The foul wind in the cave blasted with renewed vigor. A thrum of cold like a winter storm going down the tunnel halls from the epicenter, or what Hao assumed was the epicenter—the very core of the mountain.

  Hao tried to stop his forward momentum. He would rather fight all the people chasing him from behind than go forward into that space, which made his skin crawl and mind reel. It started again, the feelings and voice he managed to chase away once before. Two voices spoke back and forth. One voice telling a long-winded tale of the Immortal and the Demonic Tree Spirit.

  Again, he tried pushing it out of his mind, flooding his thoughts with other memories. Not these false ones that the cave was forcing him to relive and feel. The first thoughts were positive, things he could see again if he was just outside, or outside the Mid-Summer Secret Realm. The sun and the rain, the moon, when summer ends. Meiqi and Zhengqi sit down with Grandma He and hear stories about Grandpa. A wistful dream of Cultivation in peace on the mountain, and coming to understand the world.

  Of course, Hao couldn’t keep the less peaceful thoughts at bay. For a moment, just a brief one, not even a breath, he thought the blood dripping from his fingers wasn’t him. Then his thoughts went silent. A third voice spoke, its sound filled the mountain. He felt a chill, as if he were a normal mortal again, standing out on the icy ground during a summer night.

  “Finally, Finally, Too Slow!”

  Hao heard the voice before. As soon as he first entered the trial, before he tended to all the wounds he had gathered from his chase with Meng Hongyu.

  The two other voices started to speak back and forth, telling a tale. Repeating themselves, the words cycled over and over like they were mindless puppets made for the task. When they reached the end of the story, as the tiger approached the Demon Tree Spirit and the Immortal, the words became a scrambled mess. As it started over during the momentary pause, the sound of claws ripping up stone echoed.

  Hao had heard the story enough times already. He reached into the space of the Spirit-Holding bag and looked for the token as he hopelessly approached the glowing entryway. Squeezing down on the peach wood tile. He tried to break it, perhaps it would work, this one last desperate attempt to escape.

  It crumbled through his fingers like wet sand.

  Nothing changed. Hao kept forward, passing the doorway. The light that filled the room blinded him; no sight, but the scent told him what kind of room it would be. He wanted to reach up, to cover his mouth, and plug his nose. Anything, anything.

  Hao was sinking deeper, losing footing. When he finally got both of his feet to stop moving, he was shoved forward, the last of the badge falling through his fingers, not destroying it, not helping him at all.

  Bodies slammed into Hao’s back, as blind as Hao from days of living in the dark underground of the mountain. If they remembered the goal of their pursuit, they would have run him through. The sound of footsteps was still far from stopping. More people flooded in from behind.

  “It’s perfect, one of them here!” The voice echoed again.

  The story starts repeating, the third voice speaking over them, and talking to itself.

  “His physique is good, nothing special, but there is something unique about it, washed clean…”

  “But, his soul… It’s strong, is this one truly Reclamation—trained, natural talent, perhaps?”

  “Perhaps? He has to be Reclamation—he wouldn’t be able to pass the restrictions otherwise. Only I am bold enough to breach the restrictions to reach these peaceful lovers.”

  “Mhm. We will have to whittle his soul down.”

  Hao’s feet began to move again. He resisted as much as he could while the echo of voices reverberated in his head, but it seemed futile to fight himself when everyone else was shoving him forward. The smell of decay and molding bones grew stronger with each inch forward. It was worse than a tiger’s den. His eyes started to adjust to the light. He felt like he was holding onto a cliff, looking down on himself—it was a struggle just to keep himself in his own body.

  The first thing he saw was a withered tree. Stone-like branches bent towards the ground, never reaching the stone floor. Bark long turned gray from the unimpeded decay that was natural to the world. Not a single leaf or flower shone in the light cascading down from the hole in the ceiling, which appeared to be the center of the mountain.

  Hao could imagine it standing tall and proud on a cliff surrounded by lavender leaves in a field of blue flowers that bowed to it each night. No longer. He knew the tree for what it was once, not the corpse that it was before him. A skeletal rib cage that was a dull, moldy yellow, sticking from its hollow core in the center of its gray mass.

  The tree was not the only thing in the room. The sight of the people standing in a circle around the dead tree made Hao fight harder, their slack jaws and glazed over eyes. They seemed like corpses standing with their backs straight, their chests moving up and down. Many had bones showing beyond chunks of missing flesh.

  NO! Hao screamed in his head. His sight flicked around the rest of the room. Stacked on the wall beyond the edges of the raised natural plinth of stone, where the tree and circle of people stood, were bones. Piles of bones like fallen pillars grew green and black with years of mold and moss.

  He wanted to fall over. To puke, to cough, and shout. Yet he couldn’t, his body stilled as his mind reeled, steeped in the horrifying reality that fate had brewed for him. He couldn’t cough, despite feeling the gag gathering in the back of his throat. The feeling was only made worse as he came to know why those people with grievous wounds stood perfectly still in the center of the room. Unable to create tears for their drying eyes. Hao managed to slide his slightly back, pushed forward more by those behind him.

  “There are too many people gathered—get rid of them. Holding all of them is hard. I can’t tell which it is—we don’t need the new ones, just the first few that came in. Now, now.”

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  The light shining down from the ceiling shuddered. A group of wispy lines making up a figure passed through it. The heat haze-like shadow appeared and disappeared after just a breath.

  The breath behind Hao started to vanish. Two of the five people walking ahead of him disappeared, gone at the snap of a finger.

  “The rest are gone now. It will be one of these four.”

  Hao saw the wispy figure again, just a hand cutting dust in the air, reaching out. It landed on the shoulder of a young man in yellow robes. The saber on his back glittered because of the light from the ceiling. The young man’s robes seemed to expand. His saber fell from his back, letting out a long ring as it clattered to the ground. Dark hair turned gray and fell away from his scalp, floating in the subtle wind blowing down the skylight.

  “No…”

  The wispy haze of a hand blocked out the light a while longer. Slowly, it pushed beyond the robe and flesh, and it vanished. The robe fell off the man’s shoulders, exposing his once muscular frame. Now just skin and bones. The disciple of Two Rivers Fort in his ill-sized yellow robe stood for a second longer before collapsing.

  “A foul taste, a weak soul, pitiable strength.”

  Hao felt the pressure of control over him slip for just a moment. The chill in the air had gone for just a breath. He ripped his foot from the ground, sliding it back before the pressure returned. It grew stronger. Like a finger was freed after killing one of them, it spread to those left over. Hao kept pushing, feeling his muscles strain. It wasn’t like being paralyzed, no, that happened just moments ago. He was losing control of his own body, his feet trying to go forward towards the rise where the tree slouched.

  “Junior…”

  Hao heard Lang’s voice, which came out like an interrupted plea. He kept pushing, not responding as the man he had spent days, if not weeks, with walked forward. Hao couldn’t move his mouth to speak and keep control of his legs at the same time.

  “It must be this one. Look, while the others go forward, this one is fighting me. Mhm. How strange.”

  “Ha! Good, I will bring the others over, he is hard to control, hard to control. We will consume them for strength if we can’t get inside him.”

  Lang stopped walking forward. He turned, looking at Hao, his eyes wide. Another man did the same. In a White cloak, his eyes were already rolled into the back of his head. Each of his steps was coordinated in a manner only a puppet would move. Lang had a bit more stall in his movements. It seemed tears gathered on the face of the older man, gray facial hair catching highlights from the first light anyone had seen in what seemed an age.

  Hao’s heart sank in his chest. I will have to watch… Watch the man who just saved me from Yao die, shriveled up and discarded like the Two Rivers Fort disciple.

  Hao clenched his jaw, his sunken heart suddenly pounded, growing faster until his skin felt like it was on fire. A red shade coated his skin, veins popping out on his face, along his nose and forehead, down his neck. Blue-Green serpent-like tendril, his veins writhed beneath his skin as he forced his mouth and hand open. He tried yelling, throwing out a palm strike. It was slow, like he was moving underwater, as thick as jelly. He felt heavy.

  “He is fighting hard, hahaha, this is why I should have suppressed that little tortoise down the hall for them.”

  “But it got you all here, a fair trade.”

  “Enough. suppress him, bring him over to the light, bring them all together. I waited long enough. Food and a vessel, Ha!”

  Hao saw a shadow, ethereal, not fully there, yet its presence was as clear as rain during a storm. A featureless, smooth orb with a withered hand that reached for him. Trying to reach out and intercept the hand, his dirt-filled fingers’ nails phased through the brown, hazy hand. It touched his forehead. Something shot through him, whipped him, a wave of pain engulfed him, worse than a sword strike bisecting him, or a burn rendering his flesh and fat. He felt something deep inside get struck. It started between his eyes and shot down to both of his large toes.

  Hao let out a single chuckle before a hysterical scream tore up his throat and splattered the base of his tongue with blood. “Ha…” he couldn’t hear his own scream, his mind engulfed in pain.

  “He is still standing. And quiet the roar, keke, the other two can walk him over to that damn tree…”

  Lang and the other man grabbed one of Hao’s arms each, pulling on them as Hao’s feet began to shuffle on their own. The walk was long, or was it just the shattered minds of the men that made it seem long? They walked a winding path, Lang and the other man moving backwards and never missing a step despite being blind to the location and destination.

  Hao’s eyes somehow went wider while staring into the face of Lang, a single tear managing to roll down his face. His jaw hung slack, and his eyes twitched with desperation to close.

  Once the actual pain faded and only the aftershock of the sensation remained, Hao began to resist again. The rapidly aging face of those in front of him, and the corpse-like puppets around the tree they approached, urged him harder. He resisted moving his feet, and the strength of Lang and this man wasn’t all there while they were being controlled.

  “Impressive, but stubborn. Do it again, suppress him.”

  “I can’t, we are running out of strength—we will have to replenish. It seems like a waste.”

  “Nonsense! A vessel is right in front of us. There is no time to waste.”

  The hazy shadow, an orb without flesh or bone but with evil intent, swam around them in the air, formless yet casting a shadow.

  “I will eat one of them then, the one with the stronger soul, hmhm, they are untrained, it should be fine.”

  A hand, just the outline, formed from ripples in the air, like a brown string without a center and core, reached out for Lang. It was just about to touch his shoulder when Hao managed to move his lips.

  “Wait…” The words came out hoarse, the voice unrecognizable.

  Hao felt his stomach clench. Why did he have to speak? Why did he have to run from Meng Hongyu and enter the trial ground he knew was suspicious—Why pursue the Polarity Flower—For strength? For what reason did he need strength, to protect himself, to avenge Grandpa He, to protect people like Meiqi and Zhengqi? To go home and smile at his parents.

  Hao looked at Lang, a man he didn’t know enough about to be considered worth saving. No, not a man worth risking his life for at all. He had no reason to save him. But the man spared him from a pinch. Was it enough, perhaps letting Yao have me and do what she wished was a better fate than this?

  His voice came out as a growl, “Let him go—And I won’t… fight this control… not in—this moment…”

  A silence spun throughout the stone chamber of corpses and towers of bones.

  “I will do it, I don’t want to wait any longer, this is already burning energy…”

  “I think I am right, okay, yes, good. Perhaps… I have another idea too…”

  Hao felt the pressure disappear for just a moment, then Lang disappeared, vanishing like those before him. The wispy hand didn’t stop; however, it moved in a blink. It touched one of the grievously wounded people in the circle around the tree. The person slumped and fell back, slipping from the raised area.

  The pressure came back in a huge flood, several times heavier. It wormed deeply into Hao, pinching the tips of his fingers and toes, wrapping his heart, but unable to touch his core.

  Hao couldn’t resist any longer. Now, he could only move his eyes but not blink them. He stood shoulder to shoulder with a woman who seemed like a standing exhumed body. On his other side, a man with his colorless eyes opened wide to nothing but white.

  In his head, the story of the Peach-Taker Trial again repeated itself.