Sabers and wide knives dashed in and out. Shadowless kicks struck from odd angles, breaking knees and ribs with equal contempt. Hands flashed, blocked by iron bar arms or dodged with footwork polished on trodden corpses. This was the battlefield of mortal experts, the desperate men and women who wandered the rivers and lakes, unable to find peace in a peaceful land.
For the surviving cultivators, it was all dreadfully slow. Each swing of a saber was like a creeping disease. Inevitable, inescapable, the awareness of it seeping into everything you could see or feel or imagine. You could go mad with hope, praying that it wouldn’t land, that the end could be diverted or delayed. Where there is life, there is hope. That’s what people always tell themselves, where there is life there is hope and the contemplation of the saber’s edge before it splits your brows and everything you ever were pours into the hungry earth.
Not that they were falling under the sabers. As maddened as they were, the mortal warriors didn’t care to test their skills against immortals.
There were screams. Shouts. Furious swears and oaths of vengeance. Tian saw a fat man’s palm turn black as it swept towards a woman’s chest. The black palm was pierced by a finger more silver than white. The fat man cried silently as he shifted back. The pain in his shattered palm was only part of it. The skill he was using had rebounded, the muscles in his arm knotting and tearing under the skin.
The woman darted in and drilled her finger past the fat man’s desperate defence and jabbed him in the chest. This time she was the one to scream and stagger back, clutching her broken finger. The fat man had a heart protecting mirror under his robes. It would have been smart to retreat. To simply accept that this wasn’t the night, swear vengeance and return when they had healed.
But the erhu sawed away, its winding music fit to accompany a prince strangling his father. Music to set fire to mortal blood. Who would run from this battlefield? Who would stand out as a coward in such illustrious company? On a night where all debts are settled and all grudges repaid and all sins wiped away with sticky blood. A yin night, lit with yang fire. Inevitable. Inescapable. As natural as wasp larvae eating their way out of a paralyzed spider.
There was a charm to it. Subtle. So subtle it was almost impossible to sense. Tian couldn’t understand it. He just knew it was there.
Little Treasure couldn’t look away. It didn’t occur to anyone to try and shield his eyes. This was the martial world. Cultivating with the dawn, seeking the dao and tranquility- those things were for reclusives in their temples and mountain monasteries. Down here, in the valleys and amongst the rivers and lakes, in the stinking alleyways, fragrant brothels and rowdy coaching inns, on the moonlit docks or in front of the sealed gates of a noble manor, it was blood and pain and who could stand up one more time than their enemies.
Censor Henshen couldn’t look away either. His pale face was focused, his sword still in its scabbard, but that scabbard was in his left hand, the sword’s hilt in the thin man’s right. A chair was flung. He batted it to the side, eyes on the melee. The chair thrower rushed in, waving a heavy knife. “Unnatural freak! I’ll have your head and your purse, if you haven’t lost that too!”
The three foot blade lashed out, the censor moving forward with a single explosive step. The chair thrower’s head went flying. His body fell, spraying the Censor head to foot in blood.
“Do you think me a man without a temper? Ah, but you think me no man at all! This Henshen will teach you all very well. Witness the might of my Exorcist Sword!”
The censor dove into the melee, his cold sword warming in human meat. His swordplay was mediocre by the standards of immortal warriors. By the standards of those left standing in the dining room, he was a killing god. Each lunge came fast as lightning, each chop landed heavy as thunder. There was no defensive swordplay. When an attack came in, it was met with a dodge and a counter attack. Everything was a target- writs, fingers, the oncoming knife or saber or club itself. A superb unification of breath, strength, tempo and energy. Those who relied only on experience or crude arts were simply no match.
More bodies fell. Some from violence, others simply collapsed. Their eyes went dull and they fell on the floor. Some dead by the time their head bounced, others lay bonelessly and their breath slowed. Unable to keep up with the music of the erhu.
Tian watched Little Treasure’s eyes flicker and start to roll up in his head. There was a dreadful drop in his vitality. As though his yang essence was being drained away. Tian quickly stood behind him and placed his hand to the boy’s back, circulating Advent of Spring. He was an old hand at sending his energy through his palms and into another person. You just had to be exceedingly gentle.
He shot Liren a sharp look. She nodded and smashed one of the shutters. Her hand bounced back. She frowned as faint etchings and lines of twisting script rose up from the paint in funeral white on black housepaint. A trap. An array. And still the Elder sawed away at his erhu, his blind eyes watching, a leer dripping from his face.
Tian quickly thought through what needed to happen. Hong could break the wall, but the senior would move to stop her. He had every confidence that she would win, but Tian didn’t know if Little Treasure would survive the confrontation. All the waiters were still standing with their backs to the wall, empty smiles plastered on shiny faces. He wasn’t willing to bet they could be used for unpleasant purposes.
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He needed to break the music. That seemed to be at the core of it. The immortals weren’t immune, but at least he, Liren and Daoist Lan seemed less affected. Daoist Lan had her eyes locked on the senior up on the stage. Like Tian and Hong, she was level seven. Unlike Tian and Hong, she seemed to have no confidence in beating a Level Nine, especially not one standing in the middle of an array. She was clutching a cracked tortoise shell like it was a single thread keeping her from falling into hell.
Use his darts? Presumably there was some invisible protection for the old man. Protecting yourself while you operated the array seemed like the most obvious basic of all basics. Even the martial incompetents at the Five Elements Courtyard had their floating shields. He had better means available.
“Daoist Lan, if you can protect this boy for a moment, we can break the array.”
She gave him a disbelieving look but rushed over. Tian set an image to the crane, and a feeling of what he wanted. The message didn’t get through. It seemed that ‘brainpower’ was another thing blocked by this array. So much for having the bird attack from the outside.
“What do you need me to do?”
“Bamboo Medicine Hut?” He asked. She rocked back in surprise, then nodded quickly. “Just keep his yang qi up. You can see it draining out of everyone. The Censor was only fighting for a few moments, and he’s already swaying.”
“En.” She nodded, and replaced his small hand with hers on Treasure’s back.
“Sister-”
“On it. Do whatever you are going to do.”
Tian’s hand dropped to the rosary at his waist. He hated doing this with mortals around and who knows what effect it would have on Little Treasure. But needs must.
“On, Ran, Cho, Sa, Ni, Re, Hu, Vo, Ti, Lu, Xha…” Tian poured his vital energy into each enunciated syllable. On the bad nights, Liren sometimes practiced her spearplay until she could collapse and sleep. His chanting helped her, she said. It gave her something to concentrate on. Something real and present, not some future fear or demon of the past. She could test her understanding of the elements against his. Tian could express himself through his chant, and through his tea. Liren spoke with her spear.
The tones transformed from nonsense into sacred truths. “On” struck a metal gong, the reverberations clashing with the Erhu. “Ran” fell like a drizzle onto the sparking flint and steel of “Cho.” The elements came alive as he worked his way through, counting on his rosary, not wanting to lose his place in the cycle. With each repetition, he deepened his understanding of an aspect of an element. With every spoken syllable, he improved his ability to share that understanding with others.
The elder had his own understanding of the dao. The elder was skilled in expressing it too, for all that Tian couldn’t see his vital energy moving. His erhu never stopped, and Tian had to admit, the old man played beautifully. The elder sat on a small stage, sawing away at his instrument, debating the dao with the junior chanting and counting on his rosary.
Hong expressed her own counterpoint. She slammed the shutter again, this time with a heavy kick. The intricate designs flared back into life. Tian knew she was getting a read on them.
Tian had, for longer than he would ever admit, thought Hong was a bit dumb. He quickly revised that thought when he learned that she figured out how to break arrays by watching him hijack the energy used by array masters and turn it against them. Except she didn’t need to be standing in the path of it, or need to wait for someone else to send the power to break the array. She could do it her own damn self. With a speed and acuity that left Tian breathless, she could sort through the incomprehensible jumble of qi that formed an array. Then destroy it.
She had the basics of the technique figured out as soon as she saw him do it. By the time the Five Element Courtyard started challenging her the next morning, it was functional. By the time she was done breaking the will of everyone foolish enough to think themselves her equal, it was deadly.
Five elements gathered on her speartip. Fire led, as it always did with her, but everything was in there. The spear jabbed out and landed on glowing symbols. Five colors flashed, intensity shifting faster than mortal eyes could follow.
There was a sudden rush of air as the elder struck at Hong, his fingers flying over the strings sending near invisible ripples through the air. Tian only noticed when the ripples were almost on top of them, the Elder’s vital energy seemed as invisible as the notes he plucked.
“SHO! SII! HA!” Tian enunciated each sound, driving the wind before him. Wind belonged to the element of wood. This senior might have more vital energy than he did, but Tian could use his better. The senior’s attack was diverted. Smashing into the wards’ that senior was trying to protect.
Tian could feel something crack.Then Hong made it break. For a brief moment, the world turned blinding white. When his vision cleared, the erhu was broken. So was the elder who had been playing it. His hands were gone from the writs down. His stomach was gone- Tian could count every broken vertebrae on his spine while standing in front of him. Everything between the ribs and the knees was gone or shattered.
“We were going to toast the Emperor to Come. We were making the drink offerings, filled with life and fire and youth. And you ruined it. Ruined me. What… good… dogs… you are...” The elder gasped his last words, the life draining out of him and flowing down the stage. Tian watched the blood fall into a shallow gutter in the floor.
Looking around, he could see more of the shallow gutters set into the tiles, invisible in the lamplight, until you watched the blood run down them. All the dead bodies, gravity pulling out what the hearts couldn’t pump away while their owners lived. The waiters jerked into action. Some twist of evil qi moving them, smiling their waiter’s smile, to the sides of the people passed out on the ground. Then they pulled out pig butchering knives. The Copper Roofed Inn wasn’t done with them yet.