Chapter 18: Borrowed Lightning

"You first," Lin Xuan said.

And then Master Kuang moved.

There was no warning stance, no gathering breath. One moment the cultivator stood on the steps, and the next his palm was coming down toward Lin Xuan's head with the weight of a falling roof. The air folded. The floodlights buzzed.

Lin Xuan was not there.

He took one step sideways, and the palm struck the driveway where he had been standing. Concrete cracked in a spiderweb. A chunk the size of a dinner plate jumped and spun.

Strong, Lin Xuan thought. Sloppy, but strong.

Kuang turned, unhurried, and struck again. And again. Each palm was a hammer. The driveway began to look like a battlefield. Lin Xuan moved between the blows like water between stones, never hurrying, never quite where the hammer fell.

The fifth palm nearly had him. Kuang had learned the rhythm of his dodging and led him half a step, and the edge of the pressure caught Lin Xuan's shoulder and spun him. He landed hard, rolled, came up with gravel in his sleeve.

Half a step, he thought, breathing hard. He adjusts fast. Don't give him a sixth.

"You run well, puddle," Kuang said.

"I am not running," Lin Xuan said. "I am waiting for my guests to arrive."

Kuang frowned. Then he felt it.

Twelve points around the estate, buried in mulch and hedge and lawn, woke up at once. The flags Lin Xuan had seeded on his walk in drank the qi of Kuang's own siphoning formation and lit up like twelve small green lamps. The great invisible tide that had been draining uphill for years stuttered, hiccuped, and began flowing backward.

Eleven held steady. The twelfth, the one at the north oak, flickered.

The bad tooth, Lin Xuan thought. Of course.

He bit his own thumb and flung a drop of blood toward the north. It wasn't supposed to work at that distance. It worked anyway, because blood is blood and the flag was thirsty, and the twelfth lamp steadied.

It cost him. His vision grayed at the edges for one second.

Kuang's face changed. "What did you do to my array?"

"Improved it," Lin Xuan said. "Your containment was leaking a third of everything you stole. I fixed the leak. You're welcome."

It was the worst thing he could have said. Kuang's composure cracked like thin ice.

"You dare—" Kuang raised both hands, and the air around him began to hum. Static lifted the fine hairs on Lin Xuan's arms. The floodlights flickered. "Thunder Palm. I learned it from my master himself. Let's see your tricks survive it."

There it is, Lin Xuan thought. The signature. The pride.

He turned and ran.

Not far. Not in panic. He ran for the ornamental pond at the center of the estate's garden, and the little stone bridge that arched over it, and Kuang followed, because pride is a leash and Lin Xuan had just yanked it.

Lin Xuan's feet hit the bridge. He set the black bronze cauldron on the keystone at the bridge's crown. It sat there, small and ugly and patient, while Kuang landed at the far end of the bridge with thunder crawling over his hands.

"Nowhere to run, boy," Kuang said.

"I'm not running," Lin Xuan said. "I'm standing somewhere conductive."

Kuang struck.

The Thunder Palm came down like a verdict, a bolt of pure yang fury, and the cauldron drank it.

That was the part Kuang never understood, afterward, lying in his bed with his meridians scorched. The cauldron was three thousand years old. It had refined ten thousand pills. It knew qi the way a millstone knows grain. It took Kuang's thunder, ground it, and gave it back inverted, and the twelve flags caught the inverted thunder and threw it upward, and the iron spikes on the estate wall and the flagpole by the gate and the wet night air all agreed at once to become a single road.

The sky, which had been clear, tore open.

It was not tribulation lightning. Lin Xuan was honest with himself about that, even in the middle of it. It was a small bolt, a furious little scrap of a storm, borrowed and bent to his will for exactly one second.

One second was enough.

The bolt came down through the rod array and through the cauldron and through the bridge and through Master Kuang, who was standing on the bridge being conductive. The stone cracked. The pond boiled. Kuang's gray robe caught fire.

The smell was ozone and burned silk. The pond's koi floated belly-up, stunned but alive. Somewhere in the house, a window shattered from the pressure wave, and a car alarm started wailing.

Lin Xuan's ears rang. His left arm felt like it had been dipped in boiling water. But his eyes never left Kuang, because a wounded Foundation Establishment cultivator was still the most dangerous thing on that estate, and he knew it.

When Lin Xuan's eyes cleared, Kuang was on his knees at the far end of the bridge. His robe smoked. His bald head was blistered. His hands, the hands that had thrown the Thunder Palm, were shaking.

He stared at Lin Xuan across ten feet of cracked stone.

"What," he rasped, "are you?"2

Lin Xuan walked toward him across the bridge. His left sleeve was burned away to the elbow, and the skin underneath was red and blistered, but his steps were steady. He stopped in front of the kneeling cultivator and looked down.

"The bill," Lin Xuan said. "Your employer broke my aunt's shop. Your men beat my friend. Here is my accounting." He held up one finger. "One: the Zhao family will pay for every broken pot, every broken table, every hour my aunt spends being afraid. Two: Zhao Kai will never touch my people again. Three: you will leave this city, and you will not come back.”

Kuang laughed, a broken sound. "You could have killed me. Why—"

"I am tired," Lin Xuan said simply. It was true. The formation had drunk him nearly dry. His meridians felt like wrung cloth. If Kuang had any fight left, Lin Xuan would be in serious trouble, and both of them needed to never know how close that was. "And dead men pay no bills. Go."

Kuang stared at him for a long moment. Then he pushed himself upright, swaying, and backed away across the bridge. At the garden's edge he stopped.

"My master," he said, and his voice was raw, "will want to meet you."

Then he was gone, over the wall and into the dark, leaving a trail of smoke.

Lin Xuan let out a breath he had been holding for some time. His knees wanted to fold. He locked them through sheer rudeness.

Foundation Establishment, he thought. Twelve flags, one cauldron, and someone else's thunder. Don't do that again until you're stronger, old man.

Headlights swept the driveway.

A black car came up fast and stopped hard enough to throw gravel. The door opened, and Su Wan got out. She wore a coat over pajamas. Her hair was coming loose. She took in the cracked driveway, the smoking garden, the boiled pond, the scorched bridge, and Lin Xuan standing in the middle of it with one sleeve gone.

She walked to him slowly, like someone approaching a myth that might vanish.

"What," she said, "did you do?"

"Settled an account."

"That's Master Kuang's estate." Her voice was very quiet. "He's Foundation Establishment, Lin Hao. The Su family has watched him for a decade and never dared—" She stopped. Looked at the bridge. Looked at him. "You fought him."

"I negotiated."

She reached out, and her fingers closed on his burned sleeve, just above the blister line. Her hand was cool. Neither of them moved away.

"You could have died," she said.

"I have," Lin Xuan said. "It's overrated."

Her mouth twitched, almost a smile, and then her eyes went back to his arm. "That needs a real bandage. And probably a doctor."

"It needs quiet and time. I have plans for both." He hesitated. "How did you find me?"

"My grandfather has had someone watching the Zhao estate for a week. When you walked through the front gate, my phone rang." She studied him. "I came as fast as I could. I thought I was coming to watch you die."

"Disappointed?"

"Don't." Her voice was soft. "Don't joke about that. Not tonight."

For a moment they stood there in the wreckage of the Zhao estate's garden, her hand on his burned sleeve, the smoke curling up around them. Her eyes were very bright. His pulse, traitorously, was fast.

Then her phone buzzed, and the moment broke, and she stepped back, and the night remembered how to be a night.

But she looked at him once more before she turned away, and in that look there was no wariness left at all. Only wonder, and something underneath the wonder that Lin Xuan, for all his three thousand years, did not know how to name.

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End of Chapter 18