Chương 1: "This was a true cultivator"

Ch 1: "This was a true cultivator" The crack that wrenched Zhen from his half slumber was too sharp to be the creak of his cart. He sat up and squinted into the setting sun through his black hair as he looked down the road. Nothing. Beneath him, Chul shook her head but quickly settled back into her rhythmic plod as she pulled the cart behind her. His mare knew the road home just as well as he did, and with the plough having been delivered, they were both keen to get home.

As they rounded the bend past the old willow, Chul's ears suddenly flicked forward. That odd cracking sound came again. Louder now, and with a sharp, tearing quality. Zhen looked up to see a crowd blocking the road ahead and his hands tightened on the reins. Most people in this part of the province were harmless, but bandits weren't entirely unknown. In any event, there was never anyone on this road. Something wasn't right. As they approached and he got a better look, Zhen tensed.

A lone man stood in the middle of a group of fallen bodies, his own body blocking Zhen's view of who he was facing off against. Both the bodies and the man wore sect robes that must have once been pristine but were now stained with blood and dirt. Zhen pulled Chul to a halt and watched from a distance as his mind raced as to what to do. This wasn't good. Zhen had never seen people dressed like that in this far-flung corner of the empire. Sect robes meant cultivators. And cultivators meant trouble.

But as the man dodged to one side, Zhen stared at what was behind him. The cultivator wasn't the problem. Who he was fighting was. His opponents weren't human, nor were they any beast that Zhen had seen before. Jagged figures of black stone lurched forward, each movement splitting the air with that shrieking crack. Standing alone between him and the creatures, the survivor wielded a long wooden staff with a speed Zhen didn't know was possible. Even as he watched, the man struck out, hitting two with precise blows.

The figures' surfaces fractured with a sickly violet light and shattered into clouds of white dust, but more came behind. Blood streamed from wounds that should have crippled him, yet he still moved faster than Zhen's eyes could properly follow. The creatures continued to close in, their high-pitched shrieking building with each step. Individually, they were no match for the cultivator, but there were just so many of them. Zhen's pulse started to race.

There was a fundamental wrongness to their jerky movement and their unearthly shriek. Every instinct screamed at him to flee. But the lone cultivator was surrounded. He was bloodied but still fighting despite the impossible odds, like a figure in the stories from his childhood. To abandon him would betray everything Zhen knew was right. His hands found the grips of his twin hammers. He pulled them off his belt, and without allowing himself to think, he leaped off the cart and charged toward the fight.

One of the black figures turned toward him. Up close, it wasn't quite solid. Its form had lines that pulsed with an unnatural light. Just like he could spot hidden fractures in a poorly quenched blade, he saw weaknesses in the creature. Violet lines ran across the obsidian figure. The stress fractures and break points amongst them were clear to him as he approached. He had been warned to keep the ability a secret since childhood, but right now he was glad he had it.

The old cultivator glanced over, and his eyes widened beneath his blood-streaked bushy white brows as he registered Zhen.

"Stay back, boy!" The man swung his staff in a wide arc, forcing three of the creatures to recoil.

"They'll tear you apart!" But Zhen was already committed. The nearest obsidian figure lurched forward and reached for him with jagged fingers. As the creature lunged, Zhen raised his hammers, instinctively meeting the assault. His heart hammered against his ribs. He was no fighter, but years of honest work in his family forge meant these tools were as familiar as his own hands. His first swing wasn't perfect, but years of hammering metal meant he knew how to aim a hammer.

It hit just next to one of the glowing fractures. In the same instant, a sharp searing pain shot through his left forearm as something sharp raked across him. The impact jarred through his arm, and a jolt of panic shot through him. Then he heard a screech as the creature staggered. His blow had done something. Zhen scrambled back. His arm throbbed, but he had dealt with worse injuries in the forge. As if in response to the pain, his unique sight flared. One particular point pulsed brighter than the others.

A surge of adrenaline coursed through him as he tensed and brought his hammer down. The creature exploded into fine white dust. In the seconds that had taken, the old man hadn't been slow to take advantage of the distraction. The cultivator spun his staff and dispatched two more monsters in a single blow. Despite the danger he was in, Zhen felt a shiver of excitement. This was a true cultivator, just like the stories. The man was channeling qi to perform impossible feats despite his injuries.

Zhen staggered back as another creature lunged. His swings were powerful but uncoordinated. While he had a blacksmith's strength, he was no trained warrior. He barely ducked a grasping claw, the air whistling past his ear, but the movement sent a fresh jolt of pain through the wound in his forearm. This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience. He reset his grip as his blood slicked the handle, then aimed for the weak points.

As he swung out, sometimes he connected, but more often he missed entirely. But with Zhen in the fray, the old man gained the breathing space he needed. He dispatched half a dozen of the creatures in the time it took Zhen to fend off one.

"They have weaknesses!" The cultivator called between blows.

"Strike where their joints meet!" Zhen swung his hammer into a glowing violet fault line and forced himself not to roll his eyes at the belated, redundant advice. A new opponent closed in on Zhen's blind side. Before he could turn, the cultivator appeared, impossibly fast. His staff blurred, and the creature that was about to attack him shattered. The movement cost him, though, and he stumbled as fresh blood darkened his robes. The cultivator wove through the battle with elegance despite his wounds.

Twice more, he placed himself between Zhen and danger, to block blows that would otherwise have hit him. As they fought on Zhen found some kind of rhythm, targeting the weak points on each creature with his hammers. Even though he was used to long days in the forge, his shoulders burned with the effort, and his arms grew heavier with each strike.

Yet for every glassy figure he shattered, two more seemed to grind their way forward, their chorus of metallic shrieks building to an unbearable crescendo as they drew closer.

"There are too many," he grunted, narrowly dodging clawed fingers that left gouges in the dirt where he had stood. The cultivator glanced over his shoulder, face tight with pain and weariness. His blood-soaked robes clung to his frame as he pivoted. Looking around the battlefield, his expression hardened, he latched onto Zhen's collar and then effortlessly yanked him backward.

"Stay behind me," the old man ordered, tossing his staff to one side and planting himself between Zhen and the advancing horde. His hands moved in complex patterns, fingers tracing sigils in the air that left faint luminous trails. The cultivator's stance widened, and a strange pressure built around them, like the moment before a lightning strike." Echoing Dismay!" The cultivator's voice was clear despite his pain. A heartbeat later, a low harmonic hum filled the air around them and dust rose from the road.

The sound came from everywhere at once, vibrating through Zhen's bones as the cultivator continued to move his hands. The creatures' advance faltered as their jagged forms began to shake violently, their movements becoming sluggish and uncoordinated. Their shrieking changed pitch, becoming confused and desperate as whatever the cultivator was doing took effect. Zhen could only watch, that sense of wonder at what he was seeing tightening in his chest.

As Zhen tried to take it in, the old man danced forward impossibly fast, his form seeming to disappear in one place then reappear in another. A faint harmonic sound followed in his wake as he moved between the creatures faster than should have been possible. Zhen's breath caught in his throat as the man reappeared, and his palm struck the first monster's center. For a heartbeat nothing happened, then the creature resonated like a struck bell before exploding from within.

The old man's hand had already found the next target, and then the next. Each palm strike produced the same devastating result. The remaining monsters vibrated, then shattered in short order, collapsing into clouds of white soot. As the final creature shattered, silence fell, broken only by Zhen's heavy breathing. The road was dusted with the fine white powder that sparkled in the fading light. The cultivator appeared back next to Zhen and swayed, his face ashen.

It was clear why he had not done this before as he stumbled from the toll his display of power had taken from him. He turned toward Zhen with a groan and his eyes properly focused on him for the first time. As his gaze locked onto Zhen's face, a look of profound shock pushed aside the exhaustion. His blood-stained lips parted as if to speak, but his strength failed before the words could form. His legs buckled, and he collapsed on the dirt road with a thud. Zhen dropped to his knees beside the fallen cultivator.

His forearm throbbed, a sharp ache beneath the blood that still flowed freely from his injury, but he ignored it as his ability to spot what was broken flared. The man was losing the fight for his life. Working quickly, Zhen tore a strip from the bottom of his own shirt and bound the gash on his left arm to stop the bleeding. He couldn't help anyone if he passed out from losing blood. Then he turned his full attention to the real emergency.

Zhen pulled the cultivator's deep indigo robes away from the worst of his wounds. Blood pulsed from a deep gash in the man's thigh with alarming force. Something important deep inside had been severed.

"Hold on," Zhen muttered, pulling off the rest of his torn shirt without hesitation. A village like theirs didn't have a doctor of its own. His mother was who the villagers turned to when they had serious injuries. Over the years, he had absorbed her lessons whether he meant to or not. He tore the fabric into strips, then wrapped one tightly around the man's upper thigh, several inches above the wound. Despite the gravity of the situation, his hands worked with the same steadiness he applied to delicate metalwork.

He used a broken branch as a lever, twisting it to tighten the makeshift tourniquet until the alarming pulse of blood slowed to a trickle. The cultivator's face had gone waxy pale, his breathing shallow and irregular. Zhen swallowed down his panic but didn't pause. He continued checking for other critical wounds, finding several deep lacerations across the man's torso and a nasty gash on his scalp. He bound these as best he could before carefully lifting the stranger.

The cultivator weighed surprisingly little for a man of such power. Zhen carried him to the cart and laid him carefully among the empty sacks and tools. Chul snorted nervously at the blood, but didn't bolt. With the man settled, Zhen ran back and checked on the bodies that lay on the road. They all wore unadorned black robes made of a heavy, opaque fabric that seemed to almost absorb light. As he went from one to the other, his heart sank as he realized they were all dead.

Although it pained him, he left the corpses. The dead would slow him down and cost the living cultivator his life.

"Home, girl. Fast as you can." Zhen climbed onto the driver's bench and snapped the reins. The cart lurched forward. Every few minutes, Zhen twisted around to check his passenger. The stranger's chest still rose and fell, though barely. Dried blood crusted his white beard, and his skin had taken on a concerning grayish tinge. So this was a fabled cultivator. Not a mythical practitioner of magical martial arts who sought to transcend humanity, but an old man bleeding out in the back of a blacksmith's cart.

Zhen's thoughts churned as Chul's hooves kicked up dust on the familiar path home. Even though the danger had passed, the fight kept replaying itself behind his eyes. Creatures like whatever they had just fought were clearly not natural. Equally, a cultivator had no business here. Such figures belonged in the imperial capital or in ancient mountain sects, not on a dusty road near Zhen's village. The road curved around the lake, offering glimpses of the distant mountains through breaks in the trees.

About half an hour into their journey, a movement from the cart caught Zhen's attention. The old man's hand twitched. His eyelids fluttered, then snapped open. The man's eyes darted about, scanning his surroundings with a confusion that quickly gave way to alarm. His gaze locked onto Zhen. Before he could say anything, the cultivator's arm shot up. Despite his wounds, his fingers closed around Zhen's forearm with crushing strength.

"Dead. Are they all dead?"