It didn’t surprise Tian to learn Liren did not care to be kicked by a wolf taller than the city wall. Nor did it surprise him to learn she was entirely eager to demonstrate just what she thought of such treatment on the mystic flesh of said wolf. Nor did it surprise him that she had, silently, at some point, taught herself to leap from a flying sword, land an attack, then land again on the flying sword. “She must be controlling it with her qi. She’s getting better at multitasking,” he thought, in a dull, indifferent sort of way. Absorbing the wolf spirit was taking all his emotional energy.
That, and strangling Uudam. He really, really, really, wanted to wrap his hands around that old neck and squeeze. Two hands might be too greedy. Really, a frugal daoist needed just one arm. Tian imagined the act of strangulation so strongly, he could almost feel the old man’s windpipe settling into the crook of his elbow. Tian’s hand twitched, the ghostly act of grasping the fabric of his collar so the choking would become inescapable, an ever tightening vice crushing an antique throat. Tian wasn’t sure what he would do with his other arm. Maybe a few gentle slaps. Tian could hear the screaming mortals in his mind. He sat there and let it happen. He made the choice and had to live with the consequences. He, himself, was one of those consequences.
Right now, his hands were buried in the back of the giant wolf, consuming the spirit animating it. Soon, he would eat enough of it that Uudam would be vulnerable. Uudam was the Black Shaman of the Yuu. Uudam was one of the key supporters of the Boruski tribe, a lynchpin of their whole confederation. Uudam was someone he could blame. At the moment, that was the most important thing. Uudam could be responsible for the screaming. Uudam was the one who made his heart hurt. So Uudam must be punished. He must be killed. Brutally.
Even that heartfelt wish was being eroded by the flow running from his hands into his dantian. He had eaten a spirit once before, but it was nothing like this. Nothing remotely like this. It was the difference between a thimbleful of lukewarm water, and drinking a frozen lake. Especially since the frozen lake was sometimes a baking desert, or a forest, or the smell of rocks, or the feeling of hunting with your family. Tian could taste blood in his mouth, and knew it wasn’t his. Deer blood, fresh from the neck. The stink of the world, revealed in aching detail.
There was something else that came with the images and feeling of the wolf spirit. Something indefinable, some space, some gap that he wasn’t understanding. His daoist training was breaking down in the face of something so utterly alien to it. There was a void in the world that shaped it and defined it, an emptiness to explain the fullness. Even that was him groping for concepts he understood, however tentatively.
He knelt on the neck of a wolf that could look down on the city below, and he pulled its very essence out. The statue housing the Hell Suppressing Sutra dragged in the spiritual energy as though it was the finest food, and it had never eaten. It chanted, pulled, and chanted some more. Tian understood why Grandpa described it as being like a wheel. The qi pulled in the spiritual essence and activated the statue, while the statue itself refined the essence into vital energy. And what vital energy!
Slender muscles grew even more dense. Bones became heavy as iron, then lead. His skin, already fair, gained a lustrous depth. Utterly free of blemish or impurity, his skin was so tender it seemed as though the lightest squeeze could wring water from it. If someone was making eye contact with him right now, they would see an endless abyss in his pupils, with sudden galaxies appearing and vanishing in the iris even as storms and mystic fog wracked the sclera. Then all condensed, and if you were looking just right, and had truly heaven-defying eyes, you could see a double pupil emerge. Flickering, hesitant, fading in and out of existence, but the longer and harder Tian pulled, the more it stabilized.
Uudam, or the wolf spirit, or both, wasn’t about to leave him to it. The giant wolf slammed to the ground hard enough to send plumes of dust and pulverized grass dozens of feet into the air. Tian knew it was about to roll over on him, and felt a spike of alarm through the ecstasy of his refinement. The Martyr Venerable knew it too. The second Uudam started rolling in one direction, the god jabbed down with his stick, blocking the turn.
“Smart. Stay down and make it easier for this lady to send you on your way!”
Liren’s shouts had a way of yanking Tian’s attention over to her. She was blazing up and down the wolf’s flanks, trying to cut tendons or pierce something fatal, or just open a few veins. The indifferent anatomy of the wolf spirit was hampering her there- it was wolf shaped, but the internal structure was off. Somewhere between meat and magic, less than either but more than both. Every time she struck, Tian could feel great rips of energy being yanked away from the wolf. Tian had heard of meteors. When Liren struck, he imagined the effect was about the same.
When the Martyr Venerable struck, it, too, caused immense energy loss, but of a different sort. From outside, it seemed like all the monk could do was prod the wolf and push it around. From the inside, Tian wasn’t sure what he was feeling.
Tian’s ability to conceptualize what he was experiencing kept breaking down. Every time the god’s broomstick struck, the “wolf” seemed more “wolf-like.” Which he would normally have assumed was helping the shaman, but the way gouts of energy flowed violently through the wolf, rushing to the place it was struck and flooding it with the spirit’s energy, suggested that it was anything but helpful. The whole thing took on a tinge of madness for him. The wolf spirit was being made too wolfy by the City God who was a daoist sort-of-priest pretending to be a monk, and it hated it. That probably made as much sense as anything did, at the moment.
The wolf spirit tried to roll the other way, legs the length of trees kicking out to one side, ripping across the grassland. The stick moved faster than the giant body, clipping the wolf around the ear before sinking into the ground and stopping the roll once again. Tian felt the blow both as a physical sensation (the shockwaves were incredible, even for a body as refined as his) and as a spiritual one. The overwhelming burst of “Wolf” from so close was enough to make his mind go blank. All he could think was “It’s a wolf.” That was it. A simple factual statement. “This is a wolf.”
More and more energy flowed into Tian. The double pupil struggled to stay present in his eyes, but it was appearing more strongly, and for longer. His body was growing stronger, denser, more supple. The wolf was growing thinner. Liren was starting to actually bleed the wolf, not just carve holes in it. For all that, Tian couldn’t help feeling that what was actually winning this fight was the Martyr Venerable. He just couldn’t explain why.
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The Grand Shamans weren’t much interested in the details either. Blizzards of arrows swept towards Tian and Liren, all carefully guided so that even missed shots wouldn’t strike the great wolf. Tian vaguely sensed the breath of the regular shamans too, swarming over like ants determined to eat an elephant. There were less than ten Earthly Realm cultivators in Burning Flag City. There were dozens of ordinary, spirit wielding shamans charging at Tian. Could they see him, they might have wondered, and worried, about why he started grinning as they rushed over.
The Grand Shamans wiped the grin off his face soon enough. He wasn’t flinging talismans around any more, nor evading blows with Moon Crossing the lake. He was buried up to the elbows in the Great Wolf, a static target, or near enough. The Yuu were superb archers. The Grand Shamans might not be the best hunters in their tribes, but the spirits guaranteed that their skill wouldn’t be a limiting factor. Tian tried to twist and evade what he could. The robes blocked more.
Inevitably, arrows started piercing his armor. First one, then two, then three, punching into his back. They didn’t sink in very far, his strengthened muscles and hard bones already showing their worth. The corrosive energy on them was dealt with soon enough. “Not very far” and “Soon enough” didn’t mean “Not at all” or “Immediately.” He was bleeding. Sooner or later, an arrow was going to catch him in the head and that would be that. Tian’s returning grin was all teeth.
Three savage yanks, approved by not a single doctor he trained under, saw the arrows out. He sent out vibrations from his palms, carefully making use of his new understanding of palm arts and carelessly making use of his new strength. A hole, raw and bloody, was ripped open in the back of the wolf’s neck. Uudam screamed, and Tian howled with him. He widened the rip further and further, then, showing that there are some things a feral boy simply does not outgrow, he forced himself into the wound.
Tian had to correct himself about one thing. Now, Uudam was screaming. Tian stopped trying to widen the wound and sealed his breath. He drew in as much of the spirit as he could, his body in full contact with his prey. His deep reserves of qi came into use here, driving the refining process with dreadful speed. Even the holes in his back filled with new flesh, visibly mending themselves in seconds rather than weeks. Denser, stronger, the daoist growing more powerful by sitting still.
Well, not sitting. Sort of wedged sideways. But the principle was sound, and it was hard to mind the details while the Martyr Venerable was bashing away at the body you were hiding in. There was another almighty bash from the stick, another wave of “This is a wolf,” and then the accumulated damage finally caught up with Uudam. A crack opened, on some incomprehensible level, and the internal structure of the wolf started to fracture. “I get it. I get it! Martyr Venerable, you genius!”
“This is a wolf. Not a spirit. Unauthorized spirits are not permitted in my city. It’s just a wolf. A wolf is just the size of a big dog. It can’t stand over a city wall. It can’t ignore being beaten with a giant stick. It can’t ignore being ripped open, or stabbed, or having even a not-very-large man burrowed into its neck. It can’t merge with some old steppe nomad either. It’s a wolf. Such is the law of the Broadsky Kingdom. And in my city, it will obey!”
It was all operating on a level Tian wasn’t able to see directly, he could only deduce from the impacts. Finding the shape of things from the void. But what was the void he had seen before? He had specifically noticed it, but he still couldn’t figure out what it was. The faults spread, deepening. He could just about feel…
A blazing comet blasted through the wolf’s ribs, in one side, and a distressing quantity of internal organs later, out the other. The fractures exploded, and the void was revealed. His double pupil eyes fixed on it, dissected it, and pinned it in space just long enough for Tian to leap on it.
“It’s not how a wolf thinks of itself! It's everything you think a wolf is!” Tian didn’t realize he was shouting, nor how mad he looked as he wrapped his slender hands around Uudam’s throat. “That’s the hole, the gap is human understanding!” Uudam was trying to shake off the impact of the wolf collapsing, but his strength had left him. Mentally, physically, he was spent. The shamans were in chaos, some attacking, some fleeing, the grand shamans giving orders at cross purposes, each trying to take command.
Tian started bringing his hands together slowly. He was quite curious to see if he could make a man’s head pop off, and he was fairly sure he could.
“Spare him!” A voice like thunder or the stampede on the steppes. Female, perhaps, or a storm.
“No.”
“Spare him, and we will withdraw the Grand Shamans from the battlefield.”
“Still no.”
“All the shamans.”
“No.”
There was a gathering pressure, already massive and increasing fast. “Do you believe you can kill him before I can kill you?”
Tian didn’t even turn his head. His eyes were locked on Uudam’s face, watching it turn pretty colors. “Yes. I’m only taking this long because I want him to be afraid and in pain before he dies. I’m sure I will despise myself for this later, but right now, I can hardly think of anything else in the world I want so much as Uudam dead.”
There was silence. “The city. We will guarantee the freedom and safety of the city and its people. We will lift the siege and withdraw. Should it come to Yuu hands, and it will come to our hands, it will come peacefully. We will even aid you against your enemies, and speed you towards that which you seek.”
Tian turned his head slowly, asking “And who are you to make such promises?” His head rotated a full hundred and eighty degrees, the muscles and tendons in his neck feeling no particular strain. His eyes, however, shot open almost painfully wide.
The great horse spirit stood in the sky above him, towering high as a storm cloud. Next to the horse was a wolf made of smoke and starlight. The woman standing on the steppe, in her feathered hat which covered her eyes and the necklace of green and black ropes that draped over her chest and back and shoulders and her robe of five colors and her stout felt boots and her broad leather belt and the heavy knife at her waist and above all the sheer massive brutal presence of her, overwhelming as a flood and the weight of the sky, the truth of her hammering at him.
He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. The double pupil retreated, hiding in the interior of his eyes. She looked much smaller, now.
“Teb Tengri Yalau, Black Shaman for the Great Horse Spirit. Take my offer, sorcerer. You will find no better one.” She smiled, cold and mad as his own just moments before. “After all, people who hate you even more than I do are already here. Waiting patiently. Like an adder. But then, you know how you sorcerers are. You can only attack from ambush.”