotten what should’ve been an amazing realmskill, and he wasn’t about to let what might just be his only leg-up over Daojue and Meiyao go to waste.