Chương 35: Chapter 34 — Kidnapped (3)

Chen Wei had not intended to use his sound arts tonight, but the danger to himself from these two masked intruders was not something he had planned for. He had trained them for three years under a teacher who very much stressed the importance of restraint when using such arts. After all, sound was not like stone or wood or ice — it was not something which left visible marks on the world, and, as such, was not something one could have full control over.

His teacher had made him practice stopping himself for two years before she even let him dare practice starting. He popped the second cough drop and felt the internal cooling that smoothed the Qi pathways in his throat and chest, and drew the energy up from his diaphragm, condensing it and supporting it from the body's centre rather than his throat. He had earplugs in, as did his allies, and so there was only one thing left to do. Chen Wei opened his mouth.

He drew the Collapsing Heaven Roar, which was Qi-suffused resonance at a frequency tuned specifically to disrupt the inner ear's sensitivity, designed to throw targets off their balance, both in a physical sense and a spiritual one. In essence, it collapsed the circulation of whoever was receiving it by interrupting the body's ability to maintain external awareness. The driver, who had barely managed to get back on two feet, instantly dropped once again, having left his earplugs in the glovebox of the car.

Shen Yue had been mid-movement when it hit, and rolled downwards below Chen Wei's mouth level to hopefully diminish the effects of the attack. Unfortunately, however, the warehouse was a wide area with plenty of surfaces for an echo to reverberate. This was Chen Wei's domain. The concrete beneath Shen Yue transmitted the vibration through her chest and forearms, and the Twin Glacier Formation she had been rebuilding began to crumble away like stale bread.

She pressed her palms flat to the ice-covered floor and used the contact to ground her Qi back into an electric circulation that reconnected her disrupted pathways, causing sparks to appear on the surface of her Twin Glacier Formation as the ice began to reform once again. Chen Wei was already drawing breath for his next move. This time, he used the Piercing Bell Strike, which was a much narrower frequency sent in a directional beam rather than a radial wide-spread attack.

It was aimed directly at Hu Baolin's position, designed to penetrate through the ear drums. Hu Baolin moved behind a crate, just narrowly dodging the main brunt of the attack. The vibrations carried through the crates onto Hu Baolin, but, by then, they had lost most of their strength. Hu Baolin reached into the bag without looking into it. His hand came out with three needles, which were shorter and heavier than the ones he'd been using against Liang Su, who was still proving difficult.

Both Jiang Pei and Liang Su were still active in the fight, but their roles had changed from offence to a more supportive crowd control one — they were now fighting to keep Chen Wei safe and to prevent the intruders from dodging his attacks. Chen Wei himself was now positioning himself for his next move called Fractured Echo, which required a reflective surface to function. The technique worked by bouncing the resonance off the warehouse walls to attack from multiple directions simultaneously.

He was moving toward the position that would give him the best wall angle. Hu Baolin's eyes flashed as he jumped upwards and saw Chen Wei's path of movement. He contorted his body to the side without looking, which proved to be the correct move, as a sharp, iron-tipped fan pierced through the air which now occupied that space. Hu Baolin threw.

The first needle caught the warehouse wall six inches to the left of Chen Wei's optimal position, which caused him to jump slightly to the right, now in a worse position to attack. The second needle found him in the forearm, with Hu Baolin having thrown this needle pre-emptively with the first used for bait. Fractured Echo immediately died in his throat as the compound made its way up his nervous system. Chen Wei made it two steps before his sound arts went quiet for the night.

The fight was now thinning to its final moves, with Liang Su still occupied by Hu Baolin, and Shen Yue pushing Jiang Pei for the initiative. With his leg out of commission and no remaining support, Jiang Pei reached for the nearest thing in desperation to use as a weapon. Lin Che, unconscious from the sound arts, bound to the chair, was the nearest thing. The chair came up in one motion, and Hu Baolin's needles, which were thrown wide to target both Liang Su and Jiang Pei, were already mid-air.

One found the back of the chair, and the other concrete. The final needle found Lin Che. His eyes opened and a bloodcurdling scream came out of his mouth. Then they closed. The chair hit the ground on its side with him in it, and the echoes of his scream and the impact of the fall caused all parties in the warehouse to freeze for half a moment. Shen Yue looked at Lin Che and the two people between her and him. Something within her shifted, and she loosened her control over her Qi. Absolute Zero Convergence.

The temperature in the warehouse dropped so fast that the moisture in the air crystallised before it could fall. Ice formed on the inside of the warehouse's high windows, and breath came out as frozen air. Five columns of compressed ice rose from the floor, each one threaded with electric Qi running through the crystalline lattice, and clawed their way to the ceiling, lighting the warehouse in blue-white pulses that strobed across the faces of the three remaining people on their feet.

Five-Spire Cascade Discharge The lightning came from all five columns simultaneously, conducted along the ice sheet across the floor of the entire warehouse, and bouncing off from each crystal of frozen air that was precipitating in a radius around Shen Yue. Jiang Pei went down. Liang Su pushed herself to a wall in an effort to dodge another needle thrown her way. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

She successfully dodged, but a metal wall conducting electricity fried her body from the inside-out. The warehouse was very quiet, and the smell of ozone and barbeque spread across the room despite the extractor fans working overtime. Shen Yue lowered her hands and staggered towards a nearby crate for balance, her Qi reserves now fully-depleted.

This was her first time using this technique, derived on the spot by taking advantage of her yin constitution, but the toll on her body was much greater than she had expected. She shuffled over towards Lin Che, coughing.

Hu Baolin extracted the needle from Lin Che with the precision of someone performing surgery. His fingers were at Lin Che's wrist before Lin Che had stopped moving. He read the Qi pathways, and the Hollow Bell technique was thankfully still running. It was much weaker than usual, but running nonetheless. Shen Yue crouched next to Lin Che and looked at his face.

"The sound arts damaged the inner ear," said Hu Baolin, in the tone of a depersonalised status report.

"We need to get him to the car as soon as possible and feed him two pills from the jar before taking him directly to a hospital. The combination of both injury and toxicity—""I know," said Shen Yue, unravelling the rope that had tied Lin Che's legs together. Hu Baolin lifted him to the vehicle, and the ice on the warehouse floor cracked slowly under their feet as they walked.

Two months later, Lin Che's eyes opened. He blinked, but the light was excessive, as though the entire room was a pure, undisrupted white and nothing else. He tried to see, but there was nothing. He turned his head, and the movement resulted in pain as he felt his blood pressure spike up through his veins.

There was a beep of sorts — he couldn't be sure as the sound was dull, but something was attached to his arms and he could feel himself being in an uncomfortable bed with the smell of sterile, antiseptic air around him. He was in a hospital. He brought Qi to his eyes, which gave him a rough and general shape of the energies in the room, namely an incense which flooded the room and provided a general idea of where objects were as the Qi was reflected off their surfaces.

Ahead, there was a familiar shape of a young man, whose sliver of Qi had the character of fifteen years of martial practice bordering on the edge of cultivation.

"Mingzhe?" said Lin Che, high voice dry. There was a sound from the direction of the wisp.

"It's Xu Fang." Lin Che brought himself up to a sitting position, wincing slightly in pain as he did so. Xu Fang was sitting in the chair beside the bed with his elbows on his knees and his face pointed towards Lin Che. If Lin Che could see colour, he would have seen that his eyes were red and puffy in a way much uncharacteristic of his friend.

"It's been two months," said Xu Fang.

"Two months?"

"You don't know," said Xu Fang.

"You were—" He stopped. His jaw was set.

"Lin Che. They said you probably won't—" He stopped again, and this time the stop lasted long enough that Lin Che knew the conversation would be heavy.

"They said the damage is significant. The hearing. The—" He pressed the pad of his right hand against one eye briefly and pulled away the tears.

"They said you probably won't walk properly again. And that the nerve damage from the sound arts—""Xu Fang."

"You should have told me." His voice changed again, now more raw than ever.

"You should have told me about all of this. The cultivation. The — the whatever all of this is. I had to hear about it from Mingzhe." Lin Che was quiet.

"He called me three days after you were admitted because apparently someone had given him a contact number for a cultivation family. And that the name Lin Che was making rounds in the sect. I still don't fully understand what happened, Lin Che." He exhaled, unsteady.

"I've been sitting here for two months not understanding what happened to my best friend." Lin Che looked at him.

"I'm sorry," he said. Xu Fang looked at the floor.

"What actually happened?" asked Lin Che.

"I don't know. Shen Yue will know. She—" He checked his phone.

"She went to get food. She'll be back in a few minutes." He paused.

"She's been here every day, Lin Che. Every day for two months. She hasn't—" He stopped, as though deciding the specifics of this were hers to give rather than his.

"She'll be back."

"Okay," said Lin Che. They sat in silence for a while until the door opened. Shen Yue came in first. She stopped when she saw his eyes open, and controlled her breath the moment it hitched. She came to the other side of the bed and sat in the chair there.

"How much can you see?" she asked.

"With the Qi, enough. Without it, nothing."

"Your hearing?"

"There's muffling, but it's serviceable. It just doesn't feel like it'll resolve." She looked at her hands briefly.

"That's my fault," she said.

"It isn't""It is," she affirmed.

"I gave you the cultivation methods without preparing you for the community you'd be entering. I took you to the Shen Clan and to the competition where I knew Zichen would be competing, and where I knew you'd end up sparring with him afterwards. I didn't consider Elder Fang would see." She took a deep breath.

"Every step that led to this room came through me." The door opened again before Lin Che could reply. Hu Baolin came in and looked at Lin Che. His face did exactly what Shen Yue's had done minutes prior, correcting itself into controlled movements.

"I threw wide, and for that I'm sorry. I adjusted the throw for Liang Su and Jiang Pei, but I was tracking them instead of the objects in their path." A pause.

"I've been a pharmacist for thirty years. I know what the compound on that needle does… precisely what it does." He looked at Lin Che and bowed deeply.

"I'm sorry." The door opened again, this time Elder Mao coming in, which made the room feel much smaller. He looked at Lin Che and then to Shen Yue.

"The clan has formally acknowledged the error," he said.

"Elder Fang's accusation has been retracted, and your punishment for sharing techniques has also been decided." He paused and looked at Lin Che.

"I know that doesn't help you as you are now," he sighed.

"The formal introduction to the main family will happen when you are able. You have my word that no procedural obstacle will be raised." Lin Che looked at the ceiling.

"Someone please tell me what happened in the warehouse. From the beginning."

Lin Che listened to the entire story, focussed entirely on every word, not only because he was forced to do so given the extent of his hearing loss, but also because he wanted to commit every last detail to memory. He listened about the masked intruders and sound arts, and concentrated even more so on the two months he'd been absent, which had, apparently, been two months of his wife sitting in the chair Xu Fang was currently occupying, with Xu Fang visiting daily and Hu Baolin coming in the evenings.

Elder Mao came in twice a week, and, through all of this, alongside his connection with Guo Mingzhe, Xu Fang had also been accepted as an outer disciple of the Shen Clan and been provided beginner techniques. That explained the hint of Qi that Lin Che had mistaken for Guo Mingzhe. He thought deeply about the things he knew now that he hadn't known before the start of this loop before thinking about the legs he could not currently feel.

He thought about Shen Yue's constitution that was slowly killing her, and the Holy Land that was now providing her some minor treatment with the Yang Harmony Pill ingredients. He thought about what he would do differently. He thought back to the wolf-like creature he defeated at the start of this loop, and how he would soon be back in that labyrinth engaged in a fight with the injured beast once again. Lin Che closed his eyes and focussed his Qi deep in his heart.

It consolidated further and further, until it produced a solid, physical mass. He obstructed his heart vessels. Lin Che's heart stopped beating. The tie was giving him trouble.