The blood flowed, the swords flashed, and the slaughter filled the air.
The trouble with the zodiac tribulation was that each of the twelve heavenly beasts fought differently, and there was no chance of any one cultivator being a great match against all of them. They were making a good show of it, and yet they were still being ground down, even with the four of them making up for each other’s weaknesses. The beasts gave them no chance to rest, to recover.
Would they crack first, or would the Heavens?
Qian Shanyi was all out of talismans, and down to a fifth of her spiritual energy reserves. Jian Shizhe, for all his great skill, was down to two fifths, and if not for her pills, would have been doing a lot worse. The blood of the beasts helped, but not fast enough.
Curls, in contrast, needed no help - a mount fitting for a beastmaster in the building foundation stage, let alone a refinement one. There was a reason Hui Yin felt confident in butting into their tribulation without announcing himself in advance. Yet even the great snake still struggled, held back by having to protect its rider, and further constrained in its movements by the much more fragile fellow cultivators fighting on the very same hill. It was used to making great leaps, falling on its prey from the height of a mountain and at the speed of the wind, and struggled to deal with the beasts coming at it on all sides, ready to take a bite out of its long tail. Chipped scales, cuts, and burns were adding up.
A test of all their strengths.
Except for Wang Yonghao, who could fly, the lucky fuck, and thus could approach all but the dragon and the rooster at his leisure, and even those with only the mildest concern.
The goats were the most annoying of all, dripping in shadow and haze, their black fur blending in with the smoke still rising from the grass after the rampage of the horses. Even spiritual energy senses could not detect them. Silent killers, stalking the weak and going in for the kill - and so much worse for it than the rabbit, for at least it did not try to hide.
With the pair of goats absent, they were faced with a horse and a tiger, Jian Shizhe doing his best to keep her safe from the gouts of flame, while Curls and Wang Yonghao tried to box them in for the kill. The beasts have learned from their mistakes, and ran circles around Curls, always staying just close enough to her to stop Wang Yonghao from striking out with the Honk of the Solar Goose, yet also moving erratically, throwing off the great snake’s aim. She sent out her flying sword to help out, aiming for the horse -
And things went wrong almost at once. The tiger pivoted, sprinting at her and Jian Shizhe, who stepped in the way -
- only for one of the goats to leap out of the smoke, crashing into him from the side, tossing them both away from the tiger’s path -
- who charged at her, spit and rage flying, even as she tried to recall her sword back, knowing she would not be fast enough. Wang Yonghao rushed after it, already sending out blades of cutting light, but the tiger’s claw slammed down on her chest just a moment before his strike cut its head off. Her spiritual shield crackled, but held -
- and immediately shattered, twin black horns piercing her chest from the back, her ribs cracking to make way. The pain of it made her lose control over her flying sword technique entirely, and she saw it plunge down into the ground, a good five meters away.
She grabbed one of the horns poking out of her chest to stop it from being pulled free, ripped a knife off her back with her other hand, and blindly rammed it into the throat of the goat behind her. She felt muscle and bone tear, and the beast stilled.
Sneaky bastards.
She fell to the ground, barely keeping enough presence of mind to push out with one hand and avoid dislodging the horns. There were now two massive holes in her lungs, and these damnable horns were the only thing plugging them up. Blood gushed into her lungs anyways, flowing around the wound, and her breathing seized, as she fought against her instinct to cough - for it would only damage her lungs more.
No time to panic. Work the problem.
She focused on her inner senses, hurriedly squeezing fat, skin and muscle against the horns to plug the gaps, seal the blood vessels, and manually pump blood out of her lungs and into her stomach with her spiritual energy. Her control over her own spiritual energy stated to slip, and a little and very annoying voice in the back of her mind started to tell her how well and truly fucked she was.
Her lungs were damaged, and they were linked to the lungs meridian. Without functioning lungs, she could not properly circulate energy through it.
The lungs meridian. Yin and metal, the most important one in her entire body. Her spiritual energy recirculation was already going awry, fucking up the delicate work of keeping herself from dying. If she slipped and let the blood gush out, she would bleed out and die. If she let it fill her lungs, she would drown and die. Yet the more she used her spiritual energy to force things into place, the higher the chances her spiritual energy recirculation would destabilize entirely, overload one of her dantians, and blow it clear out of her body.
Her breaths were shallow, each one an agony as blood frothed out of her mouth. Dimly, she was aware of Jian Shizhe standing over her, fighting off a six-armed monkey, each hand holding a crude steel sword. It came to finish what the goat started, but she had no presence of mind to think of that. One problem at a time.
With shaking hands, she tore open a pouch on her bandoleer, and drew out one of her spare bottles of healing pills. She pressed it to her lips, and inhaled the red, swirling pill within, fighting against her instincts begging for air.
The healing pill dissolved as soon as it reached her stomach, flooding her chest with heat, and she felt the skin around the wounds pull closer together, regeneration accelerating further and the flood of blood slowing. There would be a reckoning, taking a double dose in short sequence, but fucking up her eyes sure beat dying.
Alright. Now what?
If she could survive until the tribulation ended, she’d get help… But she was barely holding on as she was. Without spiritual energy circulation, she had no spiritual energy shield, and could die to a sneeze by any one of the heavenly beasts.
Almost half of the tribulation was still left. She couldn’t rely on Jian Shizhe to guard her body through the rest of the chaos.
With the horns stuck in her lungs, she couldn’t properly recirculate spiritual energy - even the healing effect of the pills inside of her was severely weakened. That meant she had to pull them out. There was no other option.
Unfortunately for her, they were also the only thing stopping the blood from flowing freely.
She would have to pull them out slowly, giving the pill in her blood time to work. All the tissue - skin, muscle and bone - was still there, so perhaps if she pulled the punctures closed they could heal up enough for her to stand. Thankfully, her robes had somehow remained whole, and wrapped around the horns like a bandage, keeping the surface of the wounds relatively smooth. Masterful craftsmanship, truly.
Qian Shanyi closed her eyes, and tried to keep her breathing deep and even. Despite her best efforts at pulling blood out of her lungs, she was starting to feel light-headed, and she’d need all the air she could get.
Or perhaps it was the blood loss - her fingers did tingle slightly.
Gritting her teeth, she reached behind herself, and grabbed the goat’s head by the ears, preparing to do the one thing she was expressly told never to do, when she learned first aid back in her sect.
She didn’t get the chance. A strong hand seized her by the wrist, and she felt cold air all over her skin, pleasant after the heat of the fires and the acrid smoke. Raising her eyes, she saw Junming, kneeling on the grass right next to her, naked from the waist up. They were spinning spiritual energy in a complex pattern above their palm, before bringing that hand to her chest. She shuddered from the piercing cold as ice spread across her skin and through her lungs, blood freezing in place and sealing up the wound.
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In the skies above, thunder rumbled.
She tried to speak, and instead coughed, spurting blood foam instead of words. Closing her mouth, she raised her hands, and signed.
Junming glanced down at her face. Their face showed no emotion, but that was no surprise.
“Don’t like seeing cultivators die,” they said. “Stay still. Hard to work.”
She signed instead. Her body shook - though she couldn’t tell if it was from stimulants, fear, pain, or bloodloss - but her fingers were steady. Mostly.
Junming pulled the horns a bit further out of her back, and her spine arched. Definitely pain, this time.
“So chatty,” Junming said, “Can fingerspeak now?”
She had planned how to pretend to be worse at fingerspeaking than she was, to only use a limited set of words, not the couple hundred she actually knew. Somehow, it didn’t feel that important in the moment.
She felt the lightning about to strike, and shut her eyes, burying her face into the ground. With a thunderous clap, it struck, and yet she felt no shock. Cautiously, she raised her eyes, and saw Wang Yonghao, his sword raised where it split the lightning aimed for Junming’s head.
“Too young for grave,” Junming said, not even looking up from their work, “keep still.”
She did as she was told, hiding her face in the ground from the lightning. Yonghao blasted the rat swarm apart with a great gout of fire, and Curls snapped the back of the ox in half with the strike of her enormous tail. Slowly, the goat horns left her body, and she pulled her tissues back in place, letting the cold seal up the gaps. Junming helped her, quickly bandaging up the wounds with a gauze they brought along.
She rose up on her knees, her body still shaking from the shock. Junming’s technique didn’t heal her - merely stopped the damage, giving the healing pills in her blood time to work. Even now, she felt air whistle slightly out of the holes, and had to force it out of her chest cavity with spiritual energy, lest it collapse her lungs.
But her spiritual energy recirculation had stabilized, so it would have to do.
“Status?” she croaked, trying to keep her lungs from staining too much. They still bled, though not enough to worry her. The pills would replenish her blood. Junming helped her get up on her feet, and grabbed a large lantern, waving it through the air. A dozen shimmering swords of ice formed all around them, spinning in circles, giving them a moment’s reprieve. A small pile of corpses surrounded them - the goat that almost killed her, one of the snakes, and many others. Not even a single spot of grass was free from the blood.
Jian Shizhe’s robes were torn up, his skin bleeding from multiple wounds. Even Wang Yonghao had a large gash across his face. Their spiritual energy was low - she could feel that easily. They kept her and Junming safe, but paid dearly for it - and the tribulation was far from over.
“Rooster, Monkey, Monkey, Snake, Rabbit” Jian Shizhe said, his voice clear despite the wounds. He wiped off his face, taking a breather, and rested his enormous sword on the ground. “I am down to a fifth of my reserves. Wang is at half.” She could see the monkeys stalking around the circle of ice blades, and heard the rooster battle with Hui Yin somewhere in the smoke, its deadly, confounding crowing neutralized by some musical technique.
Wang Yonghao gave her a look. They discussed the possibility of sending her into his world fragment, hoping the tribulation couldn’t follow, if things went badly enough. She shook her head. They couldn’t just leave the others here to die. “Can you even fight?” he asked, pursing his lips.
“Yeah, I am fine.” She coughed up blood. Her lungs felt like a noodle strainer. “Never been better. In fact, I have a plan.”
Wang Yonghao cursed loudly.
“Brat.” She scowled at him. “Just for that, you have been elevated to be its key part.”
“And what do I have to do?”
She reached for her hip, picked up the fly whisk, and tossed it to him. He grabbed it out of the air, looking at her curiously. “Bring me that snake -”
“Sure,” he said, raising his sword, and waving the fly whisk in a seemingly random direction. The smoke billowed outwards, and revealed the snake, about to pounce at them between the ice swords. Wang Yonghao raised his sword, and Junming stepped around to his side, covering the flank.
“- alive,” she finished, clapping Wang Yonghao on his ankle to stop his strike.
He glared at her briefly. “What do you mean, alive?!”
“I’ll teach you all about the dao of life and death later, junior.” She coughed up blood again. Her lungs have really seen better days, huh. Well, she’d just have to grow new ones. “We need something to balance the scales - I will tie it up and use its fear like a weapon.”
Jian Shizhe gave her a considering look, pursing his lips. In his eyes, she could see something approaching respect. Wang Yonghao scowled at her. “Tie it up? It’s on fire!”
She scowled right back at him, and grabbed the goat that almost killed her by the neck, its horns slick with her own blood. “Who is the seamstress here, me or you? Go, get me the damn snake! I’ll worry about how to tie it up myself.”
She pulled her knife out of the goat’s throat like a cork out of a bottle of spirit wine, and lifted it above her head, sucking the blood out. Earth spiritual energy, the best she could hope for, in her condition. Jian Shizhe stepped closer to her, readying his sword, and Junming waved their lantern, sending half of the ice swords into the smoke.
Wang Yonghao sighed, and went after the living snake. On the way there, he pulled her sword out of the ground, and tossed it back to her.
Tossing the empty goat aside, she knelt next to the corpse of the dead snake at her feet, readying her knife.
“I will need a minute,” she said, “honorable cultivators, I hope you can manage without me.”
Junming warbled something, waving their lantern again. More swords appeared, these ones spinning closer to them. Jian Shizhe gave her a dark look, but said nothing.
With her knife, she sliced into the snake, carefully peeling the skin away from the flesh underneath, and cutting it into a long ribbon. It didn’t have to be perfect, as long as it didn’t tear. The scales of the snake resisted the fire, and her sword could not cut into them - the knife only managing with great difficulty, by cutting from the inside out. Three Obediences Four Virtues noted the skin of the heavenly snake as an excellent sewing material, tough yet elastic - and even though she had no way to properly treat it in the middle of a fight, she hoped it could serve its purpose raw.
Less than a minute later, she held a long ribbon of snake skin, her rope control technique threading through it, bringing it into motion. Just in time, too, as Wang Yonghao tossed the living snake towards them. Terror rose in her mind, but at this point, it barely even registered. If anything, it felt invigorating.
Junming blasted the snake with ice and cold, and it slowed, fires on its body dying out for just a moment, letting her get the impromptu rope around it, tying it into knots. The snake hissed, and flared more fire from its skin, but it was all for naught - where any rope would have been burned to cinders, the skin of its own kind survived. Caught, yet kept alive - and now the tribulation was five on four.
“The Heavens want to kill me, fellow cultivators,” she laughed, wheezing air out of her wounds. “So let the other beasts come. Let them make mistakes, terrified of their own Heavenly weapon. Unlike them, we are cultivators. What is a little terror to us?“
She grinned, raising her sword defiantly in the air.
“All we have to do is slaughter them like the cattle they truly are!”
----------------------------------------
Her sword flew through the air, and ripped into the eye of the last fat, bloated pig, its snout dripping with drool and blood. It fell to the ground, dead, and Qian Shanyi called her weapon back to her, just barely managing to not fumble the catch. She breathed heavily, resting her hands on her knees. She felt more drained than she ever was in her entire life, and yet her soul sung in triumph.
Next to her, Jian Shizhe was standing, his hands resting calmly on the pommel of his sword. For all that he was covered in cuts and bruises, and she knew for a fact that his left arm was broken, he looked as if he had expected their victory all along. His left foot was missing, bitten off by one of the pigs, though he had cut open its stomach right away to retrieve it - with any luck, healers should still be able to reattach it. She was the one to apply a tourniquet after the fact.
Curls had curled up in a wide circle, sucking on the tip of her own tail. Here and there, her scales have been chipped and blackened - and Hui Yin was walking down her body, inspecting the damage. Out of them all, he was the most well put together.
Wang Yonghao stood on her opposite side, looking around nervously, not knowing what to expect. Junming just seemed tired, but when she gave them a look, they smiled, very slightly and deliberately. All around the hill she could see expectant faces, the smoke having long ago cleared by now.
Up above them, thunder sounded one last time, one crack after another, each louder than the one before it. Fifteen in total, for the fifteen bolts of lightning that had descended down upon them all.
And with the last crack, the sky had brightened once more.
All around the hill, cheers rang through the air. Cultivators, ordinary people, men and women, even children, all knew what it meant.
They had transcended the tribulation. Today, the Heavens had lost, and cultivators won.
The postmaster ascended the hill at a jog, followed by an unfamiliar cultivator and a pair of ordinary people - wearing the white robes of healers, carrying a large bag and a stretcher. She waited for them to come, not moving from her spot - after what she went through, they could be the ones to exert their legs.
“You see, Yonghao?” she said quietly, inclining her head in his direction, “Is it not satisfying?”
He looked at her strangely, but she could see he liked the adoration of the crowd too. “And now what?”
“Now?” she said, stretching out her arms and back. “Now, I get to see a proper healer… And then, we celebrate. Get as drunk as you want - today, you deserved it.”