The Last Dual-Cultivator

Chapter 49: Chapter 49

They Yan Shou him out at dawn on the sixth day.

The bolt scraped back, and the iron door swung open on two enforcers in black, and one of them tossed a bundle of clean grey cloth onto the straw. ”Get dressed,” he said. ”Sect law says you fight in your own clothes, not in cell rags. The Elder wants you looking respectable.”

Yan Shuo dressed slowly. His ribs had knitted enough that he could lift his arms over his head without seeing white, but only just. Bai Rou’s vial had done most of the work. He’d drunk it on the first night, and every night after, because Lingxi had kept bringing fresh ones down the stair along with rice balls and gossip, and once a cold dumpling that she said Ruan Tie had begged her to smuggle in.

’How are you feeling?’ Qin asked.

’Like a man about to fight a Foundation Peak cultivator in front of the whole sect.’

’Good. You’d be a fool to feel anything else. Remember what I said about your foundation, brat. It’s set, but it’s not hard yet. You can lean on it. You can’t jump up and down on it.’

’So I can’t use everything I’ve got.’

’You can use everything once,’ Qin said. ’Maybe. And then you’ll be finding out whether a cracked foundation hurts as much as everyone says.’

He tied his sash and followed the enforcers up the stair.

The Life-Death Stage stood on its own spur of black rock on the northern face of Cloudpiercer Peak, where the mountain dropped away into nothing.

It was a round platform of dark stone, forty paces across, flat and scarred and very old. Nine pillars of black granite stood around its rim, each one carved from top to bottom with array script, and between the pillars, the air shimmered faintly, a dome of pale light that closed over the stage like an upturned bowl. Beyond the far edge there was only the cloudsea, white and endless, a long way down.

The whole sect had come.

They filled the terraced slopes above the stage, outer disciples and service disciples packed onto every ledge, inner disciples in blue on the stone benches, and the elders in their carved chairs on a jutting balcony of white jade. The Sect Master sat at the center. Beside him, in red and gold, sat the old Chi envoy and a second man Yan Shuo hadn’t seen before: broad-shouldered and grey-bearded, with a face like a burned stump and a weight of Golden Core qi coming off him that made the air around the balcony hum.

’The clan elder,’ Qin murmured. ’They’ve brought someone strong enough to collect the body.’

Yan Shuo found Lanying on the front bench of the core disciples. She sat very straight in pale blue with her hands folded in her lap and the new gold mark glowing faintly at her left wrist. She didn’t nod to him. She didn’t need to. Her eyes found his and held for one breath, and the frost on the bench around her crept a little wider.

Further up the slope, a large shape was waving both arms over its head. Ruan Tie. Beside him, Bai Rou was trying to pull one of his arms down and failing.

”Brother!” Ruan Tie bellowed, loud enough that half the slope turned to look. ”I saved you dumplings! For after!”

Somebody laughed. The laughter spread. Yan Shuo felt the corner of his own mouth twitch and couldn’t stop it.

Then he looked at the stage, and stopped smiling.

At the northern pillar, kneeling in the dust with a pot of cinnabar and a fine brush, Wen Lingxi was touching up a line of array script, as though she had all the time in the world. She didn’t look up.

At the southern pillar, directly across the stage from her, stood Elder Gu in his black robes, with one hand resting on the carved stone.

Chi Yao stepped onto the stage from the far side.

He’d dressed for it. Red silk, gold embroidery, a sun-shaped jade at his belt, his hair bound up in a crown of beaten gold. He looked like the hero of a temple painting. He walked to the center of the stage and turned to bow to the balcony, a long graceful bow, and the inner disciples on the benches murmured approvingly.

Then he turned and looked at Yan Shuo, and smiled.

”I hear you came out of the lake at Foundation,” he said. ”Congratulations. Truly. I’d have hated to burn a mine rat. Burning a Foundation cultivator is so much more respectable.”

Yan Shuo said nothing. He stepped through the shimmering wall of the barrier onto the black stone, and felt it close behind him with a soft hum, like a door shutting in another room.

Elder Gu raised his voice. It carried easily, warm and grave, to every ledge on the slope.

”By the ancient law of the Life-Death Stage, two disciples have agreed to settle their dispute with their lives. Neither will be helped from outside. The barrier will not open until one of them lies dead or yields with his last breath.” He paused. ”May the heavens judge fairly.”

He lifted his hand from the southern pillar.

The gong on the balcony boomed once, and the sound rolled out over the cloudsea and came back faint and strange from the empty air.

Chi Yao took a slip of gold paper from his sleeve.

It was a talisman. Yan Shuo had seen them in the Scripture Pavilion, on the shelves he wasn’t supposed to dust: thin strips of gold leaf painted with characters in red ink, the kind of thing a wealthy clan’s elders made for their heirs and charged a fortune for. Chi Yao held it up between two fingers so the crowd could see it, and smiled, and set fire to it.

The gold leaf burned white.

Instead of rising, the flame spread sideways across the stage in a flat golden ripple, like a ring of heat spreading across a pond, and when it washed over Yan Shuo, he felt it go into him.

It went down. Past his skin, past his six open meridians, down and down, hunting, to the bottom of him where the riverbed lay. It found the hidden dantian and pressed against it like a hot hand against a door.

’A Sun-Eater,’ Qin hissed. ’Brat, it’s burning out held-back qi. Anything you’re hiding, it’s dragging up into your channels. You can’t hold the riverbed shut against this.’

’Then what do I do?’

’Let the qi up. All of it. But keep your eyes shut if you have to. If the silver comes into your face in front of this whole mountain, that’s the end of everything.’

He let it up.

It came roaring up out of the hidden cave whether he wanted it or not, every scrap of it, dragged by the golden heat. His meridians flooded. His Foundation qi blazed off him in a pale wash of light that the whole slope could see, and a murmur ran along the benches.

In his face, behind his eyes, he felt the silver rise.

He dropped his gaze to the black stone and set his jaw and held it back, the way he’d held the riverbed shut against Gu’s probe on the very first morning, with every ounce of stubbornness he owned. Grey water. Silt. The silver pressed against the backs of his eyes like a tide against a sea wall. It didn’t break through.

When he lifted his head, his eyes were grey.

Chi Yao was frowning.

”That’s all?” he said. He sounded almost offended. ”Foundation Early. That’s everything you had hidden?” He tilted his head. ”My clan elder told me you’d been holding back half your cultivation. I paid a great deal for that talisman, wine boy.”

”You should ask for your money back,” said Yan Shuo.

On the slope, Ruan Tie laughed so loudly that half the crowd laughed with him.

Chi Yao’s smile went thin. He raised both hands, and fire came into them.

The first exchange lasted four breaths, and Yan Shuo lost it.

Chi Yao came at him in a rush of heat, both palms blazing, and Yan Shuo met him with ice. It was Lanying’s ice, his own now, and it came out of his hands in a sheet of frost that hissed into steam against the fire. He got his left palm up and caught a strike on the forearm, and the heat went through his sleeve and into his skin like a branding iron. He drove his right hand in under it, at Chi Yao’s ribs, with the Silent River Palm.

Chi Yao twisted. The strike glanced off. A knee came up into Yan Shuo’s stomach, and he went back three paces and down onto one knee on the black stone.

The second exchange went worse.

The third, he barely survived.

Chi Yao fought seriously this time, with none of the slow, humiliating dance from the Cloud Terrace. He fought fast and hard and smart, every move built on years of private masters and expensive pills, the training of a great clan’s heir. And Yan Shuo couldn’t answer it with everything he had. Every time he reached for the full depth of his qi, he felt his new foundation groan under him, and Qin snapped at him in his head, and he pulled back.

He was losing ground. He knew it. The whole slope knew it.

On the fifth exchange, a palm caught him across the side of the head, and he hit the barrier wall with his shoulder. The pale light shimmered and held. He slid down it onto the stone, ears ringing, and tasted blood.

Across the stage, Chi Yao stood breathing a little hard, with fire curling around his fingers, and looked down at him. Then, slowly, he turned his head and looked up the slope toward the front row of core disciples.

Toward Lanying.

”Let’s finish this properly,” he said softly.

He lifted his left hand, closed his fingers into a fist, and pulled.

On the front bench, Lanying went rigid.

The new brand on her wrist blazed gold, bright enough to see from across the stage. Yan Shuo saw her hand clench in her lap. He saw her back arch very slightly, and her jaw lock, and the frost around her on the bench flash white and crackle. She didn’t make a sound. She sat there and held perfectly still while Chi Yao poured fire into her from forty paces away, and her face went white to the lips.

A fresh brand was strongest in its first month, and she was close enough for him to see. He’d known exactly what he was doing.

”There,” Chi Yao said, watching Yan Shuo’s face. ”Now you’re paying attention.”

Yan Shuo’s focus shattered.

For one heartbeat he couldn’t see the stage at all. Only her, on the bench, burning. The rage that came up in him was enormous and blind, and it slammed into his foundation like a battering ram, and he felt the foundation creak and give a little and Qin scream at him from very far away.

Then, underneath the rage, he felt her.

It was the bond. It had been there since the burned chamber, faint and quiet as a heartbeat through a wall, and now it was blazing. Through it, he could feel exactly what she felt: the fire crawling up her arm, the pain, the fury, and underneath all of that, a cold, clear steadiness that hadn’t wavered at all.

She was waiting for him.

She’d known this was coming. She’d planned for it. On the island at dawn, with her wet hair and her stubborn chin: When you break it, break it properly.

Yan Shuo stopped fighting the rage. He let it go. He closed his eyes, there on the black stone with his back against the barrier, and reached for her down the bond instead.

The fire came to him at once.

It came out of her arm and down the thread between them, all of Chi Yao’s heat, and he drew it into himself and spread it thin, the way he had in the burned chamber the first night. It hurt. He set his teeth and took it. On the bench, Lanying’s back eased. Her hand unclenched. The gold at her wrist flickered.

And beneath the fire, deep in the bond, he felt the brand itself.

It was a knot of gold in her meridians, fresh and bright and tied to a long, burning line that ran across the stage and straight into Chi Yao’s chest. Yan Shuo could feel every strand of it. He could feel where the knot was tied.

He took hold of the first strand and began, very gently, to pull it loose.

Across the stage, Chi Yao gasped.

He staggered, one hand going to his chest, and stared at Lanying, then at Yan Shuo, with his handsome face gone grey with shock.

”What are you doing?” he said. His voice cracked. ”What are you doing to it?”

Yan Shuo opened his eyes and looked at him and didn’t answer.

He took hold of the second strand.

Chi Yao felt it go. Yan Shuo saw him feel it: the line of his own qi, his clan’s binding, his leash on his bride, loosening in his chest one thread at a time, and nothing he could do to hold it. He wrenched at it. Up on the bench, the gold at Lanying’s wrist flared and dimmed and flared. He wrenched again, and it slipped further.

On the balcony, the Chi clan elder had risen from his chair.

At the southern pillar, Elder Gu’s hand had moved back to the carved stone.

At the northern pillar, Wen Lingxi set down her brush, very slowly, and laid her own palm flat on the array script she’d spent the morning touching up.

Chi Yao looked around the stage. At the barrier that wouldn’t open. At the bride slipping out of his grip. At the mine rat on the stone with frost on his hands and a third strand of the brand between his fingers. And Yan Shuo saw it in his eyes: the moment the young master of the Chi Clan understood that he might lose.

He stopped pulling on the brand.

He lowered his hands to his sides, and closed his eyes, and his lips moved silently, a few words that nobody outside the barrier could hear.

Then blood began to run from his nose.

It ran from his ears too, a thin bright red, and from the corners of his eyes like tears. His skin flushed red and then darker, deep crimson, glowing from inside like a coal in a forge. The air around him rippled with heat. The black stone under his feet began to smoke.

’Oh, the fool,’ Qin breathed. Her voice was horrified. ’He’s burning his life essence. Brat, he’s setting fire to his own years. He’ll have the strength of a Golden Core cultivator for as long as it lasts, and when it’s gone, it’ll take half his life with it.’

Chi Yao opened his eyes. They had gone the color of molten gold.

”Fine,” he said. His voice was hoarse and terrible and very quiet. ”Then we both burn.”