Qingshan Cliff. The rope was cut. No one was coming down from the sky tonight.
Chi Yun and Shen Langhun's expressions shifted at the same moment. But just then, the mist rolling off Biluo Palace began to thin. A flame caught at the top of Lanyi Pavilion, throwing a small circle of light across the dark. Someone had hung a wooden plaque from the eaves while no one was looking. No words on it. Just a small bottle dangling from a cord. Chi Yun recognized it immediately: the "Xinggui Nine Heart Pills" Tang Li had taken from the Yu Family Sword Shop.
The masked men scattered across Biluo Palace lurched into chaos. The women in white screamed orders, but couldn't stop the surge toward the base of Lanyi Pavilion. They were almost at a stampede when one of the masked men shouted, "Hold! It's a trap! Wait! Wanyu Yuedan, come out and speak!"
The mountain wind moved through the Sa Sa trees. A clear, unhurried voice answered.
"As you can see, these are the Scarlet Demon Nine Heart Pills."
Pleasant voice. Not Wanyu Yuedan's. Zhong Chunji.
"I am Zhong Chunji, a disciple of Xue Xianzi and a friend to Biluo Palace. Every one of you was poisoned by the Nine Heart Pills. They increased your strength, yes. But at the cost of your lives. Is that a trade worth making? To fight harder, live shorter, and remain under your master's thumb until the end? Biluo Palace carries no grudge against the underworld, and no grudge against any of you personally. The sky-crossing rope is cut. Your master cannot reach this cliff. Since there is no quarrel between us, why not set down your blades and talk?"
She spoke without hesitation, without flourish. The masked fighters looked at each other. Slowly, the chaos began to settle.
"Who is this lowly maid hiding in the shadows?" The women in white began shrieking. But the fog had thinned enough to reveal the truth: they were three or five at most, each ringed by green-clothed fighters from Biluo Palace. They weren't captive yet, but they weren't winning either. After a few more outbursts, they fell quiet.
Under a wide and star-bright sky, only Zhong Chunji's voice carried.
"We still hold hundreds of Xinggui Nine Heart Pills. Enough for everyone here. Within two years of taking one, the poison's worst effects will not claim you. We are not asking for loyalty or allegiance. Whether you choose friend or enemy after tonight, the pill is yours with no conditions attached. Please wait. Someone will come to you shortly."
Two young maids from Biluo Palace stepped out. One carried a large pot of clean water. The other balanced a stack of white porcelain bowls. They were young, visibly nervous, and completely unreadable. The masked fighters watched them move through the crowd and could not figure out where the pills were hidden on either of them. So they waited, reluctant and restless, and got into line.
Among them, sharper minds had already worked out the shape of what was happening. Biluo Palace had withheld the path down the mountain. The pill offer was a favor, yes, but the withheld exit was a quiet threat. Give us cooperation, help us pressure your master into developing a non-toxic antidote, and then you may leave. The abacus was precise. But whether any of it would actually work was another question. Would the master of a place like the Romantic Shop really comply with a polite request to rework his poison formula? Unlikely. And yet, without an antidote, these men were walking corpses with a deadline. Better to gamble on something than die certain of nothing.
"We are not asking you to choose sides tonight," Zhong Chunji continued. "If you are willing to cooperate, to help encourage your master toward producing an antidote, please enter Lanyi Pavilion for a fuller conversation. If you have no interest in cooperating, we will give you the route down the mountain and you may leave freely. Biluo Palace will not pursue this in the martial arts world and will not cause trouble for anyone. As for the thirty-six sisters in white, we ask that you remain for a separate discussion. That is all."
She never showed herself. The words weren't entirely her own. Without Tang Li's planning and Wanyu Yuedan's guidance, none of it would have come together this cleanly.
"Heh." Chi Yun let out a low, bitter sound. He had been stationed at the cliff's edge by Tang Li's order, told only part of the plan. "So the whole battle tonight was already mapped out before it started. Wanyu Yuedan doesn't show his face, Biluo Palace doesn't say a word, and they send Zhong Chunji out to do the talking. The Palace wins without throwing a punch, earns a mountain of goodwill, and walks away with a dozen new allies. That damned white-haired fox. I'd bet my name this whole scheme was his."
Shen Langhun wiped the blood from his mouth, still rattled from the string music that had shaken them earlier. "If it were entirely his plan," he said quietly, "he wouldn't have handed everyone a pill and a way out. He would've kept the leverage tighter. The leniency is Wanyu Yuedan's touch."
Chi Yun pocketed the moon-ring. "An old fox and a little fox together. No wonder the Romantic Shop was completely outmaneuvered tonight." He paused, eyes traveling up toward the snow-capped peak. "But look at what that 'Lord' did. Cut the rope. Left every one of his own people stranded. He had no intention of letting them die tonight, but he had every intention of abandoning them the moment things went sideways. We didn't lose. But we didn't win all of it either. These people were his discards from the moment he sent them."
Shen Langhun gazed at the far mountain path. "Biluo Palace wins loudly tonight. After this, they'll have a name and standing in the martial arts world again. Alliances, good faith, the foundation of something larger. But the real outcome of tonight isn't settled here."
Chi Yun snorted. "A white-haired fox who calls himself the best fighter under heaven. Why is that Laozi's problem?"
"If you weren't worried," Shen Langhun said, "you wouldn't have talked this much."
Chi Yun looked at him sharply. Then his expression shifted into something almost warm. "You're starting to sound more and more like me. Laozi actually likes it." Shen Langhun moved to hit him. Chi Yun was already turning toward the woods. "Your never-quite-wife is in there somewhere. Don't you want to settle old accounts?" He was already walking. "If I don't kill Bai Su Che tonight, I'll take a different surname."
Inside Wanyu Yuedan's first-floor room.
Cheng Bangpao had sat quietly through all of it, listening to the chaos outside shift and resolve. Now he exhaled slowly. "So that is what the road to becoming a king can look like."
Wanyu Yuedan was still holding the shard of broken teacup between his fingers. The edge had cut into his skin. A thin line of blood ran between his knuckles. He didn't seem to notice. "He did everything he could," he said softly. "But this was the limit of what he could manage. The situation was never fully in my hands. On the day we finally meet in battle, I may have to sacrifice people I'd rather not." He lifted his cup, tilted it back, drank what was left. "And still you insist on becoming king."
"Maybe," Wanyu Yuedan said, "there is more than one way to become a king."
Cheng Bangpao set down his cup and looked at him for a long moment. "Maybe one day you'll open an era that history rarely sees." Wanyu Yuedan's smile came slowly. His eyes went soft, far away, like he was remembering something he couldn't quite name. "Maybe. But honestly... what I'm more looking forward to is finding someone willing to take this weight off my shoulders."
Cheng Bangpao studied him for a long time. "You are genuinely not the right person to be king." How could ambition and the wish to retire live inside the same chest? When Wanyu Yuedan had first reached for the throne, it had not been driven by hunger for power. It had been driven by the quiet courage of someone who saw no one else willing to try.
He did not answer. His eyes fell half-closed, as if the question had touched something older than words.
Outside, small groups whispered. Then one person broke away without a word and walked toward Lanyi Pavilion. After the two maids finished distributing medicine, they described the ice path route down the mountain in quiet, careful detail. When they finished, many people stood still in place, undecided. Most eventually turned toward the ice path. But sixty or seventy stayed, thought it through, and walked into Lanyi Pavilion.
"Cheng Daxia, please rest here. I have something I need to attend to." Wanyu Yuedan rose and smiled at Cheng Bangpao. "Xiao Daxia is next door. I'll ask you to look in on him." He straightened his robes with unhurried hands, adjusted his collar, and walked toward Lanyi Pavilion. Calm. Unhurried. With a faint ease about him, like a man who had nowhere pressing to be.
No attendant. No escort. Just him, moving through the night at his own pace.
Chi Yun strode into the woods and found nothing. No white carriage. No shadow of Bai Su Che. The four white-robed women who had entered the woods were gone too. Five people, vanished. This was not a large forest. There were only a few dozen trees. Where do five grown people disappear to?
Back at the cliff's edge, Plum Blossom Yishu and Crazy Orchid Wuxing stood like two wooden posts. Shen Langhun picked up two stones, flicked them in easy arcs, and struck both fighters' pressure points cleanly. He had done it a hundred times. But the stillness of these two troubled him. They were powerful. Why hadn't they moved all night? Was it the pipa? If they could only respond to musical commands and the "Lord" had planned to use them as disposable pieces, then he had brought two useless fighters to Biluo Palace to die. That made no sense. So what had been their real purpose?
Chi Yun emerged from the trees looking confused and irritated.
Shen Langhun glanced at him, then gestured at the two frozen fighters. "The acupuncture points I struck aren't working. What do you think?"
Chi Yun's face was already dark from losing Bai Su Che. He looked at the two of them coldly. "Who knows. Maybe they went deaf and missed the kill order. Maybe a ghost touched them. Maybe the altitude was too much and their legs stopped working." Shen Langhun shook his head. "Can you still hear the pipa?"
Chi Yun frowned. "Not since the white-haired fox went up the mountain."
"I can't hear it either. But I can just barely hear a flute."
Chi Yun listened. Wind roared across the peaks. The two summits were dozens of feet apart, a hundred feet above them. He heard nothing but air. "What flute? If you can hear something from up there, you've got ears built from a tailwind."
"Woo—"
A thin, fading whistle cut through. Chi Yun hadn't finished his sentence. They both turned. Something flashed out of the cloud sea, the whistling note plummeting, then gone.
"What was that?"
Shen Langhun's eyes opened fully. "A broken flute."
Chi Yun lunged to the cliff's edge. "What?"
"Half a flute. Bronze, from the weight of the fall. His."
Chi Yun looked up at the snow peak. "Could it be—"
"Only one kind of person could defeat me in a single move," Shen Langhun said. "What makes you think the pipa player on that peak was someone your son could beat easily?"
Chi Yun's face changed. "The madman playing pipa at the top of this mountain is—"
Shen Langhun's expression didn't shift. "The same madman who cut my face and threw my wife into the Yellow River."
The cloud sea stretched wide. Stars burned clear and cold. The snow peak nearby shone like white jade under the moon. From this distance, against a mountain that size, two men were nothing but specks. No one on Qingshan Cliff could see what was happening up there.
"Laozi is going down and coming back up the other way." Chi Yun's face had gone pale. He turned to leave.
"Are you an idiot?" Shen Langhun's voice was flat. "He cut the sky rope to go up alone. He didn't want anyone following. Even if you took the ice path down with these people, the exit isn't under Maoya Peak. You wouldn't find your way back."
"How do you know that?"
"Because I walked the ice path last night. I checked."
Chi Yun went still.
"He wanted to go up alone," Shen Langhun continued. "He arranged things to keep us from throwing ourselves after him out of revenge. And yes, I want revenge. But I'm more patient than he assumed." Chi Yun's expression turned dark and complicated. "Fine. If he dies tonight, it's his own doing. Call it suicide." Shen Langhun's face stayed even. "You really think he's going to lose? I don't." Chi Yun snorted. "Laozi just believes this fox has always loved courting death. If I kill him someday, I'll burn half a sheet of paper money in his memory."
Then a low, distant roar rolled down from the peak. Something had been disturbed. Moments later, three or four boulders crashed down the slope, trailing ice sheets and spraying chips of snow. Each rock was half the size of a house. Anyone caught under them would not survive.
The people on Qingshan Cliff froze.
The women in white recovered first, crying out that their Lord was killing his enemies, that their Lord was unmatched. Someone drew a blade. A fight broke out.
When the avalanche sound died, the women in white were still moving. Everyone else stared at the snow peak in blank silence, each of them turning over the same questions: who was hiding on that mountain, fighting Tang Li? What had unleashed that kind of destruction? Why had the pipa's killing power not come again?
Then someone gasped: "Who is that?"
Chi Yun looked. Two dark shapes were moving slowly up the far snowfield. Not fast. Not fighters, or barely so. There had just been a partial avalanche on Maoya Peak. The ice underfoot was treacherous. Yet these two were still climbing. Whoever they were, they had not appeared there by accident.
He couldn't make out their faces. "Shen, can you see?"
Shen Langhun, whose eyes and ears were well beyond ordinary, looked carefully for a long moment. "They look like women."
"Women?" Chi Yun stared. "How would women with no martial arts end up on Maoya Peak in the middle of the night?" Shen Langhun's brow creased. "They look like they might be from the Romantic Shop. But women from the Romantic Shop with no fighting skills, climbing a snow peak at midnight..." Chi Yun thought. "Could these be the 'Red Girls' the white-haired fox mentioned at the Yu Family Sword Shop? If they can't fight, this climb is genuinely dangerous for them. More desperate than us. Do they think their Lord is in trouble?"
What was happening at the peak was strange. Far stranger, probably, than any of them could imagine.
Shen Langhun's gaze moved to Lanyi Pavilion. Wanyu Yuedan stood inside it, one hand slightly raised, speaking. He did not once look toward the mountain. He couldn't see it from there. But his expression was the same as it had been all night: still. Composed. Almost unhurried.
Had Tang Li promised him something?
The figures on the far snowfield climbed with painful slowness. Even from this distance, the danger of it was obvious. What kind of hold did the person at the top of that mountain have over these women, that they would risk this?
Another tremor from the peak. Small rocks scattered down. A figure fell.
Then a second figure jumped after the first.
Everyone saw it. Hundreds of feet of mountain in full view, the night sky clear enough to see by. One person fell. The second chose to jump.
The snow peaks were high and distant. The wind up there cut like blades. A fall of hundreds of feet onto mountain terrain would kill anyone. For a moment no one understood what the second person was trying to do. Both figures dropped into the cloud sea and were gone.
"Lord!" The women in white cried out. A shape stirred at the base of the cliff. From the opposite cliff face, one of the slow-moving dark figures suddenly lurched into action. Shen Langhun's voice snapped sharp: "Yingtian crossbow!"
A silver arrow punched through the mountain wind and cloud, trailing a dark red rope behind it, crossing dozens of feet of open air without losing a breath of force, and struck the base of Qingshan Cliff. A white figure caught the rope, tied it to the rock, and called out. Several more white figures leaped onto the rope and ran it straight across toward the opposite mountain.
"Bai Su Che!" Chi Yun was furious. She had been hiding in the rocks at the cliff's base the whole time, waiting. The Yingtian crossbow and the hundred-poison rope. A planned retreat, set in advance. Shen Langhun's hand shot out and grabbed him. "Stop. That is a hundred-poison rope. One hundred different poisons on contact. No antidote exists unless the poisoner provides it themselves." Chi Yun was already moving. A silver flash as the moon-ring left his hand, aimed at the rope.
The dark red rope hung in the air. Its impact on Qingshan Cliff was immediate: everyone who had been weighing their options in Lanyi Pavilion went still, minds suddenly racing again. They watched the silver moon-ring flash toward the rope, saw it about to cut the only line crossing the void.
Then Wanyu Yuedan moved. A brushing of his sleeve, no more than that. Something flew out, hit the moon-ring mid-arc, and knocked it wide. The ring hummed and spun and returned to Chi Yun's hand. The rope held.
Rope saved. Moon-ring returned. Wanyu Yuedan had no martial arts to speak of, and the hidden weapon from his sleeve had just deflected a master's throw at full speed. Qingshan Cliff fell completely silent.
"Since your master has already made his arrangements," Wanyu Yuedan said quietly, "I would ask you to return to him safely. Biluo Palace does not hold anyone here by force. The mountain wind is sharp tonight. Please take care."
The person who had been stepping out of Lanyi Pavilion with one foot reconsidered. Drew it back.
Wanyu Yuedan said nothing more. He stood in the pavilion and waited with the same patience he had shown all night.
"Slippery little fox." Chi Yun retrieved his ring, jaw tight. "I'm going down to the cliff base to see what happened to those two. Stay here." He didn't use the Biluo Palace ice path. He went straight down the cliff face, grabbing rocks and ice ledges as he went, and dropped into the cloud sea after them.
Shen Langhun stood at the edge and watched Chi Yun's white clothes disappear into the mist below.
Was the person who fell really the man who had killed his wife and destroyed his face? A hatred that deep, that old. Could it simply dissolve in the air like morning cloud? The anger and grief he carried had never left him. They had only settled into something quieter and more permanent, like a wound that wouldn't close rather than a wound that wouldn't stop bleeding. He had stopped looking for healing and started carrying it instead.
Behind him, the women in white were weeping. Broken voices, genuine grief. From somewhere inside Biluo Palace someone shouted, and then came the sharp ring of a blade against stone. Someone had tried to take her own life with a horizontal cut and been stopped by a Biluo Palace fighter. The field where blood had been meant to flow was full of a different kind of devastation now.
"Palace Master." A man in green appeared at Wanyu Yuedan's side, hand on his sword hilt, presence like a wall. Bi Lianyi. The finest fighter in Biluo Palace. Wanyu Yuedan gave a quiet nod. A green shadow moved across the field. One by one, the women in white were immobilized. They were young. Naive. Deserving of some pity. But they also carried blood on their hands, the ruin of several families between them. No one could afford to simply let that go. And the information they held about the Romantic Shop still needed to be drawn out carefully.
"This part is yours, Brother Bi. I'll leave it with you." Wanyu Yuedan's eyes went quiet. "I want to go see how the two who fell are doing." Bi Lianyi acknowledged the order.
Zhong Chunji came running out of Lanyi Pavilion, face pale. "I... I..." She couldn't finish. The voice that had spoken so clearly and steadily to a cliff full of armed strangers had gone entirely. Wanyu Yuedan looked at her, and his expression didn't change. Still gentle. Still calm.
"Miss Zhong. Please lead the way."
Zhong Chunji looked at him, at that young face with nothing urgent in it, and felt something she couldn't quite name. Not comfort exactly. Something between warmth and sorrow.
"Let's go." Wanyu Yuedan's hand settled lightly on her shoulder. "After you."
Shen Langhun looked back up at the far peak. He could see it now: five of the white-robed women had reached the two climbing figures. Together they turned and started down. Quickly. Not as planned, then. The Yingtian crossbow and the hundred-poison rope had been improvised, a fast response to a changing situation. These women had come to follow their Lord. Whatever had happened on that peak had thrown them all into motion.
Deep down, he did not believe the two who had fallen were dead. People who had no plan didn't jump off cliffs. Especially not the second one, who had jumped by choice. A fall of hundreds of feet would kill most people. But for those two, there would be a way out. There was always a way out, for people like that.