"Vile, treacherous knaves!"
Wei Quji's face was so dark it seemed about to drip. Almost beneath his very gaze, that nameless enemy had taken the lives of all Little Grove Town as its offering, and roused every restless spirit that had never found its rest through the whole age of the Fenglin domain — all to condense the phantom image of the Gate of Ghosts, then slipped away without a care. While he, a fine Fifth Grade expert by any reckoning, had rushed here with all his might — and couldn't even catch a scrap!
As city lord, he had failed his duty. As a cultivator, he had been slapped in the face. When had he ever suffered such humiliation?
So...
"Waste!"
Wei Quji's backhand sent Wei Yan flying several yards through the air!
Of the dozens gathered there, not one dared make a sound, though nearly every one of them burned with injustice. Even Wei Yan himself only climbed silently to his feet, not a word to say for himself.
He had every reason to plead his case, every reason to be angry. Before the veil of fog, he had pressed onward; against the Nine Palace Array, he had gone first to break it; and at the sight of the Gate of Ghosts he had risked all to burn the single red signal-fire he carried. It could honestly be said that he had done the best that could be done at that stage, without a single flaw to be found in him.
But victory is victory, and defeat is defeat. An army grants no mercy for such niceties.
Wei Quji had opened the gates of the Dao Academy to him, set him to gather men to investigate Little Grove Town — and he had failed to stop the thing from happening. That was a failure of duty. Wei Quji could have struck him dead on the spot. But what would that have achieved?
Wei Quji came in a fury, and left in a fury.
The young ones scattered then — some bearing the wounded on their backs, some leaning on each other for support, and some carrying the dead. That was how they dispersed, the young disciples of the Dao Academy who had just fought a bitter battle of heavy death and grimmer loss.
A battle that had been devouring, and had proved, in the end, utterly useless.
From first to last they had never even learned who their enemy was, yet that enemy had reached his goal and swept away in triumph.
They were called — waste.
...
"Damn it all... I can't swallow this."
Du Yehu lay sprawled across the narrow bed of the dormitory, like a fallen iron pagoda. He had taken no wounds of any grave sort, and the bedrock he had burned had already been made good by the Root-Sealing Pill Zhao Rucheng had sent over; he needed only a season of quiet rest.
The Root-Sealing Pill was a precious thing, to be sure, but there was nothing hard about accepting it. Du Yehu happened to need it, and Zhao Rucheng happened to have it — and so it was. Two men who could entrust each other with their very lives needed no more reckoning than that.
But the battle at Little Grove Town, truth be told, had been a blow to every Dao Academy disciple who took part. For anyone with the ambition to go beyond the mortal and the hunger for strength, helplessness was perhaps the worst thing of all.
Only Zhao Rucheng was, perhaps, the exception. He had gone off to the Pavilion of Three Parts Fragrance to "nurse his wounds," saying he meant to win a fair lady's heart while still fresh from the brink of death.
Du Yehu was not a man given to lying about, but for the moment he could only lie flat. And there was no one who would indulge him in wanting a drink. So, rare as it was, some gloom settled over him.
Ling He spoke not a word; his eyes were shut as he cultivated.
As for Jiang Wang — at this moment, he was eating, together with Jiang An'an.
The Cai Family Mutton Shop was a century-old establishment. Two bowls of rich, fragrant mutton soup, and ten catties of white-cut mutton, sliced with a clean hand.
Jiang An'an held a flatbread in her left hand, and a pair of chopsticks in her right... the chopsticks gripping mutton. That word "gripping" was chosen for the way she held her sticks — no one had ever corrected her, it seemed — all five fingers wrapped around them, clutching them tight.
Having lived with Jiang Wang for a good long while, she was no longer so inward and shy as she had been at first.
She would bite on the left, then bite on the right. Between bites, from time to time she would bow her head to the bowl and take a long, contented sip of broth. Two small dimples dented her cheeks, her little face brimming with satisfaction.
The Cai Family Mutton Shop was hardly cheap; Jiang Wang alone, left to himself, might not have been willing to spend so much to eat there.
In the Little Grove Town assignment, Wei Yan had taken a fall himself, but he had still kept his word — winning each of them twenty points of Dao Merit, along with a bit of silver besides. To a cultivator, that was the least important thing. But to Jiang An'an, good food mattered a great deal.
"Do you like it?" Jiang Wang asked, smiling.
"Mmm... Mm!" Little An'an nodded hard.
"From now on, every month..." Jiang Wang did a quick calculation of his savings. "No — every ten days, we can come eat once, all right?"
Jiang An'an kept nodding.
She chatted with her brother in fits and starts — most answers just nods or shakes of the head — but her little hands kept busy, for even as she nodded, she plucked up a piece of mutton, rolled it carefully in the dipping sauce, and only then popped it whole into her mouth, jaws full.
"An'an, how have your lessons been?" It seems every grown-up, when talking with a child, ends on this very point; Jiang Wang, who counted himself a grown man now, asked the question with great naturalness. Though he was, in truth, only a boy of seventeen.
Jiang An'an's mutton-chewing paused for a moment, her little mouth stuffed full, and only with difficulty did she squeeze out, "Fine... it's fine."
Jiang Wang nodded, satisfied.
He looked at his little sister, and felt a slow, gentle happiness flowing through him. The hardships of battle, the grief of seeing fellow disciples wounded and slain, the helplessness of failing to stop what had happened — all seemed to be fading. Some things were terribly sad, of course. But the present, this present life before him, was so happy. Happy enough that a man wanted to keep it forever.
...
Walking through the Wang clan lands, returning the greetings of clansmen from time to time, Wang Changxiang was calm and at ease, just as he always was. Even the most exacting clansman could find no fault in him.
The three great clans of Fenglin — Zhang, Fang, and Wang — were near enough equal in every regard that it was hard to tell one from another. But with Zhang Linchuan now high at third on the Dao Merit Roll, the Zhangs had edged visibly ahead of the rest. Wang Changxiang of the Wangs stood seventh on that roll, no great falling behind.
Only the Fang clan had fared ill: their genius of the last generation had fallen in a trial, and this generation's best, Fang Pengju, had been slain; all that remained was this Fang Heling, who had scraped his way into the Inner Court on a Meridian-Opening Pill bought at heavy price. But in the eyes of those who could see, the Fang clan had long since slipped behind the other two.
These matters, Wang Changxiang left unspoken, for he never much cared to dip into the worldly. Though his wit was sharp enough to see through the dirty greed that lay beneath all that effusive warmth, he remained always light and free of it.
The road turned ever more secluded.
At last he stopped before a small, half-worn courtyard, tucked in a remote corner of the clan's lands, where almost no one lived nearby. Its master dwelt there like a lone bird that had flown apart from the flock.
Wang Changxiang pushed open the door, and the plain wood gave a harsh creak, startling the quiet of the yard.
Unlike the mottled and weary outer wall, the courtyard within was unexpectedly neat and fine. To the left hung a trellis of grapevine, raised high, and beneath it a reclining chair worn smooth by long use. No person sat in it, but a plump orange cat lay curled there.
It did not start at his coming, only half-opened a pair of drowsy eyes and cast him a listless glance.
"Little Orange." Wang Changxiang greeted it by name.
The fat orange cat turned its head away, narrowed its eyes once more — and deigned not to look at him at all.
Wang Changxiang bore no offense, and walked on. Before him to the right stood a great water jar in which lotus leaves floated; now and then bubbles rose to the surface, so it must have been stocked with fish.
Here he stopped, because he had caught the smell of cooking food.
Almost at the same instant, the fat cat on the reclining chair sprang up and turned to look — one fluid streak of motion.
Before the great hall's door, under the eaves, stood a low table. And just then a young man came out from behind the door, the aroma rising from the tray of food he carried aloft.
His face was nothing handsome, yet nothing ugly either; he merely gave one a strange sense of "distance." Perhaps it was those too-placid eyes.
The young man, whose bearing held that air of remoteness, crouched down and laid the dishes from his tray one by one upon the low table. There were two bowls of snow-white, plump rice; two plates of greens, green enough to drip; and two plates of pig's trotters simmered soft and tender.
He sat himself down on the threshold, drew out his chopsticks, tapped their blunt ends against the table, and said, "Eat."
Wang Changxiang did not move, for he knew those words were not for him — though he very much wanted to cross over and share in that meal.
With a swish, the orange cat — at a speed utterly at odds with its shape — darted to the low table. It lowered its head and sniffed at the plate of trotters first, and only then, seemingly satisfied, propped its forepaws on the table and began to eat.
Wang Changxiang parted his lips. "Elder brother."
Few remembered, perhaps, that Wang Changxiang, the present pride of the Wang clan, still had a full-blooded elder brother.
For it was he who was truly the eldest son of the clan's main line — by the laws of kinship, the most natural heir to the clan head.
He was also the useless one who had wasted a precious Meridian-Opening Pill and still failed to manifest a Dao meridian. He had made the Wang clan the laughingstock, and dragged their heads beneath the other two surnames.
The shame of the Wang family — Wang Changji.