Chapter 80: A New Dawn

The sky began to clear in the small hours after dawn. The sun rose over the pass for the first time in three days, after the heavens had finally finished mourning the scene the road below them had been carrying since the night before. Blood had been everywhere — across the wet stone, between the boulders, soaked into the mud at the centre of the road. Bodies of the young and the old lay where they had fallen. Puddles of red bled into the rain and into the earth until none of the three could be told apart from the others. Swords and the pieces of bodies were scattered across the pass in patterns nobody had been willing to clean up before exhaustion claimed everyone first.

Many people had been lost that day. Fathers. Sons. Husbands. Wives. Elders. Grandfathers. People who had been precious to someone else now lay on the wet stone with the rain finishing the work the steel had begun.

It had been a tragic day for the world.

But it had not been a day different from a great many other days in a world built like this one.

A week had passed since the incident.

Lin Xuan was resting on the bed of his own chamber inside the sect, one foot crossed over the other, hands folded behind his head. The sect was calm today. The first days, after the convoy had limped back up the mountain, had been a different story — disciples weeping in courtyards they had not wept in for a decade, alchemists running between infirmaries that had not been used at full capacity in fifteen years, half-shouted instructions in corridors that were supposed to be quiet. When the noise had finally lowered, Lin Zhen had been able to sit down and review everything.

Many dead. Some disciples gone, most of them still on their feet. A bad loss for Skyedge, but not a catastrophic one.

Lian and Wei had both been alive when Lin Xuan reached them inside the carriage. Wei had personally killed three Blood Fang disciples himself, a detail the apprentice had not mentioned to anyone afterwards but which Lin Xuan had read off the boy’s sword the moment he had picked it up to clean it. Cao Yan had died on the wet rock. Two of the three traitor elders had died on the same stone. The third — Wu — had been close to dying when he had vanished into the woods. Unless he had found a great deal of luck and a great deal of grace from the heavens, he was already gone.

After what Wu had done, Lin Xuan doubted the heavens were going to bend the rules in his favour. The man was going to have to find his way home half-dead, through a forest that was infested with several kinds of beasts and several more kinds of bandits, bleeding out from a high-tier gut cut along the way. The arithmetic of that journey was not encouraging.

Elder Ren had lost the arm for good. The stump had been sealed by Master Fu in the first hour back at the sect, and Ren had been on his feet by the second day, refusing to be carried anywhere. When he had spotted Lin Xuan alive at the top of the residence stairs, he had broken into a smile that wrote off the entire week — as if the arm had been the small price of something much more valuable, and as though nothing bad had really happened to him at all.

The carriages had survived in mostly working order. One had been destroyed past repair — the rear one, where the assault on Lian and Wei had played out — but the loss was the smallest entry on the ledger of the week. Material goods were the least of Skyedge’s worries this season, despite the financial trouble the sect was already carrying.

The moment that counted, in Lin Xuan’s recollection of the day, had been the moment Lin Zhen had finally reached his two sons in the mud.

One of them had been standing, watching the scene of his stepbrother. That one was Lin Xuan. He had turned to his father as the patriarch arrived and offered the only sentence he had been able to find in his head during the walk from where Madam Mei had fallen to where his stepbrother was holding her.

"I am sorry for your loss, father. I would have liked for things to be different. I would have liked for them to end another way."

His father had passed him without a word, and his attention had come to rest on the mud where Lin Kai — his legitimate son — was on his knees with the body of his own mother across his knees, no longer alive, no longer the woman either of them had been pretending she was.

Lin Zhen had lowered himself to the wet stone beside his son. He had wrapped both arms around the boy. Lin Kai had been a fool a great many times — the patriarch had cursed his son in private on more nights than he wanted to count — but he was his son. He had whispered into the boy’s hair, quiet enough that the only person meant to hear was Lin Kai, although Lin Xuan had been close enough to catch it.

"I am sorry for going away. I am sorry for leaving you behind. I am sorry for looking the other way. I hope you forgive me one day. And I hope you forgive yourself, because this was not your fault, Lin Kai."

Lin Xuan had stood there watching the three of them — his father, his stepbrother, and the woman in his stepbrother’s arms — and registered something he had not allowed himself to register since the first morning he had woken up inside the body of Lin Xuan.

He was no longer a stranger inside a xianxia world.

The three people in front of him were now his only family. A stepmother who had been manipulated and who had also contributed her own share, which did not absolve her of any of it — but the manipulation had been real. He felt pity for his father. He felt pity for his stepbrother, even after how much of a dickhead the boy had been across most of his political life. Lin Kai had killed his own mother with his own hand, and had been forced into the cut because the betrayal had been a low strike that nobody — nobody — had seen coming.

A week of memory took six seconds to walk through.

[ Are you still thinking about that day, Xuan? ]

Mira’s panel arrived at the corner of his attention, her voice softer than usual — not the teasing of better weeks, but the careful inquiry of a system who had noticed her host had been sleeping with one hand resting on the empty stool beside the bed, which was the stool Lian usually used to set down the morning tray.

’It would be strange not to be thinking about it. It has been a week. My father has been working himself sideways — three elders turned out to be traitors, and he has been interrogating every other elder, every senior disciple, every alchemist with access to the residence. The disciples themselves are afraid because no one has given them a proper explanation yet. A lot of them are wondering whether they should leave. My father’s other two wives were as surprised as anyone — they had known Madam Mei was not what she presented herself as, but they had never been in a position to say a word against her. Now there are two wives where there were three. And the sect, after this attack, sits a step below where we were before Yuncheng. It is starting to feel like the tournament we won did not count for as much as we thought it did. Losing three elders is an enormous gap to fill.’

[ But there are good things inside this too, Xuan. ]

’You are right. Not all of it is bad. The moles inside the sect are out of the building now. The rebuild will be cleaner when nobody is undermining the work from the inside. We will not have anyone tripping us in the corridors anymore. And we will need to make ourselves look strong on the outside very soon — we have a visitor coming.’

[ Are you thinking about surprising your fiancée? ]

’Nothing has been decided yet. We have a month and a half to try to work a small miracle.’

[ In that case, lift that ass off the mat. How long are you planning to lie there doing nothing, Xuan? (·•᷄‎ࡇ•᷅ ) ]

’Dawn has only just finished arriving. I am getting up. I am getting up.’

Two crisp knocks landed against the door of his chamber.

Lin Xuan

swung his feet onto the floor. Plain Steel was already in his hand before the second knock had finished — a reflex the past week had written into his right arm whether he was sleeping or not. The grey robe over the back of the chair came on across his shoulders one motion later.

Before he reached the door, Mira’s panel opened in front of him with the flat formal tone she used for the kind of system message that needed no narration around it.

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[ EXPRESS MISSION — COMPLETE ]

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[ "Survive the Ambush" ]

[ Objectives: ]

[ ✓ Survive. ]

[ Rewards: ]

[ ▸ +5,000 Origin Points ]

[ Origin Points balance: 15,000 → 20,000 ]

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Lin Xuan let the corner of his mouth lift a quarter of the way up — the most he had permitted his face to do in seven days.

’A vote of confidence from management, finally delivered.’

The knocks arrived again. Twice. Patient. Formal. Neither hurried nor nervous — the rhythm of someone who had been told to wait for a young master and had decided that waiting was the assignment they had been given.

Lin Xuan reached the door.

He opened it.