Chapter 5

  The apparently not an alien spaceship closed the remaining distance almost rocket fast before doing a full bank turn around the roof, pointing what almost had to be laser cannons or something outward as if scanning for threats, before putting its’ side even to the opposite end of the roof and opening a side door. From said door rushed out a pair of honest to god sci-fi goon soldier types. Face obscuring helmets, gear covered in blinky LED lights, guns that looked like movie props, the whole nine yards.

  Said space goons immediately beelined it to Arthur and grabbed him without so much as a how do you do or offer to buy him dinner first, dragging him back to the ship with obviously enhanced strength. He didn’t bother trying to resist. He didn’t have the energy, and he was pretty sure these guys weren’t trying to hurt him, just move him. At least he was able to hold onto his bag of goodies.

  As quickly as they came out of their ship, the goons in power armor dragged Arthur into it just as fast, throwing him into a seat with some kind of multipoint harness seatbelt that one of the goons roughly strapped him into while yelling at the other one sitting down in what he guessed was the pilot’s seat to, “PUNCH IT”. Taking to that order with gusto, pilot goon did the crazy sci-fi plane equivalent of putting the gas pedal through the floor. Arthur was very grateful for the seatbelt holding him place as the whatever the hell he was in went from stationary to really, really not at about screw you speed, pushing him into the seat hard enough to make Arthur remember that one time he’d drunkenly agreed to get shot out of a catapult on a dare. Which, not to put too fine a point on it, sucked.

  When they finally slowed to a speed that didn’t make Arthur feel like he was more projectile than person, the sci-fi goon hit a button on the neck of their suit, revealing the face of a woman somewhere in her thirties with the flinty gaze of a soldier who knew their business. “Matthews, take us back to command and call ahead. Tell them we picked up a Rifted and we need medical and a counselor to be there when we touch down.” “Roger Captain”. Order given, the soldier lady turned to Arthur and her gaze immediately softened. “What’s your name kid”?

  “Arthur,” he said, acting the part of scared nineteen year old kid he looked like instead of the centuries old cultivator he actually was. “Hello Arthur, I’m Captain Walker of the Haven City Security Force. I know you have no idea what that means, but please believe me when I say we’re the good guys, no matter how much the armor makes us look like stormtroopers

  The pilot, Matthews, laughed at that one. “Holy shit, I haven’t thought about those movies in years.”

  Captain Walker got a sour look on her face at his words and shot a glare towards her subordinate. “Eyes on the sky, Matthews.” “Sorry ma'am.” Having sufficiently chastised her subordinate, she turned back to Arthur.

  “Glossing over that and getting back to the point, given the fact you’re not blind , you’re probably wondering what the hell is going on, right?” Arthur resisted the urge to give her a “no shit Sherlock” look and simply nodded in affirmation.

  Captain Walker sighed. “I don’t blame you kid, but the answer to that question is a long one, and I’m definitely not the person to answer it. Good news is, we’re taking you to people who can not only give you much better answers than I can, but they’ll also be able to give you a hot meal and a shower.”

  “So what’s the bad news,” Arthur asked in a quiet voice, causing Captain Walker to blink in confusion. “Huh?” “The bad news,” Arthur repeated. “You mentioned good news. That kind of implies the existence of bad news.”

  Captain Walker stared at him for a moment before face-palming. “This is why explanations are above my pay grade,” she complained into her hand before meeting Arthur’s gaze with eyes full of sympathy and pain. “The bad news is that you’re really not going to like the answers.”

  After making that incredibly ominous and unhelpful statement, Captain Walker shut her mouth like a bank vault in the face of Arthur’s further questioning. And with Matthews unlikely to spill anything, all he could do was sit back and cultivate to pass the time.

  Which went really well for a bit, with the Qi flowing through his body easing his fatigue and healing the damage caused by pushing himself too hard. At least until he puked blood.

  Puking blood is never a pleasant experience, especially when it sneaks up on you. One minute, Arthur was pretending to be asleep as he slowly absorbed Qi into his withered and battered body, and the next he was on his hands and knees, almost literally puking his guts up on the airship floor.

  Walker was on him in moments, yelling something at Matthews and opening a compartment on her suit that had a little red cross on it. At least that’s what Arthur noticed before diving into himself to find the source of the problem. It wasn’t hard to figure out, and in hindsight, should’ve been obvious. The damn elf had poisoned him.

  The wound on his back throbbed with malevolence and, to his mind’s eye, was reaching into him with tendrils of dark corruption. Intent on strangling the life out of him from the inside. Well screw that. Arthur had plenty of experience with poison and corruptive powers from the other world, and knew how to fight them. At least he did back when he actually had power to fight it, but that was just details. Burning a little more life force was far from ideal, but still preferable to flat-out dying.

  Just as Arthur was about to light his soul on just a little bit of fire to try and burn this crap out of him, Walker stabbed him in the chest. He would’ve been angry about that, except she stabbed him with medicine. Medicine that had Qi in it.

  In any other situation, Arthur would’ve been surprised as hell at that, but he didn’t have the luxury right now. Not stopping to examine this horse’s dentistry, he just jumped on it and rode it into the poison in a glorious cavalry charge. Which is a crap metaphor for grabbing the Qi with both metaphysical hands and using it to bludgeon the poison before he used any of his own energy. So you know, yay.

  Whatever was in that medicine was pretty good stuff, because it actually did a whole bunch of damage to the poison, destroying the tendrils of evil death and burning it back almost to the wound itself. The poison was still killing him, but now it would take days instead of minutes. Plenty of time to absorb enough Qi to kill it the rest of the way. At least that was what Arthur thought as he prepared to do some pretty heavy cultivation. Then the sedative he hadn’t noticed was mixed with the medicine took advantage of his distraction to club him into unconsciousness.

  Arthur did not rest soundly. Whether it be the poison having some kind of effect on his mind, or the heavens deciding to kick him while he was down, bad memories long buried decided now was the perfect time to resurface. Starting with the only peaceful time he’d known in his new-old life.

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  After getting run over by a truck like a goddamn anime character, Arthur had taken what he’d thought was his last breath on the pavement and his first breath as the newborn Jin Xia, in a world completely different from his own. This world was technologically inferior to Earth in literally every way if you were born anytime after the middle-ages. Growing up again was interesting, especially since his new family was completely different than his old one.

  Poor but kind, Jin’s new parents were peasants who made their living farming rice. He was actually the eldest sibling this time, with two younger sisters and a baby brother. Adjusting to peasant life was hard. There was none of the entertainment he’d been used to, and until he was old enough to be useful for something, he’d spent most of his time in what was essentially a local daycare in some old lady’s house.

  It turns out that sticking the mind of a bored nineteen year old in a little kid’s body was a recipe for disaster, because as soon as he could figure out how to move his new baby body with it’s stubby limbs and head that felt like it was made out of concrete with how heavy it was, he quickly gained a reputation for being a trouble maker. Said reputation only got worse as he got older, especially when he finally started figuring out the language.

  Those first five years had been a hell of boredom. Finally being able to help out with work around the village wasn’t much better, but at least it gave him something to do. Jin’s first piece of evidence that the world he was living in was stranger than he’d first thought came a few weeks after he turned five years old, and a flying carriage descended from the sky into the village square. Funny how he kept running into those.

  The people who came out of this carriage were each wearing clothes that had to have cost more than Jin’s entire village was worth, and had been dispatched by the government to test the cultivation potential of every child over the age of three with an actual crystal ball. Judging by the look on their faces, every kid in the village had flunked hard, including himself, until it was his youngest sister’s turn. The second she touched it, the crystal ball lit up like a traffic light, and the people administering the test got real excited. That was the last day Jin Xia had seen his little sister. Until about thirty years later when she tried to kill him, but luckily, the dream didn’t travel down that particular chain of events.

  What it did do was skip ahead to the next traumatic thing that happened.

  On the day before Jin’s seventh birthday, hell descended upon his little village. Bandits led by a low level cultivator, which still made him essentially a superhero compared to the villagers, decided that our stuff was supposed to be their stuff by right of them being better at wanton slaughter. To their credit, the people of the village, my father included, tried their best to fight back. The village’s government administrator was even a low level cultivator himself. But being a cultivator was not synonymous with being a warrior, much less a killer, so he didn’t really last long.

  The men of the village took up whatever weapons they had to hand, mostly farming implements and the occasional hunting bow, while the women and children were sent to hide in any secret place large enough to fit them. Mostly the little hidden holes every house has to hide stuff from the tax collectors so people could exist through the winter.

  Jin had long since been kicked out of the village daycare for being a nuisance (read, incredibly bored), so he’d been co-opted into helping the fields a little early. When the alarm sounded, his father hid him in an outhouse with a digging knife and instructions to stab anyone who opened this door without knocking three times first.

  The sounds that followed were terrifying. Weapons clashing, the sound of steel striking flesh, and the screams of the dying mixed together in a horrid symphony of carnage that seemed to both go on far too long and be over in an instant. When the noise faded, Jin knew that the villagers were dead. All that remained was the speaking and shouting of the bandits as they celebrated the slaughter of everyone he knew in this world. And then a new noise came.

  It started with a simple question. “Who the fuck is tha-,” and that was a far as the speaker got before they started wailing like the damned. More shouts came from the bandits, but they too quickly turned into screams. From the sound of it, some tried to fight, while others tried to flee. It didn’t matter. They all died screaming.

  A small part of Jin was happy that the bastards who destroyed his village got what they deserved, but the rest of him was absolutely piss terrified of whatever the hell could kill an entire group of bandits in the span of a few minutes. Then he heard it.

  Step. Drag. Step. Drag. Like someone with a severe limp was walking towards the outhouse Jin was hiding in. His small hands tightened around the digging knife, praying to any god that would listen that the three knocks would come. But the limping steps stopped right in front of the outhouse, and Jin’s heart stopped cold as the outhouse door slowly began to creak open.

  Jin didn’t give himself any time to hesitate. He just charged with everything he had, intent on at least going down swinging. Then he promptly hit a brick wall shaped like a person. His momentum stopped dead, he looked down at the hand that had caught the blade of his digging knife and then up into the face of the man who held it.

  The man was large and broad, and had the kind of face that can only be gained by those few poor souls who have lived both long and hard, with eyes made kind in spite of it all. Blood covered his arms up to the elbows and was spattered across his simple clothes. For a brief moment, Jin thought this man to be a bandit himself, at least until he spoke.

  “Peace, child,” The man spoke in a voice made out of gravel. “The bandits have all been dealt with. No further threat to you exists here.”

  Jin collapsed in exhaustion right then and there as all of the adrenaline and nerves keeping him upright disappeared, and he collapsed into the man’s arms. “What of my family,” he said in a voice made heavy with exhaustion. The man looked away.

  “I am sorry, but you are the only survivor.”

  That was the last straw. Jin’s heart shattered, and he passed out with tears in his eyes. When he awoke, he would find himself in the home of the man who saved him, deep in the mountains. Jin was given two options. The man would happily take him to some people he knew, and Jin would be able to live in peace for the rest of his days, but only if he was able to let what happened to his village go and move on. Or he could stay with his savior, and turn the pain and helplessness he’d felt into the power to do something about it the next time tragedy decided to enter his life, at the cost of great pain and hardship to himself.

  Jin’s master looked so sad when he chose the latter.

  Almost as sad as when Jin killed him years later, for what he’d done.