Chapter 106: Primeval Blood [Interlude]

“I take it… We won somehow?” Feng whispered. “Though I think… I’m missing most of my parts…”

His body was split into two. Lianshi had chewed his belly and midsection in twain, completely severing the top half of his torso from his legs and waist. His guts and spine were all over the wall and the floor.

His ribs were shattered like an egg, his chest ripped apart as her voracious lips hunted for his heart mere minutes earlier.

“I… It’s my fault,” she cried again. “I don’t know how to save you like this.”

His wounds were far beyond a Foundation Realm cultivator to heal. Feng likely only had minutes left before he was dead.

“How bad?” he coughed. “I’m feeling… like crushed raspberries.”

It was such a stupid, outrageous thing to say. Lianshi, despite herself, forced out a sobbing laugh.

Feng smiled a little wider. “Hey, I got you to laugh for once.”

“Idiot…” she brokenly smiled at him before her joy faded. “You are going to die…”

“Did you… get what you need?”

Lianshi looked away, forcing back a sob. “Yes. But I never wanted it to end like this…”

He was never supposed to die, not for her. 

“I… Pretty Lady says…”

Lianshi blinked. “Who?”

Feng raised a shaky finger and pointed to his side.

The Young Miss turned, seeing him gesturing towards her father’s preserved corpse.

“Sorry… Your father… Eat…”

Lianshi realised what he was saying. Her father had been a Nascent Realm cultivator. His flesh was an impossibly potent resource — in the Outer Provinces, at least. Matriarch Chen’s command to leave his body untouched by the rest of the Sect was always an odd decision.

Now, it might save Feng’s life.

The girl reached out to her father. As if by instinct, the flesh of her back split open. A winged tendril snapped out and grabbed the body for her, bringing the top half of her father’s corpse over.

“Quickly, eat!” she insisted, pressing the dead man’s arm to Feng’s lips. 

The boy was barely responsive. He tried to move his mouth, but failed. The marbled skin of her deceased father was far too hard for him to bite through.

Lianshi despaired. A solution soon came to her desperate mind. Without hesitation, she opened her mouth and bit into her father’s flesh.

Her rabid teeth met unyielding resistance. For a split second, Lianshi thought that her canines would break against the Nascent Realm’s hardened skin. However, a blazing well of Yang qi boiled over within her, reinforcing her gnashing jaws until her fangs somehow broke through the marbled hide.

Was that the power of the Blood? 

That would make the most sense. However, for some reason, that thought rang false.

It did not matter for the moment. Lianshi ripped off a chunk of the dead man’s flesh. Chewing it was difficult, for the meat was made hard by both the product of the Inverted Monk’s cultivation and by the frost that had frozen it to rock-like hardness. 

Nonetheless, Lianshi chewed with unsightly haste, ignoring even the delectable sweetness of a Nascent Cultivator’s flesh in her haste to save Feng.

Once the meat was rendered into a pulp, she kissed the boy and pushed the meat down into his mouth.

He swallowed, groaning as his Dantian registered the rich flesh. Freshly made blood poured from his wounds. His flesh futilely tried to regrow and mend the injuries.

It wasn’t going to be enough. Even with such rich qi supplied, a cultivator in the Foundation Realm could not regenerate severed limbs or missing organs, much less the entire bottom half of their body. All Lianshi did was prolong the boy’s suffering.

“Pretty… Lady… says…” Feng mumbled, his eyes already rolled to the back of his head. Lianshi leaned in urgently to hear his words. “... Sect… Art…”

Her Sect Art? Lianshi realised what he meant.

[Arts of the Split-headed Carnivores — Severed Form Predation]

Her back split open as Lianshi’s spine ripped itself from her person. Her hoarse screams were drowned out by the screaming insectoid creature born from her biomass. The creature rapidly grew in mass as tangles of meat and bones formed around its shape.

The snaking coil of the living spine made its way forward. Under Lianshi’s silent command, it bound the two severed halves of Feng back together, wrapping itself under seluching guts and pools of his blood.

[Severed Form Predation, Reversion; Lianshi’s Variant — Daemonic Necrobiosis]

Rather than hissing away into pungent fluids and white mists, the squirming centipede-like creature’s body began melting into Feng. The two severed parts of the boy began merging into one as the liquidifying bio-matter of the creature glued and healed the two components together.

Alone, it would not be enough, but Lianshi continued feeding Feng the rich flesh of her dead father. She chewed mouthful after mouthful of marbled flesh and fed him through kiss after kiss. Slowly, the bubbling biomass working through Feng’s body repaired and rebuilt his missing organs, using the fuel fed by Lianshi as the energy source and material for their ghastly necromancy.

Hours passed. Lianshi never left his side, slowly devouring her father whole and feeding them to Feng. She never so much as swallowed a single ounce of the tantalising meat, no matter how voraciously her Hunger roared and cried out.

Her Hunger was what nearly killed Feng. She would ignore it to her death just to spite it.

Only once her father had been reduced to little more than scraps and bones did she stop. Feng’s breathing, while laboured, was still present. His stomach periodically bubbled as the half-sentient biomass continued its organic reconstruction of his missing physiology. 

Exhaustion crept upon her. Cuddling next to Feng, Lianshi fell asleep.

Matriarch Chen and Patriarch Shang would find them hours later — Lianshi having ascended to the Shaping Realm, and Feng’s wounds erased.

~~~

“You are not as clever as you think.”

At Matriarch Chen’s words, Lianshi glared. They were both back at the Split-Headed Carnivore monastery. The winter palace around them shimmered with luminous green lights, the ice reflecting the auroral night sky in all its beauty.

Lianshi said nothing.

The Matriarch flipped open her razor fan, fingers tracing the sharp edges as she sat before her daughter — in title, if not in blood. 

“The seven Frostheart bracelets combined gave the means to reach greatness,” Chen Zijing said. “The previous Matriarch believed that by plucking the jewelled eyes of the great Carnivore Corpus, she might witness its ancient history and glimpse what might be the origin of this curse upon us. That she had to combine them with the corruptive influence of a foreign corpse god was a concern… but alas, her ambition was never fulfilled, given her most untimely demise.”

In the woman’s hands were the seven shattered crystals of the seven bracelets, never to be reforged.

“Those memory crystals held the precious techniques of the Split-Headed Carnivores as well. Spiritual formula invented and painstakingly perfected by our entire bloodline through extracted memories — not just by the chief Matriarchs, but by Elders and Disciples tied to the family as well. Your mother’s techniques — your true mother, that is — had contributed her fair share to the repository. And now it is destroyed. By your hand.”

The Matriarch looked towards the Young Miss. Lianshi continued her silence.

“It is arguably more valuable than even the flesh of the Divine Corpus, for the foreign knowledge held within those jewels was only accessible thanks to the effort of great artificers. It contained the collective knowledge of our most potent non-Arts technique. All of it is now inaccessible. All of it… Now lies within you.”

The Matriarch closed her fan and placed it aside. “And yet, I am not mad. Do you know why?”

Lianshi clutched her hands into fists. She remained silent.

The Matriarch continued.

“You did not think it odd that you were so easily able to find the first six bracelets scattered across the Fang Mountain? You did not find it strange that you could so easily uncover their secrets merely by studying within the hidden alcoves of our Sect’s Scripture Halls?” 

Chen Zijing’s tone was not taunting, nor even angry. If anything, she was amused.

“You did not truly think me so foolish as to leave such power lying around? And let us not even speak of your father’s corpse, which I left alone next to the seventh bracelet, in the event you needed qi to assimilate the Blood into your form.”

This time, Lianshi did speak: “Why?”

All this time, she had been led by that woman. She never had any agency or choice in her actions. Driven by the need for revenge, she allowed herself to be lured by clues of power. It nearly cost Lianshi her life.

It nearly killed Feng.

More importantly, if Matriarch Chen Zijing already knew how to access the Blood…

Why did she give the means of acquiring it to Lianshi?

There was only one possibility in the Young Miss’s mind. The Matriarch sensed her tension and chuckled.

“Relax. I’m not going to eat you. You can keep the Blood,” the woman remarked. Lianshi could not keep the disbelief off her face. “Surprised? I thought you might be. You may come to regret what that piece of Divine Claret would do to you in the years to come, especially where it concerns that cute Fiancé of yours.”

“You will not touch him,” Lianshi snarled. The act had been utterly instinctive. Her lips had moved before she could even think.

Something foreign stirred within her veins.

“That would depend on your ability to protect him,” the woman lazily replied. “And to your will to keep the curse of foreign heavens from devouring your very soul.”

The veil covering the Matriarch’s face slipped away, revealing unspeakable horrors hidden behind the disguise. It stared at Lianshi, who returned her gaze unfalteringly. Chen Zijing nodded approvingly. 

“Incidentally, I will be taking a personal approach in your training from now on,” the Matriarch said. “You may have the knowledge of all our Sect technique burned into your mind, but your body will need considerable martial practice to bring the fruit of that knowledge to bear. The Blood should greatly accelerate the pace of your cultivation, which means it is doubly important we ensure your instincts are up to par.”

“You still have not told me why,” Lianshi pushed, frustrated. “Why all this? Why kill my mother, your sisters? Why spare me; do this for me? What are you planning? Tell me!”

“I won’t,” the Matriarch calmly denied her. “You will not understand. And even if you did, I believe you would find the truth detrimental to your sanity. Believe me when I say that I conceal the truth for your benefit, and not out of malice.”

Lianshi did not.

“I will kill you someday,” the girl snarled, heedless of how close she courted death. “For my mother. For my father. For Feng, and Lingyu, and all the others your designs had hurt, you monster!”

“It is your right to try,” Chen Zijing nodded, nonplussed. “Although… You may find yourself changing your mind when the day comes that you grow strong enough to take my life. You will likely find that the definition of ‘monster’ is not as easily grasped as you think.”

Years later, when a grown Lianshi finally held Matriarch Chen Zijing’s life in her clawed talons, the girl would finally come to understand what the woman meant. As she predicted, Lianshi would spare her life.

In the end, it seemed even her love was fated to be a pawn played at the whims of greater horrors.

~~~

At the same time, somewhere upon the Imperial Highway between the Fang and Phoenix Mountain…

“So… You want to talk about it?”

Young Master Feng looked up at his Father, Patriarch Hei, who merely glanced back with a raised eyebrow.

The two stared at each other as the wagon they were in gently tumbled on, moving at an easy pace back to the Beheaded Phoenix Sect from the Fang Mountains. 

Feng sighed.

“My best friend nearly devoured me whole, then forced-fed me the remains of her long-dead father to save me.”

Patriarch Hei considered his son’s words. Then — with wisdom worthy of his age — he reached over and patted Feng gently on his shoulders.

“That’s rough, son.”