Chapter 31- Who You Find When You Are Alone In The Dark

Tian was pretty sure he was only unconscious for a moment. It felt like he had died. Everything around him was dark, his body was broken in… more places than he could easily count, and there was a reek of corruption. High above was a ragged hole in the ceiling with a trickle of water falling through it, so it seemed he had landed in one of the dragon caves that dotted the land around here.

He really couldn’t understand how he was still alive. His muddled brain poked at that thought for a second, then his eyes shot wide open and he screamed. “LIREN!”

He tried to sit up, and almost blacked out from the pain. Something in his waist was broken. He found the rope and clawed his way along the ground until he reached his sister. She lay on her side, covered in cold, grey metal. Three faint stripes ran through the material, whatever it was. Whatever it was hadn’t been enough to stop the hundreds of thorns sticking into her back.

He couldn’t hear any breathing. Couldn’t hear her heart beating. His own heart stopped. Then there was a faint throb from her chest and he could breathe again. It was weak, and too slow, and sounded wrong, but it was there.

“What the hell is that metal shit covering her?!”

The same stuff that saved your life. The Three Stripe Steel Heart Shield Mirror you got when you did that caravan raid together. The one where Ku distinguished himself by killing Heartbreak Worm Zhu. It can’t last long. See? It’s already vanishing.

Tian blinked. It had been so long ago. He thought about the Myriad Tormenting Worms dagger he got on that same raid occasionally, but he was quite sure he hadn’t given the enchanted metal a second thought since it seeped into his palm.

The Treasure Weighing Magistrate said it would stop one fatal blow up to the third level of the Heavenly Realm. And it did, kind of. Unfortunately, the ongoing damage from those thorns counts as a hell of a lot more than “one blow,” even if individually they aren’t on the heavenly person level. You have a thorn in your foot. You just aren’t noticing it because you are in so much other pain.

Tian glared down his leg. He couldn’t really see it in the dark, but he could feel it now, sticking out of the top of his foot. Throbbing. Tian narrowed his eyes and observed with his vital energy. A hiss escaped from his mouth. It wasn’t just stabbing into him or poisoning him, it was trying to root in him. Hair thin tendrils extended from the narrow thorn and tried to burrow into his flesh. Tian’s repeatedly refined body welcomed it. It was a dense source of wood qi, after all, and all the curse qi in it was just more fodder for the Hell Suppressing art.

In the race to see who would eat who first, Tian was handily beating the thorn. But that was one thorn. Liren had been stabbed with hundreds. Tian rested his hand on his sister’s ankle and sent his vital energy into her body.

Liren wasn’t dying- She was close enough to dead as to make no difference. Her heart still beat. Her brain wasn’t destroyed. But her body was ruined. The fall, the impact of all the thorns, and then the thorns burrowing into her flesh, all conspired to ruin her. Her body cultivation was slowing the progress of the hairlike roots. The fire qi in her was burning them away. But there were so many thorns, and her vital energy was so weak.

It was only a matter of time. Not much time either. Then the parasite art would activate, and something horrible would be born from his sister’s unwilling flesh.

He stared dumbly at her. He didn’t have any medicine for this. Nothing remotely like this. He didn’t know how you could even begin to treat this. The Demon Pulling Art would be near useless, trying to put out a forest fire with a dewdrop. Her iron bones were broken, she was bleeding from tears inside and outside of her body, organs ruptured, and those damned thorns were widening the wounds.

He couldn’t save her. This wasn’t something he could fix. His sister was going to die. She was going to die, because she saved his life. There was a moment, and she could have done anything at all, and she chose to put her body between him and death. She wouldn’t even be left with an intact corpse. That mattered to her, he knew.

Tian pawed at her, trying to think of something, anything. He started ripping out thorns, but they broke apart under the skin. The little roots had already set themselves in place. It would take actual surgery to remove them all. Each broken piece of thorn was now a breeding ground for infection. Pulling out the thorns could only make things worse.

Despair. Not just death, the thorns brought despair. Making the victim and their comrades feel hopeless as they were consumed from within.

She was going to die. Hong Liren was going to die, and he couldn’t save her. He still didn’t really understand what people meant by a friend, but he understood what they meant by “sister,” and she was. She truly was. And she was going to die in the dark, as he lay next to her. Helpless to help. Helpless to stop the burrowing roots.

He looked down at the thorn in his own foot. It was turning grey. The wood qi had been devoured, as had the curse energy. He was healing, slightly. A few more weeks like this, two months at the outside, and he would be almost healthy. He shook his foot and the thorn fell out. Dead. The thorns in Liren were shiny black, glossy in the dim light.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Her body was ruined. If she was at full health, maybe she could use her vital energy to burn away the roots. She was anything but healthy, now. Ruined. Crippled, sickly, dying, infected, alone in the stinking dark.

Tian gasped. “I know one thing. One thing that would work. Soup! We have to make Liren soup!”

Zihao… just because it works for you, doesn’t mean it will work for her. And you had to be awake to force your body to make the changes you needed. She is mercifully unconscious.