The leaf-boats drifted, pale as moth-wings, hovering above a surface that should never have been called land.
They trembled beneath the pressure of Yin Qi. The Feather-Tail brush's furry tip quivered like a listening ear; the leaves shivered beneath as if the swamp below whispered threats up through the wood. Silence stretched thin and then snapped under Elder Mu Li's words–pray your luck hasn't run out yet–and the hunters' composure began to fray.
It had taken them an hour to reach the central region. The pace was slow, careful, each leaf a small island borne by ink-trace calligraphy. The brush guided them, the brush that belonged to a man who would trade ink and breath for a path through death.
Kiaria, Diala, and the Princess were not fresh. A week of ceaseless skirmishes, poor rations and ragged sleep had hollowed them. The others–hunters hardened by trade–masked their faces and grimly endured. But the strain had visited even those who were less mortal.
Diala's shoulders sagged. She folded at the waist though she floated, hands braced on her knees. The rot of the swamp struck her like a blade through the nose; bile rose hot. She vomited into the wind, small and private and bitter.
Her Abyssal Cold Phoenix shield had once rendered the stench tolerable, a frost that kept decay at bay. Now the protection thinned to nearly nothing. Smell leaked through and burned at the edges of her courage. Each breath that should have been light felt like sand.
Kiaria saw her falter and moved closer. He offered a pill and a dried bean, pressed into the palm of her trembling hand.
"Eat this," he said quietly. "Two doses. It'll steady you for thirty breaths."
The pill was small and bitter; the bean, salted and dense. Diala swallowed. For a moment her eyes glazed, then cleared. She nodded once, not trusting the words within her.
They looked down together.
Below the leaves the swamp was an ocean of rot. Corpses writhed and nursed the swamp's appetite: men, beasts, bones, and ragged armor tangled into a blackish, mud-red sea. Flesh had burst; organs oozed and slipped in slow, pulsing rhythm. The surface crawled with wet movement–a sound like cloth dragged under water.
Amid that rot, the Blood Worms moved.
At a glance one might have thought them giant serpents. Each worm stretched nearly twenty-four meters–long, segmented, slick with ancient blood and decay. They threaded through the carcass-pile like hungry shadows, drawn to any remnant of Yang. Where a faint living aura lingered–an ember of warmth–a cluster of adult worms would descend and drink until the light guttered.
And inside hollowed shells the worms laid their eggs. Some bellies split and pale hatchlings poured out, writhing, chewing inward until a body collapsed into bubbling sludge. The swamp fed itself, a slow cycle of hunger and birth.
Even worse were the tentacles.
They writhed between the piles–purple-black, slick and intelligent. These were not mere worms; they were organs of a sentient horror, long limbs that twitched and watched. A few tentacles were thicker than a man's waist–leaders among the crawling masses. They sniffed the air, tasted the vibration of breaths, and curled when they detected the heat of living flesh.
Chief Azriel's Hawk Eye swept without relish. He hated what he saw, but he looked because a chief must know the teeth that bit his people.
"Do not look down," he said, voice folded into the leaves. It was an order that left no room for the small panic that wanted to bubble up.
Hands moved to meridian points on instinct. Practiced fingers found the joints and seals as if performing a small, vital liturgy.
"Block Jianjing, Dazhui and Feishu," Azriel commanded.
"False Death Suppression State!" Diala answered sharply. Her voice was raw but precise.
Azriel nodded. Shade knew well enough to speak when survival required it. He added, with a half-smile that carried weary respect, "You look more useful than your looks suggest."
Diala's reply was modest, but she had a suggestion that cut through the stale air with its practicality. She spoke quickly, listing herbs and pills, each syllable a small life-raft.
"Men-Ji leaves and Shui Lan pills," she said. "Men-Ji grows where corpses pile to mountains. Its roots drink rot; its veins store poison. One leaf chewed every ten breaths will cleanse the decay and silence the stench. But Men-Ji alone is toxic. With sealed meridians, the body needs an external loop–Shui Lan creates a temporary water-circulation outside the normal meridians. It neutralizes Men-Ji for an hour. After an hour, another dose or meridians will suffer. Also–once Men-Ji is chewed, your tongue will go numb; weak bodies may dizzy or faint."
Azriel absorbed the facts, the way a man listens to the map of a battlefield. Shui Lan they had–divers and swamp-hunters kept the pill to breathe longer in hidden waters. Men-Ji was rarer.
Diala shrugged one shoulder and produced five tied bundles of Men-Ji from her ring. "I collected side stems when you were clearing the way. Don't strip the main root–the worms will sense that. Each stem has ten to fifteen leaves. Overdose is deadly."
Azriel's eyes flicked between the bundles and the girl who offered them. For a moment a memory crossed his face–if he had pushed them away earlier, they might not be here to help him now.
Kiaria's voice cut in, measured and exact. "After you chew, bind a brittle rope through everyone. If someone grows dizzy they break the rope–signal. Keep distance. One chain, every fifty-three spaced–easier to spread if something strikes."
"As you wish, Patron." Azriel accepted without irony. The word sat heavy, but he did not quibble.
They obeyed. Shui Lan dissolved on tongues like cool metal; silence closed around mouths as numbness took hold. The thin rope threaded through calloused fingers. Fifty-nine hands linked by a brittle line.
One thread. One chain. One chance.
The Men-Ji tasted foul, slimy as it dissolved. Nausea bit the throat of every hunter as they chewed. Yet the effect arrived–the stench dulled, the rot's sharpness faded like a face behind a curtain. For a few breaths they could act without the gagging terror.
They pressed on.
Half an hour later the swamp's center breathed out a new kind of sickness. A foul vapor lifted from the core–not mere rot but a wet, oily fume that clung like a pestilence. It smelled of excretions, of concentrated secretion from the tentacle masses. It rose in thick waves.
The Shui Lan loops–those temporary water channels in their bodies–faltered. The wet fumes tainted the artificial circulation; it stuttered like a lamp starved of oil. Protections that had seemed reliable synchronized and then cracked.
The tentacles tasted the change in the air.
They lengthened.
What had been just long enough to reach the floating leaves doubled in an instant. Thick limbs cracked through the open sky like whips. The purple-black skin of each limb oozed sticky, adhesive slime that clung to weapon and cloth alike.
Ropes snapped.
The brittle chain parted at multiple joints.
Panic snapped outward in raw chord: leaves blurred as hunters scattered, eyes wild, limbs useless. Half the group–fifty-nine split into islands of flight.
Tentacles lashed. Their strikes were fast, whip-like. When the slime wrapped around a staff, the metal and wood fused to the tentacle, seizing the hunter and dragging him down like a fish on line. Weapons that touched the appendages stuck like flies trapped in resin.
Men screamed but no words carried; numb throats made speech thin as thread. Forced to breathless silence, hunters opened their meridians in panic–ranged attacks flared, bolts and slashes filling the air with desperate light.
Mu Li stood close to Azriel. Protected by the Chief's stance, the elder moved in an ancient rhythm: his brush traced heavy marks in the air, each stroke a sigil. He drew forms of protection and lifted a defensive platform sixty meters above, a bubble of spirit-light anchored by auxiliary treasures they had paid him with.
He used eighteen Marshal beast cores as the platform's energy heart. Each core thrummed like a heartbeat, feeding the pattern with steady pulses.
"Youngster Ghost Shade," Mu Li called, his voice strained through the numb hush, "throw survivors into the formation with her cloth."
Diala obeyed. She flung her velvet nimbus like a net. The Princess–small and precious–was bundled first. Chief Azriel snatched her, and the child slid into the platform's warm interior.
Kiaria leapt upward, fifty meters, Diala in his arms. Under his monochrome field the tentacles' attack cadence slackened by a fraction–the field's coldness slowed the reflex of the swamp's limbs. It was no cure, but it bought time.
He moved like a streak of black and white memory–fast, precise, merciless. Diala shortened her nimbus, turning it into a sling that cradled bodies. They worked in tandem: Kiaria the catcher, Diala the sling. They pulled bodies loose from slime and sent them like arrows into Mu Li's formation.
The survivors dropped into the circle panting–some bleeding from hands torn trying to help friends; some shaking, eyes hollow from screams swallowed by the swamp. A few wept without sound. The air inside the formation was hot with breath and the metallic tang of fear.
At the edge, Chief and his subordinates held a last line. They beat back grasping tentacles with formation-sinew and will. Mu Li's brush traced more marks, the ink near spent; he added anchors–tokens already given to him, treasures that glowed like candles in a storm.
The tentacles bucked and writhed below. Then the swamp's main body moved.
A vast mass emerged from the churning muck: bulbous, slick, an island of flesh crowned with ringed, lidless eyes that greedily took in the moving Yang above. Mu Li, breath ragged, let the word out in a tone that was equal parts pity and calculation.
"Octopus–of a kind."
Its main bulk was sixteen meters long, each eye fixed like a thousand patient stars. It watched them with an appetite that smelled the living air and found it sweet.
The leaves trembled. The platform hummed. The survivors who had been saved pressed together, a heap of wet clothes and ragged breaths.
No more words were left unsaid. There was only the work to do–care for the wounded, keep the formation fed with cores, and prepare for the next strike.