The voice sounded like a whole tribe howling at once, with an odd echo as the last tone faded away. Kaz froze as it entered his mind, but Li was already moving, dipping her shoulder as she pushed against his back.
Kaz had no doubt she would do exactly that, but the one thing they hadn’t accounted for in their plans was the possibility that this creature was intelligent. Could it be reasoned with? Just because it was huge and had enough teeth for a whole family of dragons, did that automatically make it an enemy?
he told her.
Without waiting for her response - which he already knew would be an angry denial - he took a step away from her, breaking contact so her camouflage fell away. Lifting his hand, he summoned a very small ki-light, keeping it in the red and orange colors of flame, which didn’t seem to bother his eyes as much after a long period of darkness. For the first time, he realized there weren’t even any glow-worms or luminescent mosses here, though the water should make this a perfect place for them. As far as he could tell, the many-headed creature was the only living thing in this vast cavern. Other than himself and Li, of course.
“My name is Kaz,” he said aloud. “I-”
But the thing was already turning its largest head away from him. it said dismissively.
Kaz blinked. This thing knew of Dongwu and Nucai? No, it hadn’t just said their names. It sounded like it knew them. Nucai’s kobolds would be the xiyi. Had this creature been here since they lived in the mountain?
“Nucai’s kobolds,” the words tasted foul in his mouth as he said them, “don’t live in the mountain anymore. Even my people have-” Would this thing become angry if he told it it had been forgotten? “We don’t come here.”
A pup’s howl echoed through his mind. One is safety, Two is clear. Three is home, Four is death. Five is forbidden, Six is work. Eight is mine, Nine is forever. No seven was mentioned at all. But every level of this place except for the living quarters of the xiyi was made up of a single cavern split into seven branches. Had there once been runes carved in the walls to let wandering kobolds know they weren’t welcome, or had his ancestors simply known that this was a place they should never visit?
“But you recognize me,” Kaz said, “so you must have seen my kind of kobolds before.”
The necks swayed back and forth in a very serpentine motion.
Kaz must have reacted to Qiangde’s name, because the monster hissed laughter from dozens of throats.
This thing wasn’t a dragon. If it was, it would have been forced from the mountain with the rest, or gone mad from the compulsion it wasn’t able to obey. So what was it? Kaz focused on its core, and now that he wasn’t distracted by sheer, instinctual terror, he could see that it wasn’t one core, but many. Rather than a smooth sphere, this core was bumpy and irregular. It held a huge amount of pure Water ki, but that ki didn’t quite flow naturally. Rather it swirled and pushed against itself, like many pebbles had been dropped into a single pool, producing waves that countered each other.
“You’re a shiyan,” Kaz breathed.
A dozen heads lunged toward him, and Kaz leaped away an instant before one of them would have bitten him in half. There was only a narrow shelf of ground to stand on, and he didn’t want one of those attacks to accidentally strike Li, so he found himself running along the wall for several steps before dropping back to the ground in a crouch. He was a good thirty feet from where he’d started, but he brightened his ki-light into a pure white flare so he could see if the monster tried to eat him again.
Li didn’t like it, but he could feel her acceptance. She would wait. For now.
“I’m sorry,” Kaz said quickly, readying himself to jump away again. “I didn’t know that was an insult. I’m a shiyan myself.” And that, too, left a bitter taste in his mouth. He was a kobold, and in a way, all kobolds were shiyan, but Nucai had made Kaz into something else again. It lifted the fur on his neck to admit that Nucai was in any way responsible for who Kaz was.
the creature hissed, its heads weaving angrily just at the edge of the pool of light.
Kaz was certain none of that was true. Qiangde had been trying to discover why humans could ascend to other realms, where they could theoretically continue to grow stronger, while he - a dragon born with a beast core - could not. In the process, he had created an entire empire among the humans, learning everything they knew. Those who ascended never returned, and each sect or family guarded its methods of cultivation well. By becoming emperor, Qiangde had been able to force them to give up their secrets, only to find out that while humans knew how to ascend, at least in general, they knew next to nothing about why it happened or what came next.
After that, Qiangde and his court came to the mountain, though Kaz had yet to learn why they chose this place in particular. The dragons were sent out to abduct all kinds of beasts and humans with cores, and those beings were then merged using fulan. Nucai, Zhangwo, and the mysterious Dongwu each produced a stable race, which were called kobolds, meaning ‘servant’ in the Diushi language. But the kobolds hadn’t been created in order to learn how to create even more shiyan, but rather in an attempt to produce a creature born with a core who could still ascend. Hadn’t they?
Carefully, Kaz said, “What is the Snake?” Could he keep the creature talking?
The monster settled back at this, almost seeming to relish the opportunity to speak. Which made sense, if it had been trapped down here alone for a millennium. How was it that it hadn’t simply gone insane? Or had it?
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Oh. Oh. Of course Qiangde had heard of the twelve Divine Beasts. He had spent a thousand years among the humans, following every hint that might lead him to ascension. And yes, in the story Lianhua told Kaz, those beasts went to the palace of the Celestial Lord in the next realm. Which would make the Twelve the only creatures of this world who had passed through the Gate. And Qiangde was a dragon, though not actually the Dragon.
But from the moment he knew becoming one of the Twelve would allow him to leave this world, he would have wanted nothing more than to be the Dragon. Had he known that when one of the Twelve died, another would rise? Had he hoped that if he killed Loong, he would become the new Dragon, simply because he was the most powerful dragon left alive? Knowing what Kaz did of Qiangde, he doubted it. That ancient monster left nothing to chance.
“So you can ascend to the heavens?” Kaz asked, remembering how Lianhua and her grandfather had spoken of growing too powerful for this world.
The many heads shifted, some looking away from him, while others hissed angrily.
And that was Qiangde’s plan. He had killed or captured the Twelve - all but Heishe, who was beyond his reach, deep beneath the surface of the earth - and what? Fed their cores to other creatures of the same type? Studied them in an attempt to discover how to make himself into the Dragon without any risk? But if a creature ate a core that was too strong for them, that core could kill them, or, worse, the being within the stronger core could take over the body of the weaker creature.
Was it possible that Qiangde was stronger than Loong? Kaz didn’t think so, and Qiangde would have wanted to be certain. So he had created a test creature, just like all of his others, only this one was so strong he had to tie it to him with more than fear and tradition. He called it his child, and made it love him.
Kaz looked again at the misshapen core before him. He could see weaknesses in it, places where the many cores that had been used to create it hadn’t quite come together completely. Nothing like that was in Kaz’s core, thankfully. Was Nucai better at making shiyan than Qiangde, or had he learned more in his centuries of continuing experimentation?
Still, there was no doubt that this thing was strong. Was it stronger than Heishe? Kaz didn’t think so, just like he didn’t think its core would handle the transition to Divine Beast. Not that he could become a Divine Beast without all five types of ki, and Kaz didn’t see anything but Water in this monster. Had Qiangde not realized he needed all the elements, or did he not care that his ‘child’ would die so long as he learned what he needed? Or was this creature never intended to win? Kaz wouldn’t put it past Qiangde to have created this beast just to hurt Heishe badly enough that Qiangde himself could finish her off and take her core.
Kaz drew in a deep breath. “Qiangde is dead,” he said, and he was already moving out of the way of the attack when it came. He leaped again as he shouted. “That old dragon died hundreds of years ago, and you’ve been rotting here, forgotten and alone, ever since!”
“He was using you,” Kaz went on, briefly standing on the back of one of the enormous heads before jumping away as another head bit the first as it tried to reach him. “He used everyone, and eventually we tired of it. Some of us fought back, and Qiangde died. His bones lie beneath you, hollow and empty. You should leave here. Go live your own life, and forget him.”
The creature seemed to have gone mad by now. Kaz had run out of nearby ledges to jump to, at least ones that weren’t anywhere near Li, and instead he leaped from head to head and neck to neck, digging his claws deep into the monster’s flesh so it couldn’t shake him free. Several of the heads were snapping at each other, and some of the necks were tangled in knots.
He didn’t even feel something slip from his waist as an invisible Li flew overhead and caught him at the height of a jump. Her claws dug into his shoulders until it seemed like they might actually break the skin, and she was hissing furiously, cold vapor surrounding them in a thick fog.
Another voice broke into the one-sided fight, and Li lost several feet of height when she stopped beating her wings for a moment in surprise. Fortunately, the many-headed monster halted in mid-bite as well, and everyone looked around for the source of the new voice.
Kaz and Li dipped lower, just in time to see the still-unnamed creature staring at Heishe with more than a dozen slack jaws.
It lunged for Heishe with every one of its heads, and Kaz took advantage of its distraction to grab onto Li’s leg and swing himself up onto her back. She wobbled, hissing and clicking at him angrily, but when he offered her a large yellow ki-crystal, she seemed somewhat mollified. Now that he was settled properly, she could have made herself small enough to fly back up the tunnel, but she waited, and they watched.
Physically, Heishe and the monster seemed fairly evenly matched. There were suddenly many more coils thrashing through the water as Heishe grew until she appeared to fill the lake. The creature used its many heads to great effect, however, biting and tearing at her with serrated teeth. Blood flowed from both of them, darkening the already-black water, but Kaz had the feeling Heishe wasn’t using her full power. Not yet.
Heishe said.
Her foe ignored her words, still trying to sink its teeth into her body so it could tear her into chunks.
Her coils shifted, and now Kaz could see that while the monster had been attacking wildly, Heishe had been coiling her own body around the other. She began to squeeze, and Kaz winced, expecting her opponent to be crushed into a gory mass. Instead, it began to shrink. The heads grew smaller as ki was crushed out of it, and its power grew less dense. Its core became fully visible, no longer hidden by the thick fog of ki, and then its body vanished entirely, leaving something dark and round resting atop Heishe’s long body.
At first, he drew back, believing that she had reduced the creature to a core and was now inviting him to eat it. Then he looked more closely and realized that while there was a core there, it was tiny, barely larger than the end of his thumb. It hung in the center of something that his brain simply couldn’t comprehend, but Li had no such difficulty.
Li whistled softly.
Heishe gave her rasping laugh.
Li looked at Kaz.
“Yes,” he said, and lifted the egg from Heishe’s tail. Opening his pouch, he set the narrow end of the egg inside the opening and gave the pouch some ki. Nothing happened. He gave it more ki and a gentle push, and with a great deal of reluctance, the egg vanished. There was no doubt that his pouch was now full and overfull, but this wasn’t the time to deal with it.
With a deep sigh, he brightened his half-forgotten ki-light. They still couldn’t see the whole cavern, but he was fairly certain they’d come quite a distance from where he and Li had originally landed. Not least because there, in the wall beside them, was the exit they’d been looking for.