The bamboo grove in the northwestern corner of the palace gardens was a place of deep shadows and whispering sounds. At night, when the wind moved through the dense stalks, it was said the rustling leaves sounded like the hushed gossip of ghosts. It was the perfect place for an ambush.
Meng Tian walked the narrow stone path that wound through the grove, seemingly on a solitary, late-night patrol. His posture was relaxed, his pace even. To any observer, he would have looked like a guard on a routine, perhaps even slightly careless, circuit. But this was no routine patrol. It was a carefully laid trap.
Hours earlier, a terrified Lotus had managed to pass a message to Ying Zheng. He had recounted Cixi's deadly order, the demand for Meng Tian's death. Ying Zheng knew instantly that Cixi, in her desperation, would not rely solely on the boy she now suspected was compromised. She would send another, more reliable agent from her School of the Silent Orchid, one whose face they did not know. The order to Lotus was not just a command; it was a test of his loyalty. By reporting it, Lotus had passed.
Now, it was time to meet the real threat. Ying Zheng, using his network's knowledge of the palace's layout and the assassins' likely methods, had predicted this secluded bamboo grove as the most probable kill zone. He and Lotus were hidden now, concealed in the upper branches of a dense, ancient cypress tree a hundred paces away, watching the scene unfold from a safe vantage point.
Meng Tian walked into the deepest, darkest part of the grove, the moonlight barely piercing the thick canopy of leaves above. He paused, as if to listen to the night sounds.
The attack came with a silence that was more terrifying than a shout. From three different directions at once, tiny, dark shapes hissed through the air. They were darts, their tips coated with a glistening, black substance—a potent neurotoxin. They were aimed with lethal precision at the exposed parts of his neck and face.
Meng Tian's reaction was not human. He didn't dodge or duck. His body simply… moved. With a speed that seemed to bend the light, he twisted, his head snapping to the side, his hands coming up in a blur. He caught two of the flying darts out of the air and slapped the third one away with the back of his gauntlet. The movements were so fast, so economical, they were almost imperceptible.
From the deepest shadows of the bamboo, his attacker emerged. It was not a brutish man or a stealthy eunuch. It was a girl. She was in her late teens, slender and dressed in tight-fitting black clothes that allowed for complete freedom of movement. Her face was pale and beautiful, but her eyes held a cold, dead emptiness. This was "Ying," or Shadow, one of the Silent Orchid's most promising graduates, a specialist in stealth, poisons, and close-quarters combat.
She did not seem surprised that her initial attack had failed. She flowed forward, two short, thin-bladed daggers appearing in her hands as if from nowhere. The blades gleamed with the same black poison as the darts. She did not charge with brute force. She attacked like a striking serpent, a whirlwind of blindingly fast, precise strikes. She aimed for his eyes, his throat, the soft spots under his arms, the gaps in his guardsman's armor.
A spectacular, silent duel erupted in the moon-dappled darkness. It was a perfect, deadly matchup: the tiger versus the viper. Meng Tian, the superhuman general, against Ying, the supernaturally skilled assassin. He possessed impossible strength and resilience; she possessed impossible speed and lethal precision.
Meng Tian found himself on the defensive. He could not simply overpower her; she was too fast, too agile, a blur of motion that was always just out of his direct reach. Every time he lunged, she was no longer there, her poisoned blades slicing at him from a new angle. He parried her attacks, the clash of his gauntlet against her daggers the only sound in the grove besides the whispering wind. He was forced to rely not just on his superhuman reflexes, but on his two millennia of battlefield experience, his deep, instinctual understanding of combat geometry. He was not just fighting a girl; he was fighting a master of a deadly art.
He began to change his tactics. Instead of trying to strike her, he focused on controlling the space. He retreated slowly, drawing her deeper into a denser part of the grove, using the thick, unyielding bamboo stalks to limit her angles of attack, to force her into a narrower corridor of movement. The dance became more constrained, more brutal.
Ying, sensing her advantage was fading, committed to a final, desperate attack. She feinted high with her left dagger, forcing Meng Tian to raise his arm to block. As he did, she lunged low with her right hand, the poisoned blade streaking towards his abdomen, a killing blow.
It was the opening Meng Tian had been waiting for.
He did not try to block the second dagger. In a move of calculated, brutal risk, he allowed it to strike him. The razor-sharp, poisoned blade sliced deeply across his left forearm, a wound that would have crippled and killed a normal man in seconds.
But Meng Tian was not a normal man. The poison, a potent cocktail that should have stopped his heart, instead sent only a wave of cold numbness through his arm. The pain was secondary. The calculated injury had achieved its purpose: it had brought the assassin into his reach.
As Ying lunged in to deliver the fatal strike, her attack had left her momentarily overextended. In that split second, Meng Tian's right hand shot out, not as a fist, but as an open hand. He didn't grab her wrist; he simply clamped his hand around the blade of her other dagger, the one still near his face. His grip was like a band of forged iron. With a single, sharp twist of his wrist, the high-quality steel of the dagger bent, groaned, and snapped in two.
The assassin's eyes widened in disbelief. Before she could react, his other hand, the one on his wounded arm, shot out and seized her by the throat. He lifted her off the ground with one arm, her legs kicking uselessly in the air, her remaining dagger clattering to the forest floor. The fight was over.
He stood there for a moment, holding the struggling assassin aloft, a silent, terrifying victor. The shallow cut on his arm, which should have been pouring blood, was already beginning to clot, the flesh knitting itself back together with an unnatural speed.
From the shadows of the cypress tree, Ying Zheng and Lotus stepped out into the clearing. Ying Zheng looked at the captured assassin, her face now a mask of terror and disbelief. He then looked at the healing wound on his general's arm. He had learned another valuable piece of intelligence tonight. Meng Tian was not invincible. He could be cut. But his resilience to poison and his ability to heal were far beyond human.
He had captured another one of Cixi's living weapons. A new source of information. A new tool to be broken and reforged. He nodded to his general, a gesture of silent approval. The price of Cixi's failed assassination attempt would be the complete unraveling of the secrets of her most deadly creation.