From a distance, the farmhouse looked almost normal. It was a big house, two stories tall and sprawling, wooden beams painted in warm tones of red, orange, and yellow to hide the predominant dull brown underneath. A large barn stood not far from the house, surrounded by a half dozen smaller outbuildings, and a modest fenced garden butted up against a veranda that zigzagged around the outside of the main building. A field of golden wheat, barley, and oats swayed gently in a warm summer breeze, stalks heavy with grains nearly ripe for harvest.

  A mortal following the path leading to the farmstead from the nearest road might have been fooled into thinking that nothing was wrong. There was none of the wrongness in the air that had been so thick back at Wide Hill that even mortals could feel it from a mile away, and the breeze smelled of earth and pine, not blood and death. Even a cultivator might have run right past without giving the place a second glance, the qi in the air so thin that it barely held any impression of the world around it.

  But the path Calvin, Lulu, and Wallis had been following since the early hours of the morning led here, and the illusion of normalcy was only skin deep.

  Nothing stirred on the farmstead. There were no voices, no animal cries or birdsong, not even the buzz of bees. Only the rustle of leaves filled the air, breathing some semblance of life into grave stillness. And once you noticed that, you didn’t have to look much further to realize that something was deeply wrong. Weeds grew rampant among the garden and in places fallen vegetables rotted on the dirt. There were no animals in the pens, water and feed troughs lay empty, and one of the veranda’s gates hung crooked, its hinges broken.

  And if you looked just a little bit deeper still…

  “I found two of them,” Lulu reported, voice tightly controlled. “One’s on the second floor, early Foundation realm. I think he’s probably our leaker. He’s mostly stabilized his advancement, but it’s obvious he’s as fresh as it gets.”

  Calvin nodded in agreement. It had taken some time to pick up the trail, but once they had the man’s qi had led them practically straight here where the trail ended. They’d circled the area twice and seen no trace of it continuing, though it was obvious the farmhouse wasn’t hiding an entire group of demonic cultivators. Even if the rest of the group hadn’t noticed that he was leaking qi like water through a sieve, they probably understood the importance of stabilizing your Foundation after an advancement. They had been in too much of a hurry to do so at Wide Hill, but now that they’d made it back to what he hoped was their main base of operation, they’d left him behind to cultivate.

  Lulu paused for a moment, then continued onward. “The second one is down in the cellar. There’s a formation over the door so I couldn’t get a good read on him, but I’m thinking mid Gathering realm. I think they have a few prisoners down there, maybe mortals from here or one of the villages they’ve hit.”

  “And it would make no sense to leave two Foundation realm cultivators to guard a handful of mortals,” Wallis finished.

  “Exactly.”

  “Well then,” Calvin looked between Lulu and Wallis, “I don’t see a reason to waste any more time.” If the rest of the cultists had left recently, that meant they needed to deal with these two and go after them as soon as possible. Hopefully one of the men left behind would know where they’d gone. And if the rest were already on their way back, it would be best to deal with this isolated pair before they were reinforced.

  Lulu’s beaming smile was bright and vicious, pearly white teeth bared. “Finally…” she hissed.

  Wallis put a hand on her shoulder. “We need them alive, Lu. Or at least one of them.”

  She covered his hand with her own smaller one and turned towards him, her smile turning tender for a moment. “I know, dear. I know how much punishment a cultivator can take. I’ll only stab him a little bit.”

  Wallis kissed her forehead. “That’s my girl.”

  Calvin cleared his throat and the two jumped apart as though burnt, seemingly suddenly remembering that they were not alone. “In that case, I’ll leave the upstairs to you. Try not to break anything too badly. This was someone’s home and livelihood.” Those someones were almost certainly dead or working with the demonic cultivators, but if they couldn’t intercept their foes before their next massacre, organizing an ambush would be easier if the house and its surroundings remained in one piece.

  “And be careful. He might have only just broken through, but he’s a demonic cultivator. He could have all kinds of dirty tricks and traps available to him.”

  “When have I ever not been careful?” Lulu asked rhetorically.

  “I’ll watch her back,” Wallis reassured him.

  In the interest of time, they did not bother over complicating things. Only a few minutes after Lulu had given her report, Calvin stood a few steps from the sloped wooden doors set against the sole side of the house not rimmed by the veranda. They were painted a cheery shade of red—though the color had faded somewhat with time—that did little to hide the bloody symbols scrawled along the outside edge of the doors and the smaller circle around the two metal handles. The blood was thick with qi, looking as fresh and wet as the day it was shed.

  Calvin would in no way consider himself an expert, but he did have some passing familiarity with formations. Though he’d never seen this particular formation and was unfamiliar with many of the symbols and characters it used, it was not hard to intuit what it was meant to do. Someone did not want just anyone opening this door, and the stillness in the air around it implied a silencing element.

  Without touching the doors, Calvin delicately probed the wooden frame to which the doors were attached with his qi. It was old and weathered, held in place by the same mortar used to build the low stone structure holding the doors up above the ground, and the only foreign qi he could feel was centered around where the four metal hinges had been nailed into the wood.

  Calvin inhaled, gathering his qi and letting it permeate the wood around each hinge, then exhaled. Qi became white hot fire that turned old wood into ash and iron nails cherry red in an instant. Silently, the still sealed sloped doors slid down onto the ground, creating a gap large enough for him to drop through.

  Calvin moved quickly, silencing his footsteps with qi and preparing himself for an attack as he hopped down into the cellar, but he needn’t have bothered.

  Lulu had been right on both counts. The cultists had left a single guard behind in the cellar, a balding, middle-aged man Calvin judged to be somewhere in the middle stages of the Gathering realm. There were also a few living mortal prisoners bound to the walls and a handful of corpses, though from the state they were in Calvin suspected most of the former wished they were in the latter category. The cellar also appeared to be where the cultists stored some of what they’d looted from the people they’d killed, the floor of the surprisingly spacious chamber scattered with open crates and chests from which spilled the treasured heirlooms and meager savings of poor mortal farmers and craftsmen.

  The air in the cellar was as foul as it had been in the middle rings of the corpse formation they’d destroyed, worse even in some ways. The qi was not quite so thick and polluted, but the stench was nearly unbearable. The sickly sweet aroma of rotten meat and old sweat mixed with the coppery tang of blood and the miasma of death and other fluids, creating a uniquely revolting brew that turned Calvin’s stomach and made it hard to focus.

  His target was…cultivating with what Calvin initially took for a corpse, an armless, legless head and torso smeared with old blood and dried fluids. She lay limply on top of one of the chests, her eyes bloody pits and crimson welts, freshly-scabbed cuts, and chunks of missing flesh barely visible beneath the filth covering her. It was only when she cried out, hoarse voice hollow and muffled by the rag stuffed into her mouth that Calvin realized with horror that she was somehow still alive despite the catastrophic damage done to her body.

  He took in the scene in a single glance and moved without thinking, a burst of qi propelling him across the dimly lit chamber so quickly that he doubted that any of the mortals in the room could have seen him move even if they had the eyes with which to do so. He barely remembered to modulate his strength, his kick only launching the demonic cultivator across the chamber rather than breaking him in half, the mortals flinching or crying out in surprise when the man hit the far wall with a wet crack and then slid heavily onto the dirt. The mangled woman he’d been making use of wriggled weakly, a tiny animalistic whine wrenched from her throat past what Calvin could now see was a shattered jaw.

  The man screamed as Calvin appeared beside him and stomped on his shoulder, forcing him back onto the ground he’d only just begun to rise from. Bone shattered beneath Calvin’s shoe and the scream turned into shrieking sob, but Calvin felt no pity for him. Not after what he’d seen here and at Wide Hill.

  He reached down and grabbed the man’s thinning hair, wrenching his head up from the dirt. The man screamed again, pathetic and pained as he gibbered something Calvin had no desire to listen to. Calvin wanted little more than to slam the man’s head against the ground until he stopped moving, but there was a chance his skull held something more useful than the satisfaction of smearing his grey matter across the dirt. Instead, he slapped a talisman onto the man’s forehead. The man’s voice cut off, his eyes rolling up in his skull, and when Calvin let go, he dropped like a stone.

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  That had been reckless, but as Calvin finally looked around the cellar and took in the horrors in more detail, he couldn’t help but conclude that his actions had been perfectly justified. He only wished he’d broken a few more bones before knocking the man out, but there would be plenty of time for that later.

  In addition to the dismembered woman still lying on one of the open chests, there were three other living mortals in the cellar with him, though if not for his keen senses allowing him to hear their shallow breathing and faint heartbeats it would have been hard to distinguish the living from the dead. They were in bad shape, and Calvin guessed some pills or techniques had been used to keep them alive and aware, because he’d seen cultivators die of lesser injuries than theirs. The man at his feet had certainly been doing something with his victim beyond the obvious when Calvin had struck him, the qi around the two of them moving with foul purpose.

  Calvin wanted to say something reassuring. He wanted to say that help had arrived, that they would be safe now, that their terrible ordeal was over and they would be okay, but the words would not come. Because for all that he had brought a handful of pills formulated to heal mortals, the care these women needed was wholly beyond him. They needed trained healers, cultivators with specialized techniques, knowledge, and attunements that allowed them to perform miracles of restoration. Perhaps that was something he might be capable of someday—phoenixes were associated with healing just as much as they were fire—but healing a decade or longer from now would not help them.

  There was nothing he could do for the woman on the chest. Perhaps his pills could seal her wounds and mend her broken jaw, but they would not restore her eyes or limbs. They might even make it impossible to regrow the lost appendages in the future if she was lucky enough to find someone capable of doing so, and what kind of life would she live as a blind torso?

  The same went for two of the women bound up against the wall. Their hearts might beat and their lungs fill with air, but they were like chickens running around with their heads cut off—dead even if their flesh had yet to accept that truth.

  The third…maybe. She was mostly in one piece and her body was cleaner than the other three. Most of her injuries looked fresher too, suggesting she was a newer addition to the forsaken crypt. There were a few bodies like that, perhaps victims taken from Wide Hill?

  She hung limply by the wrists and hair from a peg set into one of the wooden beams supporting the ceiling, toes just barely touching the dirt floor. There was barely any skin left on her body, bare muscle exposed to the chill air, and she twitched and writhed constantly, but her organs seemed to still all be where they belonged and the only visible bits she was missing were mostly fat and cartilage, not limbs. It even looked like she might still have a working eye left, though it was hard to tell beneath the patina of dried blood that covered her face.

  Calvin swallowed the bile rising up in his throat and steeled himself. “I am Calvin, a disciple of the Eight Peaks sect,” he declared. “We discovered this location while investigating a group of demonic cultivators operating in this area. The men we found here will never harm you, nor anyone else, ever again. We will,” he swallowed again past a fist-sized lump in his throat, “do what we can for all of you.”

  Heads turned in his direction and his words were met with a chorus of unintelligible sounds, gags and a missing tongue turning words into little more than noise. He looked between the four of them, then resolutely marched over to the only one he thought might be salvageable. The others had survived this long already—either they would continue to do so or they wouldn’t, but Calvin only had so many hands. He fastidiously ignored the voice telling him to forget about them, that he had a job to do. It was more than possible that one of them would know where the rest of the cultists had run off too, and they would give up the information far more readily than the comatose cultivator behind him.

  She seemed to sense him approaching, shying away from him as he stopped beside her. The motion clearly hurt her, exposed muscles visibly clenching and twitching at every movement without any skin to protect them. She was gagged like all the others, a strip of colorful, bloodstained fabric that might have once been the sleeve of a dress or blouse wrapped around her head holding in place a wad of balled up fabric that had been packed into her mouth until it made her cheeks bulge out.

  “I’ll try my best to be gentle, but this is going to hurt,” he warned her. “Try not to move, that will only make things worse.” He wanted to get at least one pill in her before he unbound her hands. There was no way she had the strength to stand unaided and trying to sit or lie her down anywhere was just asking to exacerbate her many injuries.

  He didn’t wait for a response. He incinerated the crude knot tied behind her head in lieu of tugging at it and as gently as he could unwrapped the strip of fabric. Dried blood and hair stuck to the fabric and her face, tugging at her many scabs, but she didn’t move or make a sound as he worked. Where he could he carefully burned or cut away the fabric instead of tearing at it, but despite his best efforts fresh blood began to drip down her face in places.

  As soon as he was done he dropped what was left of the sleeve onto the ground and began to pry strips of crumpled, piss-stained underclothes from her mouth. She was missing several teeth and two more were badly chipped, a gash splitting her upper lip nearly to the base of her mangled nose. Calvin winced when one of the missing teeth came out of her mouth with a bit of formerly-white fabric, hitting the ground and bouncing away.

  As soon as he’d gotten the first of the fabric out, the woman began to help him, pushing bits towards his fingers with her tongue. She spit out the last piece of fabric along with a second tooth that had been logged against her gum, this one stained with her own wet blood. Lifting her head she bared her remaining teeth and tried to say something, but it had been who knows how long since she’d had any water and instead she began to cough as though hacking up a lung.

  “Don’t try to talk yet,” he warned her. Tipping her head back, he poured a trickle of water into her mouth from his canteen. She swallowed greedily, and after a few gulps he raised a pill to her lips. “This is a medicinal pill formulated for mortals. It will not heal you much, but may numb some of the pain and stop me from making things worse.” He dropped the pill into her open mouth and for a moment she hesitated, poking at the pill with her tongue as he dripped some more water into her mouth, then she resolutely swallowed.

  He gave her two more swallows of water, then pulled the bottle away. Too much would only make her sick. He doubted she’d eaten anything palatable in days. She didn’t protest, her head falling forward limply. She cleared her throat, coughing again, and spit a wad of blood onto the ground just barely missing his foot. “You’re wasting time,” she rasped before breaking into another coughing fit.

  Calvin was taken aback. “I’m trying to save your life,” he told her mildly. “If you’d prefer I didn’t, I can—“

  She forced open her single remaining eye and lifted her head a fraction of an inch so she could look up at his face. It was so bloodshot he wondered if she could ever see through it, and her pupil was huge, a black circle ringed by a thin strip of pale green.

  “What's…left…for…me…?” she asked weakly. “But…they’re going…to…Amber Crossing.” Calvin stiffened. Amber Crossing was another of the ‘larger’ villages in Nine-Pine Gulch, with an estimated population of nearly two-thousand people. And if the map they’d seen at Pine Crossing was anything to go by, it wasn’t all that far from where they were now.

  “How long ago did they leave,” he demanded.

  The woman grinned up at him weakly, letting her eye sink closed. “Hours,” she breathed. “Three? Four? I…hard to…think…" She tried to slump forward, but her still-bound arms pulled her up short. “Hurts,” she mumbled.

  Calvin’s mind raced even as his hand swept through the fabric binding her wrists to the ceiling, shredding it with a burst of metal qi. She toppled like a felled tree and he caught her as gently as he could, doing his best to only put his hands where there was skin remaining without putting too much of her weight on any one part of her body.

  She was right that they were wasting time. The three of them could no doubt move faster than the cultists, but they had a significant head start. It would be a struggle to catch up with them before they reached the village. Images of Wide Hill flashed through Calvin’s mind—the broken gates, the burnt out houses, the faces of the dead. He felt no guilt for their deaths, they did not lie at his feet, but these…

  Her arms had managed to avoid the fate of much of the rest of her body, perhaps out of reach of whomever had worked her over like a knob of ginger, though that didn’t mean they’d come away unscathed. The skin of her wrists was rubbed bloody raw and it looked like something––or someone––had bit off the last two fingers of her right hand. Several of her nails had been torn out, her left thumb was obviously broken, and the limited circulation had certainly done her no favors, but it could have been much worse. At least they were still attached.

  There was no need, nor time, to interrogate the two cultivators. Lulu and Wallis should be done by now and on their way to him. If not, his intervention would seal the Foundation realm demonic cultivator’s fate, especially since they no longer needed to try and take him alive. Then they needed to go. It would be best to cut them off before they reached the village, but if they could not, the less time they had the better. It felt disgusting to wish for something so foul, but Calvin hoped they were intending to use the mortals as sacrifices once again. If so, they would hopefully try to keep them alive while they prepared, not butcher them out of hand.

  One of the crates had the corner of a dress poking out of it, a beautiful affair of pale blue and yellow silk. He kicked the crate over, spilling fine, rumpled clothing all over the dirt, and laid the woman down on the resulting pile. She whimpered in pain, but it was the best he could do. He dropped his canteen on the ground beside her, followed by a small bag of pills.

  “Focus,” he demanded, and she shifted on her makeshift bedding until her face was vaguely facing him. “The pills beside you are suited for mortals, but dangerous if you take too many. No more than three in a day. They will numb the pain, promote natural healing, and stave off infection, but little more than that. Do what you can for the others and do not go anywhere. I will return as soon as I can. Do you understand?”

  “…go.”

  He took a step towards the door, then turned back. “The man won’t move as long as the talisman remains on his forehead. Do not remove it unless he is dead.”

  She did not respond, but something like a smile curled the corners of her lips.

  Calvin glanced back at the other three women. It felt like a crime to leave them like this, but every second he spent comforting them in their final hours was a moment not spent avenging them and stopping anyone else from suffering the same fate. The pill he’d given…he realized he’d never gotten her name…would kick in soon. He trusted she would do what she could.

  What she had to do.

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