Using His Body to Feed the Tiger

Li Tui practically crawled back to the West Courtyard.

The wounds on his left shoulder and right leg burned like fire. With every step, it felt as if countless insects were burrowing into his bones. When he pushed open the side-room door, the horizon had just begun to turn the pale blue-green of a crab shell.

The room was dark. He didn't light a lamp. With his back against the door, he slid to the floor, breathing heavily.

He raised a hand to his left shoulder. His fingers came away slick with pus mixed with blackened scabs, the stench sharp in his nostrils. The trouser leg over his right leg was soaked through with filth, clinging tightly to his skin.

He tore open his collar and looked down in the faint light from the window. The flesh around the wound had turned ashen, and dark red veins, thin as spiderwebs, crept slowly outward from its edges.

Jundu.

The poison was insidious. It ate away at the flesh and gnawed at the body.

He fished Jinchuang Powder from his clothes, pulled out the stopper, and poured it all over the wound. The instant the powder touched the pus, it hissed and sent up white smoke, then turned a murky green and fell in little flecks.

It was useless.

Li Tui tossed aside the empty bottle and closed his eyes, leaning against the cold door.

The qi in his body was already in disarray. He had forced his cultivation technique to the limit while fleeing, and now his dantian was depleted. The little qi that remained darted around like startled fish. Worse, the chill poison was creeping through every tiny branch of the wounds, devouring the Qingling and Fengshi acupoints he had opened.

He couldn't wait.

He struggled to his feet and staggered to the bed. Sitting cross-legged, he turned his palms upward and forced himself to calm his mind.

His consciousness sank into his body.

Darkness. Then pinpricks of light. The qi remaining in his meridians was thin and scattered. He gathered the points of light with his will, as if drawing in a net, and formed them into a trickle that he guided slowly toward the wound in his left shoulder.

The instant his qi touched the poison, it was like cold water thrown into boiling oil.

"Ugh!"

Li Tui groaned, the veins at his temples bulging. The two forces tore at each other beneath his skin. The poison clung to his qi like a parasite rooted in his bones, then flowed along it to invade him in turn. Through gritted teeth, he drove more qi around it, layer upon layer, building a dam against a flood and temporarily sealing off the ashen tissue.

The same was true of his right leg.

After the time it took half an incense stick to burn, he was soaked in cold sweat, his face frighteningly pale. The dark red veins spreading around the wounds had finally stopped, trapped behind a thin but resilient barrier of qi.

But it was only a stopgap.

His qi was being spent with every passing moment, while the poison continued to seep through. In three days at most, it would eat through the barrier completely.

Li Tui opened his eyes, bloodshot. He reached into his clothes and pulled out a coarse-cloth pouch.

He spread the cloth open, revealing a dark red growth.

He stared at it, his fingertips unconsciously rubbing its surface. It felt soft and faintly pulsed beneath his touch, like the heart of some slumbering, unholy creature.

Dawn brightened outside, and the sound of servants sweeping came from the distance. Zhao Mansion was slowly waking.

And he sat in the dim side room, holding a thread of life in one hand and a blade of death in the other.

He swallowed the bloody taste in his throat. The chill, stabbing pain in his left shoulder reminded him every moment that he had no time to hesitate.

Li Tui pulled open his collar to expose the ashen wound on his left shoulder. The dark red veins shifted faintly beneath the flesh, as if they were alive.

He held the growth in his right hand and slowly pressed it against the wound.

The moment it touched.

The twisted patterns on its surface shuddered!

Then an incredibly faint suction came from the point of contact. The growth wasn't giving him anything. Instead, like an infant nursing, it was drawing something from the flesh of his wound.

Li Tui's back tensed.

He could clearly feel something being drawn, thread by thread, from the numb flesh around the wound. It wasn't pain, but an emptiness as if the very marrow of his bones were being scooped out.

But at the same time, the dark red veins, thin as spiderwebs, were fading before his eyes!

It worked!

Li Tui closed his eyes and let the suction continue. He could feel the chill poison in his left shoulder being "sucked" away bit by bit. But wherever the poison passed, it dragged away his blood and vitality, even the faint life in the walls of his meridians.

It was like feeding his own living flesh to a ravenous young beast.

The same was true of his right leg.

After a quarter of an hour, Li Tui let go and collapsed onto the bed, barely able to breathe.

The dark red veins around the wounds on his left shoulder and right leg had mostly faded. The pus had cleared, and though the flesh still looked gruesome, the icy sensation of the poison's invasion had indeed vanished.

He slowly raised his hand and looked at the growth in his palm.

Its dark red surface now glimmered with a faint, gentle sheen, like something sated after a meal. Its pulse was slow and powerful. Held against his skin, it seemed that something inside it was growing stronger.

It was more "alive" than before.

Li Tui tugged at the corner of his mouth. There was no warmth in the gesture.

Feeding this unholy thing with his own vitality and using its ravenous nature to clear the Jundu was no different from feeding a tiger with his own body.

He propped himself up and sat cross-legged, closing his eyes to examine his body.

The state of his body was stranger than he'd expected.

The meridians around the Qingling and Fengshi acupoints had been corroded by the Jundu, then sealed off with his qi. Now the poison was gone, yet the meridians around those acupoints had become unusually "clear."

They weren't fragile from damage. Instead, they were "open," as if roughly flushed and forced wide. It was like a flood had swept over a dried-up riverbed, carrying away gravel and silt until only smooth, hard bedrock remained.

When his qi passed through those two places, it encountered no resistance at all. It flowed nearly twice as fast as before he'd been wounded!

And it wasn't limited to those two places.

Li Tui focused his mind and examined himself closely. Even the side meridians he had yet to open, which had been badly blocked, now showed signs of loosening. It was like a rusted hinge that had been battered hard. The door hadn't opened, but a breeze was already slipping through the crack.

The growth's ravenous suck had forced his Tongmai progress ahead by a huge leap.

But the price was unmistakable.

He could feel an emptiness rising from deep within his bones. It wasn't fatigue, but the "hollow" left behind when life force was drained away. Like a tree with intact bark and green leaves, but a heart eaten out by insects.

He looked down at his open palm.

It was the same hand as ever, flesh wrapped around bone, knuckles thick from years of labor. But the moment he clenched his fist and felt his tendons tighten, he could tell it was distinctly "soft."

It wasn't that he'd lost strength. It was that the "foundation" of his body had weakened.

Like a wall that still looked the same on the outside, though some of its bricks had been hollowed out within.

The sun climbed higher beyond the window, and warm yellow patches of light fell across the back of his hand through the paper lattice.

From afar, Zhao Yuanchong called impatiently, answered by a maid's soft voice. Another day's play was about to begin.

Li Tui slowly breathed in, then slowly let the breath out.

He got to his feet, wiped his face with cold tea water, and changed into a clean coarse-cloth outfit. In the wavering reflection in the basin by the wall, he erased the last trace of anything amiss from his face and put on the mask of a respectful, obedient servant once more.

When he opened the door, morning light spilled over him.

He narrowed his eyes, straightened his back, and walked toward the main house. His steps were steady, as if the man who had fled for his life at the bottom of the well last night, then fed himself to the tiger to purge the poison that morning, were someone else entirely.

Only the growth hidden against his chest seemed more vivid with every step.

With each beat of his heart, its slow, powerful pulse seemed to fall in time with his own.

His left hand curled unconsciously inside his sleeve.

Li Tui remembered the old man's gaunt face at the bottom of the well.

At the time, with death on his heels, he had only thought of escaping; there hadn't been time to consider the details. Now that he was calm, he went over the old man's every move again.

If that old bastard had really wanted to kill him, there would have been no escape from a Qi Refining cultivator in the narrow well.

But his opponent had held back.

And the Jundu was insidious, eating flesh and ruining meridians, yet it hadn't killed him right away. It had landed precisely at the tipping point where he could temporarily seal it with his qi, but wouldn't last more than a few days.

It had driven him into a dead end, forcing him to reach for the only thing on his person that might be able to resolve the crisis: the growth.

And the growth had just happened to be able to cure the poison.

Li Tui kept walking as usual, his mask of respect and obedience perfectly still, but his heart grew colder by the moment.

How many coincidences could there be?

From the moment he appeared, that old bastard probably hadn't planned to kill him right away.

The standoff at the bottom of the well, the Jundu infecting him, letting him escape—every step had been calculated. He had been forced to use his own body to nourish that sinister growth.

Once it was fattened up, would the old man come back to harvest it?

His left hand brushed lightly over the coarse weave of his clothes inside his sleeve. His eyes grew colder still.

Whether he was feeding a tiger or raising a gu, so be it.

He'd swallowed the bait, and he'd accepted the hook.

But he wanted to see whose throat that tiger would tear out once it had grown.