“Where is senior brother?” Chen Ai repeated as she looked around the camp.

  Nobody could answer her question. She felt their spirit senses reaching out to survey the surrounding environment. Her senses joined them, though she knew it was useless. Not once since meeting her senior brother had he ever let his qi control slip. She doubted it would happen before he died, and then it wouldn’t matter anyway.

  “Senior brother!”

  There was no answer. He must have raced out into the forest to catch whoever infiltrated the camp. She should wait for him to return.

  The Shen clan cultivators stood in a group, tending to the poisoned Shen Tongtong. While Ran Qin flicked through a book detailing various poisons.

  Ran Yaliu and Song Shuai returned in a clap of thunder and a swirl of leaves.

  “We got the swordswoman,” Song Shuai said as he tossed her head down onto the ground, her eyes glassily reflecting the dim light of the campfire coals.

  “Did you see senior brother out there?”

  He shook his head.

  “No. We encountered a mob of cultivators, but outpaced them. There was something about them that felt wrong…”

  “They were Jiangshi.”

  “Of course, I never realised they were real.”

  Song Shuai opened his storage ring and produced a sealed clay jar.

  “The swordswoman had this on her.”

  Ran Yaliu stepped forward.

  “I think it’s the poison used on Shen Tongtong.”

  “Give it to me,” Ran Qin said urgently. “I can identify it in that form.”

  “How can we trust you?” asked Shen Botao.

  Ran Qin glared at him.

  “When we escape from here, I don’t want people saying that Ran lied about alchemy. Now, wipe that Shen drool from your chin and tend to your clan member, or do you intend to fail as she failed all of us?”

  Shen Botao’s face reddened, but he seethed in silence. His body was so tense that dark fluid leaked from the bandages across his chest.

  Chen Ai stepped forward.

  “We have no time for this. Ran Qin, inspect the poison. Shen Botao, change your bandages and tend to Shen Tongtong. You two,” she said as she pointed at Ran Yaliu and Song Shuai. “Help me build a fire.”

  She rushed into the trees, sweeping the environment with grass attuned spirit sense to find dry logs and sticks. None of them had any ability to utilize fire qi, and so they needed to stack the odds in their favor. Was it a terrible coincidence that their only flame wielder was incapacitated, unless it was a strategy by whoever targeted them? Song Shuia joined her, gathering dry branches and hurling them back toward the camp where Ran Yaliu caught them with familiar twists of wind.

  “Was the swordswoman a jiangshi?”

  “Yes, and when we killed her more of the monsters swarmed us. Don’t worry, we evaded them.”

  Chen Ai wracked her brain, but she coudln’t figure out why the monsters would have followed the swordswoman without attacking. From the stories she’d heard, the creatures simply hopped from one living creature to another, draining them of warmth, blood, and qi until they were naught but a withered husk filled with the seeds of a new jiangshi.

  She found a dry enough log and snapped it in half with a swing of her club.

  Song Shuai dodged past the flying splinters with a smirk.

  “That didn’t seem entirely necessary,” he said as he brandished his spear. “I could have cut through them.”

  Chen Ai lifted a log as tall as herself onto her shoulders, roots splayed out behind her like the petals of a gnarled flower.

  “It’s not just about cutting wood. It’s about sending a message.”

  “To whom? The jiangshi aren’t close…”

  His gaze followed Chen Ai’s. Silhouettes stood in the distant trees, their forms dark despite the moonlight, with rags over their mouths and twinkles in their eyes. There were only a handful, but they were still hundreds of feet away. They had time to… a jiangshi floated down out of the trees and landed closer than the others.

  “Let’s go!”

  Chen Ai rushed back toward the camp with the log on her back, while Song Shuai struggled to carry her club. Jiangshi floated down behind them as silent as moths.

  The cultivators quickly stacked wood into the center of the camp.

  “Hurry!”

  An emaciated jiangshi floated down into the camp. He wore tattered robes and trousers stained black with dirt and rot, and a long war scythe was strapped to his arm where his hand had fallen off. He swung the scythe with a stiff arm and pirouetted into a whirling blade of death.

  Chen Ai blocked, and when the scythe struck her deep iron club it shattered. Shrapnel flew out, and a piece punctured into her thigh as another scratched her cheek.

  A stiff arm swung a war scythe that gleamed with a dark, oily substance. Chen Ai roared as poison raced through her veins. She pushed back, and the jiangshi darted backwards in the same movement that the swordswoman used to escape earlier.

  Chen Ai pursued, leaping after the creature and swinging mid-air into the jiangshi’s head. The corpse twisted to defend, but the scythe’s splintered shaft was no match for Chen Ai’s meteoric club.

  Gore splattered out, and the headless corpse hit the ground like a bag of wet manure.

  Chen Ai staggered as she hit the ground, the world swaying around her as she blinked heavy eyelids. Jiangshi descended, their dead gasps draining at her from all angles. Her skin swelled and split, bleeding…

  Thunder clapped, and lightning flashed. Song Shuai grabbed her, and thunder clapped again as he pulled her away from the jiangshi’s wicked kiss.

  The spear-wielding cultivator staggered, dropping Chen Ai as blood trickled from his nose, but he pointed his spear at the gathered wood and cycled his qi.

  A bolt of wriggling lightning struck the wood. Flames flickered and burst into existence. Ran Yaliu fanned the flames as Ran Qin played a song to broaden the light. The wooden pile stood taller than any of the cultivators, and flames roared toward the stars.

  A collective hiss came from the trees as the Jiangshi floated down to encircle the camp, but as the flames grew, the dead creatures hopped backwards to avoid the warm firelight. It was a standoff, for now.

  “We have to last until morning,” Chen Ai said as she tried to stand and failed. “We have to figure out the poison as well…”

  She slumped down to the ground, her fingers prying at the piece of shrapnel in her leg. It slid out, and blood followed. Dark, tar-like residue coated the fingersized piece of metal. Nausea crawled up Chen Ai’s throat before she slumped backwards, not quite losing consciousness, but feeling dark slumber pressing between her horns with all the weight of the night sky.

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  “We have to wait for senior brother… he’ll save us…”

  ###

  The Plum Blossom technique cloaked me as I ran in a wide circle through the forest of tall pale trees. By overriding the muscles that controlled my eyes, I was able to look in two directions at once. One eye looked ahead to avoid any of the roots that twisted out of the foliage to snare at my ankles and catapult me towards a cranium-smashing tree. The other eye remained locked onto the tall, suspicious tree that stood as though nothing hid behind its slender, skinlike trunk.

  But I know what I saw.

  It happened again and again.

  A tree stepped behind another tree, and watched me from between branches, but now I was watching it in return. We were at an impasse, where it didn’t move, and I didn’t look away. While it was observed, I heard no strange footsteps in the leaves.

  My senses told me there was nothing behind the tree, but I ignored them as I ran closer, blood pumping through my muscles.

  I was close enough to count the number of tree branches.

  Roots snaked out of the dry leaves and reached for my feet. I leaped over them, but one eye alone is not the best for depth perception, and though I did my best, a root grabbed me and sent me stumbling.

  Blood flowed from my muscles into my gloves, and I reached forward to stop my fall.

  I was moving too fast, as though someone pushed me in the back.

  Glaring, I slammed into the leaf-covered ground.

  My arms reached out to stop my fall, but they snapped like brittle twigs, and my forehead slammed into a hard, fist-sized rock that cut my forehead and struck my brain. A normal person would have been dead, but I was just annoyed.

  No…

  I was enraged.

  There must be a soul in these woods, just like in the Dancing Blades Field. There was no path, and it was twisting the way to ensure I remained lost. My brain healed, but I lay in wait without moving.

  A footstep crunched on leaves.

  My body screamed at me to move, but I resisted the impulse as more footsteps crunched closer. Whatever was influencing the forest and turning it into a deadly trap was also inflicting an aura of anxiety and fear, and I refused to let it affect me.

  “I can’t die,” I whispered to myself. “Not now, not here, and not ever.”

  While the shifting trees and roots likely were the properties of a soul bound into the environment, the sound that came from the crunching leaves was definitely something approaching me. Something of flesh and blood.

  Something I could kill.

  But every time I turned around, the pale forest hid it from me.

  The footsteps continued to crunch in a wide search pattern. My stealth technique hid me from view, but whatever unseen thing was out there knew I’d fallen. The second I stopped drawing on the Plum Blossom qi, it would come for me.

  So, I reached for my qi and paused for a full second as I wrestled with my anxiety, before I released the stealth technique. Soundlessly, I popped back into view, and the footsteps crunched towards me.

  I reached for my poison qi. With my shadow qi disabled, there was no resistance to drawing the poison qi, and my earlier theory was instantly proven right. I had resisted experimentation earlier because while the shadowy qi stuck close to me, I’d sensed that Ran Cong’s poison qi was the opposite: it wished to disperse.

  I pushed it as hard as I could, releasing a cloud of murky, poisonous vapors into the air. The footsteps skidded to a halt, and leaves flew into the air as the unseen creature screeched in pain. I turned as the screech choked away and found my assailant. A tall, thin creature, like a wax human, stretched to the point of breaking. Pallid flesh dripped and oozed from their bones as blood flowed from their eyes. The poison hung around them like gaseous chains, and they sagged to their knees, still taller than me. A long-fingered hand weakly reached out for me, and I was reminded of the amalgamated monster that tried to pull me back into my facility.

  Like then, I reached out and grasped the gigantic hand with my own.

  “Are you like me?” I asked. “Are you human?”

  The creature smiled, and blood pooled in its dark eyes before it fell to the ground dead and unable to answer.

  A mournful wind blew through the trees, and they crowded down around me, pressing in as though I were in the middle of a deep copse. Blood flowed around my hands, and I lashed out at them. The wind howled. My fists struck bark, branches whipped my face, roots snarled my legs, and my swelling muscles ripped them from the ground.

  The mournful wind faded.

  I looked around, but the tall creature’s corpse had vanished -- taken by the trees. The forest appeared as though it never moved at all… maybe it hadn’t… even though I knew what I saw, there was no evidence of anything. Was I going crazy?

  “You got away!” called out the river. “Follow my voice back to me so I can lead you back upstream.”

  “Yeah…”

  I took one last look at the pale forest with the corpses in the trees, and saw what I was looking for: a gigantic corpse impaled on a branch, long limbs reaching almost towards the ground as the slim creature’s face dripped to the ground. Taking one last look at the experiment, I turned around to leave…

  But something glimmered in the moonlight, something I hadn’t noticed earlier, maybe something that hadn’t been there before: a small brick structure with a familiar iron door that stood ever so slightly ajar.

  I glanced at the impaled experiment.

  “Were you guarding that structure?”

  The trees said nothing.

  “I bet they were,” I said to the Butcher Bird. “But does that mean you want me to enter? Or not?”

  Like the trees, the Butcher Bird, if it was watching, remained silent.

  I stared at the door for a minute.

  “Whatever. I don’t care.”

  I turned around and walked towards the river.

  After a few minutes, I turned around and sprinted back toward the forest. The door waited for me in the moonlight.

  “Damnit, damnit, damnit!” I muttered under my breath as I raced closer and pushed through the open door.

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