NOVEL NEXT Chapter 58: Not My Problem [Sidestory]
"You are upset," Dai stated, voice low and green eyes sharp. "Why are you upset, Jun? This is a happy occasion. You have ascended both in your Sect position and Cultivation Realm. We should be celebrating. Yet, you threw a tantrum instead, ruining my mood. I should be insulted."
Dai flexed his qi. Shaping Realm, Eighth Step. For a youth his age — and one without the backing of Clans — it was an absurd standing. Were he not joined from outside the Sect, he would have already been hailed as a prodigy and showered with gifts and favours.
Were he only not from outside the Sect…
"If a ruined mood is all it takes to slight you, then you insult yourself every day," Jun countered. "For each moment you stay here, your fellow disciples talk behind your back. They insult you for your origins, that you were born in a village rather than the Clans!"
Dai waved his hands. "Let them talk. That's all they are good for, anyway. Those 'Clan' disciples… Pah! If only their martial strength were as lofty as their arrogance. I lost count of how many I had to thrash within this week alone."
"You miss the point," Jun miserably said. "We will never be welcome here. Even now, the Sect hinders your advancement when they should exalt it with resources! A prodigy of your calibre, and they stifle your growth with menial tasks while showering others less capable! All because of birthright!"
"If you are to complain, at least complain about something we can change," Dai snorted. "Whining on and on about our birth… Might as well despair at the fact we were not born within the Inner Provinces. Or, better yet, the wombs of Mount Tai itself."
"But there are things we can change," Jun insisted. "We can leave."
"And go where?" A hint of genuine anger crept into Dai's voice, even as he tried to control it. "Where else is there but here, Jun? Do you speak of the lands outside the Sect? Have you ambitions to lead a gang of murderers and rapists, like the one we followed before? Raiding villages, stealing the livelihood of starving men, kidnapping women and children so that you may sell them into slavery?! Is that what you want for us? Because we already had so much practice!"
"I'd rather die first!" Jun hissed, his hand smashing aside his plate of meat. "And we never did those things either! We were slaves in that gang! Mere servants who cooked their food and washed their clothes! Their actions were not ours. We never participated—!"
"But we watched," Dai cut in, voice low and dangerous. Jun froze. "Watched, and did nothing. Watched, as men were tortured for amusement, as women were defiled in chains, as children were whipped, and as babes were torn from their mothers' breasts. How many innocents did we watch as they were sold or killed within those years in the gang, Jun? Fifty? A hundred? A thousand?!"
Jun clenched his fist. "There was nothing we could have done. We were children. You were even younger than I was! There was nothing—"
"There was always something we could have done!" Dai snarled. The table shook from the force of his rampant qi. The fireplace nearby roared with supernatural heat. "Poison their food. Free a prisoner. Die fighting against them! But we did nothing! We watched. We cleaned those monsters' clothes, sharpened their weapons, cooked their meat! We watched, and we did nothing. Because we are cowards!"
He still remembered. Cultivation did nothing to stem Dai's nightmares. Always so much screaming. Men having pieces of themselves torn out by laughing beasts in human flesh. Women defiled repeatedly until they no longer had the strength of will to resist. And the children…
Sold to fates worse than death. Seedbeds for the Decaying Greyroots. Purity to defile for the Split-headed Carnivores. And the Inverted Monks…
The Inverted Monks always preferred infants, for there were more years to harvest from the youth of babes than ageing elders.
"That's all we will ever be. Cowards." Dai pointed to Jun, then himself. "You and I, we were culpable in those horrors. Every single one of them."
"But we avenged them," Jun whispered. "You avenged them. You killed them all. The Black Ash Gang will never hurt anyone ever again."
Dai laughed bitterly. "Tell that to the victims. Ask them if vengeance meant anything. Ask them if vengeance could bring back their flesh, their lives, their peace! Vengeance is nothing! We helped no one!"
Jun said nothing. Dai took several breaths to calm himself. Once his qi was under control, he snatched a plate of fine meat and chewed it down angrily.
It no longer tasted as good — not that he had really been enjoying it anyway.
All this time, with so much wealth stored within the walls of the monastery, while not even two miles away, people were starving…
Dai felt like vomiting, but he forced the food down.
"Do you regret saving me?" Jun asked quietly.
The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
"What nonsense are you sprouting now?" Dai grunted as he tore into yet another plate of meat. "You were the one who saved me from death when you begged for the gang to keep my worthless hide instead of selling me off to the Decaying Greyroots or the Inverted Monks. I was still a slave, but at least I wasn't a seedbed for some perverse maggot-ridden cultivator or a hanging carcass screaming off the back of a war monk…"
"Not that," Jun sighed. "I meant you coming to save me, after the… Doctor…"
Dai closed his eyes. His appetite, which was already diminished from Jun's earlier words, vanished completely.
And he had hoped it would be a good night…
At ten years old, Dai had accidentally 'inconvenienced' one of the gang members. Worse, the bastard had been a cultivator — one only in the Second Step of the Foundation Realm, but for a ten-year-old Dai, the man might as well be the Perverse Emperor himself.
It was a minor thing. The gang had settled camp temporarily near a village, keeping a low profile after a raid to lick their wounds. He had stumbled into the cultivator's path while carrying a basin of dirty laundry water. The wastewater had splashed all over the gang member, who was already in a murderous mood from his injuries.
No one helped him. Jun had been away on some other errand, so when the man dragged Dai by the hair into the fields of tall reeds, the boy thought his end was near.
Still, he struggled. He fought. His hand grasped the man's face as the cultivator choked him under the mud, rough hands tightening around his neck as he was pushed under the muddy reeds-strewn fields.
Then, through the stroke of the most absurd of luck, Dai's thrashing limbs scraped against the mud, and within it, he felt something sharp slice the length of his arm.
It was instinctive. Dying and panicking as he was, Dai sought to grab whatever object had cut him. Through sheer miraculous chance, his fingers managed to wrap themselves around the handle of that mud-rusted tool.
Dai swung blindly.
The rusted sickle he had grasped slammed right into his assailant's eye socket.
Cultivator or not, a wound like that was not something one could survive. Not at the burgeoning Steps of the Foundation Realm, anyway.
The fingers around Dai's neck went limp, and the man collapsed to the side. Jun found him later, coughing mud and stale water from his lungs, beside a dead member of the gang.
They visited the doctor then, who was fortunate enough to be passing by the nearby village. Dai received his unholy modifications and returned to the gang with single-minded murder in intent. He slaughtered them all. For the suffering they caused him. For the suffering they caused so many people.
It was a series of events that beggared belief; fortune in triplicate. For Dai to be dragged to the reed fields, right where a rusted sickle was. For him to have fatally struck the cultivator, killing him with a blind swing. And for the doctor to just so happen to be at a nearby village, where she would then take an interest and give him this 'gift' of ascension.
Dai did not believe in fate. But there were times when he wondered…
"I was hardly going to let you die," Dai grunted in reply to Jun's question. "What, you thought I would just run off and let you fend for yourself in the gang after I got my cultivation?"
"No one would blame you," Jun stated.
"I would. A debt was owed," Dai snarled with a vicious grin. "Not just to you, but the gang as well."
"Maybe," Jun's hands turned to fists. "But that moment after, when I was dying from my injuries… You took the dead Boss's secret cultivation stash and fed me its contents. You made me ascend."
Dai remembered. During his forced ascension by the Doctor's surgery, Dai had to be hidden away in a cave while the foreign matter in his body did its ghastly work. Jun returned to the gang alone, and with one of their numbers mysteriously gone during the same time frame, the blame easily fell on his shoulders.
Dai wasn't sure if the gang really believed Jun had killed one of their cultivators, but it did not matter. The cruelty they subjected Jun to broke his body and nearly broke his mind.
Nearly. For all of Jun's powerlessness, he was never a coward nor weak of will.
"It was the only way to save you," Dai snorted. "What, you don't like being alive?"
"No one would blame you for using it on yourself."
"Again, I would," Dai sighed. "I would have died anyway if you hadn't carried me to the doctor. You can consider that as me paying back a debt if it helps you sleep."
If there was an architect of his destiny somewhere… Then why was he here, right now, in the Beheaded Phoenix Sect?
"I thought it would be more peaceful here," Jun whispered. "That we would no longer need to kill. That we could live virtuous lives as we cultivated towards immortality. But it's all the same, isn't it? We are still a gang of slavers. The group is just bigger now."
Dai had enough of this talk.
"Get to the point already," he snapped.
"We should be doing more, helping others," Jun said. "This isn't like back when we were in the gang. We are not powerless any more. Both of us are in the Shaping Realm. We can make a difference, a real difference."
"People like you do not live long," Dai idly countered.
"What do you live for, then?" Jun's voice was laced with frustration. Not just at Dai, but also himself. "What is the point of any of this?"
What were they even cultivating for?
Dai picked up another flask of wine. He eyed the contents inside. Spirit Wine, of a potency strong enough to warrant its considerable worth.
That single jug was likely more valuable than their lives had been before they ascended as cultivators. How many people would their old Boss have killed just to obtain this flask? Trapped without means of progress, without the backing of a Sect…
How miserable, how deranged and twisted that must have made that man.
"Someday, you and I will die," Dai began. "Painful deaths, boring deaths, worthless deaths… It's all the same to me. None of it matters."
He drank the wine, trying to savour the richness of its depth. He thought he tasted blood. When finished, he tossed it away, watching it roll noisily on the floor. "Until then, I intend to live for myself and only myself. The world cannot ask more of me. I have given it enough in my youth. Everything else is not my problem."
Jun's expression tightened. "Have it your way."
Days later, Jun was gone. The teen left a letter for Dai, stating his intent to roam the Outer Provinces and help others.
It would be years before Dai saw him again, and longer still before Jun re-joined the Sect after his self-imposed exile.