After Destroying My Cultivation, Master Went Insane When I Got Married!

“Degenerate disciple Chen Yuan. You defiled an Immortal Venerable, and you wear the shame as if it were a crown.”

High above the clouds, the Jiuhua Immortal Sect.

My master, Perfected Lord Lingxu, spoke with a voice like ten thousand years of black ice.

White robes without a speck on them. A face as flawless as a god’s, and not one degree of warmth in it.

Below his seat, several hundred disciples did not dare to breathe.

I knelt in the middle of the cold white-jade plaza with my spine straight.

Defiled?

When the qi deviation took your mind and left you raving, I held you steady with my own essence blood. To keep you alive.

And in your eyes that became defilement?

Blood rushed into my head and burst there in a roar.

I said nothing.

I knew what counted with Lingxu. Not right and wrong.

What counted was that the foremost man of the immortal Dao could not be allowed a single blemish.

I was the blemish.

“Today, This Venerable One will cut this bond of master and disciple with his own hands.”

He moved.

One hand, long and perfect as a piece of sculpture, settled on my back over my heart. Light as a fallen leaf.

No thunder. Only cold that went into the bone.

Something inside my spine was being dragged out of me.

My innate spirit bone.

The root that had let me stand first among the young generation at twenty.

“Aaaah!”

The pain tore me open. I could not hold myself still any longer, and my scream went up into the sky.

I felt it leave me inch by inch, trailing flesh and blood behind it.

Then something worse poured into my dantian.

Boom.

The sea of qi I had built over more than ten years burst, and was gone.

My spirit meridians snapped, one after another.

I slid down into the blood like a heap of wet clay.

Lingxu took his hand back. Not one drop had touched his fingertips.

He looked at the spirit bone in his palm, still glowing, slick with me, and his brows drew together a little, as though he were holding something filthy.

A flick of his wrist, and it crumbled to powder and blew away on the wind.

“Cast out from the sect gates. Never again to walk the immortal path.”

That was the last thing I heard before the dark took me.

Ten years later.

Jiangnan. Linshui Town.

“Chen Yuan, Auntie Wang at the corner is out of soy sauce. Run a bottle over.”

The voice came from the back room, soft and unhurried.

I put down the ledger and leaned out of the doorway. “Yes, dear. Going now.”

The voice belonged to my wife. Lin Wan.

An ordinary mortal girl. Neat features, gentle temper.

Three years ago I washed up in this town with nothing, and she took me in and gave me a home.

Now we keep a small general store. The days are plain, and they hold.

I picked up a bottle of soy sauce and walked out.

The afternoon sun lay warm across the street. Neighbors came and went. The whole lane smelled of smoke and fire, of people living.

I liked that smell.

It beat the lonely cold at the top of the world by ten thousand times.

Ruined dantian, severed meridians. I could not have wrung the neck of a chicken.

And my heart had never been so quiet.

I had barely reached the corner when a pack of thugs came swaggering up the lane.

The one in front, a scarred face, spotted me and grinned and planted himself in my way.

“Well now. If it isn’t Boss Chen. Where are you off to?”

I frowned.

These were the town’s petty toughs. They collected protection money and leaned on anyone who would bend.

“Delivering something for Auntie Wang,” I said.

Scarface took the bottle out of my hand and tossed it from palm to palm.

“Three years you’ve had this shop, Boss Chen, and not one copper of protection money. You think my brothers and me are nothing?”

Not again.

It irritated me.

It was not them I minded. I did not want Lin Wan to worry.

“Small business. There’s no money in it.”

“No money?” Scarface smashed the bottle on the stones. Soy sauce splashed up my trouser leg.

“That wife of yours, though. She looks like she’d fetch a price.”

His boys laughed behind him.

My face went flat.

My blood froze where it stood. Cold climbed from the soles of my feet to the crown of my head.

They could spit on me. They could not put her name in their mouths.

“Say that again.” My voice came out quiet. Something in it was not.

Scarface blinked at me, and then insult turned his face ugly.

“Huh. The pretty boy’s got a mouth on him now? You dare talk tough to your daddy? I’ll say it out loud, and then I’ll—”

He did not finish. Something moved too fast for him.

I moved.

To them I was an ordinary mortal.

They never saw the motion.

Then.

“Crack!”

One clean snap of bone.

The hand he had been reaching for me with folded the wrong way.

He stared at it for half a second, and then he squealed like a stuck pig.

“Ah! My hand! My hand’s broken!”

The others stood frozen.

One piece of trash, and it makes this much noise in front of me.

I looked at them without expression. Whatever was in my eyes, they could not read it.

Eyes like that are ground out of a man on mountains of corpses.

Cultivation or no cultivation, my body and my instincts were not things street rats could measure.

“Go.”

One word.

They scrambled off with their tails between their legs, hauling Scarface along with them.

I looked down at the stain on my trousers and sighed.

Wanwan is going to scold me for this.

I turned back for the shop to fetch another bottle.

I did not notice the young man in the upper window of the teahouse down the street, in fine clothes, who had watched the whole thing.

A smile of mild amusement pulled at his mouth. He fanned himself, slowly.

“Interesting. A man with a shattered dantian, and still hands like that.”

“Senior Brother Chen Yuan. Ten years. You’ve kept well.”

Chapter Two

Back at the store, Lin Wan was sorting goods behind the counter.

She saw the stain on my trousers and her brows went up.

“Chen Yuan! Careless again? Do you not look where you’re walking?”

I grinned, slipped around behind her, and put my arms around her.

“An accident. Purely an accident. I’ll fetch another bottle and take it over right now.”

She was soft, and she smelled of soap-pod.

She squirmed twice, then let me stay, and kept muttering.

“Clumsy hands. A grown man, and look at you.”

I rested my chin on her shoulder and breathed in the smell of her hair.

This is what a home is.

In ten years I had fallen out of the clouds into the mud, been looked down on by everyone, and learned what people are like when you have nothing.

Lin Wan was the light that got into all of it.

For her I would have given up anything I had.

“All right, all right. I’m sorry. Isn’t that enough?” I pleaded.

That got a laugh out of her. She turned and pinched my cheek.

“Good that you know it. Go on, Auntie Wang is waiting.”

“At your command, my lady.”

I took another bottle and shot out of the door.

Inside the shop, Lin Wan watched me go and shook her head, and her eyes were smiling.

She knew nothing about my past. To her I was a man with no parents who had come to this town to make a living.

I meant to keep it that way.

The killing, the blood, the years of it. The farther from her, the better.

I wanted to grow old with her and want nothing else.

The heavens did not consult me.

I had barely finished the delivery when I saw a stranger standing at my shop door.

A blue-green robe. A folding fan. A handsome face carrying an arrogance he could not be bothered to hide.

The young man from the teahouse.

Feng Qingyun.

My junior brother, once. The one who used to trail after me calling me Senior Brother, over and over, like a bird.

And the first man to step forward and cut himself loose from me when my cultivation was gone. The first to put his boot in while I was down.

Wonderful.

My heart dropped.

How had he found this place?

He saw me too. He closed the fan and came toward me, slow, wearing a smile that meant nothing.

“Senior Brother Chen Yuan. Ten years. I’ve missed you terribly.”

His eyes went over me, from my coarse cloth to my cloth shoes with the mud still on them. He did not trouble to hide the contempt.

“And look at you now. It really is a sad thing to see.”

I walked past him without a word and headed for my shop.

“I’m not your senior brother. You have the wrong man.”

The smile stuck on his face. Something ugly moved behind his eyes.

He flickered, and then he stood in front of me.

“What? Ten years as a mortal, and you haven’t the courage to admit you were a Jiuhua disciple?”

“Or does it shame the sect, having you?”

He did not raise his voice much. It carried far enough for the neighbors to hear every word.

Every head on the street turned. Curious. Measuring.

“Jiuhua Immortal Sect? Isn’t that the sect of immortals out of the old stories?”

“This shopkeeper’s an immortal?”

“An immortal keeping a grocery store? Don’t make me laugh.”

The talk came to me and my frown deepened.

“I told you. Wrong man.”

“Wrong man?” Feng Qingyun laughed, and his hand shot out for my shoulder.

“Let’s see how much of the old you is left in a body with no spirit bone.”

His hand came fast, a hard wind behind it.

A grip like that would crush an ordinary man’s shoulder blade to powder.

Courting death.

Something murderous came up out of the bottom of me.

I forced it down.

Not in front of Lin Wan.

His fingers were nearly on me when I turned my body a little, as if by accident, and was no longer where his hand was going.

At the same time the hand holding the bottle swung back behind me. Carelessly.

“Bang!”

The bottle took him square in the forehead.

Glass burst. Dark soy sauce and blood ran down his handsome face.

Feng Qingyun stood there, stunned.

He pressed a hand to his forehead and stared at me.

An inner sect disciple of the Jiuhua Immortal Sect, his head opened by a mortal with a bottle of soy sauce.

The worst insult of his life.

The street went quiet, and then it roared with laughter.

“Ha! Is the pretty boy here to make us laugh?”

“Who’s the big bad wolf now? One bottle from Boss Chen and he’s down.”

His face turned a mottled purple.

He stared at me as if he wanted to burn me where I stood.

“Chen! Yuan! You dare to strike me?”

“You walked into it.” I spread my hands. Innocent.

“You—”

He was shaking with rage. Spiritual power burst off him in a wave and the people around us staggered.

The neighbors backed away, frightened.

“The immortal… the immortal is angry!”

Lin Wan heard it and came running out of the shop, and all the color left her face.

“Chen Yuan!” She started toward me and the push of that power nearly took her off her feet.

I stepped in front of her and put her behind me.

“Feng Qingyun. You want to do this here?”

“The sect rules stand. No divine abilities in front of mortals. No harming the innocent.”

Some sense came back into him.

He gave me a look full of hate, then his eyes went to Lin Wan behind me, and a leer spread over his face.

“Fine. Fine. Chen Yuan, you’ve got nerve.”

“You think hiding here with a mortal wife will keep you safe?”

“Not a chance.”

“We’ll meet again, and soon.”

He pressed a hand to his bleeding forehead, and under the eyes of the whole street he turned into a streak of blue light and went up into the sky.

The danger was over.

Lin Wan was on me at once, checking me over.

“Are you all right? Are you hurt? Who was that man?”

I shook my head and patted her hand.

“Nothing. A madman. Let’s go inside.”

I took her in and shut the door.

But I knew this was nowhere near finished.

Feng Qingyun had come through my quiet life like a stone through a window.

Perfected Lord Lingxu. Did you send him?

Ten years. You still won’t let me be.

I looked out of the window, and my eyes went dark and far away.

Chapter Three

After Feng Qingyun fled, the town went back to its usual quiet.

My own mind did not.

That evening Lin Wan dressed the small cut on my forehead and talked the whole time.

“And you, of all people. Anyone could see he was no good. Why did you have to provoke him?”

“Next time you meet a man like that, walk the other way. Do you hear me?”

I looked at her worried face and something warm moved in my chest.

“I hear you. Whatever you say.”

“That’s more like it.” She nodded, satisfied, and her hands went gentler still.

Deep in the night, Lin Wan slept beside me, breathing evenly.

I did not sleep at all.

I got up without a sound and went out into the yard.

Moonlight lay across the little courtyard like water.

I held out my hand, palm up.

Threads of something only I could feel came in from every direction and turned, slowly, into a small whirl in the middle of my palm.

It was not spiritual qi.

It was… the smoke and fire of the mortal world.

The joy and grief of the town, its births and funerals, its illnesses and small recoveries. The plainest power there is, and the widest.

Ruined dantian, severed spirit meridians. I could not walk the immortal path again.

But ten years down in the red dust had knocked me onto a road nobody had walked.

The body for a furnace, melting down the seven passions and the six desires.

The heart for a cauldron, carrying the smoke and fire of the world.

No one had walked that road. No book recorded it.

Every step was by feel.

I looked like a mortal. My real strength was something I could not measure myself.

Against Feng Qingyun I had used less than one part in ten thousand of it.

I had not needed even that. My body alone would have flattened him.

But his coming had rung a bell.

Jiuhua had found me at last.

Perfected Lord Lingxu…

The name alone put a sharp pain through my chest.

My most respected master. The man who had hurt me worst.

I had thought that losing my cultivation and being cast out had settled the debt between us.

I had been a fool.

To him, the blemish had to be wiped out. Wiped out completely.

Feng Qingyun was only a test.

What came next would come like weather.

I had to be stronger.

Strong enough to keep this quiet life, mine and Lin Wan’s.

I closed my eyes and settled my mind, and the whirl in my palm began to turn, drinking the smoke and fire of the whole town.

One night, and nothing said.

Next day I opened as usual.

The neighbors looked at me differently now. A little careful.

Yesterday had hit them hard.

I paid it no mind and greeted them the way I always did.

The trouble came at noon.

Not Feng Qingyun.

A band of cultivators in identical black robes.

Every one of them looked like he had been fed on violence.

At their head was a hawk-nosed man in middle age, Golden Core, middle stage. A full realm above Feng Qingyun.

They came into town and walked straight to my shop.

“Which one of you is Chen Yuan?” The hawk-nosed man had a voice like a temple bell. It hurt the ears.

The townspeople had never seen anything like it and scattered.

Lin Wan was inside doing the accounts. She went pale and ran out.

I put her behind me and looked at them.

“That would be me.”

The hawk-nosed man looked me up and down with open scorn.

“A mortal? Young Master Feng let a piece of garbage like you put him on the ground?”

“Ten years of mortal life, and you’ve forgotten what you are.”

Young Master Feng?

So Feng Qingyun sent for help.

That made sense. In the sect he was an ordinary disciple, but the Feng clan behind him was a great clan in the cultivation world.

“What do you want?” I asked.

The hawk-nosed man showed his teeth.

“Nothing much. Young Master Feng says he doesn’t want to kill you. Too easy.”

“He wants you on your knees, a hundred slaps to your own face, and that pretty wife of yours sent to his bed. Then the matter’s closed.”

His words went off in my ears like thunder.

Killing intent came up out of me like a volcano.

Behind me, Lin Wan was shaking, her face white.

“You… you’re bandits! Is there no law left?” She found her courage.

“Law?” The hawk-nosed man laughed as if he had heard the joke of the year.

“In the cultivation world, the fist is the law.”

“Little beauty, I’d come along quietly if I were you. Save yourself the bruises.”

He reached out to touch her face.

That was the moment.

I moved.

No flourish. No spiritual power.

Only speed at its limit, and strength with nothing mixed into it.

To everyone watching, I blurred.

Then I was in front of the hawk-nosed man.

One hand closed on his throat like an iron clamp.

I lifted him off the ground.

“Urk—”

His feet kicked air. He clawed at my wrist, and his face was all terror and disbelief.

He could not work it out.

How did a mortal have speed and strength like that?

The true essence that guarded a middle Golden Core body: under my hand it was as thin as paper.

The other black-robed cultivators froze.

“Let… let the boss go!”

“You’re a dead man!”

They drew their magic tools and came at me.

I did not even turn my head.

I held the hawk-nosed man by the throat and swung my other hand back, once, without aim.

A wall of air went out from it.

“Bang, bang, bang!”

Those cultivators and their magic tools burst into red mist, as if a hammer the size of a house had come down on them.

Blood and shreds of meat covered the flagstones in front of my shop.

The smell of it filled the street.

The whole lane went quiet as a grave.

Everyone stood frozen at the sight.

Lin Wan had both hands over her mouth. There was terror in her eyes, and behind the terror something else.

She was looking at me the way you look at a stranger.

I did not look at anyone else.

I looked down at the man still kicking in my hand, and my voice had nothing in it at all.

“My woman. You thought you could touch her.”

“In your next life, be born blind.”

I closed my hand.

“Crack!”

His throat bones gave way.

I tossed the body into the blood like a bag of rubbish.

Then I turned to Lin Wan, who stood there white as paper.

The killing intent had not left me yet. My eyes were still hard.

I knew what I had done to her.

I opened my mouth to explain something, and my throat was dry, and no word came.

She looked at me, shaking, tears standing in her eyes.

She did not ask me anything.

She ran to me and held on.

“I’m scared…” Her voice broke.

My body went rigid, and then the cold killing thing in me drained away.

I put my arms around her and patted her back.

“Don’t be. I’m here.”

I’m sorry, Wanwan. I frightened you.

But anyone who tries to hurt you dies. That is the whole of it.

Chapter Four

The bloody mess was cleared away by the town authorities quickly enough.

Nobody dared ask me anything.

The world of mortals keeps the rules of mortals.

But when power goes past the rules, the rules step aside.

The store stayed shut.

Lin Wan was restless all day. She asked nothing, and her head was full of questions, and fear.

I did not know how to explain any of it to her.

Tell her I had been an immortal, high up, and that my master had taken my cultivation away?

Tell her I had killed more men than I could count, and that my hands had never been clean?

I was afraid she would leave me.

That evening I cooked a few plain dishes to cheer her up.

The table was quiet.

Lin Wan spoke first.

“Chen Yuan… will they come back?” Her voice shook a little.

I put down my chopsticks and took her hand.

Her hand was cold.

“They will.” I did not lie to her.

Men of the Feng clan were dead. The Feng clan would not let that go.

And behind them stood the Jiuhua Immortal Sect, watching.

Her face went whiter.

“Then… what do we do? Do we go to the magistrate?”

She was an ordinary girl. The only answers she had were the answers of ordinary people.

I shook my head and looked into her eyes. “Wanwan, there are things the magistrate has no power over.”

“All I need is for you to trust me. I can keep you safe.”

She looked at me, and there was a great deal in her face.

After a long while she nodded.

“I trust you.”

She was still afraid. She chose to believe me anyway.

Warmth went through me, and my mind settled.

After the meal I sent her to rest.

I sat alone in the yard and looked up at the moon.

I need to be stronger, and soon.

The Feng clan was the beginning.

The real danger was Lingxu.

Against Golden Core or Nascent Soul cultivators I was more than enough as I stood.

Against a man half a step into Tribulation Transcendence, I would be throwing an egg at a wall.

I needed more smoke and fire.

Linshui Town was too small. What it could give me had reached its limit.

I needed somewhere bigger.

A city with more people in it, and more life.

I was still turning this over when a streak of blue light came down out of the sky and landed in my yard.

Feng Qingyun.

He had changed his clothes and the wound on his forehead had healed, but his face was darker than before.

He looked at me, then reached out with his senses and found no trace of the men he had sent. His pupils shrank.

“Where are they?” he demanded.

“Dead.” I said it the way a man says a thing that does not matter.

His breath caught.

“You killed them? Impossible. Steward Zhang was Golden Core, middle stage. How could you—”

He stopped himself halfway.

He stared at me, and there was doubt in him now, and it was eating him.

“Your… your cultivation… no. There’s no spiritual power coming off you at all…”

Idiot.

Who told you a man without spiritual power is a dead thing?

I ignored his shock. “Feng Qingyun. I wanted nothing more to do with the Jiuhua Immortal Sect.”

“You people have come at me again and again.”

“And you should not have touched my woman.”

My voice was level. Something in it made his heart jump anyway.

“What… what are you going to do?” He took a step back without meaning to.

“Nothing much.” I stood up and walked toward him.

“I only want you to know that a wrong has a price.”

Every step I took, the pressure coming off me climbed.

It was not spiritual power. It was something simpler, out of the root of being alive.

He felt a mountain come down on him and could barely breathe.

The cultivation he was so proud of could not put one thought of resistance in him.

“What… what kind of monster are you?” he screamed.

“The kind you cannot afford.”

I stopped in front of him and put out a hand and patted his face, lightly.

“Go home. Tell the Feng clan. Tell Lingxu as well.”

“My business is my own.”

“If there is a next time, what comes back will not be bodies. It will be ash.”

I took my hand back and went inside.

Feng Qingyun did not move. His clothes were soaked through with cold sweat.

Only when I was gone behind the door did his strength leave him, and he sat down hard on the ground and dragged at the air.

He looked after me, and in his eyes, under the hatred, there was a fear that came from somewhere deeper than thought.

At the same hour.

The Jiuhua Immortal Sect. Lingxu Hall.

Perfected Lord Lingxu, seated high on his cloud couch, opened his eyes.

In those flat, still eyes of his, something moved for the first time.

“The smoke and fire of the world, and the red dust for a Dao…”

“Impossible. Quite impossible.”

He counted on his fingers and his face changed.

“A Golden Core cultivator of the Feng clan. Dead?”

“Chen Yuan… degenerate disciple. Ten years, and you hand me a surprise this size.”

His voice was cold as ever.

But under the cold there was something he had not noticed in himself. Unease.

He rose and came down from the couch.

“It seems the time has come for your Master to see you himself.”

Chapter Five

Feng Qingyun ran, and he did not run well.

I knew what came next would be weather of another kind.

I had to get Lin Wan out of this town.

Next morning I told her I wanted to take her south to Suzhou. Bigger city, more trade, room for the store to grow.

She was surprised, and she did not argue.

She is a clever woman. Yesterday had told her this town was finished as a hiding place.

“All right. Whatever you think.” Her voice was soft.

We packed light, left the store with a neighbor we trusted, and started south.

We did not take a cultivator’s flying treasure. We hired a carriage like ordinary people.

I wanted her to have time to get used to things, and I wanted to take in as much smoke and fire along the road as I could.

The carriage rocked. South, all the way.

Inside, Lin Wan leaned on my shoulder and watched the country go by backward.

“Chen Yuan, are we really going to Suzhou?” she asked, quietly.

“Mm. It’s a fine place. There’s a saying, about Suzhou and Hangzhou being the finest spots under heaven. You’ll like it.” I smiled.

“That’s not what I meant.” She shook her head, sat up, and looked at me. “I meant, are we running away?”

I said nothing.

After a while I nodded.

“More or less.”

“Will they come after us?”

“Yes.”

Fear went across her face and then something harder took its place.

“Wherever it is, I’m with you.”

Something in me turned over, and I held her tight.

Wanwan. I will not let anyone hurt you.

Three days on the road brought us into empty hills.

It was getting dark. The driver suggested we stop at an old shrine in the woods and go on in the morning.

I agreed.

The shrine had one broken idol in it and a pile of dry grass.

The driver made a fire and we ate cold rations.

He was asleep soon after dark, snoring like a saw.

Lin Wan grew sleepy too and dozed against me.

I did not let myself rest.

From the moment we entered those hills I had felt a killing intent, faint, coming and going.

So it’s tonight.

I laid Lin Wan down and covered her with the dry grass.

Then I walked to the shrine door and looked out at the black trees.

“You’re here. Stop skulking.” I said it without lifting my voice.

In the quiet of the night it carried a long way.

Something moved in the woods.

Some ten or more shadows came out of the dark from every side and closed around the shrine.

At their head was an old man in a blood-red robe.

His face was dried and sunken, and his eyes had a red shine in them. His cultivation: Nascent Soul, early stage.

“Heh heh heh. Sharp senses, brat.” The laugh was an ugly sound.

“The Feng clan hired an Elder of the Bloodfiend Sect. I should be flattered.” I knew the cut of them.

The Bloodfiend Sect: a sect of the demonic path with a name for butchery and for killing anyone in the way.

“The Feng clan paid one million spirit stones for your head.” The old man licked his cracked lips. “So. Do you cut your own throat, brat, or does this old man walk you out?”

“One million spirit stones, and they send one early Nascent Soul and a pack of Golden Core rubbish?”

I shook my head, and let some of the disappointment show.

“The Feng clan gets cheaper every year.”

The old man’s face closed up.

“Brave words for a man about to die.”

“Take him. Cut the man to pieces and feed him to the dogs. The woman… heh. Alive. This old man will enjoy her.”

At his word ten or more Bloodfiend disciples came at me, howling.

Red blades and red shadows, ugly in the dark.

Ants.

I did not even bother with the smoke and fire.

Against the demonic cultivators coming at me, I took one step forward.

One step down.

“Boom!”

A drum the size of a valley went off under my foot.

A ring of air, thick enough to see, went out from me.

The ones in front never got a scream out. Their bodies came apart in the air.

Blood came down like rain.

The ones behind were scared out of their wits and pulled up short.

The old man’s eyes went wide with horror.

“Body cultivator! You’re a body cultivator!”

“No… even a body cultivator could not kill that many Golden Core cultivators with one step!”

“Who are you?”

He was afraid.

This young man who looked like a mortal gave off a danger he had no name for.

The fear a rabbit has for a hawk, before it knows why.

I did not answer him.

I looked at the falling blood and frowned.

This will wake Wanwan.

Then I was gone from where I stood.

The old man’s instincts screamed. He threw out his natal treasure, a bone shield the color of blood, and put it between us.

He spat out a mouthful of essence blood and worked the blood-escape art to get clear.

It was too late.

A hand came through the shield. Through the true essence wrapped around his body. It settled on the crown of his head.

“You—”

He went rigid, and his eyes were all despair.

His demonic arts, his unbreakable treasure: none of it was there when he needed it.

“Noise.”

Two words, flat.

I closed my fingers.

“Bang!”

His head went the way of a ripe watermelon.

Red and grey spattered the ground.

The body stood a moment and then folded down, headless.

From my first move to the last, a few breaths.

No wasted motion anywhere in it.

I shook my hand out, though there was nothing on it, and walked back into the shrine.

Lin Wan was still asleep. The noise outside had not reached her.

I let out a breath and sat down beside her again.

I looked at her sleeping face until the killing quieted in me.

If I have to be a demon to keep this quiet, then I will be a demon.

What I did not know:

at the moment I closed my hand on the old man’s head,

a thousand li away, in the ancestral ground of the Feng clan,

in the shrine hall, a lamp that held the old man’s soul-fire went out with a small sound.

The disciple tending the hall went white and ran for the clan head.

The Feng clan head, a severe man in middle age, heard him out, and his face turned the color of iron.

“An Elder at early Nascent Soul. Dead as well?”

Beside him, Feng Qingyun had no blood left in his face.

“Impossible… that’s not possible… how did he do it…”

The clan head struck him across the face.

“Idiot! What kind of monster did you bring down on this house?”

He walked the floor, his face going one way and then the other.

Then he set his jaw and came to a decision.

“Prepare gifts. Heavy ones. And you will come with me—to the Jiuhua Immortal Sect.”

“This is beyond us now. Only Perfected Lord Lingxu can settle it.”

Chapter Six

With the Bloodfiend Sect’s people dealt with, the rest of the night was quiet.

Next morning the sun came through the holes in the shrine roof.

Lin Wan woke slowly and stretched.

“I slept so well.” She rubbed her eyes, with no idea what had happened out there.

I smiled. “You did. So did I.”

The driver woke too, yawned his way out of the shrine, and saw the dark red stains on the ground. He nearly jumped out of his skin.

“What… what is this? Were there animals out here?”

“A few wolves. I chased them off.” I said it without weight.

He did not believe me and did not dare ask more. He hitched the horses and hurried us on.

The rest of the road was clear.

Nobody else came to die.

The Feng clan was frightened. I understood that much.

They were waiting.

Waiting for someone who could settle the whole thing with one blow.

Five days later we came to Suzhou.

The moment we were through the gate, the noise and the sheer abundance of the place made Lin Wan’s eyes go wide.

Wide streets. Shops packed shoulder to shoulder. Crowds that never thinned.

The city held a hundred times the people of Linshui Town, and more.

To me it was a treasury.

In the air hung the smoke and fire of the mortal world, so thick it was almost a substance.

I breathed in, and every cell in me stood up and cheered.

This is the place.

We took rooms at an inn.

Lin Wan pulled me out to walk the streets.

I went, laughing.

We went hand in hand through the lanes like any ordinary couple.

When she saw a hairpin she liked she would stop and hold it up against her hair and think about it.

When she saw food she liked she would buy one and feed me the first bite.

Her face was full of it, and my own heart was full.

It was more real than the breakthrough that once opened a higher realm to me. It was better.

We took a shopfront in the busiest part of the city and got ready to open again.

This time we were not short of money.

What I had taken off the demonic cultivators was enough to live on silk and fine food for years.

The days went by, quiet and warm.

My strength grew without my noticing.

Every day I sat in the shop and let the city live around me, and the power came in and did not stop coming.

My body was changing.

Muscle, bone, meridian: all of it getting stronger in a way I had no name for.

I thought my body now might be a match for the best body refining treasures ever made.

If the old man in the blood robe came at me again, I would not need to move. A look would do it. His mind would come apart, and his body with it.

One day I was dozing behind the counter.

Lin Wan was in the back washing clothes.

A person I did not expect came into the shop.

A little girl in a rich brocade robe, seven or eight years old.

Two braids. A face like a doll’s.

Her eyes did not belong to that face. They were older, and sharp.

And the spiritual power coming off her made my skin prickle.

The Late Stage of Nascent Soul.

A child of seven or eight, at the Late Stage of Nascent Soul.

It was absurd.

“You are Chen Yuan?” Her voice was clear and carried the tone of someone speaking down a well.

I opened my eyes and sat up.

“Little girl. You’re looking for me?”

“Don’t call me little girl.” Her brows drew down. She hated the words.

“My name is Honglian. I am the Young Palace Mistress of Danxia Palace.”

Danxia Palace?

What I knew about them came up quickly.

A second-rate sect famous for its alchemy. Not weak. Quiet, by habit.

“The Young Palace Mistress of Danxia Palace. What does she want with a general store run by a mortal?” I asked, as if I did not know.

She sniffed and put her hands behind her back like a small official and walked a circle around my shop.

“I have heard about you.”

“A castoff the Jiuhua Immortal Sect stripped of his cultivation, and ten years later he kills Golden Core and Nascent Soul cultivators one after another.”

“You interest me.”

Her eyes came to rest on me the way a hand rests on an interesting toy.

“What you cultivate is not spiritual power. It is something I have never seen.”

“So. What did you stumble onto?”

I laughed.

“Little girl. Too much curiosity is bad for the health.”

“Insolence!” Her brows shot up, and a wave of pressure rolled over me.

Enough pressure to crack a mountain. It reached me and went in like a stone dropped into deep water. No ripple, no sound.

I sat where I was, smiling a little.

Her pupils shrank.

“You… you can ignore my pressure?”

“That is not possible. Even a Spirit Transformation cultivator who refines his body could not do it so easily.”

The amusement went out of her face. What replaced it was heavier.

“Who are you?”

I did not answer. “You didn’t come here only to satisfy your curiosity.”

She took a breath and made herself be calm.

She looked me over again, and it took her a while to speak. “I came to make a trade with you.”

“Oh? What trade?”

“Danxia Palace will shelter you.” She put it down like a heavy stone.

“Say yes, and from then on neither the Feng clan nor the Jiuhua Immortal Sect will dare touch a hair on you.”

I looked at her with some interest.

“And the price? There is no free lunch in this world.”

A small, pleased smile appeared on her face.

“The price is simple.”

“Hand over the method you cultivate.”

Chapter Seven

“Hand over the method?”

I had to laugh.

What a child.

She thinks the name of Danxia Palace is enough to make me hand over the thing I stand on.

Honglian did not like the laughing.

“What is funny? Do you know how many rogue cultivators would break their necks for the shelter of my Danxia Palace?”

“The head of the Feng clan is kneeling outside the Jiuhua Immortal Sect gates with Feng Qingyun. Three days and three nights now.”

“Perfected Lord Lingxu has said nothing yet, but a man like him will come down the mountain to clean his own house sooner or later.”

“And when he does, do you think you will still be breathing?”

What she said confirmed what I already knew.

The storm was coming.

“So your meaning is that I have no choice but to accept?” I asked.

“You could put it that way.” She lifted her small chin, entirely certain of herself.

“I am giving you a chance. You should thank me.”

I shook my head and stood up.

“Little girl. I appreciate the thought.”

“But my affairs are not for outsiders to arrange.”

“I won’t hand the method over. I don’t need the shelter.”

“The door is that way. I won’t see you out.”

I showed her the door.

Her face changed at once.

She had come down from her height to recruit a “mortal,” and been refused without a second thought.

Her pride had taken the blow, and she felt it.

“You… don’t push your luck!” Her small face went red with anger.

“I will give you one last chance. When Lingxu comes, you will beg me, and it will be too late.”

I said nothing more. I only looked at her.

Flat, deep, the way you look at a child throwing a fit.

Something in that look made her uneasy, and the pride she was born with would not stand up under it.

She ground her teeth and did not dare lose her temper.

This man was too strange. Too far outside her reckoning.

She could not read him at all.

“Fine. Fine!”

“Chen Yuan. I will remember you.”

“And I want to see how you die without Danxia Palace behind you.”

She threw that down, turned, and stamped off.

I watched her small back go and shook my head.

The trouble keeps piling up.

One Feng clan. One Jiuhua Immortal Sect. Now a Danxia Palace.

My wish for a quiet life was finished.

Not long after she left, Lin Wan came out from the back.

“Who was that little girl? She was adorable.” She was curious.

“Someone asking directions.” I brushed it off.

I did not want her carrying any of it.

But the story moved faster than I could have guessed.

“Chen Yuan, the Jiuhua castoff, ten years and he has found a supreme method, his body has become a holy vessel, and he cuts down Nascent Souls one after another!”

Where it started, nobody knew. It went through the Jiangnan cultivation world and past it, like something with wings.

Inside a few days the name Chen Yuan was in every cultivator’s mouth.

Some did not believe it. Nonsense, they said.

A man with a ruined spirit bone and a shattered dantian, cutting down Nascent Souls inside ten years?

Some half believed. Where there is smoke, they said.

And some believed every word, and wanted it.

A method that could put real power in the hands of a mortal.

What kind of heaven-defying thing was that?

Get that method, and the Great Dao to heaven was yours to walk.

Suzhou began to stir.

Cultivators came in from everywhere, openly and quietly, and gathered in the busy city.

Sharks that had smelled blood, all of them looking at one small general store.

Strangers began to appear at my door.

Some came to test me. Some pretended to shop and reached out with their spiritual sense. Some laid formations in the dark to trap me.

I paid none of them any mind.

To me they were ants.

So long as they did not come to die, and did not disturb my life with Lin Wan, I could not be bothered.

They took my patience for weakness.

Then one of them could not wait.

That night three shadows came over the wall of my back yard like ghosts.

All three were at Nascent Soul, and their qi was cold. The demonic path, without question.

They thought they were unseen. Every move they made was in my hand.

I was in bed with Lin Wan asleep beside me.

I did not open my eyes.

I only turned my mind.

The smoke and fire that filled Suzhou, that was in every street and every house, came to a boil.

Three invisible forces found the three demonic cultivators and held them.

“Pff.”

“Pff.”

“Pff.”

Three soft sounds.

The three Nascent Soul cultivators, who had walked in like lords, burst into red mist without a sound, and the night took them.

I turned over and held Lin Wan closer.

Good night, my world.

What I did not know:

at that hour, outside the gates of the Jiuhua Immortal Sect,

Perfected Lord Lingxu, whose eyes had been shut, opened them.

He looked at the Feng clan head and Feng Qingyun, kneeling on the ground, worn down to nothing, and his voice had no ripple in it.

“The Feng clan’s business. This Venerable One has heard it.”

The clan head was overjoyed and knocked his head against the stones.

“We beg the Perfected Lord to give the Feng clan justice!”

Lingxu did not look at him. He raised his head and looked south.

His gaze went through ten thousand li of empty air and came down on that busy city.

Came down on the small general store.

“Degenerate disciple…”

“Ten years, and your wings have grown hard.”

“Hard enough to defy This Venerable One’s will, again and again.”

He rose.

Something came up off him that turned the color of the sky.

Over the whole Jiuhua Immortal Sect the clouds changed and the sun went dark.

Every disciple shook under that pressure and went down on his face.

“So be it.”

“Your Master will go to Jiangnan himself.”

“Cut this bond, and while I am there, have a look at this Red Dust Dao of yours.”

He spoke, and was not there.

Chapter Eight

Lingxu had come down from the mountain.

The news went through the cultivation world like a magnitude-twelve earthquake.

The foremost man of the immortal path had not stepped off Mount Jiuhua in a hundred years.

And now, for one castoff, he had come down himself.

Every eye in the world turned to Suzhou.

They knew a great play was about to be put on.

Cultivators came in from all four directions, wanting to see it with their own eyes.

The city grew heavy.

The air had the weight that comes before a storm.

The mortals did not know what was happening. Their bodies knew something was.

There were fewer people on the streets.

My general store stayed open.

I sat behind the counter wiping a blue-and-white vase. My hands were steady.

Lin Wan had felt it too. She had gone quiet these last days, and stayed near me, sorting goods she had already sorted.

She did not ask. She was afraid for me. I knew that.

Afternoon.

The sky went dark.

It was still day, and the light drained out of the sky as though someone had poured ink into it.

A pressure came down and covered the whole city.

Every mortal in Suzhou felt his legs give way and went down on his knees and bowed toward the sky without knowing why.

In the inns and the teahouses the cultivators who had come to watch went white; the weaker ones coughed blood and fell where they stood.

“It’s Perfected Lord Lingxu!”

“He’s here!”

“That pressure. Is this what half a step into Tribulation Transcendence feels like?”

Everyone stood appalled.

Next to that power they were grains of dust.

Only my general store stood apart, a clean patch of ground in the middle of it.

The pressure that could flatten a mountain came within three feet of my door and went out like snow in summer.

Lin Wan had gone white. She held my sleeve with both hands.

I patted her hand. “Don’t be afraid. Stay inside. Don’t come out.”

I put the vase down, stood, and walked to the door.

I looked up.

In the thick black cloud one white figure was coming down, slowly.

White robes without a stain on them. A beauty that stopped the breath.

That face, too fine to be a man’s, exactly as it had been ten years ago. Time had left nothing on it.

Only the eyes were colder than ten years ago, and deeper, as though a sky of stars had been folded into them.

Perfected Lord Lingxu.

My master.

He had come.

He hung in the air and looked through the crowd and found me.

Our eyes met.

Everything stopped.

Ten years of debt, ten years of distance, all of it came up at once.

Master…

You came. In the end, you came.

A pain I knew very well went through my chest.

Not fear. Disappointment.

I had imagined our meeting more times than I could count.

I had not imagined this. The two of us on opposite sides of a blade.

Lingxu looked at me and his brows moved, very slightly.

He was surprised.

Surprised that I could stand straight under that weight with nothing on my face.

“Chen Yuan.”

He spoke.

Not loudly. Every ear in the city heard it.

It carried a weight that did not allow for argument.

“Ten years. You have come a long way.”

“Far enough to look your Master in the face.”

He spoke the way a man corrects a child who does not know better.

I said nothing. I looked at him.

“They tell me you invented a Red Dust Dao.”

“And killed a number of the Feng clan, and of the Bloodfiend Sect.”

“Who gave a castoff the nerve to raise this kind of weather outside my sect, and drag the name of Jiuhua through the mud?”

His voice fell colder with every word, and the pressure in the sky grew with it.

The city trembled.

It felt as though it would be ground to powder at any moment.

Drag your name through the mud?

In all this time, when did I ever use the name of the Jiuhua Immortal Sect?

To you, my being alive is the offense. Isn’t that so.

Something cold laughed inside me.

“Master.”

I spoke at last.

“Ten years, and you are still so sure of yourself.”

The whole city drew breath.

Mad.

This Chen Yuan had gone mad.

To stand up to Perfected Lord Lingxu in front of the world.

Something hard moved through Lingxu’s eyes.

“Insolence.”

“Degenerate disciple. Ten years among mortals has not blunted you.”

“It has only made you forget your place.”

“So be it.”

He lifted his hand.

“Today your Master will wipe this blemish off the world with his own hand.”

“And let the world see what comes of defying This Venerable One.”

Chapter Nine

Lingxu lifted his hand.

The world went still.

Every heart in the city stopped and waited.

They knew the foremost man of the immortal path was about to strike.

What would a blow from him look like?

Would Chen Yuan, who had no sense of death, be scattered into ash?

But Lingxu did not strike.

His eyes went past me, to the half of Lin Wan showing in the shop doorway, her face all worry.

His brows drew down further.

“For a mortal woman. Is it worth this?” he asked.

“You were a talent of a generation. If you had not let your heart move that year, your achievement today might stand above mine.”

“And now, for her, you make an enemy of me, and of the whole immortal path?”

This again.

Your Great Dao is all that counts with you. Everything else can be thrown away. Isn’t that so.

I laughed. It came out sour.

“Master, you practice the Dao of Supreme Detachment. You cut away the passions and look at all living things as ants.”

“How would you know what it is to have something to protect?”

“She is not a weight on me.”

I turned my head and looked at Lin Wan, and my eyes went soft.

“She is my whole world.”

Lin Wan heard it, and her eyes went red, and the tears came whether she wanted them or not.

Something crossed Lingxu’s face, and then the cold came down over it again.

“Willfully blind.”

He shook his head, as though he had given up on me.

“This Venerable One will give you one last chance.”

His voice had the sound of a sentence being passed.

“Put this mortal aside. Destroy this Red Dust Dao of yours, this thing that is neither one way nor the other.”

“Come back to Mount Jiuhua with me and start again on the orthodox immortal path, under my seat.”

“This Venerable One will let the past go.”

The city could not believe it.

Perfected Lord Lingxu was offering Chen Yuan another chance?

What a gift.

Feng Qingyun and the Feng clan head were sweating through their clothes.

They did not want him taken back into the Jiuhua Immortal Sect.

Everyone expected me to say yes.

This was Lingxu. The foremost man of the immortal path.

To be taken back under him was the dream of every cultivator alive.

I shook my head.

“Thank you for your ’kindness,’ Master.”

“But those on different roads cannot walk together.”

“Your immortal path is too cold, and too high. It does not fit me.”

“I prefer my world, with all its smoke and fire in it.”

There was no give in it anywhere.

The square went silent.

They looked at me the way people look at a madman.

He refused.

He actually refused.

Lingxu’s face settled into something final.

On that face, which had not changed in ten thousand years, anger showed.

“Well. Well said. Those on different roads cannot walk together.”

He laughed, and there was fury in the sound.

“It seems This Venerable One has been too kind to you.”

“Since you are set on dying, your Master will oblige.”

The words fell.

He did not hesitate again.

The raised hand pressed down, gently.

No thunder. No light that could level a city.

A small, simple movement.

And in my senses the whole space above Suzhou froze and fell in.

A power there are no words for took the shape of an invisible hand and came down on my head.

This was the power of law.

What Lingxu could draw out of the world itself, having taken his own Dao as far as a man can take it.

Under that palm, a Nascent Soul is an ant and a Spirit Transformation is ash.

Even a great cultivator at Tribulation Transcendence would not take it head on.

Everyone closed their eyes.

They had already seen it: me and the small general store wiped away, gone out of the world.

Lin Wan cried out.

“Chen Yuan!”

And then.

At the instant the invisible hand was about to land.

I moved.

I raised my hand as well.

Not to block it.

I pushed, gently, forward.

The way a man pushes open his own gate.

Chapter Ten

I pushed forward, gently.

An ordinary movement. A man pushing open the gate of his own yard.

No spiritual power. No law. No weight of presence.

Only an intent.

An intent out of the mortal world, belonging to the red dust.

Then.

The invisible hand that could crush the sky and level mountains stopped dead, three feet above my head.

As though it had struck a wall no one could see.

No. Not a wall.

A sea.

A sea of the smoke and fire of the mortal world, made out of every joy and grief, every birth and death of the million and more mortals of Suzhou.

“Fwump—”

A sound so small it was almost not there.

Lingxu’s killing blow, with all the power of law in it, came apart without a sound.

No explosion. No shock.

A drop of water going into the ocean.

Not one ripple.

The world went quiet as a held breath.

Time stopped where it stood.

Every eye in the city was wide, every mouth open, and no one moved, as though they had been carved out of wood.

What had they just seen?

Lingxu’s killing blow. Stopped.

Stopped as easily as a man waves off a fly.

How?

Up in the sky.

On that face frozen for ten thousand years, something showed for the first time. Shock.

His pupils shrank.

He stared at me and could not make it fit.

“You…”

He wanted to say something and found his throat dry.

“Master.”

I lowered my hand and looked up at him with a small smile.

“Your Dao is too high, and too far.”

“You look down on all living things and never learned that their strength can shake the sky.”

“This is my Dao.”

“My Red Dust Dao.”

Every ear in the city heard me.

Every word landed on their hearts like a hammer on a nail.

The Red Dust Dao.

This was the method that could give a mortal real power?

This?

In the crowd, Honglian, the Young Palace Mistress of Danxia Palace, had her mouth open in a small round O, and her pretty eyes were full of shock, and of regret.

She understood now how ridiculous her offer had been.

The man did not need anyone’s shelter.

He was the strongest thing there.

The Feng clan head and Feng Qingyun had gone the color of ash, and they shook where they stood.

They understood what they had put their hands into.

It was not a monster.

It was a god.

“Impossible. This cannot be.”

Lingxu’s voice came out thin. He could not take it in.

The immortal path he was so proud of, the power of law he had spent a thousand years building, brushed aside by a castoff he had ruined with his own hand, in a way he had never heard of and would have laughed at.

It broke something in his understanding. His dao heart shook.

“I don’t believe it!”

He shouted it, and something wild came into his eyes.

“Mortal will, a side door, a crooked path. And you dare call it a Great Dao?”

“Watch me break it.”

He made a seal with both hands and a sword came up behind him, a shadow of a sword that ran from the earth to the sky.

The Jiuhua Immortal Sect’s crowning art. The Nine Heavens Profound Clarity Sword.

One stroke of it could cut the sun and the moon.

“Cut!”

He put two fingers together like a blade and swept them at me.

The sword tore the air open and came down on my head, sword intent sharp enough to cut anything.

Ten times the force of the palm.

Under that sword intent the whole city began to split apart.

I had not moved.

I looked at the sword coming down and shook my head, slowly.

“Master. Don’t you understand yet?”

“In my world, I am unbeatable.”

I raised two fingers.

Index and middle.

In front of every horrified eye in Suzhou, I caught the tip of that sky-high sword between them.

“Ting—”

A clean ring of metal.

The sword stopped, held by two fingers, and could not go one hair further.

The sword qi that could tear a soul swirled around my fingertips and could not cut the skin.

“…”

The world went quiet again.

If stopping that palm had been a shock.

Then catching the Nine Heavens Profound Clarity Sword between two fingers was a miracle.

Every mind in the city stopped working.

There were no words left for what they were feeling.

“Krrk…”

A small sound of something giving way.

Under Lingxu’s horrified eyes.

I closed my two fingers a little.

The sword that was made of law and spiritual power broke apart in pieces.

It came apart into points of light and went out in the air.

“Puh—!”

Lingxu took the blow as though it had landed on his body and spat out a mouthful of golden blood, and staggered where he hung.

His life-bound divine ability had been broken, and he was badly hurt.

He looked at me, and there was fear in him, and confusion, and something like despair.

“You… you…”

He pointed at me, and his lips moved, and nothing came out.

His dao heart broke, there and then.

Chapter Eleven

Lingxu’s dao heart was broken.

The immortal path he had spent a thousand years on, the thing he was proudest of, lay flattened in front of my Red Dust Dao.

That hurt worse than dying.

“Why… how did this…”

He muttered it with his mind somewhere else, his eyes empty, as though a thousand years had come down on him at once.

He was no longer the Immortal Venerable who looked down on the world from above.

He was a man whose faith had come down on top of him, and who did not know where he was.

I looked at him and felt nothing like triumph. Only a long sadness.

Master. Is this the answer you wanted?

I did not strike him again.

Killing him would have been nothing.

What would it have been for?

The worse punishment was to let him watch everything he had held on to come down.

“Go.”

I said it flatly.

“Back to your Mount Jiuhua. Keep your Dao of Supreme Detachment.”

“From today the debt between master and disciple is cancelled.”

“Don’t come near my life again.”

It sounded like a sentence being read out.

The end of the last thing that had been between us.

Lingxu’s whole body moved, and he lifted his head and looked at me, and there was too much in his face to name.

Refusal. Regret. Confusion. And under all of it, something that might have been a plea.

A plea for what?

For my forgiveness?

Too late.

From the moment you pulled the spirit bone out of my back, it was too late for all of it.

I stopped looking at him and turned to go back to my shop.

My world was in there, waiting for me.

And as I turned.

Something wild came off Lingxu, the smell of a man who means to take everything down with him.

“Degenerate disciple!”

“Even if my Dao is wrong, you will not walk away clean!”

“This Venerable One will die today if he must, and take this aberration down with him!”

He had gone mad.

With his dao heart broken there was nothing left holding him.

He chose the most extreme way out there is. He would blow himself apart.

The blast of a half-step Tribulation Transcendence cultivator would level plain ground for a thousand li around.

Suzhou, and the millions of lives in it, would be gone in one breath.

“No!”

“The Perfected Lord has gone mad!”

“Run!”

The cultivators who had come to watch went white with terror and ran for the gates.

It was too late for that.

Lingxu’s body swelled like a bladder blown past its limit, and light came off him that could end the world.

At the shop door Lin Wan screamed.

“Chen Yuan!”

I turned my head, and my eyes went cold.

Madman.

If you want to die, that is yours to do.

But you will not take my Wanwan with you, and you will not take the innocent people of this city.

At the moment when every soul there thought the end had come.

I moved again.

I did not try to stop him.

I opened my hand toward the sky and closed it.

“Stop.”

One word.

Then.

The whole world was a held breath.

The wind stopped.

The clouds stood still.

The cultivators in flight froze where they were, in whatever shape their fear had left them.

Even the destroying light around Lingxu set like ice.

Time and space were mine in that moment.

I took one step and was in front of him.

I looked at that face twisted with madness and shook my head.

“Master. You disappoint me.”

I put out a hand and touched the point between his brows.

Something gentle and impossible went into him.

It took the wild energy in him, the energy that would have ended everything, and smoothed it, and drew it out of him, a little at a time.

His swollen body shrank in front of my eyes.

All his cultivation, the dao fruit of a thousand years, went out of him at the touch of one finger.

From that hour he was no longer an Immortal Venerable.

He was a mortal. An ordinary one.

I let go.

The world started moving again.

The cultivators who had run found themselves alive.

The great blast had not come.

They looked up.

Lingxu came down out of the sky like a leaf.

I was still in the air, and there was not a mark on me.

Everyone understood.

The danger was over.

Ended by the man called Chen Yuan, in a way none of them could follow.

I did not look at any of them. I was at my shop door in one step.

I went to Lin Wan, who was white and shaking, and put my arms around her.

“It’s over.”

“All of it.”

She cried into my chest.

I held her and patted her back and looked up at the sky.

I knew that from that day no one in the world would come near our lives again.

The quiet I had wanted was coming back.

Chapter Twelve

Lingxu had been stripped.

The foremost man of the immortal path, come down from the clouds into the dust.

That news made more noise than his descent had, a hundred times over.

The cultivation world had nothing to say.

The name Chen Yuan became a thing no one spoke.

A story everyone knew and nobody told.

After that day Suzhou came back to itself quickly.

The cultivators who had come to watch slipped away.

The next day the Feng clan head and Feng Qingyun brought the whole clan and knelt in front of my general store and knocked their heads on the stones.

I did not go out. I had Lin Wan carry one sentence to them.

“Don’t ever let us see you again.”

They took it like a pardon, and that night the clan pulled up and left Jiangnan.

Honglian of Danxia Palace sent gifts and a letter of apology, worded very carefully.

I did not take those either.

My life came back to me.

Lin Wan and I opened the store again.

I sat behind the counter with my tea, watching the street, feeling the smoke and fire of the world go by.

Lin Wan came out of the fright of that day slowly, and turned back into the woman who laughed at everything and scolded me about everything.

She never asked about the past again.

She only stayed beside me, in her own gentle way.

Sometimes she would lean on the counter with her chin in her hand and look at me.

“Chen Yuan. You’re handsome.”

I would put down my cup and pinch her nose.

“Sweet mouth.”

Plain days. They filled me up.

One day a beggar came to the shop door.

His clothes were in rags, he stank, and his hair was a matted bird’s nest.

He held out a thin hand for food.

I looked at him.

His eyes were clouded and empty, and there was nothing behind them.

I knew him.

Perfected Lord Lingxu.

With his cultivation gone he had not gone back to Mount Jiuhua. He had become a beggar in the red dust.

He did not seem to know me.

Or his mind was gone.

Lin Wan’s heart went out to him and she brought him two hot buns.

He snatched them and crammed them into his mouth like a dog that had not eaten in days.

When he was done he did not leave. He sat down in front of my shop and stayed.

Lin Wan looked at me, not sure what to do.

I shook my head. Leave him.

From then on the mad beggar was a fixture at my door.

He came every day and sat in the same spot and said nothing and caused no trouble.

Lin Wan fed him every day.

Sometimes he would lift his head and look at the sky and mutter.

“Dao… what is the Dao…”

“Wrong… all of it wrong…”

Then he would go quiet for a long time.

I looked at him and felt nothing move in me.

This was probably the best end he could have had.

Let him look for the answer he would never find, as a mortal, in the red dust he had always held in contempt.

Spring went, autumn came, and three years passed.

Lin Wan and I had a child. A girl.

I named her Chen An.

An, as in peace.

I wanted her to have a quiet life, all of it, and nothing to fear.

The child filled the house with noise and with laughing.

One day I sat outside with her in my arms, in the sun.

The beggar was in his usual place.

He looked at the child in my arms, and something came into his empty eyes.

He got up, shaking, and came to me.

He dug in his clothes for a long time and brought out a wooden carving on a red cord, worn past recognition.

He held it out to my daughter.

I did not stop him.

Her small hand came out and took the dirty thing.

The beggar looked at her and his mouth opened in a smile.

The first smile I had seen on him in three years.

He smiled like a child.

He turned and went away, shuffling.

In the low sun his shadow went out long behind him.

I watched him go and knew he would not come back.

Maybe he had found his Dao in that moment.

Maybe not.

It did not matter now.

I looked down at my daughter babbling in my arms, and at the ugly little carving in her hand.

I smiled.

The sun was right. The wind was easy.

My wife was inside humming. My daughter was asleep against me.

This was my whole world.

This was the mortal world I would spend my life keeping.