Chapter 13 | Difficult Choices

Two days later, the forest had settled into the particular kind of quiet that suggested it had seen quite enough excitement recently and would appreciate it if everyone involved could kindly take their catastrophes elsewhere.

Lin Mei stood at the northern approach of the corridor with her sword across her back and her arms folded.

She watched the tree line with fixed intensity.

The one on the left, for instance, the gnarled pine that leaned at an angle suggesting decades of losing arguments with the prevailing wind, had become something of a landmark. She used it to mark the passage of time the way a prisoner might use scratches on a wall, except her scratches were mental and her wall was a tree and the comparison fell apart if you pushed it.

She had not slept properly since the Patriarch entered seclusion.

This was not, she told herself, because she was worried.

Worry was an emotion, and emotions, as the Patriarch had pointed out with the calm authority of a man explaining basic Qi pathways to someone who had just attempted to unlock them all at the same time, made terrible commanding officers.

Lin Mei was not worried.

She was vigilant, which was a different thing entirely, in the same way that standing in a shallow pool to your knees was different from swimming in a calm lake.

The corridor behind her hummed with the low, vibration of five array formations, without any flags, doing their jobs with a quiet competence. The concealment array said nothing here. The silence formation said nothing to hear. The Qi suppression array said nobody home. The recovery formation said please heal faster. The monitoring web said I see everything and most of it is trees.

The Foundation Establishment cultivators rotated their shifts at the formation nodes with discipline. It would have impressed Lin Mei if she’d had the energy to be impressed by anything other than the continued absence of demonic cultivators at their doorstep.

Four hours on, four hours off, exactly as the Patriarch had ordered, and the formations held.

The corridor remained invisible, the disciples ate what little foraged food the scouts brought back, the wounded healed in the denser Qi, and the days passed.

Two of them.

Two full grinding days of Lin Mei standing at approaches, checking sight lines, rotating watches, settling disputes about water allocation, sleeping arrangements, and who had stolen whose last strip of dried meat, which turned out to be a squirrel that had gotten through the perimeter and was now living under a rock near the stream with the smug satisfaction of a creature that had found free accommodation in a building it didn’t understand.

Entire days of disciples looking at her with eyes that asked the same question over and over, the question none of them voiced out of fear of making it become reality: Is the Patriarch going to wake up?

Lin Mei didn’t know.

No one in this group, and she suspected any group, did in fact know.

She had checked the moss curtain seven times in the first day, pressing her spiritual sense toward the space behind it and finding the same thing each time: silence and a Qi signature so faint it was indistinguishable from the limestone itself.

The Patriarch’s body was there and his breathing was there in that shallow and slow rhythm many had associated with deep cultivation in seclusion from seeing other elders do it in the past.

His heartbeat was there unchanged since he’d sat down.

Everything was there except the part that made it reassuring, they could not feel an ounce of Qi from him. Even when injured and a shattered core, there had been some spark. Something they could point at and rely on when they were feeling terrified of being found by forces they had no hope against.

That was no longer there.

On the second day she had stopped checking, because it changed nothing and the act of walking to the moss curtain, pausing, pressing her sense forward, finding the same nothing, and walking back was beginning to attract attention from disciples who watched her do it with expressions that made her want to hit something, preferably something that deserved it like a demonic cultivator.

Lin Mei looked around the camp with a deep sigh, leadership was weighing on her already.

Lin Shui sat on the eastern ridge, her sword across her knees and eyes closed in meditation. She had been there for six hours and had eaten when Lin Mei brought food and drank when Lin Mei brought water and had otherwise communicated through a vocabulary that consisted entirely of nods, single syllables, and one memorable, disgusted shake of the head when Feng Jun had asked if she wanted to talk about her feelings.

Feng Jun had not asked again.

The boy was currently asleep against the eastern wall with his head tilted at an angle that was going to produce complaints in the morning and hand still loosely wrapped around the calling stone the Patriarch had made. He clutched it the way a child clutched a favourite toy, except the toy was a pebble inscribed with matrices that shouldn’t exist and the child was a seventeen-year-old boy who had watched his sect burn and was coping through the medium of unconsciousness.

Liang Hao sat near the hub stone, cross-legged.

His round face pointed toward the southern end of the corridor where the moss curtains hung undisturbed. He had appointed himself the Patriarch’s unofficial sentry, a role nobody had assigned him and nobody had the heart to take away. He sat there with a patient, unblinking focus that was admirable.

Lin Mei’s jaw ached.

She unclenched it and felt the muscles protest.

The morning of the third day arrived with a grey, noncommittal light.

Lin Mei was at the northern approach with her arms folded as she watched the gnarled pine. It was then that footsteps came up behind her, fast. The kind that carried urgency in their rhythm the way a telegram carried bad news in its brevity.

She turned to look.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

The blind cultivator, the woman with the cloth-wrapped eyes whose name was Zhao Ping, was moving through the corridor at a pace that her injuries should not have permitted. Her hands were extended in front of her, not for balance, but because her palms were still tingling with the vibrations from the monitoring web’s hub stone, and her fingers were spread wide as though trying to hold onto information that was slipping through them.

“Senior Sister Lin…” Zhao Ping stopped before her, “…we have a situation.”

Lin Mei’s hand went to her sword hilt. “Where?”

“Northeast. The monitoring web picked up signatures four hundred feet out and closing. Moving fast and in erratic patterns. Five of them, small, Qi Condensation early-stage at most. They’re running.”

“Running from what?”

Zhao Ping’s jaw tightened. “Eight signatures behind them. Mid-stage Qi Condensation, tight formation and with a controlled pace. They’re not chasing. They’re toying with them.”

Lin Mei was already moving.

She crossed the corridor in a few strides, disciples scrambling out of her path, and dropped to her knees beside the hub stone. She pressed her palm flat against its surface and the monitoring web opened up in her Qi sense.

The forest breathed around her in signatures and flow patterns.

Trees, rocks, stream, ridges, animals, patrols at distance, all of it rendered in the web’s steady pulse.

And there, northeast, five small signatures moving in the jagged, desperate pattern of prey that had been running too long and was running out of places to run. They stumbled, recovered, fell, got up, only to stumbled again. One of them was slower than the others, limping and leaving a trail of disrupted Qi that even the web’s crude resolution could read as blood.

Behind them, eight signatures in a crescent formation in a steady and patient way. Closing the distance by inches rather than feet, the way a cat closed distance on a mouse, not because it couldn’t catch it, but because the catching was less interesting than the playing with the food before it.

They were toying with them just like Zhao Ping said.

Lin Mei’s fingers pressed harder against the hub stone and the web’s resolution sharpened.