Three’s Company (3)

Mu Xiaochi was on guard against the junior sister Xiao; her mind was like a child’s, and she sensed the true feelings of people around her more keenly than most.

She must have noticed what the junior sister really thought.

Lin Qianshuang stroked the girl’s head. “That big sister isn’t a bad person. Spend a little time with her and you’ll like her.”

Mu Xiaochi nervously caught a few of Lin Qianshuang’s fingers. “She is bad. She doesn’t like Xiaochi, and she doesn’t like Big Sister either.”

Xiao Lanle gave a cold laugh and stepped from the water. Her jade arm lifted lightly as she slid a hairpin into her tightly coiled black bun; with five fingers she smoothed the folds of her sash, the dampness vanished, and the pink robe looked freshly donned.

Every movement was graceful and proper, yet when she passed Lin Qianshuang she brutally hooked the sash and hauled her close. The curve of her lips was icy, her dark eyes bottomless. “Don’t waste your heart on that fool, sooner or later I will kill her.”

Lin Qianshuang staggered half a step, her eyes darkening as she regarded Xiao Lanle. “Madame City Lord,” she said coldly, “everyone here belongs to the City Lord. If anyone sees… please don’t place your servant in a difficult spot.”

Xiao Lanle gave a short, contemptuous snort and released her. The corner of her eye drooped as she flicked a warning glance at Mu Xiaochi.

Mu Xiaochi flinched and hugged Lin Qianshuang’s arm.

Lin Qianshuang clasped the child’s icy hand and pressed her lips together.

I misread her, she realized. Junior Sister Xiao nurses a deep grudge against the City Lord; her approach to me is calculated, and she poses a real threat to Xiaochi. The City Lord may call Xiao Lanle her dao partner, yet sooner or later she will reveal her true aim.

An outside observer could see plainly that whatever feelings lay between them were neither genuine nor carved on her bones; why would Mu Weiyin shed a tear for a traitor?

The tattoo on her collarbone still burned; the fine pain rooted beneath her skin drew her brows together.

To love a paper figure and to love a real person had always been two different matters.

Lin Qianshuang lowered the hand that had brushed the mark and gave a careless smile. She would never fall in love with anyone, therefore the Gu could never harm her.

Her heart lurched; the gnawing, tearing ache of the insect made it hard to breathe, and she bent, almost double.

Her eyes narrowed, the pupils tightened, and it felt as if every drop of blood in her organs had frozen motionless.

Her mind was an utter blank; no one had left the faintest image inside her.

“Big sister, you’re so pale. Are you sick? Let me take you to the clinic.”

Xiaochi’s face hovered close as she tugged Lin Qianshuang’s sleeve and dabbed the cold sweat from her forehead.

The Gu insect’s torment arrived and vanished in a flash.

Her mood stayed as bland as drinking plain water; with no one in her thoughts, the bug’s attack felt more like a warning shot.

For a City Lord who cultivates the Emotionless Path to fall in love is simply too hard.

Back when she was small and had yet to tread the Emotionless Path, someone might once have brushed her heart.

Lin Qianshuang’s thoughts stirred. A kind, gentle smile curved her lips as she leaned toward Mu Xiaochi and asked softly, “Xiaochi, may Big Sister ask you something? Before Junior Sister Xiao, did City Lord Mu ever hold anyone dear?”

Mu Xiaochi blinked, apparently puzzled.

Lin Qianshuang rephrased, eyes warm, hands sketching closeness. “Did your sister ever have a bosom friend, the sort who are always together?”

Still no answer. Instead, Mu Xiaochi hooked Lin Qianshuang’s little finger and tugged her out of the courtyard along a lightly shaded trail.

She halted before an abandoned mansion. The stone steps at the red-lacquered gate were swept clean; wildflowers poked through the cracks, and fallen leaves lay heaped beneath tall trees as though someone tidied them.

“Every month Big Sister has to sit in this courtyard for a tea’s length of time before she leaves, and she especially hates anyone going near those papers in the study drawer.”

Xiaochi slipped into the study, cuddled a carved toy from the shelf, then watched Lin Qianshuang reach for the drawer and complained, “The paper was yellow, I only tore one sheet to patch a kite, yet Big Sister scolded me, all because of that pitch-black weirdo who once gave her a Shark Pearl.”

Lin Qianshuang pulled the drawer open. Inside lay a thin sheaf of paper headed with cryptic lines of the Simple Mantras of the Heartless Way; beneath them rested a thick bundle of yellowed bamboo slips, the basic sword-cultivation primer.

At the foot of every densely annotated column someone had written, in an unmistakably modern hand:

Before life taught me longing, I was free of longing; once it taught me, longing devoured me.

Clearly a modern plagiarized poem.

On the last line someone had engraved a few tiny characters; Lin Qianshuang traced them with a wisp of demonic qi and the words blossomed: “As Qianyu said, it ought to be so.”

The hand was fluid, delicate, utterly unlike the wild annotations above it; the writer had been in high spirits.

Lin Qianshuang wondered whether Liang Jingxuan himself had brushed those lines, whether the chosen son had stumbled on her find and planted this false scent.

A pale-gold sword flash skimmed the edge of her sight, and a violet figure stepped into the study.

“How did you coax Xiaochi into entering here?”

Mu Weiyin snatched the bamboo slips from Lin Qianshuang’s hand. The City Lord’s usually impassive face flushed with anger. “Out,” she said, pointing at the door. “You were never meant to enter this place.”

Seeing that rage, Lin Qianshuang knew she had grazed the dragon’s scale. Heart hammering, she slipped outside.

To her relief, Mu Weiyin did not order punishment.

Something inside those slips was secret; the love poem alone was unsettling.

Lin Qianshuang pressed herself to the doorjamb and peered through the crack. Inside, Mu Weiyin wiped each strip with silk as though it were treasure, then laid the bundles tenderly in a drawer.

Bundles that no one would pick up on the street were, in Mu Weiyin’s hands, suddenly priceless.

Mu Weiyin, who had seen every rare treasure under heaven, treated those bundles of scrap like priceless relics. A story had to lie behind it.

Lin Qianshuang told herself that, now that she had succeeded as Tower Lord, she might as well search the archives for the City Lord’s records. Perhaps she would pick up a thread.

With Tianshu City’s silver medallion at her waist, she walked into Tianshu Tower. Rogue cultivators in the branch wings paused to salute; old acquaintances in Yixiang Tower bowed from a respectful distance, too polite to draw near.

She climbed straight to the tenth floor and the Cabinet of Rogue Cultivator Annals, hunting for anything Mu Weiyin had written. The shelves yielded only slim, dog-eared chapbooks: casual notes, three-line entries, none of it useful.

The tiny characters blurred into sesame seeds. Page after page slid through her fingers until drowsiness crept upward; she did not notice the footsteps behind her and jumped when a shadow fell across the desk.

She closed the book and looked closely, it was someone from within Tianshu City; judging by his attire, he appeared to be an errand boy from Tianshu Tower.

“Tower Lord,” the page announced, “the Beast-Sealing Tower inside Mahayana Buddhist Temple is showing cracks. The City Lord orders you to inspect it and to guarantee Madame City Lord’s safety. The cultivation sects are already lodged at Lingyun Inn outside the temple gate.”

Lin Qianshuang closed the codex and slid it back onto the shelf. “I’ll leave at once,” she said. “Tell Lord Mu I’ll accompany Madame to the monks’ guest huts; I know a few senior brothers at the temple.”

The boy bowed and sprinted off.

Inside the Mahayana Temple, the Pagoda weakening is just the overture, she reminded herself. After today every Beast-Sealing Tower will shatter, except the one guarded by Penglai Immortal Sect, and the ancient monster Taotie will come boiling out.

Her plan was no longer to stop the coming disaster. Trying to block a script that had already been written was pointless. Instead, Lin Qianshuang focused on how to turn the event into Xiao Lanle’s coronation as Lord of the Immortal Alliance.

On the Character Favorability Interface, Xiao Lanle’s bar was full to the brim, only the final quest marker, “Alliance Lord,” still pulsing.

Night wind carried the cloying sweetness of blood. Fishing boats, candles flickering, drifted empty on the black jade water. A crimson fog rose from their keels, and clean white bones bobbed to the surface.

Inside the lantern-hung capital, traffic flowed like silk. Merchant vessels nosed against the wharf; painted pleasure boats glided beneath the pavilion bridge. A tendril of blood spiraled from the deep, followed by a second, then a third. A colossal shape nosed upward, two alien horns breaking the surface, half-lidded purple eyes studying the crowd above. Seawater and gore spilled from rows of fangs, and the reek of carrion spread.

On the bridge, a pretty girl in pale green held a brush as tall as her shoulder. She crouched, painting symbols with river water along the roots of the willows.

Passers-by glanced, curious, forming a loose ring to watch the girl scribble as though the damp paving stones were parchment waiting for a poem.

A scholar who prided himself on erudition also failed to read the girl’s crooked strokes. Instead of loitering with the crowd, he stepped before her and craned his neck to watch.

Whenever the thick brush, soaked in river water, swept across the grass, pale violet light seeped upward and lingered like drifting embers.

“Miss, what are you writing?”

Lin Qianshuang gave the book-basket youth a cursory glance; finding no trace of spiritual energy, she answered indifferently, “Fortune-telling.”

The scholar studied the girl in pale green. Her features were delicate and grave, nothing like the mountebanks who haunted temple fairs. “I travel to the capital for the examinations. Could you cast a hexagram for my success?”

Her divine sense still combed the waters beneath Pavilion Bridge; she had located the monster and had no patience for mortals. “I’m occupied. See that gentleman beside me? Ask him.”

The scholar followed Lin Qianshuang’s gaze, then watched the man holding the fortune-telling flag yank at his own hair. A seam split along his scalp, and the entire skin suit began to peel away. The scholar’s tongue tied in terror, his book basket tilted, and several volumes tumbled out. He scrambled to snatch the fallen books, dared not glance at the fortune-teller again, and fled like a startled bird.

Lin Qianshuang lifted her eyes to the pink-robed woman now holding the lifelike skin mask, and sent a quiet voice to her ear: “Junior Sister Xiao, a mortal doesn’t deserve that kind of fright.”

“That mortal had his nose practically on your cheek. If you don’t mind, I do.”

Xiao Lanle shed the disguise, stuffed the skin sheath into a jade slip, and strolled to the edge of the onlooking crowd.