The Supreme Return Of Logan Kai

Chapter 2

Without been told, they could tell It came the way Master Liam, that was how his messages always comes,  suddenly, from nowhere and this particular place. One moment the air above the stone table was empty. The next, a scroll was simply there, dropping onto the surface of the flat rock with a quiet tap, sealed with red cord and the mark Kai had known since the first year he arrived on this mountain.

Without wasting anymore time he crossed the clearing in four steps.

He recognized the seal before his fingers even touched the cord the double ring of the Liam family mark pressed into dark wax, exact and deliberate.

He broke the seal.

The cord fell away. He unrolled the scroll and read.

Master Liam's handwriting was the same as always no wasted strokes, no unnecessary flourish, every character placed like it had a specific job to do and intended to do it.

"My work here is not finished. I will not be returning for some time. Do not wait on my arrival."

"You have two assignments. Follow them precisely."

"The first go to Harlow City. Find Director Benson Cole at Meridian General Hospital. He is an old friend and he is expecting someone I trust for you to heal.And when you're done healing that person, you can decide to continuing working or leave."

"The second after that is done, you will visit the National family the family of the woman who was chosen for you. You know who she is. You have also seen her picture."

"Leave as soon as this scroll reaches you. Do not delay."

At that moment reading his Master message Kai stood over the scroll for a moment after he finished reading it. The wind moved across the clearing again. 

He rolled the scroll back up.

Behind him, he could hear the three of them moving closer, reading over his shoulder the way they always did with anything that arrived from Master Lian. There were no secrets on this mountain. There had never been any need for them.

“He is not coming back,” Malisa said quietly. It was not a question.

“Not yet,” Kai responded.

“And you are leaving.” That was Mia. Her voice had changed again the sharpness from before was gone now, and what was left underneath it was something smaller and more honest. Something that did not know how to ask for what it wanted without pushing.

“Yes.”

A beat of silence.

Then Megan said, “We will come with you.”

Kai Shen turned around.

All three of them were watching him  Mia with her jaw set, Megan with her arms still folded but her shoulders not quite as stiff as before, and Malisa with that same steady quietness that had always been the most difficult of the three to respond to because it never asked for anything dramatic, and she was the baby among them.

“No,” he said.

“Kai—”

“Master Liam did not give you permission to go anywhere.” His voice was even, not cold, just straight. 

“You are still under his instruction. You stay until he releases you or sends word otherwise. That is how it works and all three of you know that.”

At that moment Mia pressed her lips together. She looked like she wanted to argue further and the argument was sitting right there behind her teeth, fully formed, ready. But even Mia knew there were lines on this mountain that they don't cross, and defying a direct instruction from Master Liam in his own house was one of them.

The three of them went quiet.

Kai Shen looked at them once more — steady, honest and then he turned back toward the herbs still spread across the stone table.

“I have to pack,” he said. 

“Sort the rest of those while I am gone. The ones on the left are still good. The ones on the right need to be dried again before you store them.”

His room in the stone dwelling was small the way all the rooms up here were small not cramped, just honest about what a person actually needed. A sleeping mat rolled against the wall. A low wooden chest. A shelf of texts so old the pages had turned the color of old teeth. He had lived in this room for eight years and in those eight years he had never once felt it was too small.

He pulled the chest open.

He did not own much that could be called a possession clothes, a few tools for his work, the things that belonged to the mountain. Everything that truly mattered he had carried inside himself, built into his bones through years that most people would not survive a single month of.

He had just begun folding his robe when he heard footsteps in the doorway.

All three of them. Of course.

Mia came in first, and she was carrying something in both hands a long cloth case, dark blue, tied at both ends with silver cord. She held it out toward him without saying anything first, which was unusual enough for Mia that it made him actually look at her face. There was no angle in it right now. She was just standing there, offering the thing in her hands.

“Open it,” she said.

He took the case and untied the cord.

Inside, laid against silk the color of deep water, was a set of acupuncture needles. Twelve of them, each one the length of his middle finger, each one catching the light from the doorway in a way that ordinary metal did not catch light. They were gold not gold-plated, not gold-colored, but actual gold, refined to the specific purity that the dragon technique demanded, the purity that made them capable of channeling spiritual energy without resistance.

Kai went very still.

He picked up one needle carefully between two fingers and held it up. The balance was perfect. The tip came to a point so exact it almost disappeared when anyone looked at it head-on.

“These are—” He stopped. “Mia, these are Grade Seven spiritual conductors. Your family makes these.”

“The only family in the western region that still knows how," she said, and her voice was matter-of-fact about it the way she also speaks when it was about  things she actually cared about. “My father sent them three months ago. I have been holding them, because it was supposed to be my gift on your birthday coming up.” A pause. 

“But now you can have it.”

At that moment Kia looked at her.

She looked back at him, and for just a moment the usual Mia the one who pushed and tested and never quite let anything show all the way was just a young woman standing in a doorway saying goodbye the only way she knew how.

“These are worth more than two million dollars on the open market,” Kai said.