All throughout Sen’s training, Master Feng had instilled in him the need for control. He’d striven for it at first because he trusted Master Feng. Then, he’d gone out into the world and witnessed firsthand the destruction that uncontrolled techniques could unleash. He’d even been the cause of some of that destruction. A loss of control had the potential to end lives by the hundreds or, as a cultivator advanced, by the thousands. It could level homes. It could level nations. Those experiences and realizations had reinforced his belief in the absolute need for control. Sen could count on his fingers the number of times he’d truly lost that part of himself. Even when the heart demon was at its worst, Sen had rarely fallen prey.
Of course, he had also rarely been in a position where a loss of control stood to harm so few and destroy so many that deserved it. Nor had he ever been as powerful as he was at that moment, recent trauma aside. It would be so easy, he thought. Keeping a tight hold on techniques was the challenge. Letting them fail, well, that was child’s play. A heaven’s rebuke like that one I set off back in that abandoned town, perhaps, mused Sen. It would likely wipe away every devilish beast rushing toward them. Any it didn’t kill would likely be horribly injured by that detonation of qi. The idea seemed to take hold of Sen with a will of its own. He had already drawn his jian and started pressing lightning qi into it before he realized what he was about to do.
He truly had no idea what that technique or an intentionally flawed version of the technique would do at his current level of advancement. Yes, it would kill the enemy, but it might also wipe away half of the ruins or kill them all. He withdrew the lightning qi from the jian and decided that something else was more appropriate for these creatures. While his memories of why he performed the technique remained hazy, the mechanics of Heavens’ Shadow remained burned into his mind. Just as importantly, it wouldn’t bring about mass destruction in its wake. Sen pulled on the shadow qi inside of him, frantically mixing and matching the other kinds of qi it needed, before he drew on that helix of divine qi, just the tiniest thread, to bring it all together. Then, remembering that he had inflicted his grief on those other cultivators, he picked something else he was all too familiar with to infuse the technique. Fear.
He had spent most of his early life in a constant state of fear. Fear of starvation. Fear of beatings. Fear of death. His ascent into the ranks of cultivator hadn’t freed him from fear, just given him new things to fear. Sen drew deep on those experiences and distilled that fear into something more basic, something purer, something primal. He squeezed that fear the way he might squeeze qi to condense it. He took that fear and shoved it into the technique. There was a moment of resistance before the technique let him add this other element. He glanced over at Misty Peak.
“Get ready to follow me through,” said Sen before shooting a look at the spider. “That goes for you too back there.”
Misty Peak was staring at the jian in Sen’s hand like it was made of death. “What are you going to do?”
Sen gave her a smile. “I’m going to share.”
Where he’d almost instinctively limited the technique the first time he’d done it, Sen put no such restrictions on himself this time. He swept the jian before him and a casual, almost lazy arc. An avalanche of shadow, divine qi, and the essence of fear rolled across the land in front of him, spreading out and crashing over the devilish spirit beasts and restless spirits alike. There was a hush as that technique inundated those fell creatures, seeped into them, and afflicted them. The avalanche thinned as the technique took root in every living and unliving thing within its range. His mind a little more settled, Sen returned to pressing lightning qi and his killing intent into his jian. Right around the moment Heavens’ Rebuke coalesced and purple-hued black lighting started to crackle around the blade, the part of the horde that had been racing toward them quite simply went mad.
The spirits tried to float away and attacked anything that got in their way. The devilish beasts tried to run in every direction except toward Sen. They crawled over each other or went through each other. Spirit beasts were trampled and crushed beneath the hooves and claws and more powerful devilish beasts. The noises of terror they made were so loud and omnipresent that Sen felt it in his teeth. Misty Peak had clapped her hands over her ears to try to block some of the noise, and Sen had to wonder just how sensitive her hearing was. Do foxes have better hearing than humans? Sen suspected that they did and that it would only grow more acute as they gained power. The big spider was hunched low to the ground and violently shuddering, clearly pained by the noise but unable to cover whatever served to give it hearing.
Sen wove a net of air around them to cut down the noise. He didn’t stop it entirely because it was madness to deprive yourself of one of your senses in battle. He just muted the noise so that it wasn’t physically agonizing to experience it anymore. Misty Peak lowered her hands and the spider stopped crouching and shuddering. She looked at him and then stumbled back when her eyes fell on his jian. She pointed at the sword with a trembling finger.
“What is that?” she demanded.
Sen turned his attention back to the chaos playing out in the horde and answered, “A sword.”
As the horde did its best to rip itself apart and run away at the same time, Sen nodded to himself. This was a far better option than mindless destruction. It was judicious control. As much as Sen would like to simply stand there and watch the foul creatures destroy each other, he knew it wasn’t possible. His technique had only affected a small portion of the horde. As they died or fled, unaffected members of the horde would filter in to replace them. They needed to use the chaos in front of them as cover to get into the ruins. That meant they were going to have to cut their way through.
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“Keep up,” said Sen and dashed toward the madness.
Sen almost immediately decided that the only real saving grace to this approach was that they didn’t need to actually kill everything in their path. They just needed to get around the devilish beasts. Testing an idea, he let the divine qi embedded in his skin rise to the surface and emit a dull glow. Every spirit that got near to him recoiled as if in agony and even some of the devilish beast shied away from him, which made Sen happy. He didn’t even have names for most of the things he saw. They resembled spirit beasts in the loose sense that most of them had four legs, but the similarities tended to end there. He saw something that looked like a cross between a deer, a scorpion, and some kind of serpent. There was a beast that had no head, simply a chitinous body like a boar, and a long neck that ended in a maw filled with razor fangs. He saw a creature that had two heads, one of a bird and one of some kind of cat. The heads lashed out at each other as often as at something else.
Yet, those creatures were almost comforting when compared with the creature that was nothing but a mass of tentacles around a massive, pus-filled nodule that he thought served as its brain. The thing was so utterly vile, so purely revolting, that Sen went out of his way to hurl lightning at it. The lightning split open the nodule in a spray that coated nearby beasts and began to rot them immediately. Sen saw some of the human-faced spider things he fought with Chan Yu Ming what felt like a thousand years before. Sen meant to simply pass them by, but it seemed that his recent spider companion had something against them, because it launched itself in their midst with an outraged chittering noise. Sen clenched his teeth and followed the spider. His Heavens’ Rebuke-infused jian carved through the things like they weren’t even there. He actually felt their cores explode as soon as the blade came in contact with them.
He would have liked to stay and experiment, but he barely dodged a foot-long spine that something in the horde had fired off. He wasn’t even sure that it had been aimed at him. It could have been aimed at something else, or nothing at all, or simply fired in some creature’s death throes. He gave the spider a baleful glare and the creature flinched back from it. They couldn’t stop moving or they’d get bogged down in the horde.
“Let’s go!” ordered Sen, knowing that it was too late.
Misty Peak had been flittering around the edges of their fight with the human-faced spider things, but the horde had shifted, bringing fresh monstrosities into their vicinity. The horde wasn’t targeting them specifically. They were still caught in the throes of the panic that Sen had induced. Unfortunately, the devilish beasts were so thick on the ground that they didn’t need to target Sen’s group specifically. Misty Peak was frantically battling with three fear-crazed things that Sen didn’t look at too closely. He needed to make them a little breathing room. He started cycling for wind. It normally wouldn’t be much of a challenge, but maintaining Heavens’ Rebuke had never really gotten any easier. It still demanded most of his attention. He also wasn’t prepared to release it yet.
Instead, Sen did what he knew best. He pushed himself. He forced his mind to find what it needed to cycle the amount of wind he needed. Then, he crafted wind blades. Except, these weren’t the small wind blades that he normally preferred. These wind blades were massive things that were close to thirty feet long. With an effort of will and qi, he started to spin those wind blades like they were attached to an axle with his small group in a tiny safe zone at the center of the carnage he was about to unleash. It took almost five seconds, a long eternity in battle, for the wind blade to reach the speeds he wanted, but the effect was almost instantaneous. There was a hellish shriek as the wind blades cut through the air and dangerous chaotic winds hurled some of the lighter devilish beasts away. As blood started trickling out of his nose, Sen smiled and was certain he must look slightly mad. I did say someone was going to pay, he thought.
“Misty Peak! Fall back!” shouted Sen.
She didn’t hesitate. She flung herself toward where Sen was standing. As she did that, Sen pulled those massive spinning wind blades down to the earth. He didn’t have the words to describe the carnage he unleashed with that decision. Weaker devilish beasts were simply disintegrated by the blades, while stronger beasts were flung away in pieces. The bone shrapnel from the beasts that were somewhere in the middle caused a wave of death that radiated outward from where Sen stood. There was also a great wash of black blood that covered everything within sight. Misty Peak stared at the destruction with her jaw slack. Sen knew better than to waste time. He grabbed her arm and started dragging her toward the ruins. After a few steps, she shook off her shock and started moving under her own power again.
The path to the ruins was more or less clear, and Sen found it interesting that the barrier that kept out the horde had also kept out the blood, bone shrapnel, and dismembered bodies. It also let them move a lot faster. It wasn’t fast enough. A massive devilish beast slammed down between them and the ruins. It might have looked like Boulder’s Shadow if Boulder’s Shadow had leathery skin instead of soft fur and stood ten feet tall. Misty Peak started to slow down but Sen was tired and hurting. He didn’t feel like bantering with whatever that thing was. He simply pointed his jian at it and unleashed Heavens’ Rebuke as a consolidated strike. He was interested to note that another little thread of divine qi jumped into the technique right as he launched it. The devilish beast’s eyes widened as it saw the iridescent bolt of lightning streak toward it, and then punch straight through it.
The lightning hit the barrier protecting the ruins. There was a moment of infinite horror inside of Sen when he thought he’d made a lethal mistake. If Heaven’s Rebuke damaged the barrier, it might spell all of their deaths. Instead, it was as if a great hammer had struck a bell. A pure note rolled away from the barrier like a physical presence. Sen braced himself for the blow, but it passed through him. He spun to check on the spider, but it was just standing there and giving Sen a look that made him think it was confused. Sen turned to look at Misty Peak and froze at what he assumed was her actual appearance. No, he chided himself, that’s an inside-the-ruins conversation.
While that sound had left them unharmed, it was less kind to the devilish beasts. Some of them were ripped apart, some of them melted, but it seemed like all of them were hurt in some way. Sen knew enough not to waste that bit of good fortune. He activated his qinggong technique and raced toward the ruins. He flinched a little as he passed through the barrier, but nothing happened. He turned to watch as Misty Peak pulled something out of a storage ring and activated it. She looked incredibly uncertain as she passed through the barrier. Her eyes darted around like she expected something terrible to happen and only relaxed when nothing did. The spider raced up to the barrier and passed through it without so much as a twitch in its steps. Sen let himself sink down to the ground and flopped back. We did it, he thought. We’re inside. I just wish I thought the hard part was over.