Chapter 8: An Arrow from the Holy Capital
"His Lordship the Magistrate also gave special instructions: Madam is to bring that item along as well, so it does not fall into the hands of the rebels."
Inside the small courtyard, the puppet Li Shun kept his head bowed low, his voice respectful and urgent.
"That item?" The beautiful woman paused, momentarily caught off guard but a flash of comprehension crossed her eyes almost immediately.
Her brow furrowed. The soft, alluring quality that had colored her voice moments ago vanished, replaced by an abrupt coolness. "Wait here."
Without waiting for Li Shun's response, she turned on her heel and walked briskly into the inner room.
A short while later, the woman re-emerged through the doorway. Clutched tightly to her chest was a long, narrow brocade case. It was a material that seemed neither quite wood nor quite jade, its surface shimmering with a faint, cold frost.
The woman's knuckles had gone white where she gripped the case. She spoke in a low, firm tone. "Let's go."
Even through that peculiar material sealing the case, Li Shun caught it, a thread of extraordinarily pure energy emanating from within, bearing the unmistakable signature of Lengshan Grass.
The Lengshan Vessel.
"The streets outside are crawling with rebels, too many eyes everywhere. Madam carrying that so openly will draw attention. Better to let this servant conceal it on my person." As he spoke, Li Shun unhurriedly drew a piece of coarse grey cloth from his robes and held it out with both hands in a deferential offering.
The woman's step faltered. A flicker of suspicion crossed her eyes. In the end, she shook her head and said coolly, "No need. This is too valuable to trust to another's hands. Give me the cloth, I'll wrap it myself."
Li Shun lowered his head in obedient compliance, without the slightest sign of reluctance, and extended the grey cloth toward her with both hands.
At the instant the woman reached out, her fingertips barely grazing the cloth —
The eyes that had been docilely downcast blazed with sudden light. That arm, which had appeared stiff and passive, shot out like a striking serpent, seizing the long brocade case at an angle and with a speed that defied all expectation.
And yet—
The case did not move an inch. The woman's reflexes were nothing short of lightning. She had clamped her end of the case in an iron grip.
"I knew something was wrong! That cold-hearted, selfish wretch, when has he ever cared about my life when his own was on the line?!" The woman's voice turned sharp and frigid as she lashed out, a surprisingly potent surge of qi emanating from her body. "You little thief—"
But just as she moved to strike—
Her breath caught.
Without warning, she felt the sky above her head go dark.
She looked up involuntarily—
A golden streak of light, blazing with a brilliance so intense it seared the eyes, was screaming toward her across the farthest reaches of the sky, tearing through the void itself with a force that shook heaven and earth.
Its radiance, in an instant, eclipsed the full blaze of the midday sun above. Against that blinding extreme, every other color seemed drained from the world, the entire sky and earth sinking into a strange and uncanny dimness.
The streak crossed a thousand li in the space of a heartbeat. In the blink of an eye, it hung suspended directly above Lengshan County.
"What is that—"
Even catching it only at the edge of her vision, the woman felt her very soul quake. A suffocating dread welled up in her chest, the sensation of absolute destruction, of being crushed to nothing in the very next instant.
BOOM.
The golden light erupted directly above Lengshan County's Magistrate’s office, bursting apart into a cascading rain of gold that filled the sky and then dissolved.
Jolted back to her senses by the shockwave of that immense force, the woman suddenly became aware of a lightness in her hands.
She looked down in alarm, eyes wide.
There was nothing there. The "thief" who had been standing before her, along with the [Lengshan Vessel] case she had been gripping with all her strength had vanished. Disappeared into thin air, without a trace, as though they had never existed.
In their place, a single square of coarse grey cloth drifted slowly downward, spinning gently in the air like a withered leaf, floating down to rest on the empty ground.
Like a wordless mockery.
"Where did he go?!" The woman whirled in frantic alarm, scanning every corner of the courtyard, even unleashing her qi in a sweeping pulse across the entire compound and found not a single lingering shadow, not a whisper of the other party's presence.
She stood completely still, as though she had seen a ghost in broad daylight. "How is this possible?"
The whole thing felt so absurd it might have been a hallucination. The thief seemed, somehow, to have never existed in this world at all.
Still unwilling to accept it, the woman searched the entire courtyard, even the rooftop and found not the faintest trace of anything.
She stood motionless in the courtyard for a long while, her expression cycling through several violent shifts.
Around her, the battle cries and uproar that had been shaking the city were dying down at an impossible speed, as though the fierce rebel forces had been suppressed and put down within an extraordinarily short span of time.
The woman drew a long breath and forced herself to be calm.
A look of steely resolve flashed through her eyes. She turned and swept back into the house. When she pushed the door open again a moment later, she had not only donned a cloak and slung a pack across her back but that strikingly beautiful face had transformed entirely, replaced by the plain and forgettable features of a middle-aged woman.
Taking advantage of the chaos that had not yet fully subsided, she slipped into the shadows of a back alley and vanished.
...
A short while earlier.
Under the relentless, devastating bombardment of Xiong Jin's eight-armed demon-god phantom, the protective formation around Lengshan County's Magistrate’s office had been reduced to a web of cracks, its light dimmed nearly to nothing, on the verge of complete collapse at any moment.
It was at this most precarious, razor-thin instant that—
The tightly shut main gates of the Magistrate’s office were slowly, deliberately pulled open from within.
County Magistrate Fang Xun stepped across the high threshold alone, unhurried, clad in his black official robes, expression utterly unperturbed.
Xiong Jin, hovering in midair, raised an eyebrow and stilled his assault, looking down. "A puny little scholar, braver than I expected. Hand over the Lengshan Vessel, and this lord may be merciful enough to leave your corpse in one piece."
Fang Xun's expression was as still as a windless lake. His eyes stayed fixed on Xiong Jin as he replied, unhurried:
"The Lengshan Vessel is a rarity of once in a century, true but for a cultivator of your caliber in the Grotto-Mystery Realm, it would be of absolutely no use. Is this for someone of a younger generation?"
He brushed a sleeve calmly, his gaze sharpening by degrees. "For a remnant of the Great Xiang to mobilize in such force, to even dare strike against the offices of the Great Qian, the junior for whom you need the Lengshan Vessel to break through their bottleneck must hold no small place in your heart. Perhaps... royal blood of the Xiang imperial line as well?"
Xiong Jin's expression shifted violently. His pupils contracted.
He had never anticipated this. From a single demand for the item, Fang Xun had peeled back the layers in mere moments and arrived within a hair's breadth of the full truth.
"You court death!!"
Xiong Jin erupted with fury, the crimson flames around his body roaring and swelling. His eight-armed phantom formed seals across all eight hands simultaneously, preparing to obliterate the Magistrate’s office and Fang Xun along with it, in one decisive strike.
But in the very instant before his killing blow landed, Xiong Jin perceived something distinctly, deeply wrong.
In Fang Xun's eyes, there was not a single trace of fear.
On the contrary, this scholar-magistrate who looked so slight and bookish was watching him with the cold, detached gaze of a man watching prey.
And in the instant that Xiong Jin's movements faltered and alarm screamed through his mind-
A bolt of golden light descended from across ten thousand li of sky, bearing the absolute, overwhelming majesty of heaven itself.
An arrow?!
The thought had barely surfaced in Xiong Jin's mind before he could so much as begin to move. The golden arrow of light, which had crossed the entire breadth of the Great Qian sky, tore through the eight-armed phantom as if it were smoke and drove straight into his chest.
No earth-shattering thunderclap. No spray of blood and flesh.
Instead, ten thousand upon ten thousand hair-thin, unbreakable threads of gold erupted outward from the point of impact as though alive, weaving and coiling together in an instant to form a dense, impenetrable golden cocoon that locked Xiong Jin in layer upon layer of absolute restraint.
Within the cocoon, every last trace of Xiong Jin's power seemed sealed away. He plummeted from the sky and struck the ground with a crash.
Fang Xun swept one wide sleeve, and from behind him dozens of constables filed out in rapid succession, each holding specially forged chains, surrounding the golden cocoon with expressions of extreme wariness and binding it fast on all sides.
At the same time, Fang Xun arranged his official robes with the utmost deference, turned to face the direction of the distant Holy Capital, and bowed deeply in a full formal salute, his voice ringing out clearly:
"This student is grateful to Martial Uncle for the divine arrow that has defended the territory of our Great Qian!"
A vast and commanding voice answered, devoid of any emotional inflection, as though carried on the fading resonance of the arrow's light, crossing the immense distance from the Holy Capital to detonate above Lengshan County's Magistrate’s office:
"Guard him closely. The Black-Clad Envoy arrives tomorrow."
"Your disciple understands." Fang Xun held his half-bow until that boundless, ocean-deep voice had faded entirely from the world. Only then did he slowly straighten, an impossible to suppress smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
...
Lengshan Prison.
Li Shun, still hanging in the punishment net, had just successfully recalled his puppet into the Fangcun space, the long case containing the [Lengshan Vessel] now secured safely within it.
He was just about to examine it more closely when the heavy, discordant dragging of iron chains reached him from somewhere in the distance.
Li Shun forced one swollen, bloodshot eye open and looked toward the sound.
Then his pupil contracted sharply.
A group of constables was struggling, visibly straining to carry a massive golden cocoon wound in layer upon layer of chains. They staggered through the entrance, breathing hard, and dumped it with a resounding crash into the cell at the deepest end of the punishment block.
Through the gaps in the golden cocoon, a face was barely visible, the face of the Great Xiang's rebel leader, Xiong Jin, contorted beyond recognition with humiliation and rage.