Chapter 163: Not So Silent
Nine days had gone by.
Soon the Frostmoon disciples would arrive, and the first stretch of that would be chaos: bodies to house, names to learn, a hundred small questions of who slept where and answered to whom and stood at which post when. Xuan was not looking forward to the paperwork of it. But today, like the nine mornings before it, he sat in the courtyard with his eyes shut and his breathing slow, and let the rest of the world wait its turn.
His dantian kept climbing, a steady, unhurried gain he could feel widening by the day. He would have killed for the shortcut. A breakthrough pill of the right grade would have carried him into the next stage in a single afternoon, except a breakthrough pill of the right grade cost coin he did not have, and at present Xuan was, in the most literal sense the system could manage, broke. So he did it the slow way. The honest way. The way every cultivator without a cheat lodged in his skull had always been forced to.
It helped that the daily rewards had run generous lately. The recovery pills the system handed him each morning had stopped being the bottom-shelf grade of his early days, and the ones Mira slipped into the rotation were finer than anything Master Fu’s pavilion could have sold him. She had never said as much aloud. The meaning was not hard to read. She wanted him stronger and faster, and she was quietly spending whatever she could to get him there.
Across the courtyard, a familiar cold hung at the edge of his awareness.
Qingyue had taken to his mornings the way she took to most things, which was completely and without asking anyone’s permission. Each day, once breakfast was done, she came out to watch him cultivate, and because she was a cultivator herself she did not simply stand there idle. She chose a spot a careful distance from his, near enough that he always knew she was present, far enough that their Qi never argued. She had eased into the rhythm of the peak as though she had always lived on it.
Lian still moved through both their rooms each day, tidying what the two of them never got around to noticing, though more and more of her hours went to her lessons now. Her pills were improving in great strides. So was she. Master Fu had stopped being surprised by it.
And under all that motion, Silent Peak had quietly given up on being silent. There were footsteps on the stairs at odd hours, voices in the lower rooms, the small constant noise of a place with people living in it. Wei Tianming handled his share of it day by day without being told twice.
Xuan pushed for Stage Eight with everything he had. The goal past it was plain and unforgiving: reach Foundation Establishment before the war arrived in full. No one could say how long that gave him, only that it was not long.
A normal cultivator would have needed years to climb so many steps in a row, and would have been right to. Xuan was not a normal cultivator. He had a freakish talent for the sword and a cheat in his head named Mira, and between the two of them the impossible had a way of shrinking down into the merely difficult.
Difficult, at the moment, had a name. The central meridian. He had advanced, yes, and he kept slamming into the same wall every time he reached for more.
[ You know, ] Mira said, insufferably pleased with herself, [ this might be the first time I have watched you do the ugly work without buying yourself a shortcut first. It’s almost inspiring. ]
’You know that isn’t true.’
[ I do. I only wanted to needle you a little. Go back to concentrating. ]
He went back to concentrating.
At some point across those nine days, Qingyue had moved in well and truly. Her room had stopped resembling a storeroom that happened to contain a bed.
There was a proper stand for her sword now, a few belongings of her own arranged with intent, and by the look of it the space had become what it was always supposed to be, which was a young woman’s room and not a forgotten corner of a half-ruined peak.
That was not the end of it. Somewhere along the way Lian and Qingyue had formed an alliance, and the target of that alliance was Silent Peak itself. The place carried a warmer pulse now than the shut-up, dimmed-down feeling it used to wear, small touches in the common spaces that had not been there a season ago. Xuan said nothing about any of it. He liked the change, so he saw no reason to mention it and risk the two of them deciding he had opinions. He kept his eyes shut and his breath level.
The strange part, he thought, was the two of them together. A sect heir and a personal maid, ranks apart by every rule that usually governed such things, and the pair of them had gone and become real friends. He could hear it in how they spoke whenever they assumed he was buried deep enough in cultivation to miss it.
[ So now you have two people fully equipped to judge you from every angle at once. ] Mira sounded delighted by the prospect. [ That’s a good thing, I’d say. It puts a little life in your life. ]
’My life has plenty of life in it already, thank you.’
And so one more day folded itself quietly away.
It held until the afternoon, when the thing they had all been counting toward arrived a touch ahead of schedule. By the reckoning, the Frostmoon disciples were not due until the following morning, which would have made it the tenth day from the one Su Han had named. They had pushed the pace instead, and they came in early.
They had not come in small numbers either. Two hundred disciples climbed the mountain in Frostmoon blue, a full contingent of them, ready to lend their hands and to learn whatever Skyedge had to teach. Down in the yard the Skyedge outer disciples were in the thick of their own training when the first of that pale flood came into view.
Wei Tianming reached his young master’s courtyard at a near run.
He had barely opened his mouth before Qingyue, close enough to catch all of it, was already on her feet. "I think it is time we went down to present ourselves," she said. "Or not present ourselves. Receive them. You know what I mean."
Then, in the span of a breath, she changed. The ease she wore up here in his courtyard folded away beneath something cooler and straighter, until the woman at his side was the Young Mistress of Frostmoon Ridge, every line of her arranged for two hundred sets of watching eyes.
Xuan leaned in as they started down the worn stone steps and pitched his voice low enough for her alone. "You switch who you are remarkably fast. Has anyone ever told you that?"
"I would rather only a handful of people ever saw me the way you do." She did not slow, and she did not glance over, yet something under her tone warmed by a single degree. "The easier version of me. I would sooner keep that one set aside, for you to enjoy."
Xuan said nothing to that. There was nothing clever he could have answered that would not have spoiled it.
They took the next flight of steps in stride, the noise of the yard rising to meet them, and he let his curiosity off its leash. "So who did they actually send up here? Is there real talent in that contingent, or did Frostmoon just count to two hundred and call it generosity?"
"There is talent. A great deal of it, if you know what to look for." Qingyue kept her eyes on the steps ahead. "Frostmoon does not spend a journey like this one on people who cannot carry their own weight. Half of them would already outwork your better outer disciples." A pause, half a step long. "But one of them stands a clear head above all the rest."
"Better than you?"
"No one they sent up this mountain is better than me." Her voice dropped a notch, nearly to herself. "But that one makes you look twice the first time. I did, once, and I do not enjoy admitting it."
’Wonderful,’ Xuan thought. ’Another prodigy. Exactly what this place needed.’
"Should I be worried?" he said instead.
The corner of her mouth moved, not quite a smile yet. "No. Nothing is going to come of it. Far from it. You have my word on that."
"That is almost reassuring," Xuan said.
"It was meant to be entirely reassuring." The smile finished arriving, small and brief. "You will simply have to learn to take my word at full value."
He let that one go too, though the pull between them was there all the same, and with every passing day it leaned a little further, hers toward him, harder to ignore than it had been the day before.
Wei Tianming fell in ahead, and the three of them came down the last of the steps together into the open ground below, where two hundred strangers in Frostmoon blue stood ranged across the courtyard and a yard full of Skyedge disciples had begun to turn, one head after another, to watch their heir and the young mistress of Frostmoon arrive side by side.
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