Lyra stabbed the tip of her sword into the pale soil and leaned her weight against the hilt, panting raggedly as she wiped at the stream of blood that soaked her left eye. She sealed the wound with a dense line of inner essence, her bloodied glare fixed upon the burly, black-haired man that had just called on his men to stop with their attacks. Of the forty or so people that had chased her out of the city, only thirty-one lived to follow their leader’s orders, though this was still far too many for comfort.

She’d made it almost a league away from the bandit lair before they’d sealed off her path of escape and forced her into a direct confrontation, one which quickly saw her covered in enough wounds to make her dizzy from the blood loss. Most of the people she’d killed had been weaklings in the middle levels of Profound Entry, half-drunk and half-clothed, eager to appease the greasy man that kept screaming at them to capture her without so much as lifting a finger to assist with the efforts. With a torso as thick as the trunk of a small tree and a lion’s mane of dark hair, the man never stopped leering at her with his lustful gaze, even when she cut down the men that he’d ordered to subdue her.

A blood breeding pellet appeared in her palm, though just as she was about to take it the man screamed out in his deafening voice.

“Take that pellet and I’ll order my men to—”

She swallowed it. “As if you had any other intentions.” Her eyes constantly shifted between each of her potential targets, though she couldn’t spot any openings in the ring that encircled her. She could always attempt a great leap in a random direction, but the leader and a few others present would likely catch up before she landed.

Where the hell was Nyla? A few capable cultivators might have hung back to subdue her, but there was no way that they could have caught up with the quick-witted girl, not when she knew how to use such an impressive movement skill.

Did she make run for it? The leering eyes of those around her brought to mind the original purpose of infiltrating the bandit lair. No, she wouldn’t have just left me here like this. Something must have happened to her.

“You’ve got two options girl,” said the head bandit. “Stand down, or we’ll put you down.”

“What, so you can all have your way with me?” She pointed her sword toward him. “I’d rather die, and you’d best believe that I won’t be dying alone.”

“Hahaha! So fierce!” He stilled his men with a raised arm just as a few of them made to move in on her. “Subdue her, but leave her body unharmed.”

“But Griff,” said a lean man whose face was marred by a long, ropy scar along its left side. “Do you really think that’s possible?”

“Seht’s right,” said another. “I’m not tryin’ a lose a leg jus’ so you can get yerself a nice young wife—”

“Of course it’s possible!” Griff pulled out a wrinkled piece of paper, which almost immediately began to emit a blinding white light.

All of the bandits turned their heads and covered their eyes, though Lyra lagged behind for a crucial second as she observed the reactions of the others. She cried out as a searing pain erupted in both of her eyes, which immediately grew too strained to see. Even if she forced them open, she couldn’t make out much more than a pervasive white afterglow.

I’ve been blinded! She prayed that her vision hadn’t permanently left her, though that wouldn’t matter if she mishandled her defence in the coming moments.

She tracked as many auras as she could with her spiritual sense as everyone around her suddenly pounced forward like a pack of hungry hyenas.

Hoping that her attackers respected their leader enough to hold back from dealing any fatal blows, she stood her ground and punctured the closest man’s neck with the tip of her broadsword. She shifted her footing and simultaneously tore the blade free with spray of gore, avoiding a strike from the pommel of a sword while spinning in a circle with maximum force. Her sweeping strike split a man in two and severed another’s limb at the knee, though these were the weakest of the bunch. The strongest deliberately lagged behind to take full advantage of the distractions that their underlings had unwittingly created.

Before Lyra could make another move, something heavy struck her in the back of the head and sent a terrible shock throughout her body.

“What’d I tell ya?” said the man named Griff.

The last things that she heard before she lost consciousness were Griff’s hearty laughter and a chorus of triumphant cheers.

She awoke some time later to a series of heated shouts and a gentle breeze, both of which drifted into the large stone room through one of the many windows that dotted the smooth walls around her.

It took a few minutes of irritated blinking for her eyes to adjust to the candlelit room, as she was still somewhat affected by the talisman that Griff had used to blind her.

“Lyra…”

“She’s awake!”

She was taken aback to find that most of the girls that she’d come here to save were all huddled together in a far corner of the room.

Why can’t I sense them? She was filled with rising alarm as it dawned on her that her spiritual sense had been reduced to a fraction of its former strength. Not only that, but it quickly became apparent that most of her cultivation was gone.

Scoundrels! She shot up to her feet in a rage, though calmed slightly when she noticed that her dantian showed no signs of damage. I’m not crippled?

“It’s the medicine they gave us,” said Alicia, the first to approach. She helped her up with gentle hands. “It locks our cultivations at the first level of the Profound Entry stage. They’ll be back soon to give us more.”

“Where…where’s Nyla?”

“Wherever all that noise is coming from, I’d imagine.”

Though her steps were unsteady, Lyra rushed to the door only to have the other girls pull at her tattered clothes with desperate hands.

“You can’t,” said Alicia.

“I can’t just let them—”

“It’s not what you think! The people here, they didn’t attack the caravan to make slaves of us.”

“That’s right,” said Tess, a meek girl with blonde curls cut short in the early days of their journey through the Dragon’s Tail. “They intend to have us as their wives.”

“How does that change anything? They killed all of the men that we were travelling with, and all of the boys too. These aren’t good people.”

“They’re horrible people,” Alicia said helplessly. “But they have rules. Once they take on a wife, harming her is the same as offending her husband. They…they say that they won’t treat us poorly.”

“Tell that to my sister!” cried Aine. Face flushed and eyes wet with lingering tears, the young girl sat cradling her knees behind the other girls.

Lyra grew quiet as she watched the girl grieve, though a jolt of panic ran through her as she realized that her spatial bag was gone. Everything that she’d saved up since the day that she fled from the Three-River Valley, all of the medicines, weapons and treasures that she’d risked her life to acquire as an aimless wanderer with no friends or family, and nowhere to call home.

She reluctantly dropped into a smooth wooden chair, noting that the food-laden table at the room’s centre was full of silver platters and expensive cutlery, a fancy arrangement of rare fruits and pricey foods mirroring the grandeur of the rest of the décor. This town…these people…just how many caravans had they attacked over the years?

Nyla stood quietly as she watched the bandits bicker about who would get to have her as his wife, her limbs heavy as she struggled to purge the poison-like medicine that they’d forced upon her after the drawn-out battle that she’d inevitably lost. Most of the men were wary her, though many of the women stared at her with reverence, a decent number of them newly single due to her efforts.

She’d killed over twenty people in the outskirts of the town, including two men from the leader’s inner circle. She’d picked off as many as she could with the evernight bow while keeping a safe distance with the aid of her movement skill, though she was eventually mobbed by a large group and beaten into submission. The gesture of healing her wounds with precious medicine was lost when the leader of this town of criminals and victims had forced a master-slave contract upon her, though the contract failed within seconds of its activation. According the man that’d tried to enslave her, it appeared that an enslavement arrayment had already been applied to her. This was also the case with Lyra, who failed a similar contract just after her capture.

She finally knew what sort of curse those damnable pellets had contained, though she didn’t know whether to condemn the despicable man that had tricked her or to rejoice at the fact that she didn’t have to bow to the whims of Griff, the leader of the bandits and the entire township.

I’m sorry, Lyra. If I’d never brought out those pills then we… If they hadn’t taken those pills then they’d both have died while attempting to save their friends. She shook her head. There was no point in ruminating over past mistakes, not now when she needed to focus as much as possible on a plan to escape from this damnable place. With her cultivation limited to the first level of Profound Entry, and her spiritual sense immensely suppressed, her only hope was to somehow get a hold of the Divine Spirit Fountain water that she had stashed away in her spatial bag. If anything could erase the poison’s effects, her best bet was that water.

She watched Griff argue with a few of the men brave enough to speak up against him, all at the second level of Integration. It appeared that this small city was ruled by several men, two of which had been away at the time of her and Lyra’s infiltration. Once they’d laid eyes on her and Lyra, a good number resolved to take them on as their partners, to the extent that several discarded their current wives on the spot and declared their intent to take possession of them. Possession, they had said. All of the women that she saw had the same level of cultivation, the first level of Profound Entry. Evidently they were all made to take the strange suppressive medicine on a daily basis, so that none of them attempted to flee the city and their unforgiving ‘families.’

Nyla had been locked up in one of the stone buildings on the north side of town, just long enough to see Lyra’s bloody body dragged inside by Griff and a few of his lackeys. She’d watched as the master-slave contract failed just as it had for her, had kept quiet as they fed Lyra the suppressive medicine and then some other medicinal pellets to heal the superficial wounds that covered her body.