Limitless Cultivation System: From Trash to Immortal

Chapter 149: The Long Climb

The noise of the banquet had thinned to nothing behind them by the time he turned her toward the long stair that climbed the back of the mountain, the one nobody took without a reason to.

Silent Peak waited at the top of it the way it always had, far enough from everything that the sect had once treated sending a man up there as a quiet way of burying him without the bother of a grave.

Hundreds of steps, cut into the rock in uneven flights, pale and worn under the moon. Xuan had hated every one of them once, back when his lungs gave out a third of the way up and left him clinging to the rail like an old man.

Tonight he climbed them without thinking about it. That still caught him off guard now and again, how much working body he’d been handed back. He kept his pace easy so she wouldn’t have to push hers, and for a while neither of them bothered to fill the air. He was more aware than he wanted to be of how close she walked, of the cold coming off her like a window left open in winter, of the plain fact that he had no idea what he was doing here.

’How’s your end going?’ he asked, on the inner line, mostly to give the nerves somewhere to stand. ’Han Ying. Anything moving inside Blood Fang yet?’

[ Nope. ] Mira didn’t pretend to weigh it. [ And you don’t get to go hiding in my work because the pretty assassin’s got your pulse up. I have Han Ying. Right now he’s drinking with men who’d open his throat if they knew what he was, and it’ll be hours before any of it earns your attention. You have exactly one job on these stairs, and eavesdropping over my shoulder isn’t it. Mind your own and leave mine to me. ]

’Charming as always.’

[ Go talk to the girl, Xuan. ]

So he did.

Su Qingyue climbed half a step behind him and used the walk up to do the thing she did best. She read the back of him as they went: the loose, unhurried way he took stairs that clearly had a history in them, the small shift in his shoulders when he’d ducked off somewhere private in his own head a moment ago and come back into himself. She’d caught it twice now. A man who stepped out of a conversation and back into it like someone checking on something in another room. She filed it away with the rest and didn’t push.

This was why she’d put the marriage on the table herself, back in Yuncheng, ahead of the fathers and all their formalities

Not because her heart had bolted with her; she didn’t trust her heart to bolt anywhere useful. It was because Lin Xuan was the single most interesting problem she’d run across in years, and she wanted a far closer look than a tournament and a treaty would ever buy her.

A boy crippled and written off, who clawed his way back to a sword, a council seat, and two reclaimed mines inside a single year, did not happen by accident.

Either he was the luckiest creature alive, or there was a piece of him no one had been allowed to see. Su Qingyue had never believed in luck. She believed in the piece no one had been shown, and she meant to find it.

"You live at the top of all this?" she asked, somewhere around the third flight. Not winded, which would have impressed him; only confirming.

"All the way up. They wanted me out of the way, and there’s nowhere further out of the way than this."

"It’s a long climb to send a sick boy."

"That was rather the point."

There was also the smaller, less strategic fact that he was easy to talk to and easier to fluster, and she would have been lying to call either one unpleasant. But she kept that further down the list, where the things she happened to enjoy usually went.

The stairs let out onto a flat shoulder of the mountain, and Silent Peak stood on it under the moon.

A year ago he’d have been ashamed to bring anyone up here. Tonight the courtyard had been swept down to the grain of the stone, the tiles washed, the old well-cover mended, lamplight left burning warm in the windows where Lian had set it for him. Past the low wall the whole valley dropped away into dark, the sect’s lanterns scattered below and the few lights of the mortal town far beneath those. Modest, by the measure of a sect heir’s residence. But cared-for, and high, and his.

"This is it," he said. "Silent Peak. Or the Rotting Peak, depending on who in the household you ask and how kind they’re feeling that day."

She stepped past him to the wall and looked out, and he found himself talking before he’d quite decided to.

"They put me up here to die, more or less. Somewhere out of sight, where it wouldn’t trouble anyone over dinner. The sick heir with no talent, the problem nobody wanted to look at." He set his forearms on the wall a pace from her. "The climb you just made took me the better part of an hour in those days, and left me on my hands and knees at the top of it."

"And now you take it without breathing hard," she said.

"And now I take it without breathing hard, basically, yeah."

She turned from the valley to look at him properly, and the place rearranged what she’d built of him over the course of the banquet. Anyone could rise when they began with everything already in their hands.

To begin where this told her he had begun, walled off and waiting to die on a forgotten hill, and to climb out of it as far as he’d climbed, took something she had no tidy word for yet, and she’d met precious few people who carried it. The curiosity she’d brought up the stairs warmed a degree into something she was less willing to hold up to the light.

"Can I ask you something directly?" she said.

"You’ve been direct since the front gate. I don’t see why you’d start asking permission for it now."

The corner of her mouth moved. "A year ago you were dying on this hill. Some days ago you took two mines off the Blood Fang Sect. People don’t change that fast on their own." Her eyes held him, patient and unblinking. "So what changed, Lin Xuan? What did you find?"

It was the question, the one with Mira standing behind it whether Su Qingyue knew that or not, and he felt the old reflex rise to turn it into a joke and slip the hook. He let it go past. She’d earned more than a joke, and she’d see straight through one besides.

"I found out I’d been measuring myself against the wrong thing," he said. True, even if it wasn’t the whole of it. "Once you’ve already been written off, once everything they could take from you is gone, you stop being afraid of the things that used to stop you cold. You quit asking whether you’re allowed to try, and you just try. Most of what I’ve done since came out of that."

He held her gaze.

"That’s the honest answer. It isn’t the complete one, and I think you already know it isn’t. But it’s the part I can hand you standing here."

She studied him in the lamplight and discovered, to her own faint irritation, that she believed him. Both halves of it. The true thing he’d said, and the larger thing he’d folded shut behind it without once pretending it wasn’t there. Men lied to her smoothly, or they didn’t lie at all.

Lin Xuan had handed her an honest answer and a closed door in a single breath and trusted her to know the difference and respect it. It was, she thought, the most interesting thing anyone had said to her in a long while. The closed door most of all.

"Come on," he said, before the air between them could turn heavier than he could carry. "You climbed a mountain. Least I can do is prove it was worth the trip."

He brought her in through the main door. The inside was small and spare and, tonight, immaculate, since Lian and a half-dead Wei Tianming had scoured two years out of the place in a single brutal day and it showed.

A sitting room with a low table and his books. The bath house off the back that had been the one real luxury of his exile. A short hall with the rooms opening off it. He walked her through it without ceremony, naming things as they went, watching her take each one in with that quiet cataloguing attention he was beginning to find less unnerving and closer to something else entirely.

She halted in the doorway of the second room, the empty one across the hall from his own, and looked it over a while, head tilted.

"This one’s empty," she observed.

"Storeroom, mostly. Never found a use for it."

"Mm." She stepped inside, drew a hand along the windowsill, considered the stretch of valley the window faced, and nodded once, the way a person does when a sum finally comes out even. "Good. This will be my room, then. From now on."

Xuan opened his mouth, shut it, and ran the sentence back through twice to be sure he’d heard it right.

"...What?"