Tian and Hong shared a long look. Were any of the bandit’s revelations true? He didn’t sound like he was lying, but that just meant that he believed it, not that he was right.
“How do those spikes work? The one the kids are on?” Hong asked.
“No idea. An emissary from, heh, our friends down south set them up. Cold bastard. Colder than you. They were part of the deal. Start sacrificing kids by bleeding ‘em out slow into the troughs, and if any of their eyes went gold, stick them on the spikes. The spikes keep them alive, somehow. One of ‘em has been there for almost six months.”
The archer’s voice was fading.
“You never took anyone off of them?” Tian checked the bandit’s pulse. Slowing, weakening.
“Not living. Heh. Heh. Hehaha! Not so special now, are you? Not so smart!”
“How do you get in touch with the emissary?” Hong’s voice was urgent.
“We don’t. He contacts us. Cold bastard. Looks so ordinary it would make you sick.”
“What other cadres do you know about?” Tian asked.
“Cadres? What’s a cadre? I’m just a bandit out in these hills. Did you know my dad ran the store in our town? But the mine owner’s thugs burned it down. Now the only shops in town belong to him. The houses are all his, you have to rent. Want to leave town? Not without his permission. The magistrate was his wife’s cousin, the prefect was on his payroll. Where was our justice? Where was the kingdom for us? How is our rebellion anything but just?”
The light was fading. The archer seemed desperate, looking at Tian, trying to get him to understand.
“You have kids nailed to the floor in the basement.” Tian wasn’t interested in understanding.
“You think there aren’t kids being nailed now? Is it better if they starve? Worked to death in a mine? If they are run over by a rich merchant’s wagon, guts crushed, taking weeks to die, then their parents are whipped and fined for the damages their boy did to Sir’s goods? How noble, how rich you are. You can prefer one slow death to another.”
The lights went out in the bandit’s eyes. Tian checked the pulse again, then shook his head. A three fingered hand reached out to close the one-time-strategist’s eyes, but was stopped. Tian looked down at Hong’s tanned hand, gripping his wrist.
“No. Nothing. Do nothing for him. Strip the ring, search him, burn him, but that’s it.”
He could feel her hand shaking. Tian just nodded, and got to it.
He didn’t search the ring. It didn’t seem the right moment. Hong saw him starting to thread it onto his string with the other rings, and ripped it away with an oath. Tian closed his eyes softly. She stared at the ring intently, pulling out random items, flipping through them, putting them back. Then a different ring.
“Sister…”
“Like hell they just put the kids on spikes and that was it. No way. There would be something. Some key or charm. What if someone wanted to ransom their kids? Eh? Would bandits turn down a fat ransom? No chance. There is something. Something!”
“Sister…”
“WE CAN’T JUST LEAVE THEM TO DIE, ZIHAO!” She spun, knuckles white, her strong face pale, her eyes reddening.
“Even if there wasn’t an array there, the spike is passing through their body. Organs-”
“Don’t tell me why it can’t be done, tell me how we are going to do it. Or shut the fuck up!”
Tian didn’t have to check. He had no medicine that could possibly help. Maybe if he was in a full hospital with a team of skilled doctors and surgeons, they could carefully, over the course of a day, slowly remove the spike. They’d have to be stitching up as they went, but Heavenly Person doctors could perform literal miracles.
They didn’t have a hospital, or doctors, or a Heavenly Person. Tian had heard the expression “I would move heaven and earth for you.” Right now, it felt like saving these kids would take exactly that.
Tian knew he was letting his thoughts run away. Not willing to confront the horrors down below, or the madness of the heretics plan. He let one hand drift down to his dantian. It had been a while since he had checked on his cultivation progress. Level Seven was officially the back stretch of the Earthly Realm, so a few years…
He grunted.
“Hey Sis’? When did you last check your cultivation?”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?!”
“I mean, are you further through Level Seven than you ought to be?”
She snarled, looking ready to bite his head off. Then paused. She too rested her hand over her lower dantian. “Huh.”
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Hong dropped into lotus, closing her eyes and resting her upturned hands on her knees. After a few cycles of her breath, she said “It is fuller. Significantly fuller. Eighty percent of the way to Level Eight, maybe? It’s hard to say.”
Tian nodded. She opened one eye and looked at him. “You?”
“I’ve had to rebuild a lot over the last week. We both have. My body holds… a lot more vital energy in it than you might think.”
“I know. You think mine doesn’t? Get to the point.”
“I’m trying to say that it took me longer to completely replenish my internal reserves.”
“I know. I also know you aren’t level eight, so why are you dancing around this so much?”
“Because I’m close. Like… a few weeks away. Tops. Faster if I can find a source of cursed energy or something.”
“Dagger not cutting it any more?” Hong asked.
“Not since I lost it.”
“Lost it? How could you possibly… ah.”
“Yep.” Tian nodded.
“I noticed you weren’t using your rope dart earlier.”
“Broke it digging your tub. Well, and fighting those evil puppet things. It’s gone through hell in the last couple months. It just couldn’t hold on any longer.”
“Damn. Damn, I am so sorry.”
Tian smiled. “It’s just a rope dart. I don’t regret it. Besides, I kept the pieces. Sister Li is recovering well. Soon I will send it to her for repair or improvement.”
Liren gave him a deep look. Tian cared about very few material things, and the rope dart was near the very top of that short list. The dart had integrated with him so totally, it moved with his emotions.
He could read her expression perfectly. He said nothing. Neither did she. At this point, what was there to say?
They sighed together. It was a happy discovery. A joyous one. Breaking down all those near-heavenly-person thorns and refining them into vital energy and qi had saved them literal years of cultivation. Nearly a decade, possibly. A second rate talent was one who broke through to the Heavenly Realm by forty. Tian didn’t know what he and Liren qualified as by now. Which made the Monastery's silence and lack of presence downright inexplicable.
Tian decided to get an explanation. “What did they say at the Convent?”
“About what you would expect, and a lot of what we guessed. All hell broke loose as soon as you kicked off that fight with the Black Acacia cultivator.”
“I know. I was there.”
“Not what I mean. I didn’t get much of the story, but in addition to the Heavenly person who chased us, there have been two heavenly realm heretics tearing up the country within a thousand miles of Deepwater City, which is the closest city to Three Streams town, where the convent is. Which is, as you might know, on the north side of the Broadsky Kingdom, while the Redstone Wastes are on the southern border.”
“I think I did hear someone mention that once.” Tian’s voice went bone dry.
“Yeah. And a general in the west has raised the banner of rebellion, apparently, and localized plagues have broken out in the west too. To the east, a river flooded and wiped out a whole stretch of farmland. Famine and plague are on the way. Obviously this didn’t happen all at the same time. I’m just saying, there are fires to put out everywhere. Like in the north west, where there is a forest fire more than a hundred miles across. All while the overwhelming majority of the… not severely wounded or urgently needed where they are cultivators from Ancient Crane Mountain are in the Redstone Wastes.”
“Ah. Coordinated by the heretics?”
“According to the Sisters, yes, but based on everything we have seen, it might just be the lack of fortune in the country reaching a critical point. Merits depleted down to nothing, pillar families lost, the kids who should be the next generation of country supporting cultivators cut away-” Hong’s voice grew darker, becoming muffled by the end.
“Yeah.” Tian nodded. “I think even Brother Wang would struggle to find a humane solution here.”
She barked a laugh. “And Sister Su?”
“She would have no trouble.”
“Eh?” Hong tilted her head.
“Sister Su would say that if the present system can no longer support the needs it claims to serve, it should be replaced by one that does. Same as Brother Wang. Where they differ is that she would use a refinement of what she knows worked in the past. Brother Wang would want to try something entirely new.” Tian was certain of his assessment, and Hong nodded her agreement.
“And you?” She asked. Tian just shook his head. He wasn’t any good at those big, sweeping ideas about governance, or how to organize people. It was selfish of him, but he simply did not want to be responsible for so many people. His hands weren’t yet big enough to hold the sun in his right and the moon in his left. How could he hold a nation?
“Still, they couldn’t spare a single person to come looking for us? I seem to remember all those very kind things people said about us, and our future critical importance.” Tian flexed his fingers, then clenched them.
“My fault.”
Tian blinked, then looked at his sister wide eyed. “The family that killed the Hong Clan…”
“Exactly. Apparently, the Monastery has had its little ways of keeping an eye on us, though the Sister I spoke to didn’t know what it was. “They were alive when they fell out of my awareness, and I know they were provided with life-saving treasures. If I am wrong, I will accept the title of sinner, but I believe they will survive. In any case, returning with this blessed child is the most vital thing, and we cannot guarantee his safety if we are fighting a three on two battle against others of the same realm. The longer we stay here, the more likely it becomes that the child dies.”
They shared a look. The last thing her enemies would want to see is Direct Disciple Hong joining Bai and Fu in the Monastery proper. They probably wouldn’t want her life-and-death Brother standing above them either. They might not dare to kill under the eyes of Brother Fu, but they dared to ignore.
“The Sisters didn’t want you to stay at the Convent and wait to be collected?” Tian asked.
“They did.” Liren’s voice was wintery.
“Yet you came.” Tian smiled.
“Who the hell was going to stop me?” Tian could see Liren’s knuckles whitening and the veins on her neck throbbing. He really did have the very best sister.
“You have gone to great lengths to avoid naming your enemies, Sister. Who must we kill?”
“So goddamn many.”
He let silence pool around them. Coating the floor, covering the dead archer, pouring down the stairs towards the impaled and chanting children.
“Long. Your… go playing friend Long’s clan. The famous merchant family known as the Long Clan. With the heretical cadet branch Jin family you trashed in Burning Flag City. And not one but two Heavenly People holding down the fort for them in the Inner Court.”