The Last Dual-Cultivator

Chapter 44: Chapter 44

The doors of the Heart Pavilion stood open.

Gold light spilled out of them across the last stretch of the causeway, warm as lamplight through rice paper. Yan Shuo walked up the three worn steps with his crushed left hand tucked against his ribs and his right hand empty, and stepped inside.

The room was round and high-ceilinged, carved from a single block of white stone. Lotus flowers climbed every wall in deep relief, and in the center of the floor a shallow pool reflected the ceiling, where the carved petals of one enormous flower folded inward toward a hole open to the sky. Through it, he could see the first silver curve of the moon.

Lanying hung above the pool.

She didn’t touch the water. She floated a hand’s breadth above it, upright, her arms pinned to her sides by thick ropes of black ink that wound around her from shoulders to ankles and held her in the air. More ink wrapped her throat. Her silver hair hung loose and wet. When he came in, her eyes snapped to him, wide and furious, and she made a sound behind the ink that might have been his name or might have been a curse.

The collector sat on a stone bench beside the pool with a low writing desk across his knees.

He had a sheet of paper spread out on the desk and was writing on it in neat columns, dipping his wolf-hair brush now and then into the little ink-box at his elbow. He finished a line before he looked up.

”You’re early,” he said. ”The moon’s barely up.” He set the brush down and studied Yan Shuo, from the strapped ribs to the swollen hand. ”And you’re limping. Zhao Kun got a few in, then.”

”He’s already at the bottom of the lake.”

The collector’s eyebrows rose a fraction. ”Is he.” He seemed to consider that for a moment, then shrugged. ”Well. He’d have died anyway. I was rather heavy-handed with his pills.” He closed the ink-box with a soft click. ”You’ve come alone, as asked. Good. Kneel, please, and put your hands where I can see them.”

Yan Shuo knelt.

He went down slowly on the cold stone at the edge of the pool, with Lanying hanging above it and the moon climbing through the hole in the ceiling, and he laid his good hand flat on his thigh. His left hand stayed tucked against his ribs, where the little jade box sat inside his robe.

’Now,’ Qin whispered. ’While he’s pleased with himself.’

”I’d like to know one thing first,” Yan Shuo said.

The collector waited, brush in hand.

”My mother. Is she alive?”

The collector looked at him for a long time with those mild, colorless eyes. Then he did something Yan Shuo hadn’t expected. He smiled, almost kindly.

”Last time I checked the lists, yes,” he said. ”She’s one of our most productive. You’ll probably be housed somewhere near her, if that helps.” He rose from the bench and set the desk aside. ”Now, the pill, please. The one in your robe.”

Yan Shuo’s fingers had already found the lid of the jade box. He thumbed it open inside his robe, closed his hand around the warm, pulsing pill, and lifted it straight to his mouth.

The collector moved fast. Yan Shuo had known he would.

The brush flicked out, and a character slammed into the air between them, but the pill was already on his tongue and then down his throat, hot as a swallowed coal, and he was on his feet before the ink struck.

It struck him in the chest and threw him back against the carved wall. Stone lotuses cracked behind his shoulders. He slid down onto the floor with his ears ringing.

And inside him, the pill opened.

It opened like a dam giving way.

The Lotus Heart pill had sat in the dark for ten thousand years waiting for a cultivator at the peak of Qi Gathering. Now it had one, and it poured everything it held into him at once. Pale gold qi flooded his dantian, and the riverbed burst open under it, and all nine buried layers came roaring up to meet it through his six open meridians, and the whole lot crashed together in the center of his body with a force that bent him double on the floor.

He heard himself gasp. He tasted lotus, sweet and green, in the back of his throat.

’Breathe!’ Qin was shouting in his head. ’Breathe, brat, and don’t fight it. It’s building your foundation. It needs time.’

’How long does it need?’

’Longer than he’s going to give you!’

The collector was walking toward him across the floor with the brush raised. He moved carefully, his face calm and intent, the look of a man about to correct a mistake in his ledger.

”That was foolish,” he said. ”A breakthrough takes a dozen breaths at the least. I only need two.”

He lifted the brush.

Then he stopped, and coughed.

It was a small, dry cough into the back of his sleeve. He frowned at it, like a man annoyed by a hiccup. He lifted the brush again, and his hand trembled, and the stroke he drew in the air came out crooked and pale, a faint grey smudge that hung for a heartbeat and fell apart.

The collector stared at it.

He brought the brush up close to his face and sniffed the wet tip, and Yan Shuo saw the color go out of his cheeks.

”Marsh lily,” he said quietly. ”In my own ink.” He coughed again, harder this time, and there was a fleck of red on his sleeve when he lowered it. ”Crimson Lotus. When did they—”

Above the pool, Lanying moved.

She couldn’t lift a finger inside the black ropes. But ink was liquid, and she had been sitting in it for two hours, and she was the finest ice cultivator the Azure Cloud Sect had produced in a generation.

The ink binding her froze.

It froze all at once with a sound like a pane of glass dropped on stone, and every black rope around her body turned to brittle black ice, and she flexed her shoulders and it shattered off her in a rain of dark crystals. She dropped into the pool up to her knees. Before the collector could turn, she flung out her arm, and a wall of blue ice ripped up out of the water between him and Yan Shuo, thick as a man is tall.

”Don’t you dare touch him,” Lanying said. Her voice was hoarse from the ink around her throat. ”Not while he’s like that.”

The collector turned to face her, coughing.

”Senior Sister Su,” he said. ”I really did think you’d wait.”

”I really didn’t care what you thought.”

She went at him.

She had no sword. It was somewhere at the bottom of the lake by the willow island. So she fought him bare-handed with her ice. Spears of frost came up out of the floor at him. Shards of ice the length of daggers whipped across the room. The collector wrote shield after shield in the air, and each one came out a little paler than the last, and he was coughing steadily now, red on his sleeve and his lips.

She was buying time. Yan Shuo knew it, lying on the floor behind the ice wall with the breakthrough tearing through him, and the knowledge sat in his chest next to the gold fire of the pill.

’Let it come,’ Qin was saying, steadier now. ’Let it settle. Stop holding on. You’ve held on to everything for six years, brat. Let go of this one.’

The qi spun down into his dantian in a great slow spiral, gold and green and silver, around and around, faster and tighter, until it settled into a platform: a flat, solid, shining thing at the center of him, like the stone floor of a house before the walls go up, and every channel in his body suddenly had somewhere to stand.

He felt it settle into place with a deep, quiet sound, like a bell struck under water.

Foundation Establishment.

He opened his eyes. The world had changed. He could see the qi in the carved lotus walls, faint threads of old green. He could see the ice shards hanging in the air where Lanying had thrown them, and the slow drift of red mist where the collector had coughed. He could feel the moon through the hole in the ceiling, cold and bright on his skin.

His left hand had stopped hurting. When he flexed it, the bent fingers moved.

He stood up.

On the far side of the ice wall, the collector looked up sharply from the fight. His colorless eyes went wide.

”Ah,” he said. Then, more softly, almost to himself: ”Oh, the Yan woman was clever. She was so very clever.”

Yan Shuo came over the ice wall in one jump.

He landed beside Lanying, and she glanced at him once, and he saw her see the silver in his eyes and not look away. She shifted half a step to her left without a word, leaving room for him at her right shoulder.

They didn’t try the combined strike again. They’d learned that lesson on the island. This time they simply fought side by side, and it was enough.

She went high with ice. He went low with the Silent River Palm, and at Foundation Establishment it landed like a hammer. He hit the collector’s knee, the same knee he’d hit on the bridge, and felt the whole leg go out from under the man. The collector caught himself on one hand and wrote a stroke left-handed, crooked and weak, and Lanying froze the ink in the air before it finished forming and it dropped to the floor in black splinters.

The collector scrambled backward, coughing blood.

Yan Shuo went after him and caught his right wrist in his good hand. He looked down at the wolf-hair brush in the man’s fingers.

Then he let the cold go, the cold that had been Lanying’s and was now his own, and the brush froze white from tip to handle and snapped in half in the collector’s grip.

The collector stared at the two broken pieces.

For the first time all night, he looked afraid.

He didn’t stay to fight. He tore his wrist out of Yan Shuo’s grip, threw himself backward toward the pool, and dipped two fingers straight into the spilled ink on the floor. Then he wrote with his bare fingertip on the wet stone, a single character smeared in black and red.

Yan Shuo read it as it formed. Away.

The ink flared. The collector was gone. A gust of cold mist blew in through the doors and out through the hole in the ceiling, and where he’d been kneeling there was only a smear of ink and blood on the stone.

The Heart Pavilion went very quiet.

Lanying stood in the pool up to her knees with water running off her and frost still drifting off her fingers. She turned around slowly and looked at him.

He didn’t remember crossing the room. He just had her, her wet cold arms around his neck and his face in her soaked hair, and she was holding on so hard it hurt his new ribs.

”You came alone,” she said into his shoulder, furious. ”He told you to, and you actually did it. You complete idiot.”

”You froze his ink while you were tied up in it.”

”That was different.”

”How is that any different?”

”It just was.” She pulled back and glared at him, and her eyes were wet, and she was trying very hard not to smile. ”Foundation Establishment. Look at you.” She touched his cheek, just under one silver eye. ”Your eyes are still doing that.”

”I know. Give it a minute.”

”I don’t mind it,” Lanying said quietly, and kissed him.

It was Qin who noticed it.

’Brat,’ she said, when they finally pulled apart. ’On the floor. By the bench.’

Yan Shuo looked.

Something small lay on the stone beside the collector’s overturned writing desk, where it had fallen out of his sleeve when he threw himself backward. It glinted in the moonlight. He crossed the room, picked it up, and turned it over in his palm.

It was a token of black jade, the size of a coin, the kind a sect gave to trusted agents so their own people would let them pass. One face was carved with the crossed brushes of the Ledger Pavilion.

He turned it over.

The other face bore a cloud wreathed around a mountain peak, the seal of the Azure Cloud Sect’s Law Hall. And beneath it, cut small and neat into the jade, were three characters he had seen at the bottom of every notice the Law Hall ever posted.

Gu Hongzhan.

Lanying came to stand at his shoulder and looked down at it. He felt her go very still.

”That’s Elder Gu’s personal mark,” she whispered.

”I know it. It’s at the bottom of every notice he’s ever posted.”

Yan Shuo closed his hand around the black jade until the edges bit into his palm.