Chapter Text
Yan's dagger scored a deep line across the beast's chest as he swayed beneath its strike.
Its leap propelled it past him, and it twisted in midair so that its hindpaws met the trunk of a tree. It sprung off, launching itself back at him. Its fanged maw opened wide, and pinkish fog fumed out; blood-poison spores. Its snarl carried the fog out on the humid air.
Unfortunately for it, its poisons weren't the only ones at work. Yan had coated his blades with one of his qi-disruption poisons, and with how deep his blade had bit it was only the measure of seconds before the beast coughed and gagged, choking on its own breath, and the thick fog dispersed into shreds of mist.
They clashed again, the beast's body hot against his own, and this time Yan's dagger neatly sunk into the underside of its jaw, emerging within its open maw to penetrate the roof of its mouth. The curved blade was just long enough to nick the brain before he pulled it free in a torrent of gore, and the beast spasmed and thrashed, rolling on the ground in a messy seizure. Yan darted in between the blind swipes of its paws and sunk his blade in its eye, burying it to the hilt. The beast's thrashing tore the weapon from his hand, but that wasn't important; the motion had turned to death spasms.
The beast was a poisonbloom jaguar. Its coat grew green-and-pink in mazy spots, with a mantle of pink flowers budding from its very flesh; good camouflage for the flower clearing it had claimed as its den. The hide was unfortunately fairly ruined, draping down its sides in bloody rents; it'd taken more than a few slices across its back and sides before Yan had managed the killing blow.
There was a loud crash next to him as the beast's mate fell from the trees above, throat messily torn out. Neru thumped to the ground a moment later, daintily, for all that his muzzle was a mess of blood. He crunched down, shattering the other beast's core in his mouth, and Yan huffed in amusement as the crunching continued, slowly subsiding in volume he gulped down ground monster core mixed with mouthfuls of fresh blood. He leaned down, tentacles writhing in satisfaction as he tore off a strip of meat from the fresh corpse to add to the bloody slurry filling his mouth.
Yan was little more precise with his butchery. He pulled his dagger from the beast's skull with a wet wrench. He flopped the beast over on its back and sunk the blade into its chest, feeling along the muscle grain as it parted, until he felt the bulge of its core just beneath its ribs and neatly twisted around it. The core spat itself from the wound into his palm, still oozing blood and ichor. The final twitches of the beast stilled abruptly as its core was removed, body little more than dead weight.
He cinched its hind legs together with rope and tossed the coil over the lowest branch that would suffice, then hauled it up to hang. He slit its throat, collecting the blood in an empty water jug he nudged into position below. Only slightly poisoned; the alchemists may be able to use the blood still.
They'd scented the beasts on the outward leg of their trip, but it would've been a waste to kill them then. Now, low on supplies and with only a half-day's travel back to Takire, the village, the fresh meat was an enjoyable bonus, rather than a total waste.
Neru had shoved his muzzle inside the beast's chest cavity, and was already tearing free its heart. Yan finished hanging the other corpse in time to fight him for the liver.
Sweaty and aching from the battle, with time to kill for the multi-hour process of draining blood, and now with a full belly of raw meat and beast liver, Yan sat down to cultivate. The qi in the clearing was thicker than in most places — it was a nascent spirit spring, with slight but perceptible qi thickening. Life-attuned, which fed the herbs growing in clumps.
Early in life, Yan's spiritual root had been aligned towards shadow, like many in the village. Spiritual roots grew and changed alongside the person, sometimes from practice and intention, sometimes from chance, and sometimes for other reasons. Over the years, Yan and Neru's roots had shifted to align with each other — they wielded a dark, potent energy, more intense than the affinity towards dappled forest shadows that was the more common manifestation of the root. An intense umbral power, cloying and deep, but that was still only half of it. 'Void', they called it, for lack of a better word.
Consequently, his cultivation base was hardly shared with the others of the village, despite the seeming similarity: no murkbloom flowers and inkveil mushrooms to fortify his constitution, as with the other shadow-hunters. It was hardly uncommon to have similar-seeming affinities contrast. The jaguars here, for example, were known to have poison and life affinities, in a harmonious union. Meanwhile, Yan's secondary qi root, aligned with poison in its aspect of water — seeping, subtle, mercurial — opposed the life qi of the clearing. There were as many varieties of qi as there were bugs in the forest, and what found union seemed sometimes more a matter of thought and self-conception than anything crudely physical. They weren't just mixing liquors in a jar to see what tasted good; sometimes there were reactions.
He, personally, found the dissonance with the life qi bearing down on him helpful, for all that it sapped at his internal reservoirs. If there wasn't a harmonious qi to be had, Yan found that one that was actively dissonant was better than one that was merely lukewarm.
Cultivation was the process of uplifting the body and soul, unifying them together into a hybrid being. But bodies were made of crude matter, and not built for enlightenment. The meridian channels were born weak and failing, and over time, in the process of life, the body took in toxins that clogged them further. Each acupoint was a nexus where power whorled, but even at the moment of a baby's first breath they began corroding, clogged with impurities in the air. It was a miracle to even have the potential to cultivate, but it took work, unceasing.
He'd already cleared one meridian entirely: straight down his spine. Qi flowed clean and fast through that open channel; a deep river carved through the murky swamp of his body. It was enough to make it clear how shallow and polluted the rest of his meridians were.
The first meridian Neru had unlocked had been his stomach, the glutton. His meridians were different — all kinds were different. But humans had the advantage of there being many other humans to compare to, with teachers and heroes forging a path ahead. Neru had none to guide his path.
Yan dug away at the stuck nodes in his chest, high up along the meridian that begun at the tip of his right middle finger. The simple meridian of the arm, it was called: the shortest meridian in the arm muscle, and the easiest to open. The bestial poison qi in his gut helped, sending a surge of energy into him as he sunk deeper into his trance.
Life qi flowed cleanly up his arm, burning, finger to palm to wrist to forearm to upper arm, but slowly the uncleared acupoints higher up stymied the flow. The channel became clogged and the flow of qi stagnated, only slowly seeping around blockages. The flow reached his chest, passed through the hollow of his middle dantian, and sluggishly oozed back, impurities slightly buffered within the flow by the torrent of beastial qi bubbling up from his stomach.
The flow of tainted qi looped around the back of his arm and down again to finally meet back up at his fingertip — third finger, this time — to expel qi thoroughly tainted with impurities through its travel through his body. Yan worked at the sluggish, swampy latter half of the meridian, the action half-physical and half-spiritual: like clenching muscles, like tracing a shape, like dreaming. Like working with wet clay, fingers probing, feeling the grain of the material as it deformed under his touch. Beads of green-black sweat oozed out of his fingertip, the physical component of the impure qi.
The messy admixture burbled through him, peeling flakes of spiritual substance off, dissolving into his channels and making them run thicker and slower— but every flake dissolved was a flake no longer hindering the flow. He cycled and cycled, slowly feeling some blockages begin to give way, with others stiffening further from the shifting impurities. There was only so much progress he could expect, cultivating in these circumstances.
But any progress was better than none, and he had the blood-clock of the beast's body to time him. He made sixty-some cycles before he lost count, and a timeless expanse beyond that until the slowing drip of blood from the beast's body brought him back to the surface. Neru had slumped against him, bored, and he eagerly hopped to his feet, back arcing in a feline-ish stretch, as he felt Yan surface from his cultivation.
Yan stood, surveying the drained body. The jug had overflowed, but only just, with rich beast blood streaking down the side of the jug to seep into the soil. It would fertilize the herbs here, he supposed.
The clearing where they had fought was forming into a natural locus, and the vegetation reflected that: thick bunches of strange plants grew in clumps throughout, and among them Yan recognized several that deserved further inspection. The only one he was certain he could identify was life-leaf, a low-growing herb with broad, rumpled leaves and a coarse yellow stalk. Life-leaf was the primary ingredient for a particularly weak and slow-acting purification tea popular back in Takire — popular precisely for its weakness. They fed it to teething babies along with mother's milk to acclimate them to qi infusions, and there were always more children than there was tea to go around. Each day an unfortified child survived was a minor miracle in itself, even in the most well-defended of villages.
Anyone who even begun to have thoughts about becoming a hunter or guardian would need to gulp down the tea until it stopped having any effect, and work their way through another half-dozen simple supplements until they topped out on those too. All that just laid the foundation for the barest hope of fighting a forest beast; it took many supplements to even begin the process of meridian cleansing, which was needed to become a proper hunter or village guardian.
They had terms for it, grades and rarities of power and potential, but the only true rule was that so long as your body processed the supplements: flesh hardening, muscle empowering, bone unleashing, it was worth taking more. They sorted pills and teas and tinctures into categories and tiers; eventually supplements of a given tier stopped aiding one's progress, and it was time to move on to the next, with ever more rarefied ingredients required. By their metrics, Yan had fair potential, and was reasonably powerful for his age, though his void root confused things. Perhaps he was unusually dedicated to make up his unusual spiritual root that prevented him from using many of their traditional supplements. Or maybe void qi was simply more responsive than others, and he was just as lazy and laid-back as he seemed.
Yan stooped and cut off a big bunch of life-leaf at the stem with one hand, while he rooted around in his pack with the other, eventually unearthing a ball of lumpy twine. He bound the herbs into a proper bundle and wrapped the base with a cloth he wetted with some of the spilt beast blood.
He pressed his third finger against the wrap, slowly infusing it with his water qi. No hand-signs required. Even clogged meridians could be used, and the hands and feet were rich with meridian channels. There was one opening at each fingertip and another at the bone of the wrist, forming a complex lacework of connections throughout the hand and arm. Until a cultivator had the capacity and control that was brought by an open meridian, hand-signs that physically manipulated the meridian into a useful configuration for a given technique were necessary. For something as simple as exuding qi aligned with his spiritual root, he'd long ago graduated from needing hand-signs. It was a simple exercise, even if here he was using the whole of his cultivator experience to act as vase for a clump of herbs.
All that done, he stoppered the jug, brimming now with blood. He hauled the beast corpse down and slung it over his shoulders: heavy, but not an impossible weight to carry back to the village. The other corpse was mostly resting inside Neru's gut; the fang-lacerated hide and marrow-drained bones might still have their uses, but not ones worth carting the ruined corpse all the way back.
It would be scarcely the rest of the day's travel back, now, and it would be best to get back sooner rather than later — when they reached the cliffside, the view let him see that black clouds had gathered on the horizon, with dark lightning starting to flicker between them. An unseasonable voidstorm, and coming on faster than usual. Hopefully that meant it would burn itself out quicker than usual, too.
The jungle lived by many cycles. At the rainy season's peak, the river's banks swelled, and a week's travel downstream from the village it reversed its direction. Floodwaters poured up a tributary, bringing salty black water into the swamp, fresh from the sea. The swamp strained its bounds, its springs overflowing, and new streams sent tendrils out into the rest of the jungle, until after roughly two months the floodwaters abated and the river reversed its course again, slowly draining brackish water from the swamp until it ran fresh again. That cycle came by on schedule, year after year.
Other cycles were less predictable: rain came and went, but an unseasonably dry season lead to springs drying up and scattered fires, and an unseasonably wet season lead to rotten sprouts and lean harvests. Voidstorms swept through, one most years, almost always coming with the first winds of the short wet season. Now, it was the height of the long wet season — storms, the regular kind, had been blowing in all the way from the coast for weeks. The traders traveling the river had come with news of the river reversing its flow just a month ago. It was a strange time for one.
With the onset of a voidstorm, low-lying clouds would sweep across the sky, unnaturally dark. Intense blue-purple lightning would strike down, and what it struck, it changed. Sometimes in ways that were useful, and sometimes not: rotting living-wood, deforming beasts, mazing rock with veins of unknown metals. The air would fill with a charge, something intense and building. The animals would go into a frenzy.
The true danger was in navigation: sometimes, blundering around, you'd step across a path that was not like it was. An animal trail with strange prints. A fork in the river where none had been before. And if you followed it, you'd end up somewhere else. Different trees, different water. The dirt stuck differently. The air shone strangely. The sky was a different tone. The storm opened ways: into the realm of unknown gods; or to a place where spirits played with the souls of men. In the shaded tangle of roots beneath a river mangrove, there was an opening into a bone-dry realm of black rock and pale white sand; between the triangle of space where a fallen tree rested against its neighbor, there was a cluster of alien flowers growing on intense red soil. Ways that took you outside, where other things dwelled.
If you were lucky, you realized where you'd turned off the true path before it was too late, and you returned to the world. If you were unlucky, you were never heard from again. And if you were real unlucky, you returned, and something followed you.
The end-leg of their trip was nowhere near as eventful as that. The voidstorm remained looming clouds near the horizon, and the winds carried it alongside them, not closer. The lingering scent of beast blood that coated them both was a good deterrent for the meeker forest beasts. They made their way quickly, through the shadows, and they had grown long by the time they met up with the beaten path beyond the village. Dusk was falling, sky rich purple, as they approached Takire through its final twists and turns. They slowed, jumping from branch to branch instead of squirming through the shadows as murky ink-blots of darkness.
The final turn, where the path broadened as they emerged from the forest to the half-flooded paddy fields that surrounded the village, was still like a breath of clear air. The wild qi of the forest weighed heavily on them: neither of them were made for it. The qi by the village was thinner, but more familiar. A hearth, a bed, a larder: these were the traces writ into the qi of the village; things that were unknown to the forest. The safety of civilization, cut out from the eternal forest.
Across the fields, there was a watchman, Ke Hama, visible at the top of the tower overlooking the palisade, tense and alert. His concerned eyes focused on the slight stirring of the trees where Yan and Neru had landed, and they could see his posture shift: fingers curl around his spear, ready to smack the haft into the gong, sounding an alarm. Yan stepped forward and waved.
"Hoy!" the watchman called, loud enough to span the distance. And then lower, to the side, where volume and distance would have silenced the sound were it not for the enhanced hearing Yan had picked up from Neru: "It's just Baaj Yan and his mutt." Neru's mane-tentacles thrashed in irritation. Yan laughed a little.
The paddy fields sprawled out along the upstream crescent of the village, separated into a haphazard collection of off-angle rectangles. Pathways branched off along some of the edges, a few lined with coppiced trees, forming a web of thin trails along the paddy's edge. It was a few minute's walk, slow and leisurely, up the path, until they stood before the palisade.
Neru had taken issue with the 'mutt' comment. He'd been biding his time. The watchman leaned over the watchtower balcony, to see them standing at the closed gates. Neru melted into a blob of shadow, and Yan just barely caught his shadow-body streaking over the palisade and spiraling up the watchtower before he emerged at the top. There was a surprised shriek and a loud thump as the guard fell out of sight. Yan followed him up, emerging on the viewing platform with Neru pinning Ke Hama to the ground with one huge paw, affectionately chewing on the forearm he'd thrown up reflexively to defend himself.
Yan shifted the weight of the beast balanced across his back. "You're lucky I don't dump this on you," he said, shrugging his shoulders to make the corpse ripple and lurch, "and make you do the butchering duties."
"You hunters," Heng Yaya, the other guard, said, leaning against the view platform railing. He was looking down at Ke Hama pinned on the floor, visibly thankful he hadn't done the calling. "All you do is laze around the village, making everybody else do your work for you." The addition of a slight scoff at the end meant it was all in good fun.
Yan snorted. "Don't you start." He nudged Neru's haunch with a toe. "C'mon, if you take any longer, I'll make you carry the body."
Neru snarled down at Ke Hama, inner teeth chomping. "I'll be back for my recompense later," he said, stepping back and letting Ke Hama shove himself up to his elbows, face flushed.
Yan snorted. He bet he would. "Oh, tell Master Toru I'm back," he said, with a backward wave. "I'll be at Dan Yamba's first." They'd send a runner with the message. He launched himself off the balcony, dropping down physically instead of as a mass of shadow-stuff, and Neru followed after him, landing silently beside him. They didn't have to open the gate for them, after all.