Jin Qilong's mood was good enough that he almost skipped when he went to meet his tutors again, off to happily report on the duel he'd just won with Zhu Yelin. Perhaps it might even win him another audience with his mother.

  Wu Hao wished him the best but all the same watched him go with mixed feelings.

  On one hand, it was good that Jin Qilong seemed to have some self-confidence, for once. It was still fragile, Wu Hao figured - it was a thin layer of golden varnish over a heavy slab of despair and self-hate - but it was far better than what he'd had beforehand. But it'd need more layers, and Wu Hao had no clue how many it'd need before it became something that wouldn't just shatter at the slightest loss.

  And there would be losses. That much was clear, even from the ways that Jin Qilong talked about the succession, like he'd already decided he'd lost but wished everyone else would simply let him bow out.

  Even his confidence was built on the defeat of a boy that Wu Hao didn't rate all that highly, as a martial artist. Above a deathsworn, yes, but below a Brother. Below the cultist that he'd killed a few years from now, that was for sure. If Jin Qilong struggled that much against someone like that, and knowing that their trick was way too simple to actually work against a decent martial artist...

  But no. He wouldn't really bother doubting Jin Qilong: if anything went wrong he always had a reset, and in any case Jin Qilong doubted himself enough that Wu Hao didn't need to doubt him also.

  So. That left him, oddly enough, with nothing to do. Barred from the library - at least in his own imagination - and with no access to the cultivation caverns, he'd been left to go wander again, alone.

  In theory, he ought to have been working on either figuring out a way to become a second-grade martial artist or how to use Heaven-rank techniques, but both of those remained frustratingly out of reach. There was no one he could talk to who actually would know anything and everyone who knew something wasn't going to tell him.

  So he'd watched from a distance as Librarian Zhu's cottage had been cleaned up, although a better word might have been that it had been raided with the slightest pretensions of politeness.

  Nearby stood a man who shared something in common with both Librarian Zhu and Zhu Yelin in his features: stocky, somewhat round, with a hairline that showed no signs of greying even as it'd long since started receding. He held in his hands several books, writing implements, a pot of valuable ink, but he was crushing them all tight against his chest as he watched the men go through his father's belongings. His qi was a dark abyss with occasional flecks of red interspersed.

  Wu Hao didn't know his name, but to his own surprise he did somewhat emphatize. He wasn't stupid enough to express it, especially not after the morning, and when the last of the men had finished carting away Librarian Zhu's possessions that his son hadn't taken, Wu Hao scattered before he was noticed.

  Besides, there was something crawling up his spine, or so it felt like. He couldn't quite describe the feeling - not quite the ice that he'd felt during the ambush on the Demon Cult, not quite the nervousness that'd burned at his stomach when the bandits had attacked either.

  It was different. There was just an occasional nudge of sorts, as he felt just a slight shift of qi at the edge of his awareness. It was maddening, and after a while he was so sick of it that he'd abandoned even the pretense of not caring and just spun around.

  But he saw nothing. Whatever his qi sense told him, his eyes seemed to insist there was nothing there. Wu Hao had his own ideas about what it might have been, but even as he went through the motions of evening life at the Jin Clan compound he still hadn't managed to figure out a clever way to resolve the issue when the feeling suddenly vanished.

  It didn't return, either. He went to his room still alert, barely having tasted his food.

  In a way, he decided as he lay awake in the soft bed and tried to find sleep or failing that the motivation to cultivate, not knowing what it might have been was worse. He'd have reset, but that would have led to redoing the entire fight with Zhu Yelin again, and having to give Jin Qilong that pep talk, and that would've been miserable. Resetting undid his death and his fuckups but it also took away all of the good.

  When morning came, it found him having barely gotten a wink of sleep. He stumbled his way out of the bed, through the early morning rituals of splashing water on his face, grabbing a breakfast of a single bun, and heading to the training ground. A quick push of qi through his meridians woke up him up, banishing the effects of sleeplessness from his body with a single roar that resounded only in his ears.

  And when he arrived at the morning training, a small crowd of the other students had gathered around a face that Wu Hao didn't recognize.

  The newcomer was a pretty girl. Her clothes were colorful without being too much so: her dress was a deep sea green, her hair long and straight with bangs that fell across her eyes.

  She was petite, small for a fifteen-year old, but she had paler skin than most of the students here. Her fingers peeked slightly out of her sleeves, showing off occasional glints of perfectly manicured nails. The effect was like a doll - a doll fresh from the makers' workshop, perhaps, not one that'd been through the rigors of a child's playtime yet.

  Wu Hao's eyes narrowed when he saw her, and Jin Qilong standing not far from him utterly mistook why. He tugged at Wu Hao's sleeve.

  "The prefect's daughter," Jin Qilong said, trying to be helpful. "Shi Huyin."

  Nodding, Wu Hao kept his eyes on her. He wasn't looking at her because of her appearance. The fragility didn't appeal to him, anyway.

  What fascinated him was that she had qi. She was a martial artist, despite looking like a perfectly innocent little girl, blinking widely with an astonished expression as the training slowly ground to a halt.

  But her qi coiled like a spider, its mist-like tendrils resembling legs spinning a web around her. Wu Hao leaned forward slightly and smelled macha - green tea. Thin lines spread out from her like the threads of a spiderweb, snaring the group around her, one line for each of their hearts and their heads. Wu Hao wouldn't have been surprised to see her literally wind those lines around her fingers, either.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  "You're a martial artist?" he asked, voice coming out as more of an accusation than he'd meant it to. Several faces looked blankly back at him and then moved aside, as if afraid of him.

  "Me?" she asked. Her qi blared with a sudden deceit as she smiled at him sweetly. "How could I be a martial artist?"

  Wu Hao scowled. A blatant lie, but one that he couldn't expose without exposing his own ability to see qi, which was something he was still holding close to his chest.

  "And who are you?" she asked. "If I may ask?"

  "Wu Hao," he replied.

  "Of the Wu clan?"

  He doubted it.

  "No?" she asked, when he said nothing. "I'm sorry if I offended. I'm often thoughtless when I speak. Father reprimands me for it sometimes."

  Li Yanqing puffed up his chest. He was one of the boys standing closest, his nose square in the air as usual. The son of the head butler, Wu Hao remembered, but mostly notable for the size of his nose as far as he was concerned. "He's an orphan, lady Shi. "

  "Is that so?" Shi Huyin asked, her eyes widening in apparent surprise. "How'd he come to train with the Jin Clan, then? He must have achieved a noteworthy feat, no?"

  This was all theater, Wu Hao realized. Her qi spoke of no surprise, and instead there was a vicious tilt to it as the words came tumbling out.

  "He killed a bandit," Li Yanqing explained. "That's all. He's here because the young master felt bad for him."

  "Oh," Shi Huyin said, mouth curling downwards. Wu Hao could read her delight, though. Her script was proceeding apace. "Well, the young master has a magnanimous heart. That's very kind of him. Is that true, Wu Yao?"

  Wu Hao said nothing. Instead, he turned away.

  "Ignore him, Lady Shi," Li Yanqing simpered. "He's a peasant. He doesn't have any manners. I don't think I've ever so much as heard him say a polite word to anyone except the young master."

  Shi Huyin's mouth fell open in pretend-surprise as she glanced at Wu Hao, then turned to one of the boys.

  "Is he simple, maybe?" she asked, just quiet enough that everyone could hear it, especially with their hearing enhanced by the qi running through their meridians.

  Wu Hao felt a stab of annoyance. So he wasn't as immune as he'd thought he was. Whatever.

  Instead of speaking to her - it'd just give her more ammunition, anyway - he turned to the boy who'd spoken.

  "Li Yanqing," he called. "I think there's time left for a duel."

  Then he smiled. "If you want to. Maybe try to teach me those manners you're so enamored by."

  He watched with satisfaction as the other boy paled, muttering something under his breath as his white-knuckled fingers clutched at the hilt of his saber.

  "No?" Wu Hao said. "Coward."

  That earned him a heated glare, but he didn't care. He smiled again, this time at Shi Huyin.

  "Don't believe everything you hear," he said. "People might lie to your face."

  Her qi spoke of annoyance, which she masked with a smile.

  "Thank you for the advice," she said sweetly. "Is that a quote? I thought I might recognize it from somewhere. The Analects, perhaps?"

  Wu Hao bit back the instinctive retort - that it was just common sense, that he hadn't read the Analects or whatever, that he didn't even know what they were - and instead slung his saber over his shoulder again.

  "It's time to train," he pointed out.

  "I'll stop interrupting," Shi Huyin said. "My apologies for disturbing you all."

  There were a few mutters that she wasn't a bother at all, actually, and a few people even scowled at him, for whatever reason.

  "Young master," Shi Huyin asked, ignoring the byplay. "You'll be at the negotiations?"

  Jin Qilong smiled politely. It was a fuller smile still than the ones he'd seemed capable of a day or two ago. "I don't think I can make much of a difference, but yes. I'll be there."

  "I see," Shi Huyin said. "Your friend will stay here, I suppose. A shame. He seems very interesting."

  Wu Hao scowled.

  "Until later, then," she said, smiling at him. "Young master. By your leave."

  Shi Huyin dipped her head into an insincere bow that had been milimetered out to show just enough respect, and then turned to leave.

  Wu Hao watched her go, a deep frown on his face.

  "What negotiations?" he asked Jin Qilong.

  The other boy shrugged. "Her father, the regional prefect, is here to negotiate over mining rights, a dispute about the contract of what prices to set, what rights there are... It's only the first day, usually these last three days at a minimum."

  "What?"

  Jin Qilong sighed. "It's boring stuff, really. I don't think you'd be interested."

  He was right about that, at least. Wu Hao wasn't interested in the slightest in the topic, but then why had Shi Huyin brought it up?

  Instructor Yu Xiong took himself away from a quiet conversation with another man, who flickered away into nothingness as he left without Wu Hao getting a good look at his face, or a feeling for his qi.

  "We begin!" Yu Xiong declared. "The first movement!"

  Training wasn't different than usual for Wu Hao, but the others seemed odd. Some were more fired up than they otherwise were, others were clearly ill at ease. The flow of qi, which always seemed clear during these training sessions, felt turbid, even foggy.

  Wu Hao didn't know what to make of it, so he made nothing of it. Training went on, and it was so easy that he found it almost boring. Boring enough that he wondered what would be next. The second-grade, normally speaking, but what did that even involve? Each of the second-grade martial artists that he'd seen had had qi with some sort of substance to it, a weight that Wu Hao couldn't feel from his own.

  His thoughts spun around until training was done, and afterwards Jin Qilong came up to him, only breathing slightly hard.

  "I've got to go," he said. "Er."

  "What?" Wu Hao said. "Young master?"

  Jin Qilong gave him an annoyed smile. "Still with the young mastering?"

  Wu Hao shrugged.

  "Fine," Jin Qilong said, and he opened his mouth to say something, but then shut it again. "I'll be at the negotiations."

  "Fine," Wu Hao said, a little bemused. "I'll go explore."

  Jin Qilong gave him a look. "Don't try to come up with any plans," he said. After a moment's more thought, he added: "Please."

  Wu Hao nodded, solemnly. "Sure."

  He was lying, though.