Chapter 34: The Heart-Questioning Sword

 

Wen Shaoqing stood where he was. Ming Huo turned back. "Young Master. Let's go."

Wen Shaoqing looked away from the empty doorway and followed. "I know."

Jiang Rong led them through the passage with a lantern, swinging it easily. "I'll take you to my residence first. Rest."

"Where's the Blood Token?" Wen Shaoqing asked.

"The merman has it."

A beat of silence moved through the group. Ming Huo's frown was controlled but visible. "Why didn't you say so earlier?"

"If I had said so earlier," Jiang Rong turned and smiled, "would you have saved me?"

No one answered.

"Besides," she said, resuming her pace, "I did give you a clue."

"Who is this merman," Ming Huo said. "Why is he here. Why does he have the Blood Token. Why did the people of Yunsheng Town turn white overnight. Why was Goddess Mountain sealed. What exactly happened."

Jiang Rong considered this. "Fellow Daoist, you've asked a great many questions. Which one first?"

"Madam Lin." Xie Changji's voice, unhurried. Jiang Rong went still. He continued: "My wife needs to rest. Lead the way."

Jiang Rong looked at him with the expression of someone who has just had something confirmed that they had only half-suspected. She pressed her lips together, said nothing, and turned to walk.

---

The guest rooms were close together in a row. Jiang Rong pointed at them generally and said, "Divide among yourselves. I'm going to sleep," and went.

Xie Changji went straight to the innermost room and closed the door.

In the corridor, Wen Shaoqing and Ming Huo exchanged a brief look. "Question her privately," Wen Shaoqing said, quietly. Whatever Jiang Rong knew, sharing it in front of Xie Changji wasn't useful.

Ming Huo nodded and opened his door.

---

Xie Changji laid Hua Xiangwan on the bed.

The moment her back touched the mattress, her hand came up and pressed against the top of his head, holding him in the position of leaning over her. She pushed herself up slightly and put her mouth close to his ear.

"Go find Jiang Rong now," she said, barely above a breath. "Before the others do. Don't let anyone know."

He looked at her when she released him.

She preempted the question: "I'm fine. The mermaid's poison won't harm me. I need rest, that's all. Wen Shaoqing and Ming Huo will go to her alone — you need to get there first."

He held her gaze for a moment.

Hua Xiangwan recognized the look and threw back the covers. "If you won't go, I'll go myself."

"I'll go." He caught her arm and settled her back. "Stay in bed. I'll use the recording bead."

"I trust you."

She pulled the blanket up and arranged herself into an expression of cooperative docility. "I'll be right here when you get back."

He turned off the lamp and left.

The moment the door closed, she threw off the covers.

She crossed to Ming Huo's door first and pressed a talisman against it — a listening-suppression seal, applied from the outside. Then she went to Wen Shaoqing's door and pushed it open quietly.

He looked up the moment he heard it. Before he could make a sound, she crossed the room and covered his mouth with her hand.

"It's me," she said — just loud enough, she had calculated, to carry to the next room.

In the room beyond, Ming Huo's eyes opened.

Wen Shaoqing pulled her hand down, produced an eavesdropping-prevention artifact from his robes, and looked at her with something between confusion and relief. "Why are you here? Xie Changji—"

"He went to question Jiang Rong. I slipped away." She settled in front of him. "When do you plan to move?"

He hesitated. She pressed: "Tomorrow night? I'll feel better with a timeline. Shaoqing—" she let something uncertain into her voice, "I'm frightened about the medicine."

"Don't be." He was immediately reassuring. "Tomorrow night. I'll locate the array's core tonight and tell you the exact position then. Once you've given it to him and moved him into place, come back to me. I'll handle the rest."

"What if he wakes before—"

"This array was built by someone from before memory. Even a god couldn't break free, let alone someone at the Tribulation Transcending stage."

She let a pause fall. "And Ming Huo. If he discovers what we're doing—"

"Then I'll strip his cultivation too." He said it without hesitation. "He's Qin Yunyi's creature. If he becomes a problem, he becomes a problem I'll deal with." His voice softened. "Awan. This will work. Just follow my lead."

She looked at him seriously. "Then you have to promise me something. When you become the Demon Lord — when I'm Demon Queen — you cannot let Qin Yunyi go."

He blinked.

She let uncertainty show. "I'm a cripple with no spiritual power. She's the young master of Mingluan Palace and a Tribulation Transcending cultivator, and she's devoted to you. I'm afraid you'll change your mind—"

"How could I." He almost laughed. "Qin Yunyi? Compared to you? Awan, I'd skin her alive if you asked me to. Every humiliation she's ever put me through — I remember every one."

In the next room, Ming Huo, seated in meditation, went very still. His fists closed.

"Good," Hua Xiangwan said. She kept a mild expression on her face and settled in, asking questions, listening while Wen Shaoqing catalogued his grievances against Qin Yunyi in thorough and increasingly creative detail. She waited until she judged he had emptied the subject, then glanced toward the window. "Xie Changji is coming back. I should go."

"Be careful."

She slipped out, peeled the talisman off Ming Huo's door without a sound, and went back to her own room. She arranged herself exactly as she'd been left, pulled the blanket up, and closed her eyes.

Sleep came quickly. She was genuinely tired.

---

Xie Changji returned in the deep of the night.

He moved without sound. Hua Xiangwan was asleep and didn't hear him enter. She only became aware of a shadow above her — and her hand moved before she was fully conscious, a razor blade between her fingers, swinging level.

Someone caught her wrist.

The grip was cool. There was a familiar scent.

She came the rest of the way awake and looked up. Xie Changji stood at the head of the bed in white, watching her.

She let the breath out. "You're back."

He didn't answer. His gaze had dropped to her fingers, still holding the blade.

She had claimed to be a magic cultivator. Magic cultivators rarely trained the body this way. That strike — with a razor, half-asleep, from a prone position — had been faster than many sword cultivators he had faced in proper conditions.

Years of practice produced that. No other explanation.

He said nothing about it.

She tucked the blade away, a little self-conscious. "What did you find? Do you have the recording bead?"

He sat on the edge of the bed and took her hand. His thumb moved across the back of it, unhurried, tracing the lines of the veins. She went still.

"More than twenty years ago," he said, "she wasn't yet a goddess. She met a man named Lin Luo. She saved him, and they fell in love, and they married." He continued, his voice even, his thumb still moving. "On their wedding day, a merman came and told her that Lin Luo had betrayed her. Then he killed the household. She had no divine power at the foot of the mountain and couldn't stop him — she escaped back to the snow peaks. The merman followed. They have been in a stalemate here for twenty years."

He took the blade carefully from where she'd set it and produced the recording bead, placing it in her palm.

"Ten days ago, the Demon Lord's Blood Token fell onto the mountain. The merfolk seized it and used its power to imprison her. Then they altered the snow mountain's array and began drawing the spiritual energy from the people below."

She looked at him. "You found all of that out tonight."

"Yes."

"How?"

"She has a mole on her left hand."

Hua Xiangwan waited for the rest of the sentence. It didn't come. "How does that—"

"The woman cut from the Lin family portraits has one in the same place. I confirmed she was the same person, and then I had leverage."

Hua Xiangwan stared at him.

Wen Shaoqing had shown her that painting deliberately — quickly, keeping Xie Changji across the room, limiting his view. He had been at the side of it, at best, for a matter of seconds.

She had looked directly at it and not noticed a mole.

"What kind of—" She stopped herself before she said monster and substituted: "How do you do that?"

He was quiet for a moment, looking at their joined hands.

"I didn't speak until I was five," he said. "Everyone said I was a fool. My uncle and my master said I was a good candidate for the Heart-Questioning Sword." A pause. "I don't speak because I don't know what to say. I don't know joy, or anger, or tears, or pity. My master told me: go and see. Observe the world. Know love and hate, understand their advances and retreats, find their causes and effects."

Hua Xiangwan processed this. "Your observational ability is the result of years of deliberate practice," she said, offering the summary.

He didn't accept it. His free hand rose and touched the line of her brow, slowly — tracing the arc of it, and then the shape of her eye, and then down the bridge of her nose, her lips, her chin, the length of her throat. His fingertips came to rest, finally, against her chest.

"Therefore," he said, "I want to know what I want. To seek my heart. To find my path. To understand what I am gaining."

His voice went quiet.

The heartbeat under his hand was very clear. Hua Xiangwan felt it as he must be feeling it — present, slightly fast, impossible to conceal.

She turned her head and coughed. "I'm... not entirely sure what you're saying."

The sects of Yunlai had always communicated strangely. She had thought, when he didn't speak, that at least they weren't communicating. Now that he was speaking, she understood they were perhaps further apart than before.

She reached out and moved his hand from her chest with both of hers, holding it between them, giving herself something to do. "What if we stopped talking and went to sleep?"

He looked at their hands.

She let go of his and turned over, pulling the blanket up. "I'm sleeping now."

He stood for a moment without moving.

Then, as had become his habit, he took off his outer robe, got into bed, and pulled her into him — her back against his chest, his arm around her. She was tired enough that she fell asleep quickly, her breathing evening out within minutes.

He lay awake.

He held her hand in his, and listened to her breathe, and let his awareness move through the room's silence and the warmth of her and the particular scent that was hers underneath everything else — and he thought about what his master had told him.

Observe the world. Know love and hate. Understand their advances and retreats.

He was still learning the names for things. He had been learning them his whole life, slowly, the way ice learns water: one degree at a time.

Regret. Joy. Possessiveness. Pity.

He was finding all of them here, in the space of a hand's width.

He closed his eyes.