Ch. 044| The One Sword Within the Rift

That wall of the forbidden court, Lin Que turned over in his mind for days on end.

Inside the wall were inner-gate disciples, was "the Teacher," was the stone house forging the flaw-cutting tool. Bai Heng, a true-lineage disciple, had made it only into the outer court before being sent out; he, an odd-job disciple of the herb-lodge at the sixth layer of Qi Condensation, couldn't so much as get near the foot of the wall. To look once more through that door, to move against the man who cut meridians and left flaws—his present cultivation, his present skill, were nowhere near enough.

He had to grow stronger; that was one thing. But another thing pressed on his heart too—that court fed in so much rift-stock, so many lives, day and night; what did the Teacher want all that stock for? Beyond the wall he couldn't see through it.

Inside the wall he couldn't get in. But that stock all came out of the rifts—make a trip to the source of the stock, take his chances inside a rift, and he might just run across some clue.

The heat over his goods had not yet died down; rift crystal couldn't be sold.

Picking a day when the herb-lodge was off-rotation and the jade-token side had eased its grip, Lin Que slipped up to the old pill-kiln.

---

"Going in again?" Han Bosheng was quenching a fresh bone-pick in the kiln; he raised his eyes at him. "There's heat on you. Go easy."

"Not to sell stock. Just to look around," Lin Que said.

Han Bosheng gave an "Oh" and asked nothing more. This lad's thoughts were never all laid out in the open.

Qinghe handed out a few freshly drawn protective talismans and didn't ask much either—she had come along in the first place for her own account.

The one they chose this time was a rift on the west side of the blighted ground, lightly asleep but deeper than the last one. The three of them, as before: Lin Que ahead reading the path and the vital gates, Qinghe in the middle laying talismans, Han Bosheng bringing up the rear. Once in the rift, that layer of "clean" faint light lit up a winding, narrow passage, far longer than the last one.

Halfway along, a great centipede—its whole body sprouting poison-nodes, its jointed legs dripping green miasma—shot out from a crack in the rock, its rank stench striking the nose. That green miasma rotted flesh where it touched; Han Bosheng barked "Don't take it head-on" and fell back half a step first. A sweep of Lin Que's left eye made out, on the third segment of armor below its neck, a flaw not yet grown closed; Qinghe pressed two binding talismans to the ground, snaring its dozen or more thrashing legs, and only then did Lin Que press in close and drive a pick into that flaw. The great worm went slack all over and collapsed. Han Bosheng came up and stripped off its pair of miasma-dripping mandible-pincers—Qinghe said they'd come in handy for refining poison talismans.

—This was still his usual way of fighting: rely on Qinghe to snare, rely on Han to pin, and himself supply that last mending stroke.

As Qinghe gathered up her talismans, Lin Que took an extra look at the two talismans between her fingers—at the place where the final stroke closed off, the qi always thinned. That was the old flaw of her family's Green Seal-Script Talisman: its last stroke had been cut, and six generations had not mended it back. Looking at that familiar broken end, he noted in his heart: some day, when there was time, he would point that flaw out to her—whether it could be mended back rested on that brush of hers.

Deeper in, the narrow passage forked.

One branch ran downward; one, extremely narrow, ran slanting into deeper reaches, hugging the rift wall. That narrow one simply did not exist to the eyes of Han Bosheng and Qinghe—rift wall was rift wall, where was there any fork? But under Lin Que's left eye, at the end of that narrow fork, there was light.

That light was unlike any he was used to—the "clean" man-eating light at the rift's edge was cold and stabbing to the eye, the living-qi of rift crystal warm and kindly; this one point resembled neither.

It was a kind of... light he had never seen before.

---

"You two wait for me here." Lin Que fixed his gaze on the fork only he could see. "There's something in there. I'll take one look and be right back."

"I'll come with you," Qinghe said.

"That path, you can't walk it." Lin Que didn't explain why—that fork was invisible to others, and to go in was most likely to step straight into a rift and die. He only said, "Nine Lives' three rules, I've got them. If I'm not back in one stick of incense, withdraw on your own. Don't wait for me."

Han Bosheng stared at him a moment but in the end didn't stop him. What that pair of eyes of the lad's could see, his own old bones couldn't see, and couldn't argue for.

Lin Que turned sideways and squeezed into that narrow fork.

The fork was extremely narrow, the "clean" light on either wall so near it brushed the tip of his nose. Holding his breath, following the path in his eye, he edged inch by inch toward that point of light. After some twenty-odd steps, the end of the narrow passage opened all at once into emptiness—

In a small void whose four walls glimmered with a faint glow hung a "shadow."

It was the lingering shadow of a sword-light.

There was no telling which dynasty, which school of sword it was, nor who had left it. It simply hung there in midair, in the posture of a single thrust, the point aimed straight ahead, its sword-intent bitter and keen—as though someone had thrust here in this rift the last, and fiercest, sword of his life, the sword-momentum unrecalled while the man himself was gone, leaving only the "intent" of this one sword, together with the qi all about it, nailed here forever.

The sword-form was archaic and plain; its opening stance, its closing momentum, were unlike any school of swordsmanship he had seen at the Xuanzhao Sect or in the market town—not a sword this world should hold. Rather it seemed to have drifted in along this rift from somewhere very, very far away, far past telling.

Lin Que had never seen anything like it. The rifts had yielded stock, yielded aberrations, yielded rift crystal; but a "sword"—the lingering shadow of an art—he had run across for the first time.

The point of heat beneath his left eye flared up with a roar.

---

He could see that sword-intent—and he could see its "flaw."

The moves of that one sword were whole: the momentum, the force-paths, the timing of the thrust, all clear as day. But at the "root" of this sword, one stroke was missing: the breath that carried the sword, how it should be drawn from the dantian to the point—midway there was a broken stretch.

This sword, too, was broken.

The one who left it had perhaps, because of just this missing stroke, been unable to carry the breath through to the end, and so had staked his life on this single sword. For anyone else, even standing right here, they could not see this light, still less this flaw, and so could not learn it.

But Lin Que could see.

Holding his breath, he ran his spirit-sense along the force-path of that sword-intent, once, twice, three times, joining the broken stroke of qi-vessel back together, inch by inch, in his mind.

This mending was fiercer than mending a pill or a talisman. That sword-intent was bitter and keen, overbearing, the last sword left by a man who had struggled for it with his life—and it still carried three parts of vitality and would not be tamed; the moment his spirit-sense laid hold of it, a surge of sword-momentum slammed back, striking his temples until they throbbed, and the point of heat under his left eye burned until it nearly dripped blood. He gritted his teeth and, bit by bit, led that back-surging momentum away along the mended qi-vessel and brought it to heel.

By the third pass of taming, at the instant the broken end joined, the "intent" of that sword suddenly came alive—following his spirit-sense, like a thread of cold spring water, it flowed into his meridians and settled there.

He understood this sword. Not that he had memorized the moves—it was that this one sword-stroke, together with the breath he had mended whole, had become a thing within his body.

Lin Que raised his hand. There was no sword in it, only a sharpened bone-pick. But following that sword-intent, a turn of his wrist thrust the bone-pick out—

That thrust was wholly unlike the picks he'd driven into vital gates before. From the tip of the bone-pick, out of nowhere, rose a thread of sword-qi, exceedingly fine, exceedingly keen, and with a hiss it scored a gash half an inch deep into the stone wall opposite.

One pick, serving as a sword.

Lin Que stared at that gash in the stone wall, then lowered his eyes to the ordinary bone-pick in his hand. This half-year, this pick and those few needles could only, in his hands, be pressed in close and driven slow into a vital gate once an aberration had been snared by someone. Now, on the strength of this one stroke of sword-intent, the pick's tip could spit sword-qi—across three feet, one jab, and even stone broke open.

---

Out of the shadows of the void, at some point, an aberration had crept—a rift-spider, its whole body grey-white and eyeless, its eight legs splayed, clinging to the rift wall and closing on him without a sound. His whole heart earlier had been on that sword-intent; he had not sensed it.

The rift-spider lunged down suddenly.

The Lin Que of one stick of incense ago would have had to fix on its vital gate, draw out its opening, then drive a pick in. But this time—

He had no leisure to think it through. His body sank along the force-path of that sword-intent just now, and at the turn of his wrist the bone-pick, carrying that thread of sword-qi, thrust straight up to meet the shell-seam beneath the rift-spider's belly.

The sword-qi broke the shell.

The rift-spider froze in midair, its eight legs curling in a spasm, and dropped to the ground with a slap, still. One pick through the heart, clean and neat—he hadn't even had time to look closely at its vital gate; that sword-intent had found the very spot to strike, of its own accord.

Before, hunting rifts, he had to rely on Qinghe's talismans to snare and Nine Lives' blade to overturn the beast before he could get near enough to supply that one needle. Just now, from sensing the killing intent to a single sword through the heart, he alone, in one instant, had done it all.

Lin Que looked down at the bone-pick in his hand, his heart pounding, and a long-absent exhilaration surged up from within his chest.

He gripped the bone-pick, still holding a thread of sword-qi, and stood in the faint glow, not moving for a good while.

From now on, this pick in his hand—across a full ten feet, could serve as a sword.

He looked down at the place where the sword-intent had hung. It was empty now. That one sword had gone into his body.

---

Back at the fork, Han Bosheng and Qinghe still waited where they were.

"Well?" Qinghe asked.

"A dead end. Nothing." Lin Que slipped the bone-pick back into his sleeve, its thread of sword-qi long since drawn utterly clean away, his face betraying nothing. "A wasted trip."

Han Bosheng eyed him narrowly, seeming to sense that his breath was a touch heavier, going in and coming out, than before. But the thing those eyes couldn't see, he couldn't after all bring himself to ask; he only grunted, "Good, if it's nothing. Don't be greedy. Pull out."

The three of them started back out of the blighted ground along the way they'd come.

Near the edge of the blighted ground, Lin Que stopped.

Not to read the path—he'd sensed something watching him.

He looked toward that feeling. Of all the rifts across the slope, the shallowest one, right at the edge—in the faint light of its mouth crouched something the size of a palm, ash-grey all over, curled into a ball.

A sweep of Lin Que's left eye, and his heart went taut.

These eyes of his, looking at living things, only ever looked for one thing: flaws. Man or aberration, meridian, vital gate, art—there was always some place worn thin, some broken end, falling clear as day beneath his eye. But this little thing before him, from head to foot, was clean, not a single stroke missing—so whole it seemed not a thing this world should hold.

The little thing was gazing back at him too, its pair of eyes strangely bright, able to turn, able to dodge. At the instant their four eyes met, it seemed to take fright and shrank into the crevice in a blink, the faint light of that shallow rift going out along with it, gone so fast it might never have appeared.

"What is it?" Qinghe turned her head back.

"Nothing." Lin Que drew back his gaze. "Let's go."

Before catching up, he looked back and fixed the position of that shallow rift firmly in his mind.

【Ch. 044 End · the rear mountain of the Xuanzhao Sect · the west rift of the blighted ground】