The Clear Snow Reflection Art
A man in a dead faint is heavy. Zheng Nanlou was not weak, and with a held breath he could in fact have carried him.
But he could not be bothered with the effort, and had no wish to trouble himself thinking of another way, so he simply took Xie Heng by the collar and dragged him toward the pool.
The floor of the cave was far from even, and with Xie Heng senseless his head could only loll back limply, knocking now and then against jutting stones as he was hauled along, nearly waking him.
Somewhere in the jolting a scattered thread of awareness seemed to drift back to him; two blurred moans escaped his mouth, and his lashes began to tremble.
Seeing it, Zheng Nanlou raised a hand to cover his eyes and soothed him softly, in the voice one uses to lull a child to sleep, while there was plainly not the slightest expression on his face:
“Don’t be afraid. I am taking senior brother to have his wounds treated.”
Before the words were out, that hand slid down and clamped over the side of Xie Heng’s neck, and with a sudden squeeze forced him back into unconsciousness.
That done, Zheng Nanlou did not spare him another glance, but went on hauling him as before, all the way to the edge of the pool.
He cut open the man’s palm with his sword and put the hand into the water. As the blood kept flowing out, the pitch-black pool seemed to light up by half all at once, driving off the thick darkness on every side.
Faint blue lines of light began at Xie Heng’s palm and spread quickly outward, covering the whole surface within moments.
Nor was that light still; it wound and flowed without pause, weaving before Zheng Nanlou’s eyes into a brilliant and uncanny river of stars.
He narrowed his eyes and studied the paths of those ten thousand streams of light in the water, and found that although they seemed to drift without order, they were in fact all converging on one place at the bottom of the pool, as though something there drew them.
As Xie Heng’s blood kept seeping in, the light grew brighter still, and a blurred outline began faintly to surface in that place. Seen from a distance, it looked like…… a person?
Before they entered the Sunken Sword Abyss, Lu Zhuobai had told him that the place was said to be where some great power had shed his body by the sword, and that countless sword energies still remained in the waters below the ground.
And this pool needed Xie Heng’s blood to open it. The true bloodline of a great house had been steeped over who knew how many years in elixirs and rare arts until it took on certain peculiar properties. So he guessed that some fine opportunity might be hidden at the bottom.
Anyone else would probably have hesitated a while over it, since by rights the thing ought to belong to Xie Heng.
But Zheng Nanlou cared nothing for that. Had chance not smeared Xie Heng’s blood onto his hand, then with the brain that man had he would never have discovered the thing at all, even standing right here. So what if he took it now?
What he had found could only be his.
Huaizhou was a place of much water, and Zheng Nanlou had been a decent swimmer since he was small. He stripped off his outer robe, leaving only his inner clothes, and leapt into the pool, as neat about it as a fish.
The water was bitterly cold; jumping in was like burrowing straight into a block of ice, and it stiffened his whole body, as though countless steel needles were driving into his bones, the shock of it leaving his head swimming.
When he was small and there was nothing to eat in winter, he had dived into the river to catch fish, though the water in Huaizhou was never this cold; he had only stiffened after coming out, and at such times he had always bitten his tongue to keep himself clear-headed.
So he used the old trick again. The taste of rust spread through his mouth, and at last he found the strength to swim deeper.
Zheng Nanlou dove in a single breath to the very bottom, and was shocked to see that the whole floor of the pool was one enormous block of thousand-year ice.
The ice was as clear and pure as a piece of fine crystal such as the world could hardly furnish, and the faint blue light falling on it refracted in cold gleams that set the heart pounding.
And sealed inside that ice was a woman.
Her eyes were closed and her head bowed, her long hair like ink, her face still fresh with life, as though she had only fallen deeply asleep and might open her eyes again at any moment.
More striking than she was, though, was the sword lying beneath her hands where they were folded across her breast.
Its blade was thin as a cicada’s wing, and even sealed in ice the whole of it glittered with clear light, rosy colors moving across it, as though all the starlight and clear radiance of the heavens had been smelted into it. It was impossible to look away.
Zheng Nanlou could not keep a touch of delight from showing. This opportunity was better than he had imagined.
Still, he did not dare act rashly. He merely put out a hand to test it, crooked a knuckle, and rapped twice, lightly, on the surface of the ice.
He used almost no force at all; even the sound was barely audible.
But against all expectation, that all but negligible disturbance was enough to open a crack in the thousand-year ice.
It startled him, and he drew back on instinct, but it was already too late.
Along with a string of “cracking” sounds, the fissure spread outward at an alarming speed, and within moments had covered nearly the whole face of the ice.
The lines crossed and ran together, sketching out before his eyes a pattern something like a butterfly.
The faint light in the water moved along its wings, as though the butterfly had begun to beat them.
No. It was not the “butterfly” that was moving, but the ice.
That seemingly solid block of thousand-year ice shattered all at once.
Countless small shards burst outward like blades, and the water around him quickened suddenly, sweeping the ice fragments into a powerful whirlpool that flung Zheng Nanlou over and away.
He could not get clear in time and choked out a string of bubbles; even as his sight was blocked he glimpsed the woman’s body plunging downward.
He knew this was bad, and would not give up such a chance. Caring for nothing else, he kicked hard against the water and threw himself after that blazing sword light as it drew further and further off.
But the rushing current wound around him like invisible chains, and the keen edges of ice grazed his body, leaving who knew how many small cuts; his blood spread through the water in a pale red haze that changed the color of everything in front of him.
Yet the pain instead drew out the ruthlessness Zheng Nanlou had always kept so well hidden in his bones. It set his teeth clenching, and with nearly all the strength in his body he forced a path open.
Just as his fingertips were about to touch the hilt of that sword, he heard a “hum.”
In that instant the shimmering sword, and the woman’s body along with it, turned into countless points of blue light, scattering through the water like fireflies beyond counting, then gathering abruptly together and rushing straight at him.
The impact nearly took his consciousness, but at his ear came an unreal little sigh, like a woman’s murmur of regret.
Zheng Nanlou arched up violently and began to cough.
At some point the current had washed him up onto the bank.
He had swallowed water, and now his lungs hurt until his vision swam. He coughed beyond his control, and even after all the water was out he could not stop, as though he would heave up his five organs and six viscera along with it.
When at last the coughing eased a little, he wiped his eyes clear of water and found that a book had appeared in his hand.
The spine was the most ordinary sort of thread binding, the paper slightly yellowed, so plain that it could not even match the counterfeit manuals of rare arts he had seen at the secondhand book stalls down at the foot of the mountain.
What was eerie was that apart from the part he was gripping, all the rest of it was as dry as ever, without so much as a water mark, as though he had not brought it out of the water at all, but it had simply appeared in his hand out of nowhere.
By the dim light coming down from overhead, he made out the sweeping, flying ink characters on the cover.
《The Clear Snow Reflection Art》
He opened to the first page, and a line of writing sprang into view.
“In the cold pool, no reflection; all that has gone before sinks away.”
Eight short characters, and yet his heart gave a violent jolt. He sat up straight without meaning to and read on.
This volume called “The Clear Snow Reflection Art” turned out to be a secret manual of a cultivation method he had never once heard of, and the practice recorded in it was quite unlike any art he had ever seen.
He was hampered by the gu worm at his heart meridian; his channels were sluggish and could not hold spiritual energy. But this manual turned every scrap of spiritual energy drawn in into cold and stored it in the body, as though it had been made to his measure.
The more he read the more delighted he grew, and he was about to try circulating it when he remembered that he was still inside the Sunken Sword Abyss, where cultivation and spiritual energy alike were suppressed. He had to let it be, thinking he would study it properly once he was back.
So he tucked 《The Clear Snow Reflection Art》 carefully into the deepest part of his storage pouch. Only when that was done did he remember Xie Heng, whom he had left at the water’s edge.
He turned to look. The man still lay by the pool. Chilled for so long, and wounded besides, he had by now come down with a high fever.
Zheng Nanlou had never meant to take his life, and if the man were to die here it would be hard for him to explain.
So he fished out a few dried herbs, crushed them and pushed them into his mouth.
“Swallow it if you don’t want to die.” He patted Xie Heng’s cheek. “If you die here, I’ll have to go to the trouble of dealing with the body.”
Unconscious as he was, Xie Heng swallowed by instinct and got it down after a fashion. Zheng Nanlou watched him for a while, and before he could make anything of it he heard footsteps from the direction of the cave mouth.
His ears twitched and his hand went to the iron sword at his waist.
The cold light of the blade clearing its scabbard drew a silver line through the dark and stopped at the newcomer’s throat.
The cold gleam lit up that man’s face, and it turned out to be……
Lu Zhuobai.
He was plainly in far better condition than Zheng Nanlou, his white robes still whiter than snow, not one strand of hair out of place, as though he had not just come through a hard fight.
His gaze settled on Zheng Nanlou as though he did not see the sword before his own throat, and the corner of his mouth lifted slightly into a knowing smile:
“I did say that junior brother moves rather well.”
Zheng Nanlou drew back his hand and shook the water from the blade. In the dimness, those brows and eyes he usually kept lowered showed a spirit no one had ever seen in them.
“Nothing compared with senior brother,” he answered.