A Counterfeit
Lu Zhuobai’s gaze went past Zheng Nanlou’s shoulder and found Xie Heng lying senseless on the ground behind him.
He made a light “tsk,” his tone seeming to reproach, though not much feeling colored the sound:
“Junior brother was rather heavy-handed.”
Zheng Nanlou did not turn around, nor did he lower his head as he usually did to hide what he felt.
Since Lu Zhuobai had already caught him at it, there was no longer any point in putting on that cowering, timid face.
So he looked Lu Zhuobai straight in the eye, no longer deliberately turning aside as before.
“Is this not what senior brother wished to see?” he asked back, his voice low, every word distinct.
Lu Zhuobai raised a brow at that, seemingly unsurprised by the question, and only smiled faintly and said, mildly:
“Junior brother seems to have misunderstood me.”
“Is that so?” It was a question, but not a trace of expression changed on Zheng Nanlou’s face; only his eyes were startlingly bright in the dim cave, as though they had swallowed every scrap of light in the place.
“Then last night in the wood, senior brother plainly saw it long before. Why act only at the last moment?”
As his words fell, a drop of water that had been gathering a long while on the cave roof finally came loose and dropped into the pool with a dull little sound.
Lu Zhuobai did not answer.
So Zheng Nanlou supplied the answer for him:
“Among the Hidden Snow Sect’s disciples, Xie Heng has had the strongest momentum these past few years. And he has always been a proud one; he reckons his family and his talent fall short of yours in nothing, that all he lacks is a few years, so other thoughts were bound to arise, and he wants to come out above you in everything.”
“And senior brother, holding the position of the sect leader’s first disciple, naturally cannot be seen taking issue with an ignorant junior. But one must still find an occasion to put a scare into a child who does not know how high the sky is. Is that not so?”
A little wind came from somewhere and lifted a few loose strands of hair at Zheng Nanlou’s temple, and on that face, unruffled all this while, a trace of a smile finally appeared:
“Come to that, senior brother owes me a favor.”
“Without me, how could you have taught Xie Heng with one small pebble that ‘beyond a man there are other men, and beyond the sky other skies’?”
Lu Zhuobai heard him out in silence without so much as knitting his brows, as though he did not mind in the least having that little calculation of his laid bare.
He laughed low, and this time there was some genuine pleasure in the laugh:
“That is well put. And as it happens, there is an opportunity right now for me to repay junior brother that favor.”
Zheng Nanlou’s gaze sharpened. “What opportunity?”
Lu Zhuobai’s expression did not change; only something like a dark current seemed to move at the bottom of his eyes, too indistinct to see clearly.
“Getting junior brother out of this Sunken Sword Abyss. Would that count?”
Zheng Nanlou stripped off his soaked clothes, thought a moment, and in the end took the blue-green robe out of his storage pouch and put it on.
By the time he had set himself right and came out, Lu Zhuobai had already moved Xie Heng into the passage outside, had even bound his wounds, and had splinted the broken ankle.
He could not hold back a cold laugh. “Senior brother is very kind. You mean to leave him behind anyway, so what is all this for?”
Lu Zhuobai reached out to straighten the disordered front of Xie Heng’s robe before finally standing up, and explained in a level tone:
“Once we are out, the sect will certainly send people to search. Even if they find his body then, these signs will at least prove that we did what we could.”
Zheng Nanlou neither agreed nor disagreed. He had never had any interest in such hypocritical tidying-up, and asked instead:
“Is that monster still outside? And how did you get in just now?”
Lu Zhuobai gave a brief account of what had happened to him.
After the party was scattered, he had gone on trading blows with the creature for several rounds.
He soon knew he was no match for it, but he also noticed that for all the ferocity of the thing’s assault, there was in fact no method to it at all; it merely charged about on brute strength.
Stranger still, wherever Lu Zhuobai’s sword landed on it, the creature felt nothing, as though the wounds counted for nothing at all to it.
Knowing that fighting on this way would only drain his own strength, Lu Zhuobai found an opening and broke away; but he did not go far, following the creature instead at a distance.
Having lost its opponent, the monster did not blunder about aimlessly, but followed something the whole way, heading straight toward this cave, as though something were guiding it.
At that point a flash of insight crossed Zheng Nanlou’s mind. What could have drawn the creature all the way here was very likely……
“Xie Heng’s blood,” he murmured. “He was wounded, and he did leave a good deal of blood behind him on his way over here.”
Presumably the Xie bloodline was connected in some fashion with this Sunken Sword Abyss: it could point the way to the opportunity in the water, and it could draw a nameless monster out of the wood as well.
That last part, however, he did not say aloud.
Lu Zhuobai showed no surprise at how easily he had put his finger on the crux of it, and only went on:
“You saw it yourself just now. It came as far as the mouth of this cave and never dared to come any further, as though there were something inside that it feared. So I took the chance while it was unaware and came in on my own.”
“And the moment I came in, I found junior brother soaked to the skin and pointing a sword at me.”
He paused, his gaze passing over Zheng Nanlou with some meaning in it:
“I take it that whatever lay in this cave has already fallen into junior brother’s hands?”
At that Zheng Nanlou stepped back at once on his guard, which made Lu Zhuobai laugh:
“Junior brother need not worry. I have no taste for seizing what belongs to others. I only want to get clear of this Sunken Sword Abyss as soon as I can.”
Zheng Nanlou still watched him with a frown, the wariness in his eyes undiminished:
“What do you mean to do?”
“To leave, we must first kill that monster. If one man cannot manage it, then with the two of us together the odds will at least be better.”
But Zheng Nanlou shook his head. “Not enough. If we want to leave, killing it is nowhere near enough.”
Lu Zhuobai frowned. “What do you mean?”
“As you said yourself, that creature feels no pain. Is it not possible that it is not alive at all?”
Lu Zhuobai’s brows rose, and he signaled for Zheng Nanlou to go on:
“I tested it earlier. Its wounds do not bleed, and there is no warmth anywhere in its body.”
“If my guess is right, it is only a hollow shell pieced together out of assorted parts of corpses. And beneath that shell, someone is deliberately working mischief.”
Zheng Nanlou turned to look out of the cave, his eyes gone deep and dark, thinking who knew what.
“Until we drag out the man behind it, not one of us is walking out of this Sunken Sword Abyss.”
Outside the cave, the monster’s shape twisted and warped in the rolling mist, growing more horrible by the moment; its huge, urgent roars rang through the wood and shook the leaves rustling down all around.
Lu Zhuobai stood in the shadow of the cave mouth and lowered his voice to Zheng Nanlou:
“You have Xie Heng’s blood on your clothes now. It will certainly come after you.”
Zheng Nanlou glanced down at the filthy outer robe he had on, the one he had just stripped off Xie Heng; the blood on it had long since dried and set into patches of dark brown.
Something like distaste showed in his eyes, but he pressed it down and said nothing more.
Lu Zhuobai went on: “When it comes, trade a few passes with it first, then pretend to be wounded and fall unconscious. It must have some use for Xie Heng’s blood, so it likely will not put you to death so quickly.”
“Rest assured, I will be nearby. If we can draw the man out, so much the better; and if we cannot, I will still save you.”
He said it in earnest, and not as though he were feigning, but Zheng Nanlou only cast him a sidelong glance and said, with meaning:
“Let us hope so.”
Lu Zhuobai laughed, and in the cave the sound came out unusually soft and slow, carrying something that could not quite be named.
“I have noticed,” he said, tilting his head slightly as the pale daylight slanted in from the cave mouth and barely lit the upper half of his face, “that junior brother seems not to have liked me much from the very beginning.”
Zheng Nanlou, who was watching the creature, checked almost imperceptibly, and when he spoke there was not a trace of feeling left in his voice:
“Senior brother thinks too much. We have met only a few times. How could liking or not liking enter into it?”
Lu Zhuobai nodded thoughtfully, as though he were genuinely weighing the claim. Then in the next moment he turned the point around:
“Even so, junior brother always seems to hold a certain…… prejudice against me.”
His tone was mild as ever, and yet held a sharpness that could not be evaded:
“The way I see it, the two of us are really the same kind of person. Are we not?”
He came half a step forward, and his face passed fully into the sunlight; when he lowered his eyes to look over, even the cool curve at their outer corners was almost exactly that man’s.
Only then did Zheng Nanlou turn and look at him. A few points of brightness leaked into those heavy black eyes, flickered twice and vanished altogether, as though snuffed out for good in some deep sea.
He gave no answer.
In the instant the creature turned, Zheng Nanlou sprang out of the cave, the flying hem of his robe cutting the daylight and trailing an inky afterimage behind him.
In the middle of a deafening howl, he suddenly looked back.
“No, senior brother.”
The voice cut through the reeking wind, every word delivered straight into Lu Zhuobai’s ear.
“We are not alike in the slightest.”
Lu Zhuobai’s head came up, but he was only in time to see the lift at the corner of Zheng Nanlou’s mouth, a smile that looked colder than the chill inside the cave.
“After all……
“I would sooner die than be willing to be a counterfeit.”