Tian was pretty sure he was only unconscious for a moment. It felt like he had died. Everything around him was dark, his body was broken in… more places than he could easily count, and there was a reek of corruption. High above was a ragged hole in the ceiling with a trickle of water falling through it, so it seemed he had landed in one of the dragon caves that dotted the land around here.
He really couldn’t understand how he was still alive. His muddled brain poked at that thought for a second, then his eyes shot wide open and he screamed. “LIREN!”
He tried to sit up, and almost blacked out from the pain. Something in his waist was broken. He found the rope and clawed his way along the ground until he reached his sister. She lay on her side, covered in cold, grey metal. Three faint stripes ran through the material, whatever it was. Whatever it was hadn’t been enough to stop the hundreds of thorns sticking into her back.
He couldn’t hear any breathing. Couldn’t hear her heart beating. His own heart stopped. Then there was a faint throb from her chest and he could breathe again. It was weak, and too slow, and sounded wrong, but it was there.
“What the hell is that metal shit covering her?!”
The same stuff that saved your life. The Three Stripe Steel Heart Shield Mirror you got when you did that caravan raid together. The one where Ku distinguished himself by killing Heartbreak Worm Zhu. It can’t last long. See? It’s already vanishing.
Tian blinked. It had been so long ago. He thought about the Myriad Tormenting Worms dagger he got on that same raid occasionally, but he was quite sure he hadn’t given the enchanted metal a second thought since it seeped into his palm.
The Treasure Weighing Magistrate said it would stop one fatal blow up to the third level of the Heavenly Realm. And it did, kind of. Unfortunately, the ongoing damage from those thorns counts as a hell of a lot more than “one blow,” even if individually they aren’t on the heavenly person level. You have a thorn in your foot. You just aren’t noticing it because you are in so much other pain.
Tian glared down his leg. He couldn’t really see it in the dark, but he could feel it now, sticking out of the top of his foot. Throbbing. Tian narrowed his eyes and observed with his vital energy. A hiss escaped from his mouth. It wasn’t just stabbing into him or poisoning him, it was trying to root in him. Hair thin tendrils extended from the narrow thorn and tried to burrow into his flesh. Tian’s repeatedly refined body welcomed it. It was a dense source of wood qi, after all, and all the curse qi in it was just more fodder for the Hell Suppressing art.
In the race to see who would eat who first, Tian was handily beating the thorn. But that was one thorn. Liren had been stabbed with hundreds. Tian rested his hand on his sister’s ankle and sent his vital energy into her body.
Liren wasn’t dying- She was close enough to dead as to make no difference. Her heart still beat. Her brain wasn’t destroyed. But her body was ruined. The fall, the impact of all the thorns, and then the thorns burrowing into her flesh, all conspired to ruin her. Her body cultivation was slowing the progress of the hairlike roots. The fire qi in her was burning them away. But there were so many thorns, and her vital energy was so weak.
It was only a matter of time. Not much time either. Then the parasite art would activate, and something horrible would be born from his sister’s unwilling flesh.
He stared dumbly at her. He didn’t have any medicine for this. Nothing remotely like this. He didn’t know how you could even begin to treat this. The Demon Pulling Art would be near useless, trying to put out a forest fire with a dewdrop. Her iron bones were broken, she was bleeding from tears inside and outside of her body, organs ruptured, and those damned thorns were widening the wounds.
He couldn’t save her. This wasn’t something he could fix. His sister was going to die. She was going to die, because she saved his life. There was a moment, and she could have done anything at all, and she chose to put her body between him and death. She wouldn’t even be left with an intact corpse. That mattered to her, he knew.
Tian pawed at her, trying to think of something, anything. He started ripping out thorns, but they broke apart under the skin. The little roots had already set themselves in place. It would take actual surgery to remove them all. Each broken piece of thorn was now a breeding ground for infection. Pulling out the thorns could only make things worse.
Despair. Not just death, the thorns brought despair. Making the victim and their comrades feel hopeless as they were consumed from within.
She was going to die. Hong Liren was going to die, and he couldn’t save her. He still didn’t really understand what people meant by a friend, but he understood what they meant by “sister,” and she was. She truly was. And she was going to die in the dark, as he lay next to her. Helpless to help. Helpless to stop the burrowing roots.
He looked down at the thorn in his own foot. It was turning grey. The wood qi had been devoured, as had the curse energy. He was healing, slightly. A few more weeks like this, two months at the outside, and he would be almost healthy. He shook his foot and the thorn fell out. Dead. The thorns in Liren were shiny black, glossy in the dim light.
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Her body was ruined. If she was at full health, maybe she could use her vital energy to burn away the roots. She was anything but healthy, now. Ruined. Crippled, sickly, dying, infected, alone in the stinking dark.
Tian gasped. “I know one thing. One thing that would work. Soup! We have to make Liren soup!”
Zihao… just because it works for you, doesn’t mean it will work for her. And you had to be awake to force your body to make the changes you needed. She is mercifully unconscious.
“No, no! It will be fine. It will work. I’ll do the thinking for her. I know what she should look like. I even have the right things to make soup with. This will be easy.”
Tian scratched at the floor of the cave, his fingernails leaving faint furrows. Limestone. Soft rock. He hacked away at it with his rope dart, not caring about the things ripping inside of him, or the way his dart was breaking apart. It didn’t matter. None of that mattered. What mattered was making a tub sized hole in the ground, big enough that he could push Liren into a curled up shape and shove her in.
He worked fast. Too fast. Things broke. The head of the rope dart broke apart. It didn’t matter. Liren’s heart was slowing. She had few beats left in it.
Good enough. He dragged his body over. His right arm wasn’t working right anymore, but that was just an inconvenience. What mattered was getting Liren in the hole. He dumped the yin water from the orchard pond in with her, then fistfulls of the wax. Then-
Grandson, NO!
He slammed his useless right arm down on the thorns sticking out of his sister. Letting them pierce him. Binding himself to Liren.
“Though we weren’t born on the same day, I’m content to die on the same day. I’d be a lot happier if we both lived. So I’ll stake it all on this.” His lips twisted. Even curled up in a makeshift tub, she still looked bigger than he felt. “It’s what a big brother should do.”
The thorns were delighted by all the yin water. The wood qi in them gulped it down and grew even more furiously. A rictus grin slowly spread across Tian’s face. He hoped they drank lots and lots. His blood spilled into the water, replaced in his body by the Advent of Spring. Advent of Spring was quite happy too- lots of tasty water qi, earth qi, and even dense wood qi to cannibalize.
Was the wood qi fighting back? Sure. But Advent of Spring wasn’t some nice art. Growing and choking out the competition was in its nature.
He sent his vital energy into Liren. Lots and lots of open wounds inside her. Lots of long cuts and exposed muscles and tendons. Hundreds of puncture wounds from the thorns. Some of the thorns stapled the two of them together. Lots of places for his blood to enter. And with his blood, with his energy, came the Supreme Virtue Hell Suppressing Body Refining Sutra.
Advent of Spring was a domineering art, full of the eternal growth and competitiveness of wood. The Hell Suppressing Sutra was downright tyrannical. The Male-Female statue in his lower dantian wore a lotus crown. Humble beings didn’t wear crowns or suppress Hell. They weren’t interested in debating the dao. They simply overcame all objections with might.
Tian let his vital energy circulate through the water and into Liren. He could feel her body rejecting his vital energy. It registered the foreign qi as an attack. It so often was, after all. He didn’t fight back. He just let his qi burn up, fueling Liren’s own vital energy. There was enough left to grab ahold of a thorn or two. Enough to start breaking down the curse qi within it, converting it into strength. Strength that was flowing back to Tian, unfortunately, but it was the best he could do. At the very least, they wouldn’t be able to hurt Sister Liren anymore.
It was too slow. Much too slow. He could see the hair roots starting to knot together, the longer taproots digging deeper and deeper through hard muscle. Reaching for the even harder bones. It didn’t matter how hard the bones were. So long as the smallest crack or gap was found, a root could be set. And given enough time, a tree could snap a rock clean apart. His plan was working, but it was too slow. He was losing this war.
He checked the state of his own body. Horrible. It was horrible. His meridians were breaking down in places. His dantians were intact, but that was the limit of the good news. His right arm was basically non-functional. His hand could grip, but not too strong, and flex, but not too far. With care, it would heal. With even more care, and powerful medicine, it would fully recover, eventually. His pelvis was broken in two places. His legs were broken. Advent of Spring seemed to be staying on top of his internal bleeding, but the broken ribs were tapping at his lungs. One wrong move, and they promised to puncture them.
He did have some medicine. Powerful medicine, medicine intended to heal meridians and recover damage to the flesh. It just might be too strong for their damaged bodies to handle. But Liren would die if he didn’t make a drastic move. So that was that. He reached for his ring. The two jars of medicine he got from Doctor Pei still had two pills each. Tian crushed the wound healing pill and dropped it in the yin pond water. The meridian healing pill he swallowed.
It was like swallowing the moon. He remembered the water qi being cool and soothing. Not this time. This time, his meridians froze and burned with the power of the medicine. They had been abused for too long. Tian screamed in the dark. His back spasmed, his jaw dropped open and he screamed himself raw.
It didn’t get better, but he got used to it. As soon as he could focus, he whispered “I am so sorry. I am so, so sorry. I swear I will make this right.” With a careful, bare flutter of vital energy, he activated Thunderous Palms and drove the qi into Liren. The vibrating strands of vital energy didn’t even reach half an inch into her. A quarter inch. An eighth, where his control was good enough. He was trying to kill only the thorns and their roots.
He ripped her skin apart.
Muscles built over thousands of hours on the training fields melted under his hands. The thorns were destroyed but they left sickness in their wake, as well as fragments of wood and evil qi. He would either have to destroy the flesh even more completely, or find some way to expel them from her body.
Tian knew you had to break down to be built up again. It was the essence of how he rebuilt himself. Destruction and rebirth. It was fine when it was just him. When he was doing it to himself. This was Liren. This was his sister, and he was hurting her. He was destroying her. But it was all he could think of. All he knew how to do.
The cold water had long since turned red from their commingled blood, and thickened to black. The tub was flooded with little bobbing islands of red and white. The stuff heroes and geniuses were made of. And the stuff they returned to, at the end of their days.