Ji Ling’er stood motionless in the dim aisle, her cold, starlike eyes fixed on the dark blue back of the servant as it dissolved into the shadow of the mahogany shelves.
"Saintess?" The middle-aged woman at her side stepped closer, frowning at the dusty scroll that lay upon the desk. "That boy was insolent. Prince he may have been once, and a cripple sweeping floors now, but he should know better than to speak so lightly before the future Sword Maiden of the Feathered Frost Sect."
"Hush, Aunt Liu." Ji Ling’er lowered her voice and raised one slender, jade-white hand.
She crossed to the desk without a sound, her silk boots silent upon the slate. There she took up the old, yellowed bamboo scroll of the Submerged Dragon Sword Manual and unrolled it with care.
Li Xuan had spoken truly. The slats bearing the sixth diagram were badly faded, the black ink worn away by centuries of damp air beneath the earth. Yet below the original faint lines, finer ones had been scratched into the bamboo itself, as if with the blunt edge of a fingernail.
The strokes were smooth and flowing, with a grace she could not name.
Ji Ling’er caught her breath behind her silver veil.
She had reached the peak of the Foundation Establishment Realm at nineteen, and her sword sense was keen as a hawk’s eye. When her divine sense passed across those crude scratches, a flash of azure sword-light burst in her sea of consciousness.
In her vision, a shadowy figure in a plain scholar’s robe stood above a boundless, storm-lashed ocean. It held no immortal blade. It held a single dry willow branch. With one easy turn of the wrist the branch drew a silent line through the air, and a wave tall as a mountain was cleft in two without a ripple.
The Flowing River Turn... mended.
The frost Qi in Ji Ling’er’s body, lodged at her third meridian gate for more than six months, began to move of its own accord along the new road the scratches described.
Crack.
A tiny sound rang within her. The bottleneck broke like thin glass. Her frost Qi poured forward like a released river and widened her meridians, and it carried her to the very summit of the Foundation Establishment Realm. She stood now at the foot of the gate of Core Formation, near enough to see its threshold, though not yet to cross it.
"Saintess!" Aunt Liu gasped and stepped back as a sudden, sharp cold flowed out of Ji Ling’er and laid a thin film of white frost across the stones. "Has the bottleneck rebounded?"
Ji Ling’er rolled the scroll closed with fingers that trembled slightly. She looked toward the dark corridor where Li Xuan had gone, and her heart beat hard against her ribs.
A master. A Sword Dao master beyond compare, living in this forgotten place.
She was certain now that those crude marks were not the work of a lucky scholar who had read many books. Each stroke held a grasp of the Sword Dao that surpassed even her own master’s.
"Aunt," she asked in a low voice, "when you looked at him just now, did you feel any spiritual energy?"
"Not a thread, Saintess." Aunt Liu shook her head firmly. "I swept him twice with my divine sense. His dantian is shattered, his meridians are choked with dead blood, and his breath is shallow. He is a crippled mortal, beyond any doubt."
Beneath her veil, Ji Ling’er narrowed her eyes. That is concealment. Perfect concealment.
A man who could seem to a veteran of Foundation Establishment nothing but a fragile mortal, and who would mend a flaw in an ancient sword manual with a fingernail... his true realm lay beyond her imagination.
She turned to the empty aisle and made a deep, formal bow, as a devoted disciple bows to a teacher. Then she slipped the bamboo scroll into her spatial ring.
"We are leaving," she said quietly. "And not one word of what happened here today is to reach the royal house of Great Liang."
That night, in the guest pavilion of the Feathered Frost Sect’s embassy, Ji Ling’er sat before a bronze lamp with a sheet of white paper and copied six strokes from memory. She stared at them for a long while. Then she wrote to her master and sent the letter out upon a paper crane, which flew away into the dark.
The reply came before the third watch, in her master’s spare, upright hand. Three lines.
The Feathered Frost keeps no quarrel with Great Liang. Do not meddle in the affairs of the royal house. And remember: a sword that has seen the sea does not return to the pond.
She read the last line six times. The first two she understood perfectly. The third she understood too well.
She burned the letter in the flame of the lamp and sat until the window grew pale. By the time the first drum of morning sounded, she had decided nothing, and she had decided everything.
At the same hour, in the gilded eastern wing of the Royal Palace, Li Chen sat upon a throne of carved red sandalwood, sipping tea from a cup of translucent warm jade.
He was the Third Prince no longer. He had been formally invested as Crown Prince of Great Liang, and he wore magnificent golden robes embroidered with dragons. His face was sharp, handsome, and arrogant.
Below him stood an elder in dark gray robes, with sunken eyes and skin marked by faint green poison runes. This was Du Mo, the Grand Elder, a cultivator at the late stage of Core Formation, hired by the Crown Prince’s mother to secure her son’s position.
"Has Director Chen returned?" Li Chen asked carelessly, and set down his cup with a soft clack. "It has been four days. How long does it take to pour one poison pill down a cripple’s throat?"
"Your Highness," rasped Elder Du Mo, "Director Chen has not returned. Yesterday my blood-hunting worms went down to the Seventh Nether Floor, but they lost his scent at the entrance."
Li Chen scowled. "Did the old servant resist?"
"Unlikely." The elder snorted. "But the archive is rooted in the bones of the mountain and rests upon the ancient Dragon-Vein Suppression Array. It is likely that Director Chen woke some forgotten killing formation, or was swallowed by the corpse-miasma that has gathered in the lower corridors."
Li Chen sneered and settled back in his throne. "A pity. Chen was a faithful hound. But it matters little. Whether Li Xuan died of a pill or lies buried alive, it is all one to me. He will rot in that dark grave forever."
"Your Highness." Du Mo stepped forward and lowered his voice. "Our spies in the Royal Archive Bureau have turned up a secret ledger from the founding dynasty. According to those old records, the Seventh Nether Floor holds more than books..."
Li Chen arched an eyebrow. "Oh?"
"The Imperial Dragon-Vein Core!" Du Mo’s eyes shone with raw greed. "The primal source left behind by the Founding Ancestor. If Your Highness can seize that Core before you ascend the throne, you may draw the empire’s fortune into your own body and force your way into the Core Formation Realm in a single leap."
A fierce hunger flared in Li Chen’s eyes, and he struck the armrest of his sandalwood throne with his palm.
"The Dragon-Vein Core, lying under that cripple’s feet." He laughed coldly, and a cruel smile spread across his face. "Send twenty elite guards of the Shadow-Blood Battalion, and you will lead them yourself, Elder. Go down to the seventh floor, tear that dusty library apart, and bring me the Core."
"The array will need three days of preparation," Du Mo said. "The ancestral wards must be broken with talismans, or the descent will bring the whole floor down upon us."
"Three days, then." Li Chen waved a hand. "No more."
"And your elder brother, Li Xuan?" The poison elder’s lips twisted into a sinister grin.
"If he still draws breath," Li Chen said softly, "break what bones remain and cast his body into the formation furnace. I want no trace of him left in this world."
The elder bowed. The green runes along his neck pulsed once, faintly, like a slow heartbeat.
Ten zhang below the earth, a young man was sweeping a floor.