Nothing happened at first.

  He could feel the blood around him, his own on his hands and arms, the rest soaked into the dirt and the walls and the stones of the vilge square. He pulled at the qi buried inside it and the blood resisted. It sat in the ground like it had been there for years and had no intention of moving.

  His stomach heaved. The nausea came so hard that his vision went white at the edges and he nearly doubled over with his sword still locked against the grey-robed figure’s curved bde. Every muscle in his body seized and his limbs felt like they were being wrenched apart from the inside. His heart burned, and it was different from the cultivation breakthroughs or the warmth he felt when he killed. This was raw and ugly and wrong.

  He wanted to vomit. He kept pulling instead.

  The grey-robed figure shoved him back and stepped away. He did not press the attack. He stood there with his curved bde at his side and watched Yan Qiu with his head tilted, patient, like a man watching a wounded animal try to stand. Whatever the boy was doing, it looked like it was finishing him off without any help.

  Yan Qiu’s knees buckled and he caught himself with his sword pnted in the dirt. Blood ran from his nose and mixed with the blood already on his chin. His channels burned, every pathway in his body screaming as foreign energy forced its way through them alongside his own qi. He could taste copper in the back of his throat.

  He kept pulling.

  The blood moved.

  Thin ribbons of dark red lifted from the ground around him, rising from the dirt and the stones and the bodies of the dead. They curled through the air in uneven spirals and drifted toward him, wrapping around his arms and legs and chest in wet coils. The qi inside the blood was faint and scattered, nothing like the concentrated force the young master had gathered in the vision. There was less blood here, and his body was weaker, and his channels were narrower, and the technique was something he had seen once in a memory that might not even belong to him.

  The wave came anyway.

  A single pulse of blood qi expanded outward from his body in a low ring that pushed through the mist and stirred the dust on the ground. It was a fraction of what the young master had produced. It barely reached ten paces.

  The blood qi flooded his channels. His exhaustion was still there underneath, heavy and deep, but the new energy yered over it and filled the gaps where his own qi had been spent. His arms stopped shaking and his vision cleared and his breathing steadied. His legs felt solid under him again for the first time since the fight with No. 5 had started.

  Behind him, Liang Feng slumped forward. His sword cttered out of his hand and his forehead hit the dirt. Shu Yingyue’s head dropped to her chest and her remaining hand went limp at her side. The pulse had knocked them both unconscious. Their bodies had nothing left to resist even that small amount of spiritual pressure.

  The grey-robed figure stopped smiling.

  Yan Qiu could see his posture shift, his weight settling onto his back foot, his grip tightening on the curved bde. The pressure from the blood qi was pressing against him, and for the first time since the fight started he looked like he was paying attention.

  Yan Qiu raised his sword. He stepped forward with the Dust Treading Step and the movement came out clean and fast without him having to think about the weight shifts or the qi timing through his legs. He swung the sword in a rising arc from the Broken Jade Sword Art and followed it with a compressed Gale Palm aimed at the man’s chest. Both techniques came out sharper and harder than anything he had managed in the fight so far.

  The grey-robed figure blocked the sword strike and took the Gale Palm on his forearm. He slid back a full step.

  His eyes narrowed.

  The elder moved fast along the mountain road south of Dusthaven, his robes snapping behind him. Two more elders ran beside him, their movement techniques eating ground in long strides that blurred the trees on either side.

  A younger cultivator struggled to keep pace behind them. “Elder, are you certain we need three elders for this? It is a B-rank mission in the northern vilges.”

  The elder at the front did not slow down. “Liang Feng would not activate an emergency talisman unless the situation had gone beyond what his team could handle. That boy does not panic. If he sent the signal, whatever they found up there is worse than beasts.”

  The three elders pushed harder and the road blurred beneath their feet.

  The grey-robed figure stopped toying with him.

  His strikes came faster and his footwork tightened. The zy one-handed swings turned into proper two-handed cuts that carried real force, and he started using techniques Yan Qiu did not recognize. Patterns that left trails of dark qi in the air and hit with a weight that went beyond the physical bde.

  Yan Qiu dodged the first one. The dark qi grazed his shoulder and the skin beneath his robes went numb. He dodged the second and countered with a thrust that the grey-robed figure deflected. The third caught him across the ribs and sent him stumbling sideways, and the impact was dull and deep and his breathing hitched.

  He kept fighting. The blood qi in his channels was burning through fast and he could feel it thinning with every technique he used. He had minutes at most before it ran out.

  He pressed forward. The Dust Treading Step carried him inside the man’s guard and he struck with the Broken Jade Sword Art, one form flowing into the next, his bde moving through the transitions faster than it ever had. The grey-robed figure blocked and parried and gave ground, and for the first time in the fight Yan Qiu was the one pushing him back.

  The man’s curved bde came around in a wide arc and Yan Qiu read it. He shifted his weight left, faking a retreat, and the grey-robed figure committed to the swing. Yan Qiu reversed direction and drove his sword forward in a straight thrust aimed at the man’s exposed side.

  The point sank into the flesh below his ribs. The grey-robed figure’s eyes went wide and he twisted away, pulling himself off the bde. Blood trailed from the wound as he put three paces between them with a single step.

  He pressed his free hand against the wound and looked at Yan Qiu. The boredom was gone from his face. What repced it was sharp and focused and cold.

  He moved. Dark qi fred around his body in a pulse that expanded outward and hit Yan Qiu in the chest. Yan Qiu flew backward and hit the ground hard and rolled twice before he caught himself. He scrambled to his feet and the grey-robed figure was already on him, his curved bde coming down in a vertical cut that Yan Qiu barely caught on his sword. The impact drove him to one knee.

  He pushed back up and they traded blows in the open ground near the square. The grey-robed figure set a trap, retreating two steps and leaving his left side open. The invitation was too clean to be real. Yan Qiu saw it and went in anyway because the blood qi was fading and he did not have time to wait for a better opening.

  He lunged and the ground beneath his front foot gave way. A formation circle fred under the dirt, pale lines of qi that wrapped around his ankle and locked it in pce. He stumbled and the grey-robed figure’s bde came down across his back.

  The cut opened from his left shoulder to his right hip. The pain hit a moment ter and his vision went white. He ripped his foot free from the formation and threw himself forward, rolling clear of the follow-up strike that cracked the ground where he had been standing.

  He came up bleeding and breathing hard. The grey-robed figure was bleeding too, his hand still pressed against the wound in his side, and his breathing was heavier than it had been at the start.

  Yan Qiu looked at his sword. The blood qi in his channels was almost gone, thin wisps circling through his body with less force each time they passed. He had one technique left in him, maybe two.

  He let the remaining blood qi flow down through his arm and into his hand and from his hand into the bde. The sword’s edge darkened and a faint red glow spread along the steel, uneven and flickering. The qi humming through the metal was dense and heavy. The blood on his hands and arms dried and cracked as the st of the blood qi drained out of his body and into the weapon.

  The Broken Jade Sword Art. First form.

  He stepped forward and swung.

  The grey-robed figure brought his curved bde up to block. The two weapons met and the curved bde shattered. The steel broke apart at the point of contact and the fragments scattered across the dirt. The blood-qi-infused sword kept going, cutting through the space where the bde had been and into the man’s chest.

  The grey-robed figure staggered backward. He looked down at the gash that ran from his colrbone to his sternum and the dark blood pouring from it. He pressed both hands against it and his legs buckled and he dropped to one knee.

  Yan Qiu stood over him with the sword still extended. The red glow on the bde was gone and the blood qi was spent. His body had nothing left in it and his legs were shaking and the only reason he had not fallen was that he had not stopped moving long enough to let himself.

  The dark-robed man stopped walking.

  He was a mile north of the vilge, moving through the forest with the other grey-robed figure beside him, when he reached into his robes and pulled out a small jade disc. A crack ran through its center and the faint light pulsing inside it was flickering.

  “No. 5’s talisman is fluctuating,” he said.

  The grey-robed figure beside him frowned. “Those were three Breath Weaving disciples. One of them was already crippled.”

  The dark-robed man turned the disc over in his hand. The light flickered again and dimmed.

  “Go back and check the situation,” he said. “I do not believe those children could have done anything, but the signal talisman they sent earlier concerns me. It could be reinforcements.”

  The grey-robed figure nodded and turned back toward the vilge. His body blurred between the trees and within moments he was gone.

  The dark-robed man looked at the cracked disc in his palm for a long moment, then slipped it back into his robes and kept walking north.