The Jiuhua Sect's Five Elements Master specialized in water, so his disciples had naturally refined ice techniques to a sharp edge. When they saw their senior brother seal Yu Chen in a block of ice before he could even draw a trick, the rest broke into laughter.
"Su Yishui raised this kind of trash? Why do they bother throwing punches and making noise?"
The young Xishan disciples who had come up the mountain behind their senior brother burned with anger at that.
Senior brother Takakura was already moving to rush forward when junior sister Ranran caught his arm from behind. Their Uncle Shi had been frozen solid before he could pull off a single move. What good could a few green recruits do against disciples who could manage that?
Takakura assumed his junior sister was frightened, so he only glared at her and said, "A man of honor cannot swallow this humiliation. These bastards are walking all over us. Are we supposed to tuck our heads in like turtles?"
Ranran looked up at him calmly. "Big brother, isn't your slingshot incredibly useful?"
As she spoke, she reached down and picked up the pill pouch her master had left on the ground, pinched the contents into several small balls between her fingers, and held them out to her eldest brother with a nod toward the slingshot at his waist.
He had used that slingshot for bird hunting since he was small. The moment he saw what Ranran had crushed out of that pouch, Takakura understood perfectly.
He had eaten that stuff once and spent the better part of a day and night flat on his back, groaning. He raised the slingshot without another word and sent the little pellets flying.
Takakura came from a line of soldiers. His slingshot was custom-made and carried serious force.
The small pills flew true and dropped cleanly into the open, laughing mouths of the Jiuhua disciples.
The pills dissolved on the tongue before anyone could spit them out, and the taste was extraordinary, rich and sweet in a way that stopped thought entirely.
The men blinked. Then they glared. "What did you shoot at us, brat?"
At that moment, Ranran quietly untied the pouch at her waist, took out a fistful of fragrant dried meat, and scattered it across the ground the way someone scatters scraps for a dog.
Wei Fang raised an eyebrow, bewildered by what the slight girl was doing.
Then the junior brothers behind him went wide-eyed. Their nostrils worked. Their faces lost all composure, and one by one they bent down, scooped up the jerky from the dirt, and ate it. Some came up with mud on their mouths and did not notice. They crouched and grabbed and chewed like men who had not seen food in weeks.
Every trace of dignity belonging to disciples of a righteous sect had evaporated.
Qiu Xi pressed a hand over her mouth, then gave up and laughed outright. "A pack of stray dogs wandered over from somewhere. No wonder they were barking so much. Turns out they were just hungry."
Wei Fang stood frozen for a moment, then hissed orders in a low voice, but his junior brothers were past hearing him. They kept their heads down, picking and eating, some with mud ringing their lips, oblivious, exactly like the starving ghosts of old stories.
The disciples of Kongshan Sect and Feiyunshan Sect, the other two sects who had arrived behind them, watched with wide eyes.
Wei Fang knew his junior brothers had disgraced themselves and taken the Jiuhua Sect's reputation down with them. He set his face like iron and pressed shut the sleep acupoints of the disciples still scrabbling across the ground, dropping them where they crouched.
If he could not reclaim some face here, how could he go back and stand before his master as the tenth-generation disciple of Jiuhua Sect? The thought pushed him past reason. He drew his sword and lunged at Takakura and the others.
The blade was already a streak of light when a wave of heat rolled through the air and shoved him back on his heels. At the same moment, the ice encasing Yu Chen cracked and fell away. Yu Chen dragged in a breath, let out a raw sound somewhere between a sob and a shout, seized Wei Fang by the collar, and flung him with a force that sent him skidding far across the ground.
Then, into the stillness that followed, a cold voice descended from somewhere above them all, spreading through the air until it seemed to press against each person's ear directly: "Xishan does not welcome uninvited guests. Su is in seclusion and cannot receive you."
The voice came from no visible source, drawing closer by degrees out of the open sky, settling against the skin like a hand. The hair on every neck rose. The disciples of all three sects pulled back a few steps without deciding to.
They understood clearly that the speaker was not anywhere near them. This was the thousand-li voice transmission, a technique that only those who had reached extreme heights of cultivation could manage.
Su Yishui was thirty-six years old. Among Taoist cultivators, many of whom lived for centuries, that was still a young man's age. Yet his cultivation had outpaced what anyone might expect for those years.
In the decade or so since the incident at Yingchuan, Su Yishui's cultivation had taken damage and he had kept to seclusion. Even so, what he had just demonstrated placed him so far beyond the reach of even the most promising disciples of these sects that they could not see the gap clearly.
The Jiuhua Sect disciples, especially, carried a private relief home with them. They were quietly grateful that Mu Qingge had taken Su Yishui away from their sect.
If a talent like that had stayed and grown within their master's school, when would any of them ever have made a name for themselves?
Su Yishui had clearly not yet left seclusion, but he used the voice technique once more, this time releasing a piercing sound that struck like a physical force and swept every uninvited person out through Xishan's gate.
The one Kongshan Sect had sent this time was a woman in her thirties, beautiful in her bearing. A wide, angled scar cut across her right cheek in a way that drew the eye before anything else.
After the force threw her out through the gate, she steadied herself at the top of a nearby tree, gathered her spiritual energy, and sent her voice up toward the peak of Xishan: "Yishui, we carry no ill intent. My master asks you to stand with us against the demon cultivator Wei Jiu. You know better than anyone what it would mean to let that kind of tragedy happen again. The Jiuhua disciples were reckless and rude today. I apologize for them."
She held her gaze on the green-covered summit after she finished speaking, waiting.
The peak gave nothing back. Silence. The woman's expression settled into a heaviness that had no clean name, and she turned and walked quickly away, the Kongshan disciples falling in behind her.
Yu Chen had originally trained under the same master as the Xishan disciples and was now reckoned as their martial uncle. He had not covered himself in glory today, nearly losing face in front of his own juniors. Embarrassment aside, he shook the water and ice melt from his robes, cleared his throat at some length, and spoke at some length about the cunning and general loathsomeness of Jiuhua Sect disciples for ambushing a person who had not even drawn yet.
If the real masters wanted to settle something, they could come back and fight him properly, with drums and ceremony, for three hundred rounds.
Ranran stepped in with quiet consideration. "Uncle, look at how young they are. Let them go. Come inside and let me make you a red bean sweet soup so you don't catch cold."
A well-placed step up to the platform and Yu Chen's pride settled back into place. He gave Ranran a satisfied look, shook the last of the water from his sleeves with a certain dignity, and went off toward the meditation rooms to resume his practice.
At dinner, with both Yuchen and Yuchong away from the mountain, the younger disciples ate together.
Xue Ranran cooked as usual. The braised lion's head meatballs, fresh and gently salted, drew real praise from the table.
Between bites, Bai Baishan worked through his collection of strange stories from the world of cultivation and asked the senior brothers and sisters which odd thing had struck them most about the standoff with the three sects that afternoon.
Qiu Xi's mother was a matchmaker in the town below, and Qiu Xi had grown up absorbing that particular attentiveness to the way people looked at each other. She glanced around the table and leaned in with a low, delighted air: "That scarred woman from Kongshan Sect called our master by his given name. Just Yishui. Did anyone else catch that?"
The second senior brother turned to look at the third junior sister with an expression of genuine approval, as though she had solved a riddle he had been waiting for someone to solve.
"You noticed. Good. The woman with the scar is Wen Hongfan, an elder of Kongshan Sect. Kongshan and Jiuhua have always been close, and disciples of the two sects trained together regularly. Our master was a Jiuhua disciple once, and he and Wen Hongfan were close. The two of them nearly became a cultivation pair."
Xue Ranran, who had a genuine weakness for exactly this kind of story, bit into a piece of fried cake and asked, "What stopped them? Did she decide his face wasn't good enough?"
Bai Baishan, who had made a study of Xishan's history, shook her head with the patience of someone correcting a small error. "Our master and his face? Who didn't know the name of Yishui Xianjun back then? Women lined up hoping to become his cultivation partner. Some men as well. Anyway. Our master has always had that effect on people."
Everyone at the table straightened slightly. Qiu Xi could not wait. "What happened?"
Bai Baishan first turned and pressed her hands together in the direction of the Lingxi Palace ancestral hall, offering a small silent apology to the former master, then dropped her voice: "Our former master, the woman Mu Qingge, was not the kind to let anyone touch what she considered hers. She took a very direct approach to the problem. One clean strike across Wen Hongfan's face, and that was the end of the great cultivation romance."
Xue Ranran drew a slow breath through her teeth. If Mu Qingge had truly done that, it was past extreme. Did she not understand that you cannot force feeling? No wonder that match had shattered without producing anything.
"Full already?"
The four of them were deep in their discussion when a cool voice came from directly behind them. Yu Tong, the second martial uncle, was standing at their backs with his brows raised, and none of them had heard him arrive.
Bai Baishan, who had been doing most of the talking, pulled her head down between her shoulders like a bird caught in weather.
Of the two martial uncles, the easygoing Yu Chen inspired no particular caution. Yu Tong was another matter entirely. He noticed everything and forgot nothing, and the wrong word in the wrong moment could translate into ten loads of water hauled up the mountain by hand before the lesson was considered settled.
But Yu Tong only gave them one long look, then turned to Xue Ranran. "Master wants you at the summit."
Su Yishui had been in seclusion for half a month. For some reason she could not read, he had asked to see her before formally coming out. Ranran swallowed a last mouthful of water, set down her cup, and followed Yu Tong up toward the top of the mountain.
The path to the summit was all stone steps. Before her months on Xishan, that climb would have left her face-down and gasping before she reached the halfway point. She was not who she had been.
Since taking her place as a disciple here, she had not seen her master give her any more of the tree root tonic water. Her days ran on meditation and the small ritual of watering the sapling that had been moved to the ground outside her window. That was the whole of it.
Perhaps it was simply the mountain air, the clean water, the rhythm of the place. She had never in her life felt this steady, this present in her own body.
Yu Tong did not use wind-riding techniques on the way up. Whether he meant it as training for her legs or simply preferred the walk, he came up the steps beside her at her pace.
In the last stretch, he stopped and let her continue alone.
She followed the stone path to the mouth of the cave. Before she reached it, the smell met her: something medicinal and deep, a long-simmered decoction.
Su Yishui was seated on a stone chair just outside the cave entrance, a small flame going beneath a water vessel, tea steeping beside him.
Ranran's attention caught on a small white cat, round as a dumpling, curled near the brazier. "Master, when did you get a cat? It's so small."
At the sound of her voice the cat curled its lip back. The expression was ferocious in design. The sound that came out was a small, soft, entirely undignified meow.
Su Yishui glanced at the cat with mild exasperation, then gestured to the seat across from him. "There is good tea. Sit."
He was not wearing his mask. Being alone on the mountain, he had no reason to. His long black hair was loose, not even tied back, falling straight down past his waist like a length of dark water.
A person of striking appearance looks well in careful dress. The same person, caught in an unguarded moment with hair loose and no ceremony about them, looks like something else entirely. The slight disorder that would have looked careless on anyone else read as ease on him, as something freely chosen.
Xue Ranran had heard the second senior brother's account of that whole chapter of history and had thought, privately, that the telling was somewhat exaggerated.
Looking at him now, the clean line of his brows and the directness of his gaze, she reconsidered. It was, she thought, actually quite plausible that someone had put a blade across another woman's face rather than allow a rival near something this worth keeping.