This Venerable Demon is Grossly Unqualified

I don’t know why I decided to come home first. There was no reason for it. I didn’t have any goods to put away. I didn’t need to sleep, I already changed before entering the sect. I didn’t have time to put my feet up. But all the same, it just felt right, that my first stop back in the sect would be my home. Perhaps I hoped deep down that if I treated it like home, it might become one in truth.

Or maybe I was just a creature of habit. That seemed more likely to me.

Still, now that I was here, I found myself disappointed. Not in the house, or in myself. But in the absolute fucking lemmings who were kowtowing before me.

“No.” I said preemptively.

“Honored elder-” One started.

“No.” I repeated. “I chose to teach Disciple Su in spite of her habit of kowtowing outside of my door, not because of it. Spread the word that this is to cease. If you don’t have the courage to knock and interrupt my cultivation, I have no interest in speaking to you. For their sake, I will hope anyone who dares knock has a good reason to.”

Five men and one woman remained still as rabbits before the wolf. Sighing, I again stepped over them. It would have been awkward to turn around. I’d leave out the back later. I stepped inside and shut the door, then waited a few moments. There was no knock. Good.

To be quite honest, I didn’t actually intend to cultivate in my house anyway. I needed to bite the bullet and figure out how my cultivation worked very soon, but when I did, I would definitely be doing my initial tests in the woods. It would be decidedly suboptimal to blow up my own house in some sort of sword qi gone wrong incident. I could just imagine Elder Liang staring out at me from her courtyard, as I stood in the ruins of the old Elder Hu’s shredded art collection. Somehow, I didn’t think I could weave lies plausible enough to survive that scenario.

I wandered through my home, actively looking for any sort of task to be done. There was no sense putting my new clothes away, not when I owned a storage ring. I’d already switched back into the sect uniform after leaving Xiamen. I still had a few hours until Su Li’s next lesson, but the little shard of glass that reflected a full moon even during the day would largely cover that. Some basic grappling work would fill out the rest. As much as I didn’t want the additional risk of exposure a second student represented, it might make sense to consider one. So many good wrestling drills required a partner, like sprawl and circle, and shot re-shot. Doing it myself seemed… Beneath the dignity of the role I was trying to play. I would need to be careful about my choice though, I had gotten incredibly lucky with Su Li. Her particular blend of inexperience and forthrightness made her far easier for me to teach than anyone with a more formal martial background would be.

I shook my head. I was procrastinating. I had the next lesson covered. I stared at one of the paintings on the wall as I considered the question that weighed most urgently on my mind.

What exactly did a demonic sect look like? Corpse refinement was the obvious answer. I’d never read a single story in which a demonic sect didn’t have corpse refiners, or where a righteous one did. I knew Elder Li was famous for puppets. The ape I’d seen him command when I’d stumbled across his lecture was obviously made of wood, but I wondered if he had any more subtle models. I couldn’t imagine a better cover for a puppet intended for infiltration than actual human skin.

Perhaps I was just being paranoid? Black and red could be a perfectly innocuous color scheme. The Pathless Night was not the most obviously righteous name, but it wasn’t a smoking gun either. Elder Li made himself easy to hate and suspect, But Elder Xin seemed perfectly innocuous to me. I’m sure he could slit a dozen throats with a single note from his guqin, but that wasn’t even demonic. Sure, Elder Liang was a sexual predator, but as sad as it was to say, that wasn’t remotely demonic either. Not in a world like this.

The sticking point though, the thing that wouldn’t let me dismiss the idea, was that we weren’t marked on maps. Not even our own. Every other major sect was. I’d already seen hundreds of outer disciples and more than ten elders, and I suspected that wasn’t even close to the full population of the sect. It didn’t matter how famous Elder Hu was, an impromptu lecture with a short notice period shouldn’t have gotten more than a fraction of the sect in attendance. If every elder was in core formation at minimum, even just twenty of them would make us a major regional power. Qin Wenyan had said the entire eastern army had only had thirty core formation officers.

No matter how I turned it over, no other explanation made sense. There had to be a reason for us to keep such a low profile, instead of being the fourth great sect of the Qin Empire. I’d just have to look, until I either found that reason, or something clearly demonic.

I popped my back window open, hopped up on the sill, and hurtled out into the night like a human cannonball. That would never get old.

I headed for the library first. Old habits died hard, and voracious reading had served me well so far. This time, I simply blew past the disciples manning the desk and walked right into the stacks. I saw a few familiar faces, but I plastered a rather unapproachable expression on my own, and simply ignored them.

I didn’t stop to read anything this time, I just looked for one very particular thing. Leather. Most of the scrolls and tomes in the repository were parchment. The majority of the books were bound with a pair of thin wooden plates as end caps, instead of the European leather covers I was more familiar with. Every time I found one, a leather bound book, or more rarely, a scroll written directly on leather or vellum, my heart began to beat faster. Every time, as I flipped it open, and skimmed, I relaxed as the contents proved mundane. Or, mundane for the contents of the repository. Herbal compendiums, manuals of sword forms, or instructions to divine the future in bones or yarrow stalks.

Each time, I left relatively certain that the leather binding of the book was not human skin.

It was a bit of an urban myth that human leather looked special. Properly treated, it didn’t really. It was usually a little thinner than cow leather, but if it was properly stretched, treated, and dyed, it just looked like any other high quality leather. I’d googled some rather macabre subjects in my day, and it's always stuck with me just how normal many of the surviving books bound in human skin looked. Really, when you stripped away all the hairs or scales, got right to the meat of the matter, skin was skin.

Eventually, I found one that looked a little suspect. Heart in my throat, my fingers danced through the soft vellum pages. In less than a minute, my eyes devoured the foreword and introduction.

I felt so many things at once, worried, frustrated, and darkly intrigued.

Buried deep in the stacks, I’d found a bonafide blood aspected spiritual cultivation manual. For pacifists.

It was written by a man who called himself the Sage of the Bleeding Heart. Or, perhaps, the Sage of the Heart that Bled. The translation wasn’t an exact thing, but the same meaning was there. The introduction was almost self-effacing, all but proclaiming his manual to be a failure. It was a challenge and warning in one. The manual cultivated blood qi, but its cycling method was designed to cultivate the blood qi the heart of the cultivator produced. It was apparently slow, wildly complex, and could cause a variety of physical illnesses, but it required no dragon vein or natural treasures at all.

The foreword stated plainly that it was an attempt at a blood cultivation method that did not require slaughter to advance. But a failure, because it functionally bottlenecked itself at the late stages of foundation establishment. The volume of qi that could be pulled from the body was simply too low to surmount the core formation bottleneck. The Sage claimed he himself had shifted to a different, demonic, blood method to form his core; and warned any prospective users they would need to either dissipate their cultivation, or do the same.

Was it demonic? Evil? A failure? A trap? I wasn’t sure. It was simply a work too far beyond my understanding for me to pass judgment on. I could see the dream behind it, an answer to the endless struggle over resources that defined much of cultivation.

Was the leather binding human skin? I ran my fingers along it, looking in vain for a sign. The leather was incredibly smooth, a pale cream color without wrinkles or blemishes. I considered enveloping it in my spiritual sense, attempting some sort of amateur psychometry, but I didn’t truly want to know.

I passed it into my storage ring. I’d gotten away with it before. The book struck me as either the sort of hazardous dark secret that might lurk in a forgotten corner of a righteous sect’s library, or the sort of thing demons would consider innocuous. If we had a second, more secure, library, filled with demonic techniques this seemed like exactly the sort of thing that wouldn’t quite need to be stored there. It was incredibly frustrating, how perfectly vague a sign it was.

And I would be lying, if I said a truly self-sufficient cultivation technique wasn’t an interesting idea. It was useless to me unless I dissipated my cultivation, which was absolutely not an option. The same probably applied for Qin Wenyan. But it seemed like a potentially worthwhile research project, and I had a lot of free time these days. Living the schedule of a cultivator without actually spending eighteen hours a day cultivating left a lot of empty time slots.

After that, I left the library. I’d spent an hour poring through the stacks, and hadn’t found anything. I didn’t think a second one would change that, it was time for a different tact. Thus far, I’d primarily confined my roaming to a relatively narrow part of the sect.

I’d awoke on a mountain. I’d followed a road, lurked and listened, deduced the exit to the sect lay at the base of the mountain. And then I’d left the sect. Simple, easy, obvious. And yet, when I stood outside the Repository and stared outwards, the mountain I stood upon was not the only one within the bounds of the pocket realm. Below me, land stretched out into the distance, slowly disappearing into the misty white of the horizon. And three other mountains rose up. If the outside world was accessed through a portal, logic dictated the other mountains in the distance were part of the sect too. Or our backyard, at the very least.

The horizon itself looked a little suspect. The white mist looked natural, slowly growing in density with distance as a physically accurate mist would. It had to be the edge of the world. I refused to believe that the sect existed within a pocket realm the size of a planet, it had to be a finite space. I had no idea how the space worked, if it bent back upon itself, or if I’d find a wall if I ran far enough. But the other three mountains were clearly reachable, so I started running.

Perhaps we simply kept all the really messed up stuff on another peak. As I tore down the mountainside at a breakneck pace, I reflected on the fact that I really needed to learn how to fly on a sword. Tomorrow, I promised myself. After I finished Su Li’s lesson, I would figure out my own cultivation, or kill myself trying. I’d been lucky thus far, that the sect was so sparsely populated that if you veered off the main roads it was extremely unlikely you’d encounter someone. Eventually, someone would notice the elder running around like a peasant, and the rumors would begin.

Moving down the mountain, there was simply only so fast I could go. If I truly pushed off as hard as I could, I had no doubt I’d survive the landing, but the trees made it impossible to see what I’d be landing on. Even if I didn’t sprain an ankle, getting tangled up in a canopy would waste more time than taking great leaps saved. As I cleared the trees, and began crossing the flat ground separating me from the other peaks, I really started pouring on the gas.

It wasn't prudent, but I was getting so damn tired of being prudent.

On the run to Xianyang, I’d held back. There was no qi in the air, and the run was hours long. I’d found a comfortable pace and stuck to it. Now, I ran, really ran. At first, it was just wind. That meant nothing to me, even as I passed what felt like hundred miles an hour, I didn't even need to close my eyes. It tore at me with invisible fingers, my robes and hair streaming out behind me. I pushed harder, shifting into a dead sprint, and the miles began falling away beneath me.

When I finally reached my limit, I must have been moving at well over two hundred miles an hour. I might even have been pushing three, I’d long since surpassed the hundred and ten my old Honda had been capable of. It was almost like racing through water, every time my foot pushed off the ground, I accelerated by at least forty or fifty miles an hour. Then, the sheer pressure of the air in front of me would then drag my speed back down, until I took another step and blasted forward again. Gravity had become my biggest limiting factor, no matter how far forward I leaned, how deeply my slippers gouged into the earth, I just couldn’t get any more forward momentum out of my step.

Even with the enhanced reflexes of a cultivator, dodging trees took all my attention. At that speed, they seemed to appear from nowhere. It took mere minutes, before I began closing in on one of the other peaks.

I took a breath in, and the scent hit me like Wang Li’s spear. I stumbled, then frantically scrambled to keep my footing as I slowed. I knew that smell. It was the smell of the cats I’d dissected in college, the smell of the morgue that I’d once been asked to transport a body to, when I was doing my rotations in the emergency room.

Formaldehyde.

My new heart beat faster, fear managing to do what even running faster than a sports car had been unable to. Cautiously, I approached the peak.

Where my peak was heavily wooded, this one had seen substantial logging. It wasn't stripped bare by any means, but enough trees had been taken that you could see clearly for over a mile. I could see buildings, far more than on my own peak, but of far rougher construction. Many were great squat log cabins, big enough to serve as barracks or workshops, spewing smoke into the air from their stone chimneys. My inhumanly keen eyes picked up the shapes of disciples moving about like insects, all of them wearing the monochrome black robes with white trim I’d noticed at my lecture.

A great gate stood at the entrance to the peak, one of these three-part archways many Chinese towns had. No walls extended from it, but I had no doubt it was the centerpiece of some sort of protective formation. They wouldn’t have bothered to build it, or guard it, if it were easy to circumvent.

Atop and around the gate, men and women in bright white robes lounged in various states of readiness. No, not men and women. Ghouls.

Their skin was gray and waxy, even at a distance. One man’s tongue lolled out from the corner of his mouth like a great purple worm.

At the center, squatting atop the largest gate, was a colossus. Nine feet tall if he was an inch, even squatting down he was a head taller than those to either side of him. His white robe hung open, showing off deep scars sewn shut, and steel plates worked into his skin. A saber protruded from his back, sticking out from his left shoulder. A legion of paper talismans hung from it like silkworms on a mulberry tree.

His hands interlocked behind his necks in a posture of relaxation. His other pair of hands held a polearm long enough to split a horse lengthwise in a single swing.

Atop his shoulders, three heads rested. Two slept, while one frantically scanned every inch of its surroundings, eyes darting about like hummingbirds.

We were definitely not on the side of the angels.

A morbid part of me wanted to explore, but I was already cutting it close with Su Li’s lesson. It made sense on some level, I supposed. I wouldn’t want the ghoul factory right next to my house either. At the very least, the sect had better urban planning than Xianyang.

Then I felt him.

The other powerful cultivators I’d interacted with had felt muted. Restrained, weaker, or both.

This thing screamed its presence out into the world, a desperate need to share its nature with others. It was the weak bones of the living splintering beneath the heavy head of a guandao. It was the grave-mouth taste of the defeated, rich oily rot spreading across the tongue.

It wasn’t a ghoul. There was a will there, a hungry, hateful mind. It was a death cultivator.

And it was looking at me.