Chapter 8

Rex stood among the rubble of what had been the puppet creation chamber, his breathing still ragged from the destruction. Stone dust hung in the air, catching the green torchlight like toxic snow. The four massive pillars lay shattered across the floor, their carved surfaces still warm to the touch. The dais had split clean down the middle, dark stone gaping like a wound.

He'd torn everything apart with his bone weapons, demolition energy eating through ancient enchantments like acid. The only things he couldn't completely dismantle were the mounting points where the pillars had attached to the ceiling—solid stone fused directly into the rock above, now just broken stumps weeping traces of green energy.

Riasha stood by the entrance, her head tilted down, scanning the floor around her feet like she'd dropped something important. Her four hands moved in small, searching gestures, fingers splayed as if feeling for something invisible.

"This suppression is terrible." She straightened, frustration clear in her voice. "I can feel something beneath us but can barely make it out. Like trying to see through mud."

Rex wiped stone dust from his face, leaving streaks of gray across his cheeks. "How much are you suppressed? It can't be that bad. You still destroyed that puppet with barely a thought when we first met."

"I can only be at the peak of the level that you are at." She gestured to herself with disgust. "So I'm reduced to a peak mortal. I wasn't even born a mortal, Rex. I don't know how you all live this way. It's like being blind and deaf and trying to navigate by smell alone."

"Ignorance is bliss, I guess." Rex kicked a chunk of rubble, watching it skitter across the floor. The sound echoed strangely in the damaged chamber. "What are you trying to find?"

Riasha moved to the wall, running one hand along its surface. "You see these lines running along the walls? They're not decorative." She traced a barely visible groove with her finger. "They transfer essence. Like veins carrying blood, but for power. The question is from where. I can feel something below us—massive, pulsing—but with my senses this suppressed, I may as well be blind."

She turned to Rex, her covered eyes somehow still managing to convey expectation. "You need to look. Use what you learned during our vision work. Remember? Breathe, focus, and push your spiritual senses outward. You're less suppressed than I am since you're native here. You might see what I can't."

Rex closed his eyes and steadied his breathing. Four counts in, hold, four counts out—the rhythm Riasha had drilled into him. He reached for that bubble of awareness, that extension of self that let him see beyond the physical. At first, nothing. Just the darkness behind his eyelids. Then, gradually, the world began to shift.

The first thing he saw was himself.

He'd never looked at his own spiritual form before, never turned that sight inward. The shock of it made him want to close off the vision immediately. His body appeared as an almost complete void—a human-shaped absence of light. Where there should be energy flowing through channels and meridians, there was just... nothing. Black emptiness where power should course.

Except for two spots of color.

A red splotch pulsed in his stomach, unstable and alien. It writhed like something alive, something that didn't belong. The anger dao looked less like a part of him and more like a parasite that had burrowed into his flesh. It seemed as trapped in him as he was stuck with it, both prisoner and parasite at once.

Tiny specks of yellow were scattered throughout the black void of his spiritual body—demolition dao, spread thin like stars in an empty night sky. They weren't connected, weren't flowing. Just isolated points of destructive potential floating in nothingness.

He looked pathetic. Broken. Incomplete.

Forcing his senses away from himself before despair could take hold, Rex turned his spiritual sight on Riasha.

The comparison was devastating.

Where Rex was a void with spots of color, Riasha was a symphony of light made manifest. Her spiritual body blazed with energy that wasn't just present but unified, flowing, alive. It wasn't random splotches but a complete tapestry of shifting colors—golds and silvers interweaving with deep blacks, each color supporting and enhancing the others.

And there were shapes in the energy. Spearheads materialized and dissolved in the flow. Scales made entirely of tiny skulls weighed the worth of entire battalions, judgment rendered in spiritual form. Battle itself seemed to live in her essence, not as violence but as something purer—conflict elevated to art.

Rex found himself mesmerized, lost in the terrible beauty of it. This was what a true cultivator looked like. This was what he was supposed to become, if he survived long enough.

"You couldn't handle me." Riasha's voice cut through his trance. She stood with one hand on her hip, head tilted in amusement. Even though her eyes were covered, he knew she was looking directly at him.

Rex shook his head, embarrassed at being caught staring. He shifted his senses as fast as he could toward the ground beneath their feet, eager to focus on anything else. At first, he felt nothing but stone—dense, resistant, like trying to push through wet clay. His spiritual sense could penetrate maybe an inch before the resistance became too much.

Frustration built. There was something down there, he could feel it at the edge of perception, but the stone wouldn't let him through. Without thinking, he let a trickle of anger seep into his senses, the red energy mixing with his spiritual sight.

The effect was immediate and dramatic. His vision exploded through the stone like it was paper, plunging twenty feet down into a vast reservoir carved from the bedrock itself. The chamber below was massive—at least a hundred feet across and nearly as deep. The bottom third was filled with essence in liquid form, thick and viscous like honey made of light. Above the liquid, essence transformed into gas, swirling in lazy currents before being sucked up into channels at the top of the reservoir.

Rex could see now how the whole system worked. The channels spread throughout the catacombs like a circulatory system, feeding essence to specific rooms and devices. The puppet creation chamber had been just one organ in a much larger body.

"About time," Riasha said, and Rex realized she'd been waiting for him to figure it out. "I was getting worried you'd never make the connection. You must stop thinking purely materially. The dao exists in the immaterial as much as the material. It is the concept and the concrete. Expansion and consolidation." She gestured toward the floor. "That reservoir is more than just raw essence. Find the dao within it."

Rex returned his attention to the reservoir, examining it more closely. The essence had a quality to it beyond simple power. It smelled like dirt—which was strange, since he was perceiving it spiritually, not physically. It gave him a sense of density, of weight and permanence. It felt like the puppets, tasted like the room that created them. Earth. Mountains and caves, solid stone and fertile soil.

But there was something else lurking underneath, twisted into the earth essence like poison in wine. It pushed back against his examination, resisting his spiritual touch. Where earth should nurture and support, this had been corrupted into a tool of control. The essence had been modified to create servants, not cultivators. Slaves, not students.

"Earth and dominance," Rex said as he opened his eyes, the spiritual vision fading.

Riasha smiled and gave him a golf clap with all four hands, the sound echoing in the damaged chamber. "Very good. You're learning faster than expected. And now it's time we make it our own." She frowned, examining the broken pillars. "Unfortunately, we don't have the means to just use the existing channels. They're keyed to the puppet creation process."

They stood in silence for a moment, both considering the problem. The essence was there, vast amounts of it, but without a way to access it properly, it might as well be on the moon.

"We should establish ourselves here," Rex said finally. "Make this our base. But first, we need to go back to the house and grab the statuette."

"I agree, but why would you make that a priority?" Riasha's tone carried genuine curiosity. "Sentiment?"

Rex had wanted to keep his parents close, keep their memorial safe. But he knew Riasha had never shown interest in that kind of sentimentality. There had to be something more.

"I haven't told you everything about it," she admitted. "That ritual does more than just memorialize. The statuette could help us, especially here. But we should go quickly. We don't know where that guard went off to, and he knows how strong you are now. You won't catch him off guard again."

At the mention of the guard, Rex felt excitement spike through him. Not fear, not anxiety—excitement. The urge to hunt, to fight, to test himself against a thinking opponent instead of mindless puppets. His anger began to stir, eager for violence.

"Control yourself." Riasha's voice turned sharp. "You're being influenced by both your unwelcome visitor—that anger dao—and our bond. The nature of our pact means you're affected by my path as well. This is unavoidable. Your path will likely reflect mine to some degree." She paused, considering. "This would normally be considered bad, a contamination of your personal dao. But under these circumstances, what you gain might be worth the cost."

Rex's face twisted as competing urges warred inside him—his anger wanting destruction, Riasha's path demanding conflict, his rational mind trying to maintain control. "So your path is what? Fighting? War? I can barely stop myself from running out of here to hunt that guard down."

"Something like that." Riasha's smile held secrets. "Channel your anger into your weapons again. It will help reduce the pressure from my path. Give it somewhere to go besides your mind."

Rex focused on pushing the anger into the bones in his hands. They drank it eagerly, their subtle glow taking on red undertones. The mania faded with the anger's relocation, though the urge to fight remained, quieter but persistent.

"I'm ready," Rex said, shivering slightly as he managed the last of his bloodlust. "Let's go."

They made their way back through the catacombs, footsteps echoing in the empty passages. Outside, the gorilla beast's corpse still lay where it had fallen, not dissipated like the other puppets. In the afternoon light, Rex could see details he'd missed before—the crude stitchwork holding different body parts together, the mismatched skin tones where pieces from different sources had been joined.

Rex and Riasha approached the corpse carefully. Up close, the smell was overwhelming—rot and earth and something chemical. Rex covered his nose with his sleeve as he examined it. The beast wasn't one creature but an amalgamation, different bodies held together with the same type of essence from the reservoir. The stitches weren't thread but solidified earth essence, acting like metaphysical glue.

"What is this thing?" Rex asked, though he suspected he already knew.

"Zombie. Every culture has zombie myths, do you not?"

"We do, but they're exclusively dead bodies reanimated. They don't have foreign energies. Well, sometimes they do, but it's always death magic or voodoo or viruses. Never earth."

"Necromancy is just the manipulation of the dead," Riasha explained, circling the corpse with professional interest. "Almost any energy can be used. Death is traditional, but earth works well—dust to dust and all that. Life energy creates mockeries of the living. Fire creates explosive corpses. I once saw a necromancer use pure law dao to create undead that followed commands with absolute precision."

Rex noticed something glinting in the beast's neck—a stone fragment sticking out between two vertebrae. When he tried to pry it out, it crumbled to powder between his fingers.

"What was that?" Riasha asked, suddenly alert.

"Not sure. Looked like a smaller version of the stones we found in the puppet room. Maybe a control mechanism?"

"That's exactly what it was." She stood up straight, scanning their surroundings with new urgency. "We need to find intact stones. They might be the key to controlling the essence flow. But not now. Let's keep moving while we still have light."

They made their way out of the park and onto the main street. The silence was absolute—no birds, no insects, not even wind. Every house stood empty, doors open or broken, windows dark. The apocalypse had come to suburbia, and it looked like abandonment.

"We need to find survivors," Rex said, his voice too loud in the quiet. "Someone must have escaped or hidden. Right? We've cleared this area, so someone must realize it's safe and come back."

"Probably not." Riasha's tone was gentle but honest. "They won't come back here. If you think these necromancers are the only threat, think again. The puppet outbreak is just one symptom of a larger disease. But we can find your people. We can help them. You just need to follow my instructions."

She stopped walking, turning to face him fully. "I know these past couple days have been overwhelming. Everything is strange and dangerous and nothing makes sense anymore. But it's not an impossible situation. I've seen worlds recover from worse. Your people are adaptable. They'll survive, and you'll help them."

Rex nodded, drawing comfort from her confidence. They walked the rest of the way in companionable silence.

The house felt different when they returned. Still damaged from Rex's rage, but somehow smaller, less significant. Rex grabbed the statuette from the mantle, wrapping it carefully in a dish towel before placing it in a plastic bag. While Riasha kept watch, he raided the kitchen for non-perishable food—canned goods, cereal, anything that would keep for a few days.

"Do you want anything?" Rex asked, loading cans into a backpack he'd found.

"No, I don't need to eat. Haven't for a long time. Thanks though."

Rex glanced at her, wondering again what exactly she was, but just nodded. A thought struck him, and he rushed upstairs. When he came back down, he was carrying his father's sleeping bag, the one from overnight fishing trips that now seemed like they'd happened in another lifetime.

"I think that's everything," he said, shouldering the pack.

They made the trip back as the sun fell behind the horizon, painting the sky in shades of orange and red that reminded Rex uncomfortably of his anger dao. As they entered the catacombs, he noticed details he'd missed before—the walls weren't completely dark. Stones embedded at regular intervals gave off a faint luminescence, just enough to see by. They'd probably been overwhelmed by the green torches before, but with those extinguished, their subtle light was visible.

Riasha led him to a different room, one he hadn't seen before. It was sparse, maybe fifteen feet square, with smooth walls and a flat floor. The only feature of note was a strange device on the back wall—a circular depression that looked disturbingly like a mouth, complete with stone "lips" carved around the opening.

Rex raised an eyebrow. "And what goes in there? Please don't say what I think you're going to say."

Riasha made a flourishing gesture like a magician revealing a trick, producing one of the orbs she'd collected from the puppets. She slotted it into the hole in the wall, and immediately the room blazed with white light. Rex felt the air thicken, essence flooding the space until it was almost hard to breathe.

"The puppets would return here after gathering essence," she explained. "They'd deposit their orbs, the essence would spray into the room, and that sigil at your feet would activate, forcing the essence into their bodies. This room basically forced passive cultivation on them, upgrading them over time."

Only now did Rex notice the sigil carved into the floor—a complex pattern of interlocking circles and angular runes that hurt to look at directly. It wasn't glowing, wasn't active despite the essence filling the room.

"So what's wrong with it? Why isn't it working?"

"My best guess is the puppets have some sort of signature built into them, a specific essence pattern that triggers the sigil. Otherwise, any sapient person would activate it every time they entered, wasting the reserves. Smart design, actually. Efficient."

"Okay, but how can we use this then? If we break down our orbs, the essence just flows out into the hall, into the open air. We can't just cause a cave-in to seal it." Rex chuckled at the absurdity of the idea.

"Exactly!" Riasha said, and Rex's smile died. "We seal off the room. Though a cave-in is a bit extreme. Keep it together, man. We need precision, not destruction." She gestured toward the doorway. "Guess what you're about to learn?"

"...I have work to do."

---

For the next three hours, Rex trained his energy control with a focus he'd never achieved before. Demolition, he discovered, wasn't just about breaking things. It was about understanding how things broke, finding the exact point where structure became failure.

He started by making craters in the walls outside the room, basic destruction that required only power and will. But Riasha wasn't satisfied with basic.

"Feel the stone," she instructed, lounging against the wall like she had all the time in the world. "Every material has weak points—fractures, stress patterns, places where it wants to break. Your dao doesn't create these weaknesses; it reveals and exploits them."

Rex pressed his hand against the wall, pushing demolition energy into the stone not as an attack but as an exploration. Slowly, he began to sense the stone's structure. Here, a hairline fracture from when the tunnel was first carved. There, a spot where different mineral compositions met, creating a natural weakness. The stone wasn't solid—it was a collection of pressures and tensions held in temporary balance.

"Will and intent make the dao yours," Riasha continued, examining her nails with affected boredom. "Let it know your intent and use your will to project it. You're not asking the stone to break. You're telling it exactly how it's going to break."

Rex growled in frustration when his first attempts produced nothing but powder and rubble. But gradually, he began to understand. By injecting demolition energy at specific points and controlling its spread, he could cause precise failures. A tap here would cause a crack there. Pressure at this angle would create a clean break at that point.

After two more hours, he could remove sections of wall like a supernatural mason. Not random destruction but controlled deconstruction. The stone would crack along the lines he chose, falling away in neat chunks he could stack like oversized bricks.

An idea formed.

"Get in the room," he told Riasha, gesturing toward the essence chamber.

She raised an eyebrow but complied, curiosity replacing her affected disinterest.

Rex studied the doorway with his new understanding. The frame was solid stone, but he could feel the stress points where the opening had been carved. The wall above wanted to settle, held up only by the strength of the arch. If he could weaken specific points while strengthening others.

He began tapping the wall with his bone clubs, each strike precisely placed. Not breaking, just introducing carefully controlled fractures. The stone began to groan, a sound like grinding teeth that echoed through the catacombs. Rex continued his work, sweat beading on his forehead from the concentration required.

Fifteen minutes of careful work, and then a massive slab of stone, perfectly sized for the doorway, slid down from above with a grinding crash. It fit into the opening like it had been designed for it, sealing the room completely. Not a crack of light showed around the edges.

Inside, Riasha looked at Rex with genuine astonishment. For once, she seemed to have no witty comment, no correction or critique.

"Get some sleep," she said finally, her voice carrying a note of pride he'd never heard before. "We have a lot to do tomorrow."

Rex unrolled his father's sleeping bag in the corner of the sealed room, the essence-thick air already making him drowsy. As he settled in, he thought about how much had changed in just a few days. He'd gone from a grieving son to... what? A cultivator? A warrior?

Something new, certainly.

Something his world had never seen before.