Heaven's Bound: The Rise Of The Infernal Sage

Chapter 2

Jian Lei's POV

The riders never reached the square.

I found that out an hour later, crouched behind the woodpile with Mei Lin'er's hand clamped so tight around mine I could feel her pulse hammering through it. The watchmen came down from the tower shouting that the scouts had turned back at the tree line, that whoever they were, they'd only been passing close enough to be seen, not close enough to attack.

"They were counting something," one of the watchmen said, breathless, to the small crowd that had gathered. "Torches. Roofs. I don't know. They weren't raiding, they were looking."

"Looking for what," someone asked.

Nobody answered that.

Mei Lin'er let go of my hand slowly, like she wasn't sure it was safe to yet. "You should go back to Elder Sun," she said. "He looked like he already knew they were coming."

"I know," I said. "I'm going."

I found Sun Hao exactly where I'd left him, except now the fire had burned down to almost nothing and he was staring into the coals like they owed him an answer.

"They turned back," I said.

"For now," he said.

"You knew they'd come," I said. "Didn't you."

He looked up at me, and the fear from earlier had settled into something steadier, more resigned. "I suspected," he said. "I didn't know when."

"Then tell me why," I said. "You put your hand on my wrist and went white as a corpse, Elder Sun. You told me to run before I even knew what I was running from. I think I've earned an explanation."

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he stood, slower than usual, joints cracking in the cold, and walked into his hut without a word. I thought maybe he was done with me for the night. Then he came back out carrying a folded cloth, old and yellowed, and set it down between us like it was something fragile.

"Before I answer you," he said, "you're going to learn something. Tonight. And you're not going to tell anyone, not Mei Lin'er, not your own reflection in a bucket of water. Do you understand me?"

"How am I supposed to agree to a secret before I know what it is?"

"That's exactly how secrets work, boy," he said, and for a second there was a flicker of the dry humor I actually liked about him. "Sit down."

I sat.

"Close your eyes," he said. "Breathe in through your nose for a count of four. Hold it for four. Let it out through your mouth for six. Don't rush it. Don't fight it. Just breathe."

"That's it?" I said. "That's the secret technique that made you go pale?"

"That's the first line of it," he said. "Do it before you argue with me."

I did it. In for four, hold for four, out for six. It felt like nothing at first, just breathing with extra steps, the kind of thing a nervous mother might tell a child to calm down before sleep.

"Again," Sun Hao said. "Slower this time. And this time, when you hold the breath, picture something burning low in your chest. Not a fire that hurts. A fire that's just waiting."

I almost laughed at that, except something in his voice stopped me. I closed my eyes again and did as he said, and on the third cycle, right as I held the breath at the top of the count, I felt it.

Warmth. Small, faint, easy to miss if I hadn't been looking for it exactly where he told me to look. A tiny coal of heat sitting somewhere behind my ribs, where nothing should have been burning at all.

My eyes snapped open. "What was that."

Sun Hao's face had gone very still. "You felt something."

"Warmth," I said. "Right here." I pressed my hand flat against my chest. "It's still there. Faint, but it's there."

"Good," he said, though his voice shook slightly on the word. "That's good, Jian Lei. That's very good."

"Elder Sun, what is it? What did I just feel?"

He sat back down across from me, and this time when he spoke, his voice had dropped low enough that I had to lean in to catch it over the wind.

"There are techniques," he said, "older than any sect currently teaching in this world. Techniques from before the sects wrote their own histories to make themselves look like the beginning of everything. This breathing method is one of the last surviving fragments of one of them. I learned it a long time ago, from someone I was never supposed to learn it from, in a place I was never supposed to go."

"You were a cultivator," I said slowly. "Before you came here. Before you were just Elder Sun who fixes roofs and settles arguments over goats."

"I was many things before I came here," he said, and something in the way he said it told me not to push harder on that particular thread yet. "What matters tonight is that this technique doesn't create spiritual root. It doesn't build power out of nothing the way the crystal tests for. It reveals what's already there. What's hidden. What's been sealed away so completely that even the person carrying it doesn't know."

"Sealed by who," I said. "Sealed why."

"I don't know all of it," he admitted. "I know enough to be afraid of it. I know enough to know that whatever those riders were counting rooftops for tonight, they weren't looking for crops or gold."

My stomach turned cold despite the fire. "They were looking for me."

"I don't know that for certain," he said, though his eyes told a different story than his words did. "But I'd rather teach you to survive being found than let you stay ignorant and hope they never come back."

"Then teach me," I said. "All of it. Whatever this is."

"It will take longer than one night," he said. "It will take longer than one season. And you cannot tell anyone, Jian Lei, not even Mei Lin'er, no matter how much you trust her. Not until I say it's safe."

"Why," I said. "She's not going to betray me."

"I know that," he said. "But knowledge like this doesn't just endanger the person who holds it. It endangers everyone standing close enough to matter to them." His eyes held mine, steady despite the fear still living somewhere behind them. "Do you understand what I'm telling you?"

I thought of Mei Lin'er's hand around mine behind the woodpile, her pulse hammering against my palm.

"I understand," I said quietly.

"Good," Sun Hao said. "Then breathe again. In for four."

I closed my eyes and did as he said, chasing that small coal of warmth behind my ribs, and this time when I found it, it didn't stay small. It pulsed once, hard, like something knocking against a locked door from the inside, and my eyes flew open at the same moment Sun Hao's hand shot out and gripped my wrist.

"Stop," he said, urgent now, all the calm gone from his voice. "Stop breathing like that right now."

"What's wrong," I said. "Elder Sun, what did I do?"

He didn't answer. He was staring past me, toward the tree line at the edge of the village, where the shadows had gone very still in a way that had nothing to do with the wind.