Chapter 24

Chapter 24: Chapter 24

A hand closed around his wrist.

"Up," Bai Rou said. "Now. Quietly."

She had appeared beside the competitors’ bench without him noticing, a basket of bandages balanced on her hip and her round face perfectly pleasant. To anyone watching, she was just a Medicine Valley physician checking on a fighter with a cut arm. Only her grip told him otherwise. Her fingers were clamped hard over his pulse point.

"Ruan Tie," she said, without looking at the big man. "Your brother has a scratch that needs cleaning. Stay here. Tell anyone who asks that he’ll be back for the next round."

Ruan Tie opened his mouth, caught one look at her face, and shut it again.

Yan Shuo stood. His knees were steady except for everything inside him. The burning had reached his shoulder, and beneath it, his qi was heaving against the riverbed like a lid rattling on a boiling pot.

’Walk,’ Qin Wuyue said. ’Slowly. Don’t let your face show a thing.’

The medical tent at the edge of the Cloud Terrace had a heavy canvas wall dividing it in two. The front half was packed with groaning first-round losers nursing sprained ankles. Bai Rou steered him straight past them and through the flap into the back, where Medicine Valley kept its supplies, tying the canvas shut behind her.

"Sit," she ordered. "Arm on the table. Don’t move."

She seized his forearm, turned it toward the light filtering through the canvas, and studied the cut.

The purple had darkened nearly to black along the parted edges. Fine, dark threads were creeping outward from the wound beneath his skin, following the exact line of the meridian up toward his elbow.

Bai Rou’s face went very still.

"Restless Tide," she said quietly.

"You know it?"

"I know it." She was already unrolling a cloth of silver needles across the wood. "It’s ground from the root of a marsh lily that grows in the south. It doesn’t harm the flesh at all. It slips into the meridians and stirs the qi inside them. A drop makes you restless. A full dose makes it impossible to hold your cultivation steady." She selected a long needle and held it up to the light. "The Law Hall uses it during interrogations. A cultivator who can’t control his qi can’t hide what he is."

Yan Shuo’s stomach went cold.

"Can you draw it out?"

"Most of it. This is going to hurt."

She slid the first needle into the meat of his forearm, just below the cut.

It didn’t sting, instead it bit like hot iron. Then she slid in another, and another and each one hurt worse than the last. Where the steel went in, the dark threads beneath his skin slowed, pooling sluggishly around the needles.

Deep below, the churning in his body turned violent.

It felt as if the poison knew it was being cornered. His qi surged up through his three open meridians in hot, ragged waves. Beneath them, sunk deep in the riverbed, his hidden seventh layer battered upward against the stillness. Each wave hit harder than the last. The edges of his vision began to swim.

’Hold,’ Qin said, her phantom voice sharp and right against his ear. ’Hold it, brat. I’m here. Breathe with me.’

He locked his jaw and breathed with her. Grey water. Heavy silt. Absolute stillness.

The next wave crashed against the barrier but the stillness held.

Then the next.

"Your pulse is racing," Bai Rou said, pressing two cool fingers to his wrist again. She didn’t look up from her work. "The poison is trying to force your qi to flood out. Don’t let it."

"I’m trying."

"Try harder." She twisted a needle sharply, and a bead of black blood welled up at its base. "Breathe out slowly. Slower than that. Good."

It went on for what felt like an hour. In truth, it was barely a quarter of one. Bai Rou worked in tight silence, coaxing the poison out drop by black drop, while Yan Shuo sat with his arm pinned to the table, eyes shut, holding the riverbed closed against the tide as Qin murmured steady cadences in his skull.

At last, the waves began to recede.

When he opened his eyes, the dark threads beneath his skin had faded to faint, bruised grey lines. Bai Rou was wiping a row of stained needles clean on a rag. Her round face was pale and slick with sweat.

"The worst of it is out," she said. "The dregs will pass in a day. You’ll feel jittery tonight. Don’t cultivate. Don’t touch wine. Don’t fight anyone if you can help it." She paused, glancing up. "You have two more bouts this afternoon."

"Yes."

"Of course you do."

She sat down across from him on an upturned supply crate and studied him for a long moment.

"A Law Hall fighter," she said quietly, "carrying Law Hall poison on his blade. In a sanctioned tournament, where every single weapon is inspected before the bell." She tilted her head. "Do you know who inspects the blades, Yan Shuo?"

He did. He had seen the clerks sitting at the registration tables that morning, draped in coal-black robes with silver plaques at their belts.

"The Law Hall," he said.

"The Law Hall." Bai Rou folded her hands neatly in her lap. "Restless Tide is difficult to brew and expensive to buy. A dose that heavy would floor a seventh-layer cultivator in three breaths. Whoever oiled that blade wasn’t trying to win a match. If they’d wanted you crippled, they would have used something that breaks bone."

Her dark eyes held his steadily.

"Someone wanted you to lose control of your qi in public," she said. "Right out on the Cloud Terrace, in front of the entire sect, the moment the bout ended and every eye was on you." A quiet beat passed. "I don’t know why. And I’m not going to ask."

"Thank you."

"Don’t thank me." She stood up and began packing her needle roll away with brisk, practiced movements. "I already told you once that I don’t care for the Law Hall. I’m telling you again." Reaching into her herb basket, she drew out a small folded paper packet and pressed it firmly into his palm. "Settling powder. Dissolve it in water before your next match. It will weight your qi down if the remaining poison tries to stir." She hesitated. "And check your opponents’ steel. Make the examiner inspect their weapons right in front of you. Loudly."

He looked down at the paper packet in his hand. Then up at her.

"You’ve seen this done before," he said.

Bai Rou’s hands stopped moving for half a heartbeat.

"My mother was a physician, too," she said evenly. "She taught me to look for the poisons nobody else bothers to look for." She tied the cloth flap of her basket shut. "Now go. Your friend will be pacing a trench in the stone."

He went. He kept his mouth shut about her mother.

’Interesting,’ Qin murmured, as he slipped back through the front of the tent past the groaning losers. ’Very interesting. That girl knows far too much about the Law Hall’s private cellar for a visiting physician.’

’She saved my neck.’

’She did. And she kept her questions to herself. Twice now. Don’t forget that, either.’

He fought the third round that afternoon with Bai Rou’s bitter powder sitting in his stomach and the last dregs of the poison still prickling along his forearm.

Before the bell rang, he asked the examiner to inspect his opponent’s sword. The stands laughed at the skittish mine rat. The examiner sighed, rolled his eyes, and wiped the blade down in front of everyone. It was clean.

Then Yan Shuo won with a wild stumble, an open-handed slap, and his opponent’s boot slipping across the painted white line. The crowd howled with laughter and took up his nickname again.

The fourth round was much harder. His opponent was a thick-necked sixth-layer disciple carrying a heavy, brass-bound shield, who simply planted his boots in the center of the stone and refused to budge. It took Yan Shuo nearly a hundred breaths of frantic dodging and slapping at the man’s shield arm with the Silent River Palm, over and over, layer upon layer until the thick arm finally went dead, the heavy shield sagged, and one final, desperate-looking shove sent its owner sprawling across the line.

When the brass bell rang, the examiner raised his hand high.

"Yan Shuo advances to the final eight," he called out, "and earns a place on the sect’s expedition into the Misty Lotus Secret Realm!"

The outer-disciple stands erupted. Ruan Tie—who had won his own fourth-round bout half an hour earlier by simply tucking a kicking opponent under one massive arm and carrying him out of the ring like a roll of carpet—roared loudest of all.

Up beneath the white silk canopy, Elder Gu smiled his gentle grandfather’s smile.

That night, Yan Shuo lay flat on his bunk in the dark and did not cultivate, just as Bai Rou had ordered.

His qi cultivated without him.

The last traces of the Restless Tide were still prowling through his meridians, stirring the waters, while the physician’s settling powder held the lid clamped tight. Caught between the two, his qi raced around the loop of the Single Stream all night long, moving far faster than he could ever have driven it himself. It churned and settled. Churned and settled. With every pass, the stream compressed a fraction tighter, like heavy dough being folded, beaten, and folded again.

Somewhere around midnight, Qin Wuyue began to laugh softly in his head.

’What?’ he thought blearily.

’Feel it, brat. Look at where you’re standing.’

He turned his senses inward.

The seventh layer of Qi Gathering lay behind him. He was standing squarely on the eighth.

’They poisoned you to crack you open in front of the elders,’ Qin said, sounding thoroughly delighted. ’Instead, the poison whipped your qi all night, and the girl’s powder kept the banks from bursting while it ran. The fools forced a breakthrough on you.’ She laughed again, a low, wicked sound. ’Gu Hongzhan will never know what he paid for. Eighth layer, tucked quietly into the riverbed beneath a sixth-layer face. I couldn’t have arranged it better myself.’

Yan Shuo lay still in the pitch dark, staring up at the rough beams of the ceiling, and felt the new, heavy strength humming through his three open meridians.

Two layers buried now. Eighth layer, showing sixth.

The quarterfinal was held the next morning.

His opponent was a quiet seventh-layer girl from Pine Hall named Xu Mei, who fought with twin daggers and had carved her way through four straight rounds without taking a single scratch. She was fast, cautious, and genuinely skilled.

Yan Shuo asked the examiner to inspect both daggers before the bell. Both were clean.

Then he fought her wearing a sixth-layer face over an eighth-layer body, holding his strength back with every single breath. For the first time since the tournament began, it felt effortless. He could read the path of her daggers a full heartbeat before the steel arrived. For the crowd’s benefit, he let her chase him around the ring, scuffing his boots and ducking wildly, until she finally overreached on a low lunge. He stepped inside and tapped her wrist and elbow in two quick, clumsy beats.

Both daggers clattered across the stone.

Xu Mei stared down at her empty, nerveless hands. She looked up at him. Then she let out a quiet sigh, stepped back a pace, and raised one open palm.

"I yield," she said dryly. "To the Ceiling’s Favorite."

The stands laughed and stamped their feet. Yan Shuo bowed low to her, then to the elders’ canopy, and walked off the stone into the semifinals.

Ruan Tie’s quarterfinal came next. His opponent was an eighth-layer spearman, the strongest outer disciple left in the bracket, and the match turned into a long, brutal stretch of grappling and shoving dead in the center of the ring. Twice, the spearman knocked Ruan Tie flat on his back. Twice, Ruan Tie climbed right back up, grinning through a split, bleeding lip, and walked straight back into the iron point.

The third time, he caught the heavy wooden shaft in both hands, snapped it clean in half like kindling, and hurled the spearman bodily over his shoulder and across the white line.

The Cloud Terrace went completely mad.

When the loud noise finally died down, Elder Gu rose from his carved chair and walked down the steps to the bronze urn for the semifinal draw. Only four bamboo slips remained inside it now. He drew two lots with unhurried hands, read the characters carved into the wood, and looked up across the white stone toward the competitors’ bench with an expression of mild, pleasant interest.

"Yan Shuo," Gu read softly, "against Ruan Tie."

On the bench, the wide grin froze on Ruan Tie’s split lip.

He turned his head, very slowly, and looked at Yan Shuo. Yan Shuo looked back at him.