Five steps down the stairs. That was all it took to calculate exactly how badly I was going to die.
The Crimson Scale cultivators didn't look like the elegant, jade-robed immortals from the television dramas back home. They looked like thugs who had discovered spiritual energy and decided to use it for extortion. They wore boiled leather over their crimson robes. The man in the center—the one who had kicked the gate beam—had a silver ring piercing his left eyebrow. He was tapping the pommel of his broadsword against his thigh.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
He was setting the metronome for the courtyard. Waiting for me to dance to it.
I walked down the steps, keeping my focus locked on the chipped stone three inches left of his ear. Looking at the sword meant I cared about the sword. Wei Liang's muscle memory rolled my shoulders back and tilted my chin up, forcing me to look down the bridge of my nose at him.
"Wei Liang," the man with the eyebrow ring said. He didn't use the title of Sect Master. He hit the syllables like he was chewing on gravel. "You look pale. Qi deviation treating you poorly?"
"Thirty days," I said.
No echo. Just a flat, dead sound that seemed to suck the morning breeze right out of the courtyard.
The tapping stopped. The man with the ring shot a glance sideways to the guy on his left, whose neck was just a thick rope of scar tissue.
"Thirty days what?" the leader asked. He didn't blink, but his grip on the pommel shifted.
I stopped at the bottom step and clasped my hands behind my back. My left thumb was still bleeding from the kitchen flint. The wetness was making my skin slick against my own wrist.
"You will have the full four thousand in thirty days," I said, not blinking. "Leave the receipt with the boy on your way out."
Silence. Somewhere over the eastern wall, a crow cawed twice.
You don't beg a debt collector. You act like their presence is a clerical error wasting your time. It was the only card I had.
"Four thousand," the leader repeated slowly. The corner of his mouth twitched upward. "In thirty days. From a sect that doesn't have a roof on its main pavilion. You're bleeding out, Wei Liang. We heard the rumors. Your meridians are crushed. I want the deed to the outer territories right now, or we start breaking legs."
He stepped forward. The four thugs behind him stepped with him, their boots scraping the dust in unison. Hands gripped sword hilts. Qi bled into the courtyard. The air suddenly tasted like copper pennies, pressing against my eardrums until they popped.
My ribs squeezed inward. I couldn't pull a full breath past my collarbone. The muscle memory in my dantian desperately tried to pull Qi to defend itself. It hit a dead, hollow void. My knees threatened to buckle.
"Show us," the scarred man said, spitting into the dirt. "Show us you can even lift a sword, Sect Master."
"This is what happens when you bluff a tiger while wearing meat," Old Geezer said, his voice grinding against my temples. "They're going to carve you up."
I held my ground. The silence stretched until it felt brittle. Finally meeting the leader's gaze, I let out a single, sharp exhale through my nose. A dry, contemptuous dismissal.
"A demonstration," I said softly. The thug with the eyebrow ring involuntarily leaned forward an inch. "You step into my sect, break my gate, and demand a demonstration. As if drawing my blade for you wouldn't soil the steel."
The leader hesitated. His grip on the broadsword shifted. He was sweeping my body for a cultivation base and hitting a brick wall. He couldn't tell if I was a mortal or a monster.
Unfortunately, I was just a software engineer bleeding onto his own wrist behind his back.
"I don't buy it," the leader said. His voice cracked slightly on the last word. He pulled his broadsword two inches from the scabbard. The steel hissed. "I'm going to take your arm, Wei Liang. Let's see if you—"
A horrible, grinding screech ripped through the air from above.
Bronze scraping against stone.
I flinched. Above us, on the second-floor balcony of the main hall, something shifted.
Zhou Bao was up there. He was gripping the handles of a massive, three-legged bronze ceremonial cauldron. It must have weighed four hundred pounds. His fingers were desperately clawing at the bronze handles, but he was slipping. The heavy metal scraped over the stone lip.
Zhou Bao's face drained of blood. He didn't even scream. He just stared as the bronze tipped past the edge.
The cauldron tipped.
The air rushed around the bronze, whistling as it plummeted.
It hit the flagstones. Bronze shrieked. Then, decades of compressed, volatile medicinal Qi baked into the metal detonated.
The air snapped. A wave of pure, concentrated energy rushed outward, smelling like burnt ginseng. The blast caught the debt collectors in the chest. I saw a blur of crimson robes tumbling backward. Someone slammed hard into the wooden gate, the sound of cracking timber lost in the ringing in my ears.
I stayed planted, though my teeth were vibrating hard enough to ache. My fingers had gone completely numb.
Dust choked the courtyard. Through the grey cloud, the cultivators were hacking up dirt, stumbling upright. The leader stared at the crater in the stone, then slowly lifted his eyes to me.
My hands were still locked behind my back. The blood on my thumb had dried into a sticky crust. I didn't blink.
The leader's face was bloodless. He grabbed his broadsword from the dirt, his hands shaking so violently the blade rattled against the scabbard.
"Thirty days," the leader gasped, bowing so fast he nearly headbutted his own knees. "We will return in thirty days, Sect Master."
They scrambled over each other to get through the broken gate, boots slipping in the dirt.
The dust settled. The courtyard was empty except for me, the shattered flagstones, and a broken bronze pot.
Up on the balcony, Zhou Bao was crying again. "I'm sorry! I'm so sorry, Sect Master! I slipped! Please don't kill me!"
I pulled my hands from behind my back. My fingers were cramped tight, joints aching. I exhaled, and my knees finally decided to shake.
"That," Old Geezer said, the sound scraping against the inside of my skull, "was the least dignified display of authority I have witnessed in three millennia."
"It worked, didn't it?" I said.
"You won a territorial standoff with poor architecture and a clumsy fat child."
"A win is a win. I'll take the ugly ones."
I looked up at the balcony. "Stop crying, Zhou Bao. Get down here."
He scrambled down the wooden stairs, eating the bottom step and landing hard on his knees. He stayed there, grinding his forehead into the dirt. "I'll clean it up. I'll fix the stones. I swear."
"Get up," I said. "We don't have time for this. We need to know exactly what we have left."
I stepped over the ruined cauldron and walked toward the main hall's deeper corridors. Zhou Bao scrambled up and followed me, keeping a safe six-foot distance.
We walked the outer pavilions. It took two hours to confirm what I already knew. The alchemy rooms were stripped. The armory smelled like moth-eaten leather and rust. Whoever came through here after Wei Liang died hadn't just taken the weapons; they had pried the decorative copper off the walls.
"Master," Zhou Bao said, his voice dropping as we approached a heavy, iron-banded door at the back of the compound. "We used to clean this area with Brother Chen Tian. Before he... before he left."
I filed the name away. Chen Tian. A former disciple out in the world, knowing exactly which walls were crumbling.
"The vault," I said, looking at the iron door. It was sealed with a dull, grey spiritual lock that looked like a tangled knot of wire.
"We can't open it," Zhou Bao said, staring at the floor. "Only the Sect Master's Qi can unlock it."
I looked at my hands. Zero ambient Qi.
"Your blood," Old Geezer said, dragging the words out slowly. "The lock is tied to the lineage, not just the Qi signature. Smear it on the array. Try not to faint."
I bit the inside of my cheek, walked to the door, and pressed my already-bleeding thumb against the center of the wire knot.
The grey metal flashed dull blue. The heavy bolts inside the door clacked backward, echoing loudly down the empty hall. I pushed it open.
The air inside tasted like dust and dry rot. The wooden racks along the walls were stripped bare, leaving pale outlines where weapons used to rest. Just a single stone pedestal in the center holding a small wooden box.
Three jade slips sat inside. I picked one up. It was freezing, a milky green stone that pulsed faintly against my palm.
"The original manuals," Old Geezer said. His voice changed. The grinding tectonic weight vanished, dropping into a quiet, absolute stillness. "Your predecessor hid them. The schematics for the array."
"Can I read it?"
"If you press it to your forehead. The knowledge will transfer directly to your consciousness."
I raised the jade to my forehead. The ambient light in the room died.
Total, suffocating blackout.
I turned around, stepping back toward the open vault door. Through the corridor windows, I could see the courtyard outside. The sun had been shining brightly five minutes ago. Now, a shadow had fallen over the entire mountain.
No cloud cast a shadow with edges that sharp.
I walked out into the courtyard. Zhou Bao trailed behind me, making a high, thin sound in his throat.
I looked up.
High above the cloud layer, golden geometry was turning in the sky. Thousands of intersecting rings, massive and utterly silent. A mechanical eye the size of a city, scanning the mountain.
The air grew instantly freezing. The hair on my arms stood up.
"What... what is that?" I said, the syllables scraping my dry throat.
Old Geezer said nothing. For a long moment, the space in my head was completely empty. When his voice finally returned, the tectonic rumble was gone.
"That is a Heavenly Dao monitoring formation," he said. "It is searching for the signature of the array. It is searching for you."
I watched the golden rings turn.
"It found us," Old Geezer said softly. "Faster than I expected."