Hao lurked in the trees, listening for the sounds of the conflict. The best information he got was a finger point from Shiyin, but the gesture was short of anything but a general direction.

  It wasn’t a difficult search. There were a few distractions; more people than he left the camp to join the fight or loot the dead.

  Hao knocked out the people who followed. A small mercy that didn’t cost him, and for a friendly service, he took a small payment of the Day-Night Amethysts inside their bag. It was a good haul.

  “This makes going into the mountain seem like a waste of time…” Hao spoke to one of the many unconscious forms that were creating a line behind him. It was the woman from the mine. The same one that had been scowling at him since he first met them days ago now. He dragged the unconscious woman to her group of friends, who moved together, all of them now taking a peaceful nap instead of joining the bloodbath.

  “An occasional good deed doesn’t hurt,” Hao said, as he broke into the woman’s holding bag and took his due. It was a slow process, but he was getting good at it after a dozen or so people. Of course, he never took more than his due. Not that he had any interest in their molding rations, meek amounts of water, and strange treasure that seemed to have little more purpose than to shine light.

  The line of people stopped after the group of women. Other camps were too far away, or the rumor hadn’t traveled to them. As for the other people in the camp, most of them were like Qin Shiyin. It seemed foolish to them to join the skirmish.

  Hao thought it was ridiculous too, but he poured fuel on the conflict, and for a purpose. He used the pointed-out direction and the heading the unconscious Cultivators traveled in to pinpoint where the ambushes had taken place.

  Half of the morning had already passed, and the sun spun golden rays of midday light before Hao found the first sign of life. That sign came in an explosion of emotion.

  A tall man, dark in hair and blue in eyes as the land people were, ground the top of his head against the sharp bark of a tree; he wasn’t alone. Back and forth, his head shook in a desperate no, as he stared down.

  In his arms, a woman as still as a stone.

  Her features were similar to the man’s—dark hair, and a white cloak that shone with pristine fur untouched by dirt and dust at the shoulders and neck.

  Hao couldn’t see her face. He didn’t need to, not to know what he already did; his stomach felt hollow and his chest empty, which already confirmed it for him. Stunned and still, Hao could only watch as the pit in his body slowly filled with both heat and cold like ice. The numb warmth in his sight fought the numb cold in his bones.

  Did I… he asked as he watched from the trees.

  Tears. Tears like painted droplets ran down the man’s face, as blood sprang from his head. His face shifted to rage, “Those little fuckers,” he swung the sword in his right hand in a wild circle, then his lips flipped, his expression going back to despair. His left arm wrapped around the limp woman’s back and shook her. “If… If he hadn’t ambushed us… Why? We aren’t even… they said he wanted the weak and injured first. I should have known…” He tried to whisper, but his expression bounced. Tears, then killing intent, back and forth as he dug his knee into the ground. “If I were there with you after he came for us.”

  Hao blinked before he saw anymore, before he heard anymore. They weren’t bold or skilled or anything of the like; they probably weren’t part of Meng Hongyu’s group, they were just people in the same robes, in the same cloak. When he opened his eyes again, the man was marching forward, sword brandished.

  A weak man walking forward towards death, for a revenge that cannot be had. You could save him. Hao gulped the thought down and walked silently forward. The shouts of many echoed through the orange-leafed trees around him. People at battle, others grieving for the dead. There were not many, but enough, enraged men roared like dragons, enraged women cried out phoenix songs.

  Hao couldn’t help but stop. The pool of blood drew a line in front of him, and he could see still fingers in the corner of his vision. A glance at the woman turned into a stare.

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  She wasn’t beautiful. Not ugly either, thick eyebrows and soft lips that had a natural pout, but her lips had turned white. Her eyes, too. They would have been a colorful blue, but a mute gray was painted over them. Her back was slumped against a tree, bending her spine, and making messy hair hang like willow branches. Though the small pendant of a turtle with big eyes made her seem playful, and for a moment, Hao fully understood why the man was in tears. The sun shone between the trees, and her skin lost more color after each breath he took.

  Below the silver swinging turtle on her neck was a hole, no larger than two fingers, draining her of color.

  Hao felt something building in his throat. His mouth was dry, and he was swollen. “Wait…” He whispered to nothing, to the nothing around him, and everything heard.

  His knees suddenly felt weak. One of his hands gripped his stomach, the other the ground as he leaned forward, his head nearly clattering with the fallen branches. There was something inside of him trying to crawl out, it hollowed his stomach, his chest, now it was stuck in the back of his throat, lingering on the base of his tongue.

  I didn’t do it, and I won’t be blamed for this. Hao knew he could not control the actions of every other person in the realm. Still, the thought that he rekindled Mo Bangcai’s rampage wouldn’t leave him. He was the one who killed the injured. That made Mo Bangcai target the weak in an act of revenge. Droll dripped from his face to his fingers, and in what seemed ages, he felt the starving hunger that haunted him back in the Mining Division of the Drifting Stream.

  As he looked down, Hao heard the man who was marching forward towards the battle shouting.

  “I have to kill them!” The man’s voice echoed. “I won’t spare a blade of grass on that mountain, every beast, young and old! I’ll burn every chicken and dog on that cursed mountain.” His words were no longer cries, not cries with tears.

  He is talking about the Drifting Stream Sect, where Meiqi and Zhengqi are. It reminded Hao what kind of people Cultivators were, what kind of people everyone in the Secret Realm was. Their eternal struggle for life and power. Where power lets you thrive and rule over others while they struggle to survive.

  Such as what is written in the book he found in the Spirit-Holding bag, “You cannot fight the stream as it takes you to the other shore, only steal from and use it to keep yourself from drowning.” Life and Death didn’t need justification, they were nature, the stronger didn’t need justification it was nature, the tiger to eat the rabbit.

  It is natural for a tree to shed leaves.

  Hao took a handful of the dry leaves in his hand, crushed and browned, not even the Sects that brought them here thought of them all as little more than leaves to shed when a cold winter comes.

  The woman next to him, whose blood soaked his broken shoes, was a leaf, fallen and colorless. Hao was no different, only he floated, creating a wind that kept him from the ghosts on the ground.

  Hao stood slowly, the woman’s blood vanished from the forest floor into the space of the Spirit-Holding bag. He had forgotten the emptiness in his stomach. In his head played a dozen visions, his perceived deaths and sorrows, the waves and floods that swallowed the world. The rise of the First Elder. And Hao’s desire to hold the old demon’s head, before the old demon, The First Elder, removed his head. He had to kill to survive and remove threats, to make the world a safer place, for Meiqi and Zhengqi, for his parents, if not for himself.

  “Fuck off…” Hao whispered to the grass as he walked forward; leaves and branches didn’t crack under his feet. “What do you have to do with me? None of those nightmares will become real… I won’t let them.” he stumbled through the woods. The thought of the torture he endured in the Central mountain, his eyes still saw streaks, the pain seemed an old memory, a scar impossible to ignore, the streaks in his vision a constant reminder.

  His head went empty as he walked forward, closing in on the man ahead of him. The pity he felt for the man turned to mush.

  Hao followed until the sound of steel clashing filled his ears. He could have reached out and saved the man, but he would kill Meiqi if he had the chance. For revenge, without thinking of the implications or consequences.

  He let the man wander forward, while he let his mind go still, back to the nothingness of his meditations, the void he saw in his mind, where color grew and folded. Below him, that abyss. No longer did the monolithic beast he saw in the Bone-Shaking Trial need to take him apart; the pressures of the water around him were already trying to do so. The biggest contributor to his deconstruction was himself. Each time a piece fell away, he had to place everything back together—stronger, more suited for the world, far better for where he found himself.

  With a breath, the world filled Hao’s lungs. All his thoughts flowed through him, and a still calm returned.

  In the same breath, the teary blue-eyed man charged forward with a shout, never knowing Hao was behind him, a warcry of revenge turned to a death throe, and the man collapsed in a pile of flesh. His white cloak grew red as the sword of a man in a blue cloak lunged at another in a blur.

  Everyone forgot about the body once it fell. Everyone had eyes empty of thought, with pupils like tigers on the hunt.

  I must look the same way, or worse…

  With an exhale, Hao felt refreshed, invigorated. The guilt that invaded him flowed away on the stream, as all things did.

  Steadily, he walked forward, watching as people butchered each other. Observing from a few steps away, the prowess of Mo Bangcai.