Book 4, chapter 10

The soft pitter-patter of rain on the rooftop filled the air, with occasional thunder lighting up the dark sky. It was midnight, and they were ready to go. All she had to do was board the ship, yet she hesitated. The cold rain water soaked her dyed hair trickling down her face, and sliding down her back.

She took a deep breath of refreshing air, before letting it out. No point in dragging this out, time to get on the small smugglers' vessel for another run through the blockade.

Her boots splashed through a puddle at the top of the ramp. The outer door hissed open, revealing a waist-high spider-like creature. It chittered happily upon seeing her.

"Zee, welcome aboard. I am glad you changed your mind, honestly, I was dreading getting stuck with another escort other than your team," Captain Skern said.

She smiled as the door hissed behind her, "I hope we don't disappoint," Zee replied.

"I am sure you won't come, we take off in five minutes," Skern said.

Zee followed the agile captain, as he skittered along the floor plating, down the narrow hallway. "How are the guests?" Zee asked.

"They are complaining about the space available, but that's normal," Skern replied smoothly.

"Don't they have the entire storage deck to themselves?" Zee asked.

"So? These are people who live in vast mansions with hundreds of rooms. Even the cargo bay, the biggest space on the ship must feel like a jail cell to them. And this is just the start. Just you wait, soon they will be complaining about the small selection food and meager supplies of wine," Skern grumped.

"If they don't like it, maybe they should find another ship to carry them through the blockade," Zee said.

Skern laughed. "Good luck with that. Many other groups have tried, but most that have are caught and forcibly converted into the ranks of the Terlashar," Skern said.

"So, these nobles are riding aboard your ship because it's the safest?" Zee asked.

"Of course. It's how we can charge so much," Skern replied with a chittering laugh.

Over the next two weeks, little of note happened, aside from forcibly opening her fourth inner gate. With the abundant spatial energy, it was almost easy, allowing her to progress at a scary pace.

Other than cultivation, she got in a lot of reading on rituals, reading the book the old geezer gave her cover to cover at least three times.

It's not that the book was particularly interesting. No, she was simply unwilling to mess with rituals too much without knowing what she was doing.

Actually practicing the rituals was feasible, though she had to make sure not to let anyone find out the book she held contained heretical rituals. Luckily, only two of the rituals actually involved soul arts, which meant she could practice the others to her heart's content.

Well, that was also not the truth. Some of the rituals were not safe to use on a rickety ship drifting through space. What if she accidentally created a hole in the ship? They would likely be screwed.

Luckily for the crew, they arrived at the asteroid belt before she could get bored enough to start testing the more destructive rituals. Hiding amongst the drifting debris the little smugglers' vessel waited for the wormhole network to reopen a gate at their location.

It was a fairly tense wait considering their last time here. The wormhole emerged in a spectacular burst, settling into a stable gate after only a few seconds.

Everything was quiet, with no sign of anyone lying in wait. Creeping forward, still cloaked by Yukna's arrays, the ship glided towards the wormhole using the asteroid belt as cover until it got close.

The last stretch, over ten miles wide was a barren stretch of space without any cover. Midway, a soft red light started blinking on the deck as five scout ships exited the wormhole.

Captain Skern shuffled on the bridge, his posture tense as their small smuggling vessel drifted right toward the enemy formation.

"What do we do captain?" Zee asked nervously.

"They haven't detected us yet. Get ready, once we get close, we will hit them hard and fast," Skern said, his voice surprisingly calm.

She bit her lip, slapping her collar around her neck. She ran down the narrow hallway, her boots thudding loudly on the metal planking.

Bastion and Greg followed close behind, as they entered the airlock. The airlock hissed loudly, just as a translucent sheen covered her body.

It was an effect of the collar, which was etched with an intricate array that created a form-fitting bubble around them. It was a barrier of sorts, one that protected her from the harsh environment of space.

However, it did not protect her from attacks, which was a major flaw considering the constant energy cost to use the collars. The outer door slid open and they excited the airlock, and she pulled themselves out, clinging onto the edge of the ship.

In the distance, shining like a star was the wormhole, swirling in hues of green and violet. She blinked, raising her hand to shield her eyes as she looked directly at that colossal gate.

Squinting, she peered closer, and after a few minutes, they appeared. Five black dots, backlit by the light of the wormhole. Clinging to the hull of the ship, Zee was reminded once again just how eerie and silent space was.

The utter silence might have been maddening if not for the sounds of her deep breathing, and racing heart. While she waited for the foreign ships to get in range, she had some time to wonder at the absurdity of what she was doing.

She was planning to fight some unknown enemies, likely the Terlashar, in space, with a sword. It was kind of stupid now that she thought of it.

What if those ships had advanced weaponry that could tear her apart? Or even D-grade cultivators on board. She shook her head, and drew her sword, readying herself. Pushing aside her unhelpful thoughts, she prepared to launch her most powerful strike.

Destroy or disable as many of the ships as she could in the opening attack. Right… Given their distance from each other, she would be lucky to hit one of the ships, much less all of them. Taking a deep breath, she clutched her sword in a two-handed grip, using her aura infused with compression to keep her feet firmly attached to the ship's hull.

Space roiled around her as she gathered huge amounts of energy into her sword, raising it above her head. Well, here goes nothing. The swing looked deceptively simple, yet it made space ripple around her. An invisible blade of darkness a hundred meters long launched from her sword, crossing half a mile in a heartbeat.

At first, she thought she missed, but then, space tore at the edges. One of the small scout ships was caught directly in the attack, while a second had its defensive arrays flare up. The weak defensive arrays couldn't handle the attack, and one side of its hull was torn open. At the same time, Greg displayed that he wasn't just some guy with a bow.

Several crimson arrows slammed into the shields of a third ship, hitting with incredible penetrative power. The cracked shield held, if barely, at least until Greg launched his recently obtained E-grade skill.

His skill, named siege breaker hit the cracked shield with the force of pissed off world eater, crushing through barrier and hull alike, damaging the ships arrays so badly it went dark.

The last two ships juked to either side, with one of them suddenly pulsing with ominous turquoise light. The enemy ship launched a beam of death, on course to punch through the smuggler ship's thin hull.

Space cracked in front of the spear, and the attack warped, as Bastion made his move. His newest skill, momentum anomaly, did weird things to the attack. It warped space, bending it, before spitting the attack back out in another direction.

It was the weirdest skill she had ever seen, warping even her perception of the area. It was as if the laws of space were twisted in the area giving her a splitting headache.

Shaking off the odd phenomena, her eyes flitted back to the enemy just as they exited their ships. For the first time, she got a look at proper members of the Terlashar, and not just a tamed beast.

It was a flesh golem, around middle E grade, and what looked like a bone lord in the early E grade. The flesh golem was about seven feet tall, with four arms and two legs, looking like someone took a random assortment of monster corpses and stitched them together.

The bone lord looked less physically imposing, half the size, its features covered by a cloak. Its small size didn't make her any less confident in fighting it, as its aura was positively chilling, reeking of death.

Her eyes narrowed on the bone lord, as a storm of bones flooded from the dominative figure, shooting towards her at a startling speed. Using the wide-scale attack as a screen, the flesh golem launched itself forwards, using its ship like a stepping stool.

The hail of bones arrived in only a few seconds, slamming into the side of the ship. A barrier snapped into place, rippling like rain on a lake. Hiding under the protection of the smuggler ships array, bones weren't the real threat. She was more concerned about that flesh golem carrying its tree trunk-sized mace.

It raised that club, miasma surging around its body as it prepared for what looked like a finisher skill. Out of the corner of her eye, Bastion disappeared, and she knew what he intended. He was intending on redirecting the flesh golems' attack back at it, which was a good plan.

The only problem was that using that skill left him open to an attack from the bone lord, which could be fatal. Greg must have thought the same thing as several arrows streaked out, slamming into the bone lord's swirling bone shields.

At a glance, she knew it wouldn't be enough, and prepared herself to go in. In only a few heartbeats, Bastion appeared right in front of the flesh golem, catching its attack with obvious strain. As expected, the bone lord reacted immediately, redirecting dozens of bones to pierce Bastion.

Her sword shattered into dozens of pieces as she vanished, reappearing in the path of the bone spikes with a puff of blue mist. Shards of metal spun around her so fast they were a blur, forming a barrier of metal that turned the oncoming bone spikes to dust.

A storm raged, as ethereal waves crashed around her, batting aside the bones with immense ferocity. Weaving the spark of compression, with the spark of ebb and flow had a surprising effect, acting like a barrier that helped divert the hundreds of bone shards.

However, even combined with the hail of metal shards from her sword, it wasn't a perfect defense. Pain blossomed along her body as shallow gashes opened up, staining her robes red with her blood.

They were not deep cuts, but she could already feel the miasma entering her blood, poisoning her. The heart of fire beat like a drum in her chest, dispelling much of the poison with each beat.

Even still, the poison made her energy respond slower, which in turn, let more attacks get through her overlapped defenses. It was a good thing Bastion's skill didn't take long to activate. The flesh golem exploded into hundreds of chunks of gore that flash froze, as his attack was redirected back at him from point blank.

Bastion shifted towards the bone lord, giving her the chance to flash away. Her body ached from a few dozen shallow cuts, but that was a worry for later. They still had a bone lord to deal with. Noting it was outnumbered and outmatched, the bone lord turned to flee back towards its ship, launching a torrent of bones in their direction.

Greg did his best to harass it, but its storm of bones was just too hard to get through, blocking his arrows one after the other. Oh no you don't!

She wasn't going to just let it escape after it caused her so much pain. Gritting her teeth, Zee activated a wayward walk in rapid succession, crossing the distance in four bursts. Appearing inside the hail of bones, she caught the bone lord off guard, its expression shocked.

Her reformed sword was already cleaving towards its neck, on the ruthless arc to behead the monster. At the last second, the bone lord tilted its head, and the tip of her sword sent sparks flying, as it gouged into something made of metal.

Zee was already swinging again but paused. The bone lord's dark eyes were already bulging out of their sockets its skin freezing over as it was exposed to the harsh vacuum of space.

Drifting in front of her, a glint of light reflected off a broken collar. Only then did she realize what happened. The poor bone lord had been instantly flash-frozen, the moment she broke the array protecting it from the harsh vacuum of space.

Zee reached up for her own collar, brushing her fingers along the fragile alloy in search of damage. Finding none, she let out a relieved laugh. During that attack earlier, she could have died the same way this poor sod did. If one of those bone shards clipped her collar she would have been a goner.

Her mood quickly changed, as she sensed some spatial energy coming from the body. It wasn't an attack, but the tale tell the signature of a spatial storage. Excitement bubbled in her chest as she took the bracelet from the bone lord's body.

The corpse still drenched the area in miasma, but she didn't have to stomach it long, pushing the body away once she took the treasure.

Grinning, she infused some mental energy into the bracelet, perusing the items within. Scanning over the item inside, her excitement quickly faded. It was mostly stocked with piles of bones, though it did have some other things of interest.

About a dozen turquoise crystals that radiated miasma, as well as two dozen Ether crystals. There was also an assortment of what might be food, as well as some clothes, and other mundane things. It was not a very big haul.

The spatial storage itself was actually the most valuable thing, even if the space inside was nothing impressive. The space inside was on the small side, the storage capacity about the size of a cart. Even still, it should sell for a sizeable sum.

This bone lord must have been fairly well off to have one, or judging by the lacking state of his treasures inside, he probably spent most of his wealth to buy it. Having checked over everything inside the bracer, she looked towards the two small scout ships.

One drifted aimlessly, while the other tumbled away, pushed by the flesh golem during its attack. She bit her lip. Those had to be valuable, right? They were small, slow, and had crappy defenses, but they were still spaceships.

After a few seconds of studying the floating ships, she shook her head, dejected. It was too bad that they still radiated miasma, and no doubt required that deathly energy to operate.

Hmm, maybe she could find some undead to sell them to later? She smirked shaking off her greedy thoughts. It would be Skern's decision on what to do with them. And besides, they didn't have a method to bring them along. The smuggler's ship wasn't big enough, nor did it have the proper docking platforms to hold the small ships to its hull.

She sighed, and turned, heading back to the ship. There wasn't anything to push against, but that just meant she had to use her movement skill. Back in the F grade using wayward walk this much in rapid succession would have drained her energy reserves quickly.

Nowadays, it hardly costed anything to use the short-range teleport function of the skill. Her energy pool was simply orders of magnitude larger than before.

Still, that didn't mean she couldn't run out of energy. Her finisher skill, reality slash, was one example. That devastating skill consumed a startling seventy-five percent of her energy reserves.

If she tried to use it twice in rapid succession at her current power, she would pass out from draining her body dry. It might be possible in the future once she opened more of the inner gates and expanded her energy reserves.

But then again, once the skill ranked up to middle E grade, the skills energy cost might increase further. Being able to one-shot kill a peak E-grade warrior, or beast king, was worth the energy cost.

To think, she could unleash such devastation at only early E grade. What would her power be like in the later stages? Her boots smacked into the sleek black hull of the smuggler's ship.

All the while she released a stream of her aura, infusing it with compression to keep herself from drifting away. It was a bizarre experience, given that Bastion and Greg were floating along the edge of the ship, grabbing onto gaps, or small creases in the plating.

It looked like they were above her, and yet, floating, which messed with her sense of what was up and what was down. Stabbing pain shot through her side, her vision suddenly blurry. That reminded her that her wounds were not simple cuts.

The heart of fire was already beating in overdrive, but she had a lot of miasma flooding her body. She needed to rest, and let her bloodline talent cleanse her of that nasty poison.

For the next seven days, she suffered from a nasty fever, confined to her room. All the while, the ship went through the wormhole, dropped off its cargo, then turned around.

In the fight, she received a dozen small cuts and was now paying the price. The wounds themselves were not bad, it was the miasma that coated the bone lords' spikes that were the problem.

Miasma clung to her wounds, stubbornly resisting being cleansed. If not for her heart of fire, she would have likely died already from the amount of poison in her body. Now, she was facing a darker reality.

She was in her room, her body drenched in a cold sweat as she drew in energy from the world river. She had figured out that she could keep the poison at bay, though it did little to get rid of it.

Her body ached all over, the wounds refusing to close even after eating her best E-grade healing pill. The door hissed open, and Bastion enter, carrying a tray piled with some steaming bread, grilled meat, and cheese. The smell made her empty stomach clench, and she shudder, cringing away.

"Still not hungry?" Bastion asked, worriedly.

Zee let out an exhausted sigh, opening her eyes, and looking down at herself.

"I must look like shit right now," Zee said.

Bastion let out a weak laugh, his mirth not reaching his eyes.

"You look as beautiful as always," Bastion said.

"Right, you can't even say that with a straight face. What? Are you not attracted to the undead?" Zee asked with forced levity.

Bastion snorted.

"I mean, if someone could pull it off, it would be you. Though let's not find out, I love you but I would rather not date a corpse," Bastion said.

She smiled. "Well then, I guess I will do my best not to become a corpse. It might ruin your image if people find out you are dating an undead," Zee said.

He laughed for real that time, amusement crossing his handsome face.

"Thanks again for saving my ass back there. I am not as unkillable as you. If you didn't get in the way of that attack I would be dead by now. It's my fault you are-

Zee glared at him. "It was my choice to jump in the way of that attack," Zee said.

He pursed his lips, but she could tell he still blamed himself for her current state. She sighed.

"It's not as bad as it looks, I have been working on a ritual that should cleanse the poison," Zee said.

Bastion glanced back towards the door, where she could sense two of the ship's crew just outside.

"The crew is getting worried. I have heard talking about getting rid of you before you can turn," Bastion said softly.

She nodded. "I know. I can sense them talking about me throughout the ship. There are still seven days before we arrive back to Tartana. Even Captain Skern is doubtful. I suspect he will come to visit me soon to see if I need to be put down," Zee said calmly.

Bastion's expression darkened. " I would like to see them try," Bastion said.

Her words were borderline prophetic, as the door hissed open several minutes later, and the captain skittered in. After spending weeks on end with the arachnid species, she was getting fairly adept at reading their body language.

She could tell Skern was on edge, his eyes roving over her as if trying to tell if she was going to turn.

"Captain, how can I help you?" Zee asked, biting back a grimace, as she sat up.

Over a dozen beady eyes traced over her body, lingering on the festering wounds on her arms and neck.

"We need to talk," Skern said.

"It's about the crew, isn't it? They think I am going to turn," Zee said, pushing aside her blankets, standing to her feet.

Skern shifted nervously, his thin hairy legs scraping together in agitation.

"I must admit, I too have been worried. It's been over a week, and you still haven't recovered." Skern replied.

She smiled. "There is nothing to worry about, I am working on it," Zee said.

"Working on it? That's not good enough. If you turn, it could put the whole crew in danger. It would be better to get rid of it before that happens," Skern said.

Bastion, who was standing to one side, took a step forward, looking ready to hit someone. She reached out and held him back with one arm.

"I understand your concern captain, but it is unfounded. I have a ritual that can cleanse the miasma from my body," Zee said, stretching the truth, just a bit.

"And how long will this ritual take to complete?" Skern asked.

She cracked an anxious smile. "A few more days at most," Zee replied.

"Alright, two more days. Don't take any longer" The captain said, before turning, and skittering out of the room.

With the captain no longer watching her, she collapsed back on her bed, letting out an exhausted sigh.

She may have put on a confident façade, but she really wasn't doing well. The odds of the ritual actually working as intended on such short notice were slim.

Even still, she wasn't one to just give up when presented with a tough challenge. And It's not like she really had a choice. It was either cleanse the miasma from her body or turn into an undead.

Being killed in her sleep by an anxious crew was just as unpleasant as the first, though for other reasons. Neither option was pleasant, but she doubted Skern could keep the crew appeased much longer.

She sighed. It would be just her rotten luck to be turned into an undead.