Part 3 · Chapters
Training in the Valley of Wind
Victory can lift your head—and make you lose sight of those beside you.
The Valley of Wind did not accept brute force. The harder someone tried to go straight ahead, the more surely it sent them back. It seemed to mock everyone who mistook stubborn effort for perseverance.
Xiao Jin charged into the gale seventeen times.
The first time, it blew him back to the valley entrance. The second, he struck a rock wall. The seventeenth, he flipped three times through the air and landed face-first in a heap of grass.
A girl's voice came from the grass.
“Running into the same wall over and over isn't determination. It's stupidity.”
Xiao Jin got up and saw a girl with blue-green hair hanging upside down from a branch. Rows of message tubes hung at her waist, and wind ribbons wrapped her ankles. She was Feng Ling, a messenger of the Wind people.
“Have you got a better way?”
“Yes. Go in feet-first, not face-first.”
Feng Ling sprang from the tree and stepped lightly into the gale. She did not resist it. Each footfall found a brief gap between crossing currents. She moved like a leaf the wind had chosen to carry.
Xiao Jin copied her and was blown away again.
“You see where the wind goes, but you don't listen for why it turns.” Feng Ling tapped his head. “A bigger flame just gives the wind more to grab.”
He sat at the valley entrance for an entire day.
At first he heard only roaring. Gradually, he began to distinguish whistles through stone cracks, low murmurs of grass, and eddies high above. The wind was not one wall, but countless currents with different directions, temperatures, and speeds.
Xiao Jin compressed his flame even finer than he had in the abyss. His blade stopped meeting the wind head-on and extended along its flow instead. Ash Step no longer burst only forward. It borrowed force whenever the wind changed.
At last, he walked into the valley.
Feng Ling had just begun to look pleased when a pack of whirlwind beasts rushed from between the cliffs. They had no fixed shape. Blade-like currents spun around their cores, deflecting Xiao Jin's fire blade whenever it drew near.
“Updraft, upper left!” Feng Ling shouted.
Xiao Jin stepped into the current and was hurled high into the air. The beasts pursued him. He did not rush to swing, but closed his eyes to feel the heat and wind pressure. His first Ash Step pushed sideways, the second followed the pack's rotation, and the third burst in the opposite direction just as their cores turned toward him.
His crimson blade traced a hair-thin arc of light.
Three cores split at once.
Xiao Jin landed unsteadily, but could not help grinning. “I could call that move—”
“The Somehow-Not-Dead Slash.”
“Valley Skybreak.”
“Boring.”
Shuang Ya approached and added without mercy, “And you nearly hit a tree at the end.”
Feng Ling laughed so hard she rolled off the rock. When she recovered, she told them of the strange voices she had heard on the night of the theft. Black mist had passed through the valley, with someone inside whispering over and over:
“Let fire hate frost. Let frost fear fire.”
“They were carrying something that made the wind heavy, toward the ancient ruins.” Feng Ling unfastened a message tube. “I'll take you there.”
Xiao Jin glanced at Shuang Ya. “Another reluctant companion.”
“I'm perfectly willing,” Feng Ling said. “This trip looks fun.”
Shuang Ya sighed. “I'm starting to miss having only one problem.”
Xiao Jin watched his fire blade curve with the wind.
This time, he had not ordered the wind out of his way.
Yet it had carried him farther.