Chapter 13

Kora was not accustomed to humiliating herself, and yet she’d done a pretty thorough job of it. To be fair to her, it wasn’t entirely her fault. It wasn’t proper for her parents to probe the cultivation of a junior of an unrelated house, but it was perfectly acceptable for Kora to challenge Tan to what was effectively a spiritual pissing match.

But she hadn’t been expected to get slapped down quite so hard or thoroughly.

Since the mighty wind spirit had escaped the snare that had been set for it, she had worked hard to bond the second strongest spirit that had been available to her. If she was honest, she was happy that the wind spirit had gotten away. She liked fire so much better.

Or at least she liked the idea of fire better. She was having trouble gathering enough Qi to truly advance her cultivation into the third stage of the initiate’s realm. She wouldn’t have had that problem if she’d bonded the wind spirit, because air was everywhere, and she’d be able to cultvate endlessly.

Perhaps she’d even be in the second stage of the profound realm by now, she thought to herself miserably as she walked alongside the younger boy whom she was supposed to – somehow – convince to marry her after embarrassing herself like that.

“I’m sorry,” she said as the walked under one of the plumb trees. “About testing you with my Qi. My parents put me up to it. They wanted me to test how strong you were.”

“Stronger than you,” the boy said, looking up at the denuded branches. “Why are there dead people under the trees?”

“There’s what?” she asked, blinking at the non sequitur.

“There’s dead people under the trees and ghosts in the branches. Can’t you see them?”

“I knew that they were there, but no, I can’t see them,” she admitted. Her heart sank further as she realized that she was dealing with a prodigy. She was a prodigy in her family, but her family was only of average rank in the grand scheme of the cultivation world. She had no idea who the Shens were; it was obviously an assumed name.

But to have stolen a wind spirit out from under the Zangs, claiming to not even have realized that they were doing so, and then to bind it to a five year old child genius …

“I like listening to music. There’s an opera in town that plays on the weekends. If you stay, we can go together and--”

“I can’t stay five days. I need to go home before then,” the boy said, cutting her off before she could get too far into that plan to extend their relationship. “And opera sound stupid.”

“It’s not stupid! The singers train all of their lives for it, and it’s beautiful,” she said.

“Yeah? Well you’re stupid and you like it so opera is stupid. That’s called the transitive property,” the boy said.

She blushed. This was not going well.

Tan, meanwhile, was also miserable. Zephyr was angry at the girl. Before the spirit had just been angry at the idea of someone who wanted to take her away from Tan. She had only vague memories of being caught in the Zang family trap before Tan’s father had rescued her, and spirits were beings that tended to live in the moment. They were quick to forgive and forget.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

Except once was happenstance, twice was a pattern, and three times was unforgivable.

The Zang family had tried to trap her. The Zang family had tried to trap Tan with a marriage proposal. And now the Zang family had trapped an innocent flame spirit in an agonizing web inside the girl’s twisted dantian.

“Fix it,” Zephyr said. “She’s in pain and this stupid girl doesn’t even see it.”

“I don’t know how,” Tan admitted. He too could see the twisted formation that was holding the fire spirit in place inside of the older girl who might have done the same to Zephyr given the chance.

“It wants to be fixed. Just nurture the flame within her with your own Qi and it will burn away the impurities that are tormenting the spirit,” Zephyr whispered into his ear. She wasn’t certain that it would work. Well, she was certain in a way.

Either this would fix the tortuous connection between the fire spirit which was aware enough to suffer in this twisted formation. Or it would fix the situation by killing Kora and freeing the spirit.

For Zephyr it was a win-win.

She didn’t pass all of this information on to Tan, however, only how to snap the threads of the formation within the girl’s belly and how to fan the flames to do the rest.

Tan stopped walking, and Kora turned to him nervously.

“I’m going to do something, and you need to trust me,” Tan said suddenly. “It might hurt but it’s for your own good. I think.”

“I hate it when people say that. It’s never true.”

“You’re right. But I think this time it’s true. There’s a reason you’re stuck in your cultivation. I’m going to fix it.”

Kora blinked, and before she realized what was happening he pressed a hand to her belly button and pressed his Qi inside her.

And abruptly the carefully woven spell construct that would help her body consume the spirit over the course of years shattered.

She screamed as the fire Qi abruptly ran through her meridians, threatening to burn her from the inside out. The fire Qi and … and air Qi. A calm breeze that was both fanning the flames and blowing them back away from her organs and into her dantian where they belonged.

She had fallen, and he was straddling her chest, with his butt almost in her face as he kept one hand pressed to her belly. He was doing surgery to her, he realized. Magical surgery while she was awake to watch and feel it happening.

She screamed again as another gout of flame Qi escaped her dantian and ripped through her system before he could get it under control.

“What in the world is going on? What is your son doing to our daughter?” her mother exclaimed.

And suddenly there was a pressure everywhere. Like a boulder, the thought of a boulder at least, pressing down on everything and everyone and everywhere.

“Do not interfere if you value her life,” A voice so filled with power that she couldn’t even identify what stage it was at said. “To stop them now that they’ve gone this far would burn her out.”

Kora screamed again, but Tan was getting faster at redirecting the fire Qi that was ravaging her system back into her dantian before it could cause too much havoc in her body.

The cycle repeated itself five times before suddenly something shifted. She blinked in surprise.

“You stupid little brat I hate you and now that that supid circle is gone I’m going to tell you every day how stupid you are and what a brat you are and how much I hate you!” a voice whispered in her ear.

She blinked in surprise. She knew that voice. She had heard it whispering to her when she’d held the spiritual stone in her hand. It had said something like “eh, you’ll do” when she’d expressed her willingness to bond with it. But she hadn’t heard it since the ceremony had completed.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“You’re damn right you don’t you ignorant little brat! You almost killed me!” the spirit said. “You almost destroyed my mind to steal my power and I hate you for it! If we weren’t stuck together I’d fly away after setting all your clothes on fire!”

The spirit continued to spout vitriol at her, but she stopped listening as exhaustion overcame her.

She was vaguely aware of one thing as she slipped into unconsciousness, however. She’d advanced two stages in her cultivation thanks to … whatever it was that had just happened.