Ma Qianle knelt on all fours outside the entrance to the cave, retching.  He had brought up what little there was in his stomach, but he still felt sick.

"Aiya, mortals…" came a sotto voce comment from one of the Impermanents inside.  It was quiet, but more than loud enough for everyone present to hear.  Ma Qianle couldn't see who had spoken.

Ruan Ye, however, could.  He glared, dark eyes glinting dangerously in the soft light of the pearl that Ma Qianle had dropped in his rush to get outside.  

He reprimanded the Impermanent.  "They are not accustomed to these things.  I may not have reacted this way when you first met me, but I was a soldier.  I was far younger than he when I saw my first battlefield."

The scene in the cave wasn't a battlefield, but it wasn't far off.  Bodies were strewn everywhere.  There must have been at least 30 corpses, but it was difficult to tell as some had been badly dismembered.  All had hideous wounds — chunks of flesh torn out by massive teeth, gashes like great claw marks, limbs and skulls shattered by heavy impact.  Blood and less pleasant fluids pooled in low spots in the cavern floor.  Rather than a battlefield, it would be more accurate to call it a slaughterhouse.

Wei Yaling looked back towards the mouth of the cave.  "Are you ok out there kid?"

Ma Qianle sat back on his heels and wiped his mouth with a sleeve.  "I'm fine," he said, then gagged again.  "Just give me a minute."  

He searched through the items in the dimensional pouch.  'Yin dispelling pill, seven lotus detoxifying pill, wound closing elixir...why isn't there anything here that will settle my stomach?'  Then again, none of the Impermanents had so much as twitched an eyelash at the gruesome sight.  The necessity of stomach medicine probably wasn't something that even occurred to them.

Finally finding something that could be of some use, Ma Qianle pulled a length of silk from the bag.  It was probably some sort of miraculous artifact he was grossly misusing, but for now it could do the job as a face mask.  He wound it around his nose and mouth and then rose, walking unsteadily back into the cave.  Wei Yaling had ordered her subordinates to search the bodies for anything that could provide more information, and they were busily moving them into something that resembled order.

Ma Qianle looked around queasily.  "What could have done something like this?  Is it some sort of malevolent ghost?"  There was something that seemed off about the scene to Ma Qianle, but he couldn't put his finger on why.

Wei Yaling shook her head.  "No.  Ghosts don't usually do this kind of damage.  Something living did this."

Ruan Ye spoke from where he was crouched on the ground examining the wounds on one of the corpses.  "This appears to be the work of a bear demon,"  he said.  He held his long, draping sleeve out of the way with one hand as he prodded a series of deep gashes clinically with the other.  "Most likely several."

"What do bear demons have to do with the Mortal Realm Liaison office?"  Ma Qianle cast a look at Ruan Ye.  "Aren't they supposed to be your job?" he asked acidly.

Ruan Ye looked back at him sidelong, eyebrows furrowed.  "Bear demons do not explain why nearly three quarters of the village came to this cave to be slaughtered."

"That's it!" Ma Qianle suddenly exclaimed.  All eyes in the room turned to him, but after seeing he hadn't actually found anything, everyone went back to what they had been doing.  "There's so much blood here.  These people must have all died in the cave, they couldn't have been brought here after death."  The space between Ma Qianle's eyebrows creased, echoing the frown hidden behind the layers of silk covering the lower half of his face.  "Why did they bring them here though, and how?"

A snicker rang out from one of the Impermanents.  Wei Yaling glared.

"Any more of that and the one responsible will be doing extra training for a month."  She reprimanded. She turned back to Ma Qianle "That's what we're looking for.  If your stomach has settled down, take a look around.  There might be something here you can see but we can't."

Ma Qianle took a deep breath to try and center himself, but immediately regretted it as the stench of the place flooded his mouth.  Coughing, he bent to retrieve his pearl from where it sat on the ground, now stained with blood.  'What could I find that they can't?  I've only been doing this for a month!  Those jades can't be so powerful as to erase things from their sight completely, right?'  He wasn't sure what he was even doing here.  Bear demons or vengeful ghosts, whatever was responsible for what happened here had killed tens of people brutally, without leaving even a single piece of themselves behind.  If the two dozen Impermanents accompanying Ma Qianle could handle it, there was no reason for him to be here. If they couldn't, what difference could a single mortal, equipped with spells and artifacts though he may be, make? He could only hope they could find some clues before anything happened.

Ma Qianle moved to examine a portion of the cave that the bodies had already been moved away from. Ruan Ye followed behind, but was pointedly ignored.  Corpses gone, the pooling blood was beginning to dry on the stone and dirt of the chilly cavern floor.  Ma Qianle bent over, holding the pearl low so he could see the ground more clearly.  He wasn't sure what he was supposed to be looking for, so he just stared at the blood stains, trying to will them to be something other than just blood so he could get this over with, go home, and sleep for the rest of the weekend.

Me Qianle stared at them so long he almost thought he really was starting to see something beneath the crust of black and red.  'Wait, no!' he thought.  'There really is something!  Here….and here!'  Under the blood, there was something darker.  A line here, a curved seal script character there.

"What is this?" he asked, thinking out loud and not really expecting any response.

"Hm?"  Ruan Ye looked up from where he was examining his own portion of the floor and came over.

Ma Qianle crouched and transferred the pearl to his left hand, then pulled the sleeve of his jacket over his right hand and reached out to wipe away the blood.

"Do not-" Ruan Ye lunged to catch Ma Qianle's arm, but he was too slow.  The instant Ma Qianle touched the ground, the array — for that is what it was — lit up with a strange dark un-light.  A chill miasma of resentment began to pour out of the floor, pooling around their feet and flowing from one spot to the next like a perverse fog of dry ice.

Ruan Ye gripped the startled Ma Qianle's bicep and pulled him first to his feet and then away from the array.  He closed his eyes and, clenching his jaw, took a deep, angry breath.  Letting it out, he gave Ma Qianle a fierce look.  "Have you forgotten that this is almost certainly meant as a trap for whoever came to investigate?  You were told to touch nothing!"

Ma Qianle jerked his arm free.  "How was I supposed to know whatever that was didn't need bare skin to activate?  I covered my hand, didn't I?"  He was angry, as much at himself as he was at being scolded.  In his exhausted, sickened state, he had forgotten that he shouldn't be carelessly touching things.  He would never admit that to Ruan Ye, though.

"If you two have to fight, do it later!" Wei Yaling yelled.  She unsheathed her sword. "We've got company."

All around the cave, there were noises, a rustle here, a sickening crack there, as the resentment spread.  Ma Qianle realized that as the fog reached each corpse, they were beginning to move.  They pulled broken bones back into position, crawled to find limbs that had been severed and thrown to the four winds.  A stampede of fucks raced through Ma Qianle's heart.  'Shit.  First ghosts, now zombies?'

The group circled together and moved cautiously towards the exit, weapons at the ready.  The first of the corpse soldiers, the closest to the Impermanents and the fastest to pull itself upright, lunged, attacking indiscriminately.  It was met with a solid blow to the head from Xiao Wu's club-like mace.  The corpse soldier's head snapped sideways down to its shoulder, skull caved in by the force of the blow.  There was a pause as they all waited for the body to drop, but nothing happened.  Instead, it reached up with both arms, righted what remained of its head, and let out an eerie, wheezing chuckle before lunging ahead again.

"Shit!"  It was Wei Yaling's turn to swear.  "Everyone outside, now!  We're outnumbered and they're protected by one of those damn jades."

Ma Qianle and the others backed into the passageway until they only had corpse soldiers on one side, and then turned and ran, a few Impermanents acting as a rear guard while the others escaped.  The light from the pearl flashed chaotically as Ma Qianle ran, glinting off weapons and shining on pounding feet.  The uneven stone floor was first illuminated and then plunged into darkness.

'Why haven't we made it outside yet?'  Ma Qianle thought, trying not to stumble and fall.  'There's no way the cavern is this far from the mouth of the cave.'  Just as soon as that thought passed through his mind, the group burst from the confined tunnel back out into open space.  They hadn't made it outside, though.  Instead, they had burst back into the cavern they had just left from another of the passages that lead out from its sides.

"What the hell?" Ma Qianle said, confused.  "Did we go down the wrong one?"  He made as if to go back the way he just came, but Wei Yaling stopped him.

"Don't bother, we didn't go the wrong way," she said. There was a grim tone in her voice that Ma Qianle had never heard.  "There's a ghost wall, and with the Zudang Jade behind it, none of us can break it.  We're stuck here."

flying_paper_crane

Hello everyone!  First off, I'd like to apologize for the unannounced break in posting.  I finished the gig I was doing at work and realized that I needed to do some housekeeping behind the scenes here on HMA.  All chapters have now been updated to their new, edited versions.  As I've said before, the changes are mostly minor, with the largest being some edits to the dialogue that change the language but not the intent of the conversation.  Nothing has changed significantly enough to require re-reading.

This brings us to the second reason I took a break from posting here.  For those of you over 18, I have a bit of a Halloween treat for you!  I am part of a community for readers and writers of OEL BL content called The Daily Eggplant, and to promote each other's novels, we did a kinktober fanfiction exchange.  Letsplaydominos, author of Memories of the Palace wrote a fic featuring Ma Qianle and Ruan Ye, and yours truly wrote one for bickazer, author of Our Secret Storm.  The whole collection of 15 spicy fics can be found here, and I hope you'll join us on our discord server, where links to the OG works that inspired them (and many more) can be found.