Heaven's Bound: The Rise Of The Infernal Sage

Chapter 5

Jian Lei's POV

We broke through the treeline and the sky over the outer farms was already orange.

"No," Mei Lin'er said, the word torn out of her.

Fire had taken the Hu family's grain stores, flames climbing fast up the dry thatch, and figures moved between the burning buildings on horseback, torches in hand, driving frightened animals and screaming villagers alike ahead of them like they were herding cattle. These weren't Elder Fang's strangers asking quiet questions at a checkpoint anymore. These were bandits, and they'd stopped pretending to be anything else.

"That's not my grandmother's shrine," I said, scanning the chaos, my chest tight. "That's the Hu farm. That's Zhou's house past it."

"The horn came from further up," Mei Lin'er said, already moving toward the shrine path, but I grabbed her arm.

"Wait. Look." I pointed toward my own house, further down the slope, where a rider had broken off from the main group and was circling the small yard with a torch raised. My mother's house. The house Sun Hao had walked me back to a thousand times as a boy, patient with my slow legs on the uphill climb.

Something in me stopped thinking about running at all.

"Jian Lei, no," Mei Lin'er said, reading my face before I'd even moved.

"That's my home," I said. "I'm not standing here and watching it burn."

"They're looking for you," she said, gripping my sleeve now, hard enough to hold me in place for one more second. "Running toward them is exactly what gets you caught."

"Then I won't run toward them empty handed," I said, and pulled free.

I grabbed a fallen branch off the ground, thick as my wrist, more weight than weapon, and ran down the slope toward my house before I let myself think too hard about how stupid this was. The rider saw me coming when I was still twenty paces off, and he laughed, actually laughed, low and easy like I was a rabbit that had wandered into his path by accident.

"Well now," he said, reining his horse around. "Elder Fang described a scared boy who couldn't light a testing crystal. Didn't say anything about one running at me with a stick."

"Get off my family's land," I said, and my voice didn't shake nearly as much as I expected it to.

He swung down off the horse instead of answering, drawing a short blade from his belt with the unhurried confidence of a man who had done this exact thing to exact this same kind of boy more times than he could count.

"Show me the mark," he said. "Left shoulder. Do that and maybe you walk away from this without losing a hand for wasting my time."

I didn't answer him. I swung the branch instead, wild and untrained, and he stepped out of the way so easily it was almost insulting, catching the branch on his forearm and driving his boot into my knee hard enough to drop me into the dirt.

"Have it your way," he said, raising the blade.

"That's enough."

Sun Hao's voice cracked across the yard like a whip, and the bandit's head turned just in time to see the old man step out of the shadow of the house, hands empty, spine straight in a way that had nothing to do with the frail villager everyone had known for years.

"Old man, this doesn't concern you," the bandit said, though something in his posture had shifted, some instinct warning him this wasn't the easy night he'd expected.

"It concerns me a great deal," Sun Hao said, walking forward slow and deliberate. "That boy is under my protection. Has been since before you learned to ride a horse."

The bandit laughed again, but it came out thinner this time. "Protection from a village elder. That's rich."

"I was many things before I was a village elder," Sun Hao said, and I saw, even from the ground with pain lancing up my leg, the same flicker I'd seen by the firelight hours earlier, the ghost of a man who used to be someone very different from who he'd let this village believe he was.

The bandit lunged.

Sun Hao moved to meet him, and for one heartbeat I thought I was about to watch the old man show me exactly what he'd hidden all these years. Then a second rider crashed through the fence at the edge of the yard, faster than any of us had accounted for, blade already swinging, and Sun Hao had to turn to meet a strike that hadn't been aimed at him at all.

It had been aimed at me.