Elio’s Notes: The title riffs on a much-memed line from Ruyi’s Royal Love in the Palace: “it’s just that bird’s nest is a precious ingredient.” Here, “bird’s nest” has been swapped out for “meteoric iron.”
Wei Fu obligingly produced a sinister cackle. “It’s a secret, is it? Then go tell my fire striker!”
“…”
As the old saying went, the soft feared the hard, the hard feared the ruthless, and the ruthless feared the reckless. Yugong Zhaoye’s advice had struck directly at Xie Youlan’s weak point as well. Watching that tiny flame tremble dangerously beside the silk finally burned away the last of his reason.
“Stop!”
Wei Fu immediately replied, “Please, go ahead.”
Through gritted teeth, Xie Youlan said, “Have you never wondered why meteoric iron is so rare that even a thousand gold can hardly buy it, yet Jiang—your mother could bring a meteoric-iron short sword as part of her dowry? What sort of family did she come from? What sort of background did she have?”
Wei Fu corrected him, “Our mother.”
Xie Youlan choked.
He forcibly swallowed a whole cartload of cutting remarks and adopted the attitude of someone refusing to waste words on a fool.
“The earliest verifiable ancestor of the Jiang family can be traced back three hundred years, to Jiang Chi, Director of the Imperial Academy during the reign of Emperor Xianzong of the Ning dynasty. He was acquainted with Wang Guhe, a famous mystic of the time.”
“According to the Strange Records of Kaiyun, Wang Guhe was born with extraordinary sight. He could observe celestial phenomena above and examine the lay of the land below. Digging wherever he indicated would often uncover rare treasures. He was also skilled in reading faces and could supposedly determine a person’s lifespan. At the age of one hundred and one, he suddenly burned several scrolls from his collection. A white crane flew from the western heavens, and he mounted it and ascended to immortality.”
“Jiang Chi had borrowed one scroll from him. Before he could return it, Wang Guhe ascended. The scroll described methods for reading qi and locating mineral veins, and it also contained an Earth Mirror Map marking the locations of many treasures.”
“You’re saying this piece of silk is the legendary Earth Mirror Map?” Wei Fu scanned Xie Youlan from head to toe with suspicion, then asked pityingly, “Brother Youlan, don’t tell me you also believe Chang’e lives on the moon?”
Xie Youlan answered frostily, “If you don’t want me to send you up there to meet Chang’e yourself, shut up and listen.”
Wei Fu immediately turned toward Yugong Zhaoye. “Your Highness, look at him.”
Yugong Zhaoye mercilessly repeated himself. “Why provoke him for no reason? Just pretend a dog bit you. Don’t lower yourself to his level.”
Everyone: “…”
“Rumors should not be believed blindly, but neither should they be dismissed outright.” Xie Youlan shot Wei Fu a glare and continued, “Whether or not Wang Guhe truly possessed supernatural abilities, the Jiang family passed down the craft of mineral prospecting for three hundred years beginning with Jiang Chi. In earlier generations, some served the imperial court as mineral surveyors and enjoyed considerable prestige. Later, during an age of warfare, the family migrated east to escape the fighting. By our maternal grandfather’s generation, they made their living forging blades and swords. They still carried some reputation in the jianghu under the name Qieyu Villa, but in truth they had already become little more than craftsmen.”
“Yet forging weapons and smelting metal are naturally inseparable from mineral deposits. The blades and swords produced by Qieyu Villa were especially hard and sharp because they used materials prepared according to secret formulas. And although our maternal grandfather never spoke of the family’s history or inheritance, he loved collecting unusual ores and stones.”
His gaze settled upon the iron box in Wei Fu’s hands.
“According to legend, after centuries of accumulation and additions by generation after generation, the Jiang family passed down an Earth Mirror Map containing mineral deposits across the Nine Provinces. My father went to such lengths to marry into the Jiang family because of that map.”
Wei Fu and Yugong Zhaoye, who until then had listened as though enjoying a storyteller’s tale, finally changed expressions.
Xie Youlan had said the Nine Provinces.
That meant not the territory of one country, not a few mountains and rivers, but the entire realm and all its kingdoms.
If such a map truly existed, then even if most of the mineral deposits recorded upon it had already been discovered and excavated, it would remain a terrifying treasure beyond price. The moment news of its existence spread, every emperor under heaven could give up on sleeping peacefully.
For once, Yugong Zhaoye looked slightly dazed.
“Maybe we really should burn it. It would save everyone a lot of trouble…”
Terrified that his soft-eared younger brother might actually listen, Xie Youlan immediately turned on Yugong Zhaoye in fury.
“Can you show a little ambition?! Is Longsha somehow not short of money?!”
Wei Fu finally put away his deliberate nonsense and considered matters seriously. “Something still doesn’t add up. Forget whether the map is real for the moment. Given your father’s power as Palace Master of Beizhu Palace, if he wanted the Earth Mirror Map, wouldn’t simply taking it by force have been faster? Why go through something as circuitous as marriage?”
“The Earth Mirror Map existed only in ancient records. My father himself never knew whether such a thing truly existed,” Xie Youlan said. “The Jiang family understood perfectly well that possessing treasure invites disaster, so they guarded the secret extremely carefully. Whenever my father tried probing for information, our maternal grandfather blocked him.”
“He secretly searched Qieyu Villa from top to bottom and found nothing, yet still refused to give up. Even if he couldn’t find the Earth Mirror Map, Mother’s photographic memory alone was something he would never willingly let slip away.” Xie Youlan’s voice carried undisguised mockery. “Half testing, half exploiting her. Maybe there was a little true affection mixed in with the false. Who knows?”
“So when our mother finally parted ways with the old Palace Master Xie, was it actually because she saw through his ambitions?”
Xie Youlan said, “Mother’s true dowry probably wasn’t the meteoric-iron sword. It was the Earth Mirror Map.”
He tapped his temple.
“If you write something on paper, thieves can steal it. If you store it in your head, no one can find it.”
“Even when they were most deeply in love, she never revealed a single word to my father. The old bastard probably thought she was an ignorant sheltered woman and never suspected the map was inside her head. He showed his true face too quickly.”
Wei Fu asked, “Then how do you know Mother had the Earth Mirror Map?”
“After she left, the old man went mad chasing her like someone had chopped off his tail. At first I thought it was wounded pride. But over the years, his new lovers and old lovers came and went. Forget fidelity—the place was practically a den of debauchery. Yet whenever Mother was mentioned, he still became obsessed. It stopped making sense.”
“Before he died, I asked why he still couldn’t let go of his hatred. Naturally, he refused to admit he had ever done anything wrong. He only said Mother was terrible and had stolen a secret manual from Beizhu Palace. I asked what manual could possibly matter more than the Lianshan Chuyun Art. He hemmed and hawed, then suddenly changed his story and said it wasn’t a manual at all, but the greatest treasure under heaven—the Earth Mirror Map.”
“No wonder you followed us thousands of li and personally came knocking at the door.” Wei Fu said, “But your father never had actual proof that the Earth Mirror Map existed. Why are you so certain the thing Mother left me is the map? Couldn’t this simply be a letter?”
The word idiot was practically stamped across Xie Youlan’s gaze.
“You think she survived after being captured by Yanyuan and the Ten Aspects Sect because of her mediocre medical knowledge?”
“Yilin had existed for a hundred years without large-scale mining at Tianxuan Mountain. Why were the Yanyuan people able to begin excavating immediately after conquering it?”
His thin lips were like blades, every word cold and sharp.
“She was able to attach herself to Nayan Zhun and have him personally protect her because she traded him the mineral deposits of Tianxuan Mountain.”
A chill surged uncontrollably through Yugong Zhaoye, like the shadow of a bamboo-pit viper slowly emerging across an apparently harmless stretch of green grass.
Those events had happened more than ten years ago and had been unbearably painful. Jiang Fengxun had skimmed vaguely over many details while telling her story. Yugong Zhaoye had assumed she simply did not wish to revisit those experiences and had never examined the omissions too carefully.
And when he later repeated her story to Wei Fu, Wei Fu had been so devastated that careful analysis was impossible. The fact that he had remained conscious at all was nearly miraculous.
An outsider could scarcely hear Jiang Fengxun’s blood-soaked history without grieving for her. Yet as Xie Youlan quietly watched his white-haired mother tell those stories, one of them had been carefully patching the holes in her lie while the other calmly searched for weaknesses in it.
Whether a mother and son behaving this way toward one another was something to celebrate or mourn was difficult to say.
Either way, Xie Jing probably could not have outmaneuvered the two of them together.
Yugong Zhaoye had known Xie Youlan for many years and had even been deceived by him once. He had originally held a strong prejudice against the man. Yet after traveling together from Bihan City to Yun Lake, he had almost begun to believe that the new Palace Master of Beizhu Palace truly was one of those people who spoke harshly while hiding a soft heart.
Wei Fu stared at Xie Youlan in shock. “So you already started suspecting her back then?”
“Of course.” Xie Youlan sneered. “Inside the cave, right in front of me, she told you about the wine beneath the tree so she could hand the ring over to you openly and make sure you obtained whatever was hidden in this box. Did she really think that would fool me?”
“If it were nothing valuable, why hide it instead of simply saying what it was? She was biased toward you. She was afraid I would steal it, so she put on that performance about caring for me!”
Before his words had even finished, Xie Youlan snapped out his long whip.
It shrieked through the air toward the iron box in Wei Fu’s hands. Yugong Zhaoye immediately raised his blade to intercept it, but the flexible whip moved unpredictably. Its true target was Wei Fu’s fire striker. The tip darted forward like a snake and extinguished the trembling flame in a single strike.
“Careful!”
Yugong Zhaoye swept the whip away with his blade. Xie Youlan’s wrist flicked, sending a wave through the length of the whip before it snapped back from an impossible angle and wrapped tightly around the blade.
Fine steel wire had been woven into the whip. The blade could not cut through it.
Xie Youlan forcibly dragged Yugong Zhaoye away from Wei Fu and shouted, “Take him!”
The black-clad men surged forward with their sabers.
Instead of turning around to protect Wei Fu, Yugong Zhaoye used the pull of the whip to launch himself directly toward Xie Youlan. His long blade twisted, winding the whip around it as though reeling in a kite string. In the blink of an eye he appeared before Xie Youlan like a ghost, sweeping the heavy scabbard in his left hand toward Xie Youlan’s wrist.
The scabbard had no edge, but its weight alone would shatter bone if it struck cleanly. Xie Youlan was forced to release the whip and retract his arm. He gave a cold snort, raised his left palm against the scabbard, and drove an elbow toward Yugong Zhaoye’s chest.
“Yugong Zhaoye, no matter how capable you are, at best you can fight me to a draw. That idiot brother of mine can’t even truss a chicken. You’ve already lost—”
“Not necessarily.”
Yugong Zhaoye suddenly released the long blade in his right hand. His fingers closed around the end of the scabbard, and with one sharp pull, cold light flashed.
A second, shorter blade had been hidden inside.
It swept past the tip of Xie Youlan’s nose.
“Don’t speak with so much certainty.”
Yugong Zhaoye deliberately emphasized the next words.
“Palace Master Xie, you’re the one surrounded now.”
Xie Youlan: “…”
Has this man gone insane?
“Urgh!”
“Ah!”
“Aow!”
Wherever the white ribbon of sword light passed, cries of pain immediately followed. The swordwork was utterly unadorned yet refined to its essence—one opponent, one strike, no wasted movement. The courtyard filled with the clatter of weapons hitting the ground.
“Great hero…”
The moment Wei Fu saw that back, he felt an inexplicable sense of familiarity and security. Even watching the swordsman cut people down like melons and vegetables somehow seemed reassuring. Then the man turned, revealing a pair of slightly drooping eyes distinctive enough to overwhelm both his age and the rest of his features.
Wei Fu immediately understood where that feeling had come from.
The swordsman in green sheathed his sword and turned toward the completely unharmed yet dumbfounded Wei Fu, inclining his head in greeting.
“Young Master Wei. We meet again.”