"Broken Chivalrous Bones-the installment that came out in August was the finale. I haven't read it yet." Zhang Siche sighed. "I couldn't hope to find anyone here who'd read it. I thought I'd die with that regret."
"But!" Zhang Siche patted Pei Ye's shoulder. "Thank goodness you came-what's that look? Don't tell me you haven't read it?"
Pei Ye glanced at him and said slowly, "Installment twenty: Eighteen years a withered ghost; when shall a Flying Immortal ascend the foremost tower?"
Zhang Siche sucked in a breath, then grinned. "I knew it! There had to be a twist. How could the great hero Xi Wu Chou lose just like that?"
Then he blinked his silver-gray eyes at Pei Ye. "Go on."
Pei Ye shook his head. "That's all. I only read the installment title."
Zhang Siche stared fixedly at him for seven or eight breaths. Finally, he heaved a long sigh and slumped back against the stone wall. "What fate denies, you must not force."
Pei Ye poked him with a finger. Zhang Siche gave him a sidelong look. "What?"
Looking a little embarrassed, Pei Ye said, "But you could tell me the story-I've only just read the first installment."
Just then, the wooden door opened, and a man drenched in blood walked inside. Dark-red strips of tissue clung to his black clothes; it was impossible to tell whether they were mangled muscle or torn entrails.
"[Nineteen] wins. Next pair: [Twenty-one], [Twenty-two]."
The two talking raised their eyes for a glance. Zhang Siche looked away again. "All right."
Chapter 39: Out of the Cage
Now, having left the examination hall, the scholar was eager to return home, his heart flying ahead like an arrow. He led his donkey out of the city. But Heaven refused to oblige: halfway along his journey, thunder cracked overhead, and rain began to fall.
The rain was neither heavy nor light. The scholar himself would be fine, but his chest of books was precious beyond measure. As he fretted, he spotted a small pavilion ahead. Delight rose to his brows, and he hurried over with his donkey to shelter from the rain.
Once beneath the pavilion, the scholar unloaded the book chest from the donkey and placed it in the center. Only then did he breathe a sigh of relief and turn to find a seat.
Yet that simple turn nearly frightened him into a tumble-outside the pavilion behind him, a man stood in utter silence!
The scholar could hardly be blamed for his surprise. He had traveled alone the entire way, yet in the time it took him to bend down and move his book chest, this man had appeared behind him, as though he had dropped straight out of the sky.
Despite the biting spring chill, the man wore only a thin black shirt, now soaked through with rain. His posture was straight and tall, like a sturdy pine wrapped in black cloth.
When the scholar turned, the man nodded in greeting, removed his rain hat, and wrung out his wet hair, allowing the scholar to see his face clearly: thin lips, a high nose, lean cheeks, and long, bright eyes beneath sword-shaped brows. A pale-red marking the size of a thumb extended from the outer corner of his left eye.
Unusual, handsome, perceptive, proud, composed, ruthless-
"Wait, why is this part so detailed?" Pei Ye could not help interrupting. He remembered Azure Luan in the Mirror's writing as exceptionally concise, adding only a stroke or two of ink where it mattered.
Zhang Siche glanced at him. "Are you telling the story, or am I?"
"You are."
"This was the great hero Xi Wu Chou's first appearance. Without some detail, how could you grasp his splendid bearing? Do you know that, with Hero Xi's abilities, not a drop of rain needed to touch him? He deliberately let himself get wet here so he wouldn't frighten the scholar..."
Now Pei Ye understood: this was a character Zhang Siche liked. "You don't need to explain that. Just tell it the way the author wrote it."
Zhang Siche rolled his eyes and continued, "Anyway, the scholar was awed by his appearance..."
The scholar and the man sheltered together beneath the pavilion. The man leaned against a pillar with his sword in his arms, looking cold, aloof, and unapproachable. The scholar dared not start a conversation and merely sat quietly.
Unexpectedly, the man himself asked for help reading a small slip of paper. The scholar promptly took it. Written on it was a passage in an ancient style, its vocabulary and word order archaic and obscure. Only after reading it several times did the scholar realize it described a place.
Yet he still struggled to understand exactly which place it meant. Only the phrase "northward down Ghost Car" was relatively easy to decipher. The ancient name of Kui Residence Mountain beside his hometown seemed to have been "Ghost Car Mountain," and descending northward from that mountain would lead toward his town.
The remaining phrases, however, could only be unraveled by consulting a great local scholar, searching through ancient books, and conducting painstaking textual research.
The scholar told him this honestly. The man wished to thank him with a piece of jade, but the scholar firmly refused such a valuable gift. Seeing that the rain showed no sign of stopping, the two began to talk.
The scholar had assumed the man was a cultivator wholly devoted to the Martial Dao, with no interest in other matters. Yet as their conversation unfolded, he could not help marveling at the man's learning.
Literature, calligraphy, music, board games, cooking, wood and stone, architecture, judging horses, identifying jade-the man was versed in them all, leaving the scholar utterly astonished.
The scholar could not help feeling ashamed. Even if he passed the provincial examination, his accomplishments would be limited to studying the classics and writing essays. By comparison, he truly was a bookish fool.
The man said he, too, was an out-and-out rough fellow. All this knowledge had come from a learned friend. After that friend died, leaving behind many books and notes, he often leafed through them out of longing for him.
As their conversation grew lively, the man brought out a flask of wine. They drank and talked, and the scholar poured out everything: the hardships of his life, the ambitions in his heart, his feelings for a fair lady, and his private anxieties.
The man listened quietly. His experience was clearly extraordinary; whatever the scholar brought up, he could offer a few words of guidance from a commanding height.
Thus they exchanged names and formed a friendship. When they parted, the man said he had seen a shadow of his old friend in the scholar, and would come back to drink and talk with him once his business was finished in a couple of days.
Before leaving, he sent a stream of true qi into the scholar with a pat. Instantly sober, the scholar felt refreshed in body and mind. He looked around, but the black-clad figure was already gone.
At this point, Zhang Siche stopped.
"Go on," Pei Ye said, still hungry for more.
"Your turn." Zhang Siche looked toward the doorway, where a bloodied figure was entering.
Pei Ye raised his head just in time to hear the black-robed man announce in an indifferent voice, "[Twenty-one] wins. Next pair: [Twenty-three], [Twenty-four]."
An enormous figure rose in the depths of the stone cellar-a burly man roughly two meters tall. Pei Ye had noticed him earlier, but only now that he stood did his whole body come into view.
Tough, coarse skin, broad hands and feet, hard sinews, great swaths of primitive totems tattooed across his body... He walked over and gave Pei Ye a savage grin, exposing two pointed canine teeth.
One of the Wilderness People.
Pei Ye sighed silently and pushed himself up from the ground.
"You can hear the rest when you get back." A grin spread across Zhang Siche's red-scarred face.
Pei Ye left the stone cellar and had his first chance to see what this valley looked like.
Though the night was deep, the moon shone clear and bright, and countless stars studded the sky. Beneath that pale light, the high cliffs on either side rose in uneven contours, with sharp outcrops jutting out here and there.
The valley was long and narrow as well. Pei Ye raised his head and felt as though he stood inside the mouth of a giant dog.
There were fewer people outside than Pei Ye had imagined. He saw only the occasional scattered black robe, and even wondered whether more people had entered the cavern than remained outside.
Still, that made sense. First, the Torchworld Cult had little room to recruit followers on a large scale. Second, those who entered the cavern-apart from him and Zhang Siche-did not need guarding.
But when he rounded a dim mountain silhouette and the scene beyond came into view, Pei Ye's eyes widened. He wondered whether he had been wrong-perhaps there had originally been quite a few people here.
If this valley was a dog's mouth, then the sight before him was what remained after an iron hammer had been driven viciously into it.
The canine teeth had shattered and fallen away, and cascading sand and stone poured down like blood.
The Torchworld Cult had erected tall platforms and pitched tents here, but now everything had been mercilessly destroyed by some unknown force. Moreover, he could tell that neither the structures nor the mountain rocks had been that force's main target. They had merely been caught in its wake.
A little farther on, a sight appeared that nearly stopped Pei Ye's heart and lungs-a corpse lay beside the ruins. Even stained with blood, the color of its robe remained striking.
It was the purple of that mysterious Nether Venerable.
The sight flashed past. Countless thoughts raced through Pei Ye's mind, but before he could consider what sort of attack this place had suffered, the black-robed guide stopped, and an arena appeared before him.
Flames of Dark Blue, twice a person's height, rose all around it, forming a neat circle.
On the ground within that circle, the Fire Talisman he had not seen for several days had been drawn in Dark Blue liquid, so enormous that it filled the entire arena.
Above the arena's center floated a bead of light, its Dark Blue hue almost shading into purple. The blood left from the previous fight was still being drawn from the dust in wisps and flying into the bead.
Without a word, the man of the Wilderness People stepped inside first and crooked a finger at Pei Ye. Through the curtain of flames, his massive silhouette warped into something like a yaksha.
Chapter 40: First Kill
Pei Ye followed him across the flames, which, as always, neither scorched nor burned.
But the instant he entered the arena, Pei Ye felt a pull. The cocoon of light in his abdomen seemed to awaken, like a snake emerging from its hole at the scent of a rat.
Hostility! Hostility! Hostility!
The cocoons of light in their abdomens sensed each other simultaneously. Before Pei Ye could summon it, the surging liquid had already flooded his entire body in impatient anticipation.
Unlike humans fighting to the death for all manner of reasons, the desire rising from his abdomen was primal and pure-devour the other, and he would become stronger!
Neither man had blood on his clothes. Both were candidates of the lowest rank, yet to fight a single match. They would use the other's corpse to climb onto the second step.
This was the first opponent Pei Ye faced since his old wounds had healed and the cocoon of light had taken up residence within him. Having never grown a Meridian Tree, he had no way to assess the energy in his body. He guessed it was equivalent to a Meridian Tree's fourth growth or fifth growth.
Before, he had been cautious when only one arm was infected. Now that this energy flowed through every limb and bone, there was nowhere left to hide.
The man of the Wilderness People crouched, blue markings crawling over his body like roaming snakes. Pei Ye knew his own body looked the same.
Without any signal to begin, the two lunged at each other like leopards.
There was no more tactical maneuvering or winning through surprise, only solid punches and kicks, one move after another. In this empty Gu Cage, where neither had a weapon, the importance of the most primitive qualities-strength, speed, and reflexes-was magnified without limit.
The man's body felt even more oppressive up close. On the Great Tang's northern frontier, his people could contend with heavily armored soldiers and even light cavalry using flesh and blood alone. Now his fist swung out viciously, truly like an iron hammer.
Yet Pei Ye, too, had grown up praised for his exceptional physical gifts. He had never lost out in strength.
Faced with such a fearsome punch, Pei Ye did not blink, dodge, or retreat. He even reached out to catch it with one palm while driving his other fist straight at his opponent's face.
This was the style Pei Ye had developed over his years of martial training, neither long nor short-supplement defense with attack, and consider defense before attacking.
It was an upright, steady approach to fistwork. On defense, it could disrupt an enemy's attacking rhythm; on offense, it left him a measure of leeway if the enemy suddenly changed moves. This flexible technique had always given him the upper hand at the Mid-Autumn Martial Tournament.
In the blink of an eye, the fist struck his hand. An immense, unstoppable force slammed into his palm, as though a towering wave had crashed into him head-on.
The Dark Blue liquid surging within him immediately provided solid support, checking the momentum of his opponent's fist.
But his opponent was attacking with all his strength, while Pei Ye was not defending with all of his. His defense collapsed in an instant, and that huge, coarse fist drove his hand back and hammered into his lower abdomen.
Pei Ye actually knew the more sensible response-against an unfamiliar opponent's first attack, he should defend with his full strength and gauge their power.
But after he stepped into the arena, the restless cocoon of light inside him had made his entire mood more frenzied. Attack was the dominant theme here.
So, when Pei Ye felt his defense slip out of control, he did not immediately retreat or dodge. Instead, he hammered his opponent's face with still greater courage and force, even driving his own lower abdomen forward into the oncoming fist.
Agony shot through his abdomen, but the impact of his own fist felt just as solid.
Both staggered a step. Pei Ye doubled over and gulped two great breaths, his abdomen spasming uncontrollably. Before him, the man of the Wilderness People was likewise streaming tears and mucus, blood pouring from his crooked nose.
Pei Ye raised his eyes, bared his teeth, and hurled himself forward again.
In a fight at this pace, everything depended on who could launch the next attack faster and harder!
His fist shot straight toward the man's heart. The man twisted his footing and swung a punch, intending to trade injuries with this little fellow.
But this time, Pei Ye's attack was a feint. His punching hand opened, braced against the man's arm, and vaulted his entire body into the air.
The real attack would come from his leg, and its target had shifted from the heart to the temple.
Dark Blue liquid differed from true qi. It could not—or perhaps people had yet to discover the proper way to use it—serve the many ingenious purposes of true qi, which could even be projected outside the body or channeled into implements.
It served only as a passive enhancement, freely directed within the body to increase or decrease the strength of a particular limb.
Before you continue