Heaven’s Trash: I Devour Everything

Chapter 4: The Jade That Bites Back

Peak Qi Condensation had become a prison.

Leo spent the two-day walk to the Mei lands testing every way out of it. He pushed on the barrier while he marched, while he ate, while he lay awake. Berries, when he’d found a patch on the road, went down easily. The wasp venom he’d saved in a gourd barely tickled. The black qi in his dantian churned, dense enough to crush stone, and the wall to Foundation Establishment didn’t shift a hair.

You’re too big for the bowl, said Bai Yuan. The Abyss has nothing left worth your time.

“Corrupted Jade,” Leo said. “The Mei miners used to drink at the tavern under our gate. They complained about it every night. Cursed their picks, cursed the foreman, cursed the vein.”

Dense, unstable, and dangerous enough that the Mei family seals it in the dark and lies about it. Delicious.

Two days on, Leo lay on a ridge above the Mei family’s Spirit Mine, a gash in the mountain lined with lanterns and shored-up tunnels. Guards in blue-gray armor walked the entrance. Over the gate, cut deep into the stone, was the Mei family crest.

He looked at it for a while.

Having feelings? Bai Yuan asked.

“Having a plan.”

The plan took a day and a night of watching. He lay on his folded arms and learned the mine, every door and shift and habit. The day shift went in at dawn, grumbling, and came out gray. The guards changed at noon and again at midnight, and the midnight change was sloppy: two men arguing over dice while a third studied his fingernails. Ore carts went down empty and came up full. Nothing went down the lowest tunnel at all. A single lantern burned at its mouth, and the light was the wrong color, a faint violet that didn’t flicker in the wind.

He pulled a black cloth over the lower half of his face and tucked his aura down until it guttered low. To anyone with spiritual sense he looked like a bored mid-level rogue. He walked up to the gate with his hands showing.

“State your business,” a guard said, lowering his spear.

“Trade.” Leo pitched his voice half an octave below his own. “What I know, for thirty minutes in your lower tunnels. Your miners are being poisoned and you don’t know why. I do.”

The guards stiffened. A mine was a clan’s lifeblood, and the lower vein had fed the rumor mill for months: sealed shafts, coughing laborers, three deaths in a week.

“How would you know?” the watch captain demanded.

“I know what’s in the rock.” Leo let the lantern catch his eyes. “And I know what happens if it reaches the upper tunnels.”

Two minutes of whispering followed. Then: “One escort. Thirty minutes. You touch nothing I don’t say you touch.”

“Understood.”

The mine smelled of dust, sweat, and wet stone. The miners worked in a grim, careful silence. Side tunnels had been bricked up in a hurry, warding talismans slapped across the mortar while it was still damp. Three children, none past twelve, hauled an ore cart by with Mud-Grade tags sewn to their sleeves. An old man coughed into his cuff, and when he lowered it the cloth was spotted violet.

Look at them, said Bai Yuan. Thousands like them. Every one tested wrong.

Leo’s jaw tightened.

A girl of about nine stopped at a corner with soot on her cheeks and a Mud-Grade tag sewn crooked to her collar. She didn’t look afraid. She looked at him the way you look at the weather. Leo found the last strip of dried meat in his pack and let it drop where she could reach it. She snatched it without a word and was gone behind the cart before the escort turned around. He walked a little faster after that.

The old miner caught his sleeve as he passed. “Whatever you came for, son, do it quick,” he whispered. “Something in that rock listens.”

At the bottom of the lower shaft the escort stopped at a barricade. “That’s the bad one.”

Leo looked past him. Violet veins ran through the walls between the stones, swollen and thick. His Chaos Roots turned over in his chest, hungry.

“I need a closer look.”

“It eats qi.”

“Then I’ll be quick.”

The escort shrugged and unsealed a single brick. Leo slid through.

When the barricade closed behind him the air went thick. Wrong. He walked to the nearest wall, set his bare palm on the cold jade, and let the Canon open.

Careful, said Bai Yuan sharply. That isn’t natural. That vein has been—

The corruption hit all at once.

Pain ripped through every nerve at once, sharper than any poison he’d tasted. His meridians shrieked as the raw energy slammed through them, cornered and furious. He bit down on a groan and held, circulation spinning against the flood. The Canon wrapped the corruption and began to grind. It was a banquet and he was the starving man at the table.

Then the walls were gone.

He stood in a chamber of blood-slick jade. Black runes pulsed in the floor. Masked figures in crimson robes knelt around an altar, chanting in a language that set his teeth aching. At the center stood a young man in gold-threaded robes, his aura blazing.

Long Chen.

The Saint Son sliced his palm without a flinch and let the blood fall on the stone. The golden aura flickered. Under it, for the length of a heartbeat, Leo saw a core, black and wet, pulsing with a monstrous appetite.

“The vein is seeded,” a masked figure said. “It will bleed the Mei lands dry.”

“Let it,” Long Chen said, in a voice that was warm and pleasant and wrong. “The wedding feast will be richer for it. When every sect is gathered, we open the gates.”

The vision snapped.

Leo staggered, palm still on the wall, the corruption roaring into his dantian. He had one second of clear thought.

The saint is a demon.

I’d gotten that far myself, said Bai Yuan. Quietly, if you can manage it. Someone’s coming.

A heavy tread echoed down the tunnel. A man’s voice, sharp with temper. “Why is this barricade open? Who is that?”

Leo turned. The mine overseer stood at the gap with a lantern in one hand and a short sword in the other, Mei Wuyun, early Foundation Establishment, broad-shouldered and unfriendly. He saw Leo’s palm against the wall, saw the violet veins dimming under it, and his face twisted.

“You’re eating it.”

“I’m cleaning it,” Leo said.

“You’re stealing from the Mei family!”

The sword came down faster than Leo could follow.

He threw himself sideways. The blade cut a groove in the wall where his head had been. The second slash opened a line of fire across his thigh. Mei Wuyun pressed in, and the weight of a Foundation cultivator rolled off him, and Leo’s legs buckled. It pressed on every bone.

You can’t beat him straight, said Bai Yuan, calmly. So don’t.

Leo’s breath came in gasps. The corruption in him was half-refined and screaming. He could grind it down safely and get killed, or he could let it go.

He let it go.

He shoved the unrefined corruption out through his palm and slammed it into Mei Wuyun’s chest.

The overseer’s defensive qi met the violet poison, and two forces that had never touched burst apart in a flash of ugly light. Mei Wuyun’s sword arm spasmed. His protective jade talisman cracked and went black. His eyes rolled back as his own qi turned on him, and he dropped to his knees with a gurgle.

Leo caught the blade as it fell. He didn’t stop to think about what came next.

When it was over he stood over the body, breathing hard, blood running from his nose. Two ribs had cracked again. His hands shook. The Hunger murmured at the back of his skull, satisfied.

Don’t listen to it, said Bai Yuan.

“I’m not.”

You’re smiling.

Leo wiped his mouth with the back of a bloody hand and the smile went with the blood.

He stood a moment longer. The man had been a bully and a fool and had tried to kill him, and none of that did anything for the silence in the tunnel. Something in that rock listens, the old miner had said. The jade was seeded, and whatever had seeded it had been listening to every cough and curse down here for months. How many of the dead miners had died of the rock? How many of whatever was listening through it?

Outside, the escort was shouting. “Overseer? Overseer Mei!”

Leo laid a palm on the ceiling and fed one last pulse of black qi into the cracked stone. It groaned, and the tunnel behind him came down in a roar of dust, burying the body, the barricade, and everything else. Another mine accident. They’d been having a lot of those.

He climbed out through an old ventilation shaft. It was barely wider than his shoulders and slick with condensation, and he went up it in the dark, hand over hand, the corruption sloshing hot inside him, while voices rose far below and lanterns swung and somebody called for the watch. A rope ladder, long abandoned, held for exactly as long as he needed it. Then a grating rotten with rust, cold night air, stars. He didn’t stop to look. He ran along the ridge with the taste of metal on his tongue until the mine’s lanterns were a smear of orange behind him.

By the time he reached a wind-scoured ravine three miles off, the pressure in his dantian was past bearing. The corruption, the overseer’s last scrap of qi, the violet jade, all of it pushed on the wall of Foundation Establishment at once.

“Now,” he breathed.

He sat down in the middle of the ravine and let go.

The wall shattered.

Black qi went off through his meridians, forcing them wider, cutting new paths through bone and flesh. The ground cracked in a ring around him. Boulders split. Dust hid the moon. The chaos condensed and collapsed and rebuilt him from inside, and at the center of it his dantian opened.

A gray whirlpool formed there, slow and enormous, turning against the grain of the world.

When the dust settled, Leo sat in a crater, gasping, filthy, and grinning.

Foundation Establishment, said Bai Yuan. Three weeks after a boy was ruled incapable of holding qi. The sects will need a new word for impossible.

Leo flexed his hand. Black qi curled around his knuckles.

The world had changed its grain. He could hear a stream trickling a quarter mile off, and the separate footfalls of a fox on the far ridge. The night air carried a dozen layers of qi he hadn’t known were there, thin and bright and mostly useless to him. Down in the dark behind his ribs the Hunger turned once and settled.

It’s patient, said Bai Yuan, following his thought. Don’t mistake quiet for tame.

Leo climbed out of the crater and looked toward the faint glow of Azure Peak, where lanterns were already going up for a feast.

“He said open the gates,” Leo said. “Which gates?”

Bai Yuan was quiet so long Leo thought he’d gone to sleep.

The ones I spent my life closing, he said at last. Walk. We have eighteen days.