"Didn't you just enter the thirteenth floor?" Xiao Chuhe didn't even look up from his cup, delivering his words with the unhurried drawl of someone reporting mildly disappointing news. "How did you get knocked back out so fast? You're weaker than I gave you credit for."
"I'm not out — I'm still on the thirteenth floor." Lei Wujie began indignantly, then the words died in his throat.
He had just noticed the person sitting across from Xiao Chuhe.
His gaze traveled from Xiao Se to Xiao Chuhe. Then back to Xiao Se. Then back to Xiao Chuhe. His mouth opened slightly, doing the arithmetic his brain was currently refusing to complete.
"What — you two—"
A foot connected firmly with his backside.
"What you two?" Sikong Qianluo said, from the seat beside him, with the tone of someone who has already explained this and would prefer not to again. "That's a senior you're gawking at."
Lei Wujie rubbed the offended area, turned back to Xiao Se, leaned in to a distance that was somewhat closer than strictly necessary, and studied him from left to right with the focused attention of a man solving a puzzle.
"Brother," he said finally, with complete sincerity, "aren't you Xiao Se's twin?"
"No," Xiao Se said.
"Enough." Xiao Chuhe set down his cup with slightly more force than required. "This Senior shares my name and my face, apparently, but we share no blood. Now tell me what you actually came back for."
Lei Wujie, rerouted from his line of inquiry with minimal grace, recounted his encounter on the thirteenth floor — a disciple of Yin Luoxia named Luo Mingxuan, a tricky situation, a problem without an obvious solution. Xiao Chuhe listened, thought for approximately three seconds, and offered a resolution. Lei Wujie accepted it with the enthusiasm of a man who will absolutely owe three hundred more taels and has already stopped caring.
Before long, the lanterns on the thirteenth floor of the Ascending Heaven Pavilion lit up in sequence.
Lei Wujie had cleared it.
Sikong Qianluo was on her feet before the last lantern finished lighting, spear already in hand, already moving. "The fourteenth floor is mine today—"
She made it approximately two steps.
Xiao Chuhe appeared in front of her. He hadn't visibly moved so much as simply stopped being where he was and started being somewhere else — directly in her path, arms loose at his sides, expression bland.
"My apologies, Miss Sikong. Lei Wujie still owes me eight hundred taels. I can't afford to let him lose."
Sikong Qianluo's eyes narrowed. Her spear came up in a smooth arc, the tip leveling at him with pointed precision. "You want to stop me?"
Xiao Chuhe vanished.
"Yes," said a voice, directly beside her ear.
The warmth of breath reached her at the same moment the voice did. Sikong Qianluo's face went scarlet. She spun, spear flicking outward in a sharp, instinctive arc — and Xiao Chuhe was sent several meters back through the air, landing easily on his feet, expression unchanged.
Fei Xuan stared. He turned to Li Fansong. "Junior Uncle — didn't you say he didn't know any martial arts?"
Li Fansong glanced at Xiao Se. Xiao Se's expression offered him nothing. Li Fansong cleared his throat. "That wasn't martial arts. That was a lightness technique — specifically, one that can be activated without internal energy."
"What lightness technique?" Fei Xuan pressed.
Li Fansong swallowed. "The one that used to be ranked first in the world. Now ranked second." A pause. "It's called Cloud Stepping."
"And what's ranked first now?" Fei Xuan asked.
"That Senior's technique," Li Fansong said, with a small look toward Xiao Se. "The Ethereal Smoke Step."
Xiao Se's lip twitched.
In the Dou Qi Continent, the Ethereal Smoke Step was a respectable high-grade Xuan-rank movement technique — perfectly serviceable, nothing exceptional. There were better options. He simply hadn't acquired them yet. Being cited as the world's foremost in anything felt, under the circumstances, mildly fraudulent.
"Nephew Li," he said, reaching into his storage ring with a light touch and producing a jade bottle, "you've got something wrong."
"What do you mean, Senior?" Li Fansong asked, genuinely puzzled.
"That young man with my name." Xiao Se kept his voice unhurried. "He isn't ignorant of martial arts. Quite the opposite — his foundation is strong, and he's already reached the Carefree Heaven Realm."
Li Fansong's brow furrowed in outright bafflement. "That can't be. I can't sense any true energy from him at all. Could my Ziwei Qi Observation be failing me?"
"Your technique isn't failing you." Xiao Se opened the jade bottle. "His meridians were forcibly destroyed by someone using internal force. The energy is there — he simply cannot access it."
As he spoke, he withdrew a pill from the bottle. The size of a longan fruit, completely black, its surface traced with faint patterns that caught the light like something written in a language that wasn't meant to be read. He set it between two fingers and, with a clean flick, sent it directly into Xiao Chuhe's mouth from across the table.
It dissolved the instant it touched his tongue.
For one breath, nothing happened.
Then Xiao Chuhe's entire body went rigid. A sound escaped him — sharp, involuntary, the kind of sound that comes from pain that arrives faster than the mind can brace for — and he folded and hit the ground without another word, unconscious before he landed.
Everyone at the table moved at once.
Sikong Qianluo reached him first, going to her knees beside him. She looked up at Xiao Se with an expression caught between alarm and accusation. "What did you just do to him?"
"He fainted from the pain." Xiao Se's voice was entirely calm. "His damaged meridians are regrowing. Help him somewhere to rest — he'll wake up within three days."
Sikong Qianluo looked at Xiao Chuhe, then at Xiao Se, then at Xiao Chuhe again. She pressed her lips together, clearly wanting to say several things, decided against all of them, and carefully gathered Xiao Chuhe up.
Li Fansong watched all of this with the expression of a man whose understanding of what he had just witnessed was approximately thirty seconds behind the events themselves. He leaned forward slightly. "Senior Xiao Se — what was that pill?"
"A Rejuvenating Pill. Third grade. It targets injuries to bones, ligaments, and meridians specifically." Xiao Se turned the jade bottle over once in his fingers, then tossed it casually toward Li Fansong. "There are a few more in there. I have a history with your master, Zhao Yuzhen — consider them a gesture on account of that."
A bottle of third-grade pills in exchange for someone else's master's wife, something in the back of his mind observed pleasantly. Xiao Se, you really did come out ahead on that arrangement.
"Thank you, Senior." Li Fansong hesitated for just a breath — the reflex of a man raised to be cautious about accepting things — then accepted the bottle and passed it to Fei Xuan beside him. He rose, pressed his hands together, and bowed properly. "Senior, I still have business with the Ascending Heaven Pavilion. Please excuse me."
"Go ahead." Xiao Se waved a hand and settled back with his wine.
The story moved as stories do when left to their own momentum.
The fourteenth floor, Tang Lian — who held back enough to let Lei Wujie pass without making it obvious that he was doing so. The fifteenth floor, Lei Yunhe — who did the same, with the quiet subtlety of a man who had understood the situation before he'd entered the room. And then the top.
Lei Wujie stood at the summit of the Ascending Heaven Pavilion.
"Senior — look!" Fei Xuan pointed upward, his voice climbing with sudden excitement. "The Snow Moon Sword Immortal has appeared!"
At the peak of the tower, a figure in white materialized seemingly from nowhere — masked, unhurried, carrying the particular quality of stillness that belongs to people who have stopped needing to move quickly because nothing moves fast enough to require it. She raised her sword once, with the casual economy of someone finishing a chore.
Half of the Ascending Heaven Pavilion ceased to exist.
The sword energy that peeled away from the blade swept through stone and timber and decades of careful construction with the same indifference a wind applies to candle flames. Lei Wujie, caught in the leading edge of it, was sent flying from the summit — but three floors down, he drove his sword through the wall of the thirteenth floor and arrested his fall, hanging there against the side of the structure like a particularly determined decoration.
"Li Hanyi, you absolute—!" Sikong Changfeng had materialized at some point in the last few seconds, standing beside Xiao Se, staring at the ruined upper floors of the tower with an expression of a man watching something precious and irreplaceable be reduced to scenery. The rest of the sentence came out as something that couldn't quite decide whether it was a curse or a lament. "—bastard!"
Xiao Se looked at Sikong Changfeng's face — the specific, pained expression of someone watching their life's work get casually demolished — and reached into his storage ring. He produced a low-grade storage ring and set it on the table.
"The Ascending Heaven Pavilion was going to need replacing eventually anyway," he said mildly. "Consider it covered."
Sikong Changfeng looked at the ring.
He recognized it immediately — the same category as the one Li Hanyi carried, the ones he had spent years admiring from an envious distance, each containing its own small pocket of space capable of holding more than any physical container had any right to hold.
He picked it up. Extended his senses inward.
Gold coins. Stacked in luminous, organized, deeply satisfying rows. One million of them.
The grief on Sikong Changfeng's face underwent a rapid and comprehensive transformation. He slid the ring onto his finger with the reverence of a man receiving a religious artifact, straightened up, turned toward the remains of the Ascending Heaven Pavilion, and cupped his hands around his mouth.
"Hanyi!" His voice carried the full conviction of a man who has just become financially unburdened. "Don't hold back on my account! The Pavilion can be rebuilt — what matters is that this arrogant little brat gets what he deserves!"
The elders of Snow Moon City, gathered at a respectful distance, turned to look at him with the collective expression of people whose understanding of Sikong Changfeng had just been shaken loose from its foundations. Their Third City Lord — a man whose relationship with money was so well-documented it had become a local legend — was actively encouraging structural damage to city property.
Then several of them noticed the storage ring.
Then several of them noticed Xiao Se.
Understanding moved through the group like a wave, followed almost immediately by a collection of knowing, sideways looks. The particular looks of people filing information away for later use.
It appeared that Snow Moon City's second prospective son-in-law had arrived.
And he was, evidently, not short of funds.
Xiao Se, for his part, had already stopped paying attention to any of them. His gaze had traveled upward, to the masked figure standing at the ruined summit of the Ascending Heaven Pavilion, sword still in hand, white robes settling around her in the high wind like something out of a painting.
He watched her quietly, and said nothing.
(End of Chapter)
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