In the distance, households began to stir with a low murmur, and the voices of villagers drifted from the chief's courtyard.
Moments later, Wuji melted into the growing crowd.
His eyes took in the scene. First, he saw the massive corpse of the buffalo beast lying behind the disciples. Its hulking form still radiated a faint, oppressive heaviness. Then he turned to the several battered, blue-robed youths tending to their wounds.
Finally, his gaze settled on the body on the ground.
The young man was strangely, and suspiciously, intact. No visible wound marred his body except for his tattered blue robes. However, Wuji wasn't concerned with the cause of death; he was concerned with endings.
He stepped forward and stopped before the young woman seated vigil at the corpse's side.
"Hmm. Young lady, my condolences, but—"
"He is not!" She whirled on him, her eyes red-rimmed and wild.
"Senior Brother Ling is not dead!" she cried, her voice fraying. "His...his..."
Her words shattered as she opened her trembling palm. Nestled within it was a small jade pendant that emitted a faint, steady glow. "His soul jade still shines."
Wuji froze. He turned his questioning gaze toward the other disciples, his brow furrowing.
The man who stood slightly apart, the one whose bearing marked him as their mission's captain, spoke with detached calm. "Proceed with your work. This is not unheard of in our world." His tone brooked no discussion.
"If you say so," Wuji replied flatly, turning back to the grieving young woman. Her raw, desperate sorrow scraped against something long buried within him.
For a moment, he was no longer in the village square, but rather, in the silent void of his past, drowning in the fresh, suffocating grief of his wife's death.
A memory of a world where her sound had disappeared, and every breath he drew felt like a betrayal of her stillness.
It had taken him months to learn how to surface. To breathe without guilt. Now, seeing himself in her, he did not speak, he merely decided to wait until her weeping ended.
Thud!
The dull thud of the coffin hitting the ground made everyone turn their heads. Most notably, the young woman's. Seeing the plain, unadorned wood made the truth she had been denying feel irrevocably real.
A raw, wrenching sob tore from her throat. For a moment, her grief seemed to swallow the village whole, its echo vanishing into the murmuring darkness. In the unsteady torchlight, some villagers' faces showed a flicker of helpless pity. Others were simply blank, hardened by the grim routine of such nights.
After several long minutes, Wuji raised his right hand.
Wang Da responded at once. He lifted the coffin lid and retrieved a thick stack of folded spirit paper, its edges gilded with silver. He offered it to the woman with a bowed head.
She slapped it away without looking, and the papers scattered like the pale wings of dead moths into the night.
Wuji did not react to this. He gestured again to Wang Da and together, they moved to transfer the body.
"No!" she screamed, lunging forward and throwing herself over the corpse. "His soul jade still glows! You're burying him alive! I'll report you! I swear by the heavens; the sect will hunt you like beasts for doing this to your sect brother!"
Her words were like daggers in the quiet. But Wuji didn't flinch—or rather, he couldn't—with the captain's gaze burning into his back.
With grim, practiced efficiency, they lifted the body. Two disciples held the young woman back as the two ruthless men arranged the lifeless limbs and heaved the heavy lid from the ground. To her, the soft click of the lid was the sound of the world ending.
With the reluctant help of the other disciples, Wuji and Wang Da carried the coffin beyond the village toward the forest's edge, where the village cemetery lay. The air there was colder and thick with the smell of damp soil and creepy silence.
Wuji descended into the ready-open grave first. From above, Wang Da and the others lowered the coffin to him.
Wuji took the ritual hammer and pouch of silver nails from Wang Da.
One by one, he began to seal the coffin shut.
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
In the silent burial ground, the sound of each silver nail ringing against the wood was like a sharp, metallic heartbeat.
The nails were a ward—a theory passed down from cultivators to coffin makers that he only half-believed. They were supposed to pin down wandering spirits, preventing possession, corruption, and the slow transformation of the corpse into a zombie-like creature: a sight he had never witnessed in his fifty years of work.
At least, that was the theory he had learned.
As the rhythmic pounding continued, Wuji's brow furrowed. Beneath the steady percussion of his hammer, he was certain he heard something else; a faint, irregular scrabbling, a muffled thump answering each blow from inside the coffin.
His knuckles whitened around the hammer's haft. He glanced up at the disciples looking down into the grave. Their faces, carved by torchlight, were masks of detached expectation. No concern and no shred of doubt.
The suspicion curdled in his gut: he might be sealing a living man in a wooden tomb. Yet his arm did not falter. To stop was to invite questions he could not answer, wrath he could not survive.
He did not wish to accompany this unlucky soul tonight. And the nails, each silver nail was a month's food. To remove one was unthinkable and the ritual, once begun, was a debt that demanded payment in full.
The disciples' silence above grew heavier, and overwhelming pressure settled on the back of his neck.
The hammer rose and fell like a grim, unyielding metronome until the last nail head sat flush with the wood, silencing whatever lay beneath.
He placed the hammer on top of the lid and took beads and straws from Wang Da. Then, he began the ritual mantra to send the soul on its way. When he finally spoke, his voice sounded like a dry rustle in the pit of the grave.
The mantra was rote, words whose power he had long questioned, but whose rhythm was the only comfort left in this dark work:
"Earth receives the flesh." Wuji began, scattering the straw around the coffin. "Wood receives the bones," he continued, placing a baked clay bead on the coffin.
"Breath returns to the wind." He placed another bead on the lid. "Blood returns to the soil. What was borrowed, I return. What was owed, I do not keep." He put all thirteen clay beads down.
"Walk the dark road without fear. Do not linger. Do not look back. Heaven counts the living. The dead are beyond its gaze."
After finishing the mantra, he pulled himself out of the grave. He took up a shovel and began the slow work of replacing the soil. He took stroke after heavy stroke until the soil lay flat and unmarked once more.
Only then did his strength abandon him. He sank to the ground, his breath shallow and his limbs trembling with deep, bone-aching exhaustion.
Seeing their "sect brother" finally interred, the disciples turned back toward the village without a word. They did not linger; rest held no meaning for them tonight.
Wuji followed at a slower pace, his robe heavy with dirt as he leaned lightly on Wang Da's offered arm. Concern was plainly etched on the young man's face. For a moment, Wang Da wanted to repeat the old refrain, that this work was too much for an old man and that he should rest while he still could.
But he knew better than to speak. Wuji, as always, would not have listened.
This work was his inheritance, passed from his father's hands to his own. It was woven with too many memories to abandon. In a strange way, it granted him a kind of peace, sanding the sharpest edges from his fear of death, though it never erased the dread entirely.
The fear remained. He had died once before, a dagger piercing his body in a previous life. The visceral agony of that death had never faded. He hoped he wouldn't die again, but given the way things were going, death felt inevitable.
As the village lights drew near, he pushed those wandering thoughts aside. He straightened his back with an effort of will. He stepped away from Wang Da's support and approached the leader of the disciples.
"The task is complete," he stated, extending his dirt-stained hand. "My payment."
The captain removed a fist-sized pouch from his waistband. He counted out twenty gold coins, their surfaces catching the faint torchlight, and placed them in Wuji's palm.
Wuji counted them again, his touch deliberate. "Ten remain," he said, his voice calm and flat.
"You'll get them later," the captain said dismissively, as if shooing a fly. "We travel light on these missions."
"I cannot wait," Wuji replied in a low, iron-firm voice. "Silver nails aren't cheap. Do you have anything of value to cover the debt?"
"Of value?" The captain gave a short, derisive laugh. "I don't peddle trinkets." He paused, a flicker of cold amusement crossing his features. "Wait, I do have something of value."
He retrieved a thin, worn manual from his storage pouch and tossed it toward Wuji's feet. "It's a basic breathing method. You look half in the grave already. It might lend a corpse some vigor. Consider it a courtesy to an elder."
Wuji did not look down. The booklet landed in the dirt between them with a soft, insulting thud. "Young man," he said, his voice as cold and flat as a tombstone. "Do you presume I know nothing of the Way?"
The captain arched an eyebrow in mock surprise. "Of course not, Senior. You are, after all, the esteemed father of the Twin Sword Elders of the outer courtyard."
"You know that," Wuji stated, his words hanging in the air like a condemnation. "And yet you offer me a child's primer? A technique my own sons outgrew before their first decade in the sect?"
The captain's smile thinned to a razor's edge. "Let's not pretend, Seeenior. Everyone in the outer courtyard—no, everyone in the entire sect—knows that your sons severed their mortal ties for the ruthless sword path. Do you really think they would risk a flaw in their hearts for a worthless dying coffin maker?"
His words were not a blow, but a dissection. They exposed the last fragile sanctuary of hope that Wuji had nurtured for the past few years: of healing, reconciliation, and a final, whispered blessing. Inside him, something vital gave way, collapsing into silent, airless dust.
"You—how dare you—!" Wang Da spat, surging forward.
"Enough!" Wuji's voice cracked like a whip as he turned on the younger man with pure, startling ferocity. "Are you determined to die a fool's death? You dare raise your voice to a disciple of the sect?" His jaws were clenched so tightly that his teeth were about to shatter.
Wang Da flinched as if he had been struck. His face was a storm of hurt and impotent rage. "Master, I only meant to—"
"I said enough." Wuji understood the boy's loyalty. But now, with his imagined refuge stripped away, leaving only a bare, wind-scoured cliff, he could not afford a spark of hostility. Not a word, not even a wrongfully placed glance.
Slowly and stiffly, he bent over and picked up the breathing technique from the ground. He did not look at the captain again. Without a word, he turned and began the slow dark walk back to his workshop, the worn pages a bitter weight in his hand.
Wang Da followed, his fists clenched tightly at his sides; his silence spoke louder than any protest.
The captain watched their retreating figures. A cold, mirthless smile touched his lips. "So the seed is sown," he thought. "Let's see how steadfast the Twin Elders remain on their ruthless path once they learn their father withers in the mortal dust."
His smile vanished when a sudden, frantic cry cut through the night behind him.
"No! No!"
The young woman's wail pierced the air. In her trembling palm, the soul jade pendant, which had clung to its fragile light, flicked, dimmed, and went utterly dark.
Wuji and Wang Da halted mid-step. Wuji turned at the sound. Before he could think, a cool, foreign sensation washed through his body. It was not a chill but a precise, profound shift, like a single, perfect breath passing through the marrow of his bones.
Then it was gone. His body felt the same yet fundamentally altered. All of a sudden his eyes widened. A knowledge that was not his own surfaced in the depths of his mind, clear, cold, and undeniable:
[Lifespan obtained: Three years.]
The words resonated in his consciousness like a struck bell. Before the echo could fade, a more violent disruption erupted.
Flashes of alien stolen memory: sights, sounds, emotions belonging to the buried young disciple lanced through his mind.
A first kiss stolen behind the training halls, the crushing weight of a senior's disdain, and the desperate, soaring ambition to prove himself worthy to Master. They were not memories recalled, but experiences injected, a brutal, chaotic torrent threatening to drown his own identity.
Wuji collapsed to his knees. His body convulsed as if struck by invisible blows, fingers clawing into his own skull while a savage headache tore through him.
It felt as though iron nails were being driven straight into his brain, twisted and hammered without mercy. A raw scream ripped from his throat; hoarse, animalistic, and unrestrained, drowning out the wailing of the women.
Veins bulged across his forehead. The whites of his eyes turned red at the edges as his vision blurred and his hearing dulled, the world fading into a distant, ringing haze.
Through it all, one sound barely reached him; the frantic, broken voice of Wang Da calling his name.
Every head in the village turned. Shock spread across their faces; fear and unease. Wang Da looked as if his heart were being torn from his chest.
Only one man reacted differently—the captain, he watched in silence, his expression hardening, not with concern, but with disappointment.
"Too weak-willed," he thought coldly. "He broke far too quickly."
With a casual motion, he pulled out a small array plate from his pouch and pressed his Qi into it. The engraved lines flared to life, shimmering faintly in the air.
"At least this will be useful," he mused, lips curling into a thin smile. "The sight of their father screaming like a dog… that should carve itself nicely into their so-called ruthless Dao hearts."
Satisfaction crept into his gaze as he imagined the reward waiting for him, already counting the merits before the echoes of Wuji's scream had fully faded.