Alex locked gazes squarely with WiFu once more. “Why are you really offering me this?”
WiFu flashed a sad smile. “Because our opponents have already placed five cards to assure your demise, and Grandfather’s sixth card is a real doozy. Because you’ve already done enough, more than enough, and you deserve for your last life to finally be a happy one. Because for all that I’ve had many daughters, I’ve never had a son, and I know you would have been a fine one. One that I should have treated far better than I have.”
Alex flushed, lowering his gaze, touched more than he wanted to admit. “I... thank you.”
For just a heartbeat, he seriously considered his patron’s offer.
To be free of all heartache and obligation, to live a final life where every day was a fresh adventure of the gentlest sorts, uncovering mysteries he knew would always end in sweetest triumph, uncovering lost secrets, precious prizes, and one day, perhaps soon or many years from now, someone to join him on his adventures before they settled down in a quiet town, savoring the summer of their lives together. To be all but destined for peace and happiness, free of the chaos and strife even he could sense was coming to a head. Soon to swallow Baidushi whole, and perhaps the entire empire. But he, at least, could live a life filled with nothing but clear blue skies.
He closed his eyes and breathed deep, savoring that halcyon dream.
But all it took was memory of Liu Li’s heartfelt smile when Alex handed her the key to her renewal for him to open his eyes once more, memory of Liu Jian’s fierce resolve when he removed the guise of gentle alchemist and accepted the weight of duty and obligation, fearlessly challenging an entire coven of infernalists, for Alex to ask the question he knew couldn’t be taken back.
“What happens to all my friends if I turn away from the path I now walk?”
WiFu smiled sadly, sipping his wine. “Try the drink, Alex, I truly think they’ve found just the right infusion of cacao and coffee for your taste. Delightful, isn’t it?”
Heart hammering, Alex forced himself to nod, the drink every bit as delightful as any chocolate-infused drink could possibly be.
His patron nodded approvingly. “Wonderful. I was hoping it would be to your taste. And should you take the path branching just to the right of the river you’ll soon ford, you’ll find yourself in Quiandushi. Time and distance will just seem to fly by, and you’ll find yourself the proud owner of a plantation harvesting coffee and cacao beans both, before you know it. With hundreds of happy beehives keeping your vanilla harvest beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, all allowing you to make the finest coffee to be found for a thousand miles in all directions. You’ll find the ever-present forest surprisingly amenable to your rather large plantation, as ancient favors are finally cashed in.”
WiFu’s eyes twinkled warmly. “And don’t be surprised if on your journey you meet a strikingly beautiful woman with lustrous dark curls and mocha skin who will laugh at all your jokes and lighten up your confused heart with a smile that soothes your troubled soul like a fresh new dawn. Before the day’s end, you will be laughing at each other’s childhood stories and finishing each other’s sentences, as if you had both found your missing half. By the moon’s glorious light, you two will become one, and she will fill all your nights with bliss and your days with sweetest joy. She won’t be a cultivator, but she will have a natural connection to the land, and give you no less than twelve beautiful children, who will one day grow up to become nearly as strong as you.”
Alex smiled, wiping away a bittersweet tear for the dream he must defer.
“WiFu?”
“Delightful eclairs, aren’t they, Alex? You’d never think pastries this fine could be made in this time and place, but there you are.”
“What happens to Baidushi if I retreat from the board?”
WiFu flashed the saddest smile. “You have asked me twice, and again I will answer, for I have no choice but to tell you that even my grandfather understands the power of gentlest persuasion. All past sins can be forgiven. When the years hang heavy after the gentlest passing of your beautiful wife, years after your twelve children have grown tall and proud, embracing youth that never seems to end, you will find a golden locket lying upon the bed stand you had shared with your wife for so many years, struck with the sudden realization that you need but exchange tarnished copper for sacred gold and rest your weary head upon the softest of pillows, and you will wake up to the first of seven wondrous lives.
“And do not worry. For unlike fools that invaded stories that were not their province, your tale will not end with seven glorious adventures. Instead, you will have the opportunity to reincarnate endlessly thereafter, whenever your sleeping spirit chooses to emerge from the River of Souls once more, with at least a few gods looking down fondly upon you, assuring that no matter the hardships, your fate will always be kinder than the dooms suffered by those who ignored the mercies of the gods above.”
The silence between them was heavy and profound. Alex was no fool. He was well aware of just how tremendous a boon he was being offered.
An eternal death from which there would be no escape was a doom suddenly lifted, a reprieve unexpectedly granted, with the shining light not only of a second chance, but a wondrous life ahead, free all of burdens and any but the gentlest of concerns. He would also earn the most fantastic prizes anyone could hope for. Seven wondrous lives to follow his eventual exit from this one, each an adventure glorious and grand, and every life forever after would have at least a few rays of divine sunlight brightening his existence when countless billions of others could expect no such boon.
And all he had to do was turn away.
All he had to do was not ask the question blazing in his heart.
And look away from the desperate hope wilting in WiFu’s eyes.
Alex grinned. “An offer like that, I’d be an utter fool to refuse.”
WiFu chuckled good-naturedly. “Indeed you would, my boy. Indeed you would. Now take a sip of the drink that will change your life, shape your future, and bring you into the arms of your future wife!”
“WiFu?”
“Yes, Alex?”
“What happens to Liu Li if I forsake the mad path you have set me on?”
WiFu flashed the saddest of smiles. “She dies, Alex. Screaming in hellfire. But you know this already.”
Alex’s heart lurched in his chest, knowing he could never escape those terrible words. “And Baidushi?”
“Lost. Utterly. Twenty million lives lost to a necromancer’s doom or flame’s caress. My brothers are certain the casualties will be far less. They are fools. The entire city will be destroyed, Alex. The sovereign princess and her family will lose their very souls, and the outrage this will spark will catalyze a war the likes of which this part of the world hasn’t seen since you first appeared on our shores, well over a thousand years ago.”
Alex’s blood ran cold. So many odd comments exchanged between WiFu’s vindictive kinsmen suddenly made a terrible sort of sense. “We’re near the border with a neighboring empire, aren’t we?”
WiFu smirked. “If you can call thousands of miles distance a border, certainly.”
“I mean Baidushi. From what little I got out of that bastard Fu Shen’s class, the Jade Empire claims territory just a few thousand miles from Baidushi, the capital city of Cuijing Principality, which is itself as large as the continental United States, and is just one of a dozen or so principalities in the Zhengtu kingdom, which is almost as big as all the entire land mass of the world I once called home.”
Alex shook his head in disbelief, still more than a bit awed by the scope of the geography involved. “And it’s just one of maybe a score of kingdoms making up the Golden Empire. And you’re saying there will be a war. The likes of which I couldn’t even imagine. And the flash point will be Baidushi.”
WiFu flashed a humorless smile. “Why, I have said no such thing at all, disciple.”
Alex clenched his jaw. “I recall the bellicos
e words of your brother. That it was a tragedy that had to happen. Baidushi must fall. Liu Li must serve as a sacrifice. Why?”
Insight check made!
Alex’s eyes widened with horror. “Don’t tell me your family’s setting the city up to burn so they have a pretext to start a war with the neighboring empire? What, so they can claim all the cities and supplant whatever pantheon calls that empire home?”
WiFu’s rictus of a grin widened. “All for the greater good, you understand. What’s a few billion lives, compared to the glory of righteous gods resuming their rightful place?”
Bitter laughter rang through the halls of the library.
“After all, with a name like Jade Empire, an outsider might actually think they were superior to their neighbors, and this is an affront that must be corrected at all costs.”
Alex’s blood ran cold at those words. “Wait. They are going to kill Liu Li...”
“More than just kill, Alex. Her soul will burn in the pits of the underworld for all time. More to punish me than anything else, really, but the outrage this is hoped to spark within my kitsune descendants will assure that Jidihu and her ilk serve as spies and assassins for the strikes to come.”
Alex clenched his fists in helpless outrage. “And they’re going to let another twenty million die to inflame the passions of war, in battles even your bastard brothers know will take the lives of billions of innocents?”
WiFu shrugged. “What can I say? Sometimes even gods get bored peering at the world below from their glorious palaces and cities high above. Seeing the ground paved in crimson perks them free of their ennui more than a dozen vices and a score of nubile young virgins ever could, allowing them to savor their immortality that much more.”
Alex clenched his eyes shut, hearing nothing but the furious pounding of his heart.
“I think you already know what my next move has to be.”
Alex felt a powerful hand squeeze his shoulder. “You’ll never know how grateful I am to hear you say that. So long as you ignore the path that will call out to you, you’ll have at least a bit of time to grow as a cultivator and do what you can for Baidushi. Perhaps you’ll even be able to save the kitsune girl who stole your heart.” WiFu’s gaze hardened. “But not Erjizhen. Those poor souls are already as good as dead. Best ignore the goads of our enemies, and proceed straight to your ultimate goal.”
Alex’s eyes widened, immediately thinking of the compact city by the lake filled with people who had shown him nothing but kindness, or at the very least, had never once cared about his race. Good folk making a living far away from the major cities, with all the risks, freedoms, and peril that such involved.
“Wait, what’s this about Erjizhen?”
But save for leaving behind the delightful aroma of coffee and a silver platter full of fresh pastries, his patron was gone.
“Have a care, Alex. That sixth card is a doozy.”
The words echoed through his skull as he took a deep breath and approached the bronze-gold door holding so many wondrous secrets. In truth, he was relieved beyond words to know that, so long as he kept true to his ultimate goal, he had time to save the people he loved.
But he had dallied long enough. It was time to start training his heart out, learning all he could of Qi powers and deadly techniques, grateful that with so many elements open to him, there should be no secret technique he couldn’t eventually master. Or so he hoped. He would do his best to learn whatever he could that would give him an edge upon reaching Baidushi. Especially if he was to enter the city as a prospective student once more, though this time far better prepared for what lay in store for him.
Yet the second he touched that door, he understood the reason for WiFu’s final words. Understood as well, he thought, why his mentor had made him think of an entire capital city in peril, not just a community less than one hundredth of its size.
It was so that Alex could feel righteous and like he was still on the right path, even if he fled for Baidushi just as fast as he could, coldly leaving Erjizhen to its fate, refusing to be baited once more.
Nonetheless, he couldn’t help seeing in his mind’s eye the smiling faces of helpful merchants and the twinkling eyes of a certain hostess helping him flee trouble when his mind was bombarded with an unwanted message and a dire warning.
A trap.
Just like WiFu had implied.
For a heartbeat, Alex found his soul swooping over forests and fields before jolting to stillness in a grand audience hall, complete with polished wooden throne, lacquered dining tables, and terrified musicians, fingertips frozen to stillness above their seven-stringed zithers and Zhonghu fiddles, looks of horror and dread showing all too clearly through the white face paint they wore, all of them shivering in their orange-red robes.
But it was the man sitting upon the throne in gold-lined cultivation robes radiating the aura of a powerful Silver that truly let Alex know just how perilous the situation was.
For the hard eyes that looked like both an accountant’s and executioner’s could only belong to the ruthlessly efficient Lord Wan Duan. Alex didn’t even need the throne and purple cultivation robes to put two and two together. He could all but see that truth flickering within the man’s soul.
Perhaps because Alex was himself in spirit form at that moment.
And it seemed someone else knew it as well, the roaring guttural voice of a man Alex absolutely despised suddenly rang through the hall.
“I sense you, Ruidian worm!”
Alex spun around, spiritual senses honing in on none other than the fiery-eyed countenance of Bingwen himself, former Headmaster of Dragon Academy, infamous for his genocidal hatred of Ruidians and kitsune alike. And the way his fiery aura blazed with caustic fury, no one would think him injured. Even with tainted Wood Qi, it fed his flames so powerfully that Alex had no doubt he was still the equal of any single element flame master of similar rank, and Bingwen had actually broken through to Gold.
The man’s fiery eyes lit up with fanatic hate as his lips twisted in a feral smile. As if he could sense Alex every bit as well as Alex could sense him. “I can taste the stink of your presence, you foul abomination! You have awakened. You have returned to this world, and you have my library! I know not how you performed such feats, nor do I care!” He held up a golden card that chilled Alex to the quick to see.
“The gods themselves have whispered your secrets into my ears! I know you carry a divine artifact, a ring capable of carrying an entire library of works you dared to steal from me! You will return those books, Ruidian, every last one! All four Golden tomes better be accounted for, and every Silver treatise as well! Do you understand me, you vile piece of filth?”
He then held up two young children shrieking for their mother, though no one answered their call.
Alex’s heart lurched. He saw the quivering ears, the wildly twisting tale of one, the red hair and blue eyes of the other.
Ruidian and kitsune. They could be siblings, they looked so alike despite their differences, and he had no doubt that Bingwen would hate a mix like them more than anything else under the sun.
“I know you favor vermin such as these! You will come, worm! You will return my library to me, or I shall wash this entire city in flame, just like these pathetic musicians!”
His face lit up in a mad rictus as flame roared from his free hand, washing over the dozen or so musicians whose beautiful instruments were instantly reduced to ash, the final notes of their owner’s lives the awful shrieking dirge of the most agonizing of deaths.
And Bingwen’s laughter washed over them all.
Over the pair of children too terrified to move when Bingwen tossed them on the ground, over Lord Wan Duan himself, whose calculating hawk-like gaze now held nothing but mindless terror, frozen to stillness, knowing that to even call attention to himself was to invite death.
“Do you understand, Alex Hammer? Treacherous pawn of the Fox, and disciple of my most hated foe? You have until the sun set
s to return my property to me! Then I begin washing this city in flame, starting with these children and the Ruidian quarter, destroying block after block until you surrender your prize, or there is nothing of this city left, and then I shall devote my every last breath not simply in retrieving my library, but personally sending your soul to the fiery pits of purgatory! And on that, maggot, you have my Cultivator’s Oath!”
Alex immediately slammed back into his body, panting and gasping, realizing exactly what was at stake. If he didn’t race to Erjizhen at a dead sprint and come before his enemy, panting and exhausted, an easy target a single burst of flame could incinerate, that psychopath would gleefully butcher a city of a hundred thousand.
And since there was no way for Alex to communicate with the man, to bargain or negotiate from a distance, he was unable to arrange for any terms save the ultimatum laid out.
Present himself like a keening wolf, neck bared before his better, or a hundred thousand would die by fire.
Alex seethed with impotent fury. He hated feeling so trapped, to have the weight of so many deaths upon his head if he didn’t want to spend eternity drowning under the frigid waters of the River of Souls where no doubt a certain serpentine underlord would take spiteful pleasure in tormenting him for all time once his foe blasted him to super-heated ash. An eternity of pain and despair to look forward to, simply because he dared to move his piece in ways the opposing team didn’t like, all because he valued the countless lives being put in peril by surly gods who saw countless billions of souls as nothing more than expendable chips to be played for their own amusement.
It was only when he howled his outrage at the uncaring heavens from the heart of his ring that he realized he now had an edge that he hadn’t, just a short while ago.
He had in his possession an artifact that was sacred, and a certain set of chimes, carefully sealed in Dark Qi, that was most definitely infernal, even if its curse only applied to one far away soul. His ring itself was a divine artifact gifted to him by the god of Shadow and Chaos, and Alex was himself of mortal stock, if not precisely mortal any longer.
Silver Fox & The Western Hero: Warrior's Oath: A LitRPG/Wuxia Novel - Book 4 Page 52
