9 Flames in the Night

Raging Ox village, a few minutes after Jack ran away from home.

A few people milled about the village square in the faint light of sunset.

All of a sudden a great wind rose up and blew the years of packed in dirt into the faces of the gathered people.

When their sight returned, they saw a group of six men dressed in rich dark blue robes standing in the middle of the square.

The men would have looked magnificent were it not for the small disturbances that appeared on their person. Like splashes of blood on a few sleeves, or small singed tears in their clothing.

A man standing at the head of the group pointed at the gathered villagers and said in an authoritative voice "Go and gather everyone from this village and bring them here."

The people looked terrified for a second, but they managed to fall to their knees and bow while stammering out "Y-yes, Immortal!"

As the villagers scattered to go do their bidding, a man standing next to the leader asked "Do we have time for this, Senior Brother Feng?"

The man shot him a glance over his shoulder and said with confidence "It is faster this way than going around and rounding them up. We do not want them to set off the traps we place in the buildings. We need to do this quickly. The escape talisman will not hide us for long from them."

The man that asked the question looked mollified as he nodded his head.

The six men spread out around the square; some sat down and closed their eyes to rest, while others looked down the dirt road with concern.

The square gradually filled up in the time it takes to brew a cup of tea. The villagers murmured quietly amongst themselves, but no one had enough bravery to go and ask the Immortals what they wanted of them.

When Senior Brother Feng saw that people stopped rushing into the square he stood up from his meditation, jumped to a roof of a house, and asked "Who is the leader here?"

Somehow, even through all of the noise from people shuffling around and whispering, everyone heard him.

As the surroundings quieted down, a grey-haired man walked out of the crowd, fell to his knees and bowed down low while saying "I am Kong Nuanken, the Village Chief. Please tell us how we can serve you, Immortals."

The Immortal jumped down to where Kong Nuanken knelt and said "Stand up."

Kong Nuanken stood up while keeping his gaze down on the ground. Before he could say anything a hand with a vice-like grip grabbed him by the throat and lifted him up.

Senior Brother Feng picked up the Village Chief and jumped back to the roof of the house he stood on previously.

He turned the squirming man to look at the terrified frozen crowd and asked in a cold voice "Is everyone from this village gathered here?"

Kong Nuanken tried to grab the hand holding his throat, but for some reason, everything under his neck couldn't move. He tried to turn his pleading eyes towards the immortal, but he couldn't move his head.

Senior Brother Feng pulled the feeble man close to him and whispered in his ear "Nod if all the villagers are gathered in the square. If you do not, I will snap your neck."

Kong Nuanken focused his darkening vision on the crowd in the square and started looking at the faces of the people. After a few breaths of time, he slightly twitched his head in a desperate attempt to nod.

Senior Brother Feng glanced at the crowd of villagers and then looked back to the twitching Village Chief, and asked "Are you sure?"

Kong Nuanken twitched his head a few more times as his eyes started rolling up into his head.

A wide smile spread on Senior Brother Feng's face as his eyes turned as cold as ice and he purred "Good." at the Village Chief.

Just as he wanted to crush the Village Chief's neck he felt something flying at his outstretched arm. He moved it slightly and a rock, the size of a baby's fist, whizzed past it.

Senior Brother Feng furrowed his brow slightly as he looked at the direction from which the rock came from. There, at the front of the cringing crowd, stood a young boy of maybe thirteen years old holding a string in one hand and a rock in another.

The boy yelled out "Let go of my grandfather!" at the terrifying Immortal.

Senior Brother Feng clucked his tongue as he slashed his free hand at the boy. At the same time, he squeezed with his other hand until he heard a satisfying *crunch*.

Down in the square, the boy's fierce face froze, after a second his head slid down from his neck in a shower of blood.

Grandson and grandfather died at the same moment.

The villagers started to scream and recoil from the dead boy.

Senior Brother Feng looked at his men and said with indifference "Kill them all."

Only then did the screams truly start.

Back in the forest with Jack and Song Farong.

Jack leaned back on a tree trunk to catch his breath. While Song Farong complained, he looked up at the larger of the two moons, Koray. Every night it went from North to South, at least what Jack guessed were north and south, judging from the movement of the Sun which he assumed went from East to West here too.

As he attempted to figure out the direction in which they should keep moving the best that he could while using the stars, a couple of shadows flitted across the silhouette of the lightly tan moon in the sky.

Jack's entire body froze, but his eyes kept flickering about the sky.

'They're moving towards Raging Ox village, I'm sure of it.' he thought as he looked at the direction the two shadows came from. There in the distant horizon, a light orange glow splashed its undulating colors onto the night canvas of the sky.

'F*ck…' Jack thought with despair. He had seen that glow many times during the war; he had even caused a couple of them himself. That was the glow of a village burning. From the location of the glow, the village closest to Raging Ox village burned, the Fallen Crow village.

Song Farong started moving and Jack made a decision he knew he had to make. He chocked Song Farong out, tied him up, gave him his provisions, and left him with instructions on what to do in the case that Jack did not return.

Even with all the fatigue he accumulated from running by that point, he had no problem with sprinting on the way back to his home.

In his head he kept repeating 'Please let them be all right. Please let them be all right. Please…' over and over again as he ran through the dark forest.

As he neared the village he started seeing the familiar glow through the trees. His heart screamed at him to run faster, but his head and instincts warned him that he had to approach this situation carefully.

When he ran out of the forest he stopped and watched in numb disbelief as Raging Ox village burned when just a little while ago everything seemed fine.

The place where he was reborn, where he found a new family, where he grew up, gone in raging flames.

Jack took in a few sobbing gasps, but then grabbed a steely grasp over his emotions and buried them deep with his other nightmares. 'There will be time for grief later, right now I have to check if anyone survived.' he thought as he crouched in the tall grass and started creeping towards the burning village.

As he got so near to his home that he started to feel the heat from the burning buildings on his face, he saw a number of firelit silhouettes flitting above the burning rooftops in the distance.

From what Jack could gather, two sides fought against each other. One side used some kind of flying objects that moved too fast for him to see to attack, while the other used whips made out of flames to strike at their enemies. In the short time that he observed the fighting, a flame whip managed to coil around a blue-robbed person and sliced him in half.

A despairing scream echoed out into the darkness as the bisected body fell down into the flames.

Suddenly the two sides stopped their fighting and landed on two sides of the burning village, seemingly not bothered by the flames licking at their feet.

An arrogant voice rang out into the night "Give me the treasure and surrender, Feng Furui. If you do and ask me nicely, I might consider letting you and your followers live."

After a few seconds of nothing but the sounds of crackling fire, an icy cold voice rang out "I would rather die than become your Sect's slave, Mai Younu."

"So be it." said the arrogant voice and the next instant the two sides clashed once more.

Jack watched them for a while and only moved forward from his hiding spot when the fighting took them away to the other side of the village.

He ran into the yard in front of his house. All of the buildings around him burned with an unnatural intensity, but only the surface layer seemed to have any burn damage at all. Even the animals in their pens burned like someone doused them in oil, but the grass growing just a dozen meters away from the flames kept waving away cheerily from the slight wind.

Jack moved his hand over a tongue of fire out of curiosity. It felt as if he had grabbed hold of a bright hot branding iron. He had to use all of his willpower to suppress the instinct to scream as he leaped away from the flame and hissed under his breath. The pain went away almost a full ten seconds later.

'There's no way I can go in.' Jack thought as he looked at his burning home. He felt sure that if that small tongue of flame caused him such a large amount of pain, then rushing into his house would kill him in a few seconds.

Jack walked around the house and looked through all the windows and holes, but couldn't see anyone inside.

'Where are they? Even if they all stayed in the house I would at least catch a glimpse of one of their bodies.' he thought as he made another round. Just as he went past his parent's bedroom window, his eyes widened and he snapped his head back to look at the spot where Hao Tiankai used to lay.

'That's right! They would take him to the Chief. He knows the most about medicine in the entire village.' Jack realized and started stalking towards Kong Nuanken's house near the village square.

Along the way, the bad feeling in his gut kept getting worse as he couldn't see any people in or near the houses he passed by. Some of them lay in burning ruins as if a tornado formed right in the middle of the houses and then disappeared as quickly.

When he turned a corner near the village square he took a couple of steps towards it, then suddenly stopped and stared.

In the middle of the square lay hundreds of burning corpses, most of them headless.

Jack saw his father and eldest brother slumped over the rest of his family. They earned a dozen of stab wounds as they tried to protect their loved ones.

Everyone Jack knew and cared about lay burning in front of his eyes. Even little Shen Xianshu's body still clung on to a stone in his hand while his severed head stared into nothing a few meters away from it.

Jack stood in the flickering light of the now cold flames and stared at the faces of people he once knew.

He didn't know how long he stood there.

A relaxed voice saying "What do we have here?" snapped him out of his stupor.