Cultivation Unleashed

The first thing I noticed when I stepped off the mountain wasn't the noise, or the smell of exhaust, or the sheer number of people who seemed to be in a hurry to get nowhere. It was the air. Ten years of thin, cold mountain air had rewired my lungs. The thick soup of the city felt like drowning. I stood at the bus station with a canvas bag over one shoulder and a sword I'd wrapped in burlap and strapped to my back, and I tried to breathe without coughing.

A woman in a business suit walked past me, then stopped. Turned. Looked at the sword.

"Is that real?" she asked.

"Real enough," I said.

She laughed like I'd made a joke. I hadn't. My master had forged it from meteorite iron and quenched it in a mountain spring that only ran during the seventh lunar month. It had killed three demons and a man who'd tried to steal my rice. But she didn't need to know that.

I hadn't planned on coming down. The plan was to stay on Qingyun Peak until I broke through to the ninth stage, until the lightning tribulation came and I either ascended or died trying. But plans have a way of dying quiet deaths. My master's letter had arrived three weeks ago, delivered by a hawk that landed on my windowsill at dawn and refused to leave until I took the scroll from its leg.

*Your sister is in trouble. Go.*

Four words. My master was never one for paragraphs.

I hadn't seen my sister in ten years. The last time I saw her, she was seven years old, crying at the gate of the temple because I was leaving and she didn't understand why. Our parents had died that spring, a car accident on a rain-slick road, and the only relative willing to take us was an uncle who ran a martial arts school in the city. He took my sister. He sent me to the mountain because I was too much trouble, too angry, too likely to break things. I was twelve. I remembered the way my sister's hand had felt in mine when I let go. Small. Warm. Sticky with candy.

Now she was seventeen, and she was in trouble.

I didn't know what kind of trouble. The letter didn't say. My master believed in brevity the way other people believed in breathing.

The bus station smelled like diesel and fried food. I bought a bottle of water from a vending machine and stood there staring at the plastic bottle for a full minute before I figured out how to open it. Ten years on a mountain and I'd forgotten how to use a screw cap. A teenager behind me sighed loud enough for me to hear.

"Old people," he muttered to his friend.

I was twenty-two.

The city was called Jiangcheng. Two million people, give or take, stacked in concrete towers that scraped at a sky the color of dishwater. I'd seen it from the mountain on clear days, a gray smudge on the horizon, and I'd never once wanted to go there. Now I walked its streets with a sword on my back and no idea where to start.

My uncle's martial arts school was in the old district, near the river. I found it by asking directions from a man selling roasted sweet potatoes from a cart. He pointed with a pair of tongs and told me to watch out for pickpockets. I thanked him and bought a sweet potato because it seemed rude not to. It was the first food I'd eaten that wasn't rice, vegetables, or whatever I could trap in the forest. The sweetness hit me like a punch. I ate it too fast and burned my tongue.

The school had a sign above the door: *Tian Family Martial Arts. Established 1987.* The characters were faded, the paint peeling. The windows were dark. I tried the door. Locked.

A woman was watching me from across the street. She was leaning against a lamppost with her arms crossed, wearing a red jacket that was too bright for the gray afternoon. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and her eyes were the kind that missed nothing. I'd known a few people like her on the mountain. Hunters. Trackers. People who made their living by noticing what others didn't.

"You're looking for the Tian family," she said. Not a question.

"I'm looking for my sister."

She pushed off the lamppost and walked toward me. Her footsteps were quiet, deliberate. A fighter's walk. I'd seen it a thousand times in the training yard.

"Tian Suyu," she said. "You're her brother. The one who went to the mountain."

"You know her."

"I know she's been missing for two weeks."

The words landed like a stone in still water. I kept my face flat. Ten years of meditation had taught me that much.

"Missing," I repeated.

"She was supposed to meet me here. Three weeks ago. She never showed. I went to her apartment. No one there. I asked around. No one's seen her." The woman tilted her head. "And then you show up, with a sword wrapped in burlap, looking like you haven't eaten a proper meal in a decade. So either you're here to help, or you're here to make things worse."

I looked at the locked door of my uncle's school. The peeling paint. The dark windows. Something cold settled in my chest.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"Lin Xue. I was her teacher."

"Teacher of what?"

"History. At the university." She paused. "And other things."

The way she said *other things* told me everything I needed to know. My sister had gotten involved in something. Something that had pulled her under. I thought of the letter from my master, the four words that had brought me down from the mountain. *Your sister is in trouble.* He'd known more than he'd written. He always did.

"Where do I start?" I said.

Lin Xue looked at the sword on my back. Then at my face. Whatever she saw there made her nod, just once.

"Not here," she said. "Come with me."

She turned and walked away without checking if I was following. I stood there for a moment, the sweet potato still warm in my hand, the city humming around me like a machine I didn't understand. Ten years on a mountain, and I'd come down to find my sister gone and a stranger telling me to follow.

I followed.

She led me through streets that got narrower and older, past shops selling herbs and paper offerings for the dead, past a temple with incense smoke curling into the air, past a man who sat on a stool and sharpened knives without looking up. The city had layers. I was beginning to see them.

We stopped in front of a teahouse with a green awning. Lin Xue pushed through the door and I ducked in after her. The inside was dim and warm, smelling of oolong and wood smoke. An old woman behind the counter nodded at Lin Xue and didn't ask questions. We sat at a table in the back corner.

"Your sister was researching something," Lin Xue said. "Something old. Something that certain people in this city don't want found."

"What kind of something?"

"The kind that gets people killed."

I set the sweet potato on the table. It had gone cold. My hands were steady. They always were, when things got bad. It was a gift from the mountain, or maybe a curse. I didn't know which yet.

"Tell me everything," I said.

Lin Xue smiled. It wasn't a warm smile. It was the smile of someone who'd been waiting for backup and had just realized it had finally arrived, in the form of a scruffy stranger with a sword and a burned tongue.

"Everything," she said, "will take a while."

"I've got time."

"No," she said. "You don't."