Chapter 1: It Began With A Kiss

The long-awaited wedding of the town magistrate's dear son had become a funeral.

A sumptuous wedding feast had been prepared; the town was bright and beautiful beneath the colorful flags and resplendent flowers that had been used as decorations. A splendid dress had been carried to the bride's home. Vinh Phuc, the magistrate's son, was about to marry Dong Tu, the eldest daughter of the Luu family. This meant the most well-reputed dojo in the district would firmly be under the magistrate's control--and that the magistrate would finally be freed from the doubt of whether the Luu family, who had always appeared to run a well-respected dojo, was actually connected to a secret, criminal underworld: the Whispered World.

Luu Dong Tu was one of the most beautiful girls in the region, and a skilled martial artist, but that wasn't why the magistrate's spoiled son wanted her. Vinh Phuc and Dong Tu had met by chance, and after receiving a sudden (but well-deserved) slap from Dong Tu, he had decided that he would have her as his wife, whatever the cost...if only so that he could force this unruly girl to bring him warm towels and wash his feet every day.

But that was not to be: on the day of the wedding, Dong Tu died. Well and truly. Cold. Stiff. Dead.

The bride's family had obviously been trying to conceal something: they had stopped allowing the bridegroom's family to see her about a week before. Only when the magistrate made a fuss did they confess that Dong Tu had gone to guard a delivery being sent to the neighboring district, and that she would not return until closer to the wedding day.

Believing Dong Tu's father had lied to help his daughter flee the arranged marriage, the magistrate seized the family's property: the Luu's dojo was surrounded by muscled henchmen for five days, the soldiers waiting impatiently for the family to give them a reason to strike. They would kill everyone if given the chance, under the pretense of preventing an uprising against the government: the magistrate would not have himself be made into a fool.

The shipment Dong Tu had escorted arrived safely, and the recipient confirmed that Dong Tu had begun the journey home, assuring the magistrate that she had left in a hurry so she could make it home in time for the wedding. But five days later, there was no sign of the delivery team. The transport package had arrived, but the team had disappeared.

The magistrate's soldiers combed through all the neighboring villages, but came back empty-handed. It was as though they had evaporated into thin air.

Dong Tu's father swore on his life that she would return before the wedding, and resolutely went on with the wedding preparations as if nothing had happened. Miraculously enough, on the morning of the wedding, the ten guards sent with the delivery returned with Dong Tu still among them.

They could not hide their sickly, sallow skin, and several members had vomited upon arrival, but neither they nor Dong Tu--who was covered in dried blood, though none of them had suffered any serious injury--offered any explanation. Instead she quietly washed the blood from her body, put on her wedding dress and makeup, and prepared herself.

The magistrate's council finally released the order to surround the Luu's dojo, and the marriage was set to proceed as planned.

Just as the ceremony was about to start, Dong Tu said she was feeling lightheaded and needed a sip of tea. With only one sip her face drained of color and she swayed, her beautiful gown fluttering around her; she hit the floor before anyone could catch her, and no matter how hard the family and guests tried to revive her, she would not wake.

Dong Tu's already sickly pale face had drained of all color by the time the physician arrived. Her lips had faded to a chilling gray, her breathing had stopped, and he could feel no pulse.

"The bride is dead!" He announced. "Death by poison."

Panic swept the room, the guests dropping their cups or else pushing them away, terrified that they would be next.

"Everyone, please! It looks as though she was poisoned a few days ago," The physician called over the ruckus. Vinh Phuc rushed forward and felt the cooling of Dong Tu's motionless body with his own hands, and once he realized it wasn't some trick he furiously demanded the punishment of the whole dojo. His bride had clearly committed suicide!

As Vinh Phuc continued to yell furiously, dark flakes like black ash began to fall from the ceiling. People leaned in to look as the flakes collected on Dong Tu's gown, reaching out to touch them, to determine what on earth they were--and found it to be snow.

The guests looked up in confusion to see a man in black sitting calmly on the crossbeam. He appeared to be tall and strong even sitting, dressed in layers of black clothing, with numerous small, metal tubes sewn vertically into his black coat as what looked to be armoring. In his black-gloved hands he held a metal staff. His face could have been attractive, had it not been hidden by a blackened silver mask that allowed only his eyes to be seen, and he watched the wedding party below with a cold, emotionless glare, meeting their puzzled gazes just as coldly.

He didn't even flinch when a large scorpion slowly emerged from his coat and crawled across his shoulder, its tiny steps flicking those same snowflakes from his coat to float down upon guests looking up.

Snowflakes as black as obsidian.

No one had seen him enter. He did not speak, nor make any aggressive movement. For all they knew he could have been there from the very beginning, just watching. Yet somehow they all knew his appearance, his very presence there, was an omen of death.

Fear struck the guests again, that brief moment of calm turning once more into panic and disarray. The mysterious man glided gracefully to the ground amidst the madness. He considered the corpse (which had already begun to stiffen), turned, and strolled toward the door without another glance.

Both the magistrate's and the Luu families unsheathed their swords in preparation for a fight, but before they could make a move, one of the guards who had arrived with Dong Tu shouted:

"Don't! Don't touch him! You'll die!"

Both clans stopped and stared at the stranger intently. Although this mysterious visitor was not equipped with a sword, within his outfit the silver sheen of scales could be seen. The closer they looked, the more stray parts of animals they could make out, all wriggling and writhing; large black spiders could just be seen swaying within the shadowy darkness of his coat.

The whole room was silent, and the guests parted like water to create a path. The only sound was snakes hissing as he passed, and a communal shiver made its way through the guests: the air around him was freezing, surrounding his body with a faint, hazy cloud of steam as icy air met warm, and he left a trail of glittering black snowflakes in his wake.

"That man is...he is...he was with the mutants in the forest. He was the one who killed Dong Tu," The same guard explained once the other man was gone.

The physician cried out in shock and recoiled from Dong Tu's body as an inky black snowflake formed on her neck.

Duong Kien Minh--another martial arts master and Vinh Phuc's teacher--recognized the mark.

"I know this mark," He said, panic turning him breathless. "People say there is only one man in this world who leaves a mark like that, a...ruthless killer. He can kill hundreds of people just by flicking his hand, leaving behind the same mark on each dead body. He is the only person capable of using this poison. That man is definitely--"

# # #

Five days earlier, however, no one had expected such tragedy at the wedding. And five days earlier, Dong Tu was still very much alive.

"The hunchback can fight?"

Shock shot through Dong Tu like lightning. An elderly man, his deformed child, and his poor wife had appeared while she was lost in thought, silently lamenting her upcoming wedding, and begged the protective escort for food. Their pitiful appearance had prodded at her already heavy heart, and they had stopped to give him what little they could spare.

Dong Tu had assumed the man was old and frail, but without warning he reached out and grabbed a fellow guard, swinging him easily above his head like a sack of straw. The hunch on the man's back was like a turtle's shell, as hard as steel, and as a fight broke out between he and the guards, he used it as a shield. She had also assumed they must be bandits, but she quickly realized he was far too skilled--skilled enough to use a single pair of simple bronze bells to beat all ten members of their armed escort.

Even the deformed child, scaly-faced and lizard-like in appearance, was able to hit targets with a precision that should have required many more years of training than possible at his age. His nails were filed into sharp claws, and after each blow, he flicked out his tongue to lap up the blood.

The woman accompanying them did not bother to participate in the fight. She only stood there, lazily waving the fan in her hand as though she were attending a second-rate field match, and would express mild disappointment when Dong Tu missed. She watched on, yawning occasionally, as the two flashy mutants defeated the ten Luu guards.

Her escort group was beaten and bruised when they reached the middle of the wood. Only Dong Tu could stand up straight because, curiously, every time the other mutants wanted to strike her, the woman had screamed out, "Ease up, watch out for her face!"

So while Dong Tu was beaten, like a cat playing with a mouse, they never hit her hard enough to do any visible damage. Eventually her exhaustion did get the best of her, and she sank to the ground while the two mutants laughed and mocked her.

"Who are you?" She demanded. "If you're going to kill me, kill me. We are on our way back home, and there is no more gold or silver to steal!" Perhaps, deep down, she had wanted to meet mountain bandits...and if she was killed in the middle of the woods, she wouldn't have to marry Vinh Phuc, and her family would be spared the consequences of the magistrate believing they had helped her escape.

"I am not a thief! I don't enjoy killing," The woman snapped. "This girl doesn't even know who we are! Does she live under a rock?" She huffed to the others, offended.

"If she had known, she wouldn't have played with us for this long," The hunchback chuckled. He pulled his shirt up to wipe the sweat off his face, cheerfully wiped the bells clean until they shone again, and then squinted at Dong Tu. "The girl is pretty good. She'd be going places in a few years, if she kept it up."

"What a shame," The reptilian man lamented. "But Switch wants her look today. Besides, I'm bored with her current face."

It was then that Dong Tu realized who the three strangers were. The showy woman was Switch, the Skinwalker, which meant the other two had to be Leatherback and Anole. They were three of the eighteen infamous wandering mutants, collectively known as the Monstrous Eighteen.

The Monstrous Eighteen were strange in appearance, wielded extraordinary martial arts abilities, and moved in secret, so no one knew their true whereabouts. Some were good, some evil, but all were dangerous. Dong Tu had heard the stories, but had never thought she'd ever meet just one. Now she was faced with three.

Switch approached Dong Tu and inspected her face.

"Not bad...but this face is so homely. It doesn't match my style." Switch scratched at her own cheeks; wherever she touched, her skin peeled off like dry plaster and one eye drooped as though it had melted. Switch had been born without a face, Dong Tu recalled. She abducted people, and used her chi—her innate power—to change her appearance and steal the face of those she had kidnapped. Switch must have wanted to test Dong Tu's power, and to steal her face, too.

Dong Tu looked closely at Switch's current face, guessing that it would soon morph into her own. Switch always chose a beautiful girl, and her current face wasn't so bad; but it was old, and had started to crack and peel away. Even if she'd had a choice, that wasn't the kind of face Dong Tu would have chosen for herself.

She took a deep breath. Now more than ever she felt like a drowning person clinging to a thin branch.

"Beautiful lady, do you want my face? You can have it. Even better, you can be me and marry into a wealthy family and share in their immense riches," She offered sweetly. "It will be a luxurious life."

"Why? Are you being forced to marry someone? I can have gold and jewelry whenever I want, so I have no need to marry."

Crap. Dong Tu took a second to recover, and tried another avenue.

"But I'm already married off. If you walk around with my face, you'll be arrested! Can't you just pretend to be me until the wedding is over?"

The three of them laughed again. They weren't concerned by the thought of the military chasing them, and they didn't care about Dong Tu's situation. But when Switch started dipping into her power to change her face, Anole stopped her.

"Wait a minute. This girl is fun! Let's bring her home tonight, we need a drinking buddy!"

The hunchback cheerfully agreed.

That night, Dong Tu found herself huddled with the three mutants in a tattered hut nearby, drinking while they caroused and discussed various, drunken nonsense. The ten bruised and injured guards were locked up in the stables behind the hut, and she wanted to help them, but there was nothing she could do while at the mercy of her freakish captors.

Leatherback was not as old as he'd claimed to be, she learned as the night went on. He did have a hunched back, and when he took off his shirt, the skin there was rough and had the texture of a tortoise shell. He wasn't attractive (to put it kindly), but he had gentle eyes--though when he drank, he spat out endless insults about the other mutants. He also began telling the other mutants' stories, of how they had been rejected by their people, and how they had banded together for companionship. They were brilliant at martial arts, but the eighteen of them were only seen as misshapen freaks, cast out by society.

Dong Tu relaxed in their company as they drank, and eventually she began to see them as human beneath their scarred exteriors.

Anole was a child born out of wedlock, the son of an official. The official's main wife had tried to kill him, an unwanted bastard; but the family's servants took pity on him, taking him away and hiding him in a bamboo basket. As he grew, the tight weave confined him, disfiguring his limbs and muscles. His deformed hands and feet made his movements clumsy, and as he grew older, his permanently disfigured body turned grotesque. But despite all his defects and the danger to his life, he yearned to discover his true identity.

Switch used to be a faceless child, a genderless outcast. The face she wore was beautiful, but the face she'd been born with had terrified those around her. As the hunchback spoke, her hand clenched around her cup, and she drained cup after cup trying to ignore his recounting of her ugly past. When she reached the point of being truly sloshed, she relaxed enough to let her voice deepen to an almost manly pitch, giving credence to the hunchback's story.

Then Dong Tu was asked about her own story. Because Anole was eager to learn more about his noble identity, when he heard the word magistrate mentioned he began asking who Vinh Phuc was.

Dong Tu said, "Vinh Phuc is pampered and spoiled, and that's all you need to know."

Dong Tu hadn't known who Vinh Phuc was when they met; just that she had only ever seen him surrounded by servants. Whenever he said anything, they all agreed with him, nodding their heads vigorously. The two had tried to buy the same horse at the market, and Vinh Phuc had 'accidentally' touched Dong Tu where he should not have--which had resulted in him receiving the fateful 'slap from heaven.'

By the time Dong Tu finished her own story, the three mutants were asleep. Her first instinct was to take advantage of their drunken slumbers and flee, but something stopped her. Despite their bizarre appearances, these three mutants seemed more pitiful than scary...and she herself was pitiful. She felt a strange sense of sympathy with them, and rather than escape, she pulled a blanket up to cover the hunchback. She got up to pour herself a cup of water--

And at that moment the door was kicked open, revealing a new man. He wore all black clothing that covered every inch of his skin and a silver and black mask to conceal his face. An unseasonable chill washed over the room as he entered, and a few odd, black flakes swirled through the cold air.

"Who is this?" He demanded when he laid eyes on Dong Tu. "Get her out!"

"That is my new face. Don't touch it," Switch responded, rousing from her sleep.

There was something about the man that struck visible fear and discomfort into the mutants: wherever he went, Anole and Switch would shrink away.

The man in black leaned in and peered more closely at Dong Tu.

"Too ugly," He said. "Since when do you like this kind of face?"

Anger flared to life in Dong Tu, hot and fast, the girl too drunk to control her impulses; she reached out and jerked down his mask.

"You think I'm ugly? You're the one hiding your face! How pretty could you be?"

She immediately regretted it.

While she had expected someone disfigured and hideous, this new stranger was, in fact, surprisingly handsome. His bone structure was chiseled and strong, his eyes bright and his lashes thick. Dong Tu wasn't able to recover herself that time, and gaped at him for what felt like an eternity. The man frowned and hurriedly covered his face with his hand.

"Your face--you don't have to hide it," Dong Tu murmured with a shake of her head, her face red and her eyes wide. After meeting three weird mutants and hearing tales all her life about the Monstrous Eighteen, facing such a handsome so-called mutant was completely unexpected.

"Wrong!" Anole called with a smirk, but despite the smirk he chewed on his claws, jealous to see that Dong Tu was blushing.

Switch shook her head, snapping out, "This idiot!"

The last to wake, Leatherback managed to open his eyes, the lids heavy with drink. It took a moment for the scene to register, but when it did he hurriedly shouted, "Dong Tu, stay away from him!"

But he was too late. Dong Tu and the man in black had both bent over to pick up the mask at the same time, and while her hand brushed against his black glove, her lips lightly grazed the man's cheek in passing.

Like a fleeting kiss.

Like a breeze....

They had just met for the first time, but as her lips touched his cheek she felt as if she'd been shocked. Except...something was wrong. That couldn't be the kind of heart-pounding thrill she'd read about, not when the initial jolt kept burning. Dong Tu went limp, her body numb, and she collapsed helplessly to the ground.

All three mutants stared in shock

"You two just kissed!" They all shrieked in tandem like preteen girls.

"My new face is ruined!" Switch cried, dramatically bereft.

Anole crawled closer and watched Dong Tu, eyes wide with disbelief.

"You just touched...you touched him!"

Dong Tu couldn't