Ch. 010| Out of the Rift

The last point of light in his left eye was about to go out.

The aberration slid closer and closer. Lin Que hauled himself toward the exit along the hemp rope; the path he'd marked with wooden splints had been churned into chaos, and all he could do was rely on the scrap of sight he had left to find footing among the tangled rifts and fight his way through. That faint, ashen-gray light at the exit drew near—but the thing was nearer still. The blackness it dragged behind it had already pressed up against his heels.

He could feel the cold of that blackness pressing in. It was a cold that wiped footprints, wooden splints, and men alike clean away, nothing like the cold carried on the wind. A single instant's delay, and that cold would creep up over his ankle, then his knee, then his waist—and then he would be gone, cleanly, like Old Wu, like Zhou the herb-peddler.

And in that very moment, his left eye went wholly dark.

He could see nothing at all.

The man-eating hairline rifts underfoot, the aberration behind, the exit ahead—all of it sank into a single blackness. Lin Que's heart dropped. With his sight snuffed out, he was a blind man in this killing ground, and the next step he took would either land in a rift or be plowed open by that thing.

He halted half a step.

That half-step was the last thing his whole body was able to do. Forward was death; standing still was death too. The aberration's cold had already climbed to his ankle.

And in the dead stillness of that half-step, the point of pain beneath his left eye, scorched past all endurance, suddenly seemed to be torn open from within—and a "clarity" he had never known before came welling up through that opening.

In the darkness, he "saw."

First a single point, then a swath, and then the whole "shape" of that killing ground lit up line by line beneath his closed eyes, ten times, a hundred times clearer than anything he had seen the whole way in with his eyes open. His eyes were shut, yet he "saw" more clearly than when they were open.

Those eyes, in the instant they were burned through, had been forcibly tempered once by the qi of this killing ground. Like a rusted, blunted blade pressed into fire and then plunged hard into water—the pain of it nearly knocked him out; but once the pain had passed, that edge was open.

Looking back on this moment later, he always felt it was less a matter of "seeing" than that these eyes had been "ground" over once more by that killing-ground qi—ground away the indissoluble crawling blur that had clouded them whenever he looked at living things, laying bare what had always been there beneath, what had simply never been lit.

Every man-eating hairline rift underfoot, the gradations of "cleanness" along its edges—all clear and distinct; and the aberration behind him, in all the gray of its body, that rift across the midsection of its "body" shone like a white thread in the dead of night.

That rift was its vital gate. Before, he had only made out that it was "hollow"; now he could see exactly where the rift ran, how deep it went, and when it would "open." Earlier, crouched behind a broken wall, he had dared only to wish vainly, if only there were something to jab into that rift; now that rift had turned from a wish into a way out he could lay hold of.

The aberration lunged.

That rift across the midsection of its "body" gaped open in the instant it lunged—this was its weak point when it exerted force. Before, he hadn't been able to see it clearly; now he saw it plain.

Lin Que did not retreat. Retreat—he couldn't; behind him was the exit, but that thing was faster than he was. Skirt around—he couldn't; it blocked the way between him and the rope. The only way out left to him was that rift glowing beneath his eyes.

He gripped a sharpened wooden splint backhanded, and using the force of the thing's lunge, drove the splint hard into that gaping rift.

His strength was not great, but that one thrust struck the very spot it most needed to strike.

The instant the splint sank in, the aberration jerked as though seized by its mortal point, its whole "body" snapping in on itself, giving off a "shudder" that made no sound yet jolted Lin Que's scalp till it felt it would split. The blackness it dragged behind it broke apart, collapsed, and poured backward into the rift on its own body.

Lin Que too was jolted by that "shudder" till the world went black before him; he staggered back two steps, a sweetness rose in his throat, a mouthful of blood surged to his lips, and he forced it back down. That one thrust had not been without cost—the backwashing force shot back up the splint into his arm, and half of it went numb in an instant, all feeling gone.

But the thing had no attention left to spare for him.

Lin Que did not dare look a second time. With these newly gained "eyes," he picked out the threads of solid ground between rift and rift and, following the hemp rope, fled for the exit for all his life.

That faint, ashen-gray light at the exit drew near, nearer—

He flung himself headlong out.

That last step, his whole body lunged out. The edge of the rift behind him grazed his rear heel, shaving off a layer of the sole, and along with it the bit of mud stuck there—cleanly gone. Half a step slower, and what was gone would have been his foot.

Daylight, the smell of grass, the raw reek of earth—all of it came slamming back at once.

Lin Que pitched forward into the wild grass of the pauper's burial ground, gulping for breath, breathing till it tore at his chest. The hemp rope at his waist still ran back to that unseen rift behind him; with trembling hands he undid the knot, then crawled back a few more steps, crawling until he reached a place he reckoned safe, and only then slumped down.

He had come out alive.

He lay in the grass a long while without moving, feeling as though the strength in his whole body had been drained away along with that rift. The wind of the pauper's burial ground blew over, carrying the raw reek of earth and the smell of grass—the smell of the world of the living, and never had any moment made it feel so solid and real to him as now.

Against his chest, the broken jade and the lump of rift crystal were both still there.

So was the cost. His left eye burned and stung; a swipe of his hand came away covered in blood; the socket felt as though a piece had been scooped out, and for an instant things doubled when he looked at them. What Han Bosheng had said—that the qi of that place wounds you, wounds the places you can't see—he had now learned it in full. The breath of qi in his dantian sank heavily, heavier than the qi-sinking, as though pressed down a notch by the qi of that killing ground.

He made a rough reckoning: this trip, his qi was wounded, his eye was wounded, half his arm was still numb, and at the least he'd need ten days or half a month to recover. But measured against the three rogue cultivators who had died cleanly in there, this little hurt of his was found money. Of the three life-saving words Han Bosheng had given him, he hadn't dropped a single one—and only so had he taken back this life.

But he couldn't spare the time to nurse his wounds. He propped himself up and tried to open his left eye.

The grass, the earth, the rotting wood of the pauper's burial ground looked no different than before he'd gone in.

But an early-rising sparrow alighted on a toppled gravestone not far off.

Lin Que looked over.

The heat beneath his left eye had not yet dispersed. With this one look, he actually "saw" the thing in that sparrow's body—an old wound on its left wing, the sinews knit unevenly, so that when it took flight the left side would lag half a beat behind the right. That was the "flaw" in a living creature.

He froze.

He tried looking elsewhere: a beetle crawling through the grass, a crack running across its shell; a half-withered tree in the distance, a rotted patch at its root. Before, all these living things had been nothing but a crawling blur in his eyes, never clear; now, those flaws, one by one, rose up before him, distinct as a Death-Black Pill had once been.

Before he went into the rift, these eyes of his could only see the flaws of dead things: the flaw in a pill, the flaw in a talisman, the flaw in a broken formula. Living men and living things, looked at, were nothing but a crawling blur.

Now, he could see the flaws in living things.

The qi of that killing ground had burned through these eyes of his and forced them up a level.

He sat in the grass, slowly digesting the matter. Able to see the flaws of dead things, he had used it to mend pills, to mend broken formulas, and had scraped by these years; now he could see the flaws of living things too—where a man's cultivation method was stuck, where his meridians were wounded, where the heat in a pill furnace ran wrong, all of it he would be able to make out from here on. What these eyes could do was, by more than a single turn, greater than before he had gone into the rift.

But he also dimly sensed that this "rise" had not come for nothing. The qi of that killing ground pressed down in his dantian, heavy and dense, as though something had been buried there that he could not yet make out.

He bowed his head, closed his eyes, and turned these newly tempered eyes upon his own body.

The flaw in his cultivation method, the one that had stuck him for close to two years, the one that had been nothing but a crawling blur however he had looked at it before—the flaw of the minor meridian below his left rib, the wound the Breathing Scroll had jolted open—this time, its outline grew clear, little by little.

That flaw had nothing to do with his root-bones, nothing to do with how diligent he was or wasn't. It was that one stretch of the Breathing Scroll, where someone had cut away the brushwork's intent, that made his qi, the moment it ran to the top of the third layer, slam into a wall with no door. Before, he had only known the wall was there, but could never find the gap in it; now he saw it—the gap was in the latter stretch of that minor meridian below the left rib, in the wound that had been jolted open there.

He still couldn't see all of it. But for the first time, he "saw" where that flaw of his grew.

And against his chest lay a piece of broken jade, its breach answering to him, its living qi pure and rich.

There was a flaw in his body; against his chest was something that could mend that flaw.

Lin Que clutched the jade against his chest, his heart pounding hard. But he did not set to it at once—his eye was wounded, his qi had sunk, and to recklessly draw the living qi from the jade to mend the flaw now, if it failed, would only wound him a layer deeper instead. The matter of breaking the wall would have to wait until he was back, the door shut, his eye healed—then he would speak of it.

He braced himself and stood, and step by step inched toward the market town.

With every step he inched, the breath of sunken qi in his dantian dragged at him till the world went black before his eyes. He walked very slowly, skirting the main road, picking only the empty little lanes—for fear of running into someone he knew in this state. A pill-boy coming back from the pauper's burial ground west of the city at first light, his left eye streaming blood, walking unsteadily—anyone who saw it would grow suspicious. Black Wind Hall was still hunting him, the Xuanzhao Sect was still watching those few strange deaths; in such a state, he could not show himself in the slightest.

What he had carried out alive was a piece of jade, a lump of rift crystal, and two things he had never had before: for the first time he had seen his own flaw clearly, and for the first time he held in his hand something that could mend it. The wall that walled off cultivation had never been so near as now.

He wiped the blood from his left eye and took one last look at the stretch of empty waste behind him. The man-eating rift was still there, and others still could not see it. But from this day on, the eye with which he looked at that rift was no longer what it had been before he went in.

He turned, and cast that rift, that pauper's burial ground, and the life he had taken back on this trip all behind him, and limping, made his slow way toward the market town.

【Ch. 010 End · the pauper's burial ground west of the city】