Chapter 94 – Spirit Sage (I)

Chapter 94

Spirit Sage (I)

Gale blew outward, the current warm as though the lid of the cauldron were lifted. The dirt parted like gates, revealing a passage embedded diagonally into the ground.

Spirit Sage snapped his fingers and procured a mote of light that remained hovering by his side as he descended into the tunnel, his steps even and unhurried.

The passage went further down diagonally for about forty more feet before straightening out, though it remained just barely wide and tall enough to fit a grown person. There were no beams supporting it, just strange, glimmering etchings found every twenty or so feet, carved into the stone.

It was rather chilly yet warm at the same time, as though two contrasting energies were dancing an eternal waltz for supremacy, neither winning the battle.

After about five minutes of casual walking or so, the passage opened up rather abruptly and with no warning–it was as though there was a veil hiding its end, and one would only know they’d reached it by reaching it. The narrow tunnel opened out into a rather colossal, domed chamber.

Eerily, the walls here were not smooth or jagged, but rather they twisted and contorted counterclockwise, as though someone had pinned them at their core and then coiled them. Scars were etched into the rugged facade like claw marks, almost pulsing invisibly.

Though it all appeared rather chaotic and unfocused, there was a pattern to it–the angle at which the dirt twisted and bent and twined grew increasingly aggressive as the eyes wandered the circle, eventually flattening at a near eighty degrees, forging into an eye–and within that eye was a glowing, emerald gem as though an iris, pointed directly at the center of the chamber.

There, branches like arms undulated upwards, like in a huddled prayer, curling out and back in as though being woven by invisible hands, cocooning something within itself: a tiny, fingernail-sized seed.

Its surface was veined and pulsating repeatedly like a heartbeat, each pulse tossing out a feeble shockwave.

Spirit Sage slowly walked up to it, his body standing a full two feet shy of the seed itself. He craned his neck and stared at it, his slightly reddish eyes turning full crimson. Before long, trails of scarlet blood gushed out from their corners, forming a strange, symmetrical pattern across the aged skin; like someone pulled a mask off, the old face rippled back like cloth and revealed beneath a smooth complexion of a young man in his twenties, handsome if a bit unusually cruel.

He reached out toward the seed, his fingers mere inches from the webbed cocoon before they came to a halt, a pulse of electricity pushing them away.

“… not yet?” he mumbled, sounding strangely tired against his youthful face.

Just then, the room shook as the ceiling began to ‘bleed’ odd, inchworm-colored miasma. At first it looked like a fog descending, sparse and detached and hazy, but it quickly began to coalesce into singular streams that curved out and back in, all flooding directly toward the seed.

It seemed to come alive for a moment as it took it all in, ballooning to twice its size before returning to the original one a mere two seconds later.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The entire chamber quieted down as his eyes veered up from the seed and toward the ceiling–and further beyond it. About a hundred feet up or so, the ground ended and the small, decrepit, rundown corner of the sect came into view. Young and old lay sprawled on the streets, barely breathing, Death Qi swirling around them.

“Not enough,” he said as the youthful face began to wrinkle back up. “Soon. I’ll feed you more soon.”