Return Inn was already burning.
Every time a rafter gave way, sparks surged into the night sky. In fifteen years, countless banners had changed hands, but the signboard that had belonged to no sect even at the end still hung from the eaves, half-charred.
Ryu Dan stood beneath it. Blood would not stop flowing from the spear wound in his left side, and his right knee had long since gone numb. His body was moments from death, yet his hands still wanted to wipe down a table out of habit.
Each of the inn’s seven guest rooms held one of the strongest—and least compatible—guests under heaven.
“We’re out of time.”
Baek Mugyeol, Sword Saint of the Azure Peak Sect, pressed his palm to the star carved into the floor. Blood and ash had stained his white robes a dark, rusty red. “Inn boy. When you return, come to Azure Peak first. We need to settle the chain of command.”
From the room opposite his, Poison Sovereign Tang Soryeong gave a derisive snort.
“If you want to lose all over again, do exactly that. The moment you arrive, gag that man.”
“Your poison stalled the western front for three days.”
“And your orders made sure there was no western front three days later.”
Even on the verge of death, guests remained guests.
Ryu bowed to them, the same bow he had given the last time he carried in their wine.
“Please both return to your rooms and be quiet. The other guests need to concentrate on dying.”
Someone laughed. A cough followed, and then the wet sound of blood.
The seven had chosen Ryu because they did not trust one another. It was not a particularly glorious reason. But Ryu had never switched their sealed letters, never asked a starving soldier which sect owned the ladle, and whenever he received two mutually exclusive orders, he had somehow turned them into food, shelter, roads, and a night’s sleep.
Seol Muyeon placed her hand on the last star.
“The Returning Formation sends only one person. Someone unmarked. Someone anchored to the same place in past and future.”
“That is the thirteenth time you’ve explained it.”
“It might be wrong the fourteenth.”
She did not smile.
Starlight linked the seven guest rooms. Light rose from the dantians of the seven masters. The light that burned human lives for fuel was astonishingly quiet.
Ryu looked beyond the collapsed counter to the place where Ma Yeongsun had always sat. She had died nine years ago with the inn’s ring of keys still clenched in her hand.
Could he prevent her death this time?
Before the thought had finished, the world folded inward.
Seven heartbeats sounded at once.
Then a brass washbasin fell.
Clang!
Ryu opened his eyes.
His twenty-year-old body rolled off the bed by reflex. There was no blood, no spear wound. His knee worked, and his palms bore only the calluses earned from years of inn work. Early morning showed beyond the window. The smells of burning firewood and thin rice porridge drifted in from outside, along with a chicken in the rear yard loudly accusing the world of wrongdoing.
The door flew open.
“You drop one washbasin and roll around like a dead man?”
Ma Yeongsun stood in the doorway.
Forty-three years old. Her back was straight, and her eyes found lies and unpaid tabs with equal speed. Most important of all, she stood on two sound legs.
Ryu drew a breath. His throat hurt.
“Ma.”
“What?”
“You’re alive.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“At this hour, that sounds a great deal like you’re after my property.”
Ryu almost started crying when he laughed. He hurriedly picked up the basin instead. His hands shook so badly he nearly dropped it twice more.
Then he heard a door open inside his head.
Return Inn stood there at night. Snow and ash mingled beyond its windows. Of the seven guest-room doors, the first stood wide open, and a blood-soaked Baek Mugyeol waited on the threshold.
*We’re late. The Black Tooth Gang must already be here.*
Ryu froze with the basin in his hands.
*So you survived.*
*I died.*
*Your voice sounds remarkably healthy for a dead man.*
Baek looked down at his hands. His fingertips were faint, but his expression was as severe as it had ever been in life.
*A spiritual afterimage? Seol Muyeon concealed another part of the explanation.*
A rough shout erupted from the inn’s front gate.
“Ma Yeongsun! You agreed to be out before sunrise!”
Cold gripped Ryu’s chest.
He remembered this day. The Black Tooth Gang had arrived with a forged lien and seized the storage yard. In the scuffle, a shelf had toppled. Ma Yeongsun had dodged a flying wine jar only to have her right knee crushed. She survived, but walked with a limp for the rest of her life.
Ryu ran into the front courtyard. Six men in black vests were coming through the gate. Oh Gak led them. In the failed future, that face had choked on poison at the threshold of the inn. Now he was thirty-one, his chin raised in practiced swagger, though the swelling around his left eye made him look as if someone had beaten him through the night.
Oh Gak unfolded a sheet of paper.
“Eighty taels in principal, forty in overdue interest. As of today, the storehouse and eastern yard belong to the Black Tooth Gang.”
Ma pushed past Ryu.
“I borrowed thirty and repaid twenty-four. Did someone stab the arithmetic in your ledger?”
“It has a seal, doesn’t it? Look at the seal.”
At a glance, the document looked genuine. It even carried the red stamp of a clerk at the magistrate’s office. The Ryu of this day had fallen silent before that stamp. He had possessed neither the power to prove it false nor the strength to buy time.
This time, he looked not at the paper but at Oh Gak’s hand: the calluses on his index and middle fingers, the thumb pressing against his scabbard, the heels lifted half an inch off the ground.
*That is the framework of Azure Peak’s outer-school Three Powers Sword. Stolen and learned abominably, but recognizable.*
Baek’s voice rang coldly through his mind.
Ryu pointed to the ledger.
“If you acquired the lien, you should also have the original creditor’s signature. Where is that page?”
Oh Gak’s eyes flicked to his right hip. Only for half a beat.
“Since when does an inn boy know the law?”
“I’ve spent twelve years dealing with customers who buy on credit. The law is easier.”
Laughter spread through the onlookers.
Oh Gak’s ears reddened. He was the sort of man who looked to a blade for any authority his words failed to win. Ryu remembered that, too.
At that moment, the shelf beneath the eaves began to tilt.
One of the younger gang members had kicked a support post while backing away. Brass dishes slid across the shelf. The heaviest wine jar tipped toward Ma Yeongsun’s knee.
Ryu moved before thought caught up with him.
He wedged a serving tray beneath the jar at an angle. Its weight crushed down against his arms. If he tried to catch it outright, his wrists would break. Instead he turned at the waist and flowed one step to the side, the same way he had saved falling soup bowls for twelve years. The wine jar rolled along the tray and shattered on an empty straw mat.
The smell of liquor burst through the courtyard.
Ma was unhurt.
That one fact weighed more than fifteen years of memory.
“My wine,” she said.
Ryu swallowed a ragged breath.
“Could you worry about the person first?”
“The person didn’t break. The wine jar did.”
She was alive. Unmistakably Ma Yeongsun.
Oh Gak drew his saber.
“This was all a trick to steal our ledger!”
*Take his head,* Baek said.
*He comes back to destroy the evidence. First cut, the wrist. Second, the carotid.*
Ryu looked away from Oh Gak’s throat.
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?” Oh Gak snarled.
“My guest. He keeps ordering the expensive options.”
Oh Gak charged.
Something unfamiliar pulsed inside Ryu: a core left behind when seven masters died. It contained an unfathomable understanding of the sword, but his twenty-year-old dantian did not hold a single thread of internal energy.
*Seven heartbeats. Any longer and your meridians will not endure it.*
The first heartbeat.
Heat shot from Ryu’s dantian to his fingertips. It was not a vast river, but a stream no thicker than a needle. The path it followed, however, was flawless.
Ryu struck the back of the saber with the edge of his tray. The opening path of Oh Gak’s Three Powers Sword shifted half an inch off course.
Second.
He kicked an empty bowl into the air. It struck the inside of Oh Gak’s elbow, loosening his grip.
Third.
Ryu dropped low and raised the tray vertically. A club wielded by the next man slammed into it. Rather than pushing back, Ryu let the impact slide sideways and fed it into a third attacker’s shin.
“What kind of inn boy—”
Fourth.
Oh Gak changed his stance at once. His sword art might have been stolen, but he was still a man who had survived real fights. The tip of his saber went for Ryu’s shoulder.
*Cut his left foot and finish it.*
Instead, Ryu yanked the cloth off a nearby table. Three teacups rose into the air. The saber point tangled in the cloth, and the cups struck Oh Gak and two of his men on the forehead, one after another.
Fifth.
The veins in Ryu’s right hand swelled. His fingertips went numb.
Sixth.
He slipped beneath Oh Gak’s arm and turned the tray upright. Its flat face smashed up into the man’s chin. Oh Gak lifted off his feet and crashed into the courtyard.
Seventh.
Ryu caught the falling saber on the top of his foot and flicked it up with the hilt turned skyward. He caught it in his left hand, then set the point not against Oh Gak’s throat but against his right hip.
He pierced the bundle of papers hidden inside the scabbard and dragged it free.
The original creditor’s ledger.
The heartbeat ended. So did the borrowed perfection.
Ryu’s right hand shook uncontrollably. He let the saber fall. Broken bowls and groaning Black Tooth men covered the courtyard. No one was dead.
After a silence, Baek spoke.
*Explain why you spared them.*
*Ledgers cannot read. People can.*
Ryu crouched in front of Oh Gak.
“Who made this?”
Oh Gak started to spit blood at him, then noticed Ma standing behind Ryu with an abacus in her hand. Somehow, she looked more frightening than a sword.
“Deputy Leader Jang. At the eastern warehouse.”
“What are you transporting?”
Oh Gak’s mouth snapped shut. Fear displaced the swagger on his face. Whoever stood above him frightened him more than his own gang did.
Ma snatched the ledger and flipped through it.
“It’s forged, all right. The paper came from the magistrate’s office, but the ink still smells fresh.”
“Keep it, Ma. They’ll come looking for it.”
“Do I need your permission to keep the ledger for my own inn?”
She tucked it inside her robe and surveyed the fallen men.
“One table, one wine jar, four bowls, three teacups. You each pay your own medical expenses. Ryu, throw them out.”
“We need Oh Gak’s testimony.”
“Can he pay a deposit?”
Caught off guard, Oh Gak shook his head.
“Then throw him out. This inn will go bankrupt if we start lodging penniless enemies.”
The Black Tooth men dragged their injured companions away. Ryu did not pursue them. On the first version of this day, he would have wanted to follow them straight to the eastern warehouse. But the moment the ledger entered Ma Yeongsun’s custody, he had already won the victory that mattered most.
Ma caught his trembling right hand.
“What is this?”
“Nerves.”
“When you’re nervous, you break dishes. You do not put six men on the ground.”
She pressed two fingers to his wrist. She knew nothing of medicine, but she had raised him for twelve years. She knew whether his pulse felt normal.
“No knives from today onward. Don’t carry a tray in your right hand, either. And tonight, you will tell me what you’re hiding.”
It was an order. Inside Return Inn, its owner’s orders carried more immediate force than those of a Sword Saint.
Ryu bowed his head without protest.
“Yes.”
He had no idea how to explain what had happened on that final night. Still, he had bought time. He had saved Ma’s knee, the inn, and the evidence.
Then came the sound of someone falling outside the gate.
Ryu turned.
A man in black clung to the threshold. It was Oh Gak, returned from the eastern warehouse after Ma had thrown him out. His face had gone blue-gray, and dark indigo foam seeped between his lips.
He held out one hand. An Azure Peak jade token was embedded in his palm.
“Warehouse... paper three times... bell once....”
Oh Gak collapsed into the courtyard.
Baek’s voice sounded low in Ryu’s mind.
*That token is mine.*
Ryu pressed his fingers to Oh Gak’s neck. The pulse was so faint it seemed ready to snap.
Fifteen years ago, Oh Gak had died on this very spot.
This time, he was still breathing.