Outside Tide-Listening Town, a single small boat cut through the shattered gold of the sunset, its oar stirring the salt wind off the half-sea and pushing the smell of the fishing season toward the shore.
Gu Chengming sat cross-legged amidships, a plain blue robe on his back and nothing hanging at his waist. He looked like a poor scholar who had failed the examinations — not a trace of the sword cultivator about him.
In truth, flying here by sword would have taken half a day at most. He had deliberately chosen the slowest road available.
For one thing, with its vitality gravely wounded, the Fubai Dragon Lord was certain to be jumping at shadows; let so much as a single thread of sword qi drift across the sky and it would shrink straight back into its old den at the Dragon Transformation Pool. For another, Tide-Listening Town sat on the border between the Great Qian and the East Sea, and he had no clear idea whose orders the local officials actually answered to.
If he happened to run into a pack of Court of State Ceremonial lords, all of them devoted to "the greater good of foreign relations," then he wouldn't be investigating a case — he'd be the one investigated.
Perhaps because Gu Chengming's looks were too striking, the old boatman kept stealing glances at him.
"You're young, sir. What brings you out to a little place like ours?" The old boatman worked his oar and studied him, unable to hold the question in any longer.
Gu Chengming had his answer ready. He cupped his hands. "An elder of my family sent me to the East Sea to look for a distant cousin."
"Oh? Which family?"
"Surname Li."
The old boatman grunted and pressed no further. There were plenty of Lis in Tide-Listening Town, and scholars were scholars — half of them couldn't untangle their own cousins twice removed.
There were more than a few old men in town who enjoyed taking city scholars down a peg, cornering them with obscure local questions, and the moment the poor fellow started stammering they'd sniff, "Call yourself a scholar? Don't even know that?"
But the old boatman had no taste for that sort of unpleasantness.
Just as he was thinking it, the deck gave a thump underfoot.
A small head popped out of the cabin — a girl of about ten, two little braids swinging, half a sugar cake with one bite out of it clutched in her hand.
She saw the extra person aboard, froze for an instant, then stuffed the cake into her sleeve and came pattering straight up to Gu Chengming.
"Grandpa, Grandpa! Did this big brother come from far away?"
Her eyes slid over Gu Chengming first, then over the boat, then settled on her grandfather's face with an expression that said, plainly: Grandpa, Grandpa, this big brother is very handsome.
The old boatman laughed under that stare. "My girl. A little terror."
The girl changed faces at once, folded both hands in front of her and dipped Gu Chengming a half-curtsy, for all the world like a noble young lady out of an opera — except her eyes were rolling about with not one drop of noble reserve in them.
For whatever reason, one look had been enough for her to decide she liked him. She was a lively thing, and she promptly latched on and started chattering about everything under the sun.
Born by the sea, she knew the seabirds well, and introduced each one as it passed overhead.
"That's a seagrass duck, the tip of its tail is black!" "That one flapping so fast is a white-bellied shearwater!" "And that one over there, that one's called..."
The old boatman coughed from the stern. "Nannan. Don't pester the guest."
The girl stuck out her tongue, and shifted another half inch closer to Gu Chengming. He didn't mind in the least; he even put in a word for her, saying he found the birds quite interesting, which left the old boatman shaking his head in defeat.
Encouraged, the girl dug a little handkerchief bundle out of her front and spread it open. Inside were three pieces of cake, all obviously gone soft from being carried against her body.
"This one's for you." She picked out the most intact piece and held it out. "Grandpa says cake is sweet, and sweet things are for important guests."
The child's days were quiet, he supposed, and any stranger from outside was worth talking to.
Still, a gift shouldn't go unanswered. Gu Chengming fished an ordinary pine nut out of his sleeve and smiled. "Then I'll give you a present too."
The girl leaned in at once — and in her round, staring eyes the pine nut sprouted, lengthened, unfurled, and opened a tiny white flower.
The bloom reached its fullest, then dissolved into a breath of clean wind. Only the pine nut was left lying in his palm.
The girl stared for a long moment, then let out a shriek. "Big brother is an immortal!"
"Just a little trick for scraping a living on the road. Nothing worth showing off."
The old boatman had looked over by then, and the hand on his oar paused.
He had lived a good many years, and this stretch of sea had shown him its share of odd people and odder things. He'd watched conjurers before — some with hidden mechanisms, some borrowing wind or light. But that flower between the young man's fingers had grown out of the pine nut, truly and honestly.
The old man didn't say so. He simply took up the oar again, narrowed his eyes and smiled. "That's a fine skill you have, sir."
Gu Chengming smiled back. The girl cared for none of that; she tugged at his sleeve and demanded to see it again, and only sat down when her grandfather coughed twice.
By the time the boat reached shore, the sky had gone dark. The old boatman lifted the girl up onto the dock first, then turned back to call Gu Chengming over.
The dock was small. Half a coil of net and a few tethered conch cages sat on the wet flagstones, and in the distance the lanterns of the wine shops and tea sheds had just been lit, staining half the outline of Tide-Listening Town a dull yellow.
"Do you have somewhere to stay, sir?" the old boatman asked as he unloaded.
Gu Chengming shook his head.
To the old boatman's eye, this scholar clearly had nowhere to go. As for an inn — Tide-Listening Town hadn't been peaceful lately. The places on the east side were a mixed lot; not long ago an out-of-town traveler had lost his purse in the middle of the night. This young man looked slight enough that he'd only come to grief there.
Besides, his Nannan rarely warmed to strangers like this. The old boatman stroked his beard. "If you don't mind roughing it, stay a couple of days in my shabby house. Time enough to move once you've found your relatives."
"This is—"
The girl's eyes lit up on the spot.
"Big brother, stay with us! We have salted fish!"
Gu Chengming weighed it a moment, then agreed readily. "Then I'll impose on you, elder."
The girl cheered and jumped up, nearly tripping over a rope at her feet.
The old boatman lived at the end of an alley on the west side of town — a small two-court house, morning glories climbing a half-fallen earth wall, an old osmanthus in the yard.
The place was small, but kept clean.
Gu Chengming was put in the west wing.
He set down his bundle. The girl shot off toward the stove like a rabbit to draw water for washing, while the old boatman pointed out the bed and the drying pole and warned him to shut the window if the wind came up at night.
Seeing that the household held only the two of them, Gu Chengming asked, a little hesitantly, "Your daughter—"
The old boatman seemed to guess what he meant, and smiled. "Her mother went early. A widow here in town. Died in childbirth."
The old man paused. "And the child isn't my own blood either. But after all these years, she's no different from a real granddaughter."
Gu Chengming made a small sound of acknowledgement and asked nothing more.
Before long the girl leaned out of the kitchen to call them to eat.
On the table in the main room were salted fish, greens, and a small jar of rice wine. The old boatman filled a bowl for him. "Don't mind it, sir. Country brew."
Gu Chengming accepted it politely. His gaze wandered — and stopped on the wall facing the door.
A painting hung there, mounted on ordinary plain silk, but the brushwork was fine.
In it, a swordsman in white hung in midair, long hair bound up with a dark cord, the white robe spotted with a few beads of blood, the long sword in hand angled down toward the ground. Beneath the blade lay a jiao-shaped demon beast, already severed into two pieces.
Why did that look so familiar?
Gu Chengming looked closer.
Wait.
Wasn't that our Elder Little Yu?
Before he could react, the old boatman came over with a dish of peanuts, followed his gaze, and — reading it as curiosity — offered an explanation. "Ten-odd years back, two jiao came out of the sea and washed through three coastal villages. The soldiers came twice and got nowhere both times. The lords from the Court of State Ceremonial were diligent enough — they came running to discuss compensation with the village elders."
"Compensation, they called it. A few copper coins for a dead commoner and that was that."
"Then this immortal came." The old boatman pointed at the painting. "Dropped down out of the sky. No telling which sect. Cut both jiao clean to pieces in the space of a couple of hours."
Gu Chengming came back to himself, remembering that back in the Capital his own Elder Little Yu had once mentioned, in idle conversation, some old business out on the East Sea — very likely around this very town.
He had heard it and thought nothing of it at the time. Looking back now, the workings of fate in this world were a strange thing indeed.
"Grandpa." The girl finished gnawing a fish bone, pushed her bowl away, went around to his side and rose on her toes. "Will that immortal big sister ever come back?"
The old boatman rubbed her head. "Maybe she will. Maybe she won't."
The girl lowered her head to think, then tipped her face up again. "Then when I grow up, will I still be able to meet her?"
The old man laughed a little. "Then let's wait until Nannan is bigger."
Night came up quickly along the sea line, wrapping the little out-of-the-way seaside town in thick ink.
People by the sea went to bed early. Once the noise and smoke of the daytime market scattered, nothing was left but the sound of waves on the rocks, over and over, like the town's own slow breathing.
The old boatman cleared away the bowls, made up a guest room for Gu Chengming in the west wing, and took the girl off to the inner room to sleep.
That night Gu Chengming tossed on the creaking plank bed for half an hour.
By rights this was a good place — the sea wind clean and salt, the spiritual qi shallow but even. And yet sleep wouldn't come.
[The Red Dust Phantom Body Formula reminds you: Chengming, if you've nothing better to do, go take a look at the north end of town. The lamps there haven't gone out once after the hour of Xu, and every hour or two a cart sets out from that place for the docks.]
Gu Chengming rolled up and sat. In a town this small, what could possibly be worth hauling back and forth in the dead of night?
Suspecting it might have to do with the jiao clan, he pulled on his outer robe and rose. The corridor lamp under the eaves burned low, and from the inner room came the faintest snoring, tangled up with the sound of the tide.
He didn't use the scholar's outfit. He put on a straw rain cape instead, which made him even less worth a second look.
[The Red Dust Phantom Body Formula is highly satisfied with this outfit.]
At the end of North Street stood a government office, a board hanging by the gate: Court of State Ceremonial, Tide-Listening Branch Office.
Gu Chengming crouched on the roof of a shuttered cloth shop across the way, where the gutter under the eaves had half filled with salt bloom.
In the space of half an hour, he watched two carriages roll out one after another through the side gate.
Thick oilcloth covered the loads. Now and then a corner of it lifted, and when Gu Chengming probed with his spiritual sense, he found that what lay beneath the oilcloth were children, each one curled up small.
He drew a slow breath and pushed down the fire rising in his chest.
Once the carriages had gone, he circled around behind the office and dropped down at the foot of the old boundary wall by the kitchen, where half of it had collapsed.
The lamp in the kitchen was still lit. A middle-aged clerk in a grey-blue robe sat bent over documents, a freshly written stack of gift registers piled beside him.
Gu Chengming narrowed his eyes and leaned half an inch closer, taking in every character on the page.
"Presented to the East Sea Envoy Mission: Auspicious Offerings, sundry."
Below that, packed line after line, ran names, native places, ages. The hand was neat. He scanned down.
"Female. Ten years. No. 7, West Alley. Grandfather, boatman."
Gu Chengming stared at that line until the clerk inside muttered to himself, "This boatman's girl — they've asked for her by name three times now. Send her out with tonight's lot. The mission's pressing hard."
At last something murderous entered Gu Chengming's eyes.
The situation was clear enough now. The Fubai Dragon Lord was badly hurt, and the jiao clan hadn't produced a new Sixth Realm in a hundred years; its foundation was hollow. If the old jiao went on rotting like this, forget the next opening of the Dragon Transformation Pool — it might not keep hold of the life it had.
Hence blood sacrifice. The blood-qi of young boys and girls is purest — and to move living people out openly, you needed the skin of a government office to do it under.
"The greater good of foreign relations." He had never seen the phrase stretched quite this far.
It made for an awkward bind. If he acted, he would certainly startle the snake in the grass...
But at a moment like this, who weighed gains and losses?
If he stood by and watched these children shipped off, he might as well give up the sword altogether.
At the very least, tonight's shipment had to be stopped — and preferably without letting the Court of State Ceremonial see that an outsider had done it.
Of course, if he was recognized anyway, then he'd simply kill them all along with the rest.
The dock lay a li or so down the official road, then around one bend.
The tide rolled white foam under the moon. A three-masted cargo ship lay at the outer berth, a mast lamp hung low, the hull riding very deep in the water. Along the rail two decidedly suspect shapes could be seen, scales gleaming faintly. Not men.
At the bow stood an official of the Court of State Ceremonial in a blue-green robe, hands clasped behind his back.
Gu Chengming lay flat behind a stack of cargo on the dock. His plan had been to slip aboard first and find out exactly how many were being carried. His toes had barely left the ground by half an inch when a blade of sword light came slashing down from the headland behind and to his left.
Someone had moved before him.
He checked his half-launched body on the spot and looked up from against the cargo.
The blue figure that landed on the headland hadn't even settled his robes before he stumbled a step. A youth.
No more than sixteen or seventeen. The scabbard was worn old, the cloth of his clothes older, and a fresh scab crusted the web of his right hand. That sword light had cut clean through the oilcloth, and five or six children saw light again — the eldest maybe nine, the smallest no higher than his knee.
The youth hauled the children out and put them behind him.
At the same moment, the two water jiao on deck flashed their scales and slammed down onto the planks, each letting out a low warning growl.
The youth brought his sword up level across his chest, showing not a trace of fear.
Gu Chengming looked at that face and went still.
The moon wasn't especially bright, but bright enough to make out the features — and for some reason they felt familiar.
It took him a long moment to place it. This was the boy from Xuande Ward, the one whose grandfather had been trampled to death by a jiao beast.
Back then he had been nothing but a green squad officer of the Night-Watch Bureau, and when he swung that sword he had never once thought about what it might plant in another person's heart. And now, under tonight's moon, an old acquaintance appeared — as though someone on the other end of time had quietly balanced the account for him.
The two water jiao on deck had lost patience. One after the other they hurled themselves down the gangplank.
A sweep of claws sent seawater crashing up the stone steps. The youth gritted his teeth and met them, driving his sword into the scale seam beneath the left one's jaw. Spiritual power rang with a hum and burst a small cloud of water vapor into the air.
For a First Realm ninth level, the judgement in that thrust was genuinely fine. But First Realm ninth against mid Second Realm — the gap in cultivation flattened everything else.
The water jiao hissed and lashed its tail. The youth was flung twenty feet, his back slamming into the cargo stack, and half of it came down in a clatter of timber.
The smallest of the children finally broke and began to wail.
The youth wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth and got up again. His grip on the sword was still steady.
Gu Chengming's knuckles tapped his hilt. The Red Dust Phantom Body Formula was already turning quietly, and even the faint tide-whisper the blade made leaving its sheath was wiped away in passing.
Sword light cut out of the shadow of the cargo — along the extension of the very arc the youth's own swing had traced.
If the youth trained ten more years with the blade, gained ten more years of temperament, faced ten more years of opponents —
this was the stroke he would have delivered himself.
Gu Chengming delivered it for him, steady and sure.
The light skimmed the deck, entered at the side of the left jiao's neck, and came out through the throat of the one on the right.
Neither mid Second Realm water jiao had time to see where the light had come from. Both bodies seized mid-motion, and jiao blood sprayed up the mast, staining half the sail red.
The tide rolled in, and the two corpses went down heavily, crushing a whole section of the ship's rail.
The youth stood frozen, sword still raised, the tip still trembling faintly — as if that stroke really had come out of his own hand.
At the bow.
The blue-robed official of the Court of State Ceremonial hadn't moved, hands still behind his back.
He had been waiting for the two jiao to finish tidying the youth away, after which he would have the sailors count and crate the batch of "gifts" aboard. He had handled this sort of business at the Court for more than twenty years; he'd overseen eighty "greater goods of foreign relations" if he'd overseen a hundred, and never once had it gone wrong.
What lay before him now had gone very wrong indeed.
His jaw dropped — and the word "Rebellion!" never made it out.
The youth pushed himself up slowly on his sword. He raised his head, looked at the two water jiao on deck with their necks cut and throats pierced, then at the blue-robed official at the bow. Something seemed to come together in his mind, and the killing intent in his eyes finally caught fire.
"My lord." His voice came out hoarse. "Safe travels."
The official's mouth worked, and not a syllable came out.
All his life he had recited that "offense against the state's foreign relations is punishable by the extermination of three generations." Tonight, of all nights, it stuck in his throat.
The youth stepped up onto the gangplank, and sword light rose again.
This stroke was his own.
The blade shook a little — but the blue-robed official had not a shred of cultivation with which to resist.
In the instant the point entered his chest his eyes went enormous, as though even with his last breath he could not believe that a mere First Realm ninth level boy would truly dare to raise a hand against a seventh-rank official of the Great Qian's Court of State Ceremonial.
A small patch of pale red spread across the water beneath the bow.
Below deck, the other children who had been locked in the hold heard it and poked their heads up, shaking.
The youth stood with his sword and took two breaths, then turned to look up at the sky.
Gu Chengming stood in shadow, not moving. The Red Dust Phantom Body Formula was working perfectly; to any eye there was nothing there but ordinary night and the sound of the tide.
The youth saw nothing. But he knew that stroke had been far beyond his level, and that someone had helped him tonight.
He held the worn old sword crosswise before his chest, bowed once toward the sky, and said thank you without a sound.
Then he turned and walked off into the depths of the night.
The sea wind swept in past the outer berth and shook the sail with its half face of jiao blood. The blue-robed official lay sprawled on his back on the deck, eyes open, blood dripping down through the seams of the rail one drop at a time into the sea, mixing into that small patch of pale red, thinning further with each roll of the tide.
The youth walked away without once looking back.
Crouched behind the cargo, Gu Chengming watched the string of blood drops trail off into the dark, and felt his temple twitch.
Boy, don't you do any cleaning up at all?
Blood everywhere — and the footprints, needless to say, ran from deck to gangplank to reef, one bloody print per step. A blind dog could follow that trail. Never mind the two jiao carcasses lying across the deck, the sail soaked half red, and the several children still curled up in the hold.
Gu Chengming sighed. The Red Dust Phantom Body Formula turned quietly and he slipped out of the shadow of the cargo. The children felt only a cool breath of wind across their faces; when they opened their eyes there was a scholar in a straw cape standing before them.
"Don't be afraid." Gu Chengming kept his voice low, and touched a finger to the forehead of the eldest boy. The boy's eyelids sank and he toppled backward, and the rest went the same way, all of them put under in the space of a breath.
Once the children were settled, Gu Chengming began cleaning up the mess.
The jiao corpses were far too large, so he simply shattered both bodies into pieces with sword qi and threw the lot into deep water.
Into the blood-soaked deck he poured a thread of true essence, and as the steam rose the stains faded to almost nothing. As for the sail, he cut it with a twist of sword light, sheared off the bloodied half and pitched that into the sea as well.
The remaining half couldn't hold the wind. It flapped twice and hung slack.
Gu Chengming glanced down at the Court of State Ceremonial official — face to the sky, a bloody hole in his chest. A flick of his sword point at the man's collar sent a bronze waist token rolling out, the face engraved with three characters, "Court of State Ceremonial", the back stamped with a string of office numbers.
He picked it up, looked at it, and tossed it away. The bronze token drew an arc and vanished into the ink-dark swell without so much as a sound.
Somewhere out in the dark, seabirds roosting for the night were startled up by the commotion, circled twice with a beating of wings, and settled again.
When Gu Chengming slipped back into the little courtyard at the west end of town, the corridor lamp under the eaves was still lit and the old boatman's room had gone dark. Through the door panel he could hear the girl snoring in the inner room, small and broken up, like a cat walking on cotton.
Over the days that followed, Gu Chengming set about gathering word around Tide-Listening Town.
By day he moved through the markets; by night he sent his spiritual sense out and combed the coastal defense line inch by inch.
But the old jiao-dragon was cunning past all expectation. With the whole East Sea mission operation broken, the waters beneath the surface went as still as a dead pool. Not a whisper leaked out.
And ever since that night at the dock, the Court of State Ceremonial branch office had doubled its night patrols. Gu Chengming was beginning to suspect that the commotion on the dock had, in the end, startled the snake after all.
The Fubai Dragon Lord had been gravely wounded to begin with. Sensing that the wind had turned unfriendly ashore, it would be exercising its talent for hiding to the utmost.
As the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign had once said, the sea-eyes connect to the Outer Realm, and everywhere beneath the surface belongs to the jiao clan.
To hunt by brute search would mean turning the whole East Sea upside down — and even then he might not turn up one jiao that refused to show its face.
He kept telling himself there was no hurry. In truth, how could there not be?
Gu Chengming lay on the cliff edge, head pillowed on his arm, staring up at a sky full of stars.
The sea wind poured its salt reek down his collar and set the hem of his blue robe snapping. Out on the water were fishing fires, scattered points of light rocking with the swell, as if someone had flung a handful of broken gold across the sea.
Then laughter drifted up from below the cliff, and he turned his head.
On the shallow flats beneath, an old fisherman squatted by the rocks, sorting his net. Seven or eight paces off sat a child of maybe seven or eight, hair cropped in a bowl cut, trouser legs rolled up over the knee to show two lengths of sun-blackened shin.
In the child's hand was a crooked willow switch. Tied to it was a length of the coarse cotton thread used for stitching shoe soles, and tied to the thread — not a hook, but an iron nail bent into a hook shape, with a single grain of white rice hung neatly on the point.
The old fisherman's hands went still on the net. He looked at the willow switch, then at the grain of rice, and slapped his thigh laughing.
"Little one, what are you fishing for with a grain of rice?"
"Fish," the child said, without looking up.
"I've fished my whole life and never once seen anyone bait with rice!" The old fisherman rocked back and forth with laughter. "You're not just hungry, are you? Eat the thing and be done with it!"
The child paid him no mind. He swung the willow switch out into the surf with perfect gravity. Where the tip struck, a small ring of ripples spread and was quickly wiped flat by the tide.
Getting no answer, the old fisherman shook his head and went back to the tangled heap of net.
The waves slapped the rocks. Hush. Hush. Hush.
Gu Chengming shook his head too, and looked away.
The space of an incense stick passed. He was still turning over what to do next when a startled "Huh?" came up from below.
He glanced down. The crooked willow switch really had dipped. The child yanked it up, the switch bent into a bow, and the iron nail broke water — the grain of rice gone, and not so much as half a fish scale caught on it.
The child looked at the bare nail and showed no annoyance at all. He simply dug another grain of rice out of his front, hung it on, and swung it back out.
This time there was movement under the surface. Several palm-sized little fish churned in the shallows, fighting for the food, silver bellies flashing.
The child's hand tightened on the switch, a touch flustered.
Just then a sea bass of a catty or so shot up from deeper water and drove straight at the little fish. Spray leapt three feet in the shallows and came down on the rocks with a crash, splashing the child full in the face.
He spat out two mouthfuls of salt water — but the bass had dragged the willow switch down and bent it into a full bow. The coarse cotton thread creaked and finally snapped.
The bass dropped back into the water, slapped its tail, spun once and vanished into the deeper foam.
The old fisherman stared, mouth hanging open.
Up on the cliff, Gu Chengming looked at the child's stubborn little back — and a spark went off in his mind. A great many things seemed to string themselves together at once.
One grain of rice won't hook a big fish, but it will hook small ones. Small ones fighting for food draw the bass. The bass striking turns the whole shallow into a boiling pot.
The thought ran through clean and clear, and the days of frustration burned off in a single instant.
He surged to his feet and laughed out loud.
"Why should I go looking for the jiao?"
The laughter sent the seabirds off the cliff edge.
"I'll make the jiao come looking for me!"
He swept a sleeve, and a strand of spiritual power poured into the waters below the cliff.
The child had just fished out a fresh length of thread and was about to tie it to the switch when the ball of thread in his hand jerked tight and was dragged into the surf.
He grabbed at the end on reflex and was nearly hauled in bodily, and had to throw his arms around the rock at his feet, eyes huge as he stared out to sea.
The water erupted. Silver-white shoals came like an upended river of stars, surging in from every direction toward the place where that grain of rice had been, countless fish leaping clear of the surface, scales catching the moonlight like a sky full of flying glass shards, clattering down against the water.
The old fisherman's freshly sorted net didn't even need casting. The fish jumped into it themselves.
The child stared, dumbstruck. The willow switch in his hand had been pulled dead straight — and now fine roots sprouted from the wood, burrowing into the cracks of the rock, and at its tip a white flower the size of a fist opened.
The petals were thin as cicada wings, trembling in the sea wind, and at the flower's heart hung a bead of dew, brimming and about to fall, holding the whole star-crowded sky in that one small pool of water.
The net dropped out of the old fisherman's hands entirely.
He gaped — at the flower, at the fish still boiling across the water, at the flower again — and at last managed one sentence:
"Damn it all... what in hell is in that rice?"
Three days later.
Three li outside Tide-Listening Town ran a nameless little stream. In the dry season it was no more than twenty feet across, shallow enough only to wet your shoes. But come high summer, when the rains held for ten days on end, muddy water and yellow silt came sliding down off the hills and the stream mouth swelled into two hundred feet of churning brown, willow roots washed white on both banks, the wild reeds all beaten flat.
Just now, though, it was the dry season after the autumn equinox.
The stream ran thin, and where it met the sea only a single winding vein of water was left, threading out through the teeth of the reef until, joining the East Sea, it had worn down to something as fine as a silver thread.
The rocks at the stream mouth had grown just so — one fang on the left, one on the right — pinching that outflow channel into a natural funnel, wide without, narrow within.
At the ebb, seawater pushed back in; at the flood, stream water poured out; and the two currents twisted together over that reef flat into a churn of white foam, roaring steadily.
Gu Chengming stood before that foam for the better part of half an hour, the old boatman behind him with a battered bamboo pole in hand. Gu Chengming had begged the pole off him that morning, saying he meant "to catch a fish to go with his wine."
The old boatman had pulled out an old thing from the foot of his wall that had been gathering dust for three years — joints gone yellow, tip split, too shabby even for hanging laundry. Gu Chengming had received it like a treasure.
He turned it over twice, examining it, and nodded. "A fine rod."
The old boatman laughed. "So long as it pleases you, sir."
Arriving at the stream mouth, Gu Chengming looked over the lay of the land and walked straight to the rocks at the outlet. He squatted, drew a length of driftwood out of a crevice — about two feet long, grey-white through and through, no telling how many years it had soaked in the sea, and still solid when he rapped it.
The old boatman watched him cradle that rotten stick as though cradling an ancestral jade disc, and finally couldn't hold the question in:
"Sir — this fishing of yours, how exactly is it done?"
"Only those willing take the hook."
The old boatman gave up. Young people these days, he thought, always have to say something mystical.
Gu Chengming smiled, guessing exactly what the old man was thinking. He laid the driftwood crosswise at the narrowest point of the outlet, wedged both ends into the rock crevices, pressed it down to test it, then produced a small dish of cinnabar from his sleeve, dipped his brush and began to write.
The brush turned. Zhouli's Heaven-Human Heart-Rectifying Method flowed through him, and a thread of upright qi seeped along the cinnabar into the grain of the wood. Two characters came out.
"Dragon Gate".
As the last stroke settled, the two characters on the driftwood gave off a faint red glow in the daylight, as if they had been branded there.
The old boatman looked at the words and wanted to say something, but the limits of his letters left him with only: "That's fine writing, sir. You'll surely land a good fish."
Gu Chengming set the brush down and smiled at him. "May your words prove true, elder."
Once the boatman had gone, Gu Chengming sat alone by the rocks and did nothing at first, only drawing the cracked bamboo pole through the water a few times to test the depth and the run of the current.
The tide at the stream mouth worked both ways: at flood the sea pushed inland, at ebb the stream poured out, and at the place marked "Dragon Gate" the two made a natural circuit.
He had chosen this spot precisely for that circuit.
Gu Chengming drew a long breath. Spiritual power surged through him, and the Unfettered Freedom Formula turned quietly.
This art excelled above all at counterfeiting auras. Back when he had pulled the Yuanzhu at the Hunyuan Sect, it had forged even the aura of the founding patriarch to the life.
What it had to counterfeit now was merely the thing a jiao-dragon craved most in all its existence.
The aura of a Dharma-Station.
More precisely, the lingering trace left behind by that Pre-Nascent Dharma Rank the Love Laboratory had swallowed some time ago.
Gu Chengming drew that thread of aura out of his meridians, wrapped it about his fingertip, and touched it lightly to the surface of the water.
The instant it met the water, the whole stream shivered, and the settled sand on its bed lifted in a thin haze.
He rose and laid the cracked bamboo pole across one end of the "Dragon Gate" driftwood, tip angled out past the wood and hanging some three inches above the water.
A split old bamboo pole propped beside a rotten stick carved with two characters, pointing dumbly out to sea. Any passerby who saw it would assume some lazy fellow was dozing in the sun nearby and hadn't noticed his rod slide into the water.
Gu Chengming dusted off his hands, looked around, and found a slab of blue stone on the north side of the stream mouth, back against the hillside, face to the sea. Sitting on it, his line of sight passed just over the "Dragon Gate" and took in the whole of the shallows.
He drew a flask of wine from his sleeve. The sun slid west inch by inch.
A thinning wash of gold settled over his blue robe.
Above the far hills a lone crane crossed to the south; high in the sky, clouds gathered and unfurled.
The change began after dark. When the moon first rose, the shrimp came first.
The silt at the stream mouth held no shortage of green-shelled shrimp, and after nightfall they came out to feed, riding the tide upstream. A few of the larger ones, swimming along, drifted off their proper course for no reason they could name and gathered toward the driftwood.
Shrimp have no wits. Show them a gap and they'll go through it.
Beneath that piece of driftwood the current had scoured a shallow channel, open front to back. The green-shelled shrimp blundered in, and the water rolled them out the other side head over tail.
When they broke the surface, a faint luminescence clung to their shells — visible only when you lifted one against the moon, a thread of pale white, like scales.
Then came the fish. The mullet and mudskippers common to the stream mouth followed the shrimp in. They were shrewder than shrimp and knew to swim around obstacles — but tonight's current was strange, and a few of them went blundering under the driftwood all the same.
When they surfaced, that same pale luminescence lay on their scales, and their fins spread wider than usual, and they swam with a good third more strength in them, as though they'd been drinking some tonic broth.
Then came the crabs. Green-shelled crabs are stupider than shrimp or fish, but bolder. They crawled sideways along the rock seams, and when they reached the driftwood that strange current swept them in and spat them out the other end, tumbling and blowing bubbles, their auras utterly transformed.
For ordinary fish, shrimp and crabs to take on human form takes centuries of cultivation at the very least, and only after spirit-intelligence awakens can they step onto the demon-cultivator's road. Yet these water creatures, none of whom had so much as awakened intelligence, had picked up the aura of a true dragon merely by squeezing under a rotten stick with two words on it.
Any cultivator who saw it would have had his jaw on the ground.
Of course, the workings of creation here were fake. The strand of aura forged by the Unfettered Freedom Formula was more than enough to fool fish and shrimp — fooling a Fifth Realm jiao-dragon would be another matter.
But its virtue lay in a single word: pure. That thread of Dharma-Station aura had, after all, come from a genuine Pre-Nascent Dharma Rank. It was a counterfeit seed: appearance, aura and feel identical to the real thing, and plant it in soil and it would still sprout, put out leaves, even flower. It simply would never bear fruit.
But how was a jiao-dragon to know that?
All a jiao-dragon knew was that the East Sea's Dragon Transformation Pool opened once a century and yielded but a single strand of Dharma-Station root-tendril, over which countless dragon sons and dragon grandsons scrambled — while this "wild Dragon Transformation Pool" that had sprung up out of nowhere gave off a Dharma-Station aura ten times purer than the Pool itself. Gu Chengming did not believe it could hold back.
Deep in the East Sea.
The Dragon's Den.
The Fubai Dragon Lord's sealed chamber coiled at the very bottom of the trench. Down the jiao-dragon's spine ran an old wound stretching from the base of its neck to the root of its tail — flesh curled back, scale armor shattered, white bone still visible in the depths of the gash. That was what the battle at the Hunyuan Sect had left it. It had nearly been cut in two.
The Fubai Dragon Lord had lain on this ice couch for more than a month, and the injuries would not close. It knew there was only one remedy: the Dragon Transformation Pool.
But the Pool would not open again for thirty years at the least, and in its present state, whether it could last that long was anyone's guess.
The Fubai Dragon Lord lay with eyes shut, every breath tugging at the scar along its spine until its eyelids twitched with the pain.
It was thinking of the Dragon Transformation Pool. It had spent its entire life thinking of the Dragon Transformation Pool.
Among the jiao clan, only one who congealed the body of a true dragon might be called a "Dragon Lord." All the rest, whatever their cultivation, however long they had lived, were nothing in other mouths but "old jiao."
It had titled itself Dragon Lord, but in truth it had occupied the seat of "old jiao" for several thousand years. In those thousands of years it had watched two true dragons rise from the clan and die, each in turn, to one calamity or another; the Pool had emptied round after round, and it had always been one step short of the threshold.
Short of what? Of a Dharma-Station, of course.
The key to the Dragon Transformation Pool had never been the pool of spirit-liquid. It was the Dharma-Station root-tendril welling up from the sea-eye at its floor — the made-visible form of the Great Dao's own creative working. A jiao-dragon that took it into itself, with bloodline as guide and spirit-liquid as medium, could shed its jiao body and congeal the bone-frame of a true dragon.
The thought made the wound hurt worse. It had meant to keep fighting off the long night with feigned sleep — and then it sensed something.
Word from the lowest shrimp soldiers: something strange had appeared in the shallows.
The Fubai Dragon Lord's brow stirred faintly. It split off a thread of divine thought and sent it out to look.
A river mouth. A rotten stick. Leaping the Dragon Gate.
It snorted and pulled the thread back.
Some rogue cultivator with a death wish, playing tricks. Find a rotten log, carve two words on it, and call it the Dragon Transformation Pool? Clumsy stuff like that it had seen a dozen times over a thousand years, always from some fool who didn't know the height of heaven, dangling a fake Dharma-Station to lure it out. Laughable.
The jiao eyes closed again. It went back to its feigned sleep.
An incense stick later.
They opened again. The shrimp soldiers and crab generals kept feeding word into the Dragon's Den in an unending stream: more and more fish and shrimp had passed under that driftwood, more and more water creatures had taken on the "true dragon aura," and that aura was spreading along the current, seeping bit by bit from the river mouth toward deep water.
The Fubai Dragon Lord sent out another thread of divine thought.
This time it looked closely.
Somehow, that thread of "Dharma-Station aura" had spread from the bodies of the fish and shrimp into the seawater itself. The whole vein of water running down to the sea was steeped in it, as though something invisible had dissolved into the brine.
There was no mistaking it. That was truly the aura of a Dharma-Station.
The Fubai Dragon Lord's eyelid twitched. It sat up off the couch.
Why was the Dharma-Station root-tendril of the Dragon Transformation Pool purer than any found elsewhere?
Because the Pool connected to the sea-eye, the sea-eye opened onto the Outer Realm, and the Outer Realm was precisely the channel down which Dharma-Stations "fell." The root-tendril in the Pool was, stripped of all mystique, a scrap of residue leaked down from beyond — filtered by the sea-eye, scoured by the spirit-liquid, settled by a hundred years of time. Only then did it acquire that "purity."
But that miserable river mouth had nothing underneath it. No sea-eye. No spirit-liquid. Not even a formation worth the name. By what right could an aura purer than the Pool's rise out of such a place?
Unless it hadn't risen from beneath at all. Unless it had been put in from outside.
And what kind of person could "put" a Dharma-Station's aura into water?
The Fubai Dragon Lord's heart jumped.
Whoever could release such an aura was no common creature.
No rogue cultivator's trick. No means an ordinary cultivator could scrape together.
After the battle at the Hunyuan Sect it had buried itself in the deepest trench of the East Sea and drawn its aura in until almost nothing remained. It knew there were more than a few troublesome sorts among the cultivators up there — some of whom might well be hoping it would come out for a stroll.
A snare?
The Fubai Dragon Lord lay back down on the ice couch, closed its eyes, and drew a deep breath.
It was an old jiao of a thousand years. What had it not seen? It had waited thousands of years for the Pool's root-tendril; it could wait...
Thousands of years...
It parted its jaws, and a low roar ground out of its throat.
But the East Sea was its ground, the waters it had held for a thousand years. So long as it did not leave the water, who could touch a hair of it?
And at the very worst, if something did go wrong — it need only dive into the cave-dwelling of the Dragon Transformation Pool, and it would be over.
The Pool connected to the sea-eye, the sea-eye to the Outer Realm, and the Outer Realm to all four seas. Once it was in the Pool, never mind the cultivators who laid the trap — not even a Sixth Realm Sovereign could run it down.
Besides, it might not be a snare at all.
Perhaps some ancient Dharma-Station had surfaced anew. Perhaps some Sixth Realm Sovereign had fallen. Or perhaps... perhaps heaven had at last taken pity on an old jiao that had waited thousands of years.
A thousand feet of jiao body coiled in the Dragon's Den, its scale armor grey-white and scarred all over. In its true form the old wound along its spine was more appalling still, the scales at the edges broken and turned outward to bare the dark red flesh beneath. It no longer cared.
The Dharma-Station aura was still bleeding outward, thread after thread.
The Fubai Dragon Lord could bear it no longer. Its tail swung, and the black-ice rock of the den's ceiling burst open in a great hole, fragments raining down like stars onto the floor of the chamber.
It went through the gap, drove up out of the deep trench, and followed the scent toward the surface of the sea.
On the sea.
The moonlight lay like bolts of white silk.
The tide was rising at the river mouth, seawater pouring inland with its silt, the undercurrent beneath the driftwood churning foam with a steady rush.
The moon on the water was broken into pieces, drifting a fragment here, a fragment there. The tide, which had been sweeping in from the east, suddenly checked itself — as though something below had taken hold of it.
And then the tide came.
A wall of water thirty feet high burst across the sea, white foam rolling, tangled with seaweed and broken crab shells, driving straight at the river mouth.
Beneath that surge moved an enormous shadow, its grey-white scales hidden in the water's dark like a reef island on the move. The instant the wave struck the reef flat at the river mouth, the whole shallow shook.
All the fish and shrimp and crabs that the Dharma-Station aura had drawn in scattered in terror, bolting in every direction for their lives.
Two hundred feet short of the "Dragon Gate" the wave stopped dead, and the surface blew apart.
A thousand feet of jiao body tore up out of the sea, the water hanging on its scales turned to broken silver by the moon. The old wound along its spine still seeped blood, a winding red canyon in the moonlight running from the side of its neck to the root of its tail — but those jiao eyes had no attention to spare for anything just then.
They saw only one thing.
"Dragon Gate."
On that piece of driftwood laid across the rocks at the river mouth, two characters in cinnabar glowed dull red in the moonlight.
And from the undercurrent beneath the wood, thread upon thread of pale white aura came seeping out — purer than anything it had smelled beside the Dragon Transformation Pool in thousands of years, as if a Dharma-Station lay right there before it, within reach of a claw.
The Fubai Dragon Lord's pupils blew wide, and every last shred of suspicion and caution went out of it in that instant.
A thousand feet of jiao body drove up the current toward that driftwood, its tail beating waves higher than the reefs on either hand, the sea torn into two banners of white beneath it. Moonlight fell across its scales, grey and silver interwoven — a colossal column of water wrenched up out of the seabed and hurled toward the river mouth.
The jiao-dragon leapt the abyss.
The look of it was of something truly leaping the Dragon Gate.
The Fubai Dragon Lord could not even feel the old wound on its spine. Its body stretched to its uttermost in midair, forelegs thrust forward, jaws wide, straining with all its strength toward the Dharma-Station aura welling beneath that scrap of wood.
Wind poured into its jaws, cold water beat against its scales, and the moon threw its shadow across the shallows of the river mouth.
Enough — thousands of years — enough!
In the instant its body passed over the driftwood it lifted its head, and what filled the jiao eyes was no longer moonlight and seawater —
it was a man.
A blue robe. An empty wine flask. A cracked old bamboo pole propped beside his knee.
He was sitting on the blue stone directly above the "Dragon Gate," both legs hanging loose, the toes of his shoes no more than three feet from the jiao's head.
The moon shone from behind him, throwing his shadow across the Fubai Dragon Lord's face, blocking out most of the moon.
It was Gu Chengming.
He glanced down at the jiao-dragon hanging frozen in midair and said with a soft laugh:
"Reeled you in at last."
…
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