Destiny in Cinders

”Don’t stop! The town of Stonegate is right up ahead!” roared a large, gray-clad man in the snow. He tried to urge the others to not fall behind. ”The residents of that town only just left! It’s still in good shape for us to resist creatures! Don’t worry if the fiendspawns catch up. I’ll cut them off!”

The ten-odd others who were already worn out tried to squeeze out the last bit of juice in them to keep pushing ahead.

The chief wayguard of Hanlang Wayguard Logistics, Xu Tai, had the Pathfinder lifearc and a rather bombastic sobriquet, ”Good as Gold.” The moment he graduated from a martial academy and returned home, he dealt with the group of bandits that had squatted at his hometown for years, clearing out the entire den. That one battle made him a famous local martialist overnight. He proceeded to use the loot from the bandit den to establish his wayguard agency.

Initially, Xu Tai had a subpar reputation due to a weird habit of his. If the price offered for his services didn’t meet his expectations, he would refuse to accept the job outright. Even if someone managed to force him to, it wasn’t guaranteed that the merchants’ goods would arrive at their destination.

Every time someone tried to chew him out for a bad job, he would snap back with ”Don’t you know how precious the goods you wanted to transport were?! Think of all the bandits you’ll attract! Do you expect me to give my life for the pittance you’re paying me?! You get what you pay for, and that’s all your tiny fee is going to get from me.”

During those times, he was often called a miser. Eventually, his agency received no jobs at all. Things finally changed when a mother and son came asking for someone to escort them from the Hanhai Region back to the Hongjiang Region. These were the family members of a famous attorney from the city of Whitemountain.

The man of the house had helped a woman victim win a case against a martialist in court. The martialist was the son of a famous martial teacher, however, so the attorney ended up offending the local martial school. Eventually, he was found drowned at the riverbank one day. His eldest son died from being run over by a horse carriage. His eldest daughter disappeared without a trace, likely suffering an even worse fate, leaving only the attorney’s wife and their young son alive.

The martial school was a rather powerful local force with an up-and-coming Fortification Realm martialist who had manifested five wonders. He would become a Clearing Realm adept sooner or later, so none of the wayguard agencies around town wanted to accept the widow’s request, lest they offended the martial school.

Xu Tai, however, was willing to take the job, but he asked for 1500 liang of silver, which was a huge sum indeed. While the attorney had made quite a bit of money during his career, quite a lot of it had been used to run the household. The widow struggled and eventually managed to pawn off her jewelry for a paltry sum of less than five hundred liang of silver. Xu Tai accepted the job nevertheless and said, ”If that’s the case, I can only guarantee that your son will be protected.”

”That’s enough for me,” said the widow with a pained smile. She knew that there was almost no chance that her family would survive this ordeal. This was her last-ditch and desperate effort.

Without saying much else, Xu Tai set off on this perilous journey, fully aware of the risks. He made many preparations to disguise all of them and even tactically split off from them from time to time. Yet, they were found out eventually and were attacked by a group of masked martialists.

The martialists were rather capable in their own right, and they also paid off the local bandits to help them rain down arrows at their targets. Though the first volley of arrows quickly claimed the widow’s life, Xu Tai cradled the young child in his arms protectively the whole time, taking nine arrows and four cuts as he charged out of the heavy encirclement. He proceeded to run thousands of li to the nearest city.

The martialists eventually caught up and attacked him there, but he managed to break through mid-battle and caught a ferry down south. When he finally reached Hongjiang, he ran into the martialists once more and fought them all, eventually defeating all of them and delivering the young child back to the widow’s family safe and sound.

Since then, his reputation skyrocketed and he was hailed as the most likely martialist in the region to reach the Clearing Realm. His habit of giving only as much effort as he was paid didn’t change, but people stopped calling him a miser and gave him the nickname, ”Good as Gold”—once he gave you his word, it was as good as gold. It became widely known that once he accepted a job and got paid what he demanded, he would give his entire being to see to its completion, even if he would have to cross tens of thousands of li spanning countless rivers and mountains.

However, Xu Tai didn’t ask for any money for his present assignment. Due to the snow calamity, feys, beasts and other aberrations started to migrate, culminating in a massive wave that went down south. Such a phenomenon was also known as a beast tide. But unlike how they were usually depicted, beast tides tended to avoid large cities where people settled and would never attack them unprompted. The most they would do was trample on the fields beyond city walls or overrun unfortified villages. They even avoided small, fenced-up towns.

Even so, the beast tide’s presence made it impossible to ship goods into settlements. The beasts of the tide left in batches gradually, so it would take quite some time before they properly cleared out.

With Riverside sealed off, quite a few people living in the nearby settlements who used to live in the city proper gathered aid and supplies for the city. There were also experienced martialists among them who would pay attention to the beast tide and identify the moments when it began to thin out to deliver emergency aid to the city.

Xu Tai was one of the people who lived in the vicinity of Riverside. Given his strength, he would be able to defeat a pack of migrating beasts, let alone avoid them. He was also confident that he could slaughter his way out of a horde as long as he didn’t run into a powerful fey comparable to a Clearing adept.

Things initially turned out as they expected, with most beasts avoiding Xu Tai and his group when they sensed that he was not to be messed with. None of them could have expected things to fly off the rails in such epic fashion when fiendspawns attacked them.

Fiendspawns aren’t exactly out of the ordinary, but why are there so many of them? All of them are so powerful too! Xu Tai felt the hairs on his back stand from the malicious gazes directed his way. This burly man with a messy beard had a scar that ran from his forehead to his nose, which curled up rather grotesquely when he furrowed his brow. The fiendspawns are still on our tail! Damn it! Beasts have far more flesh than humans! Why didn’t they go after them instead?!

He could make out some ten fiendspawns that advanced at an eerily fast pace with contorted bodily motions. They retained most of their bestial forms from before they were corrupted. However, they were entirely ashen gray, having lost almost all color. Their sensory organs had collapsed into a single hole out of which the sinister glow of the nether shone like flaming stars yet felt paradoxically chilling.

These creatures were corrosion fiends, one of the most common types of fiendspawn, born after living beings were corrupted by fiend qi. In terms of power, they weren’t even comparable to Fortification martialists. Xu Tai would have no problem taking on a few of them, but they had no fear of death at all, making their charges erratic and savage. Xu Tai was no pushover, but he couldn’t stand suicidal types. Not to mention, he was busy escorting other people. They were forced to abandon their cargo to flee for their lives.

This is too odd! Xu Tai gritted his teeth. Being a martialist who had attended a martial academy, he knew a thing or two about fiendspawns. While corrosion fiends were quite common, they usually manifested randomly and shouldn’t group up and attack them in such a coordinated fashion in theory. There had to be something more to this!

Whether this was the plot of the True Fiend Cult, some other demonic cult or some lone madman was unclear. Why would anyone attack a simple aid convoy carrying normal food and medical supplies?

Still puzzled, Xu Tai felt his heart skip a beat and turned around with his blade drawn without a single thought, raising it only to feel a few things collide with it. He managed to deflect five icicles that shot in his direction, though some of the broken ice shards cut his face slightly.

The fiendspawns in the distance howled, causing the frost around them to gather into a vortex midair. That was where the icicles were formed and launched from! They continued to fire at Xu Tai and the rest from a distance.

”Damn it! Those fiends have spells too?!” Xu Tai was powerful enough to be relatively unscathed from the barrage, but his other fellows were not so lucky. Though most of them were martially skilled enough to evade the icicles, one of them was shot through his upper thigh. The martialist cried and collapsed, bleeding out profusely. Still in pain, he watched as frost gathered to form icicles, this time aimed at his head. The thumping in his mind either came from his heart or the spurts of blood that poured out of his thigh.

”The next wave is coming!” Xu Tai roared when he heard the thumping. Initially, he thought that this came from the group of fiendspawns. However, he soon realized that something was off. ”Wait a second, this sound...”

It didn’t come from in front of him, but rather, from behind! Before Xu Tai made sense of anything, a blur of silver and white came charging rapidly through and knocked away all the icicles. Without slowing down, it crashed into the fiendspawns like a war carriage!

No, Xu Tai widened his eyes and saw that the silver-white blur had vanished right before the collision. What appeared in its stead was the silhouette of an incredibly young man. The figure drew a long blade, which turned into waves that fired off arcs of silver against the five fiendspawns before him.

”A master!” Xu Tai bellowed subconsciously. One look and he was able to tell that this newcomer was not messing around. The eyes of normal people wouldn’t be able to follow movements that were too quick. They couldn’t even track fast-flying birds, let alone flying crossbow bolts. Blades or staves being waved around looked like smooth streaks of light to them.

Martialists, on the other hand, could perceive fired arrows or bolts as if they were moving in slow motion, so dodging them or knocking them away was no harder than catching a falling snowflake. Yet, even a Fortification martialists with four wonders like Xu Tai could see nothing but flashes, a sign that the blade was swung at impressive speeds, possibly moving faster than sound!

The loud boom from the sound barrier being broken was swiftly followed by the clear crunch of bone. With a single flash of light, the heads of all five fiendspawns flew into the air, their troubled expressions still clearly visible on their faces. They looked down, still confused about why their heads had separated from their bodies.

The figure didn’t stop there, using the momentum of the swings to push ahead. He was like a storm of silver and white among the pack of fiends, slashing limbs and drawing blood.

The others from the wayguard agency were stunned. Even the martialist who got his thigh pierced through stopped crying out and merely applied pressure on his wound with a blank look on his face, watching as the figure cut up the fiends that had utterly terrified them like vegetables on a chopping block.

All the fiendspawns had been dealt with in the span it took to snap a finger five times. The figure put his blade away and held one of the fiendspawn carcasses to study it as he walked toward the people he had just saved.

Some people shook and tried to turn and run. Others instinctually wanted to draw their blades. However, Xu Tai groaned at them and dropped his own blade to the side in a welcoming manner. In a joyful tone, he said, ”I am Xu Tai of Hanlang Wayguard Logistics. Who might you be, Esteemed Master? May we be of any help?”

Martialists with no hostile intent always introduced themselves openly. The figure looked away from the fiendspawn he carried, showing a youthful and heroic face. ”An Jing of North Han. I’m heading to Riverside. Might you be able to show me the way?”

”An Jing?” The name caused everyone there to begin to chatter. Their leader’s facial scar contorted as he stared at the young martialist that completely fit the description. ”The... the very same An Jing that bears a divine arc?”

”That’s right,” An Jing said, finally learning of his fame. ”That’s me.”