“Any idea how we can sneak out of here?” She looks are me incredulously for a moment before speaking. “Did ye nae dig a tunnel down to mae? Jus’ dig us ou’tae here.” I must admit it sounds better than facing down the countless cultivators. As i am digging I hear a wet tearing sound and turn to see..I need to ask her name has ripped the arrow out of her eye. “AHHHH!” I screamed. "We have no bandages to stop the bleeding!” I’m worried about her eye too, but she rolls her remaining eye at me and dismisses my worries. “Yew wee nancy! An eye tha’s already dead dinnae bleed, I filed off tha’ prongs o’ the’ arrah befor’ ah put it ‘tin. Disinfected it tew.” I’m shocked, I ask her “You put the arrow in yourself? Why? Can I help?” She blushes, but insults just the same. I think. “Are ye daft? ‘Ow else can ah look ded? I ‘olready los’ tha’ eye in tha pits. onl y ‘urts a little keep...digging….”
She is looking up and I follow her line of sight to see an androgynous face peering at us with an expression of utter insanity. “Oh yes, please keep digging. Never enough graves!” they say.
I jump for the first time since cultivating, the effect is literally explosive as I burst out of the ground and through a building wall. It sends the man flying and my legs are in tatters. I can tell the man is completely fine, I’m about to enter a trajectory that will take me miles from town! I can’t leave the girl! I reach out and the dragon whisker catches the corner of a building,
The cultivator who stuck they're head in the tunnel screams out, ‘Juniors! Advance on that cultivator on the rooftop! He is not aligned against the beasts!” I can’t move as my legs visibly reassemble so I come up with a last ditch idea, I pull out rock cores made by my distortion that I’ve been saving, I planned to just throw them, but I’ve got a better idea. I pull the dragon scale off my chest, load it with a stone and wrap the whisker around it. A sling, as the cultivators advance on their flying swords I let strip with a stone charged with radiation. It looks a beam of green energy in flight and strikes a female cultivator through the heart clean and keeps going becoming a star in the distance even in the day time sky. See looks at the gaping chasm in her chest. A beat passes with all eyes on her, she looks up at her allies and then to me, the wound putrefying green. She asks me in a terrified whisper, “Why isn't my dantian healing itse-AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!” An explosion of veins and hearts begin to snake themselves into the gaping cavern in her chest. A rainbow of grotesque, wrongly grown hearts flood out of the hole. She drifts like a leaf on the wind slowly to the ground before falling gracelessly off her sword onto the unforgiving ground where she shivers into the fetal position. The sound of wet squelching explosions echoes out as rotten heart after rotten heart bursts releasing a river of ankle deep blood through the entire town.
Another cultivator jumps down into the blood to check on her and screams up “SHE’S DEAD! KILL HI-” before he can finish a fleshy protrusion bursts from his mouth...He’s standing in the blood...Toes! Toes burst out of every part of his body and he falls into the blood next to his companion. I have no idea if he’s dead, but for his sake I certainly hope he is.
The cultivators turn from the spectacle to engage me. I am already spinning the next stone.
