Master
When Tu Yin came back to the nest, the cultivator he had caught was huddled trembling in a corner, evidently terrified by the lumps of flesh and severed limbs on the stand beside him; on that plainly bloodless face there was still a little spittle brought up with the vomit, faintly shining in the light that flickered past.
He heard them coming and shuddered all over, then buried his head lower still.
Tu Yin’s temper was foul just then. That cultivator in white who had broken in was a very hard man to be rid of.
In their last exchange he had been rather at a loss, but this time he seemed to have learned something, and aimed his blade specifically at the trunk of that monstrous hide and bone of theirs.
His sword was a strange thing too. It plainly had no spiritual energy behind it, and yet it was extraordinarily keen; a few strokes severed several of the iron chains, and the rotting flesh they bound spilled all over the ground.
After that they had no heart for further fighting. They lured the man into a trap laid in advance and fled back to the nest.
Tearing off the hide, which had lost all shape, in a few brisk motions, Tu Yin went straight for the hair of the cultivator in the corner, forced his head up and demanded harshly:
“What exactly did you get in that cave?”
Hauled up by the hair, the tearing pain in his scalp brought tears welling into Zheng Nanlou’s eyes beyond his control. His lips trembled, and his voice was full of fright:
“I, I really don’t know……”
“Don’t play the fool with me!” Tu Yin’s other hand came up and clamped hard on his cheeks. “The smell of that thing is all over you. I could pick it out three li away!”
Forced to tip his head back by those coarse fingers, his voice came out with the greatest difficulty:
“I, senior brother Xie was already inside before I ever entered the cave. He has never had any use for me, so why would he tell me……”
“Rubbish!”
Tu Yin clearly did not believe it, and slammed him down onto the ground.
“Then why are you wearing Xie Heng’s clothes?”
Clutching his chest, his breathing ragged, Zheng Nanlou could only answer in broken pieces:
“He forced…… forced me. He, he said…… if I put his clothes on, you would chase me…… and he could take the chance to……”
Tu Yin still did not believe him and was about to press further, when Tu Xiao, who had said nothing all this while, pulled him back.
Tu Xiao was plainly a great deal calmer than Tu Yin. “There’s no need to ask any more. Xie Heng’s blood, and him with it, is enough.”
“What was in that cave is no more than a wisp of some lingering breath. If you truly want it, once we have ‘that,’ there will still be time to go back and take it.”
Tu Yin snorted coldly, but in the end did not raise his hand again; he only glared viciously at Zheng Nanlou. “You wait, you worthless thing.”
At the far end of the Sunken Sword Abyss lay a stretch of water as still as something dead.
An underground river seeped out of pitch-black seams in the rock and gathered into a deep, cold pool whose surface was level, without a single ripple. All sound fell away here, so quiet that not a trace of life could be felt.
The stone walls at the bank were overgrown with dark green moss, and the damp cold air had condensed into fine beads of mist that clung to it, like a swarm of insects that made the flesh crawl.
Tu Yin dragged Zheng Nanlou along and came to a stop before a finely carved stone door.
Ahead of them, Tu Xiao took a bloodstained scrap of cloth just torn from Xie Heng’s robe and pressed it into the groove at the center of the door.
There was a “hum,” and a layer of bloody light rose over the dark grey stone; those intricate carvings lit up one after another. The light wove together and spread outward ring by ring, until at last it formed a complete formation diagram.
“Creak, creak……”
The heavy stone door swung slowly open with a dull, grinding sound.
As the gap widened, a cold wind thick with the smell of rot and stagnation came at their faces, stirring the loose hair at Zheng Nanlou’s temple.
Behind the door lay a pitch-black passage whose end could not be seen.
Tu Yin jerked the chain in his hand and it grated harshly. The other end of it was fastened around Zheng Nanlou’s leg, and the pull sent him staggering, nearly to the ground.
“Listen well.” Tu Yin’s voice was cold. “Go in, bring out what’s inside, and don’t think about trying any tricks.”
As he spoke he shook the chain again, as though in warning.
“Otherwise you can forget about keeping that leg.”
Zheng Nanlou kept his head down and his expression could not be seen; only his voice still trembled, as though he were afraid past all controlling:
“……All right.”
With that he shrank forward step by step into the passage.
He had not walked long in the darkness before he stepped into a stone chamber.
The chamber was not large and its walls were rough; one could tell that no great care had gone into building it, for the stacked blocks had not even been ground smooth.
A heavy layer of dust lay over everything around, so presumably no one had come in for a very long time.
And in the very center of the chamber stood a coffin.
Its body was greyish white, its surface without any carving at all, exceedingly plain, and yet it gave off a faint, unpleasant chill, as though something inside it were radiating a piercing cold.
“What’s inside?”
Tu Xiao’s voice came from outside the passage, sounding a little distant.
“There’s a coffin,” Zheng Nanlou answered.
“Open it,” Tu Xiao ordered.
Zheng Nanlou did not act rashly.
He first walked a circle around the coffin and studied it carefully for a while. But the thing was so utterly ordinary that he could find nothing unusual about it at all.
With nothing else for it, he took up a position at the head of the coffin, set both hands against the lid and pushed.
He had opened it barely a crack when a burst of blinding white light exploded out of the inside.
The blaze was fierce enough to scorch the eyes, and it startled him into snatching his hands back and retreating.
But the lid, as though thrown up by some force from within, gave a loud “bang” and flew open of itself.
Once the coffin was fully open the white light gradually drew in, becoming a hazy thin mist that circled slowly through the chamber.
Only then did Zheng Nanlou lean over and look inside.
A sword lay quietly across the bottom of the coffin.
A sword exactly like the phantom he had seen at the bottom of the deep pool.
The blade was a plain white, as though congealed out of frost and snow, clear through, so thin that light seemed as if it might pass straight past it.
A cold gleam like ice crystal came off the edge, and merely looking at it chilled a person to the bone, like standing face to face with the howling wind of deep winter, cold enough to freeze the breath.
While Zheng Nanlou was still examining the sword closely, Tu Xiao asked again from beyond the passage:
“What’s in the coffin?”
Zheng Nanlou could not help raising a brow. So they did not know what was in here after all?
His answer came with the same timidity and alarm as before, as though he did not quite understand what he was looking at either:
“It’s…… it’s a stone.”
The words had barely left him when Tu Yin’s furious voice burst out from outside:
“A stone? How could it be a stone! You’d better not be lying to us, boy!”
Zheng Nanlou’s voice shook harder under the questioning. “It really, really is a stone. If you don’t believe me, come and see……”
That only angered Tu Yin further. “Rubbish. You know perfectly well……”
But Tu Xiao cut him off. “If it is a stone, then bring the thing out first.”
Zheng Nanlou answered him, bent down, reached both hands toward the bottom of the coffin, and deliberately made a few sounds of exertion, as though he really were lifting a stone.
Tu Yin, sure enough, could not hold his temper. Thinking the delay deliberate, he came two steps forward, by the sound of it, and shouted:
“You……”
And in that instant Zheng Nanlou seized the hilt.
The cold, keen as a blade, sliced open his palm, and blood wound down the length of the sword; but as though he felt nothing at all he lifted it, hooked the chain at his leg with a backhanded turn, and hauled with every scrap of strength in his body.
Caught unprepared, Tu Yin was dragged by the force through the chain and pitched straight into the passage.
The passage, pitch dark until then, lit up the moment he fell into it. With a low hum, as though countless unseen blades had woken at once, and before he could so much as scream, his body was run through by sword energy that came shrieking at him.
Sounds of tearing flesh came one after another; the churned fragments of bone and meat spattered against the stone walls, were swept over by the sword energy again, and were ground utterly to powder.
A brawny, brutish man had become a cloud of scarlet mist in the blink of an eye.
Tu Xiao’s eyes all but split at the sight. He roared and lashed out with another chain, hooking exactly the half length left lying in the passage where Tu Yin had died.
By now Zheng Nanlou had sunk half-kneeling to the ground with his strength gone, his palm streaming blood, barely able to keep hold of the hilt. Tu Xiao gave one violent pull and dragged him straight out.
But the strange thing was that the raging sword energy, which only moments before had been shredding Tu Yin, receded like a tide as he passed through, and never attacked him at all.
The instant Zheng Nanlou was hauled out, Tu Xiao’s hand closed around his throat.
“You little bastard.” Fire all but shot from Tu Xiao’s eyes, and his grip was strong enough to crush the bones of the throat. “Give me back my brother’s life.”
Zheng Nanlou strained to lift the sword, but his arm hurt unbearably, as though half of it were broken. The point hung trembling at Tu Xiao’s side and could not advance so much as a fraction. His vision was already going black, and all that reached his ears was his own low moan, like that of a dying man.
And then Tu Xiao’s eyes went wide, and the strength drained out of his hand in an instant.
He collapsed to the ground as though his sinews and bones had been drawn out of him, a patch of dark red blood showing starkly at his chest.
Zheng Nanlou fell with him, and clutched his throat coughing for a long while before he could recover himself.
Out of the corner of his eye he caught the white figure standing behind Tu Xiao, and could not help frowning:
“Why did you only just……”
Before the words were finished, the gu worm in his chest stirred without warning. Against a heartbeat that came faster and faster he raised his eyes slowly; the red in his vision settled, and those brows and eyes, which had worn a smile for years and were nonetheless as cold as winter frost, grew clearer and clearer.
A chill climbed quietly up his spine, and all at once he could not tell whether what had caused it was the love gu he had no power to resist, or the light that had passed just then at the bottom of that man’s eyes, sterner than the north wind over a field of snow.
“Master……”