Chapter 48: Nan Wan's Scheme Unfolds

"Good morning, Lord!" Bai Shuo's greeting rang out with the sunny, uncomplicated brightness of someone for whom the previous night had been entirely without incident.

Nan Wan turned and started down the stairs without responding, and Bai Shuo fell in behind her, closing the distance with quick steps. "Lord, did you find the location last night?"

"No." Nan Wan kept walking, and Bai Shuo kept following.

"Lord, there's really no need to rush before we've eaten something — how about breakfast first—"

Nan Wan stopped on the stair and turned a look on her that communicated, without any particular warmth, a complete assessment of the suggestion and the person making it. "Lord Bei Chen left the inn before dawn. If we delay any further, which of us do you think will find the first Phoenix Heart Flame — him or us?"

The words dried up in Bai Shuo's throat. "Right," she said, with the decisive energy of someone who has just discovered they are not hungry. "Business first. Honestly, I wasn't that hungry anyway."

Beside her, Hua Da Tie materialized a chicken leg from somewhere and extended it with the straightforward generosity of someone who had been saving it and had now found the right moment. "Here. Saved it for you."

"Oh, wonderful!" Bai Shuo received it immediately, already gnawing at it as she followed Nan Wan toward the door.

Hua Da Tie, entirely unbidden and entirely at ease with this, fell into step behind Bai Shuo as a matter of natural course.

---

The moment Bai Shuo stepped through the inn's entrance into the morning street, she made a small sound of surprise. The city was full and moving already — towering figures, sharp features, brows that were set by default into expressions of fierce self-possession. Even the women had it. The desert sun was generous and unsparing, and under it, neither men nor women carried the softer quality of those from the Central Plains. They were a different texture entirely, and there were many of them.

They had barely cleared the doorway when Mingxin appeared, approaching with a cluster of dark-eyed disciples arranged behind him. His expression, when it briefly took in Bai Shuo, held a quality that was not quite contempt but was on friendly terms with it.

"Any results?" Nan Wan asked, with the clipped efficiency of someone who has learned to extract information before courtesy.

Mingxin straightened. "Senior Brother, we searched every tomb in the Outsider City. Not one of them is named the Outsider Tomb." He allowed his skepticism regarding Bai Shuo's divination to surface briefly in the direction of her face before composing himself.

Nan Wan turned to Bai Shuo. Bai Shuo, feeling the weight of the question approaching, spoke quickly: "Lord, the Outsider Tomb must be deliberately hidden. Would Immortal Jin Yao really store a Phoenix Spiritual Artifact somewhere obvious?" She shifted her attention to Mingxin. "Lord Mingxin, did anyone think to simply ask the local outsiders directly about this tomb?"

Mingxin's glance moved toward the outsiders moving through the street. "Ask them? They treat us like a contagion the moment they see us. They give the whole inn a wide berth."

Bai Shuo looked. He was right — around the inn, a visible arc of empty space had formed, the foot traffic curving naturally away from the gathering of immortal and demon disciples.

Nan Wan's patience had been running thin since the previous night, and it was running thinner now. "We have a day and a half remaining. We haven't located a single Dao Heart Flame. Daoist Bai — are you absolutely certain you could not divine the Outsider Tomb's location?"

"By every heaven and earth, Lord, this humble Daoist's abilities genuinely did not reach it."

"Then if the Daoist cannot even accomplish this much—" Nan Wan's voice lowered to the register she used when something was about to become a problem, her gaze fixing on Bai Shuo with an uncomfortable steadiness, "—what exactly is the point of keeping you alive?"

Bai Shuo felt something lurch in her chest. She had taken a rather substantial sum of spirit pearls from Yunxiao under circumstances that would not survive careful examination, and Nan Wan's tone was suggesting that the examination might be imminent and comprehensive. She was in the process of assembling a response from the available materials when the situation changed direction entirely.

Two figures burst through the inn's entrance in quick succession, a foreign woman following close behind them.

"Is Lord Bei Chen here?"

Bai Shuo's thought dissolved.

A-Zhao? Senior Sister Er Yun?

Chong Zhao had a child in his arms — five or six years old, by the look of it — and Er Yun was right behind him, both of them moving with the urgency of people who have run a considerable distance and arrived somewhere they hoped would help. In the first moments, neither of them noticed Bai Shuo among the Yunxiao disciples.

Bai Shuo stared. The half-gnawed chicken leg came close to completing its obstruction of her airway.

She had spent considerable effort trying to locate these two people. And here they were, having delivered themselves directly through the door.

The inn's hierarchy was strict in the way of such gatherings — this establishment was reserved for disciples of the Three Mountains and Six Prefectures, and the arrival of two unfamiliar faces attracted attention immediately. Shou An of Wuliang, whose principal talent lay in identifying which way advantage was currently blowing and adjusting his behavior accordingly, moved to intercept them before anyone else could. He had been notable the previous evening for a particular variety of attention directed at Nan Wan.

"Which sect's disciple dares enter here without invitation?"

Chong Zhao checked his momentum with visible effort. Beside him, the foreign woman looked at the child in his arms, then at Shou An, with the expression of someone who has arrived somewhere needing help and is encountering an obstacle. "Senior Brother — this child is critically ill. We have long heard of Kunlun's healing arts. We beg Lord Bei Chen to save him."

Shou An's gaze moved to the child. A foreigner. The skin already showing the distinctive blue-purple of severe distress, the breath shallow and labored.

He looked away from the child with visible distaste, keeping his attention on the foreign woman. "A foreigner? Senior Brother Bei Chen isn't here. Leave."

"Senior Brother—"

"Who calls me senior brother? Don't presume familiarity. Senior Brother Bei Chen is occupied with the search for the Phoenix Heart Flame. Even if he were present, he wouldn't squander effort on disciples of minor sects — let alone on foreigners."

Er Yun's expression shifted sharply. Her hand moved.

The foreign woman, hearing the words directed at her child, reacted in a different register — immediate, silent, moving to take the child from Chong Zhao's arms and go, her face set with the specific expression of someone withdrawing from a situation that is not what they hoped.

Chong Zhao stopped her. "Madam, let me try once more." He reined in the anger that had been rising since Shou An opened his mouth and turned back, keeping his voice even. "May I ask which sect you belong to, Senior Brother?"

"Wuliang. Shou An." The chin came up. His gaze dropped to the flowing cloud embroidery on Chong Zhao's sleeve and produced a sound of dismissal. "East Sea Piaomiao. Your sect hasn't sent disciples to the Phoenix Martial Banquet in three centuries. Now that you've finally produced an Immortal Lord, you think you stand alongside Wuliang?"

"We wouldn't presume to, Immortal Lord Shou An." Chong Zhao's tone remained entirely composed. "But a foreigner is still a life. Since the Phoenix Martial Banquet is held in a foreign city, the celestial immortals must have intended goodwill toward the outsiders. If we refuse to help them, Jinyao Zhangzuo may one day reprimand us for lacking in compassion."

"You—!" Around the inn's entrance and in the lobby, immortal disciples had gathered in the way people gather when an argument has potential — quietly, attentively, evaluating. Shou An felt all of those eyes and found himself cornered by his own position.

"If Lord Bei Chen is absent, could you at least tell us where to find him?"

---

Outside the inn, Nan Wan had been listening to the exchange with the detached attention of someone assessing whether any of it was her concern. She had already turned to leave — this kind of dispute had nothing to offer her current timeline — when Bai Shuo's fingers closed around her sleeve.

Nan Wan paused and looked down.

Bai Shuo explained quickly and quietly: the Outsider Tomb presumably held the remains of outsider elders, and the outsiders themselves would know its location in a way that no amount of searching by immortal disciples had been able to establish. Helping this child was not charity — it was access.

Nan Wan's expression shifted as the logic arrived. She understood immediately.

She turned back.

---

"If Lord Bei Chen is not available — perhaps I might try."

The standoff inside collapsed as Nan Wan came through the door with the Yunxiao disciples arranging themselves naturally around her. The immortal disciples inside made way with the quiet efficiency of people who understand social geometry.

"Lord Nan Wan." The deference was immediate and uniform.

Chong Zhao turned. Saw her. Saw who was standing behind her.

Bai Shuo waved the chicken leg at him from behind Nan Wan's shoulder and blinked several times with deliberate intensity.

The jade flute had not misled him. She was genuinely here, in the foreign city, in this inn, waving a chicken leg.

Something surged in Chong Zhao's blood — the frustrated relief of someone who has been searching for a reckless person and has finally located her, which was immediately accompanied by the impulse to take hold of that person and say a number of things about the exercise they had just put him through.

Then a figure emerged from behind Bai Shuo, and a hand steadied her elbow, and the figure glanced toward Chong Zhao.

Their eyes met.

Chong Zhao's grip on the child tightened without his intending it.

The Lord of Haoyue Palace. Why was he with Bai Shuo? He carried the appearance of a young man, the casual presentation of someone unremarkable — and yet Chong Zhao recognized him instantly, and the spiritual Qi he could sense from the figure was almost nothing, nothing like the divine pressure he had encountered at Fire-Ice Island. Something here did not follow the rules he understood.

What is going on?

Before he could arrive at anything, Nan Wan had already crossed the room and placed two fingers at the child's wrist.

The foreign woman watched with the attention of someone who has exhausted most of her alternatives and is watching her last one.

"How very strange." Nan Wan's eyes moved from the child to the woman. "Has this child been practicing spiritual arts?"

The mixed bloodline of outsiders typically made cultivation of spiritual arts impossible for them, though they received in its place a physical constitution that immortals generally envied. And yet within this particular child, spiritual Qi was circulating — moving through him chaotically, at odds with itself, producing exactly the kind of internal disruption that shouldn't have been possible.

"No." The woman's answer was immediate and certain. "Our kind does not practice spiritual arts."

"The Qi within him is surging without direction — it resembles the early indicators of Qi Deviation. I'll channel a strand of divine power to settle it." Nan Wan was already condensing the appropriate energy when Chong Zhao spoke.

"Lord Nan Wan." He kept his voice measured and respectful. "Outsiders are unable to cultivate spiritual arts. What this child is experiencing may not be Qi Deviation in any conventional sense. Kunlun is renowned for its healing arts — perhaps it would be worth waiting for Lord Bei Chen—"

"You ignorant Piaomiao disciple!" Mingxin moved forward, planting himself between Chong Zhao and the child. "Senior Brother's willingness to help is already more than enough good fortune for this child. Who are you to lecture—"

"Kunlun's sword cultivation is famous." Nan Wan's tone was even and carried no particular emotion about it either way. "Yunxiao is no lesser in its own arts." She waved off Mingxin with a slight gesture, met Chong Zhao's eyes with a coolness that neither invited argument nor offered apology, and sent the strand of divine power into the child.

The effect was immediate. The child's eyes opened. His breathing changed.

"Mother..."

"Hu Er!"

The relief in the woman's voice was total and unguarded. Chong Zhao let out a breath he had been holding. Around the room, the watching disciples relaxed in small increments.

Then the child's skin went red.

Not the natural flush of returning color — something wrong, something rapid, the redness spreading across him in a way that was unmistakably a reaction rather than a recovery. His eyes, a moment ago opening in recognition, had gone crimson. A sound tore from him that was nothing like a child waking from illness.

The woman's arms locked around her son as her eyes went to Nan Wan. "What have you done to him?!"

Nan Wan stared at the child, and for the first time something moved in her expression that was neither cold detachment nor calculation but simple, startled uncertainty. Her divine power had been precisely deployed. It should not have produced this.

"I knew none of you immortals were any good!" The woman's grief had ignited into something harder. Her foot connected with the nearest table. The furniture did not survive the contact. The pieces it had become were multiple and widespread.

Bai Shuo, watching the demolished table, felt a renewed appreciation for what she had encountered from this woman earlier. The outsiders' innate physical strength was spoken of in certain contexts as though it might be exaggerated. It was not exaggerated.

The woman, not waiting for anyone's permission, moved toward the exit with her child. Outside, drawn by the noise, outsiders from the street were beginning to press toward the inn's entrance, their voices mixing with each other in agitation.

"Mu Mu! I need you—"

The young man was already moving, stepping into the space between Bai Shuo and the woman's path, his body placing itself without hesitation between the two.

In the room, Chong Zhao's arm, which had been extending toward Bai Shuo, stopped where it was. His hand closed around nothing. He watched the young man's back, and then watched the way the young man's attention moved briefly to check on Bai Shuo before returning to the woman.

Mu Mu. The Lord of Haoyue Hall, standing as easily between Bai Shuo and danger as if this were simply his position in the world. Chong Zhao's hand finished closing into a fist inside his sleeve.

"Everyone, wait — look at the child!" Bai Shuo's voice cut through the moment, aimed at both the room and the people gathering at the entrance.

The woman looked down.

The violent thrashing had stopped. The red was draining from the child's skin as she watched, the blue-purple discoloration receding, his small body going still in her arms with the specific quality of a body surrendering to deep, genuine sleep rather than unconsciousness. His breathing had changed completely — steady now, even, with a healthy flush moving slowly back into his cheeks.

"Hu Er." The woman's voice had lost its hardness entirely.

"Hu Er's mother—!" The outsiders outside, seeing through the doorway that the child's color had returned to something recognizable, stopped pushing.

The child turned his head toward the sound of his name, murmured something, and closed his eyes again. The sleep that took him was undeniable and real.

The woman, shame visible in her face, moved toward Bai Shuo. Fan Yue's cold glance stopped her before she reached her.

"Mu Mu." Bai Shuo touched his arm lightly, stepping past him to check the child's breathing for herself. She exhaled with a relief that came from somewhere genuine. "He's fine. His body is exhausted — let him sleep it through and he'll recover."

"Daoist." The woman bowed, her earlier fury replaced by something that was working toward genuine contrition. "Daoist, what is wrong with Hu Er?"

Bai Shuo turned the question over. "Auntie — what did Hu Er eat this morning?"

The woman paused, working through it. "It was still early. Only water and a few fruits from home."

"Fruits. What kind?"

"Autumn Cicada Fruits. He eats them every day. He's never had any reaction before."

Autumn Cicada Fruits were a staple of the wasteland outsider diet — spiritual fruits that carried faint traces of Spiritual Qi, relied upon for the robust health of the outsider tribes and consumed without difficulty by those with the physical constitution to metabolize it. Bai Shuo studied the child in his mother's arms. Even among outsiders, this boy was unusually slight — it was visible even now in the lines of his small frame. His body had not developed the constitution to process what his mother was giving him every day in the name of his health. The Spiritual Qi had been accumulating for some time without release, disrupting the natural balance of the energies in his body, and Nan Wan's well-intentioned strand of divine power had pushed the disruption over the edge it had been approaching.

The pill Bai Shuo had given him was a Heart-Cleansing Pill — something she had concocted during a particularly dull stretch of time on Misty Isle, originally intended, in a different version of the plan, to serve as a laxative suitable for producing results in Inner Sect disciples who had been particularly unpleasant to her. The end product had diverged from that intention and become something else: a compound capable of dissolving accumulated Spiritual Qi. She had thought of it as essentially useless at the time she made it, applicable only to half-immortals and producing no effect whatsoever in Immortal Lords. If not for the specific circumstances of this child's particular problem, she would not have thought of it at all.

"Auntie," she said, "the Autumn Cicada Fruits carry Spiritual Qi. Hu Er's body isn't strong enough yet to absorb it properly — it builds up inside him instead of moving through. Wait until he's older and his constitution has developed before giving them to him again."

The woman nodded repeatedly, her expression shifting inward. "It's my fault. He was born small and I thought the fruits would strengthen him. I gave them to him every day." She held her son and bowed to Bai Shuo with the sincerity of someone who has moved past embarrassment into genuine gratitude. "I was frantic earlier, Daoist. I'm sorry for—"

"No harm done. I'm perfectly fine." Bai Shuo waved it away and scratched her head. She glanced toward the entrance where the outsiders outside were still gathered in a watchful cluster. "Could you say something to them? Having everyone here like this isn't ideal."

The woman straightened and called out clearly: "It's all right! Everyone can go. Hu Er ate something that disagreed with him, but the Daoist has fixed it — he's well!"

The outsiders outside, hearing a familiar voice and seeing the evidence of the child's restored color from where they stood, allowed themselves to disperse by degrees, the agitation draining from the crowd as they moved away.

When the space had cleared, the woman turned to Chong Zhao. "Thank you, Immortal, for bringing us here."

Chong Zhao's expression settled into something that was not quite a smile but was warmer than his usual presentation. "As long as the child is well."

He looked at Bai Shuo across the room, and Bai Shuo, seizing what seemed like a natural opening to communicate something meaningful with her eyes, noticed immediately that Chong Zhao had turned his gaze elsewhere with the decisive completeness of a person who has decided not to see someone he is looking directly at.

Bai Shuo puzzled over this for precisely as long as it took her to notice Nan Wan standing to one side, expression composed but carrying the particular quality of someone who has just been thanked in a room and not been included in the thanking.

Ah. She had walked herself directly past that.

"Auntie," Bai Shuo said, turning back with the smooth quickness of someone changing direction before a mistake can fully establish itself, "there's something I'd like to ask you."

The woman looked at her openly. "Please, go ahead."

Nan Wan spoke before Bai Shuo reached the question. "The child has just had a frightening experience. Let's see the lady home first. Other matters can follow."

With every sect disciple present watching and listening, Bai Shuo understood the instruction immediately. "Of course — Hu Er should rest properly. I'll give Auntie another Heart-Cleansing Pill for him, to protect the spiritual core while he recovers."

The woman glanced at the Yunxiao disciples. Even with a debt owed, the elaborate deference of immortal cultivation circles was a foreign and somewhat cold language. "Thank you for your kindness," she said carefully. "But perhaps — if it's not too much trouble — Young Master Chong could come with me? He's the one who helped me before, and I feel easier with him."

The genuine concern Chong Zhao and Bai Shuo had shown was not something that could be performed, and the woman had recognized it. The Yunxiao disciples, however friendly in their manner, had an aloofness behind it that she had no particular reason to trust.

Nan Wan's expression moved slightly.

Bai Shuo reached out and took Chong Zhao's hand, turning to the woman with complete assurance. "Auntie, don't worry at all — Yunxiao and Piaomiao are the closest of allies. Young Master Chong is a personal friend of our Senior Brother Nan Wan. Right, Young Master Chong?" As she finished the sentence, her thumb moved quickly against Chong Zhao's palm, writing a single character: Wu.

Chong Zhao registered it. He set aside the several things he had been planning to address at the earliest available opportunity, and nodded with the composed ease of someone confirming a well-established fact. "Certainly. There's no cause for concern, auntie."

The woman still hesitated, her eyes moving between the two groups.

"Mingxin." Nan Wan addressed her disciple without looking at him. "You and the other disciples remain at the inn. I'll go with Young Master Chong and return shortly."

Mingxin paused, processed this, and — reading Nan Wan's expression carefully — bowed. "Yes, Senior Brother."

Nan Wan's willingness to go without her full retinue was, from the woman's point of view, the most legible signal available. She looked at the sleeping child in her arms and made her decision. "Then I'll trouble you."

Chong Zhao stepped forward and took the child from her with the matter-of-fact competence of someone who has done this before. "Let's go, auntie."