Twenty paces from where Ren had bought his arm in trade for two lives, Cao Yan was cutting the second sigil into his own forearm.

Lin Zhen watched the cut with the attention of a man who had read the Blood Fang texts in his youth and had hoped never to see one of the higher techniques performed in person.

The second sigil was wider than the first. The bleed was heavier. The Qi the Blood Sigil drew up into Cao Yan’s chest this time did not stop at speed enhancement — it carried into his arms and across his shoulders, and the plum-violet of his robes lit faintly red along the entire upper body. His next breath fogged the air red in front of him.

"You think you have me, you old dog?" His voice came out one register lower than it had been. The Blood Sigil was speaking through him as much as he was speaking around it. "You think the catechism you carry under your robe is enough to put me down? I have spent fifteen years on Blood Fang’s pages, you arrogant pig. I have read what your sect chose to forget."

Lin Zhen did not answer. The patriarch’s reply was technical.

Cao Yan came at him in a charging line, sword high, the second sigil burning his speed half a stage above where it had been. Lin Zhen’s response unfurled along his own body — Patriarch’s Mantle, the violet-blue Qi wrapping his torso in the translucent figure of a dragon coiled at three points around the chest.

The dragon’s three heads — mirroring nothing of Ren’s technique, simply the patriarch’s old habit of giving Mantle three faces — reached out and bit at the air a half-breath ahead of Cao Yan’s blade. Each bite ate momentum. The charge reached Lin Zhen at three-quarter speed instead of full.

The cut Cao Yan made at the end of that charge split open the side of Lin Zhen’s robe at the hip anyway. Three-quarter speed of a sigil-enhanced elder was enough to draw blood from a patriarch who had decided the cut was not worth defending.

Cao Yan saw the blood and laughed. "There. There you are, old man. Bleeding like a regular human. Did the catechism not tell you the texture of your own blood?"

Lin Zhen moved into Form 4 — Twin Dragon Strike. The first horizontal cut came across at the throat; Cao Yan parried high. The recoil of the first cut became the second cut at the waist before Cao Yan’s blade could descend, and the second cut caught him along the floating ribs on the right side. The Blood Drink closed the wound in a heartbeat.

Cao Yan laughed harder. "Twin Dragon Strike. You are reading me the entire book, you old fucker." He flicked the sword tip up, painting an arc of red into the rain. "I will save you the trouble. The book ends with you on this stone."

Lin Zhen passed into Form 5 — Soaring Dragon. His body left the wet stone in a single upward thrust, the blade ascending in a true arc that lifted Cao Yan’s guard out of line. The chest opened for a beat. Lin Zhen used the beat. He descended into Form 6 — Storm Dragon — four consecutive cuts in four distinct angles. The first three found Cao Yan’s left shoulder, ribs, and inner thigh. The fourth was caught by three lances of solidified blood that came out of Cao Yan’s bleeding forearms in the same heartbeat — Crimson Spear. Two went past Lin Zhen into the rain. The third went through Lin Zhen’s left calf and out the back.

The patriarch’s leg buckled.

Cao Yan laughed louder. "That is one. That is the first time you have bled today, you smug bastard. I want to hear the next one. I want to hear them all."

But Lin Zhen had not finished the Storm Dragon. The Qi residual from the four cuts had not dispersed — it coiled along the patriarch’s blade and gathered into Storm Dragon’s Final Coil, a serpentine extension of the Storm Dragon’s tail that lashed out from the tip of his sword horizontally, one beat after the form should have logically ended. The Coil caught the right side of Cao Yan’s face. It took the ear and a finger’s width of cheek with it.

Cao Yan put a hand to the side of his face where the ear had been. He saw the blood on his fingers. He stopped laughing.

"You old fuck. That hurt."

"It is going to hurt more."

Cao Yan straightened. He cut himself again — both forearms, deeper than he had ever cut himself before. The blood that came out did not fall to the wet stone. It wrapped around the steel of his sword in two coils, one to either side of the blade, and solidified along its length. His single sword had become a triple-edged weapon — the steel at the centre flanked by two blood-edges, each a finger’s width from the metal, separated by an air gap the rain entered but did not cross. Crimson Wing, the final form of Blood Fang. He had paid the price of the technique in advance; the blood was already outside his veins, and Blood Drink could not call it back.

"Now we end this, Lin Zhen. Now we settle the bill. You and me and the rain and your sect coming apart behind you."

Cao Yan charged.

Lin Zhen did not move. The patriarch had been waiting since the day Madam Mei had sent her first pigeon north. He had been waiting since fifteen years ago when he had cut a man’s nose off in White River and let the man live. He had been waiting since the night his son had been crippled in a bed three thousand li from the capital. The patriarch had decided what the answer to all of those years was going to look like, and the answer had a name in the sect catalogue.

He took the posture.

He went into the second of stillness.

Heart of the Dragon — Sovereign Variant.

For one full second the patriarch did not move. The rain fell around him without touching him — the Qi he had been husbanding all day surged up through his body, gathered along the length of the long sword, and took the shape of a dragon. A true dragon. Head and body and tail, scales of translucent violet-blue running the length of the blade. The eye opened at the tip.

Lin Zhen cut once. The blade moved horizontally one time. The dragon left the blade.

It travelled through the air toward Cao Yan in a curving line that bent around the Crimson Wing’s three edges. The blood-edges fired upward as Cao Yan brought them to defend the head — and the dragon passed under them. The dragon entered Cao Yan’s chest at the centre of the sternum and exited through the back, taking with it a column of muscle, two ribs, and the lower lobe of the right lung.

Cao Yan stayed on his feet.

The Crimson Wing fell from his right hand into the mud.

His mouth moved.

"...not... over... Lin Zhen... you cannot escape... this is not... over..."

Lin Zhen crossed the two paces between them in one step. The long sword came across in a single horizontal stroke at neck height. The cut took Cao Yan’s head clean off the shoulders.

The dragon-shape that had been hanging in the air dissolved into the rain.

The patriarch’s leg buckled again as the Qi left him. He went down on his good knee on the wet stone. The Sovereign Variant had cost him most of the reserve he had been holding for the road home. He had two percent of his dantian left.

The head rolled to the inside of his boot and stopped.

"It is over, Cao Yan."

He stood, set his weight on the good leg, and looked across the wet stone toward where his old friend was holding the brachial line of a missing arm.

Ren raised the sword in his right hand by way of report.

Lin Zhen raised his free hand in answer.

The two oldest debts of their lives had been cleared in less than a quarter of an hour.

The rain went on falling.