The bald head of the Sect leader shone as he landed gracefully. The blinding light from the sun decided that now was the right time to reflect every damn thing on the man's head to a rapt, attentive audience.

"This doesn't have to end like this. Admit you were wrong in attacking the Red Fang, and we can find an accommodation."

I struggled to place the face of the man. There hadn't been that many bald men. It just wasn't something you saw, except in criminals. Then Iremembered the explosion at the inn and the stranger that had run alongside me. He had made himself out to be an emissary and we had chatted amiably.

I told him about boundaries.

He had listened.

"Wu?"

"By now, you've realized," he said, increasing the pressure, "That just active listening is not enough to-"

My bones shook as I stood up, fighting with every ounce of strength in my body.

"-win against me. Curious."

"You know what, FRIEND? I'm going to establish a clear boundary here. You see this city? This-"

I stepped forward.

"-This is MY city. And I'm the setting the boundary that you-"

I stepped again, garnering a raised eyebrow.

"-are not welcome here. You see all of these people, they're strong physically, but they can't hold a handle to what I've been through. I feel like I live in a world of paper where I have had to take constant vigilance to not break anyone. I haven't lost control the entire time I've been here. Not even for a second. But I don't have to do that anymore."

My whole body tingled as I began to run. He in turn started to take this entire enterprise seriously, bringing up both fists. I just needed to get a hand on him and let my Superman trick take over. That was one of the ways-

He dodged bodily before punching me straight in the face.

*Got him.*

He attempted to let go, his hand unexpectedly getting stuck to my face. He looked on with utter revulsion as I grabbed his forearm with mine.

The gravity of his pressure immediately dropped as he refocused himself on trying to get away from me.

"You wanted me? Here I am! Oh now you want to leave? Too freaking bad!"

I tossed him through the ground, leaving a two meter deep crater. I floated above it. Two familiar hands were on my hips, holding me up.

"I know you want to be a hero but can I take a shot at him? This is a bit personal, Joe."

I exhaled the weight of his presence.

"I got your back," I said,"or we can do this like we used to."

"What are you idiots blabbering about," Wu said, climbing unscratched from the rubble.

"You might have raised a Sect, Wu Zhao, but we raised teenage girls," I replied,"Light him up."

"With pleasure."

Arc lazer beams poured down to where he had been as I saw Moon Lee and the two Jin cultivators take up spots around the crater.

I pulled dream qi in, enveloping all three of us as I dragged him kicking and screaming into my dreamscape. He might have been able to see through it, but in his heightened state, he spent his energy batting off the thin beams. Then he was there in the post apocalyptic Los Angeles of my dreams.

"Oh, now this is new," he said,"finally a challenge-"

Maxine slammed him into I-5. Thankfully she had taken this all in stride. The normal back to back traffic had been replaced by rows of cars aiming to hit him.

He pushed his will out into the world, trying to negate the dreamscape. It was only the Qi that I gathered from the nightmares of his prisoners that kept me from immediately emptying out my new core.

Instead I focused on pulling something from his memory. If I couldn't break through to him with violence, I would have to find another way.

"Mother?"

A tall long haired Asian woman looked down upon him. Her spectral form gave the impression of a weightless spirit. See she reached out a hand to his face.

"What happened to my little boy?" The lilting voice said, "he is shorn, his sins can never be forgiven."

"Mother! How are you here! What..is this place?"

Maxine held off her assault wisely waiting for him to make move. She probably hadn't expected this trick. I hadn't explained this side of my powers, but if she was able to fly like Iron Man I was sure as heck not going to tell her everything I could do. It was going to be on her if we ever even did a team up again. I just didn't want to work with her. This was a special one time deal because everything lined up.

Wu began to blink as the image of his mother faded in and out.

"Where the hell are you," he said.

With the bald head and the sharp teeth, I couldn't help but think of him as a gremlin. I hadn't noticed the teeth before. They sure as heck seemed important now. He must have been hiding that when I saw him the first time. Unfortunately, though I made the specter of his mother, it wasn't listening to me the way I expected it to.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Been here the whole time," I said from behind him,"Why are you such a terrible son? What did you do to deserve your mothers hatred? You don't go against family!"

The incredulous look stoked something in me that I was certain I had pushed way down.

"But-but," he wavered between glaring and sneering,"You're not real. None of this can be real! These giant steel boxes can't be real."

"See," I said,"That's where you're wrong, because you might think that you're in charge of your own mind, but right here and now? You've already lost it."

The waves of pressure he pushed out stopped me flat, utterly annihilating the dreamscape as the last of my dream qi maintained the face and voice of his mother.

"YIELD!" He screamed, his muscles bulging against his form fitting clothes.

My ribs creaked. I had to have been bleeding internally and the loss of blood had me wavering between conscious and unconscious. An elephant had sat on me and it was attempting to crush me into paste.

"I SHOULD THINK NOT."

An angelic voice cut through the haze of my vision as a purple robed angel descended upon us. Either the Taoists were great at putting on a show or someone had pulled an even more powerful cultivators into the party. As Wu relented, blood forced its way out of my throat. I called to Min trying to nudge her to get to me and do something in one last faint hope before I passed out.

---

I woke up, my entire chest and right arm covered in bandages. The room around me was dark and my only consolation was that I had Min resting nearby. A hundred stray thoughts fought to the surface as I reached for the moon spirit.

"Partner Joseph, you're okay!" She padded over to me. Instead of her normal sit on my chest and wait for pets, she curled up on my left side.

"I take it you have news? Did we win or is this a fever dream?"

"In this dream, I am the human and you are my familiar. We are still partners though."

"Do you feel like I order you around a lot? Because I feel like I get a lot of snark back from you."

"This seems like a thing that you need from the women in your life. Partner Joe, if you would please keep me out of your kinks, I would be much obliged."

I propped myself up and gave her a good pat. I didn't care if she was a snarky piece. She was mine.

But if she started making harem jokes, it was going to be over.

"What happened to the rest of them? How's the crew?"

"Ally Jin Xueyie has found a replacement, though her show ended it's run. Her parents were instrumental in calling up the Mandarin. He was the one who saved you in the end."

"I might have had that coming."

I stopped petting her long enough that she used her prehensile tail to make me start up again. I was not going to get used to that.

"Just a smidgen. Bestie Maxine-"

"I'm sorry, did you just call my ex-wife your bestie?"

"She said that it was a common term for best friends where you come from."

"Uh-huh. What did your 'bestie' say? Also how long was I out? It seems like a lot has happened."

"Partner Joseph, you were out for five days."

I envisioned myself sitting straight up and looking indignant but that thought made me ache and itch.

"Anyway, Bestie Maxine helped but then took a side line to the thorough blue coat investigation. They're going to want to speak with you as well, once you have recovered enough to walk. She has been giving an oral account of what they tried to get her to do."

"She didn't know about the larder."

The moon spirit was silent for the first time since I had woken up. No purring noises and I swear I had seen those bloodshot eyes before.

"They're alive, though brought to the brink of death. Apparently the demonic cultivation requires corpses but they have gradations of... freshness."

I was thinking about my mother's garden back home. She barely tended it, leaving it for the help to deal with nowadays. Back before Dad had signed a hit artist to his label, when I was really little, that garden had been the different between eating vegetables and not. They had kept the people alive like vegetables.

"What's to be done with them?"

"The Moon clan has agreed to help heal them. The Mandarin believes that they may teach us something about the Red Fang that they can use to flush out others."

"So I got the blue robes to do their damn job after all."

"It's difficult to tell if the Mandarin is more angry at finding a demonic sect in the middle of his city, or because he has to do work."

"Could be both."

"Both is good."

"How about Egiya and her mother?"

"Ally Kang Egiya is helping her mother with those we helped saved. She is taking down their stories as they are healed. She told me that she wants to be notified when you awaken. Matriarch Kang that is, of course."

Everything in my bones wanted to leap up and tell them that I was good but a fit of coughing stopped me.

"Matriarch Kang also spoke to the Mandarin on your behalf."

The coughing started up again.

"Well I'm not trying to rescue spoiled milk. I sure hope she knows what she is doing, talking to what is he, a sixth or seventh realm cultivator?"

"The gaps get wider. The only reason you are alive is because you made it so the Mandarin himself had to show up."

I whistled a bit and once again attempted to stand. It felt good to not be on my back, even though my head spun as I got up. It was a relief to be breathing. I threw my legs over the side of the bed and just kinda existed for a while, my head in my hands.

It was one thing to think about how close I had been to death, but thinking about how everyone I has just met had been in far greater danger-Someone should have stopped me.

But I hadn't seen any adults around, so it had to be me.

"Now what?" I asked.

"The people that this happened to, they're going to need a lot of work to rejoin society. Some of them don't even know that they're in Western Jewel."

"Some of them don't even-ow!"

I tented my arms on my knees. A different type of pain hit me.

"Take me to them."

---

My neck throbbed as I came back to the converted compound. Each step was a slow deliberate process, but assisted by Min we had made it there in under an hour. The sheer size of the city still struck me almost as much as the stone and marble buildings in three or more stories. They now felt familiar.

There wasn't a line of people to indicate that we were there, most of the rubble having been cleared while I slept. Inside, the dark and reds had been changed to a more vibrant set of colors. The courtyard was full of people who look like they had just been released for recess.

Here and there they played around and I saw a ball being kicked between two women, as they ran around the now grassy interior.

Madame Kang sat with one of the men, facing away from me on a bench. His short black hair had curls, something that I had rarely if ever seen here.

I placed a hand on her back.

"Oh, hello cultivator Joseph. Why I was just talking to this man here and he has the strangest story I've heard in a while. Have you ever heard of a place called Los Angeles?"

THE END

VOLUME 1 OF NASCENT SOUL CHILD