"Run Aurora! Run! They're coming!" Bardolph shouted, his wife's blood dyeing his straw shirt and the hay beside him. The arrow was still stuck in her chest. His voice was trembling and being drowned amidst a sea of screams and agonizing pleas.

The scarlet red flowed down the fields, flooding everything in its path. The horses marched across the once peaceful village and with them brought the stench of death and earthquakes.

Aurora's friends' bodies were now piled up in the green hills where they used to spend some of the most boring afternoons, at the sun's derrick, talking about what they would do if they got out of there. The blood had stained her best friend's blond hair and ran down the forehead of one of her childhood friends, concealing his greenish eyes. Others had been beheaded alongside the seashore, beside the burning mill, half their heads sinking into the water, their bodies buried in the sand. The waves of white foam washed away the blood, dragging the bodies whose foreheads grazed the rocks until their skin finally tore. The screams of those who had been burned alive did not last long. The soldiers awaited them outside the small, cozy houses with sloping ceilings made of wood and stones and chopped their heads off. The sound of the blades scratching on their skin echoed for brief seconds, replaced by the friction of the heads rolling down the dirt road after being kicked by the Kaji soldiers.

To Aurora, their orders seemed quite simple; kill, plunder, and burn everything. Their eyes were lifeless. It had been a long time since any of them had even thought of having mercy.

She was now immersed in the flash of images unfolding before her. One of the Kaji school's soldiers, as shown by the insignia of a red dragon on the lapel of his clothes, pierced the heart of one of the city's elderly women. He carried a wooden spear with a green gooey tip. It was used to atrophy the victim's muscles as it spread throughout the blood - a poison of choice often used when they had time to torture. That was not the case, not that day. Not that it made a difference.

The soldier twisted the spear on the woman's body when he noticed little Aurora standing there, her face washed in tears, her eyes red and swollen, and her chest heaving.

"Aurora, please, run!" Bardolph shouted once again, now on his knees, holding his deceased wife's neck.

His chapped lips were now damp, as was his goatee, which he trimmed every morning, using a scribbled mirror and his knife.

The skull and the gallows had risen to the earth and now hugged the small port village. Souls abandoned their bodies and headed toward the afterlife that awaited them. The soldiers rejoiced at each death, some of them even competing for the largest number.

For them, it was just another village, another batch of bodies they had to slaughter. They saw anyone who did not belong to the same school as cattle. That was the teaching and legacy of the Kaji family, passed down from fathers to sons, starting 20 years ago when Quan Lu took over, replacing the late patriarch Luan-Lu and cutting himself off from the remaining four schools.

The war began shortly after. The Kaji motto was simple, "From fire we will rise, on fire we will burn our foes."

Aurora tried to move, to run, but she was unable to. Her feet were pinned to the ground, her sandals now of iron. Her throat was dry, and nothing came out no matter how much she tried to scream.

The soldier made his way to the old man, giggling, his body heaving as saliva slid down his chin. The leather boots stamped the mud. Under the orange luminescence, houses crumbled into ashes and the fields burned, the smoke covering the once bright sky. The soldier looked wider under the color stripes, the shadow fading amidst the gray mist. Brown eyes had acquired an orange color, and splinters and sparks were stuck on his beard, further polluting the air.

The old man didn't even have time to get up before being pierced by the burning metal tip. The soldier's chi was on fire. He didn't even need to use it against villagers, and yet he couldn't contain himself. A scarlet layer covered his body and stretched out through his sword.

Aurora had never seen anything like it. Those were only myths and fables she had heard from Bardolph and the other older men on those lilac sunny afternoons when there was not much to do but to ask the heavens for rain on the next day. The girl's bones froze. The soldier's laughter was loud and terrifying. He enjoyed seeing the despair in her eyes.

"You're next," he said, pointing to her as he drew the flaming sword bathed in chi from the old man's belly. He still laid the sole of his boot on Bardolph’s shoulder and pushed him to the ground. His body bounced twice.

Bardolph, whose face the years had not been kind to him, his skin wrinkled and scarred by time, murmured meaningless words, his fingers curling and scraping on the earth that now accepted its fate as the man’s deathbed. Blood dripped down his mouth. The red spread around and under him, staining his white clothes and giving a shade of wine to the earth. His eyes lost their color seconds later.

Aurora could not stand it any longer. All that was too much for her. Abandoned by her parents, she was entrusted to the care of old Bardolph, a trusted foreigner. In that small village, far from the war, they had been living in peace for the past 10 years.

Within her, anger rose. In her dantian, the center of all vital energy, her sleeping chi woke up and scattered throughout the meridians, corridors in her body. Aurora's thoughts were now black, catastrophic, premonitions of what was ahead. The chi now running through her veins was black, putrid, clogging up her whole body.

The energy flowed from her fingers to the outside world, clutching her hands, spinning around them; black chi bracelets that fed on the girl's body.

"What the hell do you think you're doing, child?" the soldier asked as he approached. His voice had dropped a tone and his fingers slipped down the spear.