Chapter 23 23
The message from Mei arrived again while he was still at the tea house.
Shorter this time.
They're here. Come now.
He was on his feet before he finished reading it.
Xiao Miyao looked up from the board. Read his face. "Go," she said immediately.
"The sect—"
"Is handled. The Council has the documents. The vote is done." She began rolling the board with quick precise movements. "Go."
He was already moving.
Out through the tea house door, into the street, the system snapping into full alert mode the moment he cleared the doorway.
\[Mei Xiolan — distress signal active. Location: Training ground. Distance: Two days on foot.\]
\[Enhanced movement available. Estimated travel time at full output: fourteen hours.\]
Fourteen hours. He started running.
The city blurred around him. East gate in six minutes flat, the guards barely registering the figure moving through at speed. The road opened up beyond the walls and he pushed harder, enhanced agility eating distance in a way that still surprised him when he let it fully loose.
The system tracked Mei's signal at the edge of his awareness. Steady. She was alive. But the signal had the particular quality of something held under pressure — present but compressed, like a voice kept deliberately quiet.
He ran through the morning and into the afternoon.
The terrain shifted beneath him — city road to trade path to forest track, the ground rising as he moved east, the air cooling. He stopped twice, briefly, to drink from streams and let the infinite stamina do what it was designed for.
Moving again within minutes.
\[Eight hours out. Mei's signal stable. Shadow Sect presence at training ground: estimated twelve operatives.\]
Twelve.
More than twice what she'd faced before. Elite division again or close to it.
He pushed harder.
The sun dropped and the forest path darkened and he moved through it by feel and system-light, the faint overlay of the map keeping him on track when the trees closed in too tight to see clearly.
\[Mei Xiolan signal update — affection response detected. She knows you're coming.\]
He didn't know how that worked. He didn't need to.
Three hours out the system flagged movement on the path ahead.
He stopped.
Two figures. Dark robes. Moving away from the training ground direction, fast, carrying something.
Scouts reporting back. Or worse — carrying someone.
He closed the distance silently, using the tree line, enhanced agility making him quieter than he had any right to be at this speed.
Close enough.
He took them both before the second one registered the first was down. Fast and clean, the surge activating without being called, his body reading the threat and responding.
He checked what they were carrying.
Documents. Training ground maps. Entry points marked in red.
An assault plan.
He took the maps and ran.
The training ground announced itself through the trees — lamplight where there shouldn't be lamplight, voices where Mei's forest was always silent. He slowed at the tree line and crouched.
The courtyard.
Six operatives visible, positioned around the perimeter. The pavilion lit from inside — more movement in there. He couldn't see Mei.
\[Mei Xiolan — location: pavilion interior. Three operatives inside with her. Signal compressed but stable. She's contained, not harmed. Yet.\]
Yet.
He studied the assault map in the dim light. Entry points, operative positions, timing marks. Whoever planned this had done their homework.
He'd done more.
He moved left through the tree line, circling wide, coming at the courtyard from the north side where the map showed a blind spot between two sentry positions. Twelve seconds of exposure crossing open ground before he hit the wall.
He counted three breaths and went.
Twelve seconds.
He hit the wall silent.
One sentry turned at the wrong moment. Xian Rui was already inside his reach before the turn completed. Down without a sound.
The second perimeter operative was twenty metres away, back turned.
He closed it in four seconds.
Down.
Two of the six. The remaining four were spaced around the courtyard — he needed to take at least two more before entering the pavilion or the noise would bring them all down on him simultaneously.
The surge was running hot now, power singing through his veins, his body operating at the peak of everything the system had given him.
He moved along the wall.
Third operative. Fourth.
The fifth saw him coming.
Shouted.
Everything accelerated.
He hit the fifth operative hard and fast, not clean, taking a glancing strike to his already-damaged shoulder that exploded pain up his neck. He finished it anyway and turned.
The sixth was sprinting toward the pavilion to warn the three inside.
Xian Rui threw the confiscated blade.
The hilt caught the operative across the back of the skull at thirty metres.
He dropped.
Six down. Three inside.
He hit the pavilion door at full speed.
It gave.
Inside — Mei in the centre of the room, wrists bound behind her to a training post, her sword confiscated, a cut along her jaw that was going to need attention. Three operatives spinning toward the door.
Her eyes found him.
Something crossed her face that had nothing to do with relief and everything to do with it.
"You're late," she said.
"Fourteen hours from Fangling City."
"I said come now."
"I ran."
The three operatives came at once.
The surge pushed him past his limits — strength at ceiling, agility beyond what the numbers should have allowed, the God of Depravity's blessing running at full capacity for the first time since he'd woken up in this world.
He handled the first two fast and ugly and moved through the pain in his shoulder without stopping.
The third was better than the others. Significantly. Elite rank, coordinated, adapting in real time, his purple qi blade finding angles the others hadn't.
They traded strikes across the pavilion floor, Mei watching from the post with those sharp eyes tracking every exchange.
The operative feinted left and drove hard right.
Xian Rui took the blade across his ribs — shallow, burning — and grabbed the sword arm with both hands and ended it.
Silence.
Nine operatives down. Two scouts on the forest path. Eleven total.
He stood in the wrecked pavilion breathing hard, blood from his ribs dripping onto the wooden floor.
Mei watched him from the post.
He crossed to her and worked the bindings loose. Her wrists were red and raw. She flexed her hands slowly, checking them, and then she stood straight and looked at him properly for the first time.
His shoulder. His ribs. The general state of him.
Her jaw tightened.
"Sit down," she said.
"I'm fine."
"You have two fresh wounds and you ran fourteen hours." She pointed at the floor. "Sit."
He sat.
She produced her healing kit from a hidden compartment in the post itself — clever — and knelt in front of him. Her hands were steady despite the raw wrists as she pulled his robe aside and began working.
Her blue qi moved warm and familiar across the damage.
"Twelve operatives," he said.
"I counted eleven when they came through the gate." She pressed carefully around his ribs. "You got them all?"
"Two scouts on the forest path. Nine here."
"Efficient." She glanced up briefly. "The twelfth wasn't with the assault team. He came three hours before the others. Asked questions about you specifically." Her eyes were steady on his. "Who you were. Where you came from. Who you'd bonded with."
He went still.
"He left before the assault," she said. "I couldn't follow — they had me contained by then." She pressed the last point on his ribs and held it. "They're building a file on you, Xian Rui. This isn't random anymore."
"It wasn't random from the pavilion steps in Fangling City."
"It's more coordinated than that." She sat back on her heels and looked at him. The cut along her jaw. The raw wrists. The absolutely unbroken quality in her eyes despite all of it. "They know about Nuwa. They mentioned her by name."
The warmth the system generated drained out of the room.
"How long ago?" he asked.
"Four hours." She held his gaze. "I sent a message to Cloudspire Market the moment they bound me. But if they moved on her at the same time they moved on me—"
He was already on his feet.
\[Ding. Emergency notification — Nuwa HongYan signal active. Cloudspire Market. Distress indicator: elevated.\]
Mei rose with him. No argument, no hesitation. She picked up her sword from where the operatives had dropped it and looked at him with clear certain eyes.
"I'm coming," she said.
He looked at her. At the cut on her jaw and the raw wrists and the absolute steadiness underneath all of it.
"Can you move?"
She gave him the look that question deserved.
"Let's go," he said.
They went out through the pavilion door together into the dark forest and the system was already mapping the fastest route to Cloudspire and Nuwa's signal was holding but only just and somewhere in the Shadow Sect's network a twelfth operative was reporting back to someone who had decided that the Lover of a Hundred Stars was a problem that needed to be solved before he became something larger.
Two stars behind him.
One star ahead in danger.
The forest path stretched east and they ran.