Chương 3Chapter 3: The Sect Test

Chapter 3: The Sect Test

Once a year, the Verdant Beast Sect held the Beast Selection, and once a year, Lin Xiaoyu swept up after it.

This year was supposed to be the same.

The selection hall smelled of new straw, oiled wood, and the thin, bright anxiety of two dozen junior disciples hoping a decent beast would make them look talented. Young spirit beasts — cubs and yearlings caught in the spring hunts or bred in the sect’s own pens — waited in a wide half-circle of pens. A cloud-maned colt. A pair of jade-scaled serpents twined around each other like bracelets. A stone-skinned badger cub chewing, philosophically, on the bars.

The ritual was simple. A disciple stepped forward. He pressed a drop of blood to a blank contract slate. The beast he wanted was brought out. If the beast’s qi didn’t reject the contract outright, the elders hammered a suppression talisman into place, and the disciple had himself a partner who had never been asked.

Xiaoyu stood at the back with her broom, where servants belonged, and listened to other people’s futures happen.

She was not listening to the disciples. She was listening to the beasts.

The colt was terrified — its fear came off it in cold, wet waves, and it kept thinking, in the blurred way of young animals, run run run the ground is wrong. The serpents were bored. The badger cub was interested only in the bars, which, to be fair, did seem to be losing.

“Senior Brother Zhao Feng will pick the colt,” someone whispered near her. “It’s Heaven-grade bloodline. Only he could hold it.”

Zhao Feng stepped forward to general admiration. Xiaoyu knew his qi better than most — bright, hot, ringing like a good sword, with something underneath it that smelled like old, scorched leather. She had never figured out what that under-smell was. It made her sad whenever she noticed it, and she did not know why.

“Elder Mo,” Zhao Feng said, projecting for the hall, “I request the cloud colt.”

The colt was led out. It rolled its eyes white. Zhao Feng pressed his blood to the slate with a flourish, and the contract light flared —

— and the colt screamed.

Not a horse scream. A mind scream, straight through Xiaoyu’s open meridian: NO NO HOT IRON NO—

The suppression talisman slammed down. The colt thrashed, foam flying, hooves sparking on the stone. Two handlers hauled on its ropes. Zhao Feng’s face — she couldn’t see it, but she heard his breathing change, heard the ugly spike in his qi — he was angry at the animal for embarrassing him.

“Hold it still!” he snapped. “Raise the talisman a grade!”

“No,” Xiaoyu said.

She hadn’t meant to say it aloud. But she had, and the hall heard her, because she was already moving — past the pens, past the gaping juniors, ducking under a handler’s arm by sound alone. She reached the colt and put both hands flat on its trembling neck and hummed, low, right against the drum of its panic.

The thrashing eased. The colt’s breathing slowed. It turned its great head and bumped her shoulder, hard, the way young horses do when they are claiming someone.

The contract slate in Zhao Feng’s hand went dark. Rejected.

In the ringing silence, the colt — Heaven-bloodline, the prize of the year — folded its legs and lay down at the blind sweeper girl’s feet like a dog waiting by a door.

Zhao Feng’s voice, when it came, was very quiet. That was worse than shouting. “You.”

“Senior Brother,” Xiaoyu said, and bowed, because survival is a skill too. “I’m sorry. It was hurting. I didn’t think.”

“Didn’t think,” he repeated. “The blind charity case didn’t think, and so we lose a Heaven-grade beast.”

“The beast isn’t lost,” Elder Mo said mildly from the elders’ dais. “It is lying down. In our hall. Where we can all see it. Curious definition of lost, Nephew Zhao.”

A few disciples snorted before they could stop themselves. Zhao Feng’s qi flared hot enough that Xiaoyu felt it on her skin.

“Elder Mo.” Sect Master Han Lie spoke for the first time. His voice was smooth and cool and smelled — to Xiaoyu alone in that hall — of absolutely nothing at all, which frightened her more than any stench could have. “Since the girl has such a way with beasts, perhaps she should be tested. Properly. Publicly. So that we all understand what we have in our yards.”

“She is a sweeper,” Elder Mo said. “She has no cultivation to speak of. Qi Gathering, second stage, and that on a withered—”

“On a crippled meridian, yes.” The Sect Master’s tone did not change. “Then the test will be short. Bring out the lightning marten.”

The hall gasped — actually gasped, all together, like one animal.

Xiaoyu knew the lightning marten by reputation the way everyone did. Caught three years ago. Earth-grade, fast as a blink, vicious as a sack of knives. It had bitten through four suppression talismans and put a Foundation-stage keeper in the infirmary for a month. It lived in a reinforced cage in the second yard, and the keepers fed it with tongs.

They brought the cage in on poles, covered with a cloth. From inside came a sound like a kettle about to scream, and a smell Xiaoyu knew instantly: anger on the surface, and under it — exactly like the boar king — pain. Sharp, localized pain. In its front left—

“Open it,” the Sect Master said.

“Master, the girl—” Elder Mo began.

“Open it.”

The cloth came off. The cage door lifted. The marten shot out in a crackling blur of blue-white sparks, hit the floor, and — stopped. It had seen fifty humans, all bigger than it, all smelling of fear and iron and ill intent.

And one small one, kneeling, with her hands open on her knees and nothing in her qi but calm.

Xiaoyu tilted her head, listening to the pain. Front left paw. High, thin, needling. She extended one hand, palm up, and let her qi do what it always did: I hear it. Show me.

The marten crept forward. Sparks popped along its spine. Fifty people held their breath while a beast that had hospitalized a cultivator put its front left paw, very delicately, into the blind girl’s hand.

The hall exploded into noise.

Xiaoyu ignored it. Her fingers, feather-light, explored the paw. There — between the toes, driven deep — was a splinter of black iron, a shard of an old, shattered suppression talisman, half-healed over. Every step the marten had taken for three years had driven it deeper.

“Oh, you poor thing,” Xiaoyu whispered. “No wonder you bite everyone.” She pinched the shard, braced, and pulled.

The marten shrieked. Sparks blew her hair back. But it did not bite. It stood shaking in her palm while she drew the black sliver out, and then, in front of the entire Beast Hall, the untamable lightning marten climbed up her arm, wrapped itself around her neck like a scarf, and started to cry in the high, thin way of small animals who have finally stopped hurting.

“The test,” Elder Mo said into the stunned silence, with enormous satisfaction, “appears to be concluded.”

Zhao Feng said nothing at all. Xiaoyu heard him walk out — his bright, ringing steps, and under them that scorched-leather smell, stronger than ever.

That evening, a sect runner found Xiaoyu at the well and handed her something she had never held before: a keeper’s token, warm from the forging.

Lin Xiaoyu, sweeper, charity case, was now — probationary, provisional, and much argued-about — a beast keeper of the Verdant Beast Sect.

That night she went to the well to wash, too keyed up to sleep, and Bai Xue found her there, breathless, holding something that smelled of sesame oil and warm dough.

“From the kitchens,” Bai Xue said, pressing a cloth bundle into Xiaoyu’s hands. “Cook Liu says keepers get double portions. Also—” She hesitated, and her qi did the small, sour twist of someone saying a thing that costs them. “Also, I told Zhao Feng he was wrong about you. In front of people. My hands shook the whole time.”

“Senior Sister, you didn’t have to—”

“I know. That’s why it counted.” Bai Xue squeezed her wrist once, hard, and hurried away before either of them could make it a bigger thing than a squeeze of a wrist in the dark by a well.

Xiaoyu stood holding double portions and a keeper’s token, with a lightning marten asleep around her neck and a fox scheming after her dinner, and she laughed out loud, alone, like an ordinary girl.

And behind the ninth yard’s wall, something ancient laughed softly in the dark, like it had been waiting to see exactly this.