Chapter 9 · free to read
They came at the third watch with oil, and they did not bother to be quiet about it. The Iron Lotus was not hiding a murder. It was posting a notice.
Two hundred jars of leaf. One kettle. A floor she knew by the sound of every board in it. Nineteen years, and it took a bucket of oil and one match.
For nineteen years the blade had lived inside a walking stick, because a hidden blade is a woman who intends to stay hidden. She knotted it bare to her sash and left the cane empty on her back.
She had not taken a student in twenty-two years. The last one was standing on the far side of the river with a butcher's dao and forty men. She took another anyway.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.