Chapter 4
Song of the White Crane
The Interclan Exhibition was not a tournament.
The distinction was important to the instructors, who repeated it often: a tournament implied formal competition, prizes, official rankings. The Exhibition was an educational exercise. A chance for students to observe each other's techniques in a structured environment. An opportunity for growth.
Everyone understood it was a tournament.
It was held on the last day of the first month, in the great open arena behind the Hall of Meridian Sky. Families attended from across the province — merchants and officials and clan elders who had paid generously for seats in the covered viewing galleries. Banners hung from the arena walls: the crests of sponsoring families, the colors of the academy, the imperial gold of the court observers who had come to assess the generation currently in training.
Wei Liang had no one in the galleries. He had known this going in.
He stood in the competitor's preparation hall — a long stone room beneath the arena floor — and watched the other students receive their families through the latticed viewing window. Fen Zhu was being fussed over by a mother in elaborate silk and spoken to in undertones by a father who kept glancing toward the arena exit with a particular kind of anxiety.
Song Baiyu stood alone near the far wall, not because she had no family present, but because she had clearly communicated that she did not require tending. Her parents sat in the highest gallery tier. Her Celestial Crane was recalled to her soul-space, conserving itself.
She was looking at the bracket board.
Wei Liang looked at it too.
The academy had seeded the bracket by current tier classification. Which meant Wei Liang, classified as 'unclassified, humanoid,' had been slotted last in the lower bracket — a decision that put him against the student seeded first in that bracket.
Zuo Han. Third-year. Tier 5.1, potential 6.8. His summon: a Jade Serpent, forty feet of scaled muscle and venom, able to shed and regrow its skin as a regenerative ability. He had won the Exhibition the previous two years.
Someone had put Wei Liang against the two-time champion in his first Exhibition.
He considered which instructor had arranged the bracket. He considered what they hoped the result would be.
"You are thinking about the arrangement," said Song Baiyu. She had crossed the room without him noticing, which was the sort of thing she apparently did.
"It's a message," Wei Liang said.
"Yes." She looked at the bracket with the detached assessment of someone who has long since stopped being surprised by politics. "Zuo Han is very good. He's also aware that this was done deliberately. He doesn't like being used as an instrument."
This was more words than Song Baiyu had addressed to anyone outside her circle in a long time. Wei Liang filed that away.
"Does that change how he fights?"
"It makes him angrier. Zuo Han fights worse when he's angry. He overextends." She paused. "I'm telling you this because I dislike outcomes that are fixed in advance. Whatever you are — whatever that thing you summoned actually is — you should be seen properly." She walked away. "Don't lose in the first round."
Wei Liang watched her go. Then he looked back at the bracket.
✦ ✦ ✦
The Jade Serpent entered the arena floor like a river given intent.
It uncoiled from Zuo Han's summoning diagram and filled the space with the measured menace of a creature that had never once in its existence been the smaller thing in a room. Its scales were the deep translucent green of jade held to light — not armor exactly, but something that functioned like it, resilient and regenerating. Its head was larger than Wei Liang's torso. Its tongue, when it tasted the air in his direction, made several students in the gallery seats recoil instinctively.
Zuo Han stood at the far end of the arena floor with his arms crossed, his expression neither cruel nor kind.
"I know they put you here to make a point about your summon," he said, loud enough for Wei Liang alone to hear. "I'm not interested in making that point. I fight to win. That's all this is."
"That's all I want," Wei Liang said.
Zuo Han looked at him for a moment — a real look, not the dismissive inventory most students performed — and then nodded once.
The signal bell rang.
Wei Liang summoned Achilles.
The golden diagram blazed in the arena, and Achilles stepped out onto the stone floor with his sword drawn and his shield — today he carried the great round shield, the one that Wei Liang had not seen before, its surface marked with intricate designs he was still learning to read — raised at the center. He assessed the Serpent with the rapid professional sweep of a man who has catalogued threats since childhood.
The Jade Serpent struck first.
It was faster than anything that large had any right to be — forty feet of muscle collapsing the distance between them in a single surge, jaws open, the venom that lined its teeth already aerosolizing into a toxic mist. Most opponents lost the fight here, before it had properly begun, simply from the shock of the scale of what was coming at them.
Achilles dropped to one knee and raised the round shield overhead.
The Serpent's jaws closed around the shield.
The arena held its breath.
The shield held.
Not comfortably — the force of the bite drove Achilles three feet back across the stone, his boots cutting grooves — but it held, and when the Serpent tried to constrict its grip and crack it, the shield's surface began to glow with the same golden light that had blazed at the Pillar of Heaven.
Achilles drove upward.
Not with the sword — with the shield, using the Serpent's own constriction against it, launching himself upward with the beast's own force and slamming the shield edge into the underside of its jaw with a crack that echoed off the arena walls.
The Jade Serpent recoiled. A line of dark blood ran from where the shield edge had connected.
The galleries were silent.
The Serpent shed its outer skin in an instant — the regenerative ability, shedding damage along with it — and reoriented. It was smarter now. More careful. It began circling, looking for angles.
Achilles circled with it, patient, his grey eyes tracking every shift in the massive body.
From the edge of Wei Liang's perception — not heard exactly, more felt — came the word: Heel.
Wei Liang frowned, not understanding, and then: the Serpent lunged at an angle, aiming not at Achilles but at Wei Liang himself, trying to end the match by eliminating the summoner. It was a legal tactic. A smart one.
Achilles was already there.
He moved as if he had known a second before the Serpent did that it would make that choice — stepped in front of Wei Liang, took the blow of the massive head against his shield, and redirected it upward. The Serpent overshot, crashing into the arena wall. In the moment of its disorientation, Achilles placed the tip of his sword at the soft tissue below its jaw — the killing point — and held it there.
The signal bell rang.
"Match concluded. Winner — Wei Liang."
Zuo Han stared at the arena floor for a long moment. Then, slowly, he recalled his Serpent. It went willingly — it was not afraid, Wei Liang noted, just done. There was a difference.
Zuo Han looked across the floor at Wei Liang.
"What tier is it really?" he asked.
Wei Liang had no answer to give him. Not an honest one. Not yet.
In the viewing gallery, the court observer leaned forward and made a note.