Volume Two: Mortal World — Chapter Eighty-Eight: A Wind-Swept, Snowbound Night of Murder

The snowfield was bristling with countless arrows, each one trembling ever so slightly in the wind and frost, like a patch of hard, frozen grass.

Yeming Ke, holding the first arrow in an overhand grip, carried A Ru on his back and stood among the arrows strewn across the ground. His gaze was cold as he looked at the armored soldiers, who were so shaken they had nearly gone rigid.

He stepped forward again, moving toward the dense black mass ahead, where soldiers stood with bows or blades in hand, advancing one step at a time.

The soldiers’ eyes were filled with shock and fear. Seeing Yeming Ke closing in once more, they took a cautious step back, then tightened their grips on bows, arrows, and swords alike, and roared in unison.

From behind, archers loosed another torrential barrage, while the blade-wielding soldiers in front surged up with their weapons.

Yeming Ke leaned slightly forward. His originally measured pace suddenly became a burst of speed, each footfall striking the ground like thunder, dragging a soaring white dragon of snow behind him.

The sky itself seemed to fall as arrows rained down. The arrow in his right hand spun once and flashed upward to block; the afterimages of his thrusts stitched together in a mesh, and the crisp ring of arrowheads colliding sounded like a light, floating aria.

A countercurrent was whipped up amid the descending storm, surging back into the dark vault above and cleaving the deluge of arrows in two. Yeming Ke charged through the break and slammed into the crowd.

"Ah!"

A fierce cry, trembling with fear, blocked Yeming Ke’s path. It was the first soldier to stand before him—a young man with a raw, untested face and widened eyes full of panic at the suddenness of it all. Yet even so, he still forced himself to swing his blade at the monster of a boy before him.

"Clang!"

Yeming Ke raised his left hand. His hard fingers caught the blade that came crashing down on him. With a slight turn of the wrist, he snapped the sharp military saber clean in two, the halves flying apart.

Each half reflected the young soldier’s face, stunned beyond belief.

Yeming Ke stepped forward without expression and seized the young soldier by the shoulder with his left hand.

Before the young man could even scream, he was hurled by a monstrous force into the snow several dozen feet away, where he rolled and howled in agony.

"Monster!"

"Demon!"

"The kind of monster the immortals want dead!"

The surrounding soldiers, horrified by what they had just witnessed, shouted in panic.

"Kill this demon!"

"Those who distinguish themselves may be raised to the ranks of the immortal’s own servants!"

A burly man in a commander’s garb roared at the top of his lungs.

"All together!"

"Kill him!"

Under the black vault of heaven, only this one place glowed with fire, where the crowd gathered densely like an ant swarm.

The cries of slaughter rose like tides from every direction. Countless ferocious faces twisted and roared in the flickering torchlight.

Yeming Ke stood in the snow, his face lowered, his eyes closed.

So tired. So tired.

He had to fight the wind, the snow, and the cold. He had to fight the immortals high above. He had to fight these pitiful yet hateful mortals, impossible to define in any simple way.

He was already so, so tired.

Darkness like ink and the dim light before him swayed and turned.

After gathering courage for yet another round, the soldiers came surging at him again, one after another, rasping out savage roars.

Yeming Ke did not open his eyes. He only tightened his grip once more on the single arrow in his hand. Upon that arrow rested the only inch of iron he possessed.

The surging tide struck at him again and again, and Yeming Ke walked forward step by step against the flood of steel and flesh, through blood and snow.

His face remained lowered, yet the arrow in his hand precisely deflected every blade swung at him. It stabbed into wrists, shoulders, thighs, and joints of every soldier who came at him with a sword, leaving behind one fallen soldier after another, each one dropping their weapon and crying out on the ground.

But the blades from all directions around Yeming Ke only grew more intense. Those soldiers, as though stirred by the shrieks of their fallen comrades, became even more frenzied as they threw themselves forward, hacking at him with ever greater madness.

By the time Yeming Ke had advanced no more than ninety feet, he was once again parrying the slashing sabers with his arrow. His right hand, gripping the arrow, trembled faintly, and he lowered his face, breathing out a heavy, weary breath.

Another wave of blades came down on him, the sharp military sabers gleaming with dazzling, chaotic light in the torchfire.

Yeming Ke lifted his eyes, and the glare from the blades left his head slightly dizzy. His heavy breathing was thick with the sweet, metallic scent of blood.

He felt a rising sickness in his stomach, utter exhaustion, and, from the depths of that exhaustion and nausea, an uncontrollable...

Fury.

A fury like magma surging beneath the earth.

Whoosh.

Just after blocking another wave of blades, Yeming Ke’s ear twitched, and his empty left hand moved like lightning to guard behind him.

Sssk!

Blood sprayed from the palm of Yeming Ke’s left hand. Caught off guard, he nearly failed to seize the arrow that had struck with terrifying force. By the time it stopped, the arrow was less than an inch from A Ru’s pale, delicate face.

Slowly, Yeming Ke turned his gaze, cold as ice, toward the source of the arrow. There stood a tall, bearded man holding a hornbow, looking at him with a mixture of fear and disbelief.

Yeming Ke closed his eyes and drew a deep breath.

His left hand moved, and the arrow it held shot through the air.

He turned his head, opened his deep, dark eyes, and the arrow in his right hand drove straight through the hand of a soldier who had been swinging a blade at him.

The soldier whose arm had been pierced by the arrow let out one shriek after another. The others were so startled by his cries that their assault briefly faltered.

And not far away, the burly bearded man with the hornbow did not even have time to scream. Clutching at the arrow that had pierced his throat, he fell stiffly to the ground.

Yeming Ke lifted his eyes and looked straight at the trembling white saber only inches from his face.

"Why..."

Through the blade’s edge, he looked into the eyes on the other side—eyes full of fear, hatred, and pain—and asked softly, with genuine bewilderment:

"Why do you not fear monsters, yet bow and kneel before the immortals, serving as tools in their hands?"

"Is it because..."

He paused, his dazed, lost gaze sinking down from the blade’s edge.

"Do monsters know mercy?"

Thud.

He released the arrow in his right hand and, with a swift reverse grip, tore the white military saber from the soldier’s hand. A flash of white blade ripped through the darkness and vanished.

Yeming Ke stepped forward once more, a blood-red ribbon trailing behind him in the air.

Warm blood splashed across his expressionless face, and his long hair, scattering in strands stained with blood, covered half his face.

He strode toward the terrified soldiers. In his reverse grip now was no longer a single inch of iron, but that sharp long saber, already slick with blood.

Even deeper crimson was flung across the black night.

His face, still lowered, remained expressionless, yet within the eyes fixed on the blood-streaked snow burned a quiet fire of pity and wrath.

I do not know whether you deserve to die.

I only know there was a man who studied in the cold window light for twenty years, wanting to stand before his sovereign and ask why the sovereign revered only ghosts and gods, and never once questioned you, this pitiable mass of living beings.

But he died. He did not die at the hands of the immortals who meant to kill him, but beneath the blades of the very people for whom he felt such pity.

He should not have died.

I only know that the girl on my back is an innocent and pure child. She should not die.

I only know that I have lived in this world and harmed none of you. I should not die either.

I know you may be innocent. I know you may be helpless. I know you may not possess the courage, the wisdom, or the strength to change this world of sickness.

This world beset by immortal calamities, this world where millions seek immortality, this world that worships the immortals yet devours its own, this world darkened by wind and snow.

But such a world... is too ugly.

Too dull, too unfair.

Better to leave it behind. Better to kill them all.

He gripped the blood-soaked hilt in his hand, his gaze weary, pitying, and disgusted.

Behind him, three hundred armored men had already been broken.

Yet before him, most of the soldiers still feared and retreated, though others roared and hurled themselves at him once more.

Every man who charged carried in his eyes a resolute willingness to die, and on every face shone a sacred light.

In the moment they rushed forward, in their own minds, they were glorious warriors resisting demons and monsters, fighting for their families’ wealth and honor.

...

"Heh. This world truly is outrageous."

Far away, atop a cedar tree, two figures stood on the branches. The older one looked toward the slaughter in the firelit distance and laughed madly while shaking his head.

"They fear the immortals who exploit them, yet dare to resist monsters. They seek to kill everything that might be different, anything that could possibly harm them."

"They will even kill those among themselves who dare to resist, because compared with distant and unknowable immortal disasters, these rebels bring them a more direct and obvious harm."

"Truly laughable. Truly exhausting."

"Should we not help him?" Another figure, bearing a heavy greatsword on his back, lowered his head as though unwilling to look at that hellish scene, and asked softly.

"Without entering hell, how can one become a Buddha? Even if he truly is that man, without undergoing the cruelest trial of the mortal world, how could he deserve that sword, how could he bear the burden of the world?"

The old figure gazed at the lonely shape moving through firelight, snow, and blood, and spoke with cold authority.

"Besides, if we step in, some of the friends we are waiting for may not wish to come."

His eyes shifted slowly, sweeping over the vast wilderness beneath the black vault of heaven.

And far from here, upon a towering cliff above a boundless sea, an immortal in flowing white robes, with the bearing of a transcendent sage and the face of a child despite white hair, received a secret talisman letter brought by a disciple beside him.

He closed his eyes and sensed the message contained within.

"Heh." He smiled lightly and opened his eyes, as though receiving some excellent news.

"A Yi, what do you make of this secret letter from the second brother?" he asked the disciple beside him.

Yi Yi’s plain, ordinary face showed no reaction. He merely lowered his head respectfully and said,

"It is strange indeed that two imperial bodies have appeared in such a short span of time. That sword sacrifice also seems rather troublesome. Should this disciple go down the mountain and handle it?"

"Heh. Those two are not the most important matters. The important thing is the third point."

The youthful immortal with white hair and a child’s face smiled faintly and turned his gaze toward the surging, boundless sea below the cliff. In his eyes burned a heat and greed unlike the calm expression on his face.