Chapter 199

For a moment, I can picture a line of people in front of the door of my house. Young people with swords at their belts, one behind the other, waiting their turn with the patience of someone who has come from very far away just to look for me.

But the stone path that surrounds this house fits two people if they go sideways, so the first ones take up the path, the next ones the dock, and from there on everyone else has to wait on the water.

And then I can picture the boats.

Boats around the island, on all four sides, full of people sitting with their arms crossed and their eyes fixed on my wall, while the boatmen of half the Rong make the best deal of their lives charging for the wait.

In my other life, something like that would have gotten a take-a-number machine at the entrance and a sign asking people to wait their turn, and, with enough business sense, someone could even have made a fortune out of it.

But here, what I would have is all of them wanting exactly the same thing, which is to be able to say somewhere that they defeated a girl sitting in a wheelchair, and only because that girl knows someone they detest.

The shiver at that thought starts at the nape of my neck and doesn’t stop until it reaches the bottom of my back.

“Master Mu”, I tell her. “It can’t be as bad as you’re painting it.”

It should be a statement, but the end of the sentence sounds far too much like a question.

Master Mu sighs after hearing me.

“Never underestimate what some people are capable of doing for a little reputation or fame”, she tells me. “Or what others would be capable of doing to avenge what, in their eyes, is a slight against their own.”

Less than an hour ago she told me about a list you climb by clambering over the corpses of the people you face along the way, so I have no trouble at all believing her.

She taps her shoulder with her closed fan.

“That was precisely the reason why, back then, I neither asked you nor insisted on taking you with me to be my disciple”, she continues.

I go still at those words, because I remember that day.

I remember her slumped in a chair, after more than an hour of questions, saying that she was considering kidnapping me. And I remember what she said afterward, when Lianhua had already prepared herself for the worst: that she had no intention of doing it because, given my condition, she would be doing me a disservice by taking me somewhere it would work against me.

That day I didn’t ask her what place she meant, but now she is describing it to me.

“Whoever I one day decide to officially name as my disciple will find herself under enormous pressure”, she tells me. “And that pressure will involve, among other things, a great many fights.”

She looks at me, then lowers her gaze to my legs, motionless beneath my skirt, and raises it again.

“And no offense intended, but you are not the best candidate to be a combat cultivator”, she finishes.

I don’t take offense at her words, because to take offense I would have to hear something I haven’t known for a very long time.

“I completely agree”, I answer her, in the same tone in which I would agree with someone who told me that water is wet.

Master Mu doesn’t seem surprised by my words. She doesn’t raise an eyebrow, nor does she stop to check whether I mean it. She simply nods, like someone accepting an answer she was already expecting, and goes on.

“Knowing you, I know that in a real fight, a fight with everything at stake, you will be capable of winning against any cultivator at your own level”, she tells me. “Even if you have to do it crawling along the ground and using methods any other cultivator would consider shameful.”

She opens her fan a couple of ribs and closes it again.

“But being my disciple wouldn’t be that”, she continues. “It would be a constant trickle of rivals challenging you to public duels. And for that kind of fight, your condition simply doesn’t allow you the kind of mobility that is indispensable.”

I sigh at that merciless description, because I already knew I was never going to be what you would call an ace in combat. I have known it since I first suspected that my condition had no cure, and I have taken it into account in every plan I’ve made since then.

But it is one thing to know it, and quite another for someone of Master Mu’s level to look me in the face and tell me, with all the delicacy she is capable of, that I am basically a survival fighter.

And on top of that, she meant the part about crawling along the ground and the shameful methods as a compliment.

So I set my pride aside where it will be least in the way, and get to what matters.

“From what you said earlier, have you already taken care of it?” I ask her, not wanting to keep digging into my lack of combat ability.

“Yes”, she answers. “It has already been taken care of. From this moment on, no one will be able to connect the House of the Long Journey with me.”

I don’t ask her how, because she has already told me that it falls among the Tower’s secrets, and because this woman certainly hasn’t crossed two continents to leave a job half done.

But she hasn’t finished.

“Even so, that information was on record in the Tower of the Five Dragons for several months”, she continues. “And it isn’t impossible that someone found out and, in turn, sold it to someone else.”

It takes me a moment to process it, because it is exactly the kind of sentence that, in my other life, arrived in a letter from a bank, usually saying that they had suffered a security breach and had fixed it, but that they couldn’t guarantee my data hadn’t been leaked, and that they apologized for the inconvenience.

But I set that thought aside and ask Master Mu the question that truly matters.

“Does that mean someone could still show up looking for trouble?” I ask her.

“I can’t rule it out completely”, she answers.

I snort after hearing her.

“Well, if someone shows up looking for trouble, since nothing can be proven anymore, I’ll simply have Lianhua throw them in the river”, I tell her. “And since I’m no longer connected to you, it won’t cost you any reputation at all.”

To my left, Lianhua says nothing, but she doesn’t raise any objection either, and coming from Lianhua, in a situation that concerns my safety, that is practically enthusiasm.

The corner of Master Mu’s mouth twitches after hearing my words.

“That is a good mindset”, she tells me. “But for that, I first want to check what Lianhua’s level is.”

The author's official page is the source of this chapter; this version was taken without permission, while the posted work supports its creator.

After that, she stops looking at me, turns her head and looks directly at Lianhua across the table, in no hurry at all.

“We will have a small training bout”, she tells her. “To see your level.”

It is clearly not a question, so Lianhua rises from the bench, smooths her clothes with a brief gesture, folds her hands in front of her and bows.

“It will be an honor to receive your guidance, Master Mu”, she says.

Master Mu smiles as she watches her bow, rises with her fan in hand and starts walking toward the most open part of the courtyard, the part far from the row of posts, where there is nothing but stone all the way to the wall, since it is an area I don’t normally need to reach.

Lianhua follows her three paces behind, and I stay at the head of the table with half the scene over my shoulder, until Xia gets up, takes hold of the back of my chair and turns me just enough so that I can see everything without twisting my neck.

Afterward she doesn’t go back to the bench, but stays standing beside me, with one hand on the armrest.

“Wen”, she says to me in a low voice. “Nothing serious is going to happen, is it?”

“I very much doubt someone of Master Mu’s level would let a simple training bout get out of hand”, I answer her.

I say it with considerably more confidence than I have, because accidents happen, and the woman walking ahead of Lianhua has spent years searching for the Treasures with which she could complete her Celestial Fusion, which means that between the two of them there are, at the very least, three steps of difference.

But Xia nods at my words, asks no further questions, and doesn’t take her hand away either.

Master Mu stops in the middle of that stretch of the courtyard and turns around.

She has her closed fan in her right hand and her left behind her back, and she is standing exactly as she used to when she waited, in my study at the Palace, for me to finish a stroke.

Lianhua stops a few paces from her and bows again.

Master Mu answers her with a brief flick of her fan, upward, that needs no translation.

And Lianhua vanishes.

Not really, but where she was there is no longer anyone, and by the time my eyes find her she is already on top of Master Mu, with both Shuang Bi Shou out of her sleeves and her eyes closed. I didn’t see her draw them, just as I have never once seen her draw them.

The first blade comes in from above.

The fan meets it on the flat with a sharp crack, and the blade sails past through a spot where there is no one.

The second comes in from below, without any pause in between, and the fan is already there.

And the third, and the fourth, and from then on I can no longer count them, because Lianhua attacks at a speed I can only follow by the sound. One sharp crack after another, so close together that it sounds like someone knocking on a door in a tremendous hurry.

At the same time, I realize that Master Mu hasn’t moved her feet since the start of the fight. She only moves her wrist.

The fan rises, falls and turns, and each time a blade arrives, the fan has arrived first, effortlessly and without flourish, while her left hand stays where it was.

And I recognize that routine, because I have seen it in so many manga and anime that I would have a hard time picking just one to compare the scene with: Master Mu isn’t fighting, she is correcting Lianhua’s fighting style.

Then the ground cracks with a short noise, stone against stone, and a sharp gray spike bursts out of the paving, right where Master Mu has her feet.

Except they are no longer there, because at some point she has moved aside a step, just one, to the side and without looking at the ground, while the Earth Dragon Spike shoots up through the gap she has left without so much as grazing the silk hem of her robe.

A few heartbeats later it crumbles on its own, like a dry clod of earth, and by then Lianhua is already attacking again.

Another spike, and another step.

Another one, and another step just as short as the ones before.

And what gives me goosebumps isn’t that she dodges them, it’s when she does it. Because she doesn’t step aside when the spike comes out, she steps aside before, when there is still nothing to dodge.

Beside me, Xia’s hand tightens on the armrest, and Lianhua, meanwhile, keeps her eyes closed.

She doesn’t look where she puts her feet, or where her own spikes come out, or where the wall is. And when Master Mu slips out from in front of her with one of those steps, she doesn’t turn her head to look for her, because she doesn’t need to, since the moment the fight began she activated the Vision of Horus.

So right now Lianhua isn’t seeing this courtyard from where her eyes are. She is seeing it from above, with Master Mu, the magnolia, the table and the two of us laid out beneath her like pieces on a board.

When she explained it to me that first day, after learning it, I thought that was the kind of advantage that decides fights.

But today I discover that it depends quite a lot on who you use it against.

What I do notice throughout the whole fight, though, is that small sparks leap from Master Mu again and again, and they seem to incinerate something invisible in the air.

I know what it is, because I know how Lianhua fights. A thread of the Invisible Loom, short so that it comes out quickly, and the hands of the Myriad carrying it through the air to an ankle, to a wrist or to the fan itself. Not to hold, because none of that holds someone like her, but to hinder for an instant, which is all a blade needs.

But the sparks leap from Master Mu toward patches of air in which there seems to be nothing, and for an instant, in that empty air, a very fine line of light appears, burns from end to end and goes out.

And the worst part is that Master Mu doesn’t even glance in that direction when it happens, because Lianhua never stops.

She uses everything. The blades in front, so that the fan gets no rest. The spike from below, in the middle of an attack, so that the step comes at the worst possible moment. And the thread from behind all the while. And then all of that again in another order, and again in a different one, searching for the combination she hasn’t tried yet.

And against all of it, the same thing always stands in the way: the fan, a step and a spark.

Lianhua’s breathing can already be heard from the table, while on Master Mu not even the hairpin has moved.

I don’t know how long the bout has lasted, although long enough for the stones in that part of the courtyard to fill with little mounds of gray grit, one for each spike.

And then, in Lianhua’s next cycle, I notice that something has changed, although it takes me a couple more spikes to understand what.

The earlier ones came out trying to strike, and these don’t. These come out when the two blades are closing off one of Master Mu’s sides, always the same one, so that the step with which she moves aside always goes toward the other.

Lianhua has finally realized that Master Mu knows where each spike is going to come out before it does, so instead of continuing to try to surprise her with something that cannot surprise her, she has decided to use it, because if Master Mu is going to step aside no matter what, the only thing left to decide is in which direction.

Step by step, Master Mu circles around Lianhua, one step with each spike, always toward the same side, while Lianhua lets her go without correcting her. With each one she ends up a little more to the side, and then a little more behind.

Until I see Lianhua end up with Master Mu exactly at her back, and she doesn’t turn around.

She stays as she is, with both blades low and her back to Master Mu, and anyone looking down on this courtyard from the top of the wall would see a woman who has just lost sight of her opponent.

But Master Mu has no way of knowing that isn’t the case, because she has no way of knowing that Lianhua can see her right now just as well as when she had her in front of her, since the whole time she has been watching from above.

I do know it, and that’s why my fingers are digging into the armrests.

A spark leaps at the height of Master Mu’s left side to burn a thread, only this time Lianhua is already moving.

Not after the spark, but with it, because she spins on one foot, so fast that her skirt flutters around her, and one of the Shuang Bi Shou drives in a straight line toward the exact point from which the bolt has just come.

And that is when I understand, half a heartbeat late, that the thread was only there to be burned.

Because the bolt that comes out to burn a thread has to come out from somewhere. And for as long as that release lasts, which is a thousandth of a second, or perhaps less, maybe no other bolt can come out.

Lianhua hasn’t found a gap in that defense the whole fight, so she is betting everything on that act forcing the defense to open one for her.

The blade goes in where the spark came out, inside the guard, through a spot that nothing had managed to get near in all this time.

And this time the fan doesn’t come out to meet it, and the air escapes me when I see that she has done it.

But in that very instant my breath catches again, because the blade stops, though not against the fan.

Master Mu has finally brought her left hand out from behind her back, and she has the edge caught between her index and middle fingers, without squeezing, like someone taking a sheet of paper handed to her across a table.

Lianhua pulls, and the blade doesn’t move.

For an instant the two of them stay like that, motionless, joined by a handspan of steel. And I have time to see that Master Mu is smiling.

But then the light comes.

It isn’t a spark, it is a white flash that runs along the blade from the two fingers to the hilt, with a boom that hits me like a physical blow, and Lianhua is sent flying backward as if someone had struck her with a sledgehammer.

She crosses the courtyard without touching the ground until she slams back-first into the wall, with a dull thud that can be heard over the river, drops to the foot of the wall and stays there.

“Lianhua!” Xia and I cry out at the same time.

I throw myself forward with everything I have, and all I manage is to make the chair creak. Xia lets go of the armrest, takes two steps toward the wall and stops, because Master Mu is still standing in the same spot.

She is exactly as she was when the fight began, without a hair out of her bun, with her fan in one hand and, in the other, still held by the edge between two fingers, Lianhua’s Shuang Bi Shou.

She looks at it for a moment, the way one looks at someone else’s brush, and then tosses it into the air.

The blade rises spinning, flashes once in the morning sun, comes down, and Master Mu catches it without looking, this time by the handle.

“Don’t worry”, she tells us. “She will only take a moment to recover.”