She’s mad.
She has to be mad. Delusional. Borderline disconnected from reality. There’s no other possibility, nothing else that makes the slightest drop of sense.
Qen Hou stares down at the unconscious, ragged figure in front of him and tries as hard as he can to convince himself that she’s only mad.
Seeing her appear from the ruin he fell through was surprise enough, a genuine shock that she was somehow still alive. Watching her walk out from that same ruin, somehow upright with one leg that barely touches the ground due to how warped its knee is, was shocking enough again. It took him a second to realize that she wasn’t just ignoring him like a willful moron, but the blood leaking from the ears of the mortals all around made him realize she really was deaf. And yet, she didn’t try to read his lips, or give him the proper attention, or even really look at him. She only had eyes for that which he had vanquished. It might even have made sense, it was both a mighty and strange opponent after all, but she wasn’t looking at it, or him, with admiration.
She walked straight past him, like he wasn’t even there, towards the fallen thing. It was a difficult foe, but not a true challenge; it hadn’t used even a single Qi technique, only body strengthening, so any proper cultivator that could survive its blows could defeat it.
Then he felt something behind him moving.
He felt no Qi, no power, no strength, and only barely hears the sound of it. It emerged like a steel blade from velvet, barely a whisper as it moved, and-
He’d never seen anything like it. It looked like some kind of monster, one of the stranger beasts from the lands at the edge of the empire, where the Emperor’s will reached its limits and the flesh and blood of monsters ran purer, but far too… mechanical. It looked forged, its shape a shifting illusion made of black razors and a single white stone at its center, stabbed into said razors, but it moved far too fluidly, like something truly alive.
And then the cripple grabbed it.
She sagged, but she didn’t let go, dragging herself up by her grip and glaring at the thing like it was a particularly annoying ant. With or without Qi, he could feel her killing intent from several feet away. The beast began to move, whirling razors shooting out at the both of them, and he blasted them away with his Purple-Heart Flame cultivation but it only seemed to make them stronger. He still couldn’t sense the damn construct but he could feel his own Qi, so carefully cultivated and maintained, ready to be pulled back into his meridians to avoid wasting it, vanishing where it touched the body of the thing.
And still, the cripple did not let go.
He had decided, in that moment, in that instant as he felt his very life force being dragged into that sharpened void, that her life was not worth this thing’s continued existence. If she wished to keep hold of the damn thing and get in his way, so be it.
And then, as she burned on the dregs of his power that made it past the slashing, whirling tendrils that sliced all about against his flames, she fucking bit the damn thing! After saying some kind of one-liner!
She’s mad. She has to be mad.
Except that she started walking before he heard the thing moving. She grabbed it, bare handed, and somehow kept it from killing her. Qen Hou is more than happy to acknowledge that the only reason the thing didn’t eviscerate her is that its tendrils were drinking his flames, but she was still getting cut, still burning from the heat, and in the end she was the one that killed it, dislodging that white stone somehow.
He picks up said stone. It’s nothing special; marble, though extremely pale, with scratches and indents in it where the strange creature gripped it. He can’t sense anything from it, neither Qi nor that strange void that still vaguely emanates from the creature’s limbs; to all his senses it reads as utterly normal stone. It may have been the creature’s heart, but it might simply have been something to allow energy to move through it, acting as some sort of circuit, empty now it’s disconnected.
He looks down at the collapsed figure between himself and the creature. She’s started to paint a circle of red around her, and her hair is nearly gone, burnt down to her scalp, and it’s only one of several burns she has.
“Too tough to kill, huh?” he murmurs.
—----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Li Shu can feel the weight of her breathing. She can feel the effort it takes to drag it into her lungs, one heaving breath after the next, trying as hard as she can to remain focused.
If her master were here she’d say the same thing as her friend; Focus. She lacks focus. Even having cultivated to the very ends of the Foundational realm, she’s still distracted too easily, too easy to fluster or confuse, prone to panic in new circumstances. She’s better than before, she knows that much for a fact, even without her teacher to tell her so, but it doesn’t mean that her worst habits are behind her.
Case in point; here she is wasting time with recrimination when people need her help.
Whatever that thing that Qen Hou protected them from was, it’s arrival was a horrific thing. Anyone above Qi-Gathering realm knows how to control an impact, when and where to use Qi to make sure they don’t cause unnecessary damage to their surroundings, but whatever this thing was, it did not care. It didn’t boost the impact with Qi, either; it landed as it landed, and it landed with such velocity and force that it blasted the entire courtyard apart. Shrapnel hit families and children, fires have been lit from festive candles and lanterns, and only by the light of the stars can everyone still see in the dark. It landed hard enough to crater the center of the courtyard, shattering a fountain there before launching itself through everyone in its way towards her and Qen Hou.
Li Shu added vomit to the mess when she saw the trail of red, mushy remains that it left behind. She added tears not long after at the sound of voices crying out.
So many of them were in pain and fear, but the ones filled with grief hit the hardest. Some of them knelt next to bodies that weren’t moving, while others called out for people they couldn’t find or who they saw get hurt and then lost sight of. It’s a cacophony, the crackling of fire playing drumbeat to the melody of human suffering in the courtyard.
Focus.
She took one breath, the smell and vomit and blood familiar enough that even through the horror of them, she can use them to pretend, to picture herself back in the clinic, her master over her shoulder.
Find those you can save, her master’s voice whispers in her mind, and then find the ones you need to save now.
So she moves. She spends her Qi like water, letting it free from her Dantian to spread like a blanket over the crowd, using it to sense everyone she can as fast as she can. Wherever it touches another with Qi inside them, the healing arts can communicate things like distress and damage through the connection of Qi to flesh, if one has the skill to read it. Li Shu, despite any failings, has the skill.
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The next few hours passed in a blur, a heart wrenching eye blink. She does not speak except when she has to, she moves only from one broken body to another, and she does not, cannot make eye contact with those crouched beside the fallen, those who try to get her attention, who desperately wail and scream when she moves past those she can’t save.
She loses track of who she helps. She can only measure time by the exhaustion in her meridians from the amount of Qi she’s been cycling and moving out through them, and by the slow changing of the light. At first it darkens, volunteers, the cold, and decent construction slowly smothering the flames all around them, until she can only see by moving Qi into her eyes to banish the darkness, but eventually it begins to lighten again, tinting orange.
At first she thinks it’s more fire, spreading from some other part of the city where it ran wild, and pushes herself even harder. She can practically feel the heat from the flames on her as she moves frantically, dashing from one body to the next, ignoring anyone trying to talk to her, desperate to help, breaths heaving, her lungs straining to keep up and-
A hand grabs her by the shoulder, stopping her. She tries to shrug it off, but the strength behind it is that of a cultivator, not a mortal, and she’s held firmly in place.
Someone’s been speaking to her. Has been for a while, and she’s blocked it out. Focus.
Slowly, her breaths even out, just a bit, and she lets the world back in.
“-done well, it’s ok. You can stop, take a break. You’re alright, a credit to your profession, but we-”
“I’m here,” she says, trying ever so hard to slow down her breathing. “I’m here. I’m here.”
The voice pauses, but she can sense a nod from them not long after. “Good,” it says, and she turns to see Qen Hou, kneeling next to her, hand on her shoulder. “Good. You’re here. You can rest. I heard you’ve been healing since before midnight. Rest with the dawn, honored healer.”
For the first time, she doesn’t hear that slight note of patronizing in his tone when he calls her that.
Slowly, she looks around, taking in the devastation in the light of day. It really has been hours; she feels drained, her soul and body both aching from the abuse she’s put them under. Still, the sight of the far end of the courtyard, the part away from the main thoroughfares, covered entirely in unmoving forms draped in white sheets is enough to make her wish she could have pushed harder.
“Don’t,” Qen Hou says. He turns her head away from the sight, shifting with her until she’s turned her back to the dead. “You’ll get a heart demon, acting like that. Look on the living you’ve saved, not the lost.”
And she does see them. Dozens, maybe a hundred people whose Qi still shivers and quivers from the intensive kneading and manipulation they received under a healer’s care. Wounds scabbed over, clean bandages applied, many of them held tight by each other, many of them sitting shellshocked and alone or even among loved ones, but all of them still alive. Some took more care than she could give, and she abandoned them when others came close with sutures and bandages, and she sees more than a few of them alive now in that part of the courtyard.
Not all of them. But a lot.
For the first time in hours, she feels breath leave and enter her lungs without her needing to drag it in.
And then it catches again.
“Raika!” she yells, whirling to face Qen Hou. “That’s what you said her name was, right? She never told- is she alright?”
Qen Hou’s face goes blank, but then he sighs, shaking his head softly. “She might say she’s fine,” he grumbles, before flicking his thumb off to the ruin of the restaurant they all got blasted through. “She’s over there.”
Before he’s done speaking, she’s already giving him as quick of a bow as she can manage and running off, two steps infused with what Qi she has left finding her at the base of the ruin where-
There’s a body, sitting up against the wall of the restaurant. It’s hair is burnt nearly to the scalp, second degree burns covering its shoulders and neck, its back and legs, and its arm and front are covered in cuts so fine they’re visible more by the blood leaking from them than their shape or color.
And, somehow, the body stirs as she approaches, face coming up to look at her.
Raika smiles, soft and kind. “Hey, kid,” she whispers, voice so faint it can barely be heard, even with cultivation. “Good job.”
And then her head falls again, and Li Shu is on her knees, Qi moving yet again, desperately trying to touch Raika’s Qi and finding nothing, just embers, nothing connected to her body, nothing left in her, but-
There is something wrong with her flesh, and in the midst of that sense of wrongness and the lack of aura, she can feel a heartbeat, uneven but strong, and with every beat she can see that wrongness shifting.
—-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Have we found the source of the attack?” asks the man clad in purple and red, robes gilded and ornate and the air around him nearly rippling with heat.
“Not yet,” replies another, looking dismissively at the broken window the first man came through, “though I am certain that, had you merely waited, I could have told you so myself.”
“An attack has been launched,” the furious sect master snarls, the ripples of heat and the slight discoloration of the air around him spreading with his rage. “You cannot dare to say that it isn’t a “big deal”.”
The figure he’s speaking to lounges on a throne, made of solid white ivory carved from a divine beast from many lands away, the sheer ontological weight of the bones alone enough to make the sect leader feel an overwhelming pressure. It more than doubles, however, when the seated figure turns its gaze onto him.
“And you dare to speak to me as if I do not already know this?” they ask. “I rule this city, not you. Stick to your squabbling politics and barbecued apprentices, Shen Go. I do you the kindness not to order you about in your own sect; you would do well to extend to me the same respect in my city.”
Shen Go balks at the tone, his own Qi pushing against the pressure on him just enough to keep himself from being pushed back, but careful to make sure he goes no further. He reins in the desire to snarl, reins in the fury at being addressed as such; is he not on the edge of the very end of the Nascent Soul realm? If Qi-Gathering is the realm of mortals, and Foundational realm barely it’s better, both the “lower realms”, then Core Formation, and Nascent Soul realms are the “middle realms”, the edges of comprehension and power for almost all cultivators. But he, Shen Go, stands at the very end of the Nascent Soul realm, so incredibly close to forming his Soul in truth and ascending to the higher realms he can taste it. Once he enters the higher realms, his sect can roar to new heights and truly dominate the other sects of this region, and perhaps even gain commissions and tasks from the Imperial capital itself. Then no one could look down on him like the figure on the throne is now.
“Now now, Shen Go,” the figure says, voice suddenly soft. “Let none say you are not like a brother to this senior. I would bring shame unto the name of the Imperial Scions if I let my city fall into disarray just as I would if I did not properly inform its most promising members.”
Shen Go does not see the figure move. It is on the throne, and then it is standing beside him, hand on his shoulder. Despite himself, despite the horrifying heat and the impossible wrath it so often fuels inside him, he feels a bead of cold sweat form on his forehead.
“I already have my men and healers moving to secure the enemies and my people both. By the morning, half the damage will be repaired, and this one will bow in the greatest shame to you and every other sect and noble in the city if it is not fully pristine by the dawn tomorrow. Please, be assured-”
Shen Go, patriarch of the Purple Flame Burning Lotus sect, one of the strongest sects in the city and for hundreds of miles all around, one of the people in this world on the verge of unlocking the greater mysteries, trembles ever so slightly at the pressure on his shoulder. He feels like the air is warping, like the gravity is suddenly bending inwards towards the city lord who holds him now. He feels like his shoulder is about to break, and he does not dare move, fear and respect and survival instinct all in unison in the face of this show of force which he’s never experienced from the city lord before.
“-that the moment I find out who sent these weapons into my city they will be sure to suffer Imperial wrath, and that reparations will be paid to your sects for volunteering and assisting in the city’s defense.”
The city lord lets go of his shoulder, and Shen Go can’t help but release a quiet breath he did not realize he was holding in.
“In the meantime, honored patriarch,” the city lord whispers. “Get the fuck out of my chambers before I melt your bones into a knife to disembowel your wives with.”
When the city lord turns back around, their room is empty.
They sigh. This is going to be such a headache. Ah well; cults always are, especially ones like this. Father won’t be happy to hear some of the weapons survived, or that they’re being used by a new player, but he might be happy if the city lord can collect some. Still, this may be troublesome.
But then, there’s plenty of reason why the Imperial Family rules, and the deviants of the wilds are just that. They will be more than happy to remind those who defy their authority of their favorite of those reasons: incredible, overwhelming, bloodline-erasing violence.