Jiang was practically vibrating from the nervous energy that filled him.

  In a way, he felt just as untethered as he had when leaving the slaver’s office, though in a much better way. Every part of him wanted to do something, anything, to move matters forward, even though he knew there was nothing to be done until Mai returned with news.

  He walked for several streets before he realised he didn’t actually know where he was going. He eventually slowed near a small square, letting a cart piled high with firewood rattle past before stepping aside to avoid a pair of arguing merchants. He… could go back to the inn and patiently wait until Mai was ready. It would be incredibly boring, of course, but at least he wouldn’t have to worry about attracting attention or getting into trouble.

  But waiting had never been a strength of his. Patience was one thing – hunting as a mortal often meant spending long stretches of time gradually inching closer to an unaware beast, or setting himself up and waiting for them to come to him – but that at least had a purpose.

  No, he needed to keep himself busy. The most obvious was the problem he carried with him everywhere: the constant, low burn in his meridians. He could find an apothecary or a healer – whatever the cultivator equivalent was. Biragawa was large enough that there would likely be specialists who dealt with damaged channels and corrupted Qi.

  He dismissed the idea almost as soon as it formed.

  Anything capable of touching corruption baked into a cultivator’s meridians would be expensive – prohibitively so. Even if he sold another dozen beast cores, there was no guarantee it would be enough, and no guarantee it would actually fix the problem rather than simply masking it. Worse, it would mean explaining what had caused the damage in the first place, and that explanation carried its own risks.

  Which left him with the other option the city had practically shoved in his face: hunting down spirit beasts.

  Hardly a risk-free endeavour, of course, but at least it would be working towards several goals. Firstly, and possibly most importantly, it would keep him distracted. Secondly, well, the money certainly wouldn’t hurt – he had enough to survive, but it seemed that the more money he earned, the more his expenses rose to match. Finally, it would be a very useful opportunity to test himself.

  He’d spent the last few weeks doing his best not to touch his Qi. Part of that had been the pain, of course, but there were more logical reasons as well – essentially, he had been treating it like he would any other wound. If you rolled an ankle, the solution was to keep weight off it and give it time. Qi wasn’t the same, he knew that, but… well, he wasn’t exactly drowning in other options. At least he had confirmed that it wasn’t getting any worse.

  But if he was going to get his family out of the Ninefold Jade Sect, he had to prepare for the fact that violence was a distinct possibility. A last resort, to be sure, but the fact of the matter was that if matters escalated, even if he did his best to avoid a fight, the sect cultivators wouldn’t be operating under the same restriction.

  If he got into a fight for his life, he couldn’t afford to find out then that channelling Qi would make him black out from pain. He needed to know his limits. He needed to know exactly how much power he could draw before his own body turned against him.

  It would be unpleasant. He knew that. The mere thought of forcing energy through those scarred channels made his stomach tighten in anticipation. But it was better to pass out in the woods while hunting a low-level spirit beast – in the closest thing to ‘controlled conditions’ that he could manage – than to collapse in the middle of a duel with a Sect Elder.

  Well, technically speaking, if he got into a fight with a Sect Elder he’d be dead, but the principle of the matter still stood.

  Jiang shook his head, refocusing. Right, then. Hunting. First things first: he needed to find the tea house the merchant had mentioned; if they had some specific information on the beast tide, it could save him days of tracking. Days that he couldn’t afford – which, now that he thought about it, might pose a bit of a problem. He needed to stay within roughly half a day’s travel to Biragawa itself. Either way, step one was finding the Black Dragon tea house.

  He scanned the bustling street, looking for someone who looked like they knew the city but wasn’t dressed so richly they would spit at him for having the temerity to ask them a question. In this part of the city, that was more difficult than it seemed.

  Maybe I should find someone like Lin, he mused to himself.

  The thought brought a sudden, sharp pang of guilt. He hadn’t thought about the girl in weeks, mostly because he hadn’t let himself. The last time he’d really seen her, she had been beaten half to death by the Iron Dogs, all because she had been associated with him. He knew Old Nan had looked after her following the rescue, and the woman had assured him that she’d made arrangements for Lin, but…

  But Old Nan was dead now. Jiang had fled the city with the Sect on his heels, leaving Lin behind in a city that had just been torn apart by a high-level cultivator battle.

  He hoped she was alright. She was smart, and she was a survivor long before she met him, but she was also just a mortal child in a dangerous place. There was nothing he could do about it now, though. He just had to hope that she had kept her head down and stayed safe.

  Jiang pushed the thoughts aside in favour of approaching a kindly looking woman to try his luck. Worrying about the past wouldn’t help him now.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  — — —

  The tea house was, unsurprisingly, in the nicer parts of the city. Despite that, it was not what Jiang had expected. He had been picturing something modest but expensive – two floors at most, built of lacquered wood and hanging lanterns, perhaps with a garden tucked away behind it.

  Instead, the building rising before him occupied an entire city block, its three stories gleaming with polished stone and dark timber filigree, the curved eaves lined with paper lanterns that glowed a warm amber against the early dusk. It looked less like a place people might go to quietly drink tea and more like a minor noble’s manor that had accidentally sprouted a signboard.

  Still, the sign matched what the merchant had described, and the kindly woman’s directions were easy enough to follow that he was confident he hadn’t gotten lost, so after a moment’s pause, he pushed open the door.

  Warmth rolled out to meet him, banishing the chill of the winter air he no longer fully noticed and carrying the scents of spiced tea, polished wood, and faintly burnt incense. The interior was bright, far brighter than the street outside, lit by what appeared to be glowing gemstones embedded in the walls. He could hear a faint murmur of conversation – just loud enough to make the place seem welcoming, but not so loud that he could actually make out the words themselves.

  Jiang realised after a moment that he couldn’t actually see any of the speakers – while the entrance itself was spacious enough, it clearly occupied only a fraction of the building’s interior. Instead, the walls were lined with doors – dozens of them, set so close together that the rooms beyond would have to be impossibly narrow, more like closets than places of leisure.

  He frowned, his enhanced vision picking out the seamless joinery of the frames. It was odd. Not just the layout, but the feeling of the place.

  Before he could examine them further, one of the doors clicked open. A young woman stepped out and closed the door behind her, giving him a polite smile. Jiang blinked, suddenly realising that he hadn’t gotten so much as a glimpse of the interior of the room, despite how it should have been easy to see past the woman.

  Curiosity piqued, he let his awareness drift outward, extending a tentative thread of Qi toward the nearest wall.

  It hit... nothing.

  Or rather, it hit a wall that felt like nothing. His senses didn’t bounce off; they just stopped, absorbed into a flat, featureless void. Clearly the work of a formation of some kind, even he could tell that much, but these must have been some very high-level formations to not just block his senses, but erase them entirely.

  Oddly, he didn’t feel threatened by it. The space didn’t feel hostile or oppressive. If anything, it felt… calm. Warm. Like the moment after stepping inside from the cold, when your shoulders loosen without you noticing.

  “Welcome to the Black Dragon, honoured cultivator,” the woman said, having paused just long enough for his thought process to end. She bowed slightly, hands clasped. “How may this humble establishment serve you today?”

  Jiang cleared his throat, feeling uncertain and not being entirely sure why. “I, ah… heard from someone that this is where wandering cultivators come to find information,” he said. “About the beast tide? Old Chen sent me.”

  The woman didn’t visibly react to the name. “If it is information on the tide you seek, we can certainly accommodate you. A private tea room would be most suitable for such a discussion.”

  She gestured gracefully toward one of the indistinguishable doors on the far wall.

  Jiang hesitated, glancing at the wall of identical portals. “Is there a difference?” he asked, a touch of sarcasm leaking into his tone despite his best efforts. “Or do they all lead to the same broom closet?”

  The woman didn’t so much as blink at his rudeness. “We have communal halls, of course, should you wish to save coin. The tea is perfectly adequate, and the company is… spirited. However, the Black Dragon cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information acquired in the common rooms.”

  Implying that they did guarantee the accuracy of the information acquired in the private rooms.

  Jiang shrugged. “Private room it is, then.”

  “Please, follow me,” she said, turning and opening a door that looked identical to every other.

  He followed her through.

  The room was small, with rough-hewn wooden walls and a single, low table in the centre. A clay teapot sat on a charcoal brazier, steam curling lazily into the air. The floor was covered in woven straw mats that smelled of dried grass.

  It was simple. Rustic. It reminded him, with a sudden, aching clarity, of the tea shop in Liǔxī where the village elders would gather to complain about the harvest.

  It wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t impressive. And yet, Jiang felt his shoulders relax instantly. He preferred this. He preferred the honesty of rough wood to the slick, deceptive polish of the outer hall.

  Wait.

  He stood in the centre of the room, a frown creasing his forehead. He turned back to look at the door. Had… had they walked down a corridor? He frowned harder, trying to recall the last ten seconds, but his memory was a slippery, fog-bound thing.

  Deep in his dantian, something shifted.

  A jolt of pain shuddered through him as his Qi twitched, a portion of it he suddenly recognised as the Pact between him and the Raven twisted uncomfortably before settling.

  For a fraction of a second, the world flickered. He felt a sudden sense of displacement, as if he were standing on the edge of a cliff that dropped away into forever, or as if he had just stepped across a thousand miles in a single stride.

  Jiang stumbled, his hand grabbing the edge of the low table to steady himself. Then, just as quickly as it had moved, the Raven settled. The cold presence in his gut uncoiled slightly, not in aggression, but in a strange, resonant hum. It felt… satisfied. Safe.

  The walls were just wood again. The straw mats were just straw. The smell of the void was replaced by the scent of steeping tea.

  The door clicked open.

  Jiang flinched, his hand dropping instinctively to his sword, but it was just the young woman. She bustled into the room, her arms laden with a stack of scrolls that looked heavy enough to crush a foot. She kicked the door shut behind her with a practised nudge of her heel and dumped the scrolls onto the table with a heavy thud.

  Jiang blinked. The stiff, perfect politeness from the entrance hall was gone. She was still professional, her posture perfect, but there was actual life in her face now. The difference was stark enough that it felt vaguely like seeing a statue step down from a plinth and start breathing.

  “My apologies for the disorientation, Honoured Cultivator,” she said, brushing her hands off. “Most don’t notice anything during the transition at all. You have a sharp spirit.”

  It sounded like a compliment, but it was one he didn’t understand.

  She paused, clearly reading the confusion on his face. She didn’t explain. Instead, she offered him a small, reassuring smile that felt genuine.

  “You are a guest of the Black Dragon,” she said simply. “And the Black Dragon ever abides by the terms of the Contract. You are safe here. Please, sit.”

  Well. He might not have the faintest clue what was going on, but he could tell there was nothing he could do about it anyway.

  He sat.

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