"I am definitely human. Absolutely not a demon. My home is in Xujiaping. I have a father and a mother, both human. My father's name is Xu An. My mother's name is Tian Ruijun—she came from Tianjiaping." Xu Ying muttered this litany to himself as they walked. "I still remember the way to Xujiaping and Tianjiaping. I am definitely human."
Yuan Qi slithered beside him, listening to the boy's obsessive recitation with growing curiosity. If Xu Ying was truly human, how could he master demon cultivation arts and demon martial techniques so effortlessly? Perhaps the boy's human component was less than he assumed, and his demon nature far greater. But Yuan Qi kept this thought to himself.
Xu Ying eventually set the matter aside and focused on his cultivation as they walked, absorbing the morning's solar essence through the Primordial Unity Guiding Art. Now that his Elephant-Force Ox-Demon Fist had reached the sixth level, the effect of his breathing was visibly more powerful. Light particles swirled around him in a vortex, streaming into his body with each inhalation. He cycled between Thunder-Resonance Body Tempering and Sun Body Tempering, purging the lingering true-yang qi from Huang Siping's attack while accelerating his natural healing. But without the Mud Pill Gate, he could not regenerate as quickly as Wei Chu or Ding Quan. The claw wound across his chest had laid bare his ribs; even after healing, it would leave a terrible scar.
*If only I had the method for dragon-seeking orientation and gate-opening,* he thought wistfully. Opening the Mud Pill Gate, gaining a form of immortality—that would be worth almost any price. And his face would certainly become paler. Perhaps he could even earn a living by his looks. His foster father had told him that wealthy women in the cities favored fair-skinned young men. Two years ago, during a famine, the old man had tried to sell Xu Ying to such a woman—but the deal had fallen through because the boy's skin was too dark. The son of their neighbor, Jiang Shouzheng, had fetched a good price and was reportedly living very well in the city.
Yuan Qi was quiet for a long moment. "Don't you find that tragic?" he asked at last.
Xu Ying's smile was guileless. "In times like these, simply being alive is already a blessing. He eats better than me. He wears warmer clothes." He seemed genuinely envious of the sold child.
The riverbed left by the Naihe stretched before them, a scar of death carved through the mountains. Every tree within it had withered to blackened husks. The ground was littered with bones. And among the bones rose something that stopped them both in their tracks: a skeleton of impossible scale. A single finger bone was taller than Xu Ying. They walked through the giant's ribcage as if passing through the colonnade of some fallen cathedral, craning their necks to take in the sweep of each curving rib.
"Is this one of the beings that attacked the temple last night?" Xu Ying murmured. God or demon or something older still—the bronze bell had killed it, and the Naihe had stripped its flesh. Golden script flickered weakly across the bones, the remnants of some divine power that had taken thousands of years of worship to accumulate. Yuan Qi had read that a deity required a century of offerings to develop spiritual power and three centuries to forge a sixteen-foot golden body. This skeleton measured well over a hundred feet. That suggested tens of thousands of years of worship—far longer than recorded history itself, which spanned barely three millennia. Where had such a being come from?
They pressed on through the desolate channel. Further ahead, they found something worse than a skeleton. Half a body blocked the riverbed—the upper torso of another colossal being, its lower half missing entirely. Unlike the previous skeleton, this one still carried flesh. Thick ropes of gray, rotting meat clung to the enormous bones, and as Xu Ying and Yuan Qi watched, those ropes of flesh *moved*—slowly, blindly, like half-conscious slugs.
A flock of wild birds passed overhead. The corpse's flesh shot upward in a spray of tendrils, each one as fast and accurate as a frog's tongue, snatching every bird from the sky. Feathers drifted down. The corpse's flesh-mass pulsed and grew visibly larger.
Xu Ying and Yuan Qi held their breath and circled wide around the thing. They had nearly passed it when the corpse's head jerked upright. Empty eye sockets seemed to fix on them, and the mountain of rotting meat on its skull writhed with a thousand crawling cilia. They ran. The half-corpse heaved itself after them on two massive arms, dragging its ruined torso across the riverbed with terrifying speed before finally losing their trail and subsiding into its blind, hungry waiting.
They did not stop running until they reached Jian Mountain. When they finally dared to look back, the corpse was gone. Xu Ying bent over, gasping for breath, and gestured toward the mountain's peak. "Look."
The peak had a bite taken out of it—a massive chunk missing from the summit, as if some titan had leaned down and taken a mouthful of the mountain itself. But the debris scattered down the slope suggested a different explanation: something had crashed into the mountain at tremendous speed, tearing away the peak on impact.
"The world grows stranger by the day," Xu Ying said.
Ahead lay a mountain stream, several yards wide and crystal clear. In the dry season it was gentle, but during the summer floods it would become a deadly torrent. While Yuan Qi hunted on the far bank, Xu Ying stripped and washed the blood from his body and clothes. He dressed again while still wet and circulated his qi to steam himself dry. Soon he was clean and warm, the worst of the night's horrors scrubbed away.
Yuan Qi's startled cry drew him into the forest beyond the stream. The landscape here had been brutalized. Trees lay flattened in a single direction, trunks snapped like twigs, radiating outward from a central impact point. Heat still rose from the ground in shimmering waves. Xu Ying pushed deeper into the devastation, and there, floating two feet above the earth, was the bronze bell.
It was breathing. The bell expanded and contracted in a slow, rhythmic cycle—growing larger as it rose, smaller as it sank—and with each cycle, the ancient script carved into its surface flared with light that pulsed and faded. It was healing itself. But embedded in its bronze surface was a handprint, pressed three inches deep, the delicate outline of a woman's palm and slender fingers. Around this print, the bell's glyphs writhed in constant battle, flaring up only to shatter and reform, grappling with the power the palm print had left behind.
Xu Ying remembered the woman in white at the well's edge, that calm, beautiful smile as she sat combing her hair. *The same hand,* he thought. *The coffin ghost struck the bell as she escaped.*
Not far away, Yuan Qi had caught two wild boars. One lay dead from his venom, but the other—a small black pig—was still very much alive, pinned under the serpent's coils. Both pig and snake were staring at the floating bell with identical expressions of naked terror.
Xu Ying crept forward, one hand extended. "It's injured," he whispered.
Yuan Qi's voice went shrill with panic. "Don't touch it! It'll kill you! Xu Ying, get back here! If you die, the Jiang family line ends with you!"
Xu Ying's fingers inched closer to the bronze bell. The bell stopped breathing. It hung perfectly still, neither expanding nor contracting. Yuan Qi held his breath. Even the little black pig went rigid. The air temperature spiked, and the fallen trees around them began to crackle and pop, their dried wood threatening to ignite. Xu Ying froze, his hand hovering inches from the bell's surface. The moment stretched. Then the bell resumed its steady respiration, as if deciding that this insignificant boy posed no threat.
The temperature dropped. Xu Ying crept forward another step. The bell stopped. Xu Ying froze. The bell resumed. Step by excruciating step, Xu Ying closed the distance and laid his palm gently against the bronze. He smiled with quiet satisfaction.
"You risked getting pounded to death by a divine artifact," Yuan Qi hissed, "just to *touch* it?"
"It saved our lives last night," Xu Ying said, stroking the bell's surface. "When my family's cats and dogs are injured, this is how I comfort them."
The serpent had to admit there was a sort of twisted logic to this. Then the bell crashed to the ground with a deafening clang, sending both snake and pig leaping backward. Xu Ying spun around. The bell lay on the earth, its surface rippling with uncontrolled vibrations, its script-glyphs flickering chaotically. It looked exactly like a creature in its death throes.
"Get away!" Yuan Qi shrieked. "It's dying! When it goes, the explosion will paint the forest with your guts!"
Xu Ying took a cautious step back. The bell lurched forward, scraping across the ground with a horrible grinding noise, still spasming like a creature having a seizure. He took another step. The bell followed. Xu Ying walked faster. The bell clattered after him, bumping and scraping and shuddering. He broke into a run, and the bell pursued him in a clanging, dust-choked chase, smashing through everything in its path—trees, boulders, everything reduced to splinters and gravel as it doggedly followed.
Xu Ying circled back to Yuan Qi and the pig. Behind him, the bell scraped to a halt, still twitching. The boy's face was a mask of stoic despair, two clean tracks of tears cutting through the grime on his cheeks.
"I have killed a man. I have committed deicide. The City God and the entire Lingling magistrate's office are hunting me. If I walk around with a giant bronze bell attached to my backside, announcing my position to everyone within a mile..." He tilted his head back to keep the tears from reaching his mouth. "I may not survive the afternoon."
As if responding to his despair, the bell rose silently into the air behind him. It shrank, spinning slowly, until it was no larger than a coin—and then it shot into the back of Xu Ying's skull and vanished.
Xu Ying whirled around at the expressions on Yuan Qi's and the pig's faces, but the bell was gone. He broke into a relieved grin. "Finally lost that dead weight."
Yuan Qi's tail pointed at Xu Ying's head, trembling. He opened his mouth to speak, and a bell tolled inside his own mind. His tail went limp.
"Yuan Qi, you caught two pigs. This one seems unusually intelligent," Xu Ying said, eyeing the small black boar pinned beneath the serpent. "Maybe we should let it go."
"One of these pigs died from my venom—completely inedible," Yuan Qi said flatly. "The other is alive and perfectly edible. And you want to release the edible one?"
Soon, two small wild pigs were roasting over a fire, their skins crackling and gleaming with fat. The aroma of pine smoke and roasting meat filled the clearing. Xu Ying and Yuan Qi ate until they could eat no more.
As they resumed their journey toward Wu Wang Mountain, Xu Ying shook his head and heard a faint chiming. "Strange," he said. "Every time I move my head, I hear a bell."
Yuan Qi stared straight ahead, saying nothing.
Xu Ying shook his head again. Another chime.
"Stop doing that," Yuan Qi said through gritted teeth, terrified that the bell might decide to ring Xu Ying's skull like a gong from the inside. Xu Ying not only kept hearing bells—he also felt inexplicably drained. After a short walk, he was panting. He attributed it to his wounds, but Yuan Qi watched in growing horror as the boy's face grew gaunt, his cheeks hollowing, his skin turning sallow and his eyes sinking into dark circles. He looked like a man who had been visited by a succubus three hundred times in a single night.
Then a voice like a great bronze bell rang inside Xu Ying's mind. "Young one. Do you know what is meant by inner contemplation?"
Xu Ying stopped dead. "Who said that? Who's there?"
Yuan Qi looked around, baffled. "Someone spoke? I didn't hear anything."
The voice in Xu Ying's mind was languid, almost amused. "Your blood and qi cultivation has reached its peak. Your Qi-Gathering stage is fully complete. Yet you know nothing of inner contemplation. That is why you cannot advance further."
Xu Ying looked left and right, seeing no one. "Senior, what is inner contemplation? How does one contemplate? What does one contemplate?"
"To contemplate is to look inward. The Qi-Gathering stage draws solar essence from the outside world—gathering external energy to strengthen blood and qi. Inner contemplation reverses this. You look within your own body, opening the Realm of Silent Depths. You observe your internal organs, not as mere flesh but as landscapes of visionary wonder. When you harmonize the five elemental qi, they fuse into primordial essence. Only then is the Qi-Gathering stage truly complete. Only then can you perceive the Mysterious Pass and step into the next realm."
"This next realm you describe..." Xu Ying frowned. "It doesn't match anything I've heard about the Nuo shaman path. Senior, are you describing demon cultivation?"
Yuan Qi watched Xu Ying muttering to the empty air, gesturing at nothing, and felt a deep unease settle into his scales. Something was very wrong with his companion.
The voice in Xu Ying's mind sounded genuinely puzzled. "Nuo shaman? What is a Nuo shaman? I am speaking of Qi Refiners. Are you not a Qi Refiner?"