2026-07-28 05:09:40Village 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.
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Chapter 396: The Night in the Hall
They stayed in the feast hall that night, forty-one people and a mule, under a sky so full of stars that it looked like frost on black glass. Nobody had planned it that way. Hesper sent up blankets and a cauldron of stew with two of her cousins, who set them down at the foot of the dais and fled, as if from a church. Lisbet and Calder built a fire in the centre of the floor, in the empty space between the pillars, using broken beams from the armoury. The walkers laid out their bedrolls in a ring. The Academy students, who had spent three weeks being very dignified about the whole thing, sat in a huddle against a column and passed one cup of tea from hand to hand. Ah Jiu stayed in the black chair. She had refused the litter, politely, and been wrapped to the chin in every blanket the company owned. She sat on the dais with the dead creeper at her back and the old stone table before her. From there she could see all of them, and she looked at them one by one, in th
Chapter 395: The Hall Where It Began
They climbed the last three terraces on the forty-fifth day, in a pale clear morning with the dew still on the stone. The steps were steep, and the litter had to be tilted at every turn, with Lisbet at the foot and Calder at the head calling the angles. Ah Jiu lay with the book on her chest and her two hands over it. She watched the sky go by, and said nothing for a long time. Once, on the seventh terrace, she asked for the pole to be stopped so that she could look at a swallow's nest under an eave. They stopped. She looked. Then she said, "Thank you," and they went on. The ninth terrace was a broad flat shelf of rock under the peak, open to the wind. Nothing grew on it. The old buildings had crumbled to knee height, except one. The feast hall had no roof. The pillars stood in two rows, forty feet tall, wreathed in dead creeper, and between them lay a floor of dark polished stone, scoured by two centuries of weather. A
Chapter 394: For the One Who Comes Asking
Ah Jiu was stronger in the morning, as she had said. It was a surprise to everyone but her. She woke at first light with colour in her face, or the memory of colour, a faint rose under the transparency, and asked for tea, and drank half a cup without help. Berit watched her do it with the wary tenderness of a nurse who has seen this before. It was the thing the body did, sometimes, in the last stretch: a short bright lift, a last surge, as a lamp flares when the oil is nearly gone. "Do not look at me like that," said Ah Jiu. "I know what it is. Let me enjoy it." They carried her to the kitchen table, where the book lay on its oilcloth in the pale window light. The whole company had crowded into the Keeper's House, around the walls and on the stairs, hardly breathing. Hesper Lun stood by the stove, with her arms folded, and her lips tight. Ah Jiu laid one hand on the cover. Her f
Chapter 393: Two Graves
It was very quiet on the sixth terrace. The company had withdrawn to the low wall and sat there in the dusk, with the lantern between them and their backs to the cold stone. Berit remained at the litter. Corin stayed too, a few steps off, because he had not been told to go and could not quite persuade himself to leave. Ah Jiu lay for a long time with her hand on the smaller stone. "I never came," she said at last. The words fell into the stillness without weight. It was hard to tell whom she was addressing: the children, the grass, the name on the stone. "I knew where it was. I have known for two hundred years. I could have walked here in a week at any time. And I told myself that it was not mine to forgive." She paused for breath. "That was a lie. It was not that I could not forgive. It was that I would have had to see her. A woman I had known only as a
Chapter 392: The Gate of Nine Heavens
The gate was still standing. That was the surprise. Corin had expected rubble: a field of tumbled stones with ivy on it, the kind of ruin that has stopped remembering what it was. Instead, on the forty-fourth day, as the road rose out of the forest and into a high valley of bare grey rock, they came round a shoulder of the hill and saw it, a hundred yards ahead, rising out of the scree. A great arch of dark stone, forty feet tall, with nine carved bands across the lintel, each worn nearly smooth. On the left pillar the carving of a sword had lost its blade. On the right a cloud had lost its edge. Behind it the mountain went up in nine long terraces, and on each terrace, roofless and grey, stood the bones of a building. "The Nine Heavens Sect," said Aldis. Nobody answered. Even the mule had stopped. The litter was set down at the foot of the arch. The wind came through the gateway in long
Chapter 391: The Charcoal Country
The light in the forest belonged to a family called Dun. They had been burning charcoal on the same hillside since before the Sect fell, and they had four kilns, a barn, a dog with one ear, and a grandmother who came out of the smoke at dusk with a lantern in her hand and said, to nobody in particular, "Well. You'd better come in, then." There were forty-three of them. Six of the children were already in bed, and the grandmother, who was called Old Mab and was perhaps seventy, sent them back with a sharp word and a handful of dried apple. She ladled stew into every vessel the house possessed, including a washbasin. Corin, who had expected to feel an intruder, found himself with a wooden bowl in his lap, and a hound's chin on his foot, and a plain loaf in his hand. "We don't get many," Old Mab said, seating herself on a barrel. "Not from the west. Not since the roads closed. You'll be the Path, I suppose. We had a girl through in the sp
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