Li Yi Nuo frowned up at the sky. The winter was nearing its end, but it wasn’t over yet. Based on the clouds overhead, it seemed that the season was preparing to remind all of the world that winter’s fury was nothing to dismiss. She hated the winter. She hated the cold and the snow. She hated how nothing grew. Being forced to leave the sect and the comfort of her warm home to discover the fate of three missing disciples had not left her in a good mood. It wasn’t the task itself. Those missing disciples were members of the sect. If some misfortune had befallen them, the sect had a duty to either retrieve them from the danger or at least retrieve their remains for a proper funeral. Yet, she couldn’t imagine what misfortune could have befallen them.
They were only foundation formation cultivators, but they had been sent on a simple mission to kill a spirit beast that was troubling a town. While anything could happen, these requests of the Vermilion Blade Sect were routine. The sect used them to help lower-level disciples gain experience and advance their cultivation. If the beast was powerful enough to kill all three of them, it should have been powerful enough to destroy the town and not merely trouble its inhabitants. Those oddities had been enough to convince the sect elders to dispatch an inner disciple to discover their fates. Li Yi Nuo had found herself selected for the “honor” of this task, but she knew the truth. It was a punishment for rejecting the advances of Elder Joeng.
The woman had been relentless in her pursuit, wholly uncaring that Li Yi Nuo had no sexual interest in other women. She had thought that explaining that would be enough, but it seemed the rumors were true. Elder Joeng wanted what she wanted and did not accept rejection well. Li Yi Nuo had assumed that the stories of other women simply submitting to put a stop to the endless rain of undesirable tasks were just that, stories. Now, she knew better. Her own cultivation had been set back months by the Elder’s wounded pride. Yet, she knew it could have been much worse. She had been at least partially shielded by her teacher, but his power in the sect was limited. He had reached the end of his cultivation journey long ago and was now reaching the end of his long life. He was respected, but that respect was waning as the kind old man’s life waned. She feared that the time would come when she would have to leave the sect or find herself stopped entirely in her cultivation path.
She shook off those thoughts as she traveled down the road, her qinggong technique propelling her at speeds that would have killed a mortal horse after only a few miles. She was torn between a desire to finish this mission as quickly as possible and a desire to take her time. Finishing quickly would let her return home and escape hated winter but that would also mean falling again beneath the gaze and power of Elder Joeng. Taking her time would leave her free from the unwanted attention, but it might endanger the lives of the missing disciples. In the end, duty had won out over her personal comfort and she traveled as fast as she could. That decision had been at least partially driven by strange, unaccountable tales of a wraith wandering through this region of the kingdom. She had initially assumed they meant it was some manner of hungry ghost, but this was something else.
The wraith wasn’t violent, not directly. It simply walked steadily forward with its eyes fixed on some far-distant destination. It didn’t react to human beings. Yet, its presence was something terrible for all who beheld it. It seemed this wraith was an avatar of despair. In the wake of its passage, there had been suicides and violence from those who lost all hope. It was said that even cultivators fled from it. If the disciples had encountered such an avatar of despair or, worse still, tried to battle it, she shuddered to imagine what it might have done to them. Wounds to the body could be healed. The body was well understood and there were many paths to repair it. Everything from basic acupuncture to advanced alchemy could restore the body.
Afflictions of the heart and soul were often difficult or impossible to treat because the heart and soul were, in so many ways, inscrutable. Those who even could treat such afflictions were so rare and so expensive that even trying to hire one would bankrupt the Vermilion Blade Sect. For all the impossibility of it, one may as well try to hire Fate’s Razor for a battle. However, in her secret heart, Li Yi Nuo thought that particular man was a myth. She found it far more likely that his reputation was really the deeds of many cultivators of old distilled into one cultivator cautionary tale, not the actions of one impossibly powerful cultivator who stood at the absolute peak of the cultivation world. For that matter, she strongly suspected that there were no cultivators who operated at that level. After all, why would anyone who could ascend decline to ascend for so very long?
No, they were just stories built up over time, like those stories about the blue-robed wandering cultivator, Judgment’s Gale. Blue robes were common. Wandering cultivators were common. It made more sense that people were simply confusing which wandering cultivator did what things. She had found those tales a little unnerving, though, given the things the man had supposedly done. Wandering cultivators were ill-trained or self-trained fools, by and large. She felt bad for them because that poor training almost inevitably fated them to an early death. Elder Jeong’s behavior aside, it took the constant discipline of a sect to bring out the true potential of a cultivator. Knowing that it took that kind of discipline is what made the stories about the man so disquieting. If some untrained wandering cultivator was out there performing even one of those deeds, it spoke to a genius talent. If, and she simply refused to believe it, but if one man had done all of those things, he was a true old monster in the making. She pushed those thoughts aside.
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“Don’t be foolish,” she muttered to herself. “He doesn’t exist. Not like that avatar of despair.”
She’d been inclined to dismiss those claims as mortal exaggeration. Not that it was their fault for exaggerating. They didn’t have the skills necessary to identify and understand much of what transpired around them. In a world of qi, spirit beasts, and ascension, mortal senses simply weren’t enough. The farther north she got, though, the more she believed it. Spirit beasts were common on the roads between villages, towns, and cities. She also knew that the farther north one went, the more likely you were to encounter a potent spirit beast. Yet, push her spiritual sense as hard as she could, she hadn’t sensed a single spirit beast on her entire journey. Something had frightened the spirit beasts so badly that they had apparently fled into the deeper wilds and not returned. If a true avatar of despair had traveled these roads, though, that might have been enough to send the spirit beasts fleeing.
Yet, even if there was such a thing wandering the area, she had to continue on. People recalled the three disciples passing through. That meant that they had been alive within the past few weeks. There was still a chance that she’d find them alive if in desperate circumstances. That didn’t mean she wanted to stumble blindly into a bad situation. She took every precaution she could think to deploy. She was confident in her own strength, but she doubted even her master could face down a thing like the creature of despair that people had described. Perhaps the collective strength of all the elders could pit itself against a divine messenger and send it back to where it had come from, but she was no elder. Not yet. She was a core formation cultivator. One who was only approaching the late stage. When she reached the late stage, perhaps, she might finally be considered for an elder position, but she understood well the limits of her own strength. She could not stand alone against the will of a heavenly messenger.
Li Yi Nuo stumbled to a halt and looked around wildly. Her heart thundered in her chest. One moment, everything in the environment felt fine. The next moment, she had passed into a sphere of influence that made her want to scream, run away, and cry uncontrollably. She swept her gaze and spiritual sense around, trying to find the source, only to freeze in place. She hadn’t found the source, but she had found something else. Three piles of snow that she had mistaken for snow drifts were people. The coincidence was too much. She pushed past her fear and panic. Walking toward the snow-covered forms, she remained vigilant for a trap of some kind. Yet, nothing impeded her. She crouched down by the first pile of snow and swept it away from the form beneath. She found what she feared she would. The robes of the Vermilion Blade Sect were revealed, but that barely registered in her mind. She rushed to the other piles, brushing the snow aside. She had found the missing disciples. At least, she had found what was left of them.
She could feel the impossible power of some kind of technique inside of them. She couldn’t even guess how long ago the technique had been used on them, but it had to have been days at least. For that kind of power to simply linger on them, it made her feel a kind of cold that had nothing to do with the winter weather. The man lying on the ground before her stirred, his eyes fluttering open. He stared through her with eyes that spoke of a thousand years of pain. He finally focused on her and a brief flicker of sanity took hold.
“Senior,” he rasped.
“Yes. Be at peace. I will return you to the sect.”
A look of pure animal fear crossed the man’s face as he seized her robe. “No! No! Kill me! You have to kill me! Please!”
The last word was barely human speech and quickly turned into a scream that cut off as the vacant look returned to the man’s eyes. He shuddered violently as some interior horror dragged him back inside his own mind. Then, he went still. Li Yi Nuo crouched there in a stunned stupor. She’d never even heard of a technique that could do something like what she saw before her. There were ways to influence the mind, but this went so far beyond that. There was a brief war inside her as tried to decide what to do. She needed to report this to the sect as soon as possible, but she also had to take these disciples back for treatment if there even was a treatment. Proximity won the battle. The sect was at least a week away, moving at her absolute fastest and without rest. The disciples were right there, and they would die from exposure if she didn’t help them now.
She swiftly moved beyond the lingering aura of that technique and found a spot just off the road to set up a camp. Not knowing what she’d find, she’d brought along provisions and supplies for several possibilities. She put up tents and started a fire. Bracing herself, she stepped back into the oppressive sphere of influence and carried the disciples out of it. Part of her hoped that moving them might provide some help, but they remained all but catatonic as she piled blankets around them and positioned them by the fire. Once the three were as comfortable as she could make them, she tried to understand what had been done. Cultivators often fought and killed each other. She’d prepared herself to discover that the disciples were dead, cut down by some unusually talented wandering cultivator or a rival sect. Death was an accepted and even expected outcome in those situations.
It felt like some kind of punishment to Li Yi Nuo. What could they have done to be left in this state? Could that wraith of despair have done it? While she didn’t understand the technique, it was a technique. There had been intent in it, although the specifics of that intent remained as obscure to her as the technique itself. That didn’t seem like something that an avatar would have done. Their power wouldn’t feel like a cultivator’s power. Somehow, a human cultivator had done this to all three of them. The cultivator had done it and then left them there in the road to die of exposure or from being attacked by a passing spirit beast. She struggled to imagine a sufficient insult to warrant such a brutal response. More importantly, who could they have so blindly and stupidly offended that had the power to exact such a punishment? Most importantly, would that cultivator seek vengeance on the sect itself for the insult?