Heaven’s Trash: I Devour Everything

Chapter 3: Feast of Poison

The Howling Abyss did not welcome visitors. Leo worked that out inside the first hour.

The mist never thinned. It tasted of copper and old rot. The ground gave way without warning, and the air carried something sharp enough to scorch a lung. By the second day he had learned something more useful.

Down here, pain meant progress.

He sat cross-legged on a cracked slab with a Poison-Marrow Berry in his hand. It was the color of a week-old bruise, its skin split and weeping black sap that smelled of vinegar and funerals. Sect cultivators walked a mile out of their way to avoid it. One bite, people said, left poison in the body for decades.

"Go on," said Bai Yuan. You’re hungry. It’s hungry. Nobody is being subtle.

Leo bit down.

The taste was a slap, bitter enough to curl his tongue, and after it came a heat that slid down his throat thick and scalding. His vision smeared. His pulse jumped. He clamped his jaw and drew the poison inward toward his dantian.

The Canon woke with a roar.

The toxin tried to eat him from the inside. His circulation paths wrapped around it and began to grind. His muscles locked. Sweat ran down his spine. Then the poison broke apart, and what came out was dense and black and dropped into his dantian with a hiss.

He breathed out a thin thread of black smoke and laughed, shaky and astonished.

“It’s fast. It’s so much faster than their way.”

Of course it is. Now do it again, slower. You’re not a furnace. You’re a student.

After that he ate. Ghostwort, which stank of old meat left in the sun. Venom-bark, whose sap blistered his fingers. Spirit-fruit gone bad on the vine because no animal was desperate enough to touch it. He waded hip-deep through toxic fog. He let a nest of fang-wasps sting a line up his forearm and watched the swelling climb and fall as the Canon worked.

Each time, pain. Each time, he stayed with it. And each time his cultivation jumped in a way that would have made the Bai elders weep. Qi Condensation, early layers. Middle. Late.

The nights were worse. He slept in a crevice barely wider than his shoulders, under a blanket of dried moss, while the mist whispered across the opening all night. In dreams he knelt on the marble again and counted, one, two, three. Sometimes the coin rang when it hit the floor. Sometimes it was Yan’er’s thirteen coppers. He woke with his teeth clenched and his fist around the cracked pendant. On those nights Bai Yuan talked, mostly about nothing. Which disciples had been hopeless with a sword. Which ones had been worse at lying. Leo never mentioned it, and neither did the old man.

On the sixth day he got greedy.

He’d refined a berry in ten minutes and felt unbeatable. So he ate the next before the Residue settled. And the next. Then a mouthful of blue spore-moss that Bai Yuan told him not to touch, because pretty things in the Abyss are bait.

Leo. Stop. You’re not done refining—

The world tilted.

Heat flooded his skull, and a voice that wasn’t Bai Yuan’s purred through his thoughts. More. It didn’t shout. It sounded reasonable. It sounded like his own voice. There’s more. Look how much more. Why stop?

The edges of his sight went gray.

When he came back it was cold and nearly dark. He was crouched over something small and warm, with blood on his chin and fur between his teeth. An abyss rat. It had been alive a minute ago.

He threw up until nothing was left.

That, said Bai Yuan gravely, was a rat. Next time it won’t be a rat.

“I wasn’t there.” Leo wiped his mouth with a shaking hand. “I was watching me do it.”

Yes. That’s the Hunger. It doesn’t arrive as a monster. It arrives as an excellent idea. The old voice was quieter than usual. Refine before you feed. Every time. Say it.

“Refine before I feed.”

Again.

“Refine before I feed.”

He said it a third time and a fourth, until the words had worn smooth. After that he counted every mouthful, and the Hunger kept quiet. Mostly. He wrote the words on the inside of his wrist with a burnt stick, scrubbed them off, wrote them again. It was a stupid ritual and it worked.

Nineteen days later he hit a wall.

Peak Qi Condensation. His dantian sat heavy and stable. Foundation Establishment glimmered on the far side of the wall. Leo looked at his hands, scarred and calloused and steady. Nineteen days. The Frost Moon Sect’s best disciples took years.

He’d kept time with a knife, one notch in the stone for each sunrise he couldn’t see and could only guess at from how the mist shifted. Nineteen notches. He ran his thumb down them. Forty days to the wedding, and half of them gone. He had no idea what Yan’er was eating tonight. He didn’t let himself have an idea.

Don’t get smug, Bai Yuan said. Smug people die at exactly the moment everything is going well.

That was when the voices came through the mist.

Leo rose without a sound, drew his aura tight against his skin, and slipped between two pillars of cracked stone to watch.

Five figures in Sun-God Sect outer-disciple robes, gold sun badges glinting, picked their way across the broken ground with swords drawn. The leader was broad-faced, with a sneer already in place. Late Qi Condensation. The rest were mid-stage.

“This place gives me the creeps,” one of the younger ones muttered.

“Shut up and keep looking,” the leader said. “Saint Son Long Chen wants proof. A finger, a robe, a bone. Anything.”

Leo went very still.

Interesting, Bai Yuan murmured. Your saint sent five men into the Abyss to confirm a death. Nobody does that for trash.

Leo stepped out from behind the pillar.

Five swords snapped toward him. The leader squinted through the mist, and a slow, delighted grin spread across his face.

“Well, I’ll be. Zhao Kuang, outer disciple, at your service. They told us we’d find a corpse.” He looked Leo up and down. “You’re a disappointing one.”

“Tell the Saint Son I kept his coin.”

“Tell him yourself.” Zhao Kuang smiled. “Oh, wait. You’ll be dead.”

They came all at once.

The first swordsman lunged for Leo’s chest. Leo took the blade in his shoulder.

Pain flared, white and hot. The edge bit deep, and Sun-fire qi poured into the wound, a clean righteous flame meant to burn out the weak. Leo let it in, wrapped the Canon around it, and the flame turned black and vanished into his dantian. The swordsman’s eyes bulged.

“Why aren’t you bleeding—”

Leo’s hand closed on his wrist. His qi found the small stutter in the man’s circulation, the flaw left by years of coasting on talent, and twisted. The meridians seized. The man dropped without a sound.

A blast of condensed qi caught Leo in the side before he could turn.

It threw him into a pillar hard enough to crack the stone. Ribs went with a wet crunch. He slid down, spat blood, and saw the other four fanning out to surround him.

“Trash is trash,” Zhao Kuang laughed. “One lucky trick and he thinks he’s a cultivator.”

Leo smiled with red teeth.

The qi that had hit him was still in his body, hot and foul and arrogant. He pulled it in. The Canon ground it down, and the pain in his ribs turned to a furnace. When he stood, the broken bones ached, but his hands were steady.

Three ribs, left side, Bai Yuan said, reading it off flatly. Breathe shallow. Move before they finish being surprised. And don’t laugh. Leo had been about to. The four Sun-God disciples had stopped spreading out. They were staring at the man who should have been on the ground, and one of them had begun, very slightly, to back away.

He moved first.

He stepped inside the second swordsman’s guard, laid a palm on his chest, and let the man’s own qi rush up to defend his heart. Then he collapsed it inward. The man choked, clawed at his throat, and went down.

The third turned to run. Leo’s fingers caught the back of his neck.

The fourth screamed, “Mercy—”

Leo didn’t wait for the rest. The Abyss kept its secrets because nobody left it. He wasn’t cruel. He was careful.

Zhao Kuang was the last one standing. His sword shook. The color had gone out of his face. He threw one desperate full-strength blast, the best he had, and Leo caught it, drew it in, and walked through the smoke with it already inside him.

His hand closed on Zhao Kuang’s throat.

The man’s eyes were wide enough to show white all the way round. “You’re trash,” he whispered. “You’re trash—”

“I know,” said Leo, and squeezed.

Quiet came back to the canyon.

Five bodies lay in the mist, and above them hung a thick, bitter haze of killing intent, rich and fresh and uneaten. Leo breathed it in. The Hunger sat up in the back of his skull, bright-eyed and delighted.

Leo, said Bai Yuan, quietly.

Good, whispered the other voice. Look at all of it. Take it all.

“Not today,” Leo said aloud, and closed his eyes. He drew the haze in a thin stream, a mouthful at a time, and refined each one until the Residue was gone. It took twenty minutes. When he opened his eyes the Hunger had lain back down.

Better, said Bai Yuan, and he sounded relieved.

Afterward Leo sat a long time among the dead. He had expected something large. Triumph, or horror. He got a flat, still attention. The boy who had cried in the cellar and the boy who had knelt in the Great Hall had both gone quiet. Zhao Kuang’s eyes were still open. Leo reached over and closed them, and didn’t know why he had.

Because you aren’t them, Bai Yuan said, though Leo hadn’t spoken. Hold on to that. It’ll be the first thing the Hunger goes after.

Leo searched the bodies and slid five storage rings onto his fingers. One held spare robes. One held a rotten fruit pie. In Zhao Kuang’s was a sealed orders jade, which Leo cracked with his thumb.

All outer disciples of the Sun-God Sect report to Azure Peak by the twelfth of next month. Great Alliance Feast: twenty-one days.

“Twenty-one days.”

And you’ve hit your ceiling, said Bai Yuan. Poison is a snack now. You need something denser. Something the world refuses to touch because it bites.

Leo thought of miners at the tavern below the Bai gate, complaining into their cups about a vein that ruined their picks, a violet stain in the rock they called Corrupted Jade. He thought about whose crest hung over that mine.

“The Mei family’s lower vein,” he said slowly.

Ha, said Bai Yuan. I like your taste in restaurants.

“The Mei family are my in-laws.”

Ex.

“Details.”

He took the pie out of the ring, looked at it, and ate it anyway.

He was reaching for Zhao Kuang’s sword when a speaking-jade on the dead man’s belt flared warm, and a voice came out of it, pleasant and unhurried.

Zhao Kuang. Report. Is it done?

Leo knew that voice. He had heard it in the Great Hall, laughing.

Don’t answer, said Bai Yuan.

Leo didn’t. The jade pulsed three more times, patient, then went dark. He picked up the sword and started east, toward the Mei lands, walking faster than before. Five scouts had gone missing, and by now someone knew it.