The timer ticked behind his eyes, one second at a time.
Five minutes to live, or five minutes to die, and the only weapon he had that was any good was his mouth.
He lowered the rusty sword a few inches.
“You shouldn’t kill me,” he said, “because I’m not what you think I am.”
Liu Xue’s eyes narrowed.
“Explain, and quickly.”
4:55.
“I’m working undercover.” It came out so smoothly it frightened him.
“Infiltrating the bandit networks of the Northern Wilderness.
Everything I’ve done was to build my cover.”
Behind him, through the sense, he felt three hearts lurch in perfect unison.
Liu Xue looked at him, and then she laughed.
It wasn’t a kind laugh.
It was the laugh of someone who’d heard every excuse under heaven and had just been handed the worst.
Her sword came the rest of the way out.
“Undercover for whom?
Which sect, which hall?
Answer quickly, or die slowly.”
4:20.
He had perhaps three seconds before she stopped being curious.
Somewhere in that space an idea arrived, fully formed and completely insane, and he knew at once that it would only work if he meant it.
The good ones didn’t act.
They believed, for exactly as long as the sentence took, and then they let you watch them believe.
So Hunter let go of the man who adjusted claims and the man who’d killed Shuan, and for the length of one breath he became someone else entirely: someone patient, and old, and faintly sorry for her.
“I was sent,” he said slowly, “by the Heavenly Dao.”
The frost on the grass stopped spreading.
Her sword dropped an inch.
“The Heavenly Dao,” she said flatly.
“The law that governs all cultivation personally sent you to rob farmers.”
When she puts it like that.
“Not to rob them, but to test them.” He let his voice go soft, as though the explanation pained him.
“The Dao doesn’t speak plainly, Immortal.
It sends trials.
Sometimes it sends the righteous in a demon’s coat, so that everyone who meets them has to show what they are.”
[LUNA] THAT’S THE DUMBEST THING I’VE EVER HEARD
The blade dropped another inch.
“A Foundation cultivator,” Hunter went on, “out of nowhere.
A village taken with one death, a guard who stood in the road.” That part came out harder than he meant, and he let it, because the someone-else he was being would have mourned it too.
“Three mortals raised to cultivation in a single night.
Ask yourself whether any of that is how the world usually goes.”
She studied him the way he had once studied a water-damaged ceiling, looking for the line where the story didn’t match the stain.
“If that’s true,” she said, “prove it.
Show me something no clever bandit with a silver tongue could show me.”
Proof.
All he had was a System nobody could see, a crew who’d learned to walk that morning, and a technique he’d managed exactly once, on his back. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
The trees behind her threw long morning shadows.
One lay across the grass just behind her, not twenty feet from where he stood.
Level two says twenty feet.
“Watch closely,” he said, “and witness what the Heavenly Dao has given me.”
He reached for the shadow under his own feet, and it deepened, went soft and black as ink.
He stepped down into it.
It was cold, and silent, and wrong in a way that his soul understood before his mind did.
It wasn’t falling so much as being nowhere, briefly, with something pressing on every side.
Then he came up out of the long shadow behind her, on his knees, gasping.
Something warm ran over his lip.
He wiped it with the back of his hand and it came away red, and his hand wouldn’t stop shaking.
[LUNA] IT WORKED.
YOUR NOSE IS BLEEDING
He got up, because the someone-else he was being would have got up.
Liu Xue had already turned.
He didn’t see her move.
One moment there was grass between them, and the next the edge of her blade was resting against his throat.
It stopped there, a hair from the skin, and stayed.
After a moment, he felt her grip ease by the smallest fraction.
2:30.