"You planning on making me stand out here all night, kid?"

  The words snapped Wu Hao from his early-morning reverie, and he opened the door a little wider to let Old Qin in.

  "Why're you here?" he asked. "If it's to tell me that being a servant isn't so bad, forget it. I don't want to hear it. It's too late, anyway."

  "It's barely the crack of dawn," Old Qin joked. "It's not late at all."

  Wu Hao muttered something under his breath. "Not what I mean."

  Old Qin took a chair from a small desk at the side of the room, pushed it over to the bed, and sat down on it. Wu Hao followed suit awkwardly, sitting at the side of the bed. His bed, he supposed. For now.

  "What do you mean, then?" the old man asked.

  Wu Hao exhaled. "I've agreed to the deal."

  This entire mess - it hurt. Not physically, but the knowledge that he'd dragged Old Qin into the Jin clan caused a dull ache behind his chest that made him feel small and weak, in ways that even Father hadn't been able to do. Maybe Old Qin hadn't liked his job all that much but at least he'd probably chosen that.

  "I'm sorry," Wu Hao said quietly, settling for that, at least.

  "For what?" Old Qin said, eyes finding Wu Hao's. "You saved our lives."

  "I dragged you down with me," Wu Hao protested. "If I hadn't taken the peaches, then neither you nor I would have remained stuck here -"

  "If you hadn't, the odds were good I'd be dead," Old Qin pointed out. "Even trying to take on a few bandits nearly killed you, and that was with those things."

  Wu Hao opened his mouth again - he could have just tried a few more times, until he'd found some way of killing every bandit without needing the peaches at all - but then Old Qin spoke again, interrupting his thoughts before he'd formed them into words.

  "The thing is," he said. "This isn't a punishment, kid. Again, for you, this is a massive opportunity."

  "So you've said," Wu Hao grumbled. "Why'd Lady Jin threaten me with punishments, then?"

  "I'm not sure," Old Qin said. "I've never understood women particularly well, to be honest with you."

  Wu Hao stared up at him.

  "I thought you said you had wives everywhere you went."

  "That's because I lied," Old Qin said frankly. "Don't believe everything an adult tells you, kid."

  Wu Hao scowled and Old Qin chuckled, but then the smile slowly went away and he sighed.

  "All that's not why I came over," he said. "There's something else I want to tell you. The rest we can figure out later."

  "They're not for later," Wu Hao said. "They're problems for now, old man."

  "Shut up and let me tell my story," Old Qin ordered. "You're not a martial artist yet. Bandits or not I can still whoop your ass, especially if you're one arm down."

  At length, Wu Hao decided to let him get on with it.

  "First things first," Old Qin said, and took out a small clay pot from a pocket. "Here."

  He tossed it over to Wu Hao, lobbing it underhand, and Wu Hao tried to catch it with both arms before he felt the wound shift again and hissed in pain. The pot fell between his grasping fingers, bounced onto the bed, and nearly rolled off to shatter on the floor if Wu Hao hadn't caught it with his unhurt hand just in time.

  "My bad," Old Qin said quickly. "Take it, though."

  "What is it?" Wu Hao asked, bringing the little clay pot up to his eyes to see it better.

  "Medicinal paste," Old Qin said. "Made it myself. Got some of the ingredients from other servants. Smear that on there, and your wound should be all but gone in a week. Like it never was."

  "Huh," Wu Hao said, turning the little pot around. "How does it work?"

  "How the hell am I supposed to know?" Old Qin said, rubbing the side of his head. "I just know that it works. Got the recipe from an old comrade."

  Wu Hao pulled the lid of the pot, trying not to recoil at the intense smell that reached him.

  "It works," Old Qin repeated. "I know it's not much to look at, or to smell, but I've sworn by it for years."

  Pushing his finger into the paste, Wu Hao tried not to recoil at the sense of cold discomfort that he felt. It felt wet and sticky, and Old Qin's small grin wasn't helping, either. Nonetheless he tore away the bandages with only a few muffled grunts of anguish, then he smeared it on the wound and almost sighed.

  The constant throbbing of his arm seemed almost to welcome the cold paste. It felt good, like whatever it was doing was working.

  "That's one of the things I learned in the army," Old Qin said, which was such an abrupt change in topic that Wu Hao's eyes flickered to Old Qin's. "Matter of fact, kid, that's why I'm here."

  "You served with the army?"

  Old Qin shook his head. "Not the army," he admitted. "An army, though."

  He saw that Wu Hao was confused, so Old Qin rubbed at his eyes with the side of his hand and then began to speak.

  "Maybe you've heard some of this," he began. "I served in a prefectural army for ten years. Hebei, actually, which makes it all the more ironic that I'd end up here again."

  Wu Hao could've interjected, but Old Qin wasn't done talking.

  "Wasn't much, honestly. The pay wasn't good, the company worse, the job boring at best. It had a way of being exciting only in bad ways, but even that was very, very rare. The few times I saw action was trying to take on a bandit camp. I remember one case that was two days travelling from anything that could be called civilization. By the time I got there, a friend of the prefect who practiced martial arts had killed them all. The gore... well, be glad you weren't there."

  He took a deep breath, and Wu Hao reflected that old people had a way of complaining that made it clear that they missed something deeply. Old Qin was the oldest person Wu Hao could remember having known, and that seemed to apply twice as much to him.

  "The reason I did it," Old Qin said, "is because there's a part in the employment contract that says that, if you serve ten years, the prefect will give you access to a martial arts manual."

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Wu Hao nodded. That made a little bit of sense, he thought. Martial arts manuals probably weren't the kind of thing that you could buy with money, and if you could then they were probably fake or so massively overpriced that regular people wouldn't be able to buy them.

  There was a problem, though. If Old Qin had received a manual, then why wasn't he at least a third-rank martial artist?

  "So why didn't you practice it?" Wu Hao asked.

  "Turns out I don't have any talent," Old Qin admitted. "Isn't that funny? What little talent I had, was already not enough the moment I could give it a try."

  He laughed. It sounded bitter to Wu Hao's ears, and now Old Qin returned to how Wu Hao knew him: his shoulders hunched inwards, his eyes focused on something else. Now that he knew what the pressure was that was making Old Qin look so defeated, though, he felt something he'd never thought he'd feel for a man four times his age - pity.

  It didn't feel good. Actually, it felt horrible.

  "I'm sorry," Wu Hao said again, despite not knowing what he was apologizing for.

  An odd sense of guilt crept up his spine. Distantly he wondered if this was what it felt like to be Jin Qilong. No wonder the other boy seemed so uncomfortable in his own skin.

  Old Qin waved his apology away with the wave of a hand, then sighed. He marshalled his pride, raised his head, rolled his shoulders, stalling for time.

  Then he pulled something from his robes, where it must have sat in a pocket close to his chest. It was a battered book, the characters of its title in a bold hand. But while its cover had gone through the years, the book's spine had been replaced at some point, and the pages looked to have been straightened recently by being flattened under something heavy.

  He read the title, pronouncing every character as he did. "The Dragon Gate Ascending Art?"

  Old Qin nodded.

  "I got that and a cultivation art," Old Qin said. "The Heaven and Earth Wheel Art. I don't have that one on me - gave it to a nephew - so you're going to have to find something of your own like it."

  "Er," Wu Hao said. His eyes flicked over to the side, where he'd carefully laid his own copy of it aside.

  "What?" Old Qin asked, and then he looked over. "Oh."

  He reached over, looked back at Wu Hao as if to confirm, and then picked up the book. He flipped through it, holding it up slightly so the dawn light filtered through the window allowed him to read, and scrunched his eyebrows as he read, mouthing the words as he made his way through the introduction.

  "Looks about the same as my copy," Old Qin said, and put it down again.

  He stared at it for a moment longer. "There's nothing better than that, even here? The governor didn't just give me something trash, then. Or a bad copy. I wasn't sabotaged?"

  Wu Hao shook his head, not quite sure what else to say.

  Old Qin put the Dragon Gate Ascending Art next to the Heaven and Earth Wheel Art, then shook his head.

  "That," he said, pointing at the one he'd given Wu Hao, "is a movement technique. It's divided into a few steps, but I never managed to get the qi together to actually execute one of the steps.

  "I'm entrusting this to you," he said.

  Something had taken a hold of Wu Hao's throat, and he found it hard to talk.

  Old Qin dragged a hand down his face, then spoke, more to himself than to Wu Hao.

  "Ten years of effort, and after that ten more years of trying to cultivate this. I've read it from cover to cover and back, and I think I still don't get most of what it actually talks about."

  Another rueful grin. "But I'm sure you can do better, huh?"

  Wu Hao's eyes fell on the book.

  "I don't know," he said hesitantly. For so long, he'd said that he wanted a movement art, but receiving one like this wasn't what he'd hoped for. Easier by far to simply die, he thought. There had to be a way... "What if I don't understand it?"

  "You'd better try your damnedest to understand it, you little numbskull. The point is, you'll make better use of it than I could, anyway. If you're half the genius that Young Master Zhiyi sold you as, it might even be beneath you soon enough."

  "I really can't take this," Wu Hao protested. That was something that Old Qin had spent years of effort on. Even handing it over seemed to be taking more effort than Wu Hao had ever seen him put into anything.

  "You saved my life," Old Qin said. "A man repays his debts, kid."

  Wu Hao shook his head.

  "I saved mine," he admitted. "I didn't even think about yours."

  "If that was true," Old Qin said, "you could've just run."

  Wu Hao looked away.

  He wanted to put some sort of noble airs on what he'd done, the way Old Qin seemed to want to, but he hadn't been motivated by a love for his fellow man or a desire for justice. No, it was far simpler than that.

  All Wu Hao had wanted when returning was to abandon the future where he'd been a deathsworn, and that meant ignoring the voice in the back of his head that had told him to simply cut and run. After all, that voice sounded like Father. Its suggestions had sounded reasonable, and that had scared him deeply.

  Old Qin thumbed his nose, and grinned.

  "Convinced you to keep it, have I?" he asked.

  Wu Hao shook his head. "I really shouldn't take this," he said.

  "Too late," Old Qin said. "You've got it now. Take care of it or I'll come find you, martial artist or no, and show you what it means to respect your elders, kid."

  He rose to his feet and his knees popped. Wu Hao wondered how old Old Qin actually was.

  "You're a good kid," Old Qin said, abruptly. "Don't let the world drag you down."

  Wu Hao shook his head.

  "I swear I'll never change who I am, even if I die."

  A smile crossed Old Qin's face.

  And without another word he was gone, leaving behind the Dragon Gate Ascending Art.