LingZi

Chapter One · The Northern Deep

The Qingpan Great Wall began at Ming Lake in the northwest, ran along the southern bank of the Ming River all the way to the Eastern Sea Cliff, stretching over a thousand kilometers. The wall stood twenty meters tall, built of stone, its joints poured with molten iron. A watchtower every 100 meters. A fortress every twenty km.

South of the wall was the nation of Yuan.

North of the wall was grassland. There were no people on the grassland. There were other things.

People called them the Ming.

No one knew when they had first appeared. No one knew what they truly were—they looked like humans, but were not. Skin white as bleached wax. Eyeballs far darker than any person's. Occasionally draped in scraps of cloth. Their teeth grew in crooked. They could not speak. Could not use tools.

They did only one thing.

Eat. Eat living things. Eat flesh.

The Qingpan Great Wall was built to keep them out. Centuries of construction, and it had never been breached.

......

Chu Hongli was standing on the wall, looking north, when he noticed the birds were gone.

Usually there were gray birds over the northern grassland—flying low, hunting insects. Today there was not a single one.

He mentioned it to the person beside him. Tao Yu—his wife, deputy general of the Third Legion. She raised her telescope and scanned north for a while.

"I can't see anything."

"That's exactly what's wrong."

Tao Yu lowered the telescope. "Take extra men on your patrol tonight."

"Already done."

She glanced at him. He was always one step ahead of her orders.

"How's Wenyuan?"

"Last week's letter said he can roll over now."

The corner of Tao Yu's mouth twitched.

"By the time we rotate home, he'll probably be crawling."

"Mmm."

Tao Yu walked toward the stairs, took two steps, then stopped.

"Will you make it back for New Year this year?"

"Depends on the schedule. Should be fine."

"Good."

......

That night, Chu Hongli had just finished his patrol of the wall and was heading back to the command post when the watchtower lit up. Two short blasts and one long—the alert signal.

He turned and ran back to the wall. Beyond it was black. The torchlight did not reach the base.

But he could hear.

A sound came from the darkness—like countless things dragging across the grass simultaneously. Sss-sss-sss-sss. Punctuated by brief, sharp screams, something like metal scraping glass.

He pulled out a signal flare and ignited it with scarlet lingzi—whoosh. A red orb shot upward, bursting in midair, illuminating several hundred paces beyond the wall.

Then he saw.

Things were running across the distant grassland.

Two legs, two arms. The same posture as humans—from where he stood, it looked like a crowd of people charging the wall.

But not just one crowd.

From the edge of the flare's light all the way into the darkness beyond, they were everywhere. Running figures packed shoulder to shoulder, so dense there was no gap between them.

They ran far faster than humans. Bodies two to three meters tall in full sprint, each stride enormous, each footfall pounding the earth with a muffled thud. The stone beneath the wall trembled. A bowl of water on the parapet rippled.

The flare's red light caught their faces.

Their faces were white. Utterly bloodless—white like wax. The features were in all the right places: nose, mouth, ears, exactly where they should be. Normal lip thickness. Normal tooth shape. If you saw only half a face, you would think it was a person.

But the eyes were wrong.

The entire eyeball was black. No pupil, no white—two spheres of pure black set in a human face.

They wore scraps of cloth. Some deep blue, some earth-yellow, some leather. Wrapped around them, stuck to them, wound around arms and waists. The edges of the cloth were stiff and dark, like dried blood.

Chu Hongli recognized the color of one piece.

Deep blue. A Yuan military uniform.

The front runners were less than fifty paces from the wall. They did not shout or scream—only the thud of feet striking earth and the hissing of breath.

Chu Hongli's spirit furnace lurched—like something inside his belly had been yanked by a string.

He looked down at his hand. The scarlet lingzi in his palm was bleeding outward, toward the wall's edge.

"Fire!"

Crossbow bolts flew from the wall. Several in the front rank were hit. One, two meters tall, was pinned through the chest. Its stride broke for a single beat. It looked down at the shaft in its chest, then kept running—three more steps before it fell. The ones behind trampled over its body. Not one slowed down.

They reached the base of the wall.

Chu Hongli expected them to stop—the wall was six zhang high. They would need to find a way.

They did not find a way.

The first rank slammed into the wall at full speed.

Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom!

Dozens of bodies striking stone at once sounded like a row of war drums beaten in unison. Bones shattered. Blue, purple, brown, red, white—blood of every color splashed against the wall. Those that hit died on impact, their bodies sliding down to crumple at the base.

Then the second rank trampled the first and slammed into a higher point. Most of them died too. Their bodies piled on top of the first layer.

Third rank. Fourth rank.

The living trampled the dead and charged upward. The dead became steps for the next wave. The pile of corpses at the base of the wall rose—one layer, two, three. Blood of different colors streamed down the heap, painting the wall's foundation in a grotesque rainbow.

They did not care that those beside them died. Or rather, they did not possess the function of caring. When the front ones died, the ones behind climbed up. When the pile grew tall enough, they began to scale it.

Chu Hongli looked down from the wall—the heap of corpses at the base was already two zhang high. At this rate, the bodies would soon reach the top.

"Pour the oil!"

Tung oil cascaded from the parapets. Then torches—WHOOMPH. The corpse pile and the living ones still climbing ignited together. A column of fire erupted from the base of the wall, and thick smoke and the stench of burning flesh rolled over the battlements.

The burning Ming did not stop. Some kept climbing even as they burned—skin charring and curling back, exposing grayish-white muscle underneath. They managed a few more steps before collapsing, becoming part of the burning heap below.

Then the ones behind stopped.

Not all of them—only a few tall ones in the front rank and those directly behind them. They stood outside the wall of fire, black eyes fixed on the burning corpse pile. A few took half a step forward and pulled back, as if testing. Firelight played across their faces, turning the deathly white skin to orange.

The rear ranks still surged forward, but the front rank held. The two forces crushed together. They packed tight a few paces from the fire wall, dense and white, bodies swaying in the firelight.

A few of them made sounds.

"Unh." "Mmm." Something between panting and calling.

Chu Hongli watched from the wall. They had stopped. The oil was still burning. As long as the fire held, they would not move.

"How much oil do we have left?" he asked the man beside him.

"Three barrels. Fifteen minutes at most."

Fifteen minutes later, the fire began to die. Tung oil burns fast—after the blaze came embers. The corpse pile still burned, but the flames shrank from ten feet to a few. The heat was fading.

The tall ones standing beyond the fire wall moved.

The first to move was one of them—a full head taller than the rest, over three meters. It took a step forward, stopping less than two paces from the fire.

Its legs lit up first. A brown shell spread from its shins to its knees. The glow was faint—more like mud smeared on the legs than light.

It stepped into the still-smoldering embers. Its sole hissed against the ground—the shell blocked the heat. It walked over embers and charred corpses, through the fire wall, and stood at the top of the body pile.

The parapet was less than two zhang above it.

Chu Hongli saw the brown glow on its body and froze for one beat.

"Is that an earth armor?"

The deputy beside him saw it too. "That's impossible."

A second tall one moved. This one was even larger, its legs coated in a faint purple shell.

It started from beyond the fire wall. The purple light on its legs flashed once. Then its speed changed—three strides across the ember field, trampling up the corpse pile, each footfall kicking bodies aside.

Two steps brought it to the top of the pile. Then it jumped.

A body over three meters tall launched from the crest of the heap, reaching the top of the parapet almost instantly. Two hands gripped the battlement.

A soldier's blade came down on its fingers—clang. The edge struck the purple-shelled knuckle. A current of electricity surged through the hilt. The soldier's hand went numb. Its grip did not loosen.

It vaulted onto the wall.

Standing on the battlement, it towered a full body-length above the soldier. Black eyes looked down at him. Mouth slightly open—normal teeth visible inside, but between them, something dark red. Dried.

Chu Hongli's spirit furnace seized violently.

Like a hand had reached into his belly, grabbed something, and was pulling it out. The scarlet lingzi enchanting his blade dimmed by more than half in an instant. The heat in his palm was receding. He could feel the lingzi in his meridians flooding uncontrollably toward this thing's abdomen.

The soldiers nearby felt it too. One warrior's scarlet armor suddenly went dark across his forearm. He looked down at his own arm, face white. "What the—"

Not just him. Within a dozen meters of the tall one, every person's spirit armor was dimming.

The nearest soldier raised his crossbow at it—but never got the shot off.

It looked down at the soldier. Black eyeballs, utterly expressionless. Then its entire body snapped forward and bore down on him. Two hands pinned his shoulders. Its mouth opened.

Mouth pressed against the soldier's neck. Bit down.

The soldier screamed. Chu Hongli saw the man's body convulsing. The thing's mouth was working, cheeks swelling, throat swallowing.

It was eating.

A second one came over the wall.

Then a third. A fourth. A fifth.

The sounds were quiet. No roaring, no war cries—only the sound of mouths working.

Chu Hongli's spirit furnace was hemorrhaging lingzi, the drain now several times faster than before.

He drove his blade into the stone at his feet. Hands together—eyes locked on the field beyond the wall.

Scarlet lingzi erupted from his palms, tracing a red line through the air. The air above his head was heated to a plasma state in an instant. Under Chu Hongli's control, the plasma condensed, stretched, curved, twisting into a shape in the air.

A fire dragon.

The dragon flew over the parapet and plunged outward.

The superheated air burned a white line in its wake. Where the dragon passed—everything became ash. A dozen Ming in the front ranks went from standing on two legs to two segments of charcoal on the ground in the span of a single breath.

The men on the wall saw it. The dragon carved a scorched black trench through the horde beyond, bodies and multicolored blood and charred meat heaped along its edges.

Someone shouted—the shout carried from one end of the wall to the other. Some who had been crouching on the ground, too afraid to move, got back to their feet. Crossbowmen racked their bows. Armored soldiers raised blades. A few charged the Ming that had made it onto the wall.

Other spirit warriors on the wall, seeing the fire dragon, unleashed their own—fire orbs, flame walls, lightning nets, electric arcs, gale winds. Dozens of red-tinged blasts wrapped in howling wind flew from the wall and crashed into the horde below. The field beyond lit up.

That was perhaps the brightest ten heartbeats of the entire night.

Then the dragon faded. From white-orange to orange, from orange to dull red. The plasma was stripped away layer by layer as it plowed through the horde.

By a hundred paces out, the dragon was no larger than a man's head. The point of light drifted a few more steps, then went dark.

Chu Hongli's hands dropped. He was gasping.

Beyond the wall, the Ming paused for one heartbeat. One heartbeat later, they resumed—bodies trampling bodies, climbing upward. The charred trench was stomped flat.

Chu Hongli pulled his blade from the stone and turned to glance south. Behind the wall lay the road. Ten km south along the road was the command post, where Tao Yu was still waiting.

He looked for about one heartbeat.

......

Chu Hongli was pinned to the stone of the wall.

Its knee pressed into his chest. His ribs bent under the weight. His breathing was crushed to a sliver.

A grayish-white face leaned down. Black eyeballs less than a foot from his. No hatred, no rage—nothing at all.

Then it lowered its head and bit into his shoulder.

First came pressure—teeth bearing down on the shoulder plate. The iron held for one beat, then cracked. Teeth cut through skin.

Chu Hongli did not scream. He was dying to scream, but his lungs were pinned and nothing could come out. His mouth was open, sound caught in his throat with nowhere to go.

It was chewing.

He could feel the substance of his shoulder diminishing, bite by bite. Warm liquid ran from the wound down his back, pooling on the stone.

His vision blurred. The muscles in his neck were pulled by the chewing motion, and his head slowly turned south.

The road behind the wall, lit by moonlight.

His lips moved once. No sound—perhaps her name.

Then the light left his eyes.

......

After the wall broke, the Ming did not stop.

When they had finished eating everything on the wall, they poured through the breach and down the southern side. Thousands of white figures ran along the road under moonlight, arms swinging, legs pumping—the same posture as when they had come.

Like a crowd of people on a journey.

The command post sat on a plain ten km south of Qingpan Sector Sixty-One. Earthen walls surrounded it—inside were the hospital, the barracks, the drill ground, the granary, the command center. An extra company of one hundred guards was garrisoned nearby. Most of the people inside were support staff: clerks, cooks, and medical officers.

Tao Yu was still in the command post, waiting for Chu Hongli to return from his patrol.

Maps were spread across the desk in the main tent. The tea had gone cold. She sat at the table, leafing through a patrol log. Two pages in, she paused—a letter was tucked between the pages. Tao An had sent it last week. It said little Wenyuan could roll over now, and every time he did, he rolled right off the bed.

She laughed once, slipped the letter back in, and went on reading.

Sounds came from outside.

First distant—someone running near the camp gate. Then closer. Someone shouted—the words unclear.

Then screaming, continuous and unbroken.

Tao Yu's hand stopped.

She stood. Took the blade from the wall.

She pushed open the tent flap, and it was standing right there.

Less than a step away. White as wax. Black eyeballs gleaming under the moonlight. Mouth open, red shreds of flesh caught between its teeth.

It was looking down at her.

She was looking up at it.

......

The command post did not last half an hour.

Records of that night are scarce. By the time reinforcements arrived, the post was as empty as the wall—earthen walls breached in several places, the ground marked only by bloodstains and shattered armor.

Tao Yu's blade was found driven into the mud outside the main tent. The blade had snapped—only the hilt and three inches of broken steel remained.

On the broken edge: dried blue blood.

The reinforcements that followed killed the remaining Ming and re-fortified the wall. The new stones were whiter than the old, standing out against the gray like a scar. Strangely, this relief force did not encounter any of the tall ones that could wield spirit arts.

......

Yuanzhou. Qiaotou Town.

A child not yet one year old rolled over in bed and fell to the floor. Tao An scooped him up and tucked him back under the covers. The boy did not cry. His lips moved twice, and he fell back asleep.

He was waiting for two people to come home for New Year.

He waited a long time.

......

The Qingpan Great Wall still stands.

South of the wall is still Yuan.

North of the wall is still grassland.