He could sense his qì building inside him, yin energies of death and grief and fury stirring like poison through his veins. And at last, somewhere out there…a resounding echo. A great wave yawning, rising to meet his own tide of emotions.
Zen’s eyes flew open. The lake stretched flat and black before him, broken only by the fragments of starlight from above.
He knew where the Demon God rested.
He drew qì into himself, pooling it into the soles of his feet. Then he leapt up, wind pushing against his face as he arced and fell, a streak of a comet lost to darkness.
The water was unforgivingly cold, infinitely black. Here, he was wrapped in nothing but the yin of his own emotions and the torment of his memories. His lungs began to burn as the crushing weight of the icy water pressed him down.
Down, down…until he could no longer see even the speck of light that was the moon. Until the darkness was so complete that he could no longer distinguish between consciousness and not. Until his limbs froze over, holding stilleven as his mind screamed for them to move. Until he could no longer tell if he was sinking or floating.
And then, in the midst of that horrible silence, the emptiness of being, it came.
More of a presence, anexistence,than anything else. A brush of a current against his body, a whisper caressing his consciousness.
Temurezen,boomed the voice that was everywhere and nowhere at once.Long have I waited.
Time seemed to stop. Zen was suspended in an existence in-between, one between him and the being that was older than time, more ancient than this world.
Have you come to summon me to the land of the living? The yáng of life and sun and solid ground?
Zen spoke, but his voice echoed only in his mind.“Name yourself.”
I think you know my name,the thing replied.I think you have searched for me long.
“You assume incorrectly,”Zen said coldly.
Oh? After your family’s massacre, did you not spend many moons searching for me? Instead, you settled for the first mó that presented itself to you.The being tsked.Pity. Such squandered time, of which only one of us is short.
The village. The encroaching army. And Lan.
Running out of time.
“I came to bind you, demon,”Zen said.“Name your price. I am familiar with your ways of bargaining.”
Are you now?It sounded faintly amused.You would offer me something better? Something no other mortal has?
Zen gritted his teeth.“Name your price.”
The qì around him swirled, suddenly growing crushing as though he held the weight of an entire mountain over him, as though the sky had pinned itself upon him. Between one blinkand the next, the lake water swirled, and where he had thought there was nothing came something darker than darkness.
Zen found himself looking into the core of the Black Tortoise.
It was a shadow the size of a mountain, a faint neck with a blurred head protruding from one end. Eyes the color of blood in water, flames in the east.
Ten thousand souls,the Black Tortoise boomed.Ten thousand souls…and then, you.
Ten thousand souls. He would pay the Black Tortoise with the blood of the Elantian army.
And then…his own.
“My soul is forfeit,”Zen replied.“You ask nothing new.”
You,the Demon God repeated.Not your soul. All of you. Mind…body…and at last, once you are ready, soul.
Zen’s head filled with a roaring noise. The Hin believed souls passed through the River of Forgotten Death before reaching eternal rest; his clan thought spirits were absorbed by the Great Earth and the Eternal Sky. Both, though, on the condition that they qualified for goodness in their own respects. He’d known he was far from goodness and had been prepared for his soul to be forfeit.
His soul—not his life. Not his body, his mind.
