"AAGH!"
The man in black screamed, whipped his longsword into a wheel of silver before his face, and threw himself backward through the air.
The dust that landed on his skin was nothing. But the dust that got into his eyes blinded them — the world smeared away before him.
Then he heard Wang Yu speak.
"That was my family's secret art — the Soul-Chasing, Life-Snatching, Form-Erasing Powder. It seals the blood, rots the flesh, and eats the bone. Wash it off with water within thirty breaths, or the meat sloughs from your bones and you die where you stand."
"You little cur! I nearly believed you!" the man in black howled, cursing for all he was worth. "This is lime! If it meets water, my eyes are finished!"
"Huh?" Wang Yu blinked. "You knew about that?"
Ziling burst out laughing, and even Li Yunxiu's composure cracked into a smile — as her hand swept lightly up, and two gold needles buried themselves in the man's eyes.
He screamed again, twisted, and fled for his life.
He was fast. Li Yunxiu was faster. One skimming step put her behind him; one slender jade hand pressed against his mid-back; one pulse of internal energy snapped the vessels of his heart.
Blood erupted from his mouth, and he was dead before he finished falling.
Wang Yu let out the breath he'd been holding — then jerked bolt upright again, eyes sweeping the treeline. "There's not more of them, is there?"
The evening wind sighed; fallen leaves rustled; there was no human sound at all.
"It seems not." Li Yunxiu let out a breath of her own. Three alarms in a single day — even her nerves were wearing thin.
***
The guards were set to finding tools and digging two deep pits behind the yard: the real grandfather and granddaughter, carried up out of the cellar, would be buried in one; the old woodcutter, his boy, and the black-clad killer — that whole brotherhood of murderers — would go together in the other.
Before the burying, naturally, came the frisking.
"One bottle of poison, one bottle of antidote, twelve poisoned throwing darts — and thirty gold leaves!" Ziling was beaming. "Who knew the old fellow was rich?"
Ziling searched the bodies; Li Yunxiu and Wang Yu stood by.
"That sword-theory of yours," Li Yunxiu asked. "Where did you hear it?"
"Read it in a novel," Wang Yu said.
The common streets of this world had grown prosperous, and literacy with them; alongside the scholars' classics had sprung up operas, novels, picture-books, all finding their audience.
"The novel had a peerless master in it who crossed the whole world unmatched. Before twenty, he used a treasured sword — fierce, unbreakable, cutting through anything."
Wang Yu went on. "Before thirty, a soft sword. After he wounded a righteous man by mischance, he cast it into a gorge and took up a heavy sword instead — and before forty, he crossed the world with that.
Past forty, the book says, he no longer leaned on objects at all: grass, trees, bamboo, stone — all of them could be his sword. And from there he advanced, step by step, into the realm where no sword surpasses having one."
"No sword surpasses having one?" Li Yunxiu's brow knitted around the phrase. "A novelist who trains at all rarely gets anywhere. At best they sketch their heroes and invent some techniques — where would one of them find true principles of the martial way? It sounds profound, I grant. Whether it holds up is another matter."
She considered, then asked anyway. "What is this novel called?"
"I forget," Wang Yu said, with the full courage of his convictions.
Li Yunxiu: "..."
She was quiet a moment, bright eyes deep as well-water, studying him. "And the ploy itself? Empty passing for full, full passing for empty — frighten him with words first, hold his eyes on the firewood, then finish it in one stroke of lime. How did you come up with that?"
Elder Yan's death had blindsided her. She had trapped the old poisoner quickly enough, but when the man in black appeared, she had held no real confidence at all.
She had her hidden cards, and her true arts had never once been shown before others — but a man she hadn't even sensed arriving was not a man to gamble against openly. So she had shown weakness at once: panic on the surface, gold needles palmed underneath. Whether he would actually take the bait, she had not known.
Set against her own orthodox answer — a woman's standard play, workable and uninspired — Wang Yu's answer had left her genuinely dazzled.
Wastrel reputation or no, an Innate grandmaster's son carried a certain dread; salt that with talk too abstruse to verify, and the killer had actually been held in place. Zhao Yu was known never to be parted from his sword — yet here he stood, on the eve of near-certain assassination, weaponless, toying with kindling. Any man alive would hesitate over what that had to mean.
But a man come to kill Wang Yu would have to test him eventually — carefully, probingly, his whole mind narrowed onto that improvised weapon. And no probing in the world would have prepared him for the one truth underneath: that the firewood was only firewood, and the man holding it had almost no internal energy at all.
In that single stunned heartbeat, Wang Yu's newborn sliver of energy was exactly enough — a palmful of lime, a gust of wind, a distance too short to dodge in.
And her eyes were sharp: she had seen Wang Yu release the kindling almost the instant the energized blade touched it, sparing himself the shock carried through the wood. Careful. Very careful.
And so a martial artist scarcely her own inferior had been brought down with the tactics of a street ruffian in a gutter brawl.
It left her oddly moved. Her fame as the woman Top Scholar rang across the realm — and today, this raw beginner had saved her twice. The first time, luck had played its part. The second time showed mind and method both of the very first order.
A pity he had started training so late. Otherwise, the jianghu would surely have owed him a seat!
Then again — with a mind like that, impersonating Zhao Yu would come easily. Taking control of the Westguard Manor might prove far simpler than she had feared.
Either way: a man one day into his martial arts had stepped out to face a killer without a flicker — had planted himself in front of her, too, the moment she played at helplessness — and that tall, straight back had set something knocking, just once, in her chest.
She was still watching him when he answered.
"From a novel."
"...What?"
"I read one once about a master of ventriloquism. When he fought, he threw his voice from his belly so his opponent's whole attention fastened on his hands — while the real weapon sat behind his teeth in a spring-loaded mechanism, waiting for its moment." Wang Yu recited it with a perfectly straight face.
Li Yunxiu: "..."
"Novels these days," she said, quite woodenly, "are certainly interesting."
As the woman Top Scholar, peerless in letters and arms, Li Yunxiu had read as widely as anyone alive — but classics, deep theory, statecraft, even the manuals of war. Operas, novels, picture-books were gutter-print; she had never spared them anything but disdain.
And Wang Yu had pulled a working battle-plan out of exactly that gutter!
So there were no useless books after all. Only essence unextracted — and lessons put to use in the right place, or not at all.
She thought it over and concluded that from now on she, too, would be reading a few well-chosen novels and picture-books.
Just then, Ziling made a small surprised sound and held up a brass token. "My la— Madam! He was carrying this. He's not part of some organization, is he?"
The token had come off the man in black.
Wang Yu peered at it from the side: half a palm across, its face engraved with three mountain peaks in interlocking light and shadow, its back with a single carved character — Shadow. The whole piece had been thumbed to an oily shine; its owner had plainly worried it in his hand for years.
At the sight of it, Li Yunxiu's brow lifted, and a name slipped out of her. "The Ghost Shadow Sect?"
Wang Yu's mouth twitched. "Even the name sounds like bad news."
"It is bad news — and the power behind it is bigger than you'd believe," Li Yunxiu said, her voice dropping.
It was the first time Wang Yu had seen her truly change color. "The Seven Great Sword Sects didn't rate a blink out of you. How terrifying is this Ghost Shadow Sect?"
"The Seven Great Sword Sects are famous orthodox houses. The Ghost Shadow Sect is a branch of the Demonic Cult," she said flatly.
"The Demonic Cult." Wang Yu rolled the words around his mouth.
The wuxia and xianxia novels of his past life had rarely gone a volume without one. Backdrop or center stage, supporting color or hidden hand — always a power of the first rank, and always with monsters of the first rank inside it.
"First a Southern Sea Sect that matches the Seven Great Sword Sects, now a Demonic Cult branch — day one, and you're serving me courses like this?" Wang Yu thought, speechless. "If you don't want me clearing the tutorial, just say so. No need to load hell difficulty."
But Li Yunxiu was frowning over something else entirely. "The Cult has set itself against the court for as long as anyone can remember. Why would its people take a bounty posted by capital officials? A Ghost Shadow killer not assassinating the court's grandees is already restraint — why would he help them kill you?"
By every reasonable reading, the emperor had released Zhao Yu only out of fear that the Westguard faction would rise; and a Zhao Yu restored to Longshan Prefecture was never going to be of one heart with the throne.
The Demonic Cult should have been clearing his road home, not closing it.
She could not make it fit.
"If it doesn't fit, stop fitting it. He's dead, isn't he?" Wang Yu couldn't summon much concern. The plan hadn't changed: hole up in the Westguard Manor, pop pills like candy, train like a madman, and let the rest of the world mind its own business.
"True enough." Li Yunxiu nodded. "The Ghost Shadow Sect sent one killer; they will not send another."
"But this is not going the way I expected," she went on slowly. "I assumed those court grandees would scrape up nothing worth the name. I assumed most powers would be quietly pleased to see the Westguard lands stay half-independent, and would sit on their hands — that Elder Yan alone would see us down the road.
Instead: the Southern Sea Twin Swords at our door. A poisoner of real craft. And now a Ghost Shadow killer on top of them."
She looked at Wang Yu. "I did not know they hated you this much. I no longer know what else may be waiting up that road."
Wang Yu kept his face very still. He wasn't going to die in the tutorial. Was he?
"So what do we do now?" he asked.
"Now we stop parading down the road like a signboard." Her gaze went to the guards, whose pits were nearly dug. "They may as well be town criers walking ahead of us. Keep them, and we only draw more killers in."
"You're going to silence them?" Wang Yu sucked in a breath of cold air. "The woman Top Scholar, cold as the histories — you even had them dig the pits themselves!"
Li Yunxiu very nearly tripped over her own feet. "What is wrong with your head?! I mean we send them back to the capital — and the three of us make ourselves up as ordinary jianghu travelers, drop out of sight, and slip past the killers altogether."