Zen’s elation crashed with a devastating thought: he had no way to decipher this Seal.
Ah,the Black Tortoise drawled,but I can.
Zen froze, hand on the belly of the obsidian tortoise. In his excitement, he’d forgotten to shield his thoughts from the Demon God. The Black Tortoise’s every word reminded him of the bargain that hung like a sword over his neck.
He knew very well how these bargains ended; it was the fate that had infamously befallen his great-grandfather, the last Mansorian demonic practitioner. Once he had been a righteous general fighting for the freedom of his clan, but his ending hadbeen writ in blood and tragedy when he’d lost the war to the Middle Kingdom’s Dragon Emperor, and then his body, mind, and soul to the very Demon God now bound to Zen.
Xan Tolürigin’s legacy was marked by his failure to control his Demon God, which had driven him to madness. His entire story had been overshadowed by his slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians in his final moments.
Zen swallowed. The qì of the Mansorian Seal seemed to pulse, calling out to him. His clan’s long-lost legacy, literally at his fingertips. A way to achieve redemption, to rewrite the tragic history of his people. Was he to walk away from it all?
Just this once,he thought. It couldn’t hurt to use an iota of the Demon God’s power to unlock this one door.
Just this once.
He issued the command:Open it.
The wind around him seemed to stir with the Demon God’s satisfaction. Then power surged through Zen. He felt that core of demonic qì inside him—the Black Tortoise’s core, a concentration of qì that gave it power and vitality—expand briefly, energies pouring out and mingling with the qì in his own body. It rushed to his fingertips, and Zen watched in half horror, half fascination, as his hand began to move of its own accord, tracing a Seal from a memory he did not have. He could feel himself pulling on the thousands of strands of qì of which the world is composed—iron, stone, birch, air, gold, fire—and weaving them together in patterns far too difficult to follow. This was a level of practitioning that even the masters at the School of the White Pines had not attained.
This was the work of a god.
Within seconds, the Black Tortoise was guiding his finger to trace the circle enclosing the Seal. When the end joined the beginning, the Seal took effect.
Zen watched the patterns and strokes—incomprehensibleto him—flare dark red wreathed in black. And then the statue began to writhe, its belly settling until it was as smooth as a black-glass lake. Zen frowned, squinting. Inside, fog seemed to swirl, drawing together into shadows….
A screech rent the air as a blur shot from the statue’s belly. Zen reacted by instinct. Nightfire slashed; he felt the soft resistance of flesh, then sinew, then the crunch of bone. The creature shrieked and stumbled back, and Zen was already tracing with his other hand, drawing on the strands of yáng energies as he conjured the Seal for fire and light—he needed light—
His Seal exploded in a shower of gold sparks, illuminating the chamber and the creature.
It was a woman—or had once been. Its flesh had been gnawed by maggots and rats, leaving a face of gaping holes that opened to bone. Eyes, milky and half chewed through by worms, stared straight and unseeing through wisps of long black hair. Yet most unsettling was its thick brocade páo, a robe furred at the collar and patterned in small gold-and-black flames: the mark of a Mansorian clan practitioner.
Mó,thought Zen. A demon—the most terrifying of the four classes of supernatural beings. He’d met one like this before: a grandmaster who had bargained his soul to a demon and allowed it to inhabit his body after death as a last line of defense to protect his school of practitioning from the Elantians.
A mó was formed from a malevolent cesspool of yin that had festered with hatred and wrath; to vanquish it, one had to counter its wrathful energies with those of fire, sunlight, warmth—and, most important, the intangible emotions constituting yáng: Peace. Joy. Love. All that made life worth living, and all that separated the living from the dead.
Summoning those now felt like trying to ignite a fire from ashes.
Zen funneled qì into his fingertips, tracing the strokes of aSeal—this time, on the flat of his blade. He clenched his teeth and imbued his Seal with extra fire and heat before closing it off. It glowed briefly before the light rippled across the length of his sword.
As Zen raised his jiàn, however, he paused. His previous encounter with the grandmaster-turned-demon had been close, the creature wicked and cunning and able to manipulate qì to conjure Seals. Yet there was something off about this demon—something uncoordinated, clumsy, about its movements.
It turned to him now, face slack and mouth open in a snarl, and pounced. Zen sidestepped and brought his sword up. Resistance, then clean air, and the creature’s head fell to the ground with a thud. He waited, expecting the corrupted corpse to return briefly to the original form of its soul’s owner. To his horror, the head continued to snap its teeth, and its severed body continued to lumber toward him.
Zen raised Nightfire again, hesitating. Mutilating a body was taboo in Hin folk culture, as the commoners believed that the soul within it would not pass whole through the River of Forgotten Death into the next life. It was a superstition—Zen knew that souls were made of qì and most returned to the natural flow of the world after the death of the body.
It felt like sacrilege, though, to slash through the Mansorian practitioner’s corpse again. Still, it did not die. Its darkened nails scrabbled against the stone floor.
Something at the creature’s waist drew Zen’s attention. He bent and snatched it before one of the creature’s flailing hands could find him. Zen activated another fú for light and raised his find to its glow.
It was a small brocade pennant, patterned exquisitely with golden horses and tortoises. Embroidered upon it, the black threads emanating qì, was a Seal: a Mansorian Seal saturatedwith yáng. Yet at its center were strokes indicating a sort of one-way tunnel…a trap for yin.
Yáng attracted yin, yet instead of balancing out the energies, this flag seemed to channel and gather yin into the body of its wearer. There was no demonic core tethered to this body; rather, it followed the principle of a yao, a supernatural spirit formed out of a pool of yin that had cultivated an awakening. In this case…the pennant hadcreatedthis spirit by drawing yin into the corpse.
Not mó.Zou shi,he thought.Living corpse.
Well done,came the Black Tortoise’s voice, accompanied by what felt like a cunning smile.Your ancestors favored creating living corpses as mindless, unseeing guards that did the bidding of their owners without question. Wherezou shiwere found would also lie their masters’ darkest secrets.
Zen’s heart began to pound. So this was another lost art of Mansorian practitioning. Perhaps, he thought, staring at the writhing corpse on the ground, some arts should not be practiced.
