Staring down at the compass in her hand, Li Yi Nuo felt a surge of frustration. Just how far had this curse-wielding cultivator gone? While she wasn’t eager to find whoever it was, she no longer worried that it was a death sentence hiding as a sect mission. Her master hadn’t been able to force the sect to rescind the mission, and he had tried. In the end, though, the outer disciples remained afflicted by the terrible technique that seemed boundless in its vindictive quest to punish. The matter had come so close to more violence that the reclusive patriarch of the Vermilion Blade Sect had made a brief appearance. He had approved the general details of the mission after summoning her.
“I know you don’t approve, old friend,” the patriarch had told her master, while Li Yi Nuo had stood trembling before the nascent soul cultivator. “Yet, I sense the movements of greater things at work here. This will be an opportunity for your disciple if she can seize it.”
The other elders of the sect had assumed the patriarch’s appearance meant salvation from the wrath of her master. The patriarch had crushed that optimistic hope beneath a merciless boot. When asked to intervene, the patriarch offered the casual opinion that he found it deeply unseemly that elders of the Vermilion Blade Sect had been so eager to throw away the life of a promising disciple. That comment alone likely would have been enough to correct the behaviors of the elders. The patriarch had apparently wished to excise even the slightest ambiguity from their minds.
“If Bahn Huizhong chooses to act, then it simply means that the time has come to purge the dead wood from the sect rolls.”
Li Yi Nuo’s life had changed rather dramatically after that blood-chilling announcement. Sect elders who once sniffed in derision at her presence or who had openly mocked her became ardent benefactors. Powerful weapons, tools, cultivation resources, and natural treasures had rained down on her from the lofty heights of the sect. The miserly masters of the sect treasury had found truly staggering amounts of silver to give her. The only explanation ever provided was that these resources were meant to smooth the path to success on her very important mission. She had found herself overwhelmed by both the resources and the attention, only partially understanding why it was happening. Her master, perhaps sensing her confusion, had explained.
“The patriarch met with you, personally, and chastised the elders for how they treated you. For all intents and purposes, he anointed you as the young mistress of the Vermilion Blade Sect,” said Bahn Huizhong, a decidedly smug expression on his face.
That revelation had resolved her confusion and replaced it with a deep-seated feeling of inferiority. Li Yi Nuo knew she was talented, but she was no young mistress. Titles like that were reserved for those rare cultivation geniuses that came along once every thousand years in a sect. She didn’t think she could live up to the expectations, but there was no escaping it. All she could do was try to not embarrass her master. The sheer urgency of the mission did provide her with some relief. She was able to fend off the flood of invitations to various private dinners with weak excuses about preparing for her mission. She all but ran out of the gates to the sect a few days later. Once she’d gotten clear of the sect and the chaos of its current politics, though, the realities of the mission had crashed down on her again.
She was trying to find an incredibly dangerous and powerful cultivator who had already left three members of the sect on the cusp of death, and she was doing it on purpose. Worse, the compass wasn’t a terribly efficient tool. It could point her in the general direction of the unknown monster. It would glow a little brighter as she drew closer, yet the kingdom was large. The continent was vast beyond reason. She could spend months, even years, searching for someone who might just kill her the second she found them. She had steadied her nerves and recalled the patriarch’s words. There is an opportunity for me in this, she had reminded herself. I just need to find and seize it. With that thought firmly in mind, she had consulted the compass and set out.
Standing on a road weeks later, Li Yi Nuo stared down at the compass and wondered if it was broken. It had told her that she was traveling in the right direction and that she was getting close, but most of her encounters had been with spirit beasts, bandits, and farmers taking early spring crops to market. In fact, if she was reading the compass correctly, she thought that the cultivator should be within a mile or two. Frowning, she slipped into the forest by the road and did her best to suppress her qi. The last thing she needed to do was alert the mad beast of a cultivator to her presence. That would spell disaster. Instead, she carefully made her way through the forest, shifting her eyes from the compass to the road. When people finally came into view, though, she couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing.
She stared down at the compass, then back out at the road where it was pointing at an impossibly attractive man, even when judged by the hardened standards of someone who spent decade after decade in the presence of cultivators beautified by advancement. She had been expecting someone who looked the part of a demonic cultivator from the stories or maybe even some half-human thing out of one of the darker legends. As if that wasn’t incongruous enough, what the man was doing was just… It was absurd. The man was nodding along attentively as an old farmer told some story, while he fed a carrot to the ox that was pulling the wagon. She just gaped at the scene before her while her mind refused to accept that this person was the dark cultivator who had left those three outer disciples in such desperate condition.
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Li Yi Nuo glared down at the compass and gave it a hard shake. It had to be working incorrectly. She heard laughter from the road and looked up. The man the compass insisted was the person she was looking for had thrown his head back in laughter. The farmer was beaming at him with a gap-toothed grin. This doesn’t make any sense, thought Li Yi Nuo. What kind of evil cultivator chats with farmers and feeds an ox while petting its head? Even stranger to Li Yi Nuo was the ox itself. It was staring at the man with what she could only describe as pure adoration like it had just met some kind of mythical oxen hero or king. It was wrong. Everything about this was wrong. She was frozen with indecision. Should she approach the man? Should she enlist some other sect to make sure that the compass was functioning properly? She didn’t know what to do.
By the time her indecision broke, the man was gleefully, wildly overpaying the wide-eyed farmer for the vegetables in the cart. With a wave of a hand, the vegetables disappeared into a storage ring. Then, the strange cultivator was gone, disappearing down the road with a frighteningly controlled burst of qi and a qinggong technique Li Yi Nuo didn’t recognize. She looked back at the road and saw the farmer and ox staring after the man with, respectively, confused and sad expressions. Another look at the compass and it was pointed straight in the direction the man had gone. Something very odd is happening here, and I’m going to figure it out, thought Li Yi Nuo.
Not sure what else to do, she started tracking the cultivator again. In one town, she spotted him cleaning out a local woodworker’s supply of toys. Toys! In another, she thought she’d gotten too close when he stopped in his tracks. He cocked his head like he was listening for something, and then changed directions. She watched in utter bewilderment as he found his way into the poorest part of the town, walked directly to one specific house, and knocked on the door. A woman who looked both exhausted and afraid had answered the door. He spoke with her for a few minutes, and Li Yi Nuo watched the woman’s expression go from frightened to confused and then to cautiously hopeful. He’d disappeared into the ramshackle structure, and perhaps an hour later, she felt a wave of healing energies ripple out of the house and wash over the entire area.
When she thought her curiosity might actually kill her, the door to the house was yanked open, and a bright-eyed, if underfed, little boy crashed out into the street like a tornado, calling for his friends. She glanced back to the house and saw the same woman sobbing uncontrollably, her face in her hands. The enigmatic cultivator stepped outside and watched the boy running around, an odd mixture of satisfaction and sadness on his face. He spoke to the woman briefly, who started bowing and thanking him and promising him a thousand years of loyal service. He just smiled at her, waved it all off, and started walking down the street. Then, seemingly just because he could, he waved his hand and a small mountain of food appeared. There were bags and bags of rice, piles of vegetables, enough bottles of sesame oil to bankrupt a minor sect, and so much more. Looking pleased with himself, the cultivator wandered off in all of the confusion.
Li Yi Nuo had to know. She made her way over to the woman who the increasingly inscrutable cultivator had somehow picked out of an entire town. The woman gave her a hostile look.
“What do you want?” asked the woman.
Li Yi Nuo looked off in the direction the man had gone. “Who was that?”
The woman relaxed slightly but still looked wary. “The divine cultivator didn’t tell me his name.”
“Divine?” asked Li Yi Nuo, shocked at the suggestion.
“What else could he be?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Who else but a divine messenger could have known? My son was dying. A sickness of the heart that stole his strength. I feared he wouldn’t see another dawn. Then, the divine cultivator came. He knew my son was dying. He said he could help my son a little. A little, he said. Then he gave me a miracle.”
Li Yi Nuo looked over to the boy who was wrestling furiously with another boy over an apple. A miracle, indeed.
“I see,” said Li Yi Nuo. “Thank you.”
She started to turn away when the woman spoke again. “He didn’t tell me his name, but I know who he was. Who he had to be.”
“Who?” asked Li Yi Nuo, eagerness to solve the mystery burning inside her.
“That was Judgment’s Gale,” said the woman in a reverent, hushed tone. “The divine wind that scours away the guilty and rewards the righteous.”
Li Yi Nuo wanted to scoff at the idea, but then she looked at the little boy again. She looked at the outlandish piles of food that were swiftly being carried into houses, food that would likely save lives. She thought about the stories of the man in the blue robes. She turned her head in the direction the cultivator had gone, that cultivator in blue robes. Li Yi Nuo nodded her thanks to the woman and started off in the same direction that the man had gone. She couldn’t keep just following him, she needed to confront him and get to the bottom of all of this. Yet, the man had vanished. She was forced to resort to the compass again, going back out on the road. Two days out, though, the impossible happened. The compass seemingly lost track of the man. She stared in incomprehension as the needle in the compass listlessly spun.
Before she could draw any conclusions, she felt the cold steel of a blade at her throat. She shifted her eyes, not daring to move anything else. The laughing man with the farmer was gone. The self-satisfied man who had casually given away a fortune in food was gone. The man who looked at her with stony eyes and an icy expression of displeasure was something she knew, something she recognized. This man could have inflicted that terrible technique on those outer disciples without a second thought.
“You’ve been following me for a while now,” he said, plucking the compass from her hand. “I tolerated it because you seemed harmless enough, but my patience has run out. Who are you? What do you want?”