Chapter 39

Lucien was breathing hard. His chest rose in ragged jerks, and his eyes, still glowing with that sick, red light locked onto mine with a mix of hatred and fear.

I crouched beside him, my sabre still slick with his companion’s blood. My own shoulder pulsed with pain, the wound festering like an open furnace. The arrowhead’s toxin was still eating away at the muscle. I could feel it creeping through my tissue, blackening the nerves as it went. Last Stand was fighting it but even with its power surging through my body, I wasn’t sure it would be enough this time.

He noticed. Of course he did. His gaze flicked to my shoulder, then back to my face.

“You… should be screaming,” he rasped, voice like cracked stone.

I leaned closer. “It’s nothing.”

A lie.

I could feel the damage worsening, feel the Qi pathways in my left arm buckling under the strain. The rot had reached the edge of my collarbone, and every heartbeat sent a jolt of fire across my chest. But I didn’t show it. Not in front of him.

Instead, I reached down and yanked the arrow free from his ribs with a wet, tearing sound.

Lucien’s expression twisted and he let out a scream. I added to his pain by driving the arrow into his leg.

He let out a high shuddering wheeze that grew and cracked and finally shattered into a shriek loud enough to scare birds from the trees.

The flesh around the arrow immediately began to smoke. His thigh twitched violently, muscles spasming as the green rot chewed through him. The smell was sickening.

I tried not to flinch. “You’re going to tell me what I want to know,” I said, my voice flat. “Or we do this until you die.”

Lucien’s hands clawed at the dirt. His back arched and he let out another scream, biting down on it this time. Red foam bubbled at the edge of his mouth.

I crouched lower, ignoring the pain in my shoulder. “Why are you here? What’s in that cave?”

He spat, black blood mixing with saliva. It landed near my boot.

“I won’t tell you shit,” he growled, words mangled. “You have no idea what’s coming.”

I twisted the arrow in his leg.

Lucien convulsed, mouth open in a silent cry. When sound finally returned, it was cracked and broken. “How… are you still alive?” he panted. “That wound—should’ve eaten you.”

I held his gaze. “I’m not like you.”

Another lie. I was holding on by threads. Last Stand was burning through every reserve I had left just to keep the rot from reaching my lungs.

He whimpered as the green poison advanced up his leg. I reached down and tore the arrow free, then plunged it into the other thigh.

This time, he screamed so loud it echoed through the trees like thunder. His body jerked against the ground, eyes rolling back as his mouth frothed with fresh red foam.

I slapped his face hard.

His head lolled, dazed.

“Answer me,” I hissed. “What are you doing here? Why are you killing the beasts? What’s in the cave? Answer and I’ll end this suffering.”

For a moment, I thought I’d lost him. His eyes fluttered, breath coming in shallow gasps.

Then, somehow, he finally spoke. “We didn’t… come here. Not on purpose. We were trapped. In a broken place. A prison of our own making.”

His voice wavered. “The caves nothing. Just where we ended up. When we came through, we needed to replenish.”

I narrowed my eyes. “What do you mean?”

His gaze grew distant. “What do you think, human. We need the beasts. It’s what the master craves.”

There it was again. That word.

Master.

I opened my mouth to press further, but Lucien’s body spasmed violently. His legs were nearly gone now, blackened, sizzling wrecks. The toxin was moving fast, burning through muscle and boiling blood from his pores. I could see the toxin eating away at his bone.

He wasn’t going to last much longer.

“Why are you bringing the beasts into the cave?” I demanded, grabbing his collar and shaking him. “What are you doing with them?”

But he didn’t answer.

His head lolled. Words tumbled from his mouth in a fevered jumble, incoherent and warped. His eyes had gone glassy.

“Damn it.” I exhaled slowly, then raised my sabre. The blade came down hard and clean, piercing his heart.

Lucien’s body went still.

I sat there for a moment, the world slowing around me. The arrow still lay nearby, smoking softly in the dirt.

My shoulder throbbed. My meridians were cracked and sparking like frayed wires beneath my skin. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could hold out.

I collapsed to the forest floor, the sabre slipping from my fingers as my body gave out beneath me. The pain in my shoulder had grown unbearable. It wasn’t just burning anymore, it was eating me alive. I could feel the flesh unraveling, muscle turning to soup, every nerve firing in discordant agony. My whole left side was spasming, twitching with each breath. The rot was crawling up my neck now, inching toward my jaw. The only reason I was still breathing was because the arrow hadn’t hit lower. A few more inches and it would’ve been my heart.

But it was still bad. Really bad. Last Stand was doing what it could, flooding my system with that strange, blessed cold, knitting flesh and organs wherever it could but that was the problem. It was trying to fix everything. All at once. My burned meridians from the Emberstorm technique, every cut I had taken during the fight and now this wound. This infection. This curse. The skill wasn’t prioritizing. And because of that, it was too slow to stop the poison before it reached something vital.

I let my head fall back and stared up at the canopy. Dappled sunlight pushed through in fragments, casting broken gold across the leaves. They danced gently in the breeze, oblivious to my suffering.

A shaky breath escaped me, and then, a quiet laugh followed.

Of course. Just when I had finally gained a modicum of power. Just when I’d taken the first real step forward in this insane new life. And now I was going to die. In a forest. Alone.

I wondered what El would be doing right now.

She would’ve been just getting ready for school, probably. Maybe sitting in the kitchen, tapping away at her homework with that same stubborn look on her face she always had. I pictured her frowning at a math problem, chewing on her pencil, headphones blasting too loud. She was smart though. She didn’t need me. She never really had.

Still, I hoped she was okay. Eating enough. Sleeping. Not worrying too much.

I smiled faintly through the pain. She’d be fine. She always found a way.

My vision blurred. I blinked. A flicker of movement pulled me back to the present. Something touched my cheek. A warm, wet pressure. I turned my head with great effort and saw the fox. That same black-furred shadow of a thing. It licked my face once, then stepped back, nose twitching. It circled me slowly, sniffing at the arrow wound. Then it crinkled its nose and bolted into the trees, tail flicking like it had just smelled something foul.

“Coward,” I rasped. “Traitor. I carried you up a damn tree.”

I let my head fall back again, biting back another groan. The pain was spreading now, radiating in hot waves across my chest, licking up the side of my throat like living fire. The inside of my mouth tasted like blood and copper and bile. My body was locking up, inch by inch.

I was starting to feel sorry for Lucien.

That twisted Sundered, mutated and monstrous as he was, had gone out screaming. I’d done that. I’d let the rot burn through his legs. I’d twisted the arrow in deeper, watched him writhe and cry and beg. I’d thought it was necessary. But now? Now I understood.

This wasn’t just pain. This was annihilation. This was having every piece of you slowly stripped away until only agony remained. And I had made him suffer longer than this.

I cursed my luck, why did I have to be the one to get transported to this world, I was happy. Sure I didn’t have much but the rifts were mostly controlled. Especially when I stuck to D-Rank rifts but no I had to go and try make some extra money. And now look here I was getting eaten alive by poison on the forest floor.

I’d fought. I’d endured. But I wasn’t invincible. I wasn’t some protagonist blessed by fate.

I was just a guy with crap luck.

A shadow shifted across the forest floor.

My breath caught in my throat. I turned my head—slowly, painfully—half-expecting some Sundered patrol to emerge from the underbrush and finish what their kin had started. My sabre was still in my hand, but it was too heavy now. My grip was weak. My strength was gone.

But it wasn’t a monster.

It was the fox.

The small black creature padded toward me with calm, deliberate steps, its paws silent against the dirt and leaves. For a second, I thought I was hallucinating. That maybe I was already dead and this was just some strange final trick of my mind.

It came closer, its head held high. I could see something clamped in its mouth—pale and knotted, like a root or bulb, with curling threads of green clinging to the edges.

It leapt up in a blur of motion, landing square on my chest. I grunted at the pressure, but the pain had numbed too far to truly matter. The fox stood there for a moment, staring at me with its bright black eyes, then dropped the root directly onto my face.

It bounced off my cheek and hit the ground.

The fox jumped after it, picked it up again, and repeated the process.

“Really?” I croaked, voice barely more than a rasp. My throat was raw, my shoulder still bubbling and hissing with green rot. I was dying, and this little bastard was playing fetch?

But it wasn’t playing.

It dropped the root on my mouth this time and stared at me.

“You want me to eat this?” I mumbled.

The fox swished its tail.

I looked at the thing, then at the fox, then back at the thing again. I didn’t have the strength to argue. I opened my mouth and bit down. The texture was rough and fibrous, and the taste was bitter, like dirt. But I chewed.

After the second bite, my tongue started to tingle.

By the third, my throat went numb.

I blinked, surly this little fox didn’t trick me again. Then something shifted. A coolness spread from the root to my jaw, then to my throat, then down through my chest toward the place where the arrow had struck. The burning eased. The rot slowed. The unbearable agony that had been eating its way toward my neck paused.

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. The pain was still there but the poison, whatever it had been, was finally being held at bay.

I didn’t know what the root was. Maybe some kind of rare antidote. Maybe just a plant with strange properties. But it worked. And the fox this odd, silent little creature had brought it to me. Maybe I wasn’t so unlucky.

I swallowed what was left and let my head fall back against the moss.

“Thanks,” I whispered.

The fox curled beside me, as if it understood.

The wound still looked like hell. The flesh was blackened around the edges, a hole burned clean through the muscle. But now that the venom was neutralized, Last Stand had something it could work with. I felt the system pulsing faintly behind my eyes, that familiar wash of tingling heat beginning to spread outward from my core. The skill was fighting now, repairing what it could.

It wouldn’t fix everything at once. That wasn’t how it worked. It healed everything evenly. Which meant with half my body shredded from the fight and the other half riddled with micro-tears from my cultivation art… it was going to take a while.

But I had a chance.

I let out a shaky laugh, the sound thin and broken. “Just when I was starting to enjoy being a cultivator,” I muttered. “Figures.”

My mind wandered. The pain made it hard to think straight.

The fox pressed a little closer, resting its head on my chest. My breath came slow, each one shallower than the last, but I held on.

I’d survived the worst rift Earth had thrown at me.

I’d survived beasts and battles and spirit monsters.

I could survive this too.

As long as I kept breathing. As long as I had something left to fight for. And thanks to that fox… I did.

Golden Qi floated towards me and entered my body like a stream of dust. My system responded immediately.