The pitted stone looked alive in the soft, flickering candlelight, as though the vast cavern breathed and swelled around the horrid mass in the center. My brain refused to make sense of what I saw. There were so many…

  Faces.

  Men and women and children all stitched together, only their faces, with eyes closed and lips pressed in firm smiles. There must have been hundreds of faces, all of them stitched and wrapped together until they formed a grotesque pillar like a twisted ribbon of paper. The earth around the pillar was scooped out in a perfectly circular fashion. Though the pillar was still, it felt as though it were spinning, as though I watched it drill ever so slowly into the earth — just as that strange grey stone drilled down from the sky…

  The faces were long dead — they had to be, they must be — but I couldn’t be certain in that yellow, feverish light.

  I only had one thought: no wonder they wore masks; if I did things like this, I too would hide from my fellow man just as thoroughly as I hid from the heavens.

  The Butcher Bird mistook my horrified expression for one of awe.

  “It was difficult to keep the patient’s face intact while ensuring their body ruptured in the most painful way possible. The pain was necessary for the manifestation of the curse, you understand.”

  “You’re monsters.”

  The Butcher Bird sighed.

  “I’d hoped you would be more enlightened, especially since you are living — well, persisting — proof of the Hidden Lotus’s glorious experiments!”

  “Why would anyone do this?”

  “Why does a cultivator do anything? To challenge the heavens and achieve immortality.”

  I felt sick.

  Was that what I was? A stepping stone on the road to immortality for some sick bastard.

  I’d already sworn in my heart to destroy the Butcher Bird, but that icy anger now thawed with incandescent rage. The Butcher Bird was not enough; I needed to destroy the valley, and the valley was not enough; I needed to destroy the Hidden Lotus.

  Whoever that ancient cultivator was that I saw in my vision, with his needles and his wrinkled face and inhuman eyes, he’d made me a part of this, and I would destroy him as well.

  Yes, hissed my weaponized self. Kill them all! Eat them all! They are fuel for us!

  My other past selves swirled in the back of my mind, their presences quiet, but none of them presented any counterarguments.

  I forced myself to witness the monstrosity once more: a ring of people stripped of humanity, their flesh drained for cement, their skin dried for canvas, bones reassembled into scaffolding and tied with sinew into shapes most unpleasing to the eye, and all of it radiating the bleak aura that told me this happened while they were alive and crying for help that never came.

  Before I turned to the Butcher Bird, I pulled the tears back inside my body. It would do no good to show this monster any weakness.

  “What did this pointless cruelty achieve?” I asked.

  “Pointless?!”

  The Butcher Bird shattered my legs with a sweep of its wing, and I tumbled across the floor, gasping in agony, until I was lying right beside the grotesque pile. The closest face was that of a child, skin so soft, and eyes gently closed as though in sleep, but there was no movement, and, up close, I could smell in their blood and flesh that they were dead.

  It brought me joy to know that whatever this monstrous creation was, it no longer existed as anything but a corpse.

  The Butcher Bird flew around the pillar like a proud architect giving a tour.

  “Through this work of art, my masters finally pierced the barrier between our world and the demonic. Their unsung effort advanced demonic cultivation by leaps and bounds!”

  Blood pooled beneath my body from my destroyed legs and soaked into my clothes. The attacks from the Nascent Soul spirit beast always brought more pain than any purely physical attack could inflict, and it took me a moment to wrestle control back over my blood, but, by then, it was too late.

  My blood flowed into my pocket and touched the grey stone carved with the likeness of an eye. The Butcher Bird continued to rant and rave about the necessities of sacrifice and the wonders of pursuing knowledge, but its voice faded away as the grey stone’s heat flowed through me.

  ###

  The saber stood in the ground, blade tip buried, handle to the sky, eye tracking the human body that only recently learned how to walk. Who the man once was didn’t matter, for he had become nothing but clay to the demonic forces pulling at the strings of his body. Darkness in his eyes that had nothing to do with light and shadow. The naked man with black hair crawled forward like a dog until he approached the sword.

  The Butcher Bird’s voice was an unmistakable rumble.

  “Pick up the saber,” it said.

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  The dark eyes searched and found the fluffy bird where it perched on a thick-stemmed flower.

  “I don’t want to fight,” said the man with a voice that sounded like someone practising how to be human and getting uncomfortably close. “I just want to talk.”

  “Then do it.”

  The man reached out and grasped the saber, his palm closing around the eye, the heat and sweat of his skin touching the grey stone.

  A spark without light.

  Flesh bubbled and twisted as the fingers strengthened their grip around the saber and pulled the might blade from the earthen sheathe. The man staggered backwards, his muscles rippling and twisting as a fleshy tendril uncoiled from his chest. Fingers burst from the tendril’s tip as the grey stone prompted new growth — a new hand to grasp the other sabers stabbed into the ground.

  ###

  I gasped as the memory faded.

  There’d been no pain in that man’s face. No emotions at all. Not that the grey stone would pick up on them, but I could still feel the inhuman grasp of that palm, the wrong dispersal of pressure, the lack of hesitancy, or flickering tension; it was like a vice of flesh and blood and bone…

  A living weapon.

  My blood cooled in a wide pool around me. Flesh flowed reflexisively frm my reservoir, recreating the muscles of my legs and even transmuting into bone. It was just as hard to convert flesh into bone as it was to convert blood. I wanted to fully unseal my bone reservoir, but I needed more demonic qi.

  I sat up, shaking my head as I once more was inside myself.

  The stone memories always left a sour taste in my mouth like I’d choked on a metal slug. This one in particular left me lightheaded. There’d been insight into a skill there, in using regeneration to make new flesh, rather than just replace the old.

  But since the grey stone was inside the sword handle, rather than inside the person’s body, I was less intimately aware of how the manipulation was performed.

  One thing was for certain, I was glad I took the grey stones when I had the chance.

  If any members of the expedition touched those saber handles, they would have been transformed…

  Unless they simply exploded.

  I drew on the memory as I took control over my regenerations. My legs emerged from my body, and I noticed patterns in the muscles and veins that I’d always taken for granted.

  This latest grey stone vision had opened my eyes, but this hadn’t necessarily made things easier. Before, I hadn’t known what I didn’t know, and so I’d simply thrown more matter at my regeneration to make it work faster, but now I realized how many complicated processes were actually occurring.

  As well as realizing that I simply didn’t understand any of them.

  My legs finished healing and I stood.

  The Butcher Bird returned to roosting in my hair.

  “I think you understand,” it said.

  I didn’t.

  “I do.”

  “I have a new proposition for you.”

  I almost groaned aloud. Did it want to change the deal? Again? Keeping track of what this spirit beast wanted was exhausting, and trying to predict what would come next was maddening, so I decided to abandon that altogether.

  Going forward, I would focus on my own plans first.

  “What’s your proposition?”

  “This portal, as you can see, is dead.”

  “I can see that.”

  And a good thing, too.

  “It is not the only portal.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yes, my masters were enthused by the success here, and so they moved onto bigger and better things.”

  Monsters!

  “How interesting,” I said. “But what does this have to do with me?”

  “I want your help to reopen this portal.”

  I glanced up, and the Butcher Bird leaned over my forehead to look into my eyes. Silence passed between us.

  This felt less like a proposition and more like a pronouncement. How could I argue with something like this?

  “Is my ritual not payment enough?”

  “That is a separate affair.”

  I glanced at the twisted ribbon of faces. How many deaths? How much suffering? Well, enough to twist the world until curses leaked out…

  But if this monstrous thing was truly a source of demonic qi, then maybe I could…

  Use it to harness enough power to destroy the Butcher Bird!

  It should have been a ridiculous thought, especially coming from my weaponized self, but in the heat of our anger, in the face of so much suffering, there was a certain logic to the plan. Demonic Qi allowed me to kill Ghost Fang; it could help me again.

  “I’m listening. Tell me what to do.”

  ###

  The jiangshi fled the dawn, silently hopping away into the darkness of the forest until they vanished amongst the trees. After watching long enough for an incense stick to burn and seeing nothing, the expedition cultivators finally breathed a little easier.

  One threat was gone, but though they’d made it through the night, nobody felt like celebrating.

  Shen Tongtong had not woken, and Chen Ai was barely conscious. Only the horned cultivator's bloodline and her grass affinity kept her from fully succumbing to the jiangshi’s poisoned weapon.

  As the bonfire died, Ran Qin studied a pill furnace intently, intermittently looking between the poison tome and the clay jar they’d found on the swordswoman.

  The spirit herbs in the furnace slowly transmuted through the combination of intense heat and delicate qi control. This wasn’t her first attempt, and it was the last of the appropriate spirit herbs.

  Light flashed from within the furnace, and a yellow-green pill rattled at the bottom. Ran Qin used her qi to pull the pill out and presented it to the watching cultiavtors.

  “This will counter the effects of the Night Swallow Poison used on the weapons.”

  Shen Botao’s face was pale with lack of sleep and his own, still bleeding injury, but he mustered up the energy to protest.

  “There’s only one pill!”

  “As ever, I’m impressed by a Shen’s mathematical abilities,” said Ran Qin. “There is indeed only one pill.”

  “You Ran dog! If you spent more time studying alchemy and less time barking about it, then you wouldn’t have wasted all those herbs!”

  Ran Qin flushed at that, but before she could add more fuel to the growing fire, Song Shuai stepped between the two clan members.

  “We should give the pill to Chen Ai,” he said.

  “What?” said Shen Botao. “Why?

  “Because she’s the closest to recovering already, and we don’t know if one pill is enough to counteract the amount of poison that Shen Tongtong received.”

  “We should give it to Shen Tongtong, so that she can at least be awake. Chen Ai is awake already.”

  Song Shuai scoffed.

  “You want to travel through a Forbidden Zone with two barely conscious people? It will be a lot easier with only one, and I would rather have the stronger cultivator awake and watching my back.”

  There was nothing Shen Botao could say to that, but, surprisingly, it was Ran Qin who offered comfort.

  “You’re right that I used up the herbs, but that’s not the last of them. Ran Cong planned on gathering more of these herbs within this valley. If we continue north and deviate slightly to enter a nearby marsh, then we’ll be able to gather as much of the medicinal spirit herbs as we’ll ever need.”

  Shen Botao huffed, but nodded.

  “Thank you.”

  Ran Qin offered him a polite nod before giving the pill to Chen Ai.

  It didn’t take long for the horned cultivator to cycle her qi and break down the pill. After vomiting up some poisonous bile, she stood ready to continue.

  “I agree with Ran Qin’s proposal,” she said. “We need more antidote for when those jiangshi come back. So long as everyone is happy to follow me, I say we continue as soon as we can. My senior brother will rejoin us when he can.”

  “About that…” Ran Qin said.

  Chen Ai frowned at Ran Qin’s tone.

  “What is it?”

  “Honor demands that this is now a Ran expedition.”

  “What? No, you can’t be serious…”

  Chen Ai’s face sank as Ran Qin smiled triumphantly.

  “Your senior brother said that Ran Yaliu would be in charge if he didn’t return.”

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