Book 3: Chapter 25: Rude Awakening
Under normal conditions, waking up was something Sen let himself do slowly. It was a gentle rise from the wild fantasies of dreaming into the less fantastical demands of reality. He found that gentle rise to be a fine way to start his day because it was often the last restful moment he would have until the next time he slept. It was with fond feelings that Sen remembered those moments after he was yanked out of sleep by some kind of body landing on him. Even that might not have been so bad, except the body had seemingly been mangled badly and proceeded to leak blood all over him. A part of Sen was momentarily bitter about being woken up in such gruesome fashion before the implications sank home. Then, it all came rushing back to him. What he’d seen during his brief moment of lucidity between forming his core and passing out. It had been exactly as feared it would be. There had been spirit beasts, countless spirit beasts, surrounding the campsite and braving the offensive formation.
Sen seized the body and hurled it away from him. It was only after he’d taken his feet and drew his jian on reflex that he realized that body had been wearing a robe. He swiveled his head back and forth in a search for Lifen and Lo Meifeng and took in the chaos around him. And it was chaos. There were spirit beasts everywhere. There were also cultivators everywhere. There were spirit beasts fighting cultivators. Spirit beasts fighting each other. There! He spotted Lifen being cornered by two cultivators. She was desperately swinging some kind of metal club to keep them at bay. Sen heard what sounded like thunder, but way too close. His eyes shot upward. He saw Lo Meifeng and another cultivator actually flying above the chaos. They mostly dodged each other, but every time their weapons met, there was another thunderous noise. Lo Meifeng looked like she was holding her own, so that made his decision for him.
Sen raced toward Lifen and her two attackers, cycling fire and lightning as he went. Some kind of serpent with jaws big enough to enclose Sen’s entire head launched itself at him only to get incinerated from the inside out as he sent a stream of fire down its gullet. One of those odd bear-cat hybrids he’d fought on the way to Tide’s Rest tried to pull the same trick from the other side. Sen backhanded it and was stunned when the front half of the creature simply exploded. He didn’t stop, though. He’d covered most of the distance between him and Lifen when the two cultivators noticed him. One threw himself at Sen, while the other kept attacking Lifen.
Sen took the half-heartbeat he needed to assess the cultivator attacking him. Peak foundation formation, he thought. The man threw a fireball at Sen. Sen used his own fire qi to bat it aside into a spirit beast that was trying to flank him, and advanced on the cultivator with murder in his heart. Three more fireballs followed. Sen batted the first two aside, but the last one he seized with his own qi. He ripped the technique away from the other man, who staggered in shock and pain. By the time the man had gathered his wits enough to sense the danger, Sen’s jian was passing cleanly through the man’s neck. He looked over to see how Lifen was faring. She was holding her own against the cultivator, which surprised him a little, but she didn’t have the attention to spare for anything else. So, she missed the person aiming a crossbow at her back. Sen didn’t.
Sen activated his qinggong technique and shot toward the spot between Lifen and the woman with the crossbow. He moved way faster than he expected, but his reflexes and senses were still apparently good enough to keep pace. He reached out and grabbed the bolt from the air as he all but flew by. The woman with the crossbow didn’t even have time to register his presence before he drove the bolt into her heart, fletching first. Then, he snapped her neck for good measure. Sen spared a moment for another look upwards. Lo Meifeng looked like she might be on the back foot up there, so Sen pointed his jian at the other cultivator and launched a lightning bolt at the man. The man managed to deflect the bolt, but Sen didn’t care about that. It had done its job and given Lo Meifeng a moment to regroup and take the initiative.
Turning his attention back to Lifen, he saw that a massive spirit ox had gored the man attacking Lifen and taken up a defensive position in front of her. Lifen looked both relieved and a little awestruck, but Sen found himself grinning. He strode toward them, cutting down or contemptuously batting aside anything that got in his way. The ox noticed him first and let out a moo of greeting. Sen couldn’t say how he knew, but he knew that this ox was female. He took a moment to offer the ox a deep bow of respect.
“My gratitude, elder sister,” said Sen.
The ox inclined her head to Sen, then charged back into the fray. The next moment, Sen found himself getting hit with a small, furious fist while Lifen shouted at him.
“What took you so long!”
“I don’t even know how long it’s been. I just woke up,” said Sen, futilely trying to stop Lifen. “Will you stop hitting me, please?”
Lifen kept her glare burning at full fury, but she did stop hitting him. He finally got a good look at her, and she looked beyond exhausted. The bags under her eyes were dark blue and her skin looked pale even for her. It was almost a grayish color. Sen hadn’t really taken in the full details, but when he really looked around, it was obvious that this chaos had been going on for a while. Half the trees in at least a half mile in every direction had been shattered, cut to pieces, or burned. There wasn’t a stalk of grass or ground cover plant that hadn’t been smashed, trampled, burned, or otherwise damaged, where there weren’t simply giant tracts of exposed soil. Huge rocks had been reduced to gravel. There were even sinkholes in some places. This wasn’t the kind of damage that you got from a fast and furious fight. He gave Lifen a serious look.
“How long has this been going on?”
“Days,” Lifen slurred, swaying on her feet. “Three, four, I don’t even know anymore.”
“How did we survive all of this?”
“We,” said Lifen as she slumped back against the remains of a tree trunk, “no, too tired. Luck, mostly. We can’t keep going like this. You have to do something.”
Sen searched through his storage ring, looking for something that could help Lifen right now, without him needing to take an hour to process it. He pulled a couple of roots out of his storage ring.
“Here. Eat these. They’re going to taste terrible. Eat them anyway. They’ll help.”
He took a few seconds to throw together an obscuring formation around her and the tree trunk. It wasn’t particularly subtle, and it wouldn’t really hide her, but it would encourage people to look elsewhere. He was hoping that in the chaos of the battle, everything and everyone would be too distracted to realize their perceptions were being altered. She wants me to do something about all of this, he thought. What in the hells am I supposed to do about a three-way fight between us, spirit beasts, and what I assume must be demonic cultivators? If it had been nothing but bad guys out there, Sen might have tried the same kind of trick he pulled in their last fight and just blanketed the area with his killing intent. Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to work in this situation. He’d have to do it in every direction, and he wasn’t skilled enough to exclude Lifen from that effect.
Plus, there was at least one friendly spirit ox out there he didn’t want to harm. Sen didn’t know if there was an oxen deity out there, but it had just gone to the top of his list of priorities to find out. That was the second time spirit oxen had done him a good turn. Sure, he’d been nice to that one ox, but he felt like he wasn’t really doing much to earn the amount of goodwill they’d shown him. He’d have to do something about that. Still, that was a tomorrow problem, and it hinged on surviving the crisis in front of him. If he couldn’t go throwing around techniques that affected everyone, what could he do to change the situation? Sen sighed. If he couldn’t do it all at once, he’d have to do it the hard way.
He checked his dantian. It wasn’t full by any means, but he had apparently been soaking up the environmental qi for days now, and there was a lot of it. He made a mental effort to haul on that environmental qi, harder than he normally would, and it rushed into him at painful levels. He also wasn’t as careful to balance it as he’d usually be, but that seemed to be less of a problem now that he had a core. He was briefly tempted to draw on the qi in his core, but he didn’t want to strain it so soon after formation. Besides, he was pretty sure he could get most of the work done without leaning on new tricks. He’d lean on some old tricks instead. Sen rolled his neck, then set his priorities. The spirit beasts were a threat, but they weren’t coordinated. He’d kill the ones that attacked him. Other than that, his objective was the demonic cultivators. He swept the area with his spiritual sense, pinpointing at least half a dozen life signatures that looked human to him.
“Time to do my part,” he muttered.
Picking one of the human life signatures, he dashed in that direction. He found a huge cultivator surrounded by spirit beast corpses. The man was tearing a spirit stag in half, laughing like a madman as blood sprayed his face. Well, thought Sen, I won’t need to lose any sleep over killing this tribute to humanity. The massive cultivator caught sight of Sen and grinned.
“I knew it would be me. Know that it is Chen Huan who will snuff out your life. Be honored to know that when-,” the hulking cultivator was saying before he was cut off by a bolt of lightning that hit him in the mouth.
While the giant cultivator was thrashing and howling, Sen was covering the distance with his qinggong technique. Since he didn’t know his own strength at the moment, Sen decided not to meet the man in a contest of strength. Instead, he would take a cue from Auntie Caihong and meet brute force with icy finesse. As he approached, the giant swung at him. It was the kind of heavy blow that all large, powerful cultivators seemed to favor, big on force and short on technique. Sen painted the edges of his jian with fire and tilted his head just enough to let the blow slide by. Then, one short flick of his jian severed the tendons in the man’s right wrist and cauterized the wound. The giant howled in agony and horror as his massive hand began to flop around at the end of his arm, but Sen was already focused elsewhere.
As the giant made a furious grab at him with his good hand, Sen rolled out the way. His jian snaked back, severing the tendons in the man’s left ankle. Sen knew not to give the man time. He had no idea what kind of cultivation the man practiced, and it wouldn’t do to find out that his body healed in moments, instead of in weeks, or never. Substantially crippled on both sides now, Sen wasn’t about to let the man gather a qi technique to hurl at him. Sen dropped a column of fire on the man that was so hot that it burned blue. When the technique cleared, all that remained was ash and a pair of smoldering storage rings. A wave of his hand sapped the heat from the rings, and Sen pocketed them.
Sen headed in the direction of the next cultivator that he’d seen with his spiritual sense. Sen hid as he approached, which made getting close almost absurdly easy. Unlike the giant, who had just seemed evil because he liked it, this woman actually reeked of corruption. She was also distracted by the attacks of two potent spirit beasts. One was a goat that looked all too familiar to Sen with its metal hooves and the lone metal horn spouting from its head. The other was a giant frog of some kind, although it didn’t have eyes. Instead, there was what looked like mist or maybe some kind of swamp gas swirling in the otherwise empty sockets. Sen thought it looked creepy, but he kept his attention on the cultivator. He was half-tempted to just leave her to the spirit beasts, but it looked like she was holding her own. Better safe than sorry, he thought. There was no real art to that kill. He just walked up behind her, a blank spot in reality, and split the woman in half down the middle. He idly looted her remains, picking up some odds and ends.
The spirit beasts focused on where he was, seemingly confused by the disconnect between their spiritual and physical senses. He stopped hiding and waited to see what the beasts would do. They regarded him for a long moment, traded looks, and then slowly backed away several feet before giving him what might generously be called bows. He inclined his head to them, incinerated what was left of the woman, and moved on to his next victim. He killed most of them from ambush. Sometimes, he relied on his jian, and other times, he simply launched a technique when they were too busy to defend themselves. There wasn’t much honor in it, but he didn’t really think that mattered when dealing with demonic cultivators. The more of the demonic cultivators he killed, the thinner on the ground the spirit beasts seemed to become. Maybe they were tired of the fighting as well. When he was certain that he’d gotten all of the cultivators on the ground, he turned his full attention to the cultivator fighting with Lo Meifeng overhead.
“How am I going to deal with that?” he wondered out loud.
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