Chapter 57 of 90
Ma Daha’s Rage
He did not run. Running was what Ye Qiong expected.
He finished wiping the moss clean. Then he went into the shelter and eased Nalan Meng deeper under the boughs, into the hollow against the rock, and pulled the blanket up over her and heaped leaves along its edge until even he could barely tell where she lay. She did not wake. Her breathing was slow and even now; the fever pill was working. He put the bottle of water by her hand.
"Stay," he whispered, though she could not hear him. "I'll come back."
Then he went out of the canyon the other way, alone, fast and low through the trees.
At a fork in the path, a few hundred paces on, he stopped.
Two trails. One going up, toward the high ridges and the deep woods. One going down, toward the stream. He looked at them both for a moment in the moonlight.
Then he bit the ball of his thumb until it bled, and squeezed it, and let the drops fall.
Down the wrong path. One drop, then a few paces, then another. Just the way they had fallen from Nalan Meng's shoulder all afternoon. Dark spots on the pale earth, leading away toward the stream, away from the canyon. He followed them a long way, until his thumb was white, and then he wrapped it in his sleeve and doubled back along the hard ground beside the trail, where no blood would show.
Behind him, through the trees, he heard footsteps coming.
There was a cave, a little way up the slope above the fork. More of a crack in the rock than a cave. He squeezed into it and crouched in the dark and held his breath.
He heard them reach the fork. Heard Ye Qiong's voice, sharp and eager—here! blood, this way!—and the scuffle of twenty pairs of feet turning down toward the stream. Their torches went bobbing away below him through the trees, and grew small, and went out of sight.
He waited a long time after that. Until there was no sound at all but the insects.
Then he crept out.
He found the corpse on his way down from the cave.
It was lying half in a thornbush at the edge of a little clearing, face down. A man, young, in a long robe of deep, rusty red—the color of dried blood—with black cuffs and a black sash. There was a sword wound in his back. He had been dead a day, perhaps two; the animals had not found him yet. Beside him in the grass lay a broad, heavy, single-edged blade with a blood-red tassel on its pommel.
Li Yuguo knew that robe. He had designed it. The Blood-Clothed Sect—the demonic sect of the north, the ones whose disciples dyed their robes in the blood of their first kill.
He stood looking down at the dead man for a moment.
Then he crouched, and began to undress him.
He put on the robe. It was a little long in the sleeves. He belted it with the black sash. He took the man's blade—it was heavier than it looked, and the edge had a faint red sheen to it, like heat on iron—and slung it across his back. The Iron-Blooded Mad Saber, the Blood-Clothed Sect called their weapons. He remembered that too. He had needed a name in a hurry once.
He pulled his hair back off his face, combed it up with his fingers, and tied it high in a ponytail the way the Blood-Clothed disciples wore it, and fastened an iron ring around the base. He looked down at himself.
He did not look like the King of Soft Rice any more.
There was no time to go to the Demon Tomb now. He knew that.
So he opened the system, and went to the bloodline section of the catalogue—a section he had looked at a dozen times and always closed again, because the prices had been impossible.
They were not impossible any more.
[ Bloodline: Thousand-Hand Asura ]
Grade: Rare
Price: 3000 Cuckold Points
Warning: Replacing a bloodline carries a risk of sudden death.
He looked at the warning for a long moment.
Then he thought about Ye Qiong's torches going away through the trees. About Nalan Meng under the leaves. About the Raging Wave Dragon Ape.
He pressed Buy.
Current Cuckold Points: 2700
It hit him like a hammer.
Something came pouring into him through the soles of his feet and the crown of his head at once—hot and red and enormous, too big for him, much too big. It went down into his dantian and found the little blue spider sitting there and swallowed it. He felt the spider die. He felt his own blood turn over in his veins like a river reversing its course. His heart stopped—he felt it stop—and for one long, ringing moment there was nothing at all, no sound, no breath, only the dark, and a terrible, patient pressure, waiting to see if he would break—
His heart kicked.
Again. Again. Faster. He fell forward on his hands in the grass and dragged in air in great shuddering gulps, and something in his back was moving. Under his shoulder blades. Under his skin. As if there were more arms in there than he had been born with, unfolding.
When he could see again, he looked down into his dantian.
The spider was gone. In its place, something sat cross-legged in the dark, red as a coal: a small, fierce, many-armed figure with its hands spread out around it like the spokes of a wheel, each one holding something. A blade. A bell. A noose. A flame.
The Thousand-Hand Asura.
He stood up. He clenched his fists. And he felt the strength come into them—not twice what it had been. More. Much more.
Today's Li Yuguo was not what he used to be.
Ling Snake Cottage was built into the throat of a ravine, high on the mountain, where two cliffs nearly met. A palisade of sharpened logs ran across the gap, with a gate in the middle and watchtowers on either side.
He came up to it with his hands behind his back. He was full of confidence. He had the bloodline of the Thousand-Hand Demon in him now, and he had seen what the bandits of this mountain were worth. And he knew something else, too: the Poison Emperor and the Thief Emperor had gone off on their own after they scattered, and on the way, they must have harvested a great many of these wicked men. The bandits left on this mountain would be much weaker than before.
It was a pity the Poison Emperor had gone off who knew where. With the Poison Emperor beside him, he would not have needed to worry about the True Yuan Sect at all.
But as he stood at the gate, he smelled blood.
A great deal of it. Thick and coppery and fresh, rolling out of the cottage on the night air.
Has something happened in there?
The watchtowers were empty. The gate stood a little open.
Li Yuguo shook out the long red robe behind him, and strode in.
What he saw inside was terrible.
The open ground in the middle of the cottage was a ring of torchlight and fire. On one side stood a dozen people in blue and white—clean, straight-backed, swords drawn, unruffled. On the other, crowded back against the wooden halls and storehouses, a great mass of bandits, ragged and bloody, many of them wounded. And between the two lay the dead. Bandits, almost all of them. Twenty, thirty, more.
The people in blue and white were disciples of the True Yuan Sect.
Li Yuguo slid sideways into the shadow of a great iron brazier at the edge of the yard and crouched there and watched.
Ye Qiong?
He was surprised to see him. But there he was—back already, his trail gone cold at the stream, standing among the others with his sword out and his face still flushed with frustration. And not only Ye Qiong. The whole second generation of the True Yuan Sect was here. Every name Li Yuguo had ever given them.
Including their eldest senior brother.
Ximen Lang.
"Tell me," said Ximen Lang, with fierce calm. "Where is the fire crystal?" He let his sword-point drift toward the bandits. "Otherwise, today, your Ling Snake Cottage will be put to the sword."
Among the bandits, at the front, a huge man stood with a mace in his fist and blood running down from a cut over his eye. The chief of all the bandits of Ling Snake Mountain. A Martial Soul.
Ma Daha.
He had gathered a great many brothers under him over the years—some of them Advanced Martial Teachers, dangerous men. They had dug themselves into the deep mountain, and become a thorn in Nalan City's side. Nalan City's garrison simply did not have the numbers to root them out. That was why Nalan Meng had always been so helpless against them.
But this time, Ximen Lang had come in person. Why?
In all of Saibei, Ximen Lang was a first-class master. Li Yuguo had heard that his cultivation stood at the very peak of Martial Soul, a single step from Martial King.
Martial Warrior. Martial Teacher. Advanced Martial Teacher. Martial Soul. Martial King. Martial Emperor. Martial Ancestor. Martial Lord. Martial Saint. Martial Sovereign.
In Saibei, the Martial Kings and Martial Emperors were the very peak. The highest anyone ever saw. So Ximen Lang, who had a real chance of reaching Martial King, carried the hopes of a great many of his teachers.
But Ye Qiong had been progressing so fast. He had already come to be seen as the disciple most likely to break through to Martial King, and the sect had begun to lavish its attention on him.
And that made Ye Qiong a threat to Ximen Lang's position. Which was why Ximen Lang had begun to watch him. Li Yuguo could see it from here, in the way Ximen Lang stood: always a half-step apart, never with his back to his junior brother.
If it had only been these people, it would still take some effort to fight Ma Daha. Li Yuguo knew that. As the author, he knew why Ma Daha had been able to hold Ling Snake Mountain for decades. The man had a secret trick. A last card.
But there was someone else standing beside Ximen Lang.
A girl.
Her back was to him. Long black hair, loose, fluttering a little in the heat that came off the burning torches. A fine white dress, thin as mist, and over it an array of fairy treasures—jade pendants at her waist, a silver hairpin set with pearls, a sword with a white jade hilt at her hip—that rang softly when she moved.
Her back was very beautiful. The dress was so thin that the outline of her was plain to Li Yuguo even in the firelight: the long straight spine; the waist so slender he thought he could have closed both hands around it; and below it, the full, smooth, perfect roundness of her ass, pressing against the thin white silk.
Then she turned around.
And Li Yuguo felt his heart stop beating.
She looked as if she were standing in fog. As if the thin white cloth were mist, and she had stepped out of it. She was perhaps eighteen or nineteen. Apart from her black hair, she was white all over—white as snow, white as moonlight on snow. Her face was so beautiful it was almost vulgar to look at, and yet there was no blood in it at all. She was pale. Unnaturally pale. Like a figure carved out of jade and left out in the cold.
And her breasts were large, and round, and full, and the neckline of the thin dress had slipped low on them, so that the upper swells of them showed above it, white and soft, with a deep and perfect valley between. It made her look more desirable than any woman had a right to.
He looked closer.
She was beautiful and elegant. So beautiful that he could not stare at her for long. But her expression was cold. Indifferent. Utterly empty. There was nothing in it at all.
"Junior Sister Yun," said Ximen Lang. "Is something wrong?"
Junior Sister Yun frowned.
"No," she said. "Only—I felt a chill just now. As if someone were looking at me with obscene eyes."
Li Yuguo started behind his brazier. Does this woman have eyes in the back of her head?
But he weighed it. Junior Sister Yun. Could it be—the first beauty of the True Yuan Sect? The one they called the first beauty of all Saibei?
Yun Xianchen.
Her looks were refined. Very close to how he had described her, once, in a chapter he had been proud of. It was her. It could not be anyone else.
"What if you are disciples of the True Yuan Sect?" Ma Daha's voice was savage. He hefted his mace. "My Ling Snake Cottage isn't big. But if you're set on taking the fire crystal this time—then I'll fight you to the end. Even if I'm smashed to pieces!"
"Junior Brother Ye," said Yun Xianchen coolly. "Are you sure the fire crystal is here?"
Ye Qiong thumped his chest. "Absolutely sure. I talked with Commander Li Yutang before we came. He told me where it was. In return, I helped him deal with Li Yuguo." His face twisted. "It's a pity that bastard Li Yuguo ran away. If I get the chance… I really want to cut that scum into eight pieces. To get rid of the hatred in my heart!"
"Hmph. So it really was Li Yutang."
Ma Daha's eyes had gone red.
"That dog. He's always been on good terms with my cottage. And now that we've lost men, now that we're weaker—he goes courting the True Yuan Sect instead." He spat on the ground. "You fools. Can't you see it? He's only using you!"
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