Chapter 22: Dan Qiu

The Elder let go of his wrist, and Cen Yu felt nothing leave it.

Dan Qiu stood over the table and looked down at him with open delight.

"At last," he said. "I thought I would have to hold you."

"Abbot," said Pei Ruo from the ground. Her voice was ragged. "Say something."

"The Garden's law is the Garden's law."

Su Jingzhi did not move, and his old face was bleak.

"I did not write it, and I cannot unwrite it in a breath."

"No," said the Elder. "You cannot."

He drew the bowl-knife from his own sleeve.

It was a long, plain blade, worn thin with use.

Cen Yu lay flat and looked at the sky.

It was a clear, blue winter afternoon, and the moths turned over his face in a slow grey wheel.

I am afraid, he thought.

I am as afraid as I have ever been, and I cannot even feel my own hands.

The thought did not move him.

He counted his breaths instead, and when he reached a hundred he began again.

He heard the cloth of his trouser leg part.

The Elder's warm fingers pressed on his thigh, and he felt them as a weight.

There was a stir behind the Council, and a murmur, and the sound of many feet.

The Medicine Brothers had come down the valley after Gao Tie, all forty, with their white-grey sashes in their hands.

They stopped in a ring on the path, and not one of them spoke.

Cen Yu turned his head and saw the old brother from the courtyard at the front, with his mouth open.

The knife went in.

He felt only the pressure, and then a slow pulling, and then a coolness on the leg.

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Heretical Path of Occult Immortal from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.