Chapter 144 - Dragons and Rabbits

  The number of ghostly figures was always the same. Each stayed still at their station, unmoving from the spot Hao first saw them. Each with a white tube between pursed lips; puff puff puff, they smoked like an ashy firepit in the dead of winter.

  Hao passed them all. Blue robes, but black would fit them better, matching those eyes that seemed to look beyond a veil into something he couldn’t see.

  When he cracked open the last door in the long food-filled hall, one turned to look at him. Emotion almost touched its face. A dead smile, what could have been mistaken for reverence.

  “In! Come In. I was expecting you sooner.” A voice like dry bones clacking on stone rolled in his ears, echoing in this tight space like he was in a valley.

  Hao shoved his hand forward. The door slammed at his back the moment he was inside, the room sealing itself off.

  Li Tuzai usually had one of those sticks in his mouth. It was rare to see that he didn’t; instead, he was focused.

  He didn’t bother to turn to look at Hao. Slowly taking a step back, he swung his strange blade in four directions in one breath. The tip was the only sharp part. Yet not even that had to make contact with the beast in the center of the room.

  It had only been a second since Hao had stepped in. Yet he watched as brown fur fell free from muscle, and muscle peeled from bone, hitting the ground. Then came the bones, the skeleton staying whole and massive, limbs and vertebrae clicking against the concrete ground.

  The blood must’ve been drained before he entered. Dimly lit, with not even a torch burning, just a few cores of the beast he cleaned up today glittered in the corner, on top of the cages the domesticated rabbits were stored in during spring before they were handled.

  “It’s dark…” Hao muttered, though he immediately regretted it.

  A breath out, even a spoken one, demanded a breath in. The moment the air found its way into his nose, his stomach crawled to his throat.

  Dry, acrid, sour, rotten, they filled his sinuses. If a battlefield were a deep swamp, this was the bottom, where the decay never ceased.

  Hao knew blood and death well. Such a dense gathering, however, was an intensity he didn’t wish to know, trapped in this little warehouse; the scent of a hundred hill-sized beasts dismantled down to the soul.

  How can people eat in the food hall when they know this room is the source of their food? He nearly fell to his knees. The feeling of a ball forming in his throat, spiders crawling in his chest, demanded he vomit.

  “The smell of death underneath your fingernails tells me you’ve been busy,” Li Tuzai spoke, his voice like a flute that gave off black vibrations in the room filled with the ever-present, but usually unnoted, dust of Death Qi.

  Hao held himself up. Even though his mind wished to collapse, and his body told itself, run even if you are sore.

  The only thing he did was cover his right eye with his right hand.

  Tuzai half turned, looking at the back door, one leg of the gray leathery beast that was peeking through.

  His lips parted. A shadow of his face grew like a maw, a rift between two words, “Since you are here. Take care of those little things over there. A small infestation of snakes and lizards in a few cultivation chambers, they were running from the coming cold.”

  Hao held himself upright. He gave a glance to the corner Li Tuzai pointed at, and the blade that was in the ghostly man’s hand disappeared, hilt sticking up from the sheath on his back.

  Under the pile of cores, below the cages, was a box.

  It took a minute for him to acclimate, longer than a minute; it was a challenge just to lift his head. He felt like he was back in that cave with a ghost peeling away bits of his soul. Loud cracks of shattering glass echoed in his ears. His vision still had scratches, slowly fading.

  “Take your time,” Tuzai muttered, a hint of what could have been sarcasm.

  Hao straightened up and walked his way over, looking down, ignoring the temptation of the cores, past the cages covered with puffs of rabbit fur. Inside the wooden crate were a dozen small, scaled creatures.

  “Is there any point?” he asked, looking down at the eyes of the creatures that had lost all will.

  Tuzai was close, moving with silent footsteps, his voice already at Hao’s ear, “There are more coming too, not just critters like those, but rabbits, we need their pelts for winter clothes and meat, they will be the stockpile that keeps servants free of hunger and cold.”

  That changed the way Hao looked at critters almost instantly, but he shook his head. “Senior. That is not why I am here.”

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  “Oh? Is killing a small critter below you now?” Li Tuzai asked, his voice from a distance again, yet there was a cold on Hao’s shoulders.

  The two made eye contact. Tuzai, still in the same spot he was when Hao entered the room, his back now at the large door.

  “It seems so,” Tuzai muttered, “Though I find that strange. Then help me bring that in. Be careful,” he pointed at the gray, leathery beast in the door at his back.

  They both move, Tuzai waiting for Hao to move alongside him, his finger flicking out to open the door inward. “There are so many strange tales with similar thinking. A hero goes to slay a dragon, saving every rabbit along the way. When the dragon is finally slain, he celebrates, unconcerned for the thousands crushed underneath the dragon that falls from the sky.” Li Tuzai spoke the words loudly; they echoed off the walls back and forth. Reverberating in the stinking warehouse.

  Hao listened as he helped Tuzai lift the beast. He would guess it was Fifth Rank from the lingering cultivation. Its death was slow. Left to bleed out from the variety of injuries, low on its four legs.

  Tuzai used one hand to direct the beast. “What about the dragon, I wonder? It probably led a more honest life than the hero, eating as it wished, breeding as it wished. Such a divine beast from birth would know art. Perhaps it had a favorite song and danced in the sky, alongside the wind and clouds.”

  The bloated belly jiggling around made its weight uneven, and Hao nearly lost grip, not daring to dig his fingers down. Worried he may breach the bubble trapped under the skin.

  His caution was wasted.

  As they approached the center of the room, one of many hooks floated towards Tuzai, its chain rattling as it strained.

  Li Tuzai drove the hook into the base of the beast’s shoulder. The chain retracted with another rattle, lifting the beast as the hook squeaked and scraped on bone.

  Hao felt the weight lift, but the putrid scent slowly escaped.

  Tuzai was unfazed, his lips parting to continue, another hook tearing tough hide.

  “The dragon held no hypocrisy. Of course, it didn’t care about the things it would crush with its falling body. All things were equal in death. And in its death, it had no choice where it fell, or why, but looking up, I wondered if it would see how selfless it was compared to the hero.”

  Tuzai walked around the beast, driving a third hook in. “After all, it always thought of itself as selfish too, always doing as it pleased. But never does one praise itself for saving ten rabbits and killing ten thousand people. It just did what it had to: live, and die.”

  He pushed Hao away, driving the last hook into the beast. His eyes never leave Hao’s. The heavy body anchored in the center of the room, swinging for just a moment before coming to a dead halt.

  Hao didn’t know what to say. What the message was, it seemed there were a dozen messages, a few tests, a question of moral standing. However, Tuzai didn’t care for such things. The ghostly man gave off the impression that he only cared about death as a concept and a force.

  “Remove all the perceived value, it’s all the same. Kill a rabbit, kill a fly, crush a village, they are all murder, no?” Tuzai looked almost frustrated, but it was hard to tell with his muted expressions.

  Hao took his hands from the beast, its weight pulling the chains tight. He was about to try an answer; he had a few rebuttals and arguments, but he didn’t get the chance.

  Tuzai got closer to Hao, reaching up to his blade with his right hand, but his head turned left, impossibly, as if there were no bones in the man. “The old man shoots the rabbit with the bow and crushes an ant colony all to save his vegetables. How is that any different from the Hero… Don’t answer, think.”

  Hao walked up to the neck of the beast, kicking a bucket under it. He beat Tuzai in speed, not because he was faster, though his speed was no joke, but rather the ghost of a man was surprised from the first step Hao took.

  The Seven Colored Steps technique made him pause. Though his ashen face didn’t shift, still it was enough that his blade wasn’t drawn and back in its sheath already, blood pouring on the floor.

  Hao pulled out one of the many swords in his bag. He drove it into the neck of the beast, and a red stream like lacquer in the dark flowed in uneven bursts into the bucket.

  Hao took a deep breath. With the ghostly man finally shut up, he could speak.

  “Senior, I still have a lot to learn, but I came here today to have my own beast butchered,” he got it out, before the sigh he was holding in his chest escaped his lips.

  Tuzai lowered his right hand. “Show me.”

  Hao took out one of the Feline Beasts, with white fur, giant paws the size of a man, claws to match, and teeth so much larger.

  Tuzai nodded, “Mhm, good. You could have dismantled this yourself, couldn’t you?”

  “I’m not as much of an expert as you, Senior, and there is one technique you never taught me.”

  “Ho… Which?” Tuzai pressed his hand against the Feline Beast’s massive head, opening an eyelid and staring down into it.

  “Core blood.”

  “No,” Li Tuzai didn’t glance over at Hao, just stared down into its iris. “It’s not something you can perform. You can just refine the Core itself after it is extracted.”

  Hao felt a cold breeze wash over him. “Sorry, Senior, I didn’t mean to pry,” he said, cupping his hands. He should have known not to ask; some things were kept secret for a reason.

  But there was something he knew Li Tuzai desperately wanted. He reached into the Spirit-Holding bag. Without a light or a flash, a jar appeared in his hand. A porcelain pot that once held wine and was now full of a rust-colored, dry, flaky material. Blood left to rot, pulled into the Drinking-Stone and extracted of its vitality and liquid. Dead, dry blood, swimming with Death Qi that overpowered even this room.

  Li Tuzai’s eyes lit up, just for a second, “One…”

  Hao hid his smirk, no longer feeling the urge to sigh. He took out the other feline beast, the first he fought, which he felt was purer in an inexplicable way.

  “No, I can do this one. There must still be blood in the beast’s body. And the unfinished core must be intact.”

  Hao, a little disappointed, looked to the one he already had out, Tuzai still holding its eyelid open, “This one will do then.” He said.

  Tuzai nodded, but pushed away, returning to the beast in the center of the room, in the middle of being drained.

  “Not today, we can’t today, you will have to come back when I am not busy, and when no one knows you are here.”

  Hao nodded, but he was surprised. Secrecy? What for? Tuzai didn’t seem the type to hide what was unnecessary.

  “Go and hide that jar, gather more if you can…” Tuzai said, his voice carried all the hunger of a demon without a mouth.