Zen’s stomach tightened as he reached for the hilt of the dagger strapped to the inside of his boot. He missed the length of his jiàn, but it was simply too risky to carry a longsword with him into Elantian territory, especially now that the Twelfth Cycle festivities had brought in a slew of patrols. Besides, this dagger—That Which Cuts Stars—was created to fight demons.
The thought of a soul warping into a demon or a ghoul of sorts here, in the midst of the Southern Elantian Outpost, felt incongruous, almost laughable, to Zen. It would be irony enough to spin into a tale should a horde of demons descend upon the elite military generals of the empire.
Yet much as the Hin had begun to fade from their own lands after the Conquest, so, too, had the spirits.
No, assuming that the old man’s soul would corrode into something demonic did not feel right. A demon’s core—the concentration of qì that gave it vitality—took cycles, if not decades or centuries, to form. Besides, focusing on the flow of energies all around, he found a slight distinction: the yin he felt did not come from the corpse itself but, rather, hung over parts of it like clouds of perfume. And now that he expanded his senses, he found traces of it lingering in the air, on the floor, by the door, all around the shop.
Zen’s eyes flew open. His knuckles whitened over the hilt of his dagger. The answer to this mystery was something far more intriguing and ominous.
Someoneelsehad left the trail of yin energies here. And in a world where only trained practitioners could manipulate qì, Zen could think of just one type of practitioner who would wield qì consisting largely of yin: a demonic practitioner. One who used the forbidden branch of practitioning that drew on the energies of a demon bound to their soul.
Impossible.
Restrictions over demonic practitioning had tightened throughout the nearly eight-hundred-cycle era of the Middle Kingdom, yet it wasn’t until the end of the era that this branch was eradicated. Emperor Yán’lóng, the Dragon Emperor, had massacred the rebel Mansorian clan’s last demonic practitioners, transitioning the former Middle Kingdom into the Last Kingdom: an era of peace, without the tumult and tension between the Ninety-Nine Clans and the Hin imperial government. The surviving clans had surrendered, pledging allegiance to the Imperial Court; those that didn’t had spent the majority of the era being hunted to extinction.
This had lasted just eighty cycles before the Elantians invaded.
Zen drew back as though burned, breaking his Seal with a slash of his finger. The tips of the incense extinguished with a hiss, leaving the pounding of his heart to seep into the silence that followed.
His attention shifted from worrying about the ledger he’d come for to scouring the area for more traces of this qì.
He found another concentration of it: a scroll of paper that lay flattened beneath one of Old Wei’s hands. He pried the scroll loose and unfurled it, dusting debris and splinters of wood from its surface. His pulse quickened.
On the scroll was an incantation Seal, likely copied from a practitioning tome. He felt a jolt of surprise as he studied it—structurally balanced, a combination of straight strokes and curved sweeps that mimicked Hin characters yet were arranged completely differently, all enclosed in a circle—and realized that, for all his cycles of study, he didn’t recognize it. He flipped it over and, finding nothing on the back, examined the markings in the margins of the page, of the Four Demon Gods perched upon swirls of painted clouds.
The page hadn’t come from a tome he’d seen before, but the question was: What was it doing here? The thin scroll resting in his hands seemed to swell, representing a great impossibility: something that had slipped through the cracks of time and the waters and fires of history against all odds. After the Dragon Emperor’s defeat of the Mansorian clan and the capitulation of the remaining clans, practitioning had become limited to serving the court by imperial decree; anything outside of that was to be obliterated. The Dragon Emperor’s Burning of the Hundred Schools was an event wiped from the pages of history books but quietly passed along through word of mouth by practitioners who still remembered.
By the tail end of the Last Kingdom, the knowledge of practitioners and the Hundred Schools had faded from the minds of common folk, thought of as no more than old folktales.
Then the Elantians had come and burned the remaining Hin temples to the ground, razing through the practitioners serving the Imperial Court so that the Hin would never again rise. The few remaining schools of practitioning quietly endorsed by the emperor had fallen within days of the Conquest.
All but one.
Gently, as though the scroll were embellished with gold and lapis lazuli, Zen rolled it up and tucked it into his black silk pouch. His trade with Wei was forfeit. The old shopkeeper had put out a call on the Hin black market for any surviving tomes from the Hundred Schools; Zen, seeing the man’s profession, had put in a request for the Elantian government trade ledger for metals.
Specifically, precious metals.
Metals that were being hoarded and used by Elantian Royal Magicians to channel their magic.
Zen hadn’t actually planned to give a real practitioningtome to the old man. Whatever surviving relics had been salvaged from the ruins of the Hundred Schools were worth more than the finest jade.
Why?he thought now as he considered the elder’s corpse, the incense smoke swirling around it like shadows.Why did you want a practitioning tome?
More important, towhomhad the shopkeeper planned to sell it?
Zen had a guess: the same person who had left a trace of yin energies in the air.
Zen brushed a hand over his black silk pouch, the scroll stored safely inside. If only he could speak with the old man.
Zen knew practitioners much more proficient at spiritual summonings than he, and performing one could possibly drain him of his strength. But even if it didn’t, creating anything more than the smallest of disturbances in the energies would have the Royal Magicians on him faster than ants on honeyed dates. Performing a spiritual summoning would be akin to shooting a barrel of firepowder into the night sky.
And for Zen, a surviving Hin practitioner, to fall into the hands of Elantian Royal Magicians would bring a fate worse than death…and expose the existence of the last-standing school of practitioning from the Last Kingdom.
He twisted the sticks of incense between his fingers, running through his options. The incense did not lie: there was a rogue practitioner loose somewhere in this corrupt city. The game had changed, and it was now crucial for Zen to be the first to find them. Not only to keep them and their skills from the hands of the Elantians but also to find out what business they’d had with his contact, to interrogate their allegiance…and to find the answers to the trail of yin energies they had left here.
The Seal on that scroll would be key to his search.
Zen leaned forward. In the darkness, the old man’s eyes were still open, his face frozen in fear. The moonlight blanched his skin white, the Hin color of mourning.
