Those 13 Years Were a Lie

1. Yiling Laozu

Everything. Hurts. Being dead wasn't supposed to hurt this much, was it? It was dark, he was wet. A sticky kind of wet, not like water wet. Blood? And it smelled bad. Rotting vegetation and rotting meat. Hopefully he wasn't smelling his own body's rotting meat. Every teeny bit of his body was attempting to outscream every other body part, raging from the pain. He tried to push himself up; the pain radiating from his left hand left him screaming out loud until he mercifully blacked out.

When he awoke, it was slightly less dark; he was feeling more of a damp-stickiness than a wet-stickiness. It still smelled. His body was still in significant pain. There was a new noise; he managed to open his eyes and turn his head enough to see a small ghost crouched at his side, casually eating a finger. It held out the finger remains as an offering of sorts. He started to shake his head no, decided that was a bad idea, and instead weakly whispered 'No, thank you." He had the presence of mind to hope that the ghostly child wasn't eating his own finger before darkness overtook him once again.

When he awoke the next time, he was able to manage to turn his head enough to see his left hand. All five fingers were there, just bent in positions they were not designed to be in. Fuck. His right hand looked much better; the fingers looked normal at least. His wrist, however, was swollen to almost double its normal size. Cataloging his various aches, it appeared he had hundreds of small cuts up and down his body, but his insides appeared to be inside his body. As that was preferable to them being on the outside of his body, he was going to be happy with just cuts. His legs, on the other hand.... His left ankle felt wrong, and wouldn't move very much. And once he was able to crunch up a bit to see it, he saw that, not only was it bootless and sockless, it too was quite swollen. His right foot was marginally better. Walking was going to hurt. He thought crawling might be easier until he accidentally put some weight on his left palm and promptly passed out again from the pain.

The next time he woke, he was back in his cave. Somehow he didn't think he'd crawled there. The ghost child held out a strip of maggoty raw meat in one hand and a half burned radish in the other. "Radish, please," he croaked. As much as he hated radishes, he had yet to stoop to cannibalism. He'd eat the maggots eating the meat before he'd eat the person they were eating. One of his ghostly women held his head up to drink some water from a cracked bowl. Another used her talon like nails to rip the burned radish into bite sized pieces.

He didn't want to eat. His head felt fuzzy in addition to all of the body aches and pains. A wave of heat flashed, and he realized he was feverish. He rose up enough to see his mostly naked chest covered in scraps of cloth, some sticking to the many wounds. Wounds evidenced by streaks of blood and pus. He didn't remember why he was wounded. Or why he was in the Burial Mounds. It didn't matter as darkness slid over his mind.

The next few days or weeks were a blur. Waking to sips of water and increasingly rotten radishes. The fever climbing higher and higher until all he felt was its dry heat and the accompanying aches and pains.

Eventually, the fever must have decided against killing him and died down. He felt disgusting: covered in his sweat, blood, vomit and other secretions. However long it had taken, his ankles were nearly their normal size and he could cautiously move his right wrist. He crawled out of the cave on elbows and knees to the bathing spring.

And remembered.

Shijie.

The pain doubled him over, hurt worse than his broken hand. I killed them. I killed them all. His friends, his makeshift family, all gone because of him. He stared into the water looking at his greasy, scraggly hair and filthy body and finally saw the monster the entire cultivation world saw inside him.

The tiger seal. He remembered running away from his massacred family, preparing to destroy the thing. He was surrounded by ghouls and ghosts feeding off the yin energy pulsing out of the object. Trying to feed off of him. Then the seal exploded, shoving everything away. Jiang Cheng's angry face turning to horrified as he, too, was pushed back by the wave of energy. The allied soldiers flung back almost bonelessly like they were nothing more than pieces of rubbery kindling.