Nine Lives of the Sword Saint

Chapter 4: The Tyrant of Stone Hollow

Village tyrants, Li Wuchen had learned over sixty-one years, came in a predictable range of sizes. He'd crushed sect-lords who commanded armies. He'd broken emperors who thought their qi made them gods. Somehow, none of that experience made the current problem any less irritating: a landlord's son named Duan Hu, fourteen years old, built like a young ox, and utterly convinced that the orphanage's meager rice stores existed for his personal amusement.

"Pay the toll," Duan Hu said, for the third time that month, planting himself in the orphanage's dirt yard with two friends flanking him like poorly trained hounds. "Or I tell my father the temple roof needs 'repairing' again. You know what that means."

It meant the landlord's men would come and take twice what Duan Hu was currently extorting, under cover of a legitimate-sounding tax. Everyone in Stone Hollow understood the arrangement. Nobody had the standing to refuse it.

Xiao Chen — small, unremarkable, seven years old and two months into a cultivation base that wouldn't survive a strong wind — stepped between Duan Hu and the orphanage matron before he'd fully decided to.

Old habits. A man used to being the strongest person in any room did not easily unlearn the instinct to stand in front of danger, even in a body that could not currently back the instinct up with anything at all.

"You're small enough to swat," Duan Hu observed, not unkindly, the way a boy might observe a fact about weather. "What are you doing?"

"Counting," Xiao Chen said.

"Counting what?"

"How many people in this village you've taken from this season. How many of them told their families it was your father's tax and not your own idea. How long you think that story survives once someone finally writes it down and shows the county magistrate."

It wasn't a threat with any real teeth behind it — not yet, not from a body this small, in a village this forgotten. But Xiao Chen had spent decades learning that most bullies, of any size, ran on the fuel of nobody ever calling their bluff, and Duan Hu's face did the particular flicker of a boy suddenly less sure of his own script.

"You think anyone in this village would side with an orphan against my family?"

"I think," Xiao Chen said, and here he let a fraction of the Sword Saint's old, terrible calm show through a seven-year-old's face, just enough to be unsettling, "that your father built his standing on people being too frightened to add up the numbers. I'm very good at numbers."

Duan Hu did not hit him — some instinct, animal and correct, telling him that this particular small boy was not worth whatever strange unease had just crawled up his spine. He left with a muttered threat about coming back, which they both understood was really a face-saving retreat.

The orphanage matron, once the yard was empty again, looked at Xiao Chen for a long moment with an expression he couldn't quite read.

"You're a strange child," she said.

"I've been told," Xiao Chen agreed, and did not elaborate, because there was no version of the truth that wouldn't get him labeled a lunatic or a demon by nightfall.