"Yuguo," she said quietly. "Tell me the truth. Is this what you won at the casino?"
"The casino?" Li Yuguo laughed, and let the laugh come out a little rueful, a little embarrassed—the laugh of a man who knew his own history. "In a casino, the only chance I've ever had is the chance to lose money. How could I go back to that devil's cave again?" He shook his head. "No. This is from business. Honest business. I was lucky today, that's all—I picked up a leak. Something that was worth a great deal more than the man selling it knew."
He watched her face.
Something in it eased. Very slightly. A stone that had been hanging over her heart was set gently down. He could see it happen—the faint loosening at the corners of her mouth, the small breath going out of her.
If he had gone to a gambling den and won this money, she would never have touched it. He was certain of that. She would have thrown it back in his face and taught him such a lesson that he would have spent the night hanging from the locust tree again.
But business was different. Business was honest work.
She looked at him for a long moment, and he could see the question moving behind her eyes. Is he really turning back? Has the prodigal son really come home?
And then he saw her dismiss it.
Not angrily. Just—sadly, as if she had asked herself that question too many times before. It was nothing, after all, to do something right once or twice. It was easy for a man to go bad. Coming back from the crooked road to the straight one was the hard part. It took years. Most men never managed it at all.
"I'll take back the fifty taels of principal," she said finally, picking up one of the ingots. "The rest is yours. You earned it." Her voice hardened again, just a little. "But I won't be giving you any more pocket money this month."
Li Yuguo bowed politely.
"That's good," he said.
"Hmph."
Li Yutang's smile had not wavered once through the whole exchange. But as Li Yuguo straightened from his bow, he caught the look his righteous brother threw him—quick and cold and contemptuous, the look of a man glancing at a cockroach.
And then Li Yutang's gaze moved on to Nalan Meng.
It was greedy. There was no other word for it. In the moment before he turned to go, his sharp eyes slid down over her body from her flushed throat to her bare thighs, slowly, deliberately, as if he could see straight through the thin crimson silk and was memorizing what lay beneath. Her breasts, the curve of her waist, the long legs, the shadowed place where the silk panels parted.
Then he bowed to her—a good, correct, brotherly bow—and strode out of the courtyard.
He did not speak again until he was through the outer gate and halfway down the dusty street, and there was no one near enough to hear.
"Good for you, Li Yuguo," he murmured. His voice was quite pleasant. "It seems you got lucky today. But so what?" He laughed softly to himself. "Sooner or later, I'll make you show your true face again—the face of a man who's so useless you can't even prop him up against a wall. And then Nalan Meng will be even more disappointed in you than she already is." His hand drifted down to rest on the hilt of his sword. "Hahaha… Just wait. I'll definitely have her."
That evening, when the heat had finally broken and the sky over the mansion had gone the color of a ripe apricot, Nalan Meng came along the corridor of the west wing and stopped in surprise outside her husband's door.
It was open. And he was cleaning.
He was actually on his knees, with his sleeves tied back, sweeping the floor. He had rolled up the sleeping mat he usually threw down in her antechamber, the one he dragged across the courtyard every night with his pillow under his arm so he could whine at her door until she threatened him with the whip. It lay bundled at his side, tied with string. Beside it sat a small cloth bag of his things.
"Yuguo," she said. "What are you doing?"
He looked up, a little startled, and then smiled at her—a sheepish, ordinary smile.
"I'm going to stay in the guest room for a while," he said. "The one at the back, past the old storehouse."
Nalan Meng stared at him.
He can't be.
Because in all the years of their marriage, they had slept apart—and it had never been his choice. It had never been because he was incapable. It had been her. She was the one who refused. She was the one who had looked at the man she had been given and been so bitterly, thoroughly disappointed that she could not bear to have him near her. And he—he had never once stopped trying. Every single night he came to her chamber. Every single night he rubbed his face against the posts of her big bed and wheedled and pleaded and sulked. He had not succeeded once, not one time in all those years, and he had never grown tired of it. Sometimes she honestly wondered whether he enjoyed being thrown out. Whether the man had some kind of craving for abuse.
And now he was rolling up his sleeping mat and moving to the guest room at the back of the house.
Could it be, she thought, that I've been too strict with him?
The thought surprised her so much that she did not know what to do with it.
They had been married for years. They had the name of husband and wife, and nothing else. They had never truly been husband and wife—not in the bedroom, not in the heart, not anywhere. And sometimes, in the long sleepless hours, she knew that she was partly to blame for that. She knew she had been hard. She knew she had given him nothing to grow toward but her contempt.
But she could not get over the hurdle in her heart.
When she was a girl, in her father's army camps, she had dreamed of marrying a great hero. A warrior who could stand beside her on a battlefield. A man who would make her feel—just once—that she did not have to be the strongest person in the room. That dream had never left her. And between that dream and the reality of her life there had always been a gap, wide and deep as a canyon. She had never imagined, not in her worst nightmares, that she would end up married to a man like Li Yuguo, who had achieved nothing in his life at all.
She stood in the doorway and looked at him sweeping the floor.
She did not know what to say. So she said nothing, and after a moment, she turned and walked away.
What Li Yuguo was thinking was not nearly so complicated.
He was a straightforward person, at heart. He understood perfectly well that Nalan Meng was not going to accept him overnight. A hundred taels on a stone table did not erase a decade of disappointment.
But being shut out of her bed had one advantage.
A man alone in a quiet room at the back of a house could do things in secret. Things like cultivation.
His father had been Li Guangyi, the God of War. And Li Guangyi had not become the God of War by accident. A great deal of it had come from talent and courage and a lifetime of bloody experience—but a great deal more had come from the techniques and treasures of the Li family. Inheritance. Martial arts passed down from father to son. Li Yuguo knew about them because he had written them.
And he knew what happened to them.
In the original story, when Nalan City fell, Ye Qiong and his party had swept through the ruins of the Li family's legacy like a pack of adventurers clearing a dungeon. Techniques, weapons, treasures, scrolls—all of it divided up between them, looted and carried off and put to good use. Exactly like a boss monster in a game. You killed it, and you took the drops.
And I was the boss, Li Yuguo thought. Or at least the guy standing in front of the boss room.
Well. Not this time.
The catastrophe was not on top of him yet. He had half a year. And in that half year, it was not enough just to make money. He had to make himself stronger.
"I'm barely a Martial Warrior now," he muttered, dumping his bundle onto the dusty floor of the guest room and looking around. "So it looks like I still have to work hard to catch up."
The guest room was small and bare and had not been used in a long time. It smelled of dust and old wood. There was a narrow bed, a single chair, a table, and a window that looked out onto a little overgrown garden behind the storehouse.
It was perfect.
He found a flower pot in the garden—cracked, but whole enough—and filled it with dark earth from beneath the overgrown bushes. He set it on the windowsill. Then he took the cloudy green bottle from his sleeve, broke the wax seal with his thumbnail, and tipped the tiny teardrop seeds out into his palm.
In the light of his single oil lamp, the silver lines on their coats gleamed like frost.
Moon Spirit Grass.
That was why he had taken them so readily. To Shi Dacheng, they had looked like nothing—flower seeds, weeds, a throwaway in a bundle of cheap herbs. And grown, the plant itself would look like nothing too: a slender, unremarkable orchid, the kind you could find in any mountain meadow. The only tell was the seed. Those faint silver veins.
He pressed the seeds gently into the soil with his fingertip, one by one.
Then he blew out the lamp and opened the window.
The moon was up. It had risen enormous and pale over the rooftops of Nalan City while he worked, and now its light came pouring in through the open window and fell across the windowsill and the cracked flower pot and the dark, damp earth.
And the earth moved.
He held his breath. Tiny pale points were pushing up through the soil—one, then three, then a dozen—uncurling as he watched, impossibly fast, thin threadlike stems unfolding into slender silver-green leaves that drank the moonlight and glowed with it, faintly, from within. In the space of a few dozen heartbeats, the cracked pot on his windowsill held a small, delicate clump of orchid-like grass, swaying gently though there was no wind.
That was the other half of the Moon Spirit Grass's secret. Its conditions were harsh. It would only germinate under the moon. Plant it in sunlight, and it would sit in the earth forever, dead as gravel.
But under the moon, it woke. And once awake, it did something no ordinary plant could do. It reached out into the world around it and gathered—pulling the thin, diffuse spiritual energy of heaven and earth out of the air and drawing it in, concentrating it, filling the room around it like water filling a basin. For anyone who meditated in its presence, it was like cultivating at the heart of a spirit vein.
Already, Li Yuguo could feel the difference. The air in the little room had grown cool and heavy and sweet, and it prickled faintly against his skin.
Next, he took out the King of Thieves' lacquered box and opened it.
Inside, on a scrap of faded red silk, lay a single pill—round, a little smaller than a lychee pit, a dull, cloudy green, smelling faintly of grass and honey.
A Spirit Gathering Pill.
It was nothing grand. He knew that. To the great martial masters of the world, a Spirit Gathering Pill was a cheap thing, hardly worth picking up off the ground. Its effect was gentle—a little extra Qi, a little help opening the meridians. For anyone above a certain level, it was worthless.
But for someone at the very bottom of the ladder, it was perfect. The Spirit Gathering Pill was most powerful of all at the Martial Warrior level, when the meridians were still narrow and clogged and the body had almost no Qi of its own. For a man like Li Yuguo, it was a very good medicine indeed.
Guan Yunfan must have seen my cultivation at a glance, he thought. That's why he gave me this and not something else.
He felt a flicker of warmth toward the big scarred man. Not just generous. Thoughtful.
And precious, here. In Nalan City, pills like this were rare as rain. In the rich provinces, around the great sects, they might as well have been cabbages piled on market stalls. But here on the poor, dusty border, a man could go his whole life without seeing one.
He was not about to waste it.
There was one more thing.
He crossed to the far wall of the room, where a single painting hung on a peg: an old, yellowed scroll of rice paper, a little stained at the edges. It showed a pair of prawns, sketched in a few quick strokes of black ink, their long whiskers trailing. It was a pleasant, ordinary painting, the kind that hung in a thousand guest rooms across the kingdom. Nobody had looked at it in years.
He lifted it off the peg, laid it face down on the table, and ran his thumbnail carefully along the edge of the backing.
The painting was double-layered. Most people would never have noticed. Under the outer sheet of rice paper with its prawns, pasted so finely that the seam was almost invisible, was a second layer. He peeled the two apart, slowly, gently—and there, tucked between them, lay a pair of slender scrolls bound in faded crimson silk.
His hands shook a little as he lifted them out.
This body remembered them. Not clearly—the original Li Yuguo had looked at them once or twice as a boy, been bored, and never looked again. But the memory was there. His father's hands, putting them into this hiding place. His father's voice.
The secret of the Li family.
Lieyang Shenjian.
The Fierce Yang Divine Mirror.
He unrolled the first scroll on the table, and in the moonlight the dense columns of characters seemed to glow with a faint red heat.
In this world, cultivation techniques were graded the same way weapons were. Good. Fine. Top. Perfection. Holy. Most families were lucky to possess a single technique of good grade. A fine-grade technique could found a minor sect. The Lieyang Shenjian was top-grade—the rarest cultivation technique in all of Nalan City, perhaps in all the southern provinces. Without it, his father would never have become the God of War.
Its original name had been simply Lieyang Gong—the Fierce Yang Art. But generations of the Li family had refined it, distilled it, burned away everything that was not essential, until what was left was a technique of terrifying purity.
It ignited the yang energy of the whole body.
It was a practice that only a man could learn. Liu Mang had written that detail almost as a joke: if a woman tried to practice the Lieyang Shenjian, the pure yang fire would rage through her body and change it—she would grow a beard, her breasts would shrink, an Adam's apple would rise in her throat. It was a brutal, overwhelming, utterly masculine art, built for one thing above all else: attack. For a man who mastered the Fierce Yang Divine Mirror, there would be no battlefield he could not charge.
That's why I'm choosing it, he thought. Not for elegance. For power.
He memorized the first section. It did not take long; he had written it, after all, even if he had not known at the time that he would one day have to do it. Then he rolled the scrolls back up and hid them inside the painting again and hung the prawns back on their peg.
He sat down cross-legged on the floor beneath the open window, beside the glowing pot of Moon Spirit Grass, in the full silver flood of the moonlight.
He put the Spirit Gathering Pill in his mouth.
It dissolved on his tongue at once—cool, sweet, grassy—and slid down his throat, and for a moment nothing happened.
Then the room began to move.
He felt it on his skin first. The heavy, sweet, prickling air that the Moon Spirit Grass had gathered began to flow, slowly at first and then faster, circling him like water circling a drain. The silver-green leaves on the windowsill trembled. The moonlight itself seemed to thicken and bend. And from every direction at once—from the walls, from the floor, from the night air beyond the window—a steady stream of spiritual energy came pouring in toward him and gathered at the very crown of his head.
Baihui. The Heavenly Spirit Cap.
It entered him there, cool and bright as starlight, and poured down into his skull.
His whole body shuddered.
He reached for the Lieyang Shenjian's first method, the way the scroll had taught him, and took hold of the cool stream—and turned it. Drove it downward, through the narrow, silted, clogged channels of this soft, neglected body, toward the furnace in his lower belly. The pill's energy rose up to meet it from his stomach, warm and green. Where the two met, something caught.
A spark.
Then a flame.
Li Yuguo set his jaw, closed his eyes, and began to refine it—breath by breath, thread by thread, turning the gathered spiritual energy of heaven and earth into the fire of his own life—while the Moon Spirit Grass glowed silver on the windowsill above him and the moon climbed slowly over the sleeping roofs of Nalan City.