Chapter 127: Daylight Attempt

Just like that, a new day arrived in Crimson Vale and once again, like the days before and the days to come, the market streets within the walls of Crimson Vale were busy in the way it always was in the afternoon.

There were vendors shouting over each other, the smell of roasted chestnuts and cheap incense hanging thick in the air, and a river of shoulders and baskets moving in no particular direction at all.

Han Lin wove through it with a woven basket balanced on her hip, already half-full of dried mushrooms, a bolt of pale blue silk, and a small jar of pickled plums she’d bought on a whim because Lu Feng liked them with his tea.

Ye Chenxue walked a step behind her, hands tucked into her sleeves, her pace unhurried, her eyes doing what they always did. They were sweeping the crowd without ever seeming to look at anyone in particular.

"You didn’t have to come," Han Lin said, glancing back at her. "It’s just the market."

"Lu Feng asked," Ye Chenxue said simply.

"He worries too much."

"He worries exactly the right amount," Ye Chenxue said, and there was the faintest edge of dry humor in it, gone as quickly as it appeared.

Han Lin smiled and turned back toward the stall ahead, one that sold hairpins carved from pale jade — nothing she needed, but nothing she could resist looking at, either. She didn’t notice the two men who peeled away from a noodle stand across the street and began drifting in the same direction as her, matching her pace without matching her path. Ye Chenxue did.

She said nothing at first. Just shifted her weight, let her sleeve fall half an inch lower over her wrist, and angled her body a degree closer to Han Lin’s.

By the time they reached the narrower lane behind the cloth merchants, a shortcut Han Lin took because it shaved ten minutes off the walk home, there were four of them. Two ahead, two behind, closing the distance the way men only closed distance when they had already decided how the next few minutes were going to go.

"Chenxue—" Han Lin started, her voice dropping.

"I see them."

The lane was narrow enough that the buildings blotted out most of the sun, leaving the space in a kind of dusty half-light. A cart loaded with barrels sat abandoned near the far end, and the noise of the main street faded behind them like a door closing.

The two men ahead stopped walking and turned to face them fully. One was broad through the shoulders with a scar bisecting one eyebrow; the other was leaner, with the twitchy, restless energy of someone who’d done this before and hadn’t been caught yet. Behind them, footsteps closed the gap.

"No need to make this difficult," the scarred one said, not unkindly, as if he were doing them a favor. "The girl in the yellow robe. Come with us quietly, and nobody gets hurt. Simple as that."

Han Lin’s grip on the basket tightened until her knuckles whitened. Her mind raced as she asked several questions mentally.

How do they know who I am? Why me? Is this because of Lu Feng? What is going on?

She was panicking but her feet didn’t move, because Ye Chenxue’s arm had already come up, light as nothing, a bar across Han Lin’s front that said stay behind me better than words could have.

"You’ve made a mistake," Ye Chenxue said. Her voice hadn’t changed at all. It was the same flat, quiet tone she used to ask for more tea.

The lean one laughed, short and ugly. "Mistake’s gonna be yours if you don’t step aside, sword-girl. We’re not here for you."

Four of them. Two blocking the front, two closing from the rear — she could hear their boots now, unhurried, confident. They were not cultivators. She’d have felt that the moment they stepped into the lane, that particular hum under the skin that even the weakest qi-user carried. These were just men. Strong men, maybe trained men, knives at their belts and the calm of people used to violence — but just men.

Iron Fang had sent muscle. Not a blade.

’Good,’ she thought, distantly, and something in her chest settled instead of tightened. They don’t know what they’re dealing with.

"Han Lin," she said quietly, without turning her head. "Stay close to the wall. Don’t run unless I tell you to."

"Chenxue, there’s four—"

"I know."

The scarred one took a step forward, reaching for Han Lin’s wrist past Ye Chenxue’s shoulder. It was a mistake, and a small one, but the only one he’d get to make.

Ye Chenxue caught his wrist before it closed the last few inches, twisted it in one clean motion that folded his elbow the wrong way, and drove her other palm into his sternum hard enough to send him stumbling back into the lean one behind him.

There was no flash of light. No surge of pressure that would have flattened the lane’s loose dust into a perfect circle around her. There was just leverage, timing, and a body that had been trained in exactly this kind of close, ugly fighting long before she’d ever touched a cultivation manual.

"She’s fast," the lean one snarled, catching his footing, drawing a short club from his belt. "Get the girl, forget her!"

The two from behind rushed in at that moment.

’Poor coordination,’ Ye Chenxue noted almost lazily, the kind of thing that told her everything about how this job had been assigned. Not planned. Not respected. Just handle it and be done.

She stepped into the nearer one rather than away from him, closing the distance he wanted to open, and drove her elbow up under his jaw before his club had finished its swing. He went down in a heap of limbs and dust.

The second grabbed for her sleeve; she let him have a fistful of empty cloth, pivoted low, and swept his legs out from under him with a motion so economical it barely looked like effort.

"Behind you!" Han Lin’s voice cracked with fear, and Ye Chenxue turned in time to catch the scarred man’s second attempt. It was a knife this time, held low and mean, the elbow-lock apparently not enough of a lesson.

She caught his forearm, redirected the blade past her hip with a shift of her weight rather than any burst of strength, and answered with a strike to his throat that wasn’t gentle but wasn’t lethal either. The strike was just enough to fold him gasping onto the cobblestones, hands scrabbling at his own neck.

The lean one was the last one standing, and the only one still holding his weapon. He looked at his three companions on the ground, looked at Ye Chenxue’s calm, unbothered stance, and made the only smart decision anyone in the lane had made that afternoon.

He ran.

She let him go.

For a long moment, the lane was quiet except for the groaning of the man clutching his throat and Han Lin’s ragged breathing behind her.

"Chenxue," Han Lin whispered, staring at her with wide eyes. "You... That was—"

"Basic forms," Ye Chenxue said, stepping over the fallen club without looking at it twice. "Nothing more."

"That’s not," Han Lin swallowed. "I’ve seen you cultivate. I’ve felt what you can do. That wasn’t even close to..."

"No," Ye Chenxue agreed calmly. "It wasn’t."

She crouched beside the scarred man, who was still wheezing, and pulled a small folded paper from inside his sleeve before he could stop her, the sluggishness of a bruised throat working against him.

She unfolded it just enough to see a crude sketch of Han Lin’s face, a description of her yellow robe, and, in the corner, a symbol she recognized instantly: a stylized fang wrapped in iron chain.

She said nothing about it. Just tucked it into her own sleeve and stood.

"We should get back," she said. "Lu Feng needs to see this."

Han Lin nodded quickly, still shaking slightly, her basket forgotten on the ground beside the jade hairpin stall two streets back. Ye Chenxue picked it up for her without comment, careful of the jar of pickled plums still sitting unbroken inside it, and started walking.

"Why didn’t you—" Han Lin fell into step beside her, voice lower now, almost cautious. "Why didn’t you use your real strength? You could have ended that in a heartbeat."

Ye Chenxue was quiet for a few paces, her gaze fixed somewhere down the lane ahead of them, toward the noise of the main street returning.

"Because they don’t know what I am yet," she said finally. "And whoever sent four street thugs to grab you in broad daylight doesn’t know what we are, either." A faint, humorless smile touched her mouth. "Let’s keep it that way a little longer."

Han Lin glanced down at the folded paper peeking from her sleeve, then back up at the crowd swallowing them whole as they stepped back into the main street’s light.

"Lu Feng is not going to be happy," she murmured.

"No," Ye Chenxue said. "He isn’t."