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Three birds had reached their positions and were now orbiting the city like a jet in a holding pattern. The fourth was staying about the lower town, watching the fairies. I cast a mild [Vampire Cloak] on that one.
I was calling them ‘birds’ because they had the appearance of crows, but it occurred to me, I had no name for this brand-new spell that Fan Li had concocted.
In her world, the ability to do magic came in the First Stage of cultivation, which one enters after completing the prerequisite Body Tempering and successfully opening the Inward Gate, gaining the ability to control the flow of internal qi and grasp the spiritual paths within one’s body.
The magic of Huajie is based upon Qi, the flow of energy from Heaven to Earth, which becomes modified by the states and substances it passes through along the way. The only Qi available to a normal First Stage cultivator is that which is part of her own body and flows through her veins and her meridians, becoming effectively a component of her life force and blood.
This is why the First Stage is known as the Blood and Qi Refinement stage. The body which was tempered and purified while laboring as a novice is now strong enough to stand the rapid increase in internal Qi that she will experience after opening the Inward Gate. She no longer loses it through mortal decay, which is why she has entered the realm of no-longer-mortal, the status of a candidate for Immortality.
Blood-and-Qi is thus the basis for all magic on Huajie, and it was through this key that Fan Li was able to correlate her scholarly knowledge to the Blood Magic of Huade.
Fan Li was not a human cultivator, and never passed through these stages herself. As a half-spirit, she had to forge her own self-invented path to Immortality, studying everything she could about human cultivation and that of other races and figuring out ways to apply it to herself. At the time she passed away, if she were a human cultivator, she would have been at the Sixth Stage, the Spiritual Seed stage, where her Golden Core had transformed into a spiritual lotus seed. She would have been ready to move to the Seventh Stage.
But she had never discovered the half-spirit’s equivalent to a Golden Core, or a Beast Core, or a Demon Core. Spirits like her father were already immortal, and never created such a stage. So she could never create that Spiritual Seed. She could never grow a Spiritual Lotus that would blossom to become her Nascent Soul. And thus, after one and a half millennia, her cultivation path came to an end.
Along the way, though, her studies allowed her to gain a vast knowledge of human magic from First Stage to Sixth Stage. And the fact that Blood-and-Qi magic resembled Blood Magic not only allowed her to revise her First Stage spells into Blood Magic spells, but also deduce how to reproduce Second Stage magic, which would use the external Qi available to a Qi Condensation cultivator, and some spells from Third Stage magic, in which a Spiritual Refinement cultivator can separate and utilize Yin Qi and Yang Qi. Her most recent discovery was that she could combine Blood and Dark Mana to replicate a Yin Qi spell, and she suspected either Light or Fire mana would allow her to use Yang spells.
She hadn’t yet figured out any magic beyond Third Stage, but this was far more than enough. The ‘birds’ that she made for me were based upon the Second Stage [Paper Effigy] spell, substituting condensed blood and Darkness for the paper talismans that should properly be forming their bodies. She suspected she could actually reproduce the original [Paper Effigy] spell if she could find a Huadean substitute for the magic paper made from the bark of spiritual trees.
I decided to name Fan Li’s new spell [Blood Effigy]. If she didn’t like it, she could change it the next time she woke up.
The three blood effigies orbiting the city were picking up nothing but the sea wyvern patrols who were protecting it, so I left them with instructions to contact me if anything changed, then concentrated my attention on the fourth bird, following Fairy Falerè.
She was sending individual warriors to each of the warehouses while staying in the sky to coordinate them. We had four locations of concern, so it was one fairy per warehouse.
I’m calling them fairies, but the four were actually a lesser fairy and three half-fairies, fairborn warriors with enough development to fly and fight well. Oberon had sent me some of his best. Falerè was apparently on the verge of receiving her knighthood and her four underlings were all far along the path to becoming true fairies. But I was still worried. The city had been attacked by a demonic horde, and it stood to reason that demons still lurked, left behind to cause more trouble. Rod and the military officers could talk about enemy agents all they wanted, this sudden riot, so soon after the rumors of Mother’s death began spreading, suggested nonhuman actors at work.
I wasn’t going to learn much by sticking with Falerè, so I sent the effigy forward to watch her subordinates.
In the first location I came to, men were not acting like rioters or looters, and were not paying any attention to the scantily-clad women in the cages, who were all cowering as far away from the invaders as they could get. Instead, they were busy stuffing things into crates as the fairy warrior entered. They were dressed as warehouse workers, but they were working at a frantic pace that bore no resemblance to the usual workaday attitude of laborers at work.
The warrior raised her voice and her spear and declared, “By order of the Duchess, this warehouse is impounded! Drop everything and leave the premises!”
The men turned to see her for the first time, and several of them swore. One of them turned a gun-like wand on her and fired a [Fire Ball] at her as the others dashed for cover. They appeared intent upon resisting.
She blocked the [Fire Ball] with a chantless [Water Mirror], resulting in a steam explosion, then dashed forward toward her assailant. He swore and dove behind a stack of crates.
I flew the effigy forward to follow her, then sensed one of the other ‘workers’ getting ready to fire at her back when she followed the man with the wand. The second man had retrieved a cross-bolt, drawn and ready to fire, from somewhere. This was a preplanned response, although they probably had been planning on a combat mage or such, not a fairy warrior.
It would be too confusing to try to warn her. I turned the effigy toward the new assailant while sending it Earth mana, dropped the vampire cloak to distract him from his intended target and fired an [Earth Bullet] out of the bird’s open beak.
Because I wasn’t sure how much the blood effigy could take, I had held back, but the resulting projectile still struck him hard enough to blow him backward. The crossbow fired as he tumbled, sending the bolt into the roof, where it exploded and rained down wood debris.
I spun the bird around, sending out my senses to look for other attackers, but they were now yelling something about a monster attack as they fled for the exits. For a moment, I felt the old annoyance from being called a monster, then remembered they weren’t seeing me and realized they were assuming the ‘bird’ that they did see was some kind of tamed monstrous beast.
A tamer with just one monster wouldn’t be a huge threat to an adventurer, but perhaps the two armed men seen so far were the only fighters in the crew. They had come to empty a warehouse, after all. They hadn’t been here for a fight.
Turning my attention back to the fairy warrior, I saw that the ‘gunman’ with the Fireball wand was incapacitated and badly wounded, and the girl was staring at my blood effigy with her spear held in a guarding position.
I ignored her and flew a circuit around the warehouse, looking to see if there were any other ‘guests’. Eventually I decided there were none and went flying for the next location.
The fairy who had gone to that location was having trouble with the fighters guarding the raiding crew. She had taken cover outside the door with a seriously wounded shoulder.
Fortunately, the crossbow bolt that hit her wasn’t the explosive kind like in the other warehouse. It was lodged deep, though, and her voice was shaking as she reported her situation into one of those communication stones.
Her voice cut off as she stared down warily at the strange bird that had just landed in front of her. As she was a half-fairy, I had no way to know exactly how much her fairy sight was actually showing her, but she could clearly see that there was something strange about it.
I spoke through the effigy to tell her, “Brace yourself. I’m going to pull that thing out of you.”
“W… what?” she stammered.
“What’s going on?” came Falerè’s voice through the stone.
“A crow just told me it was going to take out the bolt!”
“I’m almost there, just hold on!”
“I’m a healer,” I told her. “Brace yourself.”
As her eyes grew wider, Blood Tendrils grew out of the effigy and wrapped around the end of the bolt.
“No! Please wait!” she begged.
I sensed some men inside the warehouse coming toward the door. Clicking my tongue, I retracted the tendrils and resumed [Vampire Cloak], then hopped around the corner to see what they were plotting.
Falerè was coming in to land, out of sight of the open warehouse door, so I left the wounded girl to her and went in. A man with a crossbow and another with a sword were creeping up, preparing to come around and take her on. It had probably been her yelping at me that had alerted them that she was still there.
Growing the tendrils again, I snagged the crossbow and pulled it out of his grasp, hurling it out the door.
The crossbowman swore and dropped back, yanking a sword from its scabbard, and the swordsman went into a guarding pose. I didn’t need to distract them this time, so I remained in cloak as I fired an [Earth Bullet] into each gut, hammering them off their feet.
I went back outside and uncloaked. Falerè was checking on her wounded troop. She looked up at me and frowned.
“My Lady, you’re supposed to be guarding the skies,” she glowered.
The warrior looked up at her with huge eyes, then at me, then back at her. I could almost see the metaphorical question marks circling her head.
“I have three effigies on patrol,” I answered through the bird. “They have the full airspace covered. This one is a spare. If you can pull out the bolt, I can heal it.”
“Although I would like to trust you, the bolt struck too close to an important artery. Can we have a doctor remove it, My Lady? You can handle the healing part afterward.”
I wanted to protest that even if the artery was torn, I could heal it right away, but I reminded myself that, to her, and most everyone else in the fairy world, I’m barely out of diapers. I gave a sigh and left it at that.
Before anything else could transpire, the Pendorian army troops appeared, marching up the road double-time. The wounded girl didn’t seem to be in immediate danger, so I turned my attention back to the men ransacking the warehouse.
