Two days later, the forest had settled into the particular kind of quiet that suggested it had seen quite enough excitement recently and would appreciate it if everyone involved could kindly take their catastrophes elsewhere.
Lin Mei stood at the northern approach of the corridor with her sword across her back and her arms folded.
She watched the tree line with fixed intensity.
The one on the left, for instance, the gnarled pine that leaned at an angle suggesting decades of losing arguments with the prevailing wind, had become something of a landmark. She used it to mark the passage of time the way a prisoner might use scratches on a wall, except her scratches were mental and her wall was a tree and the comparison fell apart if you pushed it.
She had not slept properly since the Patriarch entered seclusion.
This was not, she told herself, because she was worried.
Worry was an emotion, and emotions, as the Patriarch had pointed out with the calm authority of a man explaining basic Qi pathways to someone who had just attempted to unlock them all at the same time, made terrible commanding officers.
Lin Mei was not worried.
She was vigilant, which was a different thing entirely, in the same way that standing in a shallow pool to your knees was different from swimming in a calm lake.
The corridor behind her hummed with the low, vibration of five array formations, without any flags, doing their jobs with a quiet competence. The concealment array said nothing here. The silence formation said nothing to hear. The Qi suppression array said nobody home. The recovery formation said please heal faster. The monitoring web said I see everything and most of it is trees.
The Foundation Establishment cultivators rotated their shifts at the formation nodes with discipline. It would have impressed Lin Mei if she'd had the energy to be impressed by anything other than the continued absence of demonic cultivators at their doorstep.
Four hours on, four hours off, exactly as the Patriarch had ordered, and the formations held.
The corridor remained invisible, the disciples ate what little foraged food the scouts brought back, the wounded healed in the denser Qi, and the days passed.
Two of them.
Two full grinding days of Lin Mei standing at approaches, checking sight lines, rotating watches, settling disputes about water allocation, sleeping arrangements, and who had stolen whose last strip of dried meat, which turned out to be a squirrel that had gotten through the perimeter and was now living under a rock near the stream with the smug satisfaction of a creature that had found free accommodation in a building it didn't understand.
Entire days of disciples looking at her with eyes that asked the same question over and over, the question none of them voiced out of fear of making it become reality: Is the Patriarch going to wake up?
Lin Mei didn't know.
No one in this group, and she suspected any group, did in fact know.
She had checked the moss curtain seven times in the first day, pressing her spiritual sense toward the space behind it and finding the same thing each time: silence and a Qi signature so faint it was indistinguishable from the limestone itself.
The Patriarch's body was there and his breathing was there in that shallow and slow rhythm many had associated with deep cultivation in seclusion from seeing other elders do it in the past.
His heartbeat was there unchanged since he'd sat down.
Everything was there except the part that made it reassuring, they could not feel an ounce of Qi from him. Even when injured and a shattered core, there had been some spark. Something they could point at and rely on when they were feeling terrified of being found by forces they had no hope against.
That was no longer there.
On the second day she had stopped checking, because it changed nothing and the act of walking to the moss curtain, pausing, pressing her sense forward, finding the same nothing, and walking back was beginning to attract attention from disciples who watched her do it with expressions that made her want to hit something, preferably something that deserved it like a demonic cultivator.
Lin Mei looked around the camp with a deep sigh, leadership was weighing on her already.
Lin Shui sat on the eastern ridge, her sword across her knees and eyes closed in meditation. She had been there for six hours and had eaten when Lin Mei brought food and drank when Lin Mei brought water and had otherwise communicated through a vocabulary that consisted entirely of nods, single syllables, and one memorable, disgusted shake of the head when Feng Jun had asked if she wanted to talk about her feelings.
Feng Jun had not asked again.
The boy was currently asleep against the eastern wall with his head tilted at an angle that was going to produce complaints in the morning and hand still loosely wrapped around the calling stone the Patriarch had made. He clutched it the way a child clutched a favourite toy, except the toy was a pebble inscribed with matrices that shouldn't exist and the child was a seventeen-year-old boy who had watched his sect burn and was coping through the medium of unconsciousness.
Liang Hao sat near the hub stone, cross-legged.
His round face pointed toward the southern end of the corridor where the moss curtains hung undisturbed. He had appointed himself the Patriarch's unofficial sentry, a role nobody had assigned him and nobody had the heart to take away. He sat there with a patient, unblinking focus that was admirable.
Lin Mei's jaw ached.
She unclenched it and felt the muscles protest.
The morning of the third day arrived with a grey, noncommittal light.
Lin Mei was at the northern approach with her arms folded as she watched the gnarled pine. It was then that footsteps came up behind her, fast. The kind that carried urgency in their rhythm the way a telegram carried bad news in its brevity.
She turned to look.
The blind cultivator, the woman with the cloth-wrapped eyes whose name was Zhao Ping, was moving through the corridor at a pace that her injuries should not have permitted. Her hands were extended in front of her, not for balance, but because her palms were still tingling with the vibrations from the monitoring web's hub stone, and her fingers were spread wide as though trying to hold onto information that was slipping through them.
"Senior Sister Lin..." Zhao Ping stopped before her, "...we have a situation."
Lin Mei's hand went to her sword hilt. "Where?"
"Northeast. The monitoring web picked up signatures four hundred feet out and closing. Moving fast and in erratic patterns. Five of them, small, Qi Condensation early-stage at most. They're running."
"Running from what?"
Zhao Ping's jaw tightened. "Eight signatures behind them. Mid-stage Qi Condensation, tight formation and with a controlled pace. They're not chasing. They're toying with them."
Lin Mei was already moving.
She crossed the corridor in a few strides, disciples scrambling out of her path, and dropped to her knees beside the hub stone. She pressed her palm flat against its surface and the monitoring web opened up in her Qi sense.
The forest breathed around her in signatures and flow patterns.
Trees, rocks, stream, ridges, animals, patrols at distance, all of it rendered in the web's steady pulse.
And there, northeast, five small signatures moving in the jagged, desperate pattern of prey that had been running too long and was running out of places to run. They stumbled, recovered, fell, got up, only to stumbled again. One of them was slower than the others, limping and leaving a trail of disrupted Qi that even the web's crude resolution could read as blood.
Behind them, eight signatures in a crescent formation in a steady and patient way. Closing the distance by inches rather than feet, the way a cat closed distance on a mouse, not because it couldn't catch it, but because the catching was less interesting than the playing with the food before it.
They were toying with them just like Zhao Ping said.
Lin Mei's fingers pressed harder against the hub stone and the web's resolution sharpened.
She caught details that made her stomach clench.
The five runners wore Qi signatures that resonated with the same fundamental frequency as every other disciple in the corridor. The same cultivation method, meridian patterns, breathing techniques, movement patterns, and the same faint echo of a sect that had taught them all to do things the same way.
White Clover Flame Sect disciples.
Her sect and people.
Five more who had survived the burning, the hunting, and the two days of hiding in whatever holes the forest had offered.
They were being bled for sport by eight cultivators who had all the time in the world and none of the mercy.
Lin Mei pulled her hand from the hub stone.
Fifty-six faces looked at her.
The Foundation Establishment cultivators at their formation nodes. The Qi Condensation disciples along the walls. Liang Hao at his self-appointed post. Duan Rong with his bandaged ear and his hand on the concealment array's intake. The girl with the broken leg, propped against the eastern wall, her splint freshly wrapped and recovering well. Chen Bao, whose knees had finally stopped making sounds but whose eyes had started making up for it. Feng Jun, awake now, his calling stone in his fist.
And more…
Every single one of them looking at her for a decision.
Every single one of them thinking the same thing she was thinking, and none of them willing to say it first, because saying it first meant owning it, and owning it meant accepting the consequences, and the consequences lived in a space behind a moss curtain where a patriarch lay unconscious and had specifically said do not disturb me unless absolutely necessary.
Did this count as absolutely necessary?
Five disciples being hunted by eight demonic cultivators.
The numbers were manageable for them to deal with.
The Patriarch had killed four mid-stage cultivators alone with a shattered core and a body held together by strange flowing formations and Qi spirals. Surely a rescue party of Foundation Establishment cultivators and armed disciples could handle eight demonic cultivators alone without guidance.
But the Patriarch had also said do not engage unless cornered.
And the Patriarch was in seclusion… without any signs of ambient Qi coming from him at all as though he was dead.
Lin Mei looked toward the southern end of the corridor.
The moss curtains hung still no matter how volatile her thoughts became.
She looked back at the hub stone, where the five signatures continued their desperate flight and the eight signatures continued their patient, cruel pursuit.
One of the runners fell.
The signature dropped, hit the ground, and the Qi pattern stuttered in the way that meant impact, pain, and the brief cessation of coordinated movement. Two of the other runners stopped, turned back, hauled the fallen one upright. The pause cost them fifteen feet of distance. The crescent formation tightened by the same amount, and Lin Mei could almost hear the laughter that accompanied it, the low, wet amusement of predators who had just watched their prey trip and found it entertaining.
"Damn it all to the lowest hell!" Lin Mei shouted loud enough that every disciple in the corridor flinched. She drew her sword and the steel sang against the scabbard's lip. "They're ours. They're White Clover Flame Sect, or whatever the Patriarch calls us now. We don't leave anyone behind."
Duan Rong's hand lifted from the concealment array's node. "Senior Sister Lin, the Patriarch said—"
"The Patriarch said to handle it. I'm handling it."
Duan Rong looked away, this was not a decision he would want on his shoulders either. He understood what it meant to take this burden and the cost of it. Elder and patriarchs were not know to be kind to those who made mistakes that caused death to their people and charges.
She pointed at the Foundation Establishment cultivators. "Who can fight?"
The answer came in the form of three people standing up.
Duan Rong, whose bandaged ear was seeping again and whose Qi reserves had recovered to perhaps seventy percent under the recovery formation's influence. A young man named Tao Shen, whose chest wound had closed enough that he could breathe without wincing, mostly, and whose sharp eyes had lost none of their edge during two days of formation duty. And a woman named Fang Yue, the quietest of the ten, who had said fewer words in two days than Lin Shui had, which was an achievement that bordered on the metaphysical, and whose sword had been cleaned, sharpened, and laid across her knees in a state of readiness that suggested she had been waiting for exactly this moment since the corridor became home.
Three Foundation cultivators that were injured and running on recovery formation fumes. There were running on the kind of determination that substituted for good judgment.
Lin Mei looked at the remaining seven Foundation cultivators.
Two blind, one with a leg wound still too fresh, one with shattered ribs, three who could barely circulate Qi without their meridians spasming. They would hold the formations, guard the corridor, and protect the fifty-odd disciples who couldn't fight and the patriarch who couldn't wake.
It would have to be enough.
A sound came from the eastern ridge. The soft scrape of a sword being lifted from a lap and settled into a grip.
Lin Shui stood on the ridge top, silhouetted against the grey sky and blade held at her side in a low guard that the sect's sword manuals called River Awaits the Stone. Her eyes were open and fixed on Lin Mei with an expression that contained no question, request, and no room for argument.
She was coming.
She knew her sister well enough that trying to stop her would have been impossible.
Lin Mei's jaw tightened. Her sister was fifteen and a genius with a blade.
The single person in the world whose death would break Lin Mei in ways that no amount of willpower could repair.
Lin Shui held her gaze.
Lin Mei looked away first. "Fine. Shui, you're with me."
Lin Shui dropped from the ridge in a motion that was less climbing down and more gravity being given polite notice that it would be cooperated with at the climber's convenience. She landed without sound and took her position at Lin Mei's left shoulder.
"Feng Jun, Wei Ping, Su Lan, Chen Yi." Lin Mei pointed at each in turn. The healthiest of the Qi Condensation disciples, the ones who had recovered the most under the formation's care and whose eyes held something other than hollow exhaustion. "You're with us. Everyone else stays. Zhao Ping, you have command of the corridor."
The blind cultivator pressed her palms together. "Understood."
"If we're not back within the hour, seal the approaches and don't come looking."
Zhao Ping's cloth-wrapped face turned toward Lin Mei in a way that made the cloth seem irrelevant. She said nothing except for a single nod.
Lin Mei turned to the northern approach. "Move. Quiet formation, pairs, just like the Patriarch taught us. We hit them from the east flank while they're focused on the chase. Fast, hard, kill them quickly, and we get our people out. No heroics."
She said that last part while looking at Duan Rong, who had the decency to look away.
They moved.