Chapter 212 (Patreon)

Yesterday I forgot to add a note.

In Spain, the clocks have been set back to observe so-called “winter time,” so starting today and until the next time change, this will be the new publication time for the episode.

“Just because it doesn’t explain it doesn’t mean there’s no explanation”, I tell Xia.

Xia doesn’t even look up from the book.

“It doesn’t mean there is one either”, she replies.

The book is open on the stone table, between the two of us, to the exact page where the author explains the dish in which the fish has to be cooked with its head facing north, and then moves on to talk about scales without bothering to say why.

But I didn’t start this argument because of the book; I started it because Lianhua rushed out through that gate a good while ago now, on her way to the Tower, and since then Xia has washed the same bowls twice and has looked toward the river wall more times than can be counted.

And because I myself have spent the whole afternoon at the head of this table, with a Cutting Wind Talisman between my thigh and the armrest and with the feeling that, if I keep quiet, I will end up counting the heartbeats it takes her to come back, so we argue about fish.

“Think about it”, I tell her. “If it were nonsense, he wouldn’t have put it in. And if he puts it in but doesn’t explain why, either he knows and doesn’t want to say, or he doesn’t know and copied it from someone who didn’t know either.”

“Or it’s so obvious that there’s no need to explain it”, Xia tells me.

“And what’s so obvious about a fish having to face north?” I ask her.

Xia finally looks up, and she looks at me as if the question had been asked by someone who has never set foot in a kitchen, which, in my case, isn’t entirely untrue either.

“That if he puts it in, it’s because it comes out better”, she replies.

“And how do you know it comes out better if you’ve never made it facing south?” I ask her.

“Because if it came out the same, he wouldn’t put it in”, she tells me.

And she says it with such conviction that I have to press my lips together so as not to smile, because it is exactly the same reasoning half the people I knew in my other life used to defend their grandmother’s recipe, and there was never any humanly possible way to refute it.

Although I am in no position to laugh at anyone either, because I have spent a while now struggling with a book of formations that demands I know what lies to the north of each vertex without ever explaining the reason, and in the end I do as it says.

“Maybe it has something to do with the water”, I tell her. “The book of formations says that water also has something to say about which way each thing faces.”

“The fish isn’t in the water anymore”, Xia replies. “It’s in the oven.”

And that, to be honest, is hard to refute.

Xia turns the page with her finger, turns it back again and rests her chin on her hand.

“When I have a real spirit fish, I’ll cook two”, she tells me after a while. “One facing north and one facing south. And I’ll give you the south one to taste.”

“Very generous of you”, I tell her.

“It’s so you’ll see I was right”, she replies.

“It’s so that, if it comes out badly, I’m the one who eats it”, I tell her.

Xia doesn’t deny it, which is answer enough.

But as she says it, she looks toward the wall again, and I look toward the gate again, and we both pretend not to have noticed that the other has done the same.

The sun is already low. The magnolia’s shadow has crossed the whole courtyard and climbed up onto the wall of my study, and the air coming from the river is starting to bring that late-afternoon coolness that any other day would have seemed pleasant to me, but that today only seems like a way of measuring how long Lianhua has been gone.

“Did you know the book also says…?” Xia begins.

And at that moment the courtyard gate opens.

There are no knocks. Only the creak of the hinges, and before the gate has finished opening I already have the Cutting Wind Talisman between my fingers and my arm raised, aimed at the gap, while Xia freezes with her hand halfway to her sleeve.

But the one who comes in is Lianhua, who closes the gate behind her, turns around and finds herself with a talisman aimed at her chest from the other end of the courtyard.

She says nothing about it; she simply crosses toward us at her usual pace while I let out the breath I didn’t know I was holding and lower my arm as, beside me, I hear Xia do exactly the same.

“Did you find anything?” I ask her.

“Yes, Xiaojie”, she replies as she takes her place beside me.

“Lin Quingyu consulted what the Tower knows about the Iron Oar Gang”, she tells me. “It is a small gang, of about twenty people, that operates in the area of the Rong River.”

She pauses briefly.

“They mostly devote themselves to small jobs and easy targets”, she continues. “And they have no known patron, so they survive by staying away from anyone who could cause them a problem.”

I set the talisman on the table, next to the book.

About twenty people, small jobs, easy targets and no one behind them. It is the exact description of the three who planted themselves at my door at midday with their toy oars hanging from their belts, and it would be strange if it were anything else.

And that is precisely why it doesn’t fit.

On my right, Xia has closed the book, although she keeps a finger inside so as not to lose her page.

“But then”, she asks. “Why did they come after us?”

It is the question I have been asking myself ever since Lianhua went out through that gate, and from turning it over so much, the answer comes out on its own, before I have time to decide whether I want to say it out loud.

“Because someone wants to test us”, I say.

Lianhua says nothing, but she nods just once, and that is enough for me to know that she reached the same conclusion at some point on the way back.

Xia, on the other hand, looks from one of us to the other.

“What do you mean?” she asks me.

“Think about it”, I tell her. “The three men from midday had no idea of Lianhua’s real cultivation. They came expecting to find someone who could be scared off with a couple of threats and some posturing, and judging by the way they laughed, they were convinced they were going to find exactly that.”

I raise a finger.

“Their information almost certainly came from the people who have been following Lianhua for days”, I continue.

I raise a second finger.

“And people who make a living gathering information can’t possibly not know that Lianhua is in the Condensation of the Elemental Cores”, I finish. “It’s the first thing anyone in that line of work would find out.”

I lower my hand.

“So what do you think all of that means?” I ask her.

Xia falls silent. She moves her lips without making a sound, and I let her, because I would rather she reach the conclusion on her own than hand it to her ready-made.

“That they weren’t told what Lianhua’s cultivation was”, she tells me at last.

“So it seems”, I tell her. “And the only reason I can think of for selling someone only half the information is wanting them to come and stir up trouble, to see how we respond.”

I look toward the courtyard gate, and then beyond it, toward the river, toward the other islands and toward the banks that can’t be seen from here.

“So it’s almost certain that, while Lianhua was throwing them in the river, someone was watching from a distance”, I finish.

Xia says nothing more, but the finger she had inside the book slowly slides out, and the book closes on its own, so I turn my head toward Lianhua.

“What do you recommend we do?” I ask her.

“For the moment, the only things we can do are hire guards or commission someone to make us the protection formation”, she replies. “But if we hire guards…”

“Guards can tell anyone everything that happens on the island”, I interrupt her.

Lianhua falls silent.

“So I would have to stop cultivating the way I normally do”, I continue. “And do it in a more normal way.”

I say it like that, without going into detail, because Xia knows nothing about the Resonance. But Lianhua does, and she knows that any pair of outside eyes that stays on this island will end up wondering why the island empties of Qi every time I cultivate.

Lianhua nods.

“And not only that”, she adds. “They can also sell information about everything they notice and everything that happens in the house, even if it seems normal to them.”

She pauses briefly.

“I could ask at the Tower for a recommendation on where to hire them”, she continues. “But they will always be outside mercenaries. And another party can always pay an outside mercenary more.”

I bring my hand to my face and pinch the bridge of my nose.

Because it is the same problem as with the formation, and I explained it to Xia myself, sitting at this table. Whoever creates a formation can leave a backdoor in it that only he knows about, and whoever comes in to guard your house decides what to tell about it and to whom.

The service changes, but not the problem.

“So it’s the same as the option of hiring someone to make us the protection formation”, I say at last, without letting go of the bridge of my nose. “It all depends on how paranoid we want to be about relying on a service provided by outsiders.”

“Yes, Xiaojie”, Lianhua replies. “It can be summed up like that.”

I let go of the bridge of my nose and sigh.

Above the wall, the sun is already setting behind the western islands, and the water of the Rong has turned an orange color that any other evening I would have stayed watching for a good while.

“Whatever we decide, it will have to wait until tomorrow at the very least”, I say. “So it’s better to think it over carefully and decide tomorrow morning, with a cool head.”

I rest my hands on the rims.

“And now we had better have dinner”, I finish. “And then, off to bed.”

Xia looks at me, and from the look on her face I know she has one more question left, or ten, and that none of them has anything to do with dinner. But in the end she doesn’t ask any. She gets up, tucks the book under her arm and nods.

“Okay”, she tells me.

And she heads for the kitchen, although she turns around twice before reaching the door.

Lianhua, on the other hand, doesn’t move from my side.

“Tonight I will keep watch, Xiaojie”, she tells me. “Just in case.”

“That sounds good to me”, I reply.

And I mean it, because this is the first night since we have lived on this island that I don’t find it the least bit amusing that we are so isolated.

What wakes me is the noise.

A blow, a crack of wood, something metal clashing with metal, and the voice of a man shouting a word I can’t quite make out.

For an instant I don’t know where I am; I simply see the darkness of the ceiling, the beam and the moonlight coming in through the lattice of the window and drawing pale little squares on the blanket.

But the second blow comes before I have time to decide whether I dreamed it, and it comes from the courtyard.

I prop myself up on my elbows, and then on my hands, and from there I stay still, listening. Quick footsteps on the stones, many of them, too many to be only Lianhua’s, and the metal again, and a grunt of pain that isn’t a woman’s.

I don’t call for Lianhua, because if she is out there, the last thing she needs is for me to distract her by shouting her name.

I drag myself with my hands across the mattress toward the edge of the bed, hauling my legs behind me with the sheet tangling around my ankles, and I see that the chair is where Lianhua leaves it every night, at the foot of the bed.

Too far to reach with my hand, but not for the Dragon’s Grip.

I close it around the frame, and the chair comes toward me, sliding across the floor with a screech that any other night would have made me wince, until it is pressed against the side of the bed. I turn it a little, just enough for the seat to sit at an angle to the mattress, and set the brake by hand.

Then I take the little bag of talismans from the nightstand, tuck it into my sleeve and get into the chair on my own, since using the Myriad of Hands to lift myself and lower myself into it would be slower.

One hand on the armrest on the far side and the other resting on the mattress. I count to three, push with my arms, lift my hips and let myself drop toward the seat.

It isn’t pretty. I land crooked, with half my hip off the cushion and my shoulder bumping the backrest, and I have to grip both armrests and push again to center myself on the seat.

Then I take my right leg under the knee with both hands, lift it and set the foot on the footrest. And then the left, which has been left hanging awkwardly with the foot twisted inward.

All of that takes me less than a minute, and it is the longest minute I can remember in a long time, after which I release the brake, push the rims to the door and open it just enough to look out while I activate the Golden Chains, as I have agreed with Lianhua to always do whenever there is an emergency.

I see that the courtyard is full of shadows, since the moon is almost full and bathes everything in a flat white light that shows no colors, only shapes.

By the courtyard gate, which is wide open, there are two bundles on the ground that don’t move.

And in the center, between the stone table and the row of posts, Lianhua is fighting two men.

One carries a sword, and the other carries an iron oar. Not a small one hanging from his belt, like the ones at midday, but a real one, almost as long as he is, which he swings with both hands as if it weighed nothing and which strikes sparks from the stones every time it misses.

And for an absurd instant, in the middle of it all, I think that there was someone in that gang who took the name seriously after all, but the thought passes immediately, because I see how Lianhua is moving.

Every time I have seen her fight, she was a step ahead of everything they did to her, but tonight she is only just keeping pace.

The one with the sword isn’t like the ones from midday. He doesn’t rush; he lets the one with the oar do the forcing, and when Lianhua dodges the oar, the sword is already waiting where she is going to land.

She knocks it aside with one of her blades, by a hair, and I see, with a knot in my stomach, that her left sleeve is dark and clinging to her arm.

And that isn’t the worst of it, because while those two keep her busy, more figures aren’t fighting her; they are going around her to reach the doors.

There is a man by the kitchen, pressed against the wall, advancing toward the door of Xia’s room. And another three coming across the other side of the courtyard toward me.

And those three I recognize even though I only see them by moonlight, because a shaved head, forearms like hams and a machete at the belt aren’t things you forget in half a day.

They have come for their revenge.

At that moment, a gray spike shoots up from the stones the man by the kitchen is stepping on and pierces his foot, and the man collapses against the wall with a howl. Lianhua cast it without looking at him, without even turning around.

But that instant of attention costs her dearly, because the one with the sword takes advantage of it, and Lianhua barely has time to throw herself back as another line is drawn across her clothes.

And it is then that a golden line comes out of her and reaches me.

“Xiaojie, go back to your room and close the door”, she tells me through the Golden Chains.

“No”, I reply.

I already have my hand inside my sleeve, and in the little bag are the talismans I keep for us, and among them, the most powerful ones I know how to make, the ones I haven’t yet started selling to the Tower of the Five Dragons.

But the first one I take out is the Cutting Wind.

The one with the machete is in front and is already halfway there when he sees me in the doorway, sitting in the chair with a paper between my fingers.

“The one in the chair!” he shouts as he speeds toward me.

I activate the talisman and throw it at him.

The gusts open up in front of him as if someone had suddenly released a handful of blades into the air, and the man takes them head-on. His clothes split open, the skin beneath his clothes splits open, and he falls face-first onto the stones with his arms outstretched and the machete rolling across the ground, away from his hand.

The other two stop dead.

They look at their companion, then look at me, and I see the exact moment when they understand that the kid in the strange chair knows how to use talismans, but before they can make up their minds, in the center of the courtyard, the one with the oar raises his weapon above his head and brings it down on Lianhua with all his weight.

Lianhua doesn’t dodge it, since she releases her weapon into the air, where it stays floating; then a paper ignites in her hand while, in front of her, the smooth, shining surface of a Spiritual Shield appears, after which she grabs the floating weapon again.

The oar crashes against it with a din that makes me jump in my chair, and the talisman begins to crackle with that sound of burning paper I know all too well, because it holds, but it isn’t going to hold for long.

And the one with the sword is already moving toward Lianhua’s flank, where the shield doesn’t cover her.

So I take out the second one, a Slow Poison Talisman.

I activate it and throw it at the man with the sword, and the paper crosses the courtyard in a straight line and sticks to his back, at the height of his shoulder blade, as if it had always been there.

The runes light up with a greenish glow, and from the paper dark lines begin to spread beneath the skin of his neck, like roots searching for water.

The man tries to tear it off with his free hand, but the talisman has already taken effect, and when he raises the sword again he does it as if he were underwater, just like Chen Mo on the deck of the ship after the serpent’s breath reached him.

Lianhua needs nothing more, since she lets the crackling shield deal with the oar, spins around, and her right blade finds the swordsman’s neck before he finishes raising his arm.

And at that same instant, the two who had momentarily held back after seeing me use talismans hurl themselves at me.

The one with the scar and the big one come together, at a run, and the big one’s fists are glowing just as they did at midday, but Lianhua is too far away and too busy to help me without putting herself in danger, so I take out a Minor Explosion Talisman.

I activate it without thinking, because if I stop to think about it I won’t do it, and I use the delay to send it toward them with the Dragon’s Grip.

I set the paper right in front of them, about five meters from my door, and the one with the scar sees it and opens his mouth, but he doesn’t have time to say anything.

The explosion hits me in the face as if someone had suddenly opened the door of an oven, the chair rolls back until it hits the door frame, and for an instant I hear nothing but a high, continuous whistle inside my head.

When I can see again, there is smoke and dust floating in the moonlight, and a few meters from where the two men were there are two shapes on the ground that don’t move.

In the center of the courtyard, through the smoke, I see the one with the oar trip over something that can’t be seen just as Lianhua’s shield finishes going out, and at that same instant a spike shoots out of the stones beneath him. When he falls, Lianhua is already on top of him, and the iron oar hits the stones with a dull thud.

Then Lianhua crosses the courtyard, unhurried, toward the man by the kitchen, and I look away.

But looking away doesn’t stop me from hearing what comes next. A short sound. And then another, closer to me, at the spot where the one with the machete was.

And after that, nothing, only the river, which keeps sounding on the other side of the wall as if tonight were the same as any other.

I stay in the doorway, with my hands gripping the rims, while the smoke clears and the moon lets me see the two men who were coming for me.

They are sprawled in a way no one would ever lie down, and one of them has an arm stretched out toward me, with his hand open. It smells of burning, and beneath the smell of burning there is another, sweetish and metallic, that I recognize.

That I recognize from before.

And suddenly, it stops being night.

It is hot, a dry heat that gets into my nose and scrapes my throat, the light is yellow and blinding, and there is sand everywhere, in my mouth, in my eyes and between the fingers with which I grip a rifle that weighs far more than I thought it would.

The lead SUV is on fire. Someone is praying in Latin behind me, and someone else in Spanish, and the youngest of the three has fainted against the door and I don’t have time to look at him, because there are men coming at a run across the sand, so I pull the trigger while the recoil slams into my shoulder, and I pull it again, and again, and again.

And two of the men fall.

Afterward I am on my knees beside a wheel, vomiting until there is nothing left inside me, and someone is rubbing my back and telling me in English that if I hadn’t done what I did, none of us would have lived to tell the tale.

I can’t breathe, my chest has clenched like a fist, my hands are jumping on the rims without my being able to stop them and my heart is beating so fast that I can hear it over the river.

I know what it is, because in my other life I spent three months waking up like this every night, and a psychiatrist charged me a great deal of money to teach me to put a name to it.

But also how to counter it, so I breathe in and count, breathe out and count.

One. Two. Three.

The heat goes away.

Four. Five.

The sand goes away.

Six.

And the courtyard comes back, with its moon, its magnolia and its stones, and with the smell of burning, which doesn’t go away because that smell is real.

It takes me a moment to realize that I am not alone, that Lianhua is crouching beside me, next to the wheel, with one hand resting on the armrest, not touching me.

I don’t know how long she has been there, waiting for me to come back, so I let go of the rims, run my hands over my face, and find them wet.

“I’m fine”, I tell her.

And my voice comes out so broken that not even I believe it.

Lianhua doesn’t argue with me, and it is then that, from the other side of the courtyard, Xia’s voice reaches us.

“Is it all over?” she asks.

It comes muffled, from behind her door, and it trembles so much that I barely recognize it.

“Yes”, Lianhua answers her, without getting up. “It is over.”

Then, from the other side of the courtyard, comes a long, harsh noise of wood dragging against wood, something very heavy being pulled away from behind a door by sheer tugging.

And I understand what Xia has been doing while Lianhua fought outside. Barricading the door with the heaviest thing she had, without making a sound and without calling anyone, because this isn’t the first night of her life on which she has had to hide while others fight inside her home.

The door bursts open, and Xia comes running out.

She crosses the courtyard barefoot and in her nightclothes, going around the bundles on the ground without looking at them, and stops in front of me with her eyes wide open, searching me for a wound.

“Are you okay?” she asks me. “Wen, are you okay?”

“I’m fine”, I tell her.

This time it comes out a little better.

Xia turns toward Lianhua, who has gotten to her feet, and as soon as she looks at her, her face changes.

“Lianhua, you’re hurt!” she tells her.

Because up close, in the moonlight, Lianhua’s left sleeve is no longer dark, it is black, and it hangs stuck to her arm from the shoulder to the elbow, and by her feet, on the stones, there are drops that belong to no one else.

“I have already taken one of the pills we bought for emergencies”, Lianhua replies. “I will be fine soon.”

She says it in her usual flat, polite voice, and Xia looks at her as if she wanted to argue with her and didn’t know where to begin.

I, on the other hand, let out my breath, because if Lianhua says she will be fine soon, she will be. A pill, the Nature Gate open, a night of rest, and tomorrow she won’t even have the scar.

I straighten up in the chair and look at Lianhua.

“And now what do we do?” I ask her.

Lianhua doesn’t answer right away. She stares at the courtyard gate, wide open, and beyond the gate, at the river.

And when she looks back at me, her gaze is sharp.

“I know where the Iron Oar Gang’s hideout is, Xiaojie”, she tells me.

She pauses briefly.

“And this is the best moment to rid ourselves of them”, she continues. “Right now they will be off their guard, waiting for their men to return.”

I breathe in deeply.

Because I know what she is telling me, even if she doesn’t say it in those words. That she is going to take the boat in the middle of the night, alone and wounded, to go to a house full of people who want to see us dead, and that she is asking my permission to go hunting.

“How sure are you that you can do it?” I ask her.

“If the information the Tower of the Five Dragons gave me is correct, completely sure”, she replies.

I know she doesn’t say it to reassure me, because Lianhua never says anything just to reassure me. She says it because it is what she thinks.

I close my eyes and ask myself, here, sitting in the doorway of my room.

Am I willing to send Lianhua to do something that, if I strip away all the pretty words, is nothing more than an order to murder?

Because that is what it is. Not self-defense in the moment, and not throwing anyone into the river. It is sending her to go into a house at night and kill everyone inside.

In my other life, the answer would have been easy. You call the police, you file a report and you wait.

But here I have no one to call.

I open my eyes.

And the first thing I see is the bodies. The two in front of my door, the one with the machete, the one with the sword, the one with the oar, the one by the kitchen wall and the two lying by the entrance. Eight bundles scattered across the courtyard of my home, on the same stones Xia crosses every morning with breakfast.

And then I see Xia.

She is standing beside me, with her arms wrapped around herself, and she isn’t looking at the bodies, or at Lianhua, or at me. She is looking at the courtyard gate, wide open, and on her face there is an expression I haven’t seen on her since Xi’An.

She clearly isn’t here; she is in another house, on another night when people also came in without warning and when, of her whole family, only she and her brother were left.

And I feel my own gaze turning cold as well.

It is as if something inside me went very still and clear, like water when it stops moving, because if those people are still out there, tonight isn’t going to be the last, and next time Xia may not have time to barricade the door.

I look at Lianhua.

“You have my permission”, I tell her coldly.

Lianhua inclines her head.

“But first go into my study and take all the talismans you can carry”, I continue. “All of them, the ones meant for sale and the ones that weren’t.”

“And don’t be at all afraid of burning money”, I finish. “Burn as much as it takes so that nothing happens to you.”

Lianhua nods just once, crosses the courtyard straight to my study and goes in.

She doesn’t take long, and when she comes out and stops in front of me, I notice that she has several bundles strategically placed inside her clothes.

“I will come back, Xiaojie”, she tells me.

And she leaves.

She goes through the courtyard gate, turns along the stone path toward the dock and disappears, making no more noise than a shadow.

Xia and I stay staring at the gap of the gate until we hear, very far away, the splash of an oar in the water.

“Wen”, Xia says to me very quietly. “And what are we going to do?”

I take my eyes off the gate and move them slowly across the courtyard. Over the magnolia, over the stone table, over the posts, over the eight bundles and over the dark stains that not even the moon manages to turn white.

“We’ll have to get rid of the bodies, and the only thing I can think of is throwing them in the river”, I tell her. “It’s nighttime, the current will carry them far away before dawn, and that way it will be hard for anyone to connect them with us.”

Xia says nothing at my cold description, but she nods.

“And afterward we’ll clean up”, I continue. “So that the bloodstains don’t remind us every day of what happened tonight.”