Heaven’s Trash: I Devour Everything

Chapter 2: The Skeleton Who Laughed

The skeleton didn’t come closer. It didn’t need to. Its presence pressed on Leo’s chest, and the air in the sanctum went thick and hard to swallow.

Leo made his legs hold him anyway. “Who are you?”

His voice came out thin but steady and bounced off the dead vines.

The pale lights in the skull’s sockets looked him over for a long moment, past the bruises and into whatever was underneath. Then the skeleton laughed. It was a dry, rasping sound.

“Trash,” it said, with relish. “Is that what they named you? The blood of the beginning, and they stamped trash on it?”

Leo’s jaw set. “Yes.”

The laughter swelled until the vines trembled. When it stopped, the quiet rang.

“Fools,” the voice spat. “Blind, puffed-up fools. They’ve forgotten where they sprouted.” The lights flared. “I am Bai Yuan. Founder of the Bai Clan. First to walk the path, and the last anyone remembers.”

Leo’s breath caught. No book in the clan library carried that name. The Bai Clan’s records began three hundred years back with a “lesser branch” that fled into the mountains. No founder. No ancestor. Nothing before.

Yet the name settled in his chest with a weight the clan’s polished histories had never had.

“You’re lying,” he said. His heartbeat disagreed.

“History belongs to whoever is left standing,” said Bai Yuan. “The Great Sects didn’t rise on righteousness, boy. They rose on murder, and afterward they hired scribes. Four hundred of my disciples died in one night. They were hung from the gates of Azure Peak, and my name was scraped off every stele on the continent.” The skull turned toward the ceiling, toward the Great Hall somewhere far above. “The Great Hall where you knelt today stands on my school’s foundations. You were kneeling on my floor.”

Leo said nothing. He couldn’t.

He thought of the marble under his knees. Kneeling there, he had noticed that the stone was worn into a shallow dip in one spot, by feet that had followed the same line for a good deal longer than three hundred years. He’d taken it for ordinary wear.

“Why erase you?” he asked at last.

“I couldn’t be controlled. And then there was what I practiced.” The lights narrowed. “The Chaos Path.”

Leo knew the term the way everyone did. A dark-ages story about cultivators whose roots held every element at once and tore themselves apart. Everyone knew it was impossible.

“The testing stone read my roots as Trash,” he said. “Gray decay. It said I couldn’t hold any qi at all.”

“It did,” Bai Yuan agreed cheerfully. “It was built to.”

Leo stared.

“The stones are tuned for purity. One element, clean and obedient. Anything else reads as defective. Your precious sects’ founders made them that way right after the Purge, so no Chaos Root would ever be found again. Children like you get filed under Mud or Trash, everyone is terribly sorry, and nobody is tested twice.” The jaw clacked. “Except you were tested twice. Unlucky for them that you didn’t scream.”

Leo’s hands curled on the stone. The hope in his chest felt dangerous, a knife held by the blade.

“You’re saying my roots aren’t broken.”

“Never were. They’re starving.” Bai Yuan drifted nearer, bones silent. “Pure qi is no use to a Chaos Root. Give it clean water and it dies of thirst beside the well. It eats what your world throws out: poison, rot, killing intent, bad circulation, grudges.” The lights came level with Leo’s eyes. “You’ve spent your whole life starving at a banquet, and they blamed you for not eating.”

Something inside Leo cracked open.

Ten years kneeling in the training yard while the others glowed. Ten years drawing breath and feeling nothing move. Ten years of being told it was his own fault, and believing it.

“Prove it,” he whispered. He wasn’t daring the old man. He was begging.

Bai Yuan raised one finger and tapped Leo’s sternum, over the hard knot Leo had carried since the hall.

“Feel that? That heavy, oily lump under your ribs? Every insult you swallowed and couldn’t digest. Every humiliation you carried because there was nowhere to put it. Your body kept all of it. Any other cultivator would call it a blockage.” The finger withdrew. “To a Chaos Root it’s dinner.”

Leo pressed his palm to the spot. Now that it had a name he could feel it, dense and greasy and old, his whole life coiled and stored.

“What do you want from me?”

“What do you want?”

“To make them kneel.”

“Small,” said Bai Yuan.

“Small?”

“Every child on this continent has been tested wrong for three hundred years. Thousands of Chaos Roots, filed as garbage and worked to death in the mines. I want the stones broken, and I want the men who built them to explain themselves.” The ghostly eyes held his. “You can have your revenge first. I’m not a monster. Only a patient old corpse.”

“Then give it to me.”

“The Heaven-Devouring Canon.” Bai Yuan lifted a skeletal hand. “Where they refine purity, you’ll refine filth. Where they spit out weakness, you’ll swallow it and get fat. It will hurt worse than anything you’ve imagined.”

Leo laughed, short and ragged. “I’m already trash to everyone I know. How much worse can it get?”

The lights went white.

“You’ll regret that question,” said Bai Yuan, and slammed his palm into Leo’s forehead.

The sanctum blew apart.

A flood of knowledge hit Leo’s skull and burned down his spine, heavier than anything he had ever lifted. He screamed without sound. His meridians tore open and re-formed along new routes, pathways that ran against every law of cultivation he’d been taught. He saw spirals folding inward on themselves. He saw circulation maps with no balance in them, only controlled collapse. His skin felt ready to split along every seam.

“Don’t resist!” Bai Yuan roared inside his skull. “Chaos devours resistance. Become the void!”

Too much, Leo thought. My body can’t take this.

He tasted blood where he’d bitten through his tongue. His heart ran at a pace that could only end one way. He tried to slip into unconsciousness and found the door bolted from the outside.

Then I won’t break, he thought, and the thought was small and stubborn. I refuse.

Hours passed. Or minutes.

Somewhere in it he saw a courtyard in summer. A small girl with a cracked pendant, hiccuping with laughter. A kitchen maid holding out a steamed bun in both hands. His father’s back, turned, always turned. The pictures came and went in the flood, and each one he managed to catch made the next wave easier to take. They didn’t comfort him. They gave him something to hold, and he held it.

When the pressure finally ebbed, Leo lay face-down on the stone shaking hard, his robe soaked through. The agony had dulled to a deep steady ache that showed no sign of leaving.

Bai Yuan hovered over him, flickering. Cracks ran across the skull.

“It is done.” His voice was thin. “Now, the rules. Listen. I won’t have the strength to say them twice.”

Leo tried to speak and got out a croak.

“One. The Canon eats impurity. Poison, corrupted qi, killing intent, rot. The fouler the meal, the stronger the yield.” A crack split the jaw. “Two. Everything you devour leaves Residue. Refine it before you feed again. Always.”

“And three?” Leo rasped.

The lights dimmed. “Three is the Hunger.”

“The—”

“Feed faster than you refine, and Chaos stops being your tool and becomes your master. It doesn’t care what it eats, boy. It doesn’t care who.” The cracks spread across the whole skull. “Don’t let it taste you.”

He said it flatly, a debt already paid. Leo didn’t ask what it had cost.

“Wait.” Leo shoved himself up on shaking arms. “You’re disappearing. I’ve got a thousand questions—”

“Of course you do. I’ve been dead three hundred years. I’m not gone.” The skeleton snorted, a very human sound. “This body is. The rest of me is relocating somewhere more comfortable. Hold still.”

The bones fell to white dust. A mote of gray light lifted out of the cloud, hung in front of Leo’s face, and slid into the center of his forehead, cold.

There, said a voice, inside his head now, dry and faintly put out. Soul sea. Roomy. A bit damp. I’ll live.

Leo blinked. “You’re in my head.”

Your soul sea, technically. Try not to think so loudly. I have a headache and no head.

Despite everything a laugh got out of him. It hurt his ribs.

He looked around properly for the first time. The chamber was bigger than he’d thought, round, ringed with pillars carved in spirals that turned inward on themselves. Along the walls ran rows of small stone niches, each cut to hold a memorial tablet. Every tablet had been smashed, the pieces swept into drifts of gray dust in the corners. Someone had made very sure no one would remember them, and then walked away believing that was the end of it.

Better, said Bai Yuan. Now listen. The wedding is in forty days. At the moment you are a boy with no qi in a hole in the ground. In forty days you have to walk into the Great Alliance Feast and not die in the doorway. That means Foundation Establishment, at the very least.

“That takes years,” Leo said.

For them. They cook with spring water. You drink from the sewer. A pause. Metaphorically. Please don’t drink from the sewer. The sewer down here is worse.

“And you?”

I’m a fragment. I can advise, nag, and occasionally insult you. I can’t fight for you and I tire easily. What I’ve got comes back as yours grows. The voice sharpened. So stop lying there and use the fuel you’re carrying.

Leo sat up, crossed his legs on the cold stone, and shut his eyes.

He turned his attention inward, away from the thin qi of the tomb. The knot was easy to find. It sat under his ribs, greasy and heavy. Every sneer. Every cough of laughter. Mei Ling’s heel on the jade. His father’s eyes sliding off him.

He reached for it with his mind and pulled.

It fought. His meridians screamed as the foul energy lurched into motion against the new circulation paths. The paths held. They closed around the sludge and ground it down, layer by layer.

The pain this time had a use. It was a working heat, steady and close. The sludge burned, and then it changed.

A dense dark energy began to gather in his dantian, black and dense. It had none of the clean shine of the sect geniuses. It was older and uglier, and when he leaned on it, it held.

Leo opened his eyes. A thread of black qi curled around his fingertips and sank back into his skin.

For the first time in his life he didn’t just feel energy. He felt power.

Congratulations, said Bai Yuan. You just digested your own childhood.

“They called me trash,” Leo murmured.

The black qi stirred at the word.

Careful, said the voice in his head, quieter. It likes that one.

Leo flexed his hand and watched the dark thread run along his knuckles and back under the skin. Then something snagged, and he frowned.

“Wait. At six I tested Mud. Last night, Trash.” He turned his hand over. “Elder Qu said my roots deteriorated.”

Roots don’t deteriorate, said Bai Yuan. They are what they are, from the first breath to the last. Yours were read wrong at six and read wrong again at seventeen. The question is why anyone bothered to read them again.

“The Mei family wanted out of the engagement.”

Then the Mei family could have found a hundred reasons, in private. Someone wanted a verdict, in public, with a Tribunal slip and an elder to read it aloud. The gray light in his forehead flickered. Somebody went to a good deal of trouble to throw you away before that wedding.

Leo looked at the black thread curling around his fingers.

“Then I’ll find out who,” he said.