The Dreaming Blade sat as he oiled the sword gifted by his master. A towering mound of dirt and stone rose behind him, blocking the moon and catching the warm firelight. After fleeing the landslide, he’d returned to find no trace of the portal. There were no trees. No grass. Everything was covered in a thick layer of rock and dirt as though the heavens were trying to cover up any trace of Howling Blossom Valley.

  No matter what the heavens wanted, his master lay down there. The Dreaming Blade began excavating. With his qi completely drained, it was difficult work. Using his blade and meager scraps of sword qi, he cut away the ground before hauling it away by hand. When the sun set, he sat, and he cultivated.

  Until a horse-sized lizard attacked him.

  Meat from the spirit beast roasted on spits, juicing, dripping, and hissing on the coals as the Dreaming Blade examined the four-star jian. It remained unscratched even after fighting spirit beasts and cutting rock. He’d thought it a noble’s trinket at first, finely made, but for display only. Now, he truly appreciated this beautiful sword.

  It deserved a name.

  But what name could summarize this immaculate weapon and this perfect gift?

  “Moonlight Sickle,” he stood and held the blade high above his head, where moonlight glowed on the oiled steel as though it were alive. “Cutting down enemies with the silent judgment of the moon!”

  The fire crackled, the flickering hues reflected against the bottom of the sword, and the Dreaming Blade’s eyes widened in wonder.

  “The Burning Asura! Always advancing with an endless flurry of destructive attacks!”

  But neither of those names made him think of his master.

  His master expressed interest in the jian, but fought with his fists and body without thought. The Dreaming Blade doubted his master would ever wield a sword, but if he did, his ability would be…

  A smile touched the Dreaming Blade’s lips as he turned the jian between the moonlight and the fire.

  “Supreme Sword of Cosmic Perfection.”

  He held the jian above his head for a long time, waiting for a response. The fire crackled and his meat burned, but he waited. A shooting star fell across the sky, scratching a single line of light into the darkness.

  “Supreme Sword of Cosmic Perfection is my father’s name,” whispered the jian. “You can call me Perfection.”

  The Dreaming Blade’s smile widened.

  “I will.”

  The jian hummed in his hands.

  ###

  The water rushed, dark and cold, and it called to me.

  “Follow me if you want to find your way to safety!”

  But that was a lie.

  There was no safety here.

  The river was the one that gave my weaponized self a chance to take over; if not for those hypnotic currents, I would have been alert enough to stop my weaponized self from trying anything like that! Even now, I could feel it haunting me from the back of my mind like an echo too faint to hear.

  Avoiding the river, I headed into the forest. The shaggy trees grew slim and tall into the moonlight, their white bark shimmering. Long leaves hung in clumps that drifted in the breeze like dark hair in water. After liquifying my brain, I’d lost control of the Plum Blossom stealth technique. My shadow qi chamber had dropped to about half full, so I was hesitant to start using the technique so far from my camp. It felt wasteful to hide with nobody to hide from.

  My poison qi chamber remained full, but my enthusiasm for experimentation had waned after the last attempt.

  Without the stealth technique to soften my movement, my steps crunched over dried leaves and brittle twigs. Their ecstatic sounds filled the air, but I paid them no heed as I hunted for a path.

  There must be something…

  But the undergrowth, sparse though it was, revealed nothing. Not even an animal track winding through the trees, as though I were the first living creature to walk here, but that couldn’t be true.

  Because of the bodies in the trees.

  They were high up, so I hadn’t noticed them until the canopy

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  They were all long dead, most of them little more than wizened corpses or skeletons impaled on the branches. Only a few were human; most were animals of all sizes: deer, boars, lizards, fish, dogs, even insects skewered on hair-thin spines, their carapaces glittering unmolested after untold years. Anything that once had a face no longer had a recognisable expression.

  The silence of death flowed like syrup between the trees, pooling in the spaces between my footsteps, coating my body, and choking out my thoughts. I stopped without realizing and simply stood there.

  “This forest is a tomb.”

  Not our tomb, said the street rat. We aren’t tomb people.

  Our tomb will be the grandest in the world, said the merchant. It will stand empty forever.

  I continued walking through the trees, heading in what I hoped was the direction of the expedition camp.

  A wind blew through the living mausoleum, but it carried no foul scent, only the distant words of the river.

  “You won’t be safe if you stay in the forest!”

  Was that a threat? My weaponized self bubbled at the thought, seeping into my thoughts like coals scattered across a frozen lake. I held onto control, but the heat twisted me to my knees. It was hard to fight something when I only had my mind.

  “You’re not taking over,” I ground out through clenched teeth.

  The heat resided, for now.

  I rose, took a couple of crunching steps, and stopped. That wasn’t right. The ground beneath me had no leaves.

  “He’s walking behind you!”

  I turned towards the river’s words.

  “What do you --”

  A tree stepped behind another tree.

  I stared, refusing to blink, but saw only one tall, thin, bone-white tree standing apart from the other trees, alone against the darkness with long leaves hanging down as though from a bowed head. A horse was skewered on one of the branches like dried rags hung out to dry.

  “Hello?”

  The tree remained as silent as the rest of the forest.

  “You’re not safe!” shouted the river on a sudden gust of wind. “Run!”

  I draped myself in petals of shadowy qi and dashed away from where I stood, my eyes locked onto the tree as I ran towards the river.

  Where there should be two trees, there remained one, and I knew it was a tree, despite the pale, trembling bark that looked like skin. Blood pumped through my muscles as I accelerated towards my top speed. There was no way that I would stay here a moment longer.

  Running without looking where you’re going is a skill, and my foot caught on a root. I tripped forward ass over head as I crashed through the leaves and into another tree. My head struck the pale, solid trunk of another tree hard enough to crack my skull.

  Blood flowed into the ground around the exposed roots.

  Silence rang through my head as I lay there, healing my brain and cranium. Heat flooded my mind, but I fended off my weaponized self. I had more strength when I didn’t need to control my body. My weaponized self must be weaker than me, which made sense since it only truly woke during the soul-severing ritual.

  I pushed up from the ground.

  A tree stepped behind another tree. The remaining tree was different, but it radiated a wrongness just as the last one had. I blinked slowly. The tree was just a tree. There was nothing wrong with it at all. No wind brought words of the river, but I didn’t recognise the trees around me. They looked like normal trees, but still…

  Where was I and how did I get here?

  I jogged, then started to run. My feet kicked up leaves as I searched for the river. All the trees were the same. No, they were different, but the same type of tree. Their dried leaves carpeted the floor. My stealth technique concealed me, but still I heard the odd crunching of a footstep that wasn’t mine.

  I looked.

  A tree stepped behind another tree, and a root seized my foot. I slammed down hard, and the weather-sharpened root of a log speared through my throat. Blood gushed out onto the dried leaves and sank into the ground as my throat bubbled and gasped.

  Footsteps crunched, but fell silent as I pushed off the root. Blood manipulation laced the blood falling from my throat into the gloves as I looked around. Something kept making me trip once I reached a speed that could kill a normal person.

  “Is that your game?!” I shouted. “You trying to trip me to death? You dare?”

  Oh, no…

  I was so unsettled, I sounded like a cultivator.

  Hopefully, I was just imagining things, and nobody was following me. After all, I saw no sign of anybody following me even though bright moonlight flooded through the pale canopy…

  That tree looked strange.

  As though a tree stepped behind another tree.

  I played with the muscles in my face to keep one eye on the strange, eerie tree that remained alone under observation. My other eye looked ahead, doing everything I could to keep one eye locked onto it as I ran through the trees in a wide circle. If I could get behind the tree, then I could see if anything stood there.

  I would know if I was just being paranoid.

  Or not.

  ###

  Despite being drunk, Chen Ai woke to a soft murmuring outside her tent. It could have been someone talking or moving, or it could have been the trees, but it wasn’t nothing. She’d spent too many years as a wandering cultivator to second-guess her wilderness instincts. A moment later, she felt a ping in her qi from one of the blades of grass she’d spread around her tent. The grass bent and broke, and the pinprick in her qi senses died.

  Chen Ai quietly rose from her bedroll, already fully dressed, and reached for her deep iron club. Even for her, it was heavy, but it felt good to feel her muscles strain like that. She needed that confidence as she placed the club over her shoulder and picked up the jian she used to carry. It trembled slightly in her hands, but she bit down on the sheath and drew the blade one-handed.

  With two weapons drawn, the tent was incredibly cramped, but she waited, slowly cycling up her qi and spreading it through her body, the 9th-stage energy crackling through her meridians.

  Another pinprick of grass burst.

  Chen Ai twisted on the spot and slashed with her blade, effortlessly cutting through the tent and leaping into the night outside. A woman stood outside her tent with a sword in her hands. She leaped away from Chen Ai’s swinging club, but her weapon hit the ground with enough force to shake the campsite.

  “We’re under attack!” Chen Ai shouted.

  Where was the guard?

  The mysterious woman darted between the tents, heading towards the trees. Chen Ai flung her sword at the woman’s back, but she deflected it mid stride her own blade. Chen Ai gave chase as the other expedition members emerged from their tents. The woman wasn’t too far ahead, and though it might be leftover confidence from drinking, Chen Ai was sure she could catch her. She followed the woman into the pale trees, darting between the slim trunks, when a second man stepped out from behind a tree with an axe raised high above his head. His eyes were pits of shadow as he chopped down at Chen Ai’s torso.