“My black furred son. My mightiest warrior and my last remaining child, you fought the male cultivator from the village?”
The yellow fire in the black monkey’s eyes paled as Ghost Fang relaxed whatever demonic presence he impressed upon the black monkey’s mind.
“I did,” growled the black monkey. “He killed my brother, and so I took revenge. I found him dull and weak and flavourless.”
“He had no qi?”
The black monkey nodded.
“His heart held no flavor.”
“So you think he is mortal?”
“He must be,” said the black monkey.
“Interesting,” said Ghost Fang. “Very interesting. How do you suppose this weak, flavorless mortal defeated all my soldiers? How do you suppose he killed your brother?”
The black monkey frowned and thought, before shaking his head with a growl.
“I don’t know.”
“I wish your sister were alive,” Ghost Fang said with a sigh. “She always had the best imagination of any of you.”
The black furred monkey stumbled backward. “My sister is dead?”
“Yes,” Ghost Fang said absentmindedly. “That cultivator you were dismissing killed her.”
The black monkey swung his studded iron club into the floor with a thunderous crash that widened the vapor-spewing cracks.
“Impossible!” he shouted. “I ripped out his heart before the soldiers ate him! They stripped his flesh from his bones!”
Ghost Fang’s malicious intent seeped into the air.
“Are you calling me a liar?”
The black monkey fell to his knees and kowtowed.
“Of course not, great Ghost Fang!” he said as he pressed his forehead to the ground.
“Good. I watched through the eyes of my soldiers as he bested my daughter in a battle of qi control.”
“Impossible…” muttered the black monkey to himself.
“Then, this cultivator that you so foolishly dismissed tore havoc through my soldiers until the losses were so great I was forced to withdraw!”
Rage and killing intent radiated off of Ghost Fang. The force buffeted Qian Ling where she sat, but the focus of the weight fell onto the black monkey’s shoulders and drove his face into the ground.
“I shouldn’t have underestimated him, Ghost Fang!” the black monkey pleaded. “I should have brought you his skull!”
“No…” Ghost Fang said. “He can mask his qi better than anyone I’ve ever seen before. His qi control is exquisite. His fighting form is above reproach. You never stood a chance. I am disappointed that you didn’t see the threat he posed, but how could you have known?”
“I don’t know?”
Ghost Fang stood and walked down the roots toward his supplicating son.
“That was a rhetorical question,” Ghost Fang said as he slapped the black monkey hard enough to send him tumbling head over heels.
The clap echoed through the hollow pagoda.
“Don’t worry,” Ghost Fang said. “This stranger is actually family. We share a past, he and I, and I might even call him brother.”
“I have an uncle?” the black monkey asked as he sat up.
Ghost Fang sighed.
“Where did I go wrong?” he said. “What was my mistake?”
The black monkey frowned.
“I thought I made the mistake?”
The black monkey was nine feet tall with bulging muscles, but he was like a doll when Ghost Fang placed his massive hands on his son’s shoulders.
“Close your eyes.”
The black monkey closed his eyes with a child’s intensity.
Ghost Fang wasted no time.
The flames in his eyes flared to life and cast a pure white light across the interior of the pagoda that was almost blinding even to Qian Ling’s qi-enhanced eyes.
The light burned, and the black monkey dropped his jaw in a scream that came like a whistling kettle. Glowing energy flowed out of the black monkey’s mouth. The stream was the color of oil on water as it twisted through the air and flowed into Ghost Fang’s nostrils.
Even at a distance, demonic qi wriggled against Qian Ling’s skin. Metallic qi was also present in the mix, like the taste of iron. There was something else there, though, deeper than the qi, more substantial, like the difference between a hole and a puddle.
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Qian Ling could only guess that this deeper presence was whatever passed for the black monkey’s soul — the slumped, screaming expression that stretched across the iridescent liquid like it was a wax sculpture in the sun only enforced that idea.
The strange, demonic liquid seemed to flow for hours, but after mere seconds, Ghost Fang snorted the last wriggling spark.
The black monkey collapsed like a pile of incense ash. The ever-present wind blew down from the pagoda pine branches and swept away the remains. Nothing, not even a smudge, remained.
Ghost Fang sighed as he rubbed at his stomach. Power pulsed from him, even greater than before.
“My last child is gone,” he said solemnly as he walked back up to his throne amongst the roots.
“You’re a monster,” Qian Ling murmured.
He shrugged.
“I’ve simply wiped the slate clean so I can start a new family,” he said, mostly to himself. “A new experiment, one that shall promise better results. But first, I must know… who are you, brother? What have you brought to my kingdom?”
“He is your destruction,” Qian Ling whispered to herself, half-hoping, half-praying.
Ghost Fang’s eyes flashed with fire as her words reached his ears.
“I refuse to let fear rule me,” he said. “I will test his nature and determine for myself. Then, you will see. The only doom that comes is yours.”
His eyes turned blindingly bright as he cast his mind out on his astral technique.
###
I walked in my tattered robe through the forest in the center of a parade of monkeys. The flames in their eyes flickered and pulsed in the same pattern as the statue that marched alongside us — Ghost Fang’s presence, no doubt.
Though I knew he was watching, he didn’t speak to me as we marched through the forest. We followed no path, and the monkeys moved at the same speed, swinging through trees as they did, clambering over logs.
I did my best to keep pace.
The uneasy truce between us was predicated on mutual destruction. Ghost Fang had decided that it wasn’t worth his time or resources to try to kill me, and he assumed I felt the same about his monkeys.
He was wrong about two things:
-
He couldn’t destroy me.
-
I hadn’t forgiven him, or his monkeys.
Though I’d felt some reluctance about fighting in the open, Ghost Fang’s willingness to destroy the village had doomed him in my eyes. The fact that he called me a brother was the only reason I was walking along with him. He knew something, and soon, so would I.
My plan was simple: learn whatever information he knew about my identity, my powers, and the demonic cultivators that were responsible for my situation, and then destroy him.
Judging from the flame in the eyes of the monkeys, they were all under Ghost Fang’s influence, if not his direct control. Which meant they were just tools of flesh and blood — and Ghost Fang’s attitude reinforced that view. Something about that rubbed me the wrong way.
“You alright, kid?” Cabbagy whispered to me from where I cradled him in my arms. “There’s an intensity in your eyes I haven’t seen before.”
“I’m fine, Cabbagy,” I said.
“You’re plotting.”
“Yes.”
“Good,” Cabbagy said. “A warrior without a strategy is nothing more than a fool with a weapon.”
“I know.”
“Don’t forget your priorities,” he said.
“The flower?”
“The hotties,” Cabbagy corrected me. “Mu Min and her silver friend — whatever her name is — they need our help.”
I nodded.
“I know.”
I might not have a soft spot for cultivators like I did for mortals, but denying Ghost Fang was enough of a reason.
A light flickered ahead in the trees. It was small, but bright in the darkness pervading the pines.
“What’s that?” I asked the procession of monkeys.
One of them turned and grinned.
“Trespassers,” Ghost Fang whispered coarsely through the lesser monkey’s fanged mouth. “Do not worry, they have paid their fines.”
“What did you do to them?”
“Nothing you can prevent.”
“Kid,” Cabbagy whispered to me. “Keep the strategy in mind. Save the pretty girls, remember?”
I barely heard him as I stared ahead at the flickering light through the trees. That dancing spark felt like a flame of anger in my heart, but I knew that no matter how many times my heart was destroyed and regrown, that anger would remain.
I couldn’t stop thinking of the farmhouse that I’d stumbled upon, and how close to destruction that family was.
I’d heard legends of heart demons, and to be honest, I’d never understood what they were, but in that moment, I felt as though a demon were eating my heart.
“Kid!” Cabbagy said. “You’re squeezing me too damn tight!”
I glanced down at the offensive vegetable.
“Sorry.”
I tucked him into my robe and left the monkey parade.
The monkeys stopped walking, and the statue groaned to a halt.
“Where are you going?” Ghost Fang asked me. “There are no resources for you there.”
“I’ll judge that for myself.”
I picked up the pace, leaving the monkeys temporarily behind.
The flickering light revealed itself to be a lit candle sitting inside a window. It was the sole point of brightness in a homestead swept over by night’s inky dark.
The door was smashed in, and the smell of blood hung in the air. My footsteps disturbed sleeping flies as I entered the shack.
I ignored the monkeys as they approached from behind, crawling through the undergrowth like the pale demons they were.
Inside, the single-room shack was in disarray. Deep scratches carved up the wooden walls. Two corpses lay huddled in a corner, the flesh chewed from their bones until even gender was indistinguishable.
The flickering anger grew in my heart, but none of that fire touched my face.
“Why did you eat them?”
“They trespassed on my kingdom,” Ghost Fang said through the statue with a voice like sliding gravel.
“It looks like they lived here for years. Why attack them now?”
A frown distorted the eyes of dripping glass.
“You know why…” said Ghost Fang. “You must have felt the signal.”
“Pretend I don’t know what you mean,” I said as I turned to the statue in the yard with my icy fury. “Explain to me as though I were one of your mindless monkeys.”
Fire guttered in the statue’s eyes for a moment, and the silence stretched between us to the point that I thought Ghost Fang wouldn’t answer.
At last, the statue spoke.
“I have lived in this ape, in this damned forest, for years, and I was almost as mindless as these lice picking spirit beats. Then, two days ago, I heard the tolling of my master’s bell.”
“Bell?”
“A wave of demonic qi rolled through this region. It was faint, but my astral qi specialisation could pick it up without effort. The signal awoke dreams inside me, the dreams of my master, of my purpose.”
“What is your purpose?”
“The same as you,” the statue said with a growing smile of seeping glass. “To propel the agenda of the Hidden Lotus and destroy the false emperor of the Heavenly Phoenix Empire.”
There was an appeal in the statue’s voice. A longing. It brought to mind my first conversations with Drippy long ago, that desperate desire to be heard.
I tried to puzzle through what Ghost Fang told me.
Ghost Fang was either fishing for information or believed me to be the same as him… whatever he was. He must have come from a facility like mine. Though maybe not Ghost Fang himself, but whatever demonic presence rode him like a parasite.
“These people had nothing to do with that,” I said. “They were innocent.”
The monkeys all shrugged as one.
“They are resources,” they said in unison.
I had entertained thoughts of defeating Ghost Fang and letting him live. If his troops scattered, and he stayed away from people, then he could go free. I didn’t see him as a brother, but if he was truly a victim of the facility, then he deserved a chance.
All those thoughts tasted like ash in my mouth as I met the fiery gaze of the statue. I smiled and swore to myself that I would destroy them all.