Sounds from the stronghold outside drifted in now and then, making the room feel all the quieter by contrast. Ning Yi had Hongti lie half-reclined on the bed, propping her up with bedding, then brought in the medicine box.
Years of fighting had made Qingmu Stronghold’s wound medicine quite good, and there were maidservants on hand who could tend to Hongti’s injuries, but Ning Yi simply had them wait outside. Seeing Ning Yi approach, Hongti, leaning against the bed, looked at him with a complicated expression and said, “Liheng…”
She seemed to want to say more, but Ning Yi waved a hand, set down the medicine box, and took hold of her right wrist to check her pulse.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve fought plenty of battles myself, had people come after me plenty of times — I’ve been injured before too, and I picked up some skill at treating wounds along the way… though it looks like you’ve taken some internal damage as well…”
“Just have them tend to me, you…”
“Me what?” Ning Yi looked at her. “You weren’t actually scared by what that fat man said, were you? Master and disciple… I’ll admit, there’s something thrilling about that idea. I quite like it.”
“Liheng…”
“But watching you fight him like you were ready to die — that made me angry. Yesterday you said that as long as you wanted to drag it out, there was no way he could beat you, that you’d wait for your chance and win. That’s the only reason I agreed to let you fight him. What happened out there wasn’t what you promised. Don’t forget what you told me.”
Someone knocked outside. Ning Yi went and brought in hot water, wrung out a cloth, and wiped the blood from her forehead and hands. Then he took a pair of scissors and cut open the sleeve of her left arm. There were, in truth, wounds visible elsewhere on her body too, and the way Ning Yi handled the scissors looked almost as though he meant to cut away all of her clothing. Hongti made as if to pull back, but then lowered her head, resigned, murmuring something low, her expression complicated. Fortunately, Ning Yi only cut as far as her shoulder and stopped there. Even so, it was more than enough to make her blush.
“A duel like that, who can control it that precisely. That Sect Leader Lin was hurt far worse than I was — he was just gritting his teeth and holding on. If you hadn’t stepped in, I’d have killed him. I didn’t lose… and I didn’t break my promise either.”
“Killing him would have crippled you too.” Ning Yi dabbed alcohol onto cotton cloth and disinfected her left arm, his tone showing little surprise. The bones in Hongti’s arm had indeed suffered damage from taking Lin Zongwu’s most vicious blow one-handed, but overall there was no fracture or other serious injury — a testament to just how formidable her survival instincts truly were.
The reason he’d agreed to let Hongti face Lin Zongwu in the first place was that she had once said her skill was such that, purely to protect herself, she could keep the fight going for three days and three nights against him if she needed to. But Lin Zongwu’s claim that the two of them were master and disciple had, in the end, provoked her into fury, and from the opening exchange she’d unleashed her most vicious, lethal strikes. Since their cultivation levels were, in the end, fairly close, if she meant to kill him, she couldn’t avoid taking injury herself.
Back in the hall at the time, Zhu Biao was one of the few people present capable of even vaguely grasping fights at this level, and seeing Hongti’s martial skill prove so formidable — even gaining the upper hand — had filled him with shock and admiration in equal measure. But he’d also been able to tell that this “Elder Lu” had already resolved to kill her opponent, so much so that in the space of a few brief moments the two of them had drawn blood and clashed head-on again and again. This was exactly why Ning Yi had grown so furious and stepped in — he’d been prepared, if necessary, to clash directly with Lin Zongwu himself, but the idea of Hongti trading her life for her opponent’s was something he simply couldn’t bear to watch unfold.
Though Ning Yi hadn’t been able to fully make sense of the fight while it was happening, the moment he helped Hongti up, many things became clear. In both of the truly lethal exchanges during the duel, Lin Zongwu had come out badly the worse for it. In the first, Hongti’s Chang’e-Flying-to-the-Moon backward sword strike had come while she was already running with the direction of his punch, so that although his fist landed on her, most of its force had already been dissipated — while the sword strike that tore across his back had come in direct and unmitigated. Stopping the bleeding from that wound alone must have cost him enormous effort afterward.
And in that final sweeping exchange, Hongti had caught the stone pillar one-handed with her left arm while striking Lin Zongwu’s chest with her right palm, using the most refined Tai Chi redirecting technique she knew — meaning Lin Zongwu had effectively taken both Hongti’s full-force palm strike and a good portion of his own momentum at once. Hongti’s body had been sent flying, but he himself had also been blown backward several meters, crashing through two walls — how severe his internal injuries truly were was probably something only he himself knew.
By comparison, Lin Zongwu’s internal cultivation ran so deep, and his body’s physical defenses and vitality were so extraordinarily strong. Hongti, on the other hand, was someone who had killed on real battlefields — what she understood best of all was how to survive at the very edge of life and death: not avoiding injury entirely, but trading the lightest possible wound for the greatest possible result. Whenever harm was about to land, her defenses and force-redirection were invariably masterful.
But in a duel between grandmasters, if Lin Zongwu — a master of his caliber — had truly been driven to a death-throes final burst in a genuine attempt to kill her, Hongti would certainly have paid a heavy price as well. By the time Ning Yi called for a draw, Lin Zongwu, a guest on foreign soil, had little choice but to grit his teeth and hold his ground. In truth, Lin Zongwu harbored grand ambitions — he still wanted to challenge Zhou Tong himself — so why would he throw his life away here? Even in the best possible outcome, where he killed Hongti, he himself would likely be crippled by her in the process — and with injuries that severe, once Ning Yi lost his temper, neither he nor anyone else in that hall would have walked down from Qingmu Stronghold alive. He had no wish to see that outcome play out, and so, when Ning Yi stepped in, he seized the opportunity to climb down gracefully. Fortunately, by the time Ning Yi saw how badly Hongti was hurt, he no longer cared about any of that either.
“If I went to kill him right now, would it be possible?” Ning Yi asked quietly.
Hongti shook her head. “He’s not hurt badly enough yet. If I went, it might still be possible — but with more people involved, he’d still get away… unless it were a coordinated kill by masters on the level of Chen Fan or Qianqian, there’s some chance right now… actually, I could go kill him myself too.”
“But you’d end up gravely wounded again.”
“Some risk is unavoidable…”
In the room, Ning Yi shook his head, applied medicine to her wounds, and wrapped a bandage around her forehead as well. Time slipped quietly by. While bandaging her, Ning Yi took hold of the fabric at her side and tore it open a little without thinking. Hongti pressed her lips together, her expression turning somewhat serious, but she didn’t resist — in this room, it seemed, this “master” of his was entirely at Ning Yi’s mercy. His hands paused for a moment — by now the ties of her undergarment and the skin at her side were visible, dotted with bloodstains and scrapes — but he finally stopped himself.
“I’ll have them come in to finish bandaging you.”
He said this, then stood up, steadied himself, and added, “I know what’s on your mind. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything. This talk of master and disciple — it doesn’t matter at all. I actually like it, you know… Once you’re feeling better, we’ll talk it through, and everything will go on just as before.”
Hongti looked up at him. “All right…”
Before she finished speaking, Ning Yi leaned down, like a shadow falling over her, and captured her lips. His tongue slipped in, the taste of blood between their mouths. Her body stiffened for a moment, then relaxed, and she closed her eyes, letting him do as he pleased.
Ning Yi left the room and let the maidservant waiting in the adjoining room go in to help. He then crossed through the courtyard, and looking down toward the road outside, saw that the commotion in the guest courtyard had died down entirely. Walking to another small courtyard nearby, he found Zhu Biao there, discussing matters with several others. “How did it go? What did Sect Leader Lin do? How did he react?”
“He’s still down there, hasn’t left. He’s probably tending his wounds right now.”
“What are the odds of killing him, in your view?”
“It’s hard to put a number on it — not high. Our formations could hold their own against him, but we couldn’t keep him from escaping.”
“What about sending the cavalry to hunt him down?”
“Once he’s out in the open, he’s faster than any cavalry, and it’s easy enough to disappear around here in Lüliang.”
“…What if we brought Hongti in, had her handle cutting off his escape?”
“With Elder Lu involved, in the ideal scenario we could surround and kill him — but at his level, being surrounded on one side while being blocked by Elder Lu on the other isn’t very likely to work. The moment we move, he’ll sense it immediately, and in the end, it’ll probably still come down to Elder Lu having to go all out. I know you don’t want her getting hurt, Brother Ning,” Zhu Biao said. “And just as we calculated before — even if we did kill Lin Zongwu, Sikong Nan would be the real problem. The capital’s forces can guard against an assassination attempt by Lin Zongwu, but if it’s Sikong Nan who comes, she leaves no trace coming or going — we could easily slip up.”
For Ning Yi, though he occasionally talked tough to intimidate people, what he did behind the scenes mattered far more than what he said. Well before all this, an extensive assassination plan targeting the Great Radiance Cult had already been drawn up, most of it aimed at preventing a grandmaster-level master from making a desperate, all-or-nothing dash into the capital for an assassination. Right now, seeing Lin Zongwu wounded, Ning Yi had immediately had Zhu Biao consider the possibility of finishing him off for good — but at this level of martial skill, firearms carried little effective power for now, and relying on sheer numbers still left far too much room for things to go wrong.
Success rate aside, killing Lin Zongwu would also mean an open break with the Qi Family, and an awkward reckoning with Qin Siyuan besides — those were secondary concerns. Far more troubling would be Sikong Nan, whose martial skill was likely no lower than Lin Zongwu’s own — if she came to the capital seeking revenge, that truly would be the worst possible outcome. Against Lin Zongwu, Ning Yi still had plans and preparations in place — dozens, even a hundred men ready to surround and kill him — and even just now, if Lin Zongwu had refused to back down and things had turned violent, he could have immediately called in his own men to clash with him directly. But Sikong Nan, cunning and calculating, leaving no trace coming or going, was by far the most difficult problem of all.
“…Better to kill Sikong Nan first, then Lin Zongwu.” Ning Yi nodded.
“That was the plan all along, after all…” Zhu Biao sighed. “Though this really was a good opportunity.”
“Then let’s set it aside for now. While we’re here in Lüliang, I’ll plan things out further with Hongti — figure out what it would actually take to surround and kill a master at this level. Back at Dulong Ridge, we never planned this far ahead — thought it was a hopeless cause at the time, which was a shame. We’ll need to make up for that going forward.” Having confirmed there was nothing more to be done for now, there was no point dwelling on it further. “How’s the fighting outside going?”
Zhu Biao smiled. “It’s only just started — we don’t really know yet.”
“Send a few more men out to keep an eye on it.”
Having wrapped up these odds and ends, he returned to the courtyard near the great hall, and saw that the door to Hongti’s room was, in fact, open — Hongti was nowhere to be seen, and the maidservant was tidying up. His heart gave a jolt — he thought for a moment she’d run off to kill Lin Zongwu — but upon asking, he learned that after having her wounds lightly dressed, she’d gone out to speak with Liang Bingfu.
Ning Yi, carrying internal power that had broken through to the sixth stage, had unusually sharp hearing as well. Calming his mind, he could make out the sound of two voices talking in a room not far off. He walked over and heard Liang Bingfu asking, “…I know what’s weighing on your mind… when you were out there, did you really say, with your own mouth, that Liheng was your disciple?”
Hongti was silent for a moment, then said quietly, “…I did say it… Grandfather Liang, this really is troublesome, isn’t it?”
“Ah, heaven, earth, sovereign, parent, teacher — the five cardinal relations. These things matter, and not just out there in the wider world — even here in our mountains, we hold to them. You said it with your own mouth. Troublesome doesn’t begin to cover it…” Liang Bingfu paused. “If word of this spreads, your marriage to him may end up without proper legitimacy…”
“I’m worried it might affect what he’s doing down south…”
“Ah, well, this…”
Liang Bingfu seemed to want to offer some comfort, but in the end couldn’t find the words. In truth, Hongti’s martial skill far surpassed Ning Yi’s, and if Ning Yi could hear the conversation in the room, Hongti certainly knew he had already arrived — the worries she voiced aloud were, in a sense, less for Liang Bingfu’s benefit than an indirect way of laying out the stakes for Ning Yi himself.
Her temperament appeared gentle, and matters had progressed to the point where, even in private, she let Ning Yi undress her without objection, and didn’t mind when he stepped in to stop her from fighting either — but when it came to something touching on Ning Yi’s own reputation and standing, she still held firmly to her own judgment, and wasn’t about to treat it as nothing simply because of a few reassuring words from him.
Talking things over privately with Liang Bingfu in the room was, in part, meant to let Ning Yi overhear and understand how she meant to handle things going forward. But Ning Yi pressed his lips together and, without listening any further, walked straight to the room and knocked on the door. “I’m coming in.”
Inside, Hongti turned. “Don’t—”
Ning Yi had already pushed the door open and walked straight in. Hongti’s head and hands were both wrapped in bandages; she rose from beside the table, and Ning Yi shot her a fierce glare.