Shi Ping ignored the screams around him as he focused his attention on the giant insect that was hurtling toward him. It looked like a mantis, although he couldn’t recall ever seeing one with wings before. He cycled his qi, formed the technique, and sent a fireball hurtling toward the creature. The fireball all but evaporated the central body of the spirit beast, which he had to consider a good thing. Unfortunately, its forward momentum meant that he was almost immediately pelted with burning pieces of the corpse. That was not a good thing. The burning chitin stank. He brushed some of the pieces off his robes and scanned the skies. There were no more flying spirit beasts to deal with in the immediate area, which meant that his work was temporarily done.
He grimaced as he looked around. Just because he wasn’t doing anything, it didn’t mean that there was no fighting. Soldiers and qi-gathering cultivators were battling some lesser spirit beasts that had been dropped on them from above. That had been a grisly surprise that cost a lot of lives in the minute or two it had taken everyone to react. No one had foreseen that possibility, so there hadn’t been a plan to deal with it. He itched to go over and just kill the damn things. It would be a matter of seconds. Yet, he held himself back from intervening in those fights for the same reasons that the nascent soul cultivators in the city had refrained from intervening at all. At least, they had held themselves back so far.
The reasons were both simple and chilling. The most immediate reason was that the spirit beasts they were fighting now were the stupid ones, not their elites. That meant that the truly dangerous spirit beasts with calculating minds hadn’t even entered the fray yet. The more serious reason was that every cultivator’s qi reserves were a finite resource. They had to spend that qi judiciously. The cultivators were being moved off the wall from time to time to rest and cultivate, but there was only so much environmental qi to draw on. If this kept up for a few weeks, the cultivators would drain the entire area of any useful qi. Once that happened, the cultivators would be little better than mortals, save for some enhanced strength and speed from the body refining that all cultivators went through.
It also wasn’t as simple as just cultivating any qi they could get their hands on. That might work okay for qi-gathering and foundation formation cultivators, but core cultivators needed specific kinds of qi. Worse, they had to condense the qi they gathered or lose a lot of power in their techniques. That condensing process was neither automatic nor swift. That was why they had tasked him solely with dealing with the flying spirit beasts. To preserve his qi for what they all hoped would be more meaningful fights later.
Not that knowing any of that made it easier to stand back and watch the mortals and younger sect members struggle for their lives. He might once have looked at those young cultivators with some disdain, but Lu Sen had been right. The world had changed. Now, anyone fighting to preserve their lives was an ally. He fundamentally did not care if someone was merely mortal or what sect they came from. He only cared that they were on his side and not the side of the spirit beasts. By the same token, he wouldn’t hesitate to cut down anyone who acted against their collective survival. Not that he’d seen any signs of betrayal so far. Everyone seemed to understand that they weren’t facing the kind of enemy you could bargain with.
Still, it never hurt to be mindful of the possibility. Desperate people were almost by definition stupid people. He ought to know. He’d been desperate before, and it had made him act stupidly. Of course, he’d been desperate and stupid in the kinder times before the spirit beasts had decided to kill every human being on the continent. That had given other people the opportunity to overlook his stupidity, and him the opportunity to outgrow it. He shuddered to imagine what would have become of him if he hadn’t done that. A smile abruptly lit Shi Ping’s face. One of the groups of mortals and cultivators had managed to push the spirit beast they were fighting within range of his sword. There was a flash in the air, and the creature fell into two pieces.
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He could almost feel the disapproval from another core cultivator farther down the wall. Shi Ping met the man’s eyes and offered a shrug that conveyed no contrition at all. He hadn’t gone looking for that fight. It had come to him. Who knew what that spirit beast might have done to him if he didn’t defend himself? It could have gotten fur on his robes. He couldn’t let that happen, could he? That brief moment of amusement was dispelled by the sight of more flying spirit beasts approaching the wall. Sighing to himself, he prepared to do his part once again.
Yet, even as he started to cycle his qi, there was a question that kept popping into his mind. Where in the thousand hells is Lu Sen? Shi Ping had strong opinions about the man, but it was not like Lu Sen to be absent from a fight. In fact, if anyone had asked him about the best place to find Judgment’s Gale, he would have told them to look for the nearest disaster and then walk to the very heart of it. That is where one will find the Blue Demon. Except, there hadn’t been any sign of the man since he’d performed that impossibly large technique. It was a mystery that did not leave Shi Ping with a comforting feeling in his heart. While he didn’t expect Lu Sen to win this fight by himself, it was pretty clear that he was the glue holding this fragile alliance of mortals and cultivators together. It did not speak of good fortune to come if something had happened to the man.
Lu Sen looked around and wondered, Where in the thousand hells am I? He remembered hovering over the city and activating the formation to draw down lightning. Everything he could recall after that, which was precious little, remained a hazy jumble of disorienting images and absolute, unspeakable pain. He didn’t even know if he managed to pull off the technique. He hoped he had, or he doubted the capital had much of a chance. Still, those were problems for after he figured out what was going on. There just weren’t many clues to bring clarity to his current circumstances.
Everything around him was black, but not the black of fabric or paint. It was a black so pure that he worried he might have been pulled into some kind of void. There was a floor. At least, he thought it was a floor. There was something stable and firm beneath his feet, but even that was the same pure, infinite black as everything else. He could see his own body, which meant that there had to be light, but he couldn’t find a source for it. In short, he only knew that he was somewhere, and it wasn’t the last place he remembered being. He tried walking for a time, but it proved pointless. There was no way to measure distance. There weren’t even any sounds from him moving, as if all that infinite black around him was eating the sounds.
He tried to extend his spiritual sense, but that was a different kind of disorienting. According to his spiritual sense, absolutely everything around him was alive. If he didn’t know better, he’d think he’d been swallowed by a living thing. The only reason he didn’t think that had happened was the absence of injuries. If something had managed to swallow him whole, it stood to reason he would have been hurt in some way. He felt his impatience swell as nothing continued to happen. The spirit beasts had to have attacked. He had to get back where he was needed. Intuition told him that something was behind him. He whirled to face whatever it was and stopped dead.
There were three figures standing there, and they were all him. At least, they were versions of him. Versions that might have been plucked from earlier in his life. To his right, there was a small, painfully skinny boy in ripped, stained clothes that had clearly been scavenged, tangled hair, and a fey light in his eyes. Gods, was I really that sickly? The one in the middle was older, cleaner, and healthier. He looked unburdened. Sen hesitantly decided that version of him must be from about when he left the mountain. The final version was the one who most resembled himself as he was now, if not quite as big. Sen wasn’t sure when from his past that one came from. All three of them glared at Sen.
“You look like a noble,” snarled the youngest him.
“You’re soaked in blood,” said the one in the middle with pure horror on his face.
“You have no balance,” said the last with a look of deep disapproval.