Yu Ping hurled his scabbard to the ground and closed the distance fast. "Stop stalling with your plots and tricks, demon girl. Hand over the antidote and tell us where your master is being held. Push us further and you'll regret it."
Changling's gaze dropped to the eagle-iron mark on the hilt of his sword. "Who is your master?"
"Your subordinate Tianpo put him down. And you have the nerve to ask —" Yu Ping caught himself mid-sentence, his hand flying toward his blade. Ye Qi's palm settled quietly over the hilt and held it there. "Master Chi has profound cultivation. He won't fall so easily."
"Your late master?" Changling said. "You mean Chizishan."
Yu Ping went still. "What have you done to him?"
Changling said nothing for a moment.
It was actually him.
More than ten years ago she had helped Feiyingmen settle a blood debt. The sect leader then was Kong Buwu, and trailing behind Kong Buwu every single day was a disciple who had appointed himself her foremost admirer. He circled her from morning to dusk, pestering her until she had nearly left over it. That disciple was Chizishan.
"The Flying Eagles have truly fallen," Changling said, the words carrying something closer to sorrow than spite. "If even he is leading the sect now."
Yu Ping heard only insult. He reached for his blade. Ye Qi, moving with quiet economy, slid between them and wrapped a hand around the hilt before Yu Ping could clear the sheath. Denied his sword, Yu Ping swung his fist instead, throwing it straight at Changling's face.
She sidestepped, retreated one clean step, and said: "I won't fight you."
Because it would be absurd to. Kong Buwu had barely been her peer, and Chizishan was Kong Buwu's own disciple. By lineage alone, the young man in front of her sat two generations below. Kong Buwu had died fighting for the Yue army. Raising a hand against his grand-disciple over a misunderstanding felt like a desecration.
The others read her retreat as fear. Ye Qi dragged Yu Ping back by the arm and murmured something low into his ear. Whatever he said, Yu Ping's face went red to the collar. Changling watched him sputter and felt an odd flicker of warmth. His bluntness was nothing like Kong Buwu.
"I will say this once more," she said to the group. "I am not the person you want. My appearance on that carriage was coincidence. You had the skill to stop it. Use some of that skill to verify the facts before you act on them."
A young disciple with a long, gaunt face cut her off. "Delay tactics. We're done wasting time on you."
Changling looked past him to the Taoist priest, who carried himself like a man accustomed to being deferred to. She considered trying to reason with him. She discarded the thought. He was the kind of man who had already decided, and no fact was going to move him.
The deeper problem was her own body. She had already learned what happened when she drew on her inner force without control. Using it against these people now was out of the question. In the past, an unreasonable confrontation ended when the other party begged her to stop. This was something else.
"Since you've made up your minds," she said, "do as you like. But whatever follows is not on me. If someone dies because you wasted time here, remember that when you see me again in the Central Plains."
The group exchanged uncertain glances. Then Ye Qi cleared his throat, strolled forward with his hands tucked in his sleeves, and said mildly, "There's no need to push this to a breaking point. Write two letters. One to Brother Mingyuezhou in Ling, one to King Zunyan of Ling. The delivery is our concern, not yours."
A letter.
She didn't know Yan State characters. She couldn't write it if she wanted to.
"I can't write letters."
Ye Qi blinked, apparently thrown by how direct the refusal was.
The Taoist priest started forward. Ye Qi raised one hand without looking at him. "Daoist Xu."
Just those two words. Xu Daoren stopped.
Changling marked the exchange. She filed it away and turned back to Ye Qi, who was now studying her with a small, patient smile. "Then what can you do?" he asked.
"If saving someone is the actual goal, I can show you a real path forward," she said. "But I'm not going to keep talking in circles with people who aren't listening." Her eyes moved from the assembled disciples to Ye Qi alone. "I'll speak to you. Privately."
The silence that followed had a specific texture. A striking woman, under these circumstances, asking one man to separate himself from the group. Several faces shifted toward Ye Qi with expressions caught between suspicion and something more embarrassing.
Even Ye Qi seemed to lose his words for a moment.
Xu Daoren did not lose his. "Mr. Ye, don't be taken in. She's buying time, nothing more. Forget the letter. We cut off two of her fingers and send them to Mingyuezhou. If the prisoner isn't released by sunset tomorrow, his sister collects a body instead."
Agreement spread through the group fast.
Changling looked at Xu Daoren. Her voice came out flat and cold. "You wouldn't dare."
It was exactly the wrong thing to say to him.
The scabbard left his hand. Light moved. The sword tip came forward in a blur.
The technique seemed fast from the outside, but the wrist moved with a kind of deceptive slowness, the blade shifting angles mid-thrust so that what appeared solid became uncertain, the true line of attack dissolving before anyone could read it.
Changling's expression changed. She stepped back light as a leaf lifted by wind and landed without sound three paces away. "Taixu Sword," she said. "Yangxuzi. Who are you to them?"
Ye Qi, moving to intervene, slowed. Beside him, Yu Ping frowned. "She took an unconscious-Yuan San strike. How is she still moving like that?"
Xu Daoren was more surprised than either of them. He had meant to frighten her, this girl who didn't know what she was dealing with. She had moved past it like he had been practicing alone. His guard went up. "You dare use my name."
Changling's mind went somewhere else for a moment.
Eleven years ago. Outside Taixing City. She could still see the faces of the men who called themselves the righteous of the Jianghu and gathered around Shen Yao. Men who wore virtue like a costume over something uglier.
Yang Xuzi had been among them.
"Taixu Sect," she said. "Of course. When the master is sanctimonious, it spreads downward through the whole order." She let that land, then added: "No wonder."
Xu Daoren's composure dissolved. He left the ground. The long sword in his grip gathered white light as it drove straight for her throat.
Changling turned at the waist, one sleeve sweeping down. The movement was almost leisurely. Her hand closed on something as the sleeve brushed the ground, and when she straightened she was holding Xu Daoren's own scabbard.
The group stared at the blue lacquered sheath in her hand and at the sword already back in Xu Daoren's grip. She was going to answer a sword with a scabbard.
Xu Daoren sneered and came in hard, inner force loaded through the blade, the sword light splitting into three positions and from those three positions into three separate moves, blooming fast and brilliant directly toward her face.
To the watching eye it happened like a flash of light. But when the eye could follow again, the blue scabbard had moved in a series of turns, each one catching a blade at its seam of weakness, and Changling's arm swung smooth and wide, her technique precise and entirely without waste, each response articulate. As Xu Daoren's momentum ran out, she took one step forward and pressed his sword flat to the ground.
Yu Ping walked forward without meaning to. "She's using the Taixu Sword."
Ye Qi's voice was quiet and careful. "Or something designed to break it."
He was right.
Eleven years ago, before Shen Yao's tournament, she had stood against Yang Xuzi in preparation and memorized every movement he made. The Taixu Sword ran eighty-one base movements. The first could branch to nine variations, the second to eighteen, each level expanding, the later ones compounding until they were nearly impossible to answer on reflex.
She had studied all of it. Then she built a counter.
The technique she constructed was not designed to impress. It was designed to breed confusion in the opponent, and from that confusion to open the break. A man who suspects he is watching his own art turned against him loses his timing. Lost timing in a sword exchange is fatal.
Now, without touching her inner force, she used it on Xu Daoren. She watched the uncertainty take hold in him exactly as she had planned.
The small room he had left for reason closed entirely. His attacks came uglier, heavier with killing intent, the blade cutting sound from the air with each swing. Changling did not retreat. She moved with what the sword gave her, the scabbard quick without being violent, deft without being dishonest. Twice she put the scabbard to his chest over the length of his own extended blade. Both times she stopped short. She had no interest in hurting him.
The people watching had grown up in the martial world. They understood what they were seeing, and they understood it clearly.
Changling shook out her sleeve, let the scabbard drop, and said to Xu Daoren: "I won't fight you."
In the corner, Yu Ping heard those words again and this time understood them completely. She was not afraid of Xu Daoren. She simply did not consider the fight worth finishing.
Xu Daoren did not arrive at the same understanding.
He was a senior of Taixu Sect. He had let a girl dismantle him in front of disciples young enough to be his grandchildren. He felt the weight of every eye in the clearing and let it pull him under.
He loaded everything he had left into one thrust.
Changling watched the sword come. Her right hand settled at her back. Her left hand moved the scabbard forward at a specific angle, almost lazily, and Xu Daoren's sword slid into it as neatly as a key finding its lock.
Her wrist turned.
The sword tore free of his grip, flipped end for end inside the sheath, and sailed away through the air, landing in the dirt a long distance off while every person there watched in silence.
Yu Ping pointed at the empty space where the sword had been. His mouth moved without producing words.
Ye Qi watched Changling and said softly, "She's very fast."
"What do you mean, fast?"
What the eye had read as the sword entering the scabbard was something simpler and more difficult: she had seen the angle before Xu Daoren chose it. Not one angle. Every possible angle. She had read the shift in his body and the line of the blade before it committed, and she had placed the opening where it needed to be.
Changling brushed the dust from her sleeve. She turned to Ye Qi.
"Now," she said. "Can we speak alone?"