This mountain had been a holy place once. It had been built to house the honoured dead, then become a focus of worship over the centuries. To see it turned into a torture chamber, a place of unholy sacrifice, desecration, corruption and evil sickened me. Demonic chi did not create, nor did it cleanly destroy and return what was consumed to the world. No demonic chi twisted what was into abomination, into a mockery of life, and a denial of honest death. In the center of the holy mountain, the focal point of every unhallowed ritual, the rift into which every stream of shed blood and human suffering flowed was a tear in reality, a wound in the world that bled into the abyss, and from which the abyss bled into this world. Before it stood four guardians, four unique constructs that were its champions and sources of its servants.
I charged the demon in front of me, it was the most dangerous of the four. I could feel the hunger rolling off it. I felt a weakness try to seep into me, as if the very life of my flesh was being devoured just by nearing it. It would have stood about twelve feet if it stood, but it hunched forward like a hyena. It was a ghoul, a corpse eater. It was grossly stretched and strengthened by its demonic infestation and by the power it had consumed in years or centuries of unlife, but I could see the frame was rail thin skin and bones, a female human had been the seed of this monstrous creation. Now a tongue long and deadly as any tentacle lashed from a mouth long as a hyenadon’s muzzle, filled with sharp inward curved flesh tearing teeth. Long rail thin arms were tipped with claws of pure obsidian that dripped with demonic chi.
She lashed the ground with her claws and they tore through the stone of the desecrated mountain like it was warm butter. Would steel or even flesh resist them? Her reach was longer than my spear, her speed when she moved was explosive and impossible for anything her size, but I could feel the demonic chi flowing through her. She was Hunger, she was Famine, she was a howling abyss of need so terrible that she created a storm of demonic chi as she drank it in, and it was never, could never, be enough. Her flesh destroyed itself and rewove itself every time she moved as the power and speed of her attacks was so terrible it tore her own flesh apart, yet the power howling into her in response to her hunger would not let her die.
I grinned. Madness rose up in me. I could feel Odin roaring his laughter as I heard my father’s voice from my childhood. I asked him what do I do if I fight someone who is bigger, stronger, faster and better skilled than I am? He replied simply, “Kill the son of a bitch for lying.”
I did not duck the right hand that swept for my head, but took it on my spear and rotated to ram my spear into the stone, pulling the ghoul forward off balance. As its leading leg locked, I used the pinned hand as leverage to drive all the power of my coiled body into a side kick to the locked knee of the ghoul. The sick snap and scream let me know the knee failed under the blow and it hyperextended backward. As the ghouls concentration failed under the intense pain, I drew through my spear on the demonic chi in the ghoul, and drank it in. Around me the demonic chi of the mountain swirled and flowed into my every open mana gate as the nine demons in my body consumed it and fed it to me stripped of its impurities.
The demonic ghoul’s eyes went wide as for the first time, a greater hunger than hers warred with her for control of the power roaring out of the rift, and her instant regeneration slowed. This time, her hunger had a rival. Screaming in pain, she wrenched her hand from where I had pinned it, and I had to leap swiftly, calling upon the wind chi beginning to be purified to firm my steps as I ran along the air to dodge her swing, and block the desperate sweep of her claws with the head of my spear. Metal chi crackled with lightning as the demon chi of her claws tried to tear it asunder, and only the flowing wood chi of the purifying life flowing from me strengthened my spear enough to not snap beneath the blow. Even so, I was tossed back a dozen feet.
The ghoul screamed at me. “I will eat you last. I will kill your bitch and rip the unborn child from within her and eat it in front of you!” It roared
I looked at Astrid, who fought with a great Oni whose body was crawling with runic tattoos and whose head was a crown of horns bespeaking the power of the peak of his entire race, and with a flash of Odin’s perception, at last saw what Astrid had long known about but not shared with me. Our child was within her now. If the ghoul thought this would break me, they were stupider than they were ugly.
“The only one who gets to eat her is me.” I growled, and charged the ghoul.
[Astrid’s POV]
Astrid heard Bolverk and smiled. He was a pig. A good cook, nice bedwarmer and dangerous with a spear, but a pig. She had never conceived of any use for a male beyond the night required to become pregnant. It was not the way of Oger kind, previously. An Oger Mage, an Oni, came to the Spear Mountain for one of the Spear Maidens, and if he was strong enough, they would mate and produce a child. Girls were raised upon the mountain, and boys returned to the Oger Magi to be raised in their unclean sorcery. Then Bolverk came and fucked it up. He wasn’t good when he arrived, but he learned swiftly, and returned from every beating for the next. He was audacious, scandalous, and in bed you could forget he was a full foot and hundred pounds lighter than a proper Oger for he loved with fury and utter degeneracy. Plus he cooked a good breakfast. She had talked with him about the future, and he had spoken of wanting to be there for the baby, of wanting to raise it together. Boy or girl. It would be both of theirs, not one of theirs. This was not the way of her people, but when Bolverk spoke, the most outrageous things seemed almost reasonable. She was sure he would have been unreasonable about this battle if he knew she was pregnant, so she didn’t tell him. Now the ghoul did. Once she finished this Oger Magi, she would kill it for that. If Bolverk didn’t hog it first. Greedy pig.
“I have taken and broken a dozen Spear Maidens, they lie below, mindless breeders for my sons. I have found the true power, a power beyond this world, a power that consumes all the elements and makes it their own. Your pathetic spear arts cannot touch me. With my magic, you can’t even reach me. I will rip that unnatural thing within you out, and you will sire a hundred true sons for me before your body is allowed to die.” The Oger magi mocked, standing inside nine rings of black flaming power, a cage made of demonic chi that blocked from floor to ceiling, keeping her two spear lengths away. She probed it with her spear and the demonic chi rang like cold iron as her spear point struck it with a probing thrust.
He cast a fireball the size of her chest at her and she fed it to the metal chi of her spear tip, the tip glowed with white crackling fire, before she released it as living lightning that tore into he Oger Mage’s chest, ripping one of his protective runic tattoo and leaving him twitching upon the ground.
“Impossible! Your kind cannot cultivate, you turned your back on true power to play with sticks.” The Oger Magi howled. Honestly, that was a pretty limited view of body cultivation vs spiritual cultivation, but Oger Magi were as dedicated to their path as her sisters were to their own, at least before Bolverk. He drew in demonic chi and forged chains of cold black wrongness to cast at her from all directions. Astrid drew in the demonic chi as well, but her body fed it through the demon inside her to rip it apart for its elements, to purify and release them. Release and employ.
It was the way of her sisters to use the elements within themselves, rather than without. This was not a weaker path than the external manipulation of the Oger Magi or spiritual cultivators, just a different one. She drew upon the wind for speed, and the world slowed to a crawl, she called upon wood to flow through her, and her bones and joints grew flexible, she called upon the fire that burned in her muscles for power, reached out to the earth that it should hold her no matter how she stepped, then gave herself fully to water. She flowed around the chains, moving just enough to let them pass as she danced among them. She drank in clouds of purple/black demonic chi and yet purity flowed from her like a stain of colour upon black paper. Her spear wove, turning chains to block other chains, the butt striking the ground to propel her over some even as she bent almost to the ground to pass beneath others, yet always she wove forward.
Poison flew from him as he cast a spell to merge demonic chi into wood to make a poison so terrible only his constant flow of demonic chi kept it from devouring his own body. It burned so hard that it ate the silk robes from his foe, but her skin shone like pale jade in its own luminescence as she advanced. Her spear lashed out, and his soul rang like a temple gong as the first circle of his demonic barrier shattered, but worse, her spear drank it in and its shaft grew vines and petals. Soon they crawled over her body until she wore an armour of vine and flower, each blossom of which drank the demonic chi of his power as if feeding on it.
He scrabbled at his side for a sword, then remembered that since coming into his power, he had not lowered himself to carry sword or spear, for such toys were nothing before the truth of power. A lie he felt most terribly as his back fell upon the back of his own protection circle. He drew out his wand and called upon lightning, and sent a bolt as thick as his two legs against her.
Astrid caught it on her spear, her eyes blazing and crackling with the lightning that filled her, and the demonic chi it was imbued with. She stripped the demonic chi and used it to power the splitting of the lightning into its base elements of fire and metal, filling her spear tip with metal until it’s point was heavy as the heart of a star, the fire blazed from its tip like the face of that same star and she gave her all to a thrust which channeled every ounce of chi through her body, rooting her feet into the bones of the mountain, every element drawn into her body to flow through to the spear itself where it clashed with the unnatural demonic ward. The mountain rang as the ward failed and a spear tip blazing hotter than magma quenched itself in the Oni’s heart. A fountain of black/purple lightning crawled down the spear and into Astrid, but she did not try to hold it. Feeding it to the demon within her, she let the demon split out the natural elemental chi to flow out of her like a river shattering its banks. Only the demonic chi blazed within her, blazed as the fragment of a hungry god rose to consume it. Rivers of corrupted power flowed into the fragment of godhood and Astrid felt her body transform, her flesh filled with holy power the way a cup is filled from a stream.
Then it overflowed, it began to flow into the runes and sigils beneath the Oger Magi, the chains of corruption that had tainted the holy mountain as Astrid realized she would not be turning her spear to help Bolverk in his battle, for her battle was here. She sat in the midst of battle, and set aside her spear. Opening her mana gates wide, she drank in the demonic chi, and cultivated. Holy power flowed out of her into the sigils of corruption, eating into the layers of sacrificial blood, the memories of pain and humiliation burning in the light of hope and the promise of renewal. Behind her, twenty guards stood to hold back hundreds of human cultists, not powerful physical cultivators, but spiritual cultivators, even demonic ones, had their combat arts as well. How long could they hold if matters here in the center were not settled. Astrid pit the god fragment inside her, and her own considerable will to the task of breaking the chains on the mountain, and trusted they could hold long enough.
[Bubbles POV]
Sgt Li Sung Won was facing off against a tiger faced man with tiger like paws. A Rakshasa. That was a bad fit. He was such an upright man, not a hint of deception in him, it had made him helpless to resist her when she decided to seduce him when he was head of her father’s guards. She had long known she refused to be sold to some ancient cultivator family to breed little disciples as some ancient ascendent tried among his family to find which of his nephews could breed an heir on her worthy of his instruction. Honestly, what is the point of immortality if you ascend beyond the desire to make love, and can actually think your own family are nothing but brood stock to make little almost-you to pass along your idiocy? Bubbles chose the world, thank you. She dragged Li Sung Won into it, and they had been together ever since. Now, I guess, it was time to die. Kind of sucks, but immortality seemed to be filled with only assholes, so there is that. At least I’m going to enjoy the trip out.
A crawling thing made of tentacles and mouths was crawling towards me. A hundred mouths babbled obscenities as it came, and I could feel it like acid on my mind and soul, its corruption leaking inward like poison, tainting everything with its filth.
“A woman! How I am going to enjoy taking you. I will break your mind and your soul before I am done. I won’t kill you until you beg me, and you will beg me for weeks before I let you. By that point, what is left will rise a broken and tainted thing I won’t even have to command to do my will. You will crawl when you come to me.” It rasped at my mind and I could feel it dragging the demonic chi into me, like acupuncture needles dragging healing chi into damaged meridians, only brining demonic corruption instead.
“Yum” I said as the fragment of a hungry god stirred within me. My own demon was nothing more than a mouth and digestive system, everything else being consumed by the god within. Odin is almost too earthy to be a god, but the gods of this world are so heavenly bound they are no earthly good. Odin is down here in the blood and the mud with us. Sure he is medium crazy, more than a little pervy, and so kill hungry he makes wolverines and sword saints look stable, but he does not puppet us. He will share as much of his power as we can take for ourselves, he will be beside us in the battle, but we live or die on our own strength. This, thing, thought he was the biggest monster in the room. I felt its power leaching from its tentacles into my meridians, forcing its way into my mana gates. Idiot. It isn’t even the biggest monster in me.
I let the demonic chi latch onto all my open mana gates, I let it seep into me, feel the cold and paralysis seep into my flesh as it crawls closer. Then I smile. I reach out with my own hunger and pull. Every one of my mana gates is open, and my mana channels are fully formed, wide and strong. I begin to suck his demonic chi like fruity drinks through a straw and feel it rush to my head like fine sweet liquor before my body like iron transformed into something too pure for mere alcohol to touch. I giggled as the monster paused, suddenly unsure who the predator was. Men had been making that mistake about me since the first time I wet my dagger. Now I let my dao, a Yanmaodao my husband gave me for our wedding, do the speaking.
Unlike the two edged jain a lot of the troopers preferred my Yanmaodao was single edged with a straight blade that tapered only along the cutting edge. It had a good thrusting point and fine cutting edge. The heavy back spine allowed me to use all my strength in slashes without fearing shattering the blade, and gave it enough strength to allow me to twist before withdrawing, opening wounds so wide even the greatest cultivators needed to fear how fast they bled out. Now I was so strong even its master crafted blade would not be enough to sustain the power of my strikes, but it no longer mattered. I drank the demonic chi so deeply I became drunk off of it. I let the elements rage wild within me. My husband would be pissed. Li Sung Won was such a controlled fighter, he moved like the finest dancer when he fought. I wept the first time I saw him kill, my cheeks as damp as my panties, he was so beautiful, each motion so balanced as to shame any music, so perfect as to render any painting a gross caricature. He would use just enough of each element in perfect harmony so that nothing leaked out, and the very air around him was still.
I screamed, fire exploded in my muscles and I tore the wind from the river of chi inside me for speed. I called upon the earth to sustain me and I exploded forward, the earth throwing me forward as hard as I pushed back. Water and wood sprayed from each cut of my blade but it was filled with nothing but pure metal as I began to slice tentacles. My sword sang as it cut the air, and where it cut the demonic ichor splashed outward, but water and wood chi filled the wounds, and I could see the white lines of fungus taking root in the unclean flesh, the soft tentacle filled horror was a perfect matrix for the spread of the fungi.
Tentacles cut at me, and I could not possibly dodge them all. I did not try. I let the lash of one anchor me for a deeper cut on another, let my body reach down deep into the earth for anchor and let the fire fill my muscles as I spun, dragging the tentacle around me more as I pulled the creature towards me. A dozen tentacles wrapped me, a half dozen more twitched on the ground where I had cut them, but the body was close now, and I lunged forward to drive my Yanmaodao, my goose quill wedding saber into the tentacle horror’s soft body and release a flood of water and wood chi into it, feeling the spores of the fungus forced to flower within its flesh.
The tentacles crushed me, sawing against each other to rip my skin apart and break my bones. I screamed as I drew demonic chi through every point of contact with the mass of tentacles wrapping me chin to toe, even as my eyes were blazing vortexes of power that tore demonic chi from the air to fuel my body’s need for power to resist the crushing. It wasn’t enough, the tentacles tightened on me, and the path of mortal cultivation that we walked did not abolish the need for lungs, our bodies infused with the elements, our flesh became the pure form of each, but we remained mortal, so crushing my lungs would kill me. I ripped what I needed from the beast, not just demonic chi, I stole fire from its flesh to power my strength, I stole earth from it, water and wood to power the fungi growing within it, I stole the air chi from it to fill me, for it was flesh, however horrific, and needed air as much as any living thing.
My ribs cracked, but ice formed on the tentacles and their strength failed as the beast lost control of the frozen tissue. Inside it the fungus grew and devoured, corrupted wood chi fed on earth and water within the beast to strengthen itself as the wood ran wild within it, the only parts not being consumed were the tentacles frozen to my flesh, the ice proof against the fungus. My sword driven deep, its tentacles wrapped around me tight, it could not pull back, and I let my power invade it, penetrate it, violate it. The beast that lived on corruption and humiliation wailed like a helpless babe as fungus ate its living body like cancer and its own dozen frozen tentacles bound me fast to it, too fast to hope of escaping.
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It screamed the entire time it died, then I fell forward, the muck and mushrooms of the devoured corpse no longer coherent enough to support the mass of frozen tentacles. I hit face first on a mushroom blanket, still bound in frozen tentacles. Perhaps I didn’t think this through. I had assumed when I fell the ice would shatter, but several hundred pounds of soft spongy mushrooms made a nice comfy bed, and were quite unbreakable. With no choice, I decided to mirror Astrid and focus on cultivating. I no longer needed to use the elements I stripped from the demonic chi I was devouring, so I gave them all to the hungry spark of godhood within me. Odin pulled on the river of power I offered him, and released it outward in a flow of holy light that bled into the demonic sigils beneath us, the binding that turned the protections of this holy mountain into the gross machinery of sacrifice, that turned this into Blood Mountain.
[Li Sung Won’s point of view]
Bubbles was facing some sort of tentacle covered horror. I felt my blood boil at the thought of it touching her, but then again, remembering how often we had to run away from someone she cut for the crime of touching her uninvited, I felt a wave of satisfaction follow. No one who marries a tiger thinks she will welcome protection. My enemy was a tiger in a red and gold robe. He was smoking a pipe, and a long wavy bladed pair of short swords hung at his waist. He looked at me with the lazy superior smile I had been receiving from nobles sons since my birth. That smug soul deep feeling of superiority that comes with intrinsic power no amount of skill or training could ever hope to match. I struggled to release my anger, to be still as water, awaiting the time to strike. Still, I would see that look replaced by fear before we finished.
“Pathetic human, you have fought so hard to get here, only to die. Oh, feel free to wave your sword around. Your kind always does, but it will do you no good. You think all it takes to face the world is a few feet of sharp steel and a strong body. A body is nothing, a mind is everything. So, you are strong enough to face anything in this world? What is that to me, who can remake the world at a whim. I will bind you like a sacrifice, and pour out your blood to repair the damage you have done to my workings.” The Rakshasa spoke, his cultured voice flaring to a roar at the end, before the world went crazy.
It was if I stepped into a mirror hall. There was a floor beside me, and when I stepped forward, the wall became down, and up the other wall. A hundred worlds flowered like petals of chrysanthemum, each one its own reality at angles with this one. A thousand tiger men laughed and smoked in each, and a thousand clawed hands extended, each casting a different spell at me. There was no way to judge what was true, and what was false. There was no way to block a thousand attacks from as many directions.
I opened myself to water and became stillness. The water surface is still, and while its mirror reflects a hundred images, its surface only disturbs for the onrushing air pushed ahead of one. Stepping sideways, I moved my two handed jian from right to left as I pivoted out from under the stone bolt that the Rakshasa had launched. I cleaved it in two with the metal infused in my two handed jian, its long double edged blade sparking as it split the stone that would have crushed me from above. The earth chi in the stone was real, and I felt it move the world around me. Whatever else was true, only one of those spells were real, and I could feel it.
The Rakshasa laughed. “Do you see now fool, you cannot trust your eyes, and cannot fight what you cannot see. What good is a sword against one who can reshape the world?” He laughed.
I could not tell up from down, nor plot the path between us, for he did reshape the world with every word. Yet though the demonic chi that filled the area made it impossible for me to sense him, when he cast a spell, to give it any form but demonic chi, he must infuse actual elements that I can sense. If it is simply demonic chi….. I had no time to react as black lightning hammered into me, black demonic energy ripped through me and coursed through every fiber of my being, it ripped through my mana channels and tore through my nerves. The demon I had eaten with the help of the Hanged God tore the demonic chi apart and fed it to me as mana and elements. I spun in a circle and focused myself utterly on the sword.
Sword chi flared like a ripple of reality upon the dream and the Rakshasa screamed in pain as it cut into him. I could not sense demonic chi in this place of overflowing demonic power, but I had a fragment of a god within me, and bound to him was the ever hungry maw of a demon. I could not resist the demonic chi, no more than I could resist Bubbles when she was playful. I fed on both.
I opened myself wide, drinking in demonic chi from the area, and I danced the sword forms. I danced Crane Upon the Mountain, and caught lightning on my blade that I released into the ground as my terminal thrust of the sword form caused the earth beneath my feet to break like a bow wave that carried the Rakshasa off his feet. I ignored ten thousand flaring fragments as he spun and spun the world to hide himself. I was one with my sword, my feet were firm upon the earth, the air caressed me as I moved flowing with the wood chi of life and the blazing metal chi of my sword. I flowed like water dancing in the wind as I danced Part the Falling Rain, my sword a blur tight about my body as I danced the sword dance the First Emperor was said to have used in the monsoon so that no single drop of rain would mar his robe.
A hundred vines grew from the ground to bind me, but Part the Falling Rain split them all in the sweet scent of clean wood and earth. The water chi flowed about me, mixing with my sword chi as I danced among the vines as if they were no more than falling raindrops. I let out a shout of pure will as I let my sword fill with all my killing intent as it rose in the final low to high cut that ended at high guard, pointing unerringly at the foe. From the beginning of the slash, my sword chi flowed along the blade extending from it and the water of ten thousand cut raindrops formed about the edge of the extending chi like a growing sword of water.
The Rakshasa cried out, split from crotch to shoulder as my strike cut his body in half. His mouth worked, his immortal body long in the dying, but with his cultivation shattered by the passage of my blade, his power bled out of him like blood and he desperately begged to understand.
“How? You can’t even see me. I can trap you in a hundred mirror worlds your mortal mind cannot possibly comprehend. How can you reach me?” the dying Rakshasa begged.
“That is the problem with you ascendent immortals, you live above the world, not really in it. I didn’t have to sense you. I only had to sense me. Every time you reached out to attack me, you had to join my world, and I struck you. I do not have to understand what you are, or what you do. It is enough to know it is wrong, and to stop it.” I said, and sheathed my sword. The worlds around me whirled in chaos, unravelling with the will of their broken master. I didn’t need to see the world. The demonic chi still poisoned it. With nothing better to do, I knelt and began to meditate. I opened myself fully to the demonic chi, and holy power from the fragment of the god of slaughter poured from me like a fountain, bleeding gold into the darkness of a hundred shattered mirror worlds.
[Bolverk’s POV]
I looked at the rip in space, the violation of this world brought about by not simply the sacrifice, but the torturous breaking of hundreds of innocents, their vast cultivation and centuries of effort being no more than fuel when at last their humiliation and pain broke their spirit and allowed the demonic chi to turn every hard won scrap of harmony and insight into obscenity and pollution. That’s what the demonic cultivators were. They did not build, they did not even truly destroy, they stole what was forever beyond them to make. Theirs was a quick path to power, but it was weak at its core. They did not understand the truth of sacrifice.
I swept a hard flung claw high to pass above me, then lunged deep to pierce the hollow flank of the ghoul, letting her frantic backswing knock me tumbling away from her, locking myself hard to my wide grip on the spear so when she batted me away the spear head tore free from her belly by ripping outward, spilling intestines about her knees. I could not breathe, but I had seconds before that mattered. As the ghoul instinctively grabbed at her side I took two steps and flung my spear, punching clear through her chest between the hollows of breasts that had fallen to starvation long before death. I hit the ghoul like a line backer, only the shock of my spear driven into her mana heart causing a momentary weakness allowing my mere few hundred pounds to knock her flat on her back. I drove my mind into her through the spear. I drank the demonic chi of her core and had thought to end it there, I was killing her, and killing is what I did.
Odin had other thoughts. He drove me into her, deep into the ghoul, the writhing corpse eating starving undead. I saw a girl. A villager. A bastard child of some passing merchant or guard who took without asking and left without caring. Never anything but thin, when the army came to take their food, they knew the winter would be hard, and slaughtered more animals than even they could afford. They ate the seeds before winter was over. There was nothing left for her. She ate garbage, but what garbage would be left in times like these? She ate the rats that burrowed into the empty store houses in search of food long eaten, until she was beaten for stealing rats they needed.
They would not kill her, they simply cast her beyond the village walls to die of hunger. She crawled to the grave yard and died, consumed by hunger. The next night she woke, and dug into the fresh graves of the recently dead. The earth was soft, how could it not be, with them recently dead. They were wrapped only in cloth and she tore it with her lengthening claws, and ripped into the rich putrescence of the grave like it was candy. Flesh, only with fresh human flesh could the aching hunger inside her be quelled. For the first time in her life, she was not hungry. Bliss shattered her, and she wept. It did not last the hunger returned, stronger now that she had tasted human flesh. Night after night she haunted them, catching the weak alone and killing them. Creeping into the village, she would catch some sneaking from their own hut in the night for adultery, or for natures call, and murder them. How much sweeter was the flesh still warm with life! They had cursed her to starve throughout her life and now even death would grant her no peace, so they will feed her. They would all feed her.
Shit.
She was a monster, and I would kill her. She was also a victim and a wounded child. She was the unquiet dead, and I was a necromancer. I may be a shitty priest, but a priest of the Lord of the Mount I am. I am the priest of the Hanged One, the Feeder of Ravens. I will not be one more who simply hurts this child and walks away.
Sacrifice. This whole mountain had once been a place for the honoured dead, but Demon Sui had tainted it by the power of sacrifice.
Like every immortal in this world, the demons fell into the ego trap, that sacrifice was something that others, that lessers, did for the benefit of the strong. Sacrifice was something others did for them. Sacrifice was what the strong imposed upon the weak.
Sure, their blood stained altars and corruption sigils and soul rending torments turned the unwilling victims into sacrifices, but that is a twisting of the word, and a weak one.
Sacrifice means to make sacred that which is offered. A powerful sacrifice is offering that which is first and best to those you would honour. A far lesser sacrifice is one that is stolen, like the blood sacrifice here, but since stolen goods are never sold at a loss, and a small slice of a large pie is still objectively a lot of pie, the inefficiency is lost behind the sight of stolen riches. The highest form of sacrifice was self. That is the central truth of Odin. He hung on the tree for nine nights, a sacrifice himself to himself to gain the knowledge he needed. When the time comes he will take the field in a battle he will die, so there is a chance some of us might live. Just a chance; but one we only have through his sacrifice.
Shit. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. The saga poets lie, for it is not with thoughts of nobility and hope that a sacrifice walks to his fate willingly. It is the bitter acceptance of his own stupidity that fills him. That smile on his face is not joy and acceptance, it is laughter that he played the fool to the end, and probably wouldn’t have turned aside if warned.
I came to this world by killing myself, in the hopes that I could save Christina and her boyfriend. Now I fight for this world in the hopes that I could save Astrid and our friends, now our baby too. I saw what the others are doing, the holy power bleeding into the sigils that corrupted this place from a holy place of the revered dead into a temple of blood sacrifice. There is enough power there to do much, but not with that howling gate to the abyss hanging there, replacing demonic chi as fast as they can cleanse it.
I ram my arm into the dying ghoul’s mouth and in her hunger she tears at it, gulping great mouthfuls of my left arm’s muscles. I fill each of them with Holy power, I fill it with nourishing earth chi, strengthening wood chi, healing water chi, I weave air and fire in it to banish fear and pain and bring joy. I drive my power into her unmercifully as I heal her, not the ghoul my spear is draining to a husk, but the starving girl that hangs undying inside this unhallowed tomb of flesh. I wash her in my power as my own flesh fills her belly and soul.
“May you never hunger, sister. May you know peace and rest, be reborn in love and joy. Take all you need, freely given.” I say as she tears and bites, as her body shakes and tears flow as the last of the demon chi is torn from her core to fill me and the undead within her releases the starving child, at last full, at last accepted, to pass beyond. Victory tasted like shame and shit as I rose, left arm bleeding. My men were more than half slain, but still holding. When Demon Sui returned with his army, we would be brushed aside like nothing. Ants before a river, almost unnoticed as we were trampled. The only way out for any was the path I saw before me.
“Let my child know I did this for them, let them know I only ever wanted to be with them, to see them grow, to guide their steps and pass on what little I know.” I said as the god inside me rose, uncoiling from where he hid in the back of my mind, making himself small enough not to notice how powerful all the souls we fed him had made him. Odin said nothing, but I watched him watching me through our one eye. I stood before the gaping wound in reality and placed my arms behind me, letting the spear fall to the ground. Vines shot down from the ceiling and bound my hands and feet together, then wrapped around my neck like a noose.
Odin drew me up strangling before the gate, Astrid, Bubbles and Li Sung Won cried out as the demon chi in the room roared into me like the birth of a cyclone. I looked Astrid in the eye, my face a mask of effort as I struggled against strangulation. She took up the spear, and holding my eyes without a tear, rammed my spear through my heart and into the rift.
Golden light exploded as the blood blasting from my back hit the rift. The abyss screamed in pain as golden fire ate the darkness and where a rift in reality had been a strange reality bending form of three interlocking triangles formed, power flowing along and between paths that extended in more dimensions that fit comfortably in realty. It spun to take my body into it and the vines binding my hands, feet and neck to the noose tore into and through my body.
How foolish of me. I thought I tore free of the Tree to escape to this world. I thought I had sacrificed myself once in that hospital room and lived to walk away. No man lives who is bound to the tree. He is the god of the Hanged, and we who choose to be bound to him are damned and doomed for it. I felt my flesh filled with the wood chi of life, I felt the roots extend through the valknut into the abyss of darkness, down past it to the realm of the dead, then above it to the Celestial realm where Dragons guarded the natural laws so that uncaring gods could dream away eternity while their creation suffered their neglect. It tore through the mountain and burst in flower above its slope and the sigils of demonic corruption ran with holy fire as the mountain broke like a new dawn in the last hours of darkness. A beacon was lit, and demons fled from it. Holy beasts returned to the mountain, the spirits of land and tree, of sky and fire of water and wind roared about the mountain in rage and glory at their return.
Demon Sui stood before what had been the Blood Mountain and cast his eyes down, for he could not bear to look upon it. Holy fire blazed from the tree upon its slope and the earth sang welcome to it. Lightning crowned the mountain as wind spirits wove and roared about its slopes, spirits of ice screaming their defiance as they defended its peak. Smoke billowed from its sides as magma rose from below, as hot springs burst through the stony slopes. Fire earth and water chi flowed into the mountain like storms made material. Above it all, the Tree sang with life and holy power, the World Tree, the tree of sacrifice. If any part of me remained, it was always and ever in the Tree.
Fifty thousand undead stood at his back, his fortress of centuries locked before him, and the sun about to rise.
Demon Sui screamed his rage, as sun broke over the horizon.
Less than a thousand demons who did not fear the sun raced away. The war was not over, but any hope if it being won soon died when the sun blasted the fruits of his greatest victory into dust.
Far away, at the gate house of the Outer Walls, Grand Master Bo was in a fury.
“You defied me! You dared defy me, who summoned you. Know your place. What if you had died here? The world will live or die based on your deeds and you would throw yourself away for these CATTLE!” Grand Master Bo howled, his powerful will driving all the Outer Sect Disciples to their knees, rendering three of the Heroes unable to stand. One however, braced himself on his cauldron and held himself erect against the ascendant master’s will.
“People. We fought for these people, your people. The ones you were so keen to sacrifice like the livestock you name them.” William said coldly.
Brock and Andrea worked together to rise. “Fucking coward, hiding behind your sigils while the demons came for your people, just like you fled when they came for the Imperial Army. No wonder you needed us to fight for you.”
Grand Master Bo raised his hand, ready to cast a spell to punish the heroes for defying it when Serena rose and spun crying out “SHE COMES!”
A presence that beat the air with an aura that put the Grand Master and his attendant Masters in full know-tow on the ground before it manifested even before the shadow. The shadow grew and grew until it blotted out the sky. With the impact of a falling mountain, the earth dragon Jiaolongma landed.
“This place is unworthy of you. There is a mountain newly crowned, and a sect formed that will give their all to destroy the demons. They have the power to eat the demons, not to banish them, but to destroy them utterly. There is a price, their path offers power, and while it will give long life beyond the dreams of your world, they are bound to this world. Not even the greatest of them will see even half a millennia, none will ascend the steps to immortality.” The dragon spoke.
A crackling of lightning split the sky and the Celestial Dragon Longzhie unfurled in all his glory. “Stop, what you ask is forbidden, it defies the heavens and the gods.”
Jiaolongma roared and vines shot out from the ground, seizing the Celestial dragon and dragging him down to earth. Great spines of obsidian rose to cage him in and the Earth dragon walked slowly to his side.
“Against the heavens, but not against the gods. Not all of them have turned from this world. One chose to bind himself to the Mountain of Sacrifice. He will not leave this world to the demons, to ascend to the peace of heaven, nor will his followers. Like myself, he will stay down in the untidy muck and mud, shit and blood, flowers and fruit trees to serve the world we were born to protect, not administer.” The earth dragons impatience at her brothers who so easily turned away from this world left in their charge to join the celestial realm rang loudly in her words.
Four heroes, and several hundred sect disciples, not all of them outer, left out the gates on the first pilgrimage of many to the Mountain of Sacrifice, to the Holy Tree, and to those who train beneath it to fight the rising demon.
The war was not over, but it was no longer, lost.