by Nick Harrow
With that cheery thought in my mind, I gathered the supplies I’d foraged into a bindle I’d made out of Jiro’s pillowcase, and returned to the campfire.
“What do you think?” Ayo asked as she turned around to show me what she’d been up to.
She’d fashioned the leather armor repair scraps into a top and skirt that only loosely qualified as clothing. While her new outfit covered the parts of her body you weren’t supposed to expose to the general public, that was basically all they covered. Ayo’s slender blue body seemed more naked than it had before she’d put the clothes on, and my breath caught in my throat at the sight.
“You look stunning.” There wasn’t another word for it. She looked beyond amazing. “Maybe too stunning.”
“He’s right.” Aja had made some adjustments to the outfit the other spirit had created for her. Strategically placed scraps of leather covered more of her skin, though she’d still attract every eye we passed. “Every man and most women that see you will want to fuck your legs off.”
Not that the rest of us were dressed any more conservatively. My shaman dress code, a simple belt of hemp cord, a leather breechcloth, and not another stitch of clothing, was going to stand out wherever we went. Unfortunately, wearing more clothes wasn’t an option for me. I needed the air to touch my skin and for my feet to touch the ground to use my abilities and restore my core’s rin. The more clothes I wore, the weaker I became.
“Let them stare.” Floating Village had been on the outskirts of the Moonsilver Bat Kingdom, so it was unlikely we’d stumble across any other travelers before we reached the Deepways. Once we arrived there, there’d be so many other strange and exotic sights, a mostly naked shaman and his sexy spirit companions wouldn’t attract more than passing attention.
I hoped.
“The road would be easier,” Aja grumbled after I’d led them through the forest for an hour. The spirits had more trouble navigating the undergrowth between the narrowly spaced trees than I did, it seemed.
“Easier for the Jade Seekers to spot us, maybe.” I pushed aside another tree branch and plucked a handful of bright yellow cymberries from a bush. Their sweet pulp was made bitter by the mist that clung to their skins. I tossed the half-eaten berries aside with a disappointed frown. “We’re taking a more direct route.”
“Are you sure you know the way?” Ayo asked sweetly from behind the red-haired spirit. “The lake, and our mistress, is more to the southeast.”
“I know a faster way.” I’d spent my childhood dreaming of far-off lands and cities whose names I’d only ever heard on the lips of traders who’d reached the Floating Village by traveling through the Deepways. One of them had shown me a map of the mystical transport system, and I’d studied it until the dozens of stations closest to my home were burned into my memory.
The Deepways were miracles of senjin science built by the Yellow Serpent Kingdom during the Second Age. Over the thousands of years since it was first created, the marvels of sacred energy technology had expanded until there was a station at every major dream meridian intersection. Those stations harnessed tremendous amounts of senjin energy and used it to propel enormous carriages between one station and the next at truly mind-blowing speeds. The network of stations had been critical to the growth and prosperity of the Empire. Even if everything else had fallen into ruin while I’d been on top of Mount Shiki, the Yellow Serpents would never allow such a vital piece of sacred technology to fall into disrepair.
My plan was to hike overland to the Cragtooth Station west of my former hometown, trade away the medicines I no longer needed for passage to the Looptail Station north of the Lake of Moonsilver Mist, then walk the rest of the way to the spirits’ mistress. If everything went just right, we could cut a week-long trek down to just three days. Maybe two days if we got lucky and ran into a friendly wagon headed our way.
When we stopped for a late lunch, the spirits were already looking rough around the edges. Ayo’s skin had taken on a dry, almost scaly, texture, and Aja’s fiery red hair had faded to a dull pink mottled with white patches.
“Here.” I opened my bindle and gave each of them a hunk of roast pork and a single pill I’d created with the equipment in Jiro’s tent. “Eat and take the pill. I’m going to meditate to pull some senjin into my core, then we can have some fun and refuel the two of you for the next part of the hike.”
“What is this?” Aja frowned at the tightly pressed tablet.
“It’s an all-natural mixture of herbs and shaman spit. The important part is that it will slow down the loss of shio from your core. Sit. Rest. Eat. Swallow the pill.” I gestured ahead of us. “I’m going over to that giri tree to do my thing. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
The spirits flopped down on the ground and tore into the hunks of meat like they hadn’t eaten in months. It was a good thing my mad shaman skills let me go without eating for days at a time because the spirits looked like they could eat a pig a day all by themselves.
The tree I’d picked for my meditation spot was thick-boled with drooping branches that provided excellent cover when I crawled under them. The fallen needles around its trunk made the ground extra comfortable, and it only took me a few seconds to fall into a deep meditative trance.
My earthbound core could hold five nodes of rin energy before it was filled. With practice and more knowledge, I’d eventually have a seabound core that could store ten nodes of rin energy. With a lot of luck and the right skills, I could reach even higher levels of mastery and push my core up the ladder to seabound, skybound, and beyond. The crimson bear had claimed there were nine or ten core levels, though even she thought that was unlikely. She was the strongest creature I’d ever seen, and her core was only firebound at fifth level. Trying to imagine a core twice as powerful as hers was mind-boggling.
Sacred energy was plentiful this close to a dream meridian. The turbulent flow of senjin rumbled against my shaman’s senses, and red lances of rin speared through drifting clouds of shio in my spirit sight. The crimson rin was easiest for me to absorb into my core. Its masculine energy resonated with mine, and rays of power drifted toward me with every breath I took. I could have filled my core with rin in a matter of minutes.
Unfortunately, that wouldn’t have done either of the spirits any good. They needed shio to maintain their cores, and that power was beyond my ability to control.
Senjin, on the other hand, contained both masculine and feminine power. While it would be much harder to draw into my core than rin, the spirits and I could pull the more complex dream essence apart with some good old-fashioned sexy times.
I reached out for the senjin in the dream meridian with my spirit. It was like sticking my hand into a honey-spraying firehose. The sacred energy was warm and thick and so powerful it threatened to sweep me away in its unearthly current. Raw potential hummed through my body. I steeled myself, emptied my mind, and took a deep breath.
Of burning sewage.
My core screamed in protest as the foulest energy I’d ever experienced slammed into my spirit. I’d expected a slow, steady stream of intoxicating power and had instead swallowed a tidal wave of vile rot. My core filled before I could tear myself free of the meridian. All five of my core’s nodes filled with an essence so toxic it left me dazed and wretching. The poison burned a thousand times hotter than the wound from Jiro’s mercurial kunai. My core felt ready to burst at any moment.
“Fuck.” I dragged myself to my feet and staggered back toward where I’d left the spirits. The world reeled drunkenly around me. Color bled out of reality, only to be replaced by dark shadows and sprays of purple light. A flock of passing birds transformed into a thundercloud before breaking apart into searing streaks of blood-red lightning. Finally, after an eternity wandering through a twisted hellscape of hallucinations, I found the spirits. “Poisoned.”
The crimson bear’s presence pushed through the dark venom that clouded my thoughts. As always, her primary concern was survival, and she knew ex
actly what that required.
Aja’s red eyes met mine and went wide with surprise at the burning need she saw within me. Sparks of animal lust kindled in the depths of her gaze, and she started to rise from where she sat next to her sister, her hands busy with the knots that secured her scant clothing.
There was no time for that. I grabbed her by the waist and spun her away from me. I pushed aside the thin patch of leather that covered her sex, and my fingers brushed against Aja’s damp heat.
“Yes,” she moaned, and shoved her hips back toward me. She reached back through her legs, grabbed hold of me, and jerked me forward with savage strength.
I plunged into the red-maned spirit with a guttural groan. Aja’s body closed around mine, and she threw her head back and cried out as the burning heat inside me joined our cores together in a knot of searing ecstasy. Her fingers clenched into fists and tore tufts of grass from the forest’s floor with every thrust. She turned her head to stare hungrily at me over her shoulder, panting, her cheeks and throat red with desire.
Time ceased to have any meaning. Our bodies slammed together in perfect synchronicity, every motion triggering a fresh wave of pleasure. Our cries tore the still air of the woods, sending birds into panicked flight and deer bolting from where they’d grazed among the trees. Primal passion drove us harder, faster, as a desperate need raged inside me.
Blue arms wrapped around me from behind. Ayo crushed her chest against my back. Her smooth skin was cool against the infernal heat that radiated from my core, and she gasped when the power washed over her. She kissed the back of my neck, then swirled her tongue across the knob of my spine. She pushed her hands down the length of my torso, her nails dragging over the skin as if she wanted to claw her way into my core to get at the tainted senjin that way.
Ayo’s slender hand slipped between the taut muscles of my stomach and the smooth curve of Aja’s ass. The blue spirit’s thumb and forefinger circled the base of my cock, a slippery band of friction that amplified every other sensation to nearly unbearable heights. She squeezed and relaxed her grip in time with my thrusts, adding an exquisite counterpoint to the velvet throbbing pressure of Aja around me. Ayo’s other hand reached around me to close over my grip on the redhead’s hip, urging us faster, harder. Our cores pulsed together, and the edges of reality blurred until all sense of time and place vanished.
The three of us were all that existed, all that would ever exist, all that could exist.
Aja whimpered and stiffened, her body suddenly rigid as a wave of pleasure shattered her thoughts. A soul-deep groan oozed from her throat as she spasmed around me, her nails digging furrows in the earth, her pulse pounding against mine.
Ayo bit down on my shoulder, an intense flash of cold that snapped the bonds of my self-control. I drove deep into Aja, cum gushing from me in thick spurts, frenzied thrusts lifting her knees almost off the ground. The spirits clung to me, their bodies slick with sweat, shuddering as pulses of ecstasy hammered us closer together and connected our cores in a flash of power.
The crimson bear roared inside me. She’d experienced every second of that encounter and heartily approved of almost all of it.
What she didn’t like was how the experience left her wanting more. To the eternal spirit, that hour of animal lust had passed in the blink of an eye. By the time she’d roused herself from her slumber and felt me fucking the spirits, it was over. She wanted more.
“Soon,” I promised in a hoarse whisper.
I eased back from Aja and sat, stunned, on the ground. The bonds between our cores had faded with our pleasure, but their purpose had been served. My core was filled to bursting with pure rin. The spirits crawled to my side and reclined on either side of me, their heads resting on my chest, their arms curled around my waist. My spirit sight showed me their cores as brilliant sapphire lights, nodes filled to capacity.
“The crimson bear taught you well,” Aja teased, her voice soft and dreamy. “Are you sure you’re still mortal?”
That was a good question. If I’d been gone for decades without aging, maybe I wasn’t strictly mortal. But all that time was in the hunting grounds of the gods, where time flowed to a different rhythm than the people of the Sevenfold Empire experienced.
“Does it matter?” The question was as much for myself as the spirit.
“Not if you keep doing that.” Ayo lifted her head and kissed the hollow of my throat.
“When we stop for the night,” I promised as I stood and pulled the spirits to their feet. “But we need to hurry if we’re going to get to the Deepways station before dark.”
“I could run the whole way there.” Aja flexed her left leg, then her right.
Despite the aggressive exercise we’d all shared, the three of us had more energy now than we had before we’d banged ourselves silly. The sacred energy that filled our cores invigorated our muscles and purged the weariness from our bodies. Buoyed by that energy, we made excellent time to the station.
“It’s just over this hill.” I urged the spirits onward. Their cores still glowed with nodes of shio energy, though the initial rush of power had worn off an hour before. They’d need to be replenished before our ride on the Deepways carriage was over. That would be an interesting experience.
They followed me up a hill whose top had been smashed flat by some ancient energy artist. A focusing beacon rested on the hill’s flat top, its enormous senjin crystal dark and covered in thick, thorned vines. The grass had grown up around the structure’s base, and there was no trace of the power couplings and capacitors I’d seen in the illustrations a trader had shown me.
“No,” I groaned. “No.”
The Deepways station was below us. The senjin lanterns that surrounded it no longer shed pure silver light. Instead, viscous shadows dripped from their cracked lenses, and the earth beneath them was covered in the rancid, blistered caps of poisonous fungi. The open mouth of the carriage cavern was clotted with weeds and rogue saplings with leaves the color of sun-bleached bones.
There wasn’t another soul as far as we could see from our perch. The stalls clustered around the cavern that should have bustled with merchants hawking exotic wares from far-off lands were empty, their shelves rotted away to nothing. Signposts announcing the various routes and times of departure were cast down, the metal posts choked by coils of black ivy that spread over the ground like cancerous lesions.
The Deepways station, the best hope we had of reaching the Lake of Moonsilver Mist before the spirits bled out, was dead.
Chapter Eight
A COLD EMBER OF RAGE lit up the dark corners of my heart. I’d counted on the Deepways to reach the lake before the spirits bled out. If this station was as dead as it looked, I’d have to figure out some way to make up the time we’d just lost.
“What happened?” Ayo asked. “Was there some sort of accident?”
“Let’s find out.” I had the same questions as Ayo, and I really didn’t look forward to getting the answers.
From a distance the lanterns had looked like they were leaking shadows onto the ground below. When we got closer to the station, though, it became obvious that wasn’t exactly the case. Thick, black vines had climbed up the posts and wrapped their oily tendrils around the lanterns. The strange plants were covered in a sickly sheen and had sprouted bloated fruits dotted with red nodules the color of raw beef. Clusters of those bulbous growths dangled from the lanterns and oozed a tarry ichor from their pulpy mass into black puddles coagulated around the bases of the lamp posts.
“Gross.” Aja stopped to sniff at one of the puddles of black goo. “This is what I meant when I said the world was dying. Things like this have been sprouting up all over the place.”
It was hard to argue with the spirit’s dire prediction when faced with such grotesque evidence. Whatever these plants had once been, tainted senjin had transformed them into something foul and grotesque. The presence of such obvious corruption told me that it wasn’t just the meridian we’d been foll
owing that was corrupted. I switched to my spirit sight and found swirls of pitch-black taint in all of the meridians that converged on this Deepways station. The vile energy was so thick here it had manifested in the plants.
This is worse than I’d imagined. Mielyssi’s voice rippled through my thoughts, distant and faint. I wish I had better advice to offer than be very fucking careful and don’t get any of that shit on you.
“Don’t touch anything,” I cautioned the spirits. The crimson bear’s warning had confirmed my worry about the sticky goo that stained the grass. The tainted senjin I’d taken into my core had nearly killed me. If I hadn’t had the spirits to fuck its diseased power out of me, I’d never have survived. If they became infected, too, there wouldn’t be any safety valves to save us the next time it happened.
“No need to worry about that,” Ayo said. “This stuff stinks. I wouldn’t touch it with Aja’s finger.”
“You want to go for a swim?” the red-haired spirit asked with a feral grin. “I can arrange that.”
Ayo cowered away from Aja with an exaggerated look of panic stretched across her beautiful features. They both laughed and followed along behind me as I led them around the worst of the corruption.
Their resilience in the face of all the bullshit they were faced with lifted my spirits. If they could joke while their cores leaked away their vital essences, the least I could do was put on a brave face and try my damnedest to get them back home to their mistress.
Fortunately, it wasn’t hard to see the danger spots. They shed a purple-black radiance that kept triggering my spirit sight. My stomach churned at what I saw, and more than anything I wanted to get away from this place. But, first, I had to scavenge whatever we could from the station. The corruption would make any animals I could hunt or plants I could forage inedible, which meant we’d need some sort of trail rations to reach the lake. More medicinal supplies would be good, too, because what I had on me wouldn’t keep Aja and Ayo up and running for more than a few days. Anything else we could find, like a map or some clothes for the spirits, would be a bonus.