Book One, Chapter 16 - Politics And Direct Action: One Is Violence, The Other Is Direct Action

And we're back! Added multiple pages to this one- thick and meaty now! Enjoy!

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To All Outer Disciples

The Honor of the Purple Flame Burning Lotus Sect is insulted by the presence of those who would spit upon our protected city! Their very presence in this place shows their disrespect towards that which we hold domain over, and their insult can only be rectified by swift retribution!

Every Disciple that damages one of the invaders will gain merits in proportion to the damage. Merits will be multiplied by one’s contribution if the invader is eliminated or rendered powerless, should their necromantic manifestations be immune to conventional annihilation. Those who correctly harvest the enemy will find additional merits based on how intact the materials they retrieve are and their quantity, but will lose merits in turn if it is found that they have damaged the harvest through their ineptitude.

Fight boldly, rebuff the beasts baying at the feet of their betters, and rise amongst your peers! Show your elders your strength and the strength of your will! If you possess the madness to rebel against the Heavens: prove it.

-Qi-message delivered telepathically to all Outer Disciples of the Purple Flame Burning Lotus sect through identification tablets held by ranking members of the organization.

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She’s mad. 

She has to be mad. Delusional. Disconnected from reality. There’s no other possibility, nothing else that makes the slightest drop of sense.

Qen Hou stares down at the unconscious, ragged figure in front of him and tries as hard as he can to convince himself that she’s only mad.

Seeing her appear from the ruin he fell through was surprising enough. It was a genuine shock that she was somehow still alive, only made my intense by the shock of finding her alive at all so deep into the winter months. Any impact strong enough to send him back, never mind through a building, should’ve killed any mortal nearby, nevermind someone thoroughly undone by scars and exposure to the elements. Watching her walk out from that same ruin, somehow upright in spite of a leg that can barely touch the ground from the warping of its knee-joint, was already past the point of logic. It distracted him from finishing off his opponent, and distracted him further as he tried to ask how she’d survived. He only later realized, by the blood pouring from her ears, her deafness- but even still, she barely looked at him. A cultivator, capable of annihilating her, clad in the Purple-Heart Flame: Mantle of Fire technique, and she barely glanced at him. Rheumy eyes stayed locked to that which he had vanquished. 

That alone might have made enough sense. Shell-shock is a well known effect of combat on unprepared or weak minds, and even beyond that, the opponent was a unique specimen, some sort of necromantic construct capable of matching a cultivator in strength. But… she wasn’t looking at it with shock, or wonder, or curiosity. Her eyes shifted past him, just once, and then returned to the fallen construct, sharp enough to make him hesitate to step towards her.

She walked straight past him, like he wasn’t even there, towards the fallen thing. It was a difficult foe, but not a true challenge; matching a cultivator in strength doesn’t mean it was his match in anything else. It used no techniques, no martial prowess, nothing save blind violence, like a rabid animal empowered by body strengthening. Even when he burnt it, he felt no Qi shielding, no sense of an aura or deeper spellcraft.

Then he felt something behind him moving.

He felt no Qi, no power, no strength, and only barely heard the sound of it. Only in retrospect does he know what it felt like- the barest whisper of power, less than a mortal, empowered by something cold, some void in his perception. It emerged like a steel blade from velvet, barely a whisper as it moved, and-

He’d never seen anything like it. It looked like some kind of monster, one of the stranger beasts from the lands beyond the Wall, where the Emperor’s will has yet to reach and the flesh and blood of monsters runs purer, but it was far too… mechanical. It looked forged, its shape a shifting illusion made of black razors and a single white stone at its center, but it moved so fluidly, so much like something alive…

And then the cripple grabbed it.

She sagged, but she didn’t let go, dragging herself up by her grip and glaring at the thing like it was a particularly annoying ant. With or without Qi, he could feel something from her, some ephemeral meaning emanating from her. That sharpness in her eyes, turned against her actual target. 

It was not Killing Intent. Killing Intent is a thing reserved for true veterans, for the higher reaches of cultivation, for warriors. She might once have been such a thing, but she’s been ruined for… most of a year? 

Even still, something primal in him forced him back a step. 

The abomination began to move, whirling razors shooting out at the both of them, and he blasted them away with his Purple-Heart Flame cultivation but it only seemed to make them stronger. He still couldn’t sense the damn construct but he could feel his own Qi, so carefully cultivated and maintained, ready to be pulled back into his meridians to avoid wasting it, vanishing where it touched the body of the thing.

And still, the cripple did not let go.

He had decided, in that moment, as he felt his very life force being dragged into that sharpened void, that her life was not worth this thing’s continued existence. If she wished to keep hold of the damn thing and get in his way, so be it- he could not allow it to exist, to kill them both, to move on into the city behind him.

And then, as she burned on the dregs of his power that made it past the slashing, whirling tendrils that sliced all about against his flames, as he prepared a true and final strike, she fucking bit the fucking thing! After saying some kind of one-liner!

Insane. Mad. 

She has to be mad.

Except that she started walking before he heard the thing moving. She grabbed it, bare handed, and somehow kept it from killing her.

She did something that he has no words for, save words reserved for something beyond his reach.

Qen Hou is more than happy to acknowledge that the only reason the thing didn’t eviscerate her is that its tendrils were drinking his flames, but she was still getting cut, still burning from the heat, and in the end she was the one that killed it, dislodging that white stone somehow.

He steps forward, over the bleeding body of the madwoman and the construct she’s laying on. The stone remains, and he carefully weaves a shield of Qi around his palm before picking it up. It’s nothing special as far as he can tell; marble, though extremely pale, with scratches and indents in it where the strange creature gripped it, and a larger chip missing from one corner. He can’t sense anything from it, neither Qi nor that strange void that still vaguely emanates from the creature’s limbs; to all his senses it reads as utterly normal stone. It may have been the creature’s heart, but it might simply have been something to allow energy to move through it, acting as some sort of circuit, empty now it’s disconnected.

He looks down at the collapsed figure between himself and the creature. She’s started to paint a circle of red around her, haloed by the sharpened black metal of the construct beneath her. Her flesh is torn open in a dozen places, and her hair is nearly, burnt down to her scalp. It is not the worst of her burns.

“Too tough to kill, huh?” he murmurs.

Through the sounds of burning buildings and the screams of the wounded, a sound comes out as closer, more immediate. 

Before he’s even checked its origin, Qen Hou is turning, his Purple-Heart Flame: Pillar of Force technique burning in his hand and pointing towards the noise. 

He holds back the blow just in time as he sees a child.

“Child” may not be accurate; the figure before him, clad in ragged robes and simple sandals, straddles the line between child and man, reaching the outer end of adolescence. Too old for traditional recruitment to a sect, but Qen Hou can sense a spark of cultivation in him, a more active presence to the shape of his Qi-Gathering realm signature. The boy is standing before him, frozen at the sight of the burning staff in Qen Hou’s hand, but his eyes dart down to the fallen figure at the cultivator’s feet, and turn back up to him with steel in them.

The kid stops, then bows, limp black hair falling to cover his face as he performs an almost acceptable excuse for a bow. 

“Honored cultivator,” he says, his voice hoarse from coughing and the smoke in the air; “this lowly mortal beseeches your aid, that you might follow your great victory with mercy. Please, anything you can do for the one who aided you…”

Qen Hou blinks, then squints at the young man. Surprisingly proper speech for someone who dresses as he does. And bold. 

“What is your connection to this mortal?” he asks, rather than stepping back. In spite of everything else, the message he received from the sect mean that he can’t entirely abandon his kill, lest another swoop in to take it. “Be quick about it, boy. This Qen Hou does not have time to waste, nor does the cripple.”

He feels the young man’s Qi spike at that last word, and finds himself, again, surprised at the way it moves. It’s active, intentional. Most mortals move through the Qi-Gathering stage throughout their life, with some lucky few reaching nearly to the Foundational realm before they die of old age, but those who can actively influence and move the primordial forces in their body are vanishingly rare. How did the sects miss this kid?

“The… cripple is this one’s friend and personal connection, honored cultivator. I… she is like an old grandmother, cultivator. I- please. She’s bleeding. She’s- can you just-”

The young man freezes, as if terrified by his own slipping decorum, but the anxious energy in him is climbing the longer the conversation goes.

Qen Hou’s senses turn down to the madwoman. In spite of the bleeding, her stillness and the blades that remain in their respective wounds have ensured that she’s still alive. He can sense the heat of her body fading, the dregs of Qi in her near-void of a body starting to dwindle further.

Tough to kill… but not impossible.

She’s mad. And dangerous. No matter what else he might think of the strange cripple and her connection to the healer Li Shu, there’s no way he can deny it; she is dangerous. And unknown. A threat, in more ways than none.

Feeling the kid’s energy starting to rise, his anxiety spiking alongside his paltry cultivation, the body getting cold at his feet, Qen Hou makes a decision.

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Li Shu can feel the weight of her breathing. She can feel the effort it takes to drag it into her lungs, one heaving breath after the next, trying as hard as she can to remain focused. 

If her master were here she’d say the same thing as Li Shu is repeating to herself, as her friend told her; Focus. She lacks focus. Even cultivating to the Foundational realm, she’s still too distracted, too easy to fluster or confuse, prone to panic in new circumstances. She’s better than before, she knows that much for a fact, even without her teacher to tell her so, but it doesn’t mean that her worst habits are behind her.

Case in point; here she is wasting time with recrimination when people need her help.

Whatever that thing that Qen Hou protected them from was, its arrival was a horrific thing. Anyone above the Qi-Gathering Realm knows how to control an impact, when and where to use Qi to make sure they don’t cause unnecessary damage to their surroundings, but whatever this thing was, it did not care. It didn’t boost the impact either; it landed as it landed, and it landed with such velocity and force that it blasted the entire courtyard apart. Shrapnel hit families and children, fires have been lit from festive candles and lanterns, and only by the light of the stars and growing devastation can everyone still see in the dark. It landed hard enough to destroy the everything around it at once before launching itself through everyone in its way towards her and Qen Hou.

Li Shu added vomit to the mess when she saw the trail of red, mushy remains that it left behind. She added tears not long after at the sound of voices crying out.

So many of them were in pain and fear, but the ones filled with grief hit the hardest. Some of them knelt next to bodies that weren’t moving, while others called out for people they couldn’t find or who they saw get hurt and then lost sight of. It’s a cacophony, the crackling of fire playing drumbeat to the melody of human suffering in the courtyard.

Focus.

She took one breath, the smell and vomit and blood familiar enough that even through the horror of them, she can use them to pretend she’s back in the clinic, her master over her shoulder.

Find those you can save, her master’s voice whispers in her mind, and then find the ones you need to save now.

So she moves. She spends her Qi like water, letting it free from her Dantian to spread like a blanket over the crowd, using it to sense everyone she can as fast as she can. Wherever it touches another with Qi inside them, healing techniques she’s spent so long learning can tell her of distress and damage, communicated from flesh to spiritual organs to Qi in turn. Li Shu, despite any other failings, has the skill, and has learned well.

The next few hours pass in a blur, a heart wrenching eye blink. She does not speak except when she has to, she moves only from one broken body to another, and she does not, cannot make eye contact with those crouched beside the fallen, those who try to get her attention, who desperately wail and scream when she moves past those she can’t save.

She loses track of who she helps. She can only measure time by the exhaustion in her meridians from the amount of Qi she’s been cycling and by the slow changing of the light. At first it darkens as volunteers, the cold, and decent construction slowly smother the flames all around them, until she can only see by moving Qi into her eyes to banish the darkness, but eventually it begins to lighten again, tinting orange.

At first she thinks it’s more fire, spreading from some other part of the city where it ran wild, and pushes herself even harder. She can practically feel the heat from the flames on her as she moves frantically, dashing from one body to the next, ignoring anyone trying to talk to her, desperate to help, breaths heaving, her lungs straining to keep up, her cultivation straining at its core and-

A hand grabs her by the shoulder, stopping her. She tries to shrug it off, but the strength behind it is that of a cultivator, not a mortal, and she’s held firmly in place.

Someone’s been speaking to her. Has been for a while, and she’s blocked it out. Focus.

Slowly, her breaths even out, just a bit, and she lets the world back in.

“-done well, it’s ok. You can stop, take a break. You’re alright, a credit to your profession, but we-”

“I’m here,” she says, trying ever so hard to slow down her breathing. “I’m here. I’m here.”

The voice pauses, but she can sense a nod from them not long after. “Good,” it says, and she turns to see Qen Hou, kneeling next to her, hand on her shoulder. “Good. You’re here. You can rest. I heard you’ve been healing since before midnight. Rest with the dawn, honored healer.”

For the first time, she doesn’t hear that slight humor or condescension in his tone when he calls her that.

Slowly, she looks around, taking in the devastation in the light of day. 

It really has been hours. She feels drained, her soul and body both aching from the abuse she’s put them under. Still, the sight of the far end of the courtyard, the part away from the main thoroughfares, where people are laying white sheets over unmoving forms, is enough to make her wish she could have pushed harder.

“Don’t,” Qen Hou says. He turns her head away from the sight, shifting with her until she’s turned her back to the dead. “You’ll get a heart demon, acting like that. Look on the living you’ve saved, not the lost.”

And she does see them. Dozens, maybe a hundred people whose Qi still shivers from the intensive kneading and manipulation they received under a healer’s care. Wounds scabbed over, clean bandages applied, many of them held tight by each other, many of them sitting shellshocked and alone or even among loved ones, but all of them still alive. Some took more care than she could give, and she abandoned them when others came close with sutures and bandages, and she sees more than a few of them alive now in that part of the courtyard.

Not all of them. But a lot.

For the first time in hours, she feels breath leave and enter her lungs without her needing to drag it in.

And then it catches again.

“Raika!” she yells, whirling to face Qen Hou. “She never- I didn’t- is she alright?”

Qen Hou’s face goes blank, but then he sighs, shaking his head softly. “She might say she’s fine,” he grumbles, before flicking his thumb off to the ruin of the restaurant they all got blasted through. “She’s over there.”

Before he’s done speaking, she’s already giving him as quick of a bow as she can manage and running off, two steps infused with what Qi she has left finding her at the base of the ruin where-

There’s a body, sitting up against the wall of the restaurant. Its hair is burnt nearly to the scalp, second degree burns covering its shoulders and neck, its back and legs, and its arm and front are covered in cuts so fine they’re visible more by the blood leaking from them than their shape.

And, somehow, the body stirs as she approaches, face coming up to look at her.

Raika smiles, soft and kind. “Hey, kid,” she whispers, voice so faint it can barely be heard, even with cultivation. “Good job.”

And then her head falls, and Li Shu is on her knees, Qi moving yet again, desperately trying to touch Raika’s Qi and finding nothing. There are just embers, fading elements of some sort of medicine, which can only be a fraction as effective as it should be because there is nothing connected to spiritual organs, nothing left in her, but-

But she’s alive.

And as the last of that medicinal energy dissipates and Li Shu does her best to interface with a body fundamentally different than her medical skills were made to treat, she feels… some kind of pattern. Hard to notice, impossible without training, but…

There is something wrong with her flesh. Nothing Li Shu can specifically point to, but the overall picture just seems off, and in the midst of that sense of wrongness, she can feel a heartbeat, uneven but strong.

And with every beat she can see that wrongness shifting.

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“Have we found the source of the attack?” asks the storm clad in purple and red, gilded robes fluttering in an air that burns with impossible heat. 

“Not yet,” replies a voice, the face behind it looking dismissively at the broken window the storm came through, “though I am certain that, had you merely waited, I could have told you so myself.”

“An attack has been launched,” the sect master of the Purple Flame Burning Lotus sect snarls, the ripples of heat and the slight discoloration of the air around him spreading with his rage. “You cannot dare to say that this doesn’t demand an immediate response.”

The figure he’s speaking to lounges on a throne, made of solid white ivory, festooned with strange contraptions and arcane machinery. Whether it was carved or grown, taken from some spirit beast or farmed out of one of the Empire’s deeper rings, the sheer ontological weight of the bones alone is enough to make the storm restrain itself. In spite of its arrogance, in spite of the power it wields and the respect it demands, there is an overwhelming presence to that throne, only magnified by the impossible figure seated in it. 

And yet, the storm is a thing of pride and wrath and mystery conquered, and it, nor the man it purports to be, can allow the insult it has experienced to go without some form of addressing.

“And you dare to speak to me as if I do not already know this?” the seated figure asks, its power somehow impossible to detect and constant, ever-present. It leans forward, somehow blending into the throne room, giving the storm the impression that it is inside some great stomach, surrounded by organs of gold and marble.

“The authority of the Empire rules this city, not you. Your contribution to the clean-up of this little inconvenience will be tallied appropriately, and your sect’s active engagement has been noted. To demand some sort of report, however, exceeds your standing.

“Remain at your level. The Empire does not interfere with the squabbling politics of those who benefit from it, nor does it censure you for the number of dead disciples that your sect generates, Shen Go. The Empire does you the kindness not to order you about in your own sect; you would do well to extend to it the same kindness, lest the Empire demand its proper due rather than offer its grace.”

Shen Go balks at the tone, his own Qi pushing against the pressure on him just enough to keep himself from being pushed back, but careful to make sure he goes no further. He reigns in the desire to snarl, reins in the fury at being addressed as such; is he not on the edge of the very end of the Nascent Soul realm? Is he not deserving of more respect?

If Qi-Gathering is the realm of mortals, and Foundation realm barely its better, then Core Formation and Nascent Soul realms are the “middle realms”, the edges of comprehension and power for almost all who seek the heights. But he, Shen Go, stands at the very peak of the Nascent Soul realm, so incredibly close to forming his Soul in truth and ascending to the higher realms he can taste it. Once he enters the Divergent Paths, the Empire will have no choice but to acknowledge him. 

His sect can roar to new heights as he himself ascends past it, rising to the realms of the truly worthy, the truly important. 

Perhaps, wielding the power of the Warrior Realm and its immortality, even a Scion wouldn’t dare look down on him.

“Now now, Shen Go,” the figure says, voice suddenly soft. “Let none say you are not of great value to the throne. This one would bring shame unto the name of the Imperial Scions if they let this city fall into disarray, just as they would if they did not properly inform its most important figures.”

Shen Go does not see the figure move. It is on the throne, and then it is standing beside him,  hand on his shoulder. Despite himself, despite the horrifying heat and the impossible wrath it so often fuels inside him, he feels a bead of cold sweat form on his forehead.

“The Empire already has men and healers moving to secure the enemies and people both. By the morning, half the damage will be repaired, and this one will bow in the greatest shame to you and every other sect and noble in the city if it is not fully pristine by the dawn tomorrow. Please, be assured-”

Shen Go, patriarch of the Purple Flame Burning Lotus sect, one of the strongest sects in the capital Imperial city of the region and for hundreds of miles all around, a man on the verge of unlocking the greater mysteries, trembles ever so slightly at the pressure on his shoulder. He feels like the air is warping, like the gravity is suddenly bending inwards towards the indescribable thing which holds him now. He feels like his shoulder is about to break, and he does not dare move, survival instinct unified with performative respect in the face of this show of force.

“-that the moment the Empire finds out who sent these weapons into this city, its wrath will be swift and absolute. This one has already implemented, and is preparing to tally and distribute, rewards to you and your fellow sects for volunteering and assisting in the city’s defense.”

The Scion lets go of his shoulder, and Shen Go can’t help but release a quiet breath he did not realize he was holding in. 

“In the meantime, honored patriarch,” the faceless, formless, unreal yet all too present thing that rules the city; “get the fuck out of the Empire’s Palace before this one melts your bones into a knife to disembowel your wives with one at a time.”

When the Scion turns back around, the storm has fled.

It sighs. Frustration. A fourth emotion. It understands that cults and madmen tend to be such a hassle. The Divisions likely won’t be happy to hear about this style of weapon being used by a new player, even if they’re self-evidently a minor one, but they might be happy if Paleblossom can properly prepare them for review in time for the incoming Researcher.

Still, this may be troublesome.

But then, there’s plenty of reason why the Emperor rules, and the deviants of the wilds are just that. The Scion returns to its throne, already preparing an in-depth self analysis for its actions and rectification for perceived flaws, analyzing the possibilities that the attack will bring about.

The most likely possibility remains, as ever, incredible, overwhelming, world-changing violence.