Tian didn’t breathe. Digging the deepest hole he could was more important than breathing. He could hold his breath for a long time. Not as good as his brothers with a turtle breathing technique, but it would be enough for now. His rope dart couldn’t shift much dirt as it looped around him. He didn’t have the vital energy to muscle it around at high speed either. All he could do was keep the rope moving in a loop, shifting from side to side as it brought sand from under him and dumped it on top of him.

It was slow going. Very slow. Still, every minute that he wasn't ripped apart by tens of thousands of venomous Gu was another minute for something life saving to occur.

So he kept digging, and reminding himself that even if he was buried alive, he wasn’t really trapped. Not like when he was little, and a trash heap slid over him and he nearly suffocated as the water started rising around where he was entombed. It cost him more than a layer of skin to escape. But he did escape. He survived the junkyard. He would survive this too.

Even if he could hear the junkyard around him. Even if the dry desert sand started smelling like rotting food and stagnant water. He survived that for years. This? This was nothing.

He felt like he was drowning. It wasn’t the sand- he realized with growing horror that his throat was slowly sealing up and his lungs were filling with liquid. The poison and the disease. It was working more slowly, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t working at all. He couldn’t keep digging without Snake Head Vine Body. But he was going to die if he didn’t use Advent of Spring. He had a feeling he wasn’t very deep. However deep it was, it would have to be enough.

He dithered a moment- the point of burying himself was making sure no insects could crawl their way to him, which meant being completely sealed off from the surface. On the other hand, he hadn’t progressed so far in the art that he could breathe through his pores. He needed fresh air. With a little whine of frustration, he sent his rope dart burrowing upwards, twisting slowly through the loose sand until the tip just broke the surface. Five feet. He thought he was deeper.

If he retracted his rope, the sand would cave in again. If he didn’t, he still couldn’t breathe. He whined again, even more sincerely. He flexed his dwindling vital energy, and made the barbs project out as far as they would stretch. It wasn’t very much air that could make its way past all those barbs and all that sand. It was more than none. It would be good enough. Better still, no bugs would make it to him either.

Tian dropped into the cultivation art as easily as his own natural breath. It had almost become his natural breathing pattern, the flow of qi through his body had long since become effortless. Trapped alone, in the dark, with a Heavenly Person heretic on the prowl, there was nothing to do but sink into meditation. Slow breath in, then out again. Then in.

He imagined he was a tree. Just like Brother Fu had told him, and like the author of the art wanted. He was like a seed buried in the soil. His roots stretched down, holding him in place despite the wind and rain. Then he grew. He was born with a wisp of prenatal qi, and that energy was enough to let him germinate, to drive his stretching limbs and push him to reach for the heavens. Taking the heavenly blessings and refining them into his body. Creating more energy within him. Letting his roots spread further, so that he could reach higher and withstand greater winds.

Brother Wong had patiently taught him about yin and yang, and the five elements. Wood was powerfully yang, growing from yin water, but earth? Earth was the center. It was the point of balance between the five elements, between yin and yang. The earth accepts all things and nurtures seeds- yin. But it is also the soaring mountains and exploding volcanoes- yang. Tian liked that. He was planted in the Temple, but reaching upwards into the wide blue sky.

Dull thuds came through the ground. He tried not to pay attention to them. He just breathed and let the vital energy pour through the strange statue in his lower dantian, then spread out through his body again. For the first time, he really paid attention to how the arts worked together to heal and repair his body.

The flesh knitting together was obvious, but the way the energy moved through it and seemed to sink into the material of his body was… he didn’t have the language to describe it. The best he could come up with was when you stuck a stick into a pond. You knew you put it in straight up and down, but when you looked closely, it looked like it had gone crooked once it got to the other side of the surface. Then you pull the stick out, and it’s all straight.

The poison was rapidly coming under control. The antidote did most of it, his body and Advent of Spring quickly handled the rest. The curse energy was long gone, as was the disease. All that remained was the gross damage. And that would take time.

“Got you!”

Tian froze for a moment, thinking he was discovered. Then there was a dreadful rumbling and shaking through the sand. The Heavenly Person Gu Master must have found whatever was buried under the caravan trail. A noise- a deep basso bellow at the low end and a sharp scream on the high end. An animals’ fury expressed across the entire audible range in a single voice.

“Fight. Fight! The more you tire yourself out, the more easily you will break for me!” There was a thrashing, bellowing noise. He could hear a bell ringing, a mournful sound, muffled, as though it was coming from underwater. Whatever the heretic was wrestling with bellowed even louder.

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“That’s it. That’s it. Ah, buried here for centuries, slowly growing in power- did you ever think that one day, you would become a Gu? Did you ever imagine that all that effort and accumulation would be for me? Does that infuriate you? Do you have enough consciousness to understand my words, to understand what your life will be from now on? You won’t even be a slave. I’ll wipe away that little bit of a mind you have formed. You will be my weapon. Used until you are discarded for something better.”

The heretic’s voice spilled out, humiliating and taunting. The sound of him was disgusting. Tian felt an instinctive need to scrub his skin with the rough desert sand just to get the feeling of the voice off of him.

“Better give it your all. Better fight with every scrap of strength you have. You will never have another chance to defy me. Fight. FIGHT!”

Tian swore that if he was discovered by the senior, he would destroy his head before letting himself be captured. His brothers kept saying that in eighteen years, he would be a good man again and risking them being wrong sounded a lot better than whatever the heretic would do to him.

The polytonal screams of the beast got more desperate. The thuds and thrums got louder.

“Do you feel it, beast? Do you feel yourself teetering on the edge of despair? Your strength is weakening. This is it. Your very last chance. It all ends now if you don’t escape.”

There was a hissing sound, like rain falling on sand that grew into a steady drumbeat of heavy monsoon rains on a tile roof. There was another scream, but this time it was the heretic.

“WHO DARES?!”

“Die!” The voice sounded familiar.

“Courting death!”

There was an explosion of sound, clashing blades, insect screams, the thrum of a bowstring. The bell chimed again, more quickly and urgently.

“No! NO! Not after so long!” The heretic sounded pained.

There was a long pained multi-tonal scream, then a sudden thunder of many legs running.

“Ah, damn you!” He knew that voice. It was Martial Uncle Ku.

“AHAHAHA! You thought you could play the fisherman, but the fish broke the nets.”

“I’ll catch it as soon as I collect your head! It will be twice the joy.”

“Will you? I think not. By the way, your juniors died most pitiably.”

“Twenty two Level Ten disciples in exchange for the head of Heartbreak Worm Zhu? They didn’t die in vain. And they are waiting for you on the road. Die for me!”

“Ahahaha! Try and catch me then.”

“Bastard!” The voices shot off into the distance. Fast. Impossibly fast, like comets streaking, leaving behind a tail of maddened laugher and curses.

Tian lay still, breathing. He really, really focused on the breathing. It was all a trap. A multilayered trap. Martial Uncle Ku knew something was hiding near the ambush site. Maybe he knew about Heretic Zhu coming, or maybe the battle would have woken up whatever it was. Hell, perhaps it was the Martial Uncle that arranged the mission. He had three potential profits- the caravan, if nothing was actually buried here, whatever was buried here if Heretic Zhu didn’t turn up, and all three if he did.

All it cost was the life of twenty two juniors who would never join the Inner Court, and two kids who he didn’t know from a hole in the ground. And even if they did have backing and prospects of joining the Inner Court, so what? He was alreadyin the Inner Court. The dead volunteered for the mission, knowing full well the risks. Their life and death had nothing to do with him. Tian could see the logic. He understood it perfectly. The black ball of hate in his chest felt like it was growing to the point where it would burst out of him.

Heart demon. He could see it now. It really did feel like his heart was an egg yolk within the tarry hate. His body was incubating a demon.

He didn’t move. Who knows if one of those seniors would double back? He just stayed low like a dead rat and healed. The sun rose, shining down on utter carnage. He heard scavengers starting to approach. It would be a mess of predators up there soon. He… didn’t want to see his brothers and sisters defiled.

His wounds were healed enough for him to move. Tian barely hesitated.

The hate in him was so strong, he was almost lightheaded. How? How could anyone do this to their brothers and sisters? How? He might want to kill Sima, but it was self defense. Sima was a petty man, but that pettiness made him somehow more understandable. Ku wasn’t petty. He was calm, foresighted, and carefully calculated the costs and benefits. From the Monastery’s perspective, he might be completely correct.

Tian got to the surface. The ground was littered with thousands of little holes, each melted half a foot into the ground. Must have been whatever Martial Uncle Ku’s opening move was. Scorpions had come to investigate, and were already tearing apart the bodies of the horses. The stupid things were going for the biggest food first. He cleared them out quickly. It’s not that he was much stronger than he had been when he first encountered the giant scorpions. He was just vastly more used to fighting them.

Cleaning the battlefield was tedious and unpleasant, but it didn’t shake his heart. He had never been bothered by handling corpses, but nobody enjoys putting their hands in gore. He carefully collected his brothers and sisters rings on a separate string and wore it as a necklace under his robes. Their bodies he stowed in his ring, to be properly cremated back at the Depot.

The heretics were handled with a bit more caution. Tian used his rope dart to drag them into a big pile and covered the whole thing in Gu bane powder. He had been issued entire sacks of it. He thought the hospital was being unreasonably cautious. It seems his seniors knew much better than he did what to expect.

He was right to be cautious. The heap shook itself apart with all the desperately escaping Gu burrowing their way out of corpses. None made it out alive. Once he was certain everything was good and dead, he looted them too. Then he worked his way through every wagon, searched every mortal body, smashed the wagons into quite fine splinters, found every hidden compartment… everything of value was taken. Everything.

He would bring it all back, and make sure his brothers and sisters' wills were honored, and their heirs got every spirit crystal they were owed. There was just one complicating wrinkle. One body was missing.

“Sister Hong… where are you?”