Fu Jin led them into Uzay's tower. The door there was built of heavy planks faced with iron and backed by stout bars. Though the aperture was narrow, barely wide enough to admit a single human, Liao still believed he'd be unable to easily open that barrier, even unbarred. The elder's slightest touch sufficed to pull it loose with ease. A casual demonstration of the power of qi and the easy mastery attached to higher realms.

  Once inside, they went down a spiral staircase shrouded in shadow. The only light available entered through narrow arrow slits or from strange chemical lanterns burning with eerie violet light. The stone steps were damp and slick, and Liao was forced to mind his footing with care. He doubted anyone lived in this part of the tower, not even servants, and recognized the difficulties attached to the steps as yet another layer of defense.

  They stepped off the stairs and entered a small rectangular room. It held no furnishings save the three wall-mounted sconces used for light. These, unlike those above, generated a soft white daylight shade that restored vision to its true color. Three of the walls in the room were of stout stone, but the fourth, the one he quickly realized faced east beyond the wall and toward the Killing Fields, was barred by an iron grating and backed by a series of wooden panels. These, fastened together by thick ropes, could be raised upwards into the ceiling in the manner of a city gate.

  Liao had no idea what the purpose of such a contraption might be, lodged deep inside a building.

  “It is time for you to learn the true face of the enemy of all humans, and cultivators especially,” Fu Jin spoke these words with funerary seriousness. “Stand here in the center,” she pointed to a spot on the floor marked in red. “This exercise will test your qi senses. I will leave the room to make that possible.” This was absolutely necessary, for in the realm of energy and essence the elder shone like a bonfire. Standing next to her, any attempt to sense less powerful energies, including Liao's own, was utterly overwhelmed.

  “Do not worry, you are in no danger.” She briefly tapped the metal grating with a ring. It rang out with a strange sound, unlike any metal on metal contact familiar to Liao. “This is a relic of the lost past, one even I would struggle to breakthrough swiftly.” As she turned and headed back up the stairs, Fu Jin smiled wistfully, her eyes unreadable.

  As the elder's presence receded from his perception of qi, Liao stood in place. Taking a deep breath, he closed his eyes to increase his focus and extended his simplistic qi sense. It was a strange sensation, one he still struggled to properly process, as if hearing through the touch of his mind. Ambient energy surrounded him, as always, the soft and warm power that radiated down from the stars above. In the stones beneath his sandals he could also feel a fading echo of the rumbling and hot qi that bubbled up from the earth below, though he stood high enough off the ground that it was difficult to perceive.

  The tower itself held considerable qi, gathered in bands hard as steel, flowing through a complex assembly pattern layered atop the masonry. Attempting to so much as glance at them hurt, and Liao quickly pulled his senses back from those bars. Defensive formations, he supposed, the power bound up into this place by endless efforts from the sect. Above him, several rooms away and shielded by a considerable layer of stone, Fu Jin's presence was still a bright light. Much further off, at the top of the tower, there was a molten spike of power, one that practically burned to brush against. That could only be Grand Elder Uzay, conducting her own daily meditations.

  These things, potent as they were, carried no surprises. Long proximity to Elder Yu Yong during the recruit class had accustomed him to the presence of elders, and any time he extended his feelings outward during nightly meditation he bounced back from the brilliant beacons of those Grand Elders working within the sect grounds. Formations too, ran throughout the elevated plateau, those within the tower were merely sharped and more defined.

  As he recognized and filed all these things away as ordinary, a single presence intruded against his perception. Something entirely different from everything, anything, he'd sensed before. A feeling that could never be described as normal.

  It fell into his qi sense as a hideous ball of burning rot. A trash fire of dead and discarded innards billowing smoke directly into his nose. Instinct pushed him to shake his head, to reject that awful, twisted wrongness, and he obeyed the impulse. That helped, slightly. The sensation grew more manageable as he examined it with the mental equivalent of a cloth over his face. It felt, somehow, reddish, though qi was beyond properties such as color, as if the natural energy contained within had somehow spoiled and been converted to decay.

  How the discordant source of such deviation, such disintegration, held together Liao could not understand, and his mind refused to even contemplate such possibilities. It made him want to vomit, just feeling this thing, for it was as if he'd been plunged into a barrel of excrement. He should not be there, should not be in contact with this wrongness. It needed to be cut away and burned, disposed of in the same manner as meat lost to gangrene.

  A slow rumbling noise distracted him and banished his growing nausea. The wooden wall panels were rising, hauled upwards by some mechanism tugging on the ropes. As they pulled away, it became possible to see the space beyond the metal grating, an opposite half of the chamber roughly identical to the one where Liao himself stood.

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  His first hint was a bit of reddish tinge, reflected from a tiny puddle of water left standing on the floor. Then, as the process continued, he gained far greater clarity. The wood panels, impelled by devious mechanisms backed by inhumanly vast cultivator strength, slipped into the ceiling in a pair of heartbeats. The other side of the room was fully unmasked with great speed.

  Including its sole occupant.

  It resembled a human, in the broadest sense. Two arms, two legs, large head, narrow waist, and knees designed to walk upright across the ground rather than swing through the trees like a monkey. That gross outline was as far as the resemblance sustained. The thing's skin was blood red, as if it had been flayed, but held its lithe muscles tightly wound to a body of strong build and deadly potential. The feet were over-sized, splayed wide with elongated broad toes that ended in grasping claws. This distended setup repeated itself across the hands, which were gigantic compared to the arms and equipped with knife-length cutting claws in place of nails. Even the arms were elongated, hanging down all the way to the center of the knees.

  At its waist the monster, and Liao now recognized that this thing was a ghoul, a member of the least class of demon, possessed nothing but a knot of bone. Whatever had once served to bring forth a new generation had ceased to operate and decayed.

  The face was jarringly human-like. A man missing their entire nose, with teeth filed to awl-points and lips ruined and savaged by the same. Oversize jaw muscles flanked bony growths that extended down from the scalp. This, combined with significant addition bone atop the plate of the skull, gave the impression that the demon, otherwise completely naked, was wearing a helmet.

  Clothes appeared unnecessary to the monster. The red skin was perfect, free of scars and blemishes, a state that Liao recognized with abject horror came from the thing's need to feed on qi rather than meat. It held no tools in its hands, nor did the small chamber contain any. What had once been human had degenerated into a feral monster controlled by the power and influence of twisted, alien, plague qi.

  The demon stood idle in the center of the cell where it had been placed. It did not pace or shuffle, but seemed content, rather like a horse or cow in a stall, to remain standing still indefinitely. Subtle differences in bone and muscle compared to those of a human or monkey, visible due to the impossibly tight skin, suggested this to Liao from the way the thing held itself.

  It was not looking at him. It stared eastward, eyes seeming to bore through the wall beyond and toward the Ruined Wastes that lay far away there. As Liao watched the thing, studying the monster and comparing it to everything he'd seen in graven images and heard in old stories, it appeared completely unaware of him.

  This lasted perhaps half a minute until, in an effort to get a better look at the thing's clawed hands, Liao took a single step forward.

  The rubbing contact of his sandal upon the smooth stone made little sound, but in that otherwise silent space it could be heard easily by both occupants.

  Reacting to the noise, the demon turned about. Initially, the motion was casual, unhurried, and distracted. The action of an animal stumbling through its instincts in the face of the unfamiliar. When the demon's eyes, shockingly human in structure despite their red-on-red coloration, rotated about far enough to catch a glimpse of Liao this changed completely.

  Demons do not act as humans do. It did not reason or consider. Nor did it hesitate. It reacted purely based on the signal, in the manner of simple animals living lives crawling about within the light-less earth.

  It lunged.

  The red-shifted body hurled itself forward, straight at Liao.

  A hideous splattering noise split the air, muscle and bone connecting with unyielding metal at high speed. Cracks and crunches followed as the demon smacked against the floor. Despite the horrid audio accompaniment, this impact did the reinforced flesh of the thing nothing beyond superficial injury. It rose with shocking speed and threw its claws violently against the bars. Again and again the long arms struck the metal barricade, achieving nothing but shattered claw tips.

  Groans and guttural moans, cries of base emotion without any semblance of language or even animal communication, ripped free from the throat as the ghoul raged. Pain, fury, and desire all merged together, pulsing through the thing's hideous mockery of proper qi. Nothing but the need to ravage the human before it motivated the demon.

  It took Liao no time at all to realize this thing desired to tear him apart and consume him. Not for his flesh, no such material nourishment powered this thing, its gut had atrophied away, leaving the skin nearly pushed against the spine above the waist, but for the qi in his dantian. Only through consumption of that power, the innate energy of the world not distorted by the plague powering this monster, could it assuage the terrible hunger that forced it to move, to strike, and to consume. That desire, and that alone, drove the ghoul.

  It was not a person. It was not even an animal. It was a weapon made of flesh, a destructive arrow of qi consumption launched by those who betrayed the world long ago.

  He wanted to put an arrow through the terrible red eyes. If his bow were at hand, he imagined that he would have done so, no matter that it would surely ruin the elders' carefully assembled test. This thing, it radiated wrongness. Its existence was a stain upon the world. A violation he did not know how to properly name.

  Qing Liao had never been overly concerned with higher truths or great causes. A trapper's son who expected to become a trapper, he mouthed the words directed during weekly services commemorating the Celestial Mother's gift of salvation from the demon hordes without any real contemplation. It had all been so long ago, he'd never thought it would matter to him, never considered what it had truly meant.

  He did so now, at last, facing the thing before him. The conclusion the raging ghoul offered was simple and clear. “This is my enemy,” he said to the maddened red face. “I am a cultivator. This is my cause. It is righteous.”

  He added nothing more. It was not necessary.