Shadows settled around Jian like an old friend.

A lone light source filtered down through a glass ceiling, soft and distant, only to be blocked by a half dozen silk banners that stretched across the room and threw out overlapping lines of shadow of every depth.

Her qi spread through the room, following the tangled web of shadows until it seeped into every corner and she felt the room as clearly as if she’d run her hands over every inch.

A moment later her senses snapped back into her body so fast it left her dizzy.

She stared up through the glass ceiling, unable to keep the disbelief from her face.

Hundreds of li above her hung an inverted palace of glittering glass and crystal, shining like a lighthouse in the dark.

The Abyssal Palace.

Before she could open her mouth to ask any of the questions burning on her lips, the shadows in the room jumped and twisted in knots. They swung and stretched, converging on a single point.

Empty space became full.

Jian could not tell if they were a man or a woman, young or old, tall or short, living or dead. All she knew was that there had been nobody in the room and now there was. They were barely a silhouette, just a pile of shadows in the vague suggestion of a person, but they seemed to swallow the room whole.

She felt the same weight that she had felt in the moonlight and the same heat she had felt from Shallow Sea.

The Authority of a God.

“Lady Mara.” The Patriarch of the Abyssal Palace said to the Deicide with the tiniest fraction of a bow. “I did not expect to see you again.”

Jian did not remember hearing them say the words, could not place whether the voice had been high pitched or low, but she heard the message all the same.

“Alive.” The Deicide corrected. “You did not expect to see me alive.”

Silence filled the room for a beat as the Deicide glided through it, ignoring the other occupant in favor of examining the decor. Seven seats lined the octagon.

The Patriarch sat on their throne, the only seat taking the space of two sides in prominence.

“Three decades ago, we felt the Warden’s retaliation from here.” They said, “Even knowing your strength, we didn’t dare hope for a different outcome.”

“Don’t bother.” The Deicide said with a wave. “Your disappointment is both expected and forgiven. As you can see, I lived.”

“Yet, not unchanged.”

The Deicide finally turned to them, a small smile turning the corners of her mouth.

“No, not unchanged. Tired, you might say. Weakened, if you were bolder. Is that enough to make you brave? Brave enough to try something unwise?”

The silhouette didn’t move, didn’t breathe, didn’t show any signs of life.

And neither did Jian.

For a moment, the room she stood in was the most dangerous place under Heaven.

“Of course not, Lady Mara.” The Patriarch finally responded. “We have not forgotten the debt we owe you.”

The Deicide snorted. “Disappointing. Then stop stalling and let your meat-shields in. I require their presence.”

The silhouette didn’t move, but suddenly four of the six empty seats were filled.

Unlike the two Gods, who stood too far beyond her to comprehend, she could taste the qi of the four Elders.

The first stood in a pool of water. The sounds of wet scales sliding over smooth flesh accompanied a flash of iridescent light within the depths of a deeply hooded robe. Its qi tasted like fish scales and venom, keratin and cartilage, red meat and white flesh. The flavor changed from moment to moment, refusing to be nailed down to a single thing beyond a never-ending will to Adapt.

The second was a plain man who stood before a plain cushion of red velvet in the plain robes of the sect, differentiated from a disciple only by the plain black sash around his waist. Where the Patriarch was ineffable, this man was simply so innocuous that it wrapped around to being suspicious, especially when under that facade his qi tasted like blood clouding the water. She let the flavor dance across her tongue and linger, tasting the arrogance of a Hunter.

The Third was the clearest. They tasted unambiguously of Steel and Ruin. They knelt on one knee, instead of standing, in a suit of armor completely covering their body and face. It was a rarity of steel, completely impractical to anyone without a Resonance for the metal to reinforce it. Even then, it was almost falling apart on them. Entire swathes of metal had been corroded, the metal rough and pitted, while other sections still dripped with a black tar that smoked and burned where it marred the stone floor.

The fourth was familiar to her.

She expected Elder Shen Hui to say something, to sneer and slander her, but he knew his place too well to risk it. Instead, he simply looked at her like a particularly disgusting insect that he was trying to figure out how to kill without ruining his slippers. She could feel the pressure of his disdain like a difference in temperature, or a rock hanging above her head about to fall.

But Shen Hui didn’t scare her anymore.

She looked at him and she saw Wei’s death, his body spread across the floor of the palace hanging above their heads.

All she could taste when she looked at him was the fury boiling through her own blood. If he hadn’t been such a petty bastard, hadn’t hated Wei for who fathered him, then her life might look completely different. If she traced back the chain of blame far enough, her misfortune of falling into the Deicide’s hands could be laid squarely at Shen Hui’s feet.

Jian took a deep breath, stilling the flow of blood through her body and letting it cool.

It didn’t matter. She knew the rage was lying to her, that it was her own fuck-ups that led her here as much as his. The sterile knowledge did nothing to cool her temper, but the simpler truth was that neither of them were brave enough to do anything with real monsters in the room.

The Patriarch made a motion with his hand, the shadows in the room tightening like a noose, and the three Elders still standing dropped to their knees, bowing their heads to the Deicide.

“To what do we owe the honor, Lady Mara?” The Patriarch asked, bowing at the waist, giving her the respect of polite civilization. The facade over human interaction reserved for when you couldn’t kill the other party without risking more than you were willing to give.

“These are the new stock?” She asked instead of answering.

“All but one. Our youngest is out on assignment.”

“Very well, this serving shall do.”

She turned back to the Patriarch.

“I am considering taking an apprentice.”

No eyes moved, but Jian felt the shadows swivel and stare at her from every corner of the room. Sweat began to bead on the back of her neck.

“That is… unexpected.” The Patriarch said slowly.

“So was she.” The Deicide shrugged. “That said, she’s still only a single step past being worthless. She requires iron to sharpen against.”

“I begin to see your intention.”

“I don’t know how you see anything with your head so far up your ass.”

Jian tensed, her grip on Striga’s body tightening.

“You seek an exhibition match.”

“To the death.”

Jian bit her lip, stopping herself from saying something stupid. She did not want to fight an Immortal to the death, but what she wanted apparently didn’t mean much to the Deicide.

“You ask much.” The Patriarch said eventually.

“I ask nothing. I offer much.”

“There is nothing I treasure more than the lives of my precious students.”

“Is that so? I suppose that’s understandable.” The Deicide paused, looking around the room. “Truly, you’ve done well to raise as many as you did, given the state I left the Palace in thirty years ago. You’ve even reclaimed a good five eighths of the Abyss, an impressive number.”

There was a beat of silence that Jian didn’t understand, a tension and an expectation, before the Deicide continued.

“If your Elder kills my prospective student, then I will rescind your predecessor's claim over the remainder of the Abyss.”

“Deal.” The Patriarch said instantly.

Shen Hui took a step forward, still kneeling, his head pointed at the floor.

“Honored Father, allow me to play the role of executioner for this child. Her crimes against the sect are a personal affront to my honor.”

“No.” The Patriarch said, not even glancing at Shen Hui. “She can fight Dai Bohai.”

“No.” The Deicide replied.

The Patriarch paused.

“How,” he asked, “will you remove my predecessor’s claim?”

“I will tear the qi from his bones and grind them into a dust so fine that it will be invisible to the eye. And I will let you watch.”

The silhouette shuddered, practically shivering in place.

“Very well. You may choose her opponent.”

“No.” The Deicide said again, finally turning back to Jian. “You may decide your own opponent, child.”

Jian couldn’t stop herself from laughing, a short bark that was half fear and half delirium. This was not how she had thought the day would go.

She looked at Shen Hui and heard the grinding of his stone teeth.

If she spoke with her heart, she would name Shen Hui her opponent in an instant. The rage she’d tagged as misplaced and shoved aside a few minutes ago was already boiling back up at the thought of stomping his face into dust.

But picking Shen Hui was a stupid decision, so she let it go.

The fact was that he was a horrible matchup for her. He’d been an Immortal longer than she’d been alive, and buried at least two other Immortals that she knew of. Worse, her greatest strength was her ability to heal quickly enough to shrug off most wounds, but Shen Hui was the Immortal of Pressure. She’d seen him trap Yan Feng in air thicker than stone, like a fly caught in amber. If she was caught like that, he could kill her as many times as it took until it stuck.

That wasn’t a risk she wanted to take.

Which didn’t leave many options.

The thing in the water was an instant ‘no’. She’d only heard rumors of Elder Dai Bohai and his twisted flesh, but if the Patriarch wanted him as her opponent then they thought he would win.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Her eyes landed on the Elder clad in steel. They hadn’t moved the entire time they’d been kneeling there, but their armor had changed. Even now, the black sludge continued to drip down their armor and pool in the gaps and cracks in the metal as it burned and rusted away before her eyes. The highest points of damage were starting to heal in the wake of the tar, rust transforming back into steel, but slightly different than the iteration of armor that had come before it. Then, as if to mock the effort, a new wave of sludge began to well up and drip from beneath the Elder’s helmet, running down to leave new tracks of Ruin in an endless cycle.

Jian looked away. She wasn’t confident she could eat that.

Not safely.

Which left the least assuming of the four. The last Elder waved with a grandfatherly smile when she looked at him.

His entire appearance was so obviously a trap that it looped back around to reassure her. He was doubtlessly dangerous, almost certainly stronger than she was, but if he felt the need to disguise himself as weaker than he was, then that implied he didn’t feel confident around the other Elders without that element of surprise. If she was lucky, he would be the weakest of the four.

And beyond that, the taste of his qi she caught on the air seemed the most useful. If he was the Immortal of the Hunt, then a certain interpretation of his Domain might help her track people across vast distances, or better cover her own. It could be her ticket to finding Elijah if she could ever get out from under the Deicide’s thumb. And best of all, the concept of Hunting seemed like it would be weak in an arena, but invaluable in the field.

She was confident the Hero who attacked her at Sea also had a Domain related to Hunting, and she’d never even caught sight of them. That was a power she wanted.

“Lady Mara,” she said, copying the name the Patriarch had used and hoping it was more polite than calling her the Deicide to her face, “what are the rules of this match?”

“There will be none.”

That was bad.

“Then what’s to stop the other Elders from simply attacking together and killing me right now? Or worse, to attack Striga while I’m occupied?”

Shen Hui scowled where knelt, almost rising to his feet.

“You dare insult our honor?”

“I’ve found honor to be a poor shield on its own.”

She stared at Shen Hui with flat eyes and he somehow had enough tact to keep his mouth shut.

“Very well.” The Deicide spoke. “Then I shall declare a law in three parts.”

“The match shall not begin until I declare it and shall not conclude until one party is slain.”

“None, but her chosen opponent, may visit violence upon Jian until the match concludes.”

“None may visit violence upon Jian’s ward until the match concludes.”

Each sentence rippled through the space, echoing back on each other like thunder in a closed room. Jian felt something tighten around her chest, binding her. The ineffable Authority of a God.

Jian took a deep breath as a plan started brewing in her head.

“Thank you for that.” It was even better than she’d dared hope. The Deicide must have worded it that way on purpose.

She turned around, placing her back to the room, confident in her safety.

She held Striga close to her chest with one hand and reached into her shadow with the other, forging threads of blood and shadow inside it, before pulling out a large cushioned chair. She’d crafted it to look like red velvet and golden wood, and she placed Striga in it delicately.

The girl’s eyes fluttered, but she stayed asleep, unable to wake in the presence of two Gods.

Jian left her there and turned, stepping forward into the center of the room, where the shadows of the banners overhead converged. She turned to face the plain looking Elder she’d decided on and put her hands together in her sleeves. She gave a shallow bow, one meant for equals.

“Jian, Immortal of Hunger, greets the Elder.”

The old man smiled and bowed back, acknowledging her.

“Meng Hu, Immortal of The Hunt, greets the challenger.”

“Meng Hu, I name you as my opponent. Do you accept?”

As soon as she was done speaking, Jian bit her tongue, letting the blood flow over it. The hardest place to sense another’s qi was within their body.

Elder Jian Hu looked at her, cocking his head as if he could feel what she was doing anyway.

“Are you sure, child? I’m an Immortal of the Second Pillar, and you’ve only just built your first.”

Jian nodded, but said nothing. She’d already known that. Even the weakest of these Elders was a full step above her within the Emergent Realm. It was always going to be an uphill battle.

It wasn’t a fight she would’ve picked if she could avoid it, but there was no other choice.

He nodded back to her.

“Very well. If you’re sure, then I accept.”

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Jian turned her head and opened her mouth.

A jet of pressurized blood shot towards Elder Shen Hui, carving into his chest.

Shen Hui cursed, the sound of cracking stone almost covering it up as he moved out of the beam’s path. Jian tried to make the beam follow him, but he moved faster than she could drag it after him. The beam cut straight through the stone wall behind him for an instant, opening them to the abyss, and Jian cut off the flow of blood before she wasted any more.

Shen Hui had a line carved into his stone chest, from above his heart to below his ribs, but the cut was only a finger deep. Worse, it didn’t bleed. More than just his skin was made of stone.

He reached a hand towards her and Jian felt the air around her harden, but the moment it pressed against her skin the pressure disappeared.

Shen Hui screamed as his arm crumpled and twisted.

Jian spat the remaining blood into her hand and jumped into the shadow at her feet, swimming through the lines of shadow cast by the banners overhead and appearing at the Elder’s side an instant later, already swinging a sword forged from her blood.

To his credit, Shen Hui recovered from the shock quickly. Just not quickly enough.

Her sword slipped through his guard just before his hand could shoot up to block it. Its edge bit deep into the side of his neck, but slammed to a stop against something that had to be bone.

Jian’s arms went numb from the recoil and her blade slipped from her fingers, sticking in Shen Hui’s neck as he was sent flying to the side, the blow only pushing him instead of beheading him.

The Elder seemed to hit an invisible wall, catching himself on the air and rocketing back towards her.

Jian didn’t even try to block his blow, she just smiled and pulled a dagger from sleeve.

The Elder’s fist slammed to a stop a hairsbreadth before hitting her.

Her knife, meanwhile, almost found his eye. He only barely jerked to the side enough to avoid losing it, but she still knocked off a chip of his eye socket and cheek.

Shen Hui saw where his punch had failed to land.

Jian saw the moment Shen Hui realized what was happening.

The Deicide had decreed that he could not visit violence upon her, and so he physically couldn’t harm her. Even a Second Pillar Immortal couldn’t defy a Law laid down by a God.

But the Law hadn’t said anything about Jian harming the other Elders.

The only one she couldn’t attack was Meng Hu. After all, their match hadn’t started yet.

Jian’s smile widened as she leaned closer and opened her mouth. The air around the Elder had started to change.

It was starting to taste like Fear.

With the last of the blood in her mouth, she spit in Shen Hui’s eye, blinding him.

He jumped away, windmilling wildly enough that Jian couldn’t pursue him as he wiped the blood from his eyes. She almost laughed at the sight, but she had to finish this quickly, before-

“You may begin.”

There was no reverberation in the world, but Jian heard it clearly, as if it was being spoken directly into her ear, and her blood went cold.

She thought she’d be given more time.

She spun and caught Meng Hu’s fist on her forearm.

She felt her bones crack.

The other Elder could swim through the shadows as well as she could. Better, even.

It was the first time she’d fought someone that could enter the shadows the way she could, and for a few seconds it was all she could do to keep up as he chased her up and down the web of overlapping shadows that danced across the floor.

From the outside, it must have looked like they were flickering all over the room, but inside it was a struggle she couldn’t break away from, an intimate dance where each step could cover half the room. When their fights spilled over into the physical world, they treated the shadows like narrow bridges spanning certain death, constantly trying to maneuver and push each other off to gain the advantage.

Meng Hu was stronger than Jian, and in the shadows he was faster than her too. She held on by reinforcing her forearms with sheathes of crystallized blood, fists like bricks putting cracks in them with every punch, but when she reached for a sword tucked away in her shadow he reached past her and knocked it away before her fingers could close around the handle.

That had never happened before.

Jian accepted a hit to her face in exchange for a kick that pushed the Elder away from her. She tore the blood off of one of her hands and compressed it into a ball before turning and shooting another jet of blood at Shen Hui.

The Elder cursed and tried to jump away, but he was standing too close to a shadow and black vines wrapped around his legs, holding him in place.

The jet carved into his chest again, just off target from the gouge she’d already left in it, but it didn’t punch any deeper than the first before Shen Hui raised his hands and caught the stream of blood in his palm.

It petered out, the amount of blood she’d pulled together unable to do any more than chip the skin of his palm, and Shen Hui took a single step forward, tearing the black vines to pieces with brute force. As his foot hit the ground, a wall of stone popped up in Jian’s path.

Jian dived back into the shadow she was standing on before she could hit the wall and test whether it would count as violence against her, but Meng Fu was already there waiting.

He broke her arm again when she blocked, the skin and muscle cratering under the blow. She grunted in pain and gave up on the arm, letting it destabilize and explode away from her in a shower of crystallized blood shards.

Meng Fu caught most of them on his own forearms. It protected his face, but gave her enough space to pull more blood from her wound and forge it into a sword. She swung with one arm to force the Elder to jump back and buy time for a new forearm to sprout from her bloody stump.

Rearmed, both hands closed around the hilt of her sword and she closed the distance to begin their dance again.

Twice more, she tried to break through Shen Hui’s defenses, and twice more he tried to distract or redirect her into Meng Fu’s path without hitting her directly.

It was the wrong move for Shen Hui to make. It would have been smarter to just run from the room, Jian couldn’t afford to pursue him and fight Meng Fu at the same time, but he was too proud for that. He stubbornly stayed, even when a new gouge appeared on his neck and one of Jian’s streams of pressurized blood pierced straight through his shoulder.

Likewise, it would’ve been smarter for Jian to stop trying to kill Shen Hui and only focus on Meng Hu, but Jian couldn’t give up on killing him. She craved it, hungered for it. She knew Meng Hu was still holding back whatever trick he had up his sleeve, he’d only used his bare hands for the entire fight, but that just meant this was the safest part of the fight. Whenever he sprung his trap, she’d have no choice but to give it her full attention and lose her opportunity to kill Shen Hui.

She held on for ten seconds, and then twenty, an eternity in a fight between Immortals.

Then she saw her opportunity.

Jian stumbled at the shadow’s edge. Meng Fu’s fist caught her in the gut, launching her off her feet and out into the light like an arrow. She coughed, flecks of blood filling the air above her in fine red drops.

A dozen knives coated in poisonous qi shot from the shadows around her from every direction as Meng Hu flickered through them.

The beads of blood that hung in the air abruptly clumped together into needles that shot towards the knives. The needles deflected half a dozen knives, while black vines sprouted from the shadowed folds of her clothes and deflected half a dozen more.

Two knives landed home anyway, piercing her left lung and her right thing. She hadn’t even seen where they came from.

Blood erupted from her wounds, pushing the knives out and purging the poison at the same time. She used enough blood for the momentum to twist her body in midair, until she faced the direction she was flying.

Until she faced Shen Hui.

She dropped her sword and reached into her sleeve with a smile. With a flourish, she pulled out the massive hammer Erichthonius had left behind, swinging it down the instant before she collided with Shen Hui.

The battered Elder caught the hammer’s head on crossed forearms, bracing himself.

For a moment, he held.

Then his arms cracked.

The hammer exploded at the same time his left arm shattered, fragments of both mixed together and slowed the further they flew, until they slowed to a stop. A tightly clumped debris field hung suspended in the air, held in place by the pressure of the Elder’s soul.

Jian’s hands reached through the debris for his throat.

The ground beneath her exploded before she could. A massive black hand punched through the stone floor and wrapped around her leg, crushing her bones into a fine powder.

She screamed as it yanked her away from her prize, pulling her down and slamming her through the stone floor like it was paper.

Her fingers slipped off of the smooth marble of Shen Hui’s neck, her nails leaving sparks as they were dragged across and away from it. She flailed, stretching further, but all she could reach were the shattered remains of his left hand, pulling it with her as she disappeared into the Abyss.

***

Shen Hui cursed under his breath, pulling the pieces of his arm together with a thought. He didn’t scream, he was too proud for that, but it was a near thing. Steam and the acrid smell of burning stone surrounded him as he turned pressure into heat and welded his arm back together.

He scowled at the stump he couldn’t easily replace for a moment, both the stone slabs of the floor and the fragments of bronze that littered it lacked the quality he looked for in body parts, before turning his scowl on the other occupants of the room.

None of them had moved a muscle since the fight began.

Cowards, all of them. Unwilling to demand recompense for the disrespect the upstart brat showed all of them by existing.

Nobody left the Abyssal Palace and survived.

The Patriarch surely agreed with him, but Shen Hui understood the Patriarch couldn’t take action without the Deicide reacting.

Shen Hui was stuck between two immovable mountains, but there was still a path he could take. He had learned long ago how to fight without violence.

He walked over to the child the brat had left behind.

Children taking care of children. The world was full of such stupidity.

He snapped his fingers and the block of stone the girl’s chair rested on lifted from the floor.

His eyes flickered to the Deicide and cold fear nestled in his gut, but Fear had been his ally for decades. Fear had never held him back, it had only ever goaded him forward. With its backing, he lied as easily as he breathed.

“Clearly, this mortal is unsafe here, battered by the aura of so many powerful souls. I’ll move her to the Palace, where she will be more comfortable.”

Nobody called him out.

The Deicide did not move to stop him.

If anything, despite her face not changing, he could have sworn she looked satisfied. That was enough to shove a new spike of fear down his spine, but Shen Hui embraced it.

He walked out of the room with a smile on his face.