Return of the Immortal Emperor

Chapter 2: A Week Is Enough

 The herbs she brought him were the kind nobody bothered stealing. Bitter root. Cracked spirit grass. Pale fungus scraped off the shaded side of a wall. In his old life, one wrong ingredient from his personal stores could've leveled a mountain. These were worth nothing by comparison. But worthless and useless weren't the same thing, and he'd learned that difference a very long time ago, back when he'd had nothing either.

He sat cross-legged on the mat, sorting herbs in the weak light, counting days in his head without meaning to. Six left, if the old woman's account of Elder Wren's decision held. Six days to turn a body that couldn't hold its own weight into something that at least looked like it belonged in this sect.

He let his mind drop into an old rhythm, not the Emperor's rhythm, but something further back, from before there'd been an empire at all, when he was young and broke and learning to open his own meridians with stolen manuals and whatever roots he could scrounge. He'd forgotten he'd ever had to work that hard for anything.

Turned out the body remembered, even if the dantian didn't.

He crushed the root between two stones, mixed it into water from a cracked jar, let it steep. Then turned inward, toward the one meridian his sense had found the night before, and settled into the breathing method… old, plain, built for peasant recruits who had nothing but stubbornness. He'd taught it once, back when the sect had needed soldiers more than legends, back before soldiers like that had grown up into men who could put a blade in his back and still look him in the eye while they did it.

He pushed the thought away again. It kept coming back easier than he liked.

It worked exactly as slowly as he remembered it working.

By midday his head was pounding, his hands unsteady, but the meridian had opened…barely, a crack widened just enough for a thread of qi to pass through. Not cultivation. Not even close. But it was the first time anything in this body had answered him instead of just hurting, and for a boy with six days left, that counted as progress worth having.

He was still catching his breath when the noise started outside. Voices heading toward the courtyard with the kind of energy that only shows up when people expect to watch something bad happen to someone else.

The old woman appeared in the doorway, face tight. "Deacon Rui's man's here. Not waiting for the week, apparently."

Of course he wasn't. If Elder Victor was the one pulling Rui's strings, then the week Elder Wren had granted was never meant to be honored quietly. Someone wanted this decided before Ethan had time to use any of it.

Ethan got up. It cost more than he wanted to admit, stiff joints, his vision swimming for a second, but he made it outside without letting any of that show.

The courtyard had already filled up. At the center stood a young man Ethan didn't know but understood at a glance, someone who'd never lost a fight he'd chosen to have. Mid-tier bloodline robes, a cultivation base strong enough to feel from ten paces off, though something underneath it struck Ethan as thin. Rushed. Built to look good rather than hold up.

"Ethan." He said the name like it tasted bad. "Deacon Rui sent me for what you wouldn't hand over yesterday. Honestly hoped you'd refuse again."

Someone in the crowd laughed.

Ethan felt the token against his ribs and understood exactly what was being offered, not a fight he could win with strength, since he had none worth mentioning, but one he might win if he understood something his opponent didn't. And underneath that, a colder thought: whatever happened here today, Elder Victor would hear about it by evening. This wasn't just a fight over a token anymore. It was the first move in something larger, and Ethan intended to make sure it was a move Victor regretted watching.

"And if I don't refuse?"

"Then you hand it over, and I don't have to explain to the Deacon why a cripple made me work for it." A confident smile. "Your choice."

Ethan looked him over the way he used to study generals across a war table, reading tells before the first move ever landed. Weight too far forward. Qi moving fast and loud through meridians that hadn't had time to grow into that speed. A foundation slapped together by someone in a hurry to look strong, who'd never had to fight anyone who actually knew what they were looking at.

"I accept," Ethan said. "Since that's apparently the alternative."

A gasp rippled through the crowd. Even the old woman made a small sound behind him.

The young man's smile slipped, just a little. "You can barely stand."

"Then this won't take long," Ethan said, and stepped into the open ground.