## CHAPTER TEN
### Meishan
They reached the hill country by nightfall and slept in the shallow shelter of a rock overhang that was not comfortable but was dry and invisible from the track below. Jian Yu took first watch. Lin Mei did not argue about it, which meant she understood that he would not have slept anyway and that the watch arrangement was practical rather than chivalrous.
He sat with his back against the rock and the sword across his knees and watched the track below and thought about the journal.
Specifically he thought about the section he had not mentioned to Lin Mei yet. The section near the back, in the fast marginal handwriting, that he had read twice and filed under: address when the time is right, which was the drawer in his mind where he put things that were true and important and would change something significant when he said them out loud.
Lin Dao had written it without preamble, wedged between two pages of cultivation theory as if he had needed to say it quickly before he could talk himself out of it.
*Mo Xuan was not always wrong about everything. He was wrong about the impossibility of the repair. He was wrong about what the sword recognizes. But his record of what happened one hundred and forty three years ago is accurate and his reading of it is not entirely without foundation. The young man died. That is not disputable. The cost concentrated in him and he did not survive it. If the repair sequence fails — if my theory about the recognition is incorrect and Mo Xuan's theory about the damage is correct — then the wielder of the Lost Blade dies again and the combination cannot happen and nothing I have spent thirty years working toward will have mattered.*
*I have been honest with myself about this possibility every day for three years. I am honest about it now. The probability of the repair sequence working is, in my best estimate, significantly higher than the probability of it failing. But significantly higher is not certainty. There is a version of this where I am wrong.*
*If I am wrong, Lin Mei will know it before the combination happens. The repair sequence, if it is failing, produces specific signs in the meridian work that a healer trained in the Flowing Hand method will recognize. She will know before the wielder does. She will have to decide what to do with that knowledge.*
*I am sorry to leave her with that. I cannot see a way around it.*
Jian Yu had read that section and then read it again and then sat with it for a long time before the dawn came.
He sat with it again now on the hillside in the dark.
He was not afraid of dying. He had examined that question carefully over the past week, turning it over and looking at all its faces, and what he found was not bravery exactly — bravery was something you felt in contrast to fear — but a specific settled quality that came from having already lost everything and discovered that the losing of it had not destroyed him. He had been at the bottom. He knew the dimensions of the bottom now. Whatever came after this was navigable by comparison.
But Lin Mei would know before he did if the repair was failing.
She would carry that knowledge on the road and in the camps and in every session of meridian work, and she would have to decide what to do with it, and Lin Dao had known this and had been unable to find a way around it and had apologized for it in the margin of a journal he knew she would eventually read.
Jian Yu looked at the track below. Nothing moved. The night was still and the stars were clear and his left side had progressed from aching to the deeper background hum of something healing slowly rather than urgently.
He counted the visible stars. Got to thirty before the overhang's edge cut off the sky.
He thought: he would not ask her. Not yet. The information belonged to her — what she observed during the repair work was hers to process and hers to decide about. Asking her to report it immediately, to hand the decision back to him before she had formed her own understanding of it, was the wrong approach. He knew enough about carrying difficult knowledge to know that it needed to be held for a time before it could be passed on cleanly.
He would wait for her to tell him.
And if she didn't tell him, he would wait for that too and understand what it meant.
He watched the track until the first gray appeared in the east and then woke Lin Mei with a hand on her shoulder and took two hours of the sleep that his body had been requesting with increasing insistence since Dusthaven and got most of what he needed before the light was full enough to travel.
---
They came down out of the hills at midmorning and Meishan was below them.
It was larger than Dusthaven — a proper town rather than a market stop, built at the junction of three trade roads where the hill country met the eastern plain. Two inns visible from the hillside approach. A temple at the northern end. A market that was permanent rather than seasonal, the stalls roofed and walled rather than canvas and posts. The smell of the place reached them before the sounds did — cook smoke and animal yards and the specific industrial smell of a town where things were made rather than just traded.
Jian Yu counted what he could see from the hill. Eleven entry points to the main street. Three that were wide enough for a cart. Eight that were foot traffic only. The temple's height provided a view across most of the town's roofline to anyone standing in its upper section, which meant it was also a position from which a watcher could observe most of the main street approaches.
"Mo Xuan's people," Lin Mei said beside him, reading his stillness correctly.
"Possibly. How well do you know this town."
"I have been here four times. The supplier Shen Bo mentioned — his name is Peng Shan, he operates from a workshop on the southern edge of the market, backing onto the river channel. He trades in cultivation materials and medical compounds and he has been discretely supplying researchers who operate outside the main sects for twenty years." She paused. "He knew my master. He will know me."
"Will that be a problem."
"It will be a question," she said. "He will want to know what happened to Lin Dao. I will answer honestly and it will cost us some time and at the end of it he will supply what we need because Peng Shan has been operating outside the main sects long enough to have formed opinions about them that make him unlikely to report our presence to anyone associated with any sect."
"Including Mo Xuan."
"Mo Xuan operates through sect channels when he can and around them when he can't. Peng Shan has no love for sect channels." She looked at the town. "We go through the eastern foot approach. It adds fifteen minutes but it brings us into the southern market edge directly without crossing the main street."
"You've already planned the route."
"I planned three routes last night during my watch," she said. "This one is the best of them."
He looked at her.
She looked back at him with her usual expression — level, practical, waiting for the acknowledgment that would allow them to proceed.
He thought about the marginal note in the journal. *She will know before the wielder does.*
He thought about the eight years of roads and the pre-cut oilcloth and the three routes planned overnight on a hillside while he slept.
He thought: she has been preparing for this for longer than he has. Possibly since before she understood fully what she was preparing for.
"Lead," he said.
She led.
---
The eastern foot approach was a narrow track that ran along the base of the hill's last slope and entered the town between a cooperage and a feed store, depositing them into the southern end of the market with the specific unnoticed quality of an entrance that nobody watched because nothing that mattered had ever come through it.
Peng Shan's workshop was the fourth building from the river channel end — narrow frontage, deep interior, the kind of building that contained more than it suggested from outside. The sign above the door was small and stated only a name with no description of trade, which was the sign of a business that found its customers through reputation rather than advertising.
The door was open.
Inside: the smell of compounds and dried materials and something chemical underneath that Jian Yu could not identify. Shelves from floor to ceiling on three walls, organized in a system that was legible to someone who knew it and opaque to someone who didn't. A workbench along the fourth wall with a man of perhaps fifty-five sitting at it doing something precise with small tools and not looking up at their entrance.
"You're early," Peng Shan said.
Jian Yu looked at Lin Mei.
Lin Mei looked at Peng Shan with an expression that recalibrated from the one she had been wearing outside. "We weren't expected."
"No." Peng Shan set down his tools with the deliberate care of someone who treated what he was working with as worth protecting. He looked up. He had the kind of face that had done a great deal of observing over a great many years and had become very still in the process — everything behind the eyes, nothing on the surface. He looked at Lin Mei for a moment. Then at Jian Yu. Then at the sword at Jian Yu's hip.
He was quiet for three seconds.
"Lin Dao is dead," he said. Again not a question.
"Yes," Lin Mei said.
"How long."
"Eight days."
Peng Shan absorbed that. He looked at the sword again — at the way the unnamed color pulsed faintly even in the well-lit workshop, the black-not-black that caught the light and returned it changed. "And the sword found its person."
"Yes," Jian Yu said.
"Eagle Sect." Peng Shan looked at his face. "I've seen the notice. Woodblock likeness — adequate but not accurate. You look younger than it makes you." He paused. "And Mo Xuan's secondary notice below it."
"Yes."
Peng Shan stood. He was shorter than he had appeared sitting — compact, with the economy of movement of someone who worked in small spaces with precision instruments. He moved to the shelves and began reading them the way a person read a familiar text, eyes moving quickly, pulling things off without hesitation.
"Shen Bo sent word this morning," he said. "I received it an hour ago. He told me what you would need and roughly when you would arrive." He set three containers on the workbench without turning around. "He was off by two hours. He thought you would be slower through the hills."
Jian Yu looked at the containers. Then at Lin Mei.
She was watching Peng Shan with the expression she wore when she was recalibrating something significant. "Shen Bo sent word this morning," she said. "How."
"He has methods," Peng Shan said. "He has been operating in the southern lowlands for sixty years. He has methods for most things." He continued pulling materials from the shelves. "I have been expecting something like this for twenty years. Since the first time Lin Dao brought me into his research. Since he explained what he was working toward and what it would require." He paused at the shelves, one hand on a container he hadn't pulled yet. "I told him then that I thought it was possible and that I thought the cost of being wrong was very high and that I would rather he was right than wrong."
"And now," Lin Mei said.
Peng Shan pulled the container and turned around. He set it with the others and looked at them both — a look that was more complete than his previous ones, less assessment and more acknowledgment.
"Now someone is standing in my workshop with the Lost Blade at their hip and Lin Dao's journal in their pack," he said. "Which means Lin Dao spent thirty years being right about the important parts, even if the cost of it was significant." He looked at Jian Yu directly. "How is the cultivation."
"Cracked. Moving wrong. Faster than it should through the damaged meridians."
"Can you feel the sword's absorption."
"Yes. I understand the mechanism now. I read the journal last night."
Peng Shan nodded once, the nod of someone receiving confirmation of something they had expected. "Then you're further along than the first wielder was at this stage. He didn't understand the mechanism until three months in." He began organizing the materials on the workbench into a sequence that matched the repair technique's order of application. "The repair sequence will take six to eight weeks done properly. You don't have six to eight weeks in one place."
"We know," Jian Yu said. "We do it on the road."
"Then you'll need to know which components can be interrupted and which cannot. Lin Dao documented it but the relevant section is near the back in the margin notes and he wrote it in a hurry when he was tired, which means it is less clear than the rest." Peng Shan looked at Lin Mei. "I'll walk you through it. The interruptions that are safe and the ones that will cause damage if you stop mid-sequence."
"How long," Jian Yu said.
"Two hours if she has questions. Less if she doesn't."
"She'll have questions," Jian Yu said.
Lin Mei looked at him. Something in her expression shifted at that — just slightly, the specific quality of someone who had not expected to be known accurately in that particular way and was adjusting to it.
"I'll have questions," she confirmed.
Peng Shan almost smiled. "Then two hours. There is food in the back room. Eat something. Both of you." He looked at Jian Yu. "And while she works through the technique with me I need you to do something."
"What."
Peng Shan reached under the workbench and produced a folded map — large, detailed, the roads drawn with the specificity of someone who had traveled them rather than copied them from another map. He spread it on the workbench beside the materials.
"Shen Bo included something else in his message this morning," he said. "A report from his contact on the northern road." He pointed to a location on the map — a town three days north, in the foothills below the Vermilion Sect's southern approach road. "There is a young man there causing problems for a Vermilion Sect patrol. He has been causing problems for them for two days. The patrol wants him detained and he is declining to be detained."
Jian Yu looked at the location on the map.
"He was seen carrying a sword," Peng Shan said. "Specifically a sword that the patrol captain described in his report — which Shen Bo's contact obtained through channels I won't explain — as burning. Not glowing. Burning. As if the blade itself was on fire except that nothing around it caught."
Jian Yu looked at the map for a long moment.
Vermilion Flame Blade.
"How long has this been happening," he said.
"The patrol first reported him four days ago. They have been trying to detain him since. He keeps leaving." Peng Shan paused. "He is apparently very fast."
"He would be," Jian Yu said. "Vermilion Flame chooses people who act before thinking. Fast is a natural consequence of that."
Peng Shan looked at him. "You read the journal in one night."
"I read it twice."
Peng Shan was quiet for a moment with the expression of someone revising something upward. "The patrol will escalate in the next two days. When Vermilion Sect patrols escalate they send a senior cultivator. A senior cultivator will recognize the sword for what it is and the situation will change from detention to something more significant."
"Because Vermilion Sect's leadership is connected to Mo Xuan," Jian Yu said.
"The sect leader has been in correspondence with Mo Xuan for fifteen years. Yes."
Jian Yu looked at the map. Three days north. Two days before escalation.
He did the arithmetic. It did not produce a comfortable result.
"We need to move tonight," he said.
"You need the materials first," Peng Shan said. "And Lin Mei needs the two hours. And you need to eat something because you have been moving on insufficient food for three days and what is coming will require more from you than what has already passed." He said it with the flat practicality of someone who had learned that urgency and preparation were not opposites. "Two hours. Then you move."
Jian Yu looked at the map for another moment.
He counted the distance markers between Meishan and the northern town. Counted the days. Counted what he knew about the person he was going to find — hot-headed, fast, acting before thinking, currently declining to be detained by a Vermilion Sect patrol for two days through what was presumably equal parts combat capability and stubborn momentum.
He thought: whoever this person was, they were going to be difficult.
He thought: difficult was manageable. He had been managing difficult all week.
He folded the map and put it in his pack beside the journal.
"Two hours," he said. "Then north."
He went to the back room and found the food Peng Shan had mentioned and sat down and ate all of it with the methodical attention of someone treating a meal as a logistical requirement rather than a pleasure and thought about roads and distances and a burning sword three days away.
Outside, in Meishan's market, the ordinary morning continued.
Somewhere three days north, a young man was declining to be detained for the third day in a row and did not yet know that someone was coming to find him.
Jian Yu counted his breaths.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.
Seven. He had gotten to seven.
He noted that and finished eating and went back into the workshop where Lin Mei had already begun her questions and Peng Shan was already answering them with the focused precision of someone passing on something they had been carrying alone for a very long time.
The two hours began.