Fall and flight of the Ghostking (1.3)

Screams reached his ears. Shrill, desperate cries. Screams of pain, of hopelessness. His shattered body felt nothing. With his eyes closed, trapped in a world of memories and dreams, he could do nothing but remember the screams. 

With them came images, they flickered before his inner eye, at first shadowy and shapeless, then taking shape.

He found himself on a battlefield, he couldn't say which one. He had fought so many wars and taken so many lives. 

A conflagration raged around him, and he felt the mad smile on his lips. How he watched the people, beaming with joy, as they staggered across the streets filled with mud and blood, bursting into flames. 

Someone called him, but the name was old, strange, it was a name he hadn't heard for a very long time. It was only when the person went down on their knees directly in front of him that the words reached him.

"Your Highness ... Prince Qiao ... Qiao Guan!" Something stirred in him when he saw the figure. A man, perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties, was kneeling before him. He looked up at him imploringly.

"Your Highness, please ... I beg you," he whimpered. 

His black hair was tangled, he was covered in blood and there was a desperation in his eyes that burned deep into his soul. He was a highness? Yes, he was a king, he was the Ghost King.

"Qiao Guan?" the man clawed at his robe. 

Chengzhu looked down, the indifference in him gave way to another feeling, was it... fear? He hadn't felt fear for a long time, but when he found the man whimpering and kneeling in front of him, he felt fear. Something ominous welled up inside him. He stretched out his hands.

"Jiahu!" As soon as he had spoken the name, the day returned with all its force. He couldn't react so quickly, but when Jiahu looked up at him, a spark of hope flickered in his eyes.

He opened his mouth, his lips forming the word Highness. But at the same moment, an arrow pierced the back of his head, and one of the eyes filled with hope was pierced mercilessly. 

Chengzhu didn't even realize that he was screaming. His body was numb from all the pain, but a hot burning sensation raced through his body, eating through his veins and making its way through thickened blood vessels. His heart was beating. Open, ragged, but it was beating.

"JIAHU!" he yelled as the man slumped in his arms. Memories mingled with the present. The blood-drenched battlefield lay over black, jagged rocks.

His body, his robe, soaked and soaked with blood. He held the dead body of his friend in his arms, a brother, an ally. When another scream brought him out of his trance.

"Pei Shan?" Before he even looked up, he remembered that day, that battle and the death of the last two people who had saved him from the brink of madness.

A woman rushed towards them. Chengzhu closed his eyes. Hot tears streamed down his cheeks. He felt his wound, chafed throat. He could feel his bones coming back together and the cracking of his neck. 

He didn't want to see it, he didn't want to see it again. With all his might, he forced himself to return to the present. No matter how shattered his body was, no matter how much pain he had to endure and no matter how long he had to lie impaled on the rocks before he could move again. 

Anything was better than those memories. The woman reached him, her desperate teary eyes looking at him accusingly. She clung to Jiahu and shook him, shook him, screamed his name desperately and grabbed Chengzhu by the collar. But he pushed her away from him.

"Forgive me ... Pei Shan ... Jiahu!"

When he opened his eye again, he saw nothing but black rock burrowing into misty gray swaths. At first only his fingertips twitched, then his whole hand. The pain in his body was overwhelming.

"The bastard ripped my heart out!" he moaned, slumping back onto the rock as he tried to stand up. 

He could feel countless small and larger spikes boring into his back. Some of the largest protruded from his stomach, shoulder and thigh. 

The reason he hadn't drowned in the water. Chengzhu didn't know whether to laugh or cry. So he decided to keep his mouth shut. 

It took a while before he managed to gradually detach himself from the rock. Fortunately, he had shifted his heart a few centimeters and rearranged all the vital acupuncture points before Weijie had challenged him. 

So his blows had been painful and brutal, but not fatal. 

Greasy, clotted black blood splattered on the wet rock, slipping through the cracks and mixing with the spray far below. Thick blood ran out of his nose like a long worm; it would probably be a while before it flowed properly again.

"That damn night weed!" He sat up tentatively and straightened his tattered, smeared clothes while he let his gaze wander over the not exactly intoxicating sight. 

You could hardly see your hand in front of your eyes. On one side were the sharp rocks, on the other the fog was so thick that you couldn't see a meter away. 

He didn't know how far down or up it went. He would have preferred Weijie to have thrown him into the ditch. Even if the idea was disgusting, it would have been easier to escape from there. 

So many ghosts and low-level demons ended up in Duifang's corpse pit every day that he would have reached the bottom in no time at all and made a run for it without anyone noticing. 

But now he had to somehow manage to get around the rock. He couldn't go up, he couldn't go down ... 

"For God's sake," he sighed. What could he do but try to walk around the cliff? He sat down as best he could in the lotus position and anchored himself between the peaks, then began to form a mudra with his hands and recite a mantra. 

An old traditional method of stimulating the inner spiritual flow. It took a while, but he had time, now that the burden of the king had been lifted from his shoulders, he had all the time in the world. 

In Duifang, the days and nights were gray in gray. The huge milky cloud cover rarely broke and when it did, it was only to send acid rain to the earth. 

The vast, rugged and sparsely vegetated land, enclosed between huge black cliffs, was an impassable, lifeless land. You could say it was a piece of hell on earth. Only things that had been dead for a long time lived here.

Demons, lower creatures and ghosts. Those remnants of the once mortal who could not enter the flow of death and rebirth. Corrupted by black magic, demonic cultivation and stained by blood. 

Spirits vegetated as mortals after their demise and took on grotesque appearances. Only the fewest, the most powerful, managed to retain a human appearance after their death. 

It took a while before Zhi Cheng was able to leave his pitiful position between the cliffs. He pushed himself over sharp edges, pointed pillars and cracked obsidian. He ran across barren plains, crossed raging rivers and left the bloody hustle and bustle of Duifang far behind him until he reached the edge of the huge cliffs that surrounded the spirit realm.

Trapped, but also protected from outside influences. He started to jump and flew up. The feeling was exhilarating. Freedom lifted his heart and his spirits as he glided over the jagged rocks. 

It took almost no effort to reach the top of the cliff. But the exhausting fight against Weijie was still taking its toll. He wiped the sweat from his face.

He looked back once more. The Ghost Valley stretched out below him. It was vast. It stretched across forests, uneven stones and wild rivers. He looked at the sky above him and for the first time in a long time, he saw different colors.