Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

She heard the wild hysterical squawking and fluttering of the chickens in the lower yard as heavy boots kicked the coops to splinters.

She heard her Senior Brothers screaming in the dormitory... short wet strangled shrieks that cut off abruptly in the middle of words as cold steel bit through bone.

Rèn heard the older boys running across the wooden walkway, slipping on their own blood, begging the white-robed immortals for mercy, answered only by the crisp whistling hiss of righteous sword-qi severing limbs and shattering ribcages.

Through the warped seam in the lid, Rèn watched the kitchen doorway.

Qiu Ling turned around.

The gentle, lotus-faced girl who braided Rèn’s hair every morning reached down with a trembling hand, picking up an iron kitchen cleaver from the chopping block.

She took a slow shuddering breath, her slender frame shaking like an autumn reed, and stepped out onto the kitchen threshold to block the corridor.

A flash of immaculate white silk drifted into the doorway as a single blinding beam of sword-light tore through the kitchen lintel.

THUMP!

Qiu Ling fell backward onto the threshold.

She made no grand declaration, and she spoke no final words... Her body collapsed across the doorway with her slender throat cleaved cleanly open with her hands weakly twitching against the splintered floorboards.

As her head struck the wood, the red silk ribbon at the end of her hair snapped.

The long immaculate black braid that she had woven that very afternoon loosened, unraveling strand by strand across the bloodied pine planks, spilling like an ink stain through the pool of widening crimson.

Her dark eyes remained half-open, staring sightlessly toward the dark corner where the water barrel stood.

Inside the barrel, Rèn’s chest convulsed in violent suffocating spasms.

The screams tore at the back of her throat, clawing at her teeth, burning like boiling lye behind her clamped lips.

...She bit down on the meat of her own palm until her teeth scraped against bone, tasting the salt of her tears and the hot iron of her own blood, however Rèn didn’t make a sound... not even one.

The screams outside slowly died away, replaced by the crackle of distant embers and the quiet murmur of men discussing boundary markers and earth-pulse depths then, the white boots marched back down the three hundred and twelve steps, leaving the mountain in heavy suffocating silence.

Rèn stayed inside the barrel as hours bled into night, and night bled into dawn.

The stench of blood outside the slats thickened, turning from hot iron into the sweet sickening rot of decaying flesh in the autumn sun.

Flies buzzed in thick, black swarms through the kitchen doorway, landing on the unraveled braid, crawling over the cold threshold.

Rèn did not move a finger.

She sat curled in the two inches of foul mud at the bottom of the barrel with her knees tucked against her chin, her hands still clamped over her mouth, her dark crimson eyes wide and glassy in the pitch darkness.

Through the thin wooden walls, the distant carrying voice of an official herald drifted up from the valley highway.

The Heavenly Sword Court had mobilized its messengers, broadcasting their righteous grief across every market square in the eastern province.

”A great tragedy has befallen the eastern ridge! The humble righteous disciples of the Quiet Pine Sect have been slaughtered by roaming fiends of the demonic path! The Heavenly Sword Court arrived too late to shield our brethren... We vow upon our ancestral blades to avenge their souls and take custody of the mountain to purify its desecrated earth!”

Two days passed...

Rèn’s tongue felt like a piece of dry leather.

Her small body burned with fever, her muscles cramping into rigid agonizing knots, but she stayed frozen, waiting for the sky to fall.

On the afternoon of the second day, a slow dragging footstep crunched across the shattered tiles of the kitchen corridor.

The boards groaned and a shadow blocked the narrow seam of light along the back rim.

A pair of trembling hands reached down, gripping the edges of the pine lid, and lifted it away.

Brilliant blinding sunlight poured into the barrel, searing Rèn’s dilated pupils like white-hot needles.

She shrank backward into the mud, hissing through her cracked lips with her small hands clawing blindly at the wood.

Standing above the barrel was Wei Heng.

He wore the pristine, flowing white silk robes of the Heavenly Sword Court, an ornate silver sword-belt cinched around his waist which was the cloud-and-crane crest embroidered in shining thread over his heart.

His face was streaked with dust and tears.

”Rèn...” Wei Heng choked out, his voice cracking into a broken sob.

He reached his arms down into the barrel, catching the filthy, shivering little girl beneath her armpits, the wooden sword still locked in her fist,, lifting her out of the muck and pulling her tightly against his clean white silk chest.

He buried his face into her wild, tangled black hair, weeping openly, his broad shoulders heaving with overwhelming grief.

”You’re alive...” Wei Heng sobbed, holding her so tightly that her bruised ribs ached. ”Merciful heavens, you’re alive... I was too late, little broom... I’m so sorry, I was too late... The demons... they butchered everyone...”

Rèn’s small filthy hands rose, clutching the lapels of his white robes.

The scent of him was the same... pine needles and the familiar warmth of the big brother who used to spin her around the yard... The nightmare was over as her Senior Brother was here.

”Master...” Rèn whispered, her voice a dry, rasping croak. ”Senior Sister Qiu Ling... they...”

”I know, I know,” Wei Heng hushed her gently, wiping the dried mud from her temples with his silk sleeve. ”Don’t look, little broom. Close your eyes. I’m here now... I will take you somewhere safe... somewhere far away from this mountain, somewhere nobody will ever hurt you again... I swear it to you.”

He turned his back, dropping onto one knee on the threshold, right beside the unraveled braid.

”Get on my back,” Wei Heng whispered softly. ”Just like we used to.”

Rèn wrapped her skinny arms around his neck, resting her chin on his broad shoulder, burying her face into his collar.

Wei Heng rose, stepping carefully over the dried black stains on the kitchen floor, carrying her out into the bright silent courtyard.

He walked past the headless corpse of the Master without breaking his stride, carrying her through the splintered gates and beginning the long descent down the three hundred and twelve granite steps.

Step by step, the familiar stones drifted past below them.

The rhythm was steady and swaying, it was the same gentle way that had carried her when she was six years old.

The terror that had coiled behind her ribs for forty-eight hours finally began to unravel.

Her heavy eyelids drooped, exhaustion washing over her like a dark river, and Rèn fell asleep against his back, safe in the arms of the brother she loved.

Cold air woke her as the swaying rhythm had stopped.

Rèn opened her dark crimson eyes, blinking against the damp darkness of a moonless night.

She was no longer on Wei Heng’s back... She was sitting in the cold grass beside a narrow overgrown dirt road far down in the southern lowlands, where the pine trees gave way to thorny black briars and stagnant marshes.

Ten paces ahead on the gravel, a heavy wooden freight cart stood waiting with its iron wheels coated in thick gray clay.

Standing around the cart were four tall men draped in flowing, blood-red robes embroidered with jagged black runes that seemed to pulse in the gloom.

They carried barbed bronze hooks at their belts, their faces hidden beneath deep scarlet hoods, their bodies smelling of copper, vinegar, and rancid animal fat.

Wei Heng stood before them.

He did not look like a grieving disciple... He stood straight and rigid, his white silk robes gleaming under the faint starlight and his hand extended horizontally toward the lead red-robed cultivator.

CLINK!

A heavy leather pouch landed in Wei Heng’s open palm with the sound of thick silver and high-grade spirit stones clinking crisply through the quiet night air.

Wei Heng weighed the pouch in his hand, loosened the drawstring, peered inside, and nodded with calm, businesslike satisfaction.

He tied the pouch to his belt.

Rèn pushed herself up from the grass on trembling elbows, her cracked lips parting in confusion.

”Senior... Brother...?” she called out, her voice barely more than a dry wheeze.

Wei Heng stiffened slightly, his boots pausing on the gravel road however he did not turn around.

He did not look at her face, he did not look at her eyes, and he did not look at the torn hemp tunic she was wearing.

Without a single word, Wei Heng turned on his heel and began walking briskly back up the dark dirt highway with his white robes billowing behind him as he vanished into the shadows of the northern hills.

Rèn scrambled to her feet, stumbling forward, her small hands reaching out toward the empty dark.

”Senior Brother!” she screamed, her vocal cords tearing in raw, frantic agony. ”Wei Heng! WEI HENG—”

A thick rough leather glove slammed across her mouth, cutting the scream cleanly in two.

A heavy iron collar snapped around her throat with a sharp, concussive metallic click, and a dirty strip of vinegar-soaked linen was shoved violently between her teeth, gagging her until she choked on her own saliva.

Two red-robed men hoisted her by her arms, tossing her into the dark reeking wooden cage at the back of the freight cart like a sack of turnips, slamming the iron latch shut.

One of the red-robed men picked something up out of the grass behind her... the Master’s mountain-ash sword, which had fallen from her fingers when they grabbed her.

He turned it over in his gloved hands and barked out a laugh.

”The little cattle brought a toy,” he sneered, and flung it through the bars after her like a bone thrown to a dog.

Rèn dragged it against her chest with both arms and didn’t let go of it for the rest of the journey.

CLANG!

Lying face-down in the straw, staring through the wooden bars at the retreating road, Rèn understood only one thing... Her Senior Brother had sold her.

It would take her years to learn the rest.

The Quiet Pine Sect had sat upon that modest worthless mountain for four generations, poor and forgotten, until its most talented disciple joined the Heavenly Sword Court.

Wei Heng had walked into the Court’s grand archives, read the ancient geological surveys, and realized what lay sleeping beneath the drafty halls... a rich untouched high-grade spirit vein that the great sects had overlooked for centuries.

A tiny nameless mountain sect could not be legally annexed by righteous paragons without cause so the vein had to be cleared.

Wei Heng was the one who had drawn the map.

He was the one who had told the Court about the vein, he was the one who had pointed out the Master’s habits, and he was the one who had collected his final reward... Thirty silver taels from the demonic flesh-traders to erase the last living witness from the mountain.

The cart creaked forward into the southern dark with its iron wheels grinding over the stones, carrying her straight toward the underground hell of the Blood Demon Sect.

The pens beneath Mount Xueha were carved deep into the stagnant sunless bedrock which was three hundred feet below the surface.

The air smelled of old iron and the sweet cloying reek of boiling tallow.

Thousands of narrow, rusted iron cages lined the damp cavern corridors, stacked three tiers high like coops in a slaughterhouse market.

...Inside the cages were children.

Dozens of them, hundreds of them, scrawny and hollow-eyed, ranging from five to twelve years old, wearing gray rags that hung from their protruding ribs.

They were the blood cattle of the Blood Demon Sect and every three days, the heavy iron gates of the lower pens would swing open with a grinding screech.

SCREEECH!

Red-robed disciples carrying heavy bronze bowls and short, curved obsidian lancets would march down the rows.

They did not speak to the children.

They simply reached into the bars, seized a skinny forearm, bound the wrist with a leather strap, and dragged the sharp obsidian blade across the median vein.

DRIP! DRIP!

The dark red vitality poured into the bronze bowls with steady, rhythmic splashes, collected by the barrel to be refined into blood-essence pills for the sect’s core disciples and elders.

Most children did not last long in the pens.

Within two months, their lips would turn the color of chalk, their cheeks would hollow into gray skulls with their marrow would collapse under the constant unrelenting drainage, and their limp bodies would be dragged out by their ankles and tossed into the corpse pits behind the furnaces.

...Rèn lasted.

Week after week, the obsidian blade opened the veins in her wrists yet, every single time they drained her until her vision blurred and her small heart fluttered like a dying moth, her body did something unnatural.