Chapter 100 -: Lianshan

The city appeared before they expected it.

They had been on the valley road for two days, the road widening gradually, more people on it, the settlements along it growing from single buildings to clusters to something that required a name. Then the mountain pass opened and Lianshan was below them, spread across the valley floor with the sprawl of a city that had started with a plan and kept growing after the plan ran out.

It was the largest thing he had seen since the floating island.

Different scale, different quality. Caelum had been designed. Lianshan had grown. The difference was clear from the pass: the irregular rooflines, the streets following old water channels rather than any grid, the tournament banners hanging from every available surface because the Dragon Phoenix brought the kind of traffic that required every surface to remind visitors why they were here.

Yua looked at it.

"Bigger than last time," she said.

"How many did the regional event pull," he said.

"Forty, maybe fifty pairs," she said. "Two hundred individual entries." She looked at the banners. "The Dragon Phoenix is different. The last cycle had over a hundred pairs registered. Individual entries we stopped counting at four hundred."

"More everything," Rui said, from behind them. She already had her notebook out.

The gate into the city had a line.

Not a short one. People had been waiting long enough that some had sat down and started eating from provisions they had brought specifically because they had estimated the line correctly.

Eight different sect crests visible from the pass alone. He noted the ones he could read. The cultivator’s sense picked up the distribution of practitioners before they reached the gate: dense, varied, nothing like the mountain Qi that had become his reference over six months.

"That crest," Yua said. She was looking at the line. "Third group from the right."

"Xinshan Sect," Rui said, without looking. "Eastern circuit. They placed second at the Dragon Phoenix two cycles ago. The individual who won that cycle trained under them."

"They have a new pair this cycle," Yua said.

"The one that took the eastern circuit final," Rui said.

He looked at the group. Four of them, well-equipped, the ease of a team that had traveled to major tournaments before.

"Are they better than Yanwu Peak," he said.

"Different," Yua said. "Yanwu Peak wins on disruption tolerance. Xinshan wins on output. Different problem."

"For you," he said.

"For both events," she said. "The individual bracket at a major tournament will have multiple Xinshan competitors."

He filed this and moved up in the line.

The inn district ran along the central market road.

The first inn was full. The second inn was full. At the third inn, the price Rui was quoted was enough that she closed her notebook with a particular deliberateness and they continued to the fourth.

The fourth inn had two rooms available. One with a view of the market. One with a view of a wall.

"The wall room," Yua said, when Rui showed her the keys.

"I assumed," Rui said.

"Walls are quiet," Yua said.

"The market room has better light for reading," Rui said.

"You read before the light fails," Yua said.

"Sometimes I want to read after."

"Then you should have the market room," Yua said, "which I believe you already knew when you showed me the keys."

Rui had, in fact, already put the market key in her own pocket.

He took the remaining room. The window stayed open on its own, the lamp flickered when the door moved, the bed was functional. He set his pack down and looked at the window.

Outside, Lianshan was doing everything a tournament city did the week before a major event. Practitioners in competition clothes moving between inns and the registration hall. Spectators from elsewhere reading signboards. Vendors selling stamina compounds, channel-clearing preparations, food that could be eaten quickly between rounds.

He had been on a mountain for six months.

The noise was significant.

They ate at the inn’s lower floor. Broad tables, shared dishes, strangers on all sides.

The food was good the way tournament-city food is good, made by someone who had cooked for enough competition crowds to know what a practitioner wanted after two days on a road. Not subtle. Filling, in a way that accounted for elevated energy expenditure.

He ate without tracking how much. He’d learned that on the mountain, after the one time he ignored how much the Qi cultivation demanded. Yua still wouldn’t describe what happened.

Rui was making notes on the other practitioners in the room. She held her cup at an angle that caught a partial reflection, forty degrees of the room, without needing to turn her head.

"You can look directly at people," he said.

"I am looking directly at people," she said.

"You are looking at the cup."

"The cup is positioned such that the reflective surface provides a view of the room without requiring obvious attention." She made a small note. "The note-taking is less conspicuous."

He looked at the cup. The surface was curved and scratched. The view it provided was heavily distorted.

"What can you actually see in that," he said.

"Enough," she said, and made another note.

Yua was eating with the efficient focus she brought to anything that was fuel for training. She had assessed the room in the first twelve seconds after sitting down and not looked at it since.

"The Xinshan pair is in this inn," she said. She was looking at her bowl. "Second table from the right."

He looked without moving his head much. The pair was younger than he had expected. Eating quietly, not performing awareness of the room.

"They know we are looking," Yua said. "They have been tracking the door since we came in."

"They are being careful," Rui said, not looking up.

"New to tournaments this size," Yua said. "They are trying to look like they are not nervous."

"Are they," he said.

"Yes," she said. "It is their first Dragon Phoenix." She picked up her cup. "It was ours too, the first time."

"Were you nervous," he said.

She drank her tea.

"We lost in the second round," she said. "Twice."

He said nothing.

"The nervousness was accurate," she said.