The heavy scroll hit Bai Qian’s ironwood desk with a sound like a dropping coffin.

  The man who threw it did not bow. He wore the dark crimson armor of the Iron Blood Sect, the metal plates smelling sharply of rust and horse sweat. He stood in the center of the Main Hall, surrounded by twelve White Jade elders, and smiled like a wolf looking at penned sheep.

  "A friendly exchange of pointers," the emissary said. His voice was thick with unsuppressed Core-layer qi, deliberately vibrating the lanterns hanging from the high ceiling. "Sovereign Mo is a reasonable man. He understands the... logistical difficulties of a sudden merger. He proposes a cultural tradition to ease the transition."

  Bai Qian looked at the scroll. She did not reach for it.

  "Three matches," the emissary continued, pacing a slow, arrogant circle. "Junior tier. Senior tier. And an Anchor match to conclude. Three days from now, in your main arena. If White Jade wins the majority, Sovereign Mo withdraws his vanguard from the valley for five years. We respect strength."

  The emissary stopped pacing. The smile vanished, replaced by a flat, dead stare.

  "If Iron Blood wins, you open the gates. Unconditionally."

  The silence in the hall was suffocating. Several junior elders shifted their weight, their faces pale. It was a trap. Iron Blood didn't just have superior numbers; they had combat specialists who spent their lives fighting in the southern border wars. A friendly exchange was just an execution with an audience.

  Bai Qian rested her fingertips on the edge of the desk. Her face was perfectly still. She was running the mathematics of a three-front war versus the probabilities of finding three combatants who could survive Mo Zheng’s monsters.

  Before she could speak, a voice scraped through the quiet.

  "We accept."

  Bai Qian’s eyes flicked to the right.

  Elder Shen Mu stepped forward from the semi-circle of elders. His face was a waxy, sickly gray. He moved stiffly, his spine rigid to accommodate the lingering, jagged ache in his chest from his recent meridian misfires. He didn't look at Bai Qian. He looked directly at the crimson-armored emissary.

  "The White Jade Sect does not cower from cultural traditions," Shen Mu said. He coughed once, a dry, ugly sound, and swallowed hard. "We welcome the exchange. In fact, to demonstrate our utmost respect for Sovereign Mo, I formally nominate our representative for the final Anchor match."

  The emissary raised an eyebrow. "Oh? Who?"

  Shen Mu turned his head. He looked at Bai Qian. There was no respect in his eyes. There was only the manic, desperate gleam of a man who had finally found a way to amputate a rotting limb.

  "The one who sits closest to the Sect Master," Shen Mu said, his voice rising, carrying to every corner of the vast hall. "The foundation of our political continuity. The Sect Master’s esteemed husband. Wei Tian."

  The emissary blinked. Then, a short, barking laugh tore out of his throat.

  "The mortal?" The emissary shook his head, highly amused. "The crippled scholar with zero qi? You want to put him in the arena against an Iron Blood elite?"

  "He is the Sect Master's chosen," Shen Mu said smoothly. His lips curled into a thin, bloodless smile. "If he is worthy of her shadow, he is worthy of representing our martial dignity."

  The hall erupted into hushed, frantic whispers. The elders stared at Shen Mu in horror. A mortal in a high-tier combat tournament wasn't just a guaranteed loss. It was public butchery. It was a humiliation so profound the sect’s reputation would never recover.

  "Elder Shen Mu," Bai Qian said. Her voice dropped the ambient temperature in the room by ten degrees.

  "Are you refusing the nomination, Sect Master?" Shen Mu asked softly, turning fully toward her.

  He had her. He knew he had her.

  If she refused, she proved to the entire council, and to Mo Zheng's emissary, that her marriage was a hollow political shield. She would be admitting she harbored a useless coward. The elders would have the legal leverage to force an annulment.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  If she accepted, Wei Tian stepped into an arena with a trained killer. The mortal would be beaten to death in front of three thousand disciples. Problem solved. The shield breaks, one way or another.

  Bai Qian looked at Shen Mu’s triumphant, sickly face.

  She didn't think about sect politics. She thought about a pile of gray sand sitting on a testing pedestal. She thought about an illusion array turning a pleasant, breezy blue. She thought about a massive slab of founding-era obsidian cracking straight down the middle, and a mortal complaining about the table wobbling.

  She had eleven files in her desk. None of them made sense.

  Let the hammer strike the anvil, Bai Qian thought, her expression entirely unreadable. Let us see if the anvil breaks, or if the hammer shatters.

  "The nomination is recorded," Bai Qian said flatly. She looked back at the emissary. "Three days. Have your combatants ready."

  The emissary grinned, showing slightly yellowed teeth. He tapped two fingers against his breastplate in a mock salute.

  "We will prepare the burial shrouds," he said, and walked out of the hall.

  Xiao Mei ran.

  She didn't jog. She sprinted. Her silver-trimmed robes snapped in the freezing wind as she tore up the winding dirt path toward the Eastern Pavilion. Her Sage-layer 6 qi pumped furiously through her freshly unblocked meridians, but panic made her feet clumsy. She tripped over a loose root, caught herself on a pine trunk, and kept running.

  Her lungs were burning by the time the dilapidated pavilion came into view.

  She expected to find Wei Tian reading. Or sleeping. Or doing something completely incomprehensible to a patch of dirt.

  She burst through the paper-screen door, slamming it back so hard the wooden frame cracked.

  "They're going to kill you!" Xiao Mei screamed.

  Wei Tian was sitting on the edge of his narrow wooden bed. He did not look up.

  He was holding a bone needle and a spool of cheap, coarse thread. In his lap rested his left cloth shoe. He was staring intently at the bottom of the sole.

  "It’s a perfect circle," Wei Tian noted. His voice was a slow, lazy drawl.

  Xiao Mei stood in the doorway, chest heaving, her hands gripping the doorframe. She stared at him. "Did you hear me? Elder Shen Mu just threw you into a meat grinder!"

  Wei Tian poked the needle into the frayed edge of the cotton. He missed the thickest part of the fabric. The needle slipped, entirely failing to catch.

  "I heard the bell ring three times," Wei Tian said, pulling the thread loose and trying again. "That usually means visitors."

  "It means the Iron Blood Sect!" Xiao Mei threw her hands up, stepping into the room. She was practically vibrating with anxiety. "They demanded a tournament! Three matches! If we lose, they take the mountain. And Elder Shen Mu nominated you for the final Anchor match!"

  Wei Tian stopped trying to sew. He lowered the shoe to his lap.

  He looked at the perfectly round hole worn through the heel. The hole that shouldn't exist, caused by the localized friction of plugging a microscopic tear in the fabric of reality located directly under the sect’s central courtyard. It was an annoying consequence of maintenance.

  He looked up at Xiao Mei. Her eyes were wide, terrified. She actually cared if he died. It was an inconvenient emotional complication.

  "Who am I fighting?" he asked.

  "An Iron Blood elite!" Xiao Mei gasped, pacing a tight circle in front of his table. "They only brought their vanguard. The lowest rank they have in that camp is a Peak Sage. You have no qi! You have no sword! You don't even have armor!"

  Wei Tian looked back down at his ruined shoe.

  If he didn't show up, Shen Mu won whatever petty political game the old man was playing with Bai Qian. If he showed up and died, he had to find a new mountain, which involved walking, which he hated. If he showed up and won, people would ask questions.

  It was a terrible sequence of options.

  "Xiao Mei," Wei Tian said.

  She stopped pacing. "What? Do you need me to pack your box? There’s a secret path down the western ridge. The patrol doesn't check it until midnight. You can run."

  "Does the logistics pavilion supply leather?"

  Xiao Mei blinked. Her mouth hung open slightly. "What?"

  "Leather," Wei Tian repeated gently. He tapped the hole in his shoe with the blunt end of the bone needle. "Cotton wears out too fast on the jade tiles. I need a tougher patch. Preferably boiled ox-hide, if they have it."

  Xiao Mei stared at him. Her brain frantically tried to connect the impending, brutal public execution scheduled in three days to a request for shoe repair. The gears failed to catch.

  "You..." She choked on the word. "You are fighting a monster in three days. They are going to snap your spine in half."

  "Yes." Wei Tian set the shoe on the table. He stood up, his knees popping audibly in the quiet room. "Which means I will have to stand on a stone arena for a considerable amount of time. I would prefer my heel not to be touching cold rock while I do it."

  He walked over to the small table and picked up his blue-covered book. He opened it, finding the dried leaf he used as a bookmark.

  "Tell logistics I need the leather by tomorrow morning," Wei Tian said, not looking up from the page. "And see if the kitchen has any of those burnt pork buns left. The stress of impending death makes me hungry."

  Xiao Mei stood frozen for five long seconds. She looked at the mortal scholar. She looked at the hole in his cheap shoe. She let out a long, ragged sigh that sounded suspiciously like a sob, turned on her heel, and walked out.

  Wei Tian waited until her footsteps faded down the path.

  He lowered the book.

  He looked out the window, toward the eastern valley where Mo Zheng’s vanguard camp burned with crimson, violent qi. The sky above the camp was bruised purple.

  A tournament. A formal stage. An opponent trained to kill with maximum efficiency.

  "I am going to have to stand up," Wei Tian murmured to the empty room. He sounded profoundly, deeply disappointed. "That is incredibly annoying."