Book 4: Chapter 12: Consequences
Lan Zi Rui was frustrated. He had been frustrated and growing ever more frustrated for the last two months. Ever since that wretched boy and that awful woman had left. Oh, he had been secretly relieved when they left. He still didn’t know how that boy had done what he’d done. He’d had no food for almost half a year. He’d spent most of that time in some kind of a cultivation trance. Lan Zi Rui hadn’t been concerned about it. People almost never came out of those trances. The people who did were almost never whole again, as though they left part of their minds in whatever place they had gone. If anything, he’d expected the boy to be more docile, more manageable, after the trance than before. It was why he hadn’t interfered with the trance in the first place. Oh, how he came to regret that choice.
Instead of losing pieces of himself, the damnable child came out of the trance more focused and powerful than when he’d sunk himself into it. Then, the boy had used some technique Lan Zi Rui had never seen before. The casual ease with which the boy had shattered Lan Zi Rui’s wall of force had frankly terrified the older cultivator. The older cultivator had spent entire days trying to piece together how an initial core cultivator had accomplished such a feat. Then that business with damaging the formation. The damage itself had been difficult enough to repair, as formations were not Lan Zi Rui’s strong hand, but the real difficulty had been trying to explain the formation to the less committed members of the cult. There had been endless questions that he’d never imagined he’d need to answer. He’d had to scramble to explain it all away.
The questions eventually died down, although he still saw people staring at the place where they knew that invisible wall stood around the compound. He saw their uncertainty, their doubt, and it ignited his rage at that boy all over again. Yet, even that wasn’t the source of his true frustration. It was the girl. Oh, she had been coming along so nicely. She’d been so desperate for someone to offer her safety and certainty. Lan Zi Rui had become a master at playing on exactly that kind of desperation. She’d been almost entirely bought in, almost ready to do anything he wanted. And he wanted so many things from her. He’d dreamed about her body. Yet, that boy had planted seeds of doubt in her mind that had grown in the months since he left. Oh, she still did her part, working in the fields and helping with the other tasks that accumulated in a large compound. What she didn’t do was seek him out for his sage wisdom anymore. In fact, she made a point to never let herself be alone with him.
Not that he couldn’t overcome that problem with a simple word or two. No, what stayed his hand was the boy’s final threat. The way he’d delivered it had chilled Lan Zi Rui’s soul. There had been no bluster or bravado to it. He had been calm, deliberate, and utterly certain. Not only had the boy meant it, but Lan Zi Rui had been sure that, given a bit of time, the boy could do it. If he could come out of that trance unscathed and apparently having mastered new power and skills, the cult leader wasn’t sure that there was anything that child couldn’t do if he set his mind to it. It was the mental image of Lu Sen returning as a nascent soul cultivator, shattering the protective formation, and taking his vengeance that haunted Lan Zi Rui. So, he looked for other ways to sate his needs. Hence the young man and woman he’d taken to his bed the night before who were dressing across the room.
It hadn’t helped. They’d been enthusiastic and entertaining, which had distracted him briefly, but he knew that would only work for so long. Sooner or later, he’d either have to give in to his lust, or he’d need to send that girl away. While his reason told him that the smart move was simply to send her away, his lust for her wouldn’t let him do it. He’d sought her out more than once to send her away and far from his sight, but then he’d see her and those plans would evaporate in a haze of unfilled desire. That push and pull between what he wanted and what he feared left him constantly on edge and bursting with frustration he couldn’t remedy. He’d even started convincing himself that the boy wouldn’t return for years, maybe even decades. Lan Zi Rui could have the girl all he wanted before then. The boy would never need to know. Yet, the cult leader was certain that the boy would know, somehow, someway, he would just know.
With those thoughts in mind, a spike of raw panic and terror drove itself into Lan Zi Rui’s soul when the presence of a nascent soul cultivator bore down on the entire compound. A moment later, he felt it as the protective formation was simply shredded with nothing more than brute force. No, no, he can’t be back already, thought Lan Zi Rui. No one can advance that fast. Then, he heard the sounds of panicked yelling and people running. Shaking himself free of the paralysis that had temporarily gripped his body and soul, Lan Zi Rui felt fury course through him. It wasn’t the boy. There simply hadn’t been enough time. That meant they were under attack from someone else. The cult leader threw on his robes in a flash and went out to meet the threat.
When he burst from his quarters, he scanned the compound and found nothing. Then, he looked up. Hovering over the compound like an imperious herald of doom, Lan Zi Rui saw death herself, and he knew her name.
“Ma Caihong,” he said.
He was stunned. He had met her once, long ago, and she had made it very clear to him how much he did not impress her. It had taken nearly a month to heal from her expression of displeasure at his suggestions. She had been a core formation cultivator then, more or less matched with him. Now, though, she was a peak nascent soul cultivator, and he was not. He had stalled at the initial nascent soul stage and was a very weak one, little better than a strong peak core formation cultivator. It was more than enough to keep his followers in line and deal with most spirit beasts, but a threat like Ma Caihong was fundamentally beyond him. Even worse, he didn’t know why she had come or even how she knew he was here. Then, a terrible, bowel-loosening thought struck him. That boy, that impossibly powerful and gifted boy, had to have a teacher.
Summoning what courage he had, Lan Zi Rui summoned a jian from a storage ring. He stepped onto a platform of qi and rose to face Ma Caihong. She let him rise so he could look directly at her. Terror tried to eat its way through his insides as he looked at her. She might as well have been carved from stone or ice there was so little expression on her face. He pointed his jian and did his best to put on a good front.
“Why have you disturbed the peace of my sect?” he demanded.
When she spoke, Ma Caihong’s words carried to every corner of the compound. “Sect? I see your understanding of the meaning of words hasn’t improved. This is not a sect. This is a cult.”
Lan Zi Rui ground his teeth in frustration. “Why are you here?”
“I’ve come to retrieve someone,” she said before a momentary look of consideration crossed her face. “Well, more accurately, I’ve come to retrieve everyone here.”
“You can’t make them leave against their will.”
She smiled at him then, and whatever tiny shred of hope he’d had that he might be able to talk his way out of this disaster died a whimpering, pathetic death inside him.
“I most certainly could, but they won’t have a reason to stay in a minute or two. Cults rarely survive the death of their founders.”
“Kill her,” screamed Lan Zi Rui.
While he hadn’t ever planned for this particular contingency, he had planned for the possibility that someone might come looking for him or a missing loved one. The place where Ma Caihong floated disappeared in a flurry of techniques. Fireballs, windblades, boulders, ice spears, and even a stray bolt of lightning all concentrated on the place where she floated. Lan Zi Rui didn’t really think that they would succeed in killing her, but the distraction should be enough for him to escape. He spun around on his qi platform and flew away. At least, he tried to. A hand seized the back of his neck in a grip that felt like it was forged of cold steel. Then, the next thing he knew, Lan Zi Rui was crashing into the ground. The earth cratered around him, both compressing down and exploding outward.
Even with qi reinforcement running through his entire body, he felt bones breaking and muscles tearing. The pain was monumental. He hadn’t felt any real pain in hundreds of years, let alone anything on the level of what he was experiencing now. It burned away any rational thought. He just needed to get away. He staggered to his feet and swayed like a drunkard. He took two steps, then realized that he was in a hole. He looked up and up. The crater his body had made was nearly twenty feet deep. If he’d been thinking clearly, and not wracked with pain that screamed for attention, the distance would have seemed trivial. In his current state, though, that distance looked insurmountable.
“You know,” said a woman standing right behind him, “I don’t usually go in for this kind of fighting. But you’ve angered me, Lan Zi Rui.”
The pure contempt in that voice when she said his name felt like the kiss of death. Somehow, he’d kept hold of his jian. There was nothing left to do but fight. He spun toward Ma Caihong’s voice and drove a thrust at where her heart should have been. Except the thrust only met open air. Then, the cult leader watched in horror as something he barely even registered as a blur in the air passed through his wrist. The jian and his hand fell to the ground. He instinctively grabbed his wrist, but it did precious little to stem the blood spurting from his wrist. He realized that he needed to do something to stop her, and do it now, or she was going to cut him into tiny pieces. He summoned his own qi. He remembered that she was a water cultivator. He had always had an unusual qi affinity, force, so she should still be weak to it, even if it was coming from a weaker cultivator. The loss of the hand disrupted his cycling, but he had enough stored to send a wall of force to where she stood, glaring at him like he was a particularly unsavory insect. Then, she was simply gone. He’d never seen anyone move that fast. The world went white as her fist crashed into the side of his head like the world’s most delicate mace.
What followed was just one explosion of pain after the next as Ma Caihong beat him with a kind of icy savagery. He was vaguely aware of it when his legs were shattered. He only realized his arms were broken when he stopped being able to move them in useless attempts to fend off her blows. The pure devastation of his body in combination with the blood loss made putting thoughts together in any kind of order almost impossible. He did eventually register that he wasn’t being hit anymore. He managed to open one eye. Ma Caihong was looming over him with his blood dripping from her hands, not that she seemed to care.
“In case you’re wondering why this has happened,” she said, “I don’t want you to die confused. Lu Sen sends his regards.”
The last thing Lan Zi Rui saw in that life was the bottom of a shockingly small shoe descending toward his face.
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