The night was still as water. The moonlight here had a muddied quality, falling on the ground in a soft haze that blurred the edges of everything.
At the foot of the mountain, the roads were paved with blue-grey flagstones, and odd piles of clutter left behind by the day's vendors still sat along the edges.
From inside the houses, voices drifted out now and then: parents fussing over their children, husbands and wives bickering, all the small sounds of every ordinary household everywhere in the world.
Conflicts. Old grudges. Nothing new.
But the place put Daisy at ease in a way she hadn't expected. There was almost no malice between people here, none of the tight-wound urgency you got in cities of steel and concrete. It felt like somewhere cut off from the rest of the world, self-contained and self-sufficient—a secluded paradise apart from everything else.
She reached the foot of the sacred mountain quickly. The peak rose maybe five thousand meters (16,400 ft) above her. She avoided the main path. For the sake of concealment, and out of respect for K'un-Lun, she didn't simply fly up either; instead she chose to climb the back face of the mountain by hand. With her agility, it was hardly a challenge.
There were none of the immortal trappings she might have imagined: no crying cranes, no sage chanting the Yellow Court Classic, no celestial ambiance. Through the drifting mist, all she heard was the night wind keening over bare stone.
It took her half an hour to reach the summit. The cluster of buildings up there could only be called magnificent: row upon row of structures laid out with a sharp, deliberate hierarchy. She couldn't see what lay further off, but within her line of sight stood an enormous courtyard.
At the northern end was the main hall, a towering structure with a heavy, dignified hipped roof in the palace style. The four sloping tile surfaces gave it tremendous visual weight.
Between her and the hall lay a wide plaza. The flagstones bore the faint scuffs of countless footsteps. A training ground, clearly.
Closer to the gate, beyond the plaza, stood two octagonal pagodas of wood and stone.
The whole place was empty, which left Daisy at a loss. Aren't you people supposed to be out training in the dead of night, or sharing tea, or something? With it this deserted, how was she supposed to scout anything?
Just as she was about to wander off elsewhere, she turned—and found a man in a blue robe standing a short distance to her left.
Her frequency detection had been running the whole time. For a living person to come within five meters (16 ft) of her without her noticing was almost unthinkable.
His robes covered him from head to foot, leaving only his eyes visible, and they shimmered with a faint silver light. His hands were clasped behind his back, his gaze fixed straight ahead, his voice grave.
"You've come several years earlier than the prophecy foretold."
If not for the Ancient One's warning, Daisy might have assumed the man in blue was talking about Hope Summers—the White Phoenix, the one prophesied to bring hope back to mutantkind. But she wasn't so sure anymore.
Prophecies shifted constantly. The number of variables in the future was simply too vast. In some timelines Daisy made Level Ten Agent at eighteen; in others, S.H.I.E.L.D. dissolved on her very first day on the job.
And she was a relatively minor figure. Imagine if Captain America turned. The whole world descended into chaos. Talking about mutant hope and the Phoenix in a world where Cap had gone dark—it was nonsense, all of it.
Hell, in some branches Thanos might come down to Earth and call himself Captain Titan, assemble the Avengers, while Captain America styled himself the Ameri-Titan, collected the Infinity Stones, and counter-invaded Earth. When Daisy let her imagination off the leash, she could see it. Things like that could happen.
From the Ancient One's manner, Daisy had picked up on the sorcerer's attitude toward the world: hands-off. Do whatever you want. I've seen every flavor of disastrous ending already.
"Do you know the history between K'un-Lun and the Phoenix?" the man in blue asked.
She figured she wasn't supposed to. She shook her head.
"Five hundred years ago, the Phoenix's gaze first pierced the cosmos and fixed upon Earth. The prophecy told me that a woman would rise to defeat it."
"I found her at the base of K'un-Lun. Her mother was of K'un-Lun, her father a European traveler who passed through during one of our brief sojourns on Earth. With her foreign features, she suffered countless hardships from childhood—hardships that forged in her a will like granite."
The man in blue sighed and turned to look at Daisy. "Red hair. A blend of East and West. A young woman carrying the Phoenix Force. History has returned to my doorstep."
At his sigh, Daisy couldn't help glancing down at her own hair. Red strands now made up nearly a third of it. The Phoenix's influence on her was growing stronger by the day.
"How did you get in?" the man in blue asked.
She kept silent. Partly because the question touched on her powers, and even the most honest person doesn't lay all their cards on the table at first meeting. Partly because she didn't speak the local language. At slow speeds she could catch maybe half and guess the rest, but at conversational pace it was hopeless. And against an opponent of unknown depth, using mental communication felt reckless.
Her silence only confirmed something for the man in blue. He nodded.
"Just as the prophecy described. You are like that other woman. You cannot speak either?"
Daisy, who could pull a stranger off the street and chat for half an hour, was now being mistaken for a mute. It was, she had to admit, a uniquely strange experience. What kind of bizarre prophecy was this?
Before she could think of how to respond, the man had already calmly settled on his conclusion: she was mute.
"The great wheel of fate has begun to turn, and we have no choice but to obey. Your situation was described in the prophecy long ago. Since we weathered it safely the first time, we can do so again. Stay here and rest easy. I will come see you in a day or two."
"Thunderer, take her down to rest. The prophecy has come early, and I must make preparations."
With that, the man in blue stepped off the eaves as if walking on level ground, and as he descended, a black-clad man appeared on Daisy's right.
This newcomer moved like a phantom too, but Daisy could track his speed. He was roughly on her level, nowhere near the trackless, soundless mastery of the man in blue.
Then she got a proper look at his clothing, and nearly bit her tongue.
He was powerfully built, his face hidden behind a black mask that exposed only eyes and mouth. His upper body was bare, with crossed leather suspenders over a pair of trousers, the straps studded with vicious-looking iron rivets and rings.
The whole look reeked of that particular aesthetic—the leather-daddy, dungeon-master vibe—so hard Daisy almost coughed up blood on the spot.
It wasn't just the outfit that was wild. His name was too. He was called Lei Kung, the Thunderer.
She knew him. A martial arts master, the man who would one day train Iron Fist. But seeing him in the comics and seeing him in the flesh were two completely different experiences. By now Daisy could stare down the Living Tribunal itself without flinching, but this man was different. The kink-club energy was just too much. One glance and she didn't want to look again.
Stripped of the wild getup, this philosopher-master would actually have cut an impressive figure. Broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist, dense muscle, the kind of movement that was somewhere between a dragon and a tiger. Watching him walk away from behind alone gave you the sense of barely contained strength.
Lei Kung took the lead without a word. Daisy slung her pack on her shoulder and followed in silence. After a series of turns down winding corridors, they arrived at an isolated dwelling. Only then did he speak.
"You will stay here for the time being. Tomorrow at the hour of the Rabbit—around dawn, five in the morning—you will join us for training, to temper the body."