Chapter 19: Tools of the Enemy
The brush was warm.
Not with heat, but with a residual, silvery energy that felt like frozen logic. Feng held it, feeling the strange substance—not wood, not metal, something like solidified moonlight. The tip was a single, fine filament that hummed with a silent, erasing frequency.
The stone tablet was cool and heavy. The characters he'd inverted were now black, jagged scars on its surface, pulsing faintly with his own devoured-storm energy. They looked like claw marks.
Observer Seven lay where he'd fallen, breathing in shallow, rhythmic pants. Alive, but empty. A shell. Feng looked at him, not with pity, but with cold analysis. This was the fate of those who tried to impose order on chaos without understanding its taste.
Lin got to her feet, rubbing her temples. She saw the brush and tablet in Feng's hands, then the broken Enforcer. "You… took his tools."
Feng nodded. He tucked the brush into his belt, the tablet into his pack. They were trophies. They were data. They were weapons he didn't yet know how to wield.
Kael was a problem. He didn't get up. He lay curled, muttering about "silver eyes in the walls" and "the pattern." The memetic attack had shattered something in his already-fragile mind. He was baggage now. Dangerous, whimpering baggage.
Lin followed Feng's gaze. Her expression hardened. She understood the calculus of the wild. She walked over to Kael, knelt, and checked his pulse. Then, with a quick, merciful motion, she drew her knife across his throat.
He shuddered once and was still.
She wiped the blade on the grass, her face a mask. "He would have drawn them to us. Or gotten us killed at the wrong moment." She said it to Feng, but it sounded like she was convincing herself.
Feng didn't judge. It was the correct move. He felt nothing. Kael had been a tool that broke. Tools were discarded.
They left the clearing of arranged corpses and the broken Observer. The Weeping Eye would find their agent eventually. The clock was ticking faster.
They traveled north and west, putting distance between them and the kill-site. Feng moved with a new purpose. The brush and tablet in his possession were a beacon and a puzzle. He needed to understand what he'd taken.
That night, in the shelter of a rocky outcrop, he examined them.
The brush, when he channeled a thread of his Qi into it, resisted. It didn't accept his energy. It analyzed it. A faint, silvery script, too small to read, glimmered along its length. It was judging him, finding him wanting.
He switched tactics. He didn't push his Qi. He pushed a sliver of the consumed judgment he'd taken from the tablet—the cold, logical energy now sitting uneasily in his core.
The brush lit up. The filament at its tip glowed with a soft, moon-like radiance. It felt… responsive. Like a key turning in a lock.
He had a weapon of the Enforcers, but he could only fuel it with energy he'd stolen from them. The irony was perfect.
He pointed the brush at a small rock. He focused on the concept of "stillness." Of silencing vibration. He willed the energy through the brush.
A tiny, silver glyph shot from the tip and struck the rock. Not with force. The rock didn't move. But the sound of the wind around it, the faint hum of its own mineral Qi, ceased. It became a island of utter silence. After ten seconds, the effect faded, and the rock crumbled into fine, dead dust. It had been unmade from the inside out by perfect stillness.
A tool of erasure.
The tablet was next. Its function was inscription, memory, and formation. He placed his hand on the black, claw-mark characters he'd created. He poured his will into them, thinking of "devouring."
The black scars on the tablet pulsed. The air in front of it shimmered, and a faint, circular field of distortion appeared—a weak, passive version of his devouring aura. It wouldn't stop an attack, but it would slowly drain and disrupt ambient Qi or weak spiritual probes. A defensive formation, born of his own stolen principle.
He could inscribe his will. He could create traps, seals, or warnings. This was a tool of creation, albeit creation through consumption.
He now had a kit: a weapon that silenced and erased, and a slate that could encode his own anomalous laws.
Lin watched him work, her face unreadable. "You're learning their language," she finally said.
Feng looked up. He shook his head. He wasn't learning their language. He was forging a dialect. He would use their tools to write his own, hungry scriptures.
Two days later, they found the town.
It wasn't on any map Lin knew. It was a scrappy, walled settlement of timber and sod built around a rare, clean well in the steppe. A place for caravans to water, for outcasts to gather. The sign over the gate read, in crude Common Tongue: LAST STOP.
It stank of smoke, unwashed bodies, and desperation. But it also hummed with the low-grade tribulation of frontier life—petty greed, constant fear, and stubborn survival. It was a buffet of minor sins.
They needed information. Supplies. And to disappear for a while.
Feng pulled his hood up. The strange tools were hidden. He let his aura recede, pulling the restless storm deep inside, presenting only the dull, weathered Qi of a low-level wanderer. Lin did the same, slinging her spear across her back in a non-threatening way.
They passed through the gate under the bored eyes of two guards who looked like they'd been bandits last week. The main street was a muddy track between ramshackle buildings. A tavern called The Thirsty Goat belched noise and the smell of sour ale.
They went to a trading post first, using a few spirit stones from the slaver loot to buy travel food, a waterskin that didn't leak, and for Feng, a simple, dark grey robe to replace his tattered disciple clothes. He kept the old ones. They were a part of him.
At the trading post, they heard the first rumor.
"—Enforcers," the shopkeeper, a one-eared man, was saying to another customer. "Passed through a week back. Grey robes, faces like stone. Bought nothing. Just looked. Asked about 'disturbances.' Then they headed east, toward the Blight-lands."
East. Toward the cleansed Marches. They were backtracking his trail.
"Heard they lost one," the customer, a trapper in furs, grunted. "Found him wandering mindless near the old caravan route. Something broke him. They took him and left fast. Something spooked 'em."
Good. The broken Observer was a mystery that would slow them down.
The second rumor was more interesting.
"The Horde's on the move," the shopkeeper said, lowering his voice. "Storm Khan himself. Mustered his nine tails. Not for raiding. They're marching north, toward the Shattered Teeth. Looks like a war party, but there's nothing up there but rocks and old bones."
The Shattered Teeth. A range of jagged, spiritually dead mountains that marked the northern edge of the steppe. A place of no value.
Unless you were hunting something that valued silence and hiding places.
The Khan was coming to collect his debt. He was following the trail of the dead Sky-Drum's echo, straight toward Feng.
They were in a vise. Enforcers behind, the Horde ahead. And in this town, every stranger was a potential spy or bounty hunter.
They took a room at a flophouse above a stable—one room, one pallet, one window overlooking the muddy alley. It was all they could afford that offered a quick escape.
As dusk fell, Feng took out the stone tablet. Using the Enforcer's brush, charged with a trickle of the cold judgment-energy, he began to inscribe on the floor by the door. He didn't write characters. He drew the inverted, claw-mark patterns from the tablet, the ones born of his own devouring will.
He was creating a ward. Not to keep people out. To consume the intent of anyone who crossed it with hostile purpose. It would be a silent alarm and a minor spiritual attack.
Lin watched, her arms crossed. "You're setting a trap in our own room."
Feng finished the last line. The black marks glowed faintly, then faded into the grimy wood, invisible. He nodded. It was a trap that fed him. A net that caught tribulation and gave him strength.
They slept in shifts. Feng took first watch. He sat by the window, looking down at the dark alley, listening to the town's drunken rhythms. He held the Enforcer's brush, rolling it between his fingers.
He was no longer just a fugitive eating what he found. He was becoming a cultivator with tools, with a growing understanding of the forces arrayed against him. He had a weapon that could silence heavens, a slate that could write his own laws, and a stomach that could digest both.
The hunger was changing. It was no longer a blind craving. It was a craft.
Down in the alley, a shadow detached itself from a wall. It moved with a fluid, unnatural grace, not like a man. It paused, its head tilting up, directly toward their window.
It wasn't human. It was too thin, too jointed. And where its face should be, there was only a smooth, porcelain mask, painted with a single, weeping eye.
A second Enforcer. A different model.
It had found them.
Feng didn't move. He met the gaze of the painted eye. He slowly raised the brush in his hand, letting a flicker of stolen silver light dance on its tip.
A message. I have your tools. I am waiting.
The porcelain-faced Enforcer stood frozen for a long moment. Then, it melted back into the deeper shadows of the alley and was gone.
Not an attack. A reconnaissance.
They knew where he was. They knew what he had.
Feng looked at the ward on the floor, then at the sleeping Lin. The vise tightened. The Horde from the north. The Weeping Eye in the shadows.
He smiled, a thin, cold expression in the dark.
Let them come.
He had set the table. It was time to see which tribulation would be the main course.