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“There you are… at last… I’ve found you!”
Dan Heng didn’t have time to think before a heavy black sword laced with amber swung at his head. His body reacted as if on instinct— his hand reaching for the spear he always carried with him and bracing it across his body just in time to block the descending blade as he whirled around to avoid the now-diverted strike.
It had been an ordinary day on the IPC cargo ship where he’d gotten some temporary work, and he’d been just about ready to punch out and head to the cafeteria when the entire ship had rocked violently, lights flickering. A moment later, this tall man with long, black hair and crimson eyes had appeared, and with him came the stench of blood and death. He hadn’t even given Dan Heng the opportunity to even ask him who he was, or what he was doing here, before he’d rushed in to attack.
If Dan Heng’s reaction had been even an instant too late, he would already be dead. The force behind that blow was like nothing he’d ever felt before.
You know that’s not true.
Despite the force of the blow, Dan Heng managed to keep his footing, to meet this strange new enemy’s aggression with a strength and technique he didn’t even know he had. Though he still ended up skidding back a few paces, he likewise pushed his assailant away from him, back toward the shadows from which he had issued forth. The man was breathing heavily, like he’d been wounded— even though Dan Heng knew that Cloud-Piercer hadn’t come close to even grazing him.
“Who— are you?” Dan Heng demanded, his voice echoing through the corridor. “What do you want?”
The man stood upright again, with a dark, bitter chuckle, and there was an ear-splitting, bone-rending screech as he began to step towards Dan Heng again, slowly dragging the tip of his sword along the ground, cutting a deep score into the steel floor. His crimson eyes were as wild as the twisted grin upon his lips.
“Of five people, three must pay a price,” he said at last. “You… are one of them.”
Each syllable was growling, menacing, chilling Dan Heng to the bone. He could feel his heart beating fast, his breaths becoming shorter and shallower as he held Cloud-Piercer ready. He stepped back, one foot after the other, first a single step, and then faster and faster as his assailant continued his relentless advance. He could feel his hands and legs starting to tremble, and he clenched his jaw tightly to steel himself— he couldn’t rush forward and confront this person just yet— he knew far too little about his technique and prowess.
Before he could finish coming up with a plan, there was a sinister flash of red, and the blade came flying toward him, striking to kill just as it had been before.
This time, Dan Heng wasn’t quite so lucky. He’d been backed against the wall, unable to side-step without crashing into the nearby machinery— and the sword’s edge clipped his shoulder, effortlessly slicing through the leather of his jacket to score a gash into the flesh below.
He smelled blood— his own, dripping from the fresh wound— and his body reacted without thinking. Cloud-Piercer spun in his hand like an extension of his own body, with a level of mastery that Dan Heng couldn’t have possibly achieved in his mere thirty years of life, and especially not in the few months that he’d spent outside the walls of the Shackling Prison. He’d never seen this man before, but somehow, he knew that he was connected to his past life… to Dan Feng.
There was much that Dan Heng didn’t know, but he knew one thing— his previous incarnation had plenty of enemies, and plenty of people who would want to see him dead.
This must be one of them.
And yet, as fast as the voice in the back of his mind had driven him to ready his weapon, at the same time, it held him back. When he countered the attack, his own strike was clearly meant to disarm, to disable at most, but not to kill— for some reason, killing this man who wanted to do the same to him wasn’t something that came naturally, like so many other things. Instead, it felt like that voice he dubbed “instinct” told him not to kill this person.
Dan Heng didn’t have the time or luxury to be able to think that through when the man who smelled like death rounded on him once more. They traded blows back and forth through the maintenance corridors, sword and spear leaving great, glistening gashes upon the steel walls of the corridor. The lights flickered on and off, lighting their steps before plunging them into darkness. The wound on Dan Heng’s shoulder wasn’t especially deep, and was hardly more than a bit of a sting as he fought— but then, as the lights flickered off, he felt an icy shock, then a fierce burn as the sword slid between his lower ribs, into his abdomen.
Dan Heng coughed, feeling his legs grow weak beneath him as the blade was pulled free. He clutched at his bleeding side with his free hand, falling to his knees.
The lights turned back on. The demon-like man stood above him, sword raised to deal a final blow.
The lights went out again.
Dan Heng’s reflexes were fast enough this time to get him out of the way, up on his feet, running down the corridor as fast as his legs could carry him. He was panting, gasping for breath, one hand holding Cloud-Piercer and the other clutching at his injury, red blood spilling between his fingertips.
The red-eyed man was in hot pursuit, just on his heels, but Dan Heng knew this ship better than he did. He managed to get ahead, mind numbed to the pain of his wound by the adrenaline pumping through his veins, driving him forward. Communications had been cut to the maintenance area, but if he could get back into the cargo hold and find part of the security team…
No…
There was something about that man… a chilling sense that he was one of the most dangerous people Dan Heng had ever met. He didn’t even know if the ship’s entire security team would be able to stop him— but what else could he do?
Fight him?
Not here, not so close to the engines, where one wrong move, one misplaced strike could turn the ship into a spectacular array of fireworks.
He could hear the footsteps from behind, a death-like chill overriding his senses and flooding him with a kind of terror he’d never felt before… he thought… he wasn’t really sure. He burst free from the maintenance corridor out into one of the cargo bays, panting for breath. Up ahead, his shift supervisor was standing next to a large stack of storage crates, scanning them with his datapad. When he heard Dan Heng’s approaching steps he lifted his gaze.
“Dan Heng, weren’t you supposed to be going on break? Don’t tell me you’re taking unauthorized overtime again—”
He stopped when he saw the trail of blood behind the young man, his face turning pale, and he put down his datapad and hurried forward to catch Dan Heng by the shoulders, barely managing to stop him in his tracks.
Dan Heng’s breathing was fast, his heart pounding in his ears so he could hardly hear the supervisor’s voice as he looked frantically over his shoulder.
“Slow down, son, what happened to you?” the man asked, genuinely seeming a bit concerned. “Come here, let’s sit you down and call a medic.”
He was an older fellow, who had long given up on the IPC’s rat race. He’d become perfectly content in his current position as shift supervisor on a small, unimportant cargo transport, and he’d taken a liking to Dan Heng from the first day he’d asked for a job. Dan Heng didn’t yet know how fortunate he’d been to end up with a supervisor who actually cared about his wellbeing— but none of that mattered to him right now.
“I can’t— I can’t stop now,” he shook his head, trying not to sound as frantic as he felt. “Hurry, you need to clear everyone else out of this cargo bay and leave this to me, otherwise—”
He didn’t get to finish what he was saying.
A whistle of metal tearing through the air came from behind.
That terrible amber-laced blade embedded itself in the supervisor’s chest, making him lose his grip on Dan Heng as the momentum sent him flying backwards, crashing into the storage crates he’d just been inspecting.
His face was frozen in an expression of shock. He died instantly— though it was impossible to tell whether it was from the wound, or from the impact of hitting the crates. He had just been an ordinary person, after all. Not a pathstrider, not even a fighter.
Dan Heng’s blood had turned cold as ice. He froze, his feet rooted to the ground as he stared at the supervisor’s body, then he slowly, slowly began to turn around to face the approaching footsteps.
His pursuer was slowly crossing the floor, still with that wild, terrifying expression on his face. As he walked, he left a trail of bloody footprints, pools of dark red beginning to spread out from behind the stacks of crates toward the center aisle. In one hand, he held the limp body of a guard by the collar. He dropped the body on the ground in front of Dan Heng, who just kept staring in wide eyed shock as his stomach churned. How many… how many had he already killed?
“The more you live, the more they die,” the man growled, turning his menacing blood-red gaze upon Dan Heng. “This is the calamity you bring, Yinyue-jun, for as long as you evade your rightful death.”
… How? Why?
Not long after he had first set foot aboard a transport ship and left the Xianzhou behind forever, Dan Heng had noticed that the crown of horns upon his head were drawing far more attention than he was comfortable with, both out of interest and, when it came to the people of the Xianzhou, suspicion. He had stepped into the transport’s washroom and looked upon his own face for the first time in its mirror, and then without even a moment of indecision, he took a chisel to it. He lifted the spear that the general had placed in his hands before his departure and used its sharp edge to cut through his long hair, leaving it short and jagged. Then, he closed his eyes and summoned up some indescribable, ancient power within him to change the rest of his appearance. He rounded his pointed ears, and made his dragon horns shrink down beneath his hair, until they’d vanished entirely. The uncomfortable yet familiar power that lurked within him was suppressed until imperceptible, and with it dimmed the azure luminescence of his eyes. With a change of clothes and a more polished haircut obtained after the transport dropped him off, he looked… perhaps not like a completely different person, but at least like a completely ordinary one. Certainly not someone who could be mistaken for a Vidyadhara high elder.
Dan Heng never questioned how he was able to change his appearance like that. He didn’t care to know— if that power was a fragment of Yinyue-jun, then he just wanted to leave it behind like the rest of the vestiges of that previous life.
So… why now did he have to stand here, surrounded by the bodies of his fellow workers, drenched in blood and sins that should have long since been washed away as he faced down something more beast than man?
Those haunting blood-red eyes, that terrifying grin, released him from their death grip for just a moment as the man went to retrieve his weapon from the supervisor’s corpse.
Dan Heng felt anger, fear, desperation all welling up in him at once. “I’m… not”— he could feel the pain of nails staked into his flesh, the bite of shackles around his ankles— “I’m not that person!”
As he cried out, loud enough to scrape against the inside of his throat, he threw his spear.
It pierced that man through the back, straight through the heart. He dropped to the ground instantly with a choked gasp, and went still.
Dan Heng was shaking as he ran forward and grabbed Cloud-Piercer’s staff with both bloodied hands, pulling the spear tip free from the body of his attacker. The scent of copper and iron was almost unbearable, and Dan Heng stared down wide-eyed at the body on the ground.
He’d never killed anyone before.
Not in this lifetime.
The attacker was dead. The supervisor was dead. The guards and workers that had been struck down in that demon’s mad rampage were dead, dead, dead. Blood ran in rivers, in streams down the aisle, silvery steel turned red. The alarms were going of, blaring loud and piercing overhead as the lights flickered. Dan Heng turned and ran.
He couldn’t stay here, couldn’t stay in the middle of this mess.
He could practically feel the shackles closing around his wrists, the echoing ring of a cell door slamming shut— if by any chance the cameras had gone down, which seemed to be the case since any security reinforcements had yet to arrive, then there was no way that the man with bloodied hands and a bloodied spear would escape being implemented, or at the very least escape interrogation.
Without even thinking it through, Dan Heng leapt into a small vessel stationed near the bay door, frantically pressing buttons and turning knobs, somehow managing to get it powered up and moving even though he’d never actually piloted anything before.
An explosion near the bay door rocked the ship, sending plumes of smoke through the air and making his ears ring painfully. He thought he saw, just briefly, an ominous shadow amid the smoke, a tall man with dark hair and red eyes and a black sword— but that couldn’t be true. He had to be seeing things. He’d killed that man already with his own hands—
He powered on the thrusters and the starship launched forward into the cloud of smoke toward the slowly-closing bay doors.
There was the noise of an impact, a heavy thud against the starship’s hull. Dan Heng turned to glance behind him, but the smoke was too thick to see what he’d hit. The starship didn’t seem damaged, and the gap was narrowing— there was no time to go back.
The starship launched forward, into the void beyond, barely escaping as the bay door slammed shut just behind its tail.
As the vessel drifted off toward the sea of stars, Dan Heng panted, gasping for breath. His heart pounded heavily, thumping against his ribcage and rattling at him from the inside out. He suddenly felt lightheaded as the blood loss caught up to him, and he remembered the injuries he’d sustained in the fight.
The pain that had been until now subdued by the adrenaline coursing through his veins hit him all at once.
Though he had been intimately acquainted with suffering from the moment the shell of his egg cracked, even Dan Heng could not endure losing so much blood this quickly.
He barely had the time and presence of mind to reach over and power off the thrusters to preserve fuel before he lost consciousness.
In the flickering lights of the damaged cargo bay, a tall man with black hair gasped in a lungful of air and opened his blood-red eyes.
He released a faint, bitter laugh, then again, a bit louder, a bit more pained.
It seemed that even being run over by a starship wasn’t enough to end his miserable life…
He dragged himself to his feet, picked up his blood-stained sword, and made his way back toward the ship’s engine room.
Dan Heng had no idea how long he was drifting, unconscious, through space, but after that unknown length of time had past, he found himself waking up in a bed in the ship’s infirmary. Realizing that he’d been brought back aboard had sent a jolt of anxiety rushing through him as he pushed himself up and looked around— but none of the medical staff here looked familiar. There were no accusatory glares, no one blaming him for what happened in the cargo bay, no one clapping shackles around his wrists and locking him away and interrogating him.
Later, he would find out that this was because the ship he was on now was a different IPC cargo transport than the one he’d previously been on.
That ship had been entirely destroyed, along with its entire crew.
Dan Heng was the sole survivor.
His starship had been found drifting in space near the wreckage, after another transport nearby had gotten the distress call sent out too late for it to matter. He was brought aboard, and his injuries were treated. Once he learned what happened, Dan Heng’s fingers felt numb. He found it difficult to focus his gaze, only nodded his head, and said, “I see,” quietly.
Once he had recovered, the IPC representative aboard the ship questioned him about the transport’s destruction. He felt a bit uneasy, but answered truthfully— that the ship had been attacked by a terrifyingly powerful swordsman, who had come out of nowhere— but he decided to leave out the fact that that swordsman had only attacked the ship in the first place because of him.
After all, that swordsman was dead now, anyway. Along with anyone else who knew what had happened.
His explanation was accepted easily enough, and he was offered a transfer of employment to the transport that had rescued him, which he accepted, still in a bit of a daze, his mind numb.
Not even a year out of the Shackling Prison, and he already had blood on his hands.
That day’s events would go on to haunt his nightmares. Every time he closed his eyes and tried to sleep, he could see those blood-red eyes, that twisted grin, feel the terror of prey before the hunter, and smell the iron stench of death. But at least it was over now. Dan Heng had watched that man die at the point of his spear, and even if he had somehow survived, he would have been in no condition to escape the ship’s exploding fuel tanks by the time the entire vessel was obliterated into space dust.
And yet, as he went about the days that followed, keeping himself busy with the dull, monotonous work aboard a cargo ship almost exactly like the one he’d just come from, Dan Heng couldn’t chase away a nagging feeling in the back of his mind, a creeping fear that something wasn’t right about all of this. That it wasn’t over… that he’d not yet seen the end of the shadows of the past he wanted nothing to do with.
But how could a dead man pose any threat?
Even though he had no idea how a dead man would be able to blow up a spaceship.
Still, there was no real way to find an answer, so Dan Heng had no choice but to push his fears aside and try to ignore them.
That is, until one day while he was unloading a few crates onto a dock at a way-station toward the outer reaches of the cosmos. Suddenly, he felt a chill run down his spine, his blood turning cold, and he raised his head to sweep his gaze across the docks—
And saw, to his sickening horror, a pair of blood-red eyes, watching him from further down the hangar bay.
Dan Heng didn’t know how that man had survived— no, he had to have come back to life, he had definitely be dead after Cloud-Piercer had struck him in the heart. He didn’t know how that man had managed to find him again across the infinite expanse of the starry seas. He still didn’t even know who he was, or why he held such a bitter grudge against Dan Heng’s previous incarnation.
He only knew one thing:
The terror of the immortal swordsman’s vengeful hunt was nowhere close to being over.
It had only just begun.