He told no one what he had seen. He spent a week in the mountains with Ningxue learning how to draw a sword without appearing to move. He watched Ziyu coax a flame to sit like a dog. He and Ruyan traveled to the Qilong Range and stood beneath a Gate made of bone.
It rose like a spine torn from the world, every vertebra inscribed with rites as old as the first frost. It did not hum. It slept with one eye open.
"You pushed a Gate once," Ruyan said. "Push this one."
He did. It shoved back so hard his fingernails bled. He laughed, although it hurt. He called Thunder, but the Gate did not care for weather. He called Space, but the Gate knew all the steps. He called Dragon and wrote one more line. The Gate fell still. It lifted its eyelid and watched him with the interest of a tortoise who has lived too long to be surprised.
"It knows you," Ruyan murmured, and her pupils narrowed again.
"It knows what I was," he said. "It will decide if what I am is enough."
They did not cross that day. They would, but not yet. He needed to climb. The Middle Realms waited above, where the altars are made of cleaner stone and the knives are nicer. He would go there. He would find her.
And so he did what he had done when he was a god and a street urchin both. He ate. He slept. He trained. He set his feet upon the ladder of Skysong's realms: Body Tempering to Meridian Opening to Core Condensation to Nascent Soul, which is where most sect boys stall and decide maybe running a tea shop is not so bad. He did not stop there.
When he faced his first Thunder Tribulation, he went out into it without umbrella or armor, because dragons do not wear hats. He took the bolts into his chest and wrote them down the way scholars write notes. His skin smoked. He grinned. He failed to die.
In the city below, rumors started to peel from him and stick to walls. He collected enemies, because that is the tax you pay for walking. A young master decided he had been insulted by the way Su Xuan's shadow fell across a pond. Ambitious elders decided to adopt him; he declined. He made friends who would not have called themselves that in the morning and did by dusk.
Bai Ningxue told him she had no interest in men, because her heart had been broken by the sword and then mended by it, and now it fed until it slept heavy and content. Then she admitted she might be interested in him because he did not flinch when she drew her blade and because he watched the wind when he spoke, which suggested a kind of patience she admired.
Mu Ziyu kissed his cheek once in a corridor full of smoke and ran away laughing, then came back to see if he would follow, then rolled her eyes when he did not, then stayed anyway because she loved a problem to solve and he was as full of knots as a sailor's bag.
Long Ruyan stood under the Gate of bone and touched her scale-stud with a fingertip and said, very quietly so that only the mountain heard her, "I know what you carry," and more quietly to herself, "I wonder if you will survive it."
He wanted vengeance. He wanted justice. He wanted to see if, when he got there, and the altar rose beneath his feet again, and the Ten Thousand Paths whispered, he would be the same man he had been. He did not want to be. The boy of Red Sand had a claim on him now. So did Ningxue. So did Ziyu. So did Ruyan. So did every sharecropper who came to him with a chapped palm and a quiet, stubborn ask. He could no longer say the world was only a ladder.
At the turn of spring he stood again at the Qilong Gate. He put his hand upon bone. He wrote a line. He spoke a word that tasted like thunder and tea and blood and plum blossoms.
"Open."
The Gate opened.
On the other side, the Middle Realm smelled like rain on stone and knives hidden beneath silk. A procession waited. The woman in the veil stood at its head. She lowered the cloth from her face and smiled a smile like a cut, like a shared memory of pain.
"Qinglian's student," she said, and he tasted winter leaves again.
"Tell her I'm coming," Su Xuan said. The Wheel turned and his heart chimed. "Tell her I have the scale she dropped."
The woman laughed, genuine, as if someone had told her a joke she had been waiting for. "We know," she said. "You bled on our altar. You are on our books."
He walked forward. Ningxue at his left, Ziyu at his right, Ruyan behind him with her hood up and her smile full of storm. Above, the clouds gathered for a storm that had been promised when the world was new.
The Pathlord had fallen. Su Xuan had risen. Ten thousand spokes sparked. Somewhere, far above, in a place the mind refuses to keep steady, Qinglian lit a lamp and set it down, lifted it and set it down, and closed her eyes.
The journey of revenge is a story with a tight line and a sharp hook. It is also a story with a wheel and a gate. He would walk both.
And when he found her, on an altar made of light and all the old knives laid out like a wedding, he would not ask, Why?
He would ask, What did you pay, and what did you buy?
If the answer was Heaven, he would break it.
If the answer was fear, he would pity it until pity had teeth.
The storm rolled. He stepped into it. The dragon in his bones woke and smiled. The Ten Thousand Paths peeled open like a fan. He wrote the first line of the new vow with the same hand that had fallen once and refused to stay down.
Forward.