By the second day of walking, Tianyun had learned three important things about Xuan Zhen.
The first was that he never seemed to tire, despite claiming to be older than several mountain ranges.
The second was that his wine gourd was, somehow, never empty, no matter how many times Tianyun watched him drink from it.
The third was that he asked questions like a man skipping stones across a pond — never lingering long enough for a real answer before moving to the next one.
“Favorite food?” Xuan Zhen asked, apropos of nothing, as they crested a low ridge overlooking a valley thick with autumn-colored trees.
“Why does that matter?” “It doesn’t.
I’m bored.” Xuan Zhen took a pull from the gourd.
“Answer the question.” “My mother’s pickled plums.” “Boring answer.
Next question.
Favorite person who isn’t your mother.” Tianyun opened his mouth, then closed it again, feeling heat creep up the back of his neck for reasons he couldn’t entirely explain.
Xuan Zhen’s cloudy eyes gleamed with sudden, delighted interest.
“Oh, there’s a name in there.
I can see it sitting on your tongue.” “There is no name.” “There is absolutely a name.
Was it the girl at the gate?
The one with flour on her face?” “How do you even know about that—” “I’m old, boy, not blind.” Xuan Zhen chuckled, wheezy and pleased with himself.
“Village girl.
Sharp tongue.
The kind who breaks a boy’s nose at nine years old and considers it a great romance.” “She never—” Tianyun stopped.
“How do you know she broke my nose?” “I don’t.
I guessed, and you just confirmed it.” Xuan Zhen looked entirely too satisfied with himself.
“You have a great deal to learn about keeping secrets from people older than dirt.” Tianyun scowled, though it didn’t have much heat behind it.
The teasing, he was slowly realizing, was easier to bear than silence would have been — easier than thinking too hard about how far Qinghe Village already was behind them, or how long it might be before he saw pickled plums, or flour-dusted cheeks, again.
“What about you,” he said, mostly to change the subject.
“Do you have a favorite person?” Something flickered behind Xuan Zhen’s cloudy eyes — there and gone so fast Tianyun almost missed it.
“Had,” the old man said simply, and didn’t elaborate, and for once didn’t skip to another question either.
They walked the rest of the ridge in a silence that felt, for the first time, like it belonged to something Tianyun wasn’t yet allowed to ask about.
They made camp that night in a shallow hollow off the main trail, a small fire crackling against the deepening cold.
Xuan Zhen produced dried meat from somewhere within his robes — Tianyun had long since stopped asking where things kept coming from — and tossed a strip across the fire.
“Eat.
Tomorrow we reach the border markers.
After that, mortal roads end and Spirit Continent politics begin, and out there, hunger makes you slow, and slow makes you dead.” “You make it sound like a warzone.” “It’s worse.
A warzone has rules.” Xuan Zhen turned the wine gourd over in his hands, watching the firelight play across it.
“Out there, sects smile at each other over tea while poisoning the cups.
Cultivators trade favors like coin and grudges like heirlooms.
The strong take what they want and call it destiny.
The weak learn to disappear, or they learn to survive some other way.” His cloudy eyes flicked up, pinning Tianyun with sudden weight.
“You’re going to need to learn the second thing.
You are not, and will not soon be, the strong.” “Comforting, as always.” “I told you—” “You’re not in the business of comforting people.
I remember.” Xuan Zhen almost smiled at that.
Almost.
They were three bites into dinner when the horses came.
Tianyun heard them before he saw them — hoofbeats on the trail below, too many for merchants, too fast for anything peaceful.
Xuan Zhen didn’t move from where he sat, but his cloudy eyes sharpened, tracking sound through darkness with unsettling precision.
“Bandits,” he said, almost bored.
“Small group.
Testing whether the campfire belongs to someone worth robbing.” “Shouldn’t we put the fire out?” “Why would we do that?” Xuan Zhen took another bite of dried meat.
“This is good practice.” “Practice—” Tianyun didn’t get to finish the word before three riders broke through the treeline, blades already drawn, torchlight catching on rough leather armor and rougher faces.
The lead rider reined in his horse a few paces from the fire, grinning at the sight of an old man and a boy who hadn’t so much as flinched.
“Well now,” he said.
“Traveling light, aren’t you, old timer?
Hand over the coin purse and the boy’s belt knife, and we’ll let you keep your fingers.” Xuan Zhen didn’t look up from his meal.
“Boy.
This one’s yours.” Tianyun’s stomach dropped.
“Mine?” “You want to survive the Spirit Continent, you start now.” Xuan Zhen finally glanced toward the riders, entirely unbothered by three drawn blades pointed in their general direction.
“Don’t kill them if you can help it.
Dead bandits raise questions in border towns.
Broken bones raise considerably fewer.” The lead rider’s grin faltered, just slightly, at the strange calm radiating off both of them.
“Cute,” he said, less certain now.
“Get him.” Two riders dismounted and came at Tianyun from either side, blades low.
He’d never fought a real person before — only a guardian made of light and old memory, on a mountain that already felt like it belonged to a different life.
But his feet remembered what his father had taught him, weight sinking low, watching the feet and not the hands, and when the first blade came in high, he was already moving beneath it.
He caught the bandit’s wrist and twisted, using the man’s own momentum to send him stumbling face-first into the dirt.
The second bandit swung wide in the confusion, and Tianyun ducked under the blade, driving his shoulder up into the man’s ribs hard enough to knock the wind clean out of him.
Both bandits hit the ground within three heartbeats of each other, gasping, disarmed, thoroughly unsure how a scrawny boy from nowhere had just done that.
The lead rider stared down from his horse, torch trembling slightly in his grip.
“What are you two,” he breathed.
“Tired travelers who’d like to finish dinner,” Xuan Zhen said mildly.
“Ride on, and we’ll forget this happened.
Or don’t, and I’ll stop being the reasonable one at this fire.” The lead rider didn’t need to be told twice.
He wheeled his horse around, calling for his groaning companions to mount up, and within moments the sound of hoofbeats faded back into the dark the way it had come.
Tianyun stood there, breathing hard, hands shaking with the sudden absence of danger.
“I did that,” he said, mostly to himself.
“You did that.” Xuan Zhen tossed him another strip of dried meat, as though nothing at all had happened.
“One stance lesson from your father, one near-death experience at a shrine, and already you’re better than half the disciples I’ve watched wash out of second-rate sects.
Imagine what you’ll manage once something in your chest actually wants to help you instead of just waking up when you’re desperate.” Tianyun sat back down slowly, adrenaline still humming through his limbs.
“Xuan Zhen.” He turned the jade shard over between his fingers, watching the single sealed fragment glow soft and steady gold against the dark.
“What is the Infinite Fragment Scripture?” The old man went very still.
“Where did you hear that name?” “I didn’t.
I just — felt it.
When I touched the jade, back at the shrine.
Like a word sitting just behind my teeth that I’d never actually been taught.” Xuan Zhen studied him for a long moment, firelight flickering across a face that suddenly looked far older than dry humor usually let it seem.
“That,” he said slowly, “is a conversation for Red Maple.
Not tonight.
Not around an open fire, where anything with sharp ears might be listening.” He rose, dousing embers with a practiced boot.
“Sleep, boy.
We’ve a long road left, and considerably longer answers waiting at the end of it.” Tianyun lay back against his bedroll, staring up at a sky thick with unfamiliar stars, the jade shard warm against his chest, and wondered — not for the first time since the mountain — exactly how much of his life had already been written before he’d ever had a say in it.