Li Jianqiu stood beneath the great boulder, utterly still. Only the flames of his saber-pairs swayed in the mountain wind. Jiang Wang walked to his side and read the characters on the stone.
"'The twelfth year of Yongtai. Bloody battles in a hundred arrays. Hands behind my back, unmatched. I leave these words for later generations to gaze upon!'
The signature was a single Wu. It did not look finished, for beside it ran one more vertical stroke, plainly the very start of a line.
Yongtai was the reign name of the current sovereign of the Zhuang Kingdom — now the fourteenth year, the year three thousand nine hundred and seventeen of the Dao calendar, meaning these words had been left two years ago, precisely when Standing Brush Peak had first been cleansed clean.
After cutting down the ferocious beasts, Li Jianqiu did not brag, nor sum up, nor press forward. He merely stopped before this carving that plainly carried a story, and stayed silent. The mood made even the ever-skittish Huang Azhan fall quiet.
Li Jianqiu stood in silence a while, then dismissed the flame sabers over both hands. At last, for the first time before them, he slowly drew the sword at his waist.
This was the first time Jiang Wang saw that blade leave its sheath. Bright and brilliant — adjectives one would never think to pair with a sword, yet on this one they fit perfectly.
Li Jianqiu lifted the sword in one hand and added a few strokes to the carving. Wu Shan. An ordinary name, to be sure, but it should have belonged to that senior who seemed to bear the might of the unmatched. Li Jianqiu moved his sword-point to a new line, carving: A later-generation student comes to pay respects! Then he began another row and wrote his signature: Li Jianqiu, the cur that lost.
Stone dust sifted softly down, as if burying some feeling in the grit.
"Come," Li Jianqiu said, turning. "We go to the summit."
The group skirted the great boulder and pressed on through withered branches and rotting leaves between jagged rocks. A road had perhaps run here once, but two years had let the mountain return to its own shape. There was no path across the hills, yet the way lay beneath their feet.
"Earlier I noticed your sword was broken. When we finish cleaning Standing Brush Peak on our own, the reward can be traded for a magic weapon longsword. It'll go to you." Li Jianqiu said it carelessly.
"How can that be?" Jiang Wang waved a hand. "The task isn't done by me alone, and you're the main strength here." As a cultivator long accustomed to wielding a blade, his longing for a fine sword went without saying. Had this trip carried only him and Zhao Rucheng, he would not have felt awkward. But neither Li Jianqiu nor even Huang Azhan was friend enough for that.
Li Jianqiu patted the longsword at his waist. "I have Peach Branch. I need no other sword."
So that blade was called Peach Branch — a fitting name, so bright and brilliant. Jiang Wang thought so.
Li Jianqiu went on, "A magic sword of this grade should be worth about six hundred Dao Merit. Each of you can just give me a hundred points." So calculated, Jiang Wang still came out far ahead, and the rest were not truly losing either — Dao Merit was hard currency, and the task's physical reward might not suit them. "Fine." Jiang Wang stopped being coy. The other two, naturally, raised no objection.
Li Jianqiu turned to Huang Azhan. "Judging from your Dao arts, you follow the same school as Shen Nanqi. Only where he favors metal, you lean to fire."
Huang Azhan scratched his head and smiled. "Just muddled through on my own, no real system to it."
"Fire-element Dao arts are violent. You need to set more store by mastery over the art itself. Take the Flame Pellet for instance." Li Jianqiu casually worked a hand through a seal and molded a ball of flame. "When it bursts, how it bursts, on what scale, at what speed — all this you must make effortless." Under his manipulation the Flame Pellet darted forward and back, swelled and shrank, then suddenly accelerated and smashed a boulder apart.
"I am instructed." Huang Azhan bowed formal and proper.
Li Jianqiu waved a hand, then turned to Zhao Rucheng. "You're very clever. Earlier I said that among you, Du Yehu had the greatest combat talent. It seems I overlooked you. Your talent in battle is not beneath his — only his relies on an inborn instinct for combat. Yours works on this." He tapped a finger to his own head.
Zhao Rucheng gave a laugh. "Is that so? I'd never have known if you hadn't said it." Huang Azhan chewed it over a while. "That's not right, Senior Brother Li. So of us three, I'm the only one who needs pointing at?"
Li Jianqiu smiled without answering. In so fierce a battle, he had kept his finger on the combat detail of every person — enough to show he had been entirely at ease. Yet for some reason, at the Three-City Dao Debate back then, he had never shown strength that matched his skill.
A writing brush of wolf's hair — the handle straight and upright, the hair-tip rounded and full, the point sharp as a fine awl. Turn it upside down, and there was the general shape of Standing Brush Peak. Pass the mountainside and climb a little farther — that was the position of the brush tip, where the peak's cross-section was broadest, and the stronghold of its ferocious beasts.
From far off they could already hear the beasts snarling. As they drew closer, impatient beasts began charging out. Like a signal, and then as if a hornet's nest had burst open — misshapen ferocious beasts of every kind came swarming in. Wind Centipedes, Rock Serpents, tiger-jacks, mountain spiders...
Amid all this, Li Jianqiu had leisure to count roughly. "Not bad. Fewer than a hundred."
He stepped forward, and Peach Branch came free of its sheath! The sword-light blazed; the sword-qi surged. In a gorgeous, dark red, he flung himself into the tide of beasts — like spring arriving, like peach blossoms opening. The blossoms were the color of blood; what bloomed was a life's soul. Li Jianqiu's body became a crimson tide that swept through the beast tide. Jiang Wang and the others watched dumbfounded, without ever a chance to strike.
The crimson tide receded. Every snarl and shriek fell still. Only Li Jianqiu's lean figure stood upright — one man, one sword, a ground full of beast corpses. What a painting, a broad freehand sweep of ink!
"Senior Brother Li, awesome!" Huang Azhan was stunned past all measure; even he forgot to flatter. "You're this strong — why did you still need us along?"
Li Jianqiu held Peach Branch in hand, gazing toward the mountainside, and amid the corpses of the beasts suddenly let out a long howl! The voice shook the high cliffs and carried across the far mountains — a long-knotted knot swept clean away.
Only when the howl was done did he sheathe his sword and say, "The man who left his words on that stone loved most of all to reveal his wonders before the crowd. I brought you here to satisfy his last wish of being gazed upon by later students."
Jiang Wang hesitated, then asked, "That senior Wu Shan... was he also a student of our Fenglin City Dao Academy?"
"Counting it up, he should be of the same intake as Senior Brother Zhu — only his skill fell far short. What he had then is nothing beside what I am now." Li Jianqiu shook his head; one could not say whether nostalgia or bitterness held sway.
"I told you before, didn't I? My teammates all died. They died under his leadership."
He turned to look toward the summit of Standing Brush Peak — or perhaps it was only to turn his back on Jiang Wang and the others. His voice rang through the mountain: "He was weak, terribly weak. But when the beast tide burst out all at once and broke the line, he stood before it. He said that we of Fenglin City Dao Academy could not let the people of Sanshan City look down on us.
"All of them stood before the beast tide. I ran."
Jiang Wang and the others watched his back — under the gusting mountain wind, terribly alone. In an instant they understood the signature he had carved: Li Jianqiu, the cur that lost. That line had been carved in his heart for two years, over seven hundred days and nights — and only after truly carving it upon the cliff and slaughtering every ferocious beast on Standing Brush Peak could he finally make peace with himself.