Chapter 2 | Lessons Given Freely

The screams were coming from the east.

Calid had been walking south, which had seemed like the sensible direction, being as it was the direction that contained the fewest explosions, the least fire, and the lowest concentration of people who wanted to collect his head as a decorative accent piece. South was a direction with a future and was a direction that said “reasonable choices are made here.”

The screams were not coming from the south.

The east screams were young screams, too.

That was the thing about screams, after five centuries of teaching, you developed an ear for them the way a sommelier developed a palate for wine. There were the screams of adults who understood what was happening to them, which carried a particular weight of comprehension that made them heavy and final.

And there were the screams of the young, which were worse, because they contained surprise.

An outrage at the discovery that the world could do this. That it would.

Calid stopped walking south.

He stood in the dark between two ancient pines and listened, and the Qi in the air carried the sounds to him with a fidelity that was, frankly, unwelcome. Steel on steel and a girl’s voice shouting something about formation positions. A boy’s voice cracking on a word that might have been run. The low, wet laughter of someone enjoying their work.

He could keep walking.

The thought arrived fully formed and entirely reasonable.

He was in a broken body with a shattered core, no allies, no resources, and a working relationship with the local energy that could be generously described as ‘first date with a nun.’ The fires were spreading and the demonic cultivators were everywhere. The Patriarch was dead, the sect was ash, and the smart move, the survivable move, was to put as much distance as possible between himself and every single person in this forest who had opinions about Elder Shao Wen’s continued existence.

He could walk away.

He had the skills for it.

Modified veil matrices, ambient Qi suppression, a lifetime of knowing when to leave a room. He could vanish into whatever geography lay beyond this forest and spend his remaining years, however many this damaged body had left, studying the local energy in peaceful academic isolation. Write papers and develop theories.

Perhaps find a cat to blame things on.

The girl’s voice sounded again. Closer now, or carried better by the wind. “Someone! Save us! We need an Elder!”

Calid closed his eyes.

The thing about dedicating your life to teaching was that it ruined you for self-preservation.

Five hundred and seventy-four years of watching young people walk into his lecture halls with their terrible posture and their worse study habits and their absolute, unshakeable conviction that they were immortal, it did something to you. It carved channels in your soul deeper than any mana reservoir, and those channels all ran in the same direction.

Toward the screaming, always toward the screaming.

He had built the Academy from nothing. Centuries years of political manoeuvring, fundraising, and one very memorable fistfight with a bursar. He had filled it with students who became colleagues who became friends who became, in some cases, the most important people in his life, and he had buried the ones who didn’t make it and kept teaching the ones who did because that was the job.

That was the only job that had ever mattered to him.

And now, in a forest that smelled of pine and burning woods, in a body that wasn’t his, wearing the robes of a man who had apparently felt exactly the same way about his own students–

How could he look away?

Calid Asigoth turned east.

His legs protested and chest protested louder. The shattered core fragments ground against each other with every step, sending bright lines of pain through his torso that made his vision pulse white at the edges. He ignored all of it with the ease of long practice, because pain was just the body’s way of filing complaints, and Calid Asigoth had never in his life read a complaint form.

He moved through the trees as quickly as the borrowed body would allow and followed the sounds of fighting toward a clearing where the canopy thinned and the firelight from the north painted everything in shades of amber and blood.

Calid found them in a shallow depression between a cluster of fallen trunks, the kind of natural bowl that might have been pleasant for a picnic under different circumstances.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

These were not picnic circumstances.

There were nine of them. Children, really, though the oldest might have been nineteen or twenty. They wore white robes in various states of ruin, the same white as his own, marked with the same emblem that Shao Wen’s memories identified as the White Clover Flame Sect’s crest. Several were bleeding with two were being held upright by their companions. One, a girl with a jaw set so tight the tendons in her neck stood out, had positioned herself at the front of the group with a sword that was visibly too heavy for her and a stance that said she knew it.

Surrounding them, arranged in the loose, confident semicircle of predators who had cornered something small and were in no particular hurry, were the demonic cultivators.

Calid counted twelve.

All Qi Condensation stage, if the energy signatures he was learning to read meant what he thought they meant. Low-level, by any reasonable standard, foot soldiers. The kind of cultivators who got sent to mop up survivors and loot corpses, because they weren’t trusted with anything more complex.

They were currently laughing.