The rain had changed character two hours into the afternoon. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

It no longer fell in drops so much as it occupied the road, the air, the horses’ manes, the seams of the carriage doors. The convoy moved at the cautious crawl of wheels crossing stone that had turned slick under the water, each rut shining like a narrow stream. Drivers called adjustments down the line in low voices, the practical murmur of men who had all noticed the same thing and had all decided not to name it yet.

The horses had been twitching their ears at empty roadside brush for nearly an hour.

Inside his carriage, Lin Xuan was the only one awake.

Lian had collapsed against the corner sometime around the third hour, the sash she had been folding all morning still draped across her lap with one hand closed loosely over it. Her head had tilted into the wood at an angle that was going to cost her the column of her neck when she woke, but Lin Xuan had decided not to correct it. Lian had not slept properly since before Yuncheng. The body was claiming what the schedule had been refusing it.

On the bench across, Wei sat upright with his eyes closed and his hands resting palms-up on his knees in the breathing posture, asleep in the only shape his body had decided not to surrender. Lin Xuan made a private note that the apprentice’s first proper Nine Dragons session had cost the boy more than Wei was ever going to admit out loud.

Plain Steel rested at Lin Xuan’s thigh. The Soul Lamp held its warm half-degree against his ribs.

Mira opened the inner channel without ceremony, the way she opened it when she wanted to keep him company on a long road and was not yet in the mood to be useful.

[ So. Tell me something Earth. ]

’Tell you something Earth, huh. What do you want to know?’

[ Anything. A long road, a quiet carriage, two of yours sleeping, and a host who will crawl inside his own head if I do not get him talking. I have catalogued exactly fourteen things you miss about home over two months of listening to your private thoughts. I am ready for the fifteenth. ]

’You have a list of things I miss.’

[ I have a spreadsheet. ]

’Sure, you do.’ Lin Xuan let his shoulder ease back against the carriage wall, the way a man eased back when he had decided the next two li would be easier to spend talking than watching his own ribs for omens. ’Music, then. You go first. What does the average xianxia mortal listen to when nobody is getting murdered by sword cultivators?’

[ That is a leading question, Xuan, but I will allow it. The cities run on pipa and erhu — the pipa for tavern songs that everybody hates the next morning, the erhu for opera that everybody pretends to enjoy because a cousin paid for the box. The provinces are flutes and drums, the flutes always a fraction out of tune because the flute makers all studied with the same drunk uncle. Serious cultivators play guqin for the same reason serious lawyers on Earth own a piano they cannot play. Your turn. Define pop. ]

’Pop is — ’

[ And do not say it is short for popular, because that is what every host of mine for two thousand years has said and it is not an explanation, it is a parking ticket. ]

’You have had hosts on Earth before me?’

[ No. Now. Focus, Xuan. Pop. ]

’Pop is the music you hear at supermarkets and end up humming while walking to your car. It is engineered to be liked by the maximum number of people in the shortest attention span available. The good ones hide real craft under a chorus simple enough to teach a parrot in two listens. The bad ones are the chorus and nothing else. There is a woman called Taylor who writes some good songs, I will give her that, but Earth treats her like she personally invented heartbreak and acoustic guitars, which is excessive in my opinion. Michael Jackson was the actual monster of the genre. Voice, movement, stage presence, songs people knew before they knew the language. If pop had a Heavenly Emperor, it was him. Definition delivered.’

[ Michael Jackson. A pop sword emperor. I would put him at Nascent Soul, at least. The footwork alone violates several cultivation laws. ]

’I would pay very unreasonable money to see that fight.’

The two of them ran that for a stretch — Mira fitting xianxia equivalents to half the pop singers Lin Xuan could remember, Lin Xuan arguing whether the equivalent should be a sword sect or a poison sect. Outside the window, the road had narrowed enough to notice. The walls of stone Lin Xuan had clocked an hour ago had crept closer on both sides. The light dropped a tone.

[ Food next. One Earth food you would commit a small crime to eat right now. ]

’Pizza.’

[ Define. ]

’Flat bread baked with sauce and melted cheese and whatever else you can talk the man behind the counter into. Fast, hot, ugly, perfect. The xianxia world has produced a hundred legendary pills and not one of them is pizza.’

[ The xianxia world has produced steamed pork dumplings. ]

’I will accept dumplings as a counter-argument.’

[ That is gracious of you. ]

’I am a gracious man.’

[ You are a hungry host. The carriage has not stopped for a real meal since dawn. ]

Lin Xuan let the smile rise a quarter of the way up his mouth, which had been the upper limit of his smile for nearly a month. He set his hand on Plain Steel without thinking, then registered the hand was on the sword and chose not to remove it.

Outside, the third bird he had been listening for at intervals — the two-note call of the range thrush that was supposed to be everywhere in this stretch of country even in rain — had not arrived. Not at this hour. Not at the previous one. Not at the one before that.

’Mira.’

[ Yes. I noticed an hour ago. ]

’How long are we from the mouth of the pass?’

[ Less than half a li. ]

Lian shifted in her sleep. The sash slipped a fraction across her lap. Wei’s hands stayed open and upturned, the body breathing four-four-four-four without his knowing it was still doing the work.

Above the road, the strip of sky between the two walls of stone narrowed to a thin grey ribbon, and somewhere along that ribbon, a single shape had decided to step out from the rock.

The carriage rolled the last paces toward it.