The folk of of the town watched as plumes of dust avalanched down the mountain, rising to make new dark clouds.

  Then a man walk out of the murk.

  By now everyone there knew what kind of man they were looking at. They saw five of the Yi Family’s best go up that mountain.

  One man came back down.

  “It’s him! It really is Zane!”

  “Hells…”

  “What even is he?”

  “He’s got to be a Saint—Saint-level!”

  “Dragon-level?!”

  But they did not have a word for someone like Zane.

  As he moved through the streets, they gave him a wide berth. Whispers followed him.

  He could sense a bubbling excitement. He saw something in the butcher’s gap-toothed grin. The baker shouted, “Those Yi bastards, they’ll get what’s coming to them!”

  It reminded him of something Reina told him—one of the first things she’d done was to ban the ‘wiping out the entire bloodline’ stuff in the World Tree Faction. She felt some of these folk were a little too quick to it—just bringing justice to the offender was never the end of it. It was a particular headache for her because it wiped out vast swathes of her armies.

  She would rather folk turn their energies on the Monsters.

  He’d felt she made a lot of sense, as she did in most things. And she was right—he would rather battle Monsters than men.

  That was what he was made for.

  He wasn’t sure when he knew, but it’d been growing clearer since almost the moment he saw his first notification box; at some point he was sure of it.

  He wasn’t just a fighter. He fought for his people.

  That was the mantle he took up for Earth, the way Reina thought of him.

  …But he couldn’t always live up to it.

  In the end he was just a man, no matter what anyone said of him.

  His friends were always first in his heart, over anyone else. He knew that by now; he couldn’t help it.

  He would do what it took to protect them.

  He meant what he said to Jin earlier. It all depended on the Yi Family now.

  How much did they want to push him?

  ***

  The Yi estate was all sprawling courtyards of jade and bronze. Gaudy statues, fountains, plum-blossoms.

  It was all being folded behind spiked walls as Zane came through. The gates were locked, then welded shut. Runed steles poked over the walls, making force fields crackling with lightning.

  “Far enough!” roared a wizard, brandishing an oak staff. A dozen mages flanked him to either side, powering the forcefield.

  He grabbed the force-field, crumpled it up in his hands, and crushed it.

  For a moment the mages stared gaping. They not quite seem to understand what’d just happened—magic was not supposed to bend like that.

  Then they spewed blood collapsed at once.

  The wizard’s face grew quite pale.

  He began to chant in an ancient language. The skies grew dark. Winds spiraled in from all four directions, each a different color—

  Zane gave the guy a look. Just a look. And with it came an impression of his will in the Astral Plane. A sense of the feeling in his soul.

  The storm exploded.

  The wizard fainted.

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  He looked at the guards manning the gate.

  “Are you going to open the door,” he said. “Or are you going to make me go through you?”

  They scrambled to shove open the gates.

  ***

  In the Great Hall of the Yi estate, they felt the outer shields shatter.

  Young Master Yi moaned.

  “Magus Steelsun will hold him,” said Madam Yi, trying to keep her voice steady. But she was a few shades paler than usual. “He might’ve gotten through the first layer, but that’s as far as he’ll get.” She sounded rather shriller too. “Don’t speak of him as though he’s a dragon! He’s only a man. When that first wind hits—”

  They felt the Magus’s life-force go dull, unconscious.

  Then Madam Yi couldn’t seem to make words come out of her mouth.

  They heard his footsteps coming up the hall—Thump. Thump. Thump.

  Young Master Yi let out a wail.

  “He’s coming,” he said, and put head in his hands. The Madam’s knuckles were white on her throne.

  “This isn’t over,” she whispered, voice cracking. She looked around the room, as though she might find an answer on the walls. “The rear guard—they’ll hold him. He’ll exhausted by now, he must be. We’ll charge him, just as he comes in, all of us—we’ve got twelve spears, all it takes is one! He’s just a man—”

  The Patriarch whirled on her. “Six hells, listen to yourself!”

  Madam Yi’s mouth fell open.

  Her husband had never spoken to her like that.

  He buried his face in his hands. “This was bound to happen, it was always bound to happen…” He was a meek man. But something in Patriarch Yi had broken. His head snapped up. His eyes were bloodshot.

  “No-one cared half as much as you about our so-called face!” he rasped. “It was all about putting the foot down. What happens when you find a man who won’t bend, what then!?”

  He jabbed a finger at her. “You woke something you should never have woken… hells…”

  He buried his face in his hands

  The Madam looked at her sniveling son, then at the Patriarch.

  But she had nothing to say anymore.

  There was a mighty crash—“Get down, Madam!” roared the captain of the guards.

  They felt their final wards crumple, as easily as the first.

  She shook her head. Her face was pale as death.

  Then the great door creaked slowly open.

  Zane did not bolt through. He did not run.

  He came at his own pace. There was no reason to run. He knew what he wanted, and he knew no-one in this world could stop him.

  It was the pace of absolute power.

  He strode into the throne room—every bit as large as Liu Yi had said, but somehow he

  seemed even bigger; somehow he seemed to dwarf everything.

  That was just his presence.

  He let out no aura. But the look in his eyes made them all flinch.

  “You know why I’m here,” said Zane slowly.

  “Lord Zane,” said Madam Yi. She knelt, and put her head to the ground. “You’re looking for me.”

  Her shoulders shook. “I made my son who he is. I set him upon you—”

  “I never meant for it to happen,” cried Liu Yi. Tears streaked his face. “That hunchback, he’s mad, please—”

  “All the men you sent to kill me are dead,” said Zane. He looked in their eyes.

  Then his gaze moved over them all. It was impossible to know what he was thinking. No-one dared move, even breathe.

  “It wasn’t meant to be this way,” whispered Madam Yi. She was starting to tear up too. “Spare Liu Yi—he’s a good child. But pride is all he knows, it’s all I ever taught him—please… he’s not a killer, Lord Zane, he isn’t…If someone should die, it should be me.”

  The Patriarch’s head snapped up. “Gao, you don’t—”

  “You were right,” she said. She seemed resigned to it. She wiped a tear off her cheek. “All of it. I… I will take what I’ve done.”

  But Zane’s face was made of stone.

  Then he sighed.

  “I don’t want to go home to my girlfriend, and tell her I killed all of you,” he sighed. “I killed the man who hurt my friend already. That can be enough, if you let it. She believes people can change… she’s got a good heart.”

  He paused.

  “I am not her.”

  “I’ll never touch Jin again, I swear it!” cried the Young Master.

  “I don’t trust you,” Zane informed him. “But I don’t need to.”

  With that, he lifted up the roof, chucked it a few miles, and showed them the tear in the sky.

  They all gaped at it.

  “Take ten years. Take a hundred. Take all the powers you can muster.”

  He pointed at the sky.

  “Do you understand?”

  Silence.

  Then—

  “Yes,” croaked the Madam.

  He did not need to trust they would not hurt Jin.

  He only needed to see that look in their eyes.

  You could look at a man, and no matter who he was, think you had a chance of beating him. If you just had the time. The practice, the men. And only then, would you dare plot against him.

  But they seemed to understand he was Zane.

  He saw Fei-Fei shivering in a corner, and sighed.

  “Thank Reina and Jin for your lives,” he said, and turned. “Stand by your word. If not… you will see me again.”

  They flinched, and nodded so quickly he thought their heads might fall off .

  He walked away.

  ***

  That day became enshrined in the lore of Littleleaf Village.

  It was the Day of Three Miracles.

  The first miracle was of the legendary man who destroyed the Yi’s strongest enforcers—and split the skies in two with a single fist.

  The second miracle—even more mysterious and shocking than flattening the mountain—was that after he killed them, he did not go on to serial-murder the entire bloodline that he was angry at.

  This had never happened before in the history of cultivation.

  The third miracle—was that to the surprise of everyone—Madam Yi gave back all the levies she’d imposed, and apologized tearfully.

  Young Master Yi quit his haughty ways and became a monk. He’d live out the rest of his life teaching the principles of nonviolence and the importance of humility.

  Soon they even settled a treaty with the Wei Family, bringing the town back together.

  And all this had happened because—according to eyewitness testimony—Zane had simply walked up to them and stood there.

  This act had frightened them so much it made them into better people.

  These were powers no one had ever seen before.