15. The Attack

“Hello, Miss! Is it just you and your brothers here?” The man in front asked jovially, standing right in the middle of the open gate to the siheyuan. He had a cracked tooth and while his clothes were of decent quality, they had been worn hard for a while. Yanli wondered if they were on the run.

He spotted Lao Wang hobbling over. “And grandpa?” His grin was mean and sharp. Lao Wang squinted at him, sizing him up with a sneer.

“If you want some food, best head back to town,” A’Cheng snapped at them, bristling with hostility.

“Now, now, young master, is that any way to speak to your elders?”

“Yeah, DiDi, can’t you see these are fine upstanding gentlemen who deserve respect?” Wei Ying said with a shit eating grin. Yanli wanted to strangle both of her brothers, just a little bit, for stirring the waters. On the other hand, she did not think there was a way to make things worse. These men did not look like they left witnesses behind.

The man sighed heavily, as if the weight of the world was on his shoulders. "We just need you to cooperate, young miss.”

“You are not welcome here,” she said, squaring her shoulders. A’Cheng and Ying’er shuffled closer to her, bunching up their muscles like guard dogs (not that she would ever make the comparison where Ying’er could hear…ironically).

“Can’t say we didn’t try to be nice about this.” He waved his men into the courtyard, and sauntered in after them. He stepped aside and backhanded Lao Wang, who crumbled to the ground without a sound.

Wei Ying and A’Cheng closed ranks in front of her, but even as strong cultivators, they were too young and too outnumbered. She tried running to the kitchen, where at least she could get a knife to fight with, but was easily grabbed around the waist and swung up over a shoulder like a bag of rice. Unfortunately, it gave her a good view of the courtyard, where her brothers had turned into tiny tornadoes of violence. Their martial art forms were good and they were mindbogglingly fast, but it was a melee, not a supervised spar, and they were outclassed by men who were older, bigger, more experienced, and far, far more ruthless.

By the time Yanli found herself tied to the pear tree, A’Cheng was knocked out and Wei Ying trussed up like a goose and gagged. She thought it was a miracle they weren’t dead already.

“Cultivators, huh? Would have been nice to know. They run away from a sect or something?” The man who had taken the brunt of Wei Ying’s incandescent berserker rage winced as one of his comrades fixed up an arm sling for him after resetting his dislocated shoulder. That still left an ear half torn off and, from the way he limped, an injured leg.

“Nah,” the leader shook his head. “If they did, they’d have spiritual weapons. Probably paid a rogue cultivator to teach them some tricks. Not our problem. Turn the place over, grab what you want!” At his word, most of the other men started ransacking Yanli’s home. She refused to cry.

“What about her?”

“Young, and pretty enough. Might be able to sell her for a good penny.”

“That’s not why we’re here and you know it.”

The other guy shrugged, smiling.

“Oh, you want her. Okay. Once we’re done we’ll dispose of the boys and have some fun.”

Yanli’s blood went cold, and Wei Ying started screaming into his gag.

“Hey, that one is as pretty as she is,” another guy called out from the porch, holding a bag filled with goods and pointing at A’Cheng. “Don’t throw him out just yet.”

“You’re a sick man. Drag him into one of the rooms and close the door if you want a to do that.” The leader did not seem too bothered by the suggestion, though. “We don’t want to be here too long, though.”

“You never let me have any fun,” the other man said with a vile smirk.

Wei Ying went quiet. Yanli looked over at him and saw him wriggling around like an anxious worm, but it was a fruitless endeavor in her opinion. Time was running out, and no one was coming for them.

She felt herself sinking into shock as she watched the bandits destroy her home and leer at her every time they passed by. She and her brothers would die here after suffering unspeakable acts of violence. She regretted her spirit-calming ceremony, wishing instead that she could come back as a fierce ghost and kill those criminals.

Meng Yao would come home to a dead family. Tears welled up in her eyes again, even as rage coursed through her body. She suddenly understood why A’Cheng cried whenever he got angry—the emotions were overwhelming.

“What are you doing, kid?” One of the bandits said from where he was standing in the kitchen doorway, looking over at Wei Ying. Yanli followed his gaze and saw her brother holding a rock up in both of his hands, as if getting ready to slam it down on the rock under it. His expression was the one he always wore when he was caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to, made macabre by the gag and the blood dripping down into his eyes.

The lead bandit started to walk over, but stuttered to a stop, his eyes wide with shock. He looked down to see the end of Lao Wang’s cane sticking out of his chest, then fell to his knees and toppled over, well and truly dead.

Lao Wang was up in a crouch, his arms still held out from throwing the cane like a cultivator would throw a spear. He stared at Wei Ying, his eyes clearer and more alert than they had been in over a year. “Do it now, Ying’er! Now!”

His yell was cut short by the sword of one of the other bandits slicing deep into his chest. Yanli screamed.

The clank of rocks hitting together should not have caught her notice, but it did, and drew her up short. The noise was hollow and loud, more like a massive drum being hit. It seemed to pull all the sound out of the air.

Yanli turned to look at Wei Ying again. The grin behind his gag was unmistakable. He had slammed the rock in his hands down on the other rock, and was feeding the rock pile his qi.

“Hey—” Before the man who had killed Lao Wang could finish, an array exploded under their feet, the lines and circles stretching out through the entire siheyuan, along with a crooked set of lines and seal script heading straight through the back of the main hall directly towards the Burial Mounds. The whole array lit up more like lava than sunlight, dark edges crackling with bright orange power. Too much power, Yanli realized. Wei Ying did not have that much strength. The only cultivator who might was Xiao Xingchen, who…

“I can see the array you put in.” He pointed at some rocks scattered around.

Wei Ying paled. “Um.”

“Ying’er?” Yanli turned to him. “What array?”

Xiao Xingchen laughed. “I see.”

She gasped. She felt the instinctive need to warn the men around her of the danger, but bit down on her tongue. Whatever Wei Ying had set up, it was meant to protect his family and his home. What those men were doing, what they had done, what they planned to, was on their own heads.

A black miasma rose out of the lines of the array, dark oily nets of resentful energy that ensnared the men and started strangling them, crushing them, ripping them apart. The screams hit a second later when all the bandits throughout the siheyuan realized what was happening. The man who had killed Lao Wang was obviously a very experienced fighter and was successfully slashing at the strands of resentment with his sword, at least for the moment.

But just as her boys had been outnumbered and overwhelmed earlier, the bandits were outnumbered and overwhelmed by the strangling threads of power pulled directly from the Burial Mounds. Their deaths were not kind or swift, but inevitable. She thought she could feel their very souls being dragged down into the array and off to the Burial Mounds.

When Wei Ying turned off the key by knocking over the stones, the array winked out and the resentful energy went with it. The resulting silence was absolute, not even their chickens clucking or insects humming. Yanli could see that behind and above her, the once-beautiful peach tree had atrophied and now looked like it had been dead for years.

“What the fuck?” A’Cheng, who had woken up at some point, was propped up on his elbows, staring around him at the carnage. Blood trickled down his hairline, and one of his legs was bent wrong at the knee, but he ignored that. “What the fuck, Wei Ying?” He shouted.

A murder of crows screamed from outside the siheyuan and spun in flight toward the direction of the Burial Mounds.

Wei Ying, still gagged and still smiling, his eyes deep blood-red and shining bright like sparks of fire, shrugged with a muffled giggle and then passed out completely.