Chương 50: He's an ass man

Jin idly flipped the jade slip in his hand up and watched it fly high up into the air before falling back down into his hand. He had to squint to look at it as it reflected the sunlight like a motherfucker. The thing stored sect points, and the more it had, the brighter it was. Suffice it to say, after sharing the victory with Lung Junior, the thing was full to bursting.

"Will you stop doing that already?" Hashimi asked from next to him, where she was sketching a dragon's skeleton on rough paper with a piece of graphite. They were both sitting in a clearing on the other side of the inner ring village and leaning on a large oak tree.

"Not all of us have fun ways to disperse our energy, Hashimi," Jin replied.

"Literally get a fucking hobby, you daft monkey," the girl muttered as her graphite stick scratched and scritched on the paper.

"You ever think about the people who hate our work?" Jin suddenly asked.

"Many other disciples have been giving us the cold shoulder recently."

"They think we should have done it differently," the girl replied. Scritch, scratch.

"There's also a bunch of people who loved it, and they like the change."

"I just think about it sometimes. Why does any given piece of media have to divide people so violently into polarised oppositions? Where are the enlightened centrists who assure themselves of their moral superiority by not making a choice?" he asked.

"You probably don't pay attention to them since they don't say anything," the girl muttered.

"Most people say nothing. Why are you thinking about the feedback anyway? We would have won if it weren't for that useless piece of pond scum." The stick of graphite was starting to look a bit strained under her fingers.

"Sharing the podium ain't that bad," Jin muttered.

"It just sucks who we had to share it with."

"And why," Hashimi added discontentedly. If anything, it seemed that she had a lower tolerance for injustice than Jin, which was sort of funny considering that she was the one who'd grown up in a world where the heavens themselves discriminated against you depending on where and to whom you were born.

"Keeping all of that hatred, junior sister, it is not good for the soul," Jin said wisely while twirling a non-existent moustache.

"Why is it that you were annoyed by me at first, and now I can't get rid of you?" Hashimi asked in an annoyed tone of voice.

"We're friends, but I thought finishing the project would mean we'd spend less time together." Jin rolled his eyes; the girl was just mad for other reasons and was taking it out on him. Or she was on the rag, 50/50.

"I don't got friends. I got family," he said. Hashimi sighed a loud breath.

"If you were my brother, I'd poison your tea."

"If you were my sister, I'd drink it," Jin replied, keeping their gag running. Then, a devious smirk hushed over his lips.

"But, well, who said I was looking for a sister? I've always been missing a mother figure in my life, in fact. You wanna be my mommy?" At this, Hashimi finally looked up from her sketching and threw him a look of abject disgust. Then, an idea flashed across her face, and she tilted her head thoughtfully.

"If I'm your mom, then you have to listen to me, right?" she asked. Jin nodded, "Everything, mommy."

"Everything?" Hashimi asked breathily, leaning into his ear.

"Everything," Jin whispered back.

"Ok baby, then listen close," she whispered into his ear before inhaling deeply with her mouth.

"JUMP OFF A CLIFF!" she suddenly shouted straight into his ear, causing Jin to jump up in shock, his sensitive cultivator senses flaring up in pain.

"Damn bitch!" he screamed.

"If you were trying to act like you aren't mommy, then that was an abject failure," he taunted while hopping around from pain. Hashimi dropped her sketch pad on the floor and rolled up the sleeves of her beige robe. Her dark skin was flushed, and if this were a shitty webcomic, there would have been a tick mark pulsating on her forehead. If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

"You need some help practising for the martial arts tournament, right?" she asked sweetly.

"You said you'd go around paying other disciples to fight you."

"Yeah," Jin said.

"Why do you ask?" Hashimi suddenly crouched down and started sprinting towards him before jumping into a flying high kick aimed directly at his face.

"Because I'll kick your ass for free, you asshole!" she screamed.

"Jokes on you, I'm into that shit!" Jin screamed as he ducked under the flying kick and crouched down with his hands clasped together in a double fist, only his pointer and middle fingers being extended together.

"Wrong move, time to experience…" he started as Hashimi fell, throwing a suddenly horrified look behind herself.

"Thousand Years of Death!" Jin screamed shrilly as he thrust his arms forward, injecting qi into the action to make it doubly insulting. Two planets collided. Sound stopped existing. A freeze-frame of Jin's fingers in Hashimi's butt immortalised themselves into the history of the world. Colour returned to the world, and a yowl, like the death sound of a thousand angry cats, emerged from the brown-haired girl's mouth as she flew back up into the air, her hands cradling her ass.

"Omae wa mou," Jin muttered, still crouched down, arms extended, eyes closed.

"Shindeiru," he finished as Hashimi crashed into a tree, still screaming like a wounded pig. Then he froze as he felt a presence right behind him. He woodenly turned his head, keeping his position, only to see Elder Flower in her hakama pants and her sword at her waist, standing at the edge of the clearing and looking at him with lips thinned in disapproval and a twitching eyebrow.

"I came to tell you to start practising for the tournament since your role in the zombie scenario is now officially over," she said.

"I'm glad to see you remain as enthusiastic as ever, even creating a new move. You'll have to show it to me when the war is over so I can help you refine it," she said darkly. Then she shook her head and threw him a look of disgust before disappearing like a fart in the wind. Jin was still there in his crouched position, his arms extended in the air, fingers pointing towards the heavens as if wanting to pierce them.

Hashimi, on the other side of the clearing, woodenly got up from where she'd crashed, her head reminiscent of a tomato.

"You're a dead man," she informed him coldly before starting to woodenly walk towards him, exuding a massive amount of killing intent. Jin crouched there, frozen in fear, as she approached him. She came to a stop in front of him.

"Any last words?" she asked apathetically.

"Your own son?" he asked in a whisper.

"Consider yourself disowned," Hashimi replied anticlimactically before extending a hand and grasping him on the face, lifting him up in the air. Jin was painfully reminded that she was actually taller than him. Loud screams resounded through the inner ring that day, continuing well into the night, keeping everyone awake and in their beds. They didn't stop until the sun rose. The eighth mystery of the inner ring had just been established. The screaming banshee of the forest.

-/- Private Yang leaned back in the wooden chair inside his cell and gave out another sigh. For a moment after he'd blurted out to the general that he'd been bitten but hadn't been suffering any of the negative consequences, he'd almost regretted the action. Then, ever since that moment, all he'd felt was relief. The gauntlet of Illusion Rooms he'd run had completely exhausted his body, mind and spirit. Killing zombies in an endless stream of small variable changes and deaths.

A hand slowly went up to his jugular, which had been ripped out often enough during the testing. By the time he'd arrived at that last Illusion Room, from the one annoyingly overeager duo who'd visited the army camp that one time, he'd already been done with everything. That maybe explained why, after seeing Ellie die in front of him like that, while he was frozen in shock, he'd actually believed that if he revealed his healed wound, he'd also be killed. But well, of course, that had been asinine in hindsight.

If whatever had made him immune to the infection that one time was in his blood, then killing him was one way to not get a lot more of it. Instead, he'd gotten locked up, not as a prisoner, but as an asset, in one of the more comfortable and large cells meant for political prisoners and army cultivators when they committed misdemeanours such as killing their subordinates for no reason.

He'd gotten the feeling that General Shroud hadn't even been too angry at the fact that Yang had not come forward immediately when the message had gone around the camp a few weeks ago. He just seemed relieved they'd finally found someone who was potentially immune. He'd even been promised a life's pension delivered to his daughter for his role. Not that they were demanding much more than the occasional blood transfusion, marrow extract and piece of flesh.

They'd taken the blood from his veins, the marrow from his ass, and the flesh from his thigh. The whole thing, amazingly enough, had even disqualified him from actually fighting in the upcoming war. He was now a strategic resource. He thought of his daughter and the dowry he would be able to pay for her to get married to a good man when all this nonsense finally blew over. For a brief moment, a superimposition of faces occurred in his mind. Ellie and his daughter were both looking at him from the operating table.

"The scenario," he muttered to himself.

"Too cruel." Making him get attached to what was essentially a real person before killing them before his eyes. A child at that. Thankfully, the emotions that had been so wrought up by the scenario were slowly starting to fade now, days after. The experience had been immersive enough to leave a lasting impression, but it had only lasted for less than a day; it would take longer than that to really change someone. Hadn't he heard the general say one needed a month to change one's habits? The man was probably right.

He'd never interacted with the general until recently when he'd been taken as a test-subject as punishment for slacking in his duties, but after his admission, he'd had more to do with the man. He was the smartest man Yang had ever met, and he was sort of glad that it was him leading the army. Maybe the idea of meritocracy wasn't as dead as he'd suspected.

Although, the fact that the Illusion Room, which had profoundly changed him as a person enough to sacrifice himself for the greater good, hadn't won that weird competition worked against that idea just as well. Sunlight suddenly streamed inside his cell from the flap of the tent opening. Yang looked up, blinking from the difference of light provided by the lanterns and the sun. A shadowy figure stood at the entrance, their cowled figure completely blotted out from the light contrast.

Yang squinted his eyes as he observed through the bars of his cell. He didn't bother standing up. This was, in fact, one of the things he'd been afraid of.

"An anomaly," the figure said as they stepped closer to the cell, feet completely silent as they ate up ground and got closer.

"No virus can truly be universal, the immune system and its interactions with qi, what a mysterious microcosm of possibilities."

"Are you one of the medicine men?" Yang asked bluntly. The figure gave a booming, raspy laugh, seemingly unafraid of being overheard.

"I guess you could say that I am somewhat involved in the process," they said in a joking manner. Yang looked once more at his cell. It had a comfortable bed, a wardrobe, some books he usually wouldn't have had access to and a functioning shower. It had been the most comfortable place he'd stayed in in his entire life.

"I already thought I was going to die days ago when I admitted to having been bitten," he ended up saying to the figure who had arrived in front of the cell and was holding up a hand towards him. The sleeve fell down, revealing a perfectly human, healthy female hand. Bright orange and yellow light coalesced in front of the palm.

"It's not fun when they accept it," the figure muttered sadly.

"But, well, at least you're not screaming. I got tinnitus from the last one." The light in her hand exploded in a blast of fire. As Yang saw the light approach, his last thoughts went to his daughter, who would live a good life with his pension. The only prerequisite was that humanity won the upcoming war. He thought of General Shroud, his comrades in the army and the young cultivator who had sought him out for his opinion on the Illusion Room he'd been making.

Dying, well, it wasn't that bad of a conclusion for his life, he thought as his body disintegrated from the orange fire. It was just a long nap, really.