The morning sunlight broke through the high mountain mist. It cast golden rays across the clover meadow of the Grand Defile. Between the thirty thousand armored fighters of the Orthodox Crusade and the four defenders of the Myriad Spirit Safe hall lay fifty paces of open, dew-damped turf. A silent expanse of green that should have been the slaughter ground of two clashing armies.
Instead of drawing a weapon, unleashing an earth-shattering battle cry, or summoning an iron-hard spiritual barrier, Lin Xiao took three unrushed steps forward into the meadow.
He stopped directly in the center of the no-man’s land, right between the two grand hosts.
With a graceful, fluid flick of his wide azure linen sleeve, Lin Xiao summoned a low box-shaped table crafted from polished storm-cedar wood. The timber was rich with natural amber grain. It carried the faint, soothing fragrance of cedar resin and beeswax polish. On either side of the table, he placed two round, neatly woven wicker quiet focus cushions.
Next came a tiny red-clay fire bowl burning smokeless white peach-wood charcoal, atop which sat a steaming terracotta teapot fitted with a carved bamboo handle. Beside the pot, Lin Xiao set two delicate celadon fine china teacups and a shallow wooden bowl piled high with warm, roasted mountain chestnuts, their dark brown shells split open to reveal steaming, golden meats that smelled richly of toasted sugar, wild honey, and hearth smoke.
Lin Xiao smoothed the front of his azure robes. Then he sat down cross-legged upon one of the wicker cushions, his stance relaxed, upright, and fully empty of martial tension.
He lifted the red-clay teapot. He poured a pale, jade-green stream of freshly brewed Cloud-Mist tea into both cups. A delicate wisp of fragrant steam curled upward into the crisp autumn breeze. He carried the pure, revitalizing aroma of high-mountain dew and first-flush tea leaves across the silent meadow.
Behind him on the roadside, Sword Saint Gu Qingfeng took a sip from his chipped wine gourd, chuckling softly into his ragged beard. “Look at him,” Gu Qingfeng muttered to Tie Shan. “Thirty thousand swords thirsting for blood, and our little master is hosting an afternoon tea party. If this doesn’t drive that old hypocrite Xuan Ji into Qi Deviation, nothing in the nine heavens will.”
Tie Shan grunted, his iron teeth flashing in a grin. “The tea smells good, though. Auntie Chen packed extra chestnuts for us in the wagon.”
Lin Xiao picked up a roasted chestnut, cracked the warm shell between his fingers with a crisp snap, popped the sweet meat into his mouth. Then he looked up at the floating nine-dragon jade chariot fifty feet above him.
“Elder Xuan Ji,” Lin Xiao called out, his voice clear, calm, and pleasantly conversational. “You’ve been standing on that chariot railing for nearly an hour, shouting through that lion horn until your throat must be raw. Shouting about demonic heresies and eternal damnation is terribly bad for the spleen. Why don’t you come down, sit on this cushion, drink a warm cup of Cloud-Mist tea, and eat a few roasted chestnuts? Let’s talk this through like reasonable adults.”
The silence that fell over the Grand Defile was so total that the crackle of a single charcoal ember in Lin Xiao’s fire bowl sounded like a tiny thunderclap.
Thirty thousand righteous fighters stared at the tea table in utter, numbed disbelief.
Junior students in the front ranks looked at each other, their grips on their sword handles loosening as the sweet aroma of roasted chestnuts and steaming green tea drifted across their nostrils. Many of them had marched since midnight on empty stomachs, their lips chapped and throats very thirsty from the freezing wind. The sight of a steaming cup of tea and warm roasted nuts in the middle of a sunlit clover field felt like a bizarre, beautiful mirage.
“Is he... Offering tea?” junior student Song Chen whispered to the swordsman beside him, his eyes wide. “To Grand Elder Xuan Ji?”
“He has roasted chestnuts,” another student muttered, his stomach betraying him with a loud, hollow growl that earned him a furious glare from his squad leader. “They smell like wild honey...”
Even Abbot Hui Lun, standing at the head of four thousand Pure Lotus monks, paused in his prayer recitation. His wise, ascetic eyes narrowed as he observed the youth sitting at the cedar table. “Amitabha,” the abbot whispered softly. “There’s no killing intent in his stance. No defensive ward. No hidden magic charms. He sits as a host welcoming travelers at a roadside inn.”
High above in the nine-dragon chariot, however, Grand Elder Xuan Ji didn’t see an innkeeper.
Xuan Ji’s face turned from pale ivory to mottled crimson, and finally to a furious, choking shade of dark eggplant purple.
His hands shook so wildly that the golden lion voice-magic charm rattled against his chest. In his two hundred years of training, Xuan Ji had faced mountain lords, demonic beast matriarchs, and rogue sect masters. They had snarled at him. They had pleaded for mercy. They had cursed his ancestors to the ninth generation.
Never, in two hundred years of glorious traditional dominance, had an opponent sat down in the grass and offered him a bowl of chestnuts like a retired grandfather waiting for a neighbor to play chess.
To Xuan Ji, this was not hospitality. It was the ultimate, calculated insult. A public mockery designed to drag the supreme dignity of the Heavenly Sword Manor into the dirt before thirty thousand students!
“Impudent, mocking monster!” Xuan Ji screeched, his voice cracking with humiliated fury as he slammed his fist onto the dragon railing. “Do you take this elder for a fool?! Do you think the righteous sects of the Eastern Sector will sit at a peasant table and barter with an unholy demon?! That tea is brewed from corpse-rot venom! Those chestnuts are plucked from the graves of slaughtered mortals!”
Lin Xiao blinked, looking down at the steaming teapot in genuine confusion.
“Corpse-rot venom?” Lin Xiao lifted his teacup, taking a slow, appreciative sip of the steaming liquor. “Elder Xuan Ji, this is first-flush Cloud-Mist tea from the southern ridge. Our fox maidens pick the tender shoots at dawn. I roasted the leaves myself over gentle charcoal. It clears head-colds and soothes throat inflammation. If you don’t like chestnuts, I also have some dried persimmon slices, but accusing honest tea of being corpse water is just terrible manners.”
Lin Xiao set the cup down and continued in a patient, educational tone, as if explaining warehouse shipping schedules to a stubborn builder.
“And as for trade tariffs, Elder Xuan Ji,” Lin Xiao said mildly, “there really is no need for thirty thousand people to freeze in the wind. Patriarch Lu told me your sect’s healing pills are losing market share. But that’s simply because your alchemy furnaces leave too much ash in the pills. If you want to distribute our Jade-Dew Wine through Heavenly Sword Manor’s apothecaries, we can easily agree on a wholesale margin of twenty percent. You keep your profits, the mortal patients get clean medicine that doesn’t ruin their veins, and everyone goes home in time for dinner. Doesn’t that sound much more sensible than hacking each other with metal swords?”
Hearing an eighteen-year-old youth casually lecture him on commercial spreading margins and medicine purity, Xuan Ji nearly spat out another mouthful of clotted blood.
“Silence!” Xuan Ji roared, his Peak Nascent Soul aura erupting until golden sparks danced across his chariot sails. “Silence! How dare a puddle of filth speak to this elder of margins and trade! We’re the righteous vanguard of heaven! We don’t barter with demonic vermin! Elder Yan Lie! Crimson Flame Vanguard! Burn up this blasphemous spectacle! Burn that table, that tea, and that arrogant demonic puppet to blackened ash! Show the Eastern Sector the wrath of righteous fire!”
Down on the southern meadow, Elder Yan Lie’s eyes flared with savage, bloodthirsty delight. The burly, red-bearded martial elder had been grinding his teeth in frustration. He waited for the order to kill.
“Finally!” Yan Lie bellowed, drawing his massive, five-foot-long crimson broadsword with a screech of sliding steel. The blade right away ignited, wrapping in a roaring sheath of bright orange spirit flames that hissed. It burned up the surrounding oxygen. “Crimson Flame Vanguard! Two thousand students, advance! Let not a single weed survive in this defile!”
War horns blared.
Carved from the horns of two-headed flame rhinos, twenty massive brass-bound war horns sounded an ear-splitting, clashing blare that shook the canyon cliffs. The southern ranks of the traditional host parted, and two thousand fire fighters surged forward onto the green meadow in a blazing, crescent-shaped battle line.
Their footsteps ignited the wild clover, leaving trails of black, smoking ash in their wake. Spiritual fire-qi surged from their spirit veins, coalescing above their helmets into a roiling, three-hundred-foot wave of roaring flame. The heat in the defile skyrocketed, the pleasant morning chill evaporating into a blistering, choking heat-wave that turned the air into shimmering ripples of orange distortion.
Behind the tea table, Tie Shan took half a step forward, his single eye narrowing as he gripped his forging hammer. Xiao Hei’s lips curled. He showed a glimpse of gleaming white fangs, the shadows around his paws deepening into liquid darkness.
“Stay back, Tie Shan. Xiao Hei, stay,” Lin Xiao said softly, his voice calm, clear, and unrushed as he remained seated on his wicker cushion.
He took another small sip of his Cloud-Mist tea, savoring the lingering sweetness on his palate, before setting the delicate fine china cup back onto its saucer with a gentle, baked-clay clink.
He looked toward the charging wall of fire and the two thousand screaming students. That let out a soft, resigned sigh.
“Well,” Lin Xiao murmured, picking up one last warm chestnut and tucking it into his sleeve. “I suppose you can’t reason with people when their blood is boiling. Time to turn down the heat.”