Chapter 25: Test the Will

Chapter 25: Test the Will

Paike was vaguely disappointed. Despite all his training in tactics, he had actually believed that Lan Zhu might pull out some trump card and turn the tide. That’s what the cultivators he had always read about did.

However, while Lan Zhu was an absolute monster, she was already struggling against him and his sister. With the addition of Guan Li and the return of Yixin’s arrows, she didn’t stand a chance.

She quickly burned through her remaining qi as she fended off the attacks coming at her from all directions. When she was wrung dry, Paike found himself standing over her kneeling form.

It was a stark contrast to the regal image she’d struck at the beginning of their fight. Her emerald green hair was in disarray, and her robe was torn. The vines that offered such effective combat options had faded with her qi. She looked up to meet his eyes with a burning defiance rather than the calm blasé that she had started the fight with.

“Ready to surrender?” Paike asked, admiration for her tenacity staying his hand.

Her lips formed into a smile that he couldn’t quite call mocking. Almost as if they were sharing an inside joke. Like they were acting out a play that they both knew by heart.

After holding his gaze for a beat, her head finally tilted down. With the noise of a clearing throat, Paike was barely able to move his foot out of the way of the glob of spittle that splattered on the cobblestones.

As he took a step back and let out a laugh, he caught his sister moving in the corner of his eye. A loud crack echoed off the buildings around them.

“That wasn’t very ladylike of you,” Liming stated in a deceptively calm voice as she rubbed the already reddening back of her hand.

Lan Zhu just smiled. Pake looked over at the members of his team. What were they supposed to do? They couldn’t just let her go without her surrendering. She would just recover her qi and attack them again. He also wasn’t about to hold her captive and risk having her pull something at the last moment to steal their slot in the next trail.

“You don’t have the guts,” Lan Zhu stated with a clear voice. Paike looked back at her and sighed. They were both playing the role to perfection, hopefully the elders would be pleased.

It was an obvious move that she was trying to pull. It could be very effective against most mortals and lower-level cultivators. But his family would never have sent someone to the outside world without being able to handle it. Liming’s high, clear laugh echoed from behind him as he crouched down in front of their kneeling opponent.

If this was a story, Paike would need to lift her chin with a few fingers, but she was already meeting his eyes. Still, it was the perfect setup. He just wished he was better at remembering famous quotes; she would have to do with the jist of it. “It’s not a good idea to test the will of a cultivator. No one who gets this far will back down from doing what is necessary.”

When he stood up and turned away, her body fell face-first on the ground and vanished into motes of light.

“That was cold,” Gaun Li told him with an approving tone.

“Brother won’t make this harder for us,” Liming chimed in.

“You have to remember that the elders are watching, and they won’t let anyone die without truly extreme circumstances,” Paike answered. “If this was the real world, these fights would be nowhere as lethal. In fact, if we did this stuff in the sect, we would be kicked out at the minimum, if not executed.”

They walked the rest of the way back to the fountain in silence. Paike was lost in his thoughts and presumed that his allies were as well. The whole exercise was the perfect chance for them to play the roles of cultivators before the founding of the empire and the great sects. In those days, the law was just whatever the strong decided, and cultivators ran around causing mayhem. As terrible as it was for almost everyone, it benefited the cultivators, who thrived. The first emperor and his dukes were all from that chaos.

Now, cultivators were much more limited. Powerful families didn’t want to risk their children, but they still needed experience if they were going to advance. Hence the creation of the great sects. It gave them a supervised area where they could compete and grow. Given the freedom, many found that acting out some variation of the old stories put them into stressful enough situations to force the growth they were looking for.