Near the center of the vast northerly, western landmass, a dense forest of slow-growing trees filled gaps, canyons, and slopes amid a wild and rugged tract of sharp and snowy mountains covered in ragged grass. Among the rare lands that were never properly settled by any of the multitudinous polities and sects of the old world, this region had largely been avoided even by wandering tribes. The land had been left instead to the resident bears and was called by neighbors the Bear Mountains. A bland label, but an accurate one.

  Scoria Scorn had wandered through this region long ago, in the aftermath of Bloody Roam’s victory at Grand Lakes. That had been shortly after the end of the war. She had been wounded during that battle and as she was worried that the men – most of the surviving demonic cultivators were male – would take advantage of her relative weakness to indulge in horrific violations. Distance had offered a measure of protection.

  Searching that wild landscape, which even then contained more bears than demons, she’d discovered a small fissure. Upon exploration, she discovered it extended deeper and deeper into the earth, until it reached a depth beyond that of anything she’d ever conceived of in a cavern. Hundreds of meters down into dark muck those fissures stretched, entirely untouched by human hands.

  There, in a small room at the bottom where gray water burbled cold, she’d laid down her provision against disasters to come. A single circle, formed of formation-encased bronze coffins. A careful hedge against a calamity she suspected might well unfold, eventually.

  Long ago, Scoria Scorn had deduced that when the last hidden land fell and there was no one left to feed upon, the remaining demonic cultivators would fall upon each other in a frenzy. She had intended to survive even that unpredictable chaos, but a provision against body death – it would not take much for an errant blow from Bloody Roam to kill her – had long seemed essential.

  This caution had served her well. Dead she might be, in body, but she was not without resources. She had not been reduced to a whispering voice forced to barter for a place beside a callow inferior or beg for a stone that might hold her.

  She fully intended to restore herself, by her own strength, in this place, at this moment.

  Existing as a remnant function formed of qi alone, she could not see, but she could feel. That was sufficient.

  The cave contained exactly fourteen bronze coffins. They lay in two layers of seven, squeezed in tightly to utilize every scrap of available space. Mud and water slicked beneath them, and the tiny lightless room was chilled nearly to the point of frost. Out of those fourteen metal boxes, thirteen bore identical formations that locked them in endless stasis, bound to the ageless endurance their bronze shells provided.

  One, slightly variant, did not provide such absolute sealing. It offered a carefully selective penetration, one that would defy the ravages of time but still allowed the infiltration of plague qi.

  The plague, and Scoria Scorn’s remnant soul.

  Guided by the unique feel of that formation, personally inscribed using a unique qi signature designed precisely for that moment of recognition, the demonic cultivator pushed her awareness through the thin layer of cast bronze and inside the confined coffin space. Once there, she paused only long enough to assess and confirm the presence of the occupant and their retained health and vigor.

  A single demonic cultivator in the fourth layer of the body refining realm. She was a small stature woman with a beautiful soft face, black hair, caramel-colored skin, and the gentle flesh of one who’d lived within the pampered existence of nobility.

  Having confirmed that time’s ravages had been properly forestalled, Scoria Scorn shoved her soul into the body of her half-sister, Simik Chan, and attacked.

  Soul to soul, they fought. Scoria Scorn pressed her domineering will into the simplistic qi circuitry of her much younger relative and sought to take it for her own. Forcibly grafting her soul into the dantian she moved, one meridian at a time, to take control. Place herself atop the structure, grasp it, force her qi into place and drive out the natural host. Step by step until the entirety of the dantian belonged to her and the qi structure lay solely in the hands of the invader.

  A brutal struggle, fought without tactics or restraint, one soul against the other, with the loser doomed to be rent apart and left for whatever judgment the gods might uphold. Raw will and emotion, simplistic expressions of the animal self and the primordial connection of the dao slammed through every last rivulet capable of carrying even a drop of qi. The struggle tore the restraining stasis formation apart. Simik Chan’s body thrashed wildly. Her fists slammed against the bronze until she was covered in bruises. Mindlessly, her jaw closed upon her tongue, leaving the joined and contested existence spitting blood as the silent war raged on.

  Grind. Heat. Melt. Three words, but Scoria Scorn relied upon them. Grind resistance down with strength. Heat qi and circuitry to make it suitable for the molten iron nature of her dao. Melt her way through flesh, blood, bones, nerves, and qi to take the soul as her own. Bite by bite, one nip of the tongs at a time. Until it was all her own. She burned forward, refusing to halt, refusing to slow, driven by the furious smelter of consumption which she was, which she drove within everything. This body, she would claim it as her own, the raw material to feed the forge of her dao. This soul, her half-sister, she would feed it to the forge in her heart and burn it down to nothing until it became naught but more qi to add to the core.

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  A novice born hundreds of years after her half-sibling and trapped in stasis for millennia, Simik Chan ought to have possessed no hope of resistance.

  That had been the plan. An ideal host, secured long ago against future need. A sacrifice even, as antithetical as that idea was to any demonic cultivator. Scoria Scorn had countless half-sisters, but less than a dozen who could cultivate. Simik, the one who bore the greatest physical resemblance, had been far diverged from the vapid sect princess that all the others had become.

  Not that this distant echo of familial feeling was allowed to induce the least hesitation. Scoria Scorn would live once more. Simik Chan’s soul was simply the price to be paid for that necessary accomplishment, and in that calculus, cheap indeed. Nothing would hold her back.

  Her will bit down, and she drove her dao ever forward.

  But the girl wrenched free from stasis only to serve as a receptacle fought back. Confusion, discord, darkness, these things made no difference. Simik Chan was in her body, and the soul knows its vessel. The bond between physical, mental, and spiritual was engraved upon the dao. Only an immortal could overcome that joining. Countless cultivators had failed in the act of forging their own souls.

  Forging that of another demanded no less.

  Mine! Mine! Mine! Primal assertions of identity raged through qi circuits in this battle of souls. It was enough to be there, to render her being present, and to assert that she was herself. That was strength, born ready, and nothing easily broken. Especially against an enemy who dared to invade without any guidance.

  Bind and deaf, reasoning by qi alone, Scoria Scorn scorched through her half-sister only to find molten veins slipping from her grasp. Qi flows shifted and realigned even as she attacked. Pulses of internal energy lashed back, scourging her soul as the proper resident’s immune system roused to drive out this invader and repair the injury. Body and soul, the core of humanity recognized no difference.

  Back and forth they went, all that was melted discarded, the gaps restored anew.

  How long they fought, Scoria Scorn did not know, but as heat challenged flesh, she caught one other truth embedded within the clashing waves of qi. One suitably terrifying.

  The battle would soon kill Simik Chan.

  Her half-sister might win a victory not through successful resistance, but simply by dying from injuries before the process could come to completion. Such a failure would leave Scoria Scorn a lost soul just the same, and she had no second body to claim as her own.

  Terror spiked through her at this prospect, doom laid over all. She thrashed about for an instant. This only accelerated her half-sister’s deterioration. Linked as they were, she sensed this immediately. It provided the pause necessary to reconsider, to stop and strike anew.

  The plague offered the critical insight, flowing through their temporarily joined souls as it did. Deprived of any other senses, Scoria Scorn let it pour into her consciousness, raw and unfiltered. The red haze of it surrounded them both, coating everything, and in so doing it revealed every critical link, each point of natural binding, that she normally ignored.

  But that she had seen once before.

  Understanding struck with the force of heavenly lightning. To succeed, to conquer her half-sister body and soul, she must complete the process of the celestial ascendancy tribulation, the formulation of an immortal body joining flesh, thought, and soul, in reverse. She had to rip apart the natural welding of those three traits and replace every link identifying Simik Chan with Scoria Scorn.

  Though she had no mouth, she smiled so deep it reached the foulest recesses of her being. Many tasks were difficult, but anything that could be conceptualized as the recycling of metal came easily to her. Such methods were bound to the very core of her dao.

  Redirected, she swiftly reached forth and fed her half-sister’s soul to the blast furnace within, extruding herself in its place. Weld for weld, bond for bond, she systematically replaced all that was until only she remained.

  Simik Chan howled and thrashed. The totality of her being fought against this obliteration, but Scoria Scorn grasped with an iron will informed by the brutalities of three thousand years. Each bond melted away and replaced weakened the resistance and increased her leverage. The burning vise tightened, one fraction of existence at a time. By stepping in at the same moment as severance, backlash was blocked. Rage dissipated pointlessly across the forged metal of her immediately refined existence.

  The bloody body smoked and smoldered. Burns blossomed across the surface of her skin. Heat radiated out and nearly set the air in the casket ablaze. Immense damage scourged a once beautiful form.

  Meaningless. The demonic cultivator had long ago stopped caring as to such things. She would have a body. Scarring made no difference.

  Degradation served to collapse Simik Chan’s will. As her self immolated, she lost touch with it. Surrender to the dark came soon after.

  Scoria Scorn burned free the final vestige of her half-sister’s soul and felt her essence settle into the body. Sensations returned, nearly overwhelming in their deluge. Had there been sound she might have gone mad. If she had opened her eyes to anything other than pure darkness, she might have put out those orbs using her nails.

  The coffin within the cave prevented this. Instead, she formed a fist with her right hand, channeled qi to the limits her body refining realm flesh could sustain and punched through the side of the overheated coffin.

  Pain returned to her awareness as she broke three bones in her right hand.

  It did not matter. Cold air, barely above the freezing point, flowed in from the rest of the cave to cool her exhausted, overheated tissues. She took a shallow breath of the stale, mucky air, filling her lungs once more.

  That act hurt. Every motion did. Scoria Scorn welcomed such familiar, wet, fleshy pain. “To live again,” she murmured through cracked lips and a burnt throat. “Is both glorious and terrible.” She licked her lips slowly, regaining taste, that most precious of senses. For a moment, she did nothing but savor the act of feeling.

  “Enough,” she reminded herself that this was merely the first of many steps. “There is work to be done.”

  Slowly bending and breaking the bronze, something that took the full enhanced strength this body was capable of outputting, she widened the hole enough to squeeze her way out and slip into the thick mud below. Several additional bones in her right hand gave way during this process, but she worked her way free in time.

  Slipping out, she fell into the thick mud at the base of the chamber, instantly coating her body in frigid glop. Ignoring this mineral sludge, she crawled to the sump at the edge of the chamber and reached into the lightless sludgy water there with her left hand. Grasping solid metal with a tight grip, she pulled free the sword long hidden there. A soft smile played over her fire-ravaged face as she raised the blade.

  Her half-sister was dead, but she would send that soul company soon enough.