Yan Qiu looked at his hand.
The sword was still in it, but his fingers had gone white around the grip and he could not feel them anymore. The blood on his skin had dried into dark lines that cracked when his hand trembled, and it was trembling badly. His blood, the grey-robed figure's blood, the blood he had pulled from the ground and the dead and the dirt of the village where he was born. All of it dried and flaking off his knuckles like old paint.
His vision blurred. The edges of the square went soft and the grey-robed figure kneeling in front of him became a shape without detail, just a dark mass against the lighter dirt. He blinked and the tears came, and he did not know why they came or what they were for. He was just empty, and the tears filled the space where everything else had been.
His knees gave out and his legs followed, and the sword slipped from his fingers and hit the ground with a dull sound that seemed very far away. He followed it down. The dirt was cold against his cheek and the sky above him was grey and wide and turning slowly, and then it was not turning anymore because his eyes had closed and there was nothing left to keep them open.
He woke up in a bed.
The ceiling above him was wooden, dark beams running across pale plaster, and the light coming through the window on his left was warm and golden with late afternoon. He stared at it for a long time without understanding what he was looking at. The last thing he remembered was dirt against his face and the smell of blood and the grey sky over Blackroot, and none of that matched the clean ceiling and the soft blanket pulled up to his chest.
He tried to sit up and his body refused. Every muscle from his neck to his ankles seized at once and the pain was immediate and total, a deep ache that went past the flesh and into the bones. The cut across his back pulled tight and he hissed through his teeth and lay back down.
"Do not move yet."
The voice came from his left. Yan Qiu turned his head and saw Elder Han standing by the window with his hands behind his back, looking out at something Yan Qiu could not see from the bed. He wore his dark grey robes with the pale blue sash tied at his waist, and the scar from his left ear to his chin caught the light. He did not turn around when he spoke.
"You have been unconscious for two days," Elder Han said. "Your channels are damaged and your body is running on whatever the healers put into you. If you try to sit up right now, you will tear something that has only just started mending."
Yan Qiu lay still. His mind was catching up slowly, pieces falling into place one at a time. The fight and the blood qi and the grey-robed figure's blade shattering and the tears on his face and the ground rushing up to meet him.
"Elder," he said. His voice came out rough and dry, like he had been breathing dust for a week. "How did I get here?"
Elder Han turned from the window. His expression held that rigid calm, his square jaw set and his eyes steady, but his gaze carried a weight Yan Qiu had not seen in it before. He could not name it, but it was there, sitting behind the elder's eyes.
"We reached the area north of Blackroot," Elder Han said. "Another village. We found several individuals attempting to activate something we are still investigating." He paused, and the pause was deliberate. "I will not go into the details of that. What matters is that we arrived in time to find you."
Yan Qiu waited. The elder's tone had shifted on the word "you," dropping half a note, and Yan Qiu's chest tightened before the next words came.
"The two outer seniors on your team," Elder Han said. "Zhou Tai and Chen Bao. They did not survive."
The words landed heavy in his chest. He had known it was possible. He had known it from the moment the three cultivators walked out of the mist in Blackroot and Liang Feng's face went white. He had known it when they left Zhou Tai and Chen Bao behind in Stonehollow to guard the villagers, and the dark-robed man and his companion walked north toward the other village.
He had known, and it still hit him.
They were gone.
Yan Qiu stared at the ceiling. The tightness in his chest did not ease and he did not try to make it ease. He let it sit there.
"As for the inner disciples," Elder Han continued, "Liang Feng and Shu Yingyue are both recovering. Their qi was severely depleted, but there is no lasting damage to their channels." He was quiet for a moment. "Shu Yingyue's hand could not be reattached. The healers tried. The wound was too clean and too old by the time we reached her."
Yan Qiu closed his eyes. He saw Shu Yingyue's face when the grey-robed figure took her hand, the scream that cut off into hard breathing through her teeth. He saw her fighting one-handed against No. 5 with her off hand, refusing to stop even after she lost her sword.
"The individual who was standing over your body when we arrived has been dealt with," Elder Han said. "He will not be a concern."
Yan Qiu opened his eyes. Standing over his body. That meant someone had come back after he collapsed. The grey-robed figure the dark-robed man had sent to check on No. 5, or No. 5 himself if he had managed to get back on his feet. Either way, the elders had killed him.
"The mission has been reclassified," Elder Han said. "It is no longer B-rank. Given the level of the opponents you encountered and the gap between their cultivation and yours, it has been promoted to A-rank."
A-rank. The words registered somewhere in the back of his mind, distant and factual. Elder Shen's condition: three A-rank missions in two years. This was one. He filed it away and did not think about it further because Zhou Tai and Chen Bao were dead and Shu Yingyue had lost her hand and the number did not feel like it mattered right now.
Elder Han pulled a chair from the corner of the room and sat down beside the bed. He leaned forward with his forearms on his knees and looked at Yan Qiu directly, and the question that had been sitting behind his eyes came to the surface.
"Liang Feng and Shu Yingyue both gave their accounts," he said. "They told me that they exhausted their qi fighting an opponent at the third stage of Channel Refining. They told me that they lost consciousness during the fight and that when they went down, you were the only one still standing." His voice was level and unhurried. "A third-stage Breath Weaving disciple, alone against a third-stage Channel Refining cultivator. And when we found you, that cultivator was on the ground with his weapon shattered and a wound across his chest that should not have been possible for someone at your level."
He let the silence sit for a moment.
"How did you do it?"
Yan Qiu had been waiting for the question since he opened his eyes. He had known it was coming because there was no version of this where an elder looked at what happened and did not ask. A Breath Weaving disciple does not beat a Channel Refining cultivator. The gap between those two stages did not close with willpower alone.
He could not tell the truth. The blood qi technique was something he had pulled from a memory that might not even be his, a vision of a young master in a building full of mutilated bodies who gathered the blood of the dead and used it as a weapon. He did not know what the technique was called or where it came from or whether it was something the sect would consider forbidden. He had felt the wrongness of it when he used it. If he described it to Elder Han, the elder would want to know where he learned it, and Yan Qiu did not have an answer that would not raise more questions than it settled.
"I used everything I had," he said. He kept his voice steady and his eyes on the ceiling. "All of my qi, every technique I knew, one after another. I kept hitting him and he kept blocking, and I got a lucky shot in. After that he went down on his own."
Elder Han watched him. The silence stretched. Yan Qiu could feel the elder's gaze on the side of his face, heavy and patient, the look of a man who had heard a hundred bad excuses and was waiting to hear one more.
"A lucky shot," Elder Han said.
"Yes, Elder."
More silence. Elder Han leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms over his chest. He looked at Yan Qiu for a long time, and Yan Qiu looked at the ceiling and waited.
"It is possible," Elder Han said slowly, "that the cultivator you fought was using some form of energy-boosting art. Techniques like that exist at every level, and they all end one way. If a cultivator pushes borrowed energy through channels that were not built to hold it, the backlash can be severe. A single disruption at the right moment, even a weak one, can trigger a deviation that brings the whole thing down." He uncrossed his arms and put his hands on his knees. "If that is what happened, then your lucky shot may have been the disruption that sent him into deviation. His body would have done the rest."
Yan Qiu said nothing. The explanation was clean and reasonable and it fit the evidence well enough that anyone who heard it would nod and move on. Elder Han was giving him a way out, a story that made sense without requiring the truth.
Whether the elder believed it was a different matter.
"Rest," Elder Han said. He stood up from the chair and pushed it back toward the corner. "Your body needs time and your channels need longer than that. Do not try to circulate qi for at least a week, and do not leave this bed until the healers clear you."
He walked to the door and stopped with his hand on the frame.
"When you are well enough, come find me. We have things to discuss."
He left. The door closed behind him and the room was quiet.
Yan Qiu lay in the bed and stared at the ceiling. The light from the window had shifted while they talked, the gold turning to amber, and the shadows on the beams were longer now. He could hear voices somewhere outside, muffled and distant, and the sound of footsteps on a wooden floor below him.
Zhou Tai and Chen Bao were dead. Shu Yingyue had lost her hand. Liang Feng had activated an emergency talisman because a B-rank mission had turned into something none of them were supposed to survive. And Yan Qiu had used a technique pulled from a dead man's memory to fight a cultivator who should have killed him, and he had lied about it to the elder who had trusted him enough to put him on the team.
The tightness in his chest had not gone away. It had settled in deeper, past the ribs and into the space behind them where breathing started, and every inhale pressed against it.
He closed his eyes. The tears did not come this time. He was too tired for them, or too empty, or both. He lay there in the quiet room with the amber light on his face and the ache in his chest and the elder's last words still hanging over him.