This Venerable Demon is Grossly Unqualified

As we emerged into the inner core of the dead sect, the first thing I noticed was the hatred. The ground beneath our feet hated our weight. The stagnant air hated us for having the temerity to disturb it's long slumber. A thousand formless eyes settled upon us, wishing us every malice under the sun.

I shivered. My hand shook, as I clutched at my sword.

"Such resentment." Meng Daiyu murmured. "I see why this place was sealed away. The very air lusts for our death."

I didn't answer. What could you even say, in the face of something like this. It was like a lesser, but far more pervasive, form of the aura I'd felt from our sect's void-shattering cultivators. Something that transcended mere influence and stained the world around it, enduring even after it's source was long gone. How many had died, to produce it?

I took a deep breath and clenched my jaw. Stomach tight, chest out, back straight. I repeated the old mantra one of my wrestling coaches had drilled into us before our first tournament. You can feel fear. You can't show it.

Meng Daiyu saw my face, and steeled her own.

"Let's go." She commanded.

I obeyed, following behind her. The white light of the formation cast eerie shadows as it lit us from behind, rapidly fading as we passed beyond the spatial barrier. The massive tunnel continued seamlessly as we exited the barrier, except that there were no more side halls and chambers, only a single path forward. We advanced at a fast walk, a slow run for mortals.

Scarcely a few hundred yards out, the great stone hallway simply ended.

"It appears Elder Cai was correct." I said. "We stand among the graves of our betters."

The far end of the hall opened upon a great abyss. Forget the Pathless Night, most of Xianyang, the Qin's capital, could have fit within it. The void was not merely larger than the mountain we'd entered, it dwarfed it by a factor of dozens. The ground below, if it existed at all, was beyond even a cultivator's sight.

"Ten Thousand Hells." Meng Daiyu swore. "The Glass Flowers have been holding out on us. No wonder they're willing to defy the Qin for this."

Miles out, dozens of peaks of varying sizes floated in the void. They varied in size from full mountains to thin shards of stone that could support only a single building. All of them slowly orbit around a single central peak, an inverted mountain with a towering pagoda rising from it's flattened apex.

Far above, at the top of the cavern, a great white jade the size of a city block cast false moonlight down upon the inner sect. Or, a jade that had clearly once been white. Now, it was stained with an oily red sheen, it's moonlight tinged with blood.

"Enough gawking. With me."

Meng Daiyu leapt out into the abyss, soaring through the sky weightlessly. I drew my sword and followed, holding it in one hand and using the strength of my arm to support myself as it flew. It was ungainly, but it was more dignified than risking a fall or holding the blade above my head like a pull-up bar.

I easily matched the pace Meng Daiyu set as we hurtled through the abyss towards the peak she'd chosen.

We landed gently, kicking up a wispy cloud of dust. The first slippers to set foot upon the narrow walkway in thousands of years. Our eyes met, and Meng Daiyu pointed towards one of the buildings. I stepped forward, taking point as we silently stalked across the dead walkway. It ended in a courtyard, shining golden hinges the only trace of where a wooden gate had once bared entry, now long since rotted away.

The courtyard had held a garden once, but it had not weathered the ceaseless years well. Dusty depressions marked where ponds had evaporated away, leafless trunks, bleached white as bone, the only trace of vegetation.

Then, there were the bodies. Six of them, as decayed as the rest of the courtyard. Their garments white rags, what little flesh that remained reduced to thin lines of jerky-like sinew. But still far better preserved than any corpse should be, after that long. Two of them sat, leaning back against the stone wall of the courtyard. A pose no body that old should be sturdy enough to maintain.

I caught the young mistress's eyes, point at one of the bodies, and flicked my sword. She nodded back.

Zombie rules then. Head and heart.

With a flourish of my hand, I set the blade aloft, then fired it like a bullet. It pierced right through the skull, then plowed further forward. As the blade buried itself fully in the wall, the narrow crossguard of my jian completely pulped what remained of the corpse's head.

For a long moment the sound of metal impacting bone hung in the air.

Then a body twitched, and we surged into motion. Even as I recalled my sword, I charged one of the prone corpses. I stomped, pulping it's ribcage, then kicked, sending the head flying. The scratching of bone against bone sounded out behind me, and I lashed out blindly as I spun and retreated at once. Bones flew, effortlessly severed. The corpse continued it's charge heedlessly, it's remaining arm extended to gouge. Three quick swipes reduced it to a pile of bone fragments.

I turned to the young mistress, and saw she needed no assistance.

Meng Daiyu was poetry in motion, a graceful contrast to my simple, efficient, brutality. With a twist of her hand, a fan appeared. She swept it upwards, leaving a billowing trail of shadow behind that fouled the charge of the skeletons. A quick hop sent her slowly floating backwards, lighter than air. As the skeletons struggled with the semi-material darkness, flailing as if swimming through air, the young mistress swung her other hand forward and a skull exploded.

I watched as she retracted some sort of meteor hammer, a heavy leaf-bladed spearhead attached to a thin cord. It looked like an awkward weapon to wield with one hand, but as she made two further swipes, I saw the cord extended up the sleeve of her robe, and seemed to lengthen and shorten on it's own to fit her needs.

In seconds, five of the moving corpses had been reduced to rubble. The sixth angrily flopped towards Meng Daiyu. Down two legs and one and a half arms, it's progress was limited.

I bent down before it.

"Are you capable of speech?" I asked quietly.

The skeleton flailed at me, it's jaw flapping wildly, unrestrained by tendon or sinew.

"I see."

I raised my sword to finish it off.

"Wait. Restrain that one down for me. Use the rocks." Meng Daiyu said.

I obeyed.

I suppressed a laugh, as I realized what was going on. She didn't want to dirty her robes. A pair of heavy stones from the edge of a dried pool left the thing firmly pinned in place.

I turned to the young mistress, awaiting further orders.

"So weak." She mused, slowly drawing a series of triangular flags from her storage ring. "It allowed them to disguise themselves, but what use is an ambush when their strength is so lacking? Even the Glass Flowers would scarcely be slowed be such opposition."

"There must be greater ones further in." I mused. "A formation like this, the architecture of the sect, there's no way cultivators so weak could have built it."

"Their elders might all have perished elsewhere. Or resisted whatever transformed these weaklings into mindless beasts."

"That strikes me as unlikely." I said dryly. I already knew that at least one lingered still after all, albeit in a completely different league from these things. Skeletons? Revenants? Jiangshi? I wanted to ask what exactly they were, but I should probably already know.

"Leave me, and find out. I do not require your protection at this time." The young mistress paused, thinking. "We have never seen eye to eye. But this is an opportunity for both of us. One that will be greatly diminished, if we call in other elders. Elder Xin in particular will compete for the very same sorts of benefits the two of us seek."

"You have Elder Liang's trinket with you?" I'd given her one of my spare sets of threads immediately after we'd arrived, tying it around my upper bicep next to Su Li's. The remaining 48 I kept in my ring, checking them every evening. I really hoped Elder Fan's alleged secret disciple wasn't among the expedition. If he started offing the Glass Flowers, there was no way we'd be able to avoid conflict. A secret that widely known couldn't be suppressed.

"Yes. And enough live-saving treasures to hold off a trio of nascent soul cultivators for enough time to burn a stick of incense in my master's honor. My master is enough of a mother-hen, it's embarrassing for a Daoist of his stature. Do refrain from doing the same."

"Your master would be displeased, if I were to allow you to be slain."

"And I would be displeased to die horribly and be condemned to wander this accursed place as a hungry ghost." Meng Daiyu replied icily. "I will call for you with the talisman if I have need of your sword."

She fingered the formation flags in her hand idly. She was clearly waiting for me to leave before planting them.

"Very well."

I turned and left without another word, rising into the air. Splitting up worked just fine for me, and she wasn't wrong about not needing my protection. Meng Daiyu's cultivation was easily equal to Elder Cai's, somewhere around the midpoint of core formation.

I drew a second sword from my ring as I ascended out of visual range. Holding what was effectively a one-armed iron cross was doable for me, but far from pleasant. Balancing atop my sword still felt awkward, and I much preferred flying with one blade in each hand. It let me use both my muscles and qi to steer, giving me far more stability.

But it looked odd, given that Elder Hu had apparently usually carried but one blade, so I refrained.

From a distance, there was little to distinguish the sect's mountains from each other, behind size and level of population.

I was looking for an armory, library, or treasure pavilion foremost. Not the pagoda in the center, that all but screamed trap to me. I picked a small mountain in the middle ring, with a single large building upon it. That should be either a sect facility or someone important's complex.

As I approached, I pulled back and upwards, slowing myself as much as I could. Then I pulled my qi tight, surrendering to momentum. I landed with a dull thud, crouching low to absorb the impact.

My heart beat faster in my chest, sending blood rushing through me. The fear I knew I should be feeling was replaced by something else, a focus so sharp it was almost painful.

It was strange. I should have felt safer alone. No risk of exposing myself. But the emptiness and malevolence of this place were heavy, daunting. It was even worse alone.

This building had no courtyard. Three stories, a dozen rooms per story, with a thin balcony wrapping around it all. Maximum capacity of a few hundred. My eyes swept over it all. No visible corpses, or other signs of life. I skipped the front door, simply leaping to the second floor. One sword returned to the ring to free a hand.

The windows had no glass, only shutters. Their ties had long since rotted. I opened one, wincing at the creak, and crept inside.

To my dismay, the room was empty. Not a library or armory then.

Attacking one corpse had woken all of the ones in the courtyard. But they were no real threat to me, even in numbers. It was their superiors I was worried about.

So I settled on moving about as stealthily as I could. I was confident in my ability to one-shot anything beneath nascent soul, if I got the drop on it.

I hated this. The very air felt foul, stagnant and filled with dust so thick it hung and glistened where direct light fell. I tried not to think about what the dust was made of.

I cleared rooms one after another. Most were near empty. The ones that weren't usually featured two or three bodies, surrounded by scraps of long rotten furniture. I gave them a wide berth, checking for valuables from a distance. I saw little, beyond pitted swords and moth-eaten robes.

No storage rings, no obvious signs of death.

Then, in the fourteenth room, I found the elder.

The body was as desiccated as any other I'd seen, but their robes had endured where flesh did not. They were opalescent, shining an eerie pink in the bloody moonlight. On it's right hand, it bore three plain rings.

But that wasn't what drew my eye. A flat bowl of white jade sat before the corpse. Gentle light emanated from it, pure white light. One of the terminals the Ghost Immortal had mentioned perhaps? Even if not, it had survived hundreds of years without any visible signs of suffering from the corruption that had destroyed the rest of this place. The rings might be empty, or worth a fortune, I wouldn't know until I searched them. The bowl though, that had to be something.

Slowly, I crept round the corpse. I'd come too far to chicken out now. We had one day, perhaps two, before this place became a free-for-all for every cultivator present who could fly. Under a week before others began arriving, once word leaked of what we found. Meng Daiyu wasn't wrong, these next few days were a crucial opportunity for the front-runners to grab as much as they could.

I remembered what I'd told Su Li months ago. If you always did what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten.

It was time to stop treading water.

I raised my sword, bereft of intent. I lined up the cut. Enter the top of the skull, split the ribcage through where the heart would have rested, all the way to the hip.

I swung. My intent flared into life, shrouding my blade in a steel-grey aura that drank in the bloody light.

The corpse threw itself forward in a desperate roll. My swing clipped it, splitting it's robe and leaving a deep cut in it's back.

Fuck.

I charged, thrusting for the head. I had to end this quickly.

Thunder echoed in the enclosed space, and an invisible force threw me back. The walls that had stood for a thousand years collapsed under the pressure, leaving the side of the house exposed to the elements.

The dead elder stood, empty eye sockets tracking me as I rose from the rubble.

I drew a second sword from my ring once more, setting it floating behind my shoulder.

Behind the corpse, the air shifted. Something coalesced, and a pair of red eyes opened in the air. Formless hands, visible only as distortions, clasped it's shoulders.

A mad thought struck me. How doomed would I be, if it were I who needed to call for the young mistresses aid?

A ghostly mouth coalesced, opening to speak. My flying sword shot forward, and I followed close behind it.