Lian was on the other side of the door when Lin Xuan opened it. Her hands carried the morning tray — porridge, pickled radish, two small clay pots, the brass spoons polished to the shine she had always insisted on regardless of which household she happened to be working for that month. Her face shifted into surprise the moment she registered that her young master was upright instead of horizontal.

"Xuan?" The question arrived a step ahead of her body. "Has something happened? Why are you on your feet at this hour?"

"Things to do." He brushed past the tray, careful not to upset the porridge. "Give breakfast to Wei, please. Thank you for carrying it up."

He went past her down the porch. She watched him go with the tray held in both hands and her mouth half-open around a follow-up that never finished arriving.

He took the Old Steps.

The Old Steps were the long worn stone path that connected Silent Peak — his pavilion, the one that had been forgotten for two years and was no longer forgotten now — to the central courtyards of Skyedge proper. The boots of generations of disciples had hollowed the stone into smooth furrows along the centre of the path, and the morning light caught the wet of last night’s drizzle in a thin silver glaze that broke under his weight at every step.

Lin Xuan walked with his hands folded behind his back, the way his father walked when the next ten minutes of his afternoon were already being arranged inside his head.

Mira opened the channel at his shoulder.

[ What is the plan for today, Xuan? ]

’First, I need to know how the sect actually is after the attack. I have been off my feet a few days. I am hoping my father finally has time to sit with me. I want to ask him about the conditions we are operating in now — whether the damage has gone wider than the obvious or whether we have stopped at the obvious losses.’

[ Smart. Honestly, I think the worst hit has been on morale. The disciples have been on edge all week, mostly because the uncertainty about whether more enemies might be hidden inside the sect has not been answered for them yet. A few have probably shit their pants and walked out the front gate already. ]

’A real possibility. Which is why we have to show them the building is still standing. I think today is the day to act like the young master of the sect, not the young master of the bed I have been resting in. I can probably guide a handful of them, even if it is the first time I have ever been asked to lead anyone on this continent.’

[ I think you have the right wood for it. You will do fine. ]

’You think so? I think so too.’ He kept walking. ’Although I would absolutely not recommend being a manager at an early age on a fast-food line during rush hour on Earth. Truly not recommendable.’

[ Was it stressful? Why would you take a job like that? ]

’I needed the money to pay for my own things. The differences between both worlds, I suppose.’ He turned the corner past the bell tower. ’On a different note — once the meeting with my father wraps up, we should spend some of the Origin Points. There are a few good purchases I want to make now that I have something serious in the balance.’

[ I will recommend you the best, as always. ]

’I would expect nothing less.’

He arrived at the Inner Court — what most of the senior disciples called the South Hall, the lacquered building at the centre of the administrative wing where the patriarch held his sessions and the elders held theirs and the alchemists kept their records of every petition the sect had not yet answered.

Lin Xuan pushed both doors open with the flat of his palms.

Inside, the surviving elders had been arranged around the central table with several administrators on their flanks, ledgers and disciple rolls open in front of every chair. Lin Zhen sat at the head of the room, sleeves rolled to the elbow, a brush in his right hand and the morning’s first stack of correspondence in his left. The patriarch’s attention came up the moment the doors moved.

"Good morning, father." Lin Xuan inclined his head a degree. "May I have a moment of your time?"

—————————————————————

— South of the pass, on a road that had not yet learned the name of the man riding down it —

Elder Wu was still running for his life.

He had come south by accident more than by intent. The cuts Elder Ren had taken out of him in the pass had bled less than they should have — what remained of his cultivation had kept the wound from closing, but at the price of every other reserve he had been carrying. His belly had been hungry since the third day. His robes had not been changed since the night of the attack. He had no money on him. The nearest Blood Fang waystation was somewhere along the southwestern ridge, and the southwestern ridge was the only place left in the empire where an old man with his name on it could ask for shelter without being killed for the courtesy.

He was crouched on the branch of a large pine, watching a road that cut through the trees at the base of the slope. He had been there for almost an hour — the patience an old elder remembered fast when hunger demanded it of him. The plan was a small one. He would drop on the first traveller who passed alone, take the man’s coin and the man’s water, and continue his journey south.

It was not the sort of work the elder who had argued against Lin Xuan’s elevation in the council chamber three times had ever considered himself capable of. But the man crouched on the branch this morning was operating under a precarity the man in the council chamber had not previously been required to understand.

Someone finally appeared on the road below.

A single horse. A man on top of it. White-haired, the hair long and loose around his shoulders. White robes worked with a thin red detail at the cuffs and along the high collar. The man was lying along the horse’s neck with his eyes closed, reins loose in one hand, the horse following its own line of travel down the road as though no instructions had been issued from above its head for a long stretch of the morning.

Wu’s mouth shifted into a small careful satisfaction.

’Finally,’ he thought. ’Not a merchant by the cut of him — but a man who can sleep on his own horse in the open road is a man who has something on him worth hiding. There will be coin somewhere. Water. A charm, perhaps.’

He shifted his weight to drop.

He did not even take the half-step.

Wu’s point of view changed without his consent.

The view he had been holding, from the height of the pine branch above the road, began to descend. The descent was the wrong shape. He had not moved. nor had jumped. The tree was the same tree. But the angle on the road below was now travelling downward — the pine bark sliding past, then the lower branches, the brush at the base of the trunk after that.

Thump.

His vision met the ground.

He registered, from the new angle the ground had given him, the trunk of his own tree. He registered his own body. The body was on the branch where it had been. The same crouched posture. The hand flexed in preparation for the drop.

Something was missing from the body, though.

Something the body had been carrying a heartbeat earlier.

The head.

The head was what was missing. The head had been the part of him that had taken the wrong trip down the tree, had hit bark on the way past the third branch, had come to rest on the pine needles a body’s length from the trunk, and had rolled twice before finding its angle on the ground from which Wu was now looking up at his own corpse.

The last thought Wu had time to form was small and accurate and arrived in the voice of a frightened old man.

’...monster...’

He had not seen the strike. He had not heard it. He had been holding his cultivation under the careful suppression an elder of his rank had spent forty years perfecting, and the man on the road had detected him anyway, had crossed the distance between the road and the branch in a movement Wu’s senses had not registered, and had taken his head off so fast that the body on the branch was going to spend another full second beginning to understand what had happened to it.

The white-haired man on the horse did not adjust his posture.

The horse did not change its pace.

The road continued south.

So did the rider.