However anyone had hoped it would go, the Three-City Trial was over.
The crowds drifted home, still bright with talk. Maple City's academy had not done badly at all, and they basked in it.
Most of the city's people never knew what had happened that day. The blood in the dark rooms, the killings at the alley corners, the tangle of life and death — all of it passed silently, like air dissolving into air.
Bone Path's storm had been smoothed away. Not a trace of blood on the streets. The few civilians who had seen too much were sworn to silence.
For most of the city, the day had been simply a festival with excellent entertainment.
The supernatural does not exempt a man from pain. And ignorance is not always unhappiness.
For Wei Lin, the reckoning was seventeen Bone Path heads stacked before him, plus the bodies that had not earned collection. His humiliation was washed clean.
He said to Dean Dong: "The day's debt is paid. Let's have the academy disciples chant the Sutra of Salvation a few times. A mercy for the dead of Little Grove Town."
A city lord, at last able to honor his own town.
It was no trouble. The Sutra of Salvation was the standard rite; every Dao cultivator knew it by heart.
Dean Dong's reply was cold: "Souls scattered to nothing. What is there to save?"
Wei Lin found the man impossible. Work together all day, and not one kind face at the end of it. Small wonder he had been driven out of the capital.
...
When Three Mountain City's cultivators left, Jiang Chen came to see them off.
He respected Yang Xiong, genuinely, and the will those cultivators had shown all trial.
Against Riverview's grand procession, the Three Mountain band looked thin and lonely. If Dean Dong had not personally treated their wounds, they could not even have gone home at full strength — they had fought that hard.
Yang Xiong was glad to see him. "I lost fair and square. You're strong. I'll come for you again next year!"
They talked a while. Then Jiang Chen hesitated, and asked: "The Three-City Trial isn't the county exam. Why do you fight like this?"
Yang Xiong fell silent.
"Sorry. If it's not something to ask, forget it," Jiang Chen said.
"It's because... Three Mountain City is dying by inches." It was Sun Xiaoman who answered, low and flat, who had been quiet the whole time.
"Three Mountain City. So many mountains, so many beasts — and the fierce ones are worse. The beasts you can eat. The fierce ones are trouble..."
And as Sun Xiaoman talked, Jiang Chen began to understand.
Humanity had risen in the ancient age — but life before the rise had not been kind. Men called themselves the spirit of all things, yet almost every human was born with closed meridians; only rare geniuses showed Dao meridians at birth and could cultivate freely.
Beasts were born with open meridians, every one of them.
Then a supreme human genius invented a pill formula and published it. That opened the door.
His name was lost to history. His formula endured.
That formula was the first Meridian-Opening Pill. Its core ingredient: the Dao meridian of a beast.
From that day, humanity needed no natural talent. With a pill, anyone could cultivate. And an age of wholesale beast-hunting began.
Jiang Chen had wondered about a thing, long before he could cultivate. In an age of cultivators sweeping across the world, why had humanity still not cleansed the wilds? Why did every nation only keep its official roads clear, while beasts and fierce beasts roamed the rest?
Because the beasts were a resource. In a sense, they were livestock, raised wild. The beasts and the wilderness were the ecology needed to keep them thriving. Beasts, favored by heaven, born with open meridians, could never be penned.
Fierce beasts were another matter. Viciously strong, lacking in spirit, inedible even. Their destructiveness matched the beasts' — but they were worthless.
Hunting fierce beasts was pure loss. Three Mountain City had to do it anyway. So Three Mountain City bled money, always, year after year.
All strength cost resources. Three Mountain City's outflows had always exceeded its inflows. And worse — the fierce beasts in its territory never ran out. They tore up the roads, raided villages, ate people.
The land could not feed itself; most food came from outside. And the broken roads made that food dangerous to deliver.
Then the academy had taken its beating from the Heart-Devouring Demon. Fewer hands still.
Keeping the roads was Three Mountain City's responsibility. To ask the Zhuang court for experts, it had to pay in resources. It had nothing left to pay.
That was why, with senior disciple Chu Ping dead, the academy had treated this trial as a lifeline. The desperate fights on the Drill Ground were not for glory. They were for the old and young back home, the people scraping by in the shadow of the mountains.
"You know? Every match we win, at least ten people in Three Mountain City get to live." Yang Xiong's eyes were red. He dropped his head. "If we just did well..."
He was ashamed of losing. He had given everything.
Jiang Chen was quiet a long moment.
He put a hand on Yang Xiong's shoulder: "The first-year crown this trial — I got it cheap, and I don't feel right about it. The fifty merit points. I'll transfer them to you when I'm back at the academy."
Fifty merit was no small sum. It could not fix Three Mountain City, but it eased the edge of hunger.
For a disciple whose name was on the Dao register, fifty merit was half a Meridian-Opening Pill — half a cultivator, in a manner of speaking.
That was exactly what Three Mountain City needed most right now.
"How can we accept that?" Yang Xiong stared.
Sun Xiaoman's fist had already landed in Jiang Chen's gut. "We're friends now, you and me!"
She had meant to punch his chest, heroically. Her height had other plans. Jumping to reach it would have spoiled the mood, so she settled for his stomach.
Jiang Chen felt a mouthful of old blood lodge in his throat. If the Four-Spirit Body Refining Art had not hardened him so thoroughly, that one punch would have finished him.
The little girl hit like a landslide.
And Jiang Chen knew she was not being generous. He could see the strain beneath her easy grin. She would not let her own pride cost her people a single drop of help.
"Until we meet again."
"Until we meet again!"
A thousand-mile farewell ends at one step. Jiang Chen stopped at the city gate and watched his new friends go.
...
"Big sister. Buy me new clothes." Little Fatty Sun Xiaoyan shuffled along in his hooded black robe, hiding himself.
His own clothes had been shredded in his fight.
"No money."
"I can't go home like this! So many people will see! What if I'm exposed?"
"Who cares? You're still a kid."