Sealed in the Secret Realm with My Rival novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Cliff Gave Way
Qin Heyan and Lu Baichuan fight the final bout on Mirror Cliff, the stone splits, and both fall into a hidden realm where a tablet gives them a hundred days and one way out.
Qin Heyan had lost to Lu Baichuan nine times in ten years, and he had counted every one.
Today was the tenth bout, and Qin was winning.
Mirror Cliff lay black and flat under the noon sun.
Nine sects stood around its edge, and eight thousand people held their breath.
Qin's teacher, Shi Wangshu, stood at the front of the Frostpine row with his arms folded.
Qin's thin sword, Hoarfrost, drew a white line across the air, and Lu's saber met it with a shriek.
"You're early today, Young Master Qin," Lu said, grinning.
"You're slow today," Qin said.
It was true, and it bothered him.
Lu Baichuan was never slow.
He fought, loud and warm and impossible to stand next to, and he laughed the whole time.
Now there was sweat on his temple, and his smile had gone thin.
Qin drove him back three steps, four, five.
Lu's saber came up late.
Hoarfrost slid under it and stopped an inch from Lu's throat.
Everyone in the crowd saw it.
Qin saw something else.
Lu's free hand was shaking at his side, only a little.
Qin had never once seen that hand shake.
For one breath Qin did not finish the stroke.
"Don't," Lu said, very quietly, so only Qin could hear. "Don't you dare go easy on me."
"I'm not," Qin snapped.
"Then finish it."
Qin pulled his arm back to do exactly that, and Lu's whole body flared red.
It was a flash of heat.
Ember qi roared up Lu's arm and into the saber, and the saber hit Hoarfrost so hard that Qin's wrist went numb.
Qin was thrown backward.
His heels slid across the black stone.
Then the stone under both of them cracked from end to end with a sound.
A thin gold light poured out of the seam.
Somebody in the crowd screamed.
The ground fell away.
Qin dropped with it, sword first.
For one clear second he thought, I'm going to die falling out of a tournament.
It would be on every scroll in the Nine Peaks.
A hand closed around his wrist.
It was a hard, hot, callused hand, and it did not let go.
"Got you," Lu Baichuan said above him, and Lu was falling too, and he was laughing.
They hit light instead of rock.
The light was warm, and it smelled of pine and woodsmoke.
Then there was grass under Qin's back and a heavy body on top of him.
A very long way overhead, a door slammed shut.
Qin opened his eyes.
Lu's face was six inches from his.
Lu's knee was between Qin's legs, and Lu's chest was pressed flat against his, rising and falling hard.
He could feel it all the way through two layers of silk.
Lu's heart was beating wrong.
It ran fast, then twice in a row, then stumbled, then ran again.
"Get off me," Qin said.
He did not say it very well.
"Give me a second," Lu said. "I just saved your life. I'd like to be thanked."
"You dragged me down here."
"I caught you."
"Because you pulled the stone down."
"I did not pull the stone down."
Lu lifted his head, and the red headband slid over his scarred eyebrow.
"The stone fell on its own. I just helped."
Qin shoved at his shoulder.
Lu rolled off and lay on his back in the grass with his arms thrown wide.
They both looked up.
There was no sky.
Or there was, but it was the wrong one.
It was a bowl of dusk-gold light stretching over a valley, and it was cracked.
Black seams ran across it like the glaze on a dropped bowl.
One of them was as wide as a road.
"That's not good," Qin said.
"No," Lu agreed.
They stood.
The valley was small, a walled bowl of pine slope and still lake.
A red-roofed pavilion stood on a rise, with smoke curling from its chimney.
Beside the pavilion's door stood a stone tablet taller than Qin.
He walked to it with his hand on Hoarfrost.
Lu followed, a half step behind, breathing too loudly.
The tablet had four lines of old script.
Qin read them aloud, because reading things aloud helped him stay calm.
"One hundred days. Then the Garden falls. Two cores in harmony open the door."
Behind them, in the hall, a bronze lamp with a hundred wicks burst alight, all at once.
"Two cores in harmony," Qin repeated. "That means dual cultivation."
"It does."
"You and me."
"Looks like it, Young Master Qin."
"Skin to skin," Qin said, in the flat voice he used when he was furious. "For a hundred days."
"Or until you hate me enough to say no."
Lu leaned on the tablet, and his smile came back, small and crooked.
"You've hated me for ten years. Think you can stand it?"
Far off, a piece of the sky came loose.
It was the size of a hillside, and it fell into the pines with a crash that shook the pavilion's tiles.
Lu's hand shot out and caught Qin by the waist.
He hauled him in until their chests met, and Lu's wrong, hurried heartbeat knocked against his own.
And Qin's heart, treacherous thing, sped up to answer it.
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