Chương 7Chapter 7: Trial of Beasts

Chapter 7: Trial of Beasts

They came for her before dawn.

Xiaoyu woke to the loft door slamming and Hong’er’s snarl, and then rough hands had her by the arms, and a voice she didn’t know was reading charges in the flat tone of a man who had memorized them.

“Lin Xiaoyu. You are accused of sabotaging the Beast Hall’s suppression talismans on the night of the break. Of consorting with the bound creature of the ninth yard. Of practicing forbidden arts.”

“That’s—” Bai Xue’s voice, from the doorway, shrill with disbelief. “That’s ridiculous! She stopped the break! Everyone saw—”

“Senior Sister Bai, stand aside.” Zhao Feng’s voice. Quiet. Flat. “These are the Sect Master’s orders.”

Xiaoyu went very still. “Zhao Feng.”

“It’s not personal,” he said, but his qi was doing that scorched thing again, louder than ever, and she understood — oh, she understood. The Sect Master had given him a choice: the blind girl, or his own future. And he had chosen the way frightened people always choose.

“Judgment by beasts,” the enforcer captain announced. “At noon. The Trial Pit.”

The Trial Pit was the sect’s oldest cruelty: a round stone arena sunk into the mountainside, where accused tamers were thrown in with a beast “so heaven may judge.” In practice, heaven never showed up, and the beast always won. Xiaoyu had swept the steps around it once. She remembered the smell — old blood, scrubbed and scrubbed, never quite gone.

They gave her no weapon. They gave her nothing. They shoved her through the iron gate at noon, in front of half the sect, and slammed it behind her.

The crowd’s noise washed over her like surf. She stood in the center of the pit, barefoot, Hong’er confiscated somewhere above, her heart hammering — and she listened.

The far gate rattled. Chains. A sound like a storm clearing its throat.

They sent in a Heaven-grade Storm Roc.

She felt it before she heard it — a pressure change in the air, feathers the size of banners, a beak that could shear an ox in half. It landed with a crack of thunder, and its fury hit her meridian like lightning striking a lake.

Xiaoyu understood instantly. This wasn’t judgment. This was grief with wings.

The roc screamed and dove.

She didn’t run. There was nowhere to run — the pit was round, the walls were smooth, and besides, running from a diving roc was like running from weather. She stood her ground, hands open, and did the only thing she knew.

She listened — and she answered.

“Your egg,” she sent, pouring her whole heart-meridian into the shape of it. “They took your egg. From the high nest. In the spring.“

The roc’s dive faltered. It wheeled, shrieking, and landed hard ten paces from her, talons gouging the stone. Its huge, furious eye fixed on her — she felt the attention like a brand.

“Smell of medicine,” Xiaoyu went on, shaking. She could taste it in the roc’s memory-scent: bitter herbs, old men’s hands, a cold room. “An elder took it. For pills. For his cultivation. I know. I know. I’m so sorry.“

The crowd above had gone silent. Even the wind seemed to be listening.

“I can’t give you back the spring,” Xiaoyu said — aloud now, because the roc deserved words too, deserved to be spoken to like a person. “But I can promise you this. If you let me live through this hour, I will find your egg. Whatever’s left of it, wherever they put it — I’ll find it, and I’ll bring it back to you, and I’ll make them say what they did. In front of everyone. That’s my oath. On my own name.”

The Storm Roc stared at her.

Heaven-grade. A creature that could have killed a Foundation-stage cultivator without effort. It took one slow step forward. Then another. Its great head lowered, lowered, until its beak — sharp enough to shear an ox — hovered an inch from her forehead.

And then, gently, with infinite care, it touched its beak to her brow.

Like a bow.

The pit erupted. Half the crowd was on its feet, shouting. The other half had gone dead silent. On the elders’ platform, Sect Master Han Lie’s beautiful empty face had gone very, very still.

“She’s bewitched it!” someone screamed. “Forbidden arts! I told you—”

“She made an oath,” Elder Mo’s voice cut through, shaking with something that might have been rage or might have been triumph. “In front of witnesses. The beast accepted. By the sect’s own oldest law — the law of the Trial — heaven has judged.”

Xiaoyu stood in the center of the pit with a Storm Roc’s wing curved over her like a shelter, and she laughed — she couldn’t help it, she laughed, because the roc’s grief was still there, huge and gray, but now there was something else braided through it, thin and bright as a first thread of dawn.

Hope.

It took the elders an hour to find the egg. It was where Xiaoyu’s nose — her other nose, the one in her chest — had told them to look: in Elder Chen’s medicine vault, in a jar labeled with someone else’s name, half-processed into longevity pills that would have added a decade to an old man’s life and ended a species’ line.

They brought the jar to the pit. The roc took one look, made a sound like the sky tearing, and folded over it — not eating, not raging. Mourning. Xiaoyu knelt beside it in the dust and put her hand on its feathers and stayed there until the worst of it passed, while half the sect watched a blind girl comfort a monster, and nobody — not one person — suggested putting the iron back on.

That evening, Zhao Feng found her at the well. He didn’t speak for a long time. His qi was a wreck — the bright sword-ring all tarnished, the scorched under-smell everywhere.

“My resonance test,” he said at last, very quietly. “When I was eight. Before the contracts. They put me in a room with a young fox, to see if I could… listen. The way you do.” A pause. “I couldn’t. I heard nothing. The fox bit me, and I cried, and my father told everyone I’d been brave.” His voice cracked. “I’ve hated listeners ever since. Because every time I saw one, I remembered the room.”

Xiaoyu was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “The fox bit you because you were scared and loud inside. That’s not a verdict, Zhao Feng. That’s just — being eight.”

He laughed, a broken sound. “The Sect Master will destroy you, Little Yu. You know that, don’t you? You’ve made him look like a fool twice. He doesn’t forgive.”

“Then he’ll have to get in line,” Xiaoyu said. “Behind everyone else who wants me to be smaller.”

She heard him walk away. But his steps were slower than usual. Less like a sword. More like a person.

Above them, unnoticed, the warding script on the ninth yard’s wall flickered — and went dark for three full breaths.

Someone had begun the soul-brand ritual early.

Xiaoyu stood at the well, listening to the mountain hold its breath. Bai Xue came running through the dark, out of breath, and seized her hands.

“They’re saying the Sect Master has locked himself in the array hall,” Bai Xue whispered. “With Elder Chen and the formation masters. Elder Mo went up there an hour ago and hasn’t come back. Little Yu — Xue Yu is restless. All the cranes are. Whatever they’re doing—”

“I know,” Xiaoyu said. Her heart was pounding so hard she could barely think. “They started the soul-brand. Tonight. While everyone was watching me in the pit. The trial was never the point — it was the distraction.“

Bai Xue’s hands tightened around hers. “Then what do we do?”

Xiaoyu turned her face toward the ninth yard. Toward the wall. Toward the oldest friend she’d ever had, who was at that moment feeling a formation designed to unmake him close around his mind like a fist.

“We stop asking permission,” she said.

And Xuan Mo’s scream, when it came, was not a sound at all. It was a silence — a vast, sudden absence — that every beast on the mountain felt in its bones at once, a cold hollow ache no creature could name or forget. Even the wind died in that same terrible instant of silence and dread.