Chapter 135: Hold Still [ PW Bonus ]
The walk to Silent Peak gave Wei exactly enough time to talk himself into a crime.
Xuan watched it happen from the corner of his eye — the kid’s back stiffening with every step, his bows arriving deeper and more often, the way a man’s manners swell in direct proportion to his certainty that he is about to be executed. By the time they reached the room, Wei had apologized for three things Xuan hadn’t noticed and one he was fairly sure had never occurred.
"Relax." Xuan crossed to the lacquered chest where the vial waited, already half-turned away, already three thoughts down the road. "You’re not in trouble. Take your robe off."
The quiet behind him had a texture he didn’t clock until it had stretched a beat too long.
He looked back. Wei had not taken his robe off. Wei was studying the floorboards, frozen the way a deer freezes at a snapped twig, his ears going a slow, helpless red from the lobes upward.
"...If that is the Young Master’s wish," Wei said, very low, addressing the floor with the wobbling courage of a man marching to a scaffold he has resolved to face well. His hand drifted toward his sash. "I’ll admit it’s my first time. Please — be gentle."
Xuan’s brain threw a sound like a needle dragged off a record.
"What."
"I only mean I don’t know how these things are usually—"
"No." Both hands came up, the vial forgotten between his fingers. "No. No, no, no. Hands off the sash, soldier. Whatever sentence you’ve started building in there, tear it down to the studs. I do not like men, Wei. I like women — one specific terrifying woman who lives in my skull and audits my spending, which is frankly already more romance than my schedule allows. I called you here for a reason, and you have misread that reason so catastrophically we may both need to sit down."
[ For the record, I am flattered. (◡‿◡) ] Mira, luminous with joy. [ Also he reached for the sash with zero hesitation. I’m logging that. ]
’Nobody is logging anything.’
Wei’s face had become a furnace. "Then... why ask me to—"
"Because of what comes next, which has nothing to do with that, and which I phrased like a lunatic because I was distracted." Xuan dragged a hand down his face and felt roughly forty years old. "The robe was a practical note. The awakening runs hot and it’ll scorch good cloth, that’s all. We’ll circle back to it." He turned, and the vial rose between two fingers, amber and gold swirling slow and expensive in the lamplight. "First. Drink this."
Wei looked at the vial.
He looked at it the way you look at candy held out by a stranger from an unmarked cart.
To his credit, the boy had spent weeks now watching his Young Master operate. He’d watched him stroll into a mine grinning and stroll out owning two. He’d watched a Blood Fang elder fold into the most cooperative footstool in the province. Across that stretch, Wei had quietly revised his estimate of what the Young Master might press into a person’s hands while smiling.
"...What is it," he said. He did not reach for it.
"It’s good for you."
"That isn’t what it is. That’s what it does."
"Clever lad." Xuan eased it an inch closer. "Drink it anyway."
"I’d honestly rather not, Young Master." Wei’s voice climbed into the over-polite register of a man easing a door shut on a salesman. "It’s a generous offer, truly, but it doesn’t really appeal to me — and, actually, now that it comes to mind, I left the third yard mid-drill, the new ones are unsupervised, you know how they wander, so I really should go and—"
He took a step toward the door.
[ He’s running. ] Mira’s voice flared, alarm and glee in equal measure. [ He is going to run. Do not let that boy walk out of this room with the most valuable object you have ever owned still sealed, Xuan. I mean it. I will not recover. ]
"Wei."
"—it’s only that I’ve a tremendous amount of—"
"Wei. It is a talent elixir worth more than your entire bloodline, and you are drinking it even if I have to pour it down—"
Wei ran.
It was never a fair race. Wei was a promising inner disciple with a borrowed sword and an honest heart. Xuan stood three stages above him with a Heaven-tier physique and the conscience of a man who had lately used a living elder as a chair. The chase lasted exactly as long as it took Wei to reach the threshold, where a hand closed on his collar and reeled him back into the room like a carp that had badly overestimated its chances.
"You’re welcome, for the record," Xuan grunted, wrestling an arm that wrestled back. "This is generosity. This is the kindest thing anyone has ever done to you against your express wishes."
"Young Master, please, I don’t need it—" Wei wrenched sideways, clamped his mouth shut, and whipped his head away with the frantic gymnastics of a toddler dodging a spoon. "I’m content! My talent is adequate! I have made my peace with adequate!"
[ Pinch his nose. ] Mira, ever practical. [ Works on cats. ]
’I am not pinching his—’
He pinched his nose.
Wei held the line with the lung capacity of youth and sheer conviction, eyes streaming, cheeks fat with hostage air, one hand clawing uselessly at the iron clamp on his jaw — until physics arrived the way physics always does. His mouth cracked for one desperate gulp, and Xuan tipped the vial straight past his teeth.
Amber struck the back of his throat. Wei swallowed on reflex, gagged on principle, and shot up at Xuan a look of such deep and wounded treachery that it deserved to hang in a gallery.
"There." Xuan let go and stepped off him, oddly winded for a man who’d just out-wrestled a sapling. "Was that so—"
He didn’t finish.
Wei’s eyes blew wide, drained white, then rolled to something past white — and the air around him fractured.
Heat rolled off his skin in a wave that warped the lamplight sideways. His knees cracked against the floorboards. A sound climbed out of him, low and rising, neither pain nor scream, as something buried deep in his core caught fire for the first time in his life and resolved, with great violence, to wake.
[ Oh. ] Every gram of mischief drained from Mira’s voice at once. [ Oh, Xuan. That — that is not the reaction the catalogue promised. ]
Gold light bled from the seams of Wei’s clenched eyes, his whole frame seizing, and beneath his knees the floorboards began, ever so gently, to smoke.
