Da Xin Tuonuo had made up his mind to leave.

He ticked off his reasons. First: the Blood Butcher’s hatred for the Ning Army was clearly genuine — no need to stay and monitor them for signs of betrayal. Second: Xu Suqing’s capabilities were not to be underestimated, and the longer he stayed, the more likely Xu Suqing would find a way to use him — and since Xu Suqing was still essential to the coming campaign, Da Xin Tuonuo couldn’t simply eliminate him first. Third: having now witnessed the Ning general’s martial ability, remaining in this camp felt actively suicidal.

The Ning Army was going to destroy the Blood Butcher. If he was here when that happened, he wasn’t walking away — regardless of how well he’d fulfilled Prince Kuo Ke Di Ye Lan’s assignment.

He turned it over from every angle. He was a Grand Sword Master. The Prince couldn’t simply punish him on a whim. And the mission was, by any reasonable measure, complete.

Decision made: leave at dawn. This was no place to linger. Heaven only knew who else might come charging in here.

The Blood Butcher were bait — bait to draw the Ning Army out of the border passes and into the open steppe for a decisive engagement. Da Xin Tuonuo had been here to watch the bait. He had no intention of becoming part of it.

He ordered his remaining disciples to pack, then started gathering his own things. The more he packed, the more irritated he became. What exactly had he accomplished on this trip? And every time his hands moved, he felt it — his palm throbbing where the Ning general had slapped a spear butt into it. That force had been considerable. Anyone else would have had the bones of their hand crushed to powder.

He secured his belongings, breathed out slowly, and stepped into the corridor.

The wooden tower had three floors. His room was on the third. The staircase was at the far end of a walkway, around a corner. He started toward it.

A few steps in, something felt wrong.

He looked up.

At the corner, where the light was dim, a figure stood. A man in a long scholar’s robe — Central Plains style, by the cut. Da Xin Tuonuo barely registered him at first. This was a camp full of Central Plains men. Nothing unusual.

He kept walking.

Three steps later, the feeling sharpened into something he couldn’t dismiss. He stopped and looked again.

The figure hadn’t moved. He stood at the corner with his hands clasped behind his back, his robe shifting faintly in the draft. Even in the dim light, he looked like someone who spent his life with books rather than blades.

And yet.

Da Xin Tuonuo became aware of something peculiar happening in his own body. The closer he drew to this man, the more every pore on his skin seemed to open — as if something in the air had changed. He thought at first it was a cold draft.

Then he realized: it wasn’t wind. It was the hair standing up along his arms.

“Who are you?”

He stopped and asked, unable to help himself.

The figure stepped forward into the lamplight, and his face became clear. He did look like a scholar — the face as much as the clothes.

Then, in a perfectly level voice, the man said: “I’d like to borrow something from you. My master wants it, and only you have it.”

Da Xin Tuonuo asked twice in quick succession: “Borrow what?” and “Who is your master?”

The scholar raised one hand and pointed at Da Xin Tuonuo’s head.

“Your head.”

The fury that detonated in Da Xin Tuonuo was genuine — so sudden and so total that it briefly cleared away even the creeping unease, and the sensation of his pores opening came back sharper than before.

“Xu Suqing sent you?”

He sneered. “Even Xu Suqing is no match for me. And you think you can stop me?”

It was a reasonable assumption — Xu Suqing had just sent a messenger inviting him to the mourning hall. Who else in this camp would want him dead?

But the scholar — who was, of course, Chu Xiansheng — said with the same unhurried calm: “He didn’t send me. I also have something to borrow from him. He simply comes after you on the list. He can wait.”

“Arrogant.”

The word came out flat, and then Da Xin Tuonuo was already moving. His white robes swept as he stepped forward — he did cut an impressive figure, it had to be said. He brought up his right hand, middle and index fingers pressed together like a blade, aimed directly for the pressure point over Chu Xiansheng’s heart.

Chu Xiansheng did not step back. He waited until those two fingers were nearly on him, then raised his own right hand, middle and index fingers pressed together, and met them directly.

Da Xin Tuonuo was not the sort of man who flinched from a challenge. He had no reason to believe this stranger — some unremarkable Central Plains wanderer — could meet him as an equal. Was this place suddenly full of men like Xu Suqing and Tang Pidi? The world didn’t work that way. If it did, what would be the point of the Black Wu southern campaign?

He wasn’t wrong about that. The world isn’t full of such men. That he had encountered them back to back was simply his misfortune.

Four fingers met.

No explosion. No visible force. No sound at all — nothing that would have told a bystander that anything of consequence had occurred. If someone had been watching, they might have laughed. Two grown men, tapping fingers together like children playing a game.

Then the silence broke.

A very small sound. Almost soft enough to miss.

Crack.

Then Da Xin Tuonuo’s eyes went wide.

He moved instantly to withdraw his hand, and in the moment he formed that intention —

Crack.

The second sound was fractionally louder than the first.

The first crack: his finger bones breaking.

The second crack: the bones of his forearm.

It was as if something invisible — a spike thinner and sharper than any instrument — had entered through his fingertips and was now drilling inward, splitting bone, piercing through marrow, boring steadily deeper.

Then came a soft, wet sound from his shoulder. The invisible spike emerged from the other side. A thin line of red opened across his shoulder.

“Ahh—!”

Da Xin Tuonuo screamed. It tore through the night like something being ripped apart.

Chu Xiansheng looked at his own hand briefly, murmured something low, then raised his left hand.

The scream stopped.

Not faded — stopped. Cut short mid-cry, in the abrupt way that announces only one thing.

Below, the Blood Butcher riders and the remaining Sword Sect disciples came running at the sound. They poured into the upper walkway to find a body on the floor in white robes.

They hesitated for a moment, uncertain — then understood. That was Da Xin Tuonuo by his clothing. The reason they hesitated was because the body had no head.

That was why the scream had ended so suddenly.

Xu Suqing and the others came running from the mourning hall. When they saw the body, they all went still.

What kind of fighter could enter this camp undetected and kill a Grand Sword Master before anyone even realized it had happened? Xu Suqing had measured Da Xin Tuonuo’s internal force with his own — he had not engaged him fully, but he knew exactly how strong the man was. And even he could not have done this.

Unless it was a surprise attack with no warning at all — but then there would have been a struggle, and there had been no struggle. There had been a single cry, and then silence.

“Who could it be.”

Xu Suqing said it to himself, scanning the darkness around him. There was nothing to see. There was no one there.

—

Out on the open steppe, Chu Xiansheng walked through the dark carrying a head, the night wind moving through his robe and through the dead man’s loose hair in equal measure.

He looked at his own right hand. The two fingers were broken. The arm ached deeply — the bone was damaged, not fractured, but damaged.

“A Grand Sword Master.”

He looked at the head. “Killing you wasn’t easy. That was my full force — nothing held back. And you still broke two of my fingers in return.”

The head, naturally, said nothing.

He added: “My fingers will knit back together. Your head won’t.”

He drew a slow breath, found his footing, and shot forward into the dark.

That exchange — which would have looked to any witness like a children’s game, two pairs of fingers touching — had been the absolute limit of what Chu Xiansheng could do. No reserve. No margin.

Because the target was a Grand Sword Master.

He had briefly thought about continuing on to find Xu Suqing. But he abandoned the idea. His left hand was weaker than his right. He no longer had the confidence he’d need.

—