“I’m here to arrest that man,” the heavily armored guard said as he pointed directly at me.

  The drinking house let out another collective gasp. I looked over my shoulder, and, for the first time, someone was standing behind me: my disciple.

  Oh, no.

  My disciple bowed to me. Far too low.

  “Please, master,” he said. “What should I do?”

  The guards approached us, and their attention shifted. They were no longer looking at my disciple. From the way they carried themselves and the way their eyes shone from within their stone wood helmets, I knew the guards were staring straight at me.

  Damn.

  That was even worse.

  ###

  Phoenix Gate Captain Shen Yang felt uncomfortable as he weaved his way between the tables and private booths that made up the lavish drinking house. The pillars were old-growth stone trees, still living, with their branches woven together to form the ceiling in an archaic, but well-respected, architectural style. Crystalline flowers and berries hung in sparkling clusters here and there, magnifying the light of the spirit lamps.

  He had been here once before, to celebrate his promotion to Captain, but as a member of the Shen clan, he did his best to avoid too many dealings with the Stone Forest Pavilion. There were too many Ran clan members here for him to be truly comfortable.

  He directed his guards to surround the three suspects, and was surprised that he recognised them. They’d only entered the city a few hours ago. The one in the navy blue robe had been wearing a brown, blood-stained robe earlier and had said that he was a Special Inspector. There had been a presence in the man’s eyes that led Shen Yang to believe him.

  But now he knew that the dishevelled, green-robed cultivator standing behind the so-called Special Inspector was the one who destroyed the Southern Bridge. He had a duty to investigate the crime, no matter who might be involved.

  The two men looked calm, but the blonde cultivator with the horns, Chen Ai, if memory served, looked upset.

  “I knew this would happen,” Chen Ai muttered.

  She was in the 7th stage of Qi Condensing, and while her cultivation was sound and her bloodline would afford her some extra tricks, she wasn’t a threat to him or his guards. Each one of the cultivators in the heavy stone wood armor was firmly in the Foundation Establishment realm. Shen Yang felt it was an unnecessary show of force, but the qi they detected at the severed bridge had come from a core.

  They couldn’t be too careful.

  “Don’t worry, master will resolve this,” said the green-robed cultivator.

  That was the man who’s qi signature matched the bridge. The guards might not have found him if he hadn’t blasted his presence throughout the Merchant District earlier. The green-robed man’s cultivation seemed shaky, and though Shen Yang knew he’d detected a core earlier, now the presence was no more than a 2nd Stage Qi Condensing cultivator.

  “You’re shameless, you know that?” Chen Ai chided the green-robed man.

  Shen Yang wasn’t sure what to make of that. So he approached the man who identified as a Special Inspector. He removed his helmet and saw the recognition in the Special Inspector’s eyes.

  Good, hopefully that would make things easier.

  “I didn’t expect to see you again,” Shen Yang said. “Especially not so soon.”

  Shen Yang didn’t mention the man’s status, or possible lack of status; he was completely neutral. If this man were a Special Inspector, then Shen Yang wouldn’t be the one to go against his word. If he weren’t a Special Inspector, then Shen Yang wouldn’t be seen publicly mistaking him for one.

  Shen Yang patted himself on the back for his maneuvering.

  The Special Inspector nodded a greeting.

  “I wish we had met under different circumstances, guard…?”

  “This one is Phoenix Gate Captain Shen Yang,” he said. “What are you doing with the man who destroyed the sacred Bridge to the South?”

  The Special Inspector frowned.

  “That isn’t something I want to discuss in public,” he said.

  Shen Yang sighed internally.

  He was here as a representative of the City Lord, and so he had to maintain some authority. The peace between the Shen clan, the devious Ran clan, and the Stone Forest Pavilion was precarious enough as it was.

  “I’m sure that it’s not,” Shen Yang said as he stepped closer. “However, these are serious allegations, and if you insist on resisting, we shall escort all of you to the nearest barracks.”

  The Special Inspector frowned.

  “You’re right,” he said as he beckoned the green-robed cultivator forward. “He cut the bridge while trying to attack me.”

  “Master!” the green-robed man said as he looked at the Special Inspector with shame.

  “Wait,” Shen Yang said with a puzzled expression. “Is this man your disciple or is he your attacker?”

  “Yes,” said the Special Inspector.

  “Master is correct,” the green-robed cultivator said.

  Shen Yang felt a headache coming on.

  “Why did you attack your master?” he asked the green-robed cultivator.

  “Because he shattered my cultivation and destroyed my pride as a swordsman.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Shen Yang’s eyes widened as his brain processed those words. He quickly cast his spiritual perception into the green-robed cultivator’s midsection to thoroughly inspect his cultivation. He felt the other eight guards do the same, and they all reeled back together.

  The state of that man’s core…

  It was hanging on by a thread. The amount of damage done, those hideous cracks, but the cultivation remained, and the burgeoning soul was intact.. Shen Yang couldn’t believe the calculated damage he witnessed, nor the extreme control that must be required in order to hurt someone so much, yet pull back before breaking their cultivation completely.

  It was like beating within a very literal inch of their life. For what cultivator could live after they lost their cultivation?

  Shen Yang turned to the Special Inspector. He wasn’t sure if he was outraged, impressed, or horrified.

  “You… did that?”

  “I did,” said the Special Inspector.

  “I deserved it,” the green-robed victim said sadly.

  The other guards shuddered, and Shen Yang barely suppressed the same reaction.

  “What could you have possibly done to deserve such punishment?”

  The green-robed cultivator straightened. He was tall, handsome, and carried himself with some pride despite his dishevelled appearance and the clear signs he’d been crying recently.

  “I believed myself the greatest swordsman in the world, and so my master humbled me.”

  “Humbled you…” one of the guards murmured. “More like hobbled you.”

  Shen Yang flared his 4th Stage Foundation Establishment cultivation and precisely applied a spike of weighted pressure to the guard who spoke. The guard stumbled before straightening up. The rest of the heavily armored guards maintained their quiet, rigid stances.

  The disciple nodded toward the guard who spoke.

  “Indeed,” he said. “It is better than I deserve. For now, I can strive to rebuild myself. A lesser master would have simply killed me for the insult. But this disciple was still ungrateful, and when I railed against my master’s instruction, I cut the bridge...”

  Shen Yang held up a hand.

  “Wait. You’re saying that you cut the bridge while you were crossing?”

  “Yes. My attack drained my cultivation, but even though I fell unconscious, my master rescued me.”

  “I see.”

  That meant that, even while falling, this Special Inspector managed to rescue the two other cultivators and land them on the cliff instead of falling into the chasm that had claimed so many lives. All while avoiding attacks from a man who held himself like a true swordsman, and returning a devastating blow that could crack a core…

  Shen Yang had dismissed the Special Inspector before. Even though the agents carried the authority of the Emperor, most Special Inspectors were merely glorified clerks who went about ticking boxes on paper rather than actually doing the hard work of maintaining the peace in the various kingdoms.

  He’d felt no qi at the gate and assumed this man was just a lowly Body Tempering cultivator, but if all these acts were true…

  A Foundation Establishment cultivator could move fast enough and leap far enough to abandon the bridge as it fell, but to rescue the others? Only a Core Formation cultivator could fly. Of course, there could be any number of qi techniques that might have achieved these results…

  No.

  Shen Yang was the Phoenix Gate Captain; he couldn’t just take their word for things.

  “You say that your master bested your swordplay?” Shen Yang asked. “Yet I see no sword, and no storage treasure that might contain one.”

  The green-robed disciple sneered at him.

  “My master needs no sword,” he said.

  Shen Yang fought down an urge to punch the man in the face.

  “Excuse me, Captain?” said one of the Stone Forest Merchant House attendants.

  “Yes?”

  “We can all verify that this man was just attacked by his disciple, and yet he shows no injury. It was as though he didn’t permit the blade to cut him.”

  Shen Yang’s eyes widened despite himself.

  To possess a defensive technique that prevented a blade from cutting you… What his clan wouldn’t do for something like that! Suddenly, his loyalty to his clan warred with his duty as a guard.

  Yet, when he looked into the Special Inspector’s eyes, he detected no pride or arrogance; there was merely a flat feeling, as though he looked into the eyes of a Two-Headed Mountain Lion. Those drab, brown eyes trapped Shen Yang’s ambitions like mud.

  A heat prickled at the back of Shen Yang’s mind, and he tore his gaze away. There was no qi in those eyes, simply the determination of a man who shattered cultivations! Now was not the time to antagonize him. Still, his clan would never forgive him if he abandoned this opportunity.

  Not for the first time, Shen Yang cursed his last name and all the baggage it brought him.

  “This is true?” he asked the Special Inspector. “You were attacked? You certainly don’t look like you were just attacked.”

  The Special Inspector fingered a hole in his robes.

  “My new robes were damaged, but I find that a blade that is too sharp can’t really cut anything.”

  The words drifted in through one of Shen Yang’s ears, and he seized them before they could drift out the other. They sounded like nonsense, but he knew he had just been bestowed a gift of incredible wisdom.

  Shen Yang recognised the gift as what it was: a bribe to get him to stop asking questions.

  But, duty…

  “Please,” he said with a bow. “If you would stand by while we conduct our investigation?”

  “Are we being punished?”

  Shen Yang let out a forced smile.

  Technically, the city was not in the habit of punishing Core Formation cultivators, since even capturing them wasn’t worth the trouble that could come. Banishment with the threat of mutually assured destruction was usually sufficient. However, the green-robed disciple displayed a cultivation that fluctuated between the realms. Was he a special exception to the rule? Or was he already sufficiently punished?

  As a man and a cultivator, Shen Yang adamantly agreed with the latter. Personally, he wanted to get as far away from the man who ignored swords and broke cores as physically possible.

  However, he was not a man, or a cultivator, but a puppet to his duty, and so, reluctantly, Shen Yang forced out a smile.

  “Soon enough,” he said. “My men and I just need to gather testimonies.”

  The Special Inspector nodded.

  “As you say,” he said.

  Damn! He knew Shen Yang was stretching the truth, but he was allowing it. Who was this man?

  With a gesture, Shen Yang sent his guards out amongst the tables to gather as much information as possible. They were all well-trained and were quiet and polite as they approached tables, but with the pillars of their Foundation Establishment firmly harmonized with qi, there was no need for them to be rude.

  While the Special Inspector, his disciple, and their associate Chen Ai stood back, Shen Yang turned to the attendant who had spoken up before.

  “You have made an incredible claim,” Shen Yang said to the attendant. “While I’m sure I will get all this information from the special inspector, I would like to verify my sources. I see you are in the Qi Condensing realm. Congratulations on your recent breakthrough to the 3rd stage. Now, you say you detected him using this qi technique? Could you describe that to me?”

  She shook her head.

  “No, I can’t.”

  Damn! Did the Special Inspector already secure her loyalty?

  “Why not?”

  “Because I detected no qi. As far as I know, there was no technique.”

  “Nor I,” said another attendant.

  His troops were swift in picking up Shen Yang’s true intentions -- they were all members of the same clan, after all -- and had asked about the technique that avoided blades. They reported that everyone said the same thing. Though a blade punched through the Special Inspector’s chest, not a drop of blood nor a hint of qi was detected by anyone.

  There was no way that a Special Inspector could quell the hearts of so many gathered merchants, nobles, and attendants. Yet, if the technique wasn’t a technique… it could only be…

  His dao.

  Being on the northern border of the Black Tiger Kingdom, and the kingdom’s former capital, Mountain Root City received a lot of travellers passing through, yet while Core Formation cultivators were rare, those who could manifest their Dao were even rarer.

  Shen Yang’s soul shuddered. He suddenly felt like a child playing pretend as he turned to face the monster in his midst.

  Who was this man? And why was he in Shen Yang’s home?

  He moved forward to ask that question, but a soft aroma filled his nose, like the juice of sapphires, and Shen Yang suppressed a groan.

  Playtime was over.

  “I thank the city’s guards for being so thorough in their pursuit of justice,” said the delicate voice of a woman who expected her requests to be followed without question. “Certainly, they must have gathered all the information they need so far?”

  There was the unmistakable click of golden shoes on tiles as the power of a 4th Stage Core Formation cultivator swept through the room. Nothing was pushed or broken, but the aura swept like perfume as it encompassed everything with the implication of raw, unassailable power.

  Phoenix Gate Captain Shen Yang turned and did his best to maintain his composure as he and his men bowed as one.

  “We greet Xui Ruixue, honored Matriarch of the Stone Forest Merchant House,” they said in unison.

  This was exactly why he didn’t want to come here!

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