Mu Qingyan lay on his back in the warm spring water, his young, supple limbs loosened as far as they would go, and simply floated.
He was exhausted. He had struggled against the raging flood for nearly two hours and had nothing left. He had been ruthless and cold-blooded since childhood and had never feared any enemy, but when the vast force of heaven and earth came down on him, he found there was nothing he could do against it.
A little longer in that churning spring and he would have passed out. Luckily, the current had carried them to a calm, wide stone channel.
He tightened his right hand. In his palm lay a small, limp hand, and their wrists were bound together with a sash.
Cai Zhao floated beside him, still unconscious. He had to keep her mouth and nose above the water, so he never let his attention drift. Through the worst of the surging waves he had had no choice but to hold her tightly in his arms, and only here did he dare let her float free. Though the sash tied them together, he still looked at her every few moments.
When the boundless hot spring had come roaring toward them, the two of them had gripped the Blazing Sun Blade, driven into the ice wall, to hold themselves steady. But the current was too strong. Cai Zhao had realized almost at once that the blade could not bear the weight of two people, and without a moment's hesitation she let go with both hands and let the torrent sweep her away.
Mu Qingyan understood what she meant.
Climbing the snowy mountain, hunting the snow-scaled dragon beast, saving Qian Xueshen: he had come this far on the road for her sake. The girl had said nothing, but she must have felt terribly guilty.
But thinking was one thing and doing was another. Survival is a human instinct. In that savage, roaring whirlpool, to say "let go" and simply let go left Mu Qingyan not knowing what to say to her.
The instant she let go, his hand moved faster than his thoughts and caught her. A huge wall of water crashed down on them without warning, and the two of them were like a small boat on the open sea, thrown here one moment and there the next, while great chunks of ice and gravel carried by the flood slammed into them.
He freed one hand and batted away the ice that came at them as best he could, but he still took many heavy blows, along with countless small scrapes. The flood poured down on them from every direction and would not let up. Several times, when he could bear no more, he thought of letting go, but in the end he could not give up the small, soft bundle in his arms.
Half-conscious, he thought: dying together with someone as pure, upright, and bright-hearted as Zhaozhao would not be a wrongful death.
Then the hot spring began to recede. Mu Qingyan watched as their floating bodies sank slowly, and the walls beside them, worn perfectly smooth by the water, came into view. The pool could not have been deep, because their bodies soon touched the bottom, and only a few shallow puddles of clear spring water remained around them.
He had no idea where this was. Not only was the water warm; even the surrounding rock was warm.
He carried Cai Zhao to a flat stone ledge and laid her down. Then he untied the heavy bundle from his shoulder, and four small white-furred, blue-eyed creatures, soaked through, immediately poked their round heads out and looked curiously from side to side.
Mu Qingyan had assumed they would not survive the disaster. He had not expected the white-furred Hou cubs to be tougher than he had thought. Not only had they hidden obediently inside the fur bundle, but several times they had stuck out their tiny paws and paddled.
The four cubs let out thin, whimpering cries. He knew they were hungry. He took an oilpaper packet from the pouch at his waist and opened it, only to find the dry rations had long since turned to paste. He shook his head and spread the oilpaper out on the ledge. The four cubs tumbled over at once, heads and tails wagging, and began licking up the paste with happy snuffling noises.
He stroked their heads. "No father, no mother. It makes sense that you're a rough lot."
Once he had settled the one person and four beasts, Mu Qingyan finally began to take care of himself.
Using the clear water in a stone hollow as a mirror, he undid his thick, long hair and wrung it out. He took off his dripping outer robe and opened his inner robe. Beneath it was a flat, strong, fair chest, and across his toned shoulders and arms were a dozen or more bloody welts.
The young man in the water mirror had a cold, clear gaze, a high nose, and thin lips. His good looks carried a trace of indifference. A bloody welt ran from his fair left forehead to the center of his brows, and it lent him an edge of severity.
In a situation like this, what should one do first? Naturally, take off the soaking clothes and dry them by a fire, to keep injury from turning into illness.
A fire was out of the question, but the wet clothes had to come off quickly.
So Mu Qingyan propped his chin on his hand and studied Cai Zhao. He hesitated for a moment, then reached out with a grave expression to pull at her sash. At his tug, the belt did not budge.
The girl's waist was slender and her belt was delicately made, but it was pretty and impossible to undo. To hold the Blazing Sun Blade in a hollow layer, Ning Xiaofeng had made this four-finger-wide belt of gold thread and jade for her daughter, with linked jade clasps, finely woven gold wire, and an intricate structure.
Mu Qingyan felt along it from left to right, then from right to left, and could not even find the main clasp.
After several more rounds of fumbling, sweat was beading on his clear, cold face. The four cubs had finished the paste and were looking over curiously with their little heads raised.
A snort of laughter echoed in the cave. Mu Qingyan looked up sharply, on guard, and saw that the girl who had been unconscious had at some point opened her eyes.
They were big and dark, and they were laughing.
"Sorry, but I really couldn't hold it in any longer." Cai Zhao giggled as she sat up. "It's just a belt, Big Brother. Why does this look harder than fighting that crystal ice python? You're even sweating. I'm in awe!"
"A girl has her belt undone by a man and can still laugh like this. I'm in awe of you too." Mu Qingyan sat as steady as a mountain, his face perfectly composed. At least, it looked that way.
"A belt is nothing. I was going to wait until you were pulling off my clothes to open my eyes and give you a good scare. But I couldn't keep from laughing." Cai Zhao began wringing the water out of her clothes.
Mu Qingyan frowned. "There is a difference between men and women, after all. You're really not afraid at all?"
"At a time like this, who cares about men and women? If I had woken up first today, I would have taken off your wet clothes too." She said it as though it were obvious.
Mu Qingyan's eyes drifted aside for some reason.
With a click, Cai Zhao pressed somewhere on the belt, two jade clasps popped up, and the belt came loose.
Mu Qingyan kept his composure. "...Your mother's craftsmanship is remarkable. This belt is very ingenious."
"Oh, give it up." Cai Zhao gave a dry laugh. "What's ingenious about this belt isn't the clasp. It's the hollow layer inside. The clasp alone is just a common butterfly clasp with a small change."
Something occurred to her, and she asked doubtfully, "You've never even seen a butterfly clasp? Could it be that you've never..." The Young Lord of the Demon Sect leads such a dull life? Who would have thought.
Mu Qingyan's face went dark. He reached out and pinched the girl's ear. "Haven't you heard 'do not speak of what is improper'? You'll say anything that comes to mind. Say one more wild thing and the moment I'm off this mountain I'm heading straight for Luoying Valley."
Cai Zhao was startled. "Why would you go to Luoying Valley? Are you going to flatten it?"
"No. I'm going to flatten every bookshop and opera troupe in Luoying Valley." He held her arm with one hand and pinched her ear with the other. "You never learn anything good. What is all this rubbish you read all day?"
Cai Zhao covered her ear. "What did I say? What did I say? I haven't said anything yet! Ow, ow, ow! Let go first, let go!"
Mu Qingyan let go with a sigh and rested his head against the girl's slight shoulder. "In your mind, do all of us live in gold-brick halls, with pools of wine and forests of meat, in endless debauchery?"
His breath was hot against her neck and it tickled. She tried to push his head away but could not move it. "Not just in my mind. Everyone thinks so. The Demon Sect is full of beautiful women and song every night. Get off me, you're heavy!"
Mu Qingyan stayed tucked into the hollow of her shoulder and said in a muffled voice, "Actually, the Sect has not always been the same. As the lord is, so are his people. When Nie Hengcheng was lord, the Sect was fierce, eager for a fight, and driven to advance. Now that Nie Zhe has taken his place, no one thinks of advancing. They only care about indulging themselves."
After a long while he heard nothing from her, and he lifted his head curiously. "Why aren't you saying anything?"
Cai Zhao sighed. "What do you want me to say? 'A lord like Nie Zhe is good, the less the Demon Sect wants to advance the better, please never advance, everyone just indulge yourselves'?"
Mu Qingyan snorted. "You really never forget who you are for a moment."
"It's not that I won't forget. It's that the world will never let people forget who they are." Cai Zhao sighed lightly. "Let's drop it and talk about something else. When you ambushed Duan Jiuxiu, what did you take off him?"
Mu Qingyan narrowed his eyes like a beast whose pupils had slitted slightly. "You saw?"
"I saw."
"What do you think I took?"
"The manual of the Qi Nong Hand divine art." Cai Zhao's eyes curved into crescents, and she looked perfectly friendly. "Don't be stingy, Big Brother. Take it out and let me see."
Mu Qingyan looked at her steadily for a while. This was Cai Zhao: someone who would give up her last chance at survival for him, and who would still look at him sideways with suspicion every now and then.
From a hidden layer of his sealed leather pouch he took out a silk handkerchief embroidered with Qi Nong. Cai Zhao turned it over and over. Half the characters on it had dissolved in the water. "This is Nie Hengcheng's divine art manual? What a pity so many of the characters are gone."
"If you could read it, would you want to practice it?"
Cai Zhao lifted her head proudly. "No. If this art were really that powerful, why would Nie Hengcheng have died at my aunt's hands back then? I'll just practice my aunt's art!"
Mu Qingyan smiled slightly. "That's true enough. But in the end, Nie Hengcheng never mastered this art."
Cai Zhao asked curiously, "How do you know?"
"If he had mastered it completely, then even if your aunt had given everything to use the Heavenly Demon Dissolution technique, she could not have defeated Nie Hengcheng."
Cai Zhao slowly sat up straight. "How do you know so much?"
"Because I have seen this manual." Mu Qingyan said it one word at a time. "It is called the Purple Star Heart Sutra, handed down from the founding ancestors of the Sect two hundred years ago."
Cai Zhao was stunned. "What did you say? Nie Hengcheng's divine art is actually your Mu family's inherited art?"
Mu Qingyan said, "If I hadn't seen the remaining characters on this handkerchief, I wouldn't have known that what Nie Hengcheng practiced was the Purple Star Heart Sutra."
Cai Zhao's head was spinning. "How can this be? Wait, no. If Nie Hengcheng could dominate the world with this art, why didn't your Mu family practice it themselves?"
"Because it has been impossible to practice for a long time." Mu Qingyan gently wrung out the girl's dripping long hair for her. "According to the records in the Nine Provinces Treasure Pavilion, the first two Sect leaders did master the Purple Star Heart Sutra. Its power was said to be immense. On the day it was perfected, the heavens and earth changed color and rivers ran dry."
"You're just bragging! It's only a martial art. Why would the heavens change color, why would rivers run dry?" Cai Zhao retorted.
Mu Qingyan smiled and went on. "But from the third leader on, the Purple Star Heart Sutra grew harder and harder to practice. More than one Mu descendant who tried to cultivate it had his meridians severed and was left crippled."
"It was the eleventh leader who worked out the reason from the records of past generations. The world two hundred years ago was very different from the world that came after. There was no longer abundant spiritual energy or spirit stones, no inexhaustible spirit beasts and treasured weapons. What could once be practiced could no longer be practiced. After that, no leader in any generation practiced the Purple Star Heart Sutra."
Cai Zhao was puzzled. "But Nie Hengcheng did practice it. Otherwise his power couldn't have grown so fast. And his meridians weren't severed either, he didn't become a cripple."
Mu Qingyan raised his head and thought. "Yes. So my guess is that Nie Hengcheng found a way to cultivate the Purple Star Heart Sutra."
"The saliva of the snow-scaled dragon beast, then." Cai Zhao thought for a moment. "What a shame. I didn't know there was a snake den under that snow house, so I hid the ice bottle of saliva not far from it. After all the thrashing that giant python did, I don't know if the place is even still there."
Mu Qingyan glanced at the girl. "You don't need to test me. Even with the snow-scaled dragon beast's saliva, I wouldn't dare practice the Purple Star Heart Sutra. It has four tiers, and each tier is a barrier. The saliva is only the secret to the first. What about the other three? Nie Hengcheng may have learned the secrets of the earlier barriers, but in the end he never fully mastered the Purple Star Heart Sutra and died half-dead."
"Besides, my father warned me earnestly: if the Purple Star Heart Sutra could be practiced, why would so many brilliant Mu descendants of past generations have refused to? The ancestral instruction is 'never practice it, never practice it.' I think there must be a reason."
Cai Zhao shook her head and sighed as she handed the handkerchief back. Mu Qingyan crushed it in his palm, and it turned to powder at once. He said, "Enough. Let's think about how to get out of here."
Cai Zhao took off her outer robe, grieving as she did. "It's a pity about my Blazing Sun Blade. I don't know where it was swept off to. And Qian Xueshen, I don't know if he's even alive..."
Just then, footsteps sounded from somewhere not far off.
They were steady and open, with no attempt to hide.
Mu Qingyan and Cai Zhao were on guard at once. A woman in white, in her twenties, came into view.
Her skin was pale and her features delicate. She showed no alarm at the sight of the two of them, as casual as a neighbor dropping in for a visit. The moment she opened her mouth, she said, "You're awake? The hot spring water has receded. You two don't need to stay here any longer. Come, come out and follow me."