Chương 23: Shadows

The world under Shadow Qi's rule was a surreal place. From Liu Wen's memories, Mingxuan knew that Shadow Qi was said to be an aspect of Water Qi with such heavy Yin Qi properties that it had become something altogether different from its parent element. Looking around as the caravan trudged along the packed earth road, he could see the comparison. There were times when he felt like he was underwater as the caravan travelled along. The gloom had currents. It had eddies.

There were swirls of deeper shadow that slid through the air with liquid grace. And at times, strange things seemed to be swimming in the shadows. Shapes impossible to define glided through the darkest patches as though navigating unseen channels. The world had drawn a veil to keep its secrets, and behind that curtain, things once hidden had begun to stir. Visibility had been reduced severely even with the amethyst sun gleaming overhead.

That strange celestial fountain hung at its zenith now, spilling light in slow, extravagant cascades, as though some celestial fountain had been tipped over. Veins of luminescent purple crisscrossed through the heavens like fractures in obsidian, yet the world was shrouded in permanent dusk. He thought of the morning—how he had returned to the caravan from the pale forest a few minutes after Xiaoling.

He'd found Xinyi waiting near Enlai's cart, her face tight with worry that sharpened into something fiercer when she spotted him.

"Where were you?" she'd demanded. Her hands had found his shoulders, gripping hard enough that he felt the tremor in her fingers.

"I woke and you weren't there, and I thought—" She'd cut herself off, but her eyes said everything her words hadn't.

"I'm sorry," he'd said. He had recalled her words from back in the River-Mist Inn, just a day before; that she'd wake up one day and find him gone out of some need to protect her.

"I needed to clear my head. I didn't mean to worry you."

"You can't just vanish like that." Her voice had gentled, but the fear beneath it remained audible. He'd embraced her then, feeling her arms come around him with fierce strength, her face pressed against his shoulder. The memory of her confession had twisted something in his chest. After she'd finally released him, his gaze had drifted past her toward Enlai's cart. Xiaoling had returned to her quiet vigil in the back, sitting among the grain sacks with that perfect stillness she seemed to cultivate.

The girl hadn't acknowledged him, her ice-blue eyes fixed on some distant point beyond the horizon, deep in rumination. Uncomfortable thoughts had spawned in Mingxuan's head as he'd stood there watching her. Enlai's story of how he knew Xiaoling did not match what he had learned about the girl. The farmer believed he owed a debt to her family, believed he was honoring that debt by escorting their sickly daughter to Ironhold. There's no way that's true, Mingxuan had thought, grimacing.

The merchants had been eager to resume their journey despite Shadow Qi's ominous dominance, so they had set out early. Wheels creaked as oxen pulled them eastward through a world transformed. Everyone seeming to prefer movement to stillness, action to the contemplation that came with waiting. Hours later, with the sun approaching what should have been noon yet barely seeming to illuminate the world, Mingxuan noted how everyone was reacting to Shadow Qi with such trepidation and anxiety.

They moved on guard, as if they expected something to emerge from the darkness at any moment and call them by name. Conversations that had flowed freely during their days under Wood Qi's green dominance now emerged rarely and quietly, brief exchanges conducted in low voices that carried anxiety in every syllable. It was difficult to blame them. Mingxuan kept seeing movement himself. Skulking forms at the edge of sight, dissolving into deeper shadow the moment he looked at them directly.

Silhouettes in black that suggested bodies: some bipedal, some not; some large enough to make the mind recoil, others small and quick and curious. None of them would hold still long enough to become certain, which meant they could remain anything. Yin seemed to draw confidence from the dark. Her black fur blended into the world so perfectly that Mingxuan would lose her unless she wanted to be seen. She stalked through the grass beneath their feet, nearly invisible, ranging ahead and to the sides.

Whenever one of the shadow-things drifted too close, Yin would arch her small body, hackles up, and hiss like a creature twice her size. Yang, meanwhile, clung to Xinyi in the sling. The white kitten pressed himself into the deepest corner, trembling against her chest, eyes wide with perpetual terror. Every unfamiliar sound was a fresh disaster he cowered from. He had stopped purring entirely; contentment had been replaced by a constant low whimper.

Eventually, as the day wore into what should have been afternoon though the light never changed, Mingxuan drifted toward Xiaoling. She seemed to have emerged from her contemplative mood, her ice-blue eyes tracking the surrounding shadows with curiosity rather than distant vacancy. When he drew alongside Enlai's cart, she glanced down at him without expression. He cleared his throat, suddenly uncertain how to begin, then settled on directness.

"What do you know of Shadow Qi?" he asked, then added with wry self-deprecation, "My 'tutor' in the arts of cultivation did not pay any special attention to the element, to my regret." Xiaoling stared at him for long enough that Mingxuan began to suspect she was going to continue looking at him until the end of the world, or until he dissolved into the road-dust and amethyst light and became one more thing that didn't matter.

Her pale face remained expressionless, those unsettling eyes fixed on his with an intensity that made him feel as if he'd been opened like a book and she was skimming the pages. Then, just when he'd started to accept that no answer was forthcoming, she spoke.

"Shadow Qi is a chaotic element," she began.

"That of the unseen. Its practitioners specialize, as one might imagine, in stealth." She shifted slightly, adjusting her position among the grain sacks with a frown.

"Its turn on the Celestial Cycle likely means the Elemental Realm and the Spiritual Realm are aligned close together, and a great secret is being kept somewhere in the world." Mingxuan blinked, confused and, equally, impressed.

"I've never heard of such lore surrounding the Celestial Cycle."

"My family claims to be most knowledgeable on all things. Such arrogance has led to there being barely twenty of the true-blooded Kongji left." Mingxuan couldn't decide if her tone was pleased or remorseful. Instead, her mention of her family tugged his mind back to Enlai. Words passed his lips before he could consider whether they were wise.

"The story Enlai told me," he said quietly, pitching his voice low enough that only she would hear.

"About owing your family a favour for taking him in. I… Given what you told me this morning, I cannot imagine that to be true." Xiaoling simply shrugged.

"None of the people here are going to remember me either way," she said with clinical detachment.

"So it matters little if I make his forgetting of me a gradual thing that grants me the benefit of not having to walk all the way to Ironhold." The casualness of it sent discomfort crawling up Mingxuan's spine.

"You're manipulating an innocent man's memories."

"I am." She met his gaze without flinching.

"Originally, there had indeed been a family that Enlai felt he owed a debt to. But they had all died." Her fingers traced idle patterns on the grain sack beneath her.

"I simply altered his memory so that he forgot the sickly daughter had died too, taking the girl's place. And in the end, I'll take on the burden of his regrets, making him a happier man." Mingxuan felt even worse about that.

"A person's experiences are an important part of who they are," he said carefully.

"The roads we walk in our lives, for good or ill, shape us." Yet as he said this, Xinyi's words came back to him: how she would rather forget the demon attack that had happened on the day of his birth. The way she'd described the battlefield stretching around them painted in death with trembles wracking her shoulders. Would he deny her the relief of forgetting that trauma?

He reluctantly conceded, the words emerging slower than before: "Though some people might prefer not to be burdened by the negative experiences of their lives." Xiaoling nodded, as if he had finally arrived at a conclusion she had been standing beside all along, but offered no further comment. After that exchange Mingxuan returned to Xinyi, his thoughts turning in circles, worrying at the edges of memory and truth.

She smiled at him with a soft, doey expression when he drew near, and said, "I'm happy to see you making a friend." The observation startled a small sound from him, not quite a laugh, not quite a protest.

"Connection is good for you," Xinyi continued gently, adjusting Yang in his sling where the kitten had finally stopped trembling enough to doze in fitful, unhappy spurts.

"You spend too much time alone with your thoughts." Mingxuan glanced back toward Enlai's cart. Xiaoling was already distant again, returned to her quiet contemplation, as if their conversation had never happened at all. Friend felt like an inadequate word for whatever this was, or would become. They were not friends. Not in the way people meant the word. Companions in heresy, perhaps.

Two people walking forbidden paths, recognizing in each other the weight of choices that couldn't be shared with another who hadn't made similar ones. The caravan continued. Hour after hour they trudged through a countryside drowned in Shadow, and the Shadow did not lift, and did not tire, and did not behave like anything Mingxuan had come to expect from the darkness.

On only the second day of Shadow's dominance, one of the merchants, Ping, mentioned during a rare moment of conversation that Shadow had never been recorded to last so long.

"My grandfather spoke about it once," the merchant said, his weathered face creased with worry as he glanced at the purple-veined sky.

"Shadow's greatest turn on the Cycle. Lasted just under a day before Fire Qi claimed dominance." He gestured upward with a hand that trembled slightly.

"This? This is unnatural." The things in the shadows grew bolder with time and an abundance of darkness. What had begun as vague shapes swimming through the gloom gained definition, substance. Mingxuan started to recognize patterns in their movements, behaviors that suggested intelligence rather than mere instinct. And he could sense distant Death Qi flashing like fireworks at the edges of perception. Cold sparks bloomed and faded in moments, each one marking an ending somewhere in the shadow-soaked wilderness.

Things were dying out there. Whether from natural causes or predation by the strengthening spirits, he couldn't determine. Instincts deep-rooted inside him begged to plunge into the shadows and seek those endings, but he resisted the call. He was needed here, where danger loomed over these innocent people. It grated at him, an itch he couldn't scratch. But all he had to do to firm his resolve was imagine what might become of these people if he went off in his own.

Some of the silhouettes in the roiling shadows began to resemble people. Mingxuan would catch glimpses of bipedal forms standing motionless between trees, or walking parallel to the road. Once or twice he was sure he saw winged things flying overhead, great shapes that blotted out portions of the purple-veined sky, moving with the languid grace of hunting birds. Yet none of it made any sound. No rustle of feathers, no crack of branches, no footfalls against earth.

The spectral entities moved through their world of shadow as silently as ghosts, and his death sight found no purchase on them to confirm or deny their nature. Early on the third day under Shadow's perpetual twilight, they passed by a forest that pressed close to the road. Ancient oaks with gnarled trunks stood sentinel, their branches forming a canopy so dense it created corridors of absolute darkness beneath.

And there, standing between the trees perhaps thirty paces from the road, Mingxuan saw something that made his breath slam to a halt. It resembled a human in the loosest sense. Roughly the correct height and proportions, but inaccurate in ways that accumulated into wrongness too profound to dismiss. Its skin possessed a waxy, translucent quality, stretched too tight over bones that jutted at unnatural angles.

The face—if it could be called a face—bore features that seemed to have been shaped by an unskilled hand that didn't quite understand how a face should look. Eyes set at slightly different heights. A mouth twisted into an expression that showed a grimace on one side and a grin on the other. It wore tattered robes reduced to cobwebbed remnants that stirred in a breeze Mingxuan couldn't feel. The creature stood perfectly still, watching the caravan pass.

Its mismatched eyes tracked their progress with an intelligence that felt cold, evaluating. Then its gaze met Mingxuan's directly, and the creature jerked as though struck. Its translucent skin rippled, and for a moment Mingxuan could see through it entirely, glimpsing the trees beyond as though the thing were made of glass. Then it turned and fled, skittering on all fours into the forest's deeper darkness, vanishing between the oaks like smoke dispersing.

Mingxuan stood frozen, staring at the space where it had been. What was that? His mind offered no answers, Liu Wen's memories containing nothing that matched what he'd just witnessed. After the thing in the oak forest looked at Mingxuan and then ran, the world decided it had been coy long enough. The shadow-phenomena multiplied. They became bolder. If before there had been shapes swimming in the gloom like fish in black water, now there were watchers. They kept their distance most of the time.

They did not rush the carts or leap into the firelight. It felt, more and more, as if the countryside had grown eyes. Mingxuan recognized some of them from the broken, half-remembered fragments that lived in Liu Wen's borrowed knowledge, but his knowledge covered only the broad strokes, because he'd been more focused on cultivation techniques than folklore.

Yaoguai: creatures that had started as animals and then—through resentment, through hunger, through time, through spiritual power—had outgrown their skins and transcended their original forms On the third evening under Shadow, a deer that walked on two legs like a man lingered at the edge of the darkness. Its antlers had multiplied into a crown of bone twice as tall as its body, each tip dripping luminescent violet that vanished when it struck the earth.

Its legs bent backwards at the joints, and where its eyes ought to have been there were only hollows weeping shadow like tears. It paced them for a short while, matching their speed exactly, its hooves making no sound against the ground. Shufen pointed at it and started to cry. The creature tilted its head toward the sound, then bound away into the darkness. Mere hours later, a pack of what looked like wolves circled the caravan.

Each possessed too many eyes, clusters of them running down their flanks like pox marks, all glowing that same sickly purple. Their fur seemed to be woven from pure darkness, and when they moved, they left trails of night hanging in the air behind them. They didn't growl or snarl, just circled in perfect silence, studying the caravan with those multiplied gazes. Yin hissed and arched her back, and the wolves kept their distance, but they followed for hours before finally melting back into the shadows.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. There were gui, too, ghosts of the restless dead that clung to the mortal real, refusing whatever waited beyond. These, Mingxuan handled with little issue. A woman appeared standing in the middle of the road one morning, translucent and waterlogged despite there being no water nearby. Her robes clung to her form, dripping shadow instead of liquid.

Her hair hung in wet ropes across her face, but through the tangles, Mingxuan could see empty sockets where her eyes should've been that nonetheless tracked their movement. Her mouth moved as though speaking, but no sound emerged. When Xinyi's healer's instinct recognizing someone in distress and instinctively stepped towards it, the ghost's form rippled, and Mingxuan saw in her depths dozens of other faces, all the people the malevolent spirit had drowned.

He pulled Xinyi back, and the ghost watched them with that eyeless gaze, smiling sweetly, gently. The spirit radiated Death Qi, and Mingxuan dispersed it with ease, merely plucking on the tug to sever its connection to this world. Its Qi flooded into his channels, but he was not comforted by the act. Worse was the child. It appeared at the edge of the firelight that same night, appearing maybe seven years old, wearing robes that tattered and stained with something dark.

Its face was almost normal, but the proportions were slightly wrong, eyes set too far apart, mouth too wide.

"Mother?" it called in a voice like a wind chime.

"Have you seen my mother?" Yuzhen gasped and started toward it before her husband grabbed her arm. The thing's smile widened, splitting its face nearly ear to ear, revealing darkness inside.

"Mother," it repeated, and this time the word sounded hungry. Mingxuan extended his hush, and the child-thing scattered like smoke, its final cry echoing with dozens of voices layered over each other. He stayed up all night keeping watch after that. The next morning, they encountered three bizarre figures standing at a crossroads.

They wore the approximation of scholar's robes, and their faces held the suggestion of human features, but everything was slightly melted, as though they'd been made of wax and left too near a flame. They simply watched the caravan pass, heads turning in perfect unison to track the movement. On the sixth day, Mingxuan noticed something that made him pause mid-step. Yuzhen walked beside her family's cart, engaged in animated conversation with a woman he didn't recognize.

The stranger possessed an ethereal beauty, features so delicate they might have been carved from jade, hair that fell in a cascade of midnight silk, robes that shimmered between silver and violet depending on how the light caught them. She laughed at something Yuzhen said, the sound like wind chimes in a summer breeze, and rested one pale hand on the mother's arm with the familiarity of an old friend. The comfort in the gesture almost made him doubt himself.

Perhaps, he thought, this woman truly was a friend of Yuzhen's who had always been meant to join up with the caravan. But instinct screamed at him, and he opened his death sight and reached for the stranger's endings. What came to him was not human at all. Beneath the human disguise lay a fox; nine tails, fur like spun moonlight, eyes that held centuries of accumulated wisdom.

Its deaths showed variations on themes of transformation and trickery, futures where illusions failed and hunters struck, but also peaceful endings where it simply faded into myth. Curiously, he struggled to find any examples of himself dealing its end. He started forward, caution warring with the need to understand, when Xiaoling appeared at his side without warning.

Her ice-blue eyes were fixed on the disguised fox spirit, and her expression held something he'd not seen in her before, soft and aching as old scars.

"I dreamed of bonding with a hushen as a child," she said quietly.

"Before I understood the truth of the Hollow Vessel Art. Before I learned what my family's ridiculous ambitions would cost." Her fingers twisted together, knotting and unknotting.

"Fox deities seemed so much kinder than demons. Playful rather than hungry." Mingxuan stared at her for a moment.

"Is that what this is, then? A fox deity?"

"A spirit, this one. Deities are more… noticeable." He kept staring.

"How have we both only noticed it now?" Xiaoling snorted.

"What do you mean we both?" The fox spirit noticed them watching. Its human disguise smiled with a perfect expression of polite warmth, then excused itself from Yuzhen with a graceful bow. The mother looked slightly disappointed but waved the stranger away with good humor, turning to her husband instead. The spirit approached them with unhurried steps. Up close, the illusion was flawless.

Mingxuan could see individual eyelashes, the faint flush of color in its cheeks, the slight asymmetry in its smile that made it seem genuine rather than constructed. Only his death sight revealed the truth.

"Yuzhen seems like a lovely woman," the fox spirit said. The words themselves were innocuous, but something in the delivery suggested layers of meaning Mingxuan couldn't quite grasp.

"So full of hope for the future. So convinced that Ironhold will solve all their troubles." Mingxuan kept his voice carefully neutral. Death Qi waited in his meridians.

"What are your intentions here?" The fox spirit's smile widened, and for just a moment, its teeth seemed slightly too sharp.

"Such politeness," it said.

"How refreshing. Most cultivators I encounter either attack immediately or attempt to bind me for my essence." It tilted its head, studying him as if he were the strange one.

"I was merely curious about this odd little band moving through the dark. Such an interesting collection of mortals you have here." Its gaze drifted past them toward the merchants' cart, where Ping and Wing were conducting their usual inventory. Something flickered in the fox spirit's eyes, before its attention returned to Mingxuan.

"Just curious," Xiaoling said flatly, her earlier wistfulness hardening into skepticism.

"You carry far too many regrets around humans to approach them so benevolently. I can feel them on you, memories of trust betrayed and kindness repaid with cruelty. Yet here you are, chatting with a merchant's wife as though you're old friends. What are you really after?" The fox spirit blinked, genuine surprise crossing its perfect features.

"My, my," it murmured, studying Xiaoling with new interest.

"What an unusual girl you are. Most can't sense such things. What are you, I wonder? What do you carry that lets you taste regret in others?" Before Xiaoling could respond, Yin emerged from the shadows at their feet. The black kitten strode forward with fearless confidence, tail held high, and looked up at the disguised fox spirit with furious eyes. She opened her mouth and released a single, crystalline mew. For a heartbeat, the fox spirit's form wavered.

Mingxuan saw the suggestion of fur, the ghost of tails spreading behind it, ears that weren't quite human appearing and vanishing. Several members of the caravan gasped, their conversations cutting off mid-sentence as they registered that something was wrong with the beautiful stranger. The fox spirit looked down at Yin, then threw back its head and laughed. The sound rolled across the camp like thunder, too large for the delicate form that produced it, layered with harmonics that made the shadows roil.

"Oh, how tragic," it said, still laughing, voice dripping with sarcasm.

"Discovered by a kitten. My reputation will never recover. However shall I show my faces in polite society again?" The illusion dissolved all at once. What stood before them now was a fox the size of a donkey, fur the color of starlight and shadow woven together. Nine tails spread behind it in a fan of luminous silver, each one moving independently, tracing patterns in the air that left afterimages burning in Mingxuan's vision.

Its eyes were golden and ancient, holding depths that suggested this creature had walked the world when their great-grandparents' great-grandparents were still unborn. Gasps and exclamations erupted from the caravan members who hadn't realized the beautiful woman had been anything but human. Yuzhen stumbled backward, one hand pressed to her mouth. Zhiqiang pulled his children close, putting his body between them and the revealed spirit. The fox spirit paid them no mind.

It fixed its golden gaze on Yin, who glared back with her back arched, hissing and spitting at the intruder.

"You're an interesting little thing," it said to the kitten.

"I wonder what you'll grow into, assuming you survive long enough to find out." Then it turned those ancient eyes on Mingxuan and Xiaoling, and its muzzle split in what could only be called a grin.

"We'll see each other again," it promised.

"I'm quite certain of it." Without waiting for a response, the fox spirit began to melt into the darkness without appearing to move. Its nine tails streamed behind it like banners of light, visible for several heartbeats before the shadows swallowed them entirely. Within moments, it had vanished as thoroughly as though it had never existed, leaving only the faint scent of lotus flowers in its wake. Xinyi appeared at his elbow with Yang trembling in her arms and concern written across her features.

"Are we safe?" she asked.

"Should we be worried?" He wanted to reassure her that the fox spirit had meant them no harm. But the truth was, he had no idea what that ancient creature's intentions were, or what it might do when they met again.

"I don't know," he admitted quietly.

"But we should stay alert. Shadow Qi is bringing more than just spirits out of hiding. It's revealing things that prefer to stay hidden, and not all of them will be as... restrained as that one." Xinyi nodded, accepting his honesty even though it offered no comfort. oOoOo Shadow ruled for multiple days that blurred together, time losing meaning in the perpetual twilight. The caravan's progress slowed to a crawl.

Mingxuan stayed close to Xinyi and the kittens throughout it all, positioning himself as a barrier between them and the shadow-things that prowled ever closer. Yin continued to think this was wonderful, stalking through the darkness with fearless curiosity, hissing and spitting at anything that approached too near. Her black fur made her nearly invisible in the gloom, a living absence that seemed more spirit than flesh. Yang, in stark contrast, despised everything about Shadow Qi's dominance.

He remained terrified, constantly trembling against Xinyi's chest, taking up most of her attention with his pitiful mews and desperate need for comfort. Several days after the fox's surreal visit, Mingxuan found himself struggling to sleep. The constant vigilance had worn at him, paranoia about the strange phenomena affecting even his mind. He'd tried meditation, tried simply closing his eyes and forcing rest, but sleep remained elusive. Every shadow seemed to hide threats.

Every silence felt pregnant with approaching danger. He noticed Xiaoling sitting awake at the edge of the camp, her pale form barely visible in the purple dimness. She never seemed to sleep at all, maintaining constant awareness as though slumber held no appeal or relevance for her. Mingxuan rose from his bedroll carefully, so as not to wake Xinyi, and approached Xiaoling quietly. He settled onto the ground a respectful distance away.

She glanced at him but said nothing, waiting with that infinite patience he'd come to associate with her.

"Your family," he said after a moment of shared silence.

"Why did you leave them? And what do you seek in Ironhold?" Xiaoling regarded him for a long moment, those ice-blue eyes reflecting the purple sky like chips of amethyst.

"My family's library is extensive, but not infinite," she said finally.

"There's knowledge it lacks that I hope to find elsewhere." Mingxuan couldn't help but chuckle.

"I'm headed there for similar reasons, actually." She giggled along with him, the sound so light and unexpected it seemed to belong to a different person entirely.

"I suspected that was the case," she said, and her expression softened into something approaching genuine warmth.

"You seem so unlike what I'd been led to expect of Death cultivators. It's clear to me that you don't at all comprehend just how feared your Dao is." The observation set something cold settling in Mingxuan's chest, but before he could respond, she smiled and continued: "But I'm sure you'll gain some insight into that before Shadow's time is up on the Celestial Cycle." oOoOo They saw more spirits as the days went on.

Yaoguai with twisted forms that had once been majestic and beautiful, gui that drifted through the air trailing wisps of resentment, wangliang that pooled in the darkest places like living oil, chimei that flickered at the edges of vision like heat mirages made of night. Most of them didn't actually approach. They watched from a distance, following the caravan's progress.

But their presence was a constant, oppressive reminder that the boundaries between the living world and whatever lay beyond had grown dangerously thin. Then something else arrived. Something very, very big. Mingxuan felt a presence vast enough that it sent his Qi off balance. His death sight snapped open, and his awareness filled with a darkness that had weight and appetite. The shadows consuming them all. Xinyi's throat torn open, her eyes wide with betrayal as blood poured between her fingers.

The merchants pulled apart by reaching claws. The family devoured one by one, their screams silenced before they could fully form. The visions came faster than he could process them, a kaleidoscope of endings all sharing a common element: shadow, vast and hungry, devouring them all.

"Everyone stop!" he shouted, his voice cracking with urgency.

"Stop and move close together!" Now!" The caravan members looked at him in confusion, but they'd learned over days of travel that when the strange boy with white-streaked hair gave warnings, those warnings tended to be worth heeding. Enlai halted his cart immediately, yanking on the reins hard enough that his oxen lowed in protest. The merchants pulled their wagon alongside. The family clustered together, Zhiqiang gathering his children close with protective arms.

"What is it?" Xinyi asked, moving to Mingxuan's side with Yang clutched protectively against her chest. Yin had returned to her feet, fur standing on end, a low growl building in her tiny throat that sounded far too large for her small body.

"Something's coming," Mingxuan said, scanning the darkness with mounting dread. The shadows around them seemed to deepen, becoming almost solid, pressing against them. The amethyst sun overhead darkened as though a veil were being drawn across it, its purple light fading to near invisibility until they stood in something approaching true night. It got closer. Mingxuan could feel it in the way Death Qi responded in his meridians, resonating with something vast and terrible slithering through the shadow.

Large enough to coil around them like a serpent. Large enough to constrict. To crush. To consume. Enlai's oxen lowed nervously, stamping their feet and rolling their eyes until the whites showed. Yang's trembling intensified until Mingxuan worried the kitten might shake himself apart. Even Yin's growling faltered, her small body pressed flat against the ground as though making herself as small as possible.

And Mingxuan's death sight grew more insistent: endless variations, endless endings, all of them damp and smothering, all of them full of the same crushing dark. He gathered Death Qi, pulling it into readiness. He had no idea whether what he knew could hurt something like this. He prepared anyway. Only Xiaoling seemed unbothered by the approaching presence. She'd climbed atop the driver's seat of Enlai's cart and now stood balanced on one foot, arms held out to the sides like a dancer frozen mid-performance.

Her pale face showed no fear, no tension. If anything, she looked almost serene. Then she brought her hands together as if in prayer. Her voice emerged, resonant with power. She started chanting individual syllables in a language he didn't know but somehow recognized. Her voice carried harmonics that shouldn't have been possible from a single throat, layering overtones that resonated with some kind of qi technique he didn't understand.

The shadows rippled in response to her chanting, pulling back slightly as though the words commanded them. And there, revealed in the brief moment of clarity, Mingxuan saw it. An enormous creature with black fur curved around the caravan. Six legs, each ending in paws large enough to crush a cart. Four wings folded against its back, membranous and dark, shot through with veins that pulsed with purple luminescence.

And where its face should have been, just smooth fur, as though the creature had been born without features or had them erased by some cosmic hand. Its fur shivered at the sound of Xiaoling's voice, rippling like water disturbed by wind. Then, a sibilant voice joined her chant, echoing slightly after her at first but soon seeming to match her perfectly, two voices weaving together in harmonies that stung his inner ear like nettles.

The creature was singing with her, or perhaps through her, its faceless head tilting as though listening. This went on for a time impossible to measure. The chant filled the space around them, syllables building upon syllables until the air thrummed with accumulated power. Mingxuan found himself swaying slightly, caught in the rhythm despite himself, feeling the words resonate in his bones even though he couldn't understand their meaning. Then Xiaoling lifted her hands skyward.

And with one last syllable—sǐ—she ended her chanting. Silence crashed down upon them like a breaking wave. The monster stilled. Its faceless head turned toward him, and though it possessed no eyes, Mingxuan felt its attention settle on him. For a long moment, neither moved. The entire caravan held its collective breath, waiting to see if this would be the moment the darkness finally closed in for the last time. Mingxuan called upon his Death Qi, ready to act at any moment.

Then the creature faded away back into the shadows. One moment it was pressing against reality, and the next it was gone, leaving only the purple-veined sky and the perpetual gloom of Shadow Qi's dominance. The caravan exhaled all at once. Several people dropped to their knees. Xinyi's hand found his shoulder, gripping hard enough to hurt, and he covered her fingers with his own, offering what reassurance he could manage despite the trembling in his own hands.

Xiaoling descended from the cart with the same fluid grace she'd ascended with, though Mingxuan noticed her legs shook slightly when she landed. She'd exerted herself significantly with that chanting, pushing reserves of power that even her demon-enhanced body struggled to maintain. Mingxuan approached her once the immediate panic had subsided, once people started moving again with nervous energy that needed an outlet.

"What was that thing? A demon?" Xiaoling clicked her tongue.

"You know it wasn't."

"Yes." He coughed awkwardly, struggling to find words adequate to what he'd witnessed.

"How did you scare it off? Duanyuan?" Xiaoling smiled wryly back at him, shaking her head.

"All I did was invite it to investigate what flavour of qi flows through your meridians," she said simply.

"Its instinct for self-preservation did the rest." Mingxuan stared at her for a long moment, but her smile didn't falter. Her expression held no hint of deceit. He looked down at his hands. Ordinary hands, belonging to a boy barely into his cultivation journey. And yet, something like that fled before him.

"If not a demon," Mingxuan asked, "what was it? What did it want?"

"I don't think things like that have names. Call it a primordial spirit, if you like. As to what it wanted?" Xiaoling's smile turned ghastly as her gaze drifted over the caravan.

"Isn't that a wonderful question? Strange things rearing their heads under Shadow Qi's dominion isn't so strange, but we are attracting a lot of interest from these dark spirits, aren't we?" Mingxuan grimaced.

"Do you have any idea why?" Xiaoling gave perhaps the most casual shrug Mingxuan had ever seen.

"Someone here is probably cursed." Silence lingered for a moment. Then Mingxuan's eyes widened.

"What?!"