Book 3: Chapter 18: The No Fight Rule |
Hu Shui blitzed over the courtyard wall like it owed her money.
She continued to bound over rooftops, walls, stalls, entire huts, and anything else that stood in her path.
Long Ti did not clear the courtyard wall. Long Ti was draped over her shoulders like a sack of rice that had given up on life somewhere around the third rooftop. His arms and legs dangling without an ounce of dignity or honor. Said dignity had stopped dangling about two blocks ago and simply fallen off entirely. Not that he had noticed considering his state of unconsciousness.
She landed in a crooked alleyway three streets over from Cultivator Row, boots cracking the stone beneath her. The impact sent a rat the size of a small dog scrambling into a drain hole it had no business fitting through. Shui watched it vanish and made a mental note to investigate later.
Rats that fat had to be eating well and eating well meant food.
Food meant ingredients.
Focus. I got all the Qi Stones! I’m going to be so rich and buy all the ingredients I need and make the best cake and ancestor is going to be so happy and proud and Jun is…
She set Long Ti down against the wall giggling to her self. Then she kneeled before him and smacked his cheek. Lightly.
His head snapped sideways.
His head snapped back the other way.
"Wake up, old man. We're here."
The old man's eyes rolled in their sockets for a few rotations before they found purchase on reality. He blinked, looked left, then looked right, looked up at the narrow strip of sky between the leaning buildings above them, and then his eyes finally settled upon the figure Shui kneeling before him.
His mouth mimed words, but no sound came out.
"We got them!" Shui jumped up and down, fists pumping the air. The silk pouch in her left hand caught the afternoon light and shimmered with concentrated Qi that made the air around it hum. She could feel the Qi Stones inside pulsing like tiny heartbeats. Each one was a blazing volcano of Qi and energy that would fuel the growth of any person up multiple major realms if used properly.
All given to her with a casual wave of her Ancestor’s hands.
Generosity came in many forms and her Ancestor seemed to have all of them at the same time.
"We got them, Long Ti! Do you understand what this means?! I can finally—"
She stopped bouncing.
Long Ti was staring at the silk pouch. His face had arranged itself into something she'd seen on Jun whenever Shui suggested a plan that involved fire, heights, dangerous outcomes she was positive would not be dangerous at all, or all three at the same time. Deep lines carved across his forehead. His lips pressed thin enough to vanish. One eye twitched. And a slow shake of his head, negative.
"What's wrong now?" Shui lowered the pouch.
Long Ti swallowed hard enough that she heard it. "There's a problem, Lady Shui."
"Well? Spit it out!"
"Those are too valuable. We can't sell them."
Shui blinked at him, then at the pouch. Then back at him. "Obviously! We aren't selling them. We're using them to bake—"
"No, no, no." Long Ti waved his hands in front of him like he was trying to ward off evil spirits. Which, given his proximity to Shui on a daily basis, was a reasonable survival instinct. "I mean we can't sell the Qi Stones at all. Anywhere to anyone. The ones you said you'd flip at the auction house for gold to buy even better ingredients? The plan you told me about while coming up with the play for you Ancestor–."
“Which worked perfectly.” Shui nodded with a proud look.
Long Ti continued, already used to the interruptions. “I hadn’t known that the Qi Stones were worth more than the whole city put together. No single person would ever buy them.”
Shui tapped her chin. "Right. The auction house, the old grandma at the herb garden did mention it. We take the Qi Stones there then and sell them for mountains of gold, use that gold to buy the highest tier ingredients in the city, and then I bake Ancestor the greatest cake this world has ever produced! My plans always work perfectly and with no mistakes. Just like the play."
She paused and grinned at her own brilliance.
Long Ti's expression only got worse. The lines on his forehead multiplied. His left eye joined the right in twitching. Both hands found each other and began wringing like they were trying to squeeze water from stone.
"That's even worse, Lady Shui."
"How is that worse? It's a perfect plan. I came up with it."
"The auction house in the warehouse district isn't some roadside stall." Long Ti pressed his back harder against the wall as though the bricks could absorb him and take him somewhere safer. "It's run by the Three Gilded Thrones. The merchant consortium that answers directly to the Merchant Emperor himself. Every transaction above a certain threshold gets reported. Every seller gets investigated. Every item of significant Qi density gets catalogued, traced, studied thoroughly, and if the origin can't be verified—"
"Confiscated?"
"Confiscated. And then the seller gets a visit from the Emperor's personal enforcers. The Golden Fang Guard. Cultivators that make the thugs that beat me up look like children playing with sticks." Long Ti's voice dropped. "I've seen what happens to people who bring unregistered high-value goods to that auction house without backing, Lady Shui. They don't get to leave the building through the door."
Shui crossed her arms. "So they use the window. Big deal."
"They use the cremation chute, Lady Shui."
She uncrossed her arms.
"If you had your Ancestor's name behind you, his clan's seal and his reputation then none of this would matter. They'd bow and scrape and offer you the best seats and complimentary tea that you'd hate the taste of. But you told me yourself. You want to do this without bothering him and without him knowing. A surprise."
Shui nodded slowly, it was slowly registering what he was saying.
"Then you have no background. No verifiable clan registration with the auction house. No trade history. No merchant guild membership. No power to lean on and make the larger forces hesitate or consider whether its worth attacking you. You're a girl with items worth more than this entire city combined walking into a building controlled by people who have killed for a hundredth of that value." Long Ti's hands stopped wringing. They just shook instead. "And those people? The ones behind the Three Gilded Thrones? They have cultivators on retainer that I can't even begin to describe to you. Beings that make the dojo masters in Cultivator Row look like—"
"Like what?"
"Like me, Lady Shui."
Shui laughed loud enough to scatter a second rat from the drain. "That's not a problem, Long Ti." She reached behind her back and the air split with a low, resonant hum that made the alleyway walls vibrate. Mr. Mo Mo materialized in her grip, massive and gleaming, the weapon spirit's presence flooding the narrow space with enough pressure to crack the mortar between the bricks on both sides.
Dust rained from above.
A roof tile slid free and shattered on the ground six feet behind Long Ti.
He didn't flinch at the tile. He was too busy trying not to collapse from the hammer's ambient aura.
"I'll just smash them with Mr. Mo Mo and take what I—"
Shui froze.
Her grip on the hammer went slack and the head slammed into the ground next to her shattering stone. Her eyes grew wider. Her mouth dropped open and stayed there, jaw working without producing sound. The colour drained from her cheeks in a slow, visible wave that started at her forehead and rolled down to her chin. She looked down at her hands.
“Lady Shui? Is everything fine?” Mr. Mo Mo asked her.
"It seems that it finally registered, Lady Shui." Long Ti let out a breath he'd been holding since the hammer appeared. "Lord Ancestor said you are forbidden from fighting."
The hammer vanished back behind her. Shui's arms fell to her sides.
"B-But... I..." She looked at her empty hands while turning them over. Then her eyes drifted to Long Ti, who shivered a bit more anxiously than before, and then finally back at her hands. "What... What do I do, Long Ti?"
Long Ti shrugged.
The silence that followed was the loudest thing the alleyway had ever contained. Louder than the rats. Louder than the distant shouting of merchants and the clatter of carriage wheels on stone roads. Louder than the ambient hum of a city packed with hundreds of thousands of desperate, scheming, plotting, planning, surviving souls. Of which the majority were refugees that were trying to do nothing more than save themselves and their families.
Shui slid down the opposite wall until she sat on the ground. Knees up and arms draped over them.
The silk pouch of precious ingredients resting in her lap like a sleeping pet she couldn't bring herself to put down.
Long Ti watched her from across the narrow gap.
She sat there for a long time as minutes stretching into something heavier. Her eyes unfocused, staring at the cracked stone between her boots. Lips moving without sound. Fingers drumming a pattern on the silk pouch that grew faster, then slower, then stopped entirely.
Then something shifted behind those eyes.
Long Ti saw it happen. It was nothing more than a quick flicker, like a blade catching light in a dark room. Her pupils contracted, the corners of her mouth twitched upward, but in a direction that had nothing to do with smiling, the drumming on the silk pouch resumed steady this time. It had a rhythmic, patient beat.
Hu Shui looked up at him.
Long Ti's teeth began to chatter and he pulled his threadbare robes tighter around himself, pressing his spine flat against the wall. His legs drew up beneath him. Every instinct he'd honed across decades of surviving in the gutters of Yellow HearthStone City fired at once, screaming a single unified message that his body obeyed before his mind could catch up.
The girl sitting across from him was still smiling.I know what to do!