Fan Xing arrived breathless, and the words out of his mouth nearly killed Cai Zhao where she stood.
Chang Ning caught her by the arm. "All of them? Ambushed on the road back?" She kept her voice even. "Luoying Valley too? But Mrs. Cai and Commander Cai Gu split up before they left. Nobody knew their routes."
Fan Xing went pale. He'd said too much. "No, no — Luoying Valley wasn't touched. Mrs. Cai and Master Juexing reached the Ning estate safely. Master just got the flying letter. As for Cai Gu, nobody knows his exact whereabouts, but he sent word this morning — he'll be back at the inn in Qingque Town within a few days."
Cai Zhao let out a shaky breath. Then she rounded on him. "Fifth Brother, are you trying to kill me?"
Fan Xing went from pale to crimson. He apologized until she waved him off.
"You meant well. Sit down. Tell us everything."
Furong Jade arrived with breakfast. The three of them ate while Fan Xing talked.
It had been a long peace.
Since Nie Hengcheng fell along with the loyalists who followed him to the end, the martial arts world had settled into something like a careful truce. Small skirmishes still flared — they always would — but open war between the righteous sects and the Demon Cult had gone quiet. The righteous sects kept their pride. The Demon Cult kept its distance. Both sides had bled too much to be eager for more.
So when the six sects traveled to Jiuli Mountain for the two-hundredth memorial of Beichen's ancestor, nobody moved in secret. Guangtianmen came in loud and bright. Xuankong Temple came in silent and dignified. All of them walked openly into the mountains, because why wouldn't they? The passionate troublemakers from the old days — the ones who'd have used any gathering as an excuse for blood — were already dead. The Nie Hengcheng era had taken care of that.
Chang Ning's mouth curved. "Long peace hollows out courage faster than any defeat. Nie Zhe is useless, fine — but when our people were getting slaughtered, every sect should have been watching their backs."
"Comfort does that," Cai Zhao said. "My aunt always said so."
None of them saw it coming. The Demon Cult laid in wait along the roads home, and the moment the various sects began their return journeys, they struck.
The ambushes weren't equal in outcome.
"Your family had the best luck of anyone," Fan Xing told Cai Zhao. "Especially Mrs. Cai. The disciples sent to escort her back couldn't keep up — she had them spinning in circles for days. By the time they were a day or two from Ningjiawubao, Master Juexing just sent them home. No wonder the Demon Cult couldn't find her."
Ning Xiaofeng was a woman who had been spoiled magnificently as a girl and had never entirely grown out of it. She'd fought with her own mother over becoming a nun, drifted into the martial arts world, met Cai Pingshu within days, and declared her a sister. Cai Pingshu had found her irresistible — beautiful, alive, soft in all the right places and sharper than anyone expected. She'd dived into the South China Sea for pearls because Ning Xiaofeng admired the mermaid-tear kind. She'd carried a basket up an ice-blocked mountain for the snow lotus Ning Xiaofeng wanted for face powder.
Ning Xiaofeng had repaid this by becoming cheerfully, chaotically herself.
That changed after Tushan. Cai Pingshu's meridians shattered, and she never left her bed the same way again. Ning Xiaofeng seemed to age a decade in a single night and became exactly the wife Zhou Wannenggan needed.
But this journey out of Luoying Valley — her first in over ten years — had dissolved the discipline she'd built. She went where she wanted. She heard that a town served good braised pigeon and green plum wine, so she led her family three days out of the way to try them. She spotted a beautiful lake and commandeered a boat for a week. Cai Pingchun agreed to everything because he always did. Cai Zhao was furious because she always was. Cai Xiaopang had no vote in the matter. The result: what should have been one journey became three.
On the way back to the Ning estate after the festival, Ning Xiaofeng went further off-road than ever. The escort disciples fell behind, then lost contact entirely — not to ambush, but to her detours. The one disciple who stayed close to the family made it home with a red face, a full stomach, and his arms full of local specialties. He'd been wandering with her. He'd never been in any danger.
Chang Ning looked at Cai Zhao with an expression that said everything without saying a word.
Cai Zhao felt the look and turned to Fan Xing. "Tell Master Li that the brothers suffered inconvenience on account of my mother's wandering. I'm sorry for that."
"Inconvenience?" Fan Xing shook his head. "That disciple was the luckiest man in the entire escort mission. The others came back with broken fingers, black eyes, and worse."
Chang Ning thought for a moment. "Why didn't the Demon Cult simply attack the Ning estate directly?"
Cai Zhao gave him a look. "Because my mother learned her defensive formations from my maternal grandfather. The Ning estate is buried inside a forest that stretches across several counties. Every return route looks identical from the outside. The entrance changes every time."
As for Cai Pingchun — he was quietly investigating the Chang family murders. His movements were never going to be predictable, and even Qi Yunke hadn't known his location that day.
Fan Xing spread his hands. "The Cai family is safe. All of them."
Cai Zhao exhaled. Then she gathered herself. "The Demon Cult made a big statement on the anniversary. A surprise attack feels like a tantrum. Hit hard, pull back — they didn't want a real war. Just to remind everyone they still exist."
Fan Xing shook his head slowly. "They were very real about it."
The most dramatic of the ambushes had been Guangtianmen's.
After Qiu Yuanfeng mocked Song Shijun publicly at the festival, Song Shijun had decided the entire journey home would be a restoration of Guangtianmen's reputation. He stopped at every local stronghold along the route, drank with every regional hero he could find, called men brothers within the first cup, and had them convinced by the third that Song Shijun was the finest man alive and Guangtianmen was the place to send your son.
The status gap between these local leaders and the six great sects of Beichen was enormous. Receiving warmth and genuine respect from a man of Song Shijun's standing undid them completely. They came themselves. They sent their nephews. By the time Song Shijun reached Jiuli Mountain, he was traveling at the head of a very large, very enthusiastic crowd.
That crowd walked into the Demon Cult's ambush.
The Demon Cult stared at the mass of bodies flooding into their trap and felt their formation starting to collapse inward.
Song Shijun stared at having blundered his whole entourage into an ambush and felt his image as a composed, strategic leader shuddering.
He was annoyed enough that it showed.
The two sides crashed into each other. The side that had fallen into the trap beat the side that had set it and walked out the other end.
There were casualties, but not shameful numbers. Song Shijun turned the aftermath into another performance of warmth and leadership, and the men around him were more devoted than before. The only real victim was Grand Duke Song Zimao, who had two toes destroyed by a meteor hammer.
Cai Zhao smiled. "That's a good story."
"Does Song Yu know?" Chang Ning asked.
"The fourth senior brother went to tell him. Since Guangtianmen came through in one piece, Song Shijun will probably be on his way here the moment the pigeon arrives."
Taichuguan and Xuankong Temple were next.
Taichuguan should have been easy prey. Wu Yuanying's death had broken something in the sect — people were scattered, grieving, in no shape to fight. But the news of how she died had spread faster than anyone expected. A generous, fierce young hero, vanished into a Demon Cult dungeon, tortured across more than a decade. Even people who'd never met her felt something when they heard it.
These weren't warriors. But enough people with a grudge and a bag of rotten eggs can make a journey unbearable.
The people who'd loved Wu Yuanying decided that if Cangqiongzi Qiu Yuanfeng was dead, his disciples would answer for him. Taichuguan barely made it out of Qingque Town before the harassment started — jeering, thrown filth, then fire, then real weapons. No one in the martial arts world blamed the people doing it.
Wang Yuanjing's patience finally broke. He disciplined his disciples harder, refused every inn — too exposed, too loud with contempt — and ordered everyone to travel at night and sleep rough in the open.
Which meant they were nowhere near the roads the Demon Cult was watching.
When the ambush party arrived and found their target already gone, Taichuguan was rested and waiting. They turned the tables. A disaster became a narrow victory.
Xuankong Temple followed a different path to the same result. Master Jingyuan had been unsettled since Wu Yuanying's death, the kind of unease she couldn't name but couldn't ignore. She spent more money than she had to, routed her people around the original road, switched from land to water. The Demon Cult waiting on the original road had to chase them. Master Jingyuan, who had heard something on the wind, had her disciples formed up on the far bank by the time they arrived. The enemy pursuit became an ambush. Another escape.
Siqi Gate and Changchun Temple were different.
They'd done nothing careless and nothing overcautious. They'd simply gone home on time, on schedule — which, logically, made them the easiest targets. But their sects both sat deep in a flat plain, hundreds of miles of open land with nothing to hide behind. The Demon Cult couldn't find cover for an ambush until the very edge of the plain, by which point both sects were close enough to their own gates to fight and fall back.
They fell back. The Demon Cult, red-eyed and refusing to stop, chased them through the gates.
That was a mistake.
The Demon Cult attackers were surrounded and destroyed. But the price was steep: Siqi Gate's ancestral hall was gutted, generations of memorial tablets reduced to debris. Yang Heying sat in the wreckage and wept harder than she'd wept at anything in her life. The Sutra Library and monks' quarters at Changchun Temple were more than half consumed by fire. Master Fakong burned his shoulders and back pulling scriptures from the flames and breathed enough smoke that it settled into his lungs.
"Buildings can be rebuilt," Cai Zhao said quietly. "As long as everyone survived. Master Fakong is — he's a good man. He'll be all right."
Chang Ning was watching Fan Xing. "You haven't mentioned everyone."
Fan Xing went still.
Cai Zhao caught it. Her chest tightened. "Peiqiong Villa. Uncle Zhou. Aunt Zhixian. How are they?"
Fan Xing scratched the back of his neck and wouldn't meet her eyes.
"I thought so," Chang Ning said, his voice quiet. "Zhou Zhuangzhu is neither reckless nor erratic. He would have gone home the most straightforward way. And the road back from Jiuli Mountain to Peiqiong Villa passes through some of the most beautiful lake country in the region. Exactly where you'd want to set a heavy ambush."
Cai Zhao grabbed Fan Xing's hand. "Tell me."
Fan Xing steadied himself. "The death and injury count was the worst of all the sects. Zhou Nüxia and both Zhou Shaoxia were badly hurt — very badly. Zhou Zhuangzhu himself took internal damage. Of everyone who set out, only a handful came back. Most of the disciples who'd gone with them didn't make it. They say the lake water ran red."
Silence sat over the table.
"I'm going to Peiqiong Villa," Cai Zhao said. "I need to see them."
"Master intends to visit as well. We'll go together — don't go alone."
After Fan Xing left, Cai Zhao turned around to find Chang Ning exactly where he'd been, watching her with a composed expression she was starting to find deeply irritating.
She sighed. "Go ahead."
"I could say: visiting the Zhou family won't speed his recovery. There's nothing you can do right now."
"You won't."
"I could also ask whether you're going for Uncle Zhou's sake, or whether you want to see Zhou Yuqi."
"I didn't hear that."
"Then I'll say this instead." He leaned forward slightly. "The Demon Cult's ambushes — did you notice they follow the same pattern as the attack on the Qingque Sect yesterday?"
Cai Zhao went quiet.
"I have a grievance with you about that," she said. "You told me the Demon Cult was fractured. Weak. Too divided to sustain anything. That Nie Zhe didn't have his father's grip on them. And now a fractured, weak, divided Demon Cult has just knocked over the six sects of Beichen plus a temple and a nunnery. What do you say when they're actually strong?"
Chang Ning smiled and did not apologize. "The Demon Cult is still fractured. Still divided. Everything I said was true. That's what makes this worth thinking about."
He paused. "Why did Qi Yunke and Song Yu survive yesterday? Because you saw it coming and warned them in time. Why did the other ambushes mostly fail? Because the plans were good and the execution was poor — no flexibility, no reading of what was actually in front of them. Ning Xiaofeng wanders off the road and breaks the ambush by accident. Song Shijun brings three hundred extra men and overwhelms a trap sized for thirty. Taichuguan leaves the road entirely and can't be found. None of these were in the original plan."
"Yesterday was the same. The plan was clever. It even accounted for timing. But you and I weren't supposed to be there. You'd shown your skill at the festival. I'd shown mine at the outer gate a few days before. A competent executor would have included us. This one didn't. So the plan came apart."
"Good strategy. Terrible execution." He let it land. "Like a brilliant tactician serving a fool who can't read a battlefield."
Cai Zhao studied him for a long moment. "My father's here. Come with me."
Chang Ning raised an eyebrow. "Nothing else you want to ask?"
She glanced out the window. "My aunt once told me: ask less, listen more."
Because what you ask may not be the truth — especially when you're dealing with someone you cannot see through.
When Cai Pingshu had said it, her usually still eyes had carried the faintest gleam of something knowing.