Chapter 31

“Young Master?” the mortal servant asked nervously, having knocked gently for several minutes before daring to open the door to Tan’s room. “Young Master, please wake. The Elder wishes to speak with you.”

Tan continued to snore. Key, sensing an intruder while its master was incapacitated by sleep, began to hiss at the mortal, causing the young woman to shrink back. It was the hissing, which finally awoke Tan, and the boy sat up, looking around in confusion.

“Whah?” he asked groggily, looking at the mortal woman, who shrank under his gaze. While he had been fair to all of the members of the elder’s house so far, she was shy under normal circumstances and doubly so when those circumstances involved awakening a powerful young cultivator.

“I’m terribly sorry to waken you Young Master, but the Elder wishes to speak with all of his guests regarding events on the mountain that are beyond my ken. Please get dressed and join him in the library,” the young servant said.

Tan stared at her blearily, then pulled back the covers and began to dress and follow her instructions.

Once all of the children were gathered, Elder Yotu got straight to the point.

“I’m told that you carried with you the parts of a powerful gathering array, and that you erected them near the waterfall. Is this true?” he asked.

The children exchanged looks, and Tan just shrugged. “I don’t know how ‘powerful’ it is. It’s nothing compared to the array we usually use. But yes, we erected a gathering array after Olin said that it wasn’t a big deal. Is that why you woke us in the middle of the night?”

“I’m not accusing you of any wrong doing. However, I do need to ask that you immediately disassemble it. There is a cascading effect rippling through the sect and all non-essential arrays are being dismantled. Seeing as you are familiar with this particular array and our own formation masters are not, your assistance is requested,” Yotu explained.

“Is that all?” Ko asked, yawning. “Couldn’t this have waited until morning?”

“Unfortunately the cascade is a matter of some concern,” Yotu said. “We are hoping to get ahead of it. We’re uncertain if this is an attack or some natural phenomena. Either way a certain amount of haste is required.”

“It’s not an attack. The old man in the mountain is awake,” Zephyr whispered in Tan’s ear. “He sounds like a grumpy old man who’s yelling at kids to get off his yard, but I think he’s not a bad spirit. But the mountain was messy, that’s the imbalance that you and the others have been sensing since you arrived. He’s not happy about that, and if they don’t fix it he might kick them all off the mountain whether they like it or not.”

Tan frowned, wiping some sleep out of his eye and he relayed Zephyr’s words, explaining that it was common for his spirit to whisper advice like that to him.

Yotu frowned at the child’s words, but took them seriously. The children did as they were bade, going out in the night to disassemble the gathering array that they’d left up by the waterfall despite the hour being after midnight. Tan, with his spiritual senses and tendency to walk around blindfolded anyway, didn’t have any trouble navigating. The others stuck close to Won, who lit their path with magic.

The gathering array was easy enough to disassemble. Won extinguished the brazier and they allowed that to cool down for a while. Tan pulled the wooden pole straight into his storage ring, while the other children worked on scratching out the symbols that Pao had carved into the earth. There was a water aspect of the array as well, but it hadn’t been necessary with the waterfall nearby, so once the brazier was cool, they were effectively done with the task and ready to return to bed.

Which was when their path was blocked by a twelve year old girl.

“There you are!” Fiora exclaimed. “There’s no point in hiding! You have gotten in my way for the final time! I will punish you for standing between me and my ambitions!”

Tan looked at the other children, who exchanged his expression of confusion. “Sorry, but who exactly are you?” he asked.

Rather than answering, the girl attacked, drawing her sword and slashing at Tan, sensing him to be the strongest of the four and determined to end him the quickest.

Any lingering sleepiness vanished in a wave of adrenaline as the sound of the sword leaving its scabbard filled his ears. Tan drew his own weapon, from which he sensed a wave of eagerness and exhilaration at the ambush. Steel met steel and sparks flew.

The other children hadn’t brought their weapons; Tan had only happened to strap his sword onto his hip because it was a standard part of dressing for him now. That didn’t mean that they were idle, however, as Ko pulled a large glob of water from the nearby pond below the waterfall and began forming ice lances to launch at their attacker.

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Won wreathed himself in flame, which mostly served to light up the environment and help the other children see. He also began launching flame lances at the attacker.

Neither twin hit a blow, but together with Tan they pressured the girl back. She cursed and realized under the wave of their intent that they were stronger than she’d been expecting. She conjured her own magic, engulfing her blade with flame and dancing with Tan in a waltz of deathly exchanges.

The rock hit her in the side of the head without warning, thrown by a powerful earth cultivator. She was launched off her feet and landed six feet away, dazed and disarmed. The children wasted no time, binding her with ropes that Tan pulled from his ring while she was incapacitated.

Standing over her semi-conscious body, they looked at each other and discussed what to do.

“Why did she attack us?” Tan asked the others.

“Who knows?” Won said. “Does it matter?”

“I think it does,” Tan said. “And she knows, obviously. But I think that rock hit her pretty hard. She seems pretty out of it. Do you think she’s going to die?”

“She’s a cultivator as strong as you are, Tan. Do you think getting hit in the head with a rock would kill you?” Ko asked.

“Um, depends on the rock and who threw it,” Tan admitted. “What the heck was she talking about? We haven’t been getting in anyone’s way, have we?”

“Well, I know she wasn’t happy that we got the egg,” Pao said. “Maybe she found the formation and thought that we were stealing it?”

“It’s our formation though,” Tan argued. “We brought it with us. I mean, Dad can just make us another one if we were to sell it to the sect, but it sounds like they’re having trouble right now and wouldn’t be interested.”

They continued to talk and Fiora half-listened as she struggled to recover. Her ears were ringing and she was seeing double, but she slowly came back to herself.

“I’m right here. You might as well ask me instead of speculating,” she said as they continued to talk circles.

The children glanced at her, and took her up on the offer. “Why did you attack us? What did we do to you?” Tan demanded.

“First you stole the Qi guardian I’ve been working towards for two years,” She said, biting off the venom in her voice. “Then you stole the Inner Flame Hidden Gates Pills from under my nose as well. You think that this is a game? You spoiled little brats, I bet you’ve had everything handed to you your entire lives! Well I—”

“Wait, this is about the drugs that the creepy guy gave us?” Tan asked, astounded.

Fiora paused. “Yes, that’s right. I was going to take them from your corpses, and then—”

“Why didn’t you just ask us for them?” Tan said. “We don’t even want them, we just accepted them to be polite to Argo or Argot or whatever his name is.”

Fiora blinked. He had a point, she hadn’t asked them if they’d be willing to negotiate for them. “I’ll give you one hundred contribution points for them,” she said.

“Whatever. You can just have them,” Tan said, dropping the boxes out of his ring onto the ground. “I’m tired. Let’s go.”

The children walked away, leaving Fiora bound, but with enough time she’d be able to use her magic to burn through the ropes. She looked at the four boxes of pills sitting nearby, her eyes wide with the ease at which the boy had parted with the precious treasures.

“Are you sure you should have given them to her?” Ko asked Tan. Fiora could hear their voices vanishing into the distance as they talked about her.

“Yeah, why not? We don’t want them. If my parents believed in pills they would have said something about them,” Tan answered.

“That’s not what I meant,” Ko said. “What if she’s addicted or something? It’s not good to feed people’s addiction.”

“It’s none of our business,” Tan argued, and Fiora couldn’t hear the rest of the argument as they left her earshot.

She stared at the boxes, then burned through the ropes that bound her. The boy hadn’t just given her the Inner Flame Hidden Gates Pills she’d demanded, but three other boxes filled with pills that were equally valuable.

For just a moment, she was overcome with shame. She had attacked him, and he had responded with overwhelming generosity. But then she crushed the shame with ruthless pragmatism and began making a mental list of who she could sell the unneeded pills to. She promptly retired to her own lodgings, popping one of the Inner Flame Hidden Gates Pills into her mouth and sitting on her prayer mat as she cultivated.

The pills tasted like sour fish seasoned with tobasco, and they gave her flatulence. But they would, eventually, push her through to the fourth stage of the foundation realm. She wasn’t ready to accept the children as allies, but she reluctantly revisited them as ‘not enemies’ in her head.

And eventually, she put them out of her thoughts altogether as she focused on getting stronger to meet her goal.

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