The iron chain bridge swayed in the wind like a living thing.
It was four hundred paces long, a single span of rusted links and warped planks hung over a sea of black cloud. Adam walked it slowly. The last lantern behind him went out, and the one ahead followed it, until the whole bridge was a ribbon of darkness under a sky with only stars for light.
At the midpoint, a man was waiting.
He stood with his hands folded in his rust-colored sleeves, a dozen blood-red feathers hanging from the cord at his neck. His smile was soft and almost gentle.
"Elder Hale," Gao Mo said. "I am relieved you came alone. My employer feared you would bring an escort."
"Your employer is a coward," Adam said, stopping sixty paces from him. "He sent a hired blade to do what he couldn’t."
"He is a careful man." The Crimson Vulture tilted his head. "The Law Enforcement array is dark for an hour. No sect, no elders, no witnesses. Only you, me, and the clouds." He sighed. "I truly am sorry, boy. Forty thousand stones is a great deal, but it is not personal."
"It will be," Adam said.
Gao Mo laughed, and the feathers at his throat stirred.
"Blood-Feather Rain."
The dozen feathers tore loose from his neck and multiplied in the air. A dozen became a hundred, then a thousand, a storm of crimson blades that screamed across the bridge in a single red wave.
Adam’s Sword Field bloomed around him, a thirty-foot sphere of silver sword Qi. The first feathers struck its edge and did something he had not expected.
They did not break. They bit.
Each feather was forged from condensed blood, and where it touched the Field it left a thread of red that crawled inward like rot. Sword Qi unraveled around it, thread by thread. Adam felt the Field fray at its edges and tightened it with a thought, and the feathers that reached his skin rang off his new bronze arms like hail on a temple roof.
Gao Mo’s smile stopped.
"Bronze skin," he murmured. "Second Turn, at least. Where did a boy like you find a Second Turn?"
"Same place I’ll find your head."
The Crimson Vulture’s eyes narrowed. "Then we must do this properly."
He clapped his hands, and the bridge vanished.
Crimson mist poured out of his robe, thick and warm, filling the span from chain to chain until Adam could not see his own sword. The Eyes of Divine Insight pierced it for an instant, saw only a tangle of red threads, and went blind.
And the mist was drinking.
Every breath Adam took pulled it into his lungs, and every breath felt a little thinner. His Qi was draining out of him a sip at a time, drawn through his skin by threads he couldn’t see.
A feather hissed out of the fog and kissed his cheek. A second took a strip of his sleeve. The Vulture was circling, unseen, taking his time.
’The mist eats Qi,’ Adam thought, forcing his breathing even. ’A slow bleed. I can’t hold a drain like this for long.’
So he stopped playing at small things.
"Ten-Thousand Blade Dominion."
The world turned silver again.
Ten thousand blades of black-silver light rose out of the iron planks and the dark air above them in a hundred-foot sphere. The blood-mist met them and tore. The blades shredded the crimson fog like wind through gauze, and the bridge cracked beneath the weight of the swords’ intent, chains groaning and planks splintering.
Gao Mo’s soft voice came out of the dark, no longer so soft. "Impressive, boy."
He retreated along the span, feathers flaring around him as a shield. He was already a hundred feet away, at the edge of the Dominion, giving ground without fighting. He was not fleeing. He was counting.
"Four," Adam heard, very quietly. "Five."
’He’s counting my breaths,’ Adam thought. The pressure in his dantian was a fire burning through a rope. ’He thinks I have ten.’
"Six," said the Crimson Vulture.
The Dominion shattered.
It happened all at once, ten thousand swords bursting into silver dust. The backlash punched Adam in the chest, and the bronze bones of his body rang like a bell. He dropped to one knee on the cracked planks, blood running from his nose, his sword’s point scraping the iron.
His dantian was nearly empty.
"Six," Gao Mo said again, stepping out of the settling mist. His voice was warm with delight. "Not even ten. I had budgeted ten. You really are exhausted, aren’t you? I suppose the Heavenfall Pool takes more than it gives."
The feathers at his throat were rising again, thousands of them, a crimson crown spinning in the dark.
"Goodbye, boy," he said.
On his knee, with the world tilting, Adam lifted his eyes.
He smiled.