Chapter 39 – Blood in the Alley

Two weeks.

Two weeks of Monday-Thursday private lessons, Wednesday-Friday classes, and one standing Saturday session that Shen Wei had added at the end of the first week because his body was absorbing the training faster than Fang Bo had any plausible explanation for. Two weeks of Fang Bo’s old City Guard baton finding him in places he didn’t know he was exposed, of being hit and moving and being hit again and learning — in the slow, bruise-deep way that could not be replaced by any amount of reading — the difference between thinking about a fight and being in one.

His body was responding in a way that unsettled him.

The math, as best as he could reconstruct it, went something like this. Stage 6 foundation with Stage 8-equivalent meridian width, four months of natural Qi conditioning from Yuantian crossings, a body-tempering baseline that the twin-moon air had deepened without his consent. Add Fang Bo’s eight sessions a week, and the specific kind of instruction that was calibrated for a student in a hurry rather than a student in a curriculum. The result was a training curve that, by any sensible estimate, should have taken months. He was doing it in two weeks.

The reflexes had arrived first. The blocks that had been a second too slow at the start of week one were now merely a half-second too slow, which was still too slow for a fight but was a number trending in the right direction. The stances that had wanted to float had settled into his hips. The strikes that had telegraphed had quieted. Fang Bo had stopped commenting on these changes somewhere around the sixth session, which was its own commentary. Fang Bo commented on things that were interesting.

The breakthrough had come on the ninth session.

Shen Wei had been mid-drill — a lateral shift into a palm strike, the movement Fang Bo had been drilling him on for four days — when something in his dantian had pulled tight and released, and the floor of the gym had tilted by about a degree in his perception, and he had nearly lost his footing because the world’s Qi density had just resolved at a slightly higher resolution than the one he had been operating at for the last three weeks.

Stage 7.

He’d stood there, breathing. Fang Bo had watched him.

“Sit down,” Fang Bo said.

Shen Wei sat down.

“Drink some water.”

Shen Wei drank some water.

“That what I think it was?”

“Yes.”

Fang Bo had nodded once, slow, and picked up the baton and said, “Then we’re done tonight. Integrate it. Come back Monday.”

Shen Wei had said, “Yes,” and walked home, and had spent the next three hours in his apartment cycling Still Water to its new plateau.

The outer layer had held and Fang Bo wasn’t as attuned to his aura as others in his circle. With Still Water running and some quick thinking, Fang Bo had only registered a breakthrough from stage 5 to stage 6 and not to stage 7, the stage he now actually is at. That was the part he’d been anxious about. Still Water had been built for the Stage 3-through-5 range, refined at Stage 6, and he had not been certain it would extend. It did. The inner layer needed adjustment. The cultivation-history fabrication had to be rewritten to produce the deeper resonance of a Stage 5 cultivator who had been at Stage 5 for a plausibly long time, which required him to back-invent six months of fictional plateau into his meridian signature. But by 2 a.m. he had it stable, and was reasonably confident that Still Water would hold under a Core Formation cultivator’s cursory examination.

He told no one.

Not Lin Yue, who would ask the question she had been very carefully not asking since she’d promised not to.

Lin Yue had noticed the Stage 7.

Of course she had.

They’d gone off-site for lunch. They’d ordered the same thing they ordered every week. She’d waited until they were halfway through the first basket to say it.

“You’re higher than you were two weeks ago.” She whispered, paying close attention to their surroundings.

Shen Wei set down his chopsticks.

“Ah.”

“Don’t ah. I’m asking.”

“You told me you weren’t going to ask.”

“I told you I wasn’t going to ask about how. I’m asking about what. Because if you’re three stages higher than you were two months ago, Wei, I need to know the number I’m keeping a secret. Just the number.”

He looked at her. She looked back. The dumpling steam rose between them.

He said, “I’ll tell you eventually.”

She held his eyes for a count of three. Then she picked up her chopsticks.

“Okay.”

“Lin Yue — “

“I said okay.” She ate a dumpling. Chewed. Swallowed. “But Wei.”

“Yes.”

“You’re carrying yourself different.”

“I know.”

“You need to stop carrying yourself different. Because whatever number I don’t know, there are other people in the city who know more about reading cultivators than I do, and if I can see it, they can see it, and the only reason you’ve gotten this far is that you usually see them first.” She paused. “Fang Bo teach you how to not look like you’re ready for something?”

“He’s working on it.”

“Work faster.”

She didn’t say the rest of it. She didn’t have to. The new wariness in her face was not of him. It was for him, the way the outline had said it would be, the way a person looked at a friend who was walking into a weather system the friend had clocked on the forecast and the walker had not. She ate her dumplings and changed the subject and did not bring it up again.

He walked her back to her building afterward, listened to her complain about Manager Zhao, and felt the small, familiar guilt of being loved by someone who was smarter than he was giving her credit for.

The alley was his own fault.

He knew it was his own fault ten seconds into being in it, which was about nine seconds too late.

He’d been walking home from Fang Bo’s on a Thursday night, late. Ten past eleven, Stage 7 body only mildly aching from the session, the Lower District settling into its second-shift rhythm of steam vents and argument. His usual route took him up Jinglu Street, around the southern edge of Block 7, and home. Three nights ago, after Fang Bo had said something about pattern recognition and repeated paths in an off-hand way that had landed harder than Fang Bo probably intended, Shen Wei had started varying.

Tonight’s variation was the cut-through between the back of the old tannery and the wall of Block 7-East’s ground-floor shops. It was an alley he had used a hundred times in his life, before and after Yuantian, a shortcut that took six minutes off his walk home and passed no windows and no cameras. He had used it two weeks ago coming back from Old Chen’s. He had used it last Saturday, coming back from a legitimate grocery run. He had thought about it as a pattern and decided, three days ago, to put it back into rotation to break up his other patterns.

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He had, in other words, given himself a reason for using a tactically inferior route that was sufficient to override the part of his brain that would have said don’t.

He walked into it.

Ten meters in, he felt them.

Two signatures. Stage 5 and Stage 6. They were tucked against the wall on the right, in the shadow of a stack of fish crates that Shen Wei’s Stage 6 perception had registered as empty crates and his Stage 7 perception was now registering as empty crates next to which two men were standing very still.

Two weeks ago he would have missed them.

He did not miss them.

The analytical part of his mind, which had been cycling under the conversational part at the usual low level, came online fully in the span of a single breath. Two enforcers. Ambush position. This is not a random encounter. This is Bao Zhen. The younger enforcer’s report had finally made it up the chain, the older enforcer’s nothing happened had been weighed against it, and nothing happened had lost.

He kept walking.

He did not break stride. He did not turn. He did not reach for his talisman, which was still clipped to his belt where it had been for three months, because he had not taken it off since the Mist Serpent, because some part of him had always known he would need it. He kept his right hand loose. He lowered his center of gravity by a fraction that would not be visible to anyone who wasn’t looking for it.

The two men stepped out from behind the crates.

They were in black jackets. The stitched collar mark was the Iron Fang’s. They were the enforcers from the Hundred Herb Hall. Shen Wei took a closer look at the two men. The older man, who looked to be in his thirties, had a flat face and eyes that moved a beat slower than they should have. The Stage 5 was younger, leaner, more nervous. He had his right hand in his jacket pocket.

Shen Wei stopped.

“Evening,” the Stage 6 said. His voice was pleasant. “Shen Wei, right?”

“Yes.”

“Figured. Man down at the outpost would like a word. Nothing hostile. Just a conversation.”

“About what?”

“The boss would like to ask you some questions. Should take an hour, maybe less.”

“I’d rather not.”

The Stage 6 smiled. It was a polite smile.