David

After watching a few more auctions, Alice tugged at David's sleeve without meeting his eye. She hadn't said anything to him since they had failed to buy back the saber, but her intentions were clear - she wanted to leave.

They had come in with Chan Changshou, and David wasn't sure how long it would be until they would see him again, so he gave Chan a pat on the shoulder and a quick hug.

"Here in the hills, we bid farewell," said Chan solemnly.

David glared at him, but he responded anyhow. "The twilight fades as I close my twig door." It was a rather unlucky verse - from a goodbye born of loss - but appropriate. Alice nodded along distractedly.

David stared up at the alcove where the Sect Master and the Peak Masters sat one last time. They looked rather bored. He then turned towards the exit. The pair followed a group of inner disciples out of the Sword Platform and into the open night.

To David's surprise, the Skybound Path was somehow more crowded at three in the morning than late afternoon.

From the debris littered along the path and the merchants packing up their wares, it was clear that the road between Earth Peak and Sword Peak had been a lively, bustling night market. The merchants didn't appear to be cultivators, so they must have moved up from the south side of the city after the auctions in greater Tianbei had concluded.

David supposed it made sense - the auction at Sword Peak was purportedly the only one that ran as long as it did, after all. These merchants had set up shop to sell curios and trinkets and exotic foods to the streams of disciples headed back home.

David and Alice continued to follow the milling crowds of disciples back towards Earth Peak, letting their feet fell on the grey concrete of the Skybound Path. Several times, Alice made a sound or a motion that indicated she would begin speaking, but nothing ever came of it.

When they were most of the way back, Alice finally cleared her throat. "Looks like we missed the party," she said, a little hoarse, a little miserable.

"Maybe not," David said, attempting a smile for Alice's sake. He pointed at the stream of disciples headed not up the mountain towards their living quarters, but into Earth Peak itself. "Let's go take a look at what everyone's up to."

They approached the entrance to Earth Peak and found a familiar face, guarding the door.

"It's two of our newest disciples," said the man into the stack of papers he was reading - he had been the one who had been manning the door on the day they had arrived from the west. "Did you find anything nice to buy?"

Alice mustered up a smile of her own. "We saw some things we wanted but we couldn't quite afford them," she said. Her grip was cutting off David's blood flow to his fingers.

"Pity," said the man, who had barely looked up. "Maybe next year, maybe next year."

They walked past him, into the well-lit corridor with many doors and then through it into the main hall. Stepping into the main hall was an experience that David had braced himself for, but his ears still didn't expect the change from the silence of the night and the low hum of the ever-burning Yin Fire Lamps to the blast of sound that came from hundreds of disciples speaking all at once.

The main hall was as lively, perhaps even more so, than when they'd arrived during the morning for admissions. For cultivators who didn't keep time with sleep, David supposed the early hours of morning were just that - another time of day.

David's ears picked up on the conversation of the moment - mostly about the auctions that various disciples went to.

Alice pulled David towards a stall that sold tea and they stood in line silently.

"Disciples Ji and Chow." The voice was nasally and tinged in triumph.

David recognized the man - Long Hair. He had first approached them when they were entering the sect, and then he'd watched as his friend had been verbally battered by Daoist Liang as they exited their first lesson. Fairy Guan had gotten his name wrong.

"Senior Brother Hua! What a surprise," snapped Alice.

"My name is Hu," spat Long Hair, immediately offended. "I see you two have run afoul of forces greater than you."

David gave him a blank look.

"I was at the auction. I watched you lose a treasure. A family heirloom, even. Doesn't feel good, does it, to-"

"Two tapioca teas to go," said Alice, because they were next in line.

The outer disciple in charge of the tea stall flipped a pair of glass bottles onto the counter and scooped out the gluttonous tapioca pearls into them, then added a dollop of honey. She gave Alice a suspicious glare. "You forgot to bring the glasses back from your last order. Don't forget next time, or I won't serve you. Three taels."

Alice left the money on the edge of the stall and pressed a bottle into David's hand, and then they walked off towards the exit.

"You can ignore me, but you know the saying as well as I do. The strong eat the weak!" crowed Disciple Hu behind them. When he realized no one seemed to pay his melodrama any attention, Hu turned back to the tea stall and frantically made his own order.

Alice was more talkative as they made their way up Earth Peak towards the house they shared.

"He's right, you know?"

David looked across the face of Tianbei Mountain - across the valley to Sword Peak and the Skyforge - and had a peculiar feeling, that Tianbei felt more like a cage than a home.

"What do you mean by that?" David asked, even though he knew what Alice meant.

"This isn't the world we came from, is it? There are no laws but the laws of the jungle. We ascended from a seed world to a lower realm. But they aren't more civilized here, only less," Alice hissed, suddenly furious again.

There was a clinking sound as the glass in her hand cracked. Tea and tapioca and glass splashed to the ground.

"He could have taken the saber from me after the auction. He could have arranged for it to get lost before it was sold properly to us. But the Sect Master chose to make a point to us in front of the entirety of the sect and no one could stop him."

The tea dripped from Alice's fingers onto the pile of broken glass on the floor at her feet.

"At least he thinks no one can stop him."

The tea ran from the shattered glass to the cracks in the stone of the path.

"Well, we do know someone who can stop him. I'll find a body of running water and a jug of sorghum wine," said David, trying to calm her down.

Alice's boot found the glass with a crunch. "Don't you dare, David Ji," she spat in English. "We will resolve our own problems."

For the second time that night, David thought he'd heard the sound of thunder echoing in the distance, but it could have just been the mountain breeze picking up the sound of falling rocks from Sky Peak.

Alice looked morose suddenly. "Would that even work? If it weren't the Sky River and since we're not really related to him?"

"Probably not," David muttered, as they continued up the path.

When they arrived home, Leng Qitai's door was still sealed and Tai Kanhu was nowhere to be found.

Alice slipped her guqin out of its case, sat down on a cushion and began to strum carelessly.

David sat across from her and began to listen for the sound of the Song.

Alice

The girl, she played her guqin and tried to isolate her beliefs into something concrete - not in shape but in form.

The questions passed on by Fairy Guan came to her easily - How was the cord tied to the hub? How was the Heavenly Pole added to them? What did the Eight Pillars hold up?

The silkworms whispered many Stories to her, stories like the arpeggios she played on her guqin - scales unheard by this realm.

She played Flowing Water, she played a Mozart Sonatina, she played Departing Geese, she played a medley of pop songs. She stayed away from two songs in particular - the one that had formed her foundation and the one that had named the Lightning.

Alice felt the qi of the world rise up and enter through her open apertures, to that metaphysical place under her stomach, filling her.

And then she recalled that battle with Uncle Jiang, and began to play Rain South of the River.

When she'd first played the song, it was a work of desperation - a proof of concept, that her fingers could reproduce many instruments. Even looking death in the face, Alice wasn't someone who could admit defeat.

The Core was something you could feel. It spun and spun, it moved and twirled and ate and thought and became.

Because even in this lawless world, where the power of cultivation ruled supreme, it was only right to have Principles.

The qi of the world, no- it was her silkworms, they rose in tempo.

Alice was not like her righteous, self-righteous, boy. If he carried the songs of the twentieth century into this world stuck in the era of emperors, she would carry the stories of the people who had made right, who had done wrong to-

Alice coughed and tasted blood.

"Alice!"

David's fingers, wet and sticky, found the corner of her lip. No, not his fingers, her lips. Alice jerked away and wiped her mouth. David pressed his bottle of tea into her shaking fingers and pushed it up towards her mouth.

She drank. "I'm fine, I'm fine," she promised, over and over.

Alice continued to drink, her head rested against David's collarbone as she stared listlessly at the ceiling.

"I felt my Core forming," Alice said, an excuse for him, for her, she didn't know. "I don't know why it's like this."

David sighed, putting his head in the hand that wasn't tracing a pattern on the back of her palm.

At that moment, the door burst open.

"Senior Brother and Sister, Feiyan has thwarted the vile and dastardly plan of her Fifth Sister and- Oh, am I interrupting something? Feiyan is so sorry!"

"You're not interrupting anything," said Alice, sounding more tired than she felt.

"Oh, in that case, are you drinking that?"

Feiyan had sidled up to her and her fingers were already curled around the bottle of tapioca tea.

"No."

"Is this it?" asked Feiyan, staring at the bottle of mostly finished tea.

"Yes, that's all we have," snapped Alice.

Feiyan sat down, cross legged, in front of Alice. "Will Senior Sister go out to get more tea with Feiyan?"

By now, David was sighing audibly.

"Feiyan knows that you've had it harsh tonight, but I think the best way to get over it is to have some tea with friends! It's best not to dwell on bad fortune, but instead celebrate it - you never know when the day may be your last."

Alice found herself nodding, and allowed Feiyan to pull her to her feet.

"We might as well go back to Earth Peak," Alice said to David. Alice knew he wanted to have a private conversation about her health and it was the opposite of what she wanted.

David exhaled heavily, then nodded.

As they stepped into the night air, Alice heard the chirping of birds. It was nearly morning and there wasn't a single disciple in sight.

They continued down the path towards Earth Peak at a brisk pace, with Feiyan skipping ahead and waiting for them to catch up with her.

"The bells are going to start ringing soon. I hear it's a tradition for disciples to watch the sunrise over Tianbei as the bells ring," blabbered Feiyan, speaking at a mile a minute.

"No one seems to be following the tradition," said David, giving Feiyan a wry grin that Alice misliked.

The darkness before dawn would have been an utter inky black to Alice back on Earth, but her eyes were better now - every detail of the craggy peaks and every blade of grass was obvious to her as they strode down the mountainside.

As they approached Earth Peak, she realized that the door was ajar and the disciple guarding it was missing.

"Looks like what's-his-name went in for some tea, or for another book," said David.

But before they'd taken another step, there was a low whistle.

"What-"

A clink rang out suddenly, whipping Alice's hand forward - something had collided with the glass bottle she was holding, pushing it out of her hands. It spiraled through the air too fast for her eye to see. Feiyan, who was standing in front of her, didn't even react - she couldn't process it.

The bottle sliced past the other girl's cheek and exploded behind the girl in a shower of glass.

It had hit something, and that something was a little ball of iron which had been headed for the back of Feiyan's head.

A man had suddenly landed roughly inches from the explosion, but he wasn't facing David, Alice or Feiyan.

Instead, he called out into the night.

"An assassin from Bei’an? Or a fool who trespasses upon the grounds of the Ascending Sky?" Elder Pang asked, in a deadly whisper, to no one Alice could see.

There was no reply, just another series of low whistles.

Elder Pang drew his sleeve back and a series of four little Go stones, two black and two white, zipped out into the night. A staccato of cracks were heard as the stones matched the iron balls in the air, exploding into clouds of shrapnel and stone. A fragment tore into David’s sleeve, cutting his arm lightly.

Blood splashed.

Before them, Pang sank to his knees, clutching his stomach. One of the cracks had sounded different than the others - it had been one of Pang’s ribs. Pang retched - Alice had expected a stream of blood, like from out of a kung-fu movie, but it was somehow worse to see far too much of a clear fluid, more than a mouthful.

Feiyan screamed and began to run westward, along the Skybound Path.

“No!” Alice shouted after her, running after her. “We don’t know where it’s coming from, don’t-”

Pang shot to his feet, past Alice and pushed Feiyan out of the way. Another little iron ball flew past them, straight at David.

David planted his feet, his lips moving at the speed of sound, and Alice heard some verses that were quite familiar - they had formed his Foundation Poem. In peace, we carry on, dispersing, teaching…

The ball slammed into his open palm and the force of it threw his arm back with a snapping sound, like the branches of a tree, and his body spun in place like a ragdoll and he landed on the ground.

But he pushed himself to his feet, unhurt, in just a moment.

The bells of Tianbei began to ring from the valley below.

A dark figure landed beside Elder Pang, brandishing a sword. From the way he stood, it must have been a man. He confirmed it immediately in a low, gravelly chant, which ended with a prayer for forgiveness.

The man swung his sword at Elder Pang, too quickly for Pang to respond, and the sword found Pang’s throat.

A fountain of dark blood sprayed into the air as the bells continued to ring and the first rays of sunlight transfixed Elder Pang, who clutched at his wound.

Feiyan gasped as the man turned his attention to her, ignoring David and Alice. “Let me go, I want to go home, I want to go home. I’m sorry I left Xijing,” she whimpered at the man.

The man’s face was scarred and covered in cuts, but he had been handsome once. His eyes were cloudy, almost milky. He said a prayer yet again and raised his sword.

“Please don’t kill Feiyan,” she squealed, kneeling. “I’ll leave Tianbei, I’ll go back to the Palace.”

And then Alice heard it, as clear as day, the promise that the Sword had made to Feiyan from the Skybound Scripture.

“Time is coincidence and worth is innate. Strip the chains of fate and rewrite your history.”

The man swung his sword.

Alice closed her eyes, because she didn’t want to see Feiyan die, she didn’t believe Feiyan would die, she didn’t believe this world could be like this.

And it wasn’t.

There was a clang and a squelch of steel shearing through tendon and bone.

“Outer disciples are not permitted to leave the city of Tianbei before they should form their Cores.”

Alice cracked her eyes open and before them stood Fairy Guan, with the blood red sun of morning reflecting off of her impossibly bloodless sword raised in a strike pointed skyward.

The man’s bleeding, scarred head fell to the floor in a thunk and rolled to a stop in front of Feiyan. The man’s body was still standing, holding onto a sword that had been cleanly cutslicedsevered in two.

Feiyan screamed.