The building was cramped and narrow, the once straight lines of bricks made crooked by the passage of time, but though I’d never been there, I knew the place at once: facility. There were no identifiable features to the room; any furniture was long decayed from exposure to the elements by the rusted propped door. Sweeping aside a layer of dust and leaves, I found a trapdoor and pulled it back.

  Steps wound down into the earth.

  I needed to return to the others, to resume the expedition and follow the guidelines of the Butcher Bird, but…

  I stood on the precipice of darkness, heat bubbling in my mind as my weaponized self seeped to the forefront of my thoughts.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  The heat said nothing, only simmering as though to point at the depths and demand I enter. I shrugged, unsure of whose benefit the gesture was for, possibly mine, and descended.

  As I walked down the stairs, I kept a mental finger hovering over my poison chamber, ready to draw it out at a moment’s notice. The attack against the tall, thin demonic spawn had used a fair amount of my poison chamber, and I estimated that I had half of that chamber left. Ran Cong had been noticeably weaker than anyone else I ate, which probably contributed to his reduced amount of qi.

  By contrast, I had under half my chamber of shadow qi, but that was nearly five times as much as the poison qi. Not to mention, the Plum Blossom Technique was incredibly efficient in its qi use compared to the dispersing nature of Ran Cong’s poison cloud technique. It would be nice to discuss this with Chen Ai and the Dreaming Blade so I could learn from their insight, but the questions that would naturally arise forced my silence.

  The stairs reminded me of my facility in a way I found hard to describe. The walls were lined with bricks rather than grey or natural stone, and the stairs wound down in a spiral rather than around a chute, but… perhaps it was the mind behind the facility? There was a sense of purpose to this place that my facility shared; a desire to hide from the world and the heavens and do strange things in the dark.

  At the bottom of the stairs, a hallway lined with cells and the flickering light of dying formations: my skin crawled.

  Once more, the Howling Blossom Facility showed its age. Faded bricks formed the cell walls, with some shattered by time and weight to dust, and others spewing weeds from cracks. Cell doors hung ajar and rusted in place. Solid metal, they had no view holes, but that might have been a mercy -- looking out into the corridor only ever brought anxiety and denied hope.

  Black stains splattered the inside of the cells. From the familiar starburst pattern, I could tell that these were humans who exploded after contact with the grey stone. Judging from the different sizes of explosions, some of the subjects were either children or animals.

  I wasn’t sure which one I hoped was the answer, and I wasn’t sure what that said about me.

  Any thoughts of rushing back to my camp and the expedition faded as I walked through this hallway. If I’d been abducted long ago, would I have ended up here? Melancholy weighed down my steps, draping over me as I examined gore long faded… but the stains oddly resolved into shapes that caught the corner of my eyes… a smile here… staring eyes there… a man huddled in the corner and watching from between his fingers…

  I turned back, but there was nothing but dried gore.

  Offering a silent prayer to the poor bastards who entered this place and never left, I continued.

  We might be some of those ‘poor bastards’, said my merchant self.

  “You escaped.”

  None of the cells held any traces of bodies, or grey stone, or any items except the remnants of failure. I was beginning to wonder why I even entered this place, and what exactly I’d been hoping for, when I reached the door at the end of the hallway. The metal handle was closed, and oddly warm to the touch in a way that felt like I was grasping something of living flesh.

  I hated it, but curiosity brought me here, and I would not turn back before finding out what lay in this part of the facility. When the Butcher Bird brought me to that formation room, I’d had no chance to explore, but now…

  The door opened.

  “You’re going in there?”

  I turned around in surprise.

  A man stood behind me, staring through his fingers. He shivered, as though afraid.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, ok.”

  He trembled.

  “Don’t go in there.”

  “I’m even more curious now that you’re telling me not to.”

  “Don’t!”

  He shouted and blasted apart in a twist of dark wind that howled down the corridor and twisted the doors on their squealing hinges. A faint odor of death, decay, and sadness lingered in the air. It reminded me a bit too much of that heavy night of drinking with Chen Ai.

  “Was that a ghost?” I asked aloud.

  “Yes.”

  I leaped into the air with surprise, because this time the voice came from the Butcher Bird, and it was perched on top of my head. The tiny fluffy ball of feathers peered over my forehead, its dark, gimlet eye locking onto mine with the exactness of a specimen needle.

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  “I am surprised that you saw the curse,” continued the Nascent Soul spirit beast. “Most test subjects barely even notice the negative emotions before they are possessed by them.”

  “This is another experiment?”

  “From a certain point of view, everything in this valley is an experiment.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that.

  “Even you?”

  “Of course!” said the Butcher Bird as it puffed out its chest with pride. “I was the greatest experiment! Though I have become even greater still since my masters’s left. They will be delighted with the results when they return. After all, I am the only experiment that can carry out other experiments.”

  Thinking of the pain and terror I experienced at the hands of the masked cultivators -- of which I received a recent reminder from the possessed guard in Mountain Root City -- I could only shudder at the thought of willingly inflicting that upon another person. The Butcher Bird disagreed with my shaking and pecked me in the forehead hard enough to pierce my brain.

  I slumped to the ground.

  The Butcher Bird made a nest in my hair and chirped loudly.

  “Do not misjudge me, I only experiment for the love of knowledge. That said, there is something about you that makes all of this much more fun than usual.”

  My body regained function, and I slowly pushed myself to my feet.

  “Probably because I don’t die when you stab me in the brain?”

  The Butcher Bird twittered with laughter.

  “An excellent hypothesis!”

  The twittering intensified, and I was overcome with an urge to pluck the Butcher Bird and fry it until crispy, but hid my emotion and stood as carefully as possible so as not to disturb the Nascent Soul monster.

  “I didn’t realize you were following me.”

  “Of course, I am! I needed to see if you would follow through on our arrangement, which you did not.”

  I was sick of the Butcher Bird talking down to me like that, enough to let a bit of anger slip through the careful control of my voice.

  “I’ll make it back to the camp and lead my expedition; you don’t need to worry about that.”

  “Your expedition has already left the camp. Do you not realize the sun rose hours ago?”

  This shook me.

  I hadn’t realized that at all. How had I spent so much time down here? Was Chen Ai alright? What about the rest of the expedition?

  The Bucther Bird studied me.

  “Fascinating, you didn’t know you’ve been underground all this time. Fascinating,” the Butcher Bird murmured as it conjured scrolls and brushes and took down quick notes. “A facility subject enters a fugue state when returning to another facility, most likely born from a torn sense of nostalgia for the confines of the cell. Was it traumatized in a place like this? Undoubtedly, but trauma does not mean no kindness was experienced, nor happiness felt, such is the paradoxical nature of the world -- within the darkness, light, and within the light, darkness.”

  “I’m not nostalgic.”

  “You are hardly an unbiased source of information,” said the Butcher Bird as it dismissed the pen and brush. “You failed to keep your promise, so you must make it up to me.”

  The Butcher Bird didn’t really act as though it cared, though. The anger with which it spoke to me earlier was gone. I tried to understand, but, in a flash of insight, I realized that I couldn’t.

  This creature was insane.

  It was unpredictable, dangerous, and the most powerful being in this private world. I could only expect the unexpected.

  “I think I should return.”

  “No, you are already here, and you may be of use to me.”

  The Butcher Bird’s whims settled around me as implacable as shackles, and I was reminded again of why people feared cultivators. Gaining a modicum of power made me forget what it was to be mortal, but that was a mistake. To something like the Butcher Bird, I was as mortal as they come.

  A cultivator of a higher realm moves through those of a lower realm as iron through glass.

  I needed to get out of here, but -- as much as I hated to have anything in common with the Butcher Bird -- I was curious.

  “Why is this place cursed?”

  “Hmmm, a question for a question?”

  “That sounds like a great idea!” I said with a smile I hoped wasn’t too forced.

  “Because curses were the crucial material lacking in my master’s research.”

  I paused with my hand on the warm door handle. It stirred under my skin like a sleeping creature.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “When there is too much pain, too much grief, and too much death in one place, the weight of the emotions twists and strains the qi until it twists the very fabric of the world. This twisting creates a cursed location, and if the twisting continues, a self-sustaining eddie will break off and persist as a curse.”

  I glanced back at the dark stains in the empty cells. Did the demonic cultivators inflict those cruel experiments simply to serve some larger goal? Was the cruelty of the experiment the point?

  “What do you mean that a curse was the crucial material?”

  “Go through the door if you wish to know.”

  I returned to the door with the warm handle and pushed through, ignoring the tickle of dark wind at the nape of my neck. No matter how much the curse tugged at me, it was no match for the presence of the Butcher Bird nesting in my hair. Natural rock greeted me, and I moved through a twisting passage that wound deeper into the earth. Holes were carved into the rocks with candles that lit themselves under the Butcher Bird’s ferocious gaze.

  “Where is this leading?”

  “No, it’s my question.”

  I gritted my teeth. The quicker I played along, the quicker I could get away, and the quicker I could carry out my revenge. It might be a futile hope, but I was no stranger to that.

  “Alright,” I said. “Ask away.”

  “Why wasn’t your facility cursed?”

  “I don’t know if I can answer that.”

  “You can. Think of the fundamental differences between this facility and the place of your birth.”

  “Don’t call it that…” I said absently. “The main difference is the bricks. My facility was built from stone.”

  The Butcher Bird fluttered in front of my face with a childlike eagerness.

  “What kind of stone?”

  “Grey stone? It was blank and smooth and utterly boring…”

  The Butcher Bird’s eyes rolled into the back of its head as it shivred in mid-air.

  “Aah, it is good to finally know!”

  The air thrummed and shook as though on the edge of thunder, before the bird alighted once more on my head.

  “For so long, I wondered, but now I know. The bricks leaked emotions into reality, but the formless stone you describe must have prevented corruption from cursed emotions.”

  “Actually,” I said, cringing as I interrupted. “They had formations built into the walls that purged the place with fire.”

  “Ah, even more fascinating!” cried the Butcher Bird. “The grey stone performed another function… Tell me, was your facility sealed away?”

  “There was a pretty heavy door, let me tell you that getting through that thing when it wasn’t open was absolutely brutal!”

  “I don’t care about that! Was it sealed like my valley is sealed?”

  “No, it was buried in a mountain.”

  “So that’s why…” said the Butcher Bird softly as the air thrummed and heated and chilled. “The grey stone hid them from the heavens… no wonder they abandoned this place.”

  “Abandoned? I thought they were coming back?”

  “They are coming back!”

  The Butcher Bird’s screams ruptured my eardrums and eyes and sent me flying down the tunnel like a ragdoll. I smashed into the walls and bounced before landing all bloodied and beaten in a natural cavern with stalactites hanging from the ceiling.

  Blood pooled beneath my fractured skull as heat bloomed in my mind. I could feel my weaponized self bubbling to take over as my body healed. This situation was precarious enough as it was, and so I fought it back.

  The drooping stone fangs were carved into hollow lanterns, and the Butcher Bird lit the candles sitting inside with a sweep of its wing. Waxy daylight filled the cavern.

  The Butcher Bird perched atop my crooked nose and cocked its head at me.

  “You wished to know why my masters cultivated curses? Simply look ahead.”

  I looked, and let out a gasp.

  “How could anyone do this?”

  “With endless patience and endless subjects.”

  Under my horrified gaze, the Butcher Bird preened.