They gave Chen Hao one evening off before putting him back to work, which was about eighteen hours more mercy than Elder Bao usually showed anybody.
He came back from the Nine Lotus Palace looking thinner than he’d left, which nobody mentioned, and hungrier than anybody had ever seen him, which everybody mentioned constantly.
“I dreamed about food,” he said, dropping onto the mess hall bench like his legs had stopped being consulted on the decision.
“Not even good food.
Just food.
Regular rice.
I think I dreamed about rice for two straight days.” “That’s sad,” Feng Li said.
“It’s not sad, it’s practical.
Rice doesn’t try to kill you.” “Cook Deng’s rice has tried to kill me at least twice.” “That’s the offal she puts in it.
The rice itself is innocent.” Cook Deng, who had clearly been listening from the kitchen doorway the entire time, set an extra bowl down in front of Chen Hao without a word, then went back inside before anyone could thank her for it.
Which was, as far as Tianyun had learned in his short time here, exactly how she preferred to be thanked.
Not at all, ideally, but if pressed, silently.
Chen Hao ate like the bowl might be taken away.
Nobody rushed him.
Tianyun sat across from him and didn’t say much.
He kept looking at Chen Hao’s forearm, where the skin had gone back to its normal color, mostly, except for a faint gray shadow near the wrist that the healers said might never fully leave.
He didn’t know what to say about that.
So he didn’t say anything, and ate his own dinner, and let the mess hall noise fill in the space where a conversation should have gone.
Elder Bao called them into his study the next morning.
Not a request.
A summons, delivered by a junior disciple who looked terrified to be delivering it, like Elder Bao might blame the messenger for whatever news was coming.
Tianyun.
Chen Hao.
Feng Li.
And, because Elder Bao apparently didn’t believe in doing anything halfway, Lin Yueqing, who showed up smelling like the border clinic and looking like she hadn’t slept properly in two days, though she didn’t say why and nobody asked.
There was a piece of parchment on the table.
Burned at the edges.
Most of it gone entirely, just black curling nothing where writing might once have been.
“This survived,” Elder Bao said, tapping it once.
“Barely.
Sect rune-readers pulled what they could off it.” It was a map.
Or most of one.
Red ink, the same red as the symbol at the caravan site, marking a stretch of land northeast of Red Maple that Tianyun didn’t recognize.
“The Hollow Vale,” Lin Yueqing said, leaning in.
She didn’t touch it.
“I’ve read about this.
Or — heard about it, mostly.
Nine Lotus records don’t have much.
A few expeditions, centuries back.
None of them got very far.” “Why not?” Feng Li asked.
“The records don’t really say.
Just that they turned back.” “That’s not an answer.” “I know it’s not an answer, Feng Li, I’m telling you what the records say, not what actually happened.” She said it without much heat, more tired than annoyed, and Feng Li had the decency to look slightly chastened, though it didn’t last long.
Elder Bao let the silence sit there a second before he kept going.
“I’ve written to the Palace and to Azure Cloud both.
Asked for a proper expedition.
They can’t spare one.
Not for a month, maybe longer — there’s trouble elsewhere apparently, though nobody’s telling me what kind.” He rubbed at his jaw, the way he did when he was working through something he didn’t like the shape of.
“A month is a long time to let a cult sit somewhere building whatever they’re building.” “So we go now,” Chen Hao said.
Not really a question.
“I didn’t say that.” “You’re about to, though.” Elder Bao gave him a look that might have been irritation, or might have been something closer to being caught out, and didn’t answer directly.
In the end it was five of them, plus Xuan Zhen, who’d apparently been sitting in the corner of the study the entire time without anyone noticing, which nobody found reassuring.
“I know the vale,” he said, when Elder Bao finally acknowledged him.
“Knew it, anyway.
Four hundred years is a long time.
Things change.” “Do they change for the better, generally?” Feng Li asked.
“Rarely.” “Cool.
Great.
Love that for us.” Lin Yueqing insisted on coming, and didn’t really frame it as a request, and Elder Bao — after a pause that went on slightly too long — didn’t argue the point as hard as Tianyun expected him to.
Maybe he was tired.
Maybe he’d already decided it wasn’t a fight worth having.
Either way, that was that.
“Reconnaissance,” Elder Bao said, before they left the study.
“Not a war party.
You look, you confirm what’s there, you come back.
All of you.
I mean that specifically, all of you, don’t make me come up with a smaller number.” Nobody laughed.
It wasn’t really a joke.
They left two mornings later.
Tianyun didn’t sleep much the night before, not because he was scared, exactly — or not only because of that — but because his mind kept circling back to small, useless things.
Whether he’d packed enough dried meat.
Whether Ah Rou back home had any idea what he was doing right now, three days from a place that didn’t have a real name on most maps.
He thought about that for a while and then stopped thinking about it, because there wasn’t anywhere for the thought to go.
The trail north was fine, for the first day.
Ordinary.
Trees, dirt, Feng Li complaining about the weight of his own pack like it had personally wronged him.
“Whose idea was it to bring three separate cooking pots,” he said.
“Yours,” Chen Hao said.
“You insisted.” “That doesn’t sound like something I’d do.” “You said, and I’m quoting, ‘a man needs options.'” “…That does sound like something I’d say.” By the second day the trees had started looking wrong.
Not wrong in any way Tianyun could have explained to somebody who asked.
Just — off.
Bent in ways that didn’t quite match how wind usually bent things.
He mentioned it to Xuan Zhen, who nodded like it confirmed something he already suspected and didn’t explain further, which was, by now, exactly what Tianyun expected from him.
“Helpful as always,” Tianyun said.
“I try.” “You don’t, really.” “No,” Xuan Zhen admitted.
“I don’t.
But I appreciate you noticing the effort I’m not making.” Lin Yueqing walked next to him for a while on the second afternoon.
Not saying much.
He’d noticed that about her — she didn’t fill silence just to fill it, the way Feng Li did, or the way Tianyun sometimes caught himself doing when he was nervous.
She let quiet things stay quiet until they were ready not to be.
“You’ve been somewhere else today,” she said finally.
“In your head.” “A little.” “Fragment?” “Maybe.
I don’t know.
Xuan Zhen said the third one’s coming, and every time he says something like that I start — I don’t know.
Bracing.
Like waiting for a punch you know is coming but not from which direction.” “That sounds exhausting.” “It is.” He hadn’t really thought about it that plainly until he said it out loud.
“It’s exhausting.” She didn’t say anything comforting after that.
Didn’t tell him it would be fine, or that he was strong enough, or any of the things people say when they don’t actually know.
She just reached over and took his hand, and they kept walking, and that was the whole conversation.
It didn’t end on anything memorable.
It just sort of stopped, the way conversations do, when neither person needs to say anything else.
Behind them, Feng Li was trying to convince Chen Hao that one of the three cooking pots was, in fact, cursed, based on nothing except a bad feeling and the fact that soup tasted worse out of it.
Chen Hao wasn’t buying it.
The argument went on for a while.
Nobody resolved it.
They reached the vale on the evening of the third day.
It didn’t announce itself dramatically.
That was almost worse.
The birds just — stopped, somewhere along the trail, and Tianyun didn’t notice exactly when, only that at some point he realized he hadn’t heard one in a while, and by then the trees had thinned out into a basin full of broken stone shapes half-buried in moss, arranged in patterns that made his eyes want to slide off them rather than focus.
“That’s new,” Xuan Zhen said, looking at something near the center of the basin.
“What’s new?” “That.” He pointed with his staff, toward a black spire rising out of the ruins, smooth where everything around it had crumbled, pulsing faintly with a dull red light.
“Wasn’t there four hundred years ago.
Or if it was, it wasn’t doing that.” “Is that bad?” “It’s not good.” Chen Hao’s hand had already found the hilt of his sword, quiet, no drama to it.
Feng Li had stopped talking, which was its own kind of alarm bell.
Lin Yueqing’s fingers tightened slightly around Tianyun’s, just slightly, like she hadn’t quite decided whether to be afraid yet.
Something moved near the base of the spire.
Slow.
Grinding.
Stone dragging over stone in a way that didn’t sound like rockfall, sounded more like something deciding to stand up after a very long time sitting down.
Two points of red light opened in what might have been a face, if you were being generous about the word.
“Broken one,” it said, and the voice didn’t so much reach Tianyun’s ears as land somewhere behind his teeth.
“The vale remembers your shape.” Nobody said anything for a second.
It was Feng Li who finally broke it, voice pitched somewhere between terrified and genuinely curious.
“It knows you specifically?
Like — you, personally?
That’s not — that’s not great, right?
That feels like it should worry us more than it seems to be worrying Xuan Zhen.” “It worries me plenty,” Xuan Zhen said, and for once he didn’t sound like he was making a joke out of it.
His wine gourd was already on the ground.
Nobody had seen him set it down.
“Stay close.
All of you.
Whatever this thing decides to test, it isn’t going to be subtle about it.” The guardian took a step.
The ground actually moved under it, a small tremor that Tianyun felt more than heard.
He didn’t have a plan.
He had a jade shard going warm against his chest, two sealed fragments and one still sitting there dark and unbothered, and the distinct, unhelpful thought — half-formed, gone almost as soon as it arrived — that he really should have asked Xuan Zhen more questions back at the study, before all of this, when there was still time to ask them somewhere safe.
There hadn’t been time.
There never really was, lately.
The guardian kept walking toward them, unhurried, like it already knew exactly how this was going to end and just wanted to make sure everybody got there in the right order.
To be continue….