The instant his strength returned, Li Ming grinned and dissolved into black mist, streaking toward the Qin frontier with Kreacher clinging close inside the storm of shadow.
In his left hand: the Black Book of the Dead, its bindings pulsing as they tightened his leash on the scarab swarms. In his right: the staff reforged into a scythe, a katana blade fused through the haft, curving inward like a sneer. Over his shoulders: a hooded cloak. On his face: the assassin's skull mask.
Kreacher stared, wide-eyed with something close to worship. Hood. Mask. Death-book. If only a few crows wheeled overhead, it would have been perfect. Instead, a hundred dementors fanned out, frost hissing across the sky. Kreacher shivered. Too cold for birds.
Li Ming tugged at the link, and millions of buried scarabs stirred, chitin rattling like rain on stone. He rose to lead them—and stopped, hovering.
Right. He had no idea where anything was.
He scratched his head. "Kreacher, map? Maybe a handy road sign?"
"Master," Kreacher said nervously, "Kreacher has never been here. Perhaps His Majesty Zhao Zheng—"
"Nah." Li Ming shrugged. "We'll just start trouble. Sooner or later the onmyōji will come running to stop it. I catch one, peel a memory, we trace who slipped into Zhao's ranks. And if I've got time, I'll craft a few pet wraiths from local volunteers."
He flung out his hand. The order cracked through the swarm. The ground seethed.
He floated forward, scythe on his shoulder, dementors orbiting like frozen moons.
Far off, Zhao Zheng saw the black tide and frowned. "If memory serves, I already purged the onmyōji in that direction."
His bodyguard nodded gravely while thinking, Master Li wants revenge—fine. But why send a plague of beetles at a normal city? He couldn't guess the truth: Li Ming had picked a heading at random. He wasn't hunting cities—he was baiting the enemy.
Zhao didn't know the plan, but the swarm told him enough. He turned to camp. "Open the armories. Issue ammunition. When Li Ming stirs the island to move, we strike."
Li Ming, meanwhile, had other paranoias. He'd seen too many ninja flicks to trust the ground. If these ninjas could crawl through earth or timber, the last thing he wanted was a sword sliding up under his ribs.
So he ordered the scarabs: no grass, no stumps, no stones. If it wasn't dirt, eat it.
The beetles obeyed with zeal. They chewed rock, deadwood, metal scraps. A vanguard tunneled below like augers, devouring as they went. Field mice and worms fled skyward in blind panic. Game animals stampeded from the hills in a brown river, hooves drumming like war drums.
From above, it looked like a wildlife exodus. From the city ahead, it looked like a warning siren. When deer burst past the outer markets, every soul behind the walls knew: something was coming.
The clever packed fast. Riders bolted. Carts rattled. A few fools ran into the forests—straight into the oncoming tide.
Li Ming smiled thinly. Delivered wraith-material. Don't mind if I do.
Sushi Kingdom cities stacked people in rings. The lord's keep at the core, stone walls around it. Wealth closer in, poor further out. The outermost "wall" was often a palisade—wooden fencing in a military cosplay.
The one ahead looked no different. Not that a real wall would've helped. Li Ming had teeth—millions of them. Steel would vanish under mandibles.
But breaching wasn't the goal. Not today.
He sent scarabs skirting the markets, chewing through shanties, raising half-maimed unfortunates as wraiths. He bottled them in a gourd modeled after the nested prisons of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, its interior stretched wide enough for a thousand shrieking souls.
When that was done, he loosed the dementors in squads across rooftops—feeding, watching. The trick was simple: normal people couldn't see dementors. If someone flinched at a shadow of cold, they weren't normal. Onmyōji. Ninja. Prey.
But Wángcái returned after a long sweep: nothing. Not a single occult watcher in the walls.
Li Ming clicked his tongue, spat to break the bad luck, then ordered the swarm to ring the city like a living moat. Don't breach, just let the parapets see the black tide waiting.
Revenge was the point. Wraith-harvesting was a side hustle. He didn't want dead cities—he wanted telegraphs. Wanted mayors screaming for help. Wanted the imperial court to commit its best occultists here, together, where he could crack them one by one.
Crude plan. Effective plan.
And the Emperor had no good play.
Let the beetles starve the city? The telegraphs were plaintext; half the world already knew a swarm had laid siege. If he let citizens rot, he'd be damned in history.
Ride to the rescue? Even a fool could see the swarm was controlled. Walls wouldn't stop this. Only occultists might.
So the Emperor would send them.
Exactly what Li Ming wanted.
Kreacher could heal in the Fountain of Life. But healing took time, and Li Ming didn't want time—he wanted revenge.
He wasn't a "ten years later" kind of guy. If he couldn't crush you today, he'd make sure every tomorrow was a migraine: phone calls at dawn, firecrackers under your toilet seat. Sit, boom, lesson learned.
And there was the other clock—the one he couldn't see. He had no idea when the quantum charge inside him might start bleeding off, dragging him back to the Marvel world mid-sentence. Carry his hate across dimensions? Let it calcify into a heart-demon? Not an option.
So he checked his new weapon. The staff had become something stranger: a backwards-curved scythe, katana fused into its crown. Could it still channel magic with a blade jammed through the runes? If it held, he'd pour healing into Kreacher right now. Faster recovery for the elf, free practice for himself.
The answer: yes, with caveats. The wood was still tough. The arrays still conducted. But the katana had pinned one of the core sigils. Tugging it free at the wrong angle would shear the lattice—best case, the amplification dropped dead; worst case, the staff shattered. He wasn't far enough along to risk that. Without the staff, his strength halved.
He grimaced. It worked, but it looked wrong. Definitely not his aesthetic. Still… maybe he could ease the blade out.
He pinched the hilt.
A cold suction yanked at his soul.
Li Ming flinched and let go.
He steadied himself and opened mage-sight. The katana was a prison. Inside prowled a black cat spirit: upright on two legs, ears sharp, grin saw-toothed, twin tails lashing.
A nekomata.
Old texts said they could talk, charm, even appear as women. This one was feral, hollowed out by hunger. He tried the tongue of the dead. Nothing. Either the thing wasn't human enough to comprehend it, or its mind was too far gone.
Which left a question: how had the assassin wielded it so cleanly? Li Ming had to resist the pull with both hands. The rooftop fight hadn't screamed the assassin is stronger than you. So what was the trick?
His gaze drifted to the skull mask he'd tossed aside.
At first he'd kept it because it hadn't even smudged under hellfire. Rare material. Salvage later. He wasn't planning to make skulls his brand. But the mask and the blade felt like a set. No scabbard. Comes with a facepiece. Cross-category accessories. Sure.
He studied the inside. Crude outside, intricate within: sigils nested like mazes, nets woven tight. Enough to let even a novice carry the katana without bleeding out their soul. On his face, it turned the sword into a usable tool.
He pulled the mask on and tried again. This time he eased the katana an inch free.
A crack lanced through one of the staff's arrays.
"Seriously?" He froze. He'd been careful. Then he understood—the katana's field. Its anti-magic edge was scraping the staff's glyphs raw. Each millimeter drawn was like dragging a razor across his own veins.
The amplification still held, but striking with the staff again would collapse it. The weapon had chosen its retirement.
He set the fragile scythe across his knees and sighed. It still worked for channeling. That would do. Back in the Marvel world he'd forge a new focus. Until then, he could keep the blade for people who needed quick, sharp endings.
He poured healing into Kreacher through the night.
By morning, Kreacher bounded from the Fountain, whole again. He eyed the cloak, the skull, the scythe. His ears drooped. "Master… are you becoming Death?"
Li Ming blinked, followed his gaze, and winced. Cloak. Skull. Scythe. A look.
"Not intentional," he muttered. "But… yeah. That is a look."
He shook it off and carved a portal. "Up. We've got reinforcements to recruit and debts to collect."
Kreacher trotted after him into the City of the Dead, still unsure what counted as "reinforcements."
They stepped into sun-blasted ruin. Desert unrolled in every direction.
Li Ming squinted, smacked his lips like a sommelier. "Sand. Vintage sand. All sand."
Behind him, Kreacher's eye twitched. Perhaps the Fountain had soaked his master's brain.
Li Ming tapped the ground with the scythe.
The desert boiled. Scarabs surged from beneath, clicking and hissing.
Not enough.
He ferried the first wave through a portal to the Qin–Sushi border and buried them there. Then he split into black vapor and streaked across the wastes, Kreacher tight at his heels, hunting pyramids. Tomb after tomb, he roused new hives.
One scarab was nothing. Thousands were manageable. But millions? That was a sea—enough to drown spells, cities, armies. He couldn't take them back to the Marvel side anyway. Better to use them now than hoard them.
By dusk his mana guttered. He dragged one last hive through a portal and collapsed cross-legged inside Qin lines to breathe and refill.
Zhao Zheng noticed. He always noticed. He plucked up one scarab himself. The insect behaved, but the jagged mandibles said everything: not a pet. Never alone.
He carried it toward Li Ming—then stopped. Hundreds of dementors wheeled overhead, black halo around the sorcerer.
Zhao's eyes narrowed. Then he smiled and turned away.
He understood the swarm's flaw: its master. Cut Li Ming down and the tide reverted to instinct—manageable for an onmyōji with skill. But as long as Li Ming lived, who in this world had more authority over death and vermin than the man in the skull mask, book in one hand and scythe in the other?