19. The Bell’s Final Toll

With my earth elemental attunement, it was a relatively simple matter to put up a small complex, with sleeping quarters, a common area, and a courtyard. Adan proved to be a handy thatcher, and he took care of the roofing of the simple stone buildings, all the while watching me with profound respect after my display.

My next step would be to ascend the mountain and cultivate in the ice of the snow-capped peak, attuning myself to that element as well as continuing to work on my attunement to air in the low-pressure environment. However, I would wait until my eggs had all hatched and were weened.

Which proved to be a relatively short wait, as I could feel the spark of life growing stronger and stronger within the delicate cargo.

While waiting for them to hatch, I set up an array to see to their spiritual growth, while at the same time instructing Yara in the care of young avians so that she could take care of them in my absence. I would not keep them in a cage, but rather they would be allowed to come and go as they pleased. I knew that this meant that some of them would leave and never return, but that was the way of raising spiritual beasts. You could not force something to grow, only help it along its own journey.

Xol proved to be a fine example of this, as he continued to fight against the spiritual oath that he’d made with me. I could feel its tension as he struggled against it, but my soul easily overpowered his, and the earnestness with which I had made my oath out-shown the deceit that he’d placed upon his end of the bargain.

I came to him one day on the edge of twilight.

“I know that you are trying to be free. So I will change the terms of our oath. No longer must you guard us. Simply avoid humans for the rest of your life and you may go as you please,” I offered.

Xol bristled, his hair standing on end as he turned to face me, for he had not sensed me come. “And what makes you think that I would take such a bargain? That I would allow you to trick me twice when—”

“There is no trick. Stay or go, it is your decision. I simply require your consent to modify the terms of our agreement.”

“You do not have it,” the jaguar said, and it leapt off into the distance.

I sighed and went back to the compound, where I instructed Yara and Hien Ro for two hours before retiring to my room and spending time with the eggs, which were coming ever closer to hatching.

Soon, the first would break through its shell and say hello to the world.

And if the soul-catching array had worked, then at least a few of them would possess powerful souls wich may allow them to ascend to the heights I had been asked to help them reach.

~~~~~~~~

Sana was toiling in the fields. One would think that suddenly becoming the wealthiest family in the village would mean that she could stop performing such tasks, but even after her husband had paid off their debts, purchased them new clothes, and bought her new cooking utensils, the fact remained that they were still a farming village and that meant that everyone took their turns in the fields.

Still, it was honest and rewarding work, and Sana had always enjoyed watching a crop grow from seed. She paused to look up at the sun beaming down at her for just a moment, then her hand went to her necklace, where a locket contained a small lock of hair.

The hair of Little Bug. She smiled.

It was funny how the name had stuck. She didn’t know where it had come from, but it somehow fit the boy perfectly when he was little. And its phonetics were close to his true name anyway, so it was difficult to quash. She had tried to continue to call him his real name for a while, but the diminutive nick-name truly hadn’t seemed to bother the boy, so eventually even she gave in.

Perhaps she shouldn’t have, being his mother. And with everything else that had been wrong about the boy’s youth, it had been one battle she hadn’t wanted to fight.

“Your boy is strange. The other children don’t like him,” she recalled the village women saying. “He doesn’t speak like a child should. It’s spooky. You should take him to a priest for an exorcism, because it’s clear that an evil spirit rests in his heart.”

Sana shook her head and pushed the thoughts away. It wasn’t true, it had never been true. She’d never believed that anything had been wrong with her second child. He hadn’t been slow, he’d been so quick at some things that it had startled her. But the village never saw how one day he had simply stood up and walked around, skipping the crawling stage entirely. The village never saw how he had smiled and called her mother the first time.

Not ‘mama’ or ‘mommy.’ Mother.

When he had started speaking, and it had been so early! When he had started speaking it had been in whole sentences. Slow and careful, like he was putting together unfamiliar sounds, which is why everyone thought that he was slow.

Never mind that he was speaking like a child two years older than he was.

But then had come the quiet years, where the boy had spoken less and less. And then the incident with the merchant, and then the cultivators had come and taken him away.

She felt the tears roll down her cheeks and she just went back to work. She would wipe her face once they had stopped, but any mother who sold her beloved child for a bit of silver ought to cry over not knowing his fate, should she not?

Abruptly a shadow passed over her, and she looked up to see an old man in fine robes standing over her. He had a young face, but she could tell just by looking at him that he was older than her own mother had been.

“Hello. I am Di Ram. I am looking for a woman named Po Sana.”

She swallowed. “I am Po Sana,” she admitted, praying that this cultivator—and there was no doubt in her mind that it was a cultivator who stood before her—brought her news of her son and not the wrath of some enemy he might have made.

“I thought you might be. Your son has your face, and your eyes.”

“You know Little Bug?” She asked.

“I am one of his benefactors. Or at least I was, before he left the sect. I was hoping that he might have sent word as to where he was heading,” Di Ram said.

“No. We’ve had no word since the three cultivators tested him and took him away. Is he doing well?”

“He was exceeding all expectations when I last saw him,” Di Ram said. “Come, will you not show me your home? Your village elders are calling for a day of rest and celebration since my contingent arrived, so do not feel that you need to keep working in the field.”

“Oh-okay,” Sana said, knowing better than to refuse the instructions of a master cultivator whether or not the village elders had anything to say about it. “My home is very humble, but I invite you into it. We do have some cheap rice wine, but I fear that the taste if terrible and—”

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“I am more interested in having you cook something for me, to be honest,” Di Ram said. “I would love to taste the food that the mother of Little Bug prepares.”

And so she called to her two other children, her eldest daughter who was approaching marriageable age and her second son, who was nearly as old as Little Bug had been when he left, and they retired to the small home where she had given birth to four children. The youngest was still in swaddling cloth.

Di Ram asked so many questions about Little Bug. Her second son was eager to answer most of them with tales of watching his big brother acting so strange that others thought he was stupid at the time, but now that he was a cultivator everyone had an air of respect for him so they told the stories in a completely different way.

Di Ram laughed, and he ate the rice and dumplings that she prepared for him, and he asked question after question after question about the boy.

Sana’s husband came home in the middle of the meal and sat nervously at the table in Little Bug’s old spot, his own place at the head of the table having been supplanted by the cultivator. He joined in the conversation but seldom.

Then, as the children were preparing for bed, the screams began.

Di Ram sobered up immediately and stuck his head out the door. He returned a moment later.

“The dead from your cemetery are rising. Gather the children, I shall go and deal with this corruption. My apprentices will see you to safety until this curse upon your lands has been put down.”

Sana simply nodded, gathering her youngest daughter in her arms and following her husband, who held their son’s hand as they fled in the opposite direction from the graveyard. They began to hear the screams and sounds of battles as fel energies clashed against those of the cultivator and his followers.

The fled into the night, guarded by six unseen cultivators of the bronze realm.

The corpses of the graveyard were each their equal, but the impassible wall of Di Ram stood between them and their targets.

Six dimensions away, the Necromancer cursed at the turn of fate. His trap had been sprung too early, and the prey was escaping.

~~~~~~~

Di Phon meditated in the chambers of the northernmost containment array. He felt the moment that his opponent entered the southern containment array, and as one by one the other containment arrays were filled with the silver-path cultivators who would keep them charged.

He nodded. All was going according to the precepts. Except that normally Di Phon would have a replacement for once he had provided his portion of energy into the array, attuning it to his attacks in order to prevent collateral damage outside the northern peak.

He charged the array and sensed his opponent charging the array in equal measures. Perfectly equal, no more and no less, until the array clicked into place and beacons of lights shot into the air from each of the formation centers where the witnesses would reside during the battle.

It was time to begin.

He could sense his opponent as Ko Ren flew to the summit of the mountain. Di Phon stepped forward, and he followed the trail which would bring him to the peak, walking at a leisurely pace.

“Where are you, old man? I know you are here, but why do you hide?”

Di Phon did not respond, even as the opponent began mocking and insulting him in a voice that boomed throughout the sect. He was called a coward, who would hide rather than confront his foes.

But Di Phon was climbing a mountain for what might be the last time, and he was in no hurry for the journey to come to an end. He smiled as he watched the snow fall from a branch, and he spotted a deer which was chewing on a bit of bark. He spooked the deer, hoping that the bit of intent he sent at it would keep it running until it was safely on the other side of the wards.

He reached the summit two hours later. Ko Ren continued to shout about his cowardice and impotence for any who would listen. Di Phon sighed. This was one reason why he never traded pointers with his juniors, they were always so loud!

“I am right here, Ko Ren. Let us begin,” Di Phon said, and although he spoke in a normal voice, his words echoed through the valley just as Ko Ren’s booming voice had a moment before.

Ko Ren turned and with a snarl unleashed a torrential amount of energy at Di Phon. And in that act was confession, for Di Phon recognized the taint within that energy. It was filled with betrayal and the sense of being betrayed in equal measures. Two halves put together not to form a sum greater than the halves, but each lesser than they had been before.

In time, the friction between the two would wear each other down. In time, the poisonous forbidden technique would be Ko Ren’s own downfall. But that would take years, and in the mean time, Di Phon had a battle to win.

Against an opponent who was stronger than him.

He dodged the blast rather than facing it head on, and he conjured for himself a dao avatar. A six-armed Asura appeared in the air above him, and in it’s top left hand the Asura held a spear. The Asura threw the spear at Ko Ren, and the spear became a torrential amount of cutting energy as it was backed by every thrust that Di Phon had ever made in the entirety of his life.

Every single time he had held a spear in his hand and practiced as an apprentice. Every foe which had met its end on Di Phon’s spear-tip could attest to his mastery of the weapon, and there were hundreds to make such testimony from the other side of the river Styx.

Ko Ren pulled up a shield of crimson energy to block the attack and--

The shield shattered when the spear energy impacted against it. The tip of the energy continued threw, and it caught Ko Ren in the belly. Ko Ren gasped and spat blood as he suffered what would, to a non-cultivator, be a mortal wound.

He began the process of healing himself, all while conjuring a new shield to face the next attack of the Asura.

In the Asura’s top right hand, it held a blade. It swung that blade, and from the tip came a line of energy which cut the mountain itself in two, impacting against the wards and disipating.

Ko Ren screamed as his left hand fell to the ground beneath him.

In the Asura’s middle left hand there was a kunai. This weapon was thrown, and it split into a thousand. But Ko Ren raised his hand and uttered a denial.

“NO!” he said, and a flicker of a half-formed Dao avatar of a skull appeared around him. Most of the kunai were deflected away, while three of them impacted their target anyway. He spat blood once more, pulling the weapons out of his body and screaming.

In the Asura’s middle right hand was a gourd. The Asura took a drink from the gourd and then breathed fire at its foe.

The skull-avatar grew more intense and held the flames at bay.

In the Asura’s lower left hand was a whip. It flickered at Ko Ren and wrapped around the skull. This did no damage but to hold the target in place for just a second, while the Asura unleashed its final attack.

In it’s lower right hand was a staff with a bell atop it. The Asura rang the bell.

Ko Ren screamed as he had not for any of the previous attacks at the purifying power of that sound. Throughout the sect, through the shields, seventeen disciples of the Six Mountain Sect fell dead, each of them loyal followers of Ko Ren.

Then the Asura flickered and vanished, it’s power spent.

It would take Di Phon years of meditation to build up something like that once more. All that was left to him was the might of a golden path cultivator who hadn’t truly advanced in centuries, having lost the will to do so when he had been delivered a set of carpenter tools.

His final inheritance from his parents.

Ko Ren continued to scream even after the echoes of the bell faded, falling to the ground and holding his head. He screamed as blood ran from his nose and eyes. But after the screaming faded, Ko Ren looked at Di Phon, madness in his eyes, and Di Phon knew the truth.

He had already lost.

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