Chương 1: The Weight in His Sleeve

Po Lan had killed many people. He had eaten more. He stood on the cracked summit of Mount Liyuan with a hundred orthodox cultivators arrayed around him, swords drawn, and thought, not for the first time today, that this was a hell of a way to retire. His left arm was broken in three places he could feel. His Heaven-Severing technique had failed half an incense stick ago, and three of his soul-fragments had gone quiet. He could still win. Probably. The cost would be the rest of his fragments.

He looked at the orthodox alliance in their funeral whites. He thought about it for two breaths. Then he raised his right hand and unmade the line of cultivators directly in front of him. Seven of them. Five blinks. Steel, bone, and breath parted cleanly before anyone thought to scream. The remaining ninety-three did not move. He let his hand drop.

"Send her," he said. It took them longer than it should have. The orthodox alliance was a procedural organization; they made you wait through formal accusations and the Heart-Reader's findings. He listened. He let it pass. He had heard worse poetry. At last she stepped forward. She had let her hair go silver. His first thought, his first absolutely deranged thought, was that she had let her hair go silver and she'd been right. He'd always told her she'd look good with silver. He had not meant kill-me silver.

But it was that, too. She walked unhurried up the broken stones. The jaw was sharper than he remembered. The stillness was new, a cultivator's bearing she hadn't owned at sixteen, when she'd still laughed too loud and touched his sleeve without thinking. He met her eyes. She met his.

"You came yourself," he said.

"It was always going to be me."

"I assumed they'd send a junior. Keep your hands clean."

"My hands are clean."

"Mm." The wind shifted. Her silver hair moved across her jaw and she did not push it back.

"Po Lan." It was the first time she had ever said it. Po Lan. Breaking Wave. The name he had taken when he had stopped saying thank you.

"Xueqing," he said.

"Are you afraid?" she asked. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. He thought about it. The orthodox alliance did not normally care if the heretic was afraid. She asked because she needed to know.

"Yes," he said. She nodded once. She raised her hand. He smiled at her — the first smile he had given her, with his face, in twenty years.

"Make it interesting," he said. She placed her palm on his chest. She made it interesting. Po Lan died. Xie Lan woke up screaming. This was, technically, the first thing wrong. Outer disciples in the Lingmen dormitory were not permitted to scream during morning hours. It set a tone. There were forms to fill out. He stopped screaming. He sat up. The world spun. His body was small. His hands were the wrong shape.

His soul was full of a man who had, thirty breaths ago by his own count, been Soul Severing peak and dying with a woman's palm on his chest. The dissonance was making him want to throw up. He did not throw up. Throwing up at morning drills would have been the fourteenth most embarrassing thing he had done in two lifetimes, but it would still have been on the list. He looked at his hands. No calluses where calluses should have been. Calluses where there had not been any in two centuries.

They were the hands of a sixteen-year-old outer disciple. He reached for power that wasn't there. The world did not answer. His left sleeve was a hand's width too long. He stared at it. There was a small wooden weight where one had no business being. He put his hand into his sleeve, very carefully. He took out the hairpin. The wood was warm from his sleeve and impossibly smooth against fingers that had lost two centuries of callus. The carving. The grain.

The nick at the base from the knife slip when he was fourteen. It should not have come back. Nothing from that life should have come back. He held it for a long time. Old Bao made a snorting noise across the dorm and rolled over without waking. He held it until his hands started to shake. Then he put it back. Carefully. Very carefully.

"Right," he said, in a voice that had not yet broken in this lifetime." Right." A bell rang. Morning drill. He had hated that bell. He had not heard it in two centuries. He stood up. He fell down. His lungs caught wrong on the inhale — too shallow, the ribcage too narrow for the breath he'd tried to draw. His center of gravity was a chi lower than his muscle memory expected. The floor came up at an angle that made no sense. He stood up again. His body was sixteen. His knees were sixteen.

He had been Soul Severing peak. His knees were sixteen. Old Bao stirred and yawned.

"Xie Lan, you look like you've seen a ghost."

"I have," he said.

"Several. Mostly mine."

"Drills."

"I am aware of the drills." He pulled on his outer-disciple robes. Too big at the shoulder. He walked out into a gray Lingmen morning. Cold thin air. A courtyard he had walked across exactly ten thousand four hundred and sixteen times in his first life and never once expected to walk across again. He found his place in the formation. He bowed to the instructor. He moved through the first stance.

"Lan- ge! You're going to be late again!" He turned. His sister Xie Yu stood across the courtyard. Fourteen. Alive. Brown hair tied with a green ribbon. Hands on her hips. Complaining at him. His hands closed at his sides." Lan-ge!"

"Coming," he said.

"Coming, meimei." He turned back to the formation. He moved through the second stance. He was sixteen. He was Soul Severing. He was Po Lan. He was Xie Lan. He had a hairpin in his sleeve that should not have come back with him, and a sister in the courtyard who should not have been alive, and somewhere on this mountain — somewhere on this mountain — He raised his eyes. Just for a breath.

Across the courtyard, on the high stone path connecting Lingmen Peak to the inner-disciple tier, a row of Mingxin Peak senior trainees was crossing in formation. Pale gray robes. Hair bound in the sect-formal braid for morning training. Third from the end: A girl. Sixteen. Hair dark. Laughing at something the trainee in front of her had said. Her fingers loose. Her shoulders unburdened. She was alive. Xie Lan looked back down at the courtyard tiles. He moved through the third stance. Something stirred in his chest.

Deeper than pain. Different from any fragment he carried. A pressure, like a voice gathering itself behind a closed door. Oh, said Su Yan. Oh, brother. What have you done.