"So you're that whatever-it-was — Flower-Plucking Young Lord?" Fang Shaobai dumped the man onto the tower floor and looked him over, unimpressed. "Your lightness art isn't much, either."
In the next moment, another dark figure sprang to a rooftop not far from the Xu manor, closing on the watchtower in a few bounds, laughing aloud while still on the way.
"Mount Taihua stands vast and grand, the most perilous peak under heaven — and Taihua's disciples are famed for their lightness arts to match. This flower thief could have turned into a bird on the wing and still never escaped Young Hero Fang's grasp."
By the time the sentence ended, the figure stood on the watchtower too.
Wang Yu looked up. A middle-aged monk in a grey robe, square-faced and stern-featured, somewhere past fifty by his looks, his gravity leavened now with a smile.
"Master Hongzhao?" Fang Shaobai's eyebrow rose. "Master, weren't you supposed to be..."
Halfway through the question, Fang Shaobai suddenly looked a little embarrassed.
Hongzhao chuckled. "Did Young Hero Fang only arrive after nightfall? This humble monk traded blows with the man last night. His martial arts are ordinary; his lightness art is not — I could not hold him.
I guessed he might shadow me through the day. So this afternoon I called on your junior brothers, Young Hero Lin and Young Hero Wei, and asked them to spend tonight at the Luo and Liu households in the south — a false formation, to mislead him.
I myself doubled back to the Xu house after dark, and waited for him to walk into the net. I never imagined Young Hero Fang would arrive as well — and get there ahead of this humble monk. Excellent, excellent!"
"Quite so, quite so. What a coincidence," Fang Shaobai said with a hollow laugh, and stole a glance at Li Yunxiu, his respect climbing another notch.
Hongzhao pressed his palms together. "This man gravely wounded Fazhu. This humble monk had meant to haul him back to the Great Vajra Temple for twenty years of repentance. But since it is Young Hero Fang who has taken him tonight, I would not presume to dictate his sentence. Only — he stole a Tendon-Transforming Bone-Forging Pill the temple had entrusted to Fazhu. That, I must recover."
The Flower-Plucking Young Lord lay where he'd been dropped, a sword-hole through his shoulder blade and his acupoints sealed — but his mouth still worked, and he sneered. "If Fang Shaobai hadn't popped out of nowhere, your ambush would never have caught me either.
Don't think I don't know how you monks operate. You were going to wait until I'd had the girl — wait for my essence and strength to be spent — and then strike. A pity you..." His voice died mid-jeer. "Eh?"
"Nonsense!" Hongzhao cut him off, eyes going round — and as his hands spread wide, a metallic sheen flashed across both palms and was gone.
But the Flower-Plucking Young Lord was no longer paying Hongzhao any attention at all. He was staring at Wang Yu and Li Yunxiu.
Wang Yu's eye twitched — and the man's grin split wide as he shouted their names to the rooftops. "Zhao Yu! The woman Top Scholar!"
"You actually took this road?"
The Flower-Plucking Young Lord sounded genuinely aggrieved; had his acupoints not been sealed, he might have beaten his chest and stamped. "I'd given up on ever catching you! If I'd known you'd come this way, what would another two or three days of patience have cost me?"
Fang Shaobai and Hongzhao turned as one to look at the three of them.
Wang Yu blinked, and looked at Li Yunxiu.
The corner of her mouth twitched. She hadn't imagined this flower thief had ever seen them. He must have been to the capital before — seen Zhao Yu; possibly seen her as well.
The disguises she'd painted had been built to be natural: small adjustments, a shifted age, an altered bearing — the underlying bones of each face untouched. Anyone who had truly seen them before could, in fact, recognize them.
It was just that...
This wasn't the modern world, with photographs everywhere. It had never occurred to her that among the killers lying in wait on the roads, there would be one who had personally seen them in the capital.
Fang Shaobai smacked his lips, unable to process it. "You're Zhao Yu?"
In the next instant, Hongzhao's eyes hardened. His body exploded forward, both wide sleeves rolling up gale-wind, the hands inside them hooked into tiger-claws — striking for Wang Yu's chest, and Li Yunxiu's.
Wang Yu stepped back smartly and put Fang Shaobai between them.
Li Yunxiu's right hand turned over, gold needles flashing out between her fingers.
But before her needles could fly, there came a single ringing cry of steel — "chang!" — and silver light bloomed out of nowhere into a lotus of sword-light, twelve silver petals unfolding, hanging between Hongzhao and the three of them.
To Wang Yu's eyes the world simply flowered: as if he were watching a lotus open on rippling lakewater, precise and beautiful, the kind of thing that pulled the gaze in and held it.
"The Green Lotus Sword Song? The Twelve-Petaled Green Lotus?!" Hongzhao cried out in shock and flung himself backward — but his broad sleeves had already been slit through in several places, baring two thickly muscled forearms.
Fang Shaobai's longsword slid home, as though it had never left the scabbard at all. "Master. What is the meaning of this?"
"That man is Zhao Yu!" Hongzhao's brows knotted. "Twisted of temper, vicious of method — he maimed men at his whim in the capital and defiled other men's wives and daughters. Let him return to Longshan Prefecture and take the Westguard Manor's reins, and it is the common people of the northwest who will suffer for it!"
Fang Shaobai blinked at him, then shook his head. "Master, surely you know rumor is not to be trusted. Enough mouths can melt metal; enough slander wears bone away. As I've seen him, Brother Wang — Brother Zhao — is mild, cultured, open-hearted, and true. He is no monster from the gossip mill."
Hongzhao glared. "You can know a man's face and never his heart! Young Hero Fang, you have known him a matter of days. You would stake a judgment on that?"
Fang Shaobai put up his sword and patted the wine gourd at his waist. "I would. Brother Zhao's conduct in wine is impeccable — and a man whose wine-conduct is sound is sound. Always."
Hongzhao's eyes went perfectly round, a forehead full of question marks.
What kind of logic is that?
"Young Hero Fang has been deceived by him!" Hongzhao insisted. "Set the rumors aside entirely — take only the jianghu's own ledger. The Southern Sea sect leader's treasured daughter lost her chastity to this man and died by her own hand. The Southern Sea Twin Swords came for vengeance, and he killed them both. Those are not inventions!"
Wang Yu promptly raised three fingers to the sky. "August Heaven above, Sovereign Earth below: if I drugged and violated the Southern Sea sect leader's daughter, may five thunders split my skull; may I sink into the netherworld and never be reborn; may eight generations of my ancestors climb the mountain of knives and boil in the cauldrons of oil, cast into the Unending Hell to suffer torments without shore."
Li Yunxiu: "..."
Fang Shaobai: "..."
Hongzhao: "..."
As oaths went, this one had hit the ceiling and kept going.
Fang Shaobai turned to Hongzhao with a pleasant chuckle. "Well, Master? What do you make of that?"
Hongzhao's mouth twitched through a long struggle. "It... cannot be ruled out that the boy is devious by nature, and swears falsely as easily as breathing."
Wang Yu's eyes narrowed at him. "Has the monk's eye wandered to the capital's bounty silver too?"
"The Great Vajra Temple is one of the two great houses of the Buddhist gate," Li Yunxiu said, cool and clear. "What would a monk of theirs want with the capital's little bounty? What the monk's eye covets are the market towns of Qing'an and Fengming Prefectures — the farms, the estates, the land."
"Ho?" Fang Shaobai's eyebrow climbed.
Wang Yu caught up at once. "The Great Vajra Temple borders our Westguard Manor's territory?"
"Amitabha!" Hongzhao pressed his palms together. "To one who has left the world, the four elements are all emptiness. Money and land are things outside the body. It is only that our Buddha is mercy itself — and this humble monk cannot bear to see the people of the northwest suffer again.
Killers line every road against you now, sir. You are exposed; the rest of your journey will know no peace. Come with this humble monk to the Great Vajra Temple. If you prove to have a Buddha-heart — if you will treat the people kindly — this monk will raise the sangha itself to escort you to Longshan Prefecture."
At that speech, never mind Wang Yu and Li Yunxiu — even Fang Shaobai laughed out loud. "Does the master think me incapable of delivering Brother Zhao to Longshan Prefecture myself?"
Wang Yu didn't even bother responding. He had crouched down instead, and was going through the Flower-Plucking Young Lord's clothes.
"What are you doing?!" The man glared at him.
From inside the man's belt Wang Yu drew a small box. He opened it: a thumb-sized pill, breathing out a faintly bitter medicinal fragrance.
"The Tendon-Transforming Bone-Forging Pill!" Hongzhao started forward — and was blocked by one easy sidestep from Fang Shaobai, forced to halt where he stood. "That pill answers only to our temple's secret methods! For anyone else, swallowing it brings harm and no benefit! I ask you, sir, to return..."
He watched Wang Yu put the pill in his mouth and, with one heroic gulp, swallow it dry.
"Nearly choked me to death!" Wang Yu pounded his own chest until the pill went down.
Everyone: "..."
Then they watched him resume frisking the Flower-Plucking Young Lord.
"What are you even looking for?" Fang Shaobai couldn't help asking.
"No idea. Rummaging on principle. There might be a surprise in here somewhere." And even as he said it, Wang Yu produced from the man's shirt and sleeves: two blow-tubes, two bottles of powder, a fat coin-purse — and one ivory dildo.
"You really aren't much, are you," Wang Yu observed, deadpan, to the man on the floor — and then finally pulled two books from his sleeve.
"Found it... The Thirty-Six Positions of the Spring-Breeze Couch?" Wang Yu flung the first book aside with a mutter of disgust — and then looked at the second book, and finally smiled.
The Swallow Carrying Spring!
Fang Shaobai laughed. "Elegant name, for what it is."
Wang Yu patted the book and flipped two pages at him. "It's a lightness art! Once I've trained this up, at the very least I'll stop worrying about Great Vajra Temple monks and their ambushes."
Fang Shaobai felt nothing much about that — whatever the manual was, trained to its limit it would still be no match for Taihua's own lightness arts.
Hongzhao, though — treasure pill of his order swallowed whole in front of him, and mocked on top of it — stood with both fists clenched white and a vein leaping at his temple, wanting nothing in the world so much as one full-power Great Vajra Divine Palm to flatten this man where he crouched.
And in a place none of them could perceive, the turtle shell in Wang Yu's sea of consciousness had already begun to glow again.
He had the first experience to build on now. This time Wang Yu could guide the shell's work, at least a little — no storing away, everything absorbed and released in a single pass, his gains driven to the maximum.
His sword fundamentals set firm — from now on, each day's practice would buy the most progress for the least time.
The Seven Forms of the Setting Sun, learned complete. Only to the point of competence, with room yet to grow — but the internal circuits that drove the sword art through the Flowing Flame Afterglow had been derived along with it. The blade could finally draw on the fire it was made for.
Meridians widened, bones tempered, endowments improved; the Flowing Flame Afterglow's circulation guided to the very limit of the second layer. With honest work on the road ahead, he should reach the third layer before they arrived at the Westguard Manor.
Now that was a pill! Potency leagues beyond the Lesser Returning Pill!
Wang Yu's eyes gleamed as the thought rolled on: did Hongzhao have another one on him? Was there some way to do the monk in and loot a second Tendon-Transforming Bone-Forging Pill off the body?
The other side had already planned to do him in first, after all. Wang Yu's conscience weighed exactly nothing.
Meeting Wang Yu's not-quite-smiling, distinctly unfriendly gaze — with Fang Shaobai planted immovably in guard — Hongzhao understood there was no opening left for him tonight. He pressed his palms together once more.
"Amitabha!"
"Since Young Hero Fang has set his mind, this humble monk has nothing more to say. I can only hope your eye for men is true — that this Zhao Yu is indeed generous of heart, and loves the people as his children."
Hongzhao made his bow, sprang backward off the tower, and vanished into the night.