"So, this is the final room? Nice," Pan Tian said as she increased her pace, "and the sarcophagus is still closed... I think we're the first ones here. This is awesome."
"Didn't you just say to be careful? What do you know about this room?" Jie asked.
"Well, it's the one I know the least about," Pan Tian said, "people don't normally reach it which makes it difficult to get notes on... and I meant what I said about being careful. I can't help being excited though! My brother is going to be so jealous. I can't believe how far we've come. This is the best hunt ever! I think we're easily on track to win it, and we still have time remaining!"
Jie couldn't help but smile as the older girl squirmed with exuberant energy. But, despite that, Pan Tian resumed her careful inspection of the path before them and led the way across.
Jie scanned the room with her eyes and her spirit sense. But she detected nothing apart from the sarcophagus.
They crossed the bridge and easily jumped up each of the steps of the strange pyramid. They stayed on the stone and gave the blood a wide berth. Jie eyed it and the lake cautiously. She sent her spirit sense deep into that dark liquid... but if there was anything there, it was hiding well.
Though she'd enjoyed this hunt with her friends and learned a lot... she was looking forward to resuming her more normal routine.
Dungeons and exploring... life and death battles... keeping her friends and herself alive... it was stressful. It would be good to relax, cultivate, and train more normally again for a while. Besides, everything was so damn creepy and gross. A thousand showers wouldn't be enough.
They gathered around the sarcophagus and Jie eyed it carefully while Pan Tian inspected it without touching it.
"She's not... actually dead... right? This isn't... her?" Jie asked.
"Not as far as I know," Pan Tian said, "it's just for the learning experience. She vanished ages ago, so she might be dead... but if she is, I don't think the academy has her body."
Pan Tian took out a scroll of wisdom and used it on the sarcophagus.
"It doesn't seem to be trapped," she said, "It has some... peculiar enchantments though. Preservation mostly... I think we should be safe enough."
"This one hopes we did not fight all this way for a rotting corpse and nothing else," Ithilix said.
"Well... it is supposed to train us for real tombs... Though, I always heard that experts liked to keep their greatest treasures closest to their actual tomb... and there's nothing here. So... I don't know," Pan Tian said.
She gripped the lid of the sarcophagus and pushed with a heavy exhale. It didn't move.
"Are the rest of you just going to stare at me all day? Help would be nice," Pan Tian said.
Jie helped her push as did Ithilix and the lid slid open with the grind of stone on stone.
Within, was yet another statue of the red woman, with her eyes closed and her arms crossed over her chest, her hands resting on her shoulders.
There were no treasures that Jie could see.
"Well, that's... disappointing..." Pan Tian said.
The statue's eyes snapped open and dark red energy poured out of its eyes, nose, ears, and mouth. The energy swirled into a thick cloud that exploded outward and engulfed Jie and her friends. Jie tried not to breathe as she struggled against the foreign energy. But it held her firm and squirmed into her nostrils and eyes even as it wormed its way through her ears.
Her vision changed and Jie found herself standing atop an ocean of people and all manner of other creatures. All entwined in acts of depravity. Their bodies stacked atop one another in mountains of undulating flesh.
Their eyes were lost in pleasure, madness, and unspeakable horror. Their hips gyrated and ground against one another as their teeth sank into each other's skin and tore it free in long, agonizing strips.
The sky above Jie was a mass of red, veiny, pulsating flesh that tinted the world scarlet. It bulged and writhed, contorting into countless faces that leered at her from every direction.
The red woman whose likeness Jie had seen countless times knelt upon the ocean of flesh, her face in her hands as she wept. She looked so utterly broken and so very different from the statues Jie was used to seeing that she almost didn't recognize the woman.
The image was there for just a moment before it flickered, replaced with an inky black void. Jie looked around her, but the void was featureless save for the pool of blood where a floor ought to be. Jie walked upon the surface as though it were solid. Every footstep created ripples in the otherwise still liquid.
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Laughter echoed around her in the dark void and blood flowed up in front of Jie, taking the form of the red woman. The blood fell away, leaving the woman standing before Jie with a haughty expression upon her face.
The red woman wore elegant black robes and carried herself with a straight back and proud shoulders. Gone were her tears and in their place was an overpowering gaze. She looked so different from a moment ago that Jie wondered if they were two separate people.
"Thank you so much for fighting through all my careful preparations. The weak have been weeded out, leaving only you... the strongest of the lot to open my tomb and gift me your body as my new host," said the red woman, a cruel smile upon her lips.
Blood rushed up Jie's legs and latched onto her arms in thick strands like webbing, holding her in place as the red woman stepped closer. The woman leaned down until their noses touched and the woman's cruel eyes stared into Jie's soul.
The blood holding Jie in place burrowed beneath her skin. A sharp, cold agony exploded inside Jie's soul. It transcended the physical, making her feel as though her soul was being ripped apart.
Jie screamed as she struggled against the blood like a fly caught in a spider's web.
"Give in... and it'll hurt so much less... don't worry. I'll take your body to heights you never even dreamed of, using all the knowledge I've gained and with a stronger soul to--"
The world flickered again, back to the field of death with the crying woman.
Instead of the blood, it was hands that gripped Jie. Grasping, desperate hands that clawed at her legs and arms and tore open her skin with filthy, yellowed fingernails.
The crying red woman looked up at Jie. She looked small, bedraggled, and desperate with a lost, empty look in her haunted eyes.
'Kill me' she mouthed as though she no longer had the strength to speak. Hands grasped the red woman and pulled her down into the ocean of flesh, but her lost eyes seemed too far gone to care. They stared, unblinking at Jie even as the ocean of flesh swallowed the woman entirely.
The world flickered back to the dark void, with the red woman nose to nose with Jie as the agony in Jie's soul redoubled. The woman ran her fingers through Jie's hair.
"You don't have the will to resist. Your soul is too weak, little cultivator," said the red woman.
The red woman pushed her face into Jie's as though stepping into Jie like a suit. It felt like something was trying to burrow its way into Jie's soul the way a worm burrows through an apple. Jie felt the red woman inside her, trying to push her out of herself. To turn her body into an empty shell.
The pain was excruciating.
But it was nothing compared to having her body remade with her soul still in it. Nothing at all like that searing all-consuming pain. It tried to push Jie out, but it was like a gentle summer breeze trying to move a citadel of iron and rock. Jie growled and shoved back at the invader with the full force of her will.
A tortured shriek filled the air and for a moment, Jie thought it was her. But her lips were pressed tight in a grimace. The screaming continued as something writhed beneath her skin. Jie strained against the tendrils of blood even as she pushed with her soul. Strands of blood snapped and fell away as Jie roared her defiance. She tore her way free and her body convulsed as her soul rejected the red woman, sending her flying out into the inky blackness.
The false world shattered like glass and Jie returned to herself, amid the swirling mist of dark red energy emanating from the sarcophagus.
To her surprise, Xue appeared to already have broken free of the strange attack and rubbed his furry cheek against her hand.
Jie lightly stroked his head and peered at the rest of her friends. She could just barely see their silhouettes within the vortex of dark red energy. They stood rigid like statues and as Jie looked from Pan Tian to Ithilix, she didn't know how to help them this time. How could she fight something within them?
Jie's gaze fixated on the sarcophagus. She grasped the lid and pulled it back over the statue, but it broke apart in her fingers and turned into golden dust that spilled over the sarcophagus and the floor.
"You will not interrupt their instruction, disciple," intoned the voice of the red woman.
The red energy surged and shoved into Jie and Xue, knocking them both into the air and sending them spinning away down the step pyramid. Jie activated a lightning step platform and caught herself in the air before rocketing back toward her friends. But the red energy expanded into a dome before she reached it, and she smacked uselessly into it, sliding down its surface and down to a stone step several tiers below her friends.
Xue landed lightly on his feet a few tiers below her with typical feline ease, then raced back up to join her in confronting the barrier.
Jie and Xue growled as they attacked the barrier with lightning fists and claws. Nothing was going to tell them they couldn't help their friends. And there wasn't a chance in hell they'd risk losing them to one of these stupid tests.
Thunderous booms echoed through the cavern, but the barrier didn't so much as budge.
Jie snarled and smashed it again and again at full power, but the barrier absorbed her blows effortlessly. Her strongest strikes barely sent ripples through it. Xue's attacks proved similarly fruitless.
The energy within the barrier swirled, and a dark shape hurtled toward her. Jie jumped back, readying her dragonfists to attack... only for Pan Tian to fly through the barrier straight at her. Jie released her dragonfists and caught the older girl in her arms, setting her hooves back down on the ground. Pan Tian swayed dangerously and supported herself on Jie.
"Jie?" Pan Tian asked. She sounded groggy and confused. Her voice slurred.
"I'm here," Jie said, "is it... really you?"
"Yes, it's me," Pan Tian said as she rubbed at her head, "Ugh... that wasn't in my notes... I bet they left that part out on purpose. Jerks."
"Are you okay? Can you stand?" Jie asked.
"I'm fine. Just dizzy," Pan Tian said as she carried herself under her own weight, though she still looked wobbly.
The satyr girl looked over Xue and Jie and then back at the swirling barrier of red energy.
"All that's left is Ithilix," Pan Tian said, "I wonder what's taking her so long..."
Jie stopped attacking the barrier as it seemed a pointless effort and instead readied herself for when a disoriented Ithilix shot out of the barrier as worry gnawed at her.
The seconds seemed to drag by and with each passing moment, Jie's concern for Ithilix grew.