Manners are often neglected. It is a shame that apologizing or not taking offense at something is considered a weakness. A weakness that others try to capitalize on. Still, I choose to treat people with manners, and as long as it isn’t taken too far, I can excuse some discourteous behavior. But I have a bottom line, those that cross it only experience my enmity once.

~Dagda, the All-Father, Chief of the Gods

Crow panicked. After a day in the graveyard, hopping across tombstones like a fool, he felt the ghost mana entering his body using the Druid cultivation methods. Every time he managed to absorb it, ghosts appeared and chased after him.

As a rational man, he didn’t feel he should fear any ghost. Still, these were terrifying women in various stages of undress. And somehow, he knew what they wanted. They were wanted to absorb a man’s essence or his yang.

So he hopped across the tombstones faster and faster, moving up and down the rows, afraid to stop.

“What the fuck kind of technique is this?” He shouted.

Mara, watching from a window, laughed until she collapsed on the floor, holding her sides. She knew he wasn’t in any real danger as he didn’t flee from the graveyard, but it was still hilarious watching him freak out.

The thing he realized about Druid techniques and spells was that they didn’t use meridians like he originally had thought. The ghost mana moved through his body, but the pattern the mana followed was an intricate linking of specific nodes in his body—the same ones the easterners associated with acupoints. Its movement vaguely resembled a Celtic Knot, but it wasn’t a formation. At most, it could be a type of Ogham rune he didn’t recognize.

Regardless, he could feel the mana pattern surrounding his bones, almost causing him to stumble from his strange method of stutter-stepping across the tombstones. The frigid chill that came off ghost mana wove itself deeply into his bones, causing his entire body to stiffen and ache. In the vestige, this cold chill was what most cultivators had to fight against to practice this method. Crow didn’t because he used the Night Fire within his third chakra to combat it. Within seconds, the stiffness in his muscles faded, but he did not dare try to combat the cold and pain in his bones. He feared doing so would prevent his breakthrough.

He realized his way of thinking about cultivation had drastically changed how he evaluated techniques and spells. All the competing methods inside him felt chaotic, but he could see a bigger picture emerging. Everything he did, he had to analyze, not just his body and process, but how each thing would impact the foundations he already built. Where other’s saw chaos, he started to gain insight into geomancy. Everything within him had its place, but he had to at least recognize the design to visualize that. Only then could he evaluate how to use his Source, abilities, and cultivation to achieve maximum potential.

Take his Ghostly Visage spell, the first time he used Faces of the Dead to escape a madman, he noticed that the instructed usage was limited. The pattern used to transform his face and body lacked something, and he felt with enough time, he could improve on it. He could tell the core of Druid spells and techniques were definitely related to Celtic Knots, but he lacked the ability and the experience to break them down. The best he could do was modify parts of it that allowed him to at least use it. Such as changing how to activate the ability using his hybrid Source consisting of mana and Qi.

Ghostly Visage was both fantastic and frustrating. The thing he couldn’t decide is if the spell was a temporary physiological change or an illusion. Was he bending light or fundamentally changing his body. The reason this frustrated him was that, with Ghost Steps, he knew his physiology was changing. His bones no longer felt like his own, and there were times he felt like they no longer existed.

Crow knew this feeling was a sign that he broke through to the second stage of Ghost Steps. But, the changes left him disturbed, and his mind struggled to reconcile it. On the one hand, it was like experiencing the exact opposite of phantom limb syndrome. The bones were there, but the mind didn’t want to recognize them. On the other hand, his body wanted to expel the bones, treating them as foreign matter.

Despite not feeling his limbs, he managed to keep going using the same focused mindset he used when opening his chakra. He thought through the motions and forced his brain to act, even if it was confused. It took more confidence, or at the very least, the ability to block out all doubts. So it wasn’t surprising when he fell into a semi-trance and continued to cultivate the movement ability. His legs kept moving as if with a will of their own. Focused on his breathing, stepping, and moving mana through his body, he failed to notice that his feet weren’t touching the tombstones anymore.

It couldn’t be considered flying because he was still beholden to gravity. It was the bones in his feet. They produced the ghost mana that created a cushion between the ground and the bottom of his feet. Part of his confusion

The thing that allowed him to keep going was the same method he used when opening his chakra. Even though he couldn’t feel or see what was happening, he trusted his mind to handle it. Following that, he fell into a semi-trance. His legs kept pumping along, but what he didn’t notice was that his feet were not even touching the tombstones anymore.

After several hours, he finally understood his legs hadn’t actually gone numb. Instead, when he finally realized what was happening, he knew the confusion he felt wasn’t that he couldn’t feel his legs. It was because he no longer felt the jarring impact of his foot hitting a solid surface. He longer felt the friction between his foot and the ground that slowed his movements. It was like he’d been running with a huge boulder, and he’d finally tossed away the thing holding him back. Nothing could restrict him.

The interesting thing was, the ghosts were fading off as if they could no longer sense him, or maybe he drained away their energy. After another few hours, the ghost mana was full infused into the pattern into his bones which he thought was weird. Once the knot-like design set, he could see a silver-blue light radiating from his bones. It became so intense that he could see it radiating through his flesh with just his physical eyes alone.

Exhaustion struck the moment the glow faded. Crow’s tenacity kept him moving, but he wasn’t sure for how much longer. His previous path across the tombstones circled the outer perimeter of the graveyard, so he cut down through the middle so he could reach the house faster. The changes in his body were not only affecting him physically, but he felt his vitality and mana getting drained off too.

All that energy poured into the breakthrough, so he struggled to keep moving once it was taken. His cultivation kept him going, but even that couldn’t keep up. When he thought he’d collapse in the center of the graveyard, a surge of ghost mana that was even more pure and frigid than before entered his body. It didn’t eliminate his exhaustion, but it gave him a nice boost of energy and focus.

It didn’t occur to him that the energy he had just absorbed went beyond what a typical ghost would provide. But, his focus and clarity of thought were practically garbage at the moment.

Danger. Crow shifted his direction a few times, no longer going in a straight line back toward the house. Whatever was chasing him was hindered by the tombstones, which was odd. Another reason he veered in another direction was so he could turn his head to glimpse what was chasing him easier. When he did, he was so shocked he missed his step and stumbled to the ground before his mentum was halted by another tombstone.

“Ben side.” Crow’s eyes widened, and he scrambled to his feet and fled at his top speed. The ghostly being following him was nearly a head taller than him but twice as wide. Each thigh was the size of a pig and tapered off toward her feet which looked as if they were formed of ghost mana. She was corporeal and not at the same time. He couldn’t even fathom how she moved as she drifted through the graveyard like a ghost, but one that had to dodge the tombstones. So not quite a ghost.

Her deathly pale face, limp white hair, and dark, deep-set eyes made her appear like a goth seductress. The rotting dress she wore stretched so tightly over her fat rolls and thick, heavy breasts that it was enough to make one gag. Her breasts were bigger than his head and threatened to break through at any moment.

Mara burst out through the front door of the house and stared at him and the thing chasing him. “I told you we should have left!”

“Shut up and run!” Crow growled.

Mara took off before Crow even said anything. She’d packed all her stuff and was prepared to run at a moment’s notice. She wasn’t stupid. Traveling with Crow was like dancing with a damned tornado, and she always prepared for the worst. Her lips pressed tightly together until her lips thinned and turned white.

“That thing reminds me of your sister before she hit puberty,” Crow said as he caught up.

“Pfft,” Mara almost fell in shock but couldn’t help burst out laughing. There was a point that Esme ballooned up before she sprouted, and Mara teased her endlessly about it. “What is that thing?”

“Ben side. I think,” Crow exhaled and tried to control his breathing. Mara discovered the exit early this morning, and he hoped it wouldn’t follow them out.

“Banshee? I thought they were usually crying and wailing with red hair and… attractive?”

“Pfft. Can’t you see those black streaks on its face? She’s definitely crying. Banshees were once human, so they take on whatever appearance they once were. It isn’t a true ghost, but if you hear it wailing, that’s bad. It means someone close to you is about to die.”

“Then what does it want? Why chase us?”

“Hussssband…” the banshee said, staring right at Crow.

“Oh, no way. Fuck you!” Crow’s exhaustion disappeared, and he significantly increased his speed. It didn’t matter how far or hard he ran because there was no escaping Mara’s hysterical laughter.