Ch2 Immortals

Familiar faces of farming families, fellow slaves, and unknown villagers are all embroiled in the same chaos I am.

Some have been lucky enough to leave their houses without running into warriors.

Others lay in bloodied pieces, or burned to a crisp in their own homes as the fires grow higher and the warriors more violent.

Bags of clothing, coins, food, young women, and anything of value are being dragged onto strong horses, or thrown in the back of carriages of this bandit caravan.

Many are already leaving after plundering a few houses, while some stay to find more scraps.

I follow the general crowd of fleeing villagers, it is away from the town’s center, toward an unpopulated road leading through the forest I hunt.

Out of the nearly 3,000 villagers, I see 300 heads left fleeing at most. Its population has been cut by at least 90%. The majority are bleeding, old men, or sickly kids.

The Donghe Farming Town is no more. It has been absolutely slaughtered and raided for everything valuable.

“Those Martial Warriors always choose the path of evil once they gain power. Don’t mortals have a hard enough life as it is!” one old man yells to himself after collapsing due to a broken leg.

Another, missing an arm, grunts while walking past him. “This is the way the world has always worked. The strong take from the weak. If you wanted to make a difference, you would have trained when you were young. That would have been the only way to stop them.”

Regret flashes in all the eyes of the elderly that overhear his words.

The kids without their parents that have wandered out of the village just like me are mostly crying, coughing, or wandering with blank, horrified stares.

My head aches with a sharp pain again, and memories of past conversations I’ve overheard in the farming fields over the years come back to me.

Those so-called Martial Warriors are actually quite common in this world.

With enough daily training, special elixirs, and a strong bone constitution, within 20 to 30 years any mortal can become a Martial Warrior.

Their skin becomes as hard as iron, their muscles become as strong as a tiger, and their organs become efficient and tough enough to never become sick again. Even normal poisons can be neutralized by a Martial Warrior’s blood.

On average, 1 out of every 100 people manages to walk this path in their lifetime.

A few get high-paying jobs as city guards, but many opt to work in major cities for wealthy families.

The only Martial Warriors left in the countryside are ones that have strayed off the legal path. They are bandits that raid and loot weak mortal villages because they can.

I feel a few shoulders brush past me as I stop in the middle of the thin dirt road and hunch over, holding my head.

When I come back to the present, an old man stops beside me, smoking a long hand-rolled cigarette. His eyes are sunken in, and his skin is wrinkled, as though he’s seen this fate play out many times before.

My eyes shift to the other cigarettes in his front shirt pocket, then I reach into my boot to pull out a copper coin.

“Will you spare a smoke?”

Even though I can’t even see his eyes, they grow darker as he hands one over and lights the end with his own lit smoke.

“Keep the copper, kid. This must be your first raid. Mortals have to stick together in times like these.”

I smile and accept his kindness. A copper coin would have been overpaying by quite a bit anyway. As I pull in a long drag and start to follow the flow of moving villagers again, the old man stops in place and his sunken eyes widen in fear.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The sweet sensation of a body that has never experienced nicotine once in his life rushes through me. It’s the head rush I haven’t felt for almost a decade since I joined a dead-end marketing job in my past life.

It’s so potent that I can’t even walk forward without growing dizzy.

At the same time, the crowd around me all stops moving at once. I halt my steps too as the cool rush wears off in a few seconds. Every person, young, old, crippled, or perfectly healthy stares up into the sky with wide eyes filled with fear and awe.

My vision stays blurred longer than others, but I too look up to see an enormous flying boat drifting over the trees in the forest we are trying to escape through.

A strong voice yells out, “Immortals! Immortal Cultivators have come!”

I look around in confusion, and watch the 20-meter-long vessel stop levitating in the sky.

A bright blue streak of light flies off its deck, moving through the forest in the opposite direction our small crowd is headed. It is back in the direction of Donghe Village.

I squint to tighten my gaze, and realize the blue streak of light has the outline of a woman.