The room I entered, the place where the Qi was most concentrated was a decadent descent into debauchery and slaughter. The place might have one time been the Keep's reception hall, but currently, it was being used to house the Lord, a bevy of women he had chained to his throne, and a fighting-style arena where people were being forced to fight to the death without training or Qi.

Each of the people in the room had been drained of energy, a spiritual siphon connecting their life energy to add to and bolster the strength and efficacy of a pile of beast cores used to power the eight trigrams formation. Cores that had been dumped unceremoniously into the center of the controlling array that supplied power.

The power control for the array had been bastardized, warped beyond any semblance of what should have been possible, or what had been originally created. Whoever had tinkered with the formation's structure had forced the power conduits to accept beast cores and stolen Qi instead of spirit stones. It worked, but it was unsustainable. A mad scientist creation that slowly sucked the energy from the people that had been tethered to the siphoning mechanism.

Lord Chon, himself, had only the barest hint of Qi control, enough to show that he was a cultivator, but not even as powerful as the Body Refinement guards, we had ignored. The people that had been drained of Qi were non-cultivators, none of them able to last long with their vitality being stolen to power the array.

Lord Chon had to be killing dozens of people a month in this mad scheme of his to defend himself.

I would need to track down the person responsible for creating this abomination, but that would have to come later. Once I had dealt with Lord Chon, the man still not responding to my presence. The ravages of addiction had taken hold of him. Drugs, sex, food, and wine were all he lived for, it seemed.

He was obscenely obese, weighing at least a thousand pounds. There was no way to cloth him, and if it weren't for the strength he had gained by ascending to Body Refinement, he would have been trapped on that throne, not even able to move to use the toilet. It seemed he was so indolent that even though he was capable of movement, he still chose to treat his throne as a toilet, defecating and urinating at will, leaving it to others to clean up after.

He was an obscene parody of an Elf. The folds of fat so prolific that it was hard to tell where one roll ended and the next began. The women that had been chained to his throne were lifeless drones, tasked with maintenance, cleaning up the detritus of his daily life. There were hints of the beauty they must have once possessed, but that beauty had been ravaged by Lord Chon's excesses.

And to make matters more horrifying, the Lord was currently forcing two male servants to hold the flaps of flesh aside so that a woman could sexually gratify him.

He had ignored our entrance, so lost to sex and drugs that I would be surprised if he was even able to think rationally. It was obvious he was too lost to vice to be in charge. There was no way he was in control of this town. Someone was supporting him, propping him up. He was a puppet for whoever was really pulling the strings, and I had a feeling that person was the same person that had altered the powering mechanism for the eight trigrams formation.

"Jay," Yvonne said, gaining my attention, "over here."

She had been exploring the room, opening two other doors that lead off the hall, checking to make sure there were no hidden fighters waiting in ambush. Our perception hadn't detected anyone, but there were ways to foil that perception, it was better to verify what our senses were telling us. The room she was standing in front of had the smell of death. Even as far away as I was from that room, I could smell the rot and sickness that had been allowed to fester.

The scent was cloying, and I wanted nothing to do with it.

I hesitated, afraid to see what had been hidden behind that door, before forcing myself forward. This Keep was mine now, part of the territory I had agreed to claim, and whatever was in that room was my responsibility to deal with.

The room had been converted into a makeshift hospital/morgue. Those dead left to rot, while those barely breathing slept within the great piles of decaying flesh. This was the first time my perception fought my focus. It was almost as if my Dharmic spirit refused to see.

But this was my territory now.

These my people.

And I had no choice.

I had to see, to know what had happened here.

"They have been drained of Qi so completely that their immune systems have become compromised," I said, my eyes darting back and forth, looking for any semblance of decency among the desiccated individuals that had been tossed like so much garbage into this room.

I found no trace of Qi, no sign of compassion. Lord Chon was a pustule excuse of an Elf, an oozing obscenity, but this was so much worse than the addled caricature that was drooling in sexual bliss on the throne behind me.

The worse virtues of blood cultivation had been gathered within this room. Cultist runes etched into the floor and walls, allowing him to drain these people so completely that they no longer had enough energy to maintain their own lives. All in an effort to keep him safe.

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That fear made no sense. The Empire had just reached the shores of this island, but the neglect we had encountered had been years in the making. He was afraid of something or someone that made this place home. So afraid that it seemed he would kill every person in town to power the barely functioning eight trigrams formation that protected the Keep.

"Are you sure that is all?" Yvonne asked as she extended her own perception.

"Look here," she said, using her Qi to collect one of the bodies so I could more easily examine it. "Do you see these blemishes? The red striations that follow the body's venous network?

"Those are signs of viral infection," she informed me.

"It isn't viral," a weak voice whispered, the person slumped against a wall to the side of the door, "it's venom."

"They've been poisoned?" I asked in confusion.

"We were staked out in the forest, with open wounds so that Meganeuropsis permiana would find and inject us with their poisons," the woman explained.

"Why?" I asked in disbelief.

"Because the venom has a unique property, the only known source the dragonfly's venom sac," she wheezed, "for non-cultivators inflicted with this venom, our bodies begin to absorb more Qi than normal, much faster than we can assimilate it. Almost as fast and efficient as a Body Refinement Realm cultivator is capable of holding, but our bodies are not built for that stage of cultivation, we can't sustain that output.

"Lord Chon staked us out so that he could gain Qi from those he considered worthless to power his Qi battery. He siphoned off the Qi energies we produced, forcing our bodies to shut down when we no longer had the energy or vitality needed to fight off the effect of the poison.

"It was easier and cheaper to allow us to die, than to heal us."

I had never heard of anything so vile and evil. I knew that people could be selfish, Braun and his people were proof of that. I knew there existed a stratum of entitlement, a group of people, that would see this as nothing more than what Lord Chon was due.

But to simply toss the people into a room of ever-expanding death?

That seemed beyond the pale of decency and acceptance that even the most jaded person could accept. I wondered if those who chose to join Blood Cults considered this type of horror normal.

"Why?" I wondered.

"Because the Four Element Sect has claimed Delph Island as their own, and the smugglers that he was in league with were not happy," a voice behind me answered.

Turning my back on that room of horror, I admitted to some relief as well as guilt to be able to retreat. I knew I would have to deal with what Yvonne had discovered, but for a few moments, at least, I could concentrate on something else. I needed the time to clear my mind and decide what could be done.

"A bit over ten years ago, this was a thriving town," the voice continued. "Lord Chon wasn't the most intelligent Lord, but his depravities were limited. It wasn't until the Hindel informed every community they had established trade with that the island was to become part of the empire.

"Most people here had fled the empire, escaped to this island to establish new lives. To find out that they had fled whatever ghosts haunted them in vain caused many to panic, some to flee, and most to sink into despair.

"Lord Chon panicked," she informed us.

"Who are you?" Yvonne asked for me.

"I was Lord Chon's exchequer," she informed me, "My name is Gwen, not that it will matter soon. I, like a lot of the people that fled to this town, used smugglers and coyotes to gain passage and escape the protection of the Empire, the Empire will punish our actions.

"Some of us have been here for hundreds of years, but we know the power cultivators possess. It doesn't matter why we fled, how we were mistreated, or how long ago we escaped. We serve at the will of the Emperor.

"With the island now an Empire protectorate, we will be forced to return and face whatever fate we escaped," Gwen explained.

"Why bother trying to power a broken formation, though? And if things were fine as little as three years ago, how was it able to fall into such disrepair so quickly?" I asked. "And just as important, who created the eight trigrams formation, to begin with?"

"I doubt Lord Chon cared the formation was broken," she said, "I didn't know until recently that it wasn't working for the rest of the town. We find ourselves more and more insulated from what is happening beyond the Keep walls each day.

"How badly damaged is the formation?" She asked. "Is that why it is taking more and more beast cores and stolen Qi to maintain the defenses that do work?"

"Yes," Yvonne replied, succinctly.

"Most of the functions of the trigram have been damaged. The lines dividing each section still exist between the areas of the town," I added, "but the buildings have fallen into disrepair, those that parallel the array have only acerbated the problem."

"It figures," Gwen said, looking at Lord Chon with disgust. "Every year it was harder and harder to get him to use taxes for repairs or to offer loans. He refused to use his own funds to pay for repairs outright and seemed to care little if anyone was willing. The only thing he was determined to maintain was the dock and this keep."

"You still haven't answered my question, how did the formation come to exist in the first place," I reminded her, refusing to allow her to gloss over that question.

"Lord Chon gained his position and bonded with the town stone because of his family connections," she said.

"Unlike most of us, he didn't escape to Delph Island, he was banished. His fits of hunger, within the Empire, for food and fucking went undisciplined until he decided to capture and rape the young daughter of someone he shouldn't.

"A powerful family, a family his House couldn't or wouldn't protect him from. It would have been the end of their House if they had tried to hide him. So, they negotiated banishment and forced him to flee. If he had refused, he would have faced execution from his own mother.

"He was delivered here in shackles. His sentence of hard labor commuted when an uncle that had little attachment to the main House intervened. An uncle that had reached the Nihility Realm, powerful enough on the island to have his orders obeyed. That uncle spent the time and money to create the eight trigrams formation and made sure Lord Chon was bound to the town stone he erected before leaving," she related.

"How long ago was that?" Yvonne asked.

"A century ago, maybe," Gwen answered, her eyes unfocused as she tried to remember exactly how long and how old the town was.

"Why hasn't anyone removed him as Lord by now?" I had to wonder.

"It would require a cultivator powerful enough to sever his connection with the town stone," Yvonne answered for her.

"Exactly, and as bad as Lord Chon has been as a ruler, at least he is able to activate the town's defenses," Gwen agreed. "Or had been able to."

Lord Chon had made no effort to reply, to include himself in our conversation. A quick glance proved that he was too intoxicated or drunk to offer any real input. He was a drooling mess. A failure as Elf and Lord, and I wouldn't spare any guilt to what I did next.

This town, this territory was mine, and Lord Chon's rule was over. The flash of my fan, the injection of unfocused Qi, the only effort needed to sever his head from his body.