His entire body ached terribly. He had fallen onto the almost-tile like surface of something large and nearly warm, sliding down slowly onto the dust choked floor. His feet crushed old pottery shards and the smell of rice wine and long-dried blood mingled thickly in the air. His left arm stung with the pain of two scratches made by desperate nails, but besides that and a bit of bruising he had survived the fall in one piece. Besides very dim green light from far above, everything was cloaked in darkness.
But the old man knew where he was.
The original lair of his Gracious Lord.
Two dully glowing yellow eyes the size of his head stared down at him, and the old man immediately threw himself onto his knees which were painfully bruised and hands in veneration and gratitude. “Truly a most merciful and kind lord, this servant does not know how to repay you!” He wheezed, his lungs felt squeezed as the words left his mouth. Some more dust rose into the air as the snake shifted slightly.
The body’s width alone was wider than a tree, and the length coiled and traced further into the darkness where no light touched. Each scale had a curiously porcelain looking quality to it. The old man shifted upwards slightly to look at the great snake, who had turned to stare instead at the pile of rubble that had likely pelted it when the pool above collapsed. In the poor lighting the young man, Liu Xie, was sprawled on it looked almost sickly, yet his face was a picture of serene rest. His sword was laying atop a long cracked stone beside him. For some reason looking at the sword filled the old man with an incredible sense of unease. So he focused on the young man instead. There was an old saying in poetry, “a face like fine mountain jade”, and the old man thought with some amount of pity that it matched the stupid young man’s description. What a waste, throwing away one’s life like that…
The Great Snake hissed softly and began to uncoil itself, rearing up slowly. The serpent turned its head back to the old man, who bowed his head in apology. “My Most Gracious Lord, this interloper, we had invited him as a guest into our home while a child he had recovered. I never expected such trouble to arise for him, or for him to strike his own host and intrude on our most sacred ritual!”
“What a terrible word to use for this,” a soft voice like a breeze fluttering through leaves sighed.
The old man turned his head to see the younger one was sitting up with his chin resting in one hand. “My Lord!” The old man looked at the snake, who was already rearing back before it let out a terrifying hiss, shooting like an arrow towards Liu Xie.
Liu Xie moved out of the way briskly, grabbing his sword. “You fat worm, I was sitting perfectly still and yet you moved so slowly I got impatient,” he taunted. The Great Snake twisted around again, rushing forward heedless of the piles of rubble it made as Liu Xie stepped lightly out of its way once more to allow it to crash into the cavern wall. “Did eating newborn souls for so long make you stupid too?”
The old man’s heart was quivering much like the earth around them from the snake’s chase, “you! How dare you insult our god like this?” Something scratchy rose in the back of his throat. Was it rage? Was he so angry he was going to vomit blood?
“God?” Liu Xie repeated as he drew his sword. Even in the darkness the blade itself was a bright cold gleaming white that hurt the old man’s eyes. An ocean of pressure fell upon his soul. The old man fell to his stomach as he felt something bitter and furious push down on him while Liu Xie gazed down at him with distinctly inhuman eyes. “There’s only one god here.”
The snake lunged forward again, and the old man’s mouth was too choked by thick curls of something emerging from his throat. Liu Xie again shifted his position, holding his sword out so it caught the flesh at the corner of the snake’s mouth, shearing through muscle and rib bones as the snake’s own momentum carried it forward. The pungent alcoholic smell of its blood flooded the cavern as it splashed outwards with viscera like an acrid wave where bright blue specks ripped themselves free with delighted babble noises. The Great Snake heaved in pain, more specks of light rushing from its shriveling body and flowing upwards towards the hole far above like a strange whirlpool. Within the body, things began moving, pushing and twitching against the heft of the body as it bled.
The old man stared in shock as he watched the snake writhe and spill its organs throughout the cavern in its death throes. “Wh-what have you done?”
“Don’t be sad, it’s a family reunion!” Liu Xie said, coated head to toe in the snake’s blood. Faint yelling came from above, and a near blinding surge of jade light flickered from the hole before fading.
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“E-everything we worked for…” the old man felt like his heart was liquid bleeding out of his body that refused to get up no matter how hard he tried ordering his limbs. The enemy of time had finally caught him without his patron’s protection.
The cold white blade dug into the dusty floor in front of him, reflecting his eyes and hundreds of others. Some human, some animalistic, others too bizarre to truly be labeled as ‘eyes’. They were all staring directly at him.
“I’m going to guess your family’s story,” Liu Xie said. “A creature had moved in, it was feeding on livestock or perhaps children. Someone had to go kill it right. It was weak, so even a peasant-” the old man’s eye twitched at the word, “-could kill it. But before it could die, it made an offer. For a sacrifice, it would give prosperity. So the peasant gave it someone, their wife, a sister maybe, or a daughter-”
“She willingly offered herself, it was a selfless sacrifice for our family! If you even listened to any of the stories-”
“I’m not done talking,” Liu Xie said. The old man felt the thick curling scratchy growths in his mouth suddenly surge, pushing past his lips and then plunging into the earth. His eyes crossed as he looked at it. They were roots. Like that of a tree. He made a muffled yell, trying to pull his head back up only for searing pain to fill his stomach as the roots pulled at the muscle tissue rather than the ground. “Much better. Anyways, since the creature was a wicked spirit it couldn’t actually bestow good luck for prosperity. So it simply caused bad luck for everyone else to the point that your family’s fortune could not be challenged, merchant wars, a plague that destroyed an entire trading town, you’ve stood tall from all these things. All it cost… were your sisters, daughters, and wives.”
The roots finally released themselves from the ground and withdrew back into the old man’s mouth, carrying the taste of dirt and filth that left the old man close to vomiting. A heavy foot landed on his back and the sword was drawn from the ground.
“Was I right?”
The old man’s stomach and heart both churned with both impotent rage and grief. His Lord was dead, his family was going to be sent into ruin, how many of his sons still lived, were still loyal to the family’s needs? What about the lineage that had taken so many generations to build, that should still continue to build? “H-how dare you!” He managed to spit out before his voice rose to an ear shattering cry as fiery agony crawled up his left arm. He managed to turn his head to see that it had been cleanly sliced away at the elbow. “What are you doing!? Stop!”
“Calm down, I’m not killing you,” Liu Xie said as he repeated the slice on the man’s right arm which provoked another cry. “That’ll be their decision,” he pointed towards the whirlpool of light, then gestured expansively to the giant snake corpse.
From the old man’s position he could just barely turn his head upwards enough to see through warm tears the flowing maelstrom of giggling souls above them. A low gurgling noise was only barely audible over the giggling, but he could see a shriveled arm emerge from the snake’s body. Then another one. And another set. A head appeared, black hair plastered to a shriveled face, a thin line beneath the neck. Then another came.
Dozens of women, most young but some old, emerged. Emaciated, grey, wrinkled flesh that was stretched over bony frames. Their fingers creaked and their jaws worked unevenly. Yet their shriveled eyes burned with implacable hate. They had not died. They never died. Even as their bloodless bodies sat inside the snake’s stomach they had continued to dwell within their own bodies. Trapped by its flesh and the ancient pact, and their suffering had fed it for hundreds of years. It was never enough. It always needed more. Infants were just the appetizer its endless hunger. The Li family had become its endless feast, and all the old man could feel in his heart was terror for his own life as he was trapped with monsters that he could not bargain with.
Liu Xie severed the old man’s legs above the knee with one clean stroke then moved his foot off the old man’s back.
The old man writhed, managing to roll onto his back and move his new stubby limbs in horror as his body went into a deep numbness. His bones had turned into something wooden, green shoots sprouting and extending over the exposed bloody meat to cap them and keep them from bleeding out. “What is this!?” He screamed through his pain. Liu Xie laughed coldly. The green shoots extended further outwards, towards the ground where they dug deep in. Yet they remained supple enough he could still move his limbs around uselessly. He realized Liu Xie was doing this on purpose.
“Don’t worry, you’re not going to die yet,” Liu Xie said, “they’ll last for a good bit unless all these nice young ladies feel merciful. But, if I were them, and I had been digesting in a demon’s stomach for the last few hundred years… I would be a bit resentful at the very least.”
“Who are you!?” The old man was tired of this young man’s cruelty, of pain.
Liu Xie stared down at the man, and for a brief moment the old man felt like he was not looking at a person anymore. He saw something else instead. A writhing terrible thing far too large to fit in the tunnel. A vast terrible presence that he felt absolutely insignificant against, where his wealth and reputation mattered as much as pale ash to it, whose eyeless gaze had fallen upon him with merciless judgement and found him wanting.
The old man watched Liu Xie turn away and begin walking, he was speaking but he could not hear anything more besides a cacophony of mocking laughter as the maelstrom of souls and shrieking corpses swallowed him up with nails like knives and teeth of fire.