"Oh. So that's Lu. Doesn't look so bad. Nice robe. Very shiny."

Elder Lu cut a rather odd figure in his finery. He was old, older than any monkey orange-crest had ever seen. His hair was thin and wispy, his skin spotted with dark splotches that would surely be mange if he were a monkey. But his robes were beyond glorious. The many layers swallowed up his body, obscuring limbs no doubt thinned by long years. The innermost layers were brilliant white, each successive layer a deeper, more vibrant, shade of blue. Whenever the ancient man moved his arms, it looked like clouds were captured within the countless folds of his sleeves. Each sleeve of the azure outermost robe had an entire scene of embroidery upon it. On his right shoulder, a golden crow carried a sun within its wings. On his left, a white tiger prowled amidst constellations.

"Watch your words." Li Xun admonished. After a moment's hesitation, his master's qi flared, enveloping the two of them in a bubble of stillness. "If he was a demon in the guise of a righteous man, he would not be half so dangerous. He is a powerful foe, but an inescapable patron. That is not his true shape either."

"True shape?"

"There is a technique he cultivates. One that allows him to become something other than flesh. A featureless golden idol. A statue in the vague shape of a man, that can see without eyes, speak without lips. It is not a true body yet, not complete in the way the sect master's is. But I think he intends it to become one, to cultivate it from a mere spell, to something that will forever dwell beneath his skin."

"So... Like mine? Also, how do you know this?"

"I fought at his side, once." His master casually revealed. "In the south. When the Wu still thought they had a chance of victory if they committed their elders to the field. And... Yes and no, to your first question. What the sect master did, what Elder Lu seeks to replicate, is in many ways distinct from cultivating a body through alchemy or physical tempering. But your Stone Monkey's Body is not exactly a modal case for how alchemical bodily cultivation should work. So, yes, and no."

"You don't know." Orange-crest summarized.

His master snorted with false indignation.

"Yes, I'm sorry I don't know exactly how our Pseudo-Nascent Soul sect master managed to make a transformation technique that should be incompatible with life without a constant expenditure of true qi permanent without dying in the process. Or how you seem to be making progress toward doing the same thing without even knowing what true qi is."

"Apology accepted."

His master affected a long suffering sigh. Orange-crest rolled his eyes, even though his master couldn't see them with the two of them looking in the same direction. It was a tricky maneuver to really get right, he needed all the practice he could get if he wanted to pull that one off at will.

His master fell silent, watching the elder he so feared drone on. Not that they could hear him though the bubble. Orange-crest had gotten everything he needed to know from the first half of his speech anyway. It was good. Clever. Unlike so many other humans, Elder Lu seemed to understand that compliments cost one nothing to give. He'd said more nice things about the Imperial Xiao in the first five minutes than Li Xun had said about orange-crest in the first half year they'd known each other.

"Tell more?" The monkey prompted his master.

"About?"

"Lu. You know. Knew?"

Li Xun frowned, then clicked his tongue.

"There are secrets, and there are secrets. I cannot say more with Yang Shui on the mountain. I am not sure even this technique is enough to keep our words from him. Too much of my acquaintance with Elder Lu borders upon matters I cannot speak of. But when his attention first fell upon me, it was only a few decades after I attained the rank of daoist. Long after I'd given up on earning a senior's tutelage, but before acceptance had given way to bitterness and caution."

"You have a lot of secrets." Li Hou noted.

"I have a lot of secrets?" His master echoed, looking like he was torn between laughing and scolding him. "I am your senior by a century! I should have more secrets than you! Yet you already seem determined to surpass me in that regard! I still don't know where you learned those illusions, or why you once came back covered head to toe in blue blood one day, or how you knew that particular chunk of rock was a heaven-defying treasure!"

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"That seems fair and right." Orange-crest clarified. "You can keep your secrets. Otherwise you might not have more than me."

Orange-crest's master looked a little put out by how quickly he'd folded. The monkey studied Elder Xun instead of meeting his eyes. His master was often right. It was sometimes annoying how often he could be right. So orange-crest just agreed as quickly as possible to get the matter over with.

If Elder Lu looked soft in his age, fragile and graceful like a butterfly, then Elder Xun decidedly did not. His hair was cropped short like the sleeves of his robes. His muscles were as thick around as Brother Enduring Oath's iron chains, clearly visible beneath his thin skin. He looked every bit as brutal as the vicious wolf at his side. Orange-crest wondered if the wolf was a Speaker, but he was not exactly keen to make the beast's acquaintance. Wolves were not as bad as tigers, but they were definitely more likely to try to eat you than men or monkeys. He felt like he should be more interested in the wolf, as a fellow animal on the mountain. Non-human solidarity. But he just wasn't. Not when the wolf stood next to Elder Xun.

If Yang Shui was a storm on the horizon, and Yang Wei a man guided by the beauty of a naked blade, Elder Xun reminded orange-crest of that one tree on Mount Yuelu. Storm-worn and ancient, old enough even the Monkey King was not truly certain how long it had clung to the edge of its cliff. A tree that had long since had its barked stripped away, had watched the ground vanish beneath its roots. A tree that had faced centuries of storms and landslides, wildfires and troublesome monkeys, and survived it all, undaunted.

He knew this was not a serious fight. The elders were packmates. But if they did truly clash, orange-crest would have bet on Elder Xun. There was something of the Monkey King in the way he stood, the qi he emanated, that orange-crest couldn't quite place.

Li Hou watched as the two elders drew forth weapons.

"Brace yourself." Li Xun warned. "I know you think you know what power is, that you've seen what your king can do. I trust your estimation of his strength, as unthinkable as it sounds to me. But you haven't seen him face an equal. This, I do know. If you watched him fight, if he is as strong as you say he is, and if you remained conscious to see him victorious; then he hardly needed to exert himself at all in order to win."

Orange-crest let the mountain within him fill his mind's eye. He cycled his qi, feeling it stir in his chest, before spreading across his shoulders like invisible wings. He let it fall to the base of his tail, warming his stomach, before it climbed his spine, pooling where his throat met his mouth. He exhaled, and his power moved in unison. His master's protection made the air feel thick, as if Li Xun's qi was water to orange-crest's air. Slowly, he built a thin film of it around himself, taking advantage of his master's pressure to force it into the densest shell of qi he'd ever created.

Li Xun nodded absently at him, his eyes never leaving the two elders.

"It is said that to cultivate is to learn that there are heavens beyond heavens. Legends like the Patriarch of the Azure Mountain may have allowed themselves to fade into the mists of history, content to leave us small beings to our own lives. But men like Elder Lu are not so restrained. Prodigies might overturn worlds in their pursuit of power, but it is men like him who build them. We have spoken, you and I, about living freely. Witness with open eyes, what you hope to defy. What we hope to defy."

Orange-crest had a great many opinions about that speech, but before he could voice them, the two elders moved.

Elder Lu's arm swept across his body, and a golden wind roared forth from his fan. It spread through the air like ink through water, transforming into a wall wide enough to span the massive central arena. Elder Xun's rising sword met it.

His master's qi shuddered, and whatever technique he used to control the spread of sound failed utterly before the unearthly screeched that echoed through the Godsgrave Peak. Orange-crest clapped his paws over his ears, but the hateful sound didn't care, his very bones vibrated with it.

Elder Xun slid back a few steps, but the stroke of his sword never slowed. A moment later, he was through, and the curtain of gold fell apart. His wolf danced through the gap, covering a dozen chi in an instant. It skidded and drifted as it circled Elder Lu, moving less like an animal with legs than it did a stone skipped across still water. Even as Elder Xun charged directly forward, blade low, the wolf leapt for Elder Lu's throat from his blind spot like a loosed arrow.

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Elder Lu's fist, clutching his closed fan, slammed into its nose with a awful crunch. The wolf bounced away with a whine. Before it could recover, Elder Lu spun where he stood, swinging his fan in a great rising arc.

Another burst of golden wind followed in the fan's wake. The wolf rose into the air, yipping as it flailed helplessly in the grip of the twister.

Elder Xun's sword surged forward, seemingly pulling its wielder along for the ride as it rushed to bury itself in Elder Lu's heart.

Orange-crest could taste metal. The air felt thin, like he couldn't get a proper breath in, but he refused to miss a moment of this. He knew he was supposed to hate Elder Lu, to fear him. But there something beautiful about this moment. Like when his staff had crossed with Yang Wei's spear, like when his master had burned.

Elder Lu leaned back, kicked out, and parried Elder Xun's thrust with a slipper to the wrist. His fan snapped out, and he twisted as he soared backward through the air, wrapped in golden wind. Elder Xun chased, his raining down thrusts as he kicked off the air as if it were solid ground.

Fan and blade crossed a dozen times, the impacts echoing like thunder. Somehow the elders kept rising higher. They were not flying. Elder Xun would twist like a serpent to dodge a slashing arc of wind, then kick off it, ever-rising. Elder Lu would pull upon his fan to drag himself out of the way of a thrust, then kick off his opposite's shoulder, climbing further upward.

Orange-crest didn't know where the momentum was coming from. The fan, its lift shared between them? It should be possible, but the sheer force of their clashes defied gravity. They would crash together like a pair of falling stars, split violently apart, then slam together again, as if gravity pulled them toward each other, instead of back down to earth.

Elder Xun's poor wolf whined pitifully, still being spun about by Lu's twister, trapped betwixt heaven and earth. Orange-crest was impressed it had no expelled the contents of its stomach yet, the way it was being tumbled around.

In the distance, orange-crest could see disciples occasionally drop to their knees. His heart began to skip beats, whenever the two elders clashed too forcefully. Orange-crest had to crane his neck in order to look at them, they were hundreds of chi above the arena now. Even with his vision improved by his recent breakthrough, he could barely make the pair of them out. It didn't help that small black spots were starting to grow at the edges of his sight.

Orange-crest didn't see when Elder Lu missed a step. But he clearly saw Elder Xun's hand around his ankle, as the two of them began falling back to earth, spinning wildly. Elder Lu struck at him like a viper, but it took both his fan and his free foot to keep Xun's needle-like sword from gutting him. Slowly, they begin to spin faster, Elder Xun kept kicking off the air, gathering momentum. His back arched, and he heaved. Elder Lu flew back toward the earth like a star expelled from the heavens. A golden light surged as he ceased restraining his qi, making him look all the more like a falling star.

The two elders had been restrained in their initial clash. They'd moved with impossible speed, bouncing back and forth as if they were weightless, leaving the stone untouched by the force of their clashes. Orange-crest and Yang Wei had caused more damage to the arena with every exchange, even if their qi had been far weaker.

When Elder Xun cast his opponent down to the earth, that restraint was absent. The central stage cratered as the golden light slammed down. Qi surged outward so powerfully a dozen outer disciples simply fell to the ground like puppets with their strings cut. A great cloud of grey stone dust rose up, filling the central arena, and the eight lesser ones around it. Elder Xun fell slowly by comparison, drifting almost leisurely back down to earth.

Slowly, the cloud of grey dust began to settle.

Elder Xun's feet silently touched down at the edge of a crater wide enough to fit a dozen men standing atop each other's shoulders. For a moment, orange-crest thought the sparring match was over.

Elder Lu lay on his back, unmoving, almost a man's height below where the level of the floor had been moments ago. It was glorious to witness. But if this earth-shaking clash was merely trading pointers, orange-crest was beginning to truly understand why his master was always so afraid of his seniors.

And then Elder Lu stood up. He chuckled warmly, like a grandfather whose spoiled charges had just pulled an excellent prank. His gentle laughter echoed through Godsgrave Peak, as he withdrew a square of silk from his sleeve to dab at the single droplet of blood that dripped from his nose.

The scale that had been silently hovering behind his shoulder the entire fight, constantly drifting out of the way of harm, had changed. It was larger now, its arms extending further out than Elder Lu's shoulders. It looked almost translucent, and also somehow tarnished. It's hands were no longer even. One dipped lower than the other. Even from a distance, orange-crest felt a baleful aura emanating from the unbalanced scales, a promise of retribution.

"Behold, disciples of the Azure Mountain!" Elder Lu roared, proud and terrible. "This is what your ancestors demand that you surpass, to reach the heights they have known!"

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

"What is this now, twenty six times that we have fought?" Elder Xun asked, slicing a golden gale apart. He wasn't exactly worried about being overheard. Unless he poured qi into his voice, nobody under Core Formation would make out their chatter over the thunder of their blows.

Even after serving the sect together for more than two hundred years, he did not think he knew every technique in Elder Lu's arsenal. He certainly had witnessed the majority of them, as well as all of the man's true trump cards. He had three. The body of gold, the scales of rectification, and his ability to wield enough spiritual treasures to outfit a small army at the same time. They were opposites in that regard, Elder Xun could draw forth the true power of each blade he carried, bending the limits of the possible by becoming one with his swords. Elder Lu just used them all at once, raining down heedless destruction.

Like many of the Azure Mountain's elders, Lu Xiaosheng rarely took to the battlefield. However, despite his generally peaceful existence, he was certainly no craven. On the few occasions he had taken to the southern front, he had not shied from the sort of conflicts that forced a cultivator to show his true mettle. Together with Old Xiang and Young Ren they had carved a bloody swathe through the experts of the Wu and their demonic allies.

"Twenty four, if we're counting only exhibitions. Twenty seven if we're including our real fights." Elder Lu corrected. A thin rivulet of blood slowly dripped out of his nose. His golden aura was good at attenuating impacts, but it was difficult for him to use it effectively after Elder Xun tagged him with a physical strike. His steel might not be as flexible a tool, but it was stronger, and capable of temporarily weakening Lu.

"Its your turn, yes?" Elder Xun asked.

"You need to ask? I wouldn't have brought out the scales if it wasn't."

"One day, we should finally settle that question."

Elder Xun watched as Tiexiu stalked behind Elder Lu. She'd finally gotten free of Lu's Grasping Gale, when Xun disrupted his control over the Dawngold Fan.

"I cannot say I care for finding out which of us is truly the stronger as much as you do. Unless you've given up on advancing? I certainly have not-"

Seeing Elder Lu distracted by conversation, Tiexiu lunged again for his throat. His girl had something of a one track mind.

"Tiexiu!"

His shouted warning came too late. The stubborn wolf was too competitive for her own good. She didn't hold back in these little spars of theirs. So Elder Lu did not hold back against her either. Lu didn't turn around. He tossed his fan into the air, and flashed through three doublehanded signs.

A massive bronze bell, burnished until it blazed, slammed down atop his companion. Poor girl, but it was her own damn fault. Lu might not abuse her so if he trusted her not to rip his throat out before the assembled sect.

Of course, Elder Xun couldn't allow such a blow against his dog to go unanswered. He crossed the arena in a single step, thrusting for the same spot Tiexiu had lunged. Lu dodged the blade of course, but Elder Xun was a true master of martial combat, and Lu Xiaosheng was really not. Elder Xun's other fist took him right in the face, sending him tumbling end over end. He'd still pulled the strike. There was no sense making this any worse than it had to be.

When Elder Lu rose, blood was pouring from his shattered nose. He didn't bother to wipe it away this time. Good, that meant it was over. The Duskgold Scales grew a hand's breadth width larger, tipped a finger's width further out of balance, and darkened. They were already three paces across, this was gonna hurt.

It was fun to put on a show, but with the scales out, drawing this farce of a fight longer might leave him actually injured. Unless he merged with Tiexiu, or drew upon the double edged aspects of the Mother's Mercy, he couldn't really match the Duskgold Scales.

Besides, he was pretty sure Lu was correct, and it was his turn to 'win' their little exhibition. He needed to start keeping written notes.

"Tiexiu. Brace." He barked. Through their connection he could feel her roll up, hardening her fur. Elder Xun took his own advice, feeling the steel of his sword flow up beneath his skin.

Elder Lu pulled back one wizened fist. Golden light gathered around it. Then the scales at his back began to shrink, evening out. The black unlight that tarnished them flowed into Elder Lu's fist. The aura emanating from his clenched fingers grew downright ominous, as if the old daoist held every evil in the world in his fist.

"Ugh. I shouldn't have thrown you down that hard." Elder Xun muttered, mostly for Yang Shui's benefit. He was starting to like the Marshal of the West. Sticking on his good side got you all the most interesting gossip.

"Every scale, rectified." Lu Xiaosheng spat through bloodied lips. "Every insult, repaid."

Elder Lu leapt, bearing a black sun aloft. The three Nascent Soul cultivators in attendance exerted their qi to seal off the audience. Elder Xun brought the Mother's Mercy up in a pointless parry.

Only too late, he realized that Elder Lu's leap was short, and a hair off to the left.

"Train your damn dog!" Elder Lu roared, taking advantage of the barrier sealing off sound to let lose a little.

His glowing fist slammed into the bronze bell that held Tiexiu. The toll of the bell was beyond mere volume, a roar of reckoning that hit Elder Xun with enough force to pop blood vessels all over his body. It echoed mercilessly in the confined space, unable to escape the wall of divine sense, striking Elder Xun and Tiexiu repeatedly.

Elder Xun might stand several small realms above Elder Lu, but even he had to admit, that technique hurt. When the echoes finally dissipated, Elder Lu was not the only one bleeding from several orifices.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Orange-crest slowly stood up. He'd held on to consciousness through it all, but that last impact had been louder than he'd imagined sound could be. The sheer volume of the noise had destroyed his balance worse than downing an entire jug of wine at once. Looking around, he saw he wasn't the only one off his feet. A full third of the sect and guests were struggling to find their footing, or downing pills to heal fractured eardrums. A couple of initiates were being carted off in stretchers, or

Being a cultivator really wasn't for the meek. Even spectating tournaments was dangerous. Li Xun's hand reached across the space between them, slapping at the back of Li Hou's robes.

"You're near the top of the roster. Don't get dirty, we don't have time to change your robes."

Orange-crest met his master's eyes. Finally, he understood the fear that had shaped his actions all year. Yeah, that was a pretty bad person to have holding a grudge against you. The Monkey King could certainly handle it, but orange-crest wouldn't want to be standing too close by when he did. Most of the Beast Kings that had encroached on Mount Yuelu probably were not much stronger than early Foundation Establishment.

"Don't worry, master." The monkey said cheerfully. "My fight will be better."

Li Xun stared at him for a long moment, then burst into laughter.

Next chapter will be updated first on this website. Come back and continue reading tomorrow, everyone!

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.