Chapter 821: Blood Gu Trial
Chapter 821: Blood Gu Trial
Within twelve hours, her dark crimson eyes would snap open in the cold straw.
The deep incisions on her forearms would itch with fierce, burning heat, the edges of the cuts knitting together with unnatural speed, closing into thin white lines before the scab could even form and when the red-robed disciples returned with their bronze bowls three days later, her blood did not run thin and watery like the dying cattle beside her.
…It poured out thicker and richer every single time, carrying a deep viscous crimson hue that smelled of dormant volcanic heat.
On her fourth month in the pens, a senior sect physician in a blood-stained leather apron stopped before her cage.
He held up a freshly filled bronze bowl, tilting it beneath the tallow torch, dipping his yellowed fingernail into the dark red liquid and touching it to his tongue.
The physician’s eyes widened, his sparse gray eyebrows twitching with sudden shocked revelation.
He unlocked the cage door, grabbing Rèn’s wrist, pressing his thumb hard against the spiritual meridian running along her inner forearm.
He forced a thread of his own vile acidic demonic qi into her wrist, tracking the flow through her channels.
Her meridians did not reject the demonic energy… In fact, her veins greedily drank the qi, converting the foreign essence directly into fresh boiling blood in the blink of an eye.
The physician threw his head back and let out a dry, raspy cackle that echoed off the damp stone ceiling.
“Well, well, well,” the physician chuckled, tossing her arm aside like a piece of meat. “Look at what the mortal markets dragged in… Those blind fools in the righteous sects thought she had a dead root! It was never a weak foundation… It is a Primordial Blood Root! She cannot absorb the spiritual qi of heaven and earth… but she absorbs blood like a sponge drinks river water!”
They did not release her.
Instead, they doubled her drainage rations, drawing two bronze bowls from her arms every four days to fuel the elders’ private cauldrons and still, Rèn refused to die.
In the cage directly across from hers, huddled in the damp straw with his knees pulled against his chest, lived Little Shu.
He was a year younger than Rèn, eight years old, with skin the color of parched parchment and two large watery brown eyes that dominated his sunken face.
He was smaller than the other boys with his limbs thin as dry twigs, but whenever the guards were not looking, he had a strange quiet little laugh that sounded like a series of soft hiccups.
Every morning, the guards would shove a single chunk of stale, mold-crusted barley bread through the iron bars of each cage.
Whenever the obsidian lancet had taken two bowls from Rèn and she lay shivering on the cold stone floor, unable to lift her head, a small trembling hand would reach across the narrow aisle between their bars.
A piece of dry barley bread, broken cleanly in half, would slide across the wet flags, coming to rest beside her fingers.
“Eat, Senior Sister,” Little Shu would whisper, his voice thin as a dry reed. “You have to make more blood for tomorrow… If you don’t eat, your heart will stop.”
Rèn would drag the bread to her lips with trembling knuckles, chewing the moldy grain through tears of exhaustion, her dark crimson eyes staring across the aisle at the little boy who smiled back at her with his quiet hiccuping laugh.
…And in the straw at the back of her cage, wrapped in a strip of torn hemp so the guards wouldn’t notice it, Rèn still had the Master’s wooden sword.
The cart guards had thrown it in as a joke but to Rèn, it was the only thing left in the world that still belonged to her so she kept it hidden beneath the straw.
Every night, when the tallow torches burned low and the subterranean cavern fell into restless, groaning slumber, Rèn would reach through the rusted iron bars, holding the wooden sword in her right hand.
“Watch my feet, Little Shu,” Rèn would whisper across the aisle, keeping her voice lower than the dripping water.
She took a forward step, sliding her bare sole against the cold stone flags… She raised the stick, locking her forearm horizontally across her chest and she drove the wood downward in a clean vertical arc that whistle-cut through the foul cavern air.
“Step… Guard… Cut,” Rèn instructed softly. “That’s all. Just one form. If you do it a thousand times, your arms won’t shake when someone tries to hurt you.”
Little Shu would stand behind his bars, gripping a short piece of dried beef bone he had stolen from a broth bucket, mimicking her movements with awkward trembling earnestness.
Step… Guard… Cut…
His skinny knees would wobble, his little elbows would droop, and every time he overbalanced, he would let out that quiet hiccuping laugh behind his hand, quickly resetting his feet before the guards walked their rounds.
When the winter damp seeped through the mountain rock, chilling the cavern floors to freezing slush, the guards would throw open the cage doors to let them huddle together to keep the livestock from freezing to death before their veins could be drained.
Rèn and Little Shu would curl up on the bare stone floor, back to back, pressing their spines together to share their fading body heat.
Listening to his ragged, shallow breathing against her shoulder blades, feeling the steady rhythm of his small heart beating through his coarse hemp rags, Rèn would stare into the blackness.
She did not pray to the righteous sword immortals since she knew now that the men in white silk were butcher birds who killed old men for rocks.
She simply held Little Shu’s cold, calloused fingers in her own, vowing in the silent burning dark of her soul that she would keep him alive until the sun rose again.
In the third month of Rèn’s tenth year, the bells of the Blood Demon Sect tolled from the highest subterranean altar.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
…It was the season of the Blood Gu Trial.
Once every three hundred and sixty days, the sect gathered every surviving child from the lower pens, one hundred and twenty starving, half-dead orphans who had survived the bronze bowls, and marched them down into the deepest, lightless belly of the mountain.
They were herded out onto a narrow stone ledge suspended over an ancient, yawning pit carved straight into the volcanic bedrock.
The pit was forty feet deep eighty feet wide, its walls sheer, polished black basalt slick with decades of dried tallow and old gore, offering zero handholds or crevices.
A heavy iron grate was hauled back by thick chains.
“Down you go, little cattle,” the sect overseer laughed, his whip cracking through the air.
One by one, the children were shoved off the ledge, tumbling forty feet through the dark to crash onto the bone-strewn floor of the pit.
Rèn hit the stone on her feet, rolling to absorb the impact with her hands instantly shooting out to catch Little Shu as he fell behind her, pulling him against her chest.
Above them, the massive iron grate slammed shut with a deafening final concussive roar that resonated through the bedrock like thunder.
BOOM!
Heavy iron deadbolts slid into place.
CLICK! CLANG!
The torchlight from the upper gallery was extinguished, and the pit plunged into suffocating blackness.
The rule of the Blood Gu Trial was written in the ancient laws of the demonic path…
One hundred and twenty entered and only one walked out.
The grate would not open, food would not fall, and water would not be lowered until a single living soul remained standing on the stones to inherit the demonic seed.
The dark was thick as tar, the air smelled of old iron, cold sweat, and the paralyzing terror of children who knew what hunger made men do.
Rèn backed into the furthest corner of the basalt wall, pulling Little Shu behind her back with her small fingers wrapping tightly around the Master’s wooden sword, which she had tucked into her waistband before the march.
The waiting began.
…Hours bled into days, completely indistinguishable in the pitch darkness.
The first day passed in shivering silence, the children weeping quietly against the cold walls, calling out names that were never answered.
The second day, the hunger and thirst broke the mind.
Rèn closed her eyes in the dark, pressing her back flat against the black rock with her wooden sword raised horizontally before her ribs and her breath slow and shallow as she guarded the boy behind her.
She did not look into the shadows, and she did not leave her corner.
On the third day, the noise in the pit finally stopped.
The silence that settled over the stone floor was heavy and suffocating, broken only by the dripping of condensation from the vaulted ceiling forty feet above.
DRIP! DRIP!
A single shaft of pale sickly gray light cracked through the iron grate above, illuminating the center of the pit.
Rèn stood in the shadow of the basalt wall with her hemp tunic torn, her knees bruised and covered in stone dust.
Her dark crimson eyes stared across the floor.
Standing five paces before her in the gray beam of light, swaying weakly on his trembling legs, was Little Shu.
The eight-year-old boy was clutching the short blunt piece of dried beef bone with both hands, his knuckles white, his large brown eyes wide and glassy with exhaustion.
His lips were dry and split, his face pale as fresh snow, looking at her with a gentle fragile gaze that held no malice, no terror, and no madness.
He looked down at the bone in his hands, then looked up at Rèn’s wooden sword.
Little Shu let out his quiet strange little laugh, that soft trembling hiccup that broke the suffocating quiet of the pit.
“Senior Sister…” Little Shu whispered, his voice thin as morning mist, barely carrying across the stones. “It’s okay.”
Rèn didn’t move.
Her fingers were frozen around the hemp-wrapped hilt, and her heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird.
“You have to live,” Little Shu murmured, stepping closer, his small cloth shoes scraping softly against the rock. “You’re strong… Your cuts always heal… You have to climb out and find that big brother who promised you the plums… You have to see the sun again.”
He raised the bone, resting the tip against his own chest, looking directly into her crimson eyes.
“Do it properly, Senior Sister,” Little Shu smiled, a tear cutting a clean white track through the grime on his hollow cheek. “The way you taught me on the steps… Step, guard, and cut… Do it properly, so it won’t hurt.”
Rèn’s hands trembled violently against the wood.
The tears welled up in her dark crimson eyes, burning like boiling oil, spilling down her sun-browned cheeks in silent, streaming rivers as she stepped forward into the gray light.
Her bare left foot slid smoothly across the basalt, locking her hips, lowering her center of gravity until her stance was firm as an iron bridge.
She raised the mountain-ash sword, locking the guard horizontally before her chest.
She looked at his gentle brown eyes, saw him nod with that quiet, hiccuping smile, and closed her eyes.
Step… Guard… Cut.
The wooden tip swept downward in a clean whisper-soft arc, ending the cold, ending the hunger, and ending the dark forever.
The boy slumped forward into her arms without a sound with his forehead resting gently against her shoulder and his small body going limp and warm against her chest.
Rèn lowered him down to the basalt floor with agonizing care, folding his small bruised hands over his chest while placing the blunt piece of bone beside his fingers.
She sat beside him in the silence, her face blank and stone-cold, not making a single sound.
From forty feet above, the heavy iron deadbolts ground back with a concussive metallic screech.
SCREEECH!
The iron grate swung wide open, flooding the pit with blinding, golden torchlight as a thick braided hemp rope uncoiled from the upper gallery, tumbling through the empty air to slap against the blood-stained basalt floor.
Rèn stood up.
Her untamed black hair hung loose and wild around her shoulders, her dark crimson eyes staring up into the light with the dead unblinking chill of an ancient abyss.
She gripped the hemp rope with her raw calloused hands.
The elders watched from the high ledge in silence as the ten-year-old girl climbed out of the pit alone.
At the top of the rope, a hooded elder caught her by the collar and turned her toward the torchlight, studying her blank face, the dried blood on her hands, and the chipped wooden sword tucked into her waistband.
“Mark this one,” he murmured to the elder beside him. “She’ll either become the finest blade this mountain has ever forged… or she’ll be the death of every one of us.”
He was quite right… on both accounts.
[Author’s Note]
The month is over, thank you for all of the support this month and I hope you all read what we have in store next month! Keke, Might as well start gifting in the new month but the Halloween Specials are now live in Parts 1 to 4 and I hope you enjoy them!