Plundering Worlds: I Have a Shotgun in a Fantasy World-Chapter 63: Mirror

[Inn - Night]

Kael closed his eyes. The tiger. The merchants. The starving men. The woman. The fifty-four. Their voices overlapped—the same as the dream.

Outside, the town settled into night. Guards paced the walls. Voices drifted from the teahouse. Beyond the gates, the refugees lay in the dust.

He fell asleep.

---

The training courtyard. The stone platform in the middle of the yard. The ginkgo tree at its edge. The air still. Beyond them, the world ended in white.

A young man stood beneath the ginkgo tree.

Kael’s hand moved to his sword before he’d finished looking. The stance felt familiar in a way he struggled to place—the angle of the shoulders, the steady balance in the spine. He kept looking. Something long buried in this body’s memory began to surface. The figure and that buried presence drew closer, detail by detail, until the two impressions aligned.

The young man turned, and Kael’s hand dropped from the hilt.

Lu Zhihuan’s face—this body’s, as it had existed before weeks of hard travel and harder choices had started to reshape it. The jaw a little softer. The gaze carrying a different kind of knowledge. Alive in a way the mirror never showed, because this face had belonged to someone else.

"I’ve been watching you, you’ve been using my body for weeks." He crossed his arms. "My techniques. My name. My reputation." A pause. "You handle them well enough."

Kael held his ground. "You have a problem with that."

"I have an interest in it." Lu Zhihuan moved to the stone platform and sat, unhurried, with the ease of someone settling into his own chair. "Sit down. We’ll talk."

Kael sat on the edge.

Lu Zhihuan was quiet for a moment, studying him the way one studies a hand of cards—watchful, calculating.

"Six years at the peak of First-Rate," he said. "I plateaued at twenty-three. Every master I asked said the same thing—dao heart. That the cultivation would follow once the foundation was right." His tone carried fact, neither complaint nor bitterness. "I spent six years trying to figure out what that meant."

"And?"

"And then you arrived. And started killing everything in reach." A faint dry edge. "Bandits. Demons. Fifty-some villagers. A forest full of starving men who’d stopped being men." He tilted his head. "Do you know what that Aether did?"

Kael said nothing.

"Six years of accumulation—compressed. What I was still missing, you filled in three weeks." He let that land. "I’m one step from Xiantian. For the first time in six years, I can feel the threshold."

The courtyard was very still.

"You want something," Kael said.

"I want what’s on the other side of that threshold." Immediate. Certain. "And I need this body to form a dao heart. Mine is in pieces—has been since the tiger. I know what I am. I ran. I abandoned the creed I built my entire cultivation on. That kind of fracture remains."

"So you need me to form one."

"I need this body to form one. Whether you’re the one doing it—" A slight lift of the shoulder. "That depends on you."

Kael looked at him steadily. "And if I refuse?"

"Then Baihe kills you in a few weeks. Maybe days." The words came out even, unhurried. "He finds you interesting now. That will change. The moment you stop growing, he’ll cut you down the way you’d cut down a dull tool." A pause. "I know what he is."

The ginkgo tree shed a leaf. It drifted down between them.

"You’re here for yourself," Kael said.

"I’m here because our interests align." Lu Zhihuan held his gaze. "You need to break through to stay ahead of Baihe. I need a dao heart to break through at all. Neither of us gets what we want if you keep performing your way through every choice you make."

"So."

"So stop performing." He rose from the platform and walked toward the ginkgo tree, stopping beneath it with his back to Kael—the same posture Kael had seen in memory after memory, when Lu Zhihuan had something difficult to say and preferred to say it to the air. "You’ve been doing it since you got here. Turning each choice into the only possible outcome. Making yourself the protagonist of a story where everything you do has a reason clean enough to repeat in polite company."

"I did save people at that village."

"Fifty-four died."

Kael’s jaw tightened. "I had one option."

"You had more than one." Lu Zhihuan turned. His tone stayed level. "You had a choice. But this was a place to recover the aether you’d already invested. If you died, you wouldn’t be able to keep harvesting aether in this world. I would be the one erased. You came because you wanted your investment to pay off. And when you saw you could frame the killings as a way to save the rest, you took it."

Kael held his tongue.

"The bandit—the one you skinned and tortured. You did it because you wanted to know, and he was available, and the only thing it cost you was time."

"He deserved it."

"Then why leave the others intact?"

"The hours it would take..."

"Jarek." Lu Zhihuan stopped in front of him. "You stood by his body and you felt fury."

"Of course I—"

"Fury." His tone stayed even. "What kind?"

Kael started to speak, then stopped. The words stalled in his throat.

"... ..."

"I cared," Kael said at last. "But not the way I told myself I did."

"That’s the most honest thing you’ve said since you got here."

"And will you keep looking for excuses for what you did? You’re a man who kills. You’re a man who calculates."

"Does it exhaust you yet?"

A leaf loosened from the ginkgo tree and drifted down. The silence stretched.

"Say it," Lu Zhihuan said.

"Say what."

"What you’ve known for weeks and kept building walls around."

Kael met his own gaze—the jaw he’d felt from the inside, the eyes that had spent twenty years learning to show precisely what was needed and conceal everything else.

"Maybe... you’re right. I kill for power. The reasons come after."

Lu Zhihuan waited.

"The village—the calculation was real. I did think it was the best option. But underneath that—" He stopped. "I wanted to. Some part of me wanted to. And then I found reasons why wanting to was acceptable."

"Yes."

"Jarek. The anger was about me. About making the wrong call. About leaving him exposed—and someone proving I was less clever than I thought."

A small nod.

"The bandit." His voice flattened. "That was just curiosity. I wanted to know. He was there."

Silence.

"So what does that make me." Then, quieter: "A hypocrite?"

Lu Zhihuan sat down beside him.

"By whose standard?" A beat. "If the heart were the measure, everyone would fall."

He let that sit.

"You act. You choose. You pay for it. The blade fell where it needed to fall. People lived." A pause. "That part holds."

"But you keep trying to be something cleaner than what you are. And the gap between what you are and what you keep reaching for—that’s what grinds."

"The guilt will keep coming. The faces—they stay. But there’s a difference between carrying that and letting it crush you." He stood. "You’re being crushed because you keep reaching for something you already left behind."

The platform was cold beneath Kael’s hands. The weight in his chest—the one he’d been adjusting around for weeks—shifted.

He laughed. Short and low at first, the sound catching in his throat when he realized the words fit too well. His shoulders loosened by a fraction. He let out a longer breath, and the laugh came again, rougher, steadier. He rubbed a hand over his face, eyes unfocused, as the thought settled in: that was exactly what he had done.

Lu Zhihuan watched him in silence.

The laugh faded. Kael sat with the quiet that followed—different from the quiet before.

"I built the cage," Kael said. "Forged it myself. Spent weeks being miserable inside it and calling that conscience."

"You needed it. For a while."

"Not anymore."

He stood. The laugh had settled into a different weight—the specific feeling of a lie you’ve told so long that dropping it feels like losing something, even when you’re relieved it’s gone.

"I kill for power. I protect what matters to me. I weigh the cost, and I’ll weigh it again." He met Lu Zhihuan’s eyes. "That’s who I am."

Lu Zhihuan held his gaze for a long moment. Something shifted in his expression—the look of a man who had placed a careful bet and just watched it come in.

"There it is," he said.

He straightened. For a moment he stood the way Kael had seen him stand in a hundred inherited memories—the Chief Disciple of Buyan Sect, spine straight, weight perfectly balanced, every inch of him earned.

"Six years. And it comes down to three weeks of your killing." He almost sounded amused.

"Take the Aether. Take the foundation. Take everything I spent twenty-five years building." A pause—shorter than the others, clipped. "Use it better than I did."

The ginkgo’s branches stirred, though the air was still. He was already going—receding, the way a tide pulls back from shore. His outline stayed sharp until the last moment.

"Stay alive," he said. His voice came from further away now. "Anything else would be embarrassing."

He was gone.

---

The memories arrived unbidden. His own.

Valen. The smile that touched only his mouth, never his eyes.

I know exactly what he wants—to use me as his enforcer, his hand in the dark.

I accept. For survival. For the path forward. The reasons are true enough.

The fifty-four. Hands raised. Voices demanding Wei’s blood. The sword falling—clean, precise. And beneath the motion, the arithmetic he’d worked to ignore. More Aether. Better odds next time.

Jarek. Face-down in the mud. Heat. Offense. Someone had made him wrong.

The bandit. Strips of skin. Yield unchanged. Method inefficient. Discontinue.

He’d known all of this. Always. That was what landed—the facts themselves, yes, but more: the recognition that he’d known every one of them and built careful structures around each so he wouldn’t have to look directly.

The arguments had run continuously for weeks. Now they ran dry.

---

Kael’s eyes opened. The inn room. Dark. The candle had burned to nothing, a thin thread of smoke rising from the wick.

Lianghong slept next door, his breathing just audible through the wall.

Baihe sat against the opposite wall. Eyes open. Watching.

Kael sat up.

"How long have you been awake?"

"Long enough." Baihe’s tone was stripped of its usual performance. "Your breathing changed. About an hour ago."

"Your eyes. The way you’re sitting." Baihe tilted his head. "The weight you’ve been carrying—it’s gone."

"Does it matter?"

"To me? Yes."

He stood and walked closer, stopping a few paces away—studying Kael the way a craftsman examines a blade just pulled from the forge, checking the grain, the edge, the quality of the metal.

"Tell me. What did you accept?"

"That I kill for power. For survival. For my own ends." A pause. "I stopped wearing morality as camouflage."

Baihe stared at him. Then he laughed. Brief and sharp—the performance gone entirely.

"Most people die before they get there," he said. "They carry the disguise all the way to the end, convinced it’s their actual face." He shook his head. "You actually did it."

"If someone keeps up the pretense for a lifetime," Kael’s gaze held steady, "then regardless of why he started, the life he lived is the truth of him."

Kael drew his sword. Correctly weighted. Like the distance between intention and motion had collapsed to nothing.

He raised it slowly, vertically, until the flat of the blade bisected his face.

One half: the face that belonged to this world. Skin, bone, the features worn by twenty-five years of someone else’s life.

The other half, reflected in the black steel: the face that had been underneath all of it. The one watching from behind every performance, every constructed reason, every careful word chosen for its effect.

Cold. Patient. Already decided. Both faces were his. That was the point.

[Aether: +15]

Baihe went still. The amusement left him. What remained was quieter—the look of someone who had waited a long time for something and was only now sure it had arrived.

"Perfect," he said. "Absolutely perfect."

Deep in Kael’s meridians, a current that had been circling a locked gate finally found the latch.

The Returning Yang True Art had always run like water through channels—steady, functional, controlled. Now it ran differently. Every meridian opened at once, the circulation completing itself, the qi pooling and flowing and pooling again in a loop that required only that he stop resisting.

He’d been carrying too much weight. The weight was gone.

Warmth gathered at his core and spread. A settling. Slow and total. Qi moved clean. His body answered before he asked.

He opened his eyes. The room was the same. The same dark walls, the same guttered candle, the same thin gaps in the shutters.

But the candle’s smoke moved differently now—he could track each curl as it rose. The world sharpened. All at once. 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶

The outline of the courtyard tree beyond the window, its leaves traced in starlight. The rhythm of Lianghong’s heartbeat next door—slightly faster than sleep should allow. The night air seeping through the cracks in the wood. The faint trace of old blood still clinging to Baihe’s sleeve.

Kael turned his hands over. The qi pooled in his palms the moment he thought it—instant, obedient.

Next door, Lianghong’s breathing changed. A long pause. The faint creak of the bedframe as he sat up. He’d felt it through the wall—the pressure shift, the sudden density in the air. His hand pressed flat against the partition. Listening.

"You broke through," Baihe said.

He drew his sword. The blade caught the faint spill of moonlight through the gap. His gaze carried the sharp focus of someone who had been waiting a long time for something finally worth wanting.

"I expected this eventually." A faint curve at the corner of his mouth. "Tonight was a surprise."

He walked to the window and pushed the shutter open. Cold air spilled into the room. He looked out at the rooftops, the empty road, the dark stretch of open ground beyond the town wall.

"Out there." He glanced back at Kael. "Too cramped here."

Kael lowered the blade into his stance.

Baihe’s smile sharpened. "Keep up." Almost careless. "You know what happens if you fall behind."

Then he was gone.

The air cracked. The shutters blew outward. The oil lamp guttered and died. The wooden frame splintered where pressure burst through it.

Kael moved an instant later.

Qi surged beneath his feet. The floorboards groaned as he pushed off. The window lattice shattered outward behind him. Night air slammed into the room.

Next door, Lianghong’s hand came off the partition. The bedframe scraped hard against the floor.

"What—"

Kael was already outside.