“This isn’t the work of beasts,” Wallis said quietly, voice hard and icy calm.

  Lulu twirled her spear and used its tip to indicate a deep paw print in the churned mud, edges stained with dry blood. “Not just beasts,” she corrected. She sounded distant, tone flat.

  Calvin put to words what they were all thinking. “Beasts in human skins,” he finished. “And they can’t have gone far.”

  The stench of blood and death hung in the air like a miasma, tainting the ambient qi so heavily Calvin could taste the copper and pain with every breath. If allowed to fester, this whole place would become blighted, death and resentment poisoning the land until nothing good would grow here for decades to come. He kept a tight grip on his qi. Perhaps it was an unnecessary precaution, but he wanted not even a trace of this poison tainting his Foundation.

  The once thriving village the locals called Wide Hill was a burnt out husk, curls of smoke still rising in places from the remnants of homes, shops, and granaries. The stone wall surrounding the village—nearly three meters tall and thick enough a man could walk along its top, more than adequate to fend off a typical Gathering realm beast or some mortal bandits—seemed to be just about all that was left standing higher than a man’s knee. It had clearly offered the inhabitants little protection on this day. The remains of the gate lay broken and cast to the side of the road and the wall itself had been shattered through in several places, stones bigger than Calvin’s head flung dozens of meters like leaves in a hurricane.

  All that could have been done by a malevolent spirit beast, but the bodies left little question of what had happened. They had been gathered just outside the village in what had once been a field, a few stalks of golden wheat still swaying gently in the morning breeze. Hundreds of corpses—men, women, and children alike—had been stripped, defiled, and arranged into some manner of heinous formation. Wide Hill had been estimated to have a population of just under a thousand souls and Calvin guessed that this accounted for just about all of them. They’d had yet to search the wreckage for bodies and survivors, but he doubted they’d find many, if any at all.

  A horse whinnied softly behind them and Wallis turned to the small group of mortals who’d escorted them this far. There were six of them, a guard captain and his squad from Pine’s Crossing, the largest settlement in the region and the only one marked with any accuracy on their map. They had been the ones who’d passed the news of the original attack onto Seven-Petal City, which had in turn contacted the Sect directly, and had volunteered to show their group around the gulch.

  Calvin wondered if they were regretting that decision now.

  “Captain,” Wallis called with feigned nonchalance, “when did you say was the last time you heard from Wide Hill?”

  The armored man shifted astride his horse, face extremely pale beneath his helmet. He looked more composed than his men did, but that was not a high bar to clear. One of them had already been sick, and two more looked to be right on the verge of doing the same. Calvin couldn’t blame them. The sight and smell alone were nightmarish, and even mortals could probably feel the taint in the air like a malevolent fog on the very edges of their senses. It was a lot to process for young men whose greatest role was as a deterrent against bandits and dealing with petty crimes and domestic disputes.

  The man tried to speak, but his voice caught in his throat. He swallowed heavily, then answered in a nervous voice. “Just two days past, master cultivator. A small group of traders came through on their way to Seven-Petal City.”

  Wallis nodded slowly. “And you haven’t heard anything about further attacks?” he confirmed.

  The captain shook his head. “No, master cultivator. Nothing since the tragedy in Pine-on-Rock that you’ve already heard about. Though…” he trailed off, and Wallis made a sound urging him to continue.

  The man shifted again, the soft clicking of his armor loud in the still silence. “Well, I didn’t think it worth mentioning, but we were expecting a few men from Stone Pine last week, a master carpenter and his crew. We didn’t think ‘nothing of it, that road is treacherous and it's only been a few days, but now…”

  He fell silent, one hand clutching the reins of his horse while the other didn’t move from the handle of his short sword. Calvin doubted the weapon would help him one whit if the men and beasts who’d massacred this village returned, but he could understand the sentiment. He’d probably have done the same in the man’s place.

  He pictured the map they’d looked at in the guard building earlier that day. It had been crude compared to the work of art the sect had lent them, but it was also much more focused, showing Nine-Pine Gulch in significantly more detail than the scale of their map allowed.

  Pine’s Crossing was the largest, northernmost settlement in Nine-Pine Gulch, home to some twenty-thousand mortals and a tiny handful of cultivators. The rest of the region was very sparsely settled. There were a few ‘larger’ villages like this one, a dozen smaller settlements like the one whose destruction they’d come to investigate, and a smattering of isolated farms and homesteads.

  Stone Pine was one of those smaller settlements, located some way south-west of here. It was a sizable distance for a mortal on foot—especially given the wretched state of what the locals considered roads—perhaps a two or three day trip that could easily stretch into a full week of travel, but a group of cultivators and spirit beasts could make the journey in less than a day.

  Calvin hoped for the sake of the men and women living in Stone Pine that that carpenter had just been delayed by poor weather or bad luck.

  But he doubted it.

  Wallis did not react to the news, the very picture of composure. His demeanor reassured the captain and his men, making them sit straighter on their horses. He considered the situation for another moment, then spoke decisively. “Captain, send one of your men back to Pine’s Crossing and then on to Seven-Petal City. Even if we are able to resolve this situation fully, the sect will want to know what happened here.” The situation had not necessarily changed, though the scope of the threat had. As long as their foes were only in the Gathering or Foundation realms, they could deal with them.

  And a Core realm demonic cultivator would not be wasting time on mere tens and hundreds of mortals at a time. The fact that Pine’s Crossing—and for that matter Seven-Petal City—were still standing meant that things were still under control. Or at least manageable.

  The captain saluted smartly. “Yes, master cultivator!” Then he swallowed again, ruining the effect. “And…the rest of us, sir?”

  Wallis took a deep breath, face somber. “With me, captain. If the heavens are kind, some may have survived this slaughter.”

  The captain closed his eyes and lowered his head. “Yes, master cultivator. Heavens smile upon us.”

  The captain turned away, barking orders, and Wallis shifted his attention back to Calvin and Lulu. His voice lost its forced composure, turning tense and clipped, and he spoke softly enough there was no way the mortals could hear them. “What do you guys think?”

  Calvin jerked his head at the enormous circle of corpses. “If this isn’t the work of demonic cultivators, I don’t know what is.”

  “And at least one demonic beast, probably the one that girl saw. I only saw one set of tracks, but if they’re a beast cult…”

  All three of them fell silent, considering their options. After several long moments, Calvin sighed. “Well, we’ll definitely be penalized if we go back now empty handed.”

  Wallis winced and Lulu nodded emphatically. The sect was rather heavy handed when it came to ensuring disciples actually completed the missions assigned to them and did so properly. There were circumstances where you would not be penalized for abandoning a mission half way, such as if a much stronger cultivator became involved, but nothing they’d seen yet qualified. The goal of the mission had been to deal with ‘the threat’, after all, not hunt a specific spirit beast.

  “So we should at least look around,” Lulu suggested. “I mean, I can’t imagine a Core realm monster is wasting their time on something like this. That’s just begging for an elder to come slap some sense into them for practically no value. The qi here is so thin they needed a whole…whatever that is supposed to be to get any value out of their victims. So we’re probably just dealing with a small cult or an offshoot of a distant sect.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Calvin concurred. “Probably one or two Foundation realm ‘elders’, that demonic beast, and whatever Gathering realm followers they’ve ignited with their butchery.”

  “Heavens above I hope so,” Lulu mumbled.

  Wallis sighed heavily, looking momentarily like a mortal thrice his true age. “We don’t have enough information. Let’s take a quick look around and figure out our options afterward.”

  If there was in fact a Core realm demonic cultivator in the region, they needed to get out of here yesterday. The sort of cultivator who slaughtered villages of mortals in a Great Sect’s territory would care not one whit about their disciple status, and Foundation realm lives were much more valuable reagents than mortal ones. The same went if they were dealing with an overwhelming number of enemies in the same realm as them. But if this really was just a small, weak group drunk on power…

  “Well, at least demonic cultivators should be easier to track than another damn chameleon wolf,” Lulu joked weakly.

  Wallis’s smile was weak but real. “We can hope. Small mercies.” Raising his voice so the mortals could hear, Wallis gestured to the ruins behind them. “Sister Lulu, I trust you to watch our backs. Ensure none of our foes yet linger.”

  “Yes, brother Wallis!” She twirled her spear in a simple yet visually impressive display and leapt away to begin a circuit around the outskirts of the village. In addition to making sure no one snuck up on them, she would hopefully find a trail for them to follow. Her jump carried her well over twenty feet and she landed lightly atop the wall, posing briefly for the sake of the watching guards before continuing along her way.

  Wallis turned and indicated the corpses. “Brother Calvin, you have the most experience in such matters. I leave it in your capable hands.”

  Calvin nodded solemnly. “It shall be done, brother Wallis.” In reality, Wallis and Lulu had both dealt with a lot more demonic cultivators than he had simply by virtue of taking more missions outside the sect, but he wasn’t surprised by the assignment. The two of them had been cultivating for longer than he had been, but they were fighters first and foremost. He was much more suited to examining the remains of some demonic ritual completely unfamiliar to all three of them for clues.

  Well, that and one other extremely relevant factor. Neither Wallis nor Lulu had any skill with cultivating spiritual herbs and had only a passing familiarity with the methods involved, which meant that dealing with the aftermath of this disaster would fall primarily to him. And he really was the best suited for the role for more reasons than one.

  That would come later though. For now, it was time for the grisly task of seeing what exactly these poor mortals had died for.

  Calvin was not unfamiliar with death. No one who’d grown up like he had was. It had followed him all his life, a specter he warded off with every bite of food he ate and every night he found somewhere warm and dry to sleep. It hung over him when he’d picked scraps of sustenance out of piles of rubbish or drank from the least contaminated waters he could find.

  The first dead body he’d ever seen had been his mother’s. He wasn’t sure how old he’d been then, but it was one of his clearest early memories. Her pale, emaciated face and cold, boney fingers haunted his dreams to this day, and it was often a struggle to remember her as anything other than a wretched corpse. He knew she’d been beautiful once, the most desirable, expensive whore in all of Six-Swan Pond, but even with qi to hone his mind every time he pictured her face he found glassy eyes and hollow cheeks staring back at him.

  His mother had not been the first of Madam Cho’s whores to die, but the other workers had shielded him from that reality as long as they could. In the end, most of them had died too, claimed by the wasting sickness that swept their town like a hurricane or by the cleansing flames that followed.

  Living on the edges of society, death was an ever present threat and shadow both. He had seen men starve and waste away from disease, had watched them kill and be killed for scraps of food and loose change, and had personally looted the cooling bodies of those who’d overindulged on drink and alchemical substances. He thought he’d been seven the first time he killed a man himself, driving a jagged piece of glass into his throat as the man tried to grab him and fleeing into the wilderness before the man’s friends could find him.

  He’d killed as a cultivator too. Bandits, spirit beasts, and a handful of other cultivators. It was simply a part of life. There was a reason that every cultivator, no matter their specialty, learned to fight even in the early stages of Gathering where every drop of qi was precious. The life of a cultivator was dangerous, and strength was the only law some people understood.

  What happened here had not been a battle, but a massacre. Some of the mortals had clearly tried to fight, others to run, and yet more to beg for their lives, but all had died all the same. There was little even a trained, well armed mortal could do against a cultivator in the early Gathering realm, and these people had never stood a chance.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  The outer ring of the corpse formation appeared to consist of those who had fought back the most fiercely, now arranged head to foot in the coppery mud. Their bodies were the most mangled in the most different ways. Some were missing limbs or whole chunks of flesh, others looked like they’d been stabbed dozens of times or been sliced nearly in half with a single stroke of a sword or axe. Many looked chewed on or had wounds inflicted not by blades, but rather by claws and blunt force.

  They all shared a single common injury; a single stab wound directly through the heart. From the amount of blood on display, Calvin suspected that many had only been stabbed long after the men were already dead, leading him to guess it was part of whatever the demonic cultivators were doing here.

  There was only so much he could learn from corpses, even after touching several bodies in order to examine them with the Scroll’s analysis capabilities, but he did come away with one reassuring fact. Though he could detect lingering qi in some wounds, all of the men had been killed by ordinary means. There may have been weapon techniques involved, but none of them had been drained of vitality or had their blood torn out or anything of the like.

  It was a lot easier to fight a few men with blades in their hands than ones who could kill you from a mile away with a technique you had no good way to combat.

  He also estimated that, like he’d initially suspected, most of those doing the killing had been in the Gathering realm. The only Foundation realm qi he’d found was either on the bodies of those obviously killed by the demonic beast and a few men whose fresh wounds looked like they’d had weeks to fester and rot in the sun—the work of either a sword technique or perhaps some manner of cursed blade.

  The next ring consisted mostly of older men and women, interspersed with some who might have belonged in the outer ring. They lay side by side, hands arranged over their bellies, and many had their throats torn out. Instead of a single stab wound, these bodies had their chest cut open from neck to navel, though that was the extent of the mutilation.

  The next ring tested Calvin’s self control to its limit, or perhaps that was the slimy, cloying aura of resentment that thickened the closer he moved to the center of the butchery. He flooded his body with his qi, circulating it as though preparing to use the yang technique associated with the Eight Peaks Martial Arts, but without releasing it, and some of the oppressive weight retreated.

  It was a good thing they’d been the ones to find this horror, and that they’d done so so quickly. It was practically a breeding ground for hungry ghosts and extremely dangerous kinds of spiritual beasts. Calvin made a note to inform the Captain not to send anyone to check on Stone Pine.

  The young women and girls of Wide Hill had not been given the mercy of easy deaths. Most had probably still been alive as they were mutilated, their chests flayed open, ribs shattered, and organs extracted to form sloppy piles at their feet. They were displayed in two rows, bodies splayed across the ground with arms and legs thrown wide. The ground beneath them was soaked with buckets of blood and viscera, and many of the bodies showed signs of futile struggle in the hours before their deaths—rope marks, broken limbs, missing ears, fingers, and teeth, and worse. Some of the bodies looked like they’d been chewed on, and not by the demonic beast. Human teeth marked arms, breasts, and necks, and some of the piled up organs were missing suspiciously sized pieces.

  Calvin made two circuits around that ring of bodies, committing faces and faint traces of qi to memory. That was all he could do for the people they had once been. The traces were little more than wisps, so badly polluted by the surrounding death that no tracking technique he’d ever heard of could make use of them, but they were the purest evidence he had of those who had inflicted such pain on innocent mortals. He would do what he could.

  The last ring of bodies was the worst of them all, and Calvin was seized with the urge to kill someone. Painfully. He was as charged with purifying yang and fire qi as he could manage, but the desire had nothing to do with the tangible aura of blood and death that made his breath mist and the sun seem dark.

  The bodies of young men, children, and pregnant women formed a waist-high barrier two bodies wide. Like the previous ring, these had been kept alive for as long as possible while they were mutilated, though somehow the damage was even worse. In addition to their organs, most had had their eyes carved out leaving bloody, hollow pits, and unfamiliar symbols—jagged and angular things that looked like no language Calvin had ever seen—had been carved with the tip of a sharp blade into their cheeks and foreheads. Instead of piling them individually, here the organs formed one final ring, all jumbled together like they’d simply been tossed in buckets and then distributed after.

  Despite his reluctance to disturb anything, Calvin coated his hands in a sheath of qi and delicately picked through some of the bodies to reach those buried beneath multiple layers of corpses. All had suffered the same fate and all had those same three symbols carved into their flesh. Calvin attempted to examine them with the Scroll, hoping to learn something about the methods used by the demonic cultivators, but the symbols appeared to be inert and all he was able to find was information about the victims and how they’d died.

  He knew more than enough about that already.

  Turning away from the gruesome display, Calvin made his way into the center of the formation, a clear patch of muddy earth and flattened crops slightly smaller than the clearing behind his villa. There were many, many footprints in the mud, as well as several places where he suspected men had sat and cultivated, but his eyes were drawn to a deep square imprint in the precise center of the ring. Something had been there recently, something big and heavy and important. Something the demonic cultivators had brought with them and taken when they left.

  For the first time since he’d begun his examination, Calvin called up the Codex and examined the changes he’d felt happen over the past half-hour.

  The first thing he noticed was that the list of objectives had grown. What had previously been the second objective had split into two separate goals, each with their own reward, and he’d gained an entirely separate third—now fourth—objective.

  The second thing he noticed was the rewards. Most of the time when he received a short term quest like this one, the rewards were correspondingly meager. They typically ranged between Extremely and Very Low quality, with perhaps the occasional Low or, rarer still, Modest quality thrown in, and were usually just Minor Reward Tokens like the ones he received for paying his dues to the sect and advancing his cultivation.

  These were not like that at all. In fact, none of the four were minor rewards, and Low was the baseline here, not the exception. The reward for dealing with what the Scroll had deemed a blood cult—as good a name as any—was a Below Average quality tempering method token, which was both extremely exciting and concerning. Exciting, because he really wanted a better tempering method. Terrifying, because that meant the Scroll thought dealing with the cult was worthy of a Below Average quality reward, something it had never done during a Sect mission before.

  Calvin took a deep breath and regretted it immediately. Though the lingering aura of wrongness had so far repulsed any animals interested in the abundant display of meat and offal, the corpses had been out in the sun for over a day and the stench was overwhelming. It hadn’t been so bad off to the side, the breeze carrying the worst of it away, but here, right in the middle of it all?

  He doubled over, hacking and coughing. His tongue felt like it was coated in vile slime and his stomach rebelled violently, his breakfast doing its best to escape. He managed to stop himself from vomiting like the soldier had, but it was a near thing. Calvin didn’t think he’d ever seen a cultivator be physically ill, but he’d almost been the first, which spoke of just how foul this place had become.

  He rushed out of the circle with as much care and grace as he could manage under the circumstances, leaping carefully over the rows of dead and doing his best to leave no additional marks in the mud. As soon as he was clear of it, he pulled out his water flask and rinsed his mouth several times, spitting the water onto the ground until the taste of rot was no longer quite so heavy in his mouth.

  His clothes—except for the outer robe—felt nauseatingly slimy against his skin and he silently resolved to burn them after this was all said and done if he couldn’t cleanse them sufficiently.

  He wanted to be somewhere else with all his heart, but he had a job to do. He tried to focus on the rewards, the allure of power and progress, but it was hard to think about that when ruined bodies and glassy eyes danced behind his eyelids.

  He wasn’t going to kill those cultists because they were worth several hundred contribution points and a priceless method. He was going to kill them because some people needed killing.

  The reward for their deaths was just that, a reward. A bonus for a job well done. A fragment of a memory, or perhaps it was a dream, rose in his mind. A man pressing a small pouch of coins into his mother’s hand and ruffling his hair on the way out of their tiny shared room.

  A bonus. Calvin liked the sound of that.

  He straightened slowly and mechanically turned back to the ring of bodies. The sect would want a detailed memory jade made of what he’d seen, so he’d better make sure he had a comprehensive look.

  Copying Lulu, he leapt up onto the wall surrounding the burnt out village, hearing without really listening the voices of Wallis and the guards as they combed the wreckage for any scrap of information they could. There wouldn’t be any survivors, they all knew it, but maybe they’d find a clue to point them in the direction of their quarry.

  He stood still for several breaths, gathering himself and focusing his qi, then leapt again, this time straight up into the air. He flew like an arrow shot from a bow, propelled by the yang-based movement technique he’d used, a surprised shout echoing after him from one of the guards who’d noticed him move.

  From above, the circle really did look like a formation of some sort, one crafted from dead flesh rather than more traditional reagents. He memorized as much of it as he could, the exact arrangement of the bodies and how they’d been mutilated. Knowledge was knowledge, and there would be another bonus for the three of them if this turned out to be a novel demonic art.

  He closed his eyes on the way down and spun as he hit the ground, converting the force of the impact into motion, then slowing to a stop over several seconds. Though he’d landed on dirt and not back up on top of the stone wall, he didn’t so much as raise a puff of dust.

  He only had to wait a few seconds before he was joined by Lulu, then Wallis a moment later. The two of them eyed the gruesome spectacle warily, Lulu’s spear held in a white-knuckled fist and pale silver light playing across Wallis’s palms and forearms.

  “How bad is it really?” Wallis asked from his left side, voice wavering slightly.

  “Well,” Calvin mused, “Do you want the…good news, the bad news, or the worse news?”

  Had the situation been any less serious, Lulu probably would have slapped him. Instead, she stabbed her spear into the ground and leaned against it, the wooden shaft pressed against her forehead and the tip of her nose. “Okay, I’m ready. Lay it on me.”

  Wallis rubbed his temple. “I could use some good news right about now.”

  “Well then, you’ll be happy to know that if we start now, work quickly, and don’t get very unlucky, we probably won’t need to deal with any hungry ghosts for at least a couple of days.”

  Lulu turned to stare at him. “That’s the good news?”

  Calvin snapped his fingers. “Right, I knew I was forgetting something. I estimate we’re dealing with somewhere in the range of two to four Foundation realm enemies, not counting the demonic beast, and another ten to twenty in the Gathering realm. And it does seem to be just the one beast.”

  Lulu tilted her head to the side. “That’s about what I was going to say too. I found tracks. They did a pretty good job concealing them from mortal eyes, but one of the Foundation realm cultivators is very new. He’s practically leaking qi everywhere he goes.”

  Wallis made a slightly strangled sound in the back of his throat. “You know what, that is good news. We’re only outnumbered what, eight-to-one in the worst case scenario?”

  Lulu slipped around Calvin and leaned against Wallis’s side. “I don’t know, I like those odds.”

  “You would,” he mumbled.

  Calvin shrugged. “For once, I’m with Lulu here. I doubt more than one or two of them really know what they’re doing in a fight. And they need to die.”

  Wallis sighed. “I can’t argue with that.” He took a deep breath, wrinkled his nose, and straightened his back. “So if that’s the good news…”

  Calvin grimaced. “The bad news is that if we don’t do something now, that thing is only going to get worse. There’s enough power and resentment there to produce some extremely nasty specters, not to mention a small horde of blood and death attuned spirit beasts. And it will ruin this land for centuries.”

  Wallis summed it up perfectly. “Shit.”

  “Yup. I’ll need to do a first pass, but after that the men should be able to help us put the first ring to rest. The rest will be up to us. I’ll need help, but it looks like there’s enough dry wood around that we can be done by midnight if we work quickly. Tomorrow morning at the latest.“

  Lulu blanched. “What? But we need to go after them! They’ll wise up eventually and then we’ll never find them!”

  Calvin was already shaking his head. “This takes priority. That formation has to go.”

  Wallis looked between them, frowning. “I don’t understand. What is it? Why is it so dangerous? Why do we need to deal with it?”

  Calvin shrugged. “I have no idea what it was originally supposed to be used for, but I can tell you what it is now. It’s like a…an attunement chamber for death and blood qi. The first ring isn’t so bad, but it gets thicker the deeper you go. When I was standing in the central ring I could feel it trying to chip away at my lifespan. If I’d stuck around much longer it would have eventually succeeded. I’m pretty sure a mortal that got too close would just die. Or maybe ignite, if they have the right aptitude.”

  This time Wallis blanched. “And it’s just sitting here, out in the open where anyone or anything can stumble across it.”

  “Yup.”

  He closed his eyes. “I don’t think I want to hear it, but what’s the even worse news?”

  “Well, I hope I’m wrong, but there might be another one of these things sitting over in Stone Pine with no one the wiser. Though the population there should only be a couple hundred mortals, so it shouldn’t be quite so bad.”

  Wallis covered his face with his hands. “Fuck me,” he whispered.

  Lulu wrinkled her nose. “Not smelling like this. Wait till we’re sipping spiritual wine in Sapphire Tooth City, then we’ll talk.”

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