Kaz had had to deal with far too many of these shiyan by now. For the first one, Chi Yincang had cut a hole in the body so Kaz could reach and crush the core. Then he had torn Litz’s misshapen core from her body, killing her. When faced with Ehlan, the chief of the Redmanes, he had been able to cut away the core she had eaten, salvaging her own core, however damaged it was. The last shiyan had been a truly monstrous thing that looked like a dragon that hadn’t yet figured out that it was dead. Its core had been too large to destroy at once, so he’d cut away the various parts of it until the thing simply ceased to function as a whole.
The abomination below wasn’t as large as that draconic monstrosity, but it was far too close for Kaz’s comfort, and he didn’t have anyone else to distract it while he got close to it. Well, there was Li, but a single strike from one of those unnervingly boneless limbs would be far too dangerous for his friend, even if she grew to her largest size.
In the time since they left the Deep, however, Kaz and Li had changed. For one thing, they were far stronger, and for another, they had faced the xiyi and Jianying. Thanks to Heishe and Fengji, that had ended about as well as Kaz could realistically have hoped, and in the process, both he and his dragon had learned.
“Can you roar?” Kaz asked softly, staring down at the core in the center of the pulsating mass of flesh. It was suffused with the dull reddish hue of fulan, but he could see at least a dozen disparate cores still in it, all attempting to consume the ki of the others around it, then convert it into their own. That would make what he planned to do more dangerous than he’d hoped, since the ravenous cores would grab onto his ki and attempt to pull it in, but he was sure he could do it.
Kaz nodded. “This will be easier if the creature is suppressed, both in body and power. But I think it’ll work even if you can’t.” He should have known Li would take that as a challenge, and the dragon mantled.
“Just a moment,” he told her. “I want to get a little closer.” There were still at least fifty steps between them and the writhing monster, and he was almost certain that it couldn’t actually sense them in any way. Still, he moved slowly and cautiously as he descended ten more steps, then fifteen. The rank stench of something dead filled his nostrils, and he had to fight not to sneeze. Li, unfortunately, wasn’t so successful.
As the dragon’s small sneeze echoed out into the open area below, her control of their camouflage slipped, just for a moment. It was enough. Every head on the thing below snapped toward them, several already opening jaws filled with mismatched teeth. Its gelatinous flesh stretched as both heads and body attempted to move up the stairs, only to have the red ki-crystals at the bottom of the stairs flash into brilliance. The creature stopped, making a many-throated cry that made every hair on Kaz’s body lift in instinctive horror. “Now,” he managed, and Li began to roar.
Her voice started out only a little louder than the sneeze, but rose to something her small throat should never have been able to produce. Her ki pushed out with it, tentative at first, then shoving hard at everything around them. To Kaz’s sight, even the ever-present mana in the air receded before that pressure, and the monstrosity below was squashed down like well-cooked tanuo.
It was Kaz’s turn, and he focused on a single one of the sickly colors in the monster’s core and pulled. Greedily, it reached back, attempting to take Kaz’s power, but he held it just out of reach. The mistake he had made with Ganring was allowing the xiyi’s ki to enter his own cycle, after which Kaz’s more powerful core simply pulled on Ganring’s until he was empty. Kaz knew better this time, and used Li’s roar to push the ki away instead, watching as it dissolved into mana. Then Kaz used the briefest touch of his own ki to separate the power from its originating core. With no ki left, that core flickered and died. The monster sagged.
Kaz took a single step closer, repeating this sequence of actions over and over, until only a single core remained in the quivering mass of flesh. Even Li’s prodigious strength was nearly drained by now, and her roar was little more than a rasp, so Kaz stretched out his ki one last time. The core was starving, now that it was trying to support the whole body alone, and it reached toward him with almost pathetic eagerness. Kaz felt a twinge of regret as he severed the core’s ki, and it, too, faded into powerless emptiness.
Li allowed her voice to fall silent, and Kaz sat abruptly on the stair. He gathered her up, feeling his eyes burn, even though he was still within the shield he held almost without conscious thought by now. “How many dead?” he wondered softly as he rested his muzzle against Li’s warm body. “How many tribes and how many kobolds died because of Zhangwo’s madness? Even the creatures of the mountain were innocent in this. They kill us, and we kill them, but there’s no malice in it. It’s simply the way of life. But this?”
His eyes roved over the thick mass of flesh. Parts of it were beginning to bubble; melting or simply failing under their own weight, without the power of ki to reinforce them. This thing had to have eaten dozens of kobolds, among everything else. A whole tribe? Two? This had to stop, and stop soon. Who knew how many of these shiyan there were? Yes, they might die as the fulan did, but what if they didn’t?
Kaz nodded, but that wasn’t entirely true. Yes, the shiyan in general tended to be cumbersome things, but some of them could move surprisingly quickly. And what if one of them ate a mande and became all but invisible? Even a large group of strong females would have taken losses in killing this monster, if they succeeded at all. What chance would they have against one they couldn’t see?
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
“Well,” Kaz said, climbing to his paws, though he didn’t put Li down. For once, the dragon didn’t protest, instead laying her head on his shoulder. “How do we get to the tunnel?”
Li sighed, not even raising her head to look for herself. Gazing out through his eyes, she sighed.
It was true. The shiyan had had parts of itself extended out through both of the exits from this cavern, and, worse, it looked like it had badly damaged, if not destroyed, the arch leading to the wide passage. Now, even though it was slowly flattening out, there was no way to leave without walking on the disgusting corpse, and crawling along some unknown length of its limbs when they did reach the tunnel.
“I’ll have to burn it,” Kaz said with resignation.
He eyed the enormous mass below. “I might as well. It will have to be done. Any fulan spores in the area would find this a feast.”
He laughed. She meant it, but she was also trying to cheer him up, and he loved her all the more for it. “I can put your head in one of those masks Lianhua used to keep out the spores when we came through the first time,” he offered. “I, ah, forgot to give one back.”
It was Li’s turn to laugh, and small wisps of steam trailed from her nostrils.
That was a good idea, and he should have thought of it. When he burned the Broken Knife den, he’d made a shield so thick that not even air passed in or out of it, keeping the smoke away. Eventually, it had become difficult to breathe inside of it, though he wasn’t sure why. He could hold his breath for quite a while now - if he even needed to breathe at all - but Li’s body cultivation wasn’t even as high as Kaz’s had been before he remade his body.
Concentrating, he pictured a thick bubble around them, but pushed it out much further than usual. So long as he didn’t move, it shouldn’t be too much harder to hold this than the much smaller one he’d been walking around in. It took quite a bit of ki, but he really hadn’t used much in the battle, since he’d mostly been using it as a lure, not a weapon. Once it was as strong as he could make it, he looked back at the bubbling flesh of the shiyan.
“Burn,” he told it.
It was exactly as disgusting as he expected, and he felt Li pull away from their connection as much as she could, closing out his vision. After a while, however, thick, greasy smoke surrounded them, and only the space within their shield remained clear, which prevented Kaz from seeing anything either. Still, he held on until he’d drained their combined red ki down to only what their cores were creating, and he began to feel a little dizzy. Then he sat on the stairs again, trying to breathe as slowly as he could so the air would remain good for Li.
Eventually, the smoke thinned, revealing a thick coating of black soot on everything, including - somewhat to his amusement - their shield. He wasn’t even sure what to do about that, since as soon as the shield dropped, the residue would probably fall on them. Perhaps Li could use her steam to clean it?
That was exactly what happened, though it took some effort to get the shield to allow the steam to cross while keeping everything else out. It took only a small amount of air coming in through an opening Kaz made to convince both of them that they very much didn’t want to smell anything for quite a while.
Once they could see through the shield again, Kaz pulled it in, bringing it up around his knees. Li wrapped her tail around his waist so not even a single speck of ash could reach her shining scales, and they made their way through what was left of the shiyan. The ashes were greasy and the stone beneath was hot, so Kaz had to move slowly, digging in his claws with every step.
He stopped at the broken archway, staring up at it. As he’d feared, two of the ki-stones were missing, along with a good chunk of the arch itself. The runes were covered in soot, but Kaz could see the faint glow of the drained crystals, and reached up to touch the yellow one.
The white ki-crystal was gone, as was the blue one, but with Earth, Fire, and Water, Kaz thought he could repair this archway and the cavern beyond, as well as giving the defensive crystals more power. Water served only to keep this arch connected to all of the others, but that was important, too.
Earth ki pulsed out of Kaz, quickly draining his channels and dantians. When he had rebalanced his ki after his body was…damaged, he had shifted it toward Wood and away from Earth, so even though he was stronger overall, the amount of that particular color of ki he had available wasn’t enough to complete the repairs.
Then Li joined her ki with his even more closely than usual, and bright yellow ki poured through him. She, too, had learned to compress her dantians in order to store more power, but Kaz tried to use only what flowed through their shared cycle. Now, she opened her dantian, and Earth flooded out, strong and confident, filling the ki-crystal beneath Kaz’s hand.
Something cracked loudly, and then there was a whole series of sharp sounds, making Kaz try to pull his hand away and turn to look back at the cavern he’d just exited. For the first time in several levels, it was difficult to separate his ki from that of the mountain, but then something else, familiar but also different than he remembered, pushed him away gently, and his hand dropped to his side.
Turning, Kaz saw that the blackened, broken cavern had been restored. Not entirely, since there were still smears on the ground in places, and fresh gouges in the walls, but there was no rubble, and, more importantly, the stairs themselves were clear of soot and ash. When he looked back at the arch, he could see that it, too, was clean, and though the blue and white ki-stones were still missing, the stone in which they were supposed to be set was back, along with the sharp lines of the runes surrounding them.
Kaz shook his head. “Not the husede. I think they were just there to serve the mosui. The mosui themselves…I don’t know what they were supposed to do.” Then, thinking of the mosui’s powerful claws and the massive mines beneath their city, he said, “Maybe they were supposed to be the miners, originally, but either they weren’t good enough at it, or Zhangwo just didn’t like his creations doing something like that.”
Reaching out, he didn’t quite touch the archway. “Snen said the xiyi were supposed to guard the eggs, and I think they must have been warriors in general. That only leaves one group to maintain the rest of the mountain, and we still do it to this day. No, kobolds made this, and all of the other marvels here. We’ve forgotten, but what we used to know, we can learn again.” Certainty rose up in him, a sense of truth that he might have doubted if he hadn’t realized what it was. He pushed it back down. It wasn’t time for that. Not yet.
“Let’s go,” he said to his dragon, snuggling her tired body against his chest. “You need more crystals.” Li clicked in pleased agreement, and they walked off down the empty hall.