Chapter 26

Chapter 26: Chapter 26

Nobody on the Cloud Terrace made a sound.

In the medical tent, Bai Rou had frozen with a roll of bandage in her hands. On the cot, Ruan Tie had stopped trying to sit up. Through the open flap, Yan Shuo could see the faces in the stands, all turned toward the white silk canopy where Chi Yao stood smiling with his hands clasped behind his back.

Up beneath the canopy, the Sect Master cleared his throat.

"Young Master Chi," he said, with great care. "The champion has just fought a difficult bout. He is injured. Perhaps—"

"Oh, I’ll be gentle." Chi Yao laughed easily. "It’s only a test, Sect Master. A courtesy between our two houses. I’d hate for anyone in Blazing Sun City to think the Azure Cloud Sect’s champion couldn’t stand up to a friendly exchange." His warm eyes moved across the elders one by one. "You did invite me to be your guest examiner, after all. I’d assumed the customs would be honored."

The Sect Master’s face did not change. Yet Yan Shuo saw his fingers tighten on the carved arm of his chair.

A spirit vein that would feed the sect for fifty years, held by a clan that could snatch it back with a single letter.

"Sect Master." Elder Shen had risen. Her voice was quiet and bitingly cold. "The guest’s right has not been invoked in this sect for eighty years. It was meant for Foundation cultivators testing Foundation champions. Young Master Chi stands at Foundation Peak. The boy is at the sixth layer of Qi Gathering."

"And that is precisely why it will be so instructive," Elder Gu said mildly from his seat. "A late bloomer facing true strength. The disciples will learn a great deal." He folded his hands in his black sleeves. "The custom is clear. And our guest has promised to be gentle."

Elder Shen looked at him for a long moment. Then she sat down.

The Sect Master closed his eyes briefly.

"The guest’s right is granted," he said. "The champion will present himself."

"You don’t have to go," Bai Rou said in a low, fierce voice as Yan Shuo stood up from the cot. "Your ribs. I’ve barely bound them. Tell them you can’t stand."

"If I refuse, the sect loses face in front of the Chi Clan." Yan Shuo tested his balance. His ribs screamed in protest. "And then the Sect Master looks for someone to blame for it."

"Brother." Ruan Tie had grabbed his sleeve with one huge, bandaged hand. "He’s going to hurt you."

"I know."

’Brat,’ Qin Wuyue said, her voice dropping very low. ’Listen to me. You cannot win this. He’s a full realm above you, standing at the very peak of it, and he’s had the best teachers gold can buy since he could walk. And you mustn’t raise the riverbed. Not even a single layer. Gu is watching for it. That’s why he wanted this.’

’Then what do I do?’

’You survive it,’ Qin said. ’That’s all. Get through it alive and whole, with the riverbed shut tight. Nothing else matters today.’

Yan Shuo walked out of the medical tent and back onto the Cloud Terrace.

The white stone beneath his boots was still cracked in long grey lines where Ruan Tie had knelt. The crowd watched him cross it in dead silence. Up among the core disciples, Lanying was on her feet, her hands clenched tight at her sides, frost pouring off her so thickly that the disciples on either side of her had edged hurriedly away.

Chi Yao came down from the canopy by the long stair, entirely unhurried, his red and gold sleeves rippling in the wind off the cloudsea. He stepped into the ring and stopped five paces from Yan Shuo. Up close, his qi rolled off him in waves of dry, suffocating heat, like standing beside an open forge door.

"Wine boy," he said softly, smiling. "Or should I say champion?"

"Whichever pleases the Young Master."

"Polite to the end." Chi Yao tilted his head. "I do like that about you. It’s going to make this so much more satisfying."

The brass bell rang.

Yan Shuo never saw the first blow.

One moment Chi Yao was standing five paces away. The next, he was simply there, close enough to touch, and his open palm struck Yan Shuo dead in the center of the chest.

It felt like being hit by the sun.

The sheer force of it lifted him clean off his feet. Fire burst through his rough robe and across his skin, throwing him backward across the ring. He hit the stone hard on his shoulder and rolled, and kept rolling, coming to rest three paces from the painted white line with smoke curling from the scorched cloth over his sternum.

The crowd made a sound like a single breath let out all at once.

He got up. He had no idea how. His bound ribs had come loose beneath his shirt, and something deep in his left side ground together whenever he drew air.

Chi Yao had not moved from the spot where he’d struck. He was examining his own palm with mild interest.

"Still standing," he observed. "Good."

He came again.

Yan Shuo saw this one coming—barely. He twisted desperately aside, and the palm grazed his shoulder instead of his chest. Even that glancing touch was enough to spin him half around and set his sleeve smoldering. He staggered, caught his footing on the cracked stone, and brought his own right hand down in a flat, desperate slap against Chi Yao’s wrist as it passed.

The Silent River Palm went in.

It was a sixth-layer strike against a Foundation Peak cultivator’s meridians. A pebble tossed into a flood. Yet for a single heartbeat, Yan Shuo felt Chi Yao’s fingers twitch and go slack.

Chi Yao looked down at his own hand.

Then he looked back up at Yan Shuo, and the easy warmth in his golden eyes went out like a snuffed lamp.

’Oh, brat,’ Qin breathed. ’You shouldn’t have done that.’

After that, Chi Yao stopped pretending to be gentle.

Yan Shuo would remember it afterward mostly as heat and noise. The roar of fire. The wet crack of his own body hitting stone. Chi Yao’s palms landing over and over, each strike finding a different mark: his shoulder, his thigh, his back, his bruised ribs again. Always precise, always hard enough to tear a gasp from his throat, and never quite hard enough to knock him over the line.

Yan Shuo kept getting up.

He didn’t know why. Some stubborn, animal part of him simply refused to stay down. Each time he dragged himself upright, the crowd’s silence grew heavier. Each time, Chi Yao’s smile returned a fraction thinner.

And every single time, deep beneath it all, the riverbed heaved.

Two hidden layers of qi battered upward against the stillness from below, frantic and starving to rise and fight. The pain drove them up. The fire drove them up. It would have been so easy to let the lock slip. Eighth layer. It wouldn’t change the outcome, not against Foundation Peak, but he could hit back. He could make the bastard bleed.

Up beneath the white silk canopy, Elder Gu sat leaning slightly forward, his hands folded neatly in his lap and his mild eyes fixed squarely on Yan Shuo’s face.

’Still,’ Qin commanded, steady as bedrock in his skull. ’Still, brat. Still. Still.’

He held it.

He held it through the searing burn across his back that tore a raw scream from his throat. He held it through the heavy palm to his left knee that put him flat on the ground for the sixth time. And he held it through the long, swimming dark afterward, when he lay on the cracked white stone with his face in the grit and could not quite remember how to make his arms push him up.

He pushed himself up anyway.

Chi Yao stood over him, breathing a little harder now, a sheen of sweat gleaming at his temples. His eyes were flat, hot, and entirely stripped of humor.

"You know," he said, pitched quietly enough that only Yan Shuo could hear, "I think I understand now. I think I understand exactly what she sees in you." His fingers curled. Fire gathered in his palm, a tight coil of white-gold so bright it hurt to look at. "Stubbornness. How charming. Let’s see how charming it is without a dantian."

He raised his hand directly over the center of Yan Shuo’s body.

A strike there, carrying that much fire, would burn straight through to the core of his cultivation. And from the stands, it would look just like an accident—a guest examiner who’d lost his temper for half a breath, an arrogant champion who’d provoked him, a regrettable tragedy. The Sect Master would probably apologize to the Chi Clan for the inconvenience.

Yan Shuo knelt on the stone, unable to move, and watched the fire come down.

It hit ice.

A wall of solid frost burst up out of the white stone between them, thick, blue-white, and taller than a man. Chi Yao’s blazing palm struck it full on. Steam exploded across the ring in a shrieking, blinding white cloud.

When the mist cleared, Lanying was standing directly in front of Yan Shuo.

She had come down from the core disciples’ benches. Nobody had even seen her move. She stood with her back shielding him and her arms spread wide, frost pouring off her so fiercely that the stone around her feet had turned white for three paces in every direction. Her silver hair had shaken loose from its pin, whipping wildly around her face in the wind off the cloudsea.

"That," she said, in a voice that cut to every corner of the Cloud Terrace, "is enough."

The stands went dead silent.

Chi Yao slowly lowered his hand. He looked at her. For a long moment, nobody on the entire mountain seemed to breathe.

"My dear," he said at last, very softly. "You’re interrupting a sanctioned test."

"You were about to cripple a disciple of my sect."

"I was about to conclude a lesson."

"Then consider it concluded."

Chi Yao smiled. He stepped unhurriedly around the wall of ice, closed the distance between them in two long strides, and took her left wrist in his hand.

From the stands, it looked like a patient fiancé taking his betrothed’s hand to calm her down.

From the floor, Yan Shuo saw his fingers clamp tight over the white leather bracer—right where the fractured brand sat beneath it.

He saw the fire go in.

From across a mountain, the ruined seal could no longer carry Chi Yao’s qi. Skin to skin, it still could. Harsh gold light flared straight through the white leather. Lanying’s entire body went rigid. Every drop of color drained from her face. Yet she did not make a sound, and she did not lower the wall of ice a single inch.

"There," Chi Yao murmured, holding her wrist in a vise. "Do you see? Still mine."

Behind Lanying, on his knees on the cracked stone, Yan Shuo watched the gold light burn through her bracer, and felt the riverbed heave so violently inside him he thought it would split his chest open.

"Enough!"

The Sect Master’s voice came down from the canopy like a falling mountain. Golden Core pressure rolled through every word, making the solid stone of the Cloud Terrace shudder.

"The guest’s right is fulfilled. The test is concluded. Young Master Chi, the Azure Cloud Sect thanks you for your instruction."

Chi Yao held Lanying’s wrist for one breath longer. Then he let go, stepped back, and bowed toward the high canopy with a graceful flourish.

"Of course, Sect Master. A most educational afternoon." He turned his head and looked down at Yan Shuo, kneeling behind Lanying’s wall of ice, bleeding, smoking, and swaying on his knees.

"A fine champion," Chi Yao said pleasantly. "Truly. He stood up seven times."

Yan Shuo lifted his head.

His face was black with scorched dust and his own blood. His left eye was already swelling shut. Yet when his voice came, it was quiet, and steady, and carried to Chi Yao alone.

"Remember my face," he said.