Chương 33

They split at the gate to Joyful Garden. Shin announced he would be staying and taking a long bath. The odor of the smallfolk had seeped into his pores and he intended to soak it out if it took all afternoon. He said this to no one in particular and went back inside without waiting for a response. Sarin Jeida pulled her crow feather cloak tight around her shoulders.

"I know a Beast Court cultivator in Thousand Bridges. She should know how one gets an audience with Elder Wa." Lodin nodded.

"And you?" he said to Dae Han. Dae Han adjusted his kasa.

"There's a technique library in the Terraces I sometimes stop at when I pass through the city. Open to the public, big collection." He paused.

"Might be worth a look, given what we need to know about that sword technique."

"The God-Slaying Threefold Cut."

"That one." Dae Han tipped his kasa.

"I'll find you after." Then they went their separate ways, and Lodin walked alone through the streets of Dragon's Rest toward the Founders Memorial Fighting Ground. The streets thinned as he climbed toward the Terraces. The market noise fell behind him and the cobblestones gave way to broad flagstone paths that wound between walled estates and garden compounds. The air was cleaner here, scrubbed by the altitude and the breeze off the harbor. He could feel them before he could see them.

The presence of cultivators, lots of them, a haze of hostile qi that thickened with every step. Lodin cracked his neck and kept walking. The Founders Memorial Fighting Ground occupied a natural depression in the hillside between the Terraces and the western wall of the city. Tiered stone seats rose in concentric rings around a floor of hard packed dirt broad enough to host a battle of a thousand men.

A trio of statues guarded the main entrance, carved from the pale stone of the mountain and weathered by centuries of wind and rain. Jin Shenlei stood tallest at the center. The sculptor had given him the look of a man born to be immortalized: a sharp jaw, high cheekbones, long hair swept into a topknot, robes that fell in clean folds to his ankles. His right hand rested on the pommel of a jian, its blade planted tip-down in the stone pedestal at his feet. Mayari Lakan stood to his left.

The sculptor had carved her slender and straight, her chin raised, her stone eyes level. A gown of layered silks draped her frame, and her hands gripped a spear planted butt-first against the pedestal, its blade angled toward the sky. Jorin Shen stood to Jin's right. Broad where the other two were slender, thick through the chest and arms, his stone shoulders squared as though he bore the weight of the mountain behind him. His hand gripped the handle of a long war club lined with rows of spikes.

Lodin walked past the statues and through the entrance tunnel. The noise hit him before the light did. A low roar of voices, hundreds of them, compressed by the stone walls and funneled down the corridor toward him. He stepped out into the open air and stopped. The tiered seats were full. Spectators packed the stone rings from the lowest row to the highest, and more stood along the rim where the seats ran out. Vendors moved between them. Children sat on their fathers' shoulders.

The crowd had the feel of a festival, loud and restless and eager for blood. The arena floor was worse. Cultivators filled the dirt from one end to the other. They stood in loose clusters, sorted by sect colors and insignia, and the sheer number of them made Lodin's stomach tighten. He had expected dozens. This was closer to a hundred, or more. Jians and daos and spears and halberds and weapons he could not name caught the afternoon sun. The combined weight of their auras prickled across his skin.

He scanned over them, and found that the Foundation Building and Core Formation challengers from the other day were absent, and in their place stood cultivators of the middle-mortal Realms, with a few Perfect Cores. But most were Stream Entry, Qi Sea Expansion, and Body Tempering. Those three realms could be taken on in any order, Master Yan once explained to him, but all three had to be completed to proceed to the seventh realm, Core Perfection.

A voice cut through the noise from somewhere near the center of the arena.

"He's here!" The roar of the crowd dropped to a murmur, and then the murmur died, and then a throng of faces turned toward the tunnel entrance where Lodin stood. He was assaulted by challenges. He chuckled, and accepted them all as quickly as he could. It took a minute. And then Lodin walked out onto the dirt. The silence held. His boots crunched on the packed ground, and the sound of each step carried across the arena. A hundred cultivators watched him come. Some shifted their weight.

Some adjusted their grip on their weapons. A few exchanged tense glances, gripped their weapons tighter. The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. He stopped at the edge of the arena. A hundred men and women stood arrayed before him, armed and armored, their auras pressed together in a wall of hostile intent. Lodin held out his arms.

"Here I am," he said.

"Take your best shot." The first wave hit him as the words came out of his mouth. It all happened in the space of a second. A spear thrust at his chest and he caught the shaft behind the head, yanked the wielder off balance, hammered a backfist into her temple. Twin jian stabbed at him from a pair of swordsmen who moved in sync; he stepped off the thrusts and made soulsteel shriek against soulsteel as the blades crossed each other instead of stabbing through his heart.

A halberd swept low at his knees and he hopped it, landed, threw a short hook that folded the man over his fist. A woman raked clawed gauntlets at his face and he leaned back, grabbed her wrist, slung her into the next two chargers. Then came a hammer. A chakram. A staff. A dao. Daggers. Hook swords. He slipped and weaved, rolled under blows and countered. His straight right hit a swordsman in the chest and caved his guard like paper, sent him flying. A blade reached him from behind.

He twisted clear and spotted the man who held it, still standing in front of him, arm extended, the sword somehow occupying two places at once. A fist like a sledgehammer cracked against his shoulder and he answered with a hook that sent the owner tumbling. A column of fire washed over him from the left and he bulled through the wave of heat. A woman stepped through a slit in the air, slashed at his throat, and vanished back through it before he could counter.

He could tell the difference between the Stream Entry, Qi Sea and Body Tempering fighters. The Stream Entry disciples did their tricks, bent the rules of space and time. The Qi Sea cultivators simply had vast reserves of qi at their disposal and spent it lavishly. The Body Tempering fighters were the most like him. Strong, fast, durable. Lodin spotted a cultivator at the far edge of the arena floor, arms raised, palms cupped around a sphere of fire laced through with compressed air qi.

Lightning qi snapped and arced between the layers of it, a complex weave of three qi types. The sphere swelled past the size of his head, his torso, and kept swelling. The heat of the technique warped the air and cast rippling shadows across the dirt. He did not want to get hit by that. But a Body Tempering fighter chose that moment to slam into him shoulder-first, and a swordsman came at his flank, and a woman with a staff jabbed at his throat.

He dealt with the shoulder charge, cracked the swordsman across the jaw, caught the staff and snapped it. The sphere at the edge of the arena kept growing. A Stream Entry cultivator blinked through a fold in space and swung at the back of his head. He ducked it, hammered a fist into the man's kidney, shoved him aside. The sphere was the size of a cart now and the fighters near it had scattered. The man with the qi-bomb screamed and shoved his palms forward. The blast crossed the arena floor and hit him square.

The world went white. Thunder filled his skull. The shockwave blew every fighter within ten feet of him off their feet and sent them tumbling across the dirt. For a moment Lodin stood alone. Smoke curled off his skin. The scorch mark on his chest stung like a sunburn. Lodin looked across the arena at the cultivator, who stood with empty hands and wide eyes. He grinned at him. Rushed through the empty space between them. Snapped a right cross on his jaw with an impact like the report of a cannon.

The unfortunate cultivator's face dug a trench in the arena floor as he went skidding away from Lodin's fist. The arena held its breath. The crowd in the stands went silent. Fighters on the dirt froze mid-step and stared at the gouge the man's face had carved across a hundred feet of packed earth. Then they came at him again. And these were the ones who had survived the first exchange. The difference was notable.

A swordsman closed on his left and Lodin threw a jab that should have ended it, but the man rolled his head off the punch and countered with a slash that nicked Lodin's forearm. A woman with a guandao kept her distance and used the reach of the blade to control the space between them. He had to close ground to answer her, and the two fighters flanking her made that cost him. They were good. They were middle realm cultivators, of course they were good. Good enough to make them somewhat difficult to beat.

It felt like it was time to show them all who they were dealing with. The swordsman who'd nicked his arm caught a straight right that launched him off the dirt and into the arena wall hard enough to crater the stone. The woman with the guandao tried to keep her distance, and he closed it in a stride and drove a hook under the blade that sent her cartwheeling through the air.

Her flankers rushed him, and a backfist crunched one across the jaw while a shovel hook folded the other in half and skipped him across the dirt like a stone on water. A spearman thrust at his chest, and Lodin caught the shaft, snapped it, buried his fist in the man's stomach so hard the shockwave blew the dust flat behind him. A jaw shattered under his knuckles. A ribcage buckled around his fist. A face spun from his punch, sprayed blood and sweat and spittle all over the ground.

Blasts of elemental qi and weapons of every size, shape and make sought his flesh. Faces blurred past him, enraged, terrified, defiant for a heartbeat before the moment of impact, before the moment his fists arrived, and as Lodin walked through it all, the ground around his feet became littered with the groaning bodies of cultivators who had come to make a name for themselves, and broken themselves on a wall of knuckles instead.

Lodin stood alone at the center of it, knuckles raw, and scanned the field for anyone still standing. No one was.

"I see you've found the Jianghu of Dragon's Rest a bit lacking. Lamentable, isn't it? I share in your disappointment." The voice came from across the arena. Lodin looked up. A man stood at the far edge of the dirt. He had closely cropped brown hair, and a handsome, boyish face. He wore fine robes, blue trimmed with white, without a crease or stain on them, and stood with his hands clasped behind his back.

"Han Yuan," the man said.

"Patriarch of the Divine Gale Sect and, as of yesterday, Provisional Governor of Huidao." Lodin looked him over. He didn't look like anything special. But one would have to be insensate not to feel the strength of the aura coming off of him.

"Nice to meet you," he said, and bowed back.

"I'm Lodin." Han Yuan smiled, and the expression looked somewhat strained on his face, as if he weren't used to doing it.

"Worthy opponents can be so difficult to come by," he said.

"Perhaps you could indulge me for a time?" This guy was well beyond anyone he'd fought so far. He could feel as much. Under normal circumstances he'd be keen for the challenge, but he was trying to get this done and over with so he could get back to searching for Lorn. But on the other hand, a friendly round with the patriarch of one of the biggest sects in the city might gin him some favor. Han Yuan might be willing to lend a hand in the search. Lodin grinned and bowed, and Yuan returned the gesture.

"I'm already warmed up, so why not."