The figure sat on the bluestone directly above the Dragon Gate, moonlight spreading out behind him.
Fubai Dragon Lord hung in midair, and for a moment the sight reflected in its jiao-pupils left it dazed.
Several thousand years ago, when it had still been nothing but a small jiao, it had watched from a distance as one of its clan's forebears — a true dragon who had already reached the Sixth Realm — was pinned against the reef by a man with a wine flask slung at his hip. One stroke took the dragon's head off. Then the man tipped his neck back and drank the true dragon blood spilling from that skull like it was wine.
The jiao clan lived in dread for three hundred years. The elders pressed that man's name down into a taboo, and by the time it reached the ears of the young, it came as this: the Fate-Reversing Tribulation-Severing Sovereign.
And now this figure sat upon the Dragon Gate, no sword at his waist, a fishing rod laid across his knees.
For reasons it could not explain, in that instant Fubai Dragon Lord felt the silhouette that had drunk its uncles' blood thousands of years ago sliding, inch by inch, into alignment with Gu Chengming.
The old jiao shook itself out of the daze, and understanding hit it at once: this was a killing formation laid for it. That thought cleared its head completely.
This brat was only Third Realm. To dare set a board this large here, he had to have fellow cultivators lying in ambush on every side. Charging in headlong had already been a blunder. To linger another moment would be to court death.
Its tail swept around, seawater crashing back down in silver cataracts, and it turned to flee for the deep sea.
But in the next breath the sound of the tide became wind brushing a paper curtain, and the flapping of leaping fish became cotton wadding hitting the ground. Fubai Dragon Lord felt the stretch of future in which it was already escaping struck out with a single stroke of the brush, its entire hundred-zhang body hauled bodily back and left hanging three feet above the Dragon Gate.
Savage light flared in its eyes.
A junior of the Third Realm, with methods like this?
— The ambush behind him had to be more than one Fifth Realm power!
Killing intent surged. There was no road left to retreat down anyway, so it might as well see the thing through: pounce first, take the brat hostage, and whoever was lying in wait out there, however many of them, would have to show at least some restraint.
The hundred-zhang body reared up again, jaws gaping wide, and hurled itself down at the man on the bluestone. The wind it dragged with it carried a reek of brine and a pressure heavy enough to snap the heart-meridians of an ordinary Third Realm cultivator on the spot.
Gu Chengming did not move. The jiao's head closed to within three feet of him — and only then did Fubai Dragon Lord sense that for ten li in every direction there truly was no one here but Gu Chengming.
Shock and delight hit it together. Shock, that a Third Realm junior would dare come alone to hunt down a Fifth Realm jiao-dragon. Delight, that the one who had laid this board had kept no trump card in reserve after all.
Rage curdled into laughter. "Gu Chengming!! I never even came looking for you, and here you've delivered yourself to my door to die."
Its jaws drove straight at him.
[The Hundred Bones Resonance let out a roar: Perfect timing!]
[Endless War God, come forth!]
Red-gold radiance solidified at Gu Chengming's side — a girl's phantom, white hair standing on end, an imperial aura raging in her red-gold eyes. Her fingers laced through his.
[Hundred Emperor, lend me your strength!]
Red-gold and white-gold force meshed in midair, twisted together, and detonated.
— Infinite Love!
The punch crashed into Fubai Dragon Lord's skull. The jiao felt its whole body slammed flat onto a butcher's block. The old wound along its spine, left from the battle at the Hunyuan Sect, split open in an instant; scales scattered like shattered porcelain, and jiao blood fountained from the tear, staining the seawater red for three zhang around it.
A hundred zhang of serpentine body took the blow head-on and slammed back down into the sea.
The wave burst nine zhang high. Fubai Dragon Lord lay in the churning foam, its pupils blood-red, a rasping howl caught in its throat.
Truthfully, it was stunned.
Anyone would have been. A mere Third Realm — and yet that punch had landed with force worthy of a half-step Sixth Realm.
The killing intent in the old jiao's chest was drowning under fear. This wasn't a man. This was a calamity! No human cultivator could possibly hold power that defied every rule it knew.
It knew the outcome was decided. Every scrap of will to fight drained out of it. All it wanted now was to run — to live.
It would run for the Dragon Transformation Pool. Even cut in two, so long as its jiao-soul could roll into that pool, there was a thread of hope for rebirth.
Its tail lashed, churning the whole stretch of sea into a whirlpool, and it rode the recoil away toward the deeps of the East Sea.
But the moment it moved, two sets of footsteps sounded behind it — as though someone were walking on the moonlight itself.
[Flowing Cloud, Moon-Following Sword Art CG: I Will Love You Until the End of Time.]
A half-transparent phantom of a young woman rose at Gu Chengming's back, robed in moon-white, her fingertips cool as moonglow.
She leaned down from behind him, her right hand sliding inch by inch along the arm that held his sword until her fingers laced through his.
Two people, one sword. Moonlight spilled along the blade's spine, clouds furling and unfurling, and the sword-light crossed the arc of Fubai Dragon Lord's flight and cut into its neck, inch by inch.
The jiao was fast. The stroke was faster. It never managed its final roar. A hundred zhang of body stopped dead in midair, and the barely visible line of silver-white moonlight between head and neck crept slowly downward until it had circled the throat entire.
In the next breath, the head fell.
No blood sprayed. That entire pool of dark red, the instant it left the body, turned into warm rain, drifting wide and slow into the East Sea, staining a whole stretch of water — and carrying, strangely, not the faintest reek of brine.
As if someone had repaid an old debt, and repaid it cleanly, without a smear left on the ledger.
The headless hundred-zhang body smashed into the sea and flung up a column of water toward the sky.
The column fell. The surface went still.
Only that patch of sea, washed by the blood-rain, glowed a faint red under the moon, like an old bolt of silk someone had tossed carelessly into the East Sea.
The head had come to rest beside the Dragon Gate's driftwood, and the last flicker of divine light frozen in its pupils reflected the man on the bluestone.
Gu Chengming looked down at it. "You dodged that debt for a few thousand years. Today it's paid off."
The jiao blood ran into the sea, and beneath the sea-eye the spirit-mechanism that had slept a thousand years was jolted awake by that pool of blood.
On the shallows where a nameless creek emptied into the East Sea, first one silver-scaled perch leapt from a wave-crest, then a second, then a third. After that there was no counting them — the whole shoal boiled over with rolling scales, as if someone had upended a sack of broken silver across the water. The fish leapt and fell, and every splash struck up a scatter of fine silver light.
Farther out, beneath the surface, the few scattered strands of jellyfish rode the blood-scent upward, their lantern-like bells opening and closing, lighting the ink-dark water into a soft haze.
A very faint rainbow lifted its head above the horizon. By rights there should be no rainbow at night, yet there it was — perhaps a portent following the fall of a Fifth Realm power, its seven colors so pale they might have been bled into rice paper under the moon.
Gu Chengming picked up the empty wine flask from the bluestone and tipped it back. Nothing came out. He felt genuinely sorry about that.
No wine after slaying an evil jiao. The ceremony of the thing was somehow incomplete.
He set the empty flask down beside the "Dragon Gate" driftwood, straightened the hem of his robe, and turned to leave.
Behind him the rainbow bridge thinned away, the jellyfish sank back into the deep, the sea returned to ink. Only the two characters carved into that stub of driftwood — Dragon Gate — still gave off a faint cinnabar-red glow, and beside them lay a hundred-zhang jiao's head, eyes wide open, as though even in death it had never worked out how it had come to this.
.
The next morning, before the hour of the Rabbit had even arrived, the fish market at the north dock of Tide-Listening Town had already boiled over like a pot of porridge.
Old Li had fished his whole life. This morning he had simply taken his battered boat out as usual — and the moment he cast his first net, it nearly dragged him over the side with it.
"Pull! Pull harder!"
Old Li bellowed until his throat cracked. His wife heard him from shore, hitched up her skirt, and ran for the dock, losing one shoe on the way.
When that net came up, the boat sat so low it was nearly swamped. Perch crowding sea bream, sea bream stacked on mackerel, and a few gold-thread eels of a kind nobody laid eyes on in an ordinary year, scales flashing hard enough to dazzle in the morning sun.
Old Li's wife clapped a hand over her mouth and sat down where she stood. It took her a long while to get a sentence out. "Husband... you didn't go and clean out the Dragon King's own fishpond today, did you?"
Old Li crouched in the bow, wheezing and laughing at once. "Bah, bah, bah! Don't go saying things like that!"
A few old hands drifted over with pipes clamped in their teeth, craning their necks at that boatload of silver scales. They looked their fill, said nothing at all, then turned and raced one another back to their own boats.
"Move, move, move! Any later and we'll miss the run!"
"Old Zhang, what are you running like that for?"
"What am I waiting for, then? For my woman's thin gruel?!"
By noon, every object in Tide-Listening Town capable of floating had gone out onto the water, from three-masted ships down to sampans a single man could shoulder. Even the cracked wooden tub Widow Wang at the east end of town used for pickling vegetables had been hauled off by her second boy to scoop up fish.
That day's catch was more than the market's wooden trestles could hold. In the end they laid straw rain-capes down over the stone flags of the dock, layer after layer, and simply piled the fish on top.
The old grandmothers of the town sat in their doorways gutting fish until their wrists ached, and not one of them was willing to stop.
"These fish... these fish seem uncommonly fat."
"Don't they just. Even the scales are a layer thicker than usual."
The wineshop next door to Tide-Listening Town, the one whose business had been dead for years on end, had thirty jars of Cloudbreak White out on the counter before midday. The wine-wife stood behind it counting copper coins with a grin she couldn't wipe off.
Her husband asked what she was so pleased about. She said that in all her years she had never once seen the people of this town rich enough to call for thirty whole jars of wine.
"Husband, what day is it today, anyway?"
"Who cares." The master of the house rolled up his sleeves. "Go fetch out the jar we've been saving at the bottom of the chest, wife."
That afternoon a few bold fisher-boys poled a sampan up from the river mouth toward the headwaters, meaning to find out where all these fish had come from.
They paddled along, and then they saw it: a length of old driftwood wedged between the reefs.
Two characters were carved into the wood — Dragon Gate — and an empty wine flask sat beside them.
And on the other side of that driftwood lay a jiao's head, tens of zhang across, its scales grey-white, its dead-fish eyes glaring off toward the East Sea.
The boys on the sampan stared and stared, and not one of them dared make a sound.
The first to come to his senses was a lad of thirteen or fourteen, who promptly toppled off the boat into the water with a splash.
"Ji— ji— jiao—" He thrashed, spitting water and shouting at the same time. "A jiao! It's a jiao! A jiao's head!"
The fishermen who had followed along the bank for the fun of it came surging over at the noise.
More and more gathered, until at last the town's ward chief came, and the village head, and even an official of the Court of State Ceremonial.
The moment that official laid eyes on the head, every drop of color drained from his face. He stumbled back half a step and nearly sat down in the surf.
He of course knew who this head belonged to. But how? How could Fubai Dragon Lord actually be dead?!
Somewhere in the crowd, someone muttered it first. "An immortal slew the demon."
Then a second voice picked it up, and a third.
"It was an immortal — an immortal slew the jiao!"
"An immortal came to our town?"
The old folk understood soonest. One after another they lowered themselves, hands trembling, to bow toward that driftwood, and the fisher-boys who had come to gawk from their sampan looked blankly at their elders and copied them, bowing down too.
The tide rolled up over the reef flats, washing that pool of blood-rain red paler, inch by inch.
South of town, in an unremarkable tea shed.
The youth who a few days earlier had cut down a Court of State Ceremonial official at the dock with a single stroke sat with his head down over a bowl of plain rice porridge.
He hadn't closed his eyes since the night before. A dark red scab still clung to his temple, and one sleeve of his left arm had been slit open, the cloth strips beneath it wound on carelessly — clearly seen to by his own hand somewhere along the road.
He had meant to leave Tide-Listening Town.
He had killed an official and cut down a jiao. He knew the road ahead of him would not be an easy one.
Even so, he had kept his sword and stayed one more day.
Partly because the swordwork that night had plainly not been at his own level, and he wanted to know who had helped him. And partly because the children he had pulled out of that ship's hold still needed somewhere safe to be put.
What he hadn't expected was that half an hour of sitting in this tea shed would be enough to hear all about the morning's business.
"You hear? Out on that rotten reef at the river mouth — there's a jiao's head hanging there!"
"More than that. That's Fubai Dragon Lord!"
"What sort of immortal has power like that, eh!"
"A thing this big, and the immortal doesn't even leave a name."
"Leave a name for what? A true immortal never leaves a name!"
The youth's spoon stopped at his lips and stayed there.
— Fubai Dragon Lord?
He had been asking after news everywhere these past days, so of course he knew the name. An old jiao whose legend had run along the East Sea for a thousand years, sovereign of its clan, a Fifth Realm demon cultivator. Every magistrate's office in the East Sea Commandery had to give it a measure of face.
His fingers tightened around the spoon.
The old men in the tea shed talked on, and the talk wandered around to the bloody business at the dock a few nights back.
"That case at the dock the other night — you think it's connected to this business at the river mouth today?"
"Ha, how could it not be? I'd swear to my dying day it was the same immortal."
"So why won't the immortal leave a name?"
"Leave a name for whom? He's an immortal. What he does isn't for us to see. It's for Heaven to see."
The youth lifted his head and looked out at the bustling town beyond the tea shed — fishmongers hollering, children squalling, old men clacking abacus beads, and on every face a kind of excitement no one could quite put a word to.
An immortal slew the jiao.
He chewed the four words over for a long while.
And the bowl of porridge in his mouth, he found, tasted rather better than it had a moment ago.
He finished the last half bowl in silence, set down the spoon, pressed a few copper coins under the rim, and rose to go.
Outside the tea shed he bent to collect the old sword he'd left leaning by the door — and stopped, startled. Somehow his old sword had been swapped for another.
The blade was a dim, shadowy white all through, with dark patterns flowing along its spine. He glanced around on instinct and saw no one else at all.
After a moment's hesitation he unfastened the unfamiliar sword, and the instant the scabbard settled into his hand he knew it was different. It was absurdly heavy — yet the moment his grip closed, the scab in the web of his hand, split open a few nights ago by the shock of a strike, gave off a faint thread of warmth.
He drew it half an inch without thinking. The hilt was smooth and warm, the blade better than eight inches wide, and two characters were engraved on it.
Jiao-Slayer.
In the little two-court house at the west end of Tide-Listening Town, the Old Boatman had risen early to split firewood, and it was a good while before he noticed something was off.
Ordinarily that "Young Master Li" was up before daylight; by the time the Old Boatman had the water boiling, the young man would already be out for a turn around town. Today he had most of the wood split, and the west wing's window was still shut tight.
The Old Boatman set down his axe, hesitated a moment, then went over and pushed the door open.
The room was swept clean. On the table lay a lump of broken silver.
Under the silver was half a sheet of paper, folded into a neat square, the writing on it quite tidy: "For several days' imposition, and for the salted fish and rough wine. Chengming thanks you."
The Old Boatman picked up the silver and weighed it in his palm. It had good heft — more than enough to cover several days of salted fish and rough wine, with plenty left over to have a new set of clothes cut for Nannan.
He looked at that sheet of paper for a long, long time.
Out in the courtyard, Nannan came running barefoot, saw the empty room, and pulled a face.
She ran back into the inner room and fished something out from under her pillow. A pine nut.
The very one the "immortal big brother" had used to do tricks for her a few days ago — the one that had opened into a single white flower and then dissolved into a breath of clear wind. She had assumed all along that it was only a pine nut.
But when she spread her palm open, the pine nut put out a shoot in her hand, unfurled its leaves, and bloomed.
One very small white flower, resting in her palm.
Nannan stared at it, wide-eyed, for a long while.
The blossom opened in perfect silence. She tipped her face up. "Grandpa! Grandpa, look!"
The Old Boatman came out of the west wing at the sound and saw, even from a distance, the white flower in his granddaughter's hand.
He stopped where he stood.
He thought of "Young Master Li" on the boat planks a few days back, coaxing a flower out of his fingertips as easily as breathing. He thought of the story the whole town had been shouting itself hoarse over — an immortal slew the jiao — and of the day that young man had taken him out to the "Dragon Gate" to fish. And realization went through him like a cold shock.
He raised his eyes to the old painting on the wall of the main room, the white-robed swordsman slaying a jiao — that immortal had hung in his house for more than ten years now, the edges of the scroll worn fuzzy with age. Then he looked again at the newly opened flower in his granddaughter's palm, and he began to laugh.
Little Nannan tilted her face up. "Grandpa, the immortal big sister said she'd come back. What about the immortal big brother?"
The Old Boatman stroked her hair.
"They're both immortals," he said slowly. "When it's time to see them, you'll see them."
Nannan gave a small "oh," half understanding, and bent her head back over the little white flower in her hand.
She put out one finger and touched a petal, lightly.
The petal trembled. Out in the courtyard the sea wind lifted the old osmanthus tree, and a few fine golden flecks came drifting down, settling on the ground without a sound.
Another autumn had come.
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