Chương 6: Windlisten's Complete Form

Firelight gathered fast in the depths of the earthcore beast's maw.

"Down!" Gu Zhiwei's body moved before her mind caught up. When she came back to herself, she had already kicked off the cave wall, Windlisten drawn backhanded, arrows hissing out one after another so close to the ceiling they scraped it, punching into the rim of the creature's mouthparts. The shots couldn't pierce the shell. But they knocked its head half an inch to the side. The pillar of fire swept across the left-hand wall. The rock went red in an instant, and shattered stone sprayed everywhere trailing sparks.

Gu Zhiwei dropped and rolled; the heat still seared the back of her neck raw. Matt didn't hesitate either. In the gap while the earthcore beast was still reeling, he hauled the wounded hunter onto his back and ran for the entrance, barking, "Everyone out! Don't bunch up at the exit!" The hunters covered each other in turns, squeezing through the only gap left in the collapsed rubble. Behind them the scraping came closer and closer, and fine dust kept sifting down from a ceiling the torches couldn't reach.

Wang Pu looked at the cave exit, then back at Gu Zhiwei. His legs were shaking with total honesty, and his tongue tripped over itself.

"S-S-Sis Gu, is th-there anything I can do?!" Gu Zhiwei held the bow drawn on the earthcore beast, and when she saw Wang Pu still hadn't run, anger flared to her forehead.

"Do me a favor and think about your old granny at home please! Nothing you can do here now. Get out!" Wang Pu gritted his teeth.

"Th-then you be careful!"

"Go!" He clutched his bone knife and stumbled off. The giant earthcore beast slammed the rubble aside, molten veining kindling inch by inch along its back plates. Gu Zhiwei broke left, deliberately letting her vine boots come down on loose stone, kicking up a string of bright clatter. The monster had no eyes, but the gray-white membranes on both sides of its head swelled at once and turned toward her. Found her. It swung a foreleg across at her.

Gu Zhiwei ducked and slid beneath a slanted shelf of rock; the razor limb shaved past just above her scalp, and a few severed strands of hair fell against her cheek. She pushed off the ground, up, and flung the bone knife with her left hand. The blade rang off a wall far across the chamber. Clang! The earthcore beast whipped its head around. Gu Zhiwei slipped into the narrow side passage. The branch was only wide enough for two people to pass. Overhead hung a broad slab of rock, split by earthfire.

The stalagmites under it had mostly snapped off, a few charred tree roots held up the rest, barely. She'd memorized this place on the way in. The giant earthcore beast was enormous. If it forced itself into a passage this tight, its back plates would grind and slam against the walls again and again, and that slab would almost certainly come down. Whether it would crush the thing dead? Crush first, ask later. She counted her bone arrows and shot as she retreated. The first struck its mouthparts.

The second went straight into the membrane on the left side of its head. The earthcore beast let out a shrill screech, pulled its side limbs in tight, and jammed itself into the passage. Gu Zhiwei pulled out the powder the priest's attendant had prepared for her before they left and scattered it fast across the ground ahead of her. That powder flared violently when it met heat. The wave of heat gusted out of the beast's maw.

The powder ignited all at once, a ghastly white glare bursting open inside the narrow passage. The sensory membranes on both sides of its head shrank instantly; the vast body reared instinctively upward, forelegs hammering the walls like something gone mad. Gu Zhiwei put an arrow into the weak point of the slab. Grit and dust poured down. From above came a cracking sound that set her teeth on edge. Crack. The fracture crawled across the ceiling over her head. Gu Zhiwei turned and ran.

Stone came pouring down behind her, fist-sized at first, then a black cloudburst. The great beast was hammered forward onto its face and buried under the fall. She threw herself flat, elbow striking rock, and her whole left arm went numb. There was no counting how many bleeding scrapes the flying stone had already opened on her. BOOM! Half the passage came down completely. Gu Zhiwei curled behind a jut of rock with her arms over her head and face. When the roar faded, all that was left in her ears was a low hum.

She waited two breaths, then pushed off the ground and got up. The collapse had sealed itself shut with broken stone. Only half a foreleg of the giant earthcore beast still showed. The dark red patterns on its shell brightened and dimmed, brightened and dimmed, going slowly dull. Did it work? Delight had just climbed into her chest when the rubble heaved. A burning limb punched through the stone and drove down hard beside her foot. She threw herself backward and ran for the entrance.

The giant earthcore beast struggled up out of the heap. One side of its back plating had been split by falling rock, and something thick and red as lava was leaking out; the pale powder stuck to its body had been scorched black by the heat. It was still alive. In the side tunnels, more earthcore beasts had already caught up. The cave mouth was closer and closer. She could almost make out the shapes of people outside, peering anxiously in.

Black shapes came spilling along walls and ceiling in layers, the scraping closing on the collapse. Several of the smaller earthcore beasts had already worked their forelegs through the gaps in the rubble, mouthparts working in quick, urgent flutters. Great. Classic: finish phase one, health bar changes color, boss summons trash mobs. If this really was a game, the scummy devs had clearly wracked their brains to squeeze players into whaling for gear. She stopped running and raised Windlisten.

She drove her Spirit into the bow, hard, and the two hollow stone beads flared. The wind in the cave was chaos, hot currents slamming ash in every direction, and countless sounds crowded into her mind all at once. A faint hiss of air under the rubble. Limbs crawling behind stone. The great beast's plates grinding against one another as it thrashed, a dull, sticky sound. Every motion tugged at the air around it, sketching the blurred contour of what lay inside it.

Her temple throbbed, throbbed, and the edges of her vision started to go black. Not enough. She kept pouring Spirit into Windlisten. The bow pushed back, violently, like a beast dragged awake against its will, thrumming in her palm. The light in the beads at its tips grew brighter, and a shrill whine stabbed straight into her marrow. Warm liquid came surging out of her nose and onto her lips, salty, tasting of rust. The giant earthcore beast opened its maw again. Red light lit the surrounding rock.

It also lit Gu Zhiwei's white face. She heard her own heartbeat. Thud. Once. And again. That boundary that had always lain across her mind shuddered violently under the impact of her runaway Spirit. Pain split downward along her skull, and every sound around her rushed away at once. Even the roar of the beast's building fire was pressed flat into a long, silent hum. The panel snapped open across her vision. 【Player Spirit threshold breakthrough detected. 】 【Spirit: 24→25. 】 【Spirit level: C.

】 The bottleneck has just been broken! Click. A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. Windlisten leapt out of her hand. The silver-white body extended from the center outward, the once-short limbs putting out thick, long branches, like ancient wood that had slept for years and was budding again. The two hollow stone beads at the tips split open on their own. Inside there was no core of stone. Only two slowly turning silver-white eyes of wind.

The dark blue beast-sinew string blazed alight, throwing off a brilliant blue-violet glow. Every breath of wind in the cavern was dragged toward it. The rubble at the entrance blew apart in an instant, and Gu Zhiwei's whole figure stood revealed to the companions behind her. Not that she had any attention left to spare for that. Dust, gravel, sparks and flare powder that hadn't yet touched down all froze in midair, then whirled fast around her. Windlisten no longer sent her vague washes of feeling.

She heard the bow's voice, clearly. It was urging her.

"Draw." In a state of mystical clarity she couldn't have described, Gu Zhiwei drew, not even noticing that the string had cut her fingers and blood was running down the arrow shaft. She pulled Windlisten inch by inch into a full moon. A silver-white current wrapped that perfectly ordinary bone arrow and condensed outside it into a vast bolt of light, tens of feet long. Between the great beast's chest and belly, under the plates covered in molten veining, there was one very narrow seam. It was breathing.

The plates parted. Flame surged. Gu Zhiwei let the string go. VWOOM! The whole cavern jolted. The huge silver-white shaft of light drove straight into the beast, cleaving the searing red flame open down the middle. It entered at the chest and belly and blasted out through the back plates. The giant earthcore beast's body locked in place. The next instant, silver-white light burst from every seam in its shell, boiling the lava-thick blood that flowed inside, and a wave of scorched stench detonated outward.

The arrow's light didn't stop. It punched through the collapse behind the beast and tore across the earthcore beasts that were still climbing out of the crevices. Black shells whitened and split in the silver fire; countless shapes never even managed a sound before the light running the length of the passage burned them through together. CRASH! The giant earthcore beast's enormous body was torn clean in two and slammed onto the stone. Its molten veining went out entirely.

Residual silver flame from the arrow still wandered soundlessly between the broken plates. Gu Zhiwei was still holding the release stance. Her arms had gone past feeling anything. Windlisten reverted to its old shape and slid out of her hands.

"Holy shit! Holy shit holy shit holy shit!!" After a moment, Wang Pu's voice came from behind her. He hadn't run far to begin with. He was standing right beside the cave mouth now, face caked with rock dust, eyes wide as brass bells.

"That was… way too f**king crazy!" Gu Zhiwei wanted to tell him to keep the voice down, but when she opened her mouth all that came out was a cough full of bloody dust. Matt came crunching over the rubble and caught her by the arm, holding her up, an urgency in his voice he didn't seem to notice himself.

"How bad is it?! Are you all right?" Wang Pu finally snapped out of it and hurried over to help support her, still shaking, still unable to shut up.

"Not to complain, but Sis Gu, next time you drop an ultimate like that, could you give a heads-up first? I honestly thought I was about to be cooked."

"First time using it. No experience." Matt got her over to a huge tree outside the nest and sat her down, then looked past her at the corpse burned through at the cave mouth. He was quiet for a while. Then he looked at Windlisten.

"What's the principle behind that, exactly?" Gu Zhiwei felt herself coming back a little.

"The bow can channel Spirit." Wang Pu was still lost in what he'd seen.

"That last one was just... it was just…! Brother Matt, you saw it too, right? Damn, the whole cave went white, shhhk, like that. Here we are stacking physical attacks, and Sis Gu's over with a pure magic-damage build!!" Seeing her steady a bit, Matt thought of the tribe.

"Can you walk?"

"Yes." She took one step, and her knee simply folded. Matt scooped her up before she hit the ground, frowning.

"You call that yes?"

"Just hear me out while I make excuses." Matt stopped listening to her nonsense and hoisted her onto his back. The team left the nest fast. With the giant earthcore beast dead, nothing came out of the cave after them. Gu Zhiwei lay against Matt's back. The forest was muggy, and yet her body was starting to go cold. Even after Windlisten broke contact with her, the vicious pain between her brows hadn't fully receded; it felt now like something blunt chipping at her skull, over and over.

Sensing something wrong, Matt set her down and touched her forehead.

"You're burning up."

"Probably used too much Spirit." Wang Pu looked a little panicked at that too.

"Sis Gu, you can't go down on us! I'll get you some cold water for a compress." He took off toward the river. But Gu Zhiwei knew a cold compress probably wouldn't do much. With the last scrap of clarity she had left, she said to Matt, "Go back. Go back. Find the High Priest." The next second her consciousness sank into darkness.

A salty wind blew in off the sea. Gu Zhiwei opened her eyes with no idea where she was. In the haze she saw the girl from the shore again, the one from last time. She was fully grown now. Her face was blooming with vigor, and the red shell in her braid had been changed for a pale white one. She stood at the water's edge, longbow slung across her back, her people gathering around her with their packs. The sky over their homeland was riddled with gray-black fissures.

Under attack after attack from the aberrants, the coastline had been eaten away, and black water crept over sand that had once been white. The woman carved a mark into the cliff face and led her people away from a home they had lived in for years. They traveled along the coast. The beasts hunted them on the way. Some died fighting on nameless mudflats and were given to the deep sea; new lives were born too, their crying mixed into wind and rain, coming out of crude hide tents.

Gu Zhiwei heard them sing at night around the fire. The melody ran long, the beat of struck shells folding into the sound of the tide, and the wind carried it farther still. Years later, they built great ships. The wooden vessels went out into deep water. Storms swallowed the starlight, huge swells threw up the bow, and freezing seawater slammed the decks in a frenzy. Rope cut into someone's palm and the rain washed the blood away almost at once.

The woman stood in the middle of her people's despairing sobs, eyes closed, feeling for the wind. She heard the currents of air behind the cloud layer, sensed the dark whirlpool turning slowly deep beneath the water. When the starlight showed for a moment, she opened her eyes and lifted her hand toward the southwest.

"Bring the sail around! Forward!" The fleet cut out along the storm's edge. A very, very long time later, an unfamiliar continent appeared at the far end of the sea mist. Green mountains rolled away into the distance, flocks of white birds lifted from a river mouth, and the smell of wet earth came across the water into their faces. The decks erupted in weeping and cheers. And at that moment, the woman slowly turned her head. Through the celebrating crowd, she looked once more at the spot where Gu Zhiwei was.

There was no surprise on that face the sea wind had carved the years into. As though she had known all along that someone else was here. She raised her hand and pointed at one star in the night sky. The scene broke apart. Gu Zhiwei's eyes snapped open. The night wind had blown a gap into the canopy overhead, and a single star hung there, exactly to the southwest. She was lying on a makeshift stretcher, a cool damp cloth over her forehead, the bitter astringency of herbs still in her mouth.

"You're awake?" Wang Pu leaned in.

"Sis Gu, you've been out cold most of the day. I nearly had a heart attack." Her throat was so dry it hurt: "Where are we?"

"Almost at Cloudperch. They just found fresh beast corpses up ahead." She called up her panel. 【Spirit: 25/100. 】 【Strength: 18/100. 】 【Spirit level: C. 】 【Skill: Retrocognition. 】 【 Available records: 1. Grand Sacred Spirit Shaman. Progress: 35%. 】 Her Strength had gone up. No surprise there. What excited her more was that the skill's unlock progress had climbed another twenty.

The vision was gone, but the unfamiliar knowledge of star signs, ocean currents, and wind patterns stayed lodged in her mind with uncanny clarity. It was as clear as if she had measured that sea with her own hands. She tipped her head back and listened to the way the wind ran, and could even dimly feel that tomorrow afternoon a hard, sudden rain would come out of the northwest. The woman by the sea had left part of her ability behind. And Gu Zhiwei still didn't know who she was.

She looked at the title after the skill record. Grand Sacred Spirit Shaman. Was that the woman?

The hunting party rested briefly through the night and pressed on. It was the following afternoon when they reached Cloudperch. The lower platform was a wreck. Snapped vine bridges were still smoking, earthcore beast corpses were piled beside the roots, reeking slime coated everything, and the air held burnt timber and the bitterness of medicinal herbs. The priests and hunters had held the wooden ladder up to the middle level.

Dozens of adult cloud beasts hung above the tribe, their blue-white glow driving off what black shapes remained. The tribe looked like it had weathered one savage assault. The High Priest heard out what they'd found in the nest and said nothing for a long moment.

"It didn't come here."

"The earthcore beasts were all fleeing. Once that thing left the underground, it may have gone straight to the Sacred Mountain."

"What lies pinned beneath the sacred altar is the power it lost. It means to destroy the last seal." The High Priest's hand tightened on her bone staff, and there was a tremor in her voice almost too faint to catch.

"We can't wait any longer. Tomorrow we enter the Sacred Mountain and hold the Rite." Then she turned her eyes to Gu Zhiwei. From the moment she heard about that staggering shot in the earthcore beast nest, to seeing Windlisten woken into a form no one had ever seen, the burning light in the High Priest's eyes had not once gone out. Since her Spirit hit rank C, something in Gu Zhiwei had opened up. Linking her Spirit to Windlisten came much more easily now, letting the bow show its true face.

The main quest "earn the priests' trust" had been shoved all the way up to 70%. Her fever had broken. She lay half-reclined on the stone steps outside the Sacred Spring, freshly dressed with medicine, cool herbal paste against her wounds, the stinging pushed away. Su Ye came over leading two young cloud beasts. Their transparent broad wings fanned gently. One had a tail filament curled around her wrist, and the other edged towards Gu Zhiwei.

"Loosen your soul," the High Priest said.

"Try to let it touch you. Once we're inside the Sacred Mountain tomorrow, you'll need a cloud beast's help." Gu Zhiwei closed her eyes. Her sense of her own Spirit was far clearer now. She could see that layer of force wrapped around her body, like a transparent hard shell, pressed to her skin and pressed to her mind as well. She tried to spread it open, little by little. The cub's tail filament reached toward her face. Two inches. One inch. This time, the cub finally reached her fingertips.

It even nuzzled against her palm. The High Priest smiled and nodded, then told her to join them at the Sacred Mountain ceremony the following day. There was an important task she intended to entrust to her. In the distance, the ash above the Sacred Mountain was growing thicker, dimming the daylight beneath a murky veil. Something seemed to be disrupting the balance of the mountain's power. Even the cloud beasts had grown restless, circling the treetops as one long cry followed another.

Gu Zhiwei was permitted to spend the night resting in the sacred spring, where her Spirit power could recover better. At dusk, everyone's panel opened on its own. 【Current quest time limit: Day Five. 】 The main quest line, which had only ever been one row of text, slowly unfurled downward, loading in something more complete. 【Main quest: Earn the priests' trust and become a candidate priest. Completion: 70%】 【Final quest loaded. 】 【Stop the Earthfire Rock Beast from destroying the seal. Save the Cloud Sea world.

】 【Time remaining: 48 hours 59 minutes 59 seconds. 】 The number ticked. 【48 hours 59 minutes 58 seconds. 】