Unintended Cultivator Special (Patreon)

Okay, so Volume 1 of Unintended cultivator comes out in about a week. I'd been thinking that I wanted to do something special for it, but I missed the window to order new art. That's double unfortunate because I've been meaning to do that for a while now. However, my publisher asked if I'd write a short story they could use to help promote Volume 1. I thought that was a great idea. I'll just bang out a little prequel short story with Feng Ming. Super easy. Super short. Big Fun! Well, I do think it's big fun. It was not, however, super easy or super short. In fact, it's almost 10,000 words long. So, that's what I spent all day doing, and now you get to enjoy it. Since my publisher is going to use a version of this, don't...share it on pirate sites? Or whatever it is people do with stories before they're officially put out by a publisher. Thanks! ~Eric

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Two Mountains – A Story from the Unintended Cultivator Universe

1

Plum Tree Mountain rose into the air like an edifice of unbroken, earthly strength. Its peak would be obscure to mortal eyes, hidden in mists and clouds, but it was plain to the eyes of a nascent soul cultivator. On the mountain’s slopes and tiers of massive carved terraces, he could see buildings large and small, fields of carefully maintained spiritual herbs, and the scurrying forms of the sect members. This was the uncontested, beating heart of the Coiled Dragon Sect. It was a heart that Feng Ming had, in a rare bout of nostalgic sympathy, allowed to beat for far too long. However, some things could not be allowed to stand. The Coiled Dragon Sect had overreached or, perhaps, simply underestimated what someone like him would do.

Ming allowed himself a brief, joyless smile. This was the sort of thing that Jaw-Long was famous for, not him. That spear-wielding madman had a bone to pick with every sect in the world, and his lightning affinity let him express that fury with truly awe-inspiring displays of elemental destruction. Ming had seen him do it a few times, and when Jaw-Long decided that a sect needed to go, there was rarely anything left but scorched stone, bodies, and tears in the aftermath. Ming had his own reputation, of course. You couldn’t live as long as he had or rise to the heights of cultivation the way that he had without developing one. He’d heard the stories people told about him, and the names they’d given him. Both had changed over the long years, each one worn down by time as all things were, only to be replaced by new ones.

In his early centuries, so very, very long ago, they’d called him the Blood Frenzy. As his temperament became more restrained, that name had given way to Calamity’s Envoy, then Demon’s Blight, Harbinger of Sorrow, the Inexorable Tide, and on and on. He’d stopped paying attention to such things as his losses mounted and the circle of those he trusted contracted. He had withdrawn, focused on his cultivation, and strode with relentless determination toward ascension. However, even in his relative isolation, the stories and names reached his ears. The other cultivators of the world had taken to calling him Fate’s Razor, which he considered a magnificently pompous title, but what could he do? He’d learned long ago that one simply had to let these things run their course.

And even he had to admit that there was a certain logic to the name from the point of view of others. The stories said that he was relentless, inescapable, that once he decided that someone had to die, he would never relinquish the hunt until the deed was done. He was the very razor that cut the thread of your fate and sent you to the next life. It was mostly true, and he found it incredibly useful that the stories painted him as a man who focused on individuals. No one expected him to show up and pull a Jaw-Long. Except, today, he was going to do exactly that. His air affinity wasn’t quite as flashy as Jaw-Long’s lightning affinity, but that didn’t make it any less destructive. After all, it was the wind that drove the great storms that formed far out to sea and then descended on the land like a punishment from the gods. Ming supposed that he was going to be that storm today, but it wasn’t as though the sect hadn’t been given fair warning. He’d generously sent word ahead with the survivors a few days earlier.

2

Ming floated over the snow, more or less following the path provided by the road. He could have shortened the distance by following a direct path, but that would have carried him over the wilds. Not that there were many things in the wilds that could threaten him anymore, but there was always some spirit beast that didn’t know better or that hoped that challenging him would drive their cultivation forward. Killing them was always a hassle and, he thought, a waste of life. In the end, he was just punishing bad judgment on their part and bad judgment was something even spirit beasts could grow out of given enough time. So, he stuck to the road. It wasn’t as though it really took that much longer at the speeds he traveled. He also wasn’t in that big of a hurry to reach his destination. He was just sending another message, although, he supposed this one was different.

When he’d first arrived in this middling kingdom and started purging the Coiled Dragon Sect, the deaths were the message and carried plenty of subtext. Someone noticed what you did. It’s not going to be allowed to stand. The sect had killed off the mortal royalty and nobility in one night of carnage. The kingdom, as such, didn’t exist after that. The whole territory had simply become the territory of the Coiled Dragon Sect. It went against every tradition that even wandering cultivators like Ming took as practical and good, but wasn’t entirely without precedent. If they had left it at that, Ming might have turned a blind eye. It seemed the Coiled Dragons were satisfied with controlling the territory. Word had spread that they were, for all intents and purposes, enslaving the mortal population. It was practically sacred law that cultivators aligned with the heavens did not do such things.

Ming had assumed that other sects would step in and put a stop to the matter. It was bad for every cultivator if a sect got too out of control. It made mortal authorities nervous and then openly hostile to having cultivators in their territory. It had long been an open question if cultivators could rule the world if they decided to try. Most cultivators seemed to think they could. If push came to shove, Ming thought they probably could, but he also knew what most patriarchs, matriarchs, and sect elders knew. Just running a sect required a massive investment of time, energy, and oversight. Running a kingdom or empire would magnify that problem a thousandfold. Every minute that cultivators spent worrying about grain harvests or quarries or a hundred other mundane concerns was time they couldn’t spend working on their cultivation. In other words, cultivators would inevitably trade immortality and ascension for temporal power.

No, it was simply better for everyone if cultivators worried about cultivation and left running countries to the mortals. If the damnable Coiled Dragon Sect had simply taken over the bureaucracy of the kingdom and left it at that, Ming wouldn’t be in the kingdom at all. He’d be headed for another mountain. Jaw-Long’s mountain. He’d been meaning to make that visit for a while, but kept putting it off. He loved Jaw-Long like a brother. The gods knew he liked Jaw-Long better than his actual brother. The same couldn’t be said for Jaw-Long’s wife, Ma Caihong. Ming had been in no mood to deal with her, her accusing looks, or her biting comments. So, he’d delayed. When word reached him that she was out in the world again, he’d started heading for Jaw-Long’s mountain immediately. Yet, all he heard about were the murderous cultivators to north. The king killers. The usurpers. The slavers. That was when he’d paused his journey. He’d been waiting to see what the other sects in the region would do. Hoping that they’d do the right thing, even if they did it out of blind self-interest. Yet, they had done nothing.

He didn’t know if they failed to act because they were too caught up in their own concerns, they didn’t care, or they feared the strength of a sect that was a nation. And he didn’t care. If those useless cowards refused to act, then he would do what he had always done. He would do what was required. If that meant watering the field of the north with the blood of every fool who wore the crest of the Coiled Dragon Sect, so be it. Once he finished with the Coiled Dragons, he’d have to start paying visits to the other sects in the region and remind them that dealing with rogue sects was part of their responsibilities. If a few of those sects didn’t survive that chastisement, well, the Jianghu wasn’t known for its kindness.

As he floated toward what had once served as the capital of the kingdom, he saw and felt cultivators on the walls or floating above it. They started cycling their qi the moment they became aware of him. It was far too late for that. He just waved his hand. A will tempered in the fires of twenty thousand battles and qi purified by the fires of heaven in tribulation after tribulation did his bidding. Qi gathering cultivators stationed on the wall simply ceased to be. Their foundation formation brethren fared little better. The core formation cultivations who had been standing so proudly on their swords or platforms of qi were reduced to fleshy particles by the thousands of wind blades that had swept through them. A veritable rain of blood washed the walls of the city red. The gates were long since abandoned by the time he arrived.

He walked through the city and found the streets empty, although there were plenty of mortals hiding inside the buildings. They were usually huddled together in one room. He didn’t know if that was because of him or the Coiled Dragons. Maybe both, he thought. Ming came to an abrupt stop as a boy who couldn’t have been older than ten pulled a little girl across the street right in front of him. The boy had been looking the other way when they started their dash. He turned his head toward Ming and froze as their eyes met. Ming walked over to the pair. The streets were no place for children when cultivators fought. Not that buildings would provide that much protection, but some protection was better than no protection. The boy pulled the girl behind him, apparently planning to use himself a human shield to protect her. Brave, thought Ming. Foolish and hopeless if I were a cultivator bent on harming them but brave all the same. The little girl peeked out from behind the boy, her dark eyes more curious than afraid.

“Who’re you?” asked the girl.

“Quiet, Ah Cy,” hissed the boy.

Ming crouched down so he was more or less eye level with the girl and gave her his best friendly old man smile. “I’m Elder Feng.”

The girl gave him a shy smile and looked away. He rested his hand on her head for a moment, as though offering her a brief, paternal blessing. Then, he looked at the terrified face of the boy.  Ming stood and jerked his head in the direction the pair had been headed.

“You should take her inside. I’m not done,” he almost said killing the Coiled dragons, but stopped himself after a glance at the girl. “I’m not done with what needs to be done.”

The boy gave Ming a jerky nod, clearly having understood the broad implications of those words. He grabbed the little girl’s hand and pulled her away. Ming watched them go as the little girl smiled and waved at him, mercifully too young to grasp the true dangers around her. He waited until the children had disappeared inside a building before he spoke to surroundings.

“You can come out now.”

Half a dozen peak core formation cultivators and an early nascent soul cultivator stepped out of the shadow of nearby alleys or dropped down from roofs. They seemed to think that was impressive based on their self-satisfied expressions. The early nascent soul cultivator looked at with the predatory eyes of a cat on the hunt, focused, intent, and interested. He assumed that this was who the Coiled Dragons had left in charge in the city. He glanced at the core cultivators before he looked at the woman. She’d abandoned the traditional long hair that most cultivators adopted in favor of cutting her hair short. It accentuated the willowy thinness of her neck, which he suspected she didn’t realize gave her a vaguely reptilian air.

“Chatting with the cattle?” said the woman. “Really? Aren’t you supposed to be the greatest of us all. I’ll have to make sure to kill those little brats slowly.

Ming knew that she probably meant it, but he also knew it was intended to get a rise out of him. He just ignored it.

“You really should have brought more people,” observed Ming. “In fact, you should have brought everyone you had available.”

She glared at him through slitted eyes. “Is that right? I’d need all of them to beat you.”

Ming gave her the smile of a teacher who intends to correct a student who has fundamentally misunderstood the lesson.

“Of course not, little girl. You’d have needed all of them to give you enough of a head start that you might have made it back to your sect.”

“You old men and your reputations. I’m not some qi gathering initiate. We all know that those stories are half made up,” she said, looking skyward as if imploring the heavens to understand the great burden she faced. “You’ve been coasting on that reputation for centuries.”

When she fixed her gaze on Feng Ming again, the core cultivators were all dead, or wishing they were dead. She looked down at his hand where he held six bloody cores. His teacherly smile never slipped as he crushed those cores into powder. Her face went pale, and her eyes went wide as they darted from one corpse or near-corpse to the next. Her eyes fixed on the bloody holes in their stomachs where Ming had simply plunged his hand inside of them and ripped out everything that made them cultivators. She watched in horror as he walked over, reached down, and wiped his bloody hand clean on the robes of a man she’d once known. He straightened up, stretched his back, and rolled his neck. His gave her a smile that very few people had ever lived to describe to another person.

“I do like to get a little light exercise in the morning. I find that culling some sect cattle helps get these old bones ready for some real butchery.”

He could see on her face that whatever story the woman had told herself about how this particular fight was going to go had died. She looked grim, but resolute. She drew her jian and her eyes flicked to the sword belted at his hips. Right now, thought Ming, she’s remembering all of those stories about me that she discounted. Every last tale that talks about terrible, impossible things I can do with a blade in my hand. He gave a mental shrug. She’d never see it. Not that Ming was discounting her. She had reached the nascent soul stage, which meant that she’d been around for a while. No doubt, she’d killed her fair share of opponents, and mastered some tricky techniques. It was how most nascent soul cultivators made their ascent. In the end, though, she was fighting an uphill battle so steep that nothing short of divine intervention was going to be enough.

That divine intervention did not come. He spent a couple of minutes simply demoralizing the woman. He diverted her techniques or crushed them outright. When she tried to bring her weapon into play, he just stepped out of the way. He’d been fighting with swords for longer than this woman had been alive. She was good. Maybe even some kind of sect genius, but he’d been fighting people better than her since he was a core formation cultivator. Every move was obvious. Every feint pointless. He knew what she was going to do before she did it, because he’d literally seen it all before. She grew angrier and angrier as the seconds passed until that fury overrode good sense.

“Fight me, damn you!” she screamed.

He lifted an eyebrow at her. “Oh, you wanted to fight? I thought you wanted to dance. Well, if you insist.”

He ducked beneath a wild, overhand slash. His hand shot out, seized her wrist, and twisted it to lock the elbow in place. He struck the elbow so hard that bone exploded through her skin like a shower of white shrapnel. Before she had time to even scream, he’d shattered her leg, broken most of her ribs, and severed her spine with a carefully aimed strike that completely displaced one of her vertebrae. The only thing holding her upright was Ming’s iron grip around the back of her neck.

“For the record,” he noted casually. “I happen to like children.”

He tightened his grip around her neck until her body simply dropped to the ground, severed by the hand of Fate’s Razor. With their leader dead, the rest of the sect members in the city were thrown into chaos. Some tried to fight. Some tried to plead. Some tried to run. He cut them all down, save one. That young man, a qi gathering cultivator who actually was young and didn’t just look young, was pressed up against a tree, openly weeping in terror.

“Calm yourself,” ordered Ming. “You ran the farthest, so you get to live. You’re going to carry a message for me. Return to your sect. Tell your masters that Feng Ming sends his regards, and I’ll see them in three days. Repeat it.”

“Feng… Feng…” the young man choked out between sobs.

“I’m losing patience. If you can’t remember a simple message, then maybe I should just kill you.”

“Feng Ming sends his regards, and you’ll see them in three days,” the kid almost screamed.

“Good. Now, go. And, if I were you, boy, I’d be long gone by the time I get to that sect.”

3

Ming had assumed that they would take those three days to prepare for him, set traps, and shore up their defenses. Maybe, they even had. Yet, it seemed that most of those preparations had been for nothing. As he started climbing the mountain, he let his spiritual sense and killing intent wash over the mountain. Whatever well-laid plans fell to ruins as utter panic ensued. He felt it when the wills of qi gathering and foundation formation cultivators who had been organized into tidy units broke. Those men and women fled in terror, looking for any way down off the mountain. He let them go. He’d had more than enough of slaughtering the weak in his bloody trek across the kingdom. They weren’t the people he needed to kill. Not really. Those outer sect disciples hadn’t decided anything. He doubted they’d done much of anything other than serve as guards. The real culprits were the inner sect, the core sect members, the elders, and the patriarch.

As the mountain fell away behind him, the only real obstacles he faced at first were the formations. For most cultivators, those formations would have been nearly impenetrable obstacles. Most cultivators hadn’t been friends with Kho Jaw-Long for thousands of years. For all his infamy as lightning cultivator, the man’s real skill was formations. There might be a better formation master somewhere in the world, but Ming had never met that person. While Ming wasn’t a formation master himself, or at least no more so than any other nascent soul cultivator, he had been tutored extensively in the fine art of finding weaknesses in them. It had been a game he and Jaw-Long played. Jaw-Long would set up a formation and challenge Ming to discover the weaknesses. Ming had become an expert in locating weaknesses, while Jaw-Long had been able to use that information to become ever-more-skillful at making formation. Steel had sharpened steel.

Now, Ming put all of that experience to work. Minor flaws that anyone else would have overlooked were glaring in his eyes, and he leveraged that knowledge. Formations crumbled and shattered before him, as meaningless as a bit of dust in the wind. His first real challenge came in the form of the sect guardians. These were old, powerful cultivators who had started the climb through the nascent soul stage only to discover that there was a fatal flaw in their cultivation that had ended their progress forever. They would not be fools like that woman back in the city. Three of them floated down to meet him, their faces hard, and absent any bravado. They knew who he was. They knew that the stories were true. One of them stepped forward. He was either bald or had taken to shaving his head, but a thick beard covered the bottom half of his face.

“You are not welcome here, Feng Ming.”

Ming sighed. They really must not be taking him as seriously as he thought. “Tell the other one to stop hiding, or I’m going to go kill them and come back here to try this conversation again.”

Nothing happened for several long seconds, then a fourth cultivator floated down to join the others.

“You will withdraw,” said the bearded cultivator. “You are mighty, but even you’ll struggle to content with all four of us.”

He regarded them all with a steady gaze. “If you leave now, I won’t stop you. You’re sect guardians. I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt that you weren’t directly involved trying to enslave an entire mortal nation. Who knows, you might even be able to salvage something that’s worth a damn from the wreckage.”

“Leave?!” shouted the bearded cultivator. “You overestimated yourself. Legend or not, you’re still just a cultivator, and cultivators can die. You dishonor this sect with your actions, and then spit on our willingness to overlook your transgressions.”

“My transgressions? I see. So, you’ve committed yourself to the path of stupidity and death. What about you three? Do you intend to join this fool and share in his destruction?”

A woman with a missing eye and gray hair streaked through with white sneered at Ming and stepped up next to the bearded cultivator. The other two shared a look and perhaps some mental communication that Ming didn’t notice. They nodded at each other, before they looked to Feng Ming. The one on the left, a scholarly looking man, spoke for the pair.

“We do not believe that your overestimate yourself, Fate’s Razor. Nor do we approve of the sect’s actions of late. We will withdraw to a distance of one hundred miles and take no part in what follows.”

The bearded man whirled toward them, his face a mask of rage. “You cowards! I’ll hunt you until the end of time for this betrayal.”

The scholarly man looked at the bearded man. “You were always a bully and a fool, Li Bai. I just want you to know that I’ve always hated you. I’ve been sharing Ung Chun’s bed for the last century, and I’m glad you’ll be dead soon.”

Before the bearded man could get a word in, the other defector, a pretty woman who looked to be in her middle years, shot the woman with a missing eye a vicious smile. “I did it on purpose, you evil, vindictive bitch. For Ting.”

As the older woman’s hand shot up to where her eye used to be, the defectors shot into the air and vanished. Ming didn’t need any encouragement. He raced toward to the two cultivators, drawing his jian and infusing it with qi. The remaining sect guardians reacted to his movement and the sudden burst of qi, but they were slow to respond and mentally off-balance from the betrayal and revelation of harsh truths. The bearded cultivator managed to get his own sword up in time to hastily block Ming’s slashing strike. He wasn’t coherent enough to disrupt the wind blade that Ming had followed the same path. It sheered the man in two and sent a shower of blood into the air. Happy to take advantage, Ming gathered that spray of blood with a quick application of qi and whipped it at the woman. She managed to burn most of it way, but enough escaped to cover her face in blood.

Fighting a late-stage nascent soul cultivator wasn’t ideal for an air cultivator, but Ming knew it wasn’t the insurmountable challenge that most young air cultivators imagined it was. At the end of the day, fire cultivators were as limited by their qi affinity as empowered by it. Fire was wild. Explosive. Fire could do a lot, but the main advantage fire cultivators had was psychological. People were afraid of getting burned. Ming knew that fear wasn’t without justification. He’d struggled with it himself. Getting burned was some of the worst pain a body could experience. It was simply excruciating, even for people as hardened against pain as cultivators. If you could master that fear, though, it changed the whole dynamic of the fight. When you stopped worrying about getting burned, it bought you the second or two that you needed to avoid most fire cultivator techniques. After all, it usually boiled down to either slowing the technique or redirecting it.

The one-eyed woman was someone who had come to expect a fear reaction from the people she faced. She shot a fireball that was so condensed and hot that it looked like a marble that was burning blue. If he had panicked and tried to stop the fireball, it would have done exactly what every air cultivator was afraid something like that would do. It would have burned through the shield. Okay, Ming thought, I probably could just stop it but not without burning through way more qi than I want to use. So, he didn’t try to stop it. Instead, he created a wall of hardened air on an angle. The fireball would still burn through it, but the shield would change the trajectory enough that he could ignore it. With that problem dealt with, he turned his attention to making the one-eyed woman’s life an exercise in misery. Tiny wind blades no wider than Ming’s palm rained down on her by the dozens. He saw her eyes widen as she figured out what he’d done.

A swirling column of flame surrounded her, weakening the wind blades. He dumped a bit more energy into the technique and heard her cry out in pain as the blades started to punch through the shield and strike her body. An instinct for danger that Ming had honed to a razor’s edge warned him. He didn’t question it, simply launched himself into the air. A whip of fire as big around as a tree trunk passed through the space he’d just occupied. It seemed the woman hadn’t become a sect guardian because she was easily flustered. She took a page out of his own book and flaming darts shot at him out of the swirling column. He manifested gale force winds that took the darts in an arc around him and sent them hurtling right back at the one-eyed woman. A hint of impatience took Ming at that point. He’d already wasted more than enough time here.

In a burst of qi, all of the air was pressed out of a dome that covered both himself and the sect guardian, as well about a hundred feet in every direction. It didn’t bother Ming. He hadn’t needed to breath for ages. He doubted that the sect guardian did either. The same wasn’t true of fire. While she could theoretically keep it going with qi alone, depriving the fire of air would make the task ten times more difficult. More to the point, he didn’t intend to make it easy for her to concentrate. Even as the vortex of fire all but winked out, he was flying down toward her like a ballista bolt. She summoned a spear from a storage ring and swung it up to meet his jian. The spear shattered. Ming’s jian passed into her heart and punched out of her back. The momentum of his dive drove them both down into the soil, which exploded outward from them in a massive crater. Unfortunately for the sect guardian, there wasn’t that much soil sitting on top of the unyielding rock of the mountain. When they reached the bottom of the soil, the rock arrested their descent. The one-eyed sect guardian burst like a melon when she got caught between the rock and Feng Ming crashing down on top of her.

He didn’t know what he looked like when he rose out of the crater, but he suspected it probably looked some grisly specter of the underworld had come to the mountain. The continued his steady walk up the mountain, laying waste to formations and cultivators alike. Those who wished to flee largely had, so the only people left were likely the ones he wanted in the first place.

4

When he reached the sect compound proper, he did find a small contingent of qi gather and foundation formation cultivators waiting for him there. They all turned a shade of white or green at the sight of him, and a few more picked that moment to flee for their lives. He surveyed the remaining cultivators with cold eyes.

“Loyalty until death?” he asked.

A core cultivator standing behind the young sacrifices gave Ming a hateful look.

“Attack!” screamed the core cultivator.

All of the young cultivators threw technique at the spot where Ming had been standing. By they all realized that he wasn’t there anymore, the core cultivator was lying in two pieces on the ground, his expression locked into a rictus of surprised horror. Ming looked at the poor outer sect disciples who had been led to there to die.

“Leave,” ordered Feng Ming.

There was a pregnant pause as those painfully young cultivators stared at him in varying states of shock, terror, and even a few scattered expressions of fearful awe. The moment broke. There was a wild, stumbling stampede of human bodies headed down the mountain as fast as their legs could carry them. Save for one seeming genius who had worked out a primitive qinggong technique that let her outpace her peers. In other circumstances, Ming would have tried to learn her name. He supposed he’d just have to live with that tiny bit of ignorance. He wasn’t there looking for geniuses to steal and send to better teachers. He also decided that particular outer sect disciple wouldn’t have any trouble finding another sect to take her in. Candidates were common enough, but true talents were rare.

He turned his eyes back up the mountain. To where the rest of the so-called elite of the sect were waiting. Now that the largely innocent bystanders were more or less in the clear. He could finally stop holding back. He knew where the inner sect disciples and the core disciples were waiting for him. He let a tiny smile cross his lips before he activated his qinggong technique. To anyone who wasn’t nascent soul cultivator, what he did would have looked like some kind of transportation technique. Unfortunately for the Coiled Dragon Sect members waiting for him, it wasn’t. He appeared among them and the air screamed in his wake. A shockwave rolled out from him with a tiny little bit of help from Ming. Cultivators were screaming as their eardrums exploded, they were hurled off the side of the mountain to plummet to their deaths, or were simply torn in half by the force of his arrival. Half of them were dead or disabled before the fight even started.

He moved through them like a scythe in the field at harvest. An arm went flying from one end of the group, then a head from the other end. No one saw him. They only felt the all-encompassing weight of his killing intent. As that killing intent drove itself in their minds, they all saw the same thing. It was a blade. No, it was the blade. The blade the comes unseen. The blade that knows no mercy. The blade of a million, million deaths. The blade that will be the end of all things. The blade that will sever the fate of creation itself. As that certainty permeated their hearts, minds, and souls, their own certainties faltered. Their cultivations wavered. For some, simply being exposed to that unswerving, absolute will was enough to break their cultivations. They saw how pale and feeble their own convictions were in the light of the purity. They saw what could be, and what they would never be. Cores cracked. Foundations burned. Then, almost as a mercy, the blade came and finished their suffering. With a flick of Ming’s wrist, the blood slid off of his jian. It was a blade worthy of him. A blade made by his own hands for his own hands.

“Truly,” said a soft voice, “you are cultivation’s tyrant. Our true sovereign come at last to show us the failure of our paths.”

Ming didn’t look at her. He didn’t need to look. He knew that voice of old. He had heard that she had found her way here. He’d hoped it wasn’t true, but hope had always been a fair-weather friend to him.

“Hello, Mei-Xia. Have you come to fight me, then? Or, did they send you to try to talk me out of this?”

She laughed then. It was vacant thing that laugh. Nothing but an empty cave where joy should live. “Fight you? I’m not as deluded as the rest of these fools. I know I can’t defeat you. I knew the moment I heard you were coming that the collective strength of this entire sect couldn’t defeat you.”

“You might get lucky. They might get lucky. There are no absolutes in battle.”

“You’re wrong. There is one absolute in battle. His name is Feng Ming, and all is lost when he stands against you.”

He did turn to look at Mei-Xia then. She hadn’t really changed that much. He supposed there might be a wrinkle or two around the eyes that hadn’t been there when they parted ways. She still looked frail, like she wasn’t eating enough, but advancement had simply refined that fact into something more. She looked like a transcendent wraith. Seeing her here, surrounded by the carnage he had wrought broke his heart a little. She had loved him once. For all he knew, she still did. He’d never felt the same way about her. She had been an annoyance at first, then a trusted companion, and eventually someone he thought of as a close friend. That simply hadn’t been enough for her. She had wanted him to be in love with her, and that wasn’t meant to be. He’d been in love a few times, knew what it was like, and knew himself well enough to know that he’d never feel that way for her, no matter how long she waited.

When he’d said as much to her, Mei-Xia had not reacted well. She’d cursed his name. Called him a coward for not recognizing the obvious. He had stood there and let her say it all, every little bit of hurt she could muster. He’d endured it because he’d hoped it would set her free from him. He’d wanted her to be happy, even if he couldn’t be the one to make her happy. It seemed that fate had a cruel streak because it put her right back in his path, and naturally his current path was a path of destruction. Whatever life she had made for herself here, he had come to tear it all down around her. She certainly had friends here and probably a lover. If she hadn’t been wise enough to send them away, he would cut them all down. Still, her description had been a bit much.

“All is lost? A touch melodramatic, don’t you think?”

Mei-Xia huffed out a breath. “The fact that something is melodramatic doesn’t make the truth suddenly become false.”

“I suppose that’s true. If you aren’t here to fight or to try to talk me out of it, why are you here?”

“Can’t you figure that part out? I came to get it over with. If you’re going to kill me, I want you to do it here. Make it quick and clean. The way I know you can. Not like what you did to these poor bastards. Or what you’ll do the rest of them.”

Ming looked down at his jian as an excuse to avert his eyes. She’d come here expecting him to kill her. Maybe I would have if she’d fought with the rest, he thought. But they’d traveled too far together, shared too much, and he didn’t have it in him to kill her. It was a big part of the reason why he’d waited so long and hoped that other sects would intervene. If they had found a political solution, he wouldn’t have had to come. He didn’t do political solutions. He had one method of fixing problems at his disposal, and it didn’t involve compromise. He slid his jian into its scabbard and then walked over to Mei-Xia. He stopped when he was still well outside of striking distance. It was for her peace of mind. A tiny gesture, perhaps, but he worked with what he had.

“I’m not going to kill you,” he said. “I am going to kill the rest of them. If you’re going to lose someone that you’re close to, I am sorry for that.”

He started walking toward the last significant gathering of people on the mountain. Perhaps two dozen cultivators that he assumed were the elders. Or, what was left of them. He’d killed quite a few people that were probably elders on his way to this mountain. He supposed the ranks of their elders were getting thin.

“Did you know I was here?” demanded Mei-Xia.

He stopped and bowed his head a little. “Yes. Why do you think I waited so long to come?”

With that, he started moving again and made a very conscious effort not to hear if she was crying behind him. She wouldn’t want him to know that he’d made her cry again. She wouldn’t want him to know that she still cared enough about him that he could. He forced himself to put those thoughts aside. Those were after the fight was done, when he could drink and have someone to drink with who would understand. It didn’t take him long to find the elders of the Coiled Dragon Sect. The paths were well-worn. They stood together in a block of defiance. I’d be a dead man if baleful glaring could get the job done, thought Ming. He noted that they all wore fine, expensive robes. A stark contrast to the simple, blood-soaked robes he still wore. He’d never understood why sect elders felt the need to wear expensive clothes or show off cultivation treasures. He understood enjoying fine robes. He had dozens of silk robes in one of his storage rings. They were incredibly comfortable. He just didn’t feel the need to wear them all the time in places where people could see them. Ming had never felt the need to shout at people with his clothes that they should respect him.

“So, this is mighty Feng Ming,” said someone in the crowd. “The greatest cultivator alive. The greatest swordsman alive. You look like a peasant butcher to me.”

Ming looked straight into the man’s eyes. “Excellent. A volunteer.”

Ming unleashed his auric imposition for the first time that day. He’d always found auric imposition a strange thing. He supposed it was because he’d only learned it after he’d been a nascent soul cultivator for a long, long time. It was less a technique and more an expression of will, only it went beyond that. It was the sum total of everything that a cultivator was. It was their cultivation, their killing intent, their will, and even their soul. He’d learned how to do it, but the details and nuances of it were lost on him. It was also a lot of effort. When applied at the right time, though, it could destroy the morale of a group. There was a crackling noise and abrupt screaming as that elder’s bones shattered beneath the pressure generated by the accumulated force of Feng Ming’s more than five thousand years of experience, growth, and refinement of his power.

All of the elders took a frightened step back from the bloody, misshapen thing that had been a person mere moments before. Their cohesion fragmented. Some of them became furious. Others became afraid. He saw other expression he couldn’t quite put a name to, but that didn’t matter. He didn’t need them all to react the same way. He just wanted them acting on different emotions when they did finally respond. One man stepped forward, cold fury on his unnatural youthful face.

“When the patriarch learns of this-,” started the man.

“He’ll do nothing. He was a coward three thousand years ago when I first met him. Nothing but an ambush predator of the most craven kind, preying on the weakest cultivators he could find. I probably should have killed him then, but there was a lot going on at the time. The funny thing is, he’s still a coward now. I’ve been killing your sect members all across this country for most of a year. He could have found me. He knew where I was. He could have challenged me to put a stop to all of this, but he didn’t. I slaughtered my way up this mountain. Broke your lousy formations. Killed your sect guardians. Left a graveyard’s worth of bodies where your inner sect and core members used to be. I’m literally on his doorstep. Where is he? I’ll tell you where he is. He’s hiding at the top of this mountain, praying to every god he can think of that one of you will have the luckiest day of your life and kill me.”

5

The elders all traded uncertain looks. He watched as some of them glanced up at the peak of the mountain. There was anger in those eyes. Anger at the man who was supposed to protect them if everything went truly wrong. Today, everything had gone truly wrong, and he had not appeared. Instead, they were left to face Ming by themselves. A man who had washed an entire country in the blood of their sect without anyone so much as slowing him down. Now, he was standing in front of them like death had stretched out its hand and reached for their souls. When it happened, it happened fast. One of the elders made a run for it. They were damn fast, but Ming was faster. He swooped down on that elder like a bird of prey. There was the ringing clash of blades for a second or two, and then the elder fell in two directions as his bisected body came apart. After that, chaos had its moment in the sun.

Ming dashed forward, grabbing a half-activated talisman out of the air and threw it into the face of another elder. The talisman denoted and, unfortunately for that elder, it didn’t kill him. The blind, faceless elder started thrashing around and making keening noise that even Ming found unsettling. Unsettling or not, they made for a great distraction. Ming sent out a wave of wind blades at everyone except the distraction, ducked beneath a spear, sidestepped the thrust of a sword, lopped off the hand holding that sword, and punched a woman in the face so hard that she flew sideways directly into the path of a fireball. The fireball burned a hole straight through her, but Ming was long gone by time it burst through her sternum. Someone tried to punch a hole through him using a condensed stream of water, but the same angled shield that worked against the guardian’s fireball worked against the stream of water. He even managed to direct it into the back of another elder.

Ming knew that the key to winning these kinds of fights was to avoid getting bogged down. He didn’t need to kill everyone immediately. In fact, it was better if he didn’t kill too many of them right at first. He wanted them injured and angry. Injured people got in each other’s way. They didn’t think clearly because they were in pain. Angry people made rash choices, like lobbing fireballs and compressed streams of water in close proximity to their allies. Every time someone did something like that, Ming used the minimum amount of his own power to redirect theirs. Why kill the elders himself when he could get them to do it to each other? As for him, he just kept moving and anytime someone got close enough, they lost a hand or a limb. There was blood everywhere. While he’d been an obvious target in his blood-soaked robes at first, it took less than a minute before everyone looked like him.

The elders were screaming at each other, or simply screaming, but no one could keep track of anything in that wall of noise. To add even more fun, buildings were on fire from poorly controlled fire techniques, which was starting to fill the area with smoke, adding to the confusion. Ming just stumbled up to one of the elders with his head down and moaning for help. He dashed away from that man after disemboweling him. It would have killed a mortal, but nascent soul cultivators were made of sterner stuff. So, that man just kept screaming while trying to put his organs and intestines back into his body.

Of course, in all of that chaos, Ming didn’t go unscathed. Sometimes someone identified him. That same water cultivator had opened up Ming’s leg with a water whip. He’d gotten away by disappearing into the smoke, grabbing another elder, and throwing them back at the water cultivator. The fool had been so agitated by the fight that he reacted on instinct and used the same water whip technique to cut his own ally into pieces. Ming heard the bellow of rage when the man realized he’d been tricked. An ice cultivator got lucky and drove a foot-long ice spear through one of Ming’s lungs. It hurt enough that he wanted to cry out in pain, but that was another lesson he’d learned long ago. Never give up your position. He’d stumbled away and broken the ice spear off on both sides. The rest would melt on its own and a healing pill or two would deal with the damage.

For every one injury he took, he dealt out dozens of maiming or killing strikes. He moved with purpose from point to point, looking for advantages and lucky opportunities. Ming took the ice cultivator’s head off with a condensed spear of air. He caught the water cultivator trying to tie off an injury. The woman lost both hands and a leg to a single strike from Ming’s jian. She only had a moment to stare at the empty spots at the ends of her arms before he took off her head. At that point, the elders had injured each other so badly that it became little more than a series of quick, brutal executions. A few of the elders put up a token fight and one begged to be spared, but Ming had no forgiveness left in him that day.

He glanced up at the peak of the mountain where there hadn’t been so much as an inch of movement and shook his head. Ming pulled a healing pill out of his storage ring. He might have his issues with Ma Caihong, but even he would be the first to admit that Alchemy’s Handmaiden knew her business. He washed the pill down with a swallow of water from a gourd. As always, he was astounded by the speed and potency of that pill. He started to feel better almost immediately. Then, he set about finding the sect library, treasury, armory, and alchemy lab. He looted them and left nothing behind but empty tables and shattered defenses. He’d thought that might be enough of an affront to draw the patriarch out, but even stealing the sect’s treasures wasn’t enough to compel that coward to action. Ming did a bit of casual looting in the elder’s homes that had survived the fight. He found a few things of interest.

By the time he was satisfied that he’d gotten most of what was valuable, most of his injuries had at least closed up. They were by no means healed. That would take a few days, but he wasn’t constantly losing blood anymore. He expanded his spiritual sense again so that it covered the entire mountain. Everyone was at least off of the mountain. Nodding to himself, he used a qi platform to raise himself up until he was standing on a level with the patriarch’s manor.

“Chin Haoran! Patriarch! Coward! Will you not come forth and face me? I’ve killed the rest or sent them away.”

There was no movement from inside the manor. Not even an answer to his mocking words. Ming wanted to be surprised or disappointed, but this was what he had expected from the start. A paper tiger masquerading as true dragon. Fortunately, Feng Ming didn’t need Chin Haoran to come out to do what needed to be done. Ming’s qi platform took him higher into the air until he was able to look down on Plum Tree Mountain. Long ago, when Mei-Xia had been a late foundation formation cultivator following him around everywhere, she had asked him why cultivators so rarely used complex techniques in battles.

“Battles are confusing, Mei-Xia. A lot of the time you’re hurt or don’t know where your allies are at a given moment. If you get attacked, you often only have a split second to react. Complex techniques almost always take time, calm, and concentration. Three things you almost never have in a battle.”

Hovering over the mountain and staring down at it like a vengeful god, Ming had the opportunity to take his time, reinforce his sense of calm, and concentrate. All things considered, he’d used a comparatively small amount of qi during the fighting. That meant he had plenty left for what came next. He gathered up his qi, focused it into his jian, focused his intentions, and lifted the jian skyward. He felt the power in the jian thrum and felt an echoing thrum from somewhere else. He’d been told once that this technique was more than an air qi technique. Somehow, someway, he had found a sympathetic bridge between his own mastery of air qi and the domain of space qi, even if it was limited to just this one technique. In the end, if given the opportunity to perform it, he’d found that this one technique was enough to end every fight. He didn’t normally bother with naming techniques or shouting those names, but this technique was special. It deserved a name. So, as he brought that blade down in an arc that ended with the tip pointed at the mounting, he said the name.

“Blade of the Shattering Sky.”

In the very last moment before the technique landed, Chin Haoran ran out of his manor. Ming could see the other man shouting something, but the words were lost as the technique crashed down into the mountain. Chin Haoran froze in place with mouth still wide open in a silent scream. Then, as huge fissures opened up in the mountain, the same thing happened to Chin Haoran’s body. Blood poured out of those fissures, even as dust and debris poured out of the fissures in the mountain. Ming lost sight of Chin Haoran as the stone of the mountain began to churn and shake. Pieces started to fall away, only to be pulled by some force hidden inside the core of the mountain. The noise was tremendous, even at Ming’s elevation. It wasn’t just a noise. That sound took on a life of its own, and that life was one of agony. It shrieked, bellowed, and wailed at volumes that could be felt in the bones and the blood. It was a sound that would never die in the memory of those who heard it. That tormented sound seemed to last for days, years, entire generations. Then, it was over.

Ming waited there in the air as the dust slowly settled. He had done this thing and he would see what he had wrought. Where there had been one mountain, solid and stable, ready to stand up to the centuries, now where two mountains. But these two mountains were infirm things. Shaky and decrepit. His technique had hollowed out the heart of the mountain and carried it away to somewhere else. He didn’t know where. He only knew he was glad it had taken Chin Haoran with it. What was left would stand for a time, but only a short time. It might last a hundred years, he thought. Maybe two. Of course, the Coiled Dragon sect would never rebuild. They had poured centuries and countless resources into building that compound. He had taken their treasures, their knowledge, and finally their home. He had set out to destroy this sect, and the work was finally done.

Ming lowered himself to the ground. The remains of the mountain looked even worse from ground level. He hoped no one was stupid enough to try to do anything with what was left. He just stood there for a while, letting the healing pill do it’s work and letting his passive cultivation technique slowly restore his qi reserves. He felt her arrive. Mei-Xia came and stood next to him for a time, staring in quiet disbelief at what he’d done. She didn’t look at him when she spoke.

“I understand now.”

“Understand what?”

“Why peak nascent soul cultivators need to ascend. This,” she said, gesturing at mountain, “is too much power for one person to have in this world. You may as well be a god.”

“I’m no god, Mei-Xia. Or no kind of god that I’d ever want to meet.”

Mei-Xia couldn’t seem to find a response to that. She did finally look at him. “What will you do now?”

Ming closed his eyes and leaned his head back, wishing the sunlight could warm the coldness in his heart as well as it warmed his face.

“I’ve spent the last year moving toward a mountain filled with enemies. I think it’s time I went to one where I have a friend.”

“Will you tell Jaw-Long we saw each other?”

Ming made himself open his eyes and look at her. “I hadn’t thought about it. Probably. Would you prefer I didn’t?”

“I suppose it’s fine. I haven’t seen him in a long time. I don’t know where we stand.”

“You’ve got nothing to worry about from Jaw-Long. He always liked you.”

Mei-Xia relaxed a tiny bit. “That’s good.”

“And what about you and me? Where do we stand?”

“Like it matters when you can do things like that,” she indicated the mountain with her chin.

“It matters.”

She gave him a hard look. “I did lose friends on that mountain. They weren’t all sadists or evil or monsters. They were just loyal.”

“Loyal to people who butchered mortals that couldn’t possibly fight back against them. Loyal to people who enslaved an entire nation of mortals.”

“It’s so easy for you to judge. We aren’t all like you, Ming. I can’t kill an entire sect by myself.”

“I didn’t say that they should have tried to fight the sect by themselves. But they could have left. You could have left. Or, deep down in your heart, did you think, they’re just mortals?”

Ming gave her a sad smile when she didn’t have an answer to that question. Then, he turned south and started walking. It was a struggle not to go back and argue with Mei-Xia. But he’d had those arguments many times, with many people, and always got the same place with it. Nowhere. Now, all he could do was point the way for others as best as he knew how. Beyond that, he just needed somewhere to get a little rest. Jaw-Long’s house was a good place to do that, assuming he could find the place. What was the name of that village near Jaw-Long’s mountain? Orchard’s… Orchard’s something. He was almost certain of it.