“Wu Ling, you were amazing,” Su Xiang said as they hurried through the Lapis Lake ward to her aunt’s shop. “You defeated six men with just your zither!”
“Never again,” Wu Ling said fiercely, feeling like he’d steeped himself in filth just to escape from the collection of brutes. “I don’t ever want to have to do… that. Never again,” he insisted.
“What do you mean?” Su Xiang said, looking confused. “I couldn’t have defeated them with my sword if I’d wanted to, but you completely disarmed them with just a few words and they fell right into your trap!” When she learned that her sworn brother intended to pursue the path of an Artist, Su Xiang had felt like she would need to dedicate much of her life to keeping him safe from the threats of the world but now, seeing him fight back with a few words and an enchanting bit of music, she realized that Wu Ling had a very different kind of strength, one that might not be inferior to her own.
“That trap was very, very flimsy,” Wu Ling said with a shake of his head. “I barely managed to pull down San and Er and the only reason I did is because you got them to drink so much wine,” he confessed. “If they hadn’t fallen in another few minutes, I’d have run myself dry and then we’d both need to run and hope they couldn’t catch us. And that whole time, you had to let them paw at you and pass you around like a rag doll,” he fumed. His face burned in a combination of anger and shame at the way his sworn sister had been treated and the fact that he’d had no better method of escaping than to ask her to endure it to buy him time. As much as he hated putting on the act for those brutes, he hated the way they’d treated Su Xiang much more. “It’s not right. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that to you.”
“It’s not your fault,” Su Xiang said, blushing at the memory of how the men had handled her. “You would have done better with them. You’re good at flirting, you like it even! I bet you would have danced just out of reach every time they tried to touch you,” she said looking down in deep shame. “You wouldn’t have needed to let them fondle you to keep their attention,” she said, almost too quietly to be heard over the noise of the busy street.
“Hey, hey,” Wu Ling said, grabbing her elbow and pulling her down a side street. Gently, he lifted her chin and stared deeply into her sapphire eyes. “One, don’t ever be ashamed of what happened there, okay?” Wu Ling said, feeling the shame radiating from her like someone had painted her in a lurid color that didn’t belong anywhere near the proud sword cultivator. “You played along because I asked you to, it’s my fault for anything that happened, not yours, okay?” He waited until he saw not only her nod of genuine acceptance but felt the diminishing of the aura of shame that had clung to her. Thankfully, she hadn’t spent too long dwelling on it, and getting her mind spinning in a different direction wasn’t too difficult. The last thing he wanted was for a bunch of stupid thugs to leave her with lasting internal scars. “Second thing, I hate, hate, hate flirting with men. I’m not gay you know,” he insisted. “I have fun flirting with women when we’re all having fun flirting. What I just did,” he said, making a disgusted face. “That was like flirting with a pack of wolves. No,” he corrected himself. “Like flirting with a pack of mangy dogs. They’re gross, they slobber all over you and if you make the wrong move, they’ll decide they’re hungry and they’ll bite you. Honestly, I was just as scared as you were, if not more. If things had gone wrong and they’d found out I’m not really a woman, can you imagine their reaction?”
“Oh, Brother Ling, I didn’t even think,” Su Xiang said, her eyes going wide in horror as she imagined the drunken men becoming violent and unleashing their substantial physical strength on Wu Ling’s delicate body. The image her mind conjured was so horrifyingly terrible that she began to tremble with a storm of fear and anger toward the men they’d just escaped. “You really were gambling there weren’t you?” Su Xiang asked, staring into his silvery eyes and looking for the truth in his words.
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“I was,” he admitted, pulling her back into the main street and resuming their walk towards the shop, glancing around to make sure the men from the Red Tiger’s Den hadn’t woken up and started chasing them. “I’m sure my mom would have handled things just fine like that,” he added as they walked. “She was always good at distracting men, leaving them unsure if she was coming or going and never letting anyone get their greedy little hands on her. They’d have been putty in her hands. That’s not how I intend to fight though. I don’t mean to become that kind of artist.”
“How do you intend to fight then?” Su Xiang asked. “I’ve never really seen Artists who are fighters. Most of the ones I’ve seen are performers like,” she almost said ‘like you’ but changed her mind at the last moment. “Like your mother or the other women at the school you went to. The painters I’ve seen make a living selling enchanting artworks and people like my Aunt apply their skills to making fine garments. Even swordsmiths and armorers who make treasures a person can fight with rarely fight themselves unless they’ve also reawakened as a Martial cultivator,” she continued. “So, how exactly do you plan to fight with your art?”
“With your help for one,” he said, crossing the last footbridge between them and the safety of her aunt’s shop. “I need to spend a few days actually cultivating and learning techniques but it isn’t enough to just read the books. I need you to be my training partner for a bit. Are you willing to come over to help me practice against a real opponent?”
“Of course I’m willing,” Su Xiang said hesitantly. “But that doesn’t tell me how you’ll actually be fighting or what it means to help you practice.”
“During my awakening, I had a vision of my Master,” Wu Ling confessed readily. His manual carried many secrets but he didn’t want to keep secrets from Su Xiang. She’d see through any lies he told and if he tried to be vague about things, he was certain it would only create uncomfortable distance between them. Most people, he wouldn’t expose much to, but for his sworn sister, he saw no reason to hold back.
“The Immortal Empress who wrote the cultivation manual,” he continued. “She told me that my art was a mighty enough weapon to fight armies and topple empires if that was what my heart desired. Hey, don’t look at me like that,” he said to her disbelieving stare. “She talked about painting guardian beasts into existence and summoning firestorms with my calligraphy and ‘much, much more.’ I looked at some of the techniques in the manual and I was left feeling like people in Silver Sword City don’t really understand Artist cultivators at all. Not the way she did.”
“It sounds like you really admire this master of yours,” Su Xiang said, looking deeply into his silvery eyes. “Have you started to fall for her?”
“What? No, of course not,” Wu Ling insisted. “The way she talked about love,” he started, continuing in a rush as he saw Su Xiang begin to frown. “She talked about becoming fighters for the people we love. The way she said it, it felt like she had people she loved deeply. The kind of love that she would fight and kill to defend if she had to. She was very intense! I’m not interested in wooing women who already have someone in their heart. I admire her, sure, a disciple should admire their Master, but that’s all there is to it,” he explained.
“As long as that’s all there is to it, then it’s fine,” she replied, smiling happily. She’d seen people fall in love with their masters and the only results she’d seen from it were broken hearts or people trapped in relationships with such extreme power imbalances that the one who had been a disciple suffered in countless ways. She didn’t want to see either outcome for anyone, most especially for her sworn brother. “We’re here,” she said, turning to gesture at the storefront they’d reached. “Let’s go get you into something more manly than that dress.”
“Please,” Wu Ling said with a smile. “You have no idea how much I want to change into something else right now.”