Chapter 43- Punching Down With Virtue

Tian quickly informed everyone on what he saw. “I think the poison isn’t meant to kill us directly. I think it is used by the greater array somehow. Perhaps as a means to target us without harming others inside the formation, perhaps as a means of control. We need to burst out while they are still probing us. Giving an array master time to prepare is a famously fatal mistake, and they have already had weeks to set up. We need to be gone, now.”

Burning Heaven had turned to rejoin Heavenly Demon. The heretics still in the array really didn’t seem to like that idea, and were throwing a hail of spells, artifacts, summoned spirits and gu at them to make them break off. A good time was not being had. Tian and Liren were both carrying a not-so-small fortune in protective artifacts, but those could only hold up to so much and for so long. They divided up the defensive work by type- Tian handled the curses, ghosts and demons, Liren took the sorcerers and more physical types, and Burning Heaven handled the Gu.

“I have an art I can use to speed up for a while, but it will leave me pretty wrecked afterward. Also, if there is a ward or something, and I slam into it, bad things happen.” Burning Heaven volunteered. “If the poison is tied to the bigger array, it could be dangerous to use the escape spell.”

“We have escape talismans too.” Liren reminded him. “Though I can’t imagine they are much better than what Burning Heaven learned. Maybe we could stack them? Use them while she uses her art to maximize our escape speed?”

“Good plan, but we need to understand what this array is before we try anything.” Tian nodded. “Heavenly Demon, how about you?”

“These insects merely try this Demon’s patience, the one who will die is them! Though an array on the scale you describe does merit attention. It will depend on their purpose. Should they wish to secure the site for themselves it is one thing, should they wish to seal all information about the hidden realm it is another entirely. Since they haven’t sent anyone to parlay, this Seat can only assume it is the latter.”

“Do you have a way to manage the poison on you?” Tian asked.

There was a dark chuckle carried on Heavenly Demon’s silent message. His aura, it seemed, had no problem understanding and communicating with Tian’s qi, which raised some interesting implications. “Oh yes. I was ignoring it since it was harmless, but this sort of poison is not unique. This Seat rid himself of it as soon as you said something.”

“Could you clean off Burning Heaven and I?” Liren asked.

“This Seat really doesn’t know. Perhaps. Join me and we shall discover together as we exterminate these pests.”

Liren gave Tian a glance from the corner of her eye. “Does he sound jolly to you?” She punctuated her question by flinging a throwing spear at an incautious sorcerer. The spear, a crude thing made from a reasonably straight piece of Earthly ashwood and a Earthly stone tip, accelerated far past what it could reasonably endure, and shattered on the curtain of dark water the sorcerer had raised to protect themselves. Its death was not in vain. The impact was so brutal, it also shattered the spell and made the sorcerer nearly fall from their flying cloud. Their hand covered their mouth, blood spilling between their fingers.

It was a momentary suffering. The next crude spear vanished in a cloud of splinters and bone as it took off his head. She’d had dozens of them made, and was cavalier in using them. After all, she’d had Tian gather the sticks and stones as he raced around the mountain with Burning Heaven. She only paid for labor, and had dickered for ages to make sure she got the very cheapest price possible.

“Maybe not jolly. Maybe…” Tian groped for words and couldn’t find the right one. “Something like a feeling that it’s a nice day and things are going well after things not going well for a long time? Enthusiastic contentment?”

Tian locked eyes with a necromancer that seemed particularly eager for him to do so. It didn’t go the way he expected. Tian felt the curse land and be instantly dissolved on the surface of his eyes. The necromancer’s head snapped back with the backlash, and he staggered back, nearly falling from his flayed skin rug. The necromancer yanked a banner from his ring, an inky black rectangle a yard tall and a dozen yards long. It unfurled from its rapidly extending black iron flag pole like a scroll.

“What fresh hell is this?” Tian muttered. He got his answer before the words had finished leaving his mouth. Ghosts started streaming from the banner. Maddened, screaming ghosts, mutilated and beaten into the shape of fighting beasts. Things of long fang-filled mouths and hooked claws at the end of skeletal arms. They wore shadows of the clothes they had worn while alive. Most were mortal make. The strongest ghosts wore daoist uniforms, sect robes, though Tian couldn’t tell who they belonged to. Cultivator souls had been trapped in the banner and refined too.

“Obscenity! Vile thing!” The words tore out of him, thick with revision. A storm of righteous qi slapped out, a dozen palms blasting through the ghosts to strike at the necromancer. The heretic screamed and pulled out a coffin, from which an iron-skinned corpse carrying a round shield emerged. Tian snarled. It was strong, but it wouldn’t be enough. Tian’s righteous qi was stopped by the shield, but it passed through everything else. The carpet was ripped to shreds, the legs of the zombie were ripped apart, the necromancer’s legs were shattered, and from the screaming, the feeling of the righteous qi upon him was particularly agonizing. Tian didn’t let him linger. He drew his staff and used his rough staff art to send a thick beam of qi at the heretic’s heart as he fell out of the sky.

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A moment later, the corpses, coffin, storage devices, and spirit banner were all in his hands. A moment after that, they were stowed away. He would heal the souls as best he could before releasing them and destroying the banner. He would be less gentle with the necromancer. He had heard of soul banners without properly understanding them. Now that he did understand, he would not permit their existence before him. The revulsion in him was absolute, the banner seeming to blaze in his eyes, the sin towering to the sky.

“You took old Zhe’s Ten Thousand Soul Banner? Hehe! What a pity he never got a chance to see it evolve into a hundred thousand soul banner. I’ll just have to complete it in his stead. Boy, do you think your little tricks with righteous qi can work on me?”

The voice came from far away, far enough that Tian couldn’t pinpoint just where it came from. It sounded male, and a bit breathy, as though it strained the necromancer’s lungs to project his thoughts with qi. It reminded Tian of people with lung disease that simply didn’t improve with treatment, or that had been permanently injured.

“Nothing to say? Shame, you just missed your chance to leave some memorable last words!”

He could feel Liren sending out spear after spear, even switching to rocks on occasion. He couldn’t look over and see what she was fighting. Something was racing towards them, the sin flames soaring towards the sky. He blinked hard then narrowed his eyes, forcing his vital energy to work a little harder.

“Coffins. Four coffins.” He breathed. “Another damned corpse refiner. Just how many of these bastards are there in the wastes?”

He could feel the weight of Poetry Saint Zhou on him as he carried him to the incinerator. He was so small, then, just fourteen and he had a talisman pasted on his chest to stop curses tainting him the way they had tainted the Poetry Saint, who had liked to sit in the high branches of trees in West Town Outer Court as he wrote, and he had to carry him to the incinerator because cultivator corpses could be refined into powerful zombies. He wasn’t the last of his brothers or sisters he carried to the incinerator. Tian had lost count of how many he had carried. Some in buckets of limbs, or rushing over with bits of torso on trays, trying to keep their now corrosive blood from dripping on the hospital floors and etching them with necrotic taint.

Gu cultivators were Tian’s most loathed form of heretic, but necromancers weren’t far off.

“Go on ahead for a moment. I just need a quick word with someone. Short word, one syllable, won’t take long.” He started to step off Burning Heaven’s back but was stopped by Liren yanking hard at his collar.

“Like hell you do! The enemy wants you to stop moving. So why the hell are you stopping moving?”

Tian blinked, then shook his head hard. He would have to reflect on this later. He had spirits to release, and corpses to purify. One that still thought it was alive and practicing necromancy.

The four coffins slammed to a stop in front of Burning Heaven, freezing in the air with a dull thud that shook the bones and chilled the heart. Blackened wood, aged too long in the tomb, bearing ancient carvings no good priest would bless, nor a sane man carve. Guardian gods perverted into demons, long tongues lolling, defecating on the corpse within, merrily displaying their deformed genitals as they did so. Anything to horrify a witness and defile the dead.

Burning Heaven snorted, and a concentrated beam of rainbow colored light shot out from her chest. The two coffins directly in front of her caught the worst of it, sliding backwards and visibly corroding. They did hold, though.

“Beast! See if I don’t refine you into a corpse-crane and have you pull my chariot! Four Evils, emerge!”

“He knows what he is, and it’s exactly who he wants to be. He loves this. All of it.”

The lids of the coffins exploded upwards, and the corpses flew out. They stood in the air without needing a tool, though Tian could see traceries of spellwork woven into them. It made sense- why refine a special tool for flying, when the corpse you were refining could be that flying tool?

Each zombie was distinct- one green furred, with long tusks jutting from its lower jaw, and ragged claws that dripped with corpse poison. Thick muscles rose like hill country under the long green fur, though they seemed to only roughly match human physiology. The other three had their own horror. A woman, still beautiful, her mouth slit open to her ears and a hole where her heart should be, dressed wedding red. A handsome young swordsman, eyes cut away, ears cut away, heart cut away, and he too was dressed in wedding red. The last seemed to have no gender, or was so withered, its gender couldn’t be guessed at. It was a thing that had rotted, then was dried before the rot could consume the flesh entirely. It was decay manifested, the inevitable end of all your tomorrows, not allowed to reach the final dissipation that true yin promised.

Decay was a process. Death was a process. Yin, ultimate yin, was a momentary stillness. It, too, was part of a never ending cycle. Necromancy, the defilement of corpses, was an interruption, a stopping of the wheel. Yin never reached its peak, so true yang could never emerge, leaving things that were neither properly dead or alive. So long as bodies were kept in that unnatural equilibrium, they were ‘immortal.’

“You probably think you are very deep, don’t you? Like you realized something that no one else really understands, and that’s why you are the special one who will triumph in the end. I cannot imagine the efforts and pains you went to, to assemble all this. What a waste of life. Yours included. You utter, total, complete, failure of a human.”

Tian’s voice was surprisingly calm. At least, it surprised him. He stretched out his hand, and a giant white-gold palm covered the decaying corpse. “Let me show you the truth of yin.” His fingers closed, and then he squeezed.