Book 3. The Long Journey. Chapter 34. Recognition.
“Incredible,” Shade said quietly. It had been almost an hour since Death Reaper began sticking his needles into Uluan and by now, the man had been reduced to a yelling and twitching mass of flesh… but he still refused to speak! That was simply unbelievable.
The degree of pain Uluan was as plain as day; in fact, even Death Reaper was astonished. He had already stimulated half of seventy-two main acupuncture points on Uluan’s body; he feared that if he proceeded, then he would cause Uluan’s mind to collapse. Normally he would keep adding a needle every half an hour… but with this time limit of Shade’s, that wasn’t an option. Yet, he couldn’t risk destroying their prisoner’s mind either; that would be a catastrophe.
“He can cause so much pain with just needless…” The number twenty-eight frowned. He was sure that his methods were better, but he needed to rely on many tools and poisons. This somewhat old man, on the other hand, could do not much worse with a mere set of needles. As unwilling as he was, he admitted that the pure skill of Death Reaper’s had surpassed his own.
“How stubborn can you be?” Death Reaper asked discontentedly, looking at Uluan’s pain-wracked face. “Your village will fall sooner or later, you speaking or not make too much of a difference. Tell us what we want to know and the suffering will end,” he said calmly, and couldn’t be more flabbergasted when Uluan started laughing in response. He was in this much pain and yet he still had the nerve to laugh?! Who was this man? Did he not fear pain and suffering?
“Keep dreaming,” Uluan said hoarsely, his throat sore from crying out. “Stick as much of those needles as you want into my body, I won’t tell you a thing!” he stated with a satisfied smile and began laughing maniacally, appearing as if he had gone mad.
Death Reaper frowned, then glanced at Shade. He had been pretty confident when he had volunteered to make their prisoner talk under an hour, but it didn’t look like he would be able to succeed. It was one thing to lose some face in the Anarchic Lands, but his master had told him to be very careful of Shade as his mood swings were almost as unpredictable as Nefirie’s. Given that he would almost certainly fail to make Uluan speak in the next ten minutes or so, what would Shade’s reaction be?
Shade chuckled quietly, the nervous glance Death Reaper sent him telling him everything he needed to know. “We’ve got a tough nut to crack. How about working together with the twenty-eight? Maybe you will both learn something along the way~” he recommended, then smiled to himself. It was almost comical how everyone would be relieved the moment they learned he wouldn’t kill them; had he really done anything that bad in the past to make everyone so scared? He only killed a few people he deemed to be hopeless cases and only when they kept annoying him! Why was everyone treating him like a madman? Come on! Though to be honest, he actually liked the current state of things quite a lot. Oh well.
Death Reaper relaxed visibly after Shade’s suggestion, whereas the number twenty-eight smiled ever so slightly. The number twenty-eight was pretty happy to see his rival fail and was also pretty happy to have an early chance to work together with him. If he learned something about those acupuncture techniques, then he would have a chance to become one of the top three torturers among the thirty-six unit leaders under Shade’s command. That would be no small achievement!
“Hey, hey~ I’ve got a request,” Shade spoke merrily. “Get it over with as soon as possible, kay? I’m kinda tired of waiting,” he requested, causing smiles to appear on the faces of Death Reaper and the number twenty-eight. The former of them clasped his hand, while the latter bowed. They would do everything in their ability to meet Shade’s expectations.
“Would you like to?” Death Reaper said with a smile, gesturing for the number twenty-eight to make himself home by the altar. He was impatient to see if this Shadow had any techniques that could be comparable to his acupuncture needles and if so, then he wanted to learn them.
“Hmph,” the number twenty-eight approached, taking out a thick, hollow needle and a vial of black liquid from his interspatial ring. “I concocted this poison myself. It has the best effect on the marrow, but it can be used in a wide variety of ways,” he explained, then stuck the hollow needle into Uluan’s thigh bone. The pain of this act compared to the suffering Uluan was already going through was so minuscule it was pretty much unnoticeable, but when the number twenty-eight put a drop of his poison on top of the hollow needle and pushed it down with a bit of his Qi, Uluan’s eyes went wide and he once again began shouting and crying out.
This reaction of Uluan’s surprised the number twenty-eight quite a lot. The poison had just gotten into Uluan’s marrow; it would now start dissolving it, the pain increasing with each minute for about two, three hours until it would reach its highest level and remain at it forever.
“Is this guy’s acupuncture surprisingly compatible with my poisons?” the number twenty-eight wondered. He knew there were different kinds of pain and as a torturer understood that overlapping the same kind of pain was counterproductive. He didn’t expect however the pain from acupuncture points and the pain from marrow to be so far on the spectrum; they not only worked well together, they appeared to be enhancing each other and bringing the agony to a whole another level.
“Twenty-eight, huh?” Death Reaper said with a smile. “I would love to learn your poison concocting methods,” he said straightforwardly, having come to the same conclusions as the number twenty-eight.
“Only if you teach me your acupuncture methods,” the number twenty-eight replied, he and Death Reaper exchanging a smile.
To the side, Shade appeared to be pretty satisfied, while the crowd of bandits was in the middle of partying over all the meat they had roasted over the bonfires and countless gallons of beer. Those who had bet a lot kept glancing at the altar from time to time and were paying attention to how the torture was going, but most of them considered the spectacle to be a side-show. They rarely had the opportunity to party in such numbers, so they wanted to thoroughly enjoy themselves.
In this manner, with a general clamor accompanied by Uluan’s cries of pain, time began passing. Half an hour, one hour… two hours, three hours… half a day… and finally, a whole day had passed. The sun had risen again and at the moment, it was late morning, around two hours before noon.
By this point, Uluan’s body looked like a very grotesque piñata. Nearly two hundred needles of various kinds had been stuck into his body, most of his skin had started changing colors, becoming purple or turning into a strange shade of orange. His muscles were limp, his bones were dissolved from the inside; each cell of his body was screaming in pain… but Uluan simply laid there with a blank expression on his face, numb to anything that was happening to him.
It wasn’t that he had lost his mind; Death Reaper and the number twenty-eight had taken great care not to accidentally destroy his consciousness. It simply was his unwavering will, devotion to the village, to his bloodline and the duty to his ancestors that kept him from speaking. He indeed very much wished he could die already, but he would never betray his own kin! He always was a simple man and although he wasn’t a saint or a hero, his allegiance to his people was unmatched.
As one could have expected, the looks on Death Reaper’s and the number twenty-eight’s faces were quite ugly. Either of them alone was already an expert torturer and their techniques proved to be extremely compatible; they were making up for each other’s weaknesses and were enhancing each other’s strong points, but despite that and despite twenty-four hours of their utmost effort, they failed to make their prisoner speak! To them, it was a failure like never before.
“Admirable, truly admirable,” Shade said to himself, but in the relative silence of the morning, his voice carried quite far throughout the grassland. “It makes me wish I had such a subordinate, a pity,” he added and shook his head, then walked up to Uluan and his two torturers.
“Be proud, not many people are worth me using this potion on them,” Shade said calmly, for once abandoning the playful tone of his. He was more than ninety percent sure he could break the Forest of Dream’s defenses by swarming it with bandits as at this point in time, there were over seventy thousands of them in this camp. However, he had truly recognized Uluan as someone worth his recognition; it would be too sad to simply kill him and resolve to different methods. Someone like Uluan deserved to be gone all the way through with.
Death Reaper raised his eyebrows when he saw the vial with glistering, grey liquid in Shade’s hand. He didn’t recognize this potion, but the number twenty-eight certainly did.
“Soul Devouring Potion…” the number twenty-eight murmured and swallowed nervously. Just the rare ingredients necessary to concoct this potion cost over two thousand crystal coins, not to speak of the degree of ability necessary to create the Soul Devouring Potion itself. Even if he was ten times as skilled, he wouldn’t be able to concoct it; but his master, Shade, could do so easily!
“Are the boys in the village?” Shade asked calmly. “What is the weakness of the barrier protecting the forest?” he questioned. “Tell me those two things, then I will kill you,” he stated without any playfulness in his voice, then poured the glistening liquid into Uluan’s throat. In the state Uluan was in he didn’t resist or try to cough the liquid up; he no longer cared about anything… or so he thought.
The effect wasn’t immediate; it took about a minute until a new sensation flooded Uluan’s senses. He was already more than numb to physical pain and he hadn’t even cried out for past ten hours of torture, but when he felt something deep inside, something that he felt was his true self, the essence of his being, being ripped apart and twisted he let out a howl unlike any before.
The tens of thousands of bandits all turned to look at the altar, the mere shout carrying such a quintessence of suffering that is caused all of them to shiver and tremble. They had all thought Uluan would never break, so what in the world had been done to him that he reacted like that?
“Are the boys in your village, in the Sacred Temple?” Shade asked, enhancing his voice with Qi so Uluan could hear him clearly.
“Yes!” Uluan cried the word out, bloody tears beginning to flow from his eyes. This pain was incomparable to anything those two had done to him before; it was not only unimaginable but also extremely real. The more physical pain he had experienced the less it was getting to him, but this strange potion brought a kind of agony that mere bodily pain couldn’t compare to.
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“How to break past the formation protecting the forest?” Shade asked again, both his voice and the expression on his face remaining stoically calm.
“Stones! Buried in the earth!” Uluan answered, caring only to gather his thoughts into comprehensible words as fast as possible so this suffering would end. “Great Trees! Larger than the other! Seventy-Two! Three layers! Dig twenty meters deep!” he yelled out, unable to stand the sensation of his soul being torn apart and devoured any longer.
“Kill me! Hurry up and kill me!” he begged pitifully, his body spasming uncontrollably. Devotion to the village? Care for his kin? Face before his ancestors? None of that mattered in face of this unworldly pain he was experiencing!
Shade nodded, took out a dagger and in a swift move, sank it into Uluan’s forehead, killing him instantly. He had said they would first check if Uluan hadn’t lied to them, but it was before Uluan proved himself to be worth his attention. There was no person in the world that would lie under the effects of the Soul Devouring Potion; there was no need to confirm the truth before relieving him of his life.
“You know what to do,” Shade said seemingly to himself, his eyes still remaining on Uluan’s corpse. “After you break the formation surround the village. No one is to act before I give orders,” he stated coldly, his voice carrying a very apparent threat.
The one person who had bet for Uluan lasting for twenty-four hours wanted to speak up at first, but he wisely swallowed his words. It would be fine to take the reward later; the lucky man had an inkling that if he mentioned the bet right now, then Shade would straight out murder him.
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“They are entering again?” the High Priest frowned, sensing as thousands of people began walking into the forest from all directions. “They can’t make Uluan speak so they chose to keep forcing their way in? Too bad for them; it’s already too late,” he thought with a smile. Just yesterday he had made a breakthrough in his Qi Manipulating Art thanks to the experience of operating the barrier at full force and under huge pressure two days ago. Now he was confident that he could hold off as much as one hundred thousand people for a week. The ritual would be able to proceed smoothly!
“The Heavens are on our side. The curse of those Demons will finally be broken and out clan will return to its glory!” he thought contentedly, a satisfied smile present on his face. With how much time they now had he didn’t need to give up on the idea of integrating the bloodlines of those two outsiders into his clan. He could gather everyone and threaten them openly; after the curse would be broken, he would have the core of the clan flee the Anarchic Lands while the useless ones would act as a bait.
As he thought about the future plans of his, the High Priest suddenly jumped up in shock. One of the formation stones in the outer layer had been removed! “Impossible! Those stones are perfectly hidden; no aura scan can discover them! Was it an accident? Did they start hitting the ground randomly and dislocated one of the stones?” he tried to reason, but then he felt how another of the formation stones was removed from his designated place.
“How did they know?! Did Uluan betray us? No, that’s impossible!” the High Priest refused to believe Uluan talked under any kind of torture or threats, but in his mind, he knew the answer; only Uluan and a few other people who hadn’t gone out into the forest knew about those formation stones. Since those bandits were now removing them one after another, it could only mean that Uluan had broken and told them everything!
“The outer layer already broke. The inner and the core ones won’t hold for long either,” the High Priest recognized, trying to shake off the stress and think up some kind of solution. They couldn’t start the ritual now, it was too early; they couldn’t give those kids up to the bandits either as the ritual needed fresh blood essence to be effective. Could they parley with the Great Chieftain, or Great Chieftains leading those thugs? Would they listen to them or would they ravage the whole village either way?
“The last card is… the entrance to the temple,” the High Priest said to himself. As long as he sealed the path it would be nigh impossible to break in from the outside. It was possible for a strong martial artist to assault the formation from inside and shatter it, but only an ultimate expert would be able to accomplish that the other way around.
“There’s no other choice. Either we succeed or our bloodline will perish! We shall wager everything on this one chance!” The High Priest grit his teeth. He wasn’t one to gamble with his chances, but Uluan’s betrayal had put him into a position without any outs. Aware he couldn’t afford to waste time, he left the sanctuary and hurried towards the lake.
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“Him again? Why does he look so agitated?” Yin murmured, wondering what could have happened. Did something go really wrong or did the High Priest come to express some new demands of his?
“Holy Priest, go take Marie and wait for me by the tunnel,” the High Priest said strongly, the tone of his words causing the six-year-old to give up on the thoughts of arguing.
“See you later, big brother Yin,” the six-year-old said with a slight smile and hurriedly ran towards the second sanctuary to do as he was told.
The High Priest sighed heavily and looked at Laien, then shifted his gaze to Yin. “I don’t know if you two are a blessing to our people or another curse,” he said and shook his head. “There are currently about sixty, seventy thousand bandits from all over Anarchic Lands that are breaking the Bewildering Formation. They found out how it works from Uluan so they will be in the village in half an hour at most,” he stated without emotion in his voice and laughed a little when the look on Yin’s face turned into a similar to his own.
“Good luck,” he added with a rueful smile, turned and headed out of the temple. He no longer had any control over the developing events; he could only go with the flow of fate and hope to be able to influence it just a little, just enough to save his clan from perishing.
Yin sat there, the look in his eyes cold and stern. He looked at Laien, hesitating whether he should wake him up forcefully or not when the natural energy in the cave suddenly shook. A massive amount of light blue elemental sparks began emerging from the roots all over the walls, from the lake and from the Holy Tree itself; the High Priest stopped in place and looked over his shoulder, his eyes going wide. His affinity towards water element was null so he couldn’t see the countless elemental sparks forming a vortex around the black-haired outsider, but he could feel the huge amount of natural energy that was gathering around Laien.
“Wow!” the six-year-old exclaimed, his mouth hanging wide open. Unlike the High Priest he saw the swirl of elemental sparks clearly and as far as he was concerned, he had never seen anything so beautiful in his life.
Yin laughed weakly. “He never ceases to amaze me,” he thought quietly, a calm smile sneaking onto his face. Laien had taken a huge risk and forced himself to speed up his breakthrough several times over. At this rate, with some luck, it would be possible for him to finish within an hour! With things as they became Yin was confident the two of them would be able to force their way out even under an assault of an army of bandits led by a Great Chieftain.
The High Priest habitually began analyzing new options available to him. but he quickly gave up. There wasn’t much point in him speculating about ‘what if’. Right now as bad as it felt, he could only rely on his luck. He sighed inwardly and continued walking towards the exit, taking the Holy Priest and Marie with him up the stairs to the village.
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“High Priest!”
“High Priest, what is going on?”
“Did the formation fail?”
The various elders of the village began asking the moment the High Priest walked out of the tunnel and into the main place of the village. Those of them who had the black staves had vaguely sensed the formation being destroyed, then they had received an order from the High Priest to gather everyone in the buildings by the center place and to have the militia stand on the plaza itself. They did as they were ordered to, but how could they not be nervous?
“Today might very well be the last day of our clan,” the High Priest said loudly, his voice carrying far thanks to the Qi he had infused it with. “Do not attack first, we do not stand a chance. Allow me to speak with their leader,” he ordered calmly, then added in his heart. “If he will listen to anything I have to say that is.”
The elders were still as confused as before, but some of them were able to guess what had happened. They weren’t happy with this situation, but how could they say anything about it? Any complaints at this point would be more than meaningless.
“Holy Priest, Marie, go inside the town hall,” the High Priest said, his voice alone disrupting the anxious silence which prevailed throughout the village.
The two listened obediently and walked through the crowd of militia, joining those who were too weak to fight inside the buildings.
The time passed in absolute silence; only the sounds of nervous breathing could be heard. No one moved, no one said anything; they all waited for the inevitable to come.
Finally, after two minutes the core layer of the barrier broke apart after half of the formation stones supporting it was removed. The clamor made by the tens of thousands of bandits immediately reached everyone’s ears, making it even more so apparent how many people were coming for them.
Unexpectedly for the villagers, a chaotic attack most of them were predicting in their hearts didn’t come. Instead, they saw a group of black-cloaked men walking down the main street, following a black-masked man who stood at the forefront of their group. Behind those black-cloaked people were bandits; hundreds of them, probably over a thousand. They were all quiet, they weren’t talking, laughing nor celebrating. They were unnaturally composed as if they weren’t a chaotic mob and rather, a unit under the orders of a general.
“Are you the High Priest?” Shade stopped and likewise did the one hundred and eight Shadows following behind him along with the two thousand elite bandits led by the most powerful bosses of the Anarchic Lands. The bloodthirsty pressure this group of theirs emanated was enough to cause the village militia to sweat profoundly; in a direct clash they wouldn’t stand a chance, they would be annihilated in no time at all.
“Yes, I’m the High Priest,” the High Priest answered, his voice betraying no traces of fear. If he died, he died. What was there to be nervous about now that he couldn’t change anything anymore?
“And that behind you should be the entrance to your Sacred Temple?” Shade inquired, the tone of his voice becoming more playful. He had been a bit melancholic after killing Uluan, but this High Priest appeared to be no worse than the Village Chief. He could respect a man who faced death without fear.
“Yes, and the two boys you are probably looking for are there,” the High Priest said with a slight smile. The pressure coming from Shade was suffocating, but there was no killing intent in the man’s aura. That fact alone gave him some hope, but he wasn’t about to cling to it too tightly just yet.
“Good,” Shade said happily, content with the High Priest’s swift and sensible response. “Do you intend to protect those two until the bitter end?” he asked, curious as to why this mysterious village had gone so far for two outsiders. Were those boys their descendants whom they had sent out to gain experience or something? Now that he thought about it he could have asked Uluan about that too.
“If we had a chance to win against you, I wouldn’t have hesitated to fight,” the High Priest said with a laugh and shook his head. Losing ninety-five percent of their people would have been worth it as long as they could guarantee the curse would be removed! Alas, they fighting strength of their two parties was too mismatched. Those black-cloaked characters behind the black-masked man alone would be capable of laying waste to their village and there were still all those bandits. There was no way out.
“Sensible choice,” Shade praised with a nod. “Why were you protecting those two? Was it just fear we would pillage your village along the way to them?” he asked, wanting to learn the answer before proceeding onwards.
“We needed the life of one of those boys to remove an ancient curse,” the High Priest replied straightforwardly, seeing no point in hiding anything. “The black-haired one, to be precise. The ritual was supposed to be carried during the eclipse… alas,” he shook his head and laughed bitterly. Their greatest chance to get rid of the curse had been pretty much destroyed by a twist of fate; truly, were those boys a blessing or a curse in itself?
“Oh, I think I get it,” Shade said merrily, his voice sounding quite amused. “That would interfere with my part of the Trial though. Wait here patiently, you might still have a chance to remove that curse you mentioned,” he said with a smile and began gesturing the High Priest and the other villagers to get out of the way.
The High Priest wanted to ask what was this black-masked man speaking about, but he didn’t dare to chance his luck. He and the villagers looked silently how the black-masked man went down the stairs to the temple, followed by the long line of black-cloaked men and the menacing bandits.