She came on the eleventh day.
She came early, in fact, which she justified to herself on the grounds of traffic conditions in the eastern marsh, a reasoning so transparent that even she did not attempt to examine it closely.
Xuan was already there. Of course he was.
He was sitting on the flat rock with his sword across his knees, and the moment he caught sight of her coming up the slope he was on his feet, and his whole face transformed.
"Xi'er!"
Lianxi stopped walking.
"You came," he said, crossing to her in three strides, looking her over with open delight. "You actually came. Eleven days exactly. I counted."
"I said I would." She was still frowning slightly. "Brother Xuan. What did you call me?"
"Xi'er."
"That's not my name."
"Neither is Sister Xi."
This was, annoyingly, correct.
"You've addressed me as Sister Xi for four months," she said. "Consistency in address is a basic courtesy. Why the alteration?"
Xuan shrugged, entirely too casually. "I felt like it. It sounds better."
"On what basis?"
"On the basis that it sounds better."
"That's a circular argument."
"It's a very strong one." He tilted his head at her, and then, with the smooth precision of a man deploying a weapon he had tested extensively, his expression fell. His shoulders dropped. His eyes went large and wounded. "You don't like it."
"I didn't say that."
"You hate it." He sighed, gazing off into the middle distance with the air of a man bearing a great sorrow. "I thought about it for eleven days. Every night. I thought, she'll like this one, this one suits her. And you hate it."
Lianxi stared at him, alarmed. "I don't hate it."
"You needn't spare my feelings."
"Brother Xuan—"
"It's all right, Xi'er." A brave, tragic little smile. "I'll go back to the old one. Don't worry about me."
Lianxi, who had spent nine years being raised by a man with no capacity for manipulation whatsoever and four hundred and twelve books with no chapters on this subject, considered the matter seriously.
Xi'er.
She turned the sound of it over. It was shorter. It was softer at the end. It was the sort of thing that appeared in books, in the mouths of people who had known each other a long time, in the intimate registers she had read about extensively and never once been addressed in.
Nobody had ever given her a name before. Her master called her Xiao Xi, which he had chosen himself, and before that there had been nothing at all.
Something warm unfolded in her chest.
"…I like it," she said.
Xuan's tragic expression vanished so completely that she wondered, briefly, whether it had ever been there. "Really?"
"Yes." She nodded, once, decisively. "It's acceptable. You may continue using it."
"Xi'er," he said, just to say it.
"That's what I said."
"Xi'er."
"Brother Xuan, you're being redundant."
He laughed, and it was so bright and so uncomplicated that she found herself smiling back before she had decided to.
What she did not know, and would not know for a very long time, was that he had thought about it for all eleven days and much of the eleven nights before that, and that the change had nothing to do with how it sounded.
He simply did not want to be her brother anymore.
He was twelve years old and he did not yet have words for the rest of it. He only knew that when she said sworn siblings, something in him rejected it flatly, the way a body rejects the wrong medicine. Siblings were a fixed thing. Siblings grew up and went their separate ways to their separate houses and separate lives, and saw one another at festivals, and that was the whole of it.
He wanted something else. He wanted the arrangement in which two people did not go their separate ways. He wanted the one where they stayed.
He had not yet worked out how to want that out loud. So for now, there was Xi'er, and the small fierce satisfaction of hearing her accept it, and eleven days of waiting that had turned out to be worth every hour.
"So," he said. "The northern ridge? For that frost-herb?"
Lianxi opened her mouth to agree.
And stopped.
✦ ✦ ✦
"Xi'er?"
She had turned her head to the northeast, toward the deep part of the forest, and gone completely still.
"Xi'er, what is it?"
"I don't know," she said.
It had come on her with no warning at all: a faint pull behind the breastbone, like a thread drawn taut. Not a smell. Not a sound. Something underneath both.
She had felt this twice before. Once when she had been eleven paces from a hidden Bloodroot nest and had stopped for no reason she could name. Once on the day of the storm.
Master Gao had a phrase for it. The body knows before the mind consents. He had told her to trust it absolutely, and then, in the next breath, told her never to follow it alone.
"Something's out there," she said. "Something very good."
Xuan was already at her shoulder, looking where she looked. "Good how?"
"I don't know." She frowned, irritated at the imprecision. "There's a concentration of spiritual qi in that direction. It's too faint to measure, but the gradient's wrong for anything natural. It's dense." She turned to him. "Brother Xuan. What's beyond the northeast ravine?"
His expression sobered. "Nothing good. That's past the Tier 5 boundary."
"How far past?"
"Xi'er."
"I'm aware of the risk." She was still looking northeast. "I'm asking how far."
He was silent for a moment. He knew, by now, exactly what she would do if he said no. She would nod politely, agree that it was far too dangerous, walk him back to the boundary, and come back alone on some morning when he was elsewhere, with three escape routes planned and an entirely insufficient quantity of poison.
The thought made something clench in his stomach.
"All right," he said. "But we do it my way. You stay behind me. If I tell you to run, you run, and you don't argue about the tactical merits first."
"That's a poor protocol. There will be circumstances where—"
"Xi'er."
"…Understood," said Lianxi.
✦ ✦ ✦
It took them two hours to reach the ravine, and another hour to find a way down.
The forest changed as they descended. The pines thinned and gave way to older trees, vast grey-barked things with roots like buttresses, their canopies so high and so dense that the daylight came through in scattered coins. The air grew cooler. Wetter. The ordinary noise of the forest, birds, insects, the small constant rustle of things living, faded away behind them until there was nothing but their own footsteps and, far off, the sound of water.
"It's quiet," Xuan said.
"Yes." Lianxi's voice was low. "That's concerning. Quiet means either no prey or a predator sufficiently dominant that nothing else risks the territory."
"You have a gift for reassurance."
"Thank you."
They went on.
The pull behind her breastbone grew stronger with every li, and she found she could orient on it now, the way one orients on a distant light. It drew them along the ravine floor, over slick black stones, through a stand of pale fungus that grew in vertical shelves like a staircase for something much larger than a person, and finally to a wall of hanging vines so thick that it might have been a curtain drawn deliberately across the world.
Lianxi put out a hand and stopped him.
"Wait."
She crouched, studying the ground before the vines. Then she picked up a stone and threw it.
The vines exploded.
Three of them whipped out and struck the stone mid-air, and Lianxi and Xuan both saw, in the half-second before they retracted, the ring of black thorns that lined their inner faces, each one beaded with a clear fluid that hissed faintly where it touched the rock.
"Thornlash," Lianxi said. "Parasitic. It doesn't distinguish between prey and debris, it simply strikes anything that enters its reaction radius." She tilted her head. "Which means it can be exhausted."
"Can it."
"Watch."
She threw four more stones in rapid succession, spacing them precisely. The vines struck the first. Struck the second more slowly. Twitched at the third.
Ignored the fourth.
"Approximately three strikes before the muscular tissue fatigues," she said, and dusted off her hands. "We have perhaps forty seconds. Go."
They went through.
And came out the other side into light.
✦ ✦ ✦
Neither of them spoke.
The hollow was perhaps two hundred paces across, walled on every side by sheer cliffs furred with moss. And it was glowing.
It came from the moss itself, a soft blue-green phosphorescence that ran up the rock faces in slow veins, and from the pools, a dozen of them scattered across the floor of the hollow, still as glass and lit from beneath. It came from the air. Motes of pale light drifted upward everywhere, thousands of them, rising slowly through the shafts of real sunlight that speared down from the gap far above, so that the whole hollow seemed to be breathing light upward toward the sky.
Silver-barked trees grew in a loose ring around the pools, and their leaves were translucent. When the air moved, the light came through them in shifting patterns, and they made a sound like very distant chimes.
"Xi'er," Xuan said quietly. "What is this place?"
"A spirit vein." Her voice had gone hushed. "A natural one. The qi here is—" She stopped and simply stood, breathing it in, and felt her meridians drink. "It's ten times the density of the valley. Perhaps twenty."
"Is it safe?"
"No," said Lianxi, and pointed.
Draped across the roots of the nearest silver tree, pale and translucent and faintly luminous, lay a shed skin. It was perhaps forty feet of it, split open along the spine, and the scale pattern was jade.
"Neither is it uninhabited," she added.
They moved slowly after that, keeping to the edge.
Twice, Lianxi stopped them for no visible reason and made them go a different way. The first time, she pointed out a stretch of ground where the drifting motes of light bent and swirled, indicating something beneath the surface exhaling. The second time she simply said, "No," in a flat voice, and they went around, and neither of them looked back.
Once, something enormous moved in one of the deeper pools. They stood absolutely still for a full minute. It did not surface.
And the pull in Lianxi's chest drew tighter and tighter, and led them at last to the far end of the hollow, where the cliff face split into a narrow cleft.
Inside the cleft was a hollow no bigger than a small room. There was a pool of clear water in its center, fed by a thread of water running down the rock. The light here was brighter than anywhere else, so bright it was almost hard to look at.
And growing out of a crack in the stone above the pool was a single plant.
It had nine leaves. They were a deep translucent violet, veined with silver, and each one held a bead of moisture at its tip that did not fall. At the base of the stem was a cluster of pale root-tubers, fat and faintly luminous, and the air around it was so thick with qi that Lianxi's skin prickled.
She made a small sound.
"What?" Xuan said. "What is it?"
"Ninefold Spirit Lotus." Her voice had gone strange. "Brother Xuan, this is— it takes a thousand years to mature. There are eleven recorded specimens in the last four centuries. Eleven. In four centuries."
"Is it valuable?"
"Valuable." She turned to look at him, and her eyes were enormous. "A single root, properly refined, can carry a cultivator through an entire minor bottleneck. Nine roots. You could hand this to a sect elder and he would weep."
Xuan looked at the little plant, and then at her face, and felt something complicated and warm turn over in his chest.
"Then let's take it," he said.
"Yes." Lianxi's hands were already moving toward her bag. "We'll need to cut at the third node, below the—"
The water in the pool went still.
Not calm. Still — every ripple flattening at once, as if the surface had been pressed down by a hand.
"Xi'er," said Xuan, very quietly. "Get behind me."
The pool erupted.
✦ ✦ ✦
It came out in a single fluid motion, pouring upward out of water that should have been three feet deep, and it kept coming, and kept coming, until it stood coiled between them and the lotus with its head at the height of the cleft.
It was a serpent. Its scales were the colour of old jade, and each one glowed faintly from within, so that the whole length of it pulsed with slow light. Two pale horns curved back from its skull. Its eyes had no pupils at all. They were flat discs of luminous white, and they fixed on Xuan and did not blink.
The qi coming off it made the air ripple.
"Tier 6," Lianxi breathed. "Brother Xuan, it's Tier 6. Run."
"You first."
"That's not—"
The serpent struck.
It moved like water falling. Xuan got his blade up in time by a margin measured in heartbeats, and the impact drove him back four paces across the wet stone, his boots shrieking on the rock.
"Go!"
Lianxi did not go.
She threw herself sideways instead, rolled, came up with needles already between her fingers, and flung three at the serpent's eye.
All three struck the scales below it and rang off like coins on stone.
The serpent's head swung toward her.
"XI'ER!"
Xuan hit it from the side with everything he had. His sword flared with pale silver light and he drove the point into the join behind the jaw, and for the first time the creature made a sound: a hiss like a river boiling. It whipped around, and the coil of its body caught him full across the chest and flung him into the cliff wall.
He hit hard. Slid down. Got up anyway, blood on his mouth.
"Xi'er, get out—"
"I'm working on it!"
She was.
She had backed to the wall and her eyes were moving, and behind them her mind was going faster than it had ever gone in her life. Scales overlap downward. No purchase at any angle from above. Behind the jaw took the blade — soft there, but only just, and he's already used the opening. Eyes protected by the brow ridge. Underbelly not visible. It hasn't left the pool. It hasn't left the pool—
She looked at the pool.
It hasn't left the pool because it can't. It's bound. It's a guardian; it's tied to the lotus, and a bound beast has a range.
And then, because she was Lianxi, and because she had spent five hundred hours of her short life on medical texts that concerned themselves with what lived things need rather than what they can do, she saw the second thing.
Under the glowing jade scales, running along the creature's throat, there was a pale seam. Thin. Almost invisible against the light.
A gill line.
"Brother Xuan!" Her voice cut across the cleft. "It breathes water!"
He ducked under a strike that shattered stone. "What?"
"It has gills! It can't stay out of that pool indefinitely — look at its throat, it's already flaring!" She was moving as she spoke, sliding along the wall toward the far side. "It's a water-breather in air. It's holding its breath!"
Xuan's head came up.
"How long?"
"I don't know! Two minutes? Three?" She reached the far corner and turned. "It doesn't matter — we don't have to beat it, we only have to make it work! Keep it out of the water! Make it chase you! Make it exert itself!"
And Xuan — who had trained since he could walk, who had never once in his life been told to run away and make a monster tired — laughed out loud, and threw himself at a Tier 6 spirit beast.
What followed, Lianxi would remember with absolute clarity for the rest of her life.
He did not try to kill it. He moved. He went up the cliff wall three steps and off it, over the coils, and his blade opened a line along its flank that was barely a scratch and made it turn. He stayed out of reach by fractions. Every time it went for the pool he was there, cutting at its eyes, forcing it back, and every time it struck at him he was already gone.
And the great head began to sway.
The hissing changed pitch. The seam along its throat opened and closed, faster now, gulping at air that gave it nothing.
"Now?" Xuan shouted.
"Not yet!"
Lianxi's hands were shaking and she was making herself be still anyway. She had one chance. She had six needles left and one vial of Ghost Flower concentrate and she had poured all of it onto all six of them, which was enough poison to kill a bull elephant and would not, she was almost certain, do anything at all to a Tier 6 beast through its scales.
But a gill was not scale. A gill was the thinnest, wettest, most absorbent tissue on a living creature, and it was rated directly into the bloodstream, and it was currently gasping wide open every two seconds.
Wait. Wait. It has to be at full flare—
The serpent reared back for a killing strike, and its throat opened, and the pale seam gaped wide.
"NOW!"
Six needles crossed the cleft.
Five went in.
The serpent's strike never landed. It stopped mid-air, the enormous body going rigid, and then it began to thrash, sending sheets of water out of the pool, smashing the silver-barked sapling at the cleft mouth into splinters. Lianxi flattened herself against the rock. Xuan half-fell, half-dived on top of her, one arm braced over her head, as a coil the width of a tree trunk crashed into the wall where she had been standing.
Then it went down.
It fell into the pool with a sound like a building collapsing, and the water surged out across the stone, and the glow of the jade scales dimmed, and dimmed, and went dark.
Silence.
Water dripped.
"Is it dead?" Xuan said, into her hair.
"No." Lianxi's voice was muffled against his shoulder. "Ghost Flower in that dose will paralyze it for perhaps six hours. It'll recover." A pause. "Brother Xuan, you're extremely heavy."
"Sorry." He rolled off her and lay flat on the wet stone, staring at the ceiling, breathing hard. Then he started to laugh.
"What," said Lianxi.
"Make it tired," Xuan wheezed. "I've been training in swordsmanship for eight years. Eight years. And you beat a Tier 6 spirit beast by making it hold its breath."
"It was the most efficient available approach."
"Xi'er." He turned his head to look at her, and he was grinning with his whole battered face. "You're the most terrifying person I've ever met."
Lianxi considered this, decided it was probably a compliment, and went to cut the lotus.
✦ ✦ ✦
They got out of the hollow fast, taking the fatigue window on the Thornlash at a dead run, and did not stop until they were back over the lip of the ravine and two li into ordinary forest.
Only then, sitting on a fallen log with the afternoon sun on her shoulders, did Lianxi unwrap the bundle in her lap and look at what they had.
Nine violet leaves. Nine pale roots.
She let out a long breath. Then she picked up her knife, laid the plant on the cloth, and made to cut it clean through the center of the crown.
Xuan's hand came down on her wrist.
"What are you doing?"
"Dividing it." She looked up, puzzled. "Four roots each. The ninth is the central tuber and it's the most potent, so it should go to whoever contributed more, which is unambiguously you, so—"
"Take it."
"…What?"
"All of it." His face was perfectly serious. "It's yours."
Lianxi set down the knife. "That's absurd. You fought the guardian. I threw needles from the corner."
"You found it. You found it, you got us past the vines, you worked out how to beat the thing in under two minutes." He shook his head. "And that isn't why."
"Then why?"
Xuan was quiet for a moment.
"Because you tore a channel in your own head eleven days ago," he said. "Trying to train harder."
Lianxi's mouth closed.
"You don't think I notice." He wasn't looking at her now; he was looking at his hands. "You always have a reason ready. It's always very logical. You went into the marsh because there was a herb. You went up the eastern ridge because there was a herb. You asked me how far past the Tier 5 boundary we'd have to go today, and you'd have gone alone if I'd said no. Don't tell me you wouldn't have."
She said nothing.
"Every time we go somewhere, you're calculating how much risk you can survive," he said. "Not how much you can avoid. How much you can survive. And then you take exactly that much. Every time." His jaw tightened. "And one day you're going to calculate wrong. And I'll come to the cave on the appointed day and you won't be there, and I'll never know why."
The wind moved in the trees above them.
"So take the lotus," he said. "Please. Take all of it and get stronger, and stop trying to kill yourself in increments."
Lianxi looked at him for a long moment.
Then she laughed.
Xuan's head came up, outraged. "I'm being sincere—"
"Brother Xuan," she said, still laughing, "you don't know anything about pill refinement, do you."
"…What?"
"Nine roots." She held them up. "You seem to be imagining that I'd eat them."
"Wouldn't you?"
"Absolutely not. Raw, the absorption rate is perhaps twelve percent, and the rest would burn out my meridians." She was already digging through her qiankun bag, brisk and suddenly cheerful. "Refined properly, into a Spirit Nine Pill, the yield is six pills from nine roots. Six." She glanced up at him. "I cannot take six pills. Three is the upper safe limit before the body begins rejecting the surplus, and at my realm, I'd be pushing it at two."
Xuan stared at her.
"So half of them would simply sit in my bag and degrade," Lianxi said, with genuine indignation. "Do you have any idea what that would waste?"
"…I'm beginning to understand."
"Three hundred years of growth. Eleven specimens in four centuries. And I would let three pills go stale in a bag." She shook her head at the sheer profligacy of it. "It would be criminal. It would be actively immoral."
Xuan put a hand over his face and started laughing.
"Furthermore," she said, "I happen to be carrying all six auxiliary ingredients, because I acquired them last spring at considerable inconvenience and have had no occasion to use them. So the marginal cost of refining now is effectively zero." She looked immensely pleased with herself. "You'll take three. That way nothing is wasted. It's the only sensible outcome."
He lowered his hand. His eyes were bright.
"Xi'er."
"What."
"Thank you," he said.
"It's simple resource allocation."
"Thank you," Xuan repeated.
Lianxi felt her ears go hot and turned away to look for a flat rock.
✦ ✦ ✦
She found them a sheltered place: a shallow overhang beside a stream, screened by rock, with clear ground and running water.
Out of her qiankun bag came a cauldron. It was small, barely the size of two cupped hands, squat and dark and unremarkable, its surface worn smooth with use. She set it on the stone and began laying out the ingredients around it in a precise arc, each one unwrapped and inspected and placed in the order they would be needed.
Then she sat down, put her palms on either side of the cauldron, and closed her eyes.
Xuan sat down on a rock across from her to watch.
He had seen alchemy before. He had watched sect elders work, men with two hundred years of experience and cauldrons worth more than a manor house, surrounded by attendants and array formations and every advantage a great sect could provide.
He had never seen anything like this.
It started with fire. It came up out of her palms without ceremony, a pale, steady flame that pooled under the little cauldron and settled there. The metal began to glow from beneath.
Then she started to work.
Her hands moved constantly. She fed in the ingredients one at a time, in an order that meant nothing to him, her fingers adjusting the flame between each addition with small precise gestures. The colour of the fire changed: pale gold, then blue-white, then a deep steady orange. Steam came off the cauldron in threads and she read them, he realized. She was reading the steam. Her head would tilt a fraction, and her hand would move, and the flame would drop by some invisible degree.
Her face had gone completely still. All the wariness, all the careful watchfulness she carried everywhere, had simply drained out of it. What was left was pure absorption.
She had forgotten he was there. He was entirely certain of that. She had forgotten the forest, the ravine, the serpent, the whole world outside the arc of stone and the little dark cauldron.
She looked, Xuan thought, completely happy.
He sat with his hands around his knees and did not make a sound, and watched her for an hour and forty minutes, and at some point stopped thinking about the pills at all.
When the cauldron lid finally lifted, the scent that came out of it stopped his breath.
Six pills sat in the base. Each one was the size of a thumbnail, deep violet, and there was a faint silver spiral chased across the surface of each — a pill pattern, the mark that only forms when a refinement runs perfect from beginning to end.
Lianxi opened her eyes, looked into the cauldron, and said, "Oh. Six, and they've all taken pattern." She sounded mildly pleased, the way one might on finding an extra coin in a pocket. "That's a good yield."
Xuan made a strangled noise.
"What?"
"Xi'er." He was staring into the cauldron. "Do you know what a sect elder gets, for nine roots of a Ninefold Spirit Lotus?"
"Six pills, presumably. It's not a complicated formula—"
"Four," said Xuan. "On a good day. And they don't take pattern."
Lianxi frowned at him, faintly annoyed at the imprecision of this. "Then they're running the second-phase temperature too high. It's a very common error. The formula specifies a steady heat but the third ingredient is volatile and needs a drop of about—"
"Xi'er."
"—two degrees for roughly forty breaths, which if you don't do, you lose almost a third of the essence to—"
"Xi'er."
"What?"
Xuan looked at the girl sitting cross-legged in the dirt with soot on her nose, who had just out-refined the alchemy hall of a great sect and was irritated about their temperature discipline.
"Nothing," he said. "Never mind."
✦ ✦ ✦
They took the pills as the sun went down.
Lianxi took two, which was one more than she had any business taking, and did not mention this. Xuan took three.
She had expected heat. What came instead was cold, a shocking, pouring cold that went straight down into her dantian, and then the world went away.
She found herself in the place she went during deep cultivation: the quiet dark, the slow rivers of light that were her own meridians. And into them, pouring from the core of her, came a flood.
She began to circulate it.
It was not easy. The essence was wild, far purer than anything her body had ever handled, and twice it nearly slipped her control and blew out through a minor channel. Each time she caught it, dragged it back, forced it around the cycle again. Her flawed dantian, the cracked and patched thing she had been rebuilding for seven years, groaned under the pressure.
Again, she thought, and drove it around. Again.
On the ninth circuit she felt the barrier.
She had been pressing against it for eleven months. It had never so much as flexed. Now she hit it with a tide of Ninefold Spirit essence behind her, and it did not so much break as dissolve, the way frost dissolves off glass in the sun.
Qi Refining, fourth level. Then, still rising, the fifth.
Then, impossibly, the sixth.
She surfaced with a gasp, and opened her eyes onto a world that looked sharper than it had that morning.
Lianxi sat absolutely still and took inventory. Her meridians were wider. The qi moved through them like water through a cleared channel instead of a silted one. And her dantian —
She probed it carefully, and found that three of the hairline fissures she had been patiently mending for years had simply closed.
She let out a slow, shaking breath.
Sixth level of Qi Refining. She had gained three levels in an evening. She had gained, she calculated rapidly, something on the order of fourteen months of ordinary progress.
For a moment, something in her chest swelled so large she could hardly contain it.
Then she looked across the clearing.
Xuan was still deep in it. He sat perfectly straight on the flat rock, eyes closed, and the air around him was not still. It was turning. A slow vortex of spiritual qi had formed above the clearing, drawing in from every direction, spiralling down into him, and the pressure of it was pushing her hair back from her face at eight paces. The leaves on the ground around him had all lifted and were hanging in the air, quivering.
Then it broke, and a ring of pure force went out across the clearing, and Lianxi had to brace herself against it.
Xuan opened his eyes.
For an instant, something silver moved in them.
"Late-stage Core Formation," he said, sounding dazed. "I've been stuck at mid-stage for a year and a half. Xi'er, I jumped a whole—"
He stopped, because she was smiling at him.
"That's very good," Lianxi said, and meant it entirely.
She meant it entirely, and underneath it, quietly, something ached.
She looked at the settling dust and the leaves drifting back down to the earth, and did the arithmetic without wanting to. Late-stage Core Formation. Two full realms above her and a stage besides. He had taken three pills and vaulted into a realm she would not reach for years at her present rate, and she had taken two and clawed her way to the sixth level of the very first stage, and this was after the single greatest stroke of fortune she was likely to encounter in her life.
I was in the corner, she thought. Again.
That was the part she could not get past. Not the numbers. The corner. She had thrown her needles from the corner while he stood between her and a Tier 6 beast with a sword, and when it had struck at her, he had put his own body over her head.
Every time. The storm. The panther. The hyenas. The serpent. Every single time, he had put himself between her and the thing that was trying to kill her, and every single time she had contributed intelligence and tactics and a great many correct observations, and none of that would matter at all on the day he needed someone to stand beside him.
She wanted to stand beside him.
Not behind. Not in the corner with the needles. Beside, so that when something came out of the water, there were two people between it and the thing it wanted, and neither of them had to spend their attention on protecting the other.
The gap was absurd. She knew that. It was not a gap that hard work closed; people spent lifetimes failing to close gaps a tenth the size, and she was beginning from a shattered dantian and a stolen root.
"Xi'er?" Xuan was watching her. "What is it?"
Lianxi looked up.
"Nothing," she said. "I was calculating something."
"What?"
"How long it will take me to catch up to you."
Xuan blinked. Then he grinned. "And?"
"The estimate is unsatisfactory," she said. "I'll be revising the inputs."
He laughed, and got up, and came over to help her pack away the cauldron, and did not understand at all that she had just made him a promise.
She did not particularly want him to understand. Not yet.
But walking home under the first stars, with two pills' worth of foreign essence still settling into her bones and six new levels of resolve settling on top of it, Lianxi made a private and entirely serious list.
Cultivation hours: increase by two per day. Sleep: reduce accordingly. Core Manipulation: three sessions rather than one, split to avoid channel strain. Combat forms: begin sword drills at dawn as well as dusk.
And when he next stands in front of me, be worth standing beside.