Wuchang’s fingers tightened on the ceramic. It was not bare; it was *bereft*. The familiar hum of residual warmth that typically lingered inside his hollow vessel was gone, replaced by dead glaze and inert clay. The thief had devoured every trace of quintessence down to the grain. Brenda stepped back, shifting her grip on the laundry cart. “Is something wrong, sir? Perhaps you just misplaced whatever was inside?”
Wuchang ignored her, his mind racing. This was not the careless theft of a common thief. This was a practitioner, someone capable of siphoning latent power, however minuscule, from inert objects. And they were here. In this asylum. *Eating souls.* He knew the signs. The sour, copper stink of drained vitality clung to the rim. This was an affront. A blasphemy. And a clue. The direction Toby’s glowing vomit had pointed, the source of the miasma – it all converged.
“My cauldron,” Wuchang declared, thrusting the empty vessel toward the attendant with a sharp flick. “It needs to be purified. Find me a mop bucket. Full of water. And several pairs of the standard issue foot-wraps.”
Brenda blinked. “Foot-wraps, sir? You mean… slippers?”
“Foot-wraps, tread-socks, call them what you will. The ones of pliable rubber. The more the better.” His tone brooked no argument, and the orderly hurried down the hall.
Twenty minutes later, in the dim, ammonia-scented air of the communal bathroom, Wuchang arranged eight pairs of hospital-issued skid-proof footwear in a sharp octagram around a bucket brimming with grey water. He muttered a cleansing chant under his breath as he lowered each tread, one by one, into the murk, leaving a faint sheen across the soles. He set them down in alignment, muttering about the famine of refined jade in this blighted realm. “A Spirit-Sealing Displacement Array,” he told the tile walls. “Crude, yet adequate to deceive the alarms of this asylum.”
He scooped up a palmful of soapy wash, tasted a drop to gauge the faint herbal trace, and rubbed the grey scum over his temples and knuckles. It was foul, but it veiled his presence from stray senses. He moved with the quiet grace of a predator, slipping through the quiet hallways. The few night nurses and orderlies he encountered paid him no mind, their gazes sliding over him as if he were just another part of the institutional wallpaper. His makeshift array was working.
The VIP ward occupied the entire top floor, separated by a reinforced steel door and a biometric scanner. Two broad-shouldered watchmen leaned against the reinforced jamb, their radios crackling softly. Wuchang watched from the shadows. Neither possessed a cultivation base; they were ordinary mortals with lead-weighted saps at their hips. He took a deep breath, the subtle stench of lingering miasma strengthening as he approached. He could feel the electronic circuits within the panel, a weak galvanic hum no sturdier than parchment. He pressed his palm to the casing, letting the faint resonance gathered from the wash channel into the magnetic latch. A faint *click* echoed in the silent hall, too soft for the guards to hear. He eased the steel open an inch and slid through the seam.
The VIP ward was a stark contrast to the general ward below. Polished marble floors gleamed under soft, recessed lighting. Framed watercolors hung along the corridor, though the air carried the rank tang of spoiled bile. The corruption curled thick and suffocating around the ceiling fixtures. It pulsed from a suite at the very end of the hall. He glided down the runner, his bare heels making no sound against the tile. The door to the suite was ajar, a sliver of light escaping.
He pushed it open just enough to peer inside. The room was vast, luxurious, but dominated by a single, high-tech medical bed. On it lay Victor Dalgaard, his body a withered husk, his skin a mottled grey, his breath shallow, rattling. The air above the mattress roiled with thick pitch, coiling like chimney soot. Standing over the bed was the man depicted on the brass plaques in the lobby rotunda: Elias Dalgaard. He droned in a harsh, guttural register, wrists twisting through complex mudras. His eyes, though, were fixed on his dying brother, not with sorrow, but with a cold, almost surgical precision.
“The Grandmaster of the Nine Cauldrons Realm stands before you,” Wuchang announced, stepping fully into the room, his voice echoing in the sudden silence. Elias froze mid-syllable, head snapping up, his pupils contracting into hard points of malice. “And I find you engaged in the most petty of dark arts. A pathetic attempt at soul-siphoning. And over your own kin, no less. Truly depraved.”
“How did you get in here?” Elias hissed, ignoring Wuchang’s pronouncements. His fingers hooked claw-first through the cold air, tearing a smoking seam across the room. From the tear, a massive, amorphous shadow, twice Wuchang’s height, erupted. It was a true sorrow-fiend, its form a roiling mass of black despair, its single glowing red eye fixed on Wuchang. It shrieked, a sound that scraped against the soul, and lunged, a clawed limb made of solidified grief lashing out.
Wuchang gave a short laugh. “A summoned beast? And such a starved runt. You disgrace the lineage.” With an effortless sweep of his arm, he snatched a stainless-steel bedpan from a rolling tray. The talon struck the curved pan with a deafening gong. Steel rang like a temple bell, deflecting the black claw toward the linoleum baseboard. The fiend recoiled, shaking its smoking arm. Wuchang tapped the rim with a knuckle. “Your qi control is pathetic. The construct is porous, ready to crumble at the first counter-stroke.”
Elias snarled, a low, guttural sound. “You’ll pay for this intrusion, you madman!” The sorcerer began another hand-seal, but Wuchang stepped closer, inspecting the black fumes clinging to the elder brother’s throat. “Save your breath. Your foundation cannot support two continuous workings. What festers here is an ancestral curse rooted in your marrow. Slaying you will not prevent the burst, will it? You seek to cull your own seed before the rot detonates. A clumsy, desperate mercy.”
Before Elias could respond, the reinforced door burst open with a crash. Dr. Miriam Hess stood in the threshold, lab coat fluttering, flanked by three institution officers with drawn shock-batons. “Four-Oh-Four! How did you get past the security desk?” She blinked at the ozone-scented smoke churning near the vents, glanced at the dented urinal pan in Wuchang’s grip, and focused on Elias, who instantly lowered his arms into an innocent, trembling posture.
“Dr. Hess, thank goodness you’re here,” Elias said, his voice smooth, betraying none of his earlier rage. He pointed an accusing finger at Wuchang. “This… this individual, he broke in. He assaulted my brother, tried to… tried to finish him off! He’s dangerous, Doctor. Unstable. For the safety of the ward, I want him locked in deep isolation. Permanently.”
Hess shifted her glare between the two men, calculating the politics of the hospital board against the lunatic who had somehow bypassed twenty thousand dollars of magnetic locks using a pan and dirty socks. Elias’s family donations funded Pinecrest’s entire research wing, but her clipboard remained clenched tight against her ribs.