The third bamboo brush snapped.
Shen Mu didn't throw the pieces. He stared at the jagged splinter of wood piercing the webbing of his right thumb. A single drop of blood welled up, bright against his pale skin. He pulled the splinter out with his teeth and spat it onto the floorboards.
The copper taste in his mouth wasn't from his own blood. It was the residual, metallic phantom of Mo Zheng's Celestial aura. It had been twelve hours since the Iron Blood Sect Leader walked out of the Main Hall, and the air in Shen Mu's tower still felt bruised.
Three days.
Mo Zheng had given them three days to surrender.
Shen Mu grabbed a fourth brush. His hand was shaking. He forced his fingers to lock around the bamboo, channeling a microscopic fraction of his Saint-layer qi just to stop the tremor. If his foundation misfired again, his core might crack. He couldn't afford an instability episode tonight.
He unrolled a fresh sheet of official Elder Council parchment.
Bai Qian was going to get them all killed. She was young, proud, and completely blind to the reality of the board. She thought she could hold off a Celestial Initiate with archaic formations and a crippled mortal husband acting as a legal shield.
If the shield breaks, Shen Mu thought, grinding the ink stick into the stone, she has no excuse left. The Council can force a vote.
If the mortal failed the Assessment of the Husband tomorrow, the marriage contract was legally void. Bai Qian would be unprotected by the inheritance clause. The Elders could step in, negotiate with Mo Zheng, and perhaps save the sect from being reduced to ash. They would lose autonomy, yes. But they would keep their heads.
Shen Mu began to write. The ink bled heavy and black into the paper.
He didn't design a standard test. A standard test checked a mortal's physical endurance and basic spiritual aptitude. It was a formality.
Shen Mu bypassed formalities. He wrote down the testing parameters used for Core-layer inner disciples.
First, the Cultivation Resonance Stone. Not the standard grey quartz. The deep-earth obsidian stone. It drew qi forcibly from the user to measure capacity. To a mortal, touching it felt like grabbing a hot coal.
Second, the Illusion Formation. He selected the third-tier array. It pressed directly on the soul, simulating a minor spatial collapse. Mortals usually fainted from the vertigo before they even stepped inside.
Third, physical combat evasion. Twelve strikes from a martial instructor.
He stared at the ink drying on the page. It was a death sentence. The physical combat alone would likely break the scholar's ribs. The obsidian stone might stop his heart.
Shen Mu didn't feel cruel. He felt necessary. He was the one adult in a burning house making the hard choice while the children argued about the curtains.
He stamped his personal jade seal at the bottom of the scroll. The heavy thud of the stone against the wood echoed in the empty room.
"Enter," Shen Mu said, his voice raspy.
The door slid open. Xiao Mei knelt immediately. She was wearing a new inner-sect silver trim, a direct result of her impossible, 'spontaneous' breakthrough. Shen Mu couldn't look at her without his chest tightening in rage. She was a living reminder of Bai Qian's hidden games.
"Deliver the parameters to the Eastern Pavilion," Shen Mu ordered, tossing the heavy scroll onto the floor. It rolled, stopping inches from Xiao Mei's knees. "Tell the mortal the Assessment begins at the hour of the snake. Main courtyard. The entire sect will be watching."
Xiao Mei picked up the scroll. Her hands were clammy. She kept her eyes glued to the floor.
"Has he been preparing?" Shen Mu asked. The question tasted bitter. "Has Bai Qian sent him defensive talismans? Armor? Pills to numb his pain receptors?"
Xiao Mei swallowed. The click in her throat was loud.
"No, Elder."
"What has he been doing since the Iron Blood delegation left?"
Xiao Mei gripped the edges of the parchment. She thought about what she had witnessed over the last four hours. She tried to find a way to phrase it that wouldn't result in an inkstone being thrown at her head.
"He..." She hesitated. "He asked the kitchen for a different type of pickled radish. He said the current batch was too sweet."
Shen Mu stared at her. The silence in the room stretched until it felt brittle enough to snap.
"Get out," he said quietly.
Xiao Mei scrambled backward and fled.
The Eastern Pavilion was dark. The single oil lamp cast a weak, sputtering circle of yellow light across the low reading table.
Xiao Mei stood in the doorway, clutching the heavy assessment scroll to her chest. The night wind off the cliff whipped her robes around her ankles. It was freezing, but she was sweating.
Inside, Wei Tian was not reading.
He was sitting cross-legged on the tatami mat, entirely focused on a small, brown moth resting on the edge of his teacup.
He didn't look up when she stepped over the threshold.
"It only has one antenna," Wei Tian observed. His voice was a flat, uninflected drawl.
Xiao Mei looked at the moth. Then she looked at the man. He was wearing the same cheap white scholar's robe he had arrived in. There was a faint smudge of soy sauce near the left cuff. He looked incredibly, impossibly fragile.
"Elder Shen Mu finalized the Assessment," Xiao Mei said. The words tumbled out of her mouth too fast. She stepped forward and placed the scroll on the table, careful not to disturb the moth. "It's tomorrow. At the hour of the snake."
Wei Tian picked up a single grain of loose rice from his dinner tray. He placed it next to the teacup. The moth ignored it.
"They aren't going to just test your knowledge," Xiao Mei blurted out. She couldn't stop herself. Her new Sage-layer qi hummed nervously in her veins. "I read the seal on the way over. They're using the obsidian resonance stone. And a third-tier illusion array. And combat evasion."
Wei Tian watched the moth flutter its wings once. It didn't take off.
"Do you know what an obsidian stone does to someone without qi?" she asked, her voice hitching, pitching up into panic.
"It gets warm," Wei Tian said.
"It burns your meridians out!" Xiao Mei dragged a hand through her hair, stepping closer to the table. "You have to go to the Sect Master. You have to tell her you refuse. She can cancel it. If you step into the main courtyard tomorrow, Elder Shen Mu is going to cripple you."
Wei Tian finally looked away from the teacup.
He looked at Xiao Mei. He didn't look angry. He didn't look afraid. He looked at her with the mild, exhausted patience of a man watching rain hit a window.
"The table is wobbling," Wei Tian said.
Xiao Mei stopped breathing. "What?"
Wei Tian pointed at the front left leg of the low table. "The floorboard is uneven. Every time I turn a page, the table shifts. It's very distracting."
He reached out, picked up the heavy, wax-sealed scroll containing the official Elder Council Assessment parameters—a document detailing his probable execution—and folded it in half. The thick parchment crunched.
He folded it in half again. The red wax of Shen Mu's personal seal cracked and shattered, flaking onto the floor.
He wedged the folded document under the short table leg.
He pressed down on the center of the table with his palm. It didn't move.
"Much better," Wei Tian said.
Xiao Mei stared at the table leg. The jagged remnants of the Elder Council seal peeked out from under the wood, currently supporting the weight of a half-empty teapot.
She wanted to scream. She wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him until his teeth rattled. Mo Zheng was coming in three days to annihilate them all. Shen Mu was going to publicly torture him tomorrow. And the mortal husband was fixing furniture with official decrees.
"You're going to die," she whispered.
Wei Tian picked up his blue-covered book. He opened it to the middle.
"I doubt it," he said. "The weather tomorrow is supposed to be pleasant. Dying is usually reserved for rainy days."
He didn't say anything else. The silence in the room filled up with the dry, rasping sound of him turning a page.
Xiao Mei backed out of the pavilion. The cold wind hit her damp neck. She turned and walked numbly down the dirt path toward the junior dormitories.
Halfway down the mountain, she stopped. She pulled out her small notebook. She uncapped her charcoal stick. She was supposed to report his emotional state to the Council guards tonight.
She stared at the blank page. She thought about the splintered wax seal under the table leg. She thought about the moth.
Her hand moved. She wrote three words.
He seems unworried.
She closed the notebook. It felt like a lie, but she didn't know how to write the truth. The truth was that the man in the pavilion didn't seem brave, or foolish, or in denial. He just seemed entirely, profoundly unaffected by the concept of consequence.
Back in the pavilion, the oil lamp finally sputtered out.
The room was plunged into absolute darkness. Wei Tian did not light a candle. He didn't need light to read. Light was just a convenience for eyes that relied on reflection.
He closed the book.
He sat perfectly still in the dark.
Tomorrow, he had to fail a test. But he had to fail it correctly. If he died, he would have to leave this quiet mountain and find a new place to read. If he passed, Bai Qian would ask questions, and the quiet would be ruined.
He calculated the exact density of an obsidian resonance stone. He ran a thousand simulations in the space of a heartbeat, determining the precise fraction of a millimeter he would need to adjust his skin's metaphysical resistance to make the stone shatter without looking like he caused it.
A structural failure of the testing equipment, he decided. That is suitably mundane.
He set the book down on the perfectly stabilized table.
Outside, the mountain wind howled against the ironwood walls, carrying the scent of impending frost and the distant, violent thrum of three thousand cultivators preparing for war.
Wei Tian closed his eyes.
He went to sleep.