Book 3: Chapter 24: Repressed Anger |
Hu Rong had seen beautiful things in his long existence.
Meadows that sang when the wind passed through them. Rivers of liquid starlight pooling in basins carved by primordial beings who had nothing better to do with their afternoons. Forests where the trees were born of the blood of titans after battles that had carved the very earth. Valleys of color stained by said blood as well. A palace hidden in the depths of trees, invisible to the eye except for a single being.
He'd eaten Heart Demons that tasted like regret and washed them down with the ambient terror of lesser spirits who couldn't run fast enough.
He had seen plenty.
The Hu Clan lands made all of it feel like a rough sketch someone crumpled up and tossed into a fire.
Mountains erupted from the earth in layered ridges that climbed toward a sky so blue it hurt his form eyes. Valleys carved between them overflowed with wildflowers in colours he didn't have names for, purples bleeding into golds bleeding into whites that caught the morning light and threw it back in sheets. Cherry blossom trees lined the lower slopes in groves so thick their petals formed drifts across the paths like pink snow. Hanging willows draped from cliff edges, their tendrils brushing the surfaces of streams that cut through the rock in veins of crystal clear water.
Every peak connected to the next through natural bridges of stone and root.
Each one held its own character, its own shape, its own little kingdom of vegetation and wildlife that existed in perfect, undisturbed harmony with the peaks beside it.
And at the centre of it all, the tallest peak.
The stump was fifty feet across, maybe more. Hard to tell from this angle because the sheer mass of it warped his sense of scale.
A World Tree.
Cut clean.
The rings visible in the exposed wood told a story measured in epochs, each one a chapter of growth that predated everything he'd ever known about this planet and its pitiful little cultivation sects.
And someone had seen such a blessed thing and decided it was better torn.
Someone had looked at a living monument that connected earth to sky, root to star, mortal to divine, and decided it needed to come down.
Hu Rong's jaw tightened.
The stump still radiated Qi. It was faint, a ghostly rendition of the might it had once claimed in its prime. Like heat rising off embers days after the fire died. He could feel it through the soles of his manifested feet, thrumming up through the stone and into his core where it settled with a weight that had nothing to do with power and everything to do with loss.
The world had sobbed to see its passing and now he could feel that sorrow within the connection he had to the earth.
He tore his gaze from the stump and looked at what surrounded it.
Rong could see dozens of buildings stretching across the land. Halls, residences, training grounds, meditation pavilions, a library that had been three stories tall based on the foundation footprint. All of it designed by hands that cared. Curved rooflines that followed the natural contours of the mountain. Walls painted in colours that complemented the cherry blossoms rather than competing with them. Doorways wide enough to welcome, archways carved with motifs of foxes and tigers and flowers intertwined in patterns that told the history of the people who built them.
Hu Rong grit his teeth and wondered what this place would have looked like had it not been ruined, because every single structure was destroyed.
They were burned black, walls caved inward, roofs collapsed into the rooms they were supposed to protect, support beams snapped and jutting from rubble at angles that looked like broken bones piercing skin. Scorch marks crawled across the stone foundations in patterns that spoke of deliberate, methodical fire. This hadn't been a battle that got out of hand.
This had been a razing.
Filth covered what the fire hadn't consumed. Mud, ash, excrement, the detritus of an occupying force that treated sacred ground like a latrine. Banners of dark cloth hung from poles jammed into the rubble. Tents sprouted between the ruins like parasites feeding on a corpse. Cooking fires burned where meditation gardens had been. Laundry lines stretched between the pillars of what had once been the main hall's entrance.
Hu Rong's form solidified as he felt flames come to life in his chest.
The playful shimmer that usually danced across his edges went flat and hard.
His blades, all of them, every single one he carried in his spirit form, hummed at frequencies that made the air around him vibrate.
His eyes could not look at the tents and ruined structures, rather they found the main spectacle before him. Tears welled up in his eyes and the flame turned into a volcano that begged to be set free upon the world.
There were hundreds of stakes.
Driven into the earth across the central plateau in rows that radiated outward from the stump like the spokes of a wheel. Each stake held a body impaled through the torso, arms hanging limp, heads lolled forward or back depending on how the rot had shifted the weight over the years they had been placed there. Not once had they been brought down, nor had the thought to bury them honorably ever crossed their mind.
These poor souls, defiled even in death were the original Hu Clan members.
Rong knew that as fact.
He knew it the way spirits knew things. Through the residual Qi that clung to their remains like perfume on cloth long after the wearer had gone. Faint signatures, unique as fingerprints, each one carrying the unmistakable harmonic of the Hu bloodline. Diluted, corrupted by decay and barely there at all, but present.
Skeletons wrapped in the remnants of flesh that sloughed in grey-green sheets.
Robes that had once been white and blue reduced to tatters that flapped in the mountain breeze.
Some still had hair of long strands of black and silver that moved with the wind in a mockery of life.
Two stakes stood taller than the rest and at the centre. They were positioned directly before the World Tree's stump as though the person who placed them wanted the dead to stare at what they'd lost for eternity. A statement for generations that dared to come after and witness the ruination of their peoples and their ancestors by monsters that thought they were human.
Hu Rong drifted closer.
The bodies on these two were better preserved than the rest, if that word could be applied to something so profane. Their Qi signatures were stronger than the others. Faded, yes, guttering like candle flames in a storm, but recognizable. It didn’t help that he could feel Qi surrounding their forms to keep their original looks from life upon their dead corpses as a reminder to anyone that recognized them…
And recognize them he did because they looked just like someone he knew and cared about now.
Both looked like Hu Shui.
Or was it the other way around.
Hu Rong spat.
The glob of spirit essence hit the stone and sizzled. His form flickered between three shapes in rapid succession, child, the Blade Storm, something older and less defined that he rarely let surface, before settling back into the sharp-featured young man he preferred. His eyes burned with a light that had nothing to do with ambient Qi and everything to do with the kind of fury that spirits carried in place of Heart Demons.
He could feel it in the air now that he was closer. The reason the bodies were so well kept.
The reason for this lands death.
Hu Rong could feel the malevolence of Zi Zhen's Qi.
Wrapped around the two central stakes like a signature on a painting. A calling card left by an artist proud of his work. The dark, oily resonance of Demonic Cultivation pushed to its absolute extreme, concentrated and deliberate. This hadn't been delegated to subordinates. The Patriarch of Dark Gate Palace had driven these stakes himself. Had impaled these two himself.
Had wanted anyone who came here to know exactly who did this and feel the weight of their inability to stop it.
Hu Rong's blades screamed for blood.
Every single one of them. The sound cut through the mountain air and scattered a flock of birds from the cherry blossoms three ridges over. His Qi, spirit-born and ancient, surged outward in a wave that flattened the grass around him and sent the nearest tree tumbling end over end down the slope.
He pulled it back and clamped it down. Forcing it into the tight coil he'd learned to maintain during his centuries in the meadow where nothing happened and patience was the only currency that mattered.
His teeth ground against each other.
Calm. Be calm. The Patriarch would want you calm. The Patriarch would want you thinking—
Hu Rong looked at the impaled Patriarch and Matriarch of the Hu Clan one more time.
Master would burn this entire mountain range to bedrock and salt what remained.
He turned away from the stakes and surveyed the surrounding peaks. Each one bore the same scars. Destroyed structures, dark banners, tents, cooking fires, and the distant movement of figures that his spirit senses picked up without effort. Demonic Cultivators. Hundreds of them spread across the occupied territory in clusters and groups. Patrols, guard posts, living quarters carved from the ruins of a civilization they'd helped destroy.
They moved with the lazy confidence of an occupying force that expected no resistance.
Hu Rong catalogued them. Positions, numbers, cultivation, where the strongest among them were, approximate strength based on the density of their Qi signatures. Most were weak, nothing but fodder. The kind of cultivators who joined Demonic sects because they couldn't hack it in legitimate ones and needed the shortcuts that corruption provided. A few were stronger, mid-tier at best, that were probably officers. The ones trusted enough to keep the fodder in line and maintain the occupation while their betters handled more important matters elsewhere.
None of them had noticed him yet.
That was fine by him.
He was about to begin a more thorough sweep of the eastern ridge when something prickled at the edge of his perception.
Distant, approaching fast, and carrying a Qi signature that made every blade in his arsenal go silent.
Hu Rong's head snapped toward the northwest.
A figure moving through the air above the treeline with the casual speed of someone who owned the sky and considered gravity a suggestion rather than a law. The Qi preceding it was dark and, layered in ways that spoke of decades of accumulation and refinement. It pressed against the ambient energy of the mountains like oil spreading across water, tainting everything it touched.
Hu Rong recognized it and moved before he could stop himself.
He crossed three peaks in the time it took a mortal heart to beat twice. His spirit form blurred across the landscape, leaving trails of displaced air and scattered cherry blossom petals in his wake. He reformed on a ridge overlooking a narrow valley between two of the outer mountains, directly in the path of the approaching figure.
The figure landed thirty paces away.
Ribbons of dark gray cloth unwound as the figure bobbed up and down in the air. They unfurled and exposed their owner.
“Zi Zhen,” Rong said.
Zi Zhen looked exactly as Hu Rong remembered him. Tall, gaunt, skeletal look as though he had no meat upon his bones, and sharp features arranged into a permanent expression of mild contempt for everything that existed below his eye line. His robes and massive ribbons were the same ones he had always worn ever since he had met the fool. Hair pulled back in a severe topknot that added two inches to his already considerable height. His eyes were fully black without a hint of whites, no iris, no pupil, or anything else to indicate any form of mercy or light was within his ability. Just pools of void that tracked movement.
Those eyes found Hu Rong and widened by a fraction.
"If it isn't the Blade Storm himself." Zi Zhen's voice matched his hideous nature. A smile spread across his face as he studied Hu Rong from his position. "I thought you had submitted yourself to the True Calamity of our age already? What brings you here?"
"I can ask you the same thing." Hu Rong's Qi rumbled through the valley. Loose stones vibrated on the ground between them and a cherry blossom tree at the edge of the ridge shed half its petals in a single cascade.
Zi Zhen's head tilted. The void-black eyes narrowed, studying him. His smile thinned further, then stretched wider. "Oh? You've gotten stronger?"
Dark Qi leaked from Zi Zhen's frame. It didn't surge or flare, rather it seeped and crawled across the ground in tendrils that killed the grass beneath them, curling up the trunks of nearby trees and leaving black veins in the bark. The ambient temperature dropped. The cherry blossoms closest to him withered on their branches, petals curling inward and turning grey before falling as ash.
Hu Rong's blades manifested.
The air around him filled with steel. Dozens of edges catching the mountain light, spinning in lazy orbits around his form, each one humming at its own frequency. The combined sound was a chord that resonated through the stone beneath their feet and made the entire ridge vibrate. His spirit form solidified further, edges going razor-sharp, the playful shimmer replaced by something that looked forged rather than born.
Neither spoke.
There was nothing to say.
Hu Rong could read Zi Zhen's intent the way he read the wind. It poured off the man in waves that stank of ash and ambition and a hatred so specific it had a name and an address. The Hu Clan lands weren't a conquest to him. They were a canvas. He wanted to erase every trace that the Hu bloodline had ever touched this soil. Wanted to poison the earth so deep that nothing would grow here for a thousand years and the mountains themselves to forget.
And Hu Rong's intent was simpler.
It always had been.
He'd eaten Heart Demons for fun. Played games with spirits ten times his age.
Tricked, schemed, laughed, and danced through centuries of existence without a care heavy enough to slow him down.
Then a monster in human skin had grabbed him by the scruff and dragged him into something that mattered.
Gave him a name, a title, a lofty position, and a clan to call his own.
But more importantly, he had provided family for him to care for and dote on. Mainly a little girl who called him Senior and smiled at him like he was worth smiling at.
Hu Rong looked at Zi Zhen and saw the man who had impaled that little girl's parents on stakes and left them to rot before the stump of a World Tree.
His blades stopped spinning and pointed.
Zi Zhen's smile grew wider as though he knew something the Rong did not. .
His void-black eyes flickered. Something moved behind them. His dark Qi surged, no longer seeping but flooding outward in a tide that consumed the valley floor and climbed the mountainsides. Trees died in waves and stone blackened. The sky above them darkened as his domain pressed against the world and demanded it submit.
Hu Rong's spirit form blazed.
The valley between them became a fault line.
Light on one side, dark on the other.
Cherry blossoms and ash.
Two forces that could not coexist in the same space pressing against each other with enough combined pressure to make the mountains groan.
Neither moved. Neither blinked.
The Demonic Cultivators across the occupied peaks felt it. Every single one of them stopped and turned their way. Patrols froze mid-step, guards dropped their weapons and the weakest among them collapsed where they stood, cores seizing under the weight of two powers that had no business being this close to each other without one of them dying.
The mountain itself held its breath.
And far to the south, beyond the ridgelines and valleys and forests that separated the Hu Clan lands from the wider world, something stirred.
It carried no Qi. Not an ounce of it at all.
Its body moved through the wilderness with a silence that had nothing to do with stealth and everything to do with existing on a plane that its physical body alone would dominate. Muscles dense beyond anything this planet had produced rippled beneath skin that bore scars from battles fought in places that didn't have names anymore. Each footfall covered ground that should have required a dozen.
The surging Qi from the distant mountains reached it like thunder from a storm on the horizon.
It paused for a brief moment, its dragon form turned its head and shifted into that of a human. Landing on the ground as robes wrapped around it to cover its immodesty.
Hei Gu stretched and let his body soak the energies that cascaded upon the mountain. He had a mission that he had been given. A message and a chance at redemption. He could bet his life that one of those beings knew what he wanted to figure out. Searching for a single figure named Hu Rong of the Hu Clan.
The Black Flame Dragon changed direction and began to run.