Heaven’s Trash: I Devour Everything

Chapter 1: Three Breaths to Kneel

“Kneel,” said Elder Qu.

Leo Bai stayed on his feet.

Four hundred people crowded the balconies of the Bai Clan’s Great Hall, and every one of them had come to watch him break. He stood at the center of the marble in a plain gray robe and counted his breaths, because counting kept his hands from shaking.

One.

“I will not say it again, boy.”

Two.

Mei Qingshan, Patriarch of the Mei family, raised two fingers. The pressure of a Core Formation cultivator came down on Leo with a crushing, total weight. His knees hit the marble hard enough to echo. Somewhere above him a man laughed. Someone else clapped twice, softly, pleased that the show had finally started.

Three.

Leo kept his head up. They could not take that.

The floor was colder than any floor had a right to be. The cold crawled up through his robe and into his bones, and he barely felt it. What he felt was the swallowed stone in his chest, and it had his father’s face on it.

Bai Ren stood at the head of the hall in ceremonial robes cut for a war hero. They hung loose on him now; he had lost weight this month. His fists were clenched and shaking. He looked at the elders, at the rafters, at the tassels on his own sleeves, at anything but his son.

Look at me, Leo thought. Once.

His father didn’t.

Leo’s hand found the half-pendant under his collar, jade, cracked along one edge. Seven years he’d worn it. He closed his fist around it until the broken side bit.

Mei Ling stood three steps away in the white silk of the Frost Moon Sect. It was a white so clean it looked unkind, cut so well it fit her exactly. Her chin was lifted exactly one inch. She was looking at a spot past his shoulder, careful not to see him at all.

When they were ten she had pressed that pendant into his palm. She’d dropped it first, and cracked it, and cried for an hour. He told her it looked better with a flaw. She laughed so hard she got the hiccups and couldn’t stop, and the cook had to give her a spoonful of sugar to cure it.

That girl wasn’t in this hall.

By the servants’ door, one face wasn’t smiling. Yan’er, a kitchen maid with flour to her elbows, stared at him with red eyes and both hands clamped over her mouth. A steward had hold of her shoulder to keep her where she was. She was the only person in the room who looked frightened for him.

“The Spirit Root Tribunal,” Elder Qu announced, unrolling a jade slip and glancing, once, toward the Mei delegation, “has completed its re-evaluation of the Bai heir.”

The hall went quiet.

In the Azure Cloud Continent, roots were law. A child was tested at six, ranked, and filed for life. Heavenly roots became saints. Mud roots carried stone.

“At age six the subject tested at Mud Grade. Poor, but not condemned. Last night’s test shows total deterioration.” Elder Qu raised his voice. “His roots are hereby classified Trash Grade.”

For a heartbeat nobody moved. Then a whisper ran along the balconies. Trash Grade? I thought that was a myth. Another voice: So the rumors were true. A third, laughing: No wonder Mei waited till the last minute. Imagine being tied to that.

The laughter rolled down tier by tier until even the servants on the stairs had joined in.

Leo’s nails scraped the marble. Trash Grade meant more than weak. It meant a sieve, roots that couldn’t hold a single thread of qi, and in a world that ran on talent, it meant a person had no right to be taking up room.

Last night he had stood in the clan’s cold cellar with his palm on the old testing stone while Elder Qu and two silent assistants watched the glass. The stone went the color of ash. It did not flare or hum or flicker. It dimmed slowly, and the elder’s face closed. Leo had braced for pain, because every story said a Trash verdict burned going in and children screamed. Nothing burned. There was a faint pull behind his ribs, a small turning, something down there noticing the stone. Nobody else noticed. He’d decided it was fear.

“Trash roots,” Mei Qingshan said, and the hall obeyed his voice and fell silent, “cannot absorb spiritual qi. They cannot be repaired. They are not a foundation, they are a hole.” He drew a slip of translucent jade from his sleeve, the engagement contract that had bound two families for ten years. “The Mei family will not bind its daughter to a hole.”

He opened his fingers. The contract fell and struck the marble with a small, clean click that carried to the back row.

“The engagement is dissolved,” Mei Ling said.

Her voice was cool and well practiced. She stepped forward and set her heel on the jade, and it cracked under her slipper with a thin dry snap.

Leo watched her do it. He looked for anything in her face, guilt, pity, a flicker. He found nothing, only her left hand half hidden in her sleeve with the knuckles gone white.

Disgust, he decided. She can’t even hide how badly she wants this over.

He was wrong about that, and he would find out how wrong.

“Which brings us,” Mei Qingshan went on, smiling now, “to happier news.”

A tall young man stepped out of the Mei delegation. His gold-threaded robes pulsed with enchantments, and a warm radiance rolled off him so strongly that people in the balconies leaned toward him without noticing they were doing it. Long Chen, Saint Son of the Sun-God Sect, the genius whose roots had made the testing hall shake when he was six.

“In forty days,” said Mei Qingshan, “my daughter will wed the Saint Son at the Great Alliance Feast. Every sect on the continent will attend. The Bai Clan is, of course, invited.”

The applause was enormous. Mei Ling bowed her head, and it passed for modesty. Leo noticed it also hid her face.

Long Chen strolled over, smile pitched for the galleries, and stopped one step from Leo. He looked him over slowly, top to bottom, and found nothing worth the trouble.

“So this is the famous stain. I almost feel sorry for you.”

He flicked a silver coin off his thumb. It rang across the marble and rolled to a stop against Leo’s knee.

“Buy yourself a coffin, Leo Bai. A cheap one. I’d hate for the wedding guests to step over you on their way in.”

The laughter this time was louder, jagged, and hungry.

Leo looked at the coin. Then he picked it up.

The weight on his back lifted. Mei Qingshan wanted him gone, not crawling. Leo got up on legs that barely held, turned the coin once between his fingers, and met Long Chen’s eyes.

“Generous. I’ll pay it back with interest.”

The smile didn’t fall. But for the length of a blink something moved behind it, and it was not sunlight. Then it was gone.

Leo turned to his father and bowed, low and exact, the bow of a man who means goodbye.

“Father. I’m sorry I couldn’t be what you needed.”

Bai Ren’s lips parted. His whole body strained. “Leo, I—” he said and stopped there and looked at the floor.

Leo walked out. The crowd opened ahead of him so that nobody would have to touch him.

The walk to the gate took a long time. Every corridor he had run down as a child was lined with people who had suddenly found the flagstones interesting. A cousin who had borrowed his training sword and never returned it turned to face the wall. Two junior disciples whispered behind their sleeves, and the smaller one giggled, a thin, quick sound, the giggle of someone glad the joke was on somebody else. He passed the memorial wall where his father’s name stood in gold among the heroes of the Northern War, and he did not slow down. He had always pictured leaving this place with his head up and a sect badge on his chest. In the picture, the corridors had been louder.

Footsteps pounded behind him at the outer gate.

“Young Master! Wait! Young Master, wait, please—”

Yan’er skidded to a stop with flour still on her sleeves, breath sawing in and out. She shoved a warm, lumpy bundle at him, a steamed bun wrapped in cloth, and then a small pouch that clinked.

“It’s thirteen coppers. That’s all of it. I know it’s not much, I was saving for it. It doesn’t matter—”

“Yan’er.” He closed her fingers back over the pouch. “Buy something sweet.”

“Don’t go to the Abyss.”

“I’m going for a walk.”

“You’re a terrible liar.” Her chin shook. “You always were.”

He almost smiled. It was the first thing all day that had made him want to.

“Come back,” she said. “I’ll keep your room clean.”

Leo didn’t promise. He knew by now what promises weighed. He squeezed her hand once, took the bun, and walked into the dusk without turning around.

By the time he reached the Howling Abyss the sky had gone dark and purple-gray. The canyon was a deep split in the earth, its cliffs jagged, and below them a gray mist that churned and never cleared, heavy with old poison and warped qi. Even Foundation Establishment cultivators refused to go down. The sects used it to get rid of things they didn’t want found.

Trash goes where trash is thrown, Leo thought. It was nearly funny.

He walked past the old warning stones without slowing. They were older than the Bai Clan. Someone had chiseled names into them, hundreds, cut shallow and then scratched out. Disgraced disciples. Failed experiments. Witnesses. He ran his thumb along one groove as he passed and felt cold rock and, under it, the same faint tug behind his ribs, the same slow rolling-over he’d felt in the cellar. He took his hand away. In his pocket the silver coin lay against his thigh, small and warm.

The pressure hit him all at once, thick and heavy, and every breath burned. He kept climbing toward the cliff edge, eating Yan’er’s bun as he went. It was still warm. It seemed stupid to die hungry.

At the edge he stopped and listened to the wind scream below.

“If this is how it goes,” he said to nobody, “at least I picked the ending.”

The ground cracked under his right foot with a flat, dry crack.

No rumble, no warning. The ledge simply let go, and Leo fell. Wind ripped at his clothes, and the mist closed over his head. He clawed for a root, a rock, anything, and closed his hands on the air. Then the air itself folded, and space bent in around him.

He hit stone and rolled, wheezing, his vision gone gray, and waited for death to finish the job.

It didn’t come.

The howling had stopped. In its place was a silence so deep it felt padded. When he pushed himself up on his bloodied forearms he found black stone under his palms, cut with old markings. Dead vines hung from broken pillars. The air was cool and clean, with no trace of poison in it. Someone had built this place, and built it to last.

At the far end, in a glow that had no source, a skeleton stood upright in rags of gray dust. It did not move. It had been waiting a very long time.

Two pale lights came on in its empty sockets.

The skull tilted, almost curiously, and Leo heard a dry voice inside his own head.

“Well,” it said. “Another one has fallen through the cracks of heaven.”