19. Into the Dark

Yanli had, like most sane people, avoided getting near the Burial Mounds. Their house was a little less than a li from what could charitably be called the edge of the cursed mountains, and most everyone agreed that was already too close. She thought that for commoners, it was too close, and privately believed that the former residents of the house had suffered a lot of bad luck because of it.

But the house had years of protection layered up throughout it as the four of them improved their knowledge and skill of cultivation, along with the efforts of Xiao Xingchen and Song Zichen when they came through. Wei Ying’s talismans were particularly inventive and strong, while A’Cheng had taken his naturally good sense of taste and turned it to understanding and implementing feng shui in ways that the pragmatic, utilitarian minds of his brothers would never grasp.

Yanli, up until the moment she fled out of the house after A’Yao, had never once even considered getting closer to the Burial Mounds. She assumed it would be a death sentence for her.

She didn’t care.

She was already out of breath by the time they reached the edge of the mountain, where the resentful energy was strong enough to irreparably harm and even kill living things. Only the hardiest, blackest bamboo could thrive there; the trees were sparse and twisted; the noises from the mountain a mix of screeching crows and vultures along with the unnatural sounds of nameless things.

A’Yao pulled up short and Yanli walked up next to him, trying not to wheeze.

“Oh,” she said, wondering why she was surprised. A talisman was stuck to a tree ahead of them, like a beacon. The surrounding area was clear and bright, creating a circle completely free of resentful energy. Here and there a gruesome bone poked up through the dry, grey, crumbling earth, but there was nothing dangerous within the sphere of the talisman’s power. Beyond it, at the edge of its reach, another circle of clear air started, anchored at its center by another talisman.

It was a trail straight up the side of the mountain.

“I will wring his neck,” A’Yao growled. He turned to Yanli. “Stay here. I will go grab them and drag them back.”

“I am going with you.” She took a deep breath and cycled some qi to clear her lungs.

“No.”

“Yes,” she said calmly.

“A’Li—”

“Those are my brothers and I will not leave them there.”

“I will get them and bring them home, I swear to you!” A’Yao, for once, looked genuinely panicked.

She took hold of his hand and started walking forward. He tried to pull her back, but she kept going. His choice was to grab her and carry her back to the house and lock her up, or go with her into the Burial Mounds. They both knew it. She heard him grunt in frustration, but then stepped forward to take the lead.

Far ahead of them, the red lightning continued to spark through the dim, roiling clouds of resentment.

Talisman after talisman cleared the way. Yanli understood why the boys had drugged her and A’Yao, since creating the path had probably taken them most of the night. One of them would have had to play anchor while the other dashed into the dark to set the next talisman and charge it, and it had surely been a drain on their qi. They would have had to gone so slowly to make it so far. Yanli thought it was likely Wei Ying had hoped to be back before she woke up, but the raging storm ahead of them spoke to the fact that their plan had, somehow, gone wrong.

“Why would they do this?” She asked aloud, not expecting an answer.

“Swords.” A’Yao’s expression was grim.

“What?”

“Ying’er never let go of that idea of his, to find masterless swords dropped into the Burial Mounds.”

Yanli gasped, her free hand flying to her mouth. Of course he hadn’t. He had simply put it back of mind, expecting that Song Zichen would bring them swords from Biaxue Temple. But he hadn’t, and then the attack happened, and Lao Wang was murdered in front of them. A’Cheng had even said at the time that if they had spiritual swords, the bandits would not have gotten the upper hand.

Of course Wei Ying would have made a plan for this. Of course A’Cheng would go along with it.

They kept going, faster than it had taken the boys, but the incline became steep very quickly.

“How would they even know where to look?” A’Yao grumbled, side stepping over the boney remains of a hand holding a rusted ax. Yanli worked hard not to focus too much on what she saw littering the ground.

“Ying’er probably just asked,” Yanli said without thinking.

A’Yao stopped dead so fast she bumped into him. He turned to face her. “Go back. Go back, and wait for us at the bottom.” He physically turned her around and pushed her. She reached back and slapped at his arm.

“No!”

“Yanli!” He grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “Think for a second! If Ying’er is connected to the Burial Mounds again, he’s probably suffering a qi deviation by now! When I manage to bring him down you need to be there and ready to help him!”

“You’re just scared he might hurt me by accident!”

“YES!” Meng Yao roared, his anger flaring for the first time in all the years she had known him. “That idiot has messed with powers he doesn’t understand and he could very well kill you! Go back!” He tried pushing her again.

“What about you? What about A’Cheng?”

He stopped, and Yanli knew from the crushed expression he did not manage to cover up quickly enough that he suspected that A’Cheng, if not Wei Ying himself, was already dead.

“No!” She shouted and tried to push him aside. He wrapped his arms around her and held her as she struggled.

“Stop! Yanli, please listen to me!”

They shoved and pulled at each other until Yanli managed to get a lucky move in and unbalanced him. He instinctively let go of her as he fell, and she spun around to start running up the trail again, but then froze, cold horror running through her veins.

“Jiang Yanli!” Meng Yao jumped to his feet, his entire being radiating frustration. He stopped when he looked at her, though, and cocked his head. “What?”

“I don’t think it’s a choice anymore,” she said, holding up a shaking hand to point back down the way they had come. He snapped his head around and looked down the path, and saw that the first talisman had gone dark, and the second one was flickering. Where the light went out, the oily miasma of resentful energy spilled in.

They both started scrambling up the trail. In a distant part of her mind, Yanli knew that if Wei Ying was dead or incapacitated, they would all likely die on the mountain. The Burial Mounds had taken the lives of much more powerful cultivators than any one of them, including her father and his cultivation partner. Yet, she could not prevent herself from hoping that she and A’Yao would reach the boys in time.

She was drenched in sweat and terror by the time they reached the thirty-fourth talisman, which was the end of the trail. There were no more safe oases ahead of them. It was the last talisman the boys had used. It was the nexus of whatever was going on, the red lightning roaring directly over their heads, so thick and loud that she swore she saw a dragon flying through the inky-black clouds.

The boys were nowhere to be seen.

“No!” She screamed at the talisman stuck to the dry, rotten husk of a tree.

Meng Yao stood behind her, slowly turning in a circle. “Wait.”

She bent over and put her hands on her knees, gasping for breath.

“He’s still alive,” Meng Yao said, walking over to her and rubbing her back.

“How do…do you know?” She barely managed to cough out the words.

“Think about it for a second: the talismans are tied to them. Both of them, as far as I can tell. The oldest ones are just running down, they aren’t disconnected.” He waved at the talisman hanging off a tree branch next to her. “This one is as strong as when they first put it up. If they were dead, it would fail.”

She slowly stood up and nodded, staring at the talisman. “But where are they? There aren’t any more after this.”

“No. But there might have been. Maybe they tried the next step up and were incapacitated. Walk around the clearing, look out into the dark.” He pulled them to the edge, and they walked in opposite directions, slowly pacing the edge of the light from the talisman and looking out into the swirling, foggy darkness beyond.

She almost missed it, with all the red lightning still raging overhead. A soft warm glow, like firelight from a cave.

“There! There!” She pointed and A’Yao raced over to check for himself. Then he spun back to the tree, gingerly grabbed the talisman, and slowly returned to her. The circle of clear light and air moved with him.

“Why didn’t they do this?” She asked, grabbing hold of the sleeve of his other arm. They began walking steadily toward the cave. (She hoped it was a cave.)

“They probably did,” A’Yao offered, his jaw clinched. “I think they set the talisman trail on the mountain as a fall back, a way to run for freedom if their plans failed.”

But they hadn’t run. They were still on the mountain.

The resentful energy just past the light roiled around them, as if annoyed that they were temporarily out of reach. They kept their pace slow but steady, not wanting to upset the delicate balance of the talisman and their own qi any further than they had to. It felt like an eternity had passed, but finally they were at the mouth of the cave, where a dim light flickered within.

But it was not a normal cave. It had an ornate, heavily decorated entryway, carved deeply with images of flowers and mythical beasts still visible to the eye despite being worn down by time. Over the arch at the top was a plaque with the name “Demon Subdue Palace” carved in an old, formal calligraphic script that Yanli could barely decipher.

They stood looking at the plaque for a moment. Yanli pulled herself together and finally took a step over the threshold.