Chương 10: The Heretic's Hoard

Heretics were the scum of the earth. Poor heretics were even worse. Polluting the purity of one's body with sorcery and horrible blood-infant-soul-whatever sacrifices was bad enough. Forcing saintly cultivators like Hao to burn hoards of resources in order to scrub their sorcerous stain clean was just as bad. But the audacity to commit to heresy and not have anything to show for it? Now that was unforgivable. Luckily, Xia didn't fall into that category.

Hao was a rich man by Distillator standards, boasting a small fortune's worth of low-grade spirit stones, a few useful pills which had steadily been utilized during his journey, and even a few technique scrolls which were worth a decent bit, particularly Yuchen's fragments of his master's cultivation art. All stolen from his cohort in the White Rivers, of course. The sect provided a stipend to their disciples.

As an Inner Disciple, Hao's stipend was sufficient to make him a wealthy man by mortal standards, but a pauper by a good cultivator's measure. Most masters subsidized their pupils with an allowance. Master Bolin didn't believe in such luxuries, although he occasionally gave Hao a 'gift' with immediate and practical usage. Hao oftentimes had to remind himself just how spoiled he was by the White Rivers in general when he cursed his master's stinginess.

Those practical thefts were far less satisfying compared to the dolls, letters, and personal treasures he'd stolen from his fellow Inner Disciples. Master Bolin's fervent utilitarianism had stamped itself into Hao's habits, but what was the fun of signing your own death warrant if you didn't get to enjoy yourself a little? Spitting in the faces of Yuchen's useless sycophants was as good for the soul as actually escaping the White Rivers. Yuchen boasted a greater fortune than Hao, of course.

He was a spoiled, pampered brat of the mighty Cheng Clan. Even the Cheng Clan's trash was princely by Distillator standards. The only stolen items which would have stung Yuchen came in the form of his White Surging Current Manual and—best of all—the Cheng Spear, which was so impossibly valuable that it dwarfed the other treasures of Hao's hoard. No Distillator had business wielding a weapon like the Cheng Spear. Any Ruminator would eagerly trade their left testicle to wield the heavenly jade weapon. Or ovary.

Hao was egalitarian like that. Even the titans in the higher realms would proudly wield the Cheng Spear, hence Hao largely skirting around any cultivator groups or proper cities during his flight westward. Any greater cultivator would consider it their honored duty to relieve him of his greatest prize. After all, someone else would if they didn't. Why not just skip the whole struggle altogether and profit along the way? Yes, Hao was a rich Distillator, though a peasant to those above.

Through some cruel twist of fortune, it turned out that a half-rate Distillator like Boss Xia might have had him beaten. Hao kept checking Xia's storage ring again and again. Some annoying voice in his head kept screeching that the treasure hoard would vanish. There was toil to be done before he could survey the loot. The sooner he did his dirty work, the faster he could properly account for everything in Xia's ring. That was a kick in the figurative pants like none other.

"Pyre first, then the fun part. This is a damn sight better than a few demonic wolf cores!" Hao cheered, quickly hauling down the bandit corpses from their rocky nests atop the cliff ledges. Touching the corpses didn't bother him. All the tombs that Master Bolin had tossed him into for training had extinguished any hint of squeamishness ages ago. He tossed them all into a pile.

"Don't go anywhere, got it?" Anyone passing through the Cloven Pass would have thought Hao a madman as he lectured the six bandit corpses as if they were misbehaving children. But he had to talk to someone. The road was a lonely place. Hao quickly gathered up a few remnants of the damaged wagons that littered the Cloven Pass. It didn't take long to throw a small pyre together. It took even less to find a few sharp stakes and force them into the ground.

"It took a moment, but you'll be relieved to know that I've thought up a way for you sorry lot to finally do some good," Hao said to the dead bandits.

"Aren't I virtuous? Not everyone would help heretics settle their debts." Hao effortlessly severed the bandits' heads with a few swift swipes of the Cheng Spear. Heavenly jade easily slipped through the Calcinators' gristle and bone, sending the slack-jawed heads tumbling off their previous owners to stare up at the sky with blank eyes. It took just a little longer to spike the bandits' heads upon the six stakes he'd planted before. When it was all done, Hao stood back and regarded his grisly work.

It was almost like he'd planted an orchard of bandit trees. He remembered all too well the terror of being a small boy shut in a closed wagon while bandits surrounded his father's caravan. He remembered the cold terror which had sunk deep into his bones as his father led their defenders against the marauders. He remembered the horrible uncertainty, the screams of dying men, and the thunderous clang of cultivators tearing each other to shreds. Monsters deserved monsters.

A bit of brutality now might erase endless suffering later, or at least shove it off to somewhere else. Still, the ugly sight of the skewered bandit heads made something soft in him ache. Hao tried to bury it deep and distract himself, looking for the twisted humor in the situation just as Master Bolin had taught him. It was the only way to stay human, sometimes.

"Maybe the next band of imbeciles will think twice about setting up shop here. Who knows, they might even come out a head." The dead bandits didn't appreciate Hao's poor joke, so he tossed them all on the pyre and doused them with Quickflame Oil. A touch of fiery qi set them ablaze, releasing their strength into the air as their bodies burnt away. Hao breathed their qi in, swallowing the hazy dregs, and steadily refilled the unrefined qi which billowed within his lower dantian like vapor.

Your path will be fraught with conflict. I have designed it so, Master Bolin's voice haunted Hao's thoughts, distracting him from his cultivation. He grit his teeth. Why not profit from it? It only took a minute or two to inhale the pitiful wisps of power released by the cremation. The inhaled strength was only enough to earn him two or three hours of dashing along the countryside. The Lonely Plains cultivators really were an atrocious bunch. Master Bolin's words echoed in his head all the while.

"Don't worry, I'll burn you one day too," Hao said to Master Bolin's specter. For a moment, he really wondered if he was starting to go insane on the road. Talking to the dead, talking to imaginary masters. Perhaps the Grey Hilt's madness was infectious.

"Until then…" All Hao could do was grasp for the heavens. The first step was taking a proper inventory of Xia's collection. Hao stepped away from the pyre and Xia's corpse, found a roll of soft, sky blue cloth within the storage ring, and unrolled it onto the hard ground of the Cloven Pass. From there, he swiftly began to catalogue the items and release them onto the outstretched fabric.

No doubt the Calcinators kept their mortal treasures somewhere nearby, likely stuffed into some secret hidey hole that Hao didn't care to hunt down. Why would he? Xia would have kept all the good stuff for herself.

"Seven Delights Wine!" Hao grinned as three fine ceramic bottles appeared onto the fabric. Each of the bottles proudly proclaimed that it had been refined for a century in the Temple of Liminal Joy's spirit pools. Paintings of white birds flying above a dark river adorned them, each meticulously woven with a sort of charm which reminded Hao of better days.

"Not bad at all. Were you saving these for a special occasion, Xia?" The wine was valuable, but nothing exceptional. Even so, this would've made the detour to the Cloven Pass worth it. Seven Delights Wine was precious enough to be the prize of some caravan, probably intended for a minor lord of some dirt-filled hovel or a Lonely Plains sect. Just a few drops of the wine would leave a mortal in a blissful delirium. Enough qi saturated the rice wine to affect true cultivators as well.

Hao estimated that a few drinks could refill his dantian with unrefined qi. The whole bottle might fill him with enough strength to strain another droplet of distilled qi. Hao wasn't much of a drinker—Sister Fu always tried to slip some alchemical concoction into his alcohol, and the effects were rarely pleasant—but enjoyed a good celebration, particularly when they ended in a brawl. The dinners and festivals held by the White Rivers were some of the few bright spots their halls had to offer.

"I'll keep one of you for Sister Fu and I to enjoy," Hao said, hefting one of the bottles in his hand.

"Yuchen's death is worth celebrating properly. If I'm feeling charitable, I'll dump a bit of you onto his ashes. He'll need a good drunken stupor before going through the Hells." Until then, he'd keep the Seven Delights Wine to trade. Any Sunbeam cultivator would salivate upon seeing it. Ruminators and above wouldn't gain much from the amount of qi imbued into the wine, but any product of the Temple of Liminal Joys was to be savored. Even their least refined products were worth their weight in spirit stones.

Hence the Temple's unrivaled reputation. They weren't a sect of fighters, but even the Great Nine didn't dare act against them. Who wanted to piss off the same alchemists who supplied the empire's mightiest with booze, drugs, and pills?

"Or perhaps I should take a few sips now," Hao murmured, feeling the power oozing from the sealed bottle. He ached to replace the distilled qi that he'd burnt against Xia. Unrefined qi was sufficient for basic body refining and expanding meridians during the low-stages of Filtration and Calcination, but distilled qi was mandatory for anything more advanced. If only he was a Ruminator! Their Distilled Forms automatically filtered and concentrated qi into its refined state.

As a Distillator, he'd have to fight to compress each and every droplet of the liquid qi.

"No, no, wait for later, Hao. Don't be impatient. Check out the rest of your hard-earned gains." With that thought to cheer him up, Hao set to work. He steadily parsed through the contents of Xia's storage ring while the bandits' bodies smoldered behind him. The stink of scorched flesh didn't bother him anymore, but he didn't think he'd ever adjust to the malodorous aroma of burnt hair. Alas, Hao had spent years developing a potent flame affinity. Burnt hair was a constant in his life.

"Let's see…a few dozen low-grade spirit stones. Not bad." Hao happily added his existing hoard into the secure storage ring.

"A few weapons, nothing special, but they're worth keeping." Xia had stowed away two swords of a similar fashion to her personal weapon, likely as replacements. They were both forged of good, solid steel with basic inscriptions to enhance durability. Most Distillators could wield them comfortably, although the weapons would soon break beneath a Ruminator's strength. Or Hao's, for that matter. Swords weren't Hao's favored weapon. They were effective, certainly, but he enjoyed the additional range of a spear.

There was nothing quite as satisfying as plunging a big length of wood through an enemy. Thankfully, Xia kept three decent spears in her closet-sized storage space as well. They were peasants' weapons compared to the mighty Cheng Spear, but Hao could actually carry them without drawing the greedy eyes of every cultivator in the Lonely Plains. Hao grimaced as he exchanged the Cheng Spear for one of the ordinary weapons. It was fine enough, made from low-quality spirit wood and high-quality metal.

Inscriptions carved into the weapon reinforced its durability, so it should hold up for a fight or two. The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. But it wasn't the Cheng Spear. Hao doubted any other weapon would feel right in his hands after wielding the masterwork. It was like tasting the food of the gods and then going back to gruel and rice! There was an emptiness in his hand, like he'd just lost a companion.

Such thoughts swiftly faded away as he examined the rest of the compartments in Xia's storage ring.

"Hells Below, what are these?" Hao's eyebrows raised as he found a few shiny black glass totems. They were strange enough that he thought them heretical at first, but upon closer inspection he realized that the glassy figures were people. People wrapped around other people. Intimately. He squinted as he eyed another jade idol which was in the shape of an elongated dragon, perhaps the length of his forearm, with a rounded head.

Except it looked vaguely like a— Upon realizing just what Xia was using that one for, Hao did throw it in the fire. It thunked against the skull of one of Xia's bandit underlings. Good riddance! Luckily, the rest of Xia's treasures were a little less intimate in nature.

Hao released an assortment of valuable items from the storage ring onto the fabric: spiritwood planks, jewelry of all sorts, a small pile of simplistic jade communications tablets, and a few random shiny baubles that completed the rest of her eclectic collection. Based on the number of glittering objects in her hoard, Hao considered that Xia might have just been a spirit magpie taking on a human guise.

"And now for the good stuff!" Hao stowed much of the miscellaneous items back into the storage ring. She'd hoarded all the cultivation resources into a special compartment. Xia wisely hadn't trusted her subordinates enough to keep these anywhere but on her person. Slabs of what Hao hoped was spirit beast jerky appeared. Hao wisely tossed the ones which appeared strangely similar—but not quite identical—to pork aside, not entirely certain that it wasn't human flesh. One could never be sure with heretics.

He felt confident in keeping most of the meat, though. Qi pulsed through the jerky, clearly taken from some powerful creature, and would do wonders for body reinforcement. Xia also kept a hoard of pills in scripted jade boxes.

They opened easily enough, revealing dozens of pills: qi-refining ones which smoothed the flow of energy through the body, at least thirty minor pills meant to be taken during Calcination to set qi ablaze and expand a cultivator's meridians, and plenty more with rough descriptions which painted a simple picture.

"What were you doing with enough pills to elevate a whole village?" Hao murmured, mentally sorting the pills. None were of especially high-quality, but the quantity was unheard of. There was no way Xia could have obtained this many with her own resources.

"Did you loot a sect caravan, or did someone supply you with these?" Hao returned the pills to the storage space and turned to a sealed jade box kept in another section of the storage ring. The Cheng Spear made quick work of its protections, humming happily in Hao's grip. Something about the weapon's feel reminded him of a pleased cat. Perhaps the Cheng Spear just enjoyed tasting heretic blood. Hao certainly did.

Just to be safe, Hao wedged the chest open with a mundane spear, unwilling to risk the Cheng Spear to any curses or protections left on the container. He hummed at what awaited him.

"Now what are you?" Hao picked up a small, black-painted vial that had a small note tied to it. His eyes ached upon attempting to read the strange script. It was written in the standard Sunbeam characters, but whatever hand wrote the letter must have been a strange one. Every character was smeared and distorted, some written too roughly and others so delicately they seemed nearly invisible.

"The Stone Draught of Tempering Veins…" A tiny amount of qi drained from Hao as he read the note. Heretical. Vessel of the Grey Hilt, Nurture your starborn infant with blood and sacrifice. Explore the Space Between Stars, led by the Guiding Tongues. The Higher Mysteries shall carve away the mortal, leaving only the divine, that which is worthy of the Grey Hilt. The Grey Hilt's sculpting embrace will shed you of this foul world's bindings and free the divinity within.

Drink the Stone Draught until you return to Mother's Cradle. You must not return another stillbirth… From there, the script rapidly decayed into more and more nonsensical ramblings, the characters descending into inhuman etchings which bled off the page and into Hao's eyes, sucking him dry. He sealed it swiftly. Vessel of the Grey Hilt. Was that all Xia was to her heretical benefactor? Just an incubator for the foul weapon?

Hao couldn't imagine just how devastating a true sorcerer must be if she was only a recruit stumbling into their 'mysteries'. No wonder the Acolytes fought so fiercely against the Dark World's horrors. What other choice did they have? A general theme quickly emerged as Hao sorted through the rest of Xia's hoard. She was well-stocked with resources to fortify her body, fortify her spirit, and soften her mind.

These weren't the sorts of prizes she would have found by pillaging mostly-mortal caravans wandering through the Cloven Pass. The discovery of her cultivation art manual only confirmed Hao's suspicions. The Way of the Ashen Vessel was exceedingly simple in most ways, far less intricate than Hao's own style, except for its wastefulness. Every last technique was designed to drain the dantian of qi, leaving its user an empty vessel. They were powerful, but came with a steep cost.

The Way of the Ashen Vessel was a Ruminator Art, not intended for a humble Distillator. From what Hao could determine, this was meant to assist a Ruminator in stabilizing the newfound strength of their spirit by leaving them only miniscule amounts of qi to wield. All the better to prepare their spirits to accept a Treasure at the end of their Rumination journey, or so Hao suspected. For an ordinary cultivator, perhaps the Way of the Ashen Vessel had its merits.

Hao simply saw it for what it was: a way to open Xia more fully to the Grey Hilt's arcane influence. Xia was still an imperfect host, unable to channel the Grey Hilt's full power without suffering damage herself. Draining herself of qi would have allowed the Grey Hilt to weave itself into its vessel more effectively, while the resources she'd stockpiled assisted in making her a sturdier vessel. For what good was a cup prone to cracking?

"What an ugly path." Hao shook his head. Lowering herself, shattering her own strength into shards just to be the puppet of another. Such a road was almost as pathetic as heresy itself. Naturally, Hao paused to spit on Xia's broken corpse for good measure before examining the last of her cultivation stockpile, which contained a vast collection of tonics and potions. Most of her pharmaceutical supply was filled with hallucinogens and anesthetics, but stranger concoctions found a home there as well.

"Sleep poisons… is this Lover's Delight? You must have been the Temple of Liminal Joy's best customer. What were you doing with this? Actually, I don't want to know." Just the sight of a scarlet bottle of Lover's Delight would make a young cultivator go red-faced. It amplified sensations of all sorts. There were plenty of legitimate cultivation uses for it, but a good chunk of the demand for the alchemical syrup was for ' extracurriculars'. Again, there was a reason nobody bothered the Temple of Liminal Joys.

They'd have hordes of furious cultivators going through every stage of withdrawal battering down their doors. Finally, Hao turned upon a corner of the storage ring which left Hao feeling slimy, as if he'd just been dunked ina slug's oozing secretions. Worst of all, there was the most peculiar sensation of gritty sand scrubbing into all his cracks and crevasses, even the unmentionable ones. Revulsion filled him. Sorcery. He rifled through it as swiftly as he could, grimacing with every new item he discovered.

There was a jade box full of encrypted messages. He didn't dare touch those for fear of falling afoul of some protective curse, but he'd almost prefer it to the jade bottles full of some thick, pearly liquid that Hao didn't feel comfortable handling for many reasons. They looked… sticky. Compared to those, the jars of pickled inhuman organs didn't seem so bad, though they promptly went into his 'to be incinerated' pile alongside the other heretical artifacts. He kept the messages.

They might prove a good bargaining chip in Sun Wall City.

"And—fuck!" Hao immediately turned away to vomit when he cracked the final jade container and the worst artifact of all manifested. It lacked the will of the Grey Hilt, but it stank of terrible things. This was Xia's grimoire, her collection of heretical philosophies and magics. It rushed into existence, emerging from the chest like pus from an abscess. The Grimoire was a massive book bound with three living human faces, each still blinking, screaming, and cursing. Dozens of eyes blinked at Hao.

They'd been implanted into the cheeks and foreheads of the tortured humans. None of the additional eyes belonged to mankind. Some were voids winking in and out of existence. Some were lined with ridged, mucousy membranes. Others were gaseous, resembling a star-studded sky. Words simply couldn't describe some of the others. All were foul. All stared at him.

Hao's qi boiled within him, drained wisp by wisp as their wails and furious gazes reached his ears, yet he felt enthralled by the power emanating from the grimoire. Sunder the Sun-Veil Hear Our Revenant Mother Croon Her mysteries... A deep part of him screamed as the eyes and forever-screaming faces and lashing tongues commanded him to crack open the grimoire and hear this Revenant Mother's lullaby. Hao felt impossibly distant as his trembling hands cracked the awful book open.

He leafed through page after page, reading of drawing upon the power of distant constellations to twist reality and curse one's enemies, how to fray the world to create microenvironments hospitable to sorcery— And then with a roar like crackling flame, Hao slammed the evil book shut, glaring at it. He manifested the Cheng Spear into his hand and raised it, setting it ablaze.

Something within the Cheng Spear snarled hatefully, a presence shifting with instinctive revulsion, and the fire burned white-gold with newfound intensity. He made to pierce the screaming book and put those tormented souls stitched into it to rest, but stopped, thinking better of it. There was a smarter way. The grimoire stank of evil, emanating power even more devastating than the Grey Hilt itself. Worse, Hao felt the intelligence wafting off it, something keen and predatory lurking within.

If the Grey Hilt was the abomination equivalent of an infant, this was a toddler eager to pluck the wings off butterflies. He couldn't take this one with him. Not without becoming its prey.

"I don't have much time. I can't let Yuchen catch up. But I have enough time for you." Hao stowed away the Cheng Spear and the other items he'd examined into the storage ring, nearly filling its closet-like space, and grimaced as he picked up Xia's grimoire. He grimaced a whole lot more when one of the screaming faces' tongues licked his hand. His qi drained swiftly, and he fought the urge to vomit again.

Instead, Hao dragged Xia by the collar of her robes, picked out a path of ledges to the top of the Cloven Pass, and leapt his way up to the sunbathed mountainside.

"You're trash, but at least you did well for yourself," Hao said to Xia's corpse, desperate to hear a human voice above the grimoire's malicious hissings. Insanity blurred at the edges of his vision, tendrils creeping within his mind, thoughts jumbling into a tangle of madness.

"I have enough to replace what I burnt against you. Perhaps even enough to profit a little. So thank you for that…" As expected, Xia didn't reply. Although it wouldn't have been that unusual if she had. She'd already returned to life once, thus single-handedly skewing the average of how many lives an individual could live. The sun shone brightly overhead as Hao flung Xia's corpse onto the sunbaked rocks. It smoked as the Emperor's domain seared away the sorcery from her flesh.

Hao arranged a new pyre with two of Xia's spiritwood planks, then threw her and the screaming grimoire upon the wood.

"I won't leave you in the Cloven Pass to fester. You've tainted this world long enough!" With that, Hao stabbed the Grimoire with one of the mundane swords in Xia's collection, grimacing as its screams ate away at his wispy unrefined qi. He was suddenly very glad that he hadn't used a good spear to slay it, what with the way the plain steel blade eroded to grey grains of sand. He set the pyre ablaze.

Xia and the screaming grimoire went up in a stream of white flame, broken down and smoking all the more as the sunlight steadily gnawed at them, finally eroding them to nothingness. The Emperor burnt away the heresy. Hao just helped the process along. Hao stepped away and peered west to the endless sea of golden grasses once he was certain Xia and her nightmarish Grimoire wouldn't rise up to terrorize the Cloven Pass ever again. Yuchen's spiritual thunder pealed from the east. Hao almost wanted to laugh.

Their feud seemed so petty compared to the dangers posed by Xia! His enemy must've sensed Hao's detour to the Cloven Pass. Distillators were easy to track in the Lonely Plains. Ruminators were easier still. Both were weak enough to fade into the spiritual glow of the Corelands. Hao and Yuchen were just two small candles amongst millions. Here, they blazed like bonfires in the spiritual void.

"Time to move." Hundreds of miles still separated Hao from his pursuer, but a Ruminator's speed and stamina meant that wasn't quite the safety net it would have been. Hao had tarried here for long enough. Worse, he felt exhausted, drained spiritually more than physically. But first… Could anyone blame Hao for pausing to piss on Xia and her grimoire's ashes? Treasure was nice, but after all the heresy, he needed a happy memory for the road ahead.