The Rooster Who Would Be Immortal · an original cultivation (xianxia) serial · Chapter 7 · The Tournament
"Lose to me in the final," said Senior Brother Hua, "or I tell the Hall whose footprint is in your clay."
He said it quietly, at the edge of the ring, smiling for the crowd. Then he walked away, and Ling Yue stood there with a wooden practice sword in her hand and nowhere to put it.
It was the first day of the Spring Tournament. The Dawn Terrace was hung with banners. The great bronze bell, back on its beam, had rung the opening. And an outer disciple who had earned her seat with four wheels and a rope was about to be flattened in front of the whole sect.
The rules were simple. Two disciples in a chalk ring. Step out of the ring, or stay down for a count of three, and you lose. The winner of the final could ask the Hall for one boon. Everybody knew what an outer disciple would ask for: a place in the inner sect.
Brass sat on the terrace wall and watched the first round with his feathers standing on end.
Hua fought second. His opponent was a broad inner disciple twice his weight. Hua bowed, stepped back to the very edge of the ring, and then he was simply not there any more. He crossed the ring in a blur of blue with qi roaring around him, and hit the big disciple like a cart hitting a gate.
The big disciple landed outside the ring, outside the crowd, and partly inside a banner.
"Cloud-Breaking Rush," someone whispered. "Nobody has stopped it in two years."
Then it was Ling Yue's turn. Her opponent was only an outer disciple, a quick boy with a quicker temper, and he came straight at her.
She did what she had been taught. She planted her feet and met him.
It was like trying to stop a rolling barrel by standing in front of it. She went over backwards with the boy on top of her, and one heel slid across the chalk. One finger's width more and she would have been out. She got a knee up, rolled him, and it was the boy who went over the line, with dust in both their teeth.
She had won. She walked back to the wall looking as if she had lost.
"I cannot stop someone who is already running," she said. "And he was nothing. Hua is going to go through me like a door."
Brass looked at her scraped elbow. Then at the ring. Then at Hua, on the far side, drinking tea.
A board. A piece of chalk. A ball rolling across a table, and a hand that had once been his, pointing.
A thing that is moving keeps moving, in a straight line, until something stops it. The faster and the heavier it is, the harder it is to stop, and the harder it is to turn. That is as true for the thing itself as for whatever stands in its way.
Hua could not be stopped once he was running. But Hua could not stop himself either.
[SYSTEM] Brass learned: a moving body keeps moving unless a force stops it — the charge that cannot be stopped also cannot stop · cost: it only works on someone already committed
He could not say it. He hopped off the wall and ran to the kitchen handcart, which was parked on the slope above the terrace with a cabbage in it. He hardened his spurs and kicked out the stone under the wheel.
[SYSTEM] Iron Spur — one wheel-stone kicked loose · cost: one cabbage, probably
The cart rolled. It gathered speed down the slope, straight at Ling Yue.
"Brass!" She braced to catch it, and then did not. At the last instant she took one step sideways, and as it went past she put a hand on its rail and pushed, gently, across.
The cart did not stop. It could not. But it turned, a little, and then a lot, and ran itself off the path into a hedge.
Ling Yue stood looking at her hand.
"I did not stop it," she said slowly. "I could not have stopped it. I only moved out of the way and added a little. It did the rest itself." She turned and looked at the ring, and the chalk line, and the far edge where Hua always started his run. "Oh."
Elder Mo, arriving out of breath, looked at the cart in the hedge. "That was my cabbage."
The final was at sunset.
Hua bowed. Ling Yue bowed. He stepped back to the very edge of the ring, as he always did, and gave her a small private nod. Remember.
She remembered. She thought about the inner sect, and the three years she had spent being late to the dawn lesson because she was up half the night studying by candlelight. She thought about a rooster who had turned his back on her for nine days.
"Begin," said the Deacon of Duties.
Hua vanished. The Cloud-Breaking Rush came across the ring like a thrown spear.
Ling Yue did not plant her feet. She waited. She waited longer than anyone on that terrace could bear to watch, until the wind of him was on her face.
Then she took one step to the side, and as he went past, she put her palm on his shoulder and pushed, gently, across.
He could not stop. He tried. Brass saw him try, saw his heels dig and the stone smoke under them. But all that speed was his own, and it had to go somewhere. It went over the chalk line, across the terrace, and into the bronze bell.
The bell rang. It rang for some time.
Nobody cheered at first. They were too surprised. Then the outer disciples went up like a flock of sparrows.
Hua got to his feet with the bell still humming behind him. His face was not red. It was white, and very calm.
"She did not think of that," he said, loudly, to the Deacon and the whole terrace. "None of it. Not the wheels, not the lender's sums, not this. Ask her who taught her. Go into the kitchen yard and look at the clay." He pointed at the wall. "It is the bird. A beast that gathers qi and schemes like a man. You all know what the scriptures call that."
The cheering died.
Brass did not move. There was nowhere to go. Every eye on the Dawn Terrace was on one scrawny golden-red rooster with a crooked tail feather, and for once in his life he wished they were not.
The Deacon of Duties looked at him for a long moment. Then she opened her ledger.
"The winner may ask a boon," she said. "Ling Yue. The Hall is listening."
Ling Yue was breathing hard. She looked at the inner disciples in their blue robes. She looked at them the way a person looks at a house she has walked past every day for three years.
Then she looked at the wall.
"There is a rule," she said. Her voice shook. "In the old registers. A disciple may keep a spirit companion, and a registered companion belongs to the sect. It cannot be called a curse. It cannot be driven out." She swallowed. "I ask for that. Write the kitchen rooster under my name."
Nobody spoke.
"You understand," said the Deacon, "that you are spending your boon. There will be no place in the inner sect this year."
"I understand."
"For a rooster."
"He gave up his sunrise for a kitchen that never listened to him," said Ling Yue. "I can give up a robe."
The Deacon wrote. It took a long time, or it felt as if it did.
"Registered," she said. "The Hall has no quarrel with a clever bird that belongs to someone." She closed the ledger, and looked at Hua. "Only with an unclaimed one. I believe that settles the rumour, Senior Brother."
Later, when the lanterns were lit and the terrace was empty, Ling Yue sat on the wall with her scraped elbows and no blue robe.
Brass walked along the wall and stood in front of her. He had a great many things to say. He had been saving them up for weeks.
He leaned his head against her arm.
"I know," she said. "You are welcome."
They sat like that until the stars came out. And then Elder Mo came puffing up the path from the kitchen, with a lantern, and a look on his face that Brass had never seen before.
"The beans," Mo said. "Come and look. They flowered. All of them, in one evening." He held up the lantern. His hand was not steady. "And the flowers are not white. Beans flower white."
[SYSTEM] Brass is registered: spirit companion of Ling Yue · cost: her place in the inner sect
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