Chapter 180

The first thing I notice as the run of spirit salmon approaches is the noise.

And I don’t mean the noise of the water churning, but rather I mean that the animals themselves make noise, a noise of flesh striking flesh, of fins against fins, of massive bodies colliding with one another at full speed because they have no room not to collide.

It is a dull and continuous sound, like a very heavy rain falling on a wooden roof, and it arrives long before they do.

And while I listen to it grow, I do the last thing I have left to do.

“Xia”, I call her.

Xia, who is standing to my left with the box of talismans hugged against her chest and all her attention set on the white band of the river, turns her head toward me.

“Below deck”, I tell her. “Now.”

And I see perfectly how her mouth opens to protest, so I don’t give her time.

“It is not a punishment and it is not because you are small”, I continue. “It is because in the next few minutes there are going to be nineteen people running across this deck with knives and poles, and all of them are going to have to decide very quickly where they put their feet. And none of them can afford the luxury of looking first to see whether you are in front.”

Xia closes her mouth.

“And there is a second reason”, I add. “And it is that I want you to be in the most sheltered place on the ship, because if something goes wrong up here someone has to be below.”

That last part is not entirely true, or at least it is not the main reason, but it is the kind of argument that works with Xia because it gives her a job, and you can ask this girl for anything if you explain to her what it is for.

“All right”, she tells me, and after saying it she stays still half a second longer and asks me the question I already saw coming.

“And you?” she asks me.

“I have work to do, and besides with Lianhua in front along with half the deck between the water and me”, I answer her. “I am in the most boring spot on this ship. Go down.”

Xia looks at me for two seconds with that face she makes when she knows perfectly well that I am selling her something, but in the end she nods, turns around and goes down through the hatch with the box under her arm.

And the moment she disappears through the opening, I am finally left alone while I look one last time at the blanket folded over my legs, and on top of the blanket, spread out in a fan like a hand of cards I have no desire at all to play, are the talismans I set aside for myself this afternoon.

And I have placed them there, in my lap, for a very concrete and very unheroic reason, which is that this way I can access them faster.

When I finish going over them, I lift my gaze.

“Lianhua”, I tell her.

“I am ready, Xiaojie”, she tells me after hearing me call her.

“Then let us connect”, I answer her.

And then I notice what I have been waiting to notice since we began talking about this, because a golden line, fine as a sewing thread, appears out of nowhere, comes out of Lianhua and comes directly to me.

And in the instant in which it is completed, Lianhua’s voice reaches me inside my head without passing through my ears.

“Do you hear me?” she says.

“I hear you”, I answer her in a low voice, because I still have to make a conscious effort to remember that there is no need.

“Not in a low voice, Xiaojie”, she tells me. “With your mind.”

And I breathe, order my head and do it properly.

“Like this?” I answer her.

“Like that”, she answers me.

But then the salmon arrive.

There is no concrete moment at which one can say it has begun, and that is one of the things that most surprises me, because I expected a blow, a collision, something. And what there is is that the white band reaches the point of the spit of land that shelters us, moves away from it and keeps going up the center of the channel without finding out that we exist while thousands and thousands of animals pass by.

But even so, rounding the point and getting into our inlet of still water, a portion of them come in.

A portion that, even so, makes more fish than I have seen together in my life.

“To work!” shouts Shen Fei from somewhere to my left. “The ones near the hull first! The ones going loose through the middle leave them, they will go their own way!”

And the entire ship sets into motion while I do my part, which is to begin using the Dragon’s Grip on the first salmon that leaps over the ship and that I have within my reach.

And the first thing I discover is that my previous practice with the technique has prepared me to grip something, but has not taken into account that my target would struggle, because I expected them to be heavy, though not so heavy that I couldn’t grip them, but what I did not expect was the strength the creature would have to try to get away.

It is like gripping the handle of a hammer someone is using. I notice each jerk directly in my head and in the first two jerks I almost let go of it.

But I don’t let go of it, and the moment the animal loses the momentum of its leap, everything changes all at once.

Because a fish, out of the water, still has all its strength and keeps moving with all its fury, but no longer has any way of propelling itself, and all that strength becomes an enormous body thrashing in the air without achieving absolutely anything.

“One”, I tell Lianhua. “To your right, two meters, at the height of your head.”

And I don’t need to explain anything more to her, because by the time I finish the sentence Lianhua is already underneath.

I don’t even see her unsheathe. From her sleeves come two short blades, two Shuang Bi Shou, and they come out so fast that what I actually see is that she already has them in her hands.

The first cut goes into the salmon below the jaw.

The second, with the other blade and without any pause in between, goes into its side just behind the gill.

And the animal, which half a second ago was a machine of muscle capable of sinking a hull, stops being a problem so fast that it almost seems discourteous.

“Release”, she tells me.

I do what she tells me and the body falls into the water with a wet thud, but while that happens I am already looking for the next one.

And from there on a rhythm establishes itself.

I look at the water searching for the shadows of the salmon, and when I find one going toward the hull, I grip it to lift it, I give warning, and Lianhua finishes it off.

And she does it without looking at me a single time.

That is what truly impresses me about the whole matter, because I expected to have to be coordinating with her actively, telling her where each one is going and waiting for her to position herself. And what actually happens is that Lianhua doesn’t need to be told twice, and above all, that Lianhua doesn’t need to look.

Because at some moment of the second or third fish she has activated the Vision of Horus, and now she is seeing this deck from a point that is far above our heads.

And that means she knows where everything is. She knows where the fish I have just left hanging is, she knows where I am, she knows where the sailor is who is coming running from behind with a pole so she can get out of his way, and all of that she knows at once.

Clearly, that is the kind of advantage that decides combats.

And while we continue with the routine, I take advantage of the moments without targets to lift my gaze from my patch of water and look at the rest of the deck, in part because it interests me and in part because I need to rest my head from time to time.

But what I see on the rest of the deck leaves me much calmer than I expected to be.

At the port rail there are four sailors with poles working in pairs, one pushing and another driving in, with that economy of movements of people who are not doing this for the first time. At the bow there are two more and one of Chen Mo’s men, and that last one is the one who surprises me because he has a cargo hook in his hands and is using it exactly as he would use a harpoon.

And around the ship, distributed, are the only two cultivators with an elemental core on this ship, and neither of the two is fighting the way I expected.

Shen Fei is on the side that is closest to the center of the river without any weapon in his hands, because what he does is raise his hand and, when he raises it, the water rises with it.

It is not a wave, it is a column. A column of water as thick as a man’s trunk that rises a meter above the surface and that, when he closes his fist, becomes hard and sinks all at once onto whatever was passing underneath.

And sometimes, instead of the column, he does something else I like even more, which is to cut the air with his hand in a dry gesture, with nothing in his palm, and that gust of air reaches an unsuspecting salmon that has taken it into its head to leap and wounds it gravely, if it doesn’t kill it outright.

Water and Air.

Two cores, or at least two elements he can use, and now I understand why a man like that dedicates himself to navigating rivers and not to anything else, because a captain who can push the water beneath his own hull or propel the sails has an advantage that cannot be bought.

But on the other side, I see that at the stern is Chen Mo, and he uses fire.

He doesn’t do great things and doesn’t do anything spectacular, and that is precisely what makes me look at him with more attention, because what he throws are short flares, very concentrated and low, almost grazing the water, the size of an arm and that last less time than it takes one to say they have seen them.

But they work because each one of them impacts an open mouth or the hollow of the gills, in a clear attempt by Chen Mo to spend the minimum possible on each fish.

And watching him, I suddenly remember a conversation in which this man told me, with all the tranquility in the world, that he was a merchant and not a warrior.

It is clear that merchants will always be born swindlers.

With that idea circling me, I return to my patch of water, find another shadow, grip it, lift it, and Lianhua finishes it off.

And so we continue for a long while.

I don’t know exactly how long, and I don’t know it because at some moment I lose my notion of time, which is what always happens to me when I work concentrated on a single thing.

But what I do notice is the fatigue.

At first I notice it only as the usual pressure, that sensation of having something tight just behind my forehead. Afterward it begins to be a throbbing. And after that the throbbing synchronizes with each grip, so that every time I use the technique on a salmon, the stabs intensify.

But I endure, because right now it is the only thing I can do to help.

And I am so concentrated that I almost miss the only thing that matters of the whole afternoon, because suddenly, without any prior warning, I hear Lianhua’s voice which doesn’t even bother to use the Golden Chains of Ogma.

“CAREFUL, ABOVE!” she shouts at me.

At that shout, I don’t think because there is no material time to think. What I do is that my right hand, which has spent the whole afternoon resting on the blanket, closes on the talisman that is farthest to the right of them all, which is the one I put there precisely because it was the one that mattered most to me, and I activate it.

And the Spiritual Shield Talisman lights up between my fingers.

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I have three of these. Three in total, and they are among the few medium-difficulty defensive talismans I have managed to finish without the paper burning on me halfway through the stroke, because a shield is not an effect, a shield is a structure, and the structure of that talisman is the most complex thing I have had to set down on paper.

And what it does, when it works, is what it is doing now.

A dome of very pale light opens around me a little more than a handspan from my body, so fine that through it I keep seeing the deck with complete clarity, and that dome absorbs all the attacks that reach it, of whatever type, until the charge of Qi it has runs out.

And the dome opens, thank God, half a second before the arrival of a serpent’s head that comes down from the sky with its mouth open.

Because it does not come from the water, nor from the rail, nor from the bank, but rather it comes from above, from the mass of branches we have over the ship due to the fact that we have gotten under a forest to hide from the fish, and it comes down lowering itself, with its body coiled around the branch and stretching toward me like a rope someone is letting out.

And I see, with an absolutely unbearable sharpness, the interior of a mouth that is clearly capable of swallowing me whole.

But fortunately, upon closing, the jaw of that mouth comes up against the barrier of the Spiritual Shield Talisman, and it stops there, pushing, with the two black lips stretched against the light and the two rows of teeth curved inward grazing a surface that does not yield and that they also cannot pierce.

And it stays like that for three seconds, with its mouth open around my shield, unable to close it and with no intention whatsoever of leaving.

I see its tongue, I smell its breath, which crosses the shield because the shield stops impacts but not smells, and which smells of spoiled meat along with something sweet that gives me an instantaneous and absolutely irrational fear.

And during those three seconds, I do absolutely nothing.

Nothing. Not a gesture, not a sound, not an idea. I simply stay looking at the interior of that mouth with my mind blank.

And what pulls me out of there is not what I am seeing, it is the noise of my shield’s charge.

Because the talisman begins to crackle, that sound of paper burning that means it is being used up, and that sound does reach me because it tells me a concrete thing, which is that if I don’t react my end is near.

My left hand goes to the blanket, finds the paper it is looking for in the spot where I left it and takes it out.

Without hesitating, I activate that talisman while I aim at the interior of the serpent’s mouth, and the gusts of air of the Cutting Wind Talisman open up inside the mouth.

What happens next is very fast and disagreeable, since the mouth withdraws brusquely while it lets out a hiss that, being so close to me, I feel as a gust of air in the face that comes accompanied by a substance that is clearly blood.

Although fortunately for my mental health, it is something the Spiritual Shield Talisman seems to consider an attack and it stops it before it bathes me completely in it.

And afterward the serpent’s body gathers upward, rising, coiling around its own branch, until the head remains five or six meters above the deck, moving from one side to the other with its mouth half open.

But at that moment, Lianhua finally arrives where I am, passes in front of me without braking, leaps, grabs on to a rope with a single hand and reaches the height of the serpent’s body in a single continuous movement that leaves me openmouthed.

And from there, while she tries to put both blades into the side of its body, she shouts.

“CHEN MO! CAPTAIN! HERE!” she says with all her strength.

The two of them turn at once, and I also see the exact moment in which the two of them understand what is happening, because both their faces change at the same time and in the same way.

Chen Mo lets loose a curse, Shen Fei does not.

What Shen Fei does is raise his voice in a manner I had not yet heard from him, not when he was speaking with the bow nor when he climbed onto the barrel.

“THE RIVER IS YOURS!” he shouts to his people. “You hold the fish! Nobody turns around, nobody looks over here and nobody comes! And whoever finds themselves in trouble, use the talismans that were handed out, because that is what they were given for!”

And he does not wait for an answer, because he is already running to join Chen Mo in his offensive against the serpent.

And there, for the first time, I see exactly what the problem is.

Because the problem is not that the serpent is large, although it is. The problem is not that it has hard skin, although it does, and from here I see how Lianhua’s first cut has barely made a scratch on it.

The problem is how the serpent is positioned, since it is not on the ground.

It is hanging, with the lower half of its body coiled around a branch that comes out of a tree on the bank and that passes over our deck at eight or nine meters of height, and that means it has a point of support that is not down here with us and that none of the three can reach.

And with that point of support it does three things.

It rises, and when it rises, everyone who was about to attack it is left half a meter from its body. And when it comes down, it falls on top of its target with all the momentum of someone who has gravity on their side.

But to add even more problems, when it is at its lowest point it swings from one side of the deck to the other in an arc, which makes everyone have to get out of its way, preventing them from making a precise attack.

And to that must be added the breath that arrives after three or four minutes of combat, because at that moment the serpent raises its head, swells in a very visible manner from the jaw to the first third of its body, and spits out a thick cloud, of a green that is almost yellow, that opens in a wide cone and that comes down over the part of the deck where Chen Mo was.

Fortunately, I see how Chen Mo moves quickly out of its path, but he doesn’t entirely manage it and it catches his left arm and half his side.

Chen Mo, upon receiving the impact, does not fall, does not scream and does not seem to be dying, but suddenly that man who had spent half the afternoon moving with efficiency, moves as if he were inside water.

But with that, I and everyone present realize that the serpent is clearly a level seven spirit beast.

Because a level seven spirit beast is the equivalent of a cultivator who has reached the Condensation of the Elemental Cores, and that means exactly what I have just seen, which is that it can use elemental attacks.

And this creature has venom, and its venom does not only do damage, but besides it slows you down, which is the worst possible combination in a combat where the only way to touch it is to take advantage of the half second in which it is down.

And I, after seeing that, do everything I can, although it is little.

I take a Fire Arrow Talisman, wait for it to come down, and throw it when it comes down.

The arrow comes out perfectly straight, hits it on the body at the height of the middle third, and apart from a small burn and a hiss, nothing else happens.

I try again, this time aiming at the head, and the second arrow hits it just below the eye and achieves a slightly better result, which consists of the animal turning its head toward me for an instant and then deciding that I am not worth the trouble.

After seeing that, I stop spending arrow talismans, because I have just realized that I am wasting them because a Fire Arrow is a talisman of too low a level.

It is one of the first ones I learned, it is the one I have made the most times and it is the one I handed out this afternoon precisely because it is cheap and simple, and against a spirit salmon it works more than well enough.

But against a beast of the caliber of that serpent, it is clear that it doesn’t.

So I lower my gaze to the blanket to look at the ones I have left, and what I have left, in terms of things that do damage, is one.

A Minor Explosion Talisman.

I take it with both hands, because it is the only talisman on this blanket with which one has to be careful about where and when it is activated, and I stay looking at the combat waiting for the moment in which the head comes down enough for me to be able to throw it at it with some possibility of it being good for something.

But while I wait, with the talisman between my fingers and my eyes following the movement of that enormous body rising and falling, an idea occurs to me.

Because I have spent five minutes looking at the head, like everyone else, and at a given moment I follow it with my gaze upward when it withdraws and, upon following it, instead of losing it, my gaze goes even higher and I end up looking at the branch.

And the moment I look at it, I stop seeing an animal hanging from a tree and begin to see a beam from which our problem hangs. A problem that would be much easier to resolve if that beam broke.

“Lianhua”, I tell her with the Golden Chains of Ogma.

“Busy, Xiaojie”, she answers me, and she says it with a perfectly serene voice that comes out of a woman who at this moment is dodging a head larger than I am.

“Thirty seconds”, I insist. “And listen to me to the end.”

And since she says nothing, I continue.

“We cannot kill it because you cannot make a serious attack”, I tell her. “And you cannot do it because it is hanging. Everything it does well it does because it is hanging from a branch.”

“I know”, she answers me.

“Then the serpent must not be attacked”, I continue. “The branch must be broken.”

And there there is a half-second silence that tells me she has stopped thinking about the combat and has begun to think about what I am telling her.

“I have a Minor Explosion Talisman”, I tell her. “And if we manage to make it break the branch, all the advantage the serpent has will disappear, but there is a problem.”

“What problem?” she asks me.

“The problem is that I can’t reach it”, I answer her. “It is nine meters above my head, so I can’t reach it by throwing it or with any of my techniques.”

Next I fall silent because everything has already been said, and Lianhua takes exactly two seconds to answer me.

“Give me the talisman”, she tells me.

“I have not said that you have to do it”, I answer her, although we both know that I have said it.

“We have nothing better, Xiaojie”, she tells me.

And afterward, without any transition, I hear her shout in a loud voice.

“I need a minute!” she shouts. “One minute without it on top of me! Can you do it?”

And Chen Mo, who moves as if his arms weighed twice as much and who has the entire left sleeve of his tunic destroyed, answers before the captain.

“You can have two!” he shouts to her.

“One is enough for me!” she answers him.

And from there on, those two men do something that I, sincerely, did not expect to see.

Because until now the three of them were fighting near one another, but each about their own business, but the moment Lianhua asks for a minute, Shen Fei and Chen Mo separate to position themselves one on each side of the arc along which the serpent swings and both begin to do the same work, which consists of not giving it a single second of peace.

And Lianhua, while that happens, reaches where I am, and without saying anything extends her hand, and I place the Minor Explosion Talisman in her palm.

“Don’t you dare turn off the shield”, she tells me, in a loud voice, as if this too were too important for the Golden Thread.

And what she does next I see complete, from beginning to end, and I am going to remember it as long as I live.

Because Lianhua crosses the deck in four strides, reaches the foot of the mainmast, and climbs.

But she climbs up the wood running horizontally while she uses a rope that was loose as a support so as not to fall, with her feet on the mast as if it had something holding them, and she climbs so fast that to me, from below, it seems she is running up a wall like the worthy ninja handmaiden she is.

In five seconds she is at the yard and in seven she is above it, at the part where the mast ends.

And on the eighth she leaps while still holding the rope she has used to climb the mast.

She leaps upward and toward the side, toward the gap of air there is between the tip of the mast and the serpent’s branch, and she does it at the exact moment in which the animal’s head is down, occupied with Chen Mo.

And in the air, at the highest part of her leap, when she has already stopped rising and has still not begun to fall, she activates the talisman because I see the paper light up.

The Minor Explosion Talisman has a delay. It is short, it is what it takes a person to activate it and throw it, and it is designed precisely for that, so that whoever activates it is not affected by it.

And what Lianhua does with that delay, with that little bit of time that exists so that people have the opportunity to flee or throw it, is to make the talisman leave her hand and keep rising, pushed by hands that do not exist while it crosses the air toward the branch as Lianhua begins to fall toward the deck while she turns to grab the rope with both hands.

The talisman reaches the branch, and sticks to it just below the point where the serpent has the first coil of its body wrapped.

And it explodes.

The noise resounds and startles everyone present, including the serpent, and it comes accompanied by a rain of splinters, of leaves and of pieces of bark that fall over half the deck, and for an instant absolutely nothing can be seen of what is happening up there.

But when the smoke disperses, what is revealed up there is the branch, still whole.

Splintered underneath, opened in an ugly wound that can be seen perfectly from where I am, with half the thickness it had a second ago.

But it does not break.

I look at that and feel how my stomach drops to the floor, because I have spent the only serious offensive talisman I had left, I have sent Lianhua to climb a mast in the middle of a combat, I have asked two men to place themselves beneath a venomous serpent for an entire minute to buy me the time, and all of that I have done in exchange for making a large scratch on a piece of wood.

For a moment I remember, with an odious precision, my own sentence from this afternoon, that a stored talisman is a piece of paper.

And I tell myself that there is also a version of that which no one tells, and it is that a talisman spent in the wrong place is also a piece of paper.

I am in the middle of that thought, with Lianhua already on her feet again on the deck, although with the explosion I have not noticed how she managed to get down safely, and with Chen Mo looking upward with the same face of disappointment I must have, when the branch creaks.

It is a dry creak, with that so-particular tone wood has of announcing what is going to happen before it happens.

With that sound, everyone looks upward, and the serpent too.

And I see the exact instant in which that animal, which does not have a face capable of expressing anything, understands perfectly what is happening because it tries to rise.

But upon trying to rise, it tenses the branch too much and, upon doing that, finishes the job.

The branch splits at the wound with a crack that sounds much worse than the explosion that caused it, and falls all at once with its entire length and a serpent coiled around it, and on the way it hits the mainmast.

It hits it from the side, with a blow that reaches me through the deck and through the bundles of cargo against which I have my back resting, and I see how the mast bends, how the yard jumps out of its place and how two ropes break and go flying through the air like whips.

And afterward it reaches the deck.

The impact opens the wood the way a box is opened, with a noise of planks splitting that lasts longer than it should last, and the branch stays there, sunk a meter below the level of the deck.

And with it sinks also the lower half of the serpent.

In the silence there is immediately afterward, while the dust and the leaves are still falling, I look at what has been left in the center of the ship and make the only calculation that matters.

Which is that now it is down here with us.

It is still alive, it still has a head capable of swallowing me, and the upper half of its body is already rising from the floor with all the intention in the world while it hisses in fury.

But its lower half is coiled around a branch that is stuck in a hole, with several planks that have clearly driven into its body from the impact.

And in any world, there are very few differences greater than the difference between an animal that can move and one that cannot.

“IT’S CAUGHT!” I shout, and I don’t recognize my own voice.

But there is no need at all for me to shout it, because the three of them have seen it before I have.

Lianhua goes in first.

And at last I see her fight in a completely different way from everything I have been seeing this afternoon, because there are no longer dodges, nor distances, nor patience. Lianhua gets in at its side, below the arc the head can reach, and from there on she works the same spot over and over, the same wound, always the same, widening it with both blades with the absolutely merciless efficiency of someone who has decided that this ends right now.

And Shen Fei begins to use the air, and his gusts of air, now that the creature cannot get out of the way, do affect it while Chen Mo, with his left arm still useless, positions himself in the only spot on the ship from which its mouth can be seen head-on, and every time the serpent opens its mouth to spit its venom he puts a flare inside it.

But to finish it off, at that moment the others arrive because the run of salmon has finished passing.

I don’t know exactly when it has happened and I have not even noticed, but when I lift my gaze toward the river I see that the water is already normal, with some loose body floating on its side and not a single salmon in sight, and at the rail there are seventeen people who have just been left with nothing to do.

None of them is a warrior, and all of them know it perfectly, so they don’t approach.

What they do is far more intelligent, so I see how seventeen people each take out a piece of paper that a girl gave them this afternoon saying it was from the company.

“All at once!” shouts someone who is not Shen Fei. “When it raises its head! NOW!”

And the deck fills with fire.

None of them, on its own, would have done this animal more damage than the two of mine did, but they are seventeen at once.

The first wave unbalances it and opens a wound, and the second, which arrives four seconds later because everyone had been given two talismans, impacts fully in that same wound.

And the serpent, which has endured a bodyguard, a captain, a merchant, an explosion and a fall of nine meters, finally collapses onto the deck of the ship because of those seventeen pieces of paper.

And on the deck absolutely nothing is heard for a few seconds, save the water against the hull, the creaking of the broken mast and, very faint and close to my face, the last crackle of my shield going out.