Chapter Text
Yan’an
Two decades after the fall of Qishan Wen
“Also, two suicides and five heart attacks,” reported Jin Ling. “But the heart attacks were all old people, and they always get some suicides this time of year.”
The bulk of his report had been delivered with the professionalism expected of a sect heir on a night-hunt, but, to his father’s well-concealed exasperation, this last statement was not. It was furthermore accompanied by a very judgmental look at Bai-zongzhu. However, could not such judgment be considered warranted, when even a junior of fifteen years could sniff out the holes in the Bai sect’s investigation?
“A-Ling,” said Jin Zixuan, putting just a hint of remonstrance into his voice and otherwise showing no emotion whatsoever. In the face of paternal disapproval, teenage hauteur waned, and a grudging bow of apology was provided toward the two sect leaders.
Bai-zongzhu did not give any indication he had noticed the look at all, nor the bow. Instead, his attention was taken up with Jin Zixuan, who was the person with the authority to grant or deny him significant aid. “They died of fright! Jin-zongzhu, I am sure you remember how quickly whole battlefields would flee before those monsters. That there have been no more deaths than this is only luck. If it had not been so foggy, if they were able to see who to attack, none could stand before them. When the weather changes, we will be doomed!”
Jin Zixuan did not look at him. Indeed, he did not look at anyone in particular, as he had not been doing most of the day. The watching civilians had felt very cowed by this proud and haughty immortal, who stood as if remote and untouchable.
The truth was that Jin Zixuan just didn’t want to be there. It was not that he disliked night-hunting, or thought it beneath him—on the contrary, sometimes he privately thought that it was the thing he was best at. Unlike his father, he was a sect leader who night-hunted regularly, either taking juniors on training trips or with a few select seniors to tackle tougher prey. And as Jin Ling was now at a difficult age, sometimes he felt like these were the only times that he was able to connect to his son, instead of receiving a combination of grudging filial piety and teenage sulking. No, what he disliked about this situation was the particular circumstances.
The letter had been brought to Jinlin Tai by Bai-zongzhu’s eldest daughter several days before, begging for the aid and intercession of the Jin in a most dire matter. It had been signed not just by Bai-zongzhu, but also by the provincial governor and the heads of several powerful, non-cultivator families.
Over the past two weeks, several times peasants had fled in fear—in whole mobs—from something just outside the city of Yan’an, something which could not be seen through the dense fog that crept up from the Yan river in the mornings at this time of year. The local cultivators of the Bai sect had gone out to take a look and initially found nothing. But more reports came in. First one old woman and then a lame cartwright—neither able to move quickly enough to flee—reported seeing the creature in the mist, passing by at a distance: an enormous shadow, dwarfing a two-story house, with countless moving limbs. Both had fainted at the sight and were not considered reliable witnesses.
But there was no denying that something was out there, frightening ordinary people. Merchants would not take the road for fear of it. The whole of the city was terrified, and the guards could only barely stand at their posts—and not at all when it, whatever it was, drew close. Several elderly townsfolk had died of fright.
Then one of the Bai sects seniors had spotted it, and had also nearly died of fright, because he had recognized that hundred-legged shadow. Such a thing had not been seen in the world in nearly twenty years, but no one who had witnessed one could ever forget it.
This was one of the monstrous conjurings of the Yiling Patriarch!
This news was greeted with great dismay by the most important and powerful persons of the region. If somebody like the Yiling Patriarch had cursed their city, then what could they possibly do? No ordinary cultivator could hope to lift one of his dark spells, nor defeat one of his bone-and-sinew horrors. Why would he target their city? What did he want? How could he be convinced to go away?
They first considered sending to Qinghe Nie and throwing themselves on the mercy of Chifeng-zun, the Yiling Patriarch’s husband. Chifeng-zun was well-known to be righteous—so righteous that he had married the Yiling Patriarch, to keep him from terrorizing the world! Surely the world also included the city of Yan’an, and Chifeng-zun would intercede for them.
But, suggested one older lord, hiding his face behind his fan. Chifeng-zun was also known to be extremely fearsome, and to bear long grudges. Did not the fate of Qishan Wen prove the truth of that? And in the days of the Sunshot Campaign... well, there was no way to say it delicately. Yan’an had been on the wrong side.
Not the Bai sect, of course! They had been a family of unestablished cultivators, granted the space to found a sect after their contributions to the Sunshot Campaign. (Nobody mentioned Bai-furen, or her cousins.) And the non-cultivators had had no choice but to obey the whims of the powerful Wens! (If some of them had had profitable relationships with the Wens for decades, well, what else were they to do, when they were the ones who lived here?)
...But it could not be said that no taint of the association remained.
And Chifeng-zun had publicly approved of the extirpation of the Tingshan He, who had openly opposed the Yiling Patriarch during the war...
After further deliberation, then, the elites of the city decided to beg intervention from the Jin instead. Yanchuan Bai was one of many small sects that had struck up a good relationship with Lanling Jin after the war. Jin Guangshan’s support had been deep and munificent for those struggling to make their own ways. His son, Jin Zixuan, was not cut from the same cloth, and had not courted these western newcomers with the same aggression that his father had shown, but he hadn’t broken any of their trading agreements. Those trading terms had not always proven to be beneficial to those minor sects in the long run—but! The relationship was there, and surely so was the sense of obligation. If Jin Guangshan had not said once that the new sects in the west should look to Jinlin Tai in the east for aid, then it was only because he had said it many times. In those early days they had all known who to look to, and it was not Qinghe Nie!
And Jin Zixuan was the Yiling Patriarch’s elder brother-in-law, besides; so he had rights and grounds to interfere on that side, too.
Therefore without further delay, the letter was written and dispatched with Yanchuan Bai’s fastest flyer. Despite the young woman’s overall mediocre level of cultivation, it did not take her long to reach her destination, and desperately beg their intercession. At that point, Yanchuan Bai’s headache became Jin Zixuan’s headache. But it was an entirely different sort of headache.
It was quite obvious to Jin Zixuan that Wei Wuxian hadn’t gone and cursed a whole city. The young woman from Yanchuan Bai had stammered through a protest that they didn’t know what they’d possibly done to offend the Yiling Patriarch, which was the first clue. In Jin Zixuan’s experience, Wei Wuxian was a regrettably straight-forward person with an even more regrettable memory. If he felt insulted, he might punch somebody in the face, but he’d have forgotten about it within twenty-four hours. He could simply not be bothered to curse anyone, let alone an entire city, over anything other than very serious matters indeed, and in that case the whole of China would have already heard about the offence. He was not subtle and neither were his husbands.
(What Jin Zixuan was not aware of was that if such a thing were to happen, it would actually have been one of Wei Wuxian’s other brothers-in-law, Nie Huaisang, who would be responsible for the wide publication of Yan’an’s hypothetical crimes. Nie Huaisang knew the benefit of making sure everybody knew who the guilty party was. Moreover, as the cultivation world’s biggest gossip, he was well-positioned to make that happen. But that was neither here nor there, because in this case there’d been no such news.)
It was therefore more in search of sympathy, rather than an actual negative answer, that Jin Zixuan turned to his wife and asked, “A-Li, has your brother cursed any cities in the last month?”
His wife, beloved angel that she was, pursed her lips thoughtfully and said, “He didn’t mention anything in his last letter, but if he has, let me know and I’ll have a talk with him.”
He gave her a look that would have had any of the children making a grossed-out expression if they had seen it.
However, the problem of Yan’an remained. Jin Zixuan, who was a dutiful and filial son, could not see a good way to divest himself of it without repudiating his father’s alliances with these minor sects—which, it had to be said, were good in the long-term for the profit of the Jin clan. Moreover, it sat very wrongly with him to abandon somebody in genuine need who had come to him for aid—and no matter that Wei Wuxian was obviously not the culprit, there clearly was something going on. It probably did have a lot to do with Wei Wuxian, even, if it was manifesting like this; but Jin Zixuan also couldn’t just dump it off at his doorstep, because if he did he’d then be compounding the distress of the people of Yan’an by inflicting Wei Wuxian on them, and also his brother-in-law would mock him endlessly for it the next time they met.
(Jiang Wanyin, not Wei Wuxian. Wei Wuxian would probably have forgotten who had made it his problem by that time. But such a thing was certain to be mentioned to somebody, who would mention it to somebody else, and if Jiang Wanyin didn’t hear about it first-hand then he’d hear about it second-hand. And Jiang Wanyin had never really forgiven Jin Zixuan for stealing his sister away from Lotus Pier.)
So Jin Zixuan had his secretary make adjustments to his schedule, picked a pair of steady senior disciples and a couple of the juniors that Jin Ling managed to get along with, and set off the next day.
They arrived to find a city that was on the brink of panic. Richer families had already begun to flee. Curfew had been imposed.
One of the fleshcrafted monstrosities had been spotted by a guard standing on the wall, in the dim hours of the morning the day before.
Jin Zixuan, very unimpressed with all of this, indicated to Jin Ling to go investigate, and then resigned himself to a day full of emulating his favourite brother-in-law: which was to say, keeping his face absolutely expressionless and saying nothing at all.
(Lan Wangji’s extreme partiality for Wei Wuxian could at times lead him to make extremely irrational decisions, but most of the time, he was far more restful to be around than any of Jin Zixuan’s other brothers-in-law—or, for that matter, most of his blood relations.)
For Jin Ling, this marked a distinctly upward turn in his day. Jin Ling was not any good at politics, and much to his dismay, he was well aware of this fact. What he was not aware of (being as self-centred as any teenager) was that all the adults in his life looked at him and knew immediately where it’d come from. It was very simple: he’d managed to inherit both his father’s social awkwardness and the temper that ran in his mother’s side of the family. In addition, he was fifteen, which is an awkward age for anyone. It seemed to him that every other word out of his mouth offended somebody, and every other word out of someone else’s mouth was either stupid, boring, or offensive in turn. Diplomacy was not his strong suit.
But he was good at night-hunting, so it was fortunate that that was also a respectable past-time for a young sect heir. He secretly looked forward to night-hunts led by his father more than anything else in the world. Jin Zixuan was never a man who was effusive with praise, but at the end of a successful hunt he’d look at Jin Ling and say, “Good,” with a sincerity that made Jin Ling flush deeply. Since he’d turned thirteen and started getting hit with the constant urge to shout at everyone for being so dumb all the time, night-hunting was perhaps the only activity where he felt like he was really making his father proud.
So it had been something of a betrayal to be told he was coming along on a night-hunt which was really all about politics. That was always a danger when his father led a night-hunt, of course—his father was the leader of the biggest and richest cultivation sect in China—but usually they didn’t go to big cities, let alone big cities in other territories. Plus, he could tell that his father didn’t really think this was anywhere near as serious as the Bai disciple was claiming. (In this Jin Ling wasn’t wholly correct—he correctly discerned Jin Zixuan’s distaste for the matter, but as several deaths were ascribed to it, Jin Zixuan did think it was serious.) So it was bound to be a bunch of really boring meetings where his father was an important sect leader and Jin Ling was his awkward son who would probably end up offending everybody and one of these days they were going to see that a-Nuo was so much better at this than him and make her the sect heir instead.
But then, much to his delight, his father turned to him and told him to take his cousin and juniors and go investigate.
This was exciting! Yan’an wasn’t someplace he’d ever been before, and it was huge. It was so huge, in fact, that without the guidance of the Bai juniors that they roped into coming along, they would swiftly have gotten lost. But the Bai juniors were keen as well, and although at first they were overly deferential (and, perhaps, defensive), Luo Qiuyun’s friendly welcome swiftly broke the ice. There was some initial friction, when the Bai sect juniors mentioned the Yiling Patriarch, but on this topic Jin Ling put them firmly in their places. And then, seeing that the Jin were all very unconcerned by the mention of such a person, the Bai juniors began to feel more emboldened in their own circumstances, which until now had been oppressed by the air of the city and their utter helplessness in the face of the monster. Having the backing of a powerful sect was a marvellous thing.
So it was that the juniors spent a busy day, first visiting the morgues, then the graveyards, local shrines, the civilian court, the gate-guards, the witnesses’ homes outside the city, and the houses of the elders who lived closest outside the walls—for those who farmed the land immediately outside the city generally did not live within it.
It all proved to be a great learning experience for the Jin juniors, who were not accustomed to working within a large city. Cities were a different beast than the countryside. It was impossible to crowd so many human beings together without also accumulating all their little resentments and dislikes. Those energies, gathered together, could easily become something far more malignant if they were not rooted out at once. For this reason, all cities above a certain size needed their feng shui to be actively maintained by someone who knew what they were doing. However, such work was tedious and not very fit practice for growing a golden core, so it was usually looked down upon. Small sects could set themselves up comfortably performing such work, but they’d never earn much respect for it. For the large cities under the control of a great sect, such assignments were usually considered punishment-work.
However, like many specialized tasks that are poorly regarded, the work itself required diligence and skill. So many people lived in Yan’an that the number who died of old age every day could not be counted on one hand, and the city had multiple graveyards and ancillary record offices. There was an incredible amount of information to be kept track of if one was to notice patterns that were out of the ordinary.
The results of the juniors’ investigations were as Jin Ling reported to his father: the city was in a state of panic and fear. Offerings at the temples were at an all-time high. Food was being hoarded away. But despite the terrible miasma of fear settling over the city, there did not appear to be anything concrete. The records they obtained did not show an unusual increase in the death rates for a city the size of Yan’an, and there were no verifiable reports of anyone actually being attacked, let alone wounded by the monster. The missing persons reports were, likewise, indistinguishable from the background noise of such a major metropolis.
(“This is why it’s easier to night-hunt in villages,” Luo Qiuyun grumbled, and Jin Ling had been forced to admit that she had a point. When one person disappeared in a small village, at least people noticed that they were gone.)
His father heard them out with his usual equanimity, and then nodded. “We will observe tomorrow from the wall.”
This did not earn him any favour with either Bai-zongzhu or the gathered civic leaders. “Jin-zongzhu, surely this matter is too urgent!” protested the city governor. “Our people are terrified, we cannot afford to wait!” His voice was swiftly joined by all the others. From their perspective they had already been waiting, while the Bai sect sent for aid and then returned, and then again all day while Jin-zongzhu sipped tea and said nearly nothing at all. They had not dared protest before, not when they were supplicants before the Jin, and especially not to Jin-zongzhu himself, having found him to be a cold and imperious man, whose youthful countenance seemed to cover an ageless wisdom. (Jin Zixuan had found that saying nothing at all was an excellent way to cultivate such an appearance, particularly when faced with the antics of his offspring.) But confronted with yet further delay, when each dawn brought the possibility of a new terror—no, this they could not stand.
Unfortunately for them, their protests fell entirely upon deaf ears. Jin Zixuan had had a long day of being gabbled at and would not be swayed. At last Jin Ling had had enough, and snapped, “It hasn’t even killed anyone yet! What are you all so scared of, crying like this? Aren’t you grown men?”
Jin Zixuan did not close his eyes, but he did perhaps gain yet another year in apparent wisdom. “A-Ling,” he said, and this time there was a deeper remonstrance in his tone. He stood, and his golden robes gleamed with a spark of qi, lending him further hauteur and making the protests of the civic officials dry up in their throats. “We will retire now.”
In the morning, they all were up at dawn. The sightings had been reported around half a shichen from then, and Jin Ling’s father had insisted on arriving early. This was much to the dismay of the young cultivators, who had all snuck out to enjoy the city instead of staying in their assigned rooms and meditating, loftily apart from the world. As the city was under curfew they hadn’t had too much luck getting into trouble, but wandering the darkened streets had been diverting nonetheless. Their seniors, who knew exactly what they’d been doing, showed no mercy in rousting them out of bed.
Waiting was not something that Jin Ling was good at in general, but he could make an exception when it came to night-hunting. There was something particularly ominous about the way that the fog covered everything, from the ground all the way up to the top of the extremely useless wall. The wall had not impressed any of the juniors the day previous, being in poor condition in general, and now with the thick fog all about them it wasn’t even useful as a place to watch from, for nothing could be seen. It was built of wood, and went only part of the way around the city, serving mainly as a way to control mercantile traffic and tariffs and—perhaps more importantly in certain minds—to distinguish the city-dwellers from the farmers who lived right on the other side. Any mediocre cultivator could have simply jumped over it.
“So... Xiao-jiu tore the wall down?” Jin Ling asked, barely stifling a yawn. It didn’t seem like much of an accomplishment. The way that everybody had gone on about it yesterday, it had been some terrifying feat, but Jin Ling was pretty sure he could have torn through this wall with a good enough sword glare. One of Wei Wuxian’s more dangerous talismans, the ones that he said he wasn’t supposed to lend to Jin Ling, certainly would have made short work of it.
His father shook his head. “That was Zewu-jun.”
“Oh.” Jin Ling frowned. “Then why does everyone think it was Xiao-jiu?”
“Wei Wuxian broke through the wall in several places, to disrupt its protections, so that Zewu-jun could collapse it.”
“It wasn’t wood back then, Jin-gongzi,” said Bai-zongzhu. Despite the coolness of the morning, he was sweating. “The whole thing was made of stone and thirty feet high. The Wens here had carved arrays into the outer face that turned anyone who came close to ash.” He spat over the edge of the wall, and then immediately gave a fearful look to the fog.
“It was the best defence put up by any city save Nevernight itself,” Jin Zixuan observed quietly.
“Huh.” Jin Ling looked over the edge of the wall, and then stepped back to the edge of the rickety wall-walk and looked at it from the other side, too. There were stone foundations. “Why didn’t they ever rebuild it? If it was so great, they should have some pride in their city!”
Bai-zongzhu scoffed. “Pride? Why should they be proud? It was folly. They poured gold and sweat and blood into it. It stood for decades and then the Sunshot Alliance dismantled it in less than a day. It was a lesson. Mediocre people must give way before someone who has cultivated and improved themselves; this is the proper way of the world. A wall won’t change that. And even the righteous must guard themselves against a power like the Yiling Patriarch.”
Jin Ling bristled. He quite liked his uncle—somewhat against his will, but he did.
“Even the mere proximity to those monsters was enough to make strong men flee,” Bai-zongzhu went on. “There’s nothing that can be done against them! When it comes, you’ll see it for yourself, Jin-gongzi—some things, a righteous cultivator cannot fight.”
“The Wens stood their ground on the wall,” Jin Zixuan said calmly. He glanced at Jin Ling, and then at the seniors and juniors he’d brought with him, who were hanging on this conversation while trying desperately to not look like that was what they were doing. “Disciples of Lanling Jin will do no less. A cultivator who cannot withstand fear is a cultivator who is vulnerable to any ghost or demon. You will look your fear in the face, and you will not flee from it.”
“If they’d fled, they wouldn’t have been on top of the wall when it collapsed,” Bai-zongzhu muttered, but he muttered it quietly enough that only Jin Zixuan heard, and he elected to ignore it.
The waiting dragged out. The fog became brighter as the sun reached above the horizon, but it was slow to burn away. Behind them, the sounds of the city carried up, all the people there going about their morning business. The locals and older cultivators could tell how subdued it was compared to what was normal for a city this size. The younger Jin cultivators had no such experience, but they could tell that the silence from the other side of the wall was unnatural. There were fields and villages out there, and the farmers ought to have been out working in them.
Something cold trickled down along their spines.
Gradually, it became harder to hear the sounds of the city behind them. By the time Jin Ling noticed, it was all muffled, as if the fog was more than mere mist. He blinked and found that he was sweating as hard as Bai-zongzhu had been earlier. There was something scratching at his nerves and he felt tense and on-edge. All of the disciples looked at each other and saw that the others felt the same way. Everything felt wrong—off a few degrees from normal.
“Steady, all of you,” said Jin Zixuan, his voice cutting through the racing sense of wrongness. With every appearance of calm and lack of concern, he put one hand on Jin Ling’s shoulder. It was not solely for his son’s benefit. It had been twenty years since he’d felt this wrongness, and he’d refused to show any sign of it even then, but that didn’t mean he was happy to feel it again now.
Out in the mist, something moved, and Bai-zongzhu took a gasping step backwards. Jin Zixuan’s other hand shot out and grabbed his arm just before the minor sect leader could fall off the wall-walk.
“Look at it,” Jin Zixuan demanded of all of them. “How will you fight something if you can’t look at it?”
Dull white bone moved. Sinew stretched, tore, and reformed. There was a high whining in all their ears, now, like fingernails scraping over slate. The thing looming out of the mist was a wound in the world, and if it reached them, it would pull them in, and pull them apart.
Multi-jointed limbs bent, lifted, and extended. The wound moved forward. Jin Ling could not tell how far away it was. His entire body wanted to run, run, run, but he refused to shut his eyes—he was a disciple of Lanling Jin, he would not shame his father—
Between one moment and the next, the monster vanished. Jin Ling was dead certain that he hadn’t blinked at all. His eyes were very dry from how wide they’d been.
Bai-zongzhu drew in a great gasping breath of air, which sounded a little like a sob. Jin Chan and Fu Ling had been clutching at each other, and now they collapsed down on the wall walk. Luo Qiuyun hugged her arms to her chest, shaking. The seniors were doing their best not to look like they were affected at all, and failing very badly; but their juniors didn’t notice.
Jin Zixuan was preoccupied with his own troubles. He heaved an aggrieved sigh.
“I suppose,” he said, resigned to his fate, “that we will need to go speak to your little uncles after all.”
Jin Ling had two little uncles: his Xiao-jiu and his Xiao-shu. They both lived in the Unclean Realm. His Xiao-jiu, of course, lived there because he was married to Chifeng-zun, who was the Nie sect leader. His Xiao-shu lived there because he was Xiao-jiu’s personal disciple.
When Jin Ling had been younger, Mo Xuanyu had lived in Jinlin Tai. Jin Ling, wrapped up in his own childish concerns, had never paid him that much attention, but sometimes he’d play with Jin Ling, which was cool. He always spoke very quietly and walked around with his shoulders hunched up. Then when Jin Ling was eight, his Xiao-shu had gone off to live with the Nie, and consequently gotten a lot weirder, as could only be expected. In Jin Ling’s opinion, the Nie were definitely the weird side of the family. These days, whenever Jin Ling’s little uncles showed up on night-hunts, Xiao-shu was always wearing a weird mask that covered his whole face, or else makeup so thick that it might as well have been a theatre mask, and his clothing was downright bizarre. Sometimes he even wore women’s clothing instead! But nobody ever dared say anything, because he only ever left the Unclean Realm with Xiao-jiu, and Xiao-jiu was one of the Three Northern Gentlemen—Chifeng-zun, Hanguang-jun, and Yiling-laozu. No one dared cross them.
In Jin Ling’s mind this had always been very silly. Obviously, Chifeng-zun was ferocious and intimidating, and Hanguang-jun was imperious and intimidating, at least to strangers. But Xiao-jiu was none of these things. He was always smiling and would try to be friendly to anyone he met. In fact, he was without doubt the most laid-back person that Jin Ling knew. Sure, there were a lot of stories about things that he’d done decades ago, but Jin Ling had received a thorough education in how much rumours and stories could be wrong. None of the things he’d seen or heard with his own eyes and ears supported such tales. Xiao-jiu had played children’s games with him in the halls of Jinlin Tai when he’d been little, and pouted enormously when he’d lost. Jin Ling had seen him lose arguments with donkeys (plural!), fall off a roof because he forgot where he was walking, cake his face with Xiao-shu’s makeup because he was bored on a night-hunt, and swoon disgustingly all over his husbands so that they had to catch him before he fell in a mud puddle. Xiao-jiu simply had too little dignity to be terrifying!
As they flew towards the Unclean Realm, Jin Ling found himself very soberly reconsidering this viewpoint.
Jin Ling’s father was an extraordinarily strong cultivator, but the rest of them, while considered gifted within their own generation, were not all so powerful. This meant that they ended up stopping to eat and rest in the middle of Shanxi, in a town that was just large enough to have a decent inn. After flying for the better part of the morning and afternoon the juniors were tired, but still restless, and decided to go on a walk around the town after dinner. Jin Ling stayed behind.
“Zongzhu,” one of the seniors said after they’d all been nursing their drinks for a while. “Is it the work of the Yiling Patriarch?”
“My Xiao-jiu wouldn’t curse a city!” Jin Ling immediately flared up, sincerely offended. His Xiao-jiu’s terrible reputation just wasn’t fair, and this senior ought to know it! Jin Ling might not know what was going on, or why his father thought that it was Xiao-jiu’s fault, but—surely it was not like that!
The two senior disciples on this trip were Jin Ziwan and Jin Ziman. Neither of them had fought in the Sunshot Campaign, being just slightly too young. Other sects had put disciples younger than they to work—in the war camps, if not on the battlefield itself—but the Jin had avoided doing so, and consequently, neither had experienced the horror of those battlefields. But they each had heard many stories, and much more closely after the war than Jin Ling had, from people far less inclined to be kind about Jiang Yanli’s beloved younger brother. They were also old enough to remember the volcano.
Therefore, they both looked at Jin Ling with some skepticism.
Jin Zixuan did not answer the question directly. Instead he said, after a pause, “It did not break the wall.”
The seniors and Jin Ling fell silent for a moment to think this through. Then Jin Ziman said, “A goat in a tiger’s skin.”
“The Yiling Patriarch,” said Jin Zixuan, “is not a goat.” He paused, then, almost as if he had more to say—perhaps to add a qualifier—but in the end kept any further thoughts to himself.