"Miss Li and Miss Qianqian can't wed you until the mourning year is out, Young Master. Between now and then — if they're willing, all the better; if they're not, it wouldn't do to force matters," Zhao Rong counseled.
"I know." Wang Yu had made his peace with it.
"Of course, the Manor keeps a number of maids of clean family and fine looks. Those, Young Master, are yours as you please," Zhao Rong added.
Wang Yu: "..."
"Now — our line carries real standing in the martial world, and the Young Master's arts mustn't be allowed to rust." Zhao Rong moved on. "Before you left for the capital, you'd been taught three layers of the Flowing Flame Afterglow. Have you completed them?"
"I have," Wang Yu said. "And the Seven Forms of the Setting Sun my father passed me — I'd call myself competent."
"Good!" Something flashed in Zhao Rong's eyes, and his right hand went up. "A saber! A sword!"
From under the eaves of the distant main house, two streaks of cold light came scything across the courtyard. Zhao Rong reached up and gathered them out of the air — a saber in one hand, a sword in the other.
He flipped the longsword around and tossed it to Wang Yu. "Show me your sword."
Wang Yu caught it, and opened with the first form of the Setting Sun sword art — Lone Shadow in the Golden Haze. The sword's tip shook out points of sunset light, and a single lone shadow inside them drove at three great acupoints on Zhao Rong's chest.
"Not bad," Zhao Rong approved.
The swordwork was stable and alive at once — fundamentals set deep, anyone could see — and the thrust itself came fast and exact. The boy had genuinely put in the hours.
Zhao Rong laid his saber across the line. Steel met steel.
"Ding!"
One light chime, and Zhao Rong felt the character of Wang Yu's internal energy: a banked heat riding under it, modest in raw force but with a strange, unspent depth behind it — the Flowing Flame Afterglow's third layer, unmistakably.
And unless his senses lied, the purity of it was well beyond what his own third layer had felt like, all those years ago.
"Good!" His saber changed, and caught the longsword again. "Your father has an heir worthy of him!"
Zhao Rong's arts stood far above Wang Yu's, and he fed the exchange deliberately, drawing the boy out — until Wang Yu had run the Seven Forms of the Setting Sun through all forty-nine variations, beginning to end.
"That will do."
The long saber flicked up and swept the sword aside. Zhao Rong looked equal parts gratified and regretful. "Your childhood grounding was your father's own work — the fundamentals are bedrock. But ten years in the capital without a master's eye on you... the Seven Forms have gone loose in places."
Wang Yu said nothing. He was busy settling his internal energy.
Thank heaven, thank heaven. He'd pushed the Flowing Flame Afterglow to the third layer just before reaching Longshan — and the bout had been short enough that the real weakness, his thin reserves, had never shown.
"But your gifts are far from ordinary — no less than your grandfather's, no less than your father's. Train hard from here, and the Manor will rise again in your hands." Zhao Rong waved him along and led him into the main house.
The main house had been Zhao Zheng's own quarters, cleaned now and waiting for its new master.
Wang Yu swept a look around. A classic great-house room: a canopied stepped bed of carved sandalwood, a round rosewood table figured with clouds, an aloeswood four-seasons screen inlaid with jade; tables, stands, censers, palace lanterns, scrolls, potted landscapes; on the curio shelves, a bronze ding, porcelain vases, colored-glass cups...
Zhao Rong introduced none of it. He took Wang Yu straight to the great bed.
He worked the hook on one bedpost, twisted a carved boss on the rail, then struck the waist-panel at one corner with the flat of his palm.
"Cha!"
A soft catch released beneath the bed. Zhao Rong stripped back sheet and padding to reveal a hidden compartment under the boards — and inside it, three slim volumes.
"The direct inheritance of the Westguard line: the Flowing Flame Afterglow, and the Fire Cloud Saber Art. When your father finished the Seven Forms of the Setting Sun, he was pleased enough with it to lay it with the other two."
Zhao Rong said, "Once you've moved in, read and train as you please. Whatever you can't crack, bring to me."
Wang Yu picked up the Flowing Flame Afterglow with studied casualness and riffled it — all eight layers, recorded complete.
"The full canon is in there. How far a man climbs it is his own gift's affair." Zhao Rong sighed. "Your father reached the seventh layer before forty and stood a grandmaster. I've been circling the sixth for years. The wall isn't breaking."
Wang Yu's pulse ticked. So Zhao Rong was an Innate expert himself — that was what the sixth layer meant.
The Flowing Flame Afterglow ran eight layers in all: the first five belonged to the Acquired realm; complete the sixth and you stood an Innate expert; complete the seventh and you could call yourself an Innate grandmaster.
"And the eighth?" Wang Yu asked.
"The story goes that the ancestor who created the art never passed grandmaster himself. The eighth layer is half-finished — generations of the line have patched at it from their own insights, guessing forward, and no one can swear the guesses are right."
Zhao Rong let out a slow breath. "The one man with a real hope of completing it — of standing as an Innate great grandmaster, the equal of the supreme masters under heaven — met with... what your father met with."
Wang Yu nodded, and said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world: "Understood. I'll complete the eighth layer later, then."
Zhao Rong laughed despite himself, said nothing, and closed the compartment.
"The registries — farmland, shops, estates, the horse pasture, the workshops — are all in the west study. No rush on those; after tomorrow's rite I'll take you through them properly."
"Good!"
"At the rite tomorrow: General Yang and General Feng hold the northern line and cannot leave their camps, but the other three generals and Commandant Zhao of the Iron Hawk Cavalry will all come to pay their respects."
Wang Yu: "..."
I transmigrated into a wuxia world. When exactly did the genre switch to historical drama?
Zhao Rong walked him through the Manor's military in broad strokes.
Fifty thousand men of the line; three thousand heavy cavalry.
The fifty thousand were split into five armies: two holding the northern line, one camped outside Longshan city guarding the seat, two resting and training in the south. The armies rotated once a year, a full cycle every five.
The three thousand Iron Hawk Cavalry rode to the front in war and trained in peace, moving through the three prefectures like wind — a blade that lost nothing by waiting.
The five army commanders and the cavalry's commandant had all come up through the ranks. Even the two who were Zhao clansmen carried real battle-merit — and every one of them was a martial artist of standing.
Zhao Rong talked on; by the time he finished, the sun hung low in the west. He walked Wang Yu back to Dehe Lodge, told him to sleep well, and left.
***
"Zhao Zheng died of qi deviation? By the late emperor's hand?" Li Yunxiu could barely say it.
Not long after Wang Yu's return to Dehe Lodge, she had come calling — and no soul in the Manor dared bar an emperor-bestowed consort from her husband's door.
"You didn't know?"
"I did not!"
"Does the emperor know?"
"His Majesty certainly does not — he would have told me, and I would have come far better prepared." Her voice had gone low and grim. "A blood debt for a father's life, between you and the imperial house... no wonder Zhao Rong's hostility runs the way it runs."
"The stability of the whole northwest hangs on it, and the late emperor didn't die suddenly of some galloping disease. How does a thing that size never get passed to the sitting emperor?" Wang Yu kept his eyes on her.
Li Yunxiu fell silent. Her gaze slid, just slightly, off-center. "...An oversight, perhaps. It was ten years ago — and Zhao Zheng went on, year after year, apparently untouched. The late emperor may have concluded his scheme had simply failed. So — nothing to pass on."
"Let's hope that's it." Wang Yu clapped his hands once, and moved past it with a grin. "Meanwhile: note that I have now saved your life again."
"We're two grasshoppers on the same string. But yes — that quick tongue of yours carried the day."
She pressed her lips together on a smile. "It's your standing I have to work through, after all. And the master of the Westguard Manor can be no one but you. A pity they don't know the truth of it — that you are also the emperor's man."
She looked at Wang Yu then, worried the double life would grind at him, and offered what comfort she had. "I won't ask you to beat any grass or startle any snakes. Follow His Majesty's lead in all things — one act of help at the crucial hour will be enough to help him settle the realm."
"Understood. Work hard!" Wang Yu said warmly. "The harder you work, the better the Westguard Manor develops — and the greater the help it can render the emperor."
He wasn't the least bit worried about the bridge-demolished-after-crossing problem. By the time any of that came due, he planned to be more or less invincible.
At the sight of Wang Yu's earnestly encouraging face, something moved in Li Yunxiu's eyes; she started to speak, and stopped.
And then Ziling's voice arrived from outside the door. "The consort and His Highness are in conference. No idlers."
"Ah, but I'm no idler," came Qianqian's voice — soft, unhurried, floating. "I've come to find Brother Yu. To talk a while."
"His Highness is not seeing you!"
"Little sister — you can hardly speak for Brother Yu. And besides... Brother Yu and Sister Li aren't wed yet, and here they are shut in one room together. Think what that does to Sister's good name."
Everything about Qianqian's voice was soft and yielding — and it hooked into the heart all the same.
Wang Yu rubbed his hands together and stood up.
"What are you doing?" Li Yunxiu asked.
"Going to keep Qianqian company, obviously!" said Wang Yu, as though nothing could be more self-evident. "The fiancée my own father chose for me — the Manor's future second consort. A man ought to get acquainted."
Li Yunxiu: "..."
Watching him head for the door — loose-limbed, eyes bright, radiating happy anticipation — Li Yunxiu genuinely could not tell whether this was consummate acting or the authentic article.
"I should never have wasted sympathy on him!" She spat the thought like a mouthful of tea leaves, rose, smoothed her skirts, and followed Wang Yu out.
"Brother Yu!"
Qianqian had changed yet again — a moon-white pleated skirt scattered with tiny stars, a single kingfisher-jade pin holding up her coiled black hair: simplicity itself, purity itself.
And at the sight of Wang Yu her eyes kindled — shyness shot through with anticipation, curiosity, a thread of delight, a thread of adoration. Wang Yu had no idea how one pair of eyes even transmitted that much feeling at once.
Multiple angles! Layered depths!
In his whole previous life he'd never seen an actress on any screen deliver an eye-performance like this!
Peak green tea. I love it!
If she hadn't already tipped her hand at the gate, he'd have been fooled square — this was a performing artist, the kind who could crush Best Actress fields back home!
And that, he reflected, was the one flaw: too young still. That first meeting — refusing to be pressed down by Li Yunxiu's presence, needles wrapped in all that silk. Most people would have seen nothing. To the sharp-eyed, it was already a confession.
"Come on! We'll walk the back garden and talk!"
Wang Yu caught Qianqian's soft hand in his and strolled off from Dehe Lodge toward the rear gardens.