Chương 4

Kang Dae Han walked toward the docks with an empty coinpurse and a sour taste in his mouth. He cut a roguish figure; a fur-lined cloak that had seen better decades, a broad kasa that kept the sun off his face and his expression hard to read, an eyepatch over his left eye, long hair that needed washing, scruffy stubble that needed shaving, and the hard, weathered face of a man who had spent most of his years outdoors.

His new two-handed jian hung across his back in a long lacquered scabbard, its handle and ring pommel wrapped in sturdy silken cord, the blade within sharp enough to split a falling leaf. The new set of throwing knives sat in their storage ring on his left hand, twelve blades keyed to his will, ready to appear between his fingers at a thought. Fine weapons, both. Worth every tael he'd paid for them. And then some. And then some more. Thus the sour taste in his mouth.

He had watched the smith in Anviltown tally the figures with some dismay, as the total for materials and labor climbed past reasonable and into robbery. The smith had not even tried to hide it. Why would he? Kang Dae Han was a wandering cultivator. The Steel Serpent Sect set the price of soulsteel here, and if you did not like it, you could walk back out the gate with empty hands. So he had paid. And then, because he was in a bad mood, he had taken what remained and spent it on drinking and gambling and whoring.

Now his coinpurse held three copper taels and a hole he should have patched months ago. But any ship's captain would leap at the chance to take on a Perfect Core cultivator as a deckhand. A man who could do the work of a whole crew, who needed no sleep, who could fight off pirates, demons or spirit beasts if the voyage went sour. Not to mention the fact that a mortal captain would be guaranteed to treat him well, or he would backhand him overboard and declare himself the owner of a new ship.

Dae Han would eat well on the trip to Jiangkou. He would also spend a week hauling rope and swabbing decks, which was not ideal but certainly more appealing than swimming. As for the money troubles, he would figure it out. Or he would face his karma and suffer. Kang Dae Han performed both of those activities in abundance. Ninety-seven years of wandering had taught him enough about suffering. Mainly that there was always some coming, so he might as well get used to it. The docks were close now.

He could smell the salt and the tar, hear the creak of rigging and the shouts of sailors. One more stretch of market street and he would be free of Dragon's Rest and its swindling smiths and its overpriced women. Then he heard the screaming. Dae Han stopped. He stood in the street and listened, weighed the value of curiosity against the value of a ship leaving harbor. Steel rang against something other than steel. The sound was wrong. More shouting. Two voices now.

A crowd surged past him, mortals fleeing the market square, their faces pale and their eyes wide. A woman clutched a child to her chest. A fishmonger ran with an empty basket still in his hands. Dae Han sighed. Curiosity had always been his weakness. He drew his aura inward, pulled it back from the edges of himself until his psychic footprint was small and quiet. Moon Presence was the opposite of presence, really.

Where other cultivators projected themselves outward, filled a room with their weight and their will, Moon Presence was a retreat, a shrinking. He became a man who took up no space in the mind, whom searching eyes would look past without a second glance, a face that slipped from memory the moment it passed by. He walked toward the screaming. The market square had half-emptied by the time he arrived. Mortals pressed against the edges, too curious to flee, too frightened to stay close. Stalls stood abandoned.

Broken pottery littered the cobblestones. Two men in blue and black circled a third. Divine Gale Sect, by the colors. Outer disciples, by the look of them. One held a dao, the other a pair of hatchets. Their footwork was synchronized, their angles practiced. The man they circled was something else entirely. He was huge. Blond hair, blue eyes, shoulders as wide as a doorframe, clad in a leather vest and baggy pants.

Dae Han had never seen a man of Joguo in living color before, but a glance immediately confirmed what he had been told about the men of the far east; they were giants, with hair and eyes like demons. He looked young, barely old enough to be called a man, and yet he towered over both his opponents. The dao swept down at his skull and he leaned left, let the blade pass his ear by an inch. The hatchets carved toward his ribs. He leaned right and the steel cut air. His feet never moved.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon. Dae Han found a spot at the edge of the square and watched. The fight continued. Dae Han watched the Jotunar slip attacks that should have landed, watched him block steel with bare flesh, watched him shatter soulsteel weapons with his fists. The two Divine Gale disciples threw everything they had at him, and he handled them like a man swatting flies. An eyebrow-raising performance.

Dae Han had fought sect disciples and rogue cultivators and spirit beasts and demons. He knew what power looked like, how it moved, how it felt. This barbarian boy moved like a cultivator at least, but the weight of his presence was all wrong. Too light, too quiet, like there was nothing there at all. The lightness of his presence was directly contradicted by the way he was handling these two Divine Gale disciples. It wasn't Moon Presence.

No, this one didn't feel advanced enough in his cultivation to have a Perfect Core. Without it, one's aura was not strong enough to be trained, to be shaped into a Presence. And yet he had the qi footprint of a mortal. And yet he was smacking around two cultivators at the same time. Interesting. Beneath his eyepatch, Dae Han's prized possession glowed gold. It was the eye of an Imperial Auditor, won in a game of dice.

Proof that even minor gods sometimes found themselves in dark, smoky gambling dens, drunk on cheap plum wine, making bets they should not be making to impress women they should not be trying to impress. Dae Han walked away from that table with an eye that saw what only Imperial officials were meant to see. The full properties of Demons and Spirit Beasts. The details of any cultivator's Jianghu Registry entry, laid bare for inspection.

There were things it didn't show him, since he didn't have the actual rank required to access them. But what it did let him see was most valuable. Dae Han let it do its work. – Lodin Lundgren Realm: Qi Condensation, 1st Stage Affiliation: Unaffiliated – Unaffiliated. Dae Han liked him already. And at the first stage of Qi Condensation. It didn't feel right though. Really he read like a mortal. If Lodin Lundgren possessed any qi at all, it was sealed away so perfectly as to be undetectable.

The only other explanation was that he had no qi. Bu htow could such a thing come to be? In the absence of an answer for that most perplexing question, he next looked at Lodin's Roots. – Earth Root - Grade C Air Root - Grade C Metal Root - Grade C Fire Root - Grade C Wood Root - Grade C Holy Root - Grade C Lightning Root - Grade C Water Root - Grade C Dark Root - Grade C – This was also interesting. Not the most spectacular array of Roots, to be certain, but very well cultivated. Harmonious.

Unusually and perfectly balanced. The hand of an experienced teacher was behind this, someone who knew the right blend of alchemical products and Root-enriching practices which could create such a balanced set. The why of it was beyond him, though. The amount of effort required to create such a neat but mediocre set of roots was perplexing. Next he looked at Lodin's Gates.

– Forge Gate - 0 Blade Gate - 0 Barrier Gate - 0 Ruin Gate - 0 Flux Gate - 0 Unity Gate - 0 Conduit Gate - 0 Dominion Gate - 0 Void Gate - 0 – Dae Han blinked. He checked again. But the eye of an Imperial Auditor did not make mistakes. All zeros. A man with all Gates at zero could not channel qi through any of the nine expressions. Could not do any of the things that made a cultivator a cultivator. He would be no stronger than a mortal.

And yet Dae Han had just watched this boy block a dao strike with his bare forearm. Had watched him shatter soulsteel with his fists. Had watched him move faster than any Qi Condensation cultivator had a right to move. How? He checked Lodin's Seals, and half expected them to be a row of zeroes as well. But what he saw made his jaw drop.

– Seal of Fortitude - 9012 Seal of Precision - 9090 Seal of Durability - 9023 Seal of Might - 9109 Seal of Flexibility - 9005 Seal of Resilience - 9097 Seal of Swiftness - 9088 Seal of Balance - 9001 Seal of Awareness - 9015 – He stared at the glowing numbers. For a moment it felt like he'd flipped upside down. Or that down had become up. His mouth was dry, his head floated like a kite, and his stomach sat at the bottom of a deep, cold well. How… The cap for a Seal at Qi Condensation realm was one hundred.

If, and only if, the corresponding Gate was rated zero. The two had to total up to one hundred, always, whether the split was fifty fifty, sixty forty, seventy thirty, and so forth. Gates and Seals were meant to balance each other. These caps did not elevate until a cultivator advanced Realm, and even then the ratio would remain the same. At Foundation Building, a 60/40 split became a 120/80 split, and so on. But this boy… This was beyond all reason. A Nascent Immortal hiding in a Qi Condensation package.

Could a Nascent Immortal even possess Seals that strong, even? Dae Han had no idea. Regardless, these two sect cultivators had no idea just how much they were being toyed with right now. He'd never heard of such a thing, but all the same Dae Han watched the fight with new eyes. The speed made sense now. The durability made sense. Those fists that shattered soulsteel made sense. It all made sense, except for the part where it was impossible.

The Jotunar finished the two disciples with a punch that folded one in half at the waist and sent him flying backward into his comrade. Both bodies struck the city wall hard enough to crack the stone. Dust rained from the mortar. One slumped unconscious. The other made it to one knee and stayed there. The barbarian was being remarkably gentle. Dae Han watched the Jotunar walk toward the survivors.

Then he demanded their coin purses, produced a roll of parchment from a storage ring and consulted it like a merchant checking inventory. He heard the name Somchai Lek. It meant nothing to him. Some other Divine Gale disciple, presumably. The Jotunar rolled up his parchment and walked toward a food stall. Dae Han stood at the edge of the square and did not move. There were other parts of Lodin's Registry entry he could check. – Arts Techniques Disciplines – He had a sudden and intense urge to scrutinize them all.

And he would. But not just now, perhaps later on at a tavern, with a generous supply of alcohol to buffer his mind against whatever other insanity he may find there. Every so often in the Jianghu, an outlier would come along. An oddity whose passage disrupted the hierarchy of the world. Kang Dae Han had advanced well in his short years, with grit and aptitude and a generous helping of luck, he knew it. But he also knew that as cultivators went, he was nothing out of the ordinary. Not like this one.

Jiangkou could wait. The ships would still be there tomorrow. Or the day after. Or the day after that. Whatever was about to happen in Dragon's Rest would not bode well for the status quo here, and Kang Dae Han would be damned if he missed it. And more important, he'd figure out how the hell this kid worked.