Ma Qianle grit his teeth and pulled himself upright.  With the help of the wound closing elixir he could put weight on his injured leg again, but there would be no more running as he had done earlier.

As soon as he was sure Ma Qianle was stable, Ruan Ye turned back to Lao'er.  The man's movement was slowed from the damage done to his body by spell backlash, but he was still advancing steadily on Ruan Ye and Ma Qianle.  Ruan Ye held his sword upright, his other hand held alongside it in a seal, and began speaking an incantation.  Though the sounds and tones seemed as though they came from his own native language, Ma Qianle could not understand a word of the chant.

Lao'er kept laughing.  In a hoarse voice, he spoke again.  "Ahh, just like the Keeper, taking sides with the mortals again!  I know what you're doing but it won't do you any good this time!"

Ruan Ye ignored him and continued his incantation.  Ma Qianle looked at him questioningly but seeing that Ruan Ye had no apparent intent on responding to Lao'er, he slowly backed up against the wall.  He couldn't get away if Lao'er took his bear form as the others had.  In a pinch, though, he could get back up the wall again.  It would be tough with only one leg good for anything and an injured shoulder, but it was better than standing there waiting to die.

It didn't come to that though.  Before Lao'er got close enough that Ma Qianle felt the need to try and get away, Ruan Ye finished his spell.  Once again, Ma Qianle was engulfed in a powerful surge of burning qi, but where before it had been like a wall crushing him to the rock face, this time it broke around him and continued onwards like a wave.  

Lao'er was clearly not so unaffected.  When the surge of qi reached him, he was pushed back a few steps before he fell to his knees.  He broke into a fit of coughing again, and more blood poured from his mouth.  But the vicious look on his face did not disappear, and when the coughing subsided his manic laughter returned.

"What did you just do?" Ma Qianle asked, edging along the cave wall away from Lao'er's direction.  He pulled another defensive talisman from his pocket.  'Thank goodness that bear got my back and not my front.  My clothes are torn, but at least my talismans are still intact.'

Ruan Ye frowned at Lao'er's clear disdain for his spell.  "It is a spell which seals demons in their human forms.  Get ready."  

Ma Qianle stopped and stared at Ruan Ye, dumbfounded.  "You can do that?  Why didn't you do that before anybody turned into a bear!  We could have avoided this whole thing!"

Lao'er pulled himself to his feet again.  "I told you, it's no good! That Jiang boy taught me some better tricks!"  Before either Ma Qianle or Ruan Ye could react, he activated a talisman that had been hidden in one hand.  It was blood red all over and emitted a sickly yin qi.  Ma Qianle recognized it instantly as a talisman to summon the spirits of the recently dead and bind them to the summoner's will, but it was too late to stop it.  The talisman hung in midair for less than a second before burning to ash, and two ghostly forms began to coalesce in the air over the bodies of Laosan and Laosi.

"Later. This is not the time to be distracted, Ma Qianle." Ruan Ye said.  "Are you able to fight?"

Ma Qianle snorted, testing his leg and switching the talisman in his hand to a different type.  "What kind of Mortal Agent can't handle a couple of ghosts?"  He activated the talisman and faced the corpse of the bear that had gored his leg while reaching into the pouch at his side.

In truth, Ma Qianle was not quite as confident as he sounded, but it was a matter of pride.  He'd been feeling somewhat useless the whole day.  First, Ruan Ye had had to jump in from who-knows-where and rescue him, after which he was knocked out for most of the day.  He'd been no good in the courts of hell, been sick at the sight of the dead villagers, and even activated the array that trapped everyone in here.  He couldn't even find the holder of the Zudang Jade.  Now that he had finally encountered something he knew how to handle, he was going to prove his worth, exhausted or not.

Ruan Ye heard the trace of false bravado in Ma Qianle's voice and smiled, but did not comment.  He simply said "I will leave the bears to you then," and leapt away to confront Lao'er.

The ghostly bear Ma Qianle now faced was not so different from how it had looked before death.  Aside from the fact that the pearly white v of fur on the bear's chest had now been dyed red with blood, the only obvious difference were the green fires that now burned in the depths of its pupils.  It stood over its own corpse, growling, but didn't attack Ma Qianle.  

"What, did you have enough already?"  Ma Qianle taunted.  "I've still got another leg.  You didn't even get the first one properly!"  It was no good if the bear wouldn't attack Ma Qianle first.  He knew he was in no shape to charge it head on.  Normally, he would have liked to use spells to keep the bear as far from him as possible while sealing it from a distance, but his qi reserves didn't allow that right now.  Included among the items he'd been given were trap talismans.  The talismans, when activated, would place an array below where the user stood which would trap a ghost in place when stepped on.  It was one of these that Ma Qianle had just used, and not another defensive talisman, as he'd hoped the bear would believe.

Luckily, the ghost bear took the bait.  It charged at Ma Qianle with a roar as he dodged backwards as quickly as his leg would allow.  As it ran over the array, ropes of gleaming yang qi erupted from the ground and wound around it.  Where the ropes made contact with the bear's spectral form, the conflicting energies sizzled and fought.  The bear howled in pain as it struggled against the ropes.

'It worked!' Ma Qianle thought to himself.  The fight certainly wasn't over, but it at least gave Ma Qianle a little space to breathe.  The bindings wouldn't hold forever, and it was entirely possible the bear could break out of them before the spell ran out.  He rapidly fired spell after spell at the bear, blasts of qi tearing into its essence.  When he judged that it had been weakened enough, he began casting the spell to seal it in a soul jar.  The spell which would have come to him as easily as breathing at the beginning of the fight fought him every step of the way, but in the end he succeeded.

Ma Qianle was just moving to store the sealed bear demon spirit in his pouch when he was slammed into from the side.  Sharp teeth dug into his shoulder, only barely missing the soft, exposed flesh of his neck.  The punctures burned with the icy chill of yin contamination, and Ma Qianle screamed as the second bear first knocked him off his feet and then shook him like a toy.

'Shit!  I forgot about the other bear!'  Ma Qianle berated himself.  He gritted out the words of a spell and then punched the bear in the throat with a qi-enhanced fist.  The bear let go, and Ma Qianle was flung across the room.  He tumbled across the floor until his trajectory was blocked by a stalagmite.  He groaned the words to a barrier spell as he rolled to his feet, clutching his torn shoulder with his uninjured hand.

The bear ghost slammed into the barrier and it shook.  'I need to finish this quickly,'  Ma Qianle thought.  As debilitated as he was, the barrier wouldn't hold against the bear's fury for long.  Trying the trick with the trap array again was out of the question — the ghosts may be in the shape of bears, but he couldn't forget that these were bear demons and not mortal bears.  They were no different from humans when it came to intelligence, and it was foolhardy to think the same trick would work twice.

Ma Qianle grabbed another bottle of wound closing elixir from his pouch, pulled the stopper out with his teeth, and poured it over his shoulder with a hiss of pain.  The bear was prowling around the perimeter of the barrier, biding its time until Ma Qianle was no longer able to keep the spell up rather than waste energy trying to batter it down.  It wasn't a bad plan, Ma Qianle had to admit.  He could feel he was nearly down to the dregs of his qi reserves.  Use much more than he had already, and he would begin harming himself as much as he did the bear.

'I've only got one chance,' he thought.  There was only one real choice he could make if he wanted to get out of this cavern alive at the end of the night.  Ma Qianle reached into his pouch and pulled out a pill, then pretended to swallow it while secretly hiding it in his hand. He moved around the stalagmite while he did to more easily disguise what he was doing.  Then, he began to mime exhaustion.  He fell to his knees, then to all fours, shaking.  He sat and leaned up against the stalagmite, hoping his expression was that of one desperately trying to keep a spell going.  In truth, the act he was putting on wasn't a strain to his abilities, for it was too close to the truth.

Finally, he let the barrier flicker, and then die.  He slumped bonelessly, silently gathering his energy.  The bear charged at Ma Qianle, thinking that it's prey had finally succumbed.  Just before the bear reached him, he surged upright.  The hand that held the pill plunged into the deep gash that had been left behind on the bear's neck when Ruan Ye slit the throat of its corporeal body.  As Ma Qianle withdrew his hand, the bear roared in pain.  It writhed on the ground, seeming to burn from within.  Sun-bright yang qi eroded the ghostly form until not even a trace was left.

The plan had been terrifyingly risky.  The pill that Ma Qianle had shoved into the bear's throat was a yang pill, counterpart to the yin pill Wei Yaling had used to help him open his spiritual eye.  For a mortal like himself, the pill would be used to help fight severe yin corruption, and had likely been placed in the pouch for that purpose.  But for a ghost, the pill was the antithesis of their very being.  A yang pill inside a ghost would destroy it utterly, not even leaving a trace behind.  If the bear demon hadn't thought him completely without strength, it wouldn't have worked.  If the spirit form of a being didn't take on the state of the body at death, it wouldn't have worked.  If Ma Qianle hadn't been fast enough, it wouldn't have worked.

But it had.

And now there was only one enemy left.