"I have little patience for cake ingredient stealers!"
The words bounced off the ridge and scattered into the morning air.
ng Li pressed herself flatter against the boulder she'd chosen as her observation point. Her tails, all nine of them, coiled tight around her body as she studied the figures before her. The copper-haired foxkin crouched beside her, vertical pupils locked on the clearing below and jaw still bruised from last night's warehouse debacle. A few more foxkin flanked them along the ridgeline, white robes traded for stolen grey cloaks that slled like tannery runoff.
The rabbitkin stood behind a dead tree twenty paces back.
Still useless as they scratched their ears.
ng Li could see the gears turning in their heads to walk out and happily greet this Demon.
Then they would die and all of her resources would have been wasted.
She gave them a shake of her head and a serious look. The rabbitkins’ shoulders sagged and they pressed themselves deeper into the dead tree.
ng Li's fingers dug into the rock as frost crept from her nails in thin lines that she killed before they could spread and give away her position. Her Qi did the majority of hiding her and the people with her, but she oculdn’t be to careful. This was a world that had multiple monsters stronger than her but more impoirtantly than that, housed and Ancient that was strong enough to kill a Black Fla Dragon elite.
Yet, she still had ego.
I am no thief!
I am ng Li. Daughter of the Nine-Tailed Fox Sovereign. Ascendant of the Upper Realms. And I have just been accused of stealing cake ingredients by soone shouting from a mud clearing surrounded by four thousand gang mbers wearing fat mushrooms! I will not be insulted like this!
She shifted her weight and angled her head past the boulder's edge.
The clearing spread below the ridge in a bowl of packed earth and frozen stone. The warehouse cluster sat at its back, doors hanging, walls scarred, frost still clinging to every surface she'd touched last night, and bodies moving inside. The wounded from the fight being tended to and propped against walls by comrades whose pale red sashes were as torn and bloodied as their own.
And in the centre of it all, alone in the open, stood the Red Demon.
ng Li squinted only for her pupils to contract. Her mouth dropped as she stared at the being that had been called more terrifying than her.
It's a child? You’ve got to be kidding …
The figure in the clearing couldn't have been older than twelve. Maybe thirteen if you were generous and the morning light was being kind. Small-frad, barely reaching the chest height of the scarred man who had told ng Li to co back tomorrow. She wore robes of pale red silk with white trim that caught the sun and threw it back in tiny sparks and a crown of woven silver and white gold sat on her head, crystals pulsing between pale blue and soft white.
A hamr rested across her back.
The hamr was enormous.
Comically enormous for the little girl holding it. Its head alone was wider than the girl's shoulders and the shaft extended past her knees. The thing should have crushed her into the ground under its own weight. Instead it sat there like it belonged, humming with a resonance that pressed against ng Li's senses and made the fine hairs on her arms stand straight.
A child. The Red Demon is a child.
The being that inspired loyalty so absolute that common thugs stood against my spiritual pressure rather than betray her na—
—is a child.
ng Li's gaze swept the army arrayed across the ridgeline and the slopes and the river and every approach within a mile. Four thousand bodies in formation. Spears vertical, blades drawn, in full preparation for the fight, ready to throw their lives away at a signal given, Qi signatures overlapping in fields that created a net of ambient pressure thick enough to taste.
Every single one of them faced outward and away from the girl.
Toward the ridge where ng Li hid.
She looked back at the clearing.
The girl hadn't moved. Her chin was up, feet planted, shoulders set, and red miasma curling around her ankles and climbing her fra in lazy spirals that scread at frequencies ng Li could hear through the rock she pressed against from sheer vibrations. The fog rolled outward across the clearing, lapping at the warehouse walls and crawling up the slope in tendrils that reached toward the ridgeline.
Reaching toward her.
The copper-haired foxkin's hand found her sleeve. His vertical pupils were wide and the slits blown open to full circles.
His lips moved without sound. Do we retreat?
ng Li stared blankly at him and the way her foxkin were shivering and trembling.
She turned back toward the little girl and couldn't stop staring.
The miasma climbed higher as it crested the first line of scrub brush below the ridge and kept coming. The tendrils split and fanned across the slope in a pattern that covered ground in ragged spirals. Frost from ng Li's previous visit cracked and sublimated where the red fog touched it, her ice yielding to sothing that burned hotter than it had any right to.
She hasn't even seen yet. This pressure and miasma… she's broadcasting and casting a net. Daring whatever attacked her people to show itself. And she's doing it while standing in the open without a guard, shield, formation, or a single defensive asure beyond the hamr on her back and the fury in her chest. Either she's insane or she's so confident in her own power that four thousand soldiers are decorative.
ng Li's tails twitched and swayed back and forth.
She pushed her senses forward, carefully. A thread-thin probe of spiritual perception that slid through the ambient Qi like a needle through silk. She'd done this a thousand tis across a dozen worlds. Reading cultivation bases from a distance was as natural to her as breathing. You touched the edge of soone's aura, felt the density, depth, weight, texture, and you knew what you were dealing with.
Her probe touched the girl's aura.
ng Li's eyes snapped wide.
Her fingers spasd against the rock and frost erupted from all ten nails simultaneously, coating the boulder in a sheet of ice that crackled loud enough to make the copper-haired foxkin flinch sideways. Her tails unfurled from their coiled position and fanned behind her in an involuntary display that she couldn't suppress because every instinct she possessed had just fired at once.
The girl's cultivation base was a Liquid Core.
Advanced and so refined it seed like a star. Dense beyond anything a child on this backwater planet should have possessed. The kind of density that ca from resources so far above the local standard that comparing them was like comparing a candle to a forest fire. Her ridians sang with purified Qi that tasted clean and sharp and carried harmonic frequencies ng Li associated with bloodline mutations pushed to their limits.
That alone would have been enough to make her pause because this level of purity was beyond even what her clan was capable of.
That alone would have explained the loyalty, the fear, the scarred man's refusal to kneel, four thousand soldiers, the warehouse full of beaten fighters who held their ground against foxkin because their master scared them more than an Upper Realm ascendant did.
A Liquid Core child was a monster by any standard most world could produce.
Except that wasn't what made ng Li's blood freeze in her veins.
The girl's intent carried sothing else.
Layered beneath the miasma and woven into the red fog like thread through fabric was a single thing that pressed into every wisp and tendril and screaming frequency—
A Greater Dao.
It was nothing but a faint, residual amount. The ghost of a touch rather than a full manifestation. Like perfu on a jacket from the day prior. The girl hadn't cultivated it herself. She couldn't have, right? No being on this planet had the foundation to cultivate a Greater Dao, much less a twelve-year-old whose core hadn't finished stabilising.
She'd been exposed to one so powerful it wove itself into her own.
…yet, that ant a being so powerful…
ng Li blinked as a thought ca to her unbidden.
The Greater Dao's fingerprint sat in her aura like a brand. It didn't fight against ng Li's probe the way a cultivated Dao would have. It compared compared itself and found her wanting. Her probe touched the residue and the residue asured her against a standard so far above her own. Her spiritual perception recoiled and the probe snapped back into her body.
Goosebumps erupted across her arms, neck, shoulders, down her spine, across her thighs, and along the backs of her hands.
Every follicle on her body stood at attention.
Her tails bristled and fur puffing outward until each one doubled in apparent size.
That Dao… the only being strong enough…
A shiver ran through her body far stronger than anything the little girl could make happen.
S-She’s one of his…?
ng Li looked closer and it finally registered in her mind.
The realisation didn't arrive like a thought, but rather a fist to the sternum.
ng Li's lungs emptied in a single involuntary exhale that fogged in the morning air despite the sun beating down on the ridge. Her vision tunnelled and the edges went dark and for a horrible second the only thing she could see was the girl in the clearing with her crown, her hamr, red miasma, and the ghost of a Greater Dao that belonged to a being ng Li had spent months baking lemon cakes to appease.
She was there.
In the forest when the Ancient killed the Black Dragon.
The mory surfaced with the violence of a breaching whale.
ng Li had been watching from a distance so vast that the figures below had been specks against the green. She'd felt the impact and had turned her scrying off instantly. She had no clue what else had happened and dared not even think about it. Hei Gu’s signature completely disappeared from all senses after that. A ripple in the world's Qi that made her tails go rigid and her core seize.
She'd closed her eyes back then and pressed her face into the stone of her observation perch and hidden like a child. Terrified that the Ancient would look up and sense her watching. Deciding to do the sa to her… Or worse.
She'd kept her eyes closed for a long ti.
ng Li's hands shook. She tried to control them, but they refused to listen.
Is he going to kill ? I attacked her people? God, please don’t make this my end! I don’t want to die here.
The copper-haired foxkin tugged her sleeve again, harder this ti. His vertical pupils had contracted back to slits. He leaned close enough that his breath fogged against her ear. "Lady ng Li. The red fog is thirty paces from our position. We need to move."
ng Li didn't move.
Her eyes stayed locked on the girl below.
The Red Demon stood in her clearing with her chin up.
What do I do?
The question ricocheted inside her skull.
Fight her? Kill her? Retreat? Surrender? Return the ingredients with a bow and an apology, hoping the Ancient considers the gesture sufficient to offset the fact that I assaulted his people, froze his property, and stole cooking supplies from his child?
What if he already knows?
What if he's watching right now?
What if the absence I've been tracking, that void in the world's Qi field that marks his location like a wound in reality, has already turned its attention toward this ridge because his child is standing in a clearing broadcasting fury and a Greater Dao residue?
ng Li's tails curled inward and her vision blurred with wetness.
What do I do?
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