Zou Tian faced a bit of a conundrum. Or more of a moral quandary, really. What he should do and what he wanted to do were at odds.
His sect was scheduled to arrive that day, exactly one month prior to the start of the tournant. More importantly, his girlfriend was scheduled to arrive that day, and he hadn’t seen her in more than two and a half months. He desperately, desperately, desperately wanted to at least see her. Which should be fine. Viewing from a distance. Not breaking cover. All fine.
But he knew himself. If he actually was close enough to see her with his own two eyes, could he really resist getting closer and actually interacting with her?
And what about how she felt? It would tear him apart if he saw her looking around as if frantically seeking even a glimpse of him. But maybe it would be even worse if she weren’t. What if she looked happy as if him not being with her wasn’t affecting her at all?
He sighed.
His best bet was to simply stay far, far away. That would guarantee that no one could link him to his sect. Safer for them. Safer for him. Most of all, safer for her.
Zou Tian wasn’t normally what any sane person would call fidgety. His techniques required him to stay completely still, sotis barely even breathing, for hours. And he was completely okay with that.
The prospect of Wan Ai being so close made him fidgety, though. He couldn’t just lie in the bed in the room he’d rented for the week under his current cover identity. Instead, he got up, dressed, and went for a walk.
Not one to waste ti, he reviewed what he’d learned the last couple of weeks. Which didn’t take long. He hadn’t discovered much of anything.
There was one interesting tidbit he got from the caras he’d placed in the tournant steering committee eting, though. Qiu ZhenKang, representing the City Lord, had put forth two proposals that gave a slight advantage to his faction in terms of money gained from sales of admittance tickets and concessions. Kang Ya-Ting had opposed both, but Teng Wuying and Mao Biya had voted for them with only pro forma protestations.
Later, Qiu ZhenKang presented another proposal—the inclusion of a small clan in the tournant. Kang Ya-Ting objected strenuously, naly due to the late date. The City Lord’s representative apologized and stated it was a political matter, regarding a favor the Emperor owed to the clan’s patriarch. “The Emperor would be most grateful if the committee could give him face.”
Again, Teng Wuying and Mao Biya offered token resistance before voting for the asure.
Rumors around the city were that the Rising Tide Sect’s recent paperwork indicated many more participants in the tournant than had been anticipated. Zou Tian’s best guess was that the two opposing sects couldn’t have their mbers beat up on all the supposed trash weaklings from his sect without it being so obvious what they were doing that they’d lose much face. But a proxy clan could do whatever they wanted.
As he pondered, he walked, and without conscious input from him, his feet took him to the tournant grounds and, more specifically, to a building with a roof that gave a perfect view of the area assigned to the Rising Tide Sect. Before he knew what he was doing, he was up there, ensconsced in Shadow, waiting and watching.
Dawn had barely broken, and he was already there. How pathetic was he? The sect surely wouldn’t arrive for hours. Teleportation was, of course, instantaneous, but they had to wait for the entire contingent to gather, and Yang Xiu was in charge. Great girl and ferocious in combat, but organization was not her strong point.
And since Master had assigned the task to her, he’d let her handle it even if it ant waiting all day. Zou Tian should co back after lunch, really.
Actually, he should leave and not co back at all.
He sighed again.
As he was about to stand, sothing in the air caught his eye. Movent. A silver shape.
As it drew close enough for his enhanced eyes to make out more than just a blur, he realized it was Master. He wore a robe that was pure silver with only faint blue accents and rode on a … sothing. The device, tallic silver with two blue stripes, was large, easily ten-feet long, and a couple of feet wide. And, weirdly, it had a fin on the bottom near the back.
Zou Tian had never seen anything like it. Why was Master using any kind of device, anyway? He’d flown many tis without assistance, so the device surely wasn’t necessary. And why was he holding his arms out to the side like he needed them to balance? He’d never had any issue on a much thinner flying sword.
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Weird.
But there had to be a good reason.
Master stopped when he got to the tournant grounds, pulled out a paper from his ring and studied it, looked around, and darted toward the area the sect had been assigned. He hovered above it for a mont before disappearing.
Really weird.
As Benton was about to head out to et up with the kiddos … uh, et up with his sect mbers, he made an important realization. He couldn’t Teleport to the tournant grounds.
He often thought of qi and techniques like magic, like he could do anything he wanted, any way he wanted. And, often, the System allowed him to cheat enough to get pretty close to that ideal.
So things had strict, non-negotiable rules, though. Like Teleporting. The process was visualize the place where you want to Teleport, add qi, and trigger the technique. In that order.
That visualization part couldn’t be gad. He had to pull up a ntal image of the place in his mind. Absent pictures or video of the place—both of which were in the infancy of him introducing—it was necessary for him to visit the place in advance.
How embarrassing would it have been if he had been in front of his sect about to trigger the Teleport before figuring out that important detail? Ugh. Good thing he caught it early. He probably could have bluffed his way out of it by saying that he wanted to visit the Poison Claw Sect first or sothing, but still…
There was no help for it but to Teleport to a location outside of the city—easier not to accidentally break any of the City Lord’s laws that way—fly over to the tournant grounds, put eyes on the assigned area, and then pop back to his office.
Perfect.
And hey, that was the perfect opportunity to try out sothing he’d put together for a special occasion. Okay, more like for a ti when he was feeling particularly geeky than necessarily a special occasion. And honestly, him feeling geeky wasn’t a special occasion. It was more like the norm.
He twisted his newest ring, and his clothing changed to a special silver robe he’d had made. Honestly, the outfit wasn’t really what he wanted. A tallic silver bodysuit that made him look made of tal would have been much, much better.
But there were limits to what he could pull off. His image mattered to so degree. Eccentric was good. Batcrap crazy wasn’t.
Still, as he hovered in the air just outside the wall of Sixth Flawless Flowing City and pulled the silver surfboard from his ring, he felt cool. Like just totally aweso.
He wanted to yell, “I am the Argent Surfer.” Wouldn’t want to run afoul of any copyright laws, obviously, even while living in a different reality. “I am the harbinger of … The Rising Tide Sect.”
Benton didn’t yell any of that, obviously. Again, best not to appear to be batcrap crazy. He was so, so sorely tempted to, though.
It wasn’t even that he was all that much of a fan. Greg enjoyed comic books, but Benton had only read them to a very limited extent in his youth. His only experience with the character was that movie with that young lady who played in that TV show—he couldn’t seem to quite rember the na—where she was a supersoldier in a post EMP apocalypse.
Really, he was just being silly. And hey, he bet if just about anyone on Earth had the opportunity to fly around like that character, they would. If you thought surfing the waves was cool, you need to try surfing the Wind.
The bit of silliness made him feel … good. Happy. Which was a good thing. After all, at so point in the next month, he’d almost definitely have to face a bunch of people trying to kill him, and then he’d have to retaliate. He didn’t even want to think about how many lives he would have to take.
Frankly, that entire situation was going to suck beyond the telling of it, as a certain vampire slayer might say.
His only escape was—for the mont, at least—to find what pleasure he could.
Zi Delan had never been to Sixth Flawless Flowing City. Growing up on the streets of Vermillion Incomparable Rain Town, the city might as well have been on the other side of the world for all the opportunity he had to travel there.
How things had changed!
Not only was he going there, but he was doing so as a mber of a sect. And he would be competing as a mber of a sect in a tournant against mbers from other sects. He was so excited he could barely stand it.
And he didn’t even have to spend months travelling. Master would Teleport them from their sect directly to the tournant grounds. One blink, Zi Delan would be near his—very nice!—house. The next, he’d be in the city.
Crazy.
He didn’t have an accurate count of how many people were going, but it was definitely close to a hundred. More than he expected.
With so many people to organize, he figured he’d have to settle in for a good long wait. Instead, things took shape really quickly.
The boss’ assistant, Sun Hua, was following Senior Sister around. Every once in a while, they’d encounter a group who seed out of sorts or looked lost. The mousy girl would whisper sothing in Senior Sister’s ear, and she’d shout orders. Soon after, whatever situation had been hindering the group was pretty much resolved. The pair would then move to a new location, and the process would repeat.
Fifteen minutes after everyone had gathered, they looked like an organized, well trained and experienced caravan ready to depart instead of a bunch of villagers and townies who’d never really been anywhere.
Everyone just kind of looked around, appearing as shocked as he was, and less than a minute later, Master appeared in the sky above them.
“Ready to go already?” he said. “Wow. Good job, Yang Xiu.”
As he said it, though, he winked at Sun Hua.
The boss. The sect leader. Winked. Had it been any other sect and any other sect leader, he was sure the two concepts being forced together would have caused people to faint, but no one in the crowd gave it much notice.
“Everybody ready?” he said.
Before anyone even had a chance to fully get out a word, Zi Delan felt the telltale disorientation that cos from having your body instantly transported through Space. He blinked, and when he opened his eyes, he was, as expected, in an entirely different place.
Less than a mile to the left, there was an enormous stadium, one that dwarfed the amphitheater by orders of magnitude, and in the distance to the right rose tall buildings.
They’d made it. For one month, they’d sightsee, train even more and even harder, and acclimate themselves to the city and their new living conditions and schedule. After that ca the tournant.
Zi Delan couldn’t wait!
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