Chương 5: Something Important I Must Be Forgetting

Azure Profound Continent Boom! The wooden door splintered inward with a sound like a gunshot. Rotten splinters showered across the tomb chamber, scattering over cold stone. Leo's eyes snapped open. He couldn't remember how he'd gotten here. The last few hours were blank. He tried to retrace his steps and found nothing. The must be something important I must be forgetting.

"IRS! Is it the IRS?!" An elderly man bolted upright nearby, clutching his chest with both hands.

"I don't have any offshore spiritstones! I declared all my income!"

"Keep it down, the baby's sleeping... wait." A second man sat up, blinking, patting the cold stone with increasing urgency.

"Where's the monitor? Where's the crib?"

"Oh god, I've been kidnapped!" A third man shrieked and scrambled backward until his spine cracked against the chamber wall.

"I don't have any money! I'm IT support! I'm single!" Three strangers. One tomb. Complete confusion. And the barricade of furniture wedged across the doorway was already buckling from whatever had punched through it. Leo pushed himself upright. Something nagged at the edge of his memory, a detail just out of reach. Through the breach in the barricade came the arms. Three zombie cultivators clawed their way into the room, movements jerky and unnatural.

They wore tattered robes, fabric rotted to threads, and their gray flesh looked like dried leather. Ancient robes. Stone chamber. Undead cultivators. Foreign strangers waking up confused. Leo realized he must have transmigrated again. He'd experienced something similar when he first transmigrated while shopping with his dad at Costco. He pressed himself against the back wall, legs shaking.

If the first transmigration had dropped him into a world with flying cars and nuclear cultivation wars, this one had dropped him somewhere worse. He was still a mortal with unopened meridians and an empty dantian. One hit from those things would kill him. The nearest zombie lunged straight for the IT guy, gray arms extended, blackened fingernails gleaming.

"Back! Back, help!" The man squeezed his eyes shut and threw his hands out. White flame erupted from his palms, a torrent of cleansing light that swallowed the zombie whole. The heat washed across the chamber. Everyone flinched. The afterimage seared through Leo's eyelids even as he turned away. The IT guy blinked, rubbed his streaming eyes, and flexed his fingers with a bewildered grin.

"Whoa. My recovery is so smooth. The ambient qi here is at least Foundation Establishment grade." Foundation Establishment. So these strangers were cultivators from the same world Leo had transmigrated into, the world with Exeter and spirit vein memberships and corporate nuclear raiders. Relief cut through the panic. At least he had allies who could fight. But the relief lasted exactly as long as it took for the second zombie to clear the barricade.

"Nice shot, kid!" The old man was already on his feet, panic gone, hands raised in a practiced guard.

"You speak English? You from the States?"

"Kevin from Queens!" the IT guy yelled, scrambling up.

"Mike from Seattle!" The other man, the one who'd been searching for a baby monitor, rolled his shoulders with a series of pops and moved forward with a fluid grace that contradicted everything about his dad-bod frame. The zombie hopped toward him, arms outstretched and stiff. Mike ducked under the reaching limbs, caught the creature's waist sash, pivoted his hips, and redirected its momentum into the stone floor.

"Ex-military?" The old man watched the throw with an appraising squint.

"Me too. Arthur. Florida."

"Leo!" he shouted from his position against the back wall.

"Connecticut! I think we transmigrated!" Arthur's brow furrowed.

"Transmigrated?"

"Died and reincarnated in an ancient cultivation world. I read about it before." The explanation sounded insane, but there was no time to work out what was happening. More gray arms clawed through the gap in the barricade. The three adults moved to intercept. Kevin's yang fire scorched the lead zombie while Arthur kicked the next one's head clean off. Leo stood behind them and felt the shame settle into his chest like a weight. He was useless.

These men had cultivation, combat experience, spiritual energy crackling through meridians that had been open for decades. He was fourteen years old and fragile as wet paper. Every second he stood here doing nothing brought those things one second closer to getting past the adults and reaching him. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. He needed to do something. Anything. His eyes swept the dark corners of the chamber while the sounds of combat echoed off stone.

There, against the far wall: a miserable pile of bedding, blankets still rumpled, a small fire pit filled with fresh ash. Someone had been living here. Recently. Leo moved while the zombies focused on the bigger threats. He dropped to his knees and rifled through the mess with desperate hands. A coil of frayed rope. Dried rations that looked like rocks. A leather pouch of low-grade spiritstones that clinked when he grabbed it. And wrapped in a greasy cloth at the bottom of the pile, a sword. His breath caught.

The steel shimmered with cold blue light. Formation work etched along the fuller in patterns too fine to read. When his fingers closed around the handle, the blade vibrated against his palm, humming with spiritual power. It had to be at least Foundation Establishment grade. He couldn't wield it himself. His arms already ached from the weight, the balance all wrong for someone without qi reinforcement. But he could arm someone who could.

"Guys!" He held the weapon up with both hands, the blade wobbling.

"I found a spiritual sword!" He turned to run toward Mike. A hidden panel in the wall ground open behind him. A man stumbled out. Short, scrawny, caked in grave dirt from scalp to shoes. Dark circles carved valleys under bloodshot eyes, and his robes hung off a frame that hadn't eaten properly in weeks. His hands shook. The man froze in the opening of his passage.

His gaze swept the room: the zombies breaking through his barricade, the three foreign cultivators radiating Foundation Establishment energy, the demonic language he should have studied more. Then his eyes locked on Leo's hands, on the blade in them, and his face collapsed.

"Ahhhh!" Wei Tuo screamed. Leo froze.

"Uh... hello?"

"Ni gan shen me!!!" Wei Tuo yelled in his native tongue, his face twisting from despair to fury in an instant. The words meant nothing to Leo, but the anger was clear. Leo stumbled backward, raising the blade defensively on pure reflex.

"Help! Help!" Arthur, who had just kicked the head off a zombie, spun at the noise. What he saw was clear as day. They had transmigrated to a dangerous world, in the middle of battle, and now some dirty, gibberish-spouting local was attacking their group's youngest member over their only treasure.

"Hey!" Arthur's face turned a shade of purple that spoke of decades of suppressed customer-service fury. The old man didn't hesitate. He channeled spiritual energy into his legs and launched himself across the room.

"Get your dirty hands off my sword!" The impact lifted the scrawny man off his feet. A hundred and fifty pounds of angry American former small-business owner drove into his ribs at Foundation Establishment speed, and the two of them tumbled into the dirt in a tangle of limbs and curses.

"I got him!" Arthur pinned the man flat, knee driving into his stomach, glowing fist cocked.

"Leo, let Mike use the sword! Kevin, tie this guy up! I bet he's the necromancer who sent those things!" Leo shoved the sword into Mike's waiting hand and snatched up the rope. Kevin was already aiming his palms at the pinned man, yang fire crackling between his fingers, unstable and eager. Wei Tuo wheezed and stared up at the terrifying foreigner on his chest. He started to cry.

"I think he's casting a spell!" Kevin shrieked, fingers brightening.

"Should I blast him?"

"No!" Leo dropped beside Arthur and started looping rope around the man's wrists, since Kevin was too busy panicking to follow instructions.

"We might need him for information. We don't even know where we are. Just cripple his cultivation." The words came out automatically, pulled from a cultivation novel where the protagonist captured enemies for interrogation. Standard procedure. Disable the threat, extract intelligence, then decide on disposal. Leo didn't realize what he'd just ordered until Arthur was already moving.

"Sorry, buddy." Arthur's right hand glowed with unstable, jagged yellow light. He pressed his palm flat against the man's lower abdomen. The jagged energy punched through cheap fabric and into the skin beneath, boring inward toward Wei Tuo's dantian. Wei Tuo screamed. The sound was raw, animallike. His whole body seized as Arthur's turbulent qi flooded his spiritual center and tore it apart from the inside. There was a muffled pop. Wei Tuo arched his back, then went limp, wheezing. His eyes rolled white.

Decades of cultivation, gone in seconds. Leo watched it happen from two feet away. In the novels, crippling someone's cultivation was a sentence. A single line of prose you skimmed past on your way to the next plot beat. The reality was a man convulsing on cold stone while his life's work dissolved inside him. The sound he made when it ended was worse than the scream. And Leo had ordered that. Arthur pulled his hand back and snatched up the rope Leo had dropped.

With quick, professional movements, he trussed the sobbing, broken man like a prize hog at a county fair. Leo stood up slowly because his legs didn't feel steady, and he needed a moment before anyone noticed. At the entrance of the chamber, Mike was putting on a clinic with their new spiritual sword. Mike sidestepped a frantic claw swipe. The zombie's nails screeched against the stone wall where his head had been a moment before. He pivoted on his heel and drove the blade forward in a tight arc.

The zombie's head separated from its neck with a wet thud. Black ichor sprayed across Mike's generic gray t-shirt. The body hopped forward two more steps before collapsing, legs still twitching. Mike advanced step by step, reaping the remaining zombie cultivators with rusty but practiced skill. Each strike was economical, targeting joints and necks, wasting no motion. Within thirty seconds, the last zombie fell.

"It's clear," Mike announced, his voice calm despite the carnage. He turned to face the group with a confident smile. And then he stopped. Mike went completely rigid. His eyes stared unblinking at a point in the middle distance. His chest stopped rising. His arm, still holding the sword, hung suspended at an awkward forty-five-degree angle, perfectly still, as if someone had pressed pause on a living body. The blood drained from Leo's face. He had read about this in novels. Soul seizure. Mental invasion.

Possession. The kind of technique that reached past flesh and bone and grabbed the thing that made you you.

"Mike?" Kevin whispered, shrinking against the wall.

"He's not breathing," Leo hissed.

"Look at his pupils. They're not reacting." Arthur scrambled back from the bound prisoner, bloody hands rising in a defensive stance, yellow energy crackling around his fists.

"I can't feel his divine sense. Something's killed him!" Then, before their eyes, Mike disappeared.