Demonic Tribulations - Chapter 47 preview (Patreon)

Chapter 47 – Yin Xue

Tossing the beast stone up and down as he strolled along the roadway, Yin Xue admired the glowing purple core. It was a rough, ruby stone which had yet to be carved and thus jutted out at random stages, but it glowed with a decent amount of power. Low Core Formation would have been Yin Xue’s guess, at least in the Middle Kingdom. He had extracted the stone from the creature’s body after defeating and bisecting it on the basis that the realm likely functioned along the lines of the Middle Kingdom and such a stone was basically, currency.

Utilizing his movement technique, Yin Xue was crossing ground in quick spurts, moving by compressing the distance between himself and his foot by flexing a spatial dao and understanding of space. It allowed him to travel with great speed even when he had chosen to no longer run.

After all, he could sense the farms approaching in the distance. Small residences with larger grain barns, flapping clothes and scarecrows on high poles near the buildings were surrounded by the fields that these demons tended. Yin Xue was curious about the fields, for they were not the rice paddies, wheat or barley fields or even vegetable fields that were more common in the Middle Kingdom but massive, raised clay pools that jutted out of the land. Within the pools, he could sense teeming life, familiar to his spiritual sense but disturbingly so.

It was when he closed on the fields, taking steps away from the road that he confirmed what he had sensed. Yin Xue ignored the farmers that tended the fields, the way the demons started at his sudden appearance as he peered within the raised pools.

“Do you eat these?” Yin Xue asked, staring at the smaller brethren of the centipede monster that he had just slain, not even an hour ago. Much smaller, brighter yellow and pink in coloration, the majority in this group about the size of his arm at best. They crawled and swam over one another, so many that they nearly could rear up and climb over the edge.

In fact, one particularly enthusiastic fellow had managed to clamber on top of a few others and gotten the top of its body across the lip of the pool and was pulling itself upwards. A farmer, spotting that, came hurrying over, the long pole with its barbed two-pronged edge reaching forward to pin and then shove the centipede back into its pool.

Then, and only then, did the farmer look at Yin Xue.

“We are not baheej, Honored One. We make a good living raising the karam for the cores,”

Yin Xue frowned, and the demon shrunk back a bit as though they expected Yin Xue to strike. Instead, the newly-forged demon latched onto the words he had not understood. “Honored One? Why do you call me that?”

“You are of the visal caste, are you not?” Then the farmer shook his head. “No, of course not. You are a huma falak.” At the look Yin Xue gave him, the demon added. “Interloper. That is why your ghazal is so strangely accented.”

“I am speaking Han.” Yin Xue eyes narrowed. “So you all speak this… ghazal?”

“It is the common tongue. The higher castes all speak differently, of course, but for those of us who are ghazalri and lower, we speak ghazal.”

“How many castes are there?” The Middle Kingdom resident knew of such things from the books he had been forced to read by his father. Of governance methods utilized by other kingdoms and other barbaric cultures.

“Thirteen. Twelve that are reachable, and the thirteenth of the high ones.”

“So many. And progression through the castes are forbidden?”

“Near impossible.”

Common, then, for such systems. If you were born into a specific caste, you could never be elevated and that was your fate. How that lined up with demonic cultivation, and how they undertook such demonic cultivation, Yin Xue knew not. That he had gained so much information already, was surprising. Especially since the farmer had already understood that he was an interloper – and even had a name for it.

“Why are you helping me?”

The farmer leaned on the pole that he had utilized, eyeing Yin Xue’s state of dress. He traced the demon’s body, frankly, a state of affairs that puzzled Yin Xue. Even the farmers in the Middle Kingdom would fear looking at a noble so frankly, and yet this demon commoner was fearless. Every other demon had retreated, giving the pair space; but this one had wandered up to Yin Xue uncaring.

“They say that a huma falak can bring great blessings on a village, if the wheel wishes it.”

“And if the wheel does not?”

“Then they rain down trials and tribulations upon the unfortunate.”

“You speak of that so nonchalantly,” Yin Xue replied. At the demon’s look of incomprehension, he added. “Calmly. Unworried.”

“Ah. The wheel will turn as it will. If I die, perhaps I will join my family earlier. If not, then perhaps I will see a huma falak may wreak upon the country.”

“Your family?” Yin Xue had a sense now, of what he might hear. Still, he was surprised when the demon turned and pointed to the flapping cloths, the scarecrows near the residence. Focusing, Yin Xue felt his stomach lurch, for those scarecrows, three big ones, two much smaller were no scarecrows but individuals – long dead – who had been levered upwards on poles driven through their nethers. He gulped, his stomach roiling, for all his casual disinterest and his dislike of the farmers, no individual deserved such punishment.

At least, if you had to kill the family, let it be swift.

“What happened?” he croaked out.

“The men tend the fields. It is a dangerous job, and can often require strength to wrestle the karam back into the pools.” A gesture to the creatures that clambered everywhere. “The women harvest the cores, when we have fished out a batch. The meat is taken care of by the elderly, set in piles for the baheej to take and process. And the children clean and sort the stones, looking for imperfections.

“My family missed an imperfect core. It was served to a muraa'aat. He sent his guards to teach us a lesson, to take better care in our duties.”

“When you say imperfect, did it poison them?” Yin Xue asked, groping blindly for a cause.

“It was tainted. Imperfect in its taste. Unworthy of being served to muraa'aat, only a ghazalri like us.”

“And this is the life you live in. This world of castes and casual cruelty?” Yin Xue asked, softly. “Where is the Dao in this?”

That word caused the nearby demons to flinch, for many of the farmers to flee his surroundings. Even when some of the monster centipedes escaped, none dared to move to corral them for fear of nearing Yin Xue. Only the initial demon, the widower seemed unperturbed. Staring into the green eyes that stared back at him, Yin Xue began to understand. It was not courage that allowed the other to stand before him, but fatalism and despair.

He had nothing left to live for.

More, Yin Xue felt something had shifted in the atmosphere when he had spoken of the great way. As though a silent bell had been struck, the persistent gentle wind had shifted, stilled for a moment and now rose. Bringing with it the scent of something more.

“That is a heretical religion. A dangerous philosophy that breeds rebellion and discontentment. It is what huma falak’s bring, each time they arrive. Chaos and disorder and change. A belief that ones position is not wrought by the actions of before, or that one must not suffer in this life so as to improve in the next.”

“If the Dao is heretical,” and once again, that shiver in the world, as though it was reacting to that word. Strange, how it had not seemed to matter before. “then what is it that you follow?”

“Ghandaasa Jholay.” A slight qwirk of his mouth, before he continued. “The Great Wheel.”

“Incarnation and reincarnation, with a caste system? Do you all then believe that you should avoid harming others and attempt to shed karmic burdens in this life to ascend?” Yin Xue asked.

“What sins can be shed in this life? All that we do, all that has been done, is foreordained. We must but suffer, in this life, passing through the wheel till come out higher in the next one. Over and over again, we rise and fall.” A beat before he added. “Or so the priests preach.”

“Neverending?”

“Yes.”

He could sense them. The oncoming storm. He turned his head upwards, away from where the clouds rotated in the distance as a dragon cultivated, to where the road led onward to a city in the distance. High walls and the glow of enchantments to protect against individuals who might leap over or monsters that might burrow under.

Lightning in the air, zipping forward through the sky. Bright white against purple clouds, their movements illuminating and making the green shards of stone hidden beneath the black grass to glint and reflect back.

A strange beauty, but for all that, he sensed the keen edge of lethality. The blade at their beck and call, the smell of old blood on their weapons. Bloodlust given form, as they streaked through the air alerted by his use of the word.

It seems this was not to be a peaceful introduction to the world. Then again, why should it be? Easy had never been his way, not at home where his father beat him and forced him to study and cultivate and consume foul-tasting pills and glug medicinal herbs to push him ahead. Not in the sect, where everything cost more than he had expected and he was deemed nothing but a false prodigy.