Chew on the bones
And marinate the meat
There is no meaning
In hesitating in the wake of triumph
So eat.
After his 'adventure' against the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea, the beast killed time before returning to his home. The crystal clear ocean left much to desire, and a plain red pagoda above its surface did little to interest him, void of anyone or anything. The dragon king lived a boring life, and the beast must've been a milestone in his life, honestly.
Delighted by his newfound weapon, the beast shrunk it small enough to tuck behind his ear, but not before testing how high and far it could go. When finally satisfied with his playing around, the beast made his way back to the humans' village, resting underneath his favourite tree deep in the village's outskirts.
He liked warm days like this one. Fruit-filled trees shaded him from the sun, with just enough sunlight filtering through leaves to warm his body. Grass and flowers padded him. He heard wind, birds chirping, and the nearby river as white noise. He slept soundly, carefree. He never had dreams. The only things other than himself that managed to wake him were sudden shifts in the weather or the rare human passing through his territory.
When it came to humans, he didn't care all that much. Very rarely did they ever pester him. The two walks of life lived in some sort of amicable harmony, respecting one another's boundaries. Humans varied from fear to reverence towards him, and he felt no hostility towads them, but was equally disinterested in the deeper aspects of their lives. He'd eavesdrop and watch them from time to time, definitely, but only because he'd get so bored or restless. Other things that never failed to catch his attention were the scents of various foods they made. Able to go long periods without food, ot to mention easily satiated by the juicy flesh of a peach, eating didn't feel like a necessity to the beast, he certainly didn't dislike to eat. Tasting and feeling various flavours fall into his body became somewhat a hobby of his.
So on those rare occasions humans moved in his territory, it'd comonly be to leave food out for him, he even came to recognise the scents of people who did it most often. In that regard, it'd mostly been the elderly or their grandchildren, neither of which left the beast bothered or displeased, the worst things about them ended up being the heavy smell of medicine on the elderly or overpowering scent of milk on young children. They left him alone, he left them alone. Simple. Of course, things were friendly, but only to a certain degree, and that let the beast go as far as to defend those people when other humans or demons bothered them.
That all said and done, he doesn't expect a pair of tiny hands shaking him in his sleep. His eyes snapped open, claws extended, the only thing keeping the child alive were the beast's reflexes, keeping him from slicing into her upon instantly seeing her tiny frame. Of course, his quick movement nonetheless frightened the child, who became a sobbing, snot-ridden mess.
The beast leapt to a branch, scrunching his nose at the loud noise. He forgot, kids' crying was bothersome – annoying, too. Never failed to assail his ears. Looking around, he didn't see any sign of a mother or father coming to the aid of their child, meaning no one to make the child's crying stop.
He glanced at a peach just above the child. Pulling the minimised staff from behind his ear and making it grow, he extended it, using it to dislodge the peach, which fell in front of the child with a small thud in the grass. It was enough to gain their attention, an t they kneeled down, wiping away all their tears from their red, puffy eyes and sniffing their nose. Hesitantly, the child picked the peach up, then looked up at the beast, their eyes wide.
"Is this for me?"
The beast nodded, still perched on the tree branch. Children were weird. Always changing their emotions as quickly as the wind blew.
To his relief, the child happily bit into the peach. But not ten bites in, they raised the peach up in the beast's direction. Although surprised, the beast jumped down, taking the peach and biting into it from the other unbitten side. In contrast to the child's smooth bites, his were sharper, deeper, and just a bit more jagged. He bit more and more into it, close to its core, noticing the child stare at him the whole time.
Once finished, he tossed the core into the ground. "Why are you here?" He lived far in the outskirts of the village, with the only sign of human use being an abandoned well. Nothing for a child to be running around in without some sort of caretaker in sight.
Yet again, the child's face went from happy to sad, but not the awful snotty mess they were the first time. This time, they had a more distant look in their face. Maybe the better word was disheartened, rather than sad.
"Lotsa people disappeared. I thought they might've gone here."
"Disappeared? Like that 'hide and seek' game you people play?"
The child shook their head. "Nuh-uh. No one can find them."
According to the child, a little after the beast left on his adventures, villagers began to disappear. And while the child didn't understand what the adults around her said, they mentioned a 'demon king' and his followers claiming a strange castle not far from the village, but one originally never there, always surrounded by fog. At certain points of the day, that fog would spread into the village without fail, and dissipate with villagers missing.
Although listening to her, the beast couldn't help but focus on a basket she discarded when he scared her. He smelled food from it. Warm bread. He pointed at it, silencing the girl. "You brought that for me, right?"
The girl nodded. "People said it'd be like an 'offering' to you. To convince you to-"
"Okay."
"Huh?"
"You want me to take care of that demon in the temple, and get the villagers out. That's easy for someone like me."
The girl burst into a smile, wrapping her short little arms around the beast's leg and thanking him a hundred times over. For a bit, he tolerated her, but once in the village itself, the girl still holding onto his leg, he picked her up by the back of her dress collar, holding her above the ground like a kitten before setting her down. With a wave of his hand, he told her to go home, or something, that wasn't near the fog-filled temple.
Monks surrounded the front of the temple, praying and chanting. It gave the beast a headache, but was nothing he couldn't just brush off. Fog spilled out the temple's windows and doors, weaving around like phantoms, and the beast heard heavy, inevitably drunken laughter inside.
Instead of dealing with the monks, who'd get pissy the minute they saw the beast, he jumped onto its roof, completely undetected in the fog. He could hear the intoxicated, deep voices of demons inside, one rumbling louder than the rest.
With a casual stomp, the beast broke the roof tiles enough to jump inside. Wooden planks fell on a notably larger demon wearing a golden helmet with his body completely covered by a pitch black robe. The beast heard the planks clamour onto his body, signalling that the demon wore armour under the huge robe.
With a slam of a large sword the demon had, he stared at the beast with fiery eyes. He held a larger than life mug full of sake in the other, and his flushed face failed to match his otherwise imposing appearance.
"Who are you, barging into my temple and disrupting my party?"
The beast summoned his staff, growing it long enough to lean on, and he smiled at the demon, amused by his hefty speech. This demon was one of those types that believed they wouldn't ever die sooner than they wanted to. The sort the beast took a keen liking in knocking down a peg or two. "I could ask the same thing. It's because of you I got woken up early."
Fog spilled from the demon's mouth. "And you think a puny staff like that will do something against me, the Demon King?"
"Assuming your breath doesn't do me in first."
That did it. The demon king thrust his heavy sword in the beast's direction, but the beast jumped onto it, perched atop it like a bird on a tree. No matter how violently the demon king tried to shake him off, the beast stayed put. Instead, the beast dug his claws into the blade, propelling himself forward. The demon king readied himself for a head-on attack, but the beast stopped short of the huge hilt.
For a moment, he stared into the demon king's eyes without a single word, his breathing controlled and body poised. Not until the demon king's shoulder flinched did he make another move. His staff increased in length, slamming into the demon king's armour. It broke through like a hot knife to butter, piercing and breaking the demon's ribs.
The demon king waved his sword in a frenzy of pain, howling in pain. The beast hopped off his perch on the hilt and disappeared. The demon king, infuriated, ordered for his followers to kill him, but none could find the beast, nor decipher where he hid himself.
"No excuses! Find him and kill him! And slaughter every human in this damned village for good measure!"
Flailing his hands, his drunken stupour failed to inform him that his sword had disappeared. Not until a follower pointed it out, and the demon king's mug shattered out of his hand. The demon king dropping his sake was unheard of, and followers crowding the temple hurried to his side to ascertain his trouble.
No matter how many timse they asked, the demon king did not respond. He stared onward, absolutely still, eyes staring at nothing but empty space.
The demon king's head slowly split in two, and the weight of his head and crown tore flesh and sinew off the sides, leaving both halves of his head to fall off his body, toppling to the ground. Blood covered the entire floor, thick and oozing. His body remained upright, but soon wobbled and fell to the other side. The sheer weight of his body, combined with the shock of his followers, crushed two of them under his body, spreading more blood throughout the temple. The remaining followers stared in chock at their decapitated leader, until one finally pointed at the statue directly behind the former king.
Atop the lotus statue, the beast held his staff close to his chest, smiling, tongue sticking out, his eyes aglow in the darkness. Small streaks of blood dotting his face. From his other hand, the demon king's sword clattered down, covered in its late owner's own blood.
In his anger, a follower prepped his bow and arrow, ready to shoot the beast, but the latter's staff abruptly extended, goring the demon right in the forehead. His arrow flipped from his grasp, the bow soon following, both rendered useless by a dead user. And now, the beast left all these lesser demons to their own discretion and fate. Any lingering fog faded away, any movements were entirely visible. Mice facing an owl.
The moment demons started to run in a panic, his eyes widened, pupils enlarging, body ready to pounce. He 'disappeared' from their sight in a flash, and the first to go down gets their head crushed between the beast's hand and the wall. Another had their chest lacerated. Others simply blunted by the staff. Plenty of yelling and shouting, panicked and angry. One of the last few of them tried to sneak up from behind, armed with a small firearm. Admittedly, he caught the beast by surprise, and he shot the gun, a single bullet aiming for the beast.
A look of accomplishment soon contorted into horror, and the gun trembled out of his hand. Horror soon turned to defiance, even as the beast lunged for him, impaling his chest with his staff. The demon thrashed his body and legs around, his heels slipping on blood, whilst his hands tugged at the staff in a futile effort to pull it out of his chest. Combined with blood covering his hands and a weakening body, the demon soon gave up, hands sliding off the staff.
Then the strangest thing happened.
The demon made a pained smile, turning away from the beast and to his fallen comrades. Blood dripped out the corner of his mouth.
"You... what are you?"
The beast tilted his head, but did not answer. Someone near death talking to him never happened. He wanted to hear what the demon had to say before he died because of how unexpected it was that he had the energy to still speak. The demon coughed out blood, the staff jerking inside his chest, and he cringed.
"You're no demon..." His voice became more and more strained, clogged by blood. "So what the hell are you. Who are you?"
"Why?"
"It's normal to wanna know the name of who kills you... Besides... When I go to hell, my one good deed is gonna be to warn all those sorry bastards about you. So spill it, what's your name? You ain't got nothing to lose telling a dead man."
The beast stared at him, dumbfounded. What he was. Who he was. He had answers for neither.
The demon did something even more shocking as he laid there dying.
He laughed.
"I don't kno what's more pathetic. Dying by some unnamed monster, or living a life without even a name to go by."
The demon mocked him, the beast knew that. Without a proper response, he forced the staff to cut into his abdomen. The demon sputtered and convulsed, still somehow smiling. "I'd... say you're some child lashing out but, even kids got names... so you, without a name... heh... Anyone –anything - worth the space it occupies has a name, you know."
never in his life considered himself a demon, let alone a human. He knew he was stronger than them. Far stronger. He was born of the Earth, both his 'mother' and home, that nutured and fed him. The Earth gave him food, shelter, warmth, clean air, and fun.
But not a name.
Scowling, he shook his head, kicking the demon's corpse out of his way.
Demons, slayed and scattered throughout the temple. The beast covered in demons' blood lost his smirk. He stomped out, shrinking the staff and putting it back behind his ear. When blood dripped to his tongue, he stiffened, doing his best to spit out the metalic taste.. For good measuer, he wiped the blood on his claws over the cloth over the doorway, leaving the temple, deteriorating outside and covered in blood inside.
The second he walked outside, monks looked agahst at him. Their fear no different from the slaughtered demons. The oldest looking one, beads gripped by his bony, shaky hands, stepped forth.
"You stepped into our temple?"
The beast nodded.
"How... how dare you desecrate what remained of our temple by stepping foot into it?"
The beast shrugged. He didn't think it possible to 'desecrate' something overrun by a demon king. They might as well dub it a graveyard for the demon king and his followers instead of a temple.
Another monk shook his head, pointing at the beast. "Demons are one thing. We can purify and exorcise what's been done in there over a period of time. But you... a Heretic such as yourself leaves that temple doomed!"
Taking a step forward, the beast made sure to listen closely. "What did you call me?"
Several monks backed away with wide eys and hushed voices, but thei oldest one remained in place.
"Golden eyes like yours marks the birth of an unnatural being foreign to even Heaven itself." His voice sounded like tree branches scratching each other in the wind. "To have a temple invaded by your presence leaves us – and this village, with virtually nothing."
The monk's anger rolled off the beast like water on a duck. A 'Heretic'. What he was was something called a 'Heretic'. And to be 'unnatural to Heaven itself'. Surely that referred to his birth as the Earth's child, rather than a celestial being.
"A 'Heretic'..." He walked past the monks, paying no mind to their rush to clear a path for him. In the village's centre, several villagers suddenly appeared from the disappearing fog, surrounded by others welcoming them back from their mysterious disappearance. When the excitement died down, their attention turned to the Heretic. One by one, they knelt to the ground, hands and feet digging into the dirt.
Behind the Heretic, a monk admonished, "You dare kowtow a Heretic like him?!"
A woman rose her head. The Heretic noted her resemblance to the child he met earlier.
"Ever since we've cohabited with him, he's done more than you were ever capable of." A huddle of other villagers agreed with her.
"What's your chanting good for?"
"You can't even be bothered to do the simplest tasks without receiving patronage!"
"He's more a sage than you claim to be."
"Praying to gods doesn't help!"
"Who needs 'em. His power rivals them!"
"Equals, more like it!"
The Heretic listened to their anger, less out of satisfaction in their support of him, and more out of one simple curiosity.
"None of you... are aware of if I have a name?"
His question silenced them, and the same woman from before shook her head. "We weren't aware if you had one." She was earnest, careful in her words. "We assumed you kept it to yourself."
Villagers whispered to one another beneath her confession, exchanging awkward glances their anger towards the monks forgotten. The woman kowtowed deeper than before, her forehead touching the dirt.
"If you have one, we'll listen to it. We want to know the name of the person that's lived beside us so long."
The Heretic stared at her for what seemed like ages.
"I don't have one." Before more awkward words could be exchanged, he spoke up. "But now, I do."
"Then, what is it? We'll engrave it in our minds."
The Heretic turned to the monks, his smile back in its rightful place. "A being more a sage than these useless monks. And someone unnatural to Heaven, but with all their power, right? " He jumped behind the head monk, poking his head with the tip of his claw. "A great sage equal to Heaven.The Great Sage Equalling Heaven."