Ch. 008| Into the Rift (Part 1)

The instant his foot came down, Lin Que thought he had died.

There was no pain, and no sound. Only the daylight, the waves of grass, the burial mounds around him—like a painting soaked in water, their colors "melting" open, running downward layer by layer. The hemp rope at his waist gave a sudden jerk, as if the other end had been seized by something—he turned his head on instinct, and behind him was a grey he had no words for, a grey in which he could faintly still make out the shadow of the pauper's burial ground, faint as if seen through ten layers of mist.

He was still alive. The rope was still there. With one step, he had crossed into that rift.

In the step that carried him across, there had been no threshold, no boundary line. Yet he felt it plainly: he had fallen out of one world and into another. The air had changed—the air outside was alive, with the smell of grass and the raw scent of earth; the air here was dry, cold, without the faintest smell, and breathed into his lungs it was like breathing in a mouthful of aged ash. He coughed on reflex, and the cough had no sooner left his mouth than this dead stillness swallowed it, leaving not the slightest echo behind.

Inside the rift was another heaven and earth.

To call it heaven and earth was not quite right. There was no daylight overhead, and the "ground" underfoot was not like ground either—it was a slowly flowing grey-white, like mist that had half-congealed and not quite set. Things hung in the air: a section of broken wall, half a table, a single masterless shoe, all suspended in silence, neither falling nor stirring, as if pressed down by some hand.

A stillness like death. So still that he could hear his own heartbeat—thump, thump—striking against his eardrums.

He stood where he was for a long while before he dared to move. The things hanging in the air unsettled him more the longer he looked. In the brick joints of that broken wall there was still embedded half of a talisman, burned through the middle; on that half a table sat an overturned tea bowl, unfinished, the tea long dried into a crust of black grime. These things looked as if they had been wrenched in one pull from some ordinary household in the market town, flung into this dead place, never to return.

A thought rose suddenly in Lin Que: the people "wiped" away by that rift—might they too be in here, hanging in some corner he could not see? The moment the thought came, every hair on his back stood on end.

His left eye had been scorching the instant he came in, scorching until he could scarcely keep it open. But the strange thing was that this time, he could "see" ten times more clearly than outside.

Outside, at that opening, he had only "felt" the wrongness, never made it out clearly; inside the rift, all those "wrong" things showed their shape—

He saw that across this grey-white "ground," here and there, ran many finer rifts. Some of those fine rifts were faint, some thick; the thick ones had edges that gave off the very same "cleanness" as the neat grey mark at the pauper's burial ground.

He understood at once. Those few thick fine rifts were the places that ate people. Step onto them, and a person would, like that grey mark, cleanly and simply be "gone."

Zhou the herb-peddler, the big man, Old Wu—most likely they had been outside the rift, grazed by the "edge" of fine rifts like these. Inside the rift these fine rifts were far denser; one wrong step and not even a corpse would be left.

Scorching. His left eye burned until the tears streamed, the back of the eye as if jabbed again and again with a red-hot needle. He knew this was what Han had meant by "the qi of that place harms people"—yet he also felt, just as plainly, that within this burning his pair of eyes was being forced to see what they had never been able to see before. Like a piece of dull iron thrown into fire: it hurt, and yet it was changing.

It was not only the ground. He swept his gaze up, and between the wrecked things suspended in the air there also drifted fainter rifts, fine as hairs, utterly invisible to the naked eye, showing their shapes one by one only in these eyes of his that burned and wept. The whole rift was packed thick with them; everywhere was death.

For the first time he understood why these eyes had to be scorched into this state at all—in a place like this, a man who could not see these rifts would not last three steps. Forcing him to see was forcing him to live.

He did not dare stop. Han had said: don't linger.

He crouched down, drew the wooden markers from inside his robe, and stuck the first one into the ground beside his foot, then looked back once at that "exit" gone faint and grey, and straightened the hemp rope at his waist. Then, staring at the fine rifts underfoot, he picked the faint ones, the ones that did not give off "cleanness," and edged inward step by step.

Every step was like treading on a knife's edge. Edge forward a step, stick in a wooden marker; edge forward a step, look back to make sure the rope was not snagged. That faint "answering," deeper in, pulsed warm and replied, drawing him onward.

Once, as he lifted his foot to step out, the toe came within half an inch of a fine rift that looked very faint, and his left eye stabbed with sudden agony—faint that rift was, but along its edge it gave off a thread of "cleanness" almost impossible to detect. He forced his foot to a halt, cold sweat running down his spine. Had that step come down solid, he would have been the fourth one here. He changed his route, looped a wide circle, stuck in five or six extra wooden markers, and only so got clear of that one. Han had said not to linger; but in this place, he could only pick, inch by inch, between "fast" and "steady."

When he had edged his way to a spot where half a broken wall hung suspended, he stopped.

Behind the broken wall, the layer of grey-white mist over the "ground" was moving.

It was not the mist moving of itself. Beneath the mist, something was nosing slowly toward him, toward where he stood.

The moment that thing pushed up out of the surface of the mist, Lin Que's breath stopped.

There was no saying what it was. Like an enormous worm, and like a stretch of shadow come to life, its whole body that "clean" grey, with no eyes, no mouth, yet it plainly "knew" he was here—the direction it nosed in was straight toward him. Where it crawled, the layer of grey-white "ground" was plowed open, baring beneath it a black with no bottom to be seen.

That black was blacker than anywhere else in the rift, black enough to have swallowed the light itself. At a single glance Lin Que felt something clutch at his chest, and he could not draw breath. Only now did he understand: the man-eating fine rifts on the ground were, beneath them, all likely joined to a black like this. One pass of this thing was like plowing open a row of deaths in the open street.

On its body, too, there was a "flaw."

Lin Que forced down the agony in his left eye and fixed his stare on the thing. Its whole body was without a fault, save that at the middle of its "trunk" gaped a rift exceedingly faint—that was a flaw on its own body, as if it too were something that had crawled out of some fissure and never grown whole.

That rift opened and closed, and bore, strangely, some resemblance to the flaw on the broken jade far off. A thought flicked through Lin Que's mind: this thing, that jade, and these eyes of his—might there be, among the three, some entanglement he could not put into words? No sooner had the thought risen than he had no time to dwell on it—the aberration had already nosed up close.

He could not beat it. A herb-boy at the third layer of Qi Condensation could not so much as wound a single segment of its "trunk."

But he did not need to fight.

Han's first rule: don't be greedy; talk only once you can get back out. The third rule: keep a way out.

Slowly, ever so slowly, Lin Que backed toward the far side of that half a broken wall. The thing had no eyes; it went by "sense"—sensing breath, sensing movement. He held his breath, pressed himself into the suspended shadow of the broken wall, and did not stir, even forcing that scorching left eye not to blink.

The thing nosed up to the broken wall and stopped. Its eyeless "head" turned slowly toward where he hid.

Lin Que shrank a little further into the shadow of the broken wall, even closing to a slit that scorching left eye that wept tears of blood. What he feared was not the pain; he feared the thing might "sense" the heat in his eyes—these eyes of his had not stopped burning from the instant he entered the rift, and might this heat too be a breath it could smell out?

The aberration's "head" stopped, turned toward where he hid, for a full ten breaths. In those ten breaths Lin Que did not dare let out a single breath, his whole body taut as a fully drawn bow. He even thought of the worst step: should he truly be found out, he would set his teeth and throw himself at it, jabbing a wooden marker into that faint rift of its—whether it could be jabbed through or not was one thing, better than waiting blankly to be plowed open.

Lin Que's heart beat—thump, thump—loud enough that he feared the thing would hear it. He stared at that faint rift on its body, his mind turning fast: that rift was its flaw. Everywhere else on its body was "solid," only that rift was "hollow." If something could be jabbed into that rift—

But there was nothing in his hands, save a sharpened wooden marker.

Just then, the thing suddenly paid him no more mind, swung about, and nosed off toward the source of that "answering" in the deeper reaches.

Lin Que's gaze followed the direction it went—

In the deepest part of the rift, amid a cluster of suspended wreckage, something hung quietly in the air.

That thing was wholly limpid white, faintly giving off light, the very source that had been "answering" his left eye all along. Even across so great a distance, Lin Que could make it out: it was a piece of broken jade. There was a flaw on the jade, and that flaw faced these eyes of his, opening and closing, as if breathing, as if calling to him.

The jade was not large, about half a palm, and within its limpid white there shone, faint and hidden, a thread of living energy, purer and thicker than any pill he had ever mended. Lin Que all but "knew" its use at a single glance—that thread of living energy, if drawn rightly, would be more than enough to mend a flaw in one's cultivation. The wall of the third layer of Qi Condensation, the one he had been stuck against for nearly two years, might just find its answer in this piece of jade.

And the mouth-guarding aberration was crawling slowly toward that broken jade.

Lin Que understood all at once: what that thing guarded was this jade.

To take the jade, he had to get there ahead of the aberration. But the "ground" between the aberration and the jade was thick with rifts, every one of which ate people.

He calculated fast. The aberration crawled slowly, but it went in a straight line, dodging no rifts—it was itself a thing of the rift, and those man-eating fine rifts could not harm it. He, on the other hand, had to loop, to dodge, to stick in a wooden marker at every step. In speed, he was no match for it. But if the aberration reached the broken jade first, then this whole trip, his life along with it, would be wasted for nothing.

He pressed himself into the shadow of the broken wall, his left eye weeping tears of blood, staring at that broken jade that opened and closed, and at the road to it, thick with death.

Retreat—he could still retreat now.

But that faint answering was louder than at any moment before. It told him not to retreat, told him to go over, told him to snatch that jade from the very mouth of the thing that had guarded it who knew how many years.

Lin Que wiped away the tears of blood in his eyes, fixed his stare on the thick rifts underfoot, and began to work out where his first step should fall.

【Ch. 008 End · Inside the Rift】