Chapter 20: The Teeth
They left Last Stop before the first drunk stumbled into the dawn. The ward by the door remained, a hungry ghost waiting for an unwelcome guest. Feng felt no pull from it as they slipped out the back window, down the stable's rear wall, and into the grey pre-light. No one had tried their door. The porcelain-faced Enforcer had been content to watch.
That was more troubling than an attack. It meant they were coordinating. They were a system, not just hunters. Systems were harder to eat than individuals.
They moved northwest, aiming for the only cover the map promised—the Shattered Teeth. It was a gamble. The Storm Khan was heading there. But a mountain range, even a dead one, offered caves, confusion, and high ground. The open steppe was a killing field.
For three days, they pushed hard, eating up the miles under a sky that grew paler, colder. The lush gold of the steppe faded to a brittle yellow, then to grey scrub. The wind carried grit and the smell of stone. The land rose in slow, painful increments.
On the fourth day, the Teeth appeared on the horizon. They were not peaks. They were fangs. Jagged splinters of black and grey rock thrusting at the sky as if the earth had tried to bite the heavens and broken its teeth. No snow crowned them. No vegetation clung to their lower slopes. They were a place of absolute mineral silence.
No spiritual energy. No life Qi. Just dead rock and old echoes. A perfect void. To a normal cultivator, it would be a desert, a place to avoid. To Feng, it felt like a blank page. Or a mouth waiting to be fed.
They reached the first scree slopes as the sun died behind the jagged silhouettes. The temperature plummeted. The wind funneling through the canyons had a voice like a dying beast. They found a shallow cave, little more than a crack in a cliff face, and huddled inside.
Lin broke the silence they'd held for days. "Why here? There's nothing. No water. No game. No Qi. We'll starve in more ways than one."
Feng was looking out at the darkening teeth. He held up the Enforcer's brush. In the absolute spiritual silence of the place, the brush's inherent silvery energy was a tiny, distinct candle. A beacon.
"They track Qi. Power. Life." His voice was rough from disuse. "Here, there is nothing to track. Except this." He tapped the brush. "And me."
He was bait. And the mountains were the trap. A neutral arena where his enemies' advantages—their numbers, their formations, their connection to heaven's energy—would be muted. Here, only raw power and will would matter. And his will was hungry.
Lin understood. She didn't like it, but she understood. "The Khan's storm will be weakened here too. But he has an army."
Feng nodded. He took out the stone tablet. In the dark of the cave, by feel, he began to inscribe on its surface with the brush. Not borrowed Enforcer script. He used the jagged, inverted claws of his own devouring principle. He was writing a single, complex command onto the slate.
It took an hour. When he was done, his head ached and the cold judgment-energy he used as ink was nearly depleted. The tablet glowed with a faint, malevolent black light.
"What is it?" Lin whispered.
"A welcome," Feng said.
He placed the activated tablet at the cave's entrance, facing out. Then they retreated deeper into the crack, finding a narrower crevice to hide in. They waited.
Dawn came, grey and lifeless. The silence of the Teeth was profound. No birdsong, no insect hum. Just the wind.
They felt the Horde first.
A tremor in the earth. A distant, rhythmic thunder that was not sound, but vibration through the stone. Thousands of hooves. Then, they appeared, flowing around the base of the mountains like a golden river—the Storm Khan's riders. They fanned out, surrounding the lower slopes. At their head, on a horse the color of storm clouds, was Jargal himself. His storm-Qi was a visible, crackling aura even in this dead place, though it seemed smaller, more contained, like a flame in a sealed room.
The Khan raised a hand. The thunder of hooves ceased. Silence rushed back in, deeper for having been broken.
He dismounted, his golden scale armor clinking softly. He looked up at the maze of canyons and fangs, his eyes narrowed. He could feel it too. The unnatural silence. The absence.
"Little Ghost!" His voice boomed, amplified by his Qi, echoing off the stone teeth. "You lead me to a graveyard! Come out! Face the storm you stole!"
Only the wind answered.
The Khan scowled. He made a sharp gesture. A squadron of twenty riders dismounted and began to climb the scree, scanning for tracks, for signs of Qi.
Feng and Lin watched from their high crevice. The riders passed below their cave, not seeing the narrow opening. One of them, a sharp-eyed scout, paused near the entrance. He frowned, sensing something—not life, but a lack. A hole in the nothingness.
He peered into the dark cave mouth. His eyes adjusted. He saw the stone tablet on the ground, glowing with soft, black script.
"Chieftain! I found—" he began to call.
The moment his foot crossed the threshold, the tablet activated.
The black script didn't attack. It unfolded.
A sphere of absolute darkness, ten feet across, bloomed from the tablet, swallowing the cave entrance whole. It made no sound. It emitted no energy. It was a pocket of devouring void, a manifestation of the command Feng had written: CONSUME ALL THAT ENTERS.
The scout, and the two riders behind him who had come to look, simply vanished into the black sphere. There was no scream. No flash. One moment they were there, the next, they were gone. Their horses outside shied, whinnying in terror.
The black sphere lasted for five heartbeats, then collapsed in on itself with a faint pop, leaving only the empty cave and the now-dull, cracked tablet.
The mountains were silent again.
The Horde below stared, a ripple of superstitious fear running through them. That was not a technique. That was an erasure.
The Storm Khan's face was a mask of cold fury. "Sorcery! You hide in shadows and use cursed tricks! Is this the strength of the Drum-Eater?"
Feng's trap had worked. It had consumed three lives and their tribulation—their confusion, their fear, their loyalty—and fed it back to him through the link he'd forged with the tablet. He felt a small, grim surge of power in his hollow core. It was meager, but it was something. A taste.
The Khan would not send more men blindly. He would come himself.
"Clear the lower slopes!" the Khan roared. "I will find this rat myself!"
As the Horde scrambled to obey, a new presence arrived.
Not with sound or tremor. The air simply grew colder, sharper. At the edge of the Horde's formation, three figures appeared. They wore the grey-white robes of the Weeping Eye. One had a porcelain face. The other two had the same pale, gaunt features as Observer Seven. All three had the closed-eye brand on their foreheads.
The Porcelain One spoke, its voice a dry, synthetic rustle that carried without effort. "Jargal, Storm Khan. You interfere with a purification mandated by Heaven's Will. Stand aside."
The Khan turned, his storm-Qi flaring. "This is my hunt. My debt. Your heaven has no jurisdiction over the blood of the steppe."
"The anomaly is a systemic corruption," Porcelain stated. "It falls under our mandate. You will withdraw, or you will be categorized as contaminated and purged."
The threat hung in the dead air. The Horde warriors gripped their weapons, looking from their Khan to the eerily still Enforcers.
Jargal threw his head back and laughed, but it was a sound with no humor. "You think your little seals and judgments work here? This place eats power. It eats will. Here, there is only strength." He raised his humming saber, lightning crackling along its length. "Try and purge me, ghost."
A three-way standoff. Horde versus Enforcers versus the hidden anomaly in the mountains.
Perfect.
Feng watched from above. This was the convergence. The tribulations had gathered at his table. Now, he had to decide which to eat first.
He looked at Lin. "Stay. Hide."
She grabbed his arm. "You can't go down there. It's suicide."
"No," he said, pulling his arm free. "It's dinner."
He climbed out of their crevice and moved not down, but up, scaling the sheer rock face behind their cave with the rat-agility in his limbs. He needed a better view. A stage.
He reached a jagged pinnacle that overlooked the broad canyon floor where the Khan and Enforcers faced off. He stood in the open, a small, dark figure against the grey sky.
All eyes turned upward.
"There!" a Horde rider shouted.
The Storm Khan's gaze locked onto him, a thunderhead of fury. The Porcelain Enforcer's head tilted, its painted eye seeming to focus.
Feng raised the Enforcer's brush. He channeled the last of the cold judgment-energy into it. The tip glowed silver.
Then, he pointed it not at the Khan, not at the Enforcers, but at the sky above the canyon.
And he wrote.
He didn't write a word. He wrote a concept. The concept he had taken from the Sky-Drum, refined in his core: DEVOURING SILENCE.
A single, complex, shimmering silver character burned into the air high above the canyon. It hung there, pulsing.
For a second, nothing happened.
Then, the character activated.
It didn't explode. It inverted.
It became a vortex. A spiritual black hole.
The dead Qi of the Shattered Teeth, the faint traces of storm-Qi from the Khan, the cold, logical energy radiating from the Enforcers—all of it was pulled toward the silver character. Not violently, but irresistibly, like water down a drain.
The character was using Enforcer tools and principles to create an effect they could never conceive: a tribulation that fed on all ambient power equally.
The Storm Khan grunted, feeling his connection to the storm above weaken further. The Porcelain Enforcer took a step back, its analytical protocols struggling with the paradox.
Feng's trap wasn't for them. It was for the field of battle. He was turning the arena into a spiritual vacuum where only the energy you carried within you mattered. Where his own devouring core, fueled by the tribulations he'd already consumed, would be the only thing not being drained.
He stood on the pinnacle, the wind whipping his new grey robe. He had no more tricks. No more tools.
Just his hunger, and a canyon full of the strongest tribulations he had ever faced.
He looked down at the Storm Khan and the Weeping Eye, and he bared his teeth in a silent challenge.
Come and feed me.