Chapter 125: Blood and Snow

Zhāo Yàn moved.

Not because he had a plan. He did not have a plan. He had a stick with two leaves and maybe four minutes of painful experience and nothing else. But his body moved anyway, throwing itself sideways into the dark before his brain had finished forming the thought run, and the Hollow Boar’s first charge missed him by close enough that he felt the displaced air against his fur like a slap.

He hit the ground, scrambled, got his feet under him.

The boar wheeled.

It was faster in the dark. That was the thing no one mentioned in the stories. In daylight, apparently, the Hollow Boar was merely terrifying. At night, with its small mean eyes cutting through the black like two hot coals, it was something else entirely.

It charged again.

This time Zhāo Yàn didn’t dodge fast enough.

The tusk caught him across the left side.

It was not a direct hit. If it had been a direct hit, this story would have ended here, in the dark, in the dirt, which would have been a tremendous waste of exceptional cultivation.

It was a glancing blow, the edge of the tusk dragging across his ribs as the boar’s momentum carried it past him.

It felt like being cut open with something hot.

Zhāo Yàn screamed.

He stumbled. His hand went to his side.

Wet.

His fingers came away dark.

He stared at them.

Oh no, he thought, with a clarity that was entirely different from any clarity he had experienced tonight. That is my blood. That is actually my blood.

The boar had turned around.

It was watching him. Its small eyes caught what little moonlight filtered through the canopy, and in that light they were not mean exactly.

Zhāo Yàn’s legs were shaking.

He did not let himself fall. He locked his knees, pressed his hand harder against his side, and made himself stand straight. His three tails had gone completely flat against his body. All the puff was gone. All the performance.

Just him, and the dark, and the thing across from him.

Get up, his mother’s voice said, somewhere in the back of his skull. You don’t fall down and stay down. You get up.

He had four tails worth of cultivation locked inside a six year old body and a stick with two leaves.

The boar charged.

He threw himself to the right, less a dodge and more a controlled fall, his injured side screaming as he hit the ground. The boar thundered past. He rolled, got his knees under him, pushed.

Too slow.

The boar was already turning.

It came back faster this time, and Zhāo Yàn was still half-kneeling in the dirt, his stick raised in both hands, knowing with certainty that this was not going to work, that the stick was not going to stop it, that he had made a series of very poor decisions that had led him to this specific dark patch of forest on this specific unhelpful night, and that he was going to have to live with the consequences of those decisions, if he got to live at all.

He braced.

Something white dropped out of the tree.

It landed directly on the Hollow Boar’s back with a sound like a small thunderclap, all four paws driving down simultaneously, and the boar made a noise Zhāo Yàn had not heard it make before. Not aggression. Something more surprised than that. Something that suggested the boar, which had never once encountered anything that jumped on it from above, was experiencing a significant reappraisal of its evening.

The white thing held on.

It was a cub. Smaller than the boar by an enormous margin, larger than Zhāo Yàn by a noticeable one. White fur, dark markings, and a pair of blue eyes that caught the moonlight with a flat, evaluating quality that Zhāo Yàn would spend the next several decades coming to recognize.

The cub bit down on the back of the boar’s neck.

The boar thrashed. The cub held.

Zhāo Yàn stared.

Then his brain reconnected to his body and he was moving, circling wide around the struggling pair, looking for an angle. His side was still bleeding. He could feel it, a wet warmth that he was choosing not to think about until later. He had a stick with two leaves.

The boar threw its head back, trying to dislodge the cub on its neck.

That was the angle.

Zhāo Yàn lunged.

He drove his stick directly into the soft spot just behind the boar’s ear with every ounce of force his small body contained, and at the same moment the white cub released the neck and drove both front paws directly behind the boar’s skull in a pressure strike that should not have worked.

The Hollow Boar’s legs buckled.

It went down sideways, hitting the forest floor with a tremendous crash that shook leaves from the trees and sent small creatures fleeing in every direction.

It was not dead. Its sides heaved. Its small eyes were dazed and blinking.

But it was down.

Zhāo Yàn stood over it, breathing hard, his stick still raised, his injured side pulling with every inhale. His ears were ringing slightly.

The white cub landed beside him with no sound at all.

They stood there together, both of them panting, the unconscious boar between them, the thin moon above.

Zhāo Yàn looked at his side. The bleeding had slowed. It was going to hurt a great deal more in the morning. It was already hurting a great deal now, he was simply making a choice not to acknowledge it publicly.

He straightened.

He looked at the white cub.

The white cub looked back at him with its flat blue eyes, steady and unimpressed.

Zhāo Yàn scowled.

“I had it,” he said.

The white cub said nothing.

“I was managing the situation.”

Still nothing.

“The stick,” Zhāo Yàn continued, with great dignity, “was part of a larger strategy.”

The white cub looked at the stick. At the two leaves. Back at Zhāo Yàn.

Zhāo Yàn’s scowl deepened. “Who are you?”

The white cub was quiet for a moment.

“Zhāo Yàn,” he said finally. “Of the Eastern Hills.”

Zhāo Yàn blinked. “That’s my name.”

The white cub looked at him. “I know. You announced it to the forest.”

“I was—” He stopped. “That was a tactical declaration. To intimidate the enemy.”

“Mm.”

Zhāo Yàn’s ear twitched. “Well? And you?”

The white cub turned to look at the dark trees, the way he had come from, the way he had dropped from, as if checking something. Then he looked back.

“Han Shān,” he said. “Northern Peaks.”

Zhāo Yàn looked at him. At the white fur, the blue eyes, the completely unhurried stillness of him.

“What are you doing in the Eastern Hills?” Zhāo Yàn asked.

Han Shān looked at the unconscious boar. Then at the stick with two leaves. Then at the blood on Zhāo Yàn’s side that Zhāo Yàn was very pointedly not mentioning.

He did not answer.

Zhāo Yàn scowled harder.

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