Free Web NovelChapter 29: Bai Qing Advances
While I was winning matches by falling over, Bai Qing was winning hers the way she did everything: honestly, and the hard way, and beautifully, and to almost no applause at all.
I watched her second-round match from the competitors’ tier seat. I want to describe it properly, because almost nobody else really saw it.
Her opponent was a brute of a man twice her size — a war-cultivator with arms like temple pillars — and the crowd had favored him going in. He was bigger, louder, came with a sponsor’s banner. And Bai Qing took him apart. Not with belief, not with luck, not with a single trick. With skill. Twenty years of it. She read his guard in the first exchange, baited his strength against itself, slipped three blows that would have ended a lesser fighter, and put him down with a single clean strike to the wrist that disarmed him and a blade at his throat before he understood he’d lost. It was, genuinely, one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen a human being do. Every motion earned. Every motion real.
The crowd gave her a polite cheer.
A polite cheer. The kind you give a competent performance. Twenty years of mastery, a flawless victory over a favored opponent, and the Arena clapped the way you clap for a decent meal.
And then, an hour later, I tripped over my own pants in my match and sneezed my opponent into a wall, and ten million people wept with joy and the sky caught fire with my name.
I found Bai Qing afterward, alone, in a quiet corner of the competitors’ quarter. She was sitting on a bench with her sheathed sword across her knees, staring at nothing. She wasn’t crying. Bai Qing doesn’t cry. But she had the still, hollow look of someone holding something heavy very carefully so it won’t spill.
"You were extraordinary," I said, sitting down a careful distance away. "That wrist-strike. I’ve never seen anything like it." freēwebnovel.com
"Don’t," she said. Not angry. Just tired. "I don’t need pity from the man the whole world worships for falling down."
"It’s not pity." I meant it, so I made myself say the rest, even though it was hard. "Bai Qing. I watched ten million people barely look at the best thing I’ve ever seen anyone do, and then lose their minds over me tripping. It’s not fair. It’s grotesquely not fair. You earned every scrap of what you can do, every day, for twenty years, and the world handed me a hundred times the glory for nothing." I looked at my own hands. "I’d trade it with you in a heartbeat, you know. All of it. The belief, the fame, the legend. I’d give it all to you and go back to being a clerk no one’s ever heard of, if I could, and you’d deserve it a thousand times more than I do."
She turned and looked at me then. Really looked. And I watched the hollow thing in her face shift.
"Then we’re a matched pair of fools," she said slowly. "Because I’d take it in a heartbeat. The thing you’d give away." A bitter little breath. "I have spent twenty years becoming the best version of what I am, and the world will not look at it. And you spend every day trying to convince the world you’re nothing, and it will not stop looking. You’re adored for everything you aren’t." She met my eyes. "And I’m invisible for everything I am."
And there it was — the thing that bonded us, hanging in the quiet air between the two loneliest people at that whole loud tournament.
We were the same wound, pointed in opposite directions.
"I see it," I said quietly. "What you are. For whatever it’s worth — and I know it’s not worth much against ten million people — I saw that fight. Every real, earned, beautiful second of it. You weren’t invisible to me." I almost smiled. "You put a man twice your size in the dirt with one strike to the wrist. I can’t put out a candle. If anyone in this tournament is the real thing, Bai Qing, it’s you. Not me. Never me."
Bai Qing was silent for a long moment.
"...That’s the first time anyone’s said that and meant it," she said, very low. "In twenty years." She looked away, jaw tight, mastering something. Then, gruffly, almost against her will: "Your wrist-work is appalling, by the way. If you’d let me actually teach you to hold a sword instead of just tripping into victory, you’d be less of an embarrassment to everyone who’s ever held one."
"I’d love that," I said honestly. "I’ll trip slightly more gracefully." fгee𝑤ebɳoveɭ.cøm
The smallest, most reluctant ghost of a smile crossed her face. The first I’d ever seen on her.
"We both advance to the next round," she said, standing, gathering her sword, the warrior settling back over the wound. "Different brackets. For now." She paused at the edge of the quiet, and didn’t look back, but her voice had changed. "If we both keep winning, Lin Bo, we’ll meet in the ring eventually. And when we do—" a breath "—I want it honest. Whatever your ghost is. For one fight, I want to face you, and find out if there’s a man under the legend worth fighting."
"There isn’t," I said. "But I’d be honored anyway."
She left. I sat on the bench a while longer, thinking about matched wounds, and about how the only two people at that tournament who knew the truth about me were a swordswoman the world wouldn’t look at and a scroll the world couldn’t see.
I didn’t notice, then, that someone had been watching the whole quiet conversation.
I should have. It was about to cost me.
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Author’s Note: Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this Chapter, please add the story to your library, leave a comment, and share your wildest rumor about Lin Bo.
