Chương 7: Kindling a Wildfire Heart

Light scattered off the Cheng Spear as it lay embedded in the loamy soil of the Lonely Plains. The sun ascended in the east, casting the seas of golden grasses in a rosy glow, though its gentle caress paled next to the blaze of red exploding outwards from Hao. Breathe in. Hold. Allow the qi to flow from his lungs into his meridians and into his dantian, nourishing him with the Lonely Plains' paltry dregs. A tiny trickle to fill a deep pond, but it was better than nothing.

Hao drank of the Lonely Plains' essence, tasting its nature, its history, its truths. All from the wisps of its vital essence, its breath, depleted as it was. He was the Grass, growing tall and strong in spite of hardship, spreading his roots deep below in search of water, embracing the golden sun as it nourished him, building upon the soil composed of countless generations, drawing life from death.

He was the Wind, sweeping over the endless prairies, wild and free, tinged cold as the northern gales stirred at the behest of an imperious master. He was the Sun, washing its domain in gold, feeding its subjects, watching them grow like grass. He was the Lonely Plains in all its withered glory, the great basin of its essence-life-breath diverted westward to drive back the night, a once-rich land made spiritually destitute… Yin and Yang. The Five Elements.

All weaving together in the push and pull of the world, the incessant flow of nature's rhythm, and the unceasing dance of life and death embracing the other. A dynamic order arising out of countless competing forces and cycles, melodious because of the discordant chorus, not in spite of it. Hao embraced it all, channeling the patterns carved deep into him first by his Distillator father, then perfected by Master Bolin upon his purchase.

He swallowed every insight, every whisper of the world, and every influence which brushed him. He drew all that power and knowledge in through the Lonely Plains' qi, compressed it into a dense little nugget… and set it alight, burning it as fuel to feed the Wildfire blazing within his spirit. Flame had always come easily to Hao. As a boy, he'd been fascinated by its hungry tongues lashing for every scrap they could consume.

He spent hours upon hours feeding the campfire by his father's caravan, learning its behaviors, watching it grow until it finally ate itself when it had nothing left to devour. All that life and vibrancy and warmth turned to ash in the end, just like everything else in the world. Cities grew, peaked, and crumbled. Cultivators rose and fell. Even mountains could be ground down to dust. It was a universal truth: existence was a brief, glorious flash in the face of eternity. Every fire demanded nourishment.

The Wildfire Physique is hungry, just like you, Master Bolin's voice whispered. Feed it well, or it will consume you as surely as it will any other fuel. Your spirit is the same! Your heart burns with passion. Give it what it needs. Stoke the flames higher. Fury will serve nicely… So it did.

The Cloven Pass was just a few miles west, visible even from this spot: a thin gap carved into the heart of a mountain, uncannily smooth and clean, with a cramped road passing through it that was just wide enough for carts and wagons to pass through safely. It was no wonder the Grey Hilt Bandits were so eager to claim it. In better days, a local lord would have run them out, or perhaps a wandering cultivator. But the conflict to the north promised better reward.

As Hao prepared to right their wrongs, he fed the Wildfire fostered so carefully in his heart. He poured all he could into the blaze swirling within the confines of his chest: his hatred for Yuchen, Bolin, and the White Rivers, the indignities of his burnt lifeblood, the bitter loss of Sister Fu and the few friends he'd made in the sect… Heat spilled through Hao's blood. His qi flowed like flame through his meridians, feeding his anger, and smoke poured from his nostrils.

A great red glow poured from him, casting the little clearing he'd carved out in bloody light, and he felt a hot confidence erupt in him like lava from a volcano's mouth. Visions of the Grey Hilt Bandits erupted in his mind: bodies burnt and broken, his spear painted red with the blood of evil men, and his power consuming them all like dry tinder, harvesting their strength and pouring it into his own flame. But he needed more.

Even as the Wildfire raged with Master Bolin's old lessons, demanding blood and salted fields and bloodlines burnt to ash, Hao's fingers brushed against the light weight of two snowy white rabbit feet looped around his neck by a simple leather cord. Just that light contact with his greatest regret— And Junior? You could have stopped me if you were stronger. —cooled the fires. Beneath the black rage which hardened around his heart like tar, Hao found other reasons to fight.

He remembered Auntie Wu's battered, fear-drenched caravan. They'd lost everything to these bandits: their livelihoods, their ambition, and their loved ones. What future did they have but to drift hopelessly through the Lonely Plains? He imagined all the other unfortunate travelers who'd been preyed upon by the Grey Hilt Bandits and their leader, divested of their coin, blood and worse. How many had this Boss Xia sacrificed to fuel her own power? How many more would be devoured?

He considered the blackness of Boss Xia's heresy. Souls consumed for the Grey Hilt. Horrors inflicted and horrors birthed. Cracking reality open wider and wider, easing the way for worse things to slip through. The Wildfire softened a tad, constrained, but tempered and made all the hotter by wrath made righteous. Monsters deserved monsters, so Hao would become a terror to the Grey Hilt Bandits and Boss Xia.

Their blood would paint the Cloven Pass, smoke would rise as their bodies burnt away, and the Grey Hilt's arcane influence would be seared clean in purifying flame. This was what Master Bolin had taught him. When it was all over, Xiao Hao would remain. He'd shed the monster's visage, extinguish the Wildfire, and become a man again. The Grey Hilt Bandits? They'd be on their way to becoming innocent souls. Perhaps they'd rise up from the trash in the next life. If not…

well, Hao would just have to help them along and send them back to the Hells to try yet again. Hao's breath fell into its normal rhythm. The red glow pouring from his cultivation dimmed, coiled tightly within his skin. He tore the Cheng Spear from the black soil, admiring its tip and imagining the green-gold veins doused in red. The spear seemed to heat in his grip, a ponderous spirit shifting in its sleep, and for a moment Hao felt as if a giant was watching him.

"Watch out, Grey Hilts! Xiao Hao is coming for you." Lei Kun had heard stories of the Sunbeam Corelands ever since he was a little brat bouncing on his mother's knee. She crooned to him tall tales of verdant fields, endless rice paddies, and thousands of grand cities which sprang up like cultivated crops beneath the Sunbeam Emperor's watchful eye. She said two billion people made the Core their home, soaking in rays of gold and living lives full of wonder.

Kun didn't know quite how big two billion was, but he knew it was huge. So many people out there in their cushy sunlit cradle, fat and happy, never knowing struggle, or pain, or hunger. Well, fuck them! Kun grew up watching the rich merchants travel back and forth through the Lonely Plains. Even a stupid boy didn't miss the contempt in their eyes every time they regarded the plainsmen. He'd never minded stealing from them as a boy.

Now he relished stealing from them as a man, eking out an existence as a member of the feared Grey Hilt Bandits. Those spoiled folk weren't so snooty since the Four Winds blew and tipped their cradle, scattering millions of Corefolk into the west like fallen leaves. They had nothing to worry about—Lei Kun and his fellow bandits were only too happy to show them what life was really like. Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

Kun's musings were broken by the sound of his fellow sentry loudly tearing off a chunk of salted jerky with her teeth, shattering the silence of the Cloven Pass.

"Can ya be any louder, Wei?"

"What does it matter?" Wei Bo grumbled through a mouthful of meat, spraying crumbs onto the rocky ledge they'd taken position in.

"We haven't seen a soul in hours. I'm ready for some action!" The lean woman lovingly ran her thumb down the curve of her bow.

"Bring on the feast, eh? I can't make do with scraps anymore." Kun spat out a sunflower seed, never allowing his eyes to drift away from the opening to the Cloven Pass that they'd been assigned to watch.

"You're gettin' greedy, Wei. Enjoy business while it's good, yeah? The Four Winds won't blow forever."

"We ought to buy their Emperor a drink," Wei drawled. She jabbed Kun in the stomach.

"Especially you! You're finally getting some flab on you, Noodle Kun. We'll have to start calling you Porky soon." He slapped her bony hand away.

"Fuck off, ya scrawny rat! I'm just enjoyin' our spoils. We worked hard for this! It's not my fault the Corefolk keep bringin' us big fat wagons full of sweets."

"Sure, sure. It's your fault that you keep eating them, though. Leave some for the rest of us, why don't you?" Kun leaned away from Wei's next poke.

"I'll cut that finger off the next time ya try. Boss Xia just needs your eyes." Wei batted her long eyelashes at him. Kun gulped.

"You wouldn't do that to little Wei Bo, would you?" He had nothing to say to that, grunting instead before deciding to give some sound advice.

"You're new to this, Wei. Soon as the winds blow over, no more fat Corefolk. We go back to hunting and hoping that no one cares enough to follow us back into the plains."

"If the Emperors don't kill us all first." Kun had nothing to say to that. Not much you could do about gods. He might just be a Calcinator—and a good one too, at least by Lonely Plains standards—but everyone knew that if an Emperor or Empress got off their thrones, the little folk were fucked. Bad business, that. Emperor sneezed? Rewrite the maps. Emperor farted? Rewrite the maps. Emperor gets pissed? No maps needed.

Another hour filled with tense silence which was occasionally interspersed with their familiar bickering. Both Grey Hilt spotters never let their attention stray from the opening to the Cloven Pass. Sheer cliffs guarded the thin path, which had been slashed into the mountain by some terrible cultivator's sword strike. No mortal could hope to scale the mountain, so every last pack of scrambling refugees was forced to hurry through the narrow gap, ripe for the bandits to pluck.

"Not a soul in the last three hours," Wei grumbled, toying with her bow. She was new to this life and hadn't figured out how to shut up for more than a few minutes at a time.

"Remember that big caravan that came through yesterday?"

"The one with that scary sword guy?" Kun shivered, remembering the old cultivator's screams as Boss Xia sacrificed him to her horrible weapon.

"Can't believe he cut the Boss Lady's head right off. Just like that!"

"Didn't help him much." Wei grimaced. Banditry was a time-honored tradition in the Lonely Plains. None of them could say the same for whatever nightmares Boss Xia had gotten herself mixed into. Resurrection was the least terrifying thing about her new abilities. They'd have left already if they didn't fear their leader turning her evil weapon on them.

"Nice silks, though. I felt like a queen sleeping on a big pile of them last night!"

"I'm just wonderin' where the wagons are today. They must be gettin' wise to us," Kun murmured, an unsettling feeling crawling over his skin.

"Traders talk. We oughta pick a new pass 'fore some rich bastard sends someone back for us." Wei snorted, strumming her bowstring.

"You can be the one to tell the Boss Lady that. I'm not making a peep. You think—wait, look, Noodle! Someone's coming."

"Boss Lady, we've got another one," Kun whispered, tapping a tiny jade tablet by his collar. The communication devices were nifty little things that they'd plundered off some sect rats. They shone with magical sigils that left Kun's eyes watering. Sometimes he and Wei were bored enough to spend hours staring into the shininess.

"No caravan, looks like an individual. Wanna move?" Kun shuddered as something terrible prickled at the edges of his senses, as though he'd suddenly been bathed in a noxious, cloying grease. His skin itched, feeling ready to peel away and expose his innards, and a sickening void smeared over his spiritual senses, blinding him. Then Boss Xia was right behind them, stinking of the arcane—something like a dark, cold bog full of decay and buried secrets, tinged with other foul things that he had no name for.

Kun's qi quailed, surging through his meridians like a caged bird next to a roaring flame, and he wished nothing more than for the Boss Lady to go away. Banditry was one thing. Heresy was quite another. What came from the accursed Dark World should stay in the Dark World! Boss Xia's golden eyes glared down at the pass, locking upon the lone figure striding through the dark cliffs without a care in the world.

The man was even taller than Kun himself, who was by far the tallest of their band, and clutched a massive green-tipped spear as if it were a walking stick, clanging it against the hard rocky ground.

"Big bastard, isn't he?" Kun's joke fell flat. Boss Xia was a bear of a woman, burly and nasty, and had a way of making him feel small despite her standing a head shorter than him. She'd always been intimidating, but now she made Kun want to piss himself. She wasn't 'just' a Distillator anymore.

"What do you think, Boss Lady?" Boss Xia regarded the lone traveler with a cold gaze, calculating cost and benefits faster than the rest of the Grey Hilt Bandits put together. Kun's eyes drifted to the corroded storage ring on her right hand, shuddering as he saw the strange sigils swirl across the black stone, urging him to look deeper. Nope, nope, nope. He'd seen what happened to the last person who looked too closely.

Little Zhang was useless with boiled eyes—and frankly, his subsequent babblings annoyed them all—so Boss Xia had sacrificed him to the Grey Hilt. Fuck that.

"Traveling alone in these times? He's either a madman or a hidden master. Wei, what can you sense?"

"Mid-grade Calcinator, Boss Xia!" Wei snapped to attention. She was their best sensor, though she was hampered by her cultivation level. Even the sharpest Calcinator could only see so deeply.

"But I dunno, he feels…muted. Veiled, I think." Boss Xia hummed, caressing her corroded storage ring. She kept the treasures they'd accumulated in the golden band on her left hand. That evil Grey Hilt was contained within the right storage ring. Kun thanked the Heavens above every day for that. He was sick for hours after the Grey Hilt emerged, though the Boss Lady only ever used it on cultivators.

"A Calcinator wouldn't wield a spear like that," Boss Xia murmured, her golden eyes widening.

"Heavenly jade!" Kun and Wei both froze. Heavenly jade? A splinter of the sacred material was enough to buy a village. It was said the greatest cultivators used the stuff as coin. He had a terrible, terrible feeling about this…

"That will be a fine prize. Risky, unless we sense him properly." She raised her storage ring to her lips, brushing them softly over the corroded unearthly material.

"I need you, my sweet. Shall we take him? Grant me your eyes, darling!" Kun and Wei shared commiserating glances, though promptly looked away as Boss Xia's golden hawk eyes glazed over with otherworldly power—not grey, not blue, but some impossible shade that Kun's eyes rejected. The whites of Boss Xia's eyes darkened into that horrible color as if someone had injected them with ink, seemingly melting into nothingness save for her pupils, which bulged, waxed, and split into two and four and eight.

He made the mistake of looking into those empty pits and was immediately immersed in a flood of unfiltered visions which gnawed at his qi, as things leapt from Boss Xia's empty eyes into his own— A grey beach upon which sat a grey palace of calcified time, where space was woven into angles which seared his brain, where the grey-not-things laughed, where worlds intermingled in the tangled skies of water and sand above Kun gasped as a bone-cracking slap brought him back to reality.

He collapsed back against the rock wall of their little ledge, eyes burning, feeling his qi almost emptied, as if it had drained itself fighting off whatever terrible things lived within Boss Xia. Boss Xia's eyes were golden again as she regarded him with a cruel smile, though her pupils remained blacker than black, itching with grasping influence.

"You aren't ready for my darling's blessings just yet, Noodle." Fuck, he hoped he never was. Kun's skull pounded as if someone had just split it open with an axe. His insides felt as if they were coated with stinging insects, although the flow of his qi steadily swept the gnawing things away into nothingness.

"Just a Distillator," Boss Xia murmured, grinning madly. Her fingers curled around the plain blade sheathed at her side, her favored mundane weapon.

"Yes, my darling, he will make a fine sacrifice! Your strength will wax, the doors will crack further open…the Lady of the Black Glaive will be pleased!"

"What were you thinking?" Wei hissed as she hauled him up. Boss Xia didn't pay them a lick of attention as she stared hungrily down at the lone wanderer below, tracking him like a hawk eying a juicy mouse. Kun babbled nonsense, lost in the grey hooks still wriggling in his brain. Wei turned white as a ghost, grimacing as whatever arcane tongue he spoke—words a human tongue shouldn't have been able to form—reached her ears.

"Shut the fuck up, Noodle!" Wei snarled, covering her ears.

"I'm not going into this fight pissing my robes!"

"Grey Hilts, prepare to move!" Boss Xia hissed into her own jade communication tablet. Hers was warped, straining from the corruptive arcane power she wielded, and her words came through to the other bandits as a garbled mess. But they all knew her intent.

"Trigger the formations. Strike hard and fast. We kill this rich bastard in one strike. On my mark!" For a moment, Kun remembered a time when they were simple bandits. When loot was more important than blood. The old Boss Xia—the brutal, cunning, brilliant woman who steered them into prosperity and away from hunters' spears—flickered back to life for just a moment. Then Boss Xia glanced over him and the grey things in his brain wriggled anew, hooking deeper, and Kun knew those times were well and gone.

His eyes drifted down to the lone warrior down below. The one who'd be fed to the Grey Hilt and deepen Boss Xia's strength. Poor bastard. Better him than Kun, though.

"Go!" Spectral walls flared into existence, boxing the traveler into the Cloven Pass as formations channeled the Lonely Plains' wispy qi into a stable configuration. Poisonous gas erupted from sigils carved into the canyon walls, stuttering and wheezing from the flaws introduced by Boss Xia's arcane energy. Bowstrings thwacked as six archers fired as one, launching a volley of poisoned arrows at their target. Down below, Xiao Hao grinned.

"It's about time!"