“It is the greatest of honors for the great headmaster of Dragon Academy to visit this unworthy post personally. We will of course do whatever we can to accommodate all your needs! Though we must warn you that there is a... a risk to prolonged exposure that even those blessed with the most profound cultivation insights must be wary of. Forgive our caution, but we would be remiss if we were not to make our concerns known to you. Your well-being is in all ways our highest priority!”
Bingwen snorted, wisps of fire streaming from his nostrils, singeing not a single hair of his crimson beard upon his otherwise distinctly Han features. “You mean the Dark taint of a whole damn jungle’s worth of waste Qi? You think I’m such a fool that I don’t know the risks? That I couldn’t fry all your bones to ash in the time it takes you to scream without taking a single iota of damage?”
All three cultivators immediately fell to the ground, assuming supine poses of utter submission, performing dogeza as if their lives depended upon it. And perhaps they did.
“Enough!” the Gold roared. “You will take me to the library at once!”
Xiao Shen swallowed, heart hammering with such panic even a spirit could feel it on the ether. “I... yes, your excellency. Please, come this way.” And within minutes after winding down seemingly endless corridors Bingwen seemed to know every bit as well as the increasingly anxious gatekeeper, they were before the door. The site where Alex had been torn from life, or so close it hardly mattered, before his body had been carefully gathered up and tossed into the deepest, darkest pit in the massive crater below, perhaps jolted back to life only by the shock of the ice cold waters that had pooled in the ancient caverns below.
Or perhaps it had been far more than that.
Either way, Alex’s body was long gone. But the bodies of three Ruidians who had died in the extremis of agony, faces locked in agonized rictuses as their pale blue eyes gazed at whatever hell or salvation awaited them after death, were crumpled before the door.
And four other Ruidian corpses were some feet away, the ghost of a dreaming Alex immediately noting the brilliant crimson rubies upon all four of their brows.
The Gold cultivator glared at the door, the three bodies immediately igniting in white hot sulfuric flame, leaving only slave collars and fine piles of ash, seconds later. “What is the meaning of this?”
“Forgive us, lord,” sobbed Xiao Shen, crashing to his knees and slamming his head upon the hard stone tiles. “Your wondrous door successfully warded the conniving attempts of a certain treacherous Ruidian from gaining access to tomes forever forbidden to his kind, but somehow he managed to fuse and twist your wards with his foul taint, even as he died!”
Bingwen’s hard gaze crackled with unmistakable ire.
“The door is sealed shut, Headmaster! We are unable to open it. We tried all the wards at our disposal, but of course nothing we have could possibly trump your brilliant Golden fire!”
Xiao Shen swallowed, gazing at the corpses. “We used almost all our slaves to force it open, and were going to use the remainder still harvesting within the caverns, as soon as they return. The first three proceeded just as we hoped. But by the fourth...” he trembled, flinching under the former headmaster’s gaze. “They were fire mages, master, and all our collars are attuned to Flame! Understanding they were doomed to die serving their betters no matter what they did, they knew they had nothing to lose. They killed two of our men before the collars finally destroyed them all!”
“What utter foolishness!” Bingwen snapped. “Were you in such a panic that you failed to think of blindfolding them? Bringing them up one at a time? Or did you savor witnessing that final look of terror in their eyes, knowing their deaths were inevitable, so sure our collars could suppress even a ruby?”
Bingwen flashed a homicidal grin. “Yes. It was the latter, wasn’t it? You were never a fool, Xiao, and don’t think I fail to recognize the steps you took to preserve your cultivation, even after I sealed you and your cohort’s doom.”
Ugly laughter washed over the trembling cultivators. “Does it surprise you to know that I find your heavy-handed torment of those vile foreigners amusing? That I could care less about your karmic corruption, no matter how pristine your cultivation bases? So long as you confine your black masses and dark sacrifices to Ruidians and Ruidians alone, I care not what you do. For no one hates those vile vermin more than I!”
He glared at the door, which began to glow white hot. But the wards on the door only crackled with a crimson shimmer, seeming to absorb the heat the Gold forced into the barrier, his own wards somehow so badly warped that not even he could pass.
He snarled with hate, glaring at the door.
“And now I find that the nightmares that have been plaguing me after my bitter fight are nothing less than the truth! The disciple of my worst enemy actually tracked down my refuge, ferreting out my most precious secrets, working in cahoots with Panheu to deny me access to the tomes I will have at all costs!”
Then his eyes widened, catching sight of the slightest discrepancy at the base of the door. A single stomp of his foot shattered the carefully applied mortar, revealing that which Xiao had been so desperate to hide.
Words all the more terrible for the calm, precise manner with which they were spoken cut off Xiao’s desperate pleas.
“Explain to me exactly what happened, Xiao.”
Xiao jerked a nod, his tongue nearly tripping over itself as he explained everything that had happened since Alex and his unexpected companions had first stepped out of the woods and into the clearing, immediately catching Xiao’s interest, delighting in the opportunity to acquire two more slaves after securing the prize before him.
“Of course, I sensed intruders approaching the periphery of my academy, so assumed the guise which disarms so many. I recognized him as the escaped Ruidian slave upon which master merchant Hao Zei put a massive spirit stone bounty with proof of his capture or death. And much to my surprise, that clever little rat knew just the oath to request to assure his safety for the duration of his stay.”
Xiao gave a rueful shake of his head. “My men got the signal. If we couldn’t kill him directly, we could lure him into unwinnable fights and take him out indirectly. Unfortunately, he proved far more difficult to kill than any Ruidian should have, no matter how gifted.”
Bingwen smirked. “Oh yes, much like a cockroach, that bug has proven remarkably difficult to kill.”
“But not impossible,” Xiao assured. “For when he was enticed to open the door at my behest, he did not stop or think to question, so eager he was for the secrets beyond. And that was when your talismans seared his soul so badly his body collapsed, lifeless, to the ground.”
The deadly Gold frowned. “Then he should have been completely fried to ash. Even now, he dances to Panheu’s tune. I can feel it!” Hot eyes peered deeply into Xiao’s own. “Tell me he never entered the library. Even in death, tell me there was no way he could have gotten through!”
Xiao’s ghastly countenance was all the tell Bingwen needed, gripping the man by his lapels and shaking him like a rag doll. “Tell me what you know, fool. Tell me what you know!”
“His hand,” sobbed Xiao. “He fell to the ground dead with your curses! Only his dead fingertips could have possibly slipped past the door, and only because the force of his soul being torn from his flesh was so great that the floor itself exploded in sympathetic backlash to your death wards!”
Bingwen trembled. Though whether with rage, horror, or disbelief, it was impossible to tell. “Tell me, Xiao, did he have a ring on his finger, by any chance?”
Xiao blinked in surprise. “I... no, of course not! That’s impossible. We stripped him bare before throwing him in the blackest pit in the crater below!”
“Are you sure?”
Xiao swallowed. “I... Now I don’t know.”
Bingwen clenched his teeth and glared at the door, no longer holding back as he poured forth his Qi, Wood feeding Fire with a Gold’s strength,
and the door began to warp and twist, glowing with terrible heat. The formerly pulsating sigils erupted in flashes of color before the now white-hot door burst free of its frame with an explosion of stone that lacerated all three of the kowtowing cultivators, though Bingwen himself did naught but sneer as shrapnel bounced off his shimmering ward of golden flame.
Before his sneering smirk turned to a look of wide-eyed disbelief, open-mouthed shock quickly transforming to darkest wrath.
Eyes radiating a killing aura transfixed Xiao Shen who trembled and shook with such horror that a dreaming Alex almost felt pity. Until he glanced at the corpses of numerous innocent Ruidian adventurers who had been so cruelly used and thrown away, their desperate last stand ending only with their inevitable deaths.
“What is the meaning of this, Xiao?”
“Master?”
“Look inside you, fool. Look! There is nothing there. Nothing!”
With those words, the Gold cultivator effortlessly grabbed the gasping Xiao, who didn’t dare even flinch or resist when he was summarily tossed into the chamber beyond, the once exquisite library and fine frescoed walls within utterly vanished. Only a roughhewn shell of a room remained in its place.
“Master, I swear to you! If I had thought...”
Bingwen’s fists trembled with killing fury.
Xiao Shen sobbed, holding up placating fists. “Please, master, I swear to you. No one had access. No one!”
The furious Gold roared and Alex had absolutely no doubt that, damaged cultivation base or no, did he but push himself, Bingwen could destroy the entire academy in a whirlwind of living flame.
So, when he abruptly froze, fiery passions replaced with icy calculation, Alex felt a shiver of apprehension racing down his nonexistent spine.
“Take me to wherever you stored his gear.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, Xiao Shen did just that, quickly winding back through multiple corridors and grand halls, and everyone instinctively knew to stay out of their way.
Save for one cultivator frowning in consternation as his meditative trance was broken by the pair of men striding with haste across the courtyard. “Gatekeeper, who is this stranger? I have never—”
Bingwen didn’t even glance in the man’s direction. The skeptical man simply burst into flame, his dying shrieks echoing through the courtyard long after the pair had left.
No one said a word aloud, but by the time the pair had entered the far most chambers, not another soul was in sight.
“Where is the room, Xiao?”
“Right here, Headmaster!” said a frantic Xiao Shen, hand trembling with the keys, before the door abruptly burst into flame, instantly disintegrating to ash, and it said something about a Gold’s terrible power that not a lick of heat spilled over, the ash so cold it seemed to chill Xiao’s feet when he stumbled over the threshold.
“Here it is, my lord!” said a breathless Xiao, opening a pack full of basic survival gear ideal for camping out in the wilderness, some choice Qi-enhanced fruit, some dried spirit meat wrapped in leaves, and very little else. Alex’s clothing alone seemed worthy of note, the old-fashioned changshan shirt fastened with bone buttons and made of a fabric that felt silky smooth to the touch without a speck of dirt or any odor from the road at all. His pants and leather boots were of similar quality. But save for those remarkable items, absolutely nothing else stood out. Even his coin pouch held the most common demarcations of copper and silver.
Bingwen abruptly clenched a handful of Xiao Shen’s hair, squeezing so tight the filaments tore from their roots. A horrified Xiao dared do nothing but tremble in fear, caught like a rabbit by the killing gaze of a wolf.
“It is not here! This pack lacks any magical properties. There is no ring or storage pouch of any sort to be found here!”
“We found nothing magical at all, save the clothes, sir. I swear it!”
Bingwen glared and spat, his spittle bursting into flame. “I know all your secrets, fool. All the dark games you play. I never cared what stains you brought upon your soul, so long as I got my cut of the resources plundered from this pit!”
“And we have always delivered it, without fail! Please, Master Bingwen, I know how utterly unworthy we are, but I beg of you, allow us to live. Allow us to serve!”
Bingwen’s killing gaze cooled once more. “Perhaps I will, at that. Despite the gravity of your offenses, perhaps I will.” He nodded thoughtfully to himself, still holding a squirming Xiao effortlessly in his grip. “It is fortunate, then, that you did give into your desperation, forging dark pacts only a fool would embrace. For that makes you all but immune to the rotting stench of tainted Qi this entire crater is saturated in, yes?”
“Yes, revered Headmaster Bingwen!” a desperate Xiao declared, bobbing his head in frantic agreement.
Bingwen’s grin didn’t reach his ice-cold eyes. “Which means you’ll be absolutely delighted to crawl down into whatever hole you threw that damned Ruidian’s corpse in and bring back his body, yes? Preferably with any rings still attached to his hand!”
Xiao swallowed. “Master, you don’t understand... Yes! Yes, I would be honored for the chance to serve you in even this small capacity, such a task being utterly unworthy of your time, revered headmaster!”
Bingwen nodded, coldly dropping the man. “Good. Then we are done here. And you will not go alone. You will gather all the depraved idiots who follow the same dark path you do. I’m not such a fool as to think the pits are without risk, and on the off chance the tool of my most hated foe isn’t dead at all, but actually thrives in the vile muck that is any true cultivator’s bane...”
“I understand, sir.”
“Do you? For your sake, I hope you do.” He then placed a shimmering band of silver in a gasping Xiao’s hand. “The ring is open. Glimpse its secrets.”
A trembling Xiao’s eyes widened as he did just that, immediately kowtowing before the glaring Gold’s feet. “Master, the prizes within...”
“And you will instruct each of your pawns that they may expect three spirit pearls and a pouch full of gold for their part in a successful retrieval. And death by torment, should they fail.”
Xiao swallowed, jerking a nod. “My men would slice their lover’s throats for such a prize!”
Bingwen chuckled coldly. “I ruled uncontested for decades because I know how to judge the worth of a man. And to sense what he most hungers for. No matter that you have failed me once... I don’t throw pieces away lightly, and I know you will never dare to fail me again.”
“No, master!” declared a fawning Xiao Shen.
The Gold cultivator’s gaze hardened. “I don’t need to tell you what I will do to you, and to every living member of your family, five generations deep, should you dare to flee, or fail to bring me that worm’s corpse, and whatever rings or jewelry he might have had! But fear alone will not inspire the desperation I need burning within you. I want success to be a prize you hunger for so badly that you will not hesitate hunt down and blast any and every dark beast within those catacombs that you can find, should the Ruidian’s body be stripped clean. Kill them all and search their remains. Search the entire warren of dark tunnels if you have to, for any trace of storage device or magic ring!”
He placed the shimmering ring in Xiao’s sweaty palm, closing his hand so tightly about it that the faint crack of a single broken bone could be heard. Xiao stifled a cry.
“And now you know the boon of success. You will keep this ring. The prizes within are now yours, just as your life and the lives of everyone you have ever loved are now mine. Best you let that truth sink in, as you pursue the only thing in your life that matters. Recovering my prize!”
He chuckled coldly at the odd look of desperation and avarice in the trembling cultivator’s eyes. “That is what I’m looking for, Xiao. Fear and hunger in one delightful cauldron of anxious desperation, worthy of any fool enslaved to Lady Laobao’s twisted pleasures. Now go. Delay no further! Gather your men and don’t you dare
return until my enemy’s favored pawn is wearing a slave collar before me, or his decomposing body is lying at my feet!”
Alex jolted back to wakefulness beside the exotic projector of crystal and gold. His dreams had instilled in him the blind panic of a woodland hare being run down by a pack of wolves, but a few deep breaths settled that terror, leaving him humbled anew by all the profound insights into the nature of Qi revealed within this chamber. Awed most of all by the fact that he now had imprinted within his mind all the patterns within those crystalline spheres, and the blueprints for the projector itself, while still having no solid grasp of the dizzying language within at all.
But some truths had blazed profoundly within his mind, and he felt the faint fires of hope that had been all but extinguished before, for all that he knew he was already running out of time.
His enemies were coming for him yet again, and he really needed to move.
Yet he couldn’t help but stop and pause, taking a final look around this exotic chamber that seemed so different from any other structure he had seen in this world up to now.
Perception check made!
Eyes alighting on what he was suddenly certain must be a hatch.
So well blended into the flooring that it was only by sensing the odd flow of Earth Qi resonating through the structure that he could make it out, though it was utterly inured to all his cautious attempts to open it. Then he blinked, feeling an unexpected shiver of understanding, wondering if it was the information within those spheres he had absorbed that made the method of unlocking the hatch suddenly so obvious to him, Alex sending a gentle surge of Spirit Qi through the strange-looking handle that shimmered as the hatch slowly rose of its own accord.
Revealing yet another stairwell leading down into the bowels of this fascinating archaeological find.
Even as his mind raced with everything he needed to do to prepare for the party of hunters that would soon be out for his head, he approached the stairs, the secrets below seeming to call out to him.
Silver Fox & The Western Hero: Warrior's Oath: A LitRPG/Wuxia Novel - Book 4 Page 36