In the wilds of Yongzhou there breeds a viper like no other — black-scaled, white-banded. Grass withers where it crawls. No man bitten by it has lived.
Liu Zhongyuan set down his brush and sighed. He rose and went to the window. "The people suffer, and a cruel government is deadlier than any viper. Since the fourteenth year of Tianbao, the realm has rotted — and now even monsters walk the villages."
The fourteenth year of Tianbao. The year the emperor finally went dull, the year a prince raised his banners, the year the golden age died in a single fire. The rebellion was crushed, but the wars never truly ended. Warlords carved up the land, and the old splendor never came back.
Since then, the miasma of demons had crept across the sacred heartland. Flatterers ran the court, eunuchs pulled the strings, and men of vision — men like Liu Zhongyuan — were exiled to forgotten corners of the empire, their ambitions left to rust.
He was still turning the thought over when a black wind howled past the window. A viper, banded black and white, burst from a drainage ditch onto the street. Every plant along its path shriveled in an instant.
The very monster from his essay. Deadly beyond measure.
Except this one was absurdly large — ten yards of muscle. Its tail toppled houses. Its breath rolled down the street in a fog of venom.
People screamed and ran. At the corner, a fat white pig, too slow to flee, took one breath of the fog, kicked its legs once, and died.
Then a ragged boy charged in from behind. His fist cut the air, and the punch itself became a gust that blew the venom fog apart.
The great snake fled in terror. The boy ran it down. It whirled to fight — and he kicked it under the jaw. The world spun as the snake flew. The boy was on it before it landed, leaping, ten fingers flickering up the joints of its spine.
Crack-crack-crack — like a string of firecrackers. Every bone he touched slipped out of place. In a heartbeat he had worked from skull to tail, dislocating the entire skeleton. The monster lay helpless.
The crowd erupted. "Little Yan! Beautiful work!"
The boy's name was Su Yan. Long-limbed, fingers slim and clever, skin dark from years of sun. The most famous snake catcher in Lingling County — fourteen years old, and already better than any man alive.
He grabbed the tail and started off. Liu Zhongyuan hurried out and stopped him. "Su Yan — what do you want with that snake?"
The boy paused, recognized the magistrate of Yongzhou, and bowed quickly. "Magistrate Liu. Wax-cured, this viper makes medicine — cures palsy, ulcers, kills parasites. The prefect says anyone who catches one is exempt from taxes."
"Well, that's good, isn't it?"
Su Yan's face fell. "My grandfather was a snake catcher. Snake catching killed him. My father was a snake catcher. Snake catching killed him. I've trained in the family art for six years. Sooner or later, I expect it'll kill me too."
Liu Zhongyuan's heart ached. "The prefect is a friend of mine. I can have your corvée lifted. You'd pay ordinary taxes like everyone else."
The great snake spoke, in a human voice: "His Excellency speaks sense! Su Yan, I've spent decades cultivating — spare me! You pay your taxes, and I'll go practice my arts in the mountains!"
Liu Zhongyuan jumped. "It's a yao!"
"My grandfather was a snake yao, and snake catchers killed him!" the serpent wailed. "My parents were snake yao, and snake catchers killed them! I'm a hundred and twenty years old. One more step and I'd have become a flood dragon and eaten every last one of you bastards — and now I die at the hands of a snake cat—"
Su Yan flicked its jaw out of joint. The lecture died.
The boy's eyes reddened. "Magistrate, catching snakes, I can at least eat. Go back to paying taxes and I'd starve inside a year. Who'd gamble his life on a yao if he had any other road?"
He dragged the snake away, head down.
Liu Zhongyuan wept. "Who would have thought the taxman's poison runs deeper than the viper's?"
He went back inside and wrote the essay that would outlive him — The Snake Catcher's Tale.
* * *
Su Yan hauled the yao home and dumped it into a vat. Too late to deliver it tonight; the yamen run would wait for morning. He cooked, ate, and dropped into sleep.
In the vat, the snake writhed all night, trying to pop its bones back into place. Around midnight, tax collectors stormed the village like bandits — smashing, looting, roaring for payment. Su Yan woke, lit a lamp, checked the vat. The yao was still there. He went back to bed.
Hours later the snake finally clicked its jaw together — just as the boy stirred again.
The yao sagged in despair.
Su Yan dressed and faced the rising sun. Slowly, he breathed in the dawn, cycling the Grand Unity Daoyin Art.
With every breath, the sunlight on his face seemed to brighten — as if the light itself were being inhaled. Grains of golden dust hung in the air, then sank into his skin.
Thunder rumbled faintly in his belly, rising from his dantian to his throat, his nose, then sinking back down.
Moments later, heat rolled off him in waves of white steam.
His skill had not come from his grandfather or his father.
He was not, in fact, his father's blood. His grandfather had pulled him out of a fire — the great blaze at Sujiaping, seven years ago — and carried him to Jiangjia Village. His father and grandfather were surnamed Jiang. He was a Su.
He remembered almost nothing of the fire. Nothing except a breathing method: the Grand Unity Daoyin Art. He had practiced it idly ever since — seven years now.
For most of that time, he'd thought it was useless. Its clearest benefit, he'd once sneered, was that it made him piss straighter and farther, with no fear of wet shoes.
Then he grew older, went catching with his grandfather and father, killed his first great snake — and learned the Art was good for considerably more than aim.
He'd taught it to both men, but they had started too old. Their progress crawled. One by one, snake catching killed them anyway.
Now he was the only one left.
Three years ago he had taken the Grand Unity Art as far as it went. His qi and blood ran like rolling thunder. He could feel there was more road ahead — more transformations waiting — but the method simply stopped.
Behind him, the snake yao peeked over the vat's rim and nearly died of fright.
The boy was devouring the essence of the sun, forging his qi and blood faster than the yao itself ever could. This wasn't sipping sunlight. This was a monster unhinging its jaw and swallowing the dawn whole.
"He's practicing a yao art!" The snake stared. "He's human — how can he cultivate a yao art?"
When the sun climbed higher, Su Yan let his breathing settle. The snake ducked back down. After mid-morning the solar essence turned scorching; practice then would cook a cultivator from the inside. Overdo it, and you'd have to wait for a full moon and balance the fire with lunar essence.
Su Yan came to the vat, pinched the snake behind its seven-inch, and lifted it out. His smile was friendly. "I don't enjoy killing. I ask, you answer. Or I kill you. Clear?"
The snake nodded frantically.
"How did you become a yao?"
The snake, ever reasonable, explained: "My grandfather was an ordinary viper. One day he wandered into Qinyan Cave just as half of it collapsed, revealing a scripture scroll and a gourd of pills. He ate the pills and woke up — smart, talking, reading. He cultivated by the scripture and became a yao. Grandfather passed the scroll to my parents, my parents to me. An orderly lineage. A scholarly family, really."
Su Yan nodded. "Hand over the scripture."
The snake hesitated.
Su Yan picked up a fist-sized stone by the well and squeezed. Four or five drops of water beaded out of it. He opened his hand; the stone fell as dust.
"How do you compare to that stone?"
The snake made up its mind instantly and vomited up a scroll.
The scroll held two arts: the Great Sun Daoyin Art, and a martial fist called the Titan-Ox Demon Fist.
"You're a snake. No arms, no legs. How were you planning to practice a fist art?" Su Yan laughed. "That's for ox yao or elephant yao, isn't it?"
The snake's mouth twitched. You take what cultivation you can get, it thought sourly. I don't get to be picky. And you're one to talk, cultivating a yao art yourself.
The Great Sun Art was kin to his Grand Unity Art — only slower, much slower, at drawing in solar essence. It named the stage they were both in: the Qi-Gathering stage. Gather the sun's essence, temper the body, build the blood.
And then — nothing. The Great Sun Art, like his own, simply ended at the peak of Qi-Gathering.
"Do you feel it too?" Su Yan asked. "That there's a road past the peak?"
The snake answered carefully. "At the ceiling, my blood surges like it's ready to break through a pass. I just can't find the pass."
Su Yan frowned, went inside, and came out with a book basket. He dumped it across the ground.
The snake gaped. Dozens of Daoyin arts, every school imaginable.
Su Yan had caught more than snakes over the years. Every yao within fifty li had met him. Each had found its own fortune — a collapsed cave, a voice preaching from a cliff wall, a grotto under a lake — and every single one of their arts, without exception, ended at Qi-Gathering.
"Why?" Su Yan muttered. "Why does every art in the world cut off at the same place?"
The snake seethed. "Someone is targeting yao-kind! They destroyed our arts and left us the scraps! A human conspiracy, mark my words!"
"If they could destroy the rest, why not destroy it all?" Su Yan shook his head. "There's more to this."
He turned to the Titan-Ox Demon Fist — and his eyes lit up. Any race could practice it, so long as they had limbs. It drove qi and blood at double speed; one burst of it hit like a war elephant — the titan strength. The "demon ox" was the madness that came with blood moving that fast. It would even swell the body several inches mid-strike.
Until now he had subdued yao with brute force and nothing else. No technique. With this fist, that changed tonight.
"A-Yan!" villagers were calling outside. "Time to worship the god!"
Su Yan tucked the scroll into his robe. He pinched the snake's neck bone gently back into place. "When I return — be gone, and hurt no one. Otherwise, you get waxed and delivered."
The yao felt its neck click whole again, torn between terror and joy.
* * *
At the Jiangjia ancestral hall, the contrast was obscene: villagers hollow-cheeked and ragged, the hall itself gilded and glorious.
Those with money carried cooked chickens and ducks, thick candles. Those without brought fruit and white rice, holding three sticks of incense. Those with nothing at all came like Su Yan — empty-handed.
Inside, incense smoke coiled. Behind the burner loomed a wooden idol sixteen feet tall, red-lacquered, green-robed, blue-faced and fanged. The smoke streamed up its nostrils.
The idol's chest swelled. It inhaled the village's offering of incense in one long drag — then wood became flesh, and the god stood up off its altar, snatched the chickens and fruit, ate the candles for dessert.
The first day of the month. Worship day. In Jiangjia, in Xujiajing, Yangzitang, Shuangji Bridge, Shagou Bend — idols of wood, clay, bronze and iron woke in every shrine, put on flesh, and feasted. In the mountain temples and dragon-king shrines around Lingling, in the City God's temple in town, gods stirred and supped. Across Yongzhou, across southern Hunan, across the whole sacred heartland, incense rose like mist — a grand tableau of a flourishing age.
But the emperor had gone dull, the realm had shattered, and the warlords ruled now. The gods of the heartland were not what they had been. Year by year, they were fading.
"Su Yan! Jiang Shu! Jiang Lu!"
In the Jiangjia hall, the god slammed the altar, furious. "You paupers bring me nothing — not one stick of incense! I eat only two meals a month from you, and you can't even fill me! Do you want fair winds and full harvests, or don't you? Offend me, and see what calamity falls on your village!"