Chapter 40 – The Cleanup

Shen Wei stood in the alley.

His right hand was shaking. His left hand was worse. The palm was tingling from the impact, the one against the throat, and there was a wet warmth on his fingers that was not his own.

He turned his head.

The Stage 6 against the wall had not moved. Was not going to move. Shen Wei’s Stage 7 perception, which was still wide open, registered no heartbeat. Had registered no heartbeat for — he checked, backtracked, found the memory — at least twenty seconds.

Two dead men.

His hands were shaking hard enough that he had to flatten them against the tannery wall to keep them still.

He did that for a count of ten.

Then the analytical part of his brain came back online, because it had to, because there was no one else to do the work.

It was brutal.

Two bodies. Iron Fang. Not yet reported. Bao Zhen expects them to report. A window. How long? An hour? Two? Depends on the check-in protocol.

If they don’t report, Bao Zhen assumes they ran, lost the subject, went silent. Investigation continues. Pressure increases on everyone the subject is known to know.

If the bodies are found, Bao Zhen knows the subject fought back and won. The subject’s threat profile increases by a category.

The subject — I — cannot let the bodies be found.

He looked at the alley.

No windows. No cameras. This end of the tannery block had been derelict for six years. Block 7-East’s shops were shuttered after ten. The cut-through served nobody after business hours. That was why it was a good ambush spot. That was also, now, why it was a good disposal spot.

He had Yuantian.

He had never crossed with a body. He had never crossed with another person at all. The pendant’s rules on what comes through the fold had been established for inanimate objects in contact with his person or in containers he was holding. A body was neither. A body was a person, or had been a person, with its own Qi residue still dissipating in the tissue, and the pendant’s tolerance for that was an experimental variable Shen Wei had never run.

He was going to have to run it.

He crouched beside the Stage 5. The man’s eyes were open. Shen Wei closed them, because he could not do the next thing with them open. He slid his arms under the shoulders and the knees and lifted. The body was heavier than he expected, which was a thing every person who had ever moved a body had thought, and he filed it as a datum and kept moving.

He dragged the Stage 5 to the base of the wall. Propped him against it. Then went to the Stage 6 and did the same — moved the body against the wall, close enough to the first that a single crossing might take both — and knelt between them with the pendant in his right hand.

He pressed both bodies against himself. Left arm around the Stage 5’s shoulders. Right side leaning on the Stage 6’s torso. Knees braced.

He channeled Qi into the pendant.

The fold felt different.

It came on at the normal speed. The formation patterns igniting, the green tracery, the pull of the spatial thread. But the pull was heavier. Much heavier. The weight of two full-grown men was not the weight he was used to, and the weight of two full-grown bodies whose own Qi residue had not yet dissipated was heavier than that, because the pendant was dragging not just mass but the faint, ebbing signatures of two cultivators whose meridians had not yet stopped cycling.

The pendant resisted.

Not refused. Resisted. The way a pulley complained when you asked it to carry double.

He pushed more Qi. His Stage 7 reserves flowed into the pendant, and he burned through the comfortable margin and into the uncomfortable one, and the fold completed —

— and opened on the hillside, under the twin moons, in Yuantian’s night air.

He and both bodies slammed into the grass.

He lay there for ten seconds, because he couldn’t do anything else. His Qi reserves were at eleven percent. The pendant in his hand was hot in a way he had felt only once before, during the first involuntary crossing, and he held it until the heat faded back toward normal.

Then he sat up.

The grass was cold.

The nearer moon was a little past zenith, which meant the local time was sometime around what he’d come to think of as Yuantian’s equivalent of 2 a.m., which meant the deep forest was active and the meadow was not, which meant his odds of being seen by anything meaningful were low but not zero.

He did not have time to be careful about zero.

The disposal took close to two hours.

He did it the way he did most things that mattered — systematically, in ordered stages, without allowing himself to feel any more of it than was needed to keep his hands working.

Step one, strip traceable items. Both men had Iron Fang talismans tucked into inner jacket pockets, four of them, two each. Jade tiles, cheap mass-production grade, stamped with the gang’s registration seal. He piled them together on a flat rock and burned them with a controlled fire that melted the jade into featureless slag. He kept the slag in a separate pouch, to be disposed of separately.

He took their wallets. Their ID cards. The Stage 5’s pocketed blade — small, folding, cheap steel, the kind of weapon a Qi Condensation enforcer carried not because he expected to need it but because not carrying one would have been unprofessional. The Stage 6 had carried a little over seven hundred yuan.

Step two, location. He carried them, one at a time, forty minutes east of the hillside, past the cairn, past the Three-Leaf Ginseng cluster, into a section of forest he had mapped three months ago as unclaimed territory, low beast traffic, deep loam. It was a stand of copper-barked trees with a thick understory of fern-like vegetation, fed by a seasonal seep that had carved the soil into something that was almost peat. Nothing bigger than a ground squirrel had been documented in the area. The nearest wind wolf patrol route was two kilometers north.

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Step three, depth. He dug with a folding shovel from his Yuantian emergency kit. The kit he kept stashed near the cairn under a waterproof tarp, the kit he had never imagined he would be using for this. And he dug deep. Deeper than he would have thought he needed to dig, because he was no longer trusting the part of his brain that had been doing the estimation for him. Three meters down, into the loam and then into the heavier clay underneath. Deep enough that no surface disturbance would show. Deep enough that the ambient Qi of Yuantian’s soil would accelerate decomposition to a rate that the Lower District’s morgue would not believe.

He put them in.

He covered them.

He rearranged the ferns over the disturbed ground, packed the soil back against the roots with his hands, and studied the site under the moonlight for five minutes to see if it looked different from the surrounding forest. It did not.

He stood there a moment longer.

He did not say anything. Nothing he knew how to say would have fit.

Step four, cleaning. He walked back to the stream, which ran cold and Qi-bright at this hour, and he washed his hands in it. He took his jacket off and rinsed the cuffs. The Qi-rich water did its small, indifferent thing — his skin tingled the way it always did, a faint cellular brightness that he had learned to associate with home — and the blood came off his hands and went into the water and was gone.

He did not feel cleaner.

That was not, he understood with a clarity that felt surgical, what the water was for.