Pride, Part Three

Within a few days, Wei Wuxian realized he might've made a serious mistake.

This spotted donkey he'd helped himself to was impossible to please.

She was just a donkey, but she'd only eat fresh, dew-tipped tender grass. If the tips had yellowed even a little, she wouldn't touch it. Passing a farmhouse, Wei Wuxian swiped a bit of wheat straw to feed her — she chewed twice, then spat it out with a pfft louder than a grown man hawking spit. If she didn't eat well, she wouldn't move. She'd throw a tantrum, kick out her hind legs. Wei Wuxian nearly caught a hoof more than once. And her braying was hideous.

Whether as a mount or as a darling pet, she was good for absolutely nothing.

Wei Wuxian couldn't help missing his sword. These days it was probably hanging on some clan head's wall, shown off to guests as a trophy.

After dragging and hauling her down a few stretches of road, they passed a big spread of village fields. The sun blazed. By the edge of the path stood a tall scholar tree, dense green shade pooled beneath it, and an old well too, where the villagers had left a bucket and a ladle for thirsty travelers. The donkey reached this spot and flat-out refused to budge. Wei Wuxian hopped down and slapped her noble rump. 'You've got a rich girl's fate, you know that? Harder to keep happy than I am.'

The donkey snorted at him.

While he was lounging there bored out of his mind, a line of people came walking up the distant field path.

They had hand-woven bamboo baskets on their backs, cloth shirts, straw sandals — country folk from head to toe. Among them was a young girl with a round face, just barely pretty. Maybe she'd been walking too long under the blazing sun and wanted to come cool off and drink, but seeing a hoof-stamping, braying donkey tied under the tree, and a wild-haired lunatic smeared red and white sitting beside it, she didn't dare come close.

Wei Wuxian had always fancied himself a gentleman toward delicate things. Seeing this, he shifted over, cleared a patch of ground, and went off to wrangle the donkey. Only once the group saw he was harmless did they relax and come over. Every one of them was drenched in sweat, cheeks flushed — some fanning themselves, some hauling water. The girl sat by the well, and seeming to know he'd given way on purpose, she gave Wei Wuxian a faint smile.

One of them held a compass, gazing into the distance, then bowed his head, puzzled. 'Why hasn't this needle moved at all? We're almost at the foot of Dafan Mountain.'

The compass markings and needle were strange indeed — no ordinary compass. It didn't point north, south, east, or west; it pointed toward malevolence and monsters. A Wind-Evil Compass. Wei Wuxian knew at a glance these were a down-on-their-luck rural household of independent cultivators. Beyond the refined, well-heeled great clans, there were plenty of small families like this, training behind closed doors. He figured they'd probably come from the countryside to throw in with some distant relation in a big clan, or were headed off to a Night Hunt.

The middle-aged man at the front waved the others over for water as he spoke. 'That compass of yours is probably broken — I'll get you a new one later. Dafan Mountain's less than ten li off now. We can't rest too long. We've come all this dusty way; if we slack off right here and let someone beat us to it, it won't be worth it.'

A Night Hunt, just as he'd thought. Many of the Cultivation Clan families had a taste for elegance, calling their roaming the land to slay demons and quell monsters a 'roaming hunt,' and since these creatures tended to come out at night, they called it a Night Hunt too. There were no end of cultivation families, yet the ones that ever made a name came and went among a select few. Without generations of accumulated wealth behind you, an ordinary family that wanted to climb to the top and rank among the renowned, to win prestige and respect within Xuanmen Orthodoxy, had to put up real results. Bring down a vicious demon beast or a Fierce Ghost terrorizing a region, and only then did your family's word carry weight.

This was Wei Wuxian's specialty, his old party trick — but these past days on the road, breaking into a few graves, all he'd bagged were little ghosts. He was short a proper ghost general to throw his weight around with, so he made up his mind to try his luck on Dafan Mountain too. If he found a useful one, he'd grab it and keep it on hand.

Once the group had rested their legs, they got ready to set off. Before leaving, the round-faced girl took a half-green, half-red little apple from her back basket and held it out to him. 'This is for you.'

Wei Wuxian reached out grinning to take it, and the spotted donkey threw up her head, baring her teeth to bite at it. Wei Wuxian snatched it back fast. Seeing the donkey drooling over the little apple, inspiration struck. He picked up a long branch and a length of fishing line, dangled the apple from it, and held it out in front of the donkey's nose. Smelling the sweet apple just ahead, she desperately wanted it, and went chasing after that always-just-out-of-reach apple, head up and charging forward — faster, somehow, than any famous warhorse he'd ever seen, leaving everyone in the dust.

Hooves never stopping, Wei Wuxian reached Dafan Mountain before nightfall. Only at the foot of it did he learn this 'Fan' wasn't that 'fan.' From far off, the shape of the mountain looked just like a short, big-bellied, easygoing Buddha — hence the name. At its base sat a small town, called Foshan Town.

Far more cultivators had gathered here than he'd expected — a mixed bag of every stripe, the colors and styles of the various sects and families dazzling as they wove through the streets. For some reason, every one of them looked tense, too keyed up even to mock or pay any mind to a fright like him.

In the middle of the long street, a crowd of cultivators had clustered together, talking gravely. Their opinions seemed wildly split. From a distance Wei Wuxian could already hear them — fine at first, then somehow they got worked up:

'...I'm telling you, there's no Soul-Devouring Beast or Soul-Devouring Specter here at all. Plain as day, not a single Wind-Evil Compass needle has so much as twitched.'

'And if there isn't, then where did these seven townsfolk's Soul-Loss Sickness come from? You can't tell me they all caught the same freak illness. I've never once heard of a disease like that.'

'Just because the Wind-Evil Compass didn't pick it up means there's nothing? It can only point you a rough direction — it's not precise, you can't take it as gospel. Maybe there's something nearby throwing off where the needle points.'

'Think about who made the Wind-Evil Compass. I've never heard of anything that could mess with where its needle points either.'

'What's that supposed to mean? Something about the way you're talking sounds off to me. Of course I know Wei Ying made the Wind-Evil Compass — but the things he made weren't flawless. Are people not even allowed to question it now?'

'I never said you couldn't question it, and I sure didn't say his things were flawless. There's no call for you to sling mud at me, sir!'

So they set off arguing in a whole new direction, while Wei Wuxian rode past on his donkey, snickering away. Who'd have thought, after all these years, he'd still stand tall amid the cut and thrust of cultivators' tongues — 'where there's Wei, there's a row,' as the saying went. If anyone held a poll for the figure with the most enduring popularity across the hundred families, who else could it be but him?

In all fairness, that cultivator wasn't wrong. The Wind-Evil Compass in common use now was his first version, and it really did lack precision. He'd actually been in the middle of improving it — only his lair got raided before he could finish, so everyone would just have to make do and keep using the not-quite-precise first version.

Then again, the things that feed on flesh and gnaw on bone are mostly low-level, like a Walking Corpse; only the more refined, elegant high-grade demon beasts and Fierce Ghosts can draw out and digest souls — and this one had downed seven in one go. No wonder so many families had gathered here. Since the quarry was no small thing, it was only natural the Wind-Evil Compass slipped up some.

Wei Wuxian reined her in, jumped off the donkey's back, and brought the apple that had been dangling in front of her all the way to her mouth. 'One bite, just one — pfft, that bite of yours is about to take my whole hand off.'

He took a couple of bites off the other side of the apple, stuffed it back in the donkey's mouth, and was reflecting on how he'd sunk so low as to share one apple with a donkey, when his back suddenly bumped into someone. Turning, he saw a young woman. She'd run into him, but she paid him no notice at all — eyes blank, a smile on her face, staring fixedly off in one direction.

Wei Wuxian followed her gaze. It led toward a dark, looming mountaintop — Dafan Mountain.

Suddenly, with no warning, the young woman started dancing wildly right in front of him.

Her dance was frenzied, all clawing and flailing limbs. Wei Wuxian was watching with relish when a woman came running over clutching her skirts, threw her arms around the girl, and cried, 'A Yan, let's go home, let's go home!'

A Yan shook her off with all her strength. The smile on her face never once faded the whole time — carrying a kind of tender warmth that made your skin crawl — as she danced and leapt on. The woman could only chase her all over the street, sobbing as she ran. A peddler off to the side said, 'What a sin. Zheng the Blacksmith's A Yan has gotten loose again.'

'Her poor mother. A Yan, A Yan's betrothed, and her husband too — not one of them turned out well...'

Wandering this way and that, Wei Wuxian pieced together the strange goings-on here from the scattered snatches he caught from all sorts of people.

Up on Dafan Mountain lay a stretch of ancient grave ground. Most of Foshan Town's ancestral tombs were there, and sometimes a nameless corpse would get a pit dug and a wooden marker set up there too. Months ago, one night, lightning split the sky and thunder roared, with wind and rain raging. The downpour scoured the earth, and by morning a patch of Dafan Mountain's soil had slid and collapsed — that very grave ground. Many old tombs were destroyed, and several coffins were heaved up out of the dirt, their lids blasted off by a bolt of lightning, corpse and coffin alike charred black.

Foshan Town's people were deeply unsettled. They held prayers, rebuilt the old grave mounds, and thought they'd put it to rest. Who'd have guessed — from then on, Foshan Town started seeing people fall into Soul-Loss Sickness, again and again.

The first was a layabout. The man was dirt-poor, idle by nature, and because he loved going up the mountain to catch birds for fun, he'd happened to get trapped on Dafan Mountain the night of the landslide — scared half to death, though by some great luck he came through fine. The strange part was that a few days after he got back, he suddenly took a wife, threw a big loud wedding, and announced he'd be doing good deeds and living a settled, honest life from then on.

On his wedding night he got blind drunk, lay down on the bed, and never got up. The bride called to him and got no answer; one push and she found the groom's eyes glassy, his whole body cold — apart from still breathing, no different from a dead man. He lay like that, not eating or drinking, for several days, then was peacefully buried. The poor bride had been a wife only a moment before she was widowed.

The second was A Yan from Zheng the Blacksmith's house. The girl had just gotten engaged, only for her husband-to-be to be killed the next day by jackals and wolves on the mountain while out hunting. When she heard the news, the same thing happened to her as to that first layabout. Mercifully, after a while, her Soul-Loss Sickness somehow healed on its own. But from then on she turned addled, dancing out in the open every day for everyone to see, grinning all the while.

The third was A Yan's father, Zheng the Blacksmith. To date, seven people in a row had fallen victim.

Wei Wuxian mulled it over: most likely a Soul-Devouring Specter, not a Soul-Devouring Beast.

The two were one word apart, yet completely different things. A specter belonged to the ghost class, while a beast was a demon beast. In his view, the landslide had probably shaken the old tombs loose, the heavenly thunder had cracked open a coffin, and out came some ancient specter that had been resting inside. Whether or not that was it — one look at what kind of coffin it was and whether any seal remained would tell him. But Foshan Town's people had surely long since reburied the charred coffin elsewhere and gathered the bones back into the ground; there'd be next to no trace left.

Going up meant taking the mountain trail from town. Wei Wuxian nudged the donkey along, ambling up the slope. After a while, a few people came down looking thoroughly out of sorts.

Some of them had wounds on their faces, all of them chattering at once. The sky was dim, and running smack into a donkey-riding figure in full hanged-ghost makeup, they jumped as one, cursed, and hurried around him down the slope. Wei Wuxian looked back and wondered — could it be the quarry was too much to handle, and they'd come away beaten? After a moment's thought, he patted the donkey's rump and trotted on up the mountain.

He'd just missed the flood of grumbling that came from this group next:

'Never seen anyone so high-handed!'

'A clan head from a family that big — does he really need to come here and fight us over one Soul-Devouring Specter? He must've killed who knows how many back when he was young!'

'What can you do? He's a sect leader. Of all the families you don't want to cross, it's the Jiang clan; of all the people you don't want to cross, it's Jiang Cheng. Pack up and go, and chalk it up to bad luck!'