The girl had summoned a spirit.
Zen had felt it: the subtle shift in the energies around them as Lan sank deeper into meditation—then the great pulseof qì from her core. His eyes had snapped open when he’d felt a responding pulse from somewhere deep within the forest.
A pulse that stank of demonic energy.
“What’s that?” Lan’s frightened voice came from behind him.
Zen saw it, too: a shadow cut darker than dark, moving fluidly through the copse of conifers across the clearing. The energies around him began to shudder as a sudden wind picked up, rattling the bamboo leaves and scraping dead branches against the forest floor.
The creature stepped out into a net of moonlight. Her—its—skin was the color of dead flesh, black hair trailing on the ground like snakes. It approached with the awkward, lurching movements of a newborn infant, arms dangling by its sidesand head lolling. Most disturbing, though, were its eyes: iris and sclera a lightless expanse of black.
“Do not be afraid,” Zen said. “That is a yao.”
“A yao?”she repeated. She’d scooted close to him, her face pale and drawn as she stared at the creature. “An evil spirit? The kind that haunt villages and eat people’s souls?”
Zen suppressed a sigh. Common folklore conflated the four types of supernatural creatures. In the days of old, practitioners had been hired to investigate hauntings, murders, and other bloody affairs in remote villages that had been ascribed to the stalkings of the supernatural. Now these undertakings were reduced to fodder for folktales, spoken of in hushed whispers and half belief by villagers and townsfolk.
“I suppose now would be an opportune time to begin your first lesson on supernatural spirits,” Zen said bemusedly.
“Lesson?”The girl’s voice was unnaturally high. The yao had come to a stop halfway through the clearing, its face slack, those black eyes unblinking as it watched them. “What’s there to learn besides the fact that they’re going to eat me?”
His lip quirked against his will—again, that tickling sensation in his stomach he’d almost forgotten. “They will noteatyou,” he said, then clarified: “Well, it depends on which type you encounter. Supernatural spirits are formed entirely of yin energies. They hold within them a core of qì that has gained some form of awakening. Their goal—at the basic level—will be to continue to consume yin energies to prolong their strength and existence, but that is where the similarities end. In all the books you’ve read, yao, mó, gui, and guài are likely grouped together asmonsters.At the schools of practitioning, we have separated them into four classifications, with distinct differences.”
“What does it matter? If I see any one of them, I’m going to run.”
Zen closed his eyes against a rising laugh. “It matters because knowing which classification it belongs to will clue you in as to how to defeat it. Now, the one across from us, a yao, the first classification of the four, is merely a spirit—”
“It moved,” Lan exclaimed, dragging Zen back a step. “It just moved again—I think it’s coming for us—”
“—typically associated with guài, another classification. Both are born of animals and plants that have cultivated a spiritual awakening by absorbing qì, the difference being that yao take on the forms of humans, whereas guài take on the form of monsters. They are the supernatural creatures you’ll encounter most often in our travels.” He watched the yao, its features blank, its perfectly inhuman human face regarding them without an ounce of terror or fear. “This is likely a bamboo spirit. Relatively benign, unless it senses something inside you it wishes to consume to strengthen its existence.”
As the wind around them calmed, another sound became apparent: the hollow, wending echo of music. It drifted from across the clearing, threading through the sigh of leaves and branches, spinning into a delicate, haunting melody.
Behind him, Lan froze. The grip of her hand on his arm relaxed and she stepped forward. “That song.” Her voice was filled with wonder as she turned to him, and it was a look he would never forget: her expression was open with curiosity, eyes bright like a star-strewn night. “I know it. It’s…it’s my mother’s. I was just thinking about it.”
Zen watched her carefully. Since those two instances back in Haak’gong, he hadn’t felt anything nearing yin energies coming from the girl. Even after the Elantian magician had unlocked her Seal, the yin and yáng of her qì had been balanced. He’d scrutinized her keenly all day as she’d staggered around the bamboo forest meditating.
Was it possible he’d been mistaken? That the yin energies he’d sensed…had belonged to someone—or something—else? It seemed highly unlikely that a girl who’d thought of practitioners as nonexistent folktales would know to obfuscate the makeup of her qì.
“You awakened the yao,” he said slowly. “You sent out a pulse of qì earlier, and this creature responded.”
“Is that…common?”
“It used to be.” Before them, the yao swayed, and he caught glimpses of its true form—a stalk, leaves, buried beneath the human skin it had acquired. “Most yao and guài seek qì to maintain their human forms in our world—it serves as sustenance to them. Prior to the Elantian invasion, the Last Kingdom was filled with cesspools of qì that had gathered in plants and animals in remote locations over long periods of time. Sometimes, they awakened.” He paused before adding: “Much like our coexistence with plants and animals in our world, their existence was…natural. A part of life.”
Lan looked back to the yao. “I don’t think it means us harm,” she said. “I can feel it, in its song. It just wants to…be alive.” She tipped her head up to Zen. “All the stories I’ve read depicted them as malicious creatures. Why is that?”
He knew the answer—the full answer, thetrueanswer—to that question. He knew it all too well, having carved it into his bones and inked it into his blood.
No.The truth hurt, so much that he’d decided to look the other way twelve cycles ago.
He would give her the answer written into the imperial records—the correct, accepted answer. “In the era of the Middle Kingdom, when Hin civilization rose to prosperity, supernatural spirits ravaged our lands. First Emperor Jin classified all forms of spiritual energy as ‘demonic’ and orderedpractitioners to destroy them on sight. Then he sought to set limits on the arts of practitioning across the kingdom.”
Zen raised both hands to the yao. It had not moved; it continued to watch them, that melancholy song spilling from its being. “Yin and yáng, evil and good, black and white: such is the way of our world.” His hands began to move, qì flowing through the veins in his arms as his fingers traced strokes in the air. “What is dead must remain dead, and what does not belong under the path of practitioning must be annihilated. Such is the Way.”
His Seal exploded, appearing in the air as a wreath of glimmering, ink-colored strokes that rippled like fire. Qì shot out from the center of the Seal, enveloping the yao in a circle of black flames. Its shriek echoed, a long, drawn-out wail of misery exuding yin energies.
Lan’s face was tight, her eyes dark pools as she watched. “It sounds like it’s in pain,” she said quietly.
