Wang Yu couldn't hold it in. "Then why would you say it like that?"
Li Yunxiu pressed her lips into a smile. "You looked a little frightened. I thought I would help you relax."
Neither this world's Wang Yu nor the one who had crossed over had ever watched men die in front of him. However much of it a man saw on screens, standing in the same air as it was different.
He had steadied himself quickly — adapted, in fact, surprisingly well — but not so quickly that Li Yunxiu's sharp eyes missed it. Hence the joke, to loosen him up.
"Well, thank you ever so much." Wang Yu's lip curled. "I'd still prefer to relax some other way."
"What way?" Ziling asked, curious.
"Ahem." Wang Yu coughed twice. "A proper feast, for instance."
Li Yunxiu gave him a probing look, then smiled. "We only set out this morning. Come noon, we'll find a decent cookhouse. You've just gained internal energy, and running it burns through a man — you should eat well."
***
Everything settled back to quiet, and as the carriage rolled on, Wang Yu finally had the time to get properly acquainted with his cheat — and with the legendary internal energy.
The turtle shell hung silent in his mind as ever, visible whenever he turned his attention inward — but having absorbed the pill's potency and paid out its feedback, it neither glowed nor stirred.
Then there was the Flowing Flame Afterglow itself.
The inheritance of an Innate grandmaster — Wang Yu was confident the art was formidable.
Li Yunxiu had walked him through the realms of the martial path before. Ordinary martial artists tempered the body, banked internal energy, and drilled their techniques; all of that belonged to what was called the Acquired domain, and most of the martial world lived and died inside it.
But there were also those rare few — gifted in endowment, mind, and insight alike — who refined their arts or grasped deep intent until they could draw on the power of heaven and earth to remake their own bodies, deriving the Innate from the Acquired.
Dantian and meridians alike changed in subtle ways; internal energy became self-renewing, unbroken and inexhaustible; numbers and wars of attrition largely stopped mattering. Such people were called Innate experts.
And when insight deepened further still — when a man's understanding grew into a system and a theory that was his alone — ordinary Innate experts ceased to be his match. Such a man was called an Innate grandmaster.
Was there anything beyond that? Li Yunxiu hadn't said. Knowing would do him no good anyway — she had told him this much only because his supposed father had been an Innate grandmaster, and ignorance of it would have looked wrong.
Back to the Flowing Flame Afterglow. It ran, by report, eight layers. Walk the founder's road, and completing the fifth layer opened the ascent to Innate; polish the eighth to perfection, and a man stood an Innate grandmaster on the spot.
Zhao Yu had been sent to the capital ten years ago with only the first three layers in hand. Once those were questioned out of him, they were passed to Wang Yu — and now, guided by Li Yunxiu's energy and the pill's potency, he had completed the first.
But Wang Yu had also just fed the turtle shell and woken it: it had not only retuned the first three layers to fit him exactly, it had derived the fourth layer outright.
Each layer's running circuit added more turns than the last, and no small complexity.
Each layer gained refined the energy purer, and banked it faster.
But to advance, a man's control of his internal energy had to grow ever finer and more delicate, widening the meridians by slow assault. Take a wrong path, or push too hard, and the lighter price was torn meridians and a serious wound; the heavier was energy running wild — qi deviation.
Which was why training had to start young. The younger the man, the more supple and moldable the meridians; open and widen them all early, and the foundation stood bedrock-firm — and the higher the ceiling above it rose.
Wait until age set in and the meridians hardened into their final shape, and no fineness of control would avail — the channels simply could not bear the load.
So when Li Yunxiu judged that Wang Yu's ceiling would not be high, it was a perfectly sound judgment.
But Wang Yu had the shell. Feed it potent tonics, and his endowments would rise across the board — the foundation would look after itself. And with the shell deriving the art layer by layer and teaching it back to him, the ceiling would look after itself too.
All that fell to him was to master the fine handling of his own internal energy, and climb one steady step at a time.
His energy was newborn, and borrowed into being at that; running the first-layer circuit still snagged and stuttered, and his meridians were still narrow. He dared not attempt the second-layer circuit yet.
In truth, with the shell's help, he had already learned the first four layers. His body simply couldn't cash the knowledge yet — a matter of limits, and of time. As his control grew fluent and sure, never mind the second layer; the third and fourth would come as naturally as water finding its channel.
"That's about enough."
Wang Yu's face had begun to flush, and Li Yunxiu cut his practice short. "Training has its proper measure. Push the circulation too far and you damage the meridians — all harm and no gain. Two to four hours a day is plenty."
Feeling the dull ache swelling along his meridians, Wang Yu very obediently shut the art down. Then he threw out a hand, internal energy turning with the motion — and an honest gust of force snapped off his palm.
At the excitement in his eyes, Li Yunxiu laughed. "Zhao Zheng cultivated the Flowing Flame Afterglow through a treasured blade — the Fire Cloud Saber. You, however, decided a saber lacked dash, so what you learned was the sword."
"What sword art?" Wang Yu asked.
"The Seven Forms of the Setting Sun — a sword art Zhao Zheng created for you with his own hands. The name is drawn from the fire-star sinking in the seventh month, and the dying sun's last blaze. Orthodox and unorthodox joined, hardness and softness in balance — worthy of an Innate grandmaster in every line."
Speaking of the art, even Li Yunxiu had to marvel. The Li family was minor gentry; generations of revising and perfecting their inherited arts had brought them, at best, level with this one sword art.
Wang Yu rubbed his hands together. "When can I learn it?"
"Your internal art has entered the gate — you may learn it whenever you like." Li Yunxiu smiled. "Tonight, once we've found a post station or a lodge, I will teach you."
***
The road passed without incident, and the sun climbed toward its height.
Noon found the column at a smallish market town. Song Yong picked out a cookhouse that looked passably clean, led the carriage into its yard, and called for the house to serve.
Ziling lifted the curtain and hopped down first. "Some clean, well-made dishes — and pour the brothers some wine, to warm the afternoon's road."
"Our thanks, Miss Ziling!" the guards chorused.
Orders given, she fetched a small stool down from the carriage, then steadied first Li Yunxiu and then Wang Yu as they stepped down.
Wang Yu swept a glance around. The place was no shack: a good dozen-plus tables in the main hall, more than half of them taken — travelers, merchants, and two tables of men dressed unmistakably jianghu, all quietly sizing up the new arrivals.
Wang Yu's eyes shifted, and his brow creased. "A wild-country roadhouse like this — is anything it makes even fit to eat?"
Li Yunxiu and Ziling both turned to look at him.
In character already?
Li Yunxiu slipped a hand around his arm. "We're far from home, my lord — nothing on the road is as comfortable as the house. Bear with it a little; a few days more and we're home."
Wang Yu fought down the urge to lean in just a bit closer and rub against her, and instead drew her along to a table by the window. He pointed at the grease-shine on the table and stools and told the waiter at his elbow, face expressionless, "Wipe it down."
The waiter scrambled to obey, whipped the rag off his shoulder, and scrubbed for all he was worth, until the wood fairly gleamed.
Wang Yu sighed, shook his head slowly — and only then handed Li Yunxiu to her seat, settled in beside her, and waved Ziling to the place opposite. "Look after your mistress properly."
"Yes!" Ziling dipped a small curtsy and sat.
Rich clothes, colossal airs, court soldiers in escort — the timid customers had already stopped daring to look at all, and the bold ones risked no more than the corners of their eyes.
Song Yong and his ten guards drew Elder Yan along with them and filled two tables. They had all seen what the old man could do — but he was playing a coachman, and open deference would ruin it; so they surrounded him with a careful, quiet warmth instead.
The waiter came around with a tray and set out big bowls of cool tea against the road's thirst.
"You first, elder." One man passed Elder Yan his bowl. Two more were tending to Song Yong; three were seeing to the carriage and baggage; the remaining four picked up their bowls, parched and more than ready.
Wang Yu looked down at the three bowls on his own table — chipped porcelain, the liquid cloudy.
Ziling was reaching to serve Li Yunxiu when Wang Yu stopped her. "Do we have a teapot and cups in the carriage?"
"We do!" Ziling nodded.
"And good tea?"
"That too!" She nodded again.
"We have the pot, we have the cups, we have good leaves — all this place needs to supply is hot water." Wang Yu rapped his knuckles on the table, one eyebrow up. "So why would we drink this swill?"
Ziling: "..."
She was Li Yunxiu's maid, raised in a gentry household of the Capital Circuit — she had seen things and tasted things in her time, but she was no true spendthrift, and she had never moved through the genuinely extravagant circles.
Wang Yu's little performance had honestly cowed her.
Li Yunxiu gave Wang Yu a long, deep look, then said to Ziling, "Well? Go fetch the tea."
"Yes!" Ziling scrambled up, threw Wang Yu a startled glance, and hurried for the yard with her skirts gathered — quick, but every step smooth and level, the manners of a great household showing through.
At Wang Yu's word, the four guards who had raised their bowls quietly set them down again, and the rest stopped daring to drink at all, sitting in respectful silence until the prince's table should drink first.
Ziling returned shortly, cradling a wooden case: one teapot, two cups, and a small clay jar.
She opened the jar, measured two and a half scoops of leaves into the pot with a little copper spoon, asked the waiter for hot water, and poured.
Splash—
Steam billowed up, and a fragrance rode out on it, drifting through half the room.
"Mm." Wang Yu nodded.
Only when the leaves stood bright and clear in his cup did he raise it.
Seeing him satisfied at last, the guards let out their breath, faces easing, and lifted their bowls to one another before drinking.
"Elder Yan?!"
The cry of alarm froze every hand. Heads turned. Elder Yan was still sipping his tea, easy as a man in the sun — but his face had turned a deep, bruised black.
His tablemates recoiled in horror, benches scraping back.
Li Yunxiu crossed the room in a single bound to his side. Elder Yan had noticed nothing at all; he only looked up, puzzled. "What is it?"
She pushed a full bowl of tea in front of him. "Look."
Elder Yan bent over it — and his eyes bulged. His head snapped up. "What is this..."
The sentence never finished. His voice locked in his throat; his body had already gone rigid. Black blood ran from the corner of his mouth, the light in his eyes guttered dark, and he toppled over, dead.