CHAPTER
36
TALKS AND TESTS
JIEYUAN
—∞—
“You’re back.” Meiyao had her eyes narrowed, looking him up and down. Arms crossed over her chest, standing by the door. “And whole. Early, too.”
Jieyuan was in front of her doorway. On his way back to the sect, he’d thought his next few steps through. What he wanted was to head straight back home and take his sweet time figuring out just what the Fatebloom Heart could do, but he needed to check in with Meiyao first—hand her back her saber, field her questions. From there, it’d come down to figuring out what he wanted to tell her, and what he was better off keeping to himself.
“So I am.” He tipped his head forward. “Mind if I come inside?”
Meiyao stepped away from the door, and he strode inside. The blinds over her living room windows were half-open, letting in some sunlight.
Meiyao closed the door, not taking her eyes off him. “You got your matter done, then?”
“I did.”
“But something happened?”
Meiyao was still by the door, scrutinizing him. He studied her back, though he’d have liked to think he was a bit less obvious about it. He’d wondered if she—if others—would be able to notice his quite literal change of heart. The Fatebloom Heart was technically inside his soul, so nobody should be able to reach it with their soulsense, but he’d needed to be sure. As far as he could tell, her scrutiny seemed to be of the normal sort. He reckoned she’d have had a bit more of a reaction if she could see the Heart, beating away in his chest.
“You could say that,” Jieyuan said. “I might have gone and killed a core disciple.”
He imagined Meiyao would soon be hearing about the deaths of the two Fusongshi, and where they’d died. With him having left the sect at around that time, it wouldn’t have taken much for her to connect the dots. Might as well be upfront about it and earn himself some points for honesty and openness. He’d be cashing in on them soon.
Meiyao stood up straighter. “What?”
“And also a core elder.” He paused. “You sure weren’t kidding when you said Radiant Light Blast talismans packed a punch, were you?”
Meiyao kept on staring at him, inscrutable. “Start at the beginning.”
“I went to the Fatebloom Woods,” he began, and she blinked owlishly at him, clearly caught by surprise. “I had some… business to handle, there. The core disciple turned out to have been tracking me. I managed to get a jump on her. Killed her with your saber. The core elder arrived a little while later. For him, I had to use the Radiant Light Blast talisman. Also.”
He unbuckled the sheathed saber from his belt and held it out to her. “Here you go.”
Meiyao hesitated, then shook her head and took her weapon back. “What were you even doing in the Fatebloom Woods?” She unsheathed the blade and gave it a quick look-over before sliding it back into the scabbard, which she attached to her belt.
“Remember our little talk on secrets?” Jieyuan asked.
While it hadn’t taken him long to decide to make Meiyao’s place his first stop, whether to tell her about the Fatebloom Heart hadn’t been as easy a decision. On the one hand, he felt he had a pretty good grasp of Meiyao’s character. She wasn’t the greedy sort. That she hadn’t taken Rongkai’s violet skill seed for herself back in the aftermath of their mission in the Fatebloom Woods was already pretty telling. And he’d like to think a camaraderie of sorts had developed between them during their time in the Fatebloom Woods.
But he still didn’t have much of a clue what the Fatebloom Heart was. Until he had a better grasp on things, he was better off keeping its existence to himself. Meiyao also had plenty of secrets of herself. Maybe keeping mum about his own might get her to open up about some of hers. Might be what it took for her to take the initiative.
Part of him also wanted to be the one with the mystery, for once.
Meiyao frowned, and she worked her jaw, opened her mouth, closed it, then pursed her lips, and sighed. “That’s fair,” she said, at last, and Jieyuan couldn’t deny the little stab of disappointment he felt.
Meiyao walked over to the table in the middle of the living room and sat down on a chair. “Anyway. You haven’t told anyone what happened, right? Did anyone know you’d be leaving the sect?”
“I haven’t told anybody what happened, obviously. You’re the first. As for my leaving the sect… Daojue knows I was planning on heading out. But not any details. And I don’t think he’ll be telling anyone, either.”
“Good.” Meiyao looked thoughtful. “A core disciple. And a core elder. Any idea who they were?”
“Not specifically, but the core disciple was a Fusongshi. She said Sunqiu was her cousin. The core elder said she was his granddaughter.”
“I think I know who she was. There’s a Fusongshi senior protector who apprenticed his granddaughter. Did she look around our age, a little shorter than me, oval face, sharp eyes?”
“Yeah. And the senior protector seemed middle-aged. Severe-looking.”
“It’s indeed those two, then,” Meiyao said. “I can see it. She was the ambitious sort, and not all that subtle about it. Ambitious and curious. She was always quite interested in me, in my hair and eyes. I think she wouldn’t have thought twice about dissecting me if it meant she could figure out why I looked this way.”
“That’s about right,” Jieyuan said. “She seemed awfully interested in how I’d managed to kill Sunqiu, and in what I was doing in the Fatebloom Woods.”
“It’s her, all right,” Meiyao said. “And there wasn’t anybody else? Just her, and then, later, her grandfather?”
“As far as I know. She was pretty talkative—she told me how she’d followed me in secret, how nobody else knew we were there. But then the elder appeared, so I’m not so sure.”
“No, she was probably telling the truth,” Meiyao said. “Did you find a tenth-sign artifact on her? A ring, probably.”
“A ring… Oh.” Jieyuan unhooked his glyph-stretch pouch from his belt, drew it open, stuck his right arm inside it, up to the elbow, and rummaged inside a bit before pulling out the tenth-sign Redsoul ring he’d found on the core disciple. The one he wasn’t sure what it did. He tossed it to Meiyao. “You mean this?”
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She caught it and barely glanced at it before nodding. “Precisely. That’s death-caller.”
“What does it do?”
“On its own, nothing. But when it’s paired to another, the moment its owner dies, it alerts the other death-caller it’s paired to of its owner’s time of death and the location. It also sends over their last moments. It’s standard practice for senior protectors to give their apprentice one. Her grandfather should have had its pair. You didn’t find another one?”
“No. The Radiant Light Blast pretty much erased his whole upper body and everything on it.” He narrowed his eyes at the ring Meiyao was still holding. The death-caller. “Well, at least that explains how I was tracked, this time. Is there any danger in holding onto it? Anything else it can do?”
“Not really. If it’s as you said, then its pair should’ve been destroyed, and unless it’s paired again, it serves no purpose. It also needs a bond-master to do anything, and it’s currently unbonded.” She tossed it back to him. “But if you’re found with it—well, people will be asking questions. I’d get rid of it, if I were you.”
“Got it.”
“You should be in the clear, then. If either of them had told others where they were going or who they were after, I doubt you’d have been able to make it back—at least not without killing a few other Fusongshi. I’m assuming you got a cloudcraft from the core disciple and got back on it? Tell me nobody saw you.”
“I’m not an idiot. I stayed well out of sight, flying through clouds.”
“Good call. Don’t use your cloudcraft unless it’s an emergency, then. And should anyone come asking whether you know about the two Fusongshi, claim you know nothing. You probably won’t get in any trouble—the Liangshibai are determined to see you presented to the Howling Lightning Sect envoy at the Summit—but others might get curious about what you were doing in the Fatebloom Woods, and I suspect that’s not something you want to be aired out.” She paused. “We’ll probably be better off avoiding any more brushes with the Justice Bureau, too.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” Jieyuan said. “There’s one other thing, though. I talked with Daojue earlier, yesterday, and he mentioned Gleaming End as alive. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
“Alive?” Meiyao looked confused. “What do you mean, alive?”
“As in, sentient. I asked to borrow it, and he said Gleaming End refused.”
“That sounds like an excuse to me,” Meiyao said. “A very poor one.”
“I’d normally agree with you, but it’s Daojue. He’d sooner ignore me or outright refuse me.”
Meiyao looked away, frowning. “I see your point.” She was silent for a few seconds. “I’ve never heard anything about Gleaming End being alive in any way, shape, or form. Granted, I haven’t heard all that much about it. The Liangshibai don’t like talking about it all that much. Partially because it has to do with gleamstone, and they like to keep any matters related to it to themselves. But also because they lost it, supposedly stolen away by their missing protector, and they don’t like being reminded of that.”
“But what about sentient artifacts as a whole?” That was the crux of the matter. What he was really after. It wasn’t really Gleaming End he was concerned about, but the Fatebloom Heart.
“It’s the first time I’m hearing of something like that. Artifacts are dead, as far as I’m aware. You can’t refine or inscribe something that’s alive. That’s just not how it works.”
“It might have to do with however it was that Gleaming End advanced to Orangesoul, then,” Jieyuan said, even though he didn’t really believe it, mostly to wrap up the conversation.
He’d expected that Meiyao wouldn’t know much about sentient artifacts, but he’d hoped she might have at least heard some rumors. Daojue would probably know more—at the very least, he had a sentient artifact on his own—but Jieyuan couldn’t really see Daojue just giving him a lesson on sentient artifacts at his request.
There was a chance that Daojue would also wonder why he was asking about them now. And while he didn’t think Daojue was the greedy sort, either, he didn’t have nearly as good a read on him as he had on Meiyao. For the time being, Jieyuan would be better off figuring out the Fatebloom Heart on his own—Maeva was technically a part of him, after all.
Jieyuan left a short while later, with Meiyao promising to keep him updated if anything came out of the matter of the two Fusongshi he’d killed. He returned to his residence, making straight for his bedroom. Once there, closed the door and blinds, turned on the gemstone light, and summoned Maeva.
The hallucination of his sister glided out from behind him. As usual, she wore her yellow sundress with a lab coat over it. He didn’t go for an unconscious hallucination, this time, but a conscious one, as he’d be needing to use his body fairly soon.
Maeva came to a stop in front of him. She stared at him, silent, ponderous, her gaze on his chest. Inside him, he felt his heart pick up the pace a bit. She sighed softly. “I see you had quite the adventure.” She sounded oddly resigned.
“That’s one way of putting it.”
Maeva began pacing slowly around the room, her gaze never straying away from his chest. The Fatebloom Heart kept beating at a faster rate. “You almost died. You should have died. The Silver Stream was just an instant away from pulling you in. Was it worth it?”
“That’s what we’re about to find out, isn’t it?” Jieyuan said.
With Maeva, when she got in a serious mood like that, your best bet was to be casual, irreverent, if not outright flippant. More often than not, it broke her composure, evened her out. Her husband, Qiyun, was even better at it than he was—Maeva could’ve been anywhere from dejected to furious, but he could have her trying her hardest not to smile, not to give in, in a matter of moments.
Through his bond with Huaxin, Jieyuan felt a pretty strong surge of confusion. Jieyuan wondered what it made of him using his realmskill to hallucinate his sister from his previous life. Wondered how much of what was happening the Heart even understood. Huaxin was clearly intelligent, but how intelligent was it really? The impression he got from it was rather childlike.
Maeva stopped pacing, back in front of him. She gave another long, heavy sigh—and then fixed him with a look that was just as long and heavy. Then she shook her head and resumed pacing. “What do you want to start with?” Again sounding resigned.
“I was thinking the third prime skill. Regeneration.” After all, he’d already gotten a trial run of it.
“I figured. Regeneration…” She spoke the word as if it put something foul in her mouth. “There’s really only one way of testing it.” She looked distinctly unhappy about that.
Jieyuan reached into his glyph-stretch pouch and took out the sheath holding the bladed half of his spear. He unsheathed it and held the naked blade out in front of him. The steel edge caught the gemstone light, shimmering.
Maeva had stopped pacing. She looked from the blade to him, then back to the blade, frowning even more deeply. “I don’t like this.”
“You’ve seen my memories. I’ve done worse to myself.” He recalled the lengths he’d gone to get himself used to pain, after the old man had refused to get him another dose of Cultivator’s Agony. “And don’t forget I’m a cultivator now. No physical pain comes close to the Pains. There’s nothing I can do to myself with a blade that’ll rate much higher than a tickle in comparison.”
“Say what you want.” She crossed her arms. “You’re still not the one watching her little brother cut himself up.”
Jieyuan set the spear-half down for a moment, and took off his robes, outer and inner, leaving his whole upper body bare. He then picked up the spear again, and held his forearm. “Ready?”
He didn’t wait for her answer. He set blade to skin, then slid the blade along the length of his forearm. A shallow, superficial cut, at least to start things off. Blood welled up, the line thickening with red. He felt the pain, clearly, even more clearly than a mundane would have, but handled it about as well as a mundane could tolerate someone poking them a bit hard with their finger.
“Now we count,” he said.
Across him, Maeva looked on, grudgingly. But she was attentive, fully concentrated on the wound—the healing wound. Already the blood flow slowing, his skin knitting itself back together so fast he could see it happen.
Not even a minute later, the skin on his forearm was unbroken, with only a thin, white whisker of a scar running through it where the cut had been. He then watched as the scar faded, blending in with the surrounding skin, until all that was left was a slit of slightly rosy skin.
He reckoned he was off to a pretty good start.