"There are cheerier places to spend time than in an abandoned sixth-century village next to the headless corpse of a woman on whom you were developing something of a mum crush. I'd probably even sneak Wolverhampton on a Saturday night slightly ahead of it on the list, and that's saying something.

If you know, you know.

Once the wizard had ridden out of sight, I went and sat down next to Ealdgyð's body. Her head had vanished into a dark corner somewhere, and I was not eager to play that little game of hide and seek before sunrise.

I rested my hand on her chest - oddly, there was no blood - and thought how unnecessary her sacrifice had been. Brave, no doubt, but there'd been no one left in the village to interest the Dicks. There has been no need to 'buy more time'. If we'd just kept running towards the trees when we saw them, Ealdgyð would still be alive.

But that was the point, wasn't it? As she said, everyone she loved was dead, and once she knew she'd discharged her last responsibilities and that all the women and the children in the village were safe, she'd wanted out, too.

We'd had a lot in common, Ealdgyð and me. Maybe I should have joined her in that last stand?

But no, that was the point she wanted to make to me, wasn't it? We weren't quite the same. She'd lost everyone that mattered to her in the world. But I still had someone.

And they were in danger unless I pulled my head out of my arse.

I felt tears running down my face.

The world was about as quiet as anything I had ever experienced in my life. I'd grown up in various cities, and my every moment - waking and otherwise - had been punctuated with noise.

Yet here, in this village, for the first time since I had been … was the verb 'isekaid'? Whatever. For the first time since I'd ended up here, I found myself wholly alone with my thoughts.

And if that didn't tempt fate enough for either Merlin or Wulfnoð to suddenly become chatty again, nothing would …

But no. Nothing. Not even crickets.

Just the dark. And the silence. And the headless corpse.

I don't know how many hours I sat there, just staring into the blackness.

Without Merlin, I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to be doing. He'd brought me to this realm for a purpose, dangled the imminent danger to the wellbeing of my sister in front of me, and then fucked off without leaving an instruction manual.

I was basically Luke if he'd been at home that morning on Tatooine when the stormtroopers showed up to shooting.

I idly patted my own version of Aunt Beru on her headless shoulder. There's a chance I might have become hysterical at this point.

During the next few hours, I must have fallen into a breathing exercise some therapist or other had recommended would help with my anxiety. I'm not sure they ever planned for me using it in my current circumstances, but at £50 an hour, I felt entitled to give it a whirl.

And then, suddenly, things were not so dark in the village. Because I appeared to be glowing with purple light.

Like, full-on ET chest glowing shit.

The shock utterly killed my calm buzz, and the purple glow stopped as soon as it had begun.

I sat frozen for a few minutes, worried the light show would draw the raiders back. But, no. Only the silence returned.

Remembering the Magic Eye trick Merlin had me do with the wolf, I looked around to see if anything was glowing in the village. Maybe Ealdgyð had some Qi I should seek to collect? But she looked the same with, as I was coming to think of them, 'wobbly eyes'. I assume the wizard who killed her had already absorbed anything there was to be sucked in.

Actually, did cultivators gather Qi from humans in the same way as they did with animals they killed?

That seemed a touch ethically questionable.

Thinking about that, I rubbed my nose and let out a shriek as I caught sight of my hand.

My veins were visible through my skin, shining with a soft purple light. I realised I was still all 'wobbly eyes', and the glowing stopped as soon as I looked at myself normally.

'Get that light under control,' the wizard has said. Is this how she had looked to him? Like an extra from Tron?

But, more to the point, how was I supposed to 'get it under control'?

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

I ruffled through my memory to think back to the Xianxia books I had read. I say 'read'. I let a boyfriend monologue at me for about six months, and some of it stuck. He was always going on about the heroes moving their Qi around their bodies to release new powers. So maybe that was the solution? I needed to 'cycle my Qi'.

'Big M, I'd appreciate some force ghost guidance about now …'

Silence.

'Anytime. You just feel free to pop up with the words of wisdom any second ...'

Nada.

Okay. So, Clarence wasn't going to come through in this situation. But how hard could it really be? I'd practically done it by accident once already.

Steeling myself for a mental training montage, I crossed my legs, closed my eyes and tried to clear my thoughts.

*

Have you ever tried to think about absolutely nothing? It's not as easy as people like to make out.

It turns out I have a lot of thoughts.

I was amazed the Stay Puft Marshmallow man didn't appear at one stage.

I shouldn't have been surprised, really. If I was any good being alone with my own company, there were a whole host of disastrous life choices I would probably have been able to avoid. In fact, there was a whole decade of my life where I'd used booze, drugs and mediocre sex precisely to stop me from having moments of quiet introspection.

But, in the end, the dark, the quiet, and the breathing did the trick, and I was able to let my mind drift away.

This time, I felt, rather than saw, the purple glow from my chest begin again. It wasn't so overwhelming this time, more like a soft glow than a torchlight. Without really knowing how, I could make it dim and then brighten if I concentrated.

It was pretty cool, actually. Then the air buzzed like a fridge, like a detuned radio resonating with the Qi swirling within me, and the light went out again.

I was kind of disappointed I didn't hear a from whatever superior beings were in charge of this goofy system. By fiddling with the brightness of the light, I'd clearly passed some sort of threshold.

'Okay, so there is light. What do I do with it now?'

My blank canvas appeared again behind my closed eyes, but this time with a drawing of me-as-Vitruvian-man sketched on it.

Okay, so perhaps this was my level-up reward.

Right on top of my belly button was a blob of purple paint.

I looked at it for a while, willing it to do something. But, like all blobs of paint I have encountered in my life, it is just there. Satisfied with its inherent blobby paintness.

I watched the paint dry for longer than was probably necessary before having a moment of inspiration and imagining a rigger brush. I gently touched this to the purple blob, which seemed to do the trick. The paint suddenly vibrated, and a faint warmth washed over my body, spreading from my belly.

It was a good feeling. As a connoisseur of doing things to generate good feelings in my body, I'd score this as two boxes of Dairy Milk. Maybe even half a cider if I was feeling generous.

Whichever, I wanted a bit more of that feeling. So, with each intake of breath, I flicked the paint outwards from that blob and into the veins of the drawing of me.

As the paint spread out, I could tell one channel that seemed to run from my big toe, up my inner thigh and then connected to my ribs, which seemed to need more vigour to the paint flicking than any others.

'You need to clear away your blockages', I could hear my ex droning on. 'All that booze, it's too much for your liver.' Well, look at me now, Tim. Fucking cycling my Qi through my meridians like a pro.

I don't know how long I did this for. This process was both comforting and unnerving, as I could sense, with each flick of the paint, the power of the purple glow growing, fluctuating, and surging.

As I continued to cycle my Qi, twelve glowing spots of purple popped up on Vitruvian-me, and I could see that my brush was guiding the paint to flow through an intricate network of my body. Yep, the spot near the liver was definitely the part of the picture that needed the most attention; much more effort was required to keep a harmonious cycle when the paint passed through that spot.

Goodness knows how long I sat in the village's mud painting internal me purple. Time seemed to have lost its hold on me, just like when Merlin had stopped it on the battlefield. I could feel I was drenched with sweat, and despite not moving, my muscles felt like I was at the end of a serious workout session.

But whatever I had been doing seemed to be working as, without needing to flick the brush any more, the movement of the paint synchronised up with my heartbeat, almost as if they had become one.

I did a little internal skip of joy. I was CRUSHING Qi cycling.

And then everything went to shit. I really do like to tempt fate. In another life, I would have been a detective going to work on my last day before retirement and expressing how glad I was there'd been no shootings of cops for the last decade.

The purple paint was suddenly bone dry and resisting any efforts to encourage it to flow again. I could feel my glow start to fade, and my heart began to pound in my chest in distress. I could sense this was a critical moment. I'd come so far, but I'd have missed an opportunity if I didn't get things moving again.

I visualised a palette next to the canvas and swirled the brush in the well where I always held some water. Once the brush was sopping wet, I touched it to the dry, crusty purple blob on my belly button and encouraged it to return to liquid. It resisted at first. Then, slowly but surely, the skin on the paint yielded and began to resume its flow.

As I had thought, restarting the paint seemed to have been a breakthrough in my understanding of Qi. Whereas before, it had just been the funny glow inside me, I could sense now that it was much more than that. That it had possibilities. That the boundaries between me and my Qi had become blurred.

As dawn approached, the purple light surrounding me flashed once more and then settled down under my skin. I checked with my 'wobbly eyes', but none of my Qi was leaking out. My body - and for the first time since being in this world, it really did feel like my body - hummed with newfound strength and vitality.

I don't think I'd felt this proud of myself in years.

Oh, my word, that was painful to watch. Like a baby deer trying to walk for the first time. On lava. With two legs. Missing its head. How can anyone make such a drama about pootling that tiny drop of Qi around their body? This was a mistake. I should have tried harder to keep the boy alive; maybe moved his soul into her body and took it from there? I'm never going to be able to get her where she needs to be quickly enough. The world's doomed.

'Merlin?'

Silence.

'You know I can hear you, right?'

My dear! It's good to be back! I drained my tank a bit too much there, but now you've completed a cycle of Qi – nicely done by the way, very impressive for a first go – it's meant you can hear me again. Obviously. That's fortunate, isn't it?

'Merlin?'

Yes, my dear.

'It's good to hear your voice.' And, unaccountably, I burst into tears.