NINE LIVES OF THE IMMORTAL SAGE
Chapter 4: First Blood of the Outer Territories
The first time someone tried to kill Lin Yao in this life, he was six years old and walking back from the market with a servant named Old Fen, carrying a bag of spirit herbs his mother had requested for a medicinal bath preparation.
The attempt was not sophisticated.
Two men had followed them from the market — Lin Yao had noticed them at the third stall, distinguished from ordinary foot traffic by the quality of their attention: not browsing, not moving with purpose toward a destination, but tracking. He had noted them, continued his purchase of the herbs, and walked home on the standard route while monitoring their positioning.
They moved on them in the alley behind the grain merchant's warehouse. One grabbed Old Fen. The other came for Lin Yao with a short blade and a professional lack of hesitation that said: this is not personal, this is a contracted job.
Lin Yao stepped left, into the gap between the blade and the wall, at the precise moment the man's reach was committed. The blade went past him. He put two fingers against the inside of the man's wrist — the Laogong meridian point — with a sharpness that sent a Qi disruption along the ulnar channel, and the hand holding the blade went briefly, completely numb.
The blade dropped.
Lin Yao picked it up.
He was six years old. He was four foot two. He held the blade with the economical grip of someone who had been using edged weapons since before this world's current era had begun, and looked up at the man with the calm, attentive expression he wore in cultivation sessions.
The man stared at him.
Old Fen, released by the second man who had turned to look, made a small sound somewhere between a gasp and a prayer.
'Who sent you,' Lin Yao said. Not a question. A statement offered in the form of a question, which was a different thing.
The man looked at the blade in the six-year-old's hand. Looked at the boy's face. Made a calculation about what he was seeing.
Then he ran.
The second man ran as well, immediately, as if they had planned this exit together. Lin Yao watched them go, then turned to assess Old Fen — shaken but uninjured, one hand pressed to his chest, breathing too fast.
'Are you hurt?' Lin Yao asked.
'I — no — young master, are you—'
'I am not hurt,' Lin Yao said. 'Breathe. We will continue home.'
He slid the blade into the spirit herb bag — it would be useful to examine later, the metalwork sometimes carried identifying characteristics — and they walked the rest of the way home in silence, Old Fen glancing at him every thirty seconds with an expression that suggested the servant was revising several fundamental beliefs about the world.
✦ ✦ ✦
He told Lin Baoshu that evening. Privately, in the old man's study, with the door closed.
He told him accurately and without embellishment: the men's positions when first noted, their movement pattern, the engagement, the outcome, the blade now sitting on the old man's desk.
Lin Baoshu picked up the blade. Turned it over. His expression was controlled but not entirely.
'You disarmed a grown man,' the old man said. 'A contracted blade.'
'The Laogong point disruption is reliable at close range. He was reaching, which opened the wrist. The timing was straightforward.'
'You are six years old.'
'Yes,' Lin Yao said. 'I am also at the fifth layer of Qi Gathering, which you do not know yet because I have been pacing my visible progress more slowly than my actual progress. I apologize for the deception. I judged it necessary to avoid the kind of attention that would have sent two men with a short blade after me somewhat earlier.'
Lin Baoshu set the blade down very carefully on his desk.
The silence in the room had weight.
'Fifth layer,' the old man said. 'At six.'
'Yes.'
'The visible progress I have been observing—'
'Is real. I am genuinely making that progress. I am simply also making additional progress that I have not been displaying.'
Another silence. Lin Baoshu's hands rested flat on the desk. He was looking at the blade but not seeing it.
'Why are you telling me now?' he asked finally.
'Because someone contracted two men to remove me, which means they know or suspect what I am, and that means the family needs to know what they are protecting. I cannot allow you to make strategic decisions based on incomplete information when those decisions affect people in this household.'
The old man looked up.
'People in this household,' he repeated.
'My mother. My father. Old Fen, who nearly had his throat cut today because he was in the wrong alley with the wrong employer.' Lin Yao paused. 'I have been careful to protect my own understanding of my situation. I should have extended that care further outward. I am correcting that error now.'
Lin Baoshu studied him for a long time. The locked-box expression was gone. What replaced it was something harder to name — a kind of awe that was fighting with itself, unsure whether to accept what it was seeing.
'What do you need from me?' the old man said.
Lin Yao had prepared for this question.
'Information,' he said. 'Who in the outer territories would be aware of unusual cultivation talent in a Lin family child and consider it threatening? Who monitors lineages that carry old blood? And — separately — do you know the history of the spiritual vein beneath the cultivation hall?'
Lin Baoshu sat back slowly.
'Sit down,' the old man said. 'This will take some time.'
Lin Yao sat.
✦ ✦ ✦
The information Lin Baoshu provided over the following hour reshaped several of Lin Yao's working models.
The blade was from the Copper Wind trading house — identifiable by a small mark on the tang that Lin Baoshu recognized from twenty years of outer-territory commerce. The Copper Wind house was not, on its surface, an organization that sent men with blades after small children. It was a mid-tier trading operation that dealt in spirit herbs, minor formation materials, and travel contracts.
But the Copper Wind house was also — and this was the piece Lin Baoshu delivered with the careful emphasis of a man who had been sitting on it for years — an instrument of the Hollow Branch Sect.
The Hollow Branch Sect controlled three valleys to the east. They had been doing so for approximately two hundred years, through the standard combination of military force, economic leverage, and selective cultivation of local families who showed promise and could be bound by obligation into their service structure.
They had also been monitoring the Lin family's ancestral land for approximately forty years, following the detection of anomalous Qi readings in the area that their sect's formation masters believed indicated a buried spiritual vein of mid-grade or better.
'They have been waiting,' Lin Baoshu said, 'for either the vein to surface naturally, or for a Lin family cultivator to develop enough sensitivity to interact with it — which would confirm its existence and give them a reason to move.'
Lin Yao absorbed this.
So the attempt today was not about me specifically. It was about the vein. They detected my Qi interactions with it and drew the correct conclusion: someone in the Lin family knows it is there.
'They want the vein,' he said.
'They want the vein,' Lin Baoshu confirmed. 'The Lin family has been sitting on potentially valuable land for generations without the cultivation resources to develop or defend it. The Hollow Branch Sect has been waiting for an excuse to make a move. A child demonstrating unusual spiritual sensitivity could be interpreted as the beginning of that development.'
'So they sent two men to remove the sensitive child before he became a problem.'
'That would be my interpretation.'
Lin Yao considered the situation from several angles.
The Hollow Branch Sect was, by the standards of his previous lives, a minor irritant — a group of cultivators whose highest realm was probably Domain Sovereign at best, operating in a corner of the outer territories with the focused ruthlessness of small powers that cannot afford to lose resources to competitors. In his previous life's terms, they were less significant than the atmospheric disturbances he had navigated as a matter of course in the deep upper realms.
But he was six years old. He had a fifth-layer Qi Gathering base. The Lin family had an elder at the sixth layer and a handful of family members scattered across the third and fourth.
He needed time. Time to reach Foundation Establishment, then Core Condensation, then the inner realms. The Hollow Branch Sect had probably four to six cultivators at the Domain Sovereign level or below, and they were willing to use contracted blades against children.
That meant they were willing to escalate.
I need them uncertain. Not afraid — fear makes organizations act before they are ready. Uncertain. Unsure whether the information they have is accurate. Unsure whether the threat they perceive is as immediate as their instruments tell them.
He turned to Lin Baoshu.
'I need you to spread a piece of information through whatever channels reach Hollow Branch eyes,' he said. 'Not obviously. As an organic rumor.'
'What information?'
'That your great-grandson suffered a serious illness recently. That the spiritual sensitivity he displayed was an anomalous symptom of a fever condition that has now resolved. That he is expected to be an ordinary cultivator.'
The old man studied him.
'That buys time,' Lin Baoshu said.
'Six months, perhaps eight. Enough for me to establish a foundation they cannot easily contest.' Lin Yao paused. 'And I want to seal the vein.'
'Seal it?'
'Not permanently. I want to suppress its surface emissions enough that their formation masters' readings go quiet. The vein itself I will anchor more deeply to the family land, using a technique I have been developing. This serves two purposes: it removes their immediate motivation, and it ensures that when I am ready to develop the vein properly, it will be stronger for having been concentrated.'
Another long silence.
'You are six years old,' Lin Baoshu said again. Not in the way of someone denying a fact. In the way of someone who keeps saying a thing because it is the only anchor left in a room full of shifting water.
'I am aware,' Lin Yao said. 'I am also the best option this family currently has. I would prefer this not to be true, because it places obligations on me earlier than I planned. But it is true, and I do not intend to ignore true things for the sake of comfort.'
Lin Baoshu looked at him for a long moment. Then the old man did something Lin Yao had not seen him do before: he pressed his hands together and inclined his head. A formal gesture. An elder's acknowledgment directed at someone who was not, by any conventional measure, an elder.
'Tell me what you need,' Lin Baoshu said.
Lin Yao nodded.
'First,' he said, 'I need to know if there is anyone in the family who has left the outer territories and reached a higher realm. Anyone at all — I do not care how distant the relation or how old the departure. A name and a last known location would be sufficient.'
Lin Baoshu thought for a moment.
'There is one,' he said slowly. 'My grandfather's elder sister. She left the family compound sixty years ago. She reached the Nascent Soul Realm, from the last word that reached us. She is called Lin Feiyun.'
Lin Yao filed this name carefully.
A Nascent Soul cultivator in the bloodline. That will be useful. Not now — the distance and the effort of contact would be premature. But the connection exists, and connections have uses proportional to one's ability to activate them at the right moment.
'Thank you,' he said. 'Keep that information close. We may need it.'
He stood, picked up the spirit herb bag he had set down when he entered, and moved to leave.
'Lin Yao,' the old man said.
He turned.
Lin Baoshu looked at him with an expression that had given up trying to name what it was seeing and simply existed in the presence of it.
'Be careful,' the old man said. 'Please.'
The word 'please' from a Lin family elder to a six-year-old great-grandchild would normally have been out of place. Here it was simply honest.
'I will,' Lin Yao said. 'I have made a great many errors in my existence, great-grandfather. Carelessness was not among them.'
He left the study and went to find his mother, who was waiting with her medicinal bath preparation and a worry she had been carefully not expressing.
He gave her the herbs and let her hug him for longer than was strictly necessary, and told her the outing had been uneventful.
Some truths could wait.
— End of Chapter 4: First Blood of the Outer Territories —
Nine Lives of the Immortal Sage