Chapter Text
Liu Chan pointed his sword at the man at the end of the trail of demonic qi he’d followed here. “You, whores, get away from him!”
There was some screaming and fleeing going on, but three of the whores were still standing too close to his prey. Two girl ones were cowering behind a boy one, and the boy one was clutching the man’s sleeve. Did they not understand there was about to be a fight?
Liu Chan waved his sword to indicate the direction they should go. “Even though you live immoral lives, you don’t deserve to die, so move!”
“Un-fucking-believable.” The boy one curled his lip at Liu Chan, and then he and the demonic energy source — vanished.
Wait! No, there was a faint trail out the back door now, though it was attenuated as if smeared at great speed. Liu Chan brightened at the prospect of a fight that might be slightly more interesting than he’d expected, and chased at his own fastest run.
The man and boy were waiting for him just outside the sprawl of hovels masquerading as a village. The man had a sword and was trying to look sober. The boy was pulling the straps of a backpack on over his once-fine robe. Liu Chan pointed his sword at the man again, this time charging it with qi, ready to fire off a glare. “Let the whore go and fight me like a man.”
The boy looked Liu Chan calmly in the eyes. “If you call me a whore one more time, it won’t be Shifu you have to fight.” Then he turned with a wave over his shoulder. “Whoever wins can catch up, I guess.”
“Get back here, boy!”
As the man yelled foul things after the boy, Liu Chan struggled with a moment of embarrassment and won. So what if he’d mistaken this man’s apprentice for a whore. He was wearing mended secondhand silk and, and being pretty, in a brothel! What was a righteous person to think? And besides, if he was the apprentice of a man who gave off such strong resentful energy, he was surely an immoral person.
Ethical dilemma resolved, Liu Chan attacked.
.
Orochimaru looped around the edge of the village, cutting through someone’s apple grove and hopping a chicken run fence, to approach the brothel from a different direction. If locals were on their way to join that brawl, he didn’t want to be seen and dragged into it.
The brothel was still bustling, surprisingly enough. Or maybe it wasn’t so surprising, in this world. Cultivator fights were probably not quite as rough on bystanders as shinobi fights, what with the lack of elemental jutsu and summon animals being slung around. Not so many thrown weapons either. Hardly any poison gas clouds at all. Rather than fleeing a possible future crater, villagers were crowding in to gossip about the best drama they’d seen in years.
Better that than crowding the fight itself, he supposed.
The girl he’d been sitting with on her break spotted him and rushed over to look him up and down for damage. “What happened?” She wasn’t the only one looking to him for an answer.
“They started fighting,” he answered simply. “I came back to pay for the door.”
“What? Why? You’re not the one who broke it!”
“Xiao Hong, be quiet,” the madam snapped. “Someone has to pay for it.”
“I’ll get the rude kid to pay me back if he lives,” Orochimaru shrugged. Ignoring the madam’s outstretched palm, he looked around for sawdust covered clothes; “Is the carpenter here? We may as well get the new door done as soon as possible, right?”
The carpenter was not there, so someone went to get him. Xiao Hong tugged Orochimaru’s sleeve again. “Did you just run away and leave your master? Not that I blame you! But won’t he beat you for it?”
The other girl, the one who’d been pouring wine (and had had the good sense to get her coin up front with each jug Wu Yanzi bought), joined them then. “Only if he wins. That boy was wearing a Cang Qiong Sect uniform. Why did he attack your master?”
“Because Shifu is a terrible person,” Orochimaru admitted easily.
“Then why don’t you leave?”
“Why don’t you?”
“Ah,” they both said, wine girl with her nose wrinkled in disgust and Xiao Hong sadly. Xiao Hong added, “Let’s pray your master loses. Then you’ll be free. Maybe you can get a job here! As a cook, I mean, or, or, chopping wood, not…”
Orochimaru patted her shoulder absently. He was thinking about how the rude kid didn’t have any strategy at all, but simply burst in yelling and waving his sword. “Shifu won’t lose, though,” he said, and as he said it he realized that was an unacceptable outcome. “It would be best if he lost. But he won’t.”
Because when he won, Wu Yanze was going to drag his unconscious or crippled prey into the woods and torture him to death, Cang Qiong disciple or not. There would be no dissuading him. What about all these witnesses? ‘Oh, we’ll just kill everyone in town and burn the place down.’ Right? What a terrible idea! Even if no one escaped, that kind of thing would get Imperial troops mobilized, not to mention fuck knows how many furious sect cultivators hunting the murderer of their lost disciple, who — for all they knew — had filed a detailed agenda before setting out.
No. The game was up. Wu Yanze was now officially more trouble than he was worth. The only question was whether to run (leaving the village to its sad fate) or finish off Wu Yanze himself.
Looking at Xiao Hong’s worried face, he found himself rather more biased on the topic of bystander survival than in his last life.
He sighed. “I’d better go help that rude kid. Does anyone have a sword I can borrow?”