“Stop doing that,” she said groggily, not in the best state of mind. She summoned her ankh, a staff-shaped weapon with suboptimal offensive abilities and waved it at what now looked like red tendrils. To her surprise, the ankh glowed with a soft red light that sucked in the misty red substance. A hint of familiar energy appeared within the treasure’s mystical runes. It was vital energy, something she was all too familiar with.
The infusion of vitality replenished the exhaustion in her body. The room blurred a little as she realized that it wasn’t only her latest patient that was affected, but all other patients as well.
I need to focus, she thought, pushing her soul’s exhaustion out of her mind. She cast out her soul force, and the red mist appeared once more. Then, intensifying her focus, she barely made out cloudy red tendrils that scurried beneath the floor and the patients like living organisms.
“What in the seven hells?” Yue Bing whispered as she tripped over herself trying to reach the beds. Her soul exhaustion mounted as she crawled, and her dizziness intensified. She fought off her giddiness while inspecting each of the patients. She paled when she noticed that the vital force in each of them was slowly diminishing. Meanwhile, the tendrils were growing larger, thicker, and stronger.
She struggled to maintain consciousness. Then, mustering what strength she could, she grasped her ankh and held it up with a shaky arm. If I can destroy one, I can destroy all of them, she thought. She swung out with a Splashing Wave Staff. A small amount of water qi and incandescent force poured out from her ankh as she swept across the red wisps. As the water touched the tendrils, they dissolved into the liquid and gave it a bloodred glow. The glow struggled in the water and fought to take shape once again.
Yue Bing would have none of that. Yelling, she activated her ankh once again. Small red droplets left the water on the floor and rushed into the golden object. The serpents and wings on the staff-ankh glowed red as they drank their fill after being starved for so long. After a single breath, all stray vital energy in the room had been absorbed by the wicked object. Whatever lurked beneath the earth seemed to hesitate, then withdraw.
Exhausted, Yue Bing let out a sigh of relief, but her brow scrunched in concern. These means weren’t unknown to her. The tendrils were a form of forbidden magic.
Blood magic.
Chapter 4
Tree branches swayed and demon beasts scurried as Zi Long and a white-robed woman made their way through a dense forest. The ground was wet and muddy, but it didn’t hinder them in the slightest; their flying swords hovered a few feet above the ground, making what would have otherwise been an arduous trek a walk in the park.
“The frigid sea lotus should be around here somewhere,” Luo Xuehua said as she inspected a jade slip. Her blind eyes remained closed as she probed their surroundings with incandescent force, searching for something. Meanwhile, her violet-robed companion looked around them with concern, carefully inspecting every detail of their surroundings in case the demons didn’t know any better than to attack them.
She soon found what she was looking for: a formation flag. The gray object was old and tattered. To the naked eye, it had seen better days. Yet as she picked it up, the illusion faded. The flag turned royal blue, its soft surface covered in complex golden runes that shimmered with power. They were connected to a matrix of runic lines that formed a tangible barrier right before them. The flag was a keyhole, and she had the key.
She took out a blue paintbrush and added a few golden lines to the flag. It glowed, and as it did, so did the barrier. The trees faded and revealed a clearing up ahead, its grass-covered area only containing a single pool. And within that pool sat a single blue lotus, whose icy aura filled the clearing with a frigid mist.
“We should be careful,” Zi Long said, moving in front of her. He summoned a dozen crystalline objects and coaxed them into formation. They shimmered, and an icy shield appeared. It was a combat formation formed from his qi and the crystalline sigils.
Zi Long’s caution was rewarded. The shields soon came up against an invisible obstruction and halted their advance. Intrigued, the violet-robed man formed six dozen hand seals and summoned another combat formation with thirty-six crystals. They formed a complex diagram that dismantled all illusions around him. He gasped as over a hundred silkworm cocoons appeared in the clearing. Every single one of them was connected to the icy pool within a light-blue tether.
“It’s just as I feared,” Luo Xuehua said. “The formation wasn’t strong enough to repel all the demons. These silkworms are skilled in illusions and were able to breach the formation and encroach on the frigid sea lotus.”
“They shouldn’t be a problem,” Zi Long said. “If you work quickly, they won’t even notice the lotus’s disappearance. We’ll be long gone before they awaken.”
“How much time can you buy us?” Luo Xuehua asked, not doubting his abilities.
“A half hour,” Zi Long replied. “Perhaps more. Luckily, they haven’t completed their transformation. I wouldn’t stand a chance against a hundred fully formed nightmare butterflies, but larvae?” He shook his head and walked over to the edge of the clearing and stabbed a gray formation flag into the soft soil. He then took out a purple brush and painted an icy blue runic pattern on its silken material. It glowed with unlocked potential as it awaited an outlet, a way to fulfill its instruction.
He set out flag after flag. Some were blue, others golden. Some were green, red, or brown. Once the thirty-sixth flag was placed, Zi Long summoned a thin purple staff with a white brush on its end. It glowed with a soft white light, and he then began painting his masterpiece.
His arms were a blur, and he avoided the cocoons as he moved. One white line after another landed on the forest floor, somehow avoiding the living obstructions, despite the complexity of the pattern. Thirty seconds passed as he moved far faster than a mortal could fathom, and once all the flags were connected, he spread a fine crystal dust on one of the flags. The formation let out a soft hum as it activated. His surroundings shimmered, and he and Luo Xuehua seemingly disappeared.
“You need to dismantle the frigid sea lotus’s protective formation before the cocoons realize we’re here,” Zi Long instructed. “If they hatch, things will get dicey.”
The calm woman nodded. She walked over to the icy pond and covered herself in a layer of frigid qi. Then she kneeled beside a blue formation that had been put into place by her seniors to prevent outsiders from claiming their precious prize.
As Luo Xuehua worked, Zi Long kept careful watch over his surroundings. He wasn’t sure why, but the hundreds of cocoons made him feel uneasy. Based on his observations, they were only two years old. Three years was the basic requirement for nightmare butterflies, assuming they weren’t disturbed prior.
The formation in the center pulsed as the first of three seals shattered. A dense cold qi filled their surroundings and sent chills down Zi Long’s spine.
No, it’s not the qi, he thought, sensing the strange nature of his shiver. Someone’s watching us. Is it the cocoons?
Perplexed, he began inspecting the silky white objects. They were intact and unblemished. Almost too perfect. Even if they began hatching now, it would be too late for them to evolve. Not the cocoons, he concluded.
The formation pulsed once more. This time, he heard a slight shivering sound. He looked to Luo Xuehua but saw that she wasn’t responsible. He looked to the cocoons once more but found nothing out of the ordinary. Still, the shivering continued.
Zi Long felt a crawling sensation on his skin. His mind raced to find an explanation. Then, a thought occurred to him. A frightening thought, but one he couldn’t discount, given the arts he practiced. Is what we’re seeing real?
Sister Xuehua, hold back on breaking the third seal, he instructed her mentally.
Her arm paused. Zi Long ignored the crawling sensation on his skin and focused on the thirty-six formation flags. His incandescent force entered their energy centers and probed around unt
il he found something peculiar. Here and there, a few pockets of spiritual energy had entered the formation. They were small and barely perceptible. A lesser man would have missed them.
Taking in a deep breath, he ran the formation in reverse. The lines in the formation abruptly shifted, turning the five-element concealment formation into a five-element illusion-breaking formation. Their surroundings shattered like a broken mirror, revealing the clearing’s true appearance.
The untouched cocoons had hatched, but rather than the beautiful butterflies they’d expected, thousands of venomous wasps had emerged. The crawling on his skin hadn’t been his sixth sense—it was a physical sensation, the feeling of dozens of wasps crawling around his skin, injecting him with a numbing poison.
“Run!” Zi Long yelled. His qi expanded in a shield and forced the tiny wasps away from him. The surrounding forest buzzed to life as several larger demonic wasps detected them. He threw out three red talismans that erupted in a sea of flames, burning hundreds of wasps. It was a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of thousands that swarmed around them.
Zi Long ran over to Luo Xuehua, who was busy painting lines on the last remaining seal. “If we don’t leave now, a queen might appear,” he urged.
“It’ll only take a few breaths,” Luo Xuehua said as she flicked her wrist and painted a complicated runic formula.
A buzzing sound filled the air as hundreds of large wasps entered the clearing. They buzzed angrily at the deaths of their offspring. The buzzing intensified as they combined their spiritual force into a soul-based attack.
Zi Long summoned thirty-six red sigils and channeled fire qi through them. A torrent of blue flames surrounded the angry wasp demons, burning their wings and disrupting their sound waves.
“Finished,” Luo Xuehua said as she painted the last stroke. The blue formation collapsed around the flower and zipped into her bag of holding. She took Zi Long’s hand and sent a flow of healing qi into his wasp-bitten arm. They summoned their flying swords and rushed out of the clearing.
They flew past the trees, barely avoiding them as they zipped through the forest at dangerous speeds. As they traveled, various demonic creatures ducked and dodged to avoid both them and the swarm. Occasionally, Zi Long threw conflagration talismans behind them. Their stored flame magic created a bright explosion that delayed the relentless swarm by a few precious moments.
“I see the warden’s shack up ahead,” Luo Xuehua said excitedly.
Zi Long frowned but adjusted his trajectory. It wasn’t long before they arrived at a deserted shack covered in cobwebs and venomous spiders.
“How is this possible?” she said. “We were just here this morning, but the shack looks like it’s been abandoned for decades.”
Zi Long sighed deeply. “It’s as I suspected. If there’s anything worse than nightmare butterflies, it’s fantasy wasps. Not because of these mediocre members, but rather their dreaded queens.”
“How clever,” a voice said from behind them. It was a soothing voice, an inspiring voice. A voice that made him feel excitement and dread simultaneously. “And here I thought I could shove a little more fear into your tiny little hearts before devouring you whole. Ideally, you would have died of fright; adrenaline is a potent tonic and the best of spices.”
“You’d better leave now if you know what’s good for you,” Zi Long said, probing his surroundings with incandescent force. Simultaneously, he channeled a portion of violet energy into the scan. It served as just the right boost to pierce the illusion. Thousands of wasps appeared within a hundred feet of them, but unfortunately, the wasp queen wasn’t one of them.
“Xuehua, let’s just blast our surroundings,” Zi Long said. “If she won’t come out, we’ll make her.”
The cold woman nodded. Dozens of talismans flew out of her sleeves and formed nodes around them. They tapped into the ambient heaven and earth energy and transformed the nearest five hundred meters into an icy hell. Frozen wasps tumbled in droves as icy lotuses appeared every three feet.
“I wonder how many times you can manage that?” the voice said. It seemed to come from right beside them, but at the same time, from very far away.
“As many as needed,” Zi Long said, sending out another violet-infused probe.
This time, he detected the queen amongst the minions. It was ten feet long, and its violet antennas bore four stripes. It’s a late-purification queen, he sent to Xuehua. Mass attacks like this won’t work. We need something focused.
I’ll leave the planning up to you, Xuehua said. They’d been through thick and thin together and knew each other’s strengths inside and out. Zi Long formed several hand seals, and dozens of golden beads appeared beside him. He poured his qi and incandescent force into the formation and formed a storm around them. The blade storm expanded three hundred feet outward and slaughtered wasps by the thousands. The killing field stopped just shy of the cautious queen, and when it dissipated, Zi Long sank to one knee.
“Shit,” he spat. His vision lurched as the wasps’ poison began affecting him.
“Are you all right?” Luo Xuehua asked. She grasped him by the shoulder, and Zi Long simply stared blankly. “Zi Long? Zi Long?” Tears appeared in her fearful eyes, but that fear soon turned to hate. Hate that fueled the angry swarm charging at her with increased zeal.
Her expression turned cold, and she unleashed six flying swords. They sliced through the wasps like they were droplets of water, their frozen bodies tumbling down on the forest floor. While her swords worked, she formed hand seals, unleashing Daoist magics on her nearest foes. The ten-foot perimeter around her turned into an icy kill zone, and the wasps could only wait just outside it.
Out of a corner of her eye, she finally saw the queen making a move. “Die!” she yelled. Her hands shot upward, and an icy phoenix appeared. It let out a loud cry that instantly froze half the invading insects. Just as the resulting shock wave was about to reach the queen, it retreated. Luo Xuehua cursed under her breath as her all-out attack missed. She, too, collapsed to one knee as the venom she’d been afflicted with began to take effect.
Zi Long, who’d been trying to resist the venom, finally collapsed. Luo Xuehua shook him frantically, and the queen, who’d been monitoring them, finally moved in for the kill.
“Now!” a voice shouted. To Xuehua’s relief, it was Zi Long’s voice. He hadn’t fainted. He had allowed the venom to affect him in order to act as bait.
At his signal, Luo Xuehua jumped to her feet. Thirty-six swords appeared around her, leaving behind a trail of frost as they zipped toward the queen. Her fight with four swords had just been a deception. Buzzing noises filled the air as tens of thousands of wasps fell to the ground like hail. Reacting quickly, the wasp queen struck out with her stinger. The sword formation broke apart, and all thirty-six swords were knocked away by the force of her blast.
“Did you think you could hide your intentions from me?” the wasp said. “Nightmare wasps feed on soul force. We’re impossible to deceive.” She flapped her wings, and icy shards rushed out from the ground and imprisoned them. “I think I’ll eat the man first. Though fear is very tasty, I can see that you don’t really feel fear. But anger is second best, and I’ll settle for it.”
Luo Xuehua glared as icy spikes retracted and the wasp entered their prison. She stopped only a few inches away from Zi Long and extended her stinger toward his abdomen. “You’ll make an excellent host for my brood,” she said. “Whether it be qi or soul force, you’re a prime specimen.”
She stung Zi Long, who let out a soft moan. Luo Xuehua screamed as he collapsed beside her, his soul sucked dry in the process.
“I swear, if it’s the last thing I’ll do, I’ll destroy you,” Xuehua said coldly. Her anger boiled over, and her cultivation flared as it shot up an entire sub-realm. She had activated a forbidden technique, which would lend her an intense burst of power for a short amount of time—at a cost.
“I knew you still had a trick up your sleeve,
” the wasp said with an inhuman smirk. She flapped her wings and sent out waves of sonic energy. They crashed into Luo Xuehua’s slender frame, but she ignored these vicious blows and brandished her flying swords. They sliced through the sonic waves and detonated just as they reached the wasp, who could only shrink back and defend. However, to her surprise, she was unharmed. The wasp queen’s eyes narrowed as she realized her fatal error.
A purple staff and an icy shard pierced through the wasp queen’s abdomen. Zi Long and Luo Xuehua appeared above her, their hands interlinked and channeling fire and ice into a set of seventy-two formation flags. The flags, which had suddenly appeared around the queen, glowed blue and red. Tongues of fire licked the dreadful creature while shards of ice pierced her tender exoskeleton. She wailed and moaned as her demonic body was whittled away. What the queen had seen was an illusion, one that she’d only recognized moments before her death.
Once the wasp queen was dead, their surroundings changed once more. They were still in the clearing, right next to the lotus. Luo Xuehua had never collected it, never unlocked its sealing formation.
“What a frightening illusion,” Zi Long whispered as Luo Xuehua collected the lotus.
“It’s a good thing you tagged along, Brother Zi,” Luo Xuehua said. “I would have died if you hadn’t.”
“How could I let any harm come to you?” he said. “I owe you my life.”
“You owe Brother Fan your life, not me,” Luo Xuehua replied. “You also owe your apprentice sister. I did nothing more than relay a message, and everyone else did the heavy lifting.”
A few awkward moments of silence passed. As always, they were never sure what to say when they were alone.
“How about we go on a mission after I’m done absorbing the lotus?” Luo Xuehua asked.
Violet Heart Page 5