Mistress Bai watched Li Xuan congratulate the boy, her expression a practised mask of polite interest. Inside, however, she was fighting the urge to roll her eyes. ‘Clarified his heart’ indeed.

  It never failed to amaze her how quickly sect cultivators were to claim credit for things. It was like none of them had ever heard of humility before.

  She shifted slightly, letting the connection between herself and her doppelg?nger fade. It was a taxing piece of artistry, maintaining a Perfected Reflection over such a distance. Li Xuan prided himself on his perception, on his ability to spot the hollow spots in her lesser clones, but despite the fact that they were both in the Core Formation realm, he was a long, long way off being her equal.

  He didn’t understand that the flaws he spotted were there because she put them there. A truly perfect lie required a few obvious imperfections to sell the deception. If he thought he was clever enough to see through her, he would stop looking deeper. And so, while he had sat here in the camp, guarding a shell filled with nothing but air and a whisper of Intent, the real Mistress Bai had been watching from the treeline of Shanmei, invisible and silent. She had seen it all. The boy’s clumsiness with the sword. His quick, almost desperate adaptation. And then, the moment that had actually made her pause. The claws.

  She turned the memory over in her mind, dissecting it with the cold appreciation of an artisan examining a fine, rough-cut gem. Anchoring unstructured Qi to an external object was clever enough, to be sure, and not something she had personally believed would work – though in hindsight it did help explain some things about some of the more advanced techniques she had seen others use.

  But anchoring it to oneself? Creating a construct that mimicked the natural weaponry of a spirit beast, bypassing the human need for rigid internal structures by essentially grafting a temporary meridian system onto the flesh? That was… inspired.

  From what she understood of Pact-bearers – which admittedly wasn’t much – most spent years trying to force their unique power into standard human techniques, or else surrendered entirely to the beast’s instincts and lost their minds. Jiang was walking a razor’s edge between the two, and he was doing it without a map. He hadn’t been taught that. He had forged it in the fires of necessity, in the span of a single afternoon.

  A natural, she thought, letting a flicker of genuine appreciation warm her otherwise cold assessment. Rough, untrained, and irritatingly stubborn, but a natural nonetheless.

  And, crucially, he had hidden it. He had given Li Xuan a sanitised, half-true report, stripping out the most dangerous and valuable innovation he had made. He understood the value of secrets. That, more than his breakthrough or his combat prowess, convinced her he might actually survive this mess.

  It was a pity, then, that she might still have to kill him eventually.

  Or save him.

  The ambiguity was the problem. She closed her eyes, turning her senses inward, past the flow of her Qi and into the deeper, more esoteric currents of her cultivation. There, amidst the complex, shifting web of Karma that made up her power, sat a knot. It was an ugly, tangled thing, glowing with a dull, heavy pressure. The debt. Old Nan had woven it tight. You owe him your life.

  A clumsy, brute-force application of karmic law, backed by the dying will of a Nascent Soul. Old Nan’s little trick had not just shackled her with a single rope; it had woven a new thread directly into the net of her cultivation. To a normal cultivator, it would be an iron collar, albeit one that most wouldn’t actually be able to detect. A life debt was a terrible thing to a cultivator like her; ignore it, and the Heavens would ensure her cultivation shattered at the next breakthrough.

  But Mistress Bai walked the Path of Connections, and to her, a debt wasn’t a shackle; it was a rope. And ropes could be knotted, slackened, or twisted until they pointed in a different direction entirely. She examined the threads of the bond. Old Nan had defined the debt, but she hadn’t defined the repayment. You owe him your life.

  That didn’t necessarily mean she had to serve him. It didn’t mean she had to die for him. It simply meant the scales had to be balanced. Saving him from Gao Leng would be a start, though unfortunately it wouldn’t be enough to fully balance the scales. Life debts were complicated like that, and were based on the concept of reciprocity. If she tried to trick it by ‘saving him’ from the spirit beast, nothing would have happened – because he wasn’t in any real danger. Gao Leng was going to be far trickier and more powerful than a mere spirit beast, of course, but Jiang wasn’t facing him alone – and thus, even if the situation did allow her to save his life, it wouldn’t actually be equivalent to stopping a Nascent Soul cultivator from taking her own life.

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  No matter that it only took him a few words.

  Such were the risks of walking her Path – she was both more vulnerable to debts such as this, and more able to deal with them. Eventually, the knot would unravel, and she would be free.

  It was just… inconvenient.

  She sighed internally. The tug of the debt was a constant, low-level irritation, like a stone in her boot. It demanded attention. It meant she couldn’t just cut her losses and vanish, retreating to another province to rebuild her power base. She was tethered to this boy, and by extension, to the walking disaster area that was Li Xuan.

  Qinghe is gone, she reminded herself, the thought bringing a fresh wave of cold, quiet fury. My networks shattered. My influence vaporised.

  She blamed Li Xuan for that, mostly. His reckless escalation had forced the confrontation. But she couldn’t entirely absolve Jiang, either. He was the catalyst. The pebble that started the landslide. And yet… she couldn’t bring herself to hate him. Watching him sit there, feigning agreement with Li Xuan’s pompous lecture on duty while plotting his escape… it tugged at something else. A memory of a younger, hungrier Bai, standing in the mud of a different backwater, looking at the Sects not with awe, but with the cold calculation of a thief sizing up a mark.

  He was cynical, which was good. He was also a little selfish, which was even better – no true cultivator ever progresses without looking out for themselves above all others.

  He viewed the glorious path of cultivation as nothing more than a tool to get what he wanted, which was… less than ideal. Not a deal breaker, by any means – the Sects were filled with true believers like Zhang, or ambitious climbers like Li Xuan who mistook the hierarchy for the truth. Men like that were predictable. They could be manipulated, steered, used. But men like Jiang? Men who simply didn’t care about the game? They were dangerous. They were the ones who flipped the board because they were bored with the rules.

  She opened her eyes, watching Jiang stand up and dust the snow from his trousers. He caught her looking and offered a small, guarded nod. She returned it with a serene smile that she knew he didn’t trust for a second.

  He was planning to run. She could see it in the set of his shoulders, the way his eyes constantly flicked to the tree line. He would most likely play along until Gao Leng was dead, and then he would vanish into the wilds, heading for Biragawa and his family, leaving the Sects and their “duty” to rot.

  It was exactly what she would have done. Unfortunately, it complicated things. If he ran, the debt would pull her after him. She would have to chase him across the province, playing guardian angel to a boy who actively didn’t want to be found, all while dodging the Sects that were hunting them both. It was an exhausting prospect, not to mention dangerous.

  That was assuming they even made it that far. Greywood was shaping up to be a problem, and worse, it was one that Li Xuan didn’t seem to notice – or if he did, he was keeping it to himself. Not because of the bandits – mortals were chaff, easily scattered – and not even necessarily because of Gao Leng himself. A demonic cultivator at the peak of Core Formation was a threat, certainly, but between herself and Li Xuan, they should have the raw power to put him down.

  No, the problem was the quiet. Unorthodox cultivators were usually loud. They were unstable, greedy creatures that burned bright and burned fast, consuming everything around them until they inevitably collapsed under the weight of their own twisted Qi or drew the ire of a Sect. But Gao Leng had been operating here for years. He had built a network. He had fortified a position. He had gathered enough resources to maintain a small army of thralls.

  That required patience.

  It required a supply line.

  And, most worryingly, it suggested he wasn’t working alone.

  Where is the backing coming from? she wondered, her gaze drifting toward the north. Who is feeding this dog? If Gao Leng had a patron of his own – a rogue Elder, perhaps, or a connection to a dark Sect in the inner provinces – then walking into Greywood wasn’t a hunt. It was a trap. At least Li Xuan was smart enough to avoid communicating with anyone, including his own Sect. Considering Gao Leng was once a disciple of the Azure Sky Sect, it wasn’t hard to figure out that those self-righteous idiots were the most likely to have a snake hiding in their shadow.

  It would almost be amusing, if she weren’t caught up in the whole thing. She had survived this long by knowing the difference between a gamble and a suicide, and right now, the odds were tilting uncomfortably toward the latter.

  The debt to Jiang bound her to the confrontation, yes, but it didn’t dictate how she survived the aftermath. If things went south – if Gao Leng pulled out a trump card, or if the other Sects arrived and decided to purge the entire area – she needed to be able to vanish.

  Fortunately, this wasn’t the first time she’d gotten herself in a tricky situation, and three days ago she had made the difficult decision to sever a portion of her Intent and send it towards the nearest trade road. It would travel to a city three provinces over, rent a small room, and bury a cache of spirit stones and a set of identity papers she had forged decades ago. It would lay the groundwork for a new life – a humble herbalist, perhaps, or a wealthy widow seeking a quiet retirement.

  If “Mistress Bai” had to die in the ruins of Greywood to satisfy the karmic backlash of a failed debt or to escape the wrath of the Ironwood Pavilion, then so be it.

  It wouldn’t be the first time.

  It was expensive to start over, to be sure. The loss of her network in Qinghe still made her teeth ache with phantom pain – that had been the work of almost a century. But she was not a fighter. She was a survivor. She did not break through walls; she found the cracks and slipped through them.

  Prepare for the worst, she thought, settling back against the tree and closing her eyes, feigning rest while her mind raced through contingencies. Hope for the best. And make sure you’re not the one paying when the bill comes due.