Silver Fox & The Western Hero: Warrior's Oath: A LitRPG/Wuxia Novel - Book 4

by M. H. Johnson

  “Because your technique’s killing her.”

  Ning Jing’s eyes momentarily blazed.

  For a heartbeat he saw a deadly flash of silver before gasps and rustled cheongsams and cultivator’s robes made it clear that something had happened, Jidihu now gripping her former lover’s wrist. “Calm yourself, love. The boy seeks only to help your daughter. Our daughter. A blessing from our patron himself. Are you truly so willing to throw that away?”

  Ning Jing glowered, before lowering her gaze. “Carry on as you see fit,” she said. “But if anything happens to my daughter...”

  “Hush,” Jidihu said with a gentle finger to Ning Jing’s lips before kissing her cheek. She then turned to a nonplussed Alex, the gentlest of smiles upon her features. “Please, dear Alex, what can you tell us?”

  Alex swallowed turning back to Yinzi gazing back at him with an intensity he found disconcerting.

  “Can I tell them your secret?”

  Slowly she nodded, and Alex had to suppress a wince. He hadn’t spoken so much as thought those words in her direction. But it had been enough.

  Alex sighed, relegating that headache for another time, turning back to her parents. “I am guessing your elements are Earth, Fire, and Metal, as well as Shadow and Fate, Lady Jidihu, and you are a Metal who somehow forged herself to the Void, Lady Ning Jing. Is that correct?”

  Ning Jing dipped her head. Jidihu flashed an enigmatic smile. “If it pleases you to think so, Alex. And what, pray tell, does that have to do with our daughter?”

  Alex gazed sympathetically back at Yinzi, who had almost instinctively slipped back into her kitsune mother’s basic purification pose, embracing the shadows once more, and in her own way, attempting to soothe the strain Ning Jing’s imposed techniques had caused.

  “It’s because in addition to Fate, Shadow, and Dark Qi in its purest, most destructive form, Yinzi has an affinity for Light Qi as well.”

  Ning Jing snorted. “Of course she does. All living cultivators who are not ghosts do. Of the elements tied to the living world, she has an affinity for Metal Qi, which both her mothers and the trickster god himself possess.”

  Alex smiled. “Yes. But there is one other. One you weren’t recognizing. Wood.”

  Both Yinzi’s parents blinked in surprise. “But that’s… surely you must be mistaken, Alex. I’m her mother, I would have known!” insisted a surprised Jidihu.

  Alex solemnly shook his head. “Maybe not. I’m guessing that neither of you dared risk another cultivator examining her, and with all you have accomplished, all you are both capable of, no doubt you’re used to handling almost everything on your own. But this confidence played to your weakness, as neither of you have an affinity for Wood.” He held up a finger to stave off Ning Jing’s heated protest. “Particularly not when it’s being cloaked in Shadow Qi.”

  Alex flashed a sad smile at both their expressions. “Ironic, isn’t it? How the mind’s own attempt to protect itself, cloaking Wood in Shadow, almost instinctively, no doubt from the first moment you forced Yinzi to embrace your cycling technique, would have made it all the harder for you to spot her Wood affinity.”

  Jidihu paled. “Then that means...”

  Alex solemnly nodded. “With someone as naturally potent as Yinzi, forcing her to unnaturally bind her Dark Qi within Metal just left her Wood Qi exposed with no buffer, wilting under such a disharmonious technique. In truth, I don’t know if it would have killed her, but you might have crippled her base and her potential for all time.”

  Yinzi paled, which Alex though a neat trick, considering how milky white her skin already was. “Let’s, um… let’s never practice Hammered Iron stance again, okay, Mother?”

  Ning Jing closed her eyes and bowed her head. “Heaven’s mercy. What do we do now, Jidihu?”

  “Alex?” Jidihu’s soft query fell on deaf ears, Alex’s full attention brought to studying a quietly cultivating Yinzi, allowing her affinities to flow as they would as she sought to heal the thankfully minor damage, and in that instant, it all made sense. How to help her, what techniques she could use, how her body had been able to maintain its own equilibrium for so long with two elements so in opposition to each other.

  Alex flashed a pleased grin. “I think I understand.”

  “Understand what?” asked Hao Chan.

  “Yinzi! Her Dark Qi. Not just Voidal, but Fate and Shadow as well. For a second, I thought of the vacuum of space, but it’s not really a vacuum, containing all the forces and fields of reality in constant flux, with subatomic particles being continuously created and destroyed.”

  Alex blinked, realizing his friends had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. “It’s almost like space is a sea of quantized potential. But not really ether, as scientists first thought, since the speed of light in space stays the same at just under 300,000 meters a second, whether or not other objects are heading toward or away from that light source. But in some ways, space, or the void, really is just like a fluid medium!”

  Yinzi tilted her head. “You know you’re totally blowing your cover of not being a reincarnated spirit, right?”

  Alex sighed. “What I’m saying is that Dark Qi, for you, is acting like a liquid medium. Like Water Qi! It’s keeping your Wood and Metal Qi in balance, assuring a harmonious relationship. Your birth mother’s technique, though perhaps ideal for her, separating and containing her Dark Qi, was allowing your Metal to poison your Wood while stunting your Dark Qi growth. In short, the worst possible outcome. However, if you were to cycle your elements appropriately, treating Dark Qi almost like, well, water... you will continue to grow and develop, with your foundation growing all the stronger.”

  A brotherly hand clasped her shoulder. “I can sense your potential, Yinzi, and frankly, I’d be very surprised if you didn’t have it in you to make Silver one day.”

  It was a bold claim, Alex knew, since he had hardly any experience save with his closest friends, but he could sense that Yinzi had the ideal number of meridian channels, bold and healthy as anyone could hope to possess, his own anomalous existence aside. If anything, he thought her potential was even more profound than what he had declared. But considering how rare actual transcendence to Silver really was, he might be forced to eat his words, sooner or later. And considering who Yinzi’s parents were, he’d rather avoid that fate altogether, if possible.

  Ning Jing’s gaze all but said the same thing. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Alex.”

  And before he could say another word, Yinzi’s eyes widened with sudden hope, a beatific smile gracing her features. “Alex? Are you saying that you can help me? That you’d even want to help me, understanding how… different I am?”

  Alex flashed her his most reassuring smile. “Of course I want to help you, Yinzi. Even though I’m as much of a student as you, nothing would make me happier than seeing you blossom into your full potential.”

  She squealed with happiness and leapt into his arms, ruby eyes gazing into his own after planting a kiss upon his surprised lips. “Now this is the part of the story where you reveal that you’re secretly in love with me and you discovered a magical tome you endured a perilous journey through endless forests and lost kingdoms to acquire, right? An ancient Shadow cultivation novel that can save our entire tribe?”

  Alex blinked, everyone going so utterly silent that all that could be heard was the soft crunch of reinforced carriage wheels spinning along, their ride as smooth as a dream. Or, for some people like the girl suddenly flushing in Alex’s arms, slowly letting herself down and hanging her head, a nightmare.

  “Oh gosh… I just… I see what I did there. I didn’t think. The words just gushed out of my mouth. Again. For just a second, I felt like I was immersed in one of my favorite stories, and I finally found my champion. But that’s stupid. I know that. And it’s not like you’re not already in love.” She sighed. “And lost cultivation manuals capable of gifting even fragile mortals with cultivation powers or the secrets to we
alth, eternal youth, all of that… are just stories the bards share with the scribes. And not even the bards dare make up stories about any tome favored by the god of mischief. I… I’m sorry, Alex. Please forget I said all that, okay?”

  And it was Hao Yin herself who darted forward, gathering a suddenly sobbing Yinzi in her arms after glaring at a totally-confused Alex while Qie Qie and the other kitsune girls had the grace to turn away, giving the sobbing girl the illusion of privacy.

  Hao Chan gave Alex’s confused hand a reassuring squeeze, thankfully not squeezing to the point of cracked knuckles. “It’s alright,” she soothed. “She means no harm by it. Yinzi is just being, well… Yinzi.”

  Ning Jing sighed, bowing her head. “If only I had known I was carrying her sooner.”

  “It would have changed nothing,” Jidihu soothed. “She is a daughter of chaos and transformation, as wild as wild comes, and nothing you could have done would have made her any different than she is today. Rather, let us just be grateful that she can actually feel a trace of social shame. It means we can teach her to be just a bit more thoughtful than her sire, who understands his own worldview and no other, and who certainly thought nothing about conceiving her through us.”

  “Actually, I’m amazed,” Ning Jing said. “Yinzi normally takes a strange sort of pride in being as outrageous as she possibly can, laughing off all consequence, or using her gifts to hide in the garden so well that not even I can find her until I’ve given my oath not to beat her silly behind black and blue. And really, with how easily she hid in any garden or the grove that traps our enemies so well inside your own demesne, I should have known that Wood as much as Shadow were her elements, and how foolish I feel to have needed a Ruidian to point out something so bloody obvious in hindsight.”

  “It must be Alex’s doing,” said Jidihu. “Either him or my charges, who she now sees as sisters. Now she actually cares, just a tad, what other people think of her. About time, really. She has the chaos part of her heritage down pat. It’s good to see her embrace change as well.”

  Alex’s ears burned, the voices of the Silver cultivators so soft he was almost certain it was only thanks to his odd ability to pick up fragments of conversations he had no business overhearing that allowed him to put it together.

  But neither Yinzi’s embarrassed tears, nor the impulsive declarations and wishes of a girl so hoping for a champion would deter him from what he had already decided he was going to do from the moment Jidihu had bared her intentions, and her soul, before his own.

  Surprised to find his own heart racing, Alex carefully approached the sobbing girl, a kitsune of the Void as much as shadow, daughter of the trickster god Alex called mentor and, he suspected in some lives, friend as well.

  “Yinzi?”

  Something in his voice, perhaps. The kitsune whose ears of Voidal darkness only Alex could see gasped and swallowed, her porcelain features growing even more pale. She slowly stepped away from a puzzled Hao Yin whose eyes widened as she lurched back, catching sight of what was in Alex’s hand.

  “You’re going to show me something wonderful, aren’t you, hero?” Yinzi whispered, still not daring to look his way. But Alex could sense her desperate hope, the way she tightly clenched fists both delicate and powerful tightly together.

  Alex swallowed, doing his best to tune out the breathless pause suddenly filling up his entire world, everyone frozen with looks of awe or stupefaction upon their faces, or in some cases, sheer terror.

  It was the strangest sensation, as if they weren’t even riding atop a massive carriage Alex already knew was hurtling in strange, otherworldly directions somewhere between Heaven, Earth, and Shadow, through forests lush, fecund, and nothing like any trees he had ever seen before. It was as if all of reality had gone still, for all that shadowy trees were still whipping past them at frightful speed.

  Alex did his best to ignore the hyper-focused gazes of three Silvers burning into his back as he revealed his treasure before them all. “Turn around, Yinzi. There is something I want you to see.”

  And the look in Yinzi’s eyes when she beheld the tome of brilliant sparkling midnight, dark as the void, yet shimmering like the heavens above, was a sight to behold.

  Awe, reverence, and yes, even adoration, had crept upon her features as one tender hand caressed his cheek, the other gently touching the ancient symbol for yin and yang, order and chaos, each eye that of a running fox, bordered by diamonds and jade.

  “Alex?”

  “Yes, Yinzi?”

  “Is that… is that what I think it is?”

  Alex grinned. “It’s not any tome I found collecting dust in the ruins of an ancient city. Your father made it clear that it would take me years to retrieve such a thing, in any case.”

  Yinzi chuckled softly. “There you go, leaking secrets, again.” She swallowed, desperate ruby eyes locking upon his own. “Can I… is it even safe for me to open?”

  Alex frowned, suddenly forced to wonder, chilled by the thought that…

  No.

  He wouldn’t second guess what he already knew to be true.

  Yinzi had seven fully-intact meridian gates, to put it mildly, and such was the only true requirement for absorbing the lessons within that would emblaze themselves upon the reader’s mind at a speed Alex sensed would be pretty damned close to breathtaking.

  But still.

  His smile was almost apologetic. Yinzi wilted.

  Alex turned around, catching sight of Lady Feng Huang’s awed gaze. Alex could tell she was fighting a knot of terror in her normally unshakable resolve, which chilled Alex even more than the hungry, almost predatory, looks that Yinzi’s parents were favoring him with.

  Alex swallowed his parched throat. “Lady Jidihu? Madame Ning Jing? Before I go any further, I want to make sure I have your permission to proceed.” He forced an almost apologetic grimace. “I think, maybe, I’m not sure, but… maybe? The lessons within will impart themselves in ways alien to any other tome anyone’s ever read before.”

  The deadliest pair of women Alex had ever met anywhere exchanged solemn glances.

  “That’s no lesser tome,” said Ning Jing.

  “No. It isn’t. And it isn’t Silver, either,” declared Jidihu.

  “Gold, then. It must be!” hissed Lady Feng Huang. “Heaven’s mercy, if this boy stole the tome of a Silver close to ascension...”

  Jidihu’s piercing gaze held Alex’s own. “That tome isn’t a Gold. Is it, Alex?”

  Alex swallowed as cold chills caressed his skin. It was all he could do not to fall into the kitsune’s brilliant gaze.

  If his pulse had been racing before, it was hammering so loud he could hear the blood in his ears.

  “No, Lady Jidihu. It is not.”

  Lady Feng Huang furrowed her brow. “Impossible. I can feel a pressure from it. An aura! The three of us have dared much, perusing Silver tomes our enemies would have done anything to keep from us. Even the least of all Silver Masterworks would make the school a fortune, the fools charging exorbitant fees in credits and spirit pearls that numerous cultivators desperate for a breakthrough would all too happily pay. There is no way that could be anything weaker.”

  “I agree,” Lady Jidihu said.

  Lady Feng Huang blinked. “But then...”

  Lady Jidihu flashed the most mischievous of smiles. “Be at ease, Huang. I know the power and potency of a Gold tome. It was quite the adventure, after all, acquiring one myself, and at great cost, I might add.”

  Lady Feng Huang paled. “But those things are priceless!”

  Jidihu nodded. “Priceless enough for me to negotiate with he who I sincerely hope is now the former head of Dragon Academy, to permit the instruction of kitsune on an equal basis with everyone else, to allow any kitsune that I chose to sponsor or who had means to pay for it to be allowed to embrace the Noble’s Path, avoiding hardship and persecution entirely.” She flashed a tired smile. “Of course, I hadn’t originally expected to be playing mother
hen to every kitsune to set foot within Dragon Academy, but I certainly don’t begrudge the precious lives that were saved.”

  “Wait, you’re saying that that single Golden tome was all it took to stop the silent purge of unwanted cultivators Dragon Academy had been engaged in for centuries?”

  Ning Jing snorted. “My former wife—”

  “—Present wife. We were never properly divorced.”

  “That’s because we could never find that laughing monk with the fox tail sewn to the back of his robe who married us in the first place! Anyway, the point, Huang, is you’ve never seen Jidihu in a bad mood.”

  Lady Feng Huang blinked. “Sure I have. With those students...”

  Ning Jing sighed. “Are the students still alive?”

  “Of course!”

  “Then clearly my former wife—”

  “—Present wife—”

  “—Was not in a bad mood. She’s gotten ridiculously patient over the last thirty years. The last time she purged traitors within the guild was… how many years ago?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  Ning Jing grinned. “She’s positively domesticated at this point, especially after giving birth to little Zhao.”

  Alex blinked. Zhao Doushi was a strapping young man at this point, mid-twenties at least, and had already achieved Silver at what Alex had deduced was an absurdly young age, thanks to the power and potency of his parents. But Alex supposed any man, no matter how powerful, would always be remembered as the little boy he once was in his mother’s heart.

  Hao Chan’s instructor, however, was looking a bit the worse for wear. “Wait a minute. I heard about those Jianghu purges when traitors were found in their midst, people seeking to overthrow the shadow head of the guild with the help of foreign city aid or, worse, diabolists. Hell, the bards sing of the tales in hushed tones to this day, over in Storyteller’s Way!”

  “Of course,” Ning Jing agreed. “Stories are a great way to bolster a leader’s prestige as well as intimidate the riff raff into best behavior.”

  Lady Feng Huang lowered her head. “But all that blood. All those deaths...”