Limitless Cultivation System: From Trash to Immortal

The column came up the mountain road in the last of the afternoon light, and Xuan was at the gate to meet it.

He’d left Wei propped against the wall of Silent Peak under Lian’s command — fed, watered, dimming by the hour — with firm instructions to exist quietly and explain himself to no one. The overclocking would keep. His father did not need to ride home into a riddle that glowed.

[ Your father at the head, Elder Ren a length back, the column strung out behind. ] Mira read the road the way she liked to, before his own eyes could. [ No wounded worth the name. They ride like men who finished a job, not men who crawled out of one. Good for your nerves, such as they are. ]

Lin Zhen rode at the front on the grey that had carried him to the capital and back more times than Xuan had been alive in this borrowed body, riding it the way he did everything, without effort and without slack.

He drew rein at the gate, looked down at his second son, and the lines at his eyes loosened by a hair.

"Have you been able to rest, son?" Lin Zhen asked. "You carried too much on that mountain."

Xuan dipped his head. "Enough. I came back a few days ahead of you, so I had time to sleep, eat, and pretend I know how to behave like a normal disciple again."

Lin Zhen’s mouth moved, almost a smile.

"That may be the greater miracle."

"Low bar. But I cleared it." Xuan let the humor fade enough for the question beneath it to show. "Father. Is it done, then? Properly done?"

Elder Ren came down off his own mount with the slow, aggrieved dignity of a man whose knees had lodged a formal complaint somewhere around the second pass. "Properly, the boy asks. Three days in a saddle and the first word out of anyone is a question." He planted both boots and winced at the ground for treachery. "Ask me where the nearest chair lives. That’s the pressing question."

[ I like him more each time. ] Mira, fond.

They came through the gate together, Xuan falling in at his father’s left where the question had been sitting behind his teeth since the dumplings went cold. Lin Zhen handed his reins to a disciple without turning to confirm one would be there to take them.

"Done," he said. "Both mines hold a standing garrison now, rotated and provisioned, under men I’d trust with worse than rock. Extraction’s already going. First carts head east within the tenday. Ren spent some days getting the place running again, and earned every ache in those knees doing it."

"Somebody had to count the picks," Ren grumbled.

Xuan kept his voice easy. "And the rest of it? Anything left out there to deal with?"

"Nothing out there but the dead." His father said it plainly. "You didn’t leave us much else to do. The whole garrison was gone before we even got there. We buried what we could and burned the rest. Nobody left to question, nobody to send anywhere." A short pause. "The only one who got out was that elder, and he’s one man running with nowhere to run to. I wasn’t about to send people chasing him across the range with a mine to hold. We can talk another time about how he got past you. For now it’s done, and I’ll take done."

For Lin Zhen, that was about as close to praise as it got. Xuan took it and left it there.

The courtyard was filling the way it does when the head of a house comes home, but Lin Kai stood apart from it at the foot of the hall steps and hadn’t moved to greet anyone. His mother’s blade sat across his back in its red scabbard. He’d put the weight back on since the worst of it, and his face wasn’t hollow anymore — but his eyes went past the whole reunion to the sealed case tied behind Ren’s saddle, and stayed there.

He waited until his father was through the gate. "You brought them."

It wasn’t a question. Lin Zhen turned to face him.

"All of it. Mei’s ledgers, her letters, the overseer’s books. Sealed and counted. I wasn’t about to leave them in a hole for the next person to find."

"We need to see them father." Kai’s voice was tight. "There’s a name all over them. Mu. I want to know who he is."

"I know the name." Lin Zhen didn’t raise his voice, and it stopped Kai anyway. "I’ve read enough to know it’s serious. But I’m not doing this out here, half-dead off the road, in the dark. We’ll go through every page properly, at the table, with Elder Min, when we can actually think straight." His voice eased a little. "She was your mother, Kai. Whatever she turned into. You’ll get your answers. Just not in a rush."

Kai’s jaw worked. He swallowed whatever he’d meant to say and managed a single nod — which, after the state he’d been in a month ago, counted for something.

[ He’s holding. ] Mira, the grin gone. [ Barely. Don’t poke it. ]

’Wasn’t going to.’

[ You poke things, Xuan. It’s a documented condition. ]

Lin Zhen straightened his collar with two fingers, and the tired traveler went out of him and the head of the sect came back. "Right. Enough standing around in the dust." He lifted his voice just enough to carry, and the courtyard sorted itself out without anyone being told twice. "Kai. Xuan. Both of you, with me. We’re deciding what this house does next, and we’re doing it tonight. I want you both in the room."

He turned to Ren. "I know what I’m asking of your knees. Get the whole Council up, all of them. And send to the women’s hall for Madam Yu and Madam Lin Hua. I want everyone seated before the lamps are lit."

Ren let out a long breath, the sigh of a man who would do it now and complain about it for a week. "The full Council and both wives. Tonight." He was already moving off. "You don’t pull all that together to talk about the harvest, Patriarch."

"No," Lin Zhen said. "I don’t."

And that told Xuan all he needed. The quiet hour with the dumplings was over. The whole Council, both of his father’s wives, every one of them dragged into a single room before nightfall, to weigh two mines, a war inching closer up the map, a Frostmoon heir already on the road, and a name out of Mei’s letters that nobody at that table could put a face to yet.

He fell in beside his father, Kai a step back with the blade on his spine and the sealed case going on ahead of them, and headed for the hall where all of it would come down on one table at the same time.

’Mira,’ he said under his breath, for the one ear nobody else could catch. ’I’ve got a bad feeling about who Mu turns out to be.’

[ So do I, Xuan. ] No play left in her at all. [ So do I. ]