The second group of armed men to walk through my shattered front gate in twenty-four hours did not have the courtesy to be debt collectors.
No announcement. No demands. Five of them stepped over the frosted splinters of the timber, fanning out across the courtyard in a practiced, predatory half-circle. They wore mismatched leather armor over gray robes. Scavengers. Vultures looking to pick the bones of the Azure Void Sect before Zhao Feng's larger operation swallowed the territory whole.
The air in the courtyard immediately tasted like battery acid.
My lungs squeezed. The pressure was different from the Crimson Scale thugs yesterday. It was sharper, less disciplined, but heavier. Core Formation. All five of them.
"You have approximately thirty seconds," Old Geezer's voice scraped against the inside of my temples, "before they realize you are a hollow shell and peel the skin from your skull."
I stood at the top of the main hall stairs. My hands were already folded behind my back. Wei Liang's muscle memory locked my spine, tilting my chin up just enough to look down the bridge of my nose at them.
Inside, my heart was hammering so hard it made my teeth ache.
If I drew the sword at my hip, they would instantly sense the dead void inside my meridians.
Thirty seconds.
I looked at the courtyard. Really looked at it.
Six hours ago, Shen Yuebing had walked those twenty-two paces. Where she sat, her passive Stage Seven aura had bled into the ground. Spiritual ice didn't just melt when the sun hit it. It baked into the porous rock. It lingered. I knew this because my boots had slipped slightly when I walked back inside.
The flagstones directly between the gate and the stairs were heavily shaded by the dead willow tree. The morning condensation had settled over the invisible, residual freeze.
It was a patch of black ice, three inches thick, completely undetectable to the naked eye.
I left the sword sheathed. I took one step down the stairs.
"The Azure Void Sect is closed to scavengers," I said. My voice dropped into the courtyard, dragging the syllables out slowly.
The man in the center—tall, missing half his left ear—grinned. He drew a pair of hooked blades. The steel hissed.
"We heard the Sect Master was bleeding out," he said, stepping forward. "Looks like you can still talk."
"I can," I said, stepping down to the second stair. I adjusted my angle by a fraction of an inch, shifting my shoulders so I appeared to be favoring my right side. "The question is whether you can listen."
The scavenger with the missing ear didn't hesitate. He saw the opening. He lunged.
He moved incredibly fast. A blur of gray cloth and drawing steel, crossing the distance in a single, Qi-reinforced leap. He aimed exactly where I wanted him to aim.
His boots hit the shaded flagstones under the willow tree.
He tried to plant his lead foot to launch the strike. The heavy leather boot met the sub-zero spiritual residual left by a woman entirely out of his league. Friction ceased to exist.
His lead leg shot forward into empty air. His forward momentum, accelerated by his own Core Formation Qi, betrayed him instantly.
He went horizontal. The sound of his skull hitting the stone edge cracked like dry firewood. He dropped to the dirt, completely limp.
I hadn't moved a muscle. I was still standing on the second stair, looking down my nose at the remaining four.
They stared at the empty space where their leader had just slipped. Their eyes tracked back to me, searching for a spell fluctuation that didn't exist.
"Who's next?" I asked.
The man on the far left panicked. He avoided the direct route, sweeping wide toward the weapon racks, trying to circle behind me.
My stomach dropped.
He was avoiding the frozen patch under the willow, taking a dry path over broken gravel. Wei Liang's muscle memory tracked him. He was too fast.
I watched him pivot off his back foot, raising a heavy mace. He was five paces away. Four.
Then, his front ankle jerked.
His left boot simply refused to land where physics dictated. The trajectory of his leg warped two inches to the right, as if it had caught an invisible tripwire in the empty air.
He lost his balance mid-swing. The heavy mace carried his weight forward, twisting his torso. His face hit the granite with a wet, heavy snap. He collapsed, clutching his face, groaning through a mask of blood.
I kept my hands behind my back. My fingernails were digging into my own palms so hard the skin was breaking.
What just happened. I didn't do that. Neither did Old Geezer. The stone there was completely dry.
I didn't look at the shadows near the weapon racks. I didn't look for the sixth footprint.
The three men exchanged one look. The man in the middle took a slow step backward.
They turned and ran. They scrambled over the broken gate, not bothering to collect their unconscious comrades, boots kicking up dirt as they fled down the mountain path.
The courtyard emptied. The only sound left was the unconscious leader breathing bubbles through his own blood.
Up on the second-floor balcony, a head slowly peeked over the railing. Zhou Bao stared at the two bleeding bodies on the stones. Then he looked down at me.
"Master," Zhou Bao said. His jaw shook. "Did you... you fought five Core Formation cultivators with a cold stare and the environment?"
I kept my spine straight, refusing to let my chin drop.
"That is not quite accurate," I said, forcing the words out evenly.
I turned around. Up the stairs, through the main hall, blind navigation until I hit the lateral corridor leading to the inner garden. Out of sight of the courtyard. Out of sight of the balcony.
The moment the shadows hit my face, Wei Liang's muscle memory released its grip.
My knees evaporated.
The adrenaline evaporated. The base of my skull throbbed violently. My lungs, which had apparently forgotten how to process oxygen for the last three minutes, started heaving violently.
I stumbled forward into the sunlight of the inner herb garden. The world tilted sideways. The ground rushed up to meet me.
I hit the dirt face-first.
It didn't even hurt. The soil was soft, recently turned. It smelled intensely of crushed mint, wet roots, and loamy earth. I lay there, my cheek pressed against a clod of dirt, listening to my own heart trying to hammer its way out of my throat.
Alive. Just black ice. An invisible wire. I gagged, tasting stomach acid.
Footsteps. Light, unhurried footsteps crunching on the garden path.
I couldn't drag myself up. My arms felt like they were filled with wet cement.
A pair of cloth shoes stopped roughly ten inches from my nose. They were simple, practical shoes, currently dusted with potting soil. The hem of a yellow robe brushed against the dirt.
"Oh my," a voice said.
It sounded like someone who had just found a particularly interesting beetle.
I cracked one eye open. The angle was terrible. I could see the knees of her robes, and hands that were currently coated in fine, silvery pill-dust.
"You're hurt," the girl said.
I spat a grain of soil off my lip.
"No," I said to the dirt.
"You fell over."
"I am thinking," I said.
A pause.
"Well," the girl said, setting her trowel down gently. "The soil here is very good for thinking. I was just checking the ph-balance of the shade-moss. Do you mind if I keep digging while you think?"
I closed my eye. "Dig."
The soft, rhythmic sound of metal scraping against earth started up a few feet away. She started humming. It was a bouncy, upbeat tune that completely clashed with the fact that there were two bleeding mercenaries in the front yard.
"You absolute disaster," Old Geezer said in the dark space of my skull. "You survived."
I did, I thought.
I stayed face-down in the mint leaves. Somewhere near my head, the metal trowel kept scraping against the dirt.