Chapter 40

Chapter 40: Chapter 40

Lanying gathered the expedition along the rocky lakeshore and laid out the rules in a voice like a drawn blade.

"The Misty Lotus is a sect ruin," she said. "Ten thousand years old, according to the Scripture Pavilion records. Its masters raised nine pavilions out on this water, and every one of them holds a trial. Pass the trial, and the doors open. Whatever lies inside belongs to the hands that unsealed it." Her pale eyes moved slowly down the line of outer disciples. "Fail, and the array will break you. Not a slap on the wrist. The annals record two deaths here ten years ago, and four the decade before that."

The eager chatter along the shingle died at once.

"You will work in pairs," Lanying continued. "The core disciples will hold the shore and the main footbridges. Physician Bai and Physician Lu will set up a station in the first pavilion for anyone dragged back bleeding. We march out when the great lotus begins to fold—three days from dawn. Anyone not standing on these stones when the fog turns gold stays behind for the next ten years."

She glanced down at the rice-paper scroll in her hand and began calling out names in the strict order of their tournament finish, assigning each pair a roof in the mist.

"The champion and the first semifinalist." She did not look up from the ink. "Yan Shuo and Ruan Tie. The fourth pavilion. Across the stone causeway."

Ruan Tie let out a whoop. Down the line, several of the other finalists glared at the two of them with open, sour resentment.

Lanying folded the paper crisp and walked away down the waterline without another word. Yet as her hem brushed past Yan Shuo’s boots, she murmured—so low it barely stirred the damp air—"The fourth roof sits farthest from the escort’s perch. Stay out of the deep fog."

Then she was gone. Yan Shuo looked out across the glass-smooth lake and saw the grey figure still perched motionless atop the curved tiles of the nearest pavilion, watching the shore like a heron waiting for fish.

The fourth pavilion sat far out on the water at the end of a long, narrow causeway of rough grey stone.

The bridge stretched three hundred paces from shore to pillar and was no wider than a grown man’s shoulders. It had no rails. No ropes. Only a sheer drop into black, unmoving water on either side. At its far end, the pavilion rose straight out of the lake on a ring of slender marble columns, its curved eaves glinting with moss-green tiles, its tall double doors carved with a massive, closed lotus bud.

At the near foot of the bridge stood a weathered stele, its face pitted with characters so ancient Yan Shuo could barely make out the strokes.

"What’s it say?" Ruan Tie asked, squinting at the rock.

Yan Shuo traced the worn grooves with a calloused finger.

"The Bridge of Burdens," he read slowly. "Every step you take, the stone remembers. Every step you take, it gives back what you have carried."

Ruan Tie scratched behind his ear. "And what’s that supposed to mean?"

’It means the bridge gets heavier, brat,’ Qin Wuyue said dryly in his skull. ’Ancient sects loved their riddles. They thought making people squint at rocks made them look profound.’

"I think it means the stone gets heavier," Yan Shuo said aloud.

Ruan Tie looked out down the long grey ribbon stretching into the mist. Then he cracked his knuckles, and a faint slate-grey sheen crept across the backs of his hands.

"Good," the big man grinned. "I know how to do heavy."

The first ten paces were nothing at all.

By the twentieth, Yan Shuo felt as though someone had slung a loaded ore basket over each of his shoulders. By the fortieth, it wasn’t baskets anymore. It was a full iron cart. The crushing weight settled down on him out of the empty air itself, thick and suffocating, and every single boot-step he took added another stone to the pile. His knees began to knock. His breath tore short in his throat. Hot sweat ran down into his eyes.

At the sixtieth pace, his left leg gave out. He went down hard onto one knee against the narrow granite, and found he could not push himself back up.

"Brother?" Ruan Tie pivoted around. He stood two paces ahead, chest heaving like a bellows, yet his back was still straight. "Brother, get up."

"I’m trying, Tie. My legs aren’t listening."

He wasn’t lying. He had nine layers of Qi Gathering sitting inside him, and he poured every last drop of the six he was allowed to show straight into his thighs—and the invisible mountain on his back barely budged. For a heartbeat, he considered cracking the riverbed open. Yet even with all nine layers loose, he doubted it would carry him three hundred paces. This bridge wasn’t built to test men. It was built to fold them in half.

Ruan Tie stared down at him for a long moment.

Then the big man looked down at his own bare soles planted on the grey granite. The slate sheen on his knuckles had climbed past his wrists. Even as Yan Shuo watched, the color crept up Ruan Tie’s thick forearms, while a matching grey rose up from the soles of his feet—and the ancient stone of the bridge itself began to darken beneath his toes, as though the causeway were bleeding straight into his heels.

"Oh," Ruan Tie muttered, blinking in surprise. "It’s stone. The whole damned thing is just stone."

He bent down, hooked one massive, slate-colored arm beneath Yan Shuo’s ribs, and hauled him upright like a child.

"The heavier it presses," Ruan Tie said, a huge grin splitting his grey face, "the more there is to drink."

He started walking.

He marched down the narrow spine of rock with Yan Shuo’s arm slung over his broad shoulders and the combined weight of the array hammering down on both their heads—step after grinding step. And with every pace he took, the slate sheen across his skin grew thicker and brighter, while his breathing slowed into a deep, subterranean rumble. By the hundredth pace, the stone skin had swallowed him to the jaw. By the two-hundredth, his irises had turned the flat grey of river pebbles, and he was humming the tune about the widow and the goat under his breath.

By the time they reached the marble steps of the fourth pavilion, Yan Shuo wasn’t walking at all. He was slung bodily over one broad grey shoulder like a sack of winter grain.

Ruan Tie set him down on the top step with immense care, straightened his spine with a sound like grinding boulders, and looked back down the three-hundred-pace causeway with deep, honest satisfaction.

"Brother," he rumbled, his voice echoing as if it came from the bottom of the lake, "I think the bridge made me stronger."

Yan Shuo lay flat on his back on the cold marble, wheezing at the green roof tiles, and looked up at him.

"How strong?"

Ruan Tie chewed on the question with great seriousness.

"Eighth layer," he decided. "Solid eighth. Maybe knocking on the ninth."

’One in ten thousand,’ Qin murmured in Yan Shuo’s mind, sounding genuinely impressed despite herself. ’An ancient trial array built to crush intruders into paste, and the idiot eats it for breakfast without even knowing what his bones are.’

The double doors of the fourth pavilion stood nine feet tall, carved in high relief with a closed white lotus. There were no iron rings. No keyholes.

Instead, the carved flower itself was the lock. Its nine massive petals were hewn from separate slabs of white stone fitted into the wood on hidden pivots, each one built to turn by hand. Dead in the center, where the seed-pod ought to sit, a shallow stone basin held a pool of dark, mirror-still water.

A second stele stood beside the threshold.

"The lotus wakes in the winter," Yan Shuo read aloud. "The water remembers the shape of the bloom."

Ruan Tie, whose skin had faded back to its usual warm brown, scowled at the carving for a long while. Then he reached out a thick hand and twisted the nearest stone petal. It swung smoothly on its hidden pin with a dry click. He twisted a second. Nothing happened. Setting his jaw, he began wrenching all nine petals around in every pattern he could invent, until sweat beaded on his nose and the carved flower looked like a mangled cabbage.

"It’s rusted shut," Ruan Tie declared, stepping back.

Yan Shuo hadn’t been watching the petals. He had been watching the basin.

Every time a stone slab turned on its pin, a tremor ran through the door and rippled the water in the center pool. And for the space of a single heartbeat after each ripple a pale reflection shivered up from the shallow bottom: the ghostly outline of a lotus in full bloom, all nine petals spread wide at exact, asymmetrical angles.

The water remembered the shape of the flower.

Yet it only held the memory while the surface moved. The instant the water settled, the guide vanished.

’The lotus wakes in the winter,’ Qin repeated slowly. ’Brat. You don’t even need me for this one.’

Yan Shuo glanced over his shoulder at Ruan Tie.

"Brother. Do me a favor?"

"Name it."

"Turn around and watch the bridge for a minute. Don’t look back until I tell you."

Ruan Tie blinked at him. Then, without a single question or a sideways glance, the big man planted his boots facing the lake and folded his massive arms across his chest.

Yan Shuo reached out and shifted the nearest stone petal a fraction of an inch.

The door vibrated. The dark pool rippled. Up from the bottom rose the pale, shivering ghost of the open flower.

Before the water could still, Yan Shuo touched the tip of his index finger to the surface and let Lanying’s cold slip off his skin.

The basin froze solid in a single breath, trapping the ripple mid-beat. Inside the ice, the ghostly flower hung caught in fine white rime, every one of its nine petals etched sharp and immovable against the stone.

Yan Shuo studied the frozen map. Then, working methodically around the ring, he turned the nine heavy stone slabs on the door until their angles matched the ice.

As the ninth petal clicked into its notch, the ice in the basin thawed all at once with a soft chime, returning to still water.

A deep groan echoed inside the walls. Slowly, grindingly, the nine stone petals slid backward into the frame, and the tall double doors swung inward.

"All right," Yan Shuo said, wiping his wet finger on his sleeve. "You can turn around."

Ruan Tie pivoted back. He looked at the gaping doorway, then at the drop of water hanging from Yan Shuo’s knuckle, and finally at the thin crust of white frost still clinging to the lip of the stone basin.

He opened his mouth. Closed it.

"I’m not asking," Ruan Tie said firmly.

"Thank you, brother."

"It’s going to cost you dumplings, though. A mountain of pork dumplings."

The interior of the fourth pavilion was a single circular chamber floored in milky white jade, completely bare save for a waist-high stone pillar rising from the center.

Atop the pillar rested a casket of dark green jade no bigger than a man’s two fists.

Yan Shuo crossed the floor and lifted the lid. Inside, nested in a bed of ancient dried lotus petals that crumbled into grey powder at the brush of air, sat a single pill. It was pale gold, round as a pearl, glowing from within with a slow, rhythmic light that beat like a sleeping heart.

Ruan Tie craned his neck over Yan Shuo’s shoulder and gawked down at it.

"What kind of medicine glows like that?"

Qin answered before Yan Shuo could even guess.

’A Lotus Heart Foundation Pill,’ she breathed in his skull. ’Brat. I haven’t laid eyes on one of those in three thousand years. A cultivator standing at the ninth layer of Qi Gathering who swallows that pearl will forge a Foundation in a single hour that would otherwise take a year of closed-door meditation.’ Her phantom voice pulled tight. ’That is your life on the stage in eleven days.’

Yan Shuo stared down at the pulsing gold pearl for a long, quiet stretch.

Then he snapped the jade lid shut, lifted the casket off the pillar, and held it out toward Ruan Tie with both hands.

"You carried me three hundred paces across that stone," Yan Shuo said. "I wouldn’t have made step seventy alone. It’s yours."

Ruan Tie let out a loud snort.

"I just hit the eighth layer, brother. If I swallow a Foundation pill right now, you’ll be scraping me off the ceiling tiles." He shoved the jade box firmly back against Yan Shuo’s chest until Yan Shuo was forced to take it. "Besides, I’m not the fool who agreed to step onto the Life-Death Stage with the Chi heir in eleven days." His broad, square face went dead serious. "Eat the pill. Don’t die. Then buy me those dumplings."

Yan Shuo tucked the cold jade casket deep inside his robe, right against his ribs.

"A mountain of them," he promised.

When they stepped back out onto the marble porch, the afternoon had bled away. The white mist across the lake had grown thick as wool, swallowing the distant pavilions and curling over the stone until the far end of their causeway vanished completely into the fog.

They were halfway back across the Bridge of Burdens, which, having been conquered once, now carried no weight at all, when Ruan Tie stopped dead in his tracks.

"Brother," the big man muttered, his voice dropping low. "Look ahead."

Thirty paces down the narrow grey stone, right where the mist grew thick, two figures stood side by side across the path, waiting for them.

The one on the left was the sect’s unnamed escort, his hands tucked neatly into his grey sleeves, the smooth lacquer half-mask turned squarely toward them and the silver thread of the crossed brushes glinting coldly at his throat.

The one on the right was a head taller and broad through the shoulders, draped in a plain grey traveling cloak of the exact same cut.

He stood planted on two whole, solid legs—though the last time Yan Shuo had seen those legs in gallery seven, they had been pinned and crushed beneath three tons of fallen shale. His right wrist was unbandaged and whole. His face was leaner than it had been a month ago, hollowed out around the cheeks, with a hard, ugly crease carved beside his mouth that hadn’t been there before.

He smiled across the narrow stone at them.

"Well, well," Zhao Kun said. "Hello, Ceiling’s Favorite."