Chapter Text
The burnt-blade smell of steel and amber jade ignites like paper, its potency strong enough to burn down into your lungs, joints of your dominant hand screaming in agony. You lift your blade high enough, locked into a standstill with your opponent's copper eyes glaring into yours.
"What truth do you see?"
His last words before shedding the mask echo in your mind as it does every single sword strike, lungs burning worse than the medicine you had when you were sick as a child and yellow dust choking you out as you bear the assail of the sand soldiers, see through the strikes that propel you into a hell-torn pit.
You answer his question with steel.
The truth is the fight.
The fight is to persevere.
Ye Wanshan's mounted strikes bubble up into your mind as a sandy clone tears into your main sword-hand, momentarily distracted by biting pain before the metallic tang of your own blood fling you to your senses. You growl as the blood splatters onto your face, lunging forward into a retaliation of your own, second hand materialising your second weapon, effortlessly executing the tip of your spear into its heart.
The fight stays your pain, blood thudding down from your chest to your arms, forcing you to stay present, to stay alive.
He could be anywhere, but you pray that you remember the rhythm.
The last clone fades into ash as silent as it does graciously as its life force fades, and you shout as you witness the assassin at the edge of your vision, barely able to slide a hair's breadth away from certain death.
The adrenaline ignites you and sharpens your mind.
Praying to anyone listening, you quick-step forwards and aim your blade, five quick strikes that catch the older man off balance, and a gasp of surprise leaves you as this opens him up for several hits.
Then, hubris - he de-materialises and what feels like the arm of ten men bore the hilt of his dagger onto your shoulder blades.
Lucky Seventeen's assault was more predictable than this, you think quickly, before madly dashing away, anywhere, off to your right as one lucky hidden hit glances off of your left cheekbone, the sound-spray of steel squealing like molars clamping down on metal chopsticks.
The silver mask falling from your face from the direct hit doesn't even cause him to hesitate - his aim is hauntingly true - as he kicks you back several paces, a groan of exertion leaving your mouth.
Like light of a lantern chasing darkness, he follows you into a flurry of an assault with his blade, but this isn't the first time you've seen this. Your legs carry you quicker than your mind and raise your sword to fend off the assault of seven strikes, culminating into a dirty kick that lands you tumbling backwards, but you regain you footing and raise your eyes to your attacker.
Biting your lip, blood tasting of coins trickles down your throat as you look up to see him regarding you as he prowls side to side, a rare reprieve, but there was no malice in that gaze.
You feel more than see the forward jaunt of the air, of one last strike; you feel your consciousness fading.
A tap of steel clinks near the hilt of your blade. Once. Twice.
Thrice.
Gasping deep in breath, you throw a clumsy unpractised kick that pushes the assassin back, and the momentary stun allows you an opening.
Your sword strikes true; it bites into his shoulder, and your frenzied gaze mistakes a small sunken smile on his hollow face.
You wish he would wear the mask again, because at least that face wouldn't have lied to you.
You blame what you see on the blood loss because the next second, your nameless sword (all the way from the beginning), clinks and screeches horribly with his own, the sound is close to deafening.
But you've seen this before.
Panting, you put every ounce of your remaining strength into that sword-lock. Then, your eyes lock with his brown ones, and it feels like it shouldn't have been forever.
It reminds you of a world burning of hatred boring down into your soul, except the older man's gaze was not hate.
Not hate.
Something else.
A twisted mark of excitement perhaps, of which you could not glean its meaning. Like the rank of a thousand soldiers, lying dead or alive underneath a forsaken city, of a meteor fell to earth.
You are reminded of the nightdream vision, in the Thousand-Buddha village of the taking of thousands of lives in an instant; The red-orange blossom of an untimely perish.
The moment lasts too long.
You use the momentum from that raw vision to throw the rest of your energy into a devastating throw, desperate to rid yourself of that singeing gaze. It is as if he looks through you, sundered into the soul-form, mind envisaging your sore body bleeding naked with open wounds in a cruel endless sandscape bored down by the sun.
An intrusive thought needles into your mind, as if the swordsman put it there, trailing into the dark thought that perhaps returning to Qinghe was an awful idea in retrospect, but you felt something calling to you and the three-headed mask of fate answered a question you did not know you held.
And that answer is the drum beat siren call of the challenge; in truth, you know this song - if you do not kill him, you would die here.
Ruby would have died in vain.
Not sparing a glance down to your wrist, you dodge a kick, hop a pace away, then without hesitation you swing your sword in a wide arc.
As sure as the day turns to night, it lands.
You watch as the bloodied body of the monk is sent hurtling backward with a harsh smack, into body of his own shrine, the behemoth of a Buddha statue, falling down as the movement cracked bone-deep into an evolving sound of an avalanche of the arena.
What felt, heard, and played like thunder struck all around you as you stare up at the behemoth of stone cause his body to plummet to the ground.
The man's face turns to witness the sigh of stone in almost slow-motion. With what feels like the grit of sand clouding your vision, you swear the statue lands directly onto the man's body.
Surely that would have killed any mere man.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Then, water. A last dooming suck of breath before what felt like the ocean beats down into you.
Your eyes barely adjust to the impossibly clear water, and finding your bearings, you see a black figure slowly sinking into the grey.
Something stops you then: not life, not breath, but what felt like sheer stupidity causes you to swim after that figure.
Not the fight, not the way he looked at you, not the way you've lost everyone, but some clouded instinct in you says to save this man. Save this body.
You've held your breath long for a while before, but while bearing the weight of another body?
A fool's errand.
As your oxygen depletes, you tug the deadweight of inky black robes with you, but your eyes close on their own, and a slow painful death awaits. You re-adjust your grip on one of the ropes of his apparel, and you tug as hard as you can.
You curse your luck as letting go is a perfectly valid option, you could just let this dead stranger go.
Or die here.
But you don't let go, tugging that heavy boulder along with you to the almost blinding light - if you had gone alone, you'd have had more time - and the white of the sun blinds you...
In an actionable stupid move, you groan and let out the last of your air in an exertion, pushing that body up into the light.
Will nature take care of the rest?
Yet everything fades to black as you belatedly realise the sun was instead the wondrous light of the full moon.
When you wake, all is not what it was.
The first thing you do is oblige your lungs rejecting the tide as you cough up what felt like salty chunks of bitter fish. Your nose and throat sting as you force it all out of your system. Your brain registers the field of red flowers as a splotch of crimson red, but that's all it was, a far-off field.
This feels like it goes on forever, and you roll onto your hands and knees, and bits of acid splashes onto the ground as you throw up nothing but the empty contents of your stomach.
I'm alive.
Swinging your hazy gaze, you notice the swordsman was nowhere to be found.
Soon, you hear a voice. "Ah! Young wanderer! You're awake!?" A woman's voice at the edge of your vision.
But you can't look up because you keep coughing, tears burning your vision as you wonder how you're still alive. You feel like you've been run over by a horse.
Your body protests as you push yourself up, still coughing, still unable to respond. You weakly turn your head at the figure - an auntie with long, flowing white hair that drapes over her shoulders.
For a moment, your heart spikes in thinking this is Qianye; however, her face remarks a different aspect. She's at least forty years old and garbed in a pure white yet unremarkable robe.
"Did you..." you cough again, and you see more than feel a bubble drip out of your nose. You sound sick. "Did you save me?"
She bends down, giving a once-over. You suddenly hope she's not some sort of bandit.
"Little watermelon, what happened?"
The nickname glances off your foggy head in way of explaining. How do you explain nearly dying in a fight?
"Y-you... did you see someone here in a black garment?"
She looks at you strangely. "Ah, half-alive, but you think of someone else?"
Your opponent still weighs heavy in your mind, but for different reasons. "A-Auntie..." Your lungs still feel infiltrated by water, so you clear your throat a few times.
"But but! You haven't told me your name."
You tell her your name, and she continues staring at you oddly. "What is it?" There's a sort of smile that creeps onto her face, repeating your name under her breath. Surely you aren't that infamous in the jianghu yet…
She raises a small object in her hand. "Is this yours?"
"...Huh?" you say dumbly.
"I found this beside you," she says, holding up a bronze key. "Is it yours?"
Blinking at it, you don't recognise it, but it's ornate, gleaming in the night. "That isn't mine."
She clicks her tongue, as if annoyed. "Are you sure? It was beside you. Seemed very important!"
"No, I've never seen it before."
She starts to laugh, shoving it into your hands. You fumble and drop it, still nauseated. "Auntie?"
"Well, well! The young wanderer has integrity!" Slowly, you grasp the key, still staring at her splendorous form. She had the body of a young woman, but her white hair signifies a different aura. Staring at her robe, you notice rivets that gleam, and faint track marks, haphazard cuts you can see through the other side of. She seems wholly unbothered by her tattered robes.
Her hands are wet, and so are the wisps of her worn robe. She was surely my saviour.
You notice your staring, and cough to hide it. "What, uh... what day is it?"
"Today," she says, nodding sagely.
Cursing, you pick up the key, confused by her strange behaviour. "Auntie, stop joking around!"
"Do you know who you fought, young man?"
You offset your jaw in thought. "A dead man, I'm sure."
She laughs like a bat screech, and you wince. "Assassin Tian Ying! Yet you still live!"
What?
Whispers of his name crowd around like crows, but that just cannot be true. He disappeared from the jianghu years ago, still missing to this day. A man you know to have fought alongside the humble blacksmith of Harvestfall village. A whisper of a long-dead jianghu legend, a name spoken in hushed whispers. But you know deep down there may be some truth to her words.
You do not even know why you wanted to kill him.
A dead man rises from the grave to fight one last time.
The question doesn't register in your mind as something normal, but the implications make your head spin. "No, auntie. You must... Must be mistaken."
She prowls around, the water lapping at her feet, and the sloshing sound makes you feel a little sick. Then she bends her knees down to your sitting level, doe-brown eyes staring mischievously into yours.
"Did he don a beautiful three-faced golden mask?"
Dread courses through you, but your body doesn't want to obey its call. Your body is spent, so you can only stare. You could really go for a bowl of noodles.
"I see it all over your face, little watermelon," she says, grinning. "This is no accident." She waves a hand in the air in a near-perfect circle, but you're too tired to figure the meaning. "As payment for your honesty.... It's yours now."
Weirdly, you stare down at the key. Now that it's closer to your eyes and you're farther away from death, you notice that It's engraved with Buddhist motifs, but you have no idea what it opens.
"Auntie..." Questions taste of bitter bile on the tip of your tongue, so you look up. "Huh?"
She's gone, and you blink down at the beautiful key, wondering if you had imagined it all.
reset my patient violence along both lines of a pathway higher.
take me back to eden - sleep token