Dao of Language

Mu Fei, whom almost everyone in that building knows as Master Mu, contemplates the room from the small dais on which they have installed her work table.

Before her, distributed across desks arranged with neatness, the small group of students that the Tower of the Five Dragons has seen fit to assign her the moment she returned from her little vacation in the Tianjing Empire toils in silence over the talismans she has entrusted to them. None lifts their gaze and none gets distracted, only the constant rasp of the brushes over the talisman paper can be heard and, very occasionally, the contained crackle of one who, after spoiling a stroke, sets aside the ashes and begins anew without a single complaint.

It is, objectively, a tableau that almost any talisman master of the continent would give half a life to have before them.

And, even so, the sight is enough to make Mu Fei sigh.

She does not sigh because the students are bad, but because it is precisely the opposite. Each of them is, in their own way, a small genius in the subject, chosen among hundreds precisely for their talent. The problem, she concludes as she observes them with her eyelids half-closed, is that she has had the immense misfortune of meeting a certain little princess before them.

And after having taught an eagle to fly, sitting down to teach the same thing to a coop of hens, however lustrous, docile and well-fed the hens may be, turns out to be an enterprise that strikes her as, in the best of cases, profoundly lackluster.

Nor does it help, she adds to herself with a renewed touch of annoyance, that the task she finds herself obliged to impose on them should be precisely the most tedious imaginable. Because the talismans those geniuses copy over and over again are none other than the ones the Tower has decided to mass-produce to make money during the effects of the fire Qi surge, so that handful of promising minds is spending its best hours polishing an extremely narrow and most concrete repertoire. A repertoire that, to crown the misfortune, will serve them practically nothing once the surge subsides and the heat returns to its course.

Mu Fei sighs one last time, lets the thought dissolve with the same elegance with which she discards everything that does not merit her attention and takes her own brush to occupy herself with the part of the work that, like it or not, also falls to her.

She has barely wet the tip with the ink when the door of the room opens.

The man who enters does so with just enough discretion not to disturb the students, and a single glance suffices for Mu Fei to recognize in him one of Jiang Hai’s secretaries. The newcomer stops at a prudent distance, inclines his head with respect and addresses her with the title everyone employs in that place.

“Master Mu, the Executive Hai has asked me to accompany you to his office”, he says in a low voice so as not to break the room’s concentration. “He wishes to speak with you.”

Mu Fei sets the brush on the brush rest with an unhurried gesture and straightens up fluidly while she arranges the wrinkles of her clothing.

“Then it will be better not to keep him waiting”, she replies as she picks up the closed fan that rested beside the inkwell.

The secretary guides her through the corridors of the Tower until a door that Mu Fei knows all too well. There the man steps aside, she knocks twice with her knuckles and, without bothering to await a reply, pushes the leaf and enters.

The office is just as she remembered it. Spacious without being ostentatious, lit by that white and somewhat cold light its owner seems to prefer, and presided over by a dark wood table behind which awaits a man of impossible-to-pin-down age. He wears, as always, a luxurious but discreet outfit, of that luxury that knows perfectly well what it represents and does not need to announce it. He is the same man with whom, not so long ago, she argued through a mirror from a hotel in the Tianjing Empire about a certain rough gem, only that this time there is no glass in between.

The man lifts his gaze from the documents he had before him and observes her enter with an expression she already knows all too well.

“It is good manners to wait until one is given permission before entering another’s office”, he says in a dry tone.

Mu Fei crosses the room without her face betraying that she has heard a single word, chooses the chair nearest at hand and sits in it with a studied elegance.

The man observes her do it and presses his lips together.

“That same applies to sitting down”, he adds with acrimony.

Mu Fei, after having settled herself, finally looks at him.

“You called me, Jiang Hai”, she tells him with the calm of one who lays out an obvious truth. “And if after doing so you were not waiting for me, the only thing you would reveal would be a degree of incompetence so notable that it would make you unviable for your position.”

Jiang Hai holds her gaze an instant and then sighs, leaving the documents to one side like someone setting aside one matter to face a worse one.

“I know you are still angry with me for having saddled you with that group of students the moment you set foot here”, he says, and in his voice there is a weariness he does not bother to disguise. “But I received pressure to do it, and the only thing within my power was to reduce the number, since at first they intended to assign you almost triple.”

Mu Fei lets out a snort, brief and elegant, but one that leaves no room for doubt about what she thinks.

“If they had done that, I would have gathered my things and left the way I came”, she replies firmly.

“That was, precisely, the argument I wielded so that they would lower the figure”, Jiang Hai replies without flinching. Then he intertwines his fingers over the table and his tone becomes different. “In any case, I have not made you come to talk about that.”

As he says it, Jiang Hai brushes with a finger a barely visible mark on the surface of the table, and instantly several discreet runes light up with a faint glow along the walls of the office, enveloping the room in the hermetic silence of a privacy formation, only then does he continue.

“I have called you to ask whether you remember Li Yundong”, he tells her with a certain caution.

The name falls upon the room like a stone thrown into a calm pond, since Mu Fei’s expression, until that moment tinged with an almost lazy annoyance, hardens all at once while from her eyes little sparks begin to flash that rise into the air.

“If you have found that thieving rat I will go myself, in person, to take care of him”, she says, and each word comes out wrapped in a cutting coldness.

Jiang Hai, far from being intimidated, leans back in his chair and sketches a smile.

“I regret having to inform you that the most probable thing is that you spent months in the same city as him without ever finding out”, he says. “But I am afraid it is already too late for you to avenge yourself in person.”

Mu Fei breathes in slowly, in an evident effort to contain something that struggles to come out, and when she speaks she does so almost between her teeth.

“What is that supposed to mean?” she mutters.

Jiang Hai, without abandoning the smile, replies to her.

“A bounty hunter managed to follow his trail”, he says. “And he found him in none other than a wretched dive in the capital of the Tianjing Empire.”

For an instant the air of the room seems to halt, and the next instant Mu Fei loses control when a tangle of lightning bolts sprouts from her body with a dry and ferocious crackle that makes the chair in which she was sitting come apart under the discharge in a rain of smoking splinters while she rises to her feet in the middle of the room.

“Are you telling me that I had that wretch within arm’s reach for months, and that never, ever, did I come to know it?” she exclaims, and her voice no longer preserves anything of its habitual laziness.

Jiang Hai contemplates first the charred remains of what until a second ago was a perfectly respectable chair, and then, with a calm explainable only by the years he has spent dealing with her, lifts his gaze toward Mu Fei.

“That is so”, he confirms. “But calm yourself before running off to nowhere, because the bounty hunter took care of Li Yundong despite the fact that the reward was for the goods he carried off and not for his head.”

Mu Fei closes her eyes, breathes deeply and the lightning bolts that crackled around her fold back little by little until extinguishing themselves. When she opens them again, her gaze slides toward the destroyed chair and, for an instant, something resembling guilt crosses her face.

But the gesture lasts barely a blink before she discards it with the same ease with which she discards anything that discomforts her and, without a single word of apology, settles into another of the office’s chairs.

“And when are they going to return to me all the talismans he stole?” she asks once seated.

Jiang Hai, faced with the question, composes a face of circumstance that Mu Fei does not like in the slightest.

“As for that, there may be a small problem”, he says, measuring his words.

Mu Fei narrows her eyes, but does not interrupt him, so Jiang Hai continues.

“When Li Yundong saw himself cornered by the bounty hunter, he defended himself employing above all the talismans he had stolen from you, since the man surpassed him by far in level of cultivation”, he tells her with tact. “And besides, we suspect he must have sold a good part of them in order to finance himself during all the time he was on the run.”

Mu Fei, who is beginning to fear the worst, breathes in deeply once more.

“How many have you managed to recover?” she asks with a dangerous calm.

“In the bag the bounty hunter brought there barely remained a dozen talismans”, replies Jiang Hai with all the tact he can muster.

But the calm breaks again when Mu Fei gets to her feet once more while the lightning bolts crackle anew around her, although this time, fortunately for the furniture, the chair manages to survive.

“That wretch stole almost a thousand talismans from me!” she exclaims with her voice raised. “A thousand! How is it possible that only a miserable dozen of them remain?”

Jiang Hai sighs, and this time there is not a trace of the earlier smile left in him.

“I don’t know”, he admits. “And, in all probability, it will never be known. And that is not even the worst of it.”

Mu Fei, who already intuited that that conversation could bring nothing good, looks at him without saying anything, waiting.

“In the bag neither was the list with the sects affiliated with the Tower of the Five Dragons”, says Jiang Hai with care. “And what is worse, neither was the entry permit token to the Divine Fragment.”

This time, instead of exploding, Mu Fei stays very still while the lightning bolts fade away, the tension of her shoulders dissolves to adopt a more serene pose and, after a long silence, she takes her seat again without saying a word.

“Then, what are you going to do?” she says at last, and her voice has recovered its habitual edge.

Jiang Hai nods, as if that were at last the appropriate question.

“The pertinent orders have already been given and a delegation is being prepared to visit the Sect of the Celestial Sun”, he explains, and before Mu Fei’s arched eyebrow, he continues. “According to the bounty hunter, during the fight several buildings were destroyed and the local authorities were not slow to arrive. Since he did not want to find himself entangled with them, he limited himself to taking the bag and leaving the place without getting to finish searching the corpse.”

“So the delegation’s orders are simple”, he concludes. “To find out whether, when the local authorities searched the body, they found anything else. And, in case they did, to pray that they have not realized how important what they have on their hands is and to negotiate its return before they do.”

Mu Fei does not respond immediately. Instead of that, she unfurls the fan with a sharp snap of the wrist and begins to fan herself slowly, with her gaze lost on some point of the wall.

Those thousand talismans she can recover or replace with time and patience, something she has already begun, and a list of affiliations would only be useful in case of a conflict with the Tower of the Five Dragons. It is a considerable loss, humiliating even, but in the end it is still a matter of resources and reputation.

The entry token to the Divine Fragment, on the other hand, is a horse of a different color, since it is an opportunity that comes only once in a lifetime, and the lives of cultivators are very long.

“That delegation had better be quick”, she says at last, snapping the fan shut. “Because if that token ends up in the wrong hands, I assure you that the problem of the loss of those thousand talismans will seem to you a true blessing.”

And Jiang Hai, who rarely concedes Mu Fei the point on anything, this time finds absolutely nothing to object to.

The afternoon sun spills over Xi’An and dyes its walls a coppery tone that, from a distance, almost manages to make the city seem beautiful.

But it stays at the almost.

Ling Tian contemplates it from the edge of the forest, perched on a small hillock from which he contemplates those same walls. With the end of a bandage held between his teeth, he finishes winding the fabric around his right forearm, where a gash crosses his skin in a line still moist, and tightens the knot with a dry tug, without a single gesture, as if the pain belonged to another person.

“Are you sure?” a voice suddenly resounds in his mind, grave and devoid of all urgency. “Do you really intend to leave the city without having finished what you started?”

The question settles in Ling Tian’s chest like a slab, and for an instant the faces return without asking permission. That of his father pushing him toward the passage. That of his sister crying on the other side of a door that was closing. Those of so many who fell that night and whom he has still not been able to honor as they deserve.

He closes his eyes an instant, lets the weight pass through him and opens them again with his gaze fixed on the walls.

“I am, Master”, he replies in a low voice, without taking his eyes off the city. “The ringleaders of the four families that ordered the massacre are dead. Those who gave the order, those who divided up what was ours… all of them. What remains are dry branches, and for dry branches it is not worth staying here.”

He makes a pause and lowers his gaze toward the bandage on his arm.

“And to keep on with the constant hunt for the disciples of the Sect of the Celestial Sun is too risky”, he continues with the same calm. “This time there were five, and I barely managed to flee after wounding them. If the Sect decides to send more reinforcements, perhaps next time I won’t even be capable of doing that.”

The voice in his mind lets out a long sigh, of those that Ling Tian has learned to interpret over the years as a mixture of feigned patience and authentic resignation.

“If it is your decision, I respect it”, says the Emperor of the Sword. “But allow me to remind you of something you should already know, since you have demonstrated it yourself rather forcefully, which is that leaving loose ends is almost never a good idea. Those four families left one alive for a single night, and look at you now, look at what that loose end has become.”

Upon hearing his Master, Ling Tian’s face hardens and something cold and ancient crosses his eyes. He gives one last tug to the bandage to secure it and lets his hand fall to his side.

“If they come looking for me thirsting for revenge, let them come”, he replies without raising his voice. “I will be waiting for them.”

After those words he bends down and picks up the sword that rested on the ground, at his side, that blade of strange appearance that fits so little in these lands. He straightens up, hangs it at his side and sets off walking toward the interior of the forest, turning his back on Xi’An for the last time.

The voice sounds in his head again when the first shadows of the trees swallow him.

“And now what do you intend to do?” his Master asks. “Will you set course for the Imperial Palace to look for your sister?”

Ling Tian listens to the question and, after a brief silence, sighs.

“No”, he replies as he pushes aside a branch from his path. “Too many years have passed. By this point she has surely already rebuilt her life, and knowing the character the Zhāohuán demonstrated, I have no doubt that things will not be going at all badly for her under her protection.”

He advances a few more steps among the trunks before continuing, now with a somewhat more somber tone.

“Besides, the road that awaits me is no place for a little girl either”, he adds. “Because what I am going to do now is follow the trail of that rat of a governor. He fled the empire, of that I am sure, so the imperial justice will have stopped looking for him the moment he crossed the border. But I have no intention of stopping. And when I find him, he will meet the same fate as all those who betrayed my family.”

His Master’s voice takes a bit longer to reply this time, and when it finally does, it does so without any reproach.

“It is your decision”, says the Emperor of the Sword. “But do not forget one thing, the fire Qi surge approaches. When it reaches these confines of the world, it will be the best moment for you to stop for a while, finish forming your fire core and begin to Harmonize it. You will not have an opportunity like it for the rest of your life.”

Ling Tian listens to his Master’s words and nods to himself, without slackening his pace.

“Don’t worry, Master”, he replies. “I know all too well that gaining strength is the most important thing right now. If I want to reach the central continent with a minimum of safety, I have no other choice. And I have to reach it, because my mother’s family comes from there, and that is the only clue I have about her.”

There is no reply to that, only the complicit silence of one who knows when to keep quiet. And with that silence as his only company, Ling Tian penetrates into the thicket, leaving behind Xi’An, his dead and his settled debts, with his gaze set on a much more distant horizon.

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