Falling Leaves
There was a real bandit problem. I mean, it wasn’t my bandit problem. For me it was more of a bandit opportunity. The funny thing about bandits, is that they spend a huge amount of time finding out where all the rich targets will be, when they will be there, and figuring out exactly how to get around their protection to steal all their stuff.
It is a decent plan. Mortals do not matter to the great cultivators. If you screw up and go after resources already belonging to a powerful sect or cultivating clan, they will send out powerful sword cultivators to murder all of you. If you prey upon the merchants who provide those resources, or the craftsmen, farmers, apothecaries and miners that were supposed to be provided to said sects and families, then the farmers, craftsmen, apothecaries, and miners are both out of what you stole, and what they must then replace at their own cost or the cultivators will kill them for breaking their contracts to supply said resources.
Bandits only need a few cultivators to be a threat to merchants, farmers, craftsmen, apothecaries, etc, as if they had any cultivation potential of their own they would be part of a sect and not trying to survive selling them expendables. Those few bandit cultivators do most of the fighting, get most of the rewards and do absolutely nothing resembling work, that is why they were bandits.
I followed a better business model; let the bandits do the collecting, then nip by and relieve them of their worldly goods, lives, and karmic burden. Honestly, I was not only doing a public service, but I was ensuring their next life would be a better one. I was practically a saint!
I came in the night. I had the chi sense to feel the spirit of the land, and the experience of twenty years in the infantry moving through bush against people who were just as trained and motivated as I was. These guys were absolutely sure no one dared to come against them.
I made a few mistakes. It turns out when you have the strength of nine demons you should not garotte anyone who is not at least at body like stone. It was quiet, and I guess being covered with the blood that comes when you accidentally behead a sentry with wire counts as camouflage. I got all six. That trip gave me a full circuit of the bandit camp and a good picture of my target. I found tents with all the heavy chests and bound women. Those would be my cultivators.
There is a trick you learn when it comes to stalking sentries in the dark. You look at the ground, you never look at them, or they will feel it and turn. In a world where people cultivate their chi this is even more important. Killing intent is something that you can feel, if you look upon someone and your soul releases its will to end theirs, their soul will feel it and your foe will either ready himself, if he is near to your power (or just brave), or freeze if he is weaker (or just a coward).
There is probably a great and sure fire way to figure out how strong someone else's cultivation is, and how much of a threat they are to you. When you find it, please explain it to me. My method was try to kill them, and if they rip my head off and poop down the hole, it turns out they were stronger. I was really looking for a better one, but without any sword of chi based fighting art or training all I had was raw physical power and the arts of professional murder that our tax dollars provided.
I walked towards the tent where the two girls were dancing in silhouette through the tent silks. The tent was lit by lamps, filled with incense that really did enhance cultivation. I could see the chi flowing into the tent and pooling in one place where a figure sat and watched the dancers while lazily cultivating. The chi flowed into him like water draining from a bathtub, not swift, but sure enough all the chi in the area was flowing into him as if to fill a void dozens of times larger than his body should be.
I looked at the girls as they danced, and I looked at the flow of the chi. I closed my own gates so I was not breathing any of this chi in, making no ripples in the flow. I could feel that I was no where near as strong as he was in the draw. There were at least six points of his body that drew streams from the flow, compared to my two. I don’t know for sure that meant he was stronger than me, and I didn’t intend to find out. I didn’t even intend to look at him.
I moved closer and closer, quiet and slow. I could feel Odin stirring in my mind. The spear shaker, the lord of the slain, the battle glad, the spear was his holy of holy’s and war the first mystery he taught. When I first saw the hint of a shadow blocking the light, the vague outline of shoulders roughly in the center of the chi storm, roughly between me and the two dancers, I flowed into a two step throw.
The first time I fully looked on my target my arm was extended in follow through and eight feet of Oger crafted courting spear had cut through the tent and hammered into the cultivator, cleaving spine, heart and chest.
He did not in fact, die. He fell forward and struggled to cry for help. The two women screamed, since their lungs did not have eighteen inches of engraved and probably enchanted steel jammed through them, their screams worked.
I yanked the tent wall apart to storm in and finish the bandit leader off. It may have been a bit over bold. He rose and drew a really pretty single handed sword, like a Chinese nandao. He blurred into one of those damned sword techniques, and spun in a rising cut that would have cut me in half, except while it hadn’t killed him, it was still stuck in him. Rising and spinning 270 degrees in a boss draw and cut move when you have four feet of spearshaft sticking out of your back only works if you are more than four feet from the central tent pole.
His eyes went wide, his sword came loose, the tent came down and I got hit in the face with the hilt as the sword went past. I picked up the first chest that showed when the tent fell away from me, and onto him, and hammered it down until he stopped moving.
About a dozen bandits were sober enough to see me rip my spear out of their dead boss in the ruins of the tent, I guess coating yourself liberally with the blood of a sentry and making your public debut standing in front of a burning tent over the body of the guy they were all terrified of makes and impression. If they came against me and knew any chi techniques at all I was dead meat. On the other hand, I was two kills into a slaughter and the Battleglad was rising inside me. Odin wanted the raven’s feast laid, and it wasn’t in me to argue.
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I lunged forward like a fencer, shooting the spear into the belly of the man in front of me, then using my hips as a pivot, pulling in with my trailing hand and ramming out with my leading hand, I cut from his belly button out through his right side then continued the cut to remove the left arm at the elbow of the fellow who had reached down with his left to grip the scabbard to ease his draw with his right hand. Oddly, losing his left arm caused him to take up a career in screaming and sprinting rather than swordplay.
I may suck at this, at cultivation and chi, but I was a combat arms soldier, and battle was the one part of this world I actually understood. These were not soldiers, they did not march to the sound of the guns, did not charge the shield din looking for blood and glory. These were thieves and rapists; murderers sure, but scavengers not predators. I let my killing intent flow out and I laughed as I stalked forward casually, stepping on the dying man as I walked towards the rest of them.
They broke and ran. Could I have taken them? I do not have a clue. For all I know they could have had at least a few of them with the skill to take me out. All I really had was demonic strength, decent bare handed techniques, and really basic bayonet drill (who really remembers much of that in the age of automatic weapons?).
I freed the captives, or those who claimed to be. I didn’t really care if the camp followers were willing or not. I am willing to slaughter any number of enemy under arms, but slaughtering noncombatants is not an adjustment I am willing to make for this world. The bandits had a lot of really nice stuff. Most I left with the peasants, but a few courting gifts I kept. I had no idea what to get a wood be Oger bride. I went with bling and spices. I don’t know enough about the medicines to tell poison from potion, so I left it. Spices I know, fabrics I know, jewelry I know. Plus, I destroyed one of the good chests on the leader, so I was down to one good one that would work on the pack saddle of the horse I was planning on taking.
I had food, bedding, tenting, horse, and a chest full of courting gifts. Time to go find me an Oger maiden seeking true love through spear combat. The Mountain of Maidens, and my first dating adventure in this new world awaited me.
Interlude: Perfected Essence Sect
The guards shivered at their posts. The officers were professional sword cultivators, usually failed disciples whose advances in the path of alchemy had denied them traditional advancement, and who had chosen instead to serve as guards in return for the pills and elemental essence drafts required to artificially raise their cultivation in a purely physical path. The common guards were outer disciples. After all, in a sect where alchemy was the path to enlightenment, advancement, and profit, tasks like walking the walls and manning the gates ranked only slightly above sweeping the courtyards and cooking the meals in unpleasant duties.
No one would dare to offend the Perfected Essence Sect, they were the premier alchemists in this region, and every other sect came to them for elemental essence drafts for body tempering, and for the bone cleansing and channel purifying pills required for breakthroughs at higher levels. While other sects may boast about their own greatness, at the end of the day, they came cap in hand to the Perfected Essence for those miracles beyond their own alchemists. Gate duty was to keep sneak thieves away, and to stop apprentices from sneaking out to sell their products directly.
Still, something about the night was making the guards shiver. They clutched their swords. To break the mood, Qi Nan joked to Li Sun.
“Brother Li Sun, perhaps you should have brought a healing potion to steady your nerves. You know we are going to have to brew a dozen of them tomorrow anyway?” Qi Nan jokes, but another voice answered, dry as dust, cold as death.
“Yes. That would have been good. The Yin chi enhancement of the potion would make you taste so much sweeter.” The voice said.
Turning to look, they saw a figure dressed in the black and gold robes of an official from the last dynasty. He held his body with an odd stiffness, his face was cold and dead. His eyes, cold and without pupil. With a hop like a grasshopper, he covered the twenty feet to the wall, landing with stiff arms extended to grip Qi Nan. The fingers were clawed with bones grown out of the fingertips. They pierced through the cloth disciple's uniform.
Qi Nan shuddered and shook, Li Sun saw his aura being drained, his living chi drawn into the undead creature who tossed Qi Nan aside like an empty drinking cup. The jiangshi (vampire) moved with the stiff limbs of the dead, and Qi Nan struggled to draw his sword. He had hated every moment of sword practice, he could not wait to advance to the Chi Condensation level and leave it behind for purely spiritual pursuits. Now in his last moments he wondered if he had made a mistake in slacking off.
Inside the courtyard, a Daolaogui ghost formed out of the moaning wind and rain, as the captain of the guard moved to face him, the Daolaogui howled and a green arrow of poison lanced into the captain. Channelling his sword chi into his blade, he hacked the attack apart, but the poison cloud claimed the strength of the unskilled disciples around him who fell choking and coughing as the jiangshi and goblin like forest demons mobbed them under with claw and fang.
The captain fought like the proud sword cultivator he was, a body like iron and fully formed mana heart, his sword techniques allowed him to flash through the enemies of his sect like a farmer harvesting grain, yet the Daolaogui was the ghost of a sword slain, and his blade too was dripping chi, even if it was the cold corruption of demonic cultivation. The monster battled the pure culitivator to a standstill, but Demon Sui cast a dart with his own profound technique, the whispering death, and the blade found the neck of the righteous captain, the demonic chi interrupting the body enhancement of the pure cultivator. He fell to the blade of the Daolaogui.
When dawn came, the Perfect Essence Sect was an abattoir. No disciples lived, and the potions, the pills, the essences, the great strengthening treasures that supported the sects of the whole region were now looted by the demonic forces.
Worse still, the villagers had not dared to pass beyond the gates and the dead guardians to care for the rest of the corpses. No one burned the bodies, no one said the rites to purify them. When night fell again, over half the slain rose again, stiff limbed, to answer the call of Demon Sui in his war with the righteous cultivators.