Chapter 4: Face Slapped

There were three of them waiting behind the gym, which Lin Xuan considered insulting.

Not the ambush itself. Ambushes were a time-honored tradition. He had survived seventeen of them before breakfast on certain memorable mornings. No, the insult was the number. Three. Against one nineteen-year-old with a bad heart.

They think this is enough, he thought, shifting his backpack to his other shoulder. How embarrassing for them.

The leader stepped forward. Tall, thick-necked, a faded tattoo crawling up his forearm. The boy's memories supplied the name: Ma Lei. Not a student. A "friend of Zhao Kai's," which meant hired muscle with a gym membership.

"Lin Hao," Ma Lei said. "Zhao Kai says you forgot your place. We're here to remind you."

The other two fanned out. One had a buzzcut. One had a chain wrapped around his fist. They had the loose, confident posture of men who had done this before and enjoyed it.

Behind them, the gym wall. To the left, a dumpster. To the right, the service alley that led back to the quad. No witnesses.

No witnesses, Lin Xuan noted. Their mistake, not mine.

"My place," he repeated thoughtfully. "And where would that be?"

"On the ground." Ma Lei cracked his knuckles. "Don't worry. We'll be gentle. Zhao Kai just wants you to remember who owns your aunt's building."

Lin Xuan looked at the three of them the way he had once looked at enemy formations: weight, balance, tells. Ma Lei led with his right and telegraphed everything. Buzzcut had reach but no guard. The chain one was the only one with any imagination, and his imagination was currently wrapped around his fist.

Three mortals, he thought. No qi. No training. No idea.

It was almost unfair. Almost.

Something cold turned over in Lin Xuan's chest.

Ah. So that's how it is.

He set his backpack down. Carefully. He rolled his shoulders once, feeling the new meridians, the single thread of qi sitting in his dantian like a coal in ash. Qi Refining, first layer. Against three grown men, it was almost nothing.

Almost.

I wrote the manual on this, he thought. Literally. The Cloud-Treading Steps. Two thousand years ago. I wonder if any of it survived.

Ma Lei came in first, all shoulders and momentum, throwing a wide right hook the way street fighters do when they've never needed to learn better.

Lin Xuan did not move until the last possible instant.

Then he moved exactly four inches to the left, caught Ma Lei's wrist with two fingers, and turned.

It was not strength. It was geometry. Ma Lei's own weight did the work, his arm bending in a direction arms do not bend, and he went down to one knee with a sound like a surprised dog. Lin Xuan's two fingers stayed exactly where they were, gentle as a teacher correcting a student's brush stroke.

"Your stance is wrong," Lin Xuan said conversationally. "Your weight is forward. Anyone could do this to you."

Buzzcut charged. Lin Xuan stepped into him, inside the swing, elbow finding the hollow under the ribs with the precision of an acupuncturist. Not hard. Precise. Buzzcut folded like a dropped curtain and sat down heavily next to the dumpster, trying to remember how lungs worked.

The chain one hesitated. That was his second mistake. His first had been wrapping a chain around his fist, which Lin Xuan found quaint.

"Come on, then," Lin Xuan said.

The chain came whistling in. Lin Xuan caught it. He simply caught it, the way a man catches a tossed set of keys, and pulled.

The third goon flew forward two steps, off balance, and Lin Xuan's foot was somehow behind his ankle, and then he was on the ground too, staring up at the sky with the chain still wrapped around his own fist.

Silence. Three men on the asphalt. One nineteen-year-old standing over them, not breathing hard, backpack still neatly set aside.

Ma Lei pushed himself up on one elbow. His face had gone white. "What... what are you?"

Lin Xuan picked up his backpack. He considered the question with the seriousness it deserved.

"A noodle delivery boy," he said, and walked away.

He did not look back. He had broken no bones and drawn no blood. In his old life, he had once leveled a mountain because a sect master insulted his tea. Restraint, he was learning, was its own kind of power. The boy whose body he wore would have wanted it this way.

He was halfway down the alley before he heard the scrambling behind him, and the furious whisper: "Nobody says a word about this. Nobody."

Lin Xuan smiled to himself.

Oh, they will.

Then his heart stuttered.

It was a small thing. A skipped beat, a lurch, like a bell with a crack in it. Lin Xuan stopped walking and stood very still in the alley with his hand pressed to his chest until the rhythm settled.

This body, he thought. Nineteen years old and already failing. The fight cost almost nothing, and still the bell cracks.

He had fought demon kings with this soul. Now three street thugs could kill him by making him breathe too hard.

I need that pill, he thought. Soon.

---

Someone had filmed it, of course. Someone always filmed it.

By dinner, the video was everywhere. It was shaky, shot from a gym window, forty-one seconds of grainy footage: three men surrounding a skinny freshman, and then, impossibly, three men on the ground, and the freshman walking away without a backward glance.

The campus forum exploded.

noodle shop kid beat up three guys???

that's not Lin Hao, Lin Hao faints climbing stairs

my roommate says he learned kung fu over the summer

KUNG FU ISN'T REAL KEVIN

At lunch, the dining hall went quiet when he walked in with his tray. Then the whispering started, a wave following him down the aisle.

"That's him."

"No way. He's like, a hundred pounds."

"My roommate was there. She said he didn't even move. Like, they fell down around him."

Lin Xuan sat in his usual corner and ate his rice. He had once been the subject of ballads. This was not so different, except the ballads had been sung and these were typed, and the awe had the same flavor either way.

A girl from his chemistry class stopped at his table, turned bright red, and asked if the video was real. He said yes. She asked if he could teach her. He said no. She left looking thrilled anyway.

Fame, he thought. The cheapest currency.

Fatty burst into the dorm waving his phone like a flag. "Bro! BRO! Is this you?!"

Lin Xuan looked up from the formation diagram he was sketching. "Is what me?"

"This!" Fatty shoved the screen in his face. "You took down Ma Lei! Ma Lei once put a senior through a wall!"

"He put a senior through drywall," Lin Xuan corrected. "There is a difference."

"That's not the point! The point is you did that!" Fatty flopped onto his bed, staring at the ceiling. "When did you learn to fight? You've never thrown a punch in your life. I've seen you lose an arm-wrestling match to a girl."

"I watched some videos," Lin Xuan said.

"On what? Your hostile artifact?"

"Exactly."

Fatty sat up. "Bro. Are you, like, a secret martial arts prodigy? Was the concussion actually a cultivation concussion? Did you unlock your meridians?"

Lin Xuan paused, chalk hovering over paper. Perceptive, he thought, for a mortal.

"Eat your dinner, Fatty."

---

Zhao Kai watched the video four times in his father's penthouse office, the city glittering behind him.

On the fifth viewing, he set the phone down very carefully on the desk, screen down, and smiled.

It was not a pleasant smile. His friends, lounging on the leather sofa, went quiet.

"Interesting," Zhao Kai said softly. "The cripple learned to bite."

"Want us to go again?" one of them asked. "More guys this time?"

"No." Zhao Kai stood and walked to the window. Below, the campus lights burned, tiny and obedient. "Three nobodies with chains couldn't handle him. So we stop sending nobodies."

One of them, braver than the rest, opened his mouth. "It's just some scholarship kid who got lucky—"

The glass paperweight left Zhao Kai's hand before he finished the sentence. It shattered against the wall, six inches from the speaker's head.

"Ma Lei doesn't lose to luck," Zhao Kai said softly. "Ma Lei has forty pounds on him and a chain. Nobody gets lucky three times in forty seconds." He picked up his phone again and looked at the frozen frame: the skinny boy walking away, hands in his pockets. "Something changed in him. I want to know what."

He turned back, and the smile was still there, cold as a scalpel.

"Find me someone real. Someone who actually knows how to fight."

End of Chapter 4