Gravel still clung to Chen Wuya's brow, blood mingling with dust and leaving a slanted smear when he raised a hand to wipe it away. His right leg was numb from knee to ankle, as though it had been clamped in iron pincers and then released, twitching in pulses. He leaned against the cartwheel, his short spear laid across his knees, its tip trembling faintly.
Zhao Tianying stood before him without speaking, simply staring at his foot.
"Chaotic Wind Leg." Zhao Tianying finally spoke, his voice pressed low, like a blade grinding against stone. "Thirty years ago, the third disciple of the Azure Edge branch left the sect. He died on the northern desert snowfields, and this leg technique was buried beneath the ice with him. You, a menial from a refugee camp—how did you kick out that move in the mist?"
Chen Wuya did not look up. His fingers slowly traced the cracks in the spear shaft. He knew he could neither panic nor play dumb now. Zhao Tianying was not some deputy escort chief who could be fobbed off with a line like "a blacksmith fooling around."
"Someone taught me," he said.
"Who?"
"He never mastered it himself." Chen Wuya raised his eyes and looked Zhao Tianying straight in the face. "Halfway through training, his meridians went awry and he went mad. Before he died, he broke the moves apart and taught them to me by reversing the paths. He said—only those who survive deserve to be called right."
Zhao Tianying's brow furrowed.
It sounded absurd, yet it happened to match certain rumors from the martial world. When practitioners suffered qi deviation, they sometimes overturned every route of force within themselves and instead created bizarre techniques. Such people were often no longer sane, yet in their dying moments,