Yan Qiu did not answer the grey-robed figure.

  He looked over his shoulder. Liang Feng was on one knee with his sword braced against the ground, using it to hold himself upright. His breathing was shallow and uneven and his qi had dimmed to almost nothing, a faint shimmer around his hands that flickered with each exhale. Shu Yingyue was sitting against the wall of a colpsed house with her legs stretched out in front of her and her remaining hand pressed ft against the dirt. The shimmer around her severed wrist was barely visible. Her eyes were open but they were gssy and unfocused, and her chest rose and fell in slow, bored movements.

  They looked like they were waiting to die.

  He turned back to the grey-robed figure and raised his sword.

  The man came at him without hurry. A single step forward and a zy swing of the curved bde, testing. Yan Qiu caught it on his sword and the impact ran through his arms and into his shoulders and his feet slid back in the dirt. He redirected the force and stepped sideways, letting the bde pass, and countered with a thrust aimed at the man’s ribs.

  The grey-robed figure turned his body just enough for the point to miss and brought his elbow around in a short arc. Yan Qiu ducked under it and came up with a rising cut from the Broken Jade Sword Art. The bde caught the edge of the man’s sleeve and nothing else.

  “Close,” the grey-robed figure said. He did not sound concerned.

  Yan Qiu kept moving. He circled left and struck at the man’s leading leg, then pulled back and came in from the right with a Gale Palm aimed at his chest. The compressed burst of wind qi hit the man’s sternum and he rocked back half a step. Yan Qiu followed it with a sword thrust and the grey-robed figure deflected it with the ft of his curved bde and kicked Yan Qiu’s front leg out from under him.

  He hit the ground on his side and rolled and came up with his sword between them. His ribs ached from the kick in the previous exchange and his left arm was going numb where the man’s bde had grazed it earlier. Blood ran down his forearm and dripped off his fingers.

  He was spending his qi carefully, measuring each technique, using only what was needed and pulling the rest back into circution. It was the only reason he was still standing. But the grey-robed figure was not even trying. Every strike the man threw was casual, almost bored, and each one hit harder than anything Yan Qiu could produce at full effort.

  Behind him, he heard Liang Feng cough. It was a wet sound.

  “The talisman,” Shu Yingyue said. Her voice was thin and cracked. “Did it work?”

  “It went off,” Liang Feng said. “I felt it activate.”

  “How long until someone comes?”

  Liang Feng did not answer. The sect was in the mountains south of Dusthaven. Bckroot was in the northern hills of Copperwind Province. Even if someone had sensed the signal immediately, even if an elder had dropped everything and flown north at full speed, the distance was not small.

  “We do not know if anyone is coming,” Shu Yingyue said.

  Yan Qiu blocked another strike. The curved bde hit his sword and the vibration traveled up through his wrist and into his elbow and his grip loosened for a fraction of a breath. He tightened it and stepped back and the grey-robed figure let him go, watching him with mild interest.

  Something about this was familiar.

  The thought came from nowhere and settled in the back of his mind like a stone dropping into still water. He could not pce it. The fight, the mist, the bodies in the streets, the two people behind him who could not fight anymore and were depending on him to hold the line. All of it pressed against something inside him, some shape that did not belong to here.

  His mind buzzed.

  It started as a low hum behind his eyes, it was same sensation he had felt before the dreams in seclusion. A pressure building at the base of his skull, spreading forward through his temples. His vision flickered. The grey-robed figure in front of him blurred and the vilge behind him went soft at the edges and the ground under his feet felt like it was tilting.

  He blinked hard and swung at the grey-robed figure to buy himself space. The man deflected it without effort and Yan Qiu stumbled back three steps.

  The buzzing grew louder.

  “Young master, you have to escape with us. You cannot go inside there.”

  The voice belonged to a man in armor. He was gripping my arm and pulling me backward, away from the entrance. Two more guards fnked him, their faces tight with fear. Behind us, the courtyard was empty. Everyone else had already fled.

  The building ahead was dark. Mist poured from the doorway in slow, heavy curls that pooled on the stone steps and spilled down into the yard. The smell hit me from twenty paces away. Iron and rot and something underneath both that I could not name.

  “But my friends are in there,” I said. “Let me go.”

  “No, young master. You cannot. The elders have ordered a full retreat. We must leave now.”

  “I do not care what the elders ordered.” I pulled my arm free. “They are inside. I am going in.”

  The guard reached for me again. “Young master, please. You cannot go in there alone. The enemy is still inside. If you go in, you will die. I cannot allow you to do that”

  “Then I will die.” I looked at him. “You cannot order me.”

  “Young master, you cannot g-”

  I went anyway.

  The entrance swallowed the light behind me. Inside, the mist was thicker and the air was cold and wet against my skin. I could not see more than a few paces ahead. The floor was slick under my feet and when I looked down I saw why.

  Blood. Everywhere. It covered the stone in a dark, uneven sheet that reflected the faint light from the doorway. It was not fresh. Some of it had gone dark and sticky and some of it was still wet and spreading, and the smell of it filled my throat until I could taste it.

  I was not scared of it. I had seen blood before. I had caused plenty of it myself.

  But when I looked at the bodies, something changed.

  They were scattered across the hall. Some were slumped against the pilrs and some were lying face down in the blood and some were in pieces. I recognized the first one by his robes. He had sat across from me at meals every morning for the past three years. The second one I recognized by the scar on his hand. He had gotten it sparring with me and he had ughed about it afterward and said it made him look tougher.

  They were my friends. The people who talked to me every day, who trained beside me, who ate with me and argued with me and followed me because they chose to.

  I kept walking. The blood was ankle-deep in pces and it soaked through my boots and I did not care.

  A sound came from deeper inside. Faint and broken, like someone trying to breathe through a crushed throat. I followed it.

  I found them in the back of the hall. Two of them, propped against the far wall. They were alive. Their limbs had been cut, arms and legs severed at the joints, and the stumps had been cauterized so they would not bleed out. They were kept alive on purpose. Their mouths moved but no words came out. One of them saw me and his eyes went wide and he tried to shake his head.

  A voice came from the shadows to my left.

  “Young master. You should have left with your men.”

  A figure stepped out of the mist. I could not see his face clearly. He was tall and his robes were dark and his hands were wet with blood up to the elbows.

  “Your fate will be the same as your friends.”

  He ughed. It was a quiet, satisfied sound, like someone who had finished a long day of work and was pleased with the results.

  Something inside me broke. The discipline, the training, the careful control that my instructors had spent years building into me, all of it snapped at once. Rage poured through the gap, pure and absolute and so hot it burned the inside of my skull.

  I remembered the words. They came from somewhere old, from a lesson I had been told never to use. Every drop of blood counts. Bleed out your finger, your skin, or even your limbs. Use that blood to gather blood qi. It allows a cultivator to fight against someone far stronger than himself.

  The cost is the body. The gain is power that does not belong to you.

  I did not hesitate. lucky for me, I did not have to use my own blood.

  The blood on the floor responded. All of it. The pools and the streaks and the dark sheets covering the stone, it all moved at once. It rose from the ground in thin ribbons and spiraled inward toward me, wrapping around my arms and legs and chest in tight, wet coils. The qi in it was faint and scattered but there was so much of it, so much blood from so many bodies, that the combined force of it hit me like a wave crashing into a seawall.

  My friends against the wall fainted. The spiritual pressure alone was enough to knock them unconscious, and their heads dropped forward and their bodies went limp.

  The figure in the shadows stopped ughing. Sweat broke across his forehead and he moved, fast, lunging toward me with a bde aimed at my throat. He was trying to finish me before I completed the gathering.

  The wave hit him first. The blood qi erupted outward from my body in a single pulse that shook the walls and cracked the stone beneath my feet. The figure’s bde stopped in the air as if it had struck something solid. His arm trembled and his feet slid backward across the bloody floor and his eyes went wide.

  The mist in the hall scattered. The blood on the floor dried to dust in an instant. And I stood in the center of it with the ribbons of blood qi coiling around me, burning against my skin, and the rage in my chest was so bright and so hot that I could not see anything else.

  A bde hit his sword and the impact jarred him back.

  Yan Qiu stumbled. His vision snapped into focus and the vilge was around him again, the dirt streets and the red mist and the grey-robed figure standing three paces away with his curved bde resting against his shoulder. The memory dissolved like smoke, leaving only the heat of it behind his ribs and the echo of that rage sitting somewhere deep in his chest where he could not reach it.

  He was breathing hard. His hands were shaking and his sword felt heavier than it had a moment ago.

  The grey-robed figure frowned. “You went somewhere just now. Your eyes gzed over.” He tilted his head. “That is a dangerous thing to do in a fight.”

  Yan Qiu raised his sword. His arms ached and his qi was running low and the cut on his forearm was still bleeding. Behind him, Liang Feng had not moved from his knee and Shu Yingyue’s eyes were half-closed.

  If this continues, I will not be able to do anything. Worse, I might die here. They might die here. I cannot let that happen.

  He parried another strike and countered with a thrust that the grey-robed figure batted aside. The man’s curved bde came back around and caught Yan Qiu across the shoulder. The cut was shallow but it stung and more blood ran down his arm.

  Will it work? The thing I saw. What if I am just panicking? What if it was just a dream and none of it was real?

  He fought through two more exchanges. The grey-robed figure was toying with him now, nding small cuts on his arms and legs, opening shallow wounds that bled freely. Each one cost Yan Qiu a little more focus, a little more qi to keep his body moving through the pain.

  His vision started to blur again. The memory was gone but exhaustion had taken its pce. His qi was almost gone and his body was running on willpower alone and his eyes were blinking too fast, trying to stay open against the weight that was pulling them shut.

  He could feel the blood running down his arms and dripping off his fingers. He could feel it soaking into his sleeves and pooling in his palms where his grip on the sword was slipping.

  This cannot go on. I have to try it.

  He pnted his feet. The grey-robed figure came in with another zy swing and Yan Qiu caught it on his bde and held it there, their weapons locked together, his arms trembling under the pressure.

  He looked down at the blood on his hands. He looked at the blood on the ground beneath him, his own and the blood that had been there long before he arrived, soaked into the dirt between the bodies of vilgers and strangers, dried into the walls of colpsed houses, pooled in the nes where people he had grown up with had fallen and never gotten back up. The vilge was drenched in it.

  He let go of his sword with his left hand. He closed his eyes.

  And he reached for all of it.