Long Jia Wei stood in the shadow of a tree. He did his best to suppress a shudder as he watched Lord Lu and Fate’s Razor discussing something. Like many others, he’d believed that Fate’s Razor was a myth made from whole cloth or some ancient cultivator who had ascended long since. Meeting the man, however brief it had been, was one of those experiences that had seared itself into his memory. As frightening as Lord Lu could be, he was eclipsed by the older cultivator. To Long Jia Wei’s senses and intuition, Feng Ming was power incarnate. Not the kind of power that normal cultivators wielded. He was more like a force of nature. He was wind or the tides or some other incomprehensibly vast thing that could and would swallow the unwary in its passage.
He sighed a little in relief as the two men walked away to continue their discussion in private. Based on their expressions, they were discussing the coming war. He supposed that everyone with real power was privately discussing the war all of the time. If they weren’t, they were fools. He was not one of those people, but he was adjacent to some of them. He’d pieced some of it together from snippets of conversation he’d heard before Lord Lu had simply told him outright what was coming and then sworn him to secrecy. Long Jia Wei had been a little surprised that he’d been informed, but not the way he might have been a year earlier. He’d been making a genuine and ongoing effort to prove himself useful to Lu Sen. There were many reasons for that effort.
Some of it was simple gratitude. Judgment’s Gale could have killed him at any moment and had chosen not to end him. While an assassin had to accept the possibility of death, it didn’t make him any less happy to be alive. He also never let himself forget the conversation in which the insanely powerful young man said he was giving Long Jia Wei room to prove himself untrustworthy. Over the last year, fear and gratitude had largely morphed into a deep respect for Lu Sen. Long Jia Wei wouldn’t say that he understood the man, but he had come to understand some of what drove the other cultivator. The man had an abiding sympathy for mortals. Few things would rouse his master to rage and violence like the senseless death and injury of mortals.
It was a sympathy that Long Jia Wei shared. He’d spent more time moving among mortals than most cultivators. He’d passed himself off as a mortal more than once to achieve his missions. He saw exactly how they were treated. He also saw how they behaved with each other when not stifled by a cultivator’s presence. There were only two real differences between them and cultivators. Power and experience. Cultivators had more power. Mortals, ironically, often seemed to have more experience. They seemed to learn more and get more from everything that happened to them. He believed it was because their lives were so much shorter. They examined their lives more deeply, and drew more meaning from them, precisely because their lives were so brief. It was easy to ignore lessons when you knew you had centuries before you.
Of course, one of the most powerful things that drove Judgment’s Gale was embodied in the tiny, laughing figure that was playing with the Xie children. Long Jia Wei had come to check on her, as he did several times every day. Nor was he alone in that activity. That little girl, Ai, was Lord Lu’s chosen family, and the man took family as a deadly serious matter. A fact that was not lost on anyone who wished to remain in his good graces. There might be better-protected children somewhere on the continent, but Long Jia Wei would have wagered a small fortune that he could count them on one hand. At any given time, there were mortals, cultivators, and frequently nascent soul demigods within sight of that child who would unhesitatingly cut down anything suicidal enough to threaten her.
He didn’t know exactly what kind of world-ending event would follow if anyone managed to hurt that little girl. He only knew that he wanted to be dead, having done his best to defend her, before that event occurred. Because Long Jia Wei had no desire to watch the entire world burn as Judgment’s Gale took his revenge. It was one reason why he wished that Ai had not chosen to befriend the Xie children. Most of them were fine, but some of them had that look in their eye. They remembered what they’d had, what they’d lost, and they didn’t intend to let it go unanswered. He’d had that look in his own eyes long ago, and he’d gotten his vengeance on the edge of a dagger. He frowned but decided that it probably wasn’t a problem he needed to address today. In a few more years, though, he worried that some of those Xie children might need to vanish. He was not looking forward to that day. Lord Lu would never ask him to do something like that, but some threats couldn’t be tolerated.
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Glancing around, he saw plenty of defenders loitering in varying degrees of conspicuousness. Not that Ai understood what they were doing. She mostly seemed to see them as her “big” friends, which he supposed wasn’t that far from the truth. Even he’d been charmed by the little girl and gotten himself dragged into some of her games when she decided she needed another body involved. Still, she was adequately protected at the moment, which meant he could get on with his next unpleasant task. He slipped away from the open area where the children usually played and made his way into one of the buildings where the cultivators lived. He personally thought Lord Lu was providing them with more luxury than was appropriate, but his former sect had been rather short on luxury and long on discipline.
He got more than a few uncertain looks as he moved through the building. He had no official role in the sect. There was no office where he could be found. It was how he liked it, and Lord Lu had been content to leave his situation vague. The only thing that people really knew was that he only answered to Judgment’s Gale. That uncertainty had given rise to all kinds of entertaining rumors that he had made no effort to squash. He’d also picked up an unofficial title in the sect. The Cold Blade. It sounded utterly melodramatic to Long Jia Wei, but he supposed it spoke to the uncertainty and fear that surrounded him. Both things that he actively encouraged. He wanted people nervous about him because that could solve a lot of problems before they started. It wasn’t anything like the fear that Lu Sen inspired, fortunately. That kind of fear was more of a hindrance than a help in that it started as many fights as it stopped.
He drew to a stop in front of a particular door. He weighed the advantages and disadvantages of knocking before he simply opened the door and walked in. The person he was there to see was sitting at the stone table that every room had. There was even a scroll open on the table, but neither the man he’d come to see nor the woman who was also in the room was paying any attention to the scroll. Long Jia Wei fixed his gaze on the woman.
“Leave,” he ordered.
She looked startled, initially, and then like she was about to burst into an angry protest. He watched as that impulse faded. She’d figured out who he was. Her eyes went from his face to the daggers he always carried before they moved to the man. She stood and left the room without looking back. The man watched her go with a stricken look on his face that turned fearful when his gaze turned to Long Jia Wei.
“What do you want?” demanded the man.
Long Jia Wei ignored the question and walked over to the table. He scooped up the scroll and glanced at it. Oh, the irony, thought Long Jia Wei. It was a treatise on honorable behavior, one of a very, very few that Lord Lu believed contained something on the subject worth reading. He dropped the scroll back on the table before he looked at the man.
“It’s time for you to leave,” said Long Jia Wei.
“This is preposterous!” the man shouted. “I demand to—”
Long Jia Wei summoned a pile of correspondence the man had tried to send to his supposedly former sect that had been intercepted. They fell from the storage ring and spilled onto the table like an expanding pool of damning water. They were all open, which meant that Long Jia Wei knew what they contained. They were essentially lists and descriptions of everyone at the sect, including best-guess assessments of their strengths and weaknesses. The man stared at the pile with his mouth still open and fear in his eyes. He didn’t look away from the pile until he felt the edge of the blade against his throat.
“You should be very grateful that Lord Lu is a kind man. He’s simply sending you away. I would have sent you home one piece at a time, starting with your lying tongue. Be on the road in five minutes. Do not ever return.”
Long Jia Wei pulled the dagger away from the man’s throat and pointed at the door with it. The man rose and walked out, trying to put on a proud air as though he’d accomplished something grand and worthy. Shaking his head, Long Jia Wei put the evidence back into his storage ring. He followed the man out of the building and watched him disappear down the road. He made a show of walking into a building that he almost immediately slipped out of again. He trailed the spy for hours. The man eventually made camp for the night. After being spotted so easily during that disastrous attempt on Lu Sen’s life a year ago, Long Jia Wei had put a lot of effort into improving his stealth. The man didn’t so much as flinch until the dagger plunged through his back and into his heart. The other dagger opened the man’s throat. The damage was enough that it would kill the man, given a little time, but Long Jia Wei wasn’t in the habit of taking stupid chances. He kicked the man in the head. Hard. It was very difficult to put together a qi technique after a blow like that.
“I imagine you’re wondering why,” said Long Jia Wei as he stared down at the dying man with cold, cold eyes. “Lord Lu is a kind man. I am not.”