Reforged from Ruin [Eldritch Xianxia Cultivation]

Shin Ren calls, and the sky responds with rain. The ash-grey sky, impossibly dark for day, impossibly bright for night, snaps to crystal-clear illumination, casting shadows of pitch black against the forest of thorns beneath him.

The thorns retaliate with gunfire to burn the heavens.

Each fruiting branch of the obsidian spikes holds perhaps a dozen bullets, and there are so many that as they fire up at him they turn the over-sharp dark below into a fireworks show. Most of the bullets burn away against the spears he's casting down and the field he has around himself, but some of them start to make it through. He sees one flash by, just barely slow enough to be perceived, and finds the spiral, fractal-edged tip of the bullet to be alien compared to earlier lumps of lead.

He fortifies himself, and he goes forward. A smiling general, gilded with the promise of glory, warps the world to match, and he goes forward. A dead thing of flame and violence and hunger for more devours the abyss all around him, and he goes forward, weaving and riding and shackled to the worst versions of his worst pieces.

Such is self. Such is family. Such is the path.

A wave of trauma emerges from across the thorns.

The psychic technique wielder, whoever or whatever they may be, is adept at their art. It's a rare trait, but not one that Shin Ren's never seen- most in the Empire who learn it are recruited or culled is all. He circulates power through his senses and his mind, placing in it his intent to burn away illusion, and it works, though imperfectly.

He is alone. He is burning. He is a liar and a cheat and an agony and the blood on his hands-

Is eaten by the demons in him. It joins the tar.

With a wave of his hand, he asks the violence and devastation around him if it might choose to be more of the same. As violence does, it gleefully agrees. He grabs at the ignition of the bullets, their heat, their violence, wraps it around his own flames.

Qi is Truth is Dao is cultivation is self.

He has made himself something that is a part of the flame, that can source it and control it. As such a being, he does what he has made himself capable of doing.

He throws a flaming sea at the quarry.

The psychic cultivator does something, his horns flaring a blue-purple light an instant before he vanishes, while the gun-witch evades more conventionally. A barrel forms at her feet and fires, launching her away from the impact site even as hundreds of corpse-miners are evaporated by the iridescent wave of fire washing over them. For a moment, the sun sits upon the earth, burning brighter than ever against the backdrop of obsidian and thorn.

He lands in the flames, and continues to strike.

In spite of his firepower, Shin Ren remains most adept at mid-to-close range, swinging his blade in an enhanced radius and burning through the space around him. Neither of his opponents seem to share this particular style. The gun-witch, whose cultivation seems both nonexistent and wide at once, keeps on the move, firing herself off like a bullet from perch to perch, turning the landscape against him as she does. He actually has to dodge now, the heat no longer enough to melt away the bullets, especially as he senses several more complete weapons forming from out of the damaged landmass. Rather than try to whittle away at him with the random resources born from cordite rivers and black-metal landscape, he can sense her powers manifesting through something like a Domain, but more diffuse. What can be a gun, becomes one, slowly but surely, and the bullets they fire force him to duck and dodge as he moves.

He stays one step ahead, dodging and weaving by igniting space behind him and using his Qi as fuel for his acrobatics. The dead ignite as he leaps over them towards where he can sense the gun-witch, but none turn to face him- pale white echoes mix with oblivion-dark shadows, and what were once people and now are anything but continue to chip away at the stone of this place.

A burst of his movement technique has him land within a hundred yards of his opponent. A bullet the size of his thigh slams into him, the impact muted by being half-molten but still violent enough to crack his armor- but it's not enough to distract him.

[Divine Purity Of Flame] roars as he manifests the barest touch of it, turning the fire into Gold, Purple and Blue heat. The rain of bullets slows for a moment as the nature of his Soul burns away even the gunpowder used to fire, turning it to flawless, empty fuel rather than explosive force, and even the thorns around him begin to melt.

Agony.

A look from the patriarch the first time he was called the sect's young prince. The first time he loved someone, and decided to let that love die rather than pursue it. A burning corpse, unjustly murdered, rising up off an arena floor to bite at his eyes-

He coughs, tasting tar on his lips. A flash of golden insight, tinged with heat and jewelry, points him to what his perception was forced to overlook.

He waves his Guandao, Cutting through the trees- and instead of falling, they spawn fresh thorns where the Cut lands, filling the landscape even further. It's enough to startle his other opponent, though, who flashes a look of fear before he sprints away to prep another ambush.

The fight is… asymmetrical. More than he can brute force his way through.

A flash of mist, out of place and alien amidst his fire, flickers through his peripheral vision.

A deep breath. The taste of steel and ozone on his breath.

He refocuses.

He's not here to win a fight. He's here to wreck an operation.

He turns from where he was chasing the ballistic caster and moves back towards the quarry.

The gunfire redoubles against him, then halts- an instinctive move rather than a clever one. The malformed lumps of lead that make it to his aura evaporate before they can touch him, rather than being saved up and grown into something threatening. Their role is to guard the quarry, not to kill him- that's their weakness.

He lands on the edge of it, hard enough to soften and weaken the lip of the mine, and pours out his cultivation.

A Corpse Aflame crackles with glee as he unleashes her wholesale in a wave of black smoke and crimson heat.

And again, the landscape responds.

The dead are torn asunder and unmade, many-limbed horrors designed out of fragments of once-life turned to meaningless fuel under his power. The quarry itself, however, responds a bit differently. Just like when he Cut, where the black of his heart demon's particularly violent persuasion lands on the black steel, it grows rather than breaks apart. His flames turn an even blacker pitch where they touch, becoming a vector for the Death in this place to grow further.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

No wonder it's such a goddamn headache for the higher-ups. In a landscape like the dead sands, there's no telling how far this place might spread. A global ring all its own, surrounding the third with a perfect landscape of thorns and death and Ruin.

A Corpse Aflame is almost giddy at the thought- so he turns away from her core, going instead to the Smiling Noble. Better suited to defense against the psychic cultivator anyways. She rails at it, hard enough that he can feel it pull at the overall flow of his meridians- but she's outvoted.

The quarry is bubbling now, more and more thorns sprouting from it like saplings from a fallen corpse. The thing at the center of it, five times Shin Ren's size and made entirely of mechanical obsidian and half-intact ballistics, seems to almost twitch.

He's not sure if the fact that its "skull" is missing its back half and eye sockets is more or less reassuring about the possibility of it waking up.

He keeps on the move, using the angle of the slope and the sprouting thorns as cover against the ever-increasing gunfire raining down on him. There are other, stranger projectiles than just bullets coming in against him; flechettes, miniaturized blades, grenades, all rain down after him. It must cost something to control the area like this, or else they'd have done so before he ever arrived- while that's not a guarantee that he can outlast them, it's a further hint.

A pulse of something washes over the quarry, rolling over its edge and falling in towards him-

There. The slightest hint of blue-purple, the disorienting touch of psychic Qi. He braces, ready for the assault, ready to strike back-

He doesn't have to. It vanishes before it ever reaches him, and he hears a scream echo out from the shadows. It cuts off before he can pinpoint where it is exactly, but that's fine- the fact that he could hear it at all is sign enough that Mei Yu has found her target.

There's a matching scream, out from where he saw the gunwitch moving. Less agony or surprise, more despair, a panic born from genuine concern. She knows the other cultivator. They're not just allies- there's something there, even if it's just camaraderie.

The rain of gunfire stops for a moment, her attention divided, turning the bullets and mechanisms she's grown from the world towards detonation rather than propulsion-

Crack.

Like the sound of shattering stone. Like a miles-deep lake thawing just enough to break open.

A hundred malformed explosives fall apart into noise and shrapnel, and Shin Ren glimpses the shape of someone small falling down from one of the thorns and into the woods.

For all that their cultivation does not match the mission, it seems that Taran has enough tricks to make up the difference.

Silence falls over the quarry. The last of the autonomous corpses of the mining operation are falling silent, molten, ashed, or subsumed under the obsidian growth that follows out of Shin Ren's assault of flame. He lands on one of the thorns, the protective arrays built into his armor straining but ultimately holding firm against touching the material, and looks out over their victory.

A place of Ruin, ruined further. Two dead bodies that were once people, and a few hundred dead bodies that were once functional tools.

And the body that they were digging through and under, looming like a giant over the landscape.

…It doesn't look like it fell here. It… also doesn't look like the thorns spawned from it. If anything, with the way that they're stabbing into the titanic creature, it almost looks like-

A clank draws his attention away, over to where he sees Researcher Yun Ka's armor landing awkwardly on the top of the quarry. Next to her, Gou Mai artfully lands, safely having dropped himself and his charge from whatever quasi-realm he steps into with his techniques.

"Senior brother, this junior is going to be heartbroken if you decide to leave him out of the next encounter as you did this one. I barely even got to watch!"

A snort, from right behind Shin Ren.

He turns, a bit too fast, and sees Mei Yu behind him, tenderly wiping a few drops of blue blood off her hand with a cloth. "Brutes will be brutes. Perhaps next time, he can tear up the landscape instead of you, Ren."

He snorts, eliciting a raised eyebrow from Gou Mai.

"Oh? Am I doubted? Do my loyal fellows doubt my ability to shatter the enemy? I suppose a demonstration might be in order, seeing as there is so little faith in this Gou Mai's abilities. Mei Yu? Would you like to volunteer?"

Before she can reply, Gou Mai is saved from having his ego torn to shreds on her barbed tongue by a loud pinging sound that emerges from Yun Ka's armor. The many-limbed, almost crustacean-like machinery beeps and makes several distinctly inhuman sounds before venting a cloud of purified Qi, tinged with concepts of stress and lighting up several lesser talismans.

"Analysis completed. Successfully. Relevant information; locations. Of anchors."

Right- there was more than one location they were aiming for.

"Any that you're willing to share, honored Researcher?"

The armor emits a sound not unlike the crying of some strange beast, discordant but brief and altogether too quiet to be a proper scream. Another hiss, venting heat and harm away from the tools deployed along the armor's many limbs.

"Affirmative. The entity located. Here before us. Is not the only one. Of its kind. There are several. Other signatures that. Match the flow of energy. Of this location. It would seem that this. Assimilator-class threat. Is hoping to build. Something."

"Despite appearances, this place is not of Death," comes a voice. Again, Shin Ren is forced to turn to see who is speaking, though he's a lot more surprised this time- Mei Yu's specialty is stealth and misdirection. Taran, as far as he's been able to tell, has a much more direct skillset.

Apparently, they blend into this place better than Shin Ren originally gave them credit for. That, or there's even more hidden beneath the surface.

"What do you mean?" he asks, instead of the questions that feel a bit more pressing around the corpse-gunner.

The eyes that look out from the bandages and acupuncture of the other's figure seem to be another color, yet again. "The causing of Death is integral, but it is not of Death. It's why this place hasn't eaten the whole dead sands yet. Harm, violence, machinery, and even some aspects of biology are present. It's why it suits my cultivation so well- I too spend most of myself both fighting and causing Death, rather than embodying it."

"So, it's not trying to spread. Or at least, not entirely. It's… building energy to make something."

"Perhaps. Or perhaps it. Is simply confused. About its purpose. The flows here are. Discordant."

He raises an eyebrow. "Unsurprisingly, no? This isn't an intentionally designed weapon."

"If it is, it's rather bad at its job," Gou Mai says, sniffing at the air. "Way too much here that's alive, and it wouldn't need some witch to be shooting at things. Too much of this place feels like it touches on my higher precepts."

"Those being?" Mei Yu asks.

"The heights. Reaching towards something. Traveling upwards, no matter the weight. This place is not as lifeless or mindless as it appears."

Shin Ren sighs, inhaling the scent of burnt bodies and cold metal. "Unless we figure out why it's trying to build, and what, none of this is the priority. We need to keep moving- the sooner we manage to contain or destroy this place, the sooner we get what we need to move forward elsewhere. Researcher Yun Ka- how many more locations like this do you think exist?"

"By my sensoria. I believe that. There are four more. Locations. Though all have. Operations of their own. Of machinery and. Death. The Fallen Kingdom and. Its allies are. Well represented here."

He nods. "No guarantee that the other locations will be guarded as this one was, but this doesn't seem like a high priority operation. We should-"

"Now, before you go'n finish that sentence," comes a voice from over the thorns, "I figure you might 'oughta meet me."

And a hook made of bone flies out from the dark, stabbing through Shin Ren's shoulder, wrapping a near-invisible line around and into the machinery of the researcher, and neatly severing Gou Mai's leg.