The Black Teeth held their court in the deepest chamber of the Underworld, a place that even Mo Jiu approached with caution.
Su Fu had heard whispers of this place during his months in the tunnels — the Sunken Hall, they called it, a vast natural cavern that had been carved by an underground river centuries before the first emperor had unified the realm. The river was gone now, diverted by some ancient engineering project that no one remembered, but the cavern remained, its walls glistening with moisture, its ceiling lost in shadows that the lamps could not reach. And in the center of the cavern, on a throne carved from a single block of black stone, sat the man who ruled the Underworld's most feared organization.
His name was Hei Chi, and he was the most dangerous man Su Fu had ever seen.
It was not his size that made him dangerous, though he was large enough — broad-shouldered and thick-armed, with hands that could crush a man's skull like an eggshell. It was not his scars, though those were numerous — a web of old wounds that crisscrossed his face and arms, souvenirs of a lifetime spent in the shadows. It was his eyes. They were pale and flat and utterly without warmth, the eyes of a man who had seen so much suffering that it had ceased to register as anything more than weather.
"The demon and his apprentice," Hei Chi said, his voice a low rumble that echoed in the cavern. "I wondered when you would come to me. You've been making quite a noise up there, Mo Jiu. Dead officials. Burned records. A censor who rose from the grave. My people tell me the princess's network is in disarray. They tell me Cui Shi can't sleep at night. They tell me there's a boy from the provinces who moves like a shadow and kills like a professional."
He leaned forward, and his pale eyes fixed on Su Fu.
"Is this him? Is this the blade you've been forging?"
Mo Jiu stepped forward. "His name is Su Fu. He is the son of Su Shouzhuo, the clerk from Zheng County. And he is the reason we are here."
"I know why you're here. You want access to the monastery. You want the records. You want the children." Hei Chi leaned back in his throne. "My people have been watching you since you arrived in the Underworld. Did you think I wouldn't notice when a former judge from the Ministry of Justice started building an army in my territory?"
"I am not building an army."
"No? You've got the boy. You've got the censor — Han Wan is still alive, by the way, still writing his memorials, still making noise. You've got a network of informants and safe houses and weapons caches that would make a warlord jealous. What would you call it?"
Mo Jiu was silent for a moment. "I would call it preparation."
"Preparation for what?"
"For the end of the princess's network. For the destruction of the Great Compassion Monastery. For the liberation of the children who are being held there. And we cannot do it alone."
Hei Chi laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. "So you come to me. The demon comes to the devil and asks for help. What makes you think I would give it?"
"Because the monastery is your enemy as much as ours. They have been encroaching on your territory for years — taking children that your people could have used, controlling trade routes that should belong to the Underworld, building a power base that threatens everything you have built. If the monastery falls, you benefit."
"And if I help you, the princess will know. She will send her soldiers into the tunnels. She will burn the Underworld until there is nothing left but ash and bones. Why would I risk that?"
"Because you have already been risking it," Mo Jiu said. "Your people have been skirmishing with the monastery's guards for months. You have been gathering intelligence. You have been waiting for the right moment to strike. The only thing you lack is the catalyst — the spark that will turn your scattered attacks into a coordinated assault. I am offering you that spark."
Hei Chi was silent. His pale eyes moved from Mo Jiu to Su Fu and back again.
"There is a price," he said at last. "Nothing in the Underworld is free. If I help you — if I commit my people to this attack — I will want something in return."
"Name it."
"The records. The ledgers. Everything the Abbot has been keeping in those cellars. You can have the children. You can have the princess's network. You can have your revenge, or your justice, or whatever it is you're calling it these days. But the records are mine."
Su Fu stepped forward before Mo Jiu could respond. "Why do you want the records?"
Hei Chi's eyes flicked to him, and for a moment, something glinted in their depths — amusement, perhaps, or curiosity, or something darker.
"The records contain the names of everyone who has ever done business with the network," Hei Chi said. "Everyone who has ever taken a bribe or laundered money or sold a child. That information is worth more than gold. With those records, I can control half the officials in Chang'an. I can blackmail the unblackmailable. I can build an empire that makes the princess's network look like a village market."
"You want to replace them," Su Fu said. "You want to become what they are."
"I want to survive. The princess and her kind — they think the Underworld is nothing but a sewer. A place where the dregs of the empire collect because they have nowhere else to go. They tolerate us because we are useful. But the moment we become inconvenient, they will try to destroy us. The records are our insurance. With them, we can protect ourselves. We can make ourselves untouchable."
Su Fu looked at Mo Jiu. The older man's face was unreadable, but there was a tension in his shoulders that Su Fu had learned to recognize. He was calculating, weighing options, trying to find a path through the negotiation that would not compromise everything they had worked for.
"If we give you the records," Mo Jiu said slowly, "you will use them to continue the cycle. You will become the new network. The same corruption, the same exploitation, the same suffering — just with different names at the top."
"Perhaps. But the children will be free. The monastery will be destroyed. And the princess will be weakened. Those are things you want, are they not?"
"They are things I want. But I did not spend eight years tearing down one network just to help build another."
Hei Chi shrugged. "Then we have nothing to discuss. You can try to attack the monastery on your own — you and your boy and your censor and your handful of informants. You will fail. You will die. And the children will stay exactly where they are."
The silence stretched. The lamps flickered. Su Fu thought about Li Sanniang's bloodstained cloth, about the children in the frozen fields, about the Abbot sitting in his cell beneath the main hall. He thought about the price that Mo Jiu had warned him about — whatever it is, we will pay it.
"There is another way," Su Fu said.
Both men turned to look at him.
"The records are the key. If they fall into the wrong hands — into Hei Chi's hands, or anyone else's — they will be used to rebuild what we destroyed. So we don't let them fall into anyone's hands. We destroy them. Completely. Every ledger. Every name. Every transaction. When we take the monastery, we burn the records. No one gets them. No one uses them. The network dies, and nothing rises to replace it."
Hei Chi stared at him. His expression was unreadable, but something in his pale eyes shifted — a flicker of respect, or perhaps of wariness.
"You would destroy that much power?" he asked. "You would burn information that could make you rich beyond imagining?"
"I didn't come to Chang'an to get rich. I came to get justice for my father. And justice doesn't mean replacing one set of monsters with another."
The words hung in the air. Su Fu could feel Mo Jiu's gaze on him, could sense the older man's surprise. It was not the answer Mo Jiu would have given. Mo Jiu would have bargained, negotiated, found a compromise that advanced their goals while preserving something for the future. But Su Fu was not Mo Jiu. He was not a strategist or a politician. He was a farmer's son who had watched his world burn and had decided that he would rather destroy everything than let the fire spread to anyone else.
Hei Chi was silent for a long moment. Then, slowly, he smiled.
"You are interesting," he said to Su Fu. "More interesting than your teacher. Mo Jiu is a planner. A calculator. He thinks in terms of strategies and contingencies. But you — you think in absolutes. You would rather burn the world than compromise with it. That is dangerous. But it is also useful."
He turned to Mo Jiu. "I will help you. Not for the records. Not for the power. But because the boy reminds me of someone I used to be — a long time ago, before I learned that the world does not reward absolutes. Before I became what I am now."
"What are your terms?" Mo Jiu asked.
"Simple. I will provide thirty of my best fighters. They will create a diversion at the main gate, draw the guards away from the cellars, give you time to find the records and the children. In return, you will owe me a favor. Not the records. Not the power. A favor. To be collected at a time and place of my choosing."
"A favor can mean anything."
"Yes. That is why it is valuable." Hei Chi's smile widened. "Do we have a deal?"
Mo Jiu looked at Su Fu. Su Fu nodded.
"We have a deal," Mo Jiu said.
The preparations took two weeks.
Su Fu spent every waking hour training, planning, memorizing the layout of the monastery until he could navigate it blindfolded. He learned the guard rotations from Hei Chi's spies — when the shifts changed, where the blind spots were, which walls were scalable and which were not. He learned the layout of the cellars from a former monk who had escaped the monastery years ago and had been living in the Underworld ever since, his tongue cut out by the Abbot's men to ensure his silence.
And he learned about the children.
There were forty-seven of them, according to the former monk's testimony. Some as young as five, some as old as fourteen. They worked in the fields during the day and slept in locked dormitories at night. They were fed just enough to keep them alive, beaten just enough to keep them obedient, and taught just enough to make them useful. The ones who showed promise were trained as scribes or messengers. The ones who did not were sold to the highest bidder.
Li Sanniang's sons were among them. The former monk remembered them — two small boys, twins, who had arrived three years ago. They had been sickly at first, weak from the journey and the cold, but they had survived. They were working in the monastery's vegetable gardens, the monk said. They were still alive.
Su Fu held onto that thought as the days passed. They were still alive. The children were still alive. And in three days, on the night of the new moon, he would go into the monastery and bring them out.
But there was something else that occupied his thoughts in those final days. Something that had been gnawing at him since the negotiation with Hei Chi — a question that he had not been able to answer.
On the night before the attack, he found Mo Jiu alone in the training chamber, sharpening his knives.
"You've been quiet," Mo Jiu said without looking up. "What's on your mind?"
"Duan Wenzhong," Su Fu said. "On the night he died. Just before you killed him. He recognized the mask. He said there was another man who wore a demon mask, eight years ago. He said that man killed a minister and a general. He said they never caught him."
Mo Jiu's hands paused on the whetstone. Then they resumed their motion, slow and steady.
"Duan was a frightened man. Frightened men say many things."
"He said the man was a ghost. He said he was—" Su Fu hesitated. "He said he was you."
The chamber was very quiet. The lamp flickered, casting shadows that danced across the walls.
"Eight years ago," Mo Jiu said slowly, "my family was killed. My house was burned. I was left for dead in the street outside the ministry gates. Do you know what happened to the men who did it?"
"No."
"They died. All of them. The minister who gave the order. The general who provided the soldiers. The merchant who paid for the operation. One by one, over the course of two years, they died. Some were found in their beds with their throats cut. Some disappeared and were never found at all. Some died in accidents so improbable that no one believed they were accidents. And every time a body was discovered, there was a demon mask left somewhere nearby. Not as evidence. As a signature. A message."
Su Fu stared at him. "You were the demon. Before me. You were what I'm becoming."
"Yes."
"And when you finished — when you killed everyone who had destroyed your family — why didn't you stop? Why did you keep going? Why did you find me?"
Mo Jiu set down the whetstone. He looked at Su Fu, and for the first time since they had met, his eyes were not cold or calculating or unreadable. They were tired. Profoundly, impossibly tired.
"Because when I finished," he said, "I looked at what I had become, and I realized that there was nothing left. The rage had consumed everything. My family was still dead. My life was still gone. And I was still a man who had killed more people than I could count. The revenge did not bring them back. It did not heal the wound. It only made the wound deeper."
He paused.
"I found you because I wanted to believe that there was another way. That if I could teach someone else — someone younger, someone who had not yet crossed the line — I could perhaps make up for what I had done. But I was wrong. You are crossing the line anyway. You crossed it the night you killed the agent in the Lantern Market. You crossed it again when you stood over Duan's body and did nothing. And tomorrow, when you enter the monastery, you will cross it again. And each time, it will become easier. And each time, a piece of you will die."
Su Fu was silent for a long moment. "Then why are we doing this? If the revenge doesn't work — if crossing the line doesn't heal the wound — why are we attacking the monastery?"
"Because of the children. Because Li Sanniang's sons are still alive. Because there are forty-seven reasons to do the right thing, even if we are doing it the wrong way. And because, after tomorrow, perhaps we can stop. Perhaps we can find another path. Perhaps you can still be something other than what I became."
"And if I can't?"
Mo Jiu picked up his knife and held it out to Su Fu, hilt first.
"Then you will become me. And you will spend the rest of your life trying to find someone else to save."
Su Fu took the knife. It was cold in his hand, perfectly balanced, its edge honed to a wicked sharpness. He looked at his reflection in the blade — a face that was no longer the face of a seventeen-year-old boy, but not yet the face of the man he was becoming.
Tomorrow, he would enter the monastery. Tomorrow, he would find the children. Tomorrow, he would face the Abbot and learn the truth about the network that had destroyed his family.
But tonight, he was still Su Fu. Still the farmer's son from Zheng County. Still the boy who had carried a bloodstained ledger page across two hundred li of frozen ground, believing that the truth would save him.
Tomorrow, everything would change. But tonight, the lamp still burned. The knife still gleamed. And somewhere in the darkness, the children were still alive.
小儿未死.
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