Chapter 47: What the City Is Hiding

"Daoist Bai — what are you doing out here?"

Bai Shuo was already half-deafened by Hua Da Tie's crying when Mingxin came around the corner at a run with several Cloudsoar disciples at his back.

At the same moment, two surges of spiritual energy came bearing down the street from opposite directions, fast and heavy.

Her stomach dropped. They could not see Fan Yue like this. Bai Shuo shot a look at him — blood everywhere, no explanation that would hold — and grabbed his sleeve with both hands. "Mu Mu. Get out of sight. Now."

Fan Yue tightened his grip on her hand and didn't move.

"Listen to me—"

Something shifted in his expression. He looked at her face, read the urgency there, and with visible reluctance uncurled from human form entirely, shrinking down into a small, thin vine that wound itself around her wrist and went still.

Hua Da Tie made a sound like she'd swallowed something sideways.

Bai Shuo's hand flew over her mouth before she could finish making it. "Little sister. Don't say a word about Mu Mu. Not one word."

Hua Da Tie nodded against her palm, fast and repeatedly.

Two streaks of light hit the street at the same time. Nan Wan landed on one side, Bei Chen on the other. They'd both been in the inn — the spiritual fluctuations from the street had pulled them out of meditation before they'd had time to think about it.

Bei Chen's face was its usual unreadable surface. Nan Wan's darkened the moment his eyes landed on Bai Shuo and Hua Hong standing in the middle of the lane. He looked at Bai Shuo with his eyes slightly narrowed.

She was supposed to be sleeping. He'd put her in a room and left Mingxin to watch the corridor. So why was she here, in this specific street, at this specific hour — unless she'd already worked out the location of the Yi Tomb and had been stringing him along?

One look at Nan Wan's face told Bai Shuo exactly what he was thinking, and none of it was correct.

What a disaster of a misunderstanding.

"Your Excellency, you arrived at exactly the right moment!" She stepped forward, keeping her voice high and her face properly rattled. "There was a creature — monstrous thing, came right at us — it must have heard you coming and fled!"

Nan Wan's eyes stayed flat. "A creature."

"Human shape, four claws, a tail dragging behind it — truly revolting." She demonstrated with both arms and one leg.

"No demonic entity I know of takes that form," Bei Chen said from where he stood, tone carrying no particular heat, just the observation.

Nan Wan was watching her with the same expression.

"I'm not making it up!" Bai Shuo spun toward Hua Da Tie. "Little sister — tell them. You saw it too. That thing nearly had me!"

Hua Da Tie nodded so hard her painted face shook. "It was real! Covered in something dark and rotten — it had to be an evil spirit!"

"That's impossible." Nan Wan's voice came down firmly. "Yicheng runs on the Spirit-Sealing Array that Mu Guang himself laid down. Evil spirits cannot exist within these walls. And there's no trace of dark energy in this street right now."

"But I saw—"

Bei Chen raised his palm. A sphere of immortal light expanded from it and flooded the alley, turning the dark lane as bright as open noon. Every corner, every shadow, every inch of ground — perfectly clean. No claw marks. No black blood. No trace of anything that didn't belong.

The words stopped in Bai Shuo's throat.

She rubbed her eyes. She looked at the ground where the thing had been standing. She looked at the wall where the severed claw had sprayed blood across the stone.

Nothing.

Beside her, Hua Da Tie had gone completely quiet.

The logic wasn't wrong — Mu Guang's array was the reason spiritual power was suppressed inside the city at all. If it could hold down Immortals and Demons alike, an evil spirit wouldn't last long enough to take a single step through the gates. But if that thing hadn't been an evil spirit, then what had it been? And why had every trace of it vanished so completely?

"Daoist Bai." Bei Chen's voice was level. "You stopped speaking. Why?"

"I — nothing." Bai Shuo pressed her lips together. "I think I may have been mistaken about what I saw." She reached back and found Hua Da Tie's sleeve with her fingers, pinching lightly.

Hua Da Tie shut her mouth.

Nobody else had seen it. Even if she described every detail of that creature to its face — its pus-running eyes, its four claws, the smell of rot it dragged behind it — neither Nan Wan nor Bei Chen would believe her. And if a genuine threat was moving around inside Yicheng, something the Yi King's palace already seemed to know about and was choosing not to address, then as a half-immortal with no power to do anything about it, the sensible thing was to stay out of it entirely. She just needed A-Zhao to be safe. Two more days and they could go home.

"Mistaken." Bei Chen's frown deepened. He had sensed two clear surges of spiritual energy from the inn — significant enough to pull him out of meditation. Yet the only things in this street were these two half-immortals. He turned toward Nan Wan, and let the implication land in the silence between them. "It seems Cloudsoar has already located the Spiritual Artifact."

Nan Wan's jaw tightened. He was silently furious — at Bai Shuo for wandering out and pulling Bei Chen's attention straight to them. He was drawing breath to say something that would remove Bai Shuo from the conversation entirely when she lurched forward and grabbed Hua Da Tie's arm.

"Lord Bei Chen misreads the situation entirely." Her fake mustache wobbled. She managed something between shyness and apology. "This humble Daoist simply found the moonlight tonight too beautiful to waste. I brought my little sister out to enjoy it. Nothing more."

If she went back to the inn tonight already in trouble with Nan Wan, the last thing she needed was Bei Chen suspicious on top of it.

Hua Da Tie picked up the thread without being asked. She blinked at Bei Chen with an expression that had no business being on a face painted quite like hers, and tilted her head. "Exactly so, Immortal Bei Chen! Baibai and I were moon-watching! Won't you join—"

She lunged. A small cloud of powder shook loose from her face and drifted toward him. Bei Chen retreated two full steps, looked at her for half a second, and apparently made a decision.

"Unnecessary. Since nothing is amiss, carry on." He vanished into a streak of light and was gone.

The street felt immediately less compressed without him in it.

Nan Wan looked at Bai Shuo. "The moonlight is still fine, I see. Does the Daoist wish to continue admiring it?"

Bai Shuo yawned, large and slow and unconvincing. "Much too late now, Your Excellency, much too late. I don't know what I was thinking. Let's all go inside and rest — come, come, back to the inn."

"A Spiritual Artifact of this tier will only answer to the one who claims it properly," Nan Wan said, his tone light enough to be conversational, his eyes not light at all. "In any other hands, it's worthless scrap."

Bai Shuo nodded with great seriousness. "This humble Daoist is deeply enlightened. I'll carry that wisdom with me."

"See that you do." A short exhale through his nose, and Nan Wan was gone the same way Bei Chen had left.

The Cloudsoar disciples closed in around Bai Shuo and Hua Da Tie without a word exchanged between them and walked the two back to the inn in a formation that had nothing casual about it.

Inside, Hua Da Tie made a move toward Bai Shuo's door. It closed before she reached it. She stood in the corridor with her hammer and looked at the closed door for a long moment, then put her back against the wall beside it and slid down until she was sitting on the floor.

"Pair of ungrateful wretches," she muttered, dragging a hand across her face and smearing the paint further.

The moment Bai Shuo was through the door, Fan Yue uncoiled from her wrist and returned to himself. She grabbed him before he'd finished standing up, turning him by the shoulders and running her eyes over him with her hands following. "Mu Mu — where does it hurt? Show Master where—"

He shook his head and pulled his outer robe off. The undershirt beneath was soaked dark. "It isn't mine."

Bai Shuo stared at it. "Not yours. Then whose?"

"Something stopped me outside the inn. Before I could get to you."

"What did it look like? Four claws? Big tail?"

"No." Fan Yue considered. "It looked like a person. It was too dark to see properly. Whatever it was, it didn't seem to have much awareness — the spiritual power was weak. Almost like it wasn't fully there."

"And where is it now?"

"Gone."

"Gone how? It ran?"

Fan Yue's expression shifted slightly toward sheepish. "I was worried about Master. I used too much. One strike and it—" He paused. "Came apart."

Bai Shuo looked at the blood on his shirt and understood with a slow, crawling clarity what "came apart" meant in this context.

She swallowed. If Fan Yue weren't standing there with that mild, slightly apologetic look on his face, she might have started wondering whether this great demon had recovered his memories long ago and was simply choosing to be entertained by all of this.

"It doesn't matter," she said finally. "You're not hurt — that's what matters. This city is wrong in ways I can't name. Once these two days are over and A-Zhao walks out safely, we are leaving. Straight back to South Sea City." She dropped onto the bed like all her strings had been cut at once. "I'm going to sleep. I'm finished."

"Rest, Master. I'll stay up."

Fan Yue pulled a small wooden stool to her bedside and sat down on it.

"Good disciple..."

The words came out slow and already half-asleep. Between one breath and the next, she was gone — genuinely, completely, peacefully unconscious in the middle of a foreign city full of sealed power and things that disappeared without leaving blood behind.

She didn't think once about how Hua Da Tie had taken a creature's claw off with a single hammer strike.

Whether it was raw physical strength or the kind of fearlessness that bordered on stupidity, Hua Da Tie had nothing worth stealing and no obvious reason to be anyone's enemy. Whatever she was — fairy, demon, something else entirely — she meant no harm. And anything beyond that was somebody else's problem.

In the corridor, Hua Da Tie sat with her back against the door and her hammer resting across her knees. She had heard every word through the wood. She tapped two fingers slowly against the iron head of the hammer, staring at nothing.

Across the city, inside the Yi King's palace, every corridor was dark and still.

A figure moved through it without hesitation, taking turns with the ease of someone who had walked these passages since childhood, heading straight for the deepest chamber.

She stepped through the entrance to the Yi King's Hall.

A blade caught the light and stopped her before she crossed the threshold. Wu Zhao came out of the dark with his saber already drawn — radiating the kind of authority that didn't need volume — and then he recognized her. His sword arm dropped. Something moved across his stern face that looked, unexpectedly, like relief.

He bowed his head. "Your Highness. You've come back."

"Don't call me that." Her voice was flat and cold. "When I left, I said I was done with this city. That hasn't changed."

Wu Zhao's expression fell. "Your Highness—"

"There are evil spirits in the city. Did you know?"

"That's—" Wu Zhao stopped. "Impossible. Under the Spirit-Locking Seal—"

She lifted her hand. A severed claw appeared on the ground between them.

Wu Zhao looked at it. He looked away from it. His jaw worked.

"I have no stake in this city anymore, so I won't involve myself in whatever this is." Her voice stayed even, which somehow made it worse. "Immortal and Demon disciples are here from every major faction. Whatever you and the Yi King are planning — if it goes wrong, Yicheng won't survive what comes next. Neither race will forgive a trick played on them at a Martial Banquet. You're on your own."

She turned.

"Your Highness!" Wu Zhao's voice rose slightly. "Will you not see His Majesty? Even for a moment?"

She stopped walking. She didn't turn around. After a silence that stretched three full seconds, she left.

Wu Zhao stood alone in the hall. He picked up the severed claw from the floor. His expression moved through several things and settled on none of them. Then he too disappeared, further back into the palace.

Below the Yi King's Hall, reached through a passage that wasn't on any map of the palace, a chamber sat cut into the stone, sealed from light and sound alike. The Yi King was in the center of it, cross-legged on bare ground.

Wu Zhao appeared at the edge of the chamber. The Yi King opened his eyes.

"Report."

"Your Majesty." Wu Zhao paused. "The Princess has returned."

The Yi King went still. He said nothing.

"She found this." Wu Zhao held up the claw.

The Yi King's expression shifted, a furrow forming between his brows that hadn't been there a moment ago.

"Your Majesty, the risk grows. Now that the Princess is here, perhaps we should reconsider—"

A look from the Yi King closed Wu Zhao's mouth.

"The Yi People have been cast out of the Three Realms for a thousand years." The Yi King's voice was quiet and final. "This is the only path left to us." He turned his head. His gaze moved across the chamber to the figure resting in the blood pool nearby — a creature with a human body and a serpent's tail, four claws, one of which ended in a ragged stump.

He closed his eyes again.

Wu Zhao stood for a moment longer. Then he withdrew without another word.

---

Bai Shuo woke when the sun was already well past the middle of the sky, stretched in every direction, and felt more human than she had in days. She sat up, found Fan Yue still on his stool — upright, watching the door with the quiet patience of something that didn't get tired — and decided she was ready to face food.

She swung her legs off the bed, stood up, and opened the door.

Nan Wan was standing in the corridor, arms folded, expression belonging to someone who had been waiting long enough to develop opinions about it.