The delegation wound up the valley road in the last of the morning light, and from the rocks above the narrows the old demonic cultivator watched them come, counted them twice, and found nothing among them worth fearing.
Twelve cultivators in the crimson and black of the domain capital. None of them had troubled to hide their cultivation. They crossed the wilds with their auras open, so that beasts and bandits and demonic cultivators alike kept their distance and let them pass. He read them without hurry.
Most were at foundation establishment or below. Two had reached core formation, and the hard-faced woman who led them was at its peak. He gave her one glance and looked no closer. He had killed more peak late-stage core formation cultivators than he cared to remember, and there was nothing to fear from her.
A thin but equally strong cultivator stepped up beside him, his face a ruin. He smiled, his teeth black with rot, a dark miasma bleeding off his skin, and laughed low. "I'd like to taste that woman's body before you turn her into one of your disgusting puppets."
The old man turned his head and looked him in the eye, with no fear in it and nothing but disgust. "Are you making a demand of me?" He let the silence sit. "The woman is mine. She will make a perfect puppet, and I am owed one. Your disciples were not fit to keep my last from burning himself to ash."
For a moment his cultivation flared, a hard pulse of core formation pressure. Then it drew back, and he smiled. "Keep her, then. There are plenty of others to choose from. Why would I fight an old bastard like you and your disgusting puppets?"
The old man had already turned back to the road. A core formation corpse, whole, the meridians not yet cooled and stiff, the marrow uncracked. The cold work was always short of that, and no market would sell it to you. And here came two of them, walking up a road in the sun, believing themselves the most dangerous things on it.
He had made vessels out of less. He thought, without grief, of the boy from the ruined clan, the one who had come to him already so full of hate that he seemed near to bursting with it, and had burst, in the end, before he ripened. A waste. Hate burned fast and left the shell scorched and good for nothing.
The dead were better material than the living had ever been. They did not overreach. They only waited to be put to work.
"And that?" the thin cultivator asked.
The old man lifted two fingers toward the trees. Down the slope, where the pines gave way to a scar of dead ground its kind left wherever it fed, the thing they had spent a month and four oxen drawing out of its territory hunched over the carcasses, feeding without hurry.
It had only just broken through. He could feel the power of it, a Beast King that had not yet settled into its new rank, the aura still churning in it unsteady and raw.
A Blood Devouring Mosquito grown to the size of an ox, wings a dry grey color, its long proboscis sunk deep in a carcass, drawing the last of the blood out of it.
"Send one of your disciples down to lure it over," the old man said.
The thin cultivator turned and pointed out one sickly disciple, barely at qi condensation, and sent him down to do it. The old man settled back against the cold stone to watch.
...
Qin Hualing felt the beast before she saw it. A wave of pressure rolled down the slope ahead of it, cold as a winter river, and she read it in a breath. The thing was well past core formation, and someone had driven it towards them.
She had lived a long time, and little on a road still surprised her. She knew the difference between a beast that wandered into a group and a beast that had been steered into one.
"Off the road," she said, not raising her voice. The delegates were already breaking and scattering, their qi flaring bright and useless in their fear.
A young man broke from the trees below and came down onto the road at a dead run, straight at them. He had opened his own forearm to the bone, and the blood came off him in a bright ribbon as he ran, and he was shouting, trying to bring the thing down on them. Whoever had sent him down had not cared whether he came back.
It came chasing out of the trees after him, buzzing and darting, quick enough to have impaled him at any moment. It had not, she judged, because it was enjoying the hunt, gorged enough already to take its time. Then it caught sight of the rest of them on the road, and everything changed.
It finished him without slowing. One moment he ran, and the next the proboscis stood out through his chest, long as a spear and weeping dark at the tip, and his feet had left the road, and the bright ribbon of his blood stopped in the air and ran backward up it in a thin red thread until there was nothing left to take. It let the husk fall to the stones, no mark on him but the one he had made himself.
It did not roar. Its wings dragged out a high thin note instead, a sound that made the skin crawl.
Wei Zhennan put himself in front of the others, blade out, core formation qi gathering in his arms. It would have bought the men behind him about as long as the proboscis took to find him.
Qin Hualing stepped forward to face the Beast King.
Up on the rocks the pair who had driven it down watched, certain, their disciples gathered behind them. They had chosen this road for slaughter, and a core formation woman standing still in a Beast King's path was only the slaughter arriving early. Not one of them thought to wonder why she had not run. She had already marked where each of them stood.
To the beast she was a meal, a warm body standing still in the road, no different from the oxen or the boy. Newly risen and half-mad with hunger, it lunged for her.
She met it with one cut.
There was little to see. A line of pale light crossed the road, the high note ended, and the great grey body split in the air and fell in two pieces.
The proboscis drove a hand's depth into the road and stood there shivering, weeping a single drop into the dust, drawing nothing.
Then she looked up toward the slope. The demonic cultivators stood frozen, and the thin one was already running. They had seen the beast cut in half and the way she moved, and they knew now they had marked no core formation cultivator at all, but at least a peak early-stage mortal shedding one. They had picked the wrong target.
She was gone up the slope before the thin one had run ten paces, and the delegates were left staring after her.
...
By the time she came down the slope, her cultivation suppressed again to the peak late-stage core formation she passed for, the screaming had stopped.
She walked the line of them and looked them over. No dead, and none of them hurt. One was vomiting into the grass, the rest white and shaking. She kept a hand on the sick one's shoulder until he steadied.
They were delegates of the domain capital, grey and seasoned, and she had brought them out to look into a hard matter in a frontier city, their own dead and demonic cultivators where there should have been none, and a clan that would answer for both.
Wei Zhennan had gone down to the dead ground to look at the beast. There was nothing strange in that. Violence was his work, and a beast that could drain a dozen cultivators and leave no mark on them was worth a look. He crouched by the severed proboscis, turned the dead boy over with his boot, and studied the ground without hurry.
That was the whole of it. He was not afraid, and none of it was new to him.
She had stood over demonic corpses beside a great many cultivators, and the good ones were always uneasy around such dead, even when they were cold and harmless and lying in the dirt. It put a stiffness in them they could not help. Wei Zhennan knelt over the boy as easily as a man in his own garden.
He looked at the corruption under the boy's skin and named the path it came from, quietly, almost to himself, before she had placed it herself. Then he straightened and gave her a cupped-fist salute, correct in every degree. Qin Hualing studied him as she studied everyone, trying to learn what kind of man he was from how he moved and spoke and held himself.
She did not know what to make of him yet, but she would in the end. She always did.
"Should we not go on, Investigator?" Wei Zhennan said. "Half the day is gone, and it is a day's road yet to Redstone." He asked it as he did everything, correct and easy. She gave the word to go on.
She did not look back, not at the beast in two pieces nor at the demonic cultivators dead on the slope, who would be carrion for wandering beasts by nightfall. Redstone was ahead of her, and the matter she had come for, and she meant to find the truth of it.