Gyuvin awoke again, with a headache that felt like it was going to pound through his skull at any moment, back in his room in the courtyard he shared with Ricky and Jiwoong. He was overcome by a mild wave of panic; why wasn’t he in his detention quarters? He didn’t remember ever leaving.
He recalled suddenly, the encounter he’d had during the night. It came back to him in flashes and echoes of quick movement, like he was trying to recall a memory that wasn’t quite his, but slowly he remembered. Hanbin, outside the Peak, with a gash splitting his chest into two in the silence of the night.
Had it all been a dream? Gyuvin looked down at his hands. They were clean, marked with a few calluses where he habitually gripped Yuexi.
He put the thought aside and dressed in a hurry, tying his hair up into a ponytail and stumbling out the door. There was a huge ruckus going on outside, again, and it was much louder than it was the previous two times, and as far as he could see, the sky was so dark it couldn’t even have been dawn yet. As he opened the door of their courtyard and stepped outside, the scene before him made his heart go cold.
The cultivators’ courtyards were lined up along one side of a long, open outdoor breezeway connecting the gates of the Peak to the central areas like the dining and Assembly Halls. On the other side of the long breezeway was a wide, open field dotted with trees and bushes, and even a little pond at the far corner, where the cultivators liked to sit around at night after training to talk and laugh and play games together.
But now, as the clouds above parted to reveal a blood-red sky, the open field was overrun with demons, and around him the dying screams of the other cultivators was all he could hear. Gyuvin stood there, frozen for a moment, trying to get his bearings, summoning Yuexi to his hand out of mere survival instinct. He couldn’t recognize anyone in the carnage, but there were people all around him, fighting for their lives to overcome the demons engulfing them.
Where could the demons even be coming from? Gyuvin remembered being told during the briefing at the beginning of the camp that the Peak grounds were heavily warded for their safety, such that even normal cultivators entering required their entry tassel, let alone any other sentient being. There were only two possible options; either the wards had been completely broken, or a rift from the infernal realm had opened up inside of the Peak grounds, bypassing the wards entirely. He couldn’t decide which was worse.
“Kim Gyuvin!”
Gyuvin turned. Minwoo was calling to him, from a distance away, his sword Shanqing slashing out around him to keep the demons from getting close.
“Hyung, what’s going on!”
“Come here!” Minwoo called again. “Don’t ask stupid questions, there’s obviously been some kind of infernal invasion!”
Gyuvin was a little stunned that Minwoo still had the wit to scold him at a time like this, but he took off running down the breezeway towards him anyway, swinging his polearm around him to clear the demons out of his path. He stood with his back to Minwoo, panting hard from the sudden exertion, Yuexi still humming softly in his hand, on guard.
“Where’s Hanbin-hyung?” Gyuvin asked.
“I don’t know, he wasn’t in his quarters when I woke up,” Minwoo answered. “Neither were you. What were both of you doing out? You know we were being detained, right?”
Gyuvin raised his arm to bring Yuexi’s blade down onto a creeping mass of dark energy, sending it shattering into thin air. “Is that really the most important question right now?”
“Maybe not, but it’s one you’ll definitely be answering later,” Minwoo said, clearing out a horde of incoming demons with two slashes. “Something’s very very wrong here. I can’t use any of my spiritual powers at all. There’s something here that’s suppressing my cultivation.”
Gyuvin made the connection then, late as it was. Low-level demons like these, which could barely be considered life forms, were usually no harm to any experienced cultivator. He himself could take down six in a single slash, as Hanbin had reminded him many a time. The only reason it made sense for all these experienced cultivators to be so overwhelmed by the demons was because, like Minwoo said, something was suppressing their cultivation. Without access to their spiritual powers, they were effectively crippled. Barrier techniques, talismans and energy blasts were all out, even holy weapons couldn’t be summoned without the use of spiritual energy.
He looked down at his hand just then. Yuexi’s jade-tipped blade glinted with dark, viscous demon blood. “Why is it that I could summon Yuexi, then?” he asked, still slashing to keep the fiends away from him and Minwoo.
“I don’t know,” Minwoo answered. “But it seems like you’re the only one. No one else here is wielding a holy weapon.”
Gyuvin looked out onto the greenery and grass that had been transformed into a raging battlefield. Holy weapons usually glowed with an aura when they were summoned, and lit up when they were used. Yuexi held a faint, but clearly visible golden aura. As he watched on, not a single holy weapon could be seen.
“That means…that means the cultivators who use holy weapons will be defenseless,” Gyuvin said quickly, beginning to panic. Cultivators who had earned a holy weapon usually gave up the use of their regular weapons after, since they were in truth cumbersome to carry around when there was a much more convenient alternative. But that also meant that everyone there who had a holy weapon wouldn’t have anything to defend themselves with, when everyone else had one.
“Who do I know who has a holy weapon…Hanbin-hyung, Hao-hyung, Jiwoong-hyung, Yujin…I’m sorry, hyung, but I have to go and look for them. Without their holy weapon, they won’t have anything left to fight with.”
“Okay, go,” Minwoo said readily. “I can hold my own. Go and make sure they’re alright.”
Minwoo had Shanqing, and though it wasn’t imbued with his own spiritual power like it usually was, it still worked moderately to kill demons, just much slower than usual.
Gyuvin turned to run, but at the last second, he turned back around. Drawing a simple demonic repulsion talisman, he condensed the strokes of gold into his palm and pushed the energy into Minwoo’s back. Immediately, the demons surrounding him began to fall back, skittering away, their howls and screeches echoing through the carnage. Gyuvin closed his eyes and felt for the amount of spiritual reserves he had left in his core.
Okay, it was enough. He steeled himself, taking a deep breath. Directing Yuexi towards the sky, he felt a rush of energy leave him, and he closed his eyes so he could focus.
“Yuexi, it’s raining!”
A sunburst of golden light expanded above him like an umbrella, the crescent moon array unfolding in all directions, and heavenly light slashed down from the sky, burning and destroying every demon in the field. All around him, he watched streaks of gold send demons falling back, their demonic forms wilting and burning from the heavenly light that was too much for their dark-matter composed bodies to handle, fading to dust and ashes that blanketed the lush grass with a layer of black and gray.
The killing array closed after a long few seconds and Gyuvin stumbled against a tall pillar, his heart beating fast, his stomach sick from the feeling of his spiritual reserves beginning to empty out. He had cleared out the first wave of demons, but from where he was, it seemed like the demons were flooding in from everywhere; through the open gates, over the walls, from every direction he could see. The cultivators who’d been rescued from the first wave had only a short amount of time before they would be overrun again, and there were already more bodies littering the floor than he could count.
Gyuvin stood with his father’s weapon in his hand, the sky a roiling red over the Peak, looking out over the field of blood and death, as a deep, sinking sense of dread washed over him like an ocean wave.Â
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