Joshi, despite the seriousness of the situation, was enjoying pitting himself against what was, for a change, a worthy opponent. He kept an eye on the fight. His opponent, Dai Noc, was probably not stronger than he was, but this strange pill he had consumed had his enemy's lux pulsing oddly, and Joshi was having trouble predicting his next moves. One moment the man would slow and then next he would be moving impossibly fast.

Joshi exchanged a flurry of blows with his opponent. When Dai Noc kicked out at him, Joshi leapt over the kick, across to a crate beside a half wall, then up onto the wall. His opponent laughed and chased after him, balancing on the unsteady wall of rock. They threw blows at each other, Joshi keeping his attention on other man's feet. He'd hoped the instability in the man's unstable lux would make him less sure of his footing, but that didn't appear to be happening.

Joshi's lux sang in his channels. Magen darted about, giving him awareness of the rest of the fight. A trio of bandits who had returned a few moments before were knocking arrows to their bowstrings. Joshi sent Magen into their midst. He carefully aimed a Thousand Fists technique. His own fists hit his opponent while the reflected blows from Magen knocked the bandits' bows out of their hands. The men cursed and scrambled after them.

Joshi followed up his punch with a roundhouse kick at his opponent's midsection, reinforcing his knee with lux. He connected, knocking the man backward, off the wall. Joshi leapt to fall below him, hoping to gain an advantage as the man scrambled away.

"Kill them!" the leader shouted. "Kill them all! Whoever strikes the death blow will be richly rewarded, your choice of women and loot!" With that, the bandit stragglers who had been watching raced forward onto the field. The boss turned and ran toward the mostly-complete shelter at the rear of the encampment.

Dai Noc laughed. Joshi's attention, momentarily divided, snapped back as the man called out, "Burning Soul!" and exploded with flame.

The fire leapt from his skin everywhere that wasn't covered by cloth or hair. His fists burned, but there was no heat that Joshi could sense.

He was burning his own lux reserves, the strange pill that the woman cultivator had given him raising his lux output to unnatural heights. The man wouldn't last long like this, and Joshi suspected his lux channels would be permanently crippled, but it didn't matter if Joshi lost before that happened.

Dai Noc came in punching. Joshi dodged to the side but the blow caught him in his stomach. Joshi stumbled back, his breath pushed out of his body, more shocked than hurt. He had seen the blow two feet short of his body, but felt it in his stomach. The man's technique had hit him despite what all Joshi's senses had warned.

His enemy followed up with another assault. Joshi leapt aside. If he could reach the top of another wall, he'd limit the ways Dai Noc could come at him.

Five sobbing, terrified women were being chivied out of the far hut by the bandit master. They wore rags and tattered clothes, had bare feet and bruised arms, their hair falling into their faces as they hurried forward.

"Get in there! Get in there!" the boss shouted. He was driving them straight into the battle between Chang-li and Joshi and his own cultivators, perhaps having guessed that they would not want to hurt innocents, perhaps just to confuse the battlefield further.

Five or six bandits, armed with clubs and short swords, interposed themselves between Joshi and his enemy. He lashed out with a flurry of blows, knocking some of them sprawling. The others kept striking at him. They were like gnats or mosquitoes. Small, unimportant, but in a whole cloud, disconcerting.

Joshi lashed out with Binding Chains again to connect with the balding cultivator. His chain wrapped around Dai Noc's waist. He pulled him forward even as he fended off blows from four bandits at once.

One of the captive women, stumbling under a blow from the bandit boss, ran into the lux chain and tripped over it. She screamed in pain as her body touched the hardened lux. Joshi's technique was disrupted by the unexpected interference.

This was madness, not a clean duel between cultivators. This was a chaotic mess. His father's advice came back to him now. "Battlefield control is a war leader's most important goal, and it is often won or lost before the battle even begins. The man who sets his army to fight on an unfavored battleground has already lost. He should retreat and fight more advantageously."

Joshi pushed himself into the air with Meteor Punch. He came down at the edge of the encampment, ready to reposition. But Chang-li was in the middle of that mess. Even as Joshi looked over the brawl, the bandits who'd been attacking him were descending on Chang-li.

Chang-li had eight Firepots burning in a circle around him, probably from scripts he had made previously. He was darting out between the flames to launch an attack, then slipping back in. For now at least, he was in control. But the bandit boss had spotted what he was doing and was urging the captive women toward Chang-li's fires. The boss had a whip in his hand now, a three-foot-long leather flail, and he lay into them, smacking their heads and shoulders with it.

This was not an honorable cultivator duel.

The thought cleared Joshi's head. He took a breath, changing his cycling pattern to Way of Boulders. They were not abiding by any kind of rules. This was a scrum, a fight to life and death. He should not be bound by his own conceptions either.

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He was letting someone else dictate his battlefield. His father would never approve of that. This was a fight he had to win.

Then he needed to stop thinking like a warrior and start thinking like a general. A general does not wait for conditions to be correct. A general does not whine about the unfairness of his enemy's tactics. A general commands.

His lux changed. Joshi felt it as Way of Boulders shifted subtly, and now the lux in his veins ran denser and thicker. He could see and hear it more clearly, feeling the different qualities in his veins of the different colors.

And the secret eluded him for so long was laid bare, so stark and simple he couldn't understand why it had taken this long. He had been treating his lux cycling, and his will control as two separate things. But they weren't. His cycling affected his will. His will changed his cycling. It was like trying to separate breathing in and breathing out. Now he saw how they combined into one greater whole.

The Peak of Spiritual Enlightenment, at long last. He had thought it required him to perfect the art of using his will as a weapon, forcing the world around to bow to him. Instead, it was as though he'd finally come to understand his own place in the world. His mind imagined; his will commanded; his lux enforced.

Joshi wove lux and will together and thrust it out onto the battlefield. He would control this. His enemies would fear him. The innocent, he could protect, even in the midst of this chaos.

The bandits were puny, insignificant insects who dared to fight against him only because they believed their own cultivators would protect them. They were wrong.

This boss was using bystander innocents, captives, to force Chang-li and Joshi to fight according to his terms. No more.

Joshi ordered his will against the bandits. "You are insects. Kneel," he told them. His will whispered to the prisoners, "You are protected. Stand." The bandit boss, he wasted barely a fraction of his attention on. "You are trash. Wait for your judgment."

Now the battleground stilled, the frantic chaos tamed by Joshi's will, just as it should be.

To the cultivators, he whispered, "You are my foe. Come to me." His will pushed against them, urging them forward.

The bandit rabble fell to their knees, their weapons dropping. The women turned clutching each other tight like drowning victims. The bandit boss stood, stock still, his eyes bulging, his hands at his side.

The cultivators took unwilling steps toward him. Chang-li was following them with his sword raised high. Joshi reinforced his body with red and yellow lux. His gauntleted fist burst into flame as he raced in.

His first punch took the balding cultivator under the chin, knocking him backward thirty feet into a wall, which toppled over onto him. Spinning, he kicked the second man, knocking him right back into Chang-li's waiting blade.

Joshi strode toward Dai Noc. The balding cultivator was kneeling, his hands raised, pleading. "Please, I didn't realize — if we had known your strength we would have given you anything. What is it you want? The women? The—"

Joshi's flaming gauntlet cut his words short as it caved in his head. His body topped forward to lie among the fallen stones. Not releasing his will, Joshi turned back to the battlefield, striding forward toward the bandit boss.

Chang-li, sword gleaming with blood, joined him. "What about the rest?" he whispered.

"One at a time," Joshi said, keeping his will strong.

"What happened?" Chang-li asked. "Your core, it's dense as diamond, and your will, it's like..." His eyes widened. "You've reached the Peak of Spiritual Refinement."

Joshi allowed himself a satisfied nod. "I have."

"You'll have to tell me everything," Chang-li said, and Joshi half expected him to pull a notebook from his void space and start writing immediately. But the former scribe had more sense than that as they approached the bandit boss and his captives, who were standing near the middle of the fray. The frozen bandits knelt or lay on the ground, hapless spectators to what was about to occur.

Joshi approached the women and eased his will, not all the way, but enough that some of them stopped shaking and turned to face him. He spoke as gently as he could. "You are free now. We will see you return to your families. It's all right. You don't have to be afraid."

All looking terrified rather than reassured, they drew back aways. Chang-li turned to them, holding out his hands in what he probably hoped was a reassuring manner. "It's true," he said. "We've been to one of your villages recently and spoke with Headman Dai Ahn. They'll be glad to have you back. Once we've dealt with these vermin."

The women began sobbing once more. Joshi turned away. He didn't have the right words to comfort them and wished Hiroko was here. She'd know what needed to be done. Instead, he approached the mob boss.

Tears streamed down the man's face. "I'll give you anything. Don't. Don't hurt me."

"Why did you come here?" Chang-li asked.

"It was their idea," the boss said. "Dai Noc and Nao Hien. They said they'd heard of incredible treasures. But we've been here three damn years without a sight of anything. I knew we should have moved on. But it gets easy living like this. Someone to bring you food all the time. A little female companionship."

Joshi struck the man's face with his open palm, knocking his head sideways. The boss looked back at him with tears of pain in his eyes but still defiant.

"You imperial lapdogs! What would you know of it? You've had a soft, luxurious life as pampered young masters. Some of us have had to fight and scrape for everything we've ever had."

"And what you have now isn't yours," Chang-li said coldly. "It belongs to those that you extorted, stole from, and raped."

Joshi turned back to the women. Two of them had dried their tears and were staring at the mob boss with utter hatred. "You two. What do you want done with him?"

One of them shook her head and looked away. The other, a woman with her hair down loose over her shoulders, her clothes in tatters but a fiery look in her eye, said, "Do you mean that, Young Master?"

"I do."

"Then I want a sword," she snarled.

Chang-li stepped back from the mob boss. He handed the sword to the woman. She stepped forward, faced the mob boss.

His eyes widened. Joshi kept his will focused on the man, holding him in place as he began to babble. "Moonflower, I was always kind to you. I was good to you. I protected you from the others. I... I..."

"My name is Han Eya. Not Moonflower." She swung the sword with energy and determination, but not much accuracy. It sliced into the mob boss's shoulder, cutting deep into his neck, but caught on his collar bone and stopped.

She yanked it out, and blood spurted everywhere. The man stared at her in horror for a few seconds before his eyes rolled up in his head, and he fell over to the ground. The blood puddle continued to grow, deeper, darker, and redder as his lifeblood ran out. She started forward again, but Chang-li caught her arm.

"He's done for," he told her quietly. "You've struck well. May I?" He took his sword back from her limp fingers.

"Well, that solves that problem," Joshi said. "Now, I think it's time that we interrogate the prisoners."

Chang-li gave a long sigh. "You do that," he said. "I'm going to need to escort these women back to their homes. I'll be back as soon as I can."

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