2: 2
2.
They dragged me back to my quarters, half invited, half in chains.
Joanna clutched her chest with one hand and directed the disciples through the search with the other, her orders coming fast.
In the space of a blink, everything was picked clean: the night-luminescent pearl on my bed, the imperial-grade green tea set on the white jade table, the thousand-year ginseng from the herb field, the Marrow-Cleansing Pill in the alchemy chamber.
If it could be found, it was carried off.
The disciples withdrew, cradling their treasures, well satisfied. Joanna, though, was so frantic she could have coughed blood.
"Is there really no escaping death for me today?"
"Senior Sister, my life hangs by a thread, and all you can think of is hiding the treasure so you can ascend alone."
"Senior Sister, how can you be so heartless!"
The things in my quarters were precious, true, but not one of them was any ascension treasure.
They stood there staring at the room turned inside out,
and even they had to admit that maybe I really had no such secret treasure. But no one dared say so for certain.
"Or maybe... she just hid it too well?"
"Evelyn Mercer has always acted meek and easy to bully, but who's to say it isn't all an act? She could have planned ahead and moved the treasure somewhere else."
"Exactly. The senior brother of the Sword Sect told me himself. She's a hypocrite through and through!"
The whispers reached me, and all I felt was how wronged I was.
I'm soft-hearted. I've saved my share of ungrateful curs and loved a few faithless men.
That senior brother of the Sword Sect, the one who'd fainted from hunger by the roadside, was one of them. At first I didn't realize who he was and took him for a beggar.
Who knew he was the kind of dog that bites the hand that feeds it? In the end my spirit beast, the Qilin, frightened him off.
Listening to all this, the senior brother's temper flared.
He drove his heel into my knee and forced me down until I knelt.
Then he seized my jaw and demanded, "Speak! Where is the treasure the Immortal Sovereign left behind?"
My eyes filled with tears from the pain.
He gripped so hard I couldn't get a word out. All I could do was shake my head.
And in the very moment his heart softened and his hand loosened,
the Master gave a slight flick of his fingers. A current of spiritual power shot into my body and coursed backward against my meridians.
"Evelyn, I spoiled you too much. That's what made you so blind to your own place."
"A life is at stake. This is no time for your tantrums!"
"If you still won't speak, this spiritual power will tear apart your meridians and let you taste what Joanna suffers!"
My constitution is unusual. Others' spiritual power can wound me, but in the end I absorb it and turn it to my own use.
Still, I'm weak, I fear pain, and by now I was drenched in cold sweat. "Except for my parents' portraits, everything in my quarters has already been hauled away."
"There's nothing, because there's nothing."
"I'm afraid to die, afraid of pain. I don't lie."
The words had barely left me when Joanna's eyes went cold. "So it's the hard way, then."
"Senior Sister Mercer, you think you've hidden it so well? The Immortal Sovereign and the Poison Physician never even liked you. In this whole room there's nothing of theirs but that one portrait. That's why you're so weak, so afraid to die!"
"The Immortal Sovereign must be bitterly disappointed in you. Even if we killed you, nothing would come of it."
She said it with such certainty that the others kept nodding along.
Only I let out a bitter laugh.
It isn't death I fear. It's that they would die.
Dragons breed dragons, phoenixes breed phoenixes.
My father and mother were the finest of their kind, and they bred a monster.
At my birth I devoured my mother's inborn sword-bones, and she had no choice but to turn to poison cultivation instead.
When I practiced the sword I once devoured the sword's spirit by accident, so my father was forced to give up teaching me the blade,
and even the destined swords he gave me were swapped out day after day, always cheap ones.
So most of what my parents sent me came with its aura wiped away, to keep me from swallowing it.
Joanna caught the change on my face, and a smug smile pulled at her lips. "What? Did I hit the mark?"
She lifted her chin. "If the Immortal Sovereign truly cared about you, he'd have come to save you long ago!"
"What if the Immortal Sovereign is watching right now?"
Someone had barely ventured the words, weak and hesitant, before the senior brother shot them a savage glare.
"Joanna is clever. She's never once been wrong."
Joanna glanced around the room and thought for a moment.
Her gaze settled on the two portraits on the wall.
"Is the treasure hidden inside the portraits?"
With that she strode forward, not a trace of the dying girl about her.
A tearing shriek of sound, and the portraits were ripped to shreds.
My fists clenched all at once, and rage roared straight up to the crown of my head.
"The treasure's inside the portraits, isn't it!"
Joanna grabbed a fistful of my collar, a mad flush creeping into the corners of her eyes.
"Once I have the treasure the Immortal Sovereign left, I can ascend!"
"Senior Sister! Hand over the treasure or die. You choose."
I looked at her and knew she wouldn't let this go.
I let out a slow breath and reached back to draw the long sword at her waist.
Better to die quickly and be reborn than live on under their questioning. If it makes all of you happy, so be it.
I had just brought my head down to the blade when a clamor broke out beyond the door.
Someone screamed, "Something's coming!"
