Chapter 22

Chapter 22: Chapter 22

Yan Shou finally managed to reach the seventh layer.

It arrived on the morning of the tournament, down in the burned chamber, right at the end of a quarter hour with Lanying’s palms resting beneath his. The pressure that had been building in his three open meridians for six days simply spilled over its edge and settled at a new level.

She felt it through the thread. Her eyes opened.

"Seventh layer?," she said.

"It seems so."

She looked at him for a long moment, then down at their joined hands, and took hers back, standing up very briskly.

"You’ll fight better than you did against me, then," she said. "Don’t embarrass Frost Lotus Peak."

"I’m not from Frost Lotus Peak, Senior Sister."

"You’re my guide," Lanying said, as if that settled the matter entirely, and disappeared into the crawlway with the tips of her ears pink.

’She’s terrifying,’ Qin Wuyue remarked. ’I approve of her.’

’You approve of everyone who’s rude to me.’

’Now listen. The seventh layer is a problem.’

He knew it before she even finished the thought. Sixteen days ago, half the sect had watched the assessment stone show him at the fourth. A late bloomer could plausibly climb one more layer in that time. Three would set every single tongue on the mountain wagging.

’How much can I hold back?’

’All of it, if you’re clever. The registration jade only reads what’s actively circulating. Keep two layers’ worth of qi still in the riverbed, and you’ll read as fifth.’ Her phantom voice sharpened. ’And fight like a fifth-layer disciple, brat. If you win, win clumsily. Let them call it luck.’

The Outer Sect Tournament was held on the Cloud Terrace—a vast circle of white stone jutting straight out from the eastern face of Cloudpiercer Peak, with nothing beyond its rim but the churning cloudsea a thousand paces below.

Yan Shuo had watched it twice before from the cheap seats on the slope, crammed shoulder-to-shoulder among the service disciples. This time, he walked out onto the terrace itself with the other competitors—a crowd of a hundred and twenty-eight outer disciples in grey—and felt the crushing weight of a thousand eyes settle on all of them at once.

The stands rose in steep tiers around the terrace’s inner edge. Outer and service disciples packed the lower rows. Inner disciples in sky-blue sat above them. At the very top, beneath a sweeping canopy of white silk, the elders sat in carved chairs: the Sect Master, Elder Gu in his coal-black Law Hall robes, Elder Shen straight as a planted spear, and the rest of the sect’s high council.

And beside the Sect Master, in a chair carved with blazing suns, sat the guest examiner.

Chi Yao wore red and gold and a brilliant smile. He was chatting with the Sect Master as if they were old friends. As the competitors filed onto the terrace, his gaze passed across them idly.

It paused on Yan Shuo. The smile didn’t change a fraction. Then it moved on.

Ruan Tie leaned in close, his shoulder bumping Yan Shuo’s. "Brother. The way he just looked at you."

"I saw."

"I want to throw him off the terrace."

"Get in line."

A few rows below the elders, among the core disciples, a figure in pale blue sat very still with a white leather bracer buckled around her left wrist. Lanying did not look at him. Yet the frost on the stone bench around her spread noticeably wider every time Chi Yao laughed.

The Sect Master rose and spoke the opening words. A hundred and twenty-eight competitors. Single elimination. Victory by yielding, by stepping out of the ring, or by the direct judgment of the examiners. No killing, on pain of crippling and immediate expulsion.

"And this year," he declared, "the eight disciples who reach the final rounds will earn places on the sect’s expedition into the Misty Lotus Secret Realm, which opens at the end of this season for the first time in a decade."

A deafening roar went up from the stands. Even the elders leaned forward. The Misty Lotus Secret Realm was the stuff of outer-sect legend. Disciples came back from it with spirit herbs, ancient pills, and treasures that could change a life overnight—or they didn’t come back at all.

Yan Shuo glanced up at the elders’ canopy.

Elder Gu was looking straight down at him, smiling.

’There,’ Qin said quietly. ’That’s why he wanted you in this tournament. A secret realm is a wonderful place for tragic accidents.’

At the registration table, each competitor laid a hand on a slab of milky jade. It glowed, and a clerk read the color aloud before scribbling it into his ledger.

Yan Shuo pressed his palm flat to the jade and held two layers’ worth of qi perfectly still beneath the riverbed.

The jade glowed a soft, mild green.

"Fifth layer," the clerk droned, and wrote it down without looking up.

A few people nearby murmured. The late bloomer, still blooming. One of the outer disciples behind him snorted, "Ceiling’s Favorite," not quite under his breath, and a few others laughed.

Yan Shuo walked away from the table with his head down and his face blank. Good. Laughter was the safest sound in the world.

His first-round opponent was a tall outer disciple named Song Ji, who had trained with the sword since he was eight years old and desperately wanted everyone to know it.

He walked into the ring twirling his blade in a flashy figure eight. Sixth layer. He bowed to the elders with a sweeping flourish, bowed to the crowd with another, and gave Yan Shuo a short, contemptuous nod, as if acknowledging a stray cart that had wandered into his path.

"The mine rat," Song Ji sneered. "I hear you’re lucky."

"So people keep telling me."

The brass bell rang.

Song Ji came at him in a blinding rush of steel. He was good. His blade moved in fast, tight arcs, and the crowd cheered every whistling cut. Yan Shuo backed away across the ring, ducking and stumbling, letting his boots scuff the stone and his arms flail wildly as if he were barely keeping his head attached.

In truth, he was keeping up easily. After facing Lanying’s ruthless sword in the pine clearing, Song Ji’s blade looked slow and painfully predictable. Every cut began with a small hitch of his right shoulder—a sloppy habit nobody had ever bothered to train out of him.

’Clumsy, brat,’ Qin murmured. ’Remember. Clumsy.’

The crowd was laughing openly now. Song Ji was grinning, driving him relentlessly toward the edge of the ring, toward the painted white line and the dizzying drop beyond the terrace’s rim. Yan Shuo let himself be driven. Three paces from the line. Two.

Song Ji’s shoulder hitched.

Yan Shuo stumbled sideways, flung out an open hand as if desperately trying to catch his balance, and slapped Song Ji squarely on the wrist.

The crowd barely even saw it connect.

Song Ji’s fingers flew open. His sword dropped from his nerveless hand, clattered loudly across the stone, and spun to a stop well beyond the white line. He stared down at his empty palm with an expression of total incomprehension.

And because he had been lunging forward with all his weight behind a sword that was no longer there, his momentum kept carrying him. Yan Shuo stepped neatly aside and gave his back a small, polite shove.

Song Ji stumbled three full steps and pitched straight across the white line.

The bell rang.

For a moment, the stands were dead silent. Then laughter rolled down from the tiers like a landslide.

"Song Ji of Pine Hall steps out of the ring," the examiner announced, visibly struggling to keep a straight face. "Victory to Yan Shuo."

Song Ji was violently shaking his right hand, scarlet to the very roots of his hair. "My hand slipped! It went dead! He did something to me!"

"I tripped, Senior Brother," Yan Shuo said apologetically, bowing low. "I’m sorry. I was just trying to grab onto something."

The laughter redoubled. Somebody in the outer-disciple stands cupped their hands and shouted, "Ceiling’s Favorite!" Somebody else took up the chant, and within breaths, half the lower tiers were roaring it.

Yan Shuo bowed to the elders and walked out of the ring with his shoulders hunched, the absolute picture of a man who couldn’t believe his own absurd luck.

Steward Hao had finally signed Ruan Tie’s petition for outer rank the week before, grumbling that two years on the ninth level was sentence enough for one punched inner disciple. So Ruan Tie had entered the tournament too, and he won his first match in under ten breaths. His opponent was a sixth-layer disciple wielding a heavy spear. Ruan Tie simply walked straight through the spear thrust, caught the wooden shaft in both massive hands, lifted both spear and spearman clean off the ground, and set them down very carefully on the other side of the white line.

The crowd went dead quiet. Then it went wild.

"He’s at the third layer," Yan Shuo heard someone mutter in the stands, their voice cracking with disbelief. "The third. How in the heavens is he that strong?"

Ruan Tie lumbered back to the competitors’ bench, grinning from ear to ear, and dropped onto it so hard the thick wood groaned in protest.

"Did you see?" he demanded. "Brother, did you see that?"

"I saw."

"I didn’t even use any qi!" Ruan Tie thumped his own chest proudly. "I just picked him right up!"

’That boy,’ Qin murmured thoughtfully, ’has an earth body sleeping in his bones. One day someone is going to wake it up, and this whole mountain had better watch out.’

Over by the medical tent at the edge of the terrace, Bai Rou was busy splinting Song Ji’s sprained ego, by the look of things. She glanced up as Yan Shuo passed, caught his eye, and returned to her work with the faintest twitch at the corner of her mouth.

The first round ended at midday. The draw for the second round was held directly on the terrace before the elders’ canopy, where a great bronze urn sat on a stand, brimming with carved bamboo lots.

The Sect Master gestured graciously. "Elder Gu. As head of the Law Hall, will you do the honors?"

Elder Gu rose, inclined his head, and walked down the steps to the urn. He drew lots in pairs with slow, careful hands, reading each name aloud in his gentle voice. Competitors cheered or groaned as they heard their fate.

"Ruan Tie," Gu read, "against Lin Shou of the Herb Garden."

Ruan Tie let out a booming whoop.

Gu reached into the bronze urn and drew another lot. He looked down at the bamboo slip for a quiet moment. Then he looked up, straight across the white stone of the terrace, and found Yan Shuo sitting on the competitors’ bench.

He smiled.

"Yan Shuo," Gu read softly, "against Fang Lie of the Law Hall."

The noise in the stands changed instantly. Yan Shuo heard it shift from scattered laughter to a low, rising murmur. Everyone in the outer sect knew the name Fang Lie. Eighth layer. Elder Gu’s own personal pick for the Law Hall’s enforcers. A young man famous for never having lost a sanctioned bout—and for leaving his opponents unable to walk out of the ring on their own feet.

At the far end of the competitors’ bench, a lean, quiet young man in grey robes edged with Law Hall black looked up from his lap. He had been running a whetstone down the edge of a short blade.

He met Yan Shuo’s eyes across the terrace.

He didn’t smile.

He simply looked back down, and went right back to sharpening his blade.