Chapter 4: A Treasure Trove

Green meadows and deep forest stretched ahead without end. Above them, the sky arched high and clear, the particular blue that belongs only to altitude. In the far distance, ancient peaks floated behind a white gauze of mist, their summits carrying snow that had never fully melted in living memory—or in any memory beyond that. At the cliff's edge, a few plump flower buds leaned out as if trying to get a better look at the view.

At the mountain pass entrance, twin waterfalls descended from the snowmelt above, tracing the rocky walls in long white ribbons before gathering into semicircular terraced pools below. The water was so clear it seemed to produce its own light. The morning glow had not quite left; sunlight came through the mist in long slanted rays, catching droplets that carried with them the faint sweetness of peach blossom, cool against the face, settling something in the chest.

This was the Myriad Waters, Thousand Mountains Cliff. The genuine article.

After seeing these mountains, all others would disappoint. After seeing these waters, all others would pale.

Cai Zhao stood very still for a considerable while. It occurred to her, with some surprise, that staying here for three years might not be entirely terrible after all.

Song Yuzhi appeared at her side, moving at his usual unhurried pace. He looked at the young girl still staring upward with her mouth slightly open and permitted himself a small smile. Few people arrived here for the first time without producing some memorable declaration. "Junior Sister Cai. Have you anything to say?"

Cai Zhao blinked as though surfacing from water. "Huh? Oh! Yes—yes, I do. Senior Brother—"

"I'm not the eldest disciple," Song Yuzhi said, his brows relaxing slightly.

"Second Brother, then."

"Nor the second."

"Third Brother?" Cai Zhao tried, with the careful tone of someone who has already been wrong twice.

Song Yuzhi nodded.

Cai Zhao looked around instinctively for her parents—she wanted to lodge a complaint that the Azure Tower Sect sending only their third disciple to receive a delegation from Luoying Valley was a pointed slight and they should perhaps consider going home. Unfortunately, Cai Pingchun and Ning Xiaofeng had disappeared somewhere with Cai Han in tow.

She turned back and took a breath. "Third Brother, I—"

"Do you find my father and elder brother excessive?" Song Yuzhi asked, catching her off guard entirely. "Too much display for men of the martial world?"

Cai Zhao recovered quickly. "Not at all. Not excessive in the least."

Song Yuzhi's expression shifted to one that said, clearly, you're only being polite. Having spent considerable time around shopkeepers and merchants, Cai Zhao was fluent in that particular expression. She elaborated:

"Actually, anyone with a genuine eye for quality understands that flashy appearances don't always indicate true value—and that the reverse is equally true. Take yourself, Third Brother. Your robe appears simple enough, but that fabric is Ice Silk Gauze, isn't it? Half the martial world would commit serious crimes for enough of it to make a pair of flame-resistant gloves. And those gold-thread embroideries—that's Divine Needle Granny Zhuo's work, unless I'm very wrong. When our town tried to invite Granny Zhuo to open a branch shop, we couldn't find a trace of her."

Song Shijun, standing within earshot, went very quiet.

The unspoken math was not difficult: your father is tasteless new money; you are the truly extravagant one. And somehow this was meant as a compliment.

"Third Brother—Third Brother—I still have something to say," Cai Zhao added, with an appeasing smile.

Song Yuzhi briefly closed his eyes. "Go ahead, Junior Sister."

"Here's the thing." Cai Zhao straightened with the gravity of someone raising a matter of genuine importance. "I understand completely that Azure Tower Town is home to retired martial heroes whose circumstances are—complicated. I respect that entirely. But, Third Brother—" She raised her voice slightly, adopting the gentle persuasive tone she reserved for delicate negotiations. "Could you put it to our master that every profession requires its own particular talent, and business is no exception? These esteemed individuals are clearly accomplished people. There are surely other things they could do. For instance—they must have led remarkable lives. If they find themselves at loose ends, they could write memoirs."

Song Yuzhi looked at her.

"The sweethearts missed by a hairsbreadth," Cai Zhao continued, warming to the topic. "The sworn brothers who later became enemies. The regrettable accidental injuries inflicted in moments of poor judgment. Our town has several excellent bookshops—fair pricing, honest dealings, covers illustrated by the Wonderful Brush Scholar of the Martial World. The readership has very good taste."

"The shopkeeper at the head of the street prefers tangled affections and impossible choices between lovers. The one at the other end favors swords-and-dreams adventures—falling off cliffs, discovering manuals, being forcibly infused with power against one's will. The older shopkeeper is retiring to dote on grandchildren, and his son, who's taking over, prefers generational vendettas and age-old grudges." She paused. "In any case—the pay is good."

Song Yuzhi had stopped blinking.

"What I'm really saying is: managing food and drink, maintaining a cheerful demeanor, attracting customers—this is a genuine skill that not everyone possesses. If these esteemed heroes lack the talent for it, they truly ought not to open shops. Leaving Azure Tower Town half-empty and barely turning a profit is a tremendous waste of prime locations."

The Azure Tower Sect stood highest among the six descendant branches of the Northern Star lineage—first among all sects in the world, by common acknowledgment. Martial artists traveled here from every direction, and the foot traffic through that town was substantial. To be sitting on a treasure trove and still nearly starving—Cai Zhao's heart genuinely ached at the thought.

"Third Brother? Third Brother—Senior Brother Song? Why aren't you—"

Song Yuzhi's faint smile had vanished completely. He stared at her for what felt like half a cup of tea's worth of time, wearing the expression of a man who has just watched a trumpet flower sprout from someone's forehead. Then he turned away with a perfectly expressionless face and did not look back regardless of how she called after him.

Was this truly the girl raised by Cai Pingshu? The woman his father couldn't stand to this day? If Cai Pingshu had been half this infuriating in her prime, his father's restraint in never resorting to hex dolls all these years was, on reflection, admirable.

Cai Zhao watched his retreating back and tried to work out what she had said wrong. She couldn't identify it.

Around her, the mountain was busy. Disciples moved in every direction—some carrying loads, others guiding recently arrived guests toward their lodgings. Song Shijun, the leader of Vast Heaven Gate and second in standing only to the Azure Tower Sect among the six branches, had not come for Cai Zhao's apprenticeship ceremony or to visit his son studying here. He had come, as had a number of other sects on friendly terms with the Northern Star lineage, for the bicentennial memorial ceremony for the Old Ancestor.

Among the visitors, Cai Zhao spotted a group of bald monks and nuns sorting crates near the cliff—almost certainly people from the Gharana Temple and the Hanging Temple. The abbess of the Hanging Temple, Shijing Yuantai, had never gotten along with Aunt Cai Pingshu. Cai Zhao decided quietly to be somewhere else and moved in a different direction.

She wasn't in any particular hurry to find her parents. The spring scenery was too fine to rush through. She clasped her hands behind her back and strolled forward at her own pace, with the unhurried proprietary air of a shopkeeper doing a slow morning circuit of the premises.

---

Her aunt had told her the history of this place when she was young, and told it carefully—not simply as legend but as geography, so that Cai Zhao would know the terrain before she arrived.

Nine Conch Mountain, the story went, had once been a pillar of mystic iron connecting the mortal realm to the celestial heavens, used as a ladder for those destined to ascend. During some ancient upheaval, the pillar's peak was sheared away, the Reception Palace above it collapsed, and what remained became a mountain range of unusual density and spiritual force. Nine primordial beasts came to cultivate here. Countless demons built their nests in its passes and ravines. The celestial ladder became a demonic mountain, spreading miasma and poison across the land around it, leaving the fields empty and the wilderness full of bones.

The rest unfolded as Aunt Cai Pingshu had described to young Cai Zhao in their sunny afternoon conversations—the immortals eventually came and brought the mountain to order, and the disciple left behind to guard it afterward became the Old Ancestor of the Northern Star lineage. He renamed it Nine Conch Mountain, and here the Azure Tower Sect had made its home.

The main peak—Sky Piercing Peak—had earned its name honestly. No one was said to have ever crossed its summit. Disciples who set out determined to try did not return. Unlike the abyss at the cliff's edge, which was filled with mechanisms and poison mists from the Great War, Sky Piercing Peak had no traps of any human devising. Its danger was simpler and more absolute: it was impossibly tall, and impossibly cold.

The snow on its upper reaches had accumulated for so long that it had compressed into ice harder than any weapon could chip. The remains of creatures that died on its slopes were sealed inside this ice, layer upon layer, century upon century. An elder who had turned back halfway described climbing for three full months through cold so severe he had been uncertain he was still alive—bone-deep, relentless, the kind of cold that dissolved resolve as efficiently as it dissolved warmth. The sky appeared close ahead, brilliant and blue, and yet the summit never drew nearer regardless of how long or far he climbed.

Climbers had to carry all their provisions, since nothing grew or lived on the upper peak. Over time, the food froze solid and became useless—crumbling to icy fragments that satisfied nothing and caused illness if eaten for long. Those who died on Sky Piercing Peak tended to be the most tenacious: people who refused to turn back until there was no choice, and by then found themselves too weakened to descend.

Ning Xiaofeng, who trusted no obstacle she hadn't personally examined, held the view that the peak must have been set with a maze formation by the immortals in ancient times—something sophisticated enough that even formation masters who had tried to solve it had not come back. She said this with the calm tone of someone who found the theory interesting but had no intention of testing it herself.

The advantage of this terrain was not only defensibility. The area below Sky Piercing Peak, where the Dusk Micro Palace stood, enjoyed permanent spring—fed by meltwater from above, protected by elevation from below, surrounded by mountain forests, orchards, meadows, and streams. Past sect leaders of presumably practical temperament had established wheat fields, rice paddies, vegetable gardens, and livestock farms in the available ground. The result was that Dusk Micro Palace had never, in any siege, been successfully starved out.

The Demonic Cult, during the era of their greatest power, had circled this mountain with armies more than once and taunted from below: You cowards of the Azure Tower—come down if you dare! The disciples above responded with cheerful consistency: You scoundrels of the Demonic Cult—come up if you dare! This exchange had become, over generations, something of a tradition.

One particularly inventive Cult strategist had attempted poison smoke, lighting fires on Wind Cloud Peak across the abyss and hoping the rising heat would carry the fumes upward to Dusk Micro Palace. The mist between the two cliffs blocked it entirely. When the mountain wind shifted—as it consistently did, whenever such experiments were attempted—the fumes reversed course and drifted back toward the people who had lit the fire.

Why the wind behaved this way and no other way, specifically when poison smoke was involved, was a question that had never been satisfactorily answered. Perhaps, as the sect disciples maintained with cheerful conviction, it was simply the mountain's own preference.

When Cai Zhao stood on Wind Cloud Peak, the opposite cliff was invisible behind thick mist—she could not have said whether it was round or flat. But when she stood on the Myriad Waters side and looked back across, only a thin gauze of haze drifted above the abyss, and she could see Wind Cloud Peak with perfect clarity, all the way down to what its inhabitants were doing.

Nature, Cai Zhao concluded, had made certain choices here and was not prepared to explain them.

---

She snapped off a twisting peach blossom branch from beside a clear stream and wandered into the woods, hands behind her back, the branch in one hand. The air smelled of fruit even this early in the season. She walked until she found herself beneath a towering tree heavy with plump fruit she couldn't name, dangling from its upper branches with the self-satisfied abundance of things that have grown somewhere excellent for a very long time.

Her stomach registered an opinion on the matter.

In her mind, images began cycling past: fragrant pork buns still steaming from the basket, seafood paella with the crust properly formed at the bottom, double-fried eel noodles with the sauce reduced exactly right.

Cai Zhao considered herself a low-key person of discerning taste, and she drew the line at a slapdash lunch. She turned around, peach blossom branch still in hand, and headed toward the sect's kitchen. It was possible—she was willing to give the possibility fair consideration—that the Azure Tower Sect employed cooks of unexpected skill.

She picked up her pace as hunger made its urgency more clearly felt.

Passing through the orchard, she heard it: a burst of voices, then above them, sharp and urgent, a girl's voice cutting through the rest.