Chapter 7: The Heiress

The boy was dying in the middle of the cafeteria, and everyone was filming it.

Five minutes earlier, it had been a perfectly normal Tuesday. Lin Xuan had been explaining to Zhou Pang why the sweet and sour pork was a trap.

"It's too red," Lin Xuan said, eyeing the tray. "Real sweet and sour pork is never that red. That color is a warning."

"It's delicious is what it is," Fatty said, already eating. "You have trust issues with food."

"I have three thousand years of experience with poison. The principle transfers."

Fatty opened his mouth to answer. Then the screaming started.

Lin Xuan saw it from the drink counter. A sophomore, maybe twenty, on his knees between the tables. His face was purple. His hands clawed at his throat. A ring of students stood around him with their phones up, and one girl was screaming for someone to do something, which was not the same as doing something.

Useless, Lin Xuan thought, and set down his tray.

Zhou Pang grabbed his sleeve. "Hao, don't. Someone called campus security. They'll, they'll handle it."

"They will handle a corpse." Lin Xuan pulled free and walked into the circle.

The choking boy's eyes bulged. A big guy in a basketball jersey stood behind him, arms wrapped around his ribs, and heaved. Nothing happened. The guy tried again, red-faced, adjusting his grip. Still nothing.

"Someone called 911," a girl said, her voice shaking. "They said ten minutes."

He has three, Lin Xuan thought. The boy's lips were already going blue at the edges.

"Heimlich isn't working," someone said. "The food's too far down."

"Turn him over! Hit his back!"

"Don't touch him, you'll make it worse!"

Everyone had an opinion. Nobody had a plan. The phones stayed up. Lin Xuan had seen this before, three thousand years ago, in villages where the only healer was a three-day walk away. Crowds were the same in every century. Fear made people into furniture.

Up close, he could see the veins standing out on the kid's neck and the particular shade of blue that meant minutes, not hours.

Tiantu point, he thought. The hollow at the base of the throat. Strike it precisely and the diaphragm convulses. The body coughs hard enough to expel anything.

Three thousand years ago, he had done this with a silver needle. Today, he had a cafeteria.

He picked up a wooden chopstick from a nearby tray, snapped it in half, and pressed the broken end against the edge of the table until it splintered to a point. It took four seconds. Nobody stopped him, mostly because nobody understood what they were looking at.

Across the room, a girl at a corner table had set down her fork. She was watching his hands.

"Hey," the basketball guy said. "What are you doing?"

"Saving him." Lin Xuan placed two fingers on the boy's throat, found the hollow, and drove the sharpened chopstick in exactly one inch.

The boy's whole body seized. Then he coughed, a violent barking cough that shook the tables, and a chunk of half-chewed chicken flew across the room and hit a vending machine.

The boy sucked in a huge rattling breath and burst into tears.

The basketball guy sat down hard on the floor, laughing with relief. Someone's girlfriend was crying into her boyfriend's shoulder. The spell broke all at once.

Silence. Then the cafeteria erupted. People cheered. Someone clapped Lin Xuan on the back hard enough to stagger him. The basketball guy stared at the chopstick like it had personally offended him.

The rescued boy grabbed Lin Xuan's wrist with both hands. "Thank you," he gasped. "Oh my god. Thank you. I'm Chen Wei. Sophomore. I owe you my life, man."

"You owe me nothing," Lin Xuan said. "Chew your food."

Campus security arrived four minutes later, which is to say they arrived in time to fill out a form. A guard asked Lin Xuan if he was pre-med.

"Undeclared," Lin Xuan said.

The guard wrote that down like it meant something.

"Dude," a freshman said, holding up his phone, "this is already online. Two thousand views. You're famous, man."

Wonderful, Lin Xuan thought. Fame. Exactly what a reincarnated immortal trying to keep a low profile needs.

By dinner it would be fifty thousand. By morning, the whole campus would know his name. He had survived three thousand years by being unremarkable. That strategy was now officially dead.

Across the room, past the cheering circle, the girl from the corner table still sat with her textbook open and her salad untouched. She was not cheering. She was not filming. She was looking at Lin Xuan the way Lin Xuan looked at suspicious pills.

He knew her face from Lin Hao's memories, filed under "out of your league, do not make eye contact." Su Wan. Pre-med junior. The kind of student professors mentioned in the same sentence as scholarships.

Interesting, he thought. She saw the point I struck. She knows what it means.

"That was insane," Fatty breathed, appearing at his elbow. "Hao. That was actually insane. Where did you learn that?"

"My aunt's neighbor," Lin Xuan said smoothly, "is a retired doctor."

It was a lie. It was also, he reflected, the kind of lie that would collapse under ten seconds of scrutiny. He made a mental note to invent a better neighbor. Preferably a dead one. Dead neighbors could not be interviewed.

She stood up, closed her textbook with deliberate care, and walked toward him.

Fatty saw her coming and made a small strangled noise. "Hao. Hao, that's Su Wan. Why is Su Wan coming over here?"

"To thank me, presumably," Lin Xuan said. "I am very thankable."

"You're going to ruin this. I can feel it."

Su Wan stopped in front of them. Up close, she was even more composed than at a distance, which Lin Xuan had not thought was possible. Her eyes went from his face to his hands to the broken chopstick he still held, cataloguing everything.

Her own hands, he noticed, had the small calluses of someone who trained. Not typing. Something else.

"That was a Tiantu stimulation," she said. Not a question.

"So it was."

"The angle was perfect. The depth was perfect." She tilted her head. "You did it with a broken chopstick, in four seconds, on a stranger, with three hundred people watching. Medical students train for years to place a needle that cleanly."

"I have steady hands."

"Mm." She did not blink. "Do you know the name of that technique?"

Lin Xuan considered his options. The truth was three thousand years old and involved heavenly lightning. The lie needed to be boring enough to end the conversation.

"A retired doctor taught me," he said.

"What is the doctor's name?"

Sharp, he thought. She is very sharp.

"I don't remember," he said. "It was a long time ago."

"It was not that long ago. You are nineteen." She took one step closer, and her voice dropped. "My family has collected medical texts for six generations. Acupuncture manuals, mostly. Some of them are very old."

"Congratulations to your family."

"That technique is in none of them." Her gaze did not waver. "Do you understand what that means? It means you either invented it today, which is impossible, or you learned it from someone who should not exist."

"Maybe your family's library has gaps."

"We don't have gaps." Flat. Certain. "And you didn't hesitate. I watched your hands. People who learn from books hesitate. People who learn from teachers don't."

Lin Xuan smiled. It was, he knew, not a reassuring smile. Three thousand years of keeping secrets had not taught him how to look innocent.

"You should be careful," he said, "asking questions like that. Curiosity got a lot of people killed in the old days."

"It's not the old days," Su Wan said.

"No," Lin Xuan agreed quietly. "It isn't."

Fatty, trying to help, said, "He's just really talented!"

Both of them ignored him.

Lin Xuan studied her. Pre-med junior, twenty years old, and she had just dismantled his cover story the way he dismantled meridians: precisely, without wasted motion. Lin Hao's memories said she was untouchable. Lin Xuan's instincts said something else.

She knows the old world is real, he thought. Or she suspects. Either way, she is looking for proof.

"You're very curious," he said, "for someone eating a salad."

"You're very calm," she said, "for someone who just lied to me twice."

A beat passed between them, quiet and electric.

Around them, the cafeteria had gone back to normal. Trays clattered. Someone laughed too loud. The world resumed, indifferent, while the two of them stood in the middle of it having a completely different conversation than everyone else.

Su Wan's expression shifted, just slightly. The interrogation fell away, and what was left looked almost like respect.

"That technique is three hundred years old," she said quietly. "Where did you learn it?"