Book 2: Chapter 28: Five Minutes of Life

Book 2: Chapter 28: Five Minutes of Life

Sen leaned up against the wall and pressed a hand to his side. He could feel warm blood trickling between the fingers. His side wasn’t his only injury. It wasn’t even his worst injury. At least, Sen didn’t think so. It was just the one that hurt the most at that moment. He’d rolled over a table in a desperate bid to avoid an attack and rolled that open wound right over some spilled salt. For something that people sprinkle on their food, it shouldn’t hurt so damn much when it gets into cuts, thought Sen. He thought he might have a minute before something found him, so he pulled out a healing pill from his storage ring and choked it down. In truth, Sen was astounded to be alive at all.

When Boulder’s Shadow released the illusion that Sen had been walking through, the buildings didn’t change very much. They were all still there and intact. There was just a lot more blood on them. The fact that Sen hadn’t seen any bodies was something he was working very hard not to think about much. Of course, that had been made easier to ignore by the absolute horde of spirit beasts that surrounded him. He’d only recognized a handful of them. There was a demon crane perched on top of one building. He spotted a spirit goat like the one he’d fought on the mountain, only this one’s lone metal horn was nearly twice as long as the last one he’d seen. There were even spirit frogs the size of small cows, and spirit oxen that let out moos that shook the earth.

“Oxen!” Complained Sen almost without thought. “Come on! I was nice to one of your mortal cousins not that long ago.”

Complaining or not, Sen wasn’t wasting time. He was getting two cycling patterns up and running even as he prepared to hide. He almost lost the threads of all of those things when the oxen, after seeming to consult with each other, withdrew.

The other spirit beasts started to let out protesting noises at the same time Sen called out a stunned, “Thank you.”

His most immediate problem was that he was bleeding, which would make it very easy for the beasts to track him. He didn’t have the time he needed to staunch the bleeding properly. He racked his mind for something else he could do to obscure that scent. Two ideas came to him. One that was workable and ought to buy him some time. The other one was stupidly dangerous for him if things went wrong but would probably turn out to be a necessity. Because of course it will, he mentally complained to whatever powers might be listening. He started with the less personally dangerous option and cycled up some wind qi. If he was going to bleed, he might as well make it as confusing as possible for the spirit beasts. He gathered up the scent of his own blood with the wind qi and sent it out in every direction. Air and wind qi were more flexible by nature than shadow qi, more prone to going everywhere, which dramatically enhanced the range of that technique.

He heard startled roars and shrieks and a lot of other noises he vaguely recognized as similar to sounds he’d heard on the mountain. The good news was that the sounds were now going in every direction. Thinning out the enemies could only work to his advantage. As a group, he had no chance of defeating them. Most of them weren’t foundation formation stage, at least not that he could tell. But they didn’t need to be. If they worked as a group, they could drag him down by sheer weight of numbers. He could only switch qi types so fast, which meant he could only defend against so many things at once. That was without even considering the physical advantages that the spirit beasts had. Even if he was on their level or close to it in terms of physical strength and speed, he couldn’t fly. He didn’t have teeth or claws. He didn’t have a poisoned bite and probably a bunch of other things he wasn’t even considering. No, he needed to keep them separated out. If he only had to face a few at a time, there was a chance he could make it to the wall. If he could make it to the wall, there was a good chance he could make it over the wall. He checked his dantian and had to reassess that prediction.

He’d burned through a lot of qi just getting himself away from them long enough to confuse the issue. Sen tried to figure out how long ago that initial confrontation with the spirit beasts had been. His heart fell. By his estimation, all of his antics and burning through around half of his qi reserves had only bought him an extra five minutes of life. He leaned his head back against the wall and searched for hope or wisdom in his memories. To his surprise, he found some.

“You’re going to face overwhelming numbers,” said Uncle Kho. “It happens to every wandering cultivator sooner or later. I’m hoping it will be later for you, but it will happen. What you need to understand is that what kills most cultivators when facing overwhelming numbers isn’t the actual numbers. It’s the fact that it’s mentally overwhelming as much as it’s physically overwhelming. Your mind wants to fixate on the size of the problem instead of generating solutions. If you can survive the initial contact, though, then it’s just like any other task. Break it up into pieces. What’s the biggest threat to your survival? Deal with that first.”

“The birds,” whispered Sen. “I need to deal with the birds first.”