Chapter 36 — Demonic Heretics

Overjoyed, Zhang Qingyue was about to call the staff back when a searing pain shot through his shoulder, half his body went weak, and his mind went blank. He looked down and saw, jutting out through his chest and shoulder, the tip of a small dark-red fork, with bright red blood gushing and spouting without cease.

It was that same dark-red fork: while Zhang Qingyue's guard was down, it had stolen in and dealt him a grievous wound.

Zhang Qingyue saw that the fork, which had been dark red, now seemed almost to brighten, as though it had woken at the smell of blood. He groaned low, meaning to reach up and pull the fork out, when suddenly, as the bloodstains upon it deepened, a shadow in the darkness seemed to rise out of nothing from the fork and clung fast to Zhang Qingyue's back.

The master of that dark-red fork, it appeared, was parasitic upon the treasure itself.

Zhang Qingyue felt dizzy and sick, without the strength to shake off the fiend behind him. And at the wound, besides pain, there now came a numb, itching sensation — poison, most likely, upon it too. From the corner of his eye he could not see the fiend's face behind him, only the two hands clamped hard on his shoulder, withered and filthy, stinking abominably.

In the distance a burst of wild laughter rang out, and behind him a voice came, cold and sinister: "You stinking brat of the Canglan Sect — you brought this on yourselves. Hand over your vital blood like a good boy!"

Zhang Qingyue had no time to grasp the meaning of his words before the fiend's actions made it plain: the shadow opened its great mouth and sank its teeth into the left side of Zhang Qingyue's neck, drinking deep, and at the same moment the dark-red fork grew brighter still, as though it too were drinking blood.

Zhang Qingyue was terrified beyond measure; he felt all the blood in his body rushing to his throat, his limbs going light and hollow, the strength draining slowly out of him from head to foot. He could no longer even hold up the Black Iron Staff in the air, and it fell.

In that dazed moment, all at once, he seemed to be back in the past, in that secluded valley.

In that nightmare!

The Black Iron Staff dropped from above his head and fell before him, giving off a faint blue light, as though summoning something. Zhang Qingyue seized it, and at once felt the chill in the staff surge and swell within him like fury itself.

His blood kept flowing out, drunk away by the fiend; Zhang Qingyue could hear nothing of the world any more, only gathered up the last shred of strength in his whole body, and like a cornered beast drove the blue-glowing Black Iron Staff hard into the fiend behind him.

The Black Iron Staff was blunt and edgeless, yet now it treated that body of flesh and blood as though it were bean curd, and drove in as easily as a blade through bamboo.

The fiend behind him convulsed and stopped drinking; as though unable to believe it, he turned his head to look at Zhang Qingyue — and Zhang Qingyue, in that same instant, saw him.

In the gloom it was like the low sneer of some demon of the nine shades, or else someone's heartbeat in the darkness; the hand that gripped the Black Iron Staff felt the pulses come wave on wave, like the coursing of blood, or the exultation of devils.

The light on the dark-red fork dimmed swiftly, and behind it the endless darkness came rushing in.

In the instant the darkness swallowed Zhang Qingyue and the fiend together, in his half-conscious state Zhang Qingyue saw a sight he could never forget as long as he lived.

That fiend's face, seamed with wrinkles yet still full, shrivelled in a matter of moments; flesh and blood turned to withered skin clinging to the bone.

The next instant, darkness closed around him.

What had been lost was restored; an inexhaustible power poured from the shaft of the Black Iron Staff and merged into his body.

Zhang Qingyue came back to himself and stood rooted to the spot. The wound at his shoulder still ached, but the gushing blood had already stopped under the working of that unknown power — and yet the boy noticed none of it. Only one thought churned over and over in his mind:

What have I done? What have I done?