Crowds cheered and flames roared as aspected Ki washed over the audience packed together outside the small arena inside the walls of the Hidden Heart Sect. Sparks winked in and out of existence in the concentrated Ki while purple sympathy flames flashed above the audience’s heads where fire Ki met the dozens other aspects left by the sect’s day long exhibition. In the arena, two young men darted back and forth in a blur of green robes and flashing techniques while the audience from the sidelines even as their hair singed and their fine robes grew holes where the sparks found them.

One of the contestants appeared momentarily from the blur as he stopped and planted his feet. Long hair whipped around him as he raised a hand to unleash a gout of fire that engulfed the entire opposite side of the arena.

The crowd cheered, even as those closest to the newly born blaze scrambled away from the Ki born fire. A blade of forged light flew at the fire cultivator and he ducked out of the way, blurring back to speeds that matched his opponent as they “traded pointers” across a patch of sand that glowed from the heat.

Yi Cao sat amongst the other junior disciples of the Hidden Heart Sect in a cordoned off section along one side of the arena reserved for the sect, it’s elders, and those members permitted to sit by rank beneath the elders’ dais to watch. He watched a spark flicker to life in the overabundant Ki. Watched it drift down towards the back of one of the juniors half his age and hover, as though indecisive, then wink back out of existence.

A dragon appeared above the arena, coiling into a condensed tower of golden Ki to roar before diving for the cultivators in the arena.

The Crowd cheered. The boy in front of Yi Cao cheered, turned, wide eyed to a friend beside him to shout something Yi Cao didn’t here.

Yi Cao, just stared at the spot where the spark had disappeared.

He lifted his own hand, fingers cupped as though to cradle a non-existant flame, then let them drop as a crescendo of light and raging fire consumed the arena, obscuring its two occupants entirely from sight. He watched with all the others as the fire and light constructs faded to sparks to reveal the two combatants standing with dummy swords unsheathed, the blade of one half buried in the sand, the blade of the fire wielding young master just touching its tip to the other man’s throat.

The crowd erupted.

Yi Cao’s little cousin turned to him with eyes wide as tea cups, still wearing the plain gray travel robes he’d worn when he arrived the day before this tournament exhibition instead of the brown outer disciples robes he would wear once the masters pulled one out of storage for him.

“Can you do that?” He asked.

Yi Cao snorted but didn’t answer him. One of the boys a few years his cousin’s senior and still at least a half dozen Yi Cao’s junior, spoke up for him.

“No one in brown robes can do that.” The boy said. He pointed to the pair in the arena still surrounded by a dissipating fog of Ki. “That’s Bao Goa and Zihan Beigao. Bao is one of the sect’s mercenaries. He spends most of his time fighting demons in the north. That’s why his law is so condensed. You can sense some of it in the dragon he summoned. He’s probably somewhere deep into the node forming stage of the second testing otherwise they wouldn’t have matched him against Zihan.”

“What’s the node forming stage?” Yi Cao’s cousin asked.

Yi Cao answered him this time. “When you go from using the ambient Ki to specifically aspected Ki.” He watched Zihan and Bao Goa separate in order to bow to one another, then glanced at his little cousin. “Capacity goes up too. A lot. I’m a little stronger than your average mortal. A little faster.” He turned back to the cultivators in the ring. “I couldn’t summon a spark if I wanted to. Much less a dragon.”

The crowd cheered as the two men straightened and elder Xia stepped to the front of the dais behind the junior disciples to congratulate the two combatants on their advancement then went on and on about the honor of the sect and its bright future. The boys beneath him listened in silence, while Yi Cao felt his hand curling tight into a fist, heard the noise of the crowd shift towards the susurration of the willow trees beneath the sect’s walls.

“Now comes the dangerous part.”

Clouds hung between the sect and the sun the day elder Xia found him amongst the other boys his age to tell him that his cousin had arrived.

The elder loomed over Yi Cao, casting a pall of silence over the table of new minted apprentices as he glanced over them before his eyes settled on Yi Cao.

“I will take you to him.” He said evenly. He flicked one finger as summons and Yi Cao got up from the table, leaving the half cup of rice wine he’d been fiddling with while he listened to his once-friends compare stories of their masters and apprenticeships without contributing any stories of his own. He had no stories to share. None that they hadn’t heard before as children in the same dormitory he still shared with children six years his junior.

He followed elder Xia without a word while his friends returned to their stories without a hitch, as he’d never really been there.

Tents littered the interior yards of the Sect compound and merchants who’d come specifically for the testing shouted their wares from carts stacked with goods that wouldn’t be seen in this part of the wilderness until the testing came again in another year.

Silks from the capital. Scales from sea dragons of the east. Porcelain and tools manufactured in civilization a three month’s travel from the sect.

Elder Xia led Yi Cao deftly through the maze of the temporary camp until they were back on the cobbled streets of the compound proper. Two story wooden houses peered down at them from either side while green banners with the boxed heart of the sect’s emblem hung limp in the still air. Men, outer members of the sect, raised cups and shouted greetings to the elder as they passed while the women of the sect laughed at them or wandered among the carts in tight knit clicks or accompanied by their husbands, or, for the more richly dressed wives of their visitors, by guards armed with truncheons or wooden poles.

When their path crossed that of a brown robed disciple a handful of year’s Yi Cao’s junior elder Xia told him to follow. The boy bowed wordlessly then fell in step beside Yi Cao.

Brown stone walls ringed the compound. The sect was not old, barely older, in truth, than Yi Cao himself, but the walls were a remnant from a time when this had been the wilderness outpost of a robber baron, a man as much thug as administrator to those handful of villages built by hardnosed woodsmen and stubborn peasants out here where no proper imperial authority existed until the sect arrived. The walls ringed the top of a broad hill, and elder Xia led his two charges out through the gates bustling with carts and visitors down a narrow empty path into the forest of willow trees and aspen that ringed the hill like a second wall beneath the sect.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

Yi Cao did not begin to feel uneasy until the sigh and rattle of leaves stirred by what little breeze moved beneath the overcast sky replaced the distant voices of the sect in celebration.

A narrow creek chuckled through rounded stones deep beneath the trees. Elder Xia stopped as they reached the middle of the bridge that crossed it and turned to look at Yi Cao.

“Now comes the dangerous part.”

Flat eyes regarded Yi Cao without expression until the elder went on. “If you run, you will die. Do you understand?”

Yi Cao nodded and the elder turned to the disciple they’d picked up along the way. “Do you have a name, boy?”

The disciple smiled as he bowed to the elder. “This one is Yuo Zhaoping.” The youth told him. “How can this Yuo serve the honored elder?”

The strike that felled him moved so fast that Yi Cao couldn’t even see it. One moment the boy stood bent at the waist on the crown of the bridge and in the next he hurtled over the side of the bridge to splash into the creek below.

The trees whipped in the aftermath of the blow and Elder Xia regarded Yi Cao with that same flat expression across the bridge. When he was sure that Yi Cao wouldn’t run, the elder stepped up, into the air, then dropped light as a leaf down to the stream where the twelve year old You lay drowning.

Aspen leaves clattered like thunder in the silence. Weeping willows whispered and rasped, and a gurgling thrashing sound rose from beneath the bridge.

Yi Cao did not hear the elder return to the bridge behind him. Something made him turn, and when he turned he found the elder looking at him as he dried his hands on a scrap of cloth.

“What are you doing?”

The words came unbidden to Yi Cao’s lips. When he heard them Yi Cao immediately threw himself onto his face and Cow Towed before the elder.

The bridge shook beneath him in the silence.

“A tragic accident, don’t you think?” The elder asked. “And such a promising young disciple. So… dedicated.” He regarded Yi Cao steadily. He finished drying his hands then tucked the scrap of cloth back into his robes. “One wonders if he will even be missed.”

The bridge shook violently and Yi Cao pressed his face harder into the rough grain of the wood.

“You will not follow the instructions I gave you in the sight of the other elders. Do you understand?”

Yi Cao pressed his hands together. “Th-this Yi Cao… does not…”

Elder Xia sighed and smoothed down one corner of his mustache with a thumb. “Repeat to me your original instructions.” He said.

The instructions he’d memorized the day the elders called him to an early testing tumbled out of him as he clutched to the bridge for balance.

“I-I-I was to… go to the technomancers, ahead of the delegation of inner disciples, and-and-and I was to-to collect a case from the p-place known as the Baggage Train, on the th-third deck. Then, I was to- to, without drawing attention to myself, I was to return to the gate where I arrived and w-wait for the delegation to return. I-I-I was b-bait, to draw out any waiting observers who would wish to intercept the package before the inner disciples arrived to collect the actual treasure. Safe, only because they would be right behind me to rescue me if, if, if, someone decided to try and t-take it from me.”

“That was a lie.” Elder Xia told him.

Yi Cao’s mouth opened to deny it but was interrupted.

“Oh not your instructions.” Xia told him. “But the, reasoning, we gave you, and the details of the package you were going to collect.”

Yi Cao clamped his mouth shut and pressed his face harder into the wood.

“You were no bait.”

The elder fell silent for a moment as though collecting his though while he listened to the whispering of the leaves in the woods around them.

“I am glad that you did not run.” Elder Xia said. “It confirms to me that you were the right choice, even though some of the elders advocated using someone younger, more gullible. Yuo, perhaps, or one of the other juniors. I told them you would handle the possible stress and disorientation of the journey better. That you would carry yourself with more resolve. That you would be more motivated by the promise of power.”

Silence as the elder seemed to study something in the shifting of the leaves.

“You were not going to collect a false treasure.” The elder eventually went on. “We were sending you to collect the true one. To collect it, and bring it back to us while all the eyes of our enemies were on the delegation we sent just behind you. The security of the whole operation, of your safety, rested in your anonymity as a nobody in the sect. A servant, less than, even. A bug that no self-respecting sect would expect us to permit to handle such an invaluable treasure, let alone even look at, or breath upon.”

The elder’s voice grew closer as the elder approached Yi Cao, though no footsteps rang against the wood of the bridge.

“There is a change in plan.” The elder told him.

“But the plan was yours!”

“Of course it was.” The elder snapped.

Yi Cao quailed inside.

“You will still collect the package,” The elder said after a moment of silence, “but you will not return with it. You will place it in a locker I will identify for you and then return with the case, empty, for the elders to rage and argue over while I send someone else to collect the treasure for my own ends.”

A hand touched Yi Cao’s shoulder and the boy jerked back.

The trees whispered in the breeze.

“Please.” Yi Cao whispered. “Don’t make me do this. I swore an oath, on my name…”

He could hear the stream beneath the slats of the bridge, chuckling as the water flowed around the body floating just beneath them.

“...On my cousin’s name…”

“Then you know what is at stake.” The elder moved back, and when he spoke his voice cracked like a whip. “Get up.”

Yi Cao didn’t hesitate. He scrambled to his feet and looked at the ground, then yanked his eyes away to look up at the sky visible between the gently shifting branches of the trees.

“In a moment we are going to retrieve your cousin. Afterwards, I will take you, both of you, to the lesser treasure hall where I will give you a construct that will allow you to open the locks on the case and a slip of paper with instructions for finding the cabinet where you will put it, in secret, before resealing the box and continuing with the mission as you were initially instructed.”

Yi Cao met the murderer’s eyes and had a very sudden and very vivid memory of the last time he’d seen the boy beneath them, at the testing in which he’d lit a tile in the first ring of the formation for the first time, a radiant smile Yi Cao had envied as he sat in the hall amongst the others many years his junior knowing what he would have to risk in order to stay in the sect as Yuo would, simply for advancing a single step in his cultivation.

“If you wish to kill me,” Yi Cao whispered, “I am powerless to stop you.”

Elder Xia made a face. “Don’t be dramatic.” He said. “I do not intend to kill you. I intend to use you, and to reward you handsomely in return.”

Yuo’s grin when he turned, knowing he’d secured his future for another year as a disciple of the sect, had turned Yi Cao’s stomach. He’d barely been able to see the blow that killed him.

“If you do not kill me, then they will.” Yi Cao replied. He turned his head to meet the elder’s gaze. “The other elders.”

Elder Xia shook his head. “They will not even know that the case was ever opened. The key I will give you is a spirit key. A construct with only one use. You set it against the case and feed it a bit of Ki and it will dissolve. The law it is bound to will allow it to open the case without tripping any of the hidden alarms or watchers that may be on the locks. When you close it, after you have removed the treasure, it will be as though the box was never opened, and, when you return, locked box in hand, the elders will have no choice but to support your advancement through the second ring as they promised. You will be rewarded. A valued member of the sect. A valued, outer member, of the sect.”

Elder Xia raised one eyebrow. “A completed second circle is enough to remain an outer member of the sect, but not enough if you still wish to become an inner member, or did you think that they would simply elevate you into their ranks? Cultivation resources are always at a premium, inner worlds are hungry spaces, and the best treasures always find their way to the immortals whose servants we are. No. You will require more, more, that I am prepared to provide, for this service. With my support in the testing, you won’t have any trouble entering the sect, after. I’ll even throw in something for your cousin now as a show of good faith.”

Yi Cao hesitated. “And if I refuse?”

The elder glanced down at the river with a faint look of distaste. The look he gave Yi Cao was as flat and emotionless as when he’d first ordered Yi Cao not to run away.

“Your cousin is waiting.” He said. “Lets go give him a proper welcome to his new sect.”

The smile he gave Yi Cao was nothing but chilling.