The assignment came down three days later, posted on the sect’s notice board in Elder Bao’s blunt, no-nonsense hand: four outer disciples, one healer escort, one day’s travel to the ruined caravan site, tasked with confirming the courier’s report before word could spread further and panic Red Maple’s merchants into closing their roads.
Tianyun’s name was on the list.
So was Chen Hao’s, which he discovered by the particular quality of silence that fell over the notice board when the other boy read it.
“Wonderful,” Chen Hao muttered.
“A whole day trapped with the broken root.” “I could ask Elder Bao to swap you out,” Tianyun offered.
“Save us both the trouble.” “I don’t need saving from anything, least of all you.” Chen Hao’s jaw tightened.
“I need you to not slow us down when it matters.” It was, Tianyun reflected, the closest thing to a truce either of them had managed since the training yard.
Feng Li rounded out the party with his usual unbothered cheer, and to Tianyun’s quiet relief, Lin Yueqing had been assigned as healer escort — Nine Lotus Palace policy, apparently, requiring a trained healer accompany any investigation involving suspected cult activity.
“Try not to need my services too badly,” she told him as they set out at dawn, her satchel of medicine already slung across one shoulder.
“I’d like this to be a boring day.” “I make no promises.
Trouble seems to enjoy my company lately.” “So I’ve noticed.” The caravan site sat two hours off the main trail, in a shallow valley where merchant roads converged before splitting toward three different border towns.
Even from a distance, something about the place felt wrong — no birdsong, no wind stirring the tall grass, the whole valley wrapped in the same unnatural stillness Tianyun remembered from the mountain, moments before Xuan Zhen had first appeared.
The wagons sat exactly where the courier had described them, wheels still upright, goods still packed beneath their canvas covers as though the merchants had simply set them down and walked away.
It was the bodies that told the truth — a dozen of them, scattered between the wagons, faces slack and gray, not a mark on any of them, as though something had reached inside each person and simply emptied them out.
Lin Yueqing knelt beside the nearest body, pressing two fingers to a cold wrist out of habit rather than any real hope.
“Their Qi’s completely gone,” she said quietly.
“Not weakened.
Not drained slowly, the way a wound or illness would do it.
Gone, all at once, like a cup poured out in a single motion.” She looked up, genuinely unsettled for the first time since Tianyun had met her.
“I’ve never seen anything take Qi this cleanly.
Not even from trained cultivators.” “The symbol,” Feng Li said, voice tight, pointing toward a flat stone at the valley’s center.
The crescent moon was painted there in something dark and long dried, cut cleanly through by a single jagged line — crude, deliberate, unmistakably a signature rather than an accident.
“Blood Moon Cult,” Chen Hao said, unusually quiet now that the reality of it sat in front of him instead of secondhand in a courtyard rumor.
“I thought they only operated near the southern provinces.” “So did everyone, apparently,” Tianyun said.
“Which is probably why nobody was watching for them here.” They’d nearly finished searching the wagons — mostly untouched, whatever had happened here having no interest in mundane goods — when the stillness broke.
It came from the treeline at the valley’s edge, three figures emerging in tattered crimson robes, faces hidden beneath cloth wraps stained the same dark red as the symbol on the stone.
They moved wrong, Tianyun noticed immediately, too smooth, too silent, like puppets whose strings had learned to imitate walking without ever quite mastering it.
“Cultists,” Chen Hao breathed, already dropping into a ready stance.
The lead figure raised one hand, and Tianyun felt it before he understood it — a pull, faint but unmistakable, like something reaching invisible fingers toward the fragment of Qi he’d only just begun coaxing into his dantian.
“They’re trying to drain us,” Lin Yueqing said sharply, already backing toward the wagons, medicine satchel forgotten in favor of the short blade she kept sheathed at her hip.
“Don’t let them touch you directly — whatever they did to those merchants, it happens on contact.” The lead cultist didn’t wait for further warning.
It surged forward with unnatural speed, crimson sleeves flaring, one hand reaching for Feng Li’s exposed wrist.
Tianyun moved without thinking, driving his shoulder into the cultist’s side hard enough to knock the reaching hand wide, and immediately regretted it — the moment his forearm brushed crimson cloth, cold flooded up through his arm like ice water replacing blood, a hungry, pulling sensation that made his single sealed fragment flare hot in protest.
No, he thought, fierce and sudden.
Not this one.
This one’s mine.
The cold receded as quickly as it had come, the cultist recoiling with what might have been surprise, if its wrapped face had been capable of showing anything at all.
“Tianyun!” Feng Li’s shout cut through his focus just in time to see the second cultist bearing down on him, reaching hand outstretched.
Chen Hao intercepted it, driving a Qi-wrapped fist into the cultist’s ribs with enough force to send it stumbling — and for the first time since they’d met, Tianyun saw genuine cultivation technique in action, gold light crackling faintly along Chen Hao’s knuckles, honed by three years of proper training that Tianyun still didn’t have.
“Don’t just stand there admiring it,” Chen Hao snapped, already resetting his stance.
“Help me or get out of the way.” Tianyun helped.
Between the two of them — Chen Hao’s trained strikes and Tianyun’s unpracticed but stubborn instincts, fueled by a fragment that had apparently decided draining cultists made an acceptable use of its newfound strength — they drove the second figure back toward the treeline, landing blow after blow against a body that barely seemed to register pain the way a living thing should.
Lin Yueqing handled the third herself, weaving between its grasping hands with the fluid economy of someone who’d trained in more than medicine, her short blade finding gaps in its guard that a purely defensive healer had no business finding so easily.
It was the lead cultist, recovered now, that turned back toward Tianyun with singular, unmistakable focus, wrapped face tilting as though listening to something only it could hear.
“Fragment,” it rasped, the first word any of them had spoken, voice layered and wrong, like three throats speaking through one mouth.
“The Broken Dao.
Our master has been waiting.” Ice ran down Tianyun’s spine that had nothing to do with drained Qi.
“What did you call me?” The cultist didn’t answer.
It simply lunged, faster than before, both hands reaching for his chest — for the jade, Tianyun realized with sudden, terrible clarity, not for him at all.
He caught both wrists an instant before contact, cold flooding up his arms in a rushing wave, his vision briefly doubling with the strange, slowed clarity of Spirit Vision flaring unbidden under pressure.
He saw the cultist’s strike coming a fraction of a second before it arrived — a knee, driving up toward his ribs — and twisted just enough to take the blow on his hip instead of his gut, pain blooming sharp but survivable.
He answered with everything he had, driving the cultist backward, off balance, until Chen Hao’s boot swept its legs out from beneath it and it hit the ground hard.
“Bind it!” Lin Yueqing shouted, already moving.
“It knows something — we need it alive!” But the cultist was already convulsing, crimson robes smoking faintly at the edges, wrapped face turning up toward a sky it could no longer properly see.
“Not yet ready,” it rasped, voice fading, layered tones collapsing into one thin, human whisper beneath the cloth.
“But soon.
The master will come himself, when the fragments are ripe enough to harvest.” Then it simply stopped, the smoking fabric collapsing into ash and nothing, as though it had never been a person at all — only ever a puppet, cut loose from whatever hand had been holding its strings.
The valley fell silent again, all three intruders gone, leaving only the wagons, the bodies, and four disciples breathing hard in the settling dust.
“Fragment,” Feng Li repeated slowly, staring at Tianyun with an expression that had lost all its usual humor.
“The Broken Dao.
They knew about you.
Specifically you.” “I don’t understand it any better than you do,” Tianyun said, though his hands hadn’t quite stopped shaking, and the jade shard against his chest had gone cold as river ice.
Chen Hao, for once, said nothing at all — just studied Tianyun with an expression that had shifted, however grudgingly, from contempt toward something closer to wary reassessment.
Lin Yueqing crossed the distance between them and took his hands in hers without a word, checking his pulse, his color, the steadiness of his breathing with the same careful attention she’d given him in the herb garden — except this time, when she finished, she didn’t let go right away.
“You’re alright,” she said, quiet enough that only he could hear it.
“Whatever that thing wanted, it didn’t get it.
That’s what matters right now.” “For now,” Tianyun said.
“For now,” she agreed, and didn’t argue the point further, though the worry in her eyes said she understood exactly how temporary for now might turn out to be.
Behind them, the crescent moon still stained the flat stone dark red, patient and unhurried, as though it already knew this valley would not be the last place its symbol was left waiting for him.