The pain was a tangible thing inside Tian. It damaged tissue, sickened his blood, left nerves paralyzed or dead. It was a moment of terrible, almost hallucinatory, lucidity when Tian realized the spirit was attacking his meridians directly. Like the Dantian, they were one of those things that straddled the material and immaterial. Most problems with meridians that he had encountered happened on the physical side. The curse-ghost attacked the immaterial side. The side that was almost impossible to defend against.
Unless you had a spirit and curse suppressing body. Then you were pretty damn well defended. The curse-ghost was doing his best to bite through the governing meridian, and not getting anywhere. It was horribly painful, but useless. It was just dulling its immaterial teeth as Tian ground it down to nothing. As the spirit broke down, something was revealed within it. Yet, to his supreme frustration, he couldn’t understand what it was! It was a bit like a beast core, but not. It was simultaneously the texture of a peeled grape, wobbly as jelly, and entirely without texture because it was the same ghostly stuff as the curse surrounding it.
He didn’t have much time to examine it. The heretics were attacking with fire, acid, knives, and now Threadcutter himself was rejoining the fray. The dull looking man no longer seemed as mild as before. His face contorted into a rictus of pain and hate. His eyes had turned ash grey, as had his hair. His skin wasn’t doing much better, flush to almost magenta, while the little capillaries and blood vessels in his face turned the same ashen grey as his eyes. Tian wouldn’t usually worry about someone clawing at him, but Threadcutter’s hands had a corrosive chill to them that Tian instinctively feared.
Tian swapped back to his staff, focusing on dodging and refining the poison. Mostly just using wide sweeps to keep Threadcutter and the rest back. His flailing feints towards the others didn’t fool anyone. They knew he wasn’t in any state to commit to an attack.
The poison hurt more and did more damage, but it was more easily resolved. The damage would be lingering, but he could heal it with time. The spirit was another matter. The Hell Suppressing Body absolutely loved whatever the exterior shell was, but that jelly-like core seemed to slip through its grasp. If it was the ghostly version of those beast cores, he should use the Darknorth Sea spell to absorb it. But that was flatly impossible under the circumstances. It was thrashing more and more violently, too, even as its means of causing damage weakened. It seemed as though, Tian thought, feeling his nerves freezing and burning at random, it was in pain.He could relate.
Tian kept swinging his staff in big overhead chops or wild swings. Moving with a desire to not be hurt, a mindless urge to destroy that which caused pain, all the hours of practice were lost. All thoughts of striking acupoints, stretching the attack with qi, entirely vanished from his mind.
The last of the coating on the spirit was dissolved and refined in the furnace of Tian’s lower dantian. The little jelly ball was terrified, silently screaming, thrashing and jerking wildly even as it tried to force its way towards Tian’s heart dantian. A little ball of yin suffering, trying to find a moment’s warmth. He didn’t know what to do with it. A focused burst of qi would probably destroy it, but it felt wrong. Not least of which because he didn’t think he could focus well enough to destroy it without harming himself.
Send it off! Comfort it, and send it off!
Grandpa was almost always silent during a fight. Send it off? Tian didn’t know what that was supposed to mean, but he tried to warm the little yin ball. He pulled fire from the little lamp of compassion within his heart dantian, and gently wrapped the intruder, transforming it into a guest. To the extent that he could, he tried to make it feel comfortable.
It wasn’t a very big extent, given everything, but Tian had some practice at hospitality. He had always put compassion at the very center of it. The little lamp in his heart wasn’t some elegant creation of gold or silver, not holy, not ancient, not mighty. It was a little clay lamp, the sort that was cheaply made by the dozens in any village kiln. It was a human fire, spreading human warmth and a human light of understanding. A… the memory made him gasp, almost laughing as the pain tore his guts and a cursed knife sliced across his chest and he was bracketed by sprays of acid and fire. It wasn’t just fire qi. It was the yin aspect of fire. What better fire to warm a ghost?
There was a long moment. Tian ducked and slid, his pin had fallen out who knew when and his long white hair whipped around as his staff spun and hammered away at the dodging, drifting, demons around him. There was a long moment, then Threadcutter threw his head back and screamed, and screamed, and screamed. Pain, and loss, and something else, something raw and small and fearful.
Dead, ash grey eyes turned on Tian. The little jelly orb had turned a brilliant gold.
“Don’t you dare. You are already going to suffer a thousand years of hell under my hand, but I can always make it worse. So, so much worse.”
Terrible things manifested around Threadcutter. Ghostly babies, organs tattooed and scarified with sigils and runes beyond any decent person’s understanding, obscene talismans and poison boluses that corrupted the air around them.
Tian touched his chest, right over where the little ball was. He guided it out with a thread of his fire qi and warm feelings.
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“I warned you! A million spirit crystals and ten drops of earth milk! Kill him for me, now! Right now, or I'll kill you next!”
The heretics unleashed their hidden moves, swarms of insects, fire arrays, a dagger that looked like a hole was torn in the sky to let in the night, all at the periphery of Tian’s awareness as the now golden little ball rolled out of his chest and onto his finger. It could move through his body quite easily now. He stretched out his hand a little, palm up, as though shooing a butterfly that had landed on his fingertips.
The attacks came in, fast, so fast he could hardly see them. The little golden ball vanished before they arrived.
“NO! Damn you! Damn you! Do you know what you have done?”
Tian didn’t know, but anything that made Threadcutter suffer was definitionally good. The poison was being flushed out of his body faster and faster, converting into his strength at an unprecedented speed. The absence of pain brought the battle into a crystal focus. Everything his qi touched, the heretics in front of him, the blazing storm of Liren’s battle behind him, all were laid out within his mind as clearly as his tea tray. Attacks were coming, much too fast and too many to dodge. That was fine. He would receive them, and flow.
His staff became an extension of his hands, catching the incoming attacks and being pushed backwards, redirecting the fireball into the insect swarm, or the night dagger into the screaming horror that had emerged from the ghost baby. Threadcutter charged in, weeping black tears from his ash colored eyes, trying to rip away Tian’s face. Tian tripped him, the staff catching the ancient across the shins and knocking him off his smokey cloud. It was just for a moment, the cloud caught him again on the next step, but it put him in line for a returning dagger. The dagger bounced off Threadcutter’s robes, but it triggered something in the old devil.
“YOU DARE!” The words were loud as thunder, but hissed like a coming rain. The poison bolus twisted, convulsing and sending a spike of purple-black liquid into the scarified organs. Tian couldn’t see the process, but the dagger flinging heretic howled until their throat went raw. The voice was high pitched, feminine. Was it a - Tian watched the heretic convulse then begin rotting, first the fingers falling away, then the feet, rolling up a joint at a time until all that was left was a screaming, begging torso. Then not even that. Whatever they were, they were no longer. All that remained was cursed slurry falling onto the grassland below.
Two down. Three left. The obscenity of them was inescapable. That was the word that came to mind, floating in that too-clear battle space. Obscene. Morally revolting. Shocking to the conscience. Even the flame wielder. Tian could feel the arrogance and cruelty in that fire. There was a nostalgia to it, a familiarity, but he couldn’t quite remember where he had seen it before. He wondered if it was the qi of the flames that burned him in his sickbed, the fires of spite his mother laid to take at least some of her enemies with her. A demon determined to die on her own terms, and leave nothing behind.
Tian felt much the same. He could be honest with his hate. He wouldn’t be cruel, but he would be ruthless. There could be no peace with this. No deals, no trades, no exchanges of hostages. There could only be… he groped for the right word, even as he slipped past sprays of acid and met swarms of insects with a blindingly quickly spinning staff. The insects, some of the insects, were crushed. Others, batted into oncoming spears of fire. The flame consumed them entirely, leaving no residue.
Purification. The Heretic must be suppressed, then purified. Like the little spirit in the curse ghost. He couldn’t polish a whole soul that way. That was King Yan’s job, and the job of all those suffering demons in Hell. But like a good orderly, he could make sure things were well prepared for the real doctors. He could be of assistance getting the patients where they needed to go.
His staff play was misguided from the start. It was a big, sweeping length of wood. Upright. Flexible, yes, but at its core, and like a rope dart, it was about momentum. Humble, but there was an authority in that humility. Something tested so utterly, only the most humble things could endure and remain. So humble, it came right back around to arrogance. So simple, it could become anything he needed it to be. Freeing it of all extraneous things could also be considered a form of purification. A return to the origin.
The ideas slotted into place, all the little scraps of his practice coming together with near-audible clicks in his mind. He couldn’t see it, but Grandpa watched as Tian’s head was topped with a blooming lotus crown, its holy pistils raining golden pollen into his brow.
Purification was only part of it, not the whole of it. Nor was something as abstract as “pure yang.” Maybe Liren could speak on that, it was beyond Tian. No, his staff play was about returning to the origin to make way for new life. Direct, unadorned, and carrying immense weight. Predominantly yin, the dissolution of sickness, but with that blazing refusal to tolerate evil. To flow, to turn, but to never lose sight of what was right. Never lose sight of the path.
The willow had always carried a faint sinister air, too yin, too rooted in water and death. But that was looking at it the wrong way. From death, life was born. From water grew wood. In destruction, there was birth. The elements turned, but for a daoist, for someone who had seen the gap in the wheel, what should be the hub? On what axle should it turn? The Saintess in her caverns had one answer. Tian, looking at the heretics and all their hellish works, found a different one.
“Virtue. The way is walked with virtue and righteousness. Even if we aren’t exactly sure what those things are, even if we get it wrong, even if every blessing contains a bane. The way is walked with virtue. My father swept my path. I will sweep the path of those coming behind me.”
His eyes locked on the heretics, a second pupil emerging from behind the first in each eye. The moon crossed the lake of the sky, the willow grew strong. The wind blew, and a branch lashed out. To the Gu master, it was like a golden pillar fell from the heavens, come to rebuke the demons. It smashed through the swarm, and his protective charms, and his skull, and the hideous things hiding in his chest. The virtuous qi obliterated the gu, leaving only mangled flesh to fall on the steppes below.
If you had the right ears, you could hear ancient temple bells ringing. If you had the right eyes, you could see the lotus crown blazing above his head. But none could see a ghostly old man grinning with savage joy.