Senior Brother Ximen Roars

The lane fell quiet.

It was an alley, narrow and out of the way, and no one else had come near. The noise of the market was a far-off murmur beyond the walls. A breeze came down between the high mud bricks—the first breath of wind in days—and it stirred the dust and the torn edges of Li Yuguo's robe, and carried a faint chill on it that raised the hair on his arms.

"Better than with you, scum!" Ye Qiong's eyes were full of killing intent. "Today I'll use your blood to offer up to my sword!"

Li Yuguo laughed again.

"I have a terrible reputation in Nalan City. Fine. I'll admit that. But let me ask you, hero—have I ever killed anyone?" He spread his bloody hand. "Have I? Ever? Ask the common people with their sharp eyes. And you—you meet me for the first time in your life, and the first thing you do is try to murder me in an alley." He shook his head slowly. "Truly. What a hero you are. What a good man."

The words landed.

Li Yuguo saw them land. Ye Qiong's face froze. Something went through his eyes—a shock, a crack in the certainty, as if for one instant he had heard his own voice from the outside and not recognized it. His sword dipped a fraction of an inch.

It was the smallest of openings.

Li Yuguo took it.

He crossed the space between them in one long stride, with the Lieyang fire roaring up his leg and through his hip and into his shoulder, and while Ye Qiong was still caught in that frozen instant, he drove his fist into Ye Qiong's left ribs.

There was a deep, hollow crunch.

Ye Qiong flew.

He left the ground and sailed sideways through the air and came down hard on the packed earth three paces away, rolling, his sword clattering out of his hand. He lay there for a moment, gasping, clutching his side.

Li Yuguo stood over him, breathing hard, and pulled back his fist.

And then let it fall.

He was not going to kill Ye Qiong. He had never intended to. If the protagonist died here, in a back alley of Nalan City, at the hands of the King of Soft Rice, the True Yuan Sect would come looking for whoever had done it. And Ye Qiong was no ordinary disciple. He was the sect's great hope, a genius they had nurtured for years. There was no wall in the world without a crack, and no secret that could not leak. They would find out. And when they did, it would not be Li Yuguo alone who paid. It would be Nalan City.

He would be bringing the disaster down himself, half a year early.

---

"Bastard," Ye Qiong rasped from the ground. He was pushing himself up onto one elbow, and his face was twisted with rage, and his eyes were full of something darker than killing intent. "You took advantage of me when I wasn't ready…"

Li Yuguo could almost see the thoughts behind those eyes.

In the True Yuan Sect, Ye Qiong was the object of everyone's admiration. At eighteen, he had already touched the edge of Advanced Martial Teacher. With just a little more effort he would break through. The elders praised him. The juniors worshipped him. The senior sisters blushed when he walked past. He had never been beaten. Not once. Not by anyone of his own generation.

He had never imagined that he would suffer like this. Here. In this shabby border town. At the hands of this.

He gritted his teeth until they creaked. He wanted to kill Li Yuguo so badly that his whole body shook with it.

"If you hesitate, you lose," Li Yuguo said in a low voice.

He meant it as advice. Honest advice. He was the author; it was practically a line from the book.

Ye Qiong did not take it as advice.

He saw the stunned, almost pitying look on Li Yuguo's face, and something inside him snapped.

"What are you?" he roared. "A King of Soft Rice! A prodigal son! A waste! And you dare to stand there and lecture me like that? Me?" He staggered to his feet. "I am—I am the rarest genius the True Yuan Sect has seen in a hundred years! How can I be defeated by a waste like you?!"

His body was trembling. And the aura around him—

The aura around him was rising.

---

Li Yuguo felt it at once, like the pressure drop before a storm. He took a quick step back.

"I won't kill you," he said quickly. "You can go. Listen to me. The True Yuan Sect and the imperial court have always been on good terms, and I'm the consort of the Third Prince's ninth daughter—I'm married into the royal house. There's no need for this to go any further. Just go."

He was trying to cool it down. Because he knew—better than anyone alive—what was sleeping inside Ye Qiong's body.

The Raging Wave Dragon Ape.

It was the bloodline he had sealed in Ye Qiong's veins. One of the top bloodlines in the whole world: the blood of an ancient beast that could split mountains and drink rivers. Normally, a bloodline like that would only awaken when its bearer reached the level of a Martial King. But there was an exception. Liu Mang had written it in as a plot device. If the bearer's emotions became extreme—if they were pushed to the edge of rage or grief or despair—the bloodline could awaken early.

And an early awakening was dangerous. When the blood broke out before its time, there was a chance that the bearer would lose his mind completely. Become a beast. Kill anything in front of him.

If Li Yuguo humiliated Ye Qiong too badly—if he pushed him over that edge—he would not live to regret it.

But Ye Qiong's whole body was trembling now, and his voice, when it came, was slow and low and shaking.

"I have never," he said, "been treated with such contempt… Bastard. I'm not leaving this time. I'm going to punish you. On behalf of justice!"

Li Yuguo covered his face with his hand.

"Heavens," he groaned into his palm. "I actually created such a second-rate idiot of a character!"

He had overestimated the intelligence of his own protagonist.

---

Ye Qiong's momentum was swelling.

Li Yuguo could see it happening. Ye Qiong's muscles were bulging under his gray disciple's robe, swelling and hardening, his shoulders broadening, the veins standing out on his neck and forearms like ropes. A moment ago he had been a Martial Teacher, bright and raw. Now his breath was suddenly stronger—heavier, darker, thick with something old and wild that made the air around him shimmer.

This is bad, Li Yuguo thought. This idiot's about to play the protagonist card.

"I'll kill you…" Ye Qiong said.

He bent and picked up his sword. And as his fingers closed around the hilt, the blade ignited.

A flame burst up along it from guard to tip—not red, not yellow, but an eerie, almost-white fire, so pale and so hot that it made the air above it ripple like water. It roared softly. It lit his face from below, turning his fierce eyes into two burning points.

He began to walk toward Li Yuguo. One step at a time.

"Jun Xue," Li Yuguo said, without taking his eyes off him. His voice was very calm. "Go on ahead. Go to the end of the alley and look for a man with a scar on his head."

He understood now how serious this was.

This was not a full awakening. Not yet. Ye Qiong's bloodline had only been shaken loose a little—Li Yuguo's words had cut into his self-esteem, and his pride had cracked open, and something had leaked out through the crack. But even a little of the Raging Wave Dragon Ape was enough to kill him.

At the end of the lane, Jun Xue had gone white as her hair.

"O-okay! This servant is going now!"

She turned and ran, her bare feet slapping the dust, her white hair streaming, and vanished around the corner.

Li Yuguo watched her go, and made a bet with himself.

He bet she would not run away. He bet she would do exactly what he had told her. Because she was not a fool. She was a girl, and she was thin and sick and frightened, but she was clever. He had written her clever. And she would know that if she ran off alone in Nalan City—a slave with no papers, a runaway demon girl—she would be caught again within the day. And with a body as thin and sick as hers, she would end up in another cage, facing a far more terrifying fate than the one she had just escaped.

She would go to Guan Yunfan. He was almost sure of it.

Almost.

---

"Calling for help?" Ye Qiong laughed—a low, rough sound, not quite his own. "Heh. Then before she gets back, I'll get rid of a piece of scum!"

He shouted and charged.

"So fast!" Li Yuguo had time to gasp.

Ye Qiong's speed had jumped by more than a whole level. He crossed the lane in a single blurred bound—this is the power of the bloodline—and Li Yuguo threw up his arms, braced for the white-hot sword—

And Ye Qiong spun in midair and kicked him.

BAM.

The kick caught him full in the chest. It was like being hit by a battering ram. He flew backward off his feet and crashed into a stack of wooden barrels against the alley wall, and the barrels exploded around him in a shower of splintered staves and iron hoops and old rainwater. He lay sprawled in the wreckage, gasping, his chest a solid wall of pain, his shoulder bleeding, his robe in tatters, soaked and filthy and utterly humiliated.

"Go to hell," Ye Qiong said.

He was already there. Standing over the broken barrels. The pale-white flame roared along his sword, and the point came down toward Li Yuguo's throat—

"Enough!"

The voice cracked down the lane like a whip.

It was full of anger—sharp and cold and commanding—and with it came a wave of pressure that slammed into both of them at once. Li Yuguo felt it pin him into the wreckage of the barrels. Ye Qiong staggered, and the white flame on his sword guttered and shrank.

A tall young man was striding up the alley toward them.

He was older than Ye Qiong—twenty-two, perhaps, or twenty-three—and taller still, lean and hard, in a robe of the same pale gray as Ye Qiong's, but trimmed in silver at the collar and cuffs. His face was handsome, sharp-boned, with a thin, cruel mouth and narrow, glittering eyes. And the aura rolling off him was fierce—far heavier, far deeper than Ye Qiong's. It filled the narrow alley like smoke.

Ye Qiong lowered his sword and stared.

"Senior Brother Ximen?!"

Ximen?

Li Yuguo, lying in the broken barrels, felt his blood run cold all over again.

Senior Brother Ximen. The senior brother of the True Yuan Sect. The son of the Sect Master himself. The man who would one day become Ye Qiong's greatest rival, his love rival, his nemesis—the man who would flee into Nalan City half a year from now with Ye Qiong on his heels, and bring the bloody storm down on everyone in it.

Ximen Lang.

"Junior Brother Ye," Ximen Lang said, glaring at him, "you're causing trouble again!"

Ye Qiong whirled toward him, his face flushed with fury, his finger stabbing toward the wreckage where Li Yuguo lay.

"Senior Brother Ximen," he roared, "it's this guy who's in the wrong!"