The front gate of the Bai manor in Kangtian is an enormous wall of immovable obsidian jade, a stone so called because it is as hard as obsidian and as beautiful as jade. It is not even a gate that is meant to be opened, except on ceremonial occasions, when a hundred and eight cultivators must work on it for eighty-one minutes to push it open.

But it is the fastest way into the manor, when it is open.

Bai Canyue, carrying a trembling mass of cloth and flesh in her hands, slammed the heel of her boot into the gate. Its surface cracked ever so slightly, and it screeched with enough force to raise the dead, but it did not move more than half an inch.

"Sister..." whined the bundle of cloth and flesh. "The rakshasa... the rakshasa...!"

"Long'er," she said, as coolly as she could, though her voice still frothed with fury. "There is no rakshasa here. Only me."

Canyue stepped to the side of the main gate and slammed her shoulder into the stone wall, which readily crumbled before her. She stepped through the rubble and dashed forth into the courtyard. Hearing the noise, servants and family members stepped out to see what had happened, but the moment they saw the cloud of darkness trailing behind Canyue, materialized qi so thick that it swallowed even the light, they turned their heads and returned to their work. One servant, observing that he was the closest person to the doors of the central hall, grimaced and held the door open for Canyue. When she passed by him, he collapsed, clutching his chest, trying to resolve the qi deviation that Canyue's ossified hatred had inflicted on him— him, but a mere bystander!

This was how much she despised Bai Chunxue.

This was how much she loved her family.

—The halls were empty. All the servants had fled into side rooms, and all the family members present were simply watching from afar. Alone she flew through the twisting turns of the inner halls of the Bai manor, until she made it to the sick bay. But the sick bay's door was closed, and there was nobody to open it for her. So she projected her qi outwards, and the door crumbled to dust.

She laid Xiaolong down at the back of the sick bay, not in a bed but in the spring at its back, in which flowed a liquid saturated in spirit energy, a liquid more transparent than air yet more dense than water. Then she dug through the cabinets full of pills, looking for the ones Xiaolong needed most. One to accelerate healing. One to speed up blood flow. One to replenish qi. One to stimulate cultivation. She threw them into a mortar and crushed them then along with some blue spinefern for insulation, then mixed the paste with water and dribbled it down what remained of Xiaolong's throat.

"Bai Canyue," came a voice from the entrance of the sick bay, a voice as smooth as the flat sides of a knife.

With fury blazing in her eyes, Canyue spun around towards the person standing at the door. Halfway through, she realized who it was that was speaking, and so she softened her gaze before meeting his eyes.

"Grand Elder," she said with a bow.

There in the doorway stood Bai Fei, the single most prominent elder of the Bai family, whose power was so great that even Canyue did not have the right to know its extents. She could only guess by the force of his aura that he might be in the True Dao realm. But that hardly mattered. All she needed to know what that the only reason he was not the patriarch of the Bai family was because the position was beneath his dignity. Everyone, the patriarch included, had to pay their respects to him.

"The patriarch will see you," he stated dryly.

"...When?" Canyue dared to ask.

"Now."

He turned—

"And we will be watching."

—and disappeared.

----------------------------------------

Canyue knocked three times on the great rosewood doors.

"Enter."

She pushed the doors open and stepped into the office.

There at the far end of the room, backlit by the reddening light of a summer afternoon's falling sun, sitting behind a desk of pure white cypress, was Bai Qiu, the patriarch of the Bai family, the man that Canyue had once addressed as father.

By his side stood Jing Ke, a decrepit, withered man who seemed as though he spent every hour, waking and sleeping, fleeing from the Reaper. He was not a member of the family by blood. Rather, he was an advisor, an old advisor, very old, so old that nobody in the family other than perhaps Bai Fei knew for just how long he had rendered his services to the family.

Seated upon the air along the wings of the room were many of the elders of the Bai family. Some of them had to bow their heads to Bai Qiu, and most of them had to bow their heads to Jing Ke. Out of the corners of her eyes, Canyue cast a glance at the elders. Bai Fei was not among them. No matter. He did not need to be physically present to attend a meeting.

"Patriarch," she said with a bow.

The patriarch tapped his desk with his ring finger, once, twice, several times more.

"I gave you a job— a very simple one at that, one that should have taken you no more than twelve hours to complete. It has now been thirty hours, and you return to me with Xiaolong crippled and hands empty. How do you expect me to face the Long family like this?"

"I apologize. However, the bastard has become much more difficult to deal with."

The patriarch sighed.

"So? Explain yourself. What happened?"

"He kept clear of us the first day, and we were not able to conclude matters then. On the second day, Xiaolong went to confront him while I stood guard. He told me to give him one hour— when I went to check on him after fifteen minutes, the bastard had disappeared and Xiaolong was lying on the ground, burning alive and missing one forearm."

"Bullshit!" shouted one of the elders. "Bai Xiaolong is in the late Core Formation stage. He could not possibly burn alive!"

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

The elders began muttering among themselves. Canyue grimaced and remained silent. She did not have the right to contradict them.

"When one's ears are enamored by the tones of jade and stone, one's eyes will not see even Mount Tai," echoed Bai Fei's voice across the room. "If you doubt her words, then go to the sick bay and look at the wounds upon Bai Xiaolong's body. They are, with absolute certainty, burn injuries."

The elders went silent. They would doubt Canyue as much as they wished, but they did not have the right to contradict Bai Fei. One finally said, "Then, Bai Canyue, you must explain what exactly this fire was, that it could burn upon the skin of a late Core Formation cultivator."

Canyue nodded.

"It was a strange flame of green and purple that only burned upon his skin, and not upon anything else. But he is in the Core Formation realm, so his skin grew back quickly, and then the flame burned his skin again. I could not extinguish it by any normal means, so I had to suppress his cultivation to allow the flame to burn out."

"You suppressed his cultivation?!" The patriarch slammed his fist down on the desk. "Xiaolong is one of the most blessed scions of this family, and you suppressed his cultivation?! At best you have cost him a year's worth of cultivation! On what basis did you act so rashly?!"

"Before I suppressed his cultivation, I touched the fire, then cut off my hand and watched the fire burn out. Then I reattached it, and I was fine." Canyue unwrapped the bandages on her left hand, revealing only charred bone and seared muscle up until the cut on her wrist, though patches and blots had begun growing back, piece by piece. "I was absolutely certain that the fire would stop if there was no more skin left to burn."

And yet as she said these words she wished to vomit, for it insulted her more than anything else that they would doubt her love for her family.

The patriarch grimaced, but he could raise no more complaints. The elders proceeded to debate—

"In all my years I have never heard of such a magical technique, not here in Wei, not in the west, not in Ji Han, not in Huoshanlong."

"What about in Nalantuo? I have only been to Almora, but I have never heard of something like this."

"A friend of mine from the Capital has been fairly deep into Nalantuo, and he has told me about a myth of an eternal flame, but it was only a religious story, not a magical spell."

And thus they came to an impasse.

"If I may..." Canyue began, and the elders permitted her to speak, but only because they were out of ideas. "Xiaolong said that a rakshasa dragged him down to Pratapana Naraka. Since the foreigner looks very much like a rakshasa, I initially thought she might be involved... though she turned out to have a perfect alibi."

"What foreigner?"

"A foreigner? Here in Kangtian, and not in the Imperial Capital?"

"I didn't hear of a foreigner while I was in the Capital."

The patriarch cleared his throat. "Rumor has it that a foreigner with the appearance of a rakshasa is currently at the Phantom Orchid Sect. However, it was my assumption that the rakshasa part was just an exaggeration."

"—No," said Canyue. "It is not. The foreigner has horns like a markhor, and her eyes are black where a human's are white."

The patriarch's eyes narrowed. "—And is it true that the foreigner is involved with—" His neck tightened forcefully, as if a fish-bone had just caught in his throat. "—Bai Chunxue?"

Some quiet scoffs rose up from the higher-ranked elders. The elders who were of lower rank than the Patriarch only bit their cheeks and frowned, since they did not have the right to interject in the Patriarch's discussion, even if only to grumble.

Grimacing at the name, Canyue replied, "I am not sure, but based on what I have heard from the sect disciples, they have at least spoken to each other once."

—"That settles it, then," said an elder. "We can explain everything by the foreigner's presence. Jiang Hanfeng, Chen Mantian, and our Bai Xiaolong, all attacked by the foreigner."

"That's right. It could not have been the bastard, after all."

"Wait." Jing Ke's voice broke through the scattered murmurs. "Through my position at the Phantom Orchid Sect I have some knowledge of this foreigner. I have not seen her myself, but based on what I have heard, it is unlikely that the foreigner could have been responsible for this. Young Master Canyue, can you elaborate on what you meant by a perfect alibi?"

The elders' gazes turned to Canyue. With a nod, she said, "At the time that Xiaolong was attacked, as well as for several hours preceding, the foreigner was with a sect elder and an alchemist of the Tower. It was not possible for her to have attacked Xiaolong."

The room went silent. They could no longer see a solution to the mystery. The culprit obviously could not have been Bai Chunxue, who had no qi whatsoever; it could not have been the foreigner, who was not even there; and it could not have been anyone else, wielding a magical power that did not exist anywhere east of A'erjin-Shan.

—Bai Fei spoke.

"There are two questions before us. One is the matter of who attacked Xiaolong. We cannot answer this question now. Let us have Canyue surveil the sect for some time, and then we shall draw a conclusion on it. The other question is the matter of how we shall answer the Long family. We must answer this question now, so let us turn to it."

The patriarch nodded. "Canyue, do you have any last words on this matter?"

Canyue suppressed a smile and said, "How shall we answer the Long family? This is not a question of truth, but a question of face. All we have to do is offer them the bastard's head, and all will be solved. Is it not for that very purpose that we have allowed that bastard to live under our name?"

The patriarch shook his head. "I understand the sentiment, but we have to think about the regulations. Insofar as Bai Chunxue is legally considered a civilian and not a cultivator, we can't get rid of him so easily."

One of the older elders let out a long, slow sigh. "Such matters were far simpler back during the old Han dynasty. Back then, we could act more-or-less freely and the Imperial Court would turn a blind eye as long as we did not interfere with their governance. Now we cannot even deal with this bastard child without running afoul of some civilian-cultivator relations regulation. All this because he was born without a cultivation base."

"And to make it worse," another elder muttered, "if we violate the regulations, the Magistrate will have the imperial censors knocking on our door in a heartbeat."

"The Magistrate? You mean Sima Rui, the magistrate here in Kangtian? I can't imagine she would care that much about Chunxue. Even if he is legally a civilian, everyone knows that he's from a cultivation family. What does it matter to her if Chunxue dies?"

"For the Magistrate, Bai Chunxue dying would not be about Bai Chunxue," interjected Jing Ke. "The Magistrate is politically opposed to cultivators in general, so she will use whatever means she can to weaken our position. The Phantom Orchid Sect has had trouble dealing with her for quite some time now. She is one of those people who believes in... civilian rights."

Some snorts rose up around the room. How could they not laugh at the idea that civilians, those fortuneless fools who did not have the ability to cultivate, could be anything more than lesser lifeforms compared to cultivators? From a cultivator's perspective, the imperial regulations protecting the lives of civilians are no different than a law that would disallow them from stepping on anthills!

"—So before we decide on any one course of action, we must examine the text of the imperial regulations and verify that we are not running afoul of any of them."

The patriarch nodded. "Canyue, you are dismissed. On your way out, go find a servant and have them bring us a copy of the relevant regulations. We should have them in our library."

With a bow, Canyue turned and left the office, heading once again for the sick bay.