Fate Bone

Dama County, ten kilometers from the border defense station. The county hospital morgue. Intense white light beat down on the shape draped in a white cloth. The air hung thick with the smell of disinfectant and rotting flesh, and a high-powered air conditioner growled out its chill. On the central table lay the Greenwood bandit who had been shot dead a few days before. Lin Zhiyan was "interrogating" the dead man. Her pale, slender fingers, with no protection of any kind, went straight into the brain tissue exposed where the skull had been sawed open. Lin Zhiyan's eyes were shut tight, her spirit threading like the finest probe through the dead man's shattered mental world. After a long while she opened her eyes and swiftly drew her hand out. Her assistant immediately brought water. Lin Zhiyan scrubbed her hands with all her strength, water spraying in every direction, with such force it seemed she meant to scrub the skin clean off. Only when the skin had gone red and broken open in several places did she stop. "I saw him take possession of a deep-blue jade stone," Lin Zhiyan said, her features dark. "Very heavy, and it carried the earthy smell of an ancient tomb. Then the memory cuts off. Forced splicing only shows me fragments of his flight—I can't pin down the Fate Bone's exact location." "Everyone he made contact with on this route, every place he stopped—all of it has to be traced." A year earlier, a Ming dynasty princely tomb had been excavated in Lincheng, and a huge cache of Fate Bones had come out of it. By rights, Fate Bones should never have been interred as grave goods—they were the foundation of rule—let alone brought there in bulk. That was why the excavation of an ancient tomb needed no military guard. Yet the unexpected happened: over a hundred Fate Bones were dug out of the tomb, and more unexpected still, every one of them was snatched away by Greenwood bandits. ----- May the twenty-seventh. It was Lu Zhao's turn for duty. Border work came in two kinds: garrison duty at the foremost outposts deep in the mountains and old-growth forest, and symbolic patrol of the surrounding area. The latter was fairly leisurely—at most it meant joining public-security sweeps of border hotels and entertainment venues, checking the identities of suspicious persons. The former meant patrolling the national border line on foot or by vehicle, covering complicated terrain of mountains, jungle, desert, islands, and facing smugglers and demon beasts. Lu Zhao had just come off a rotation at a forward outpost, so things were much quieter now. All he had to do each day was drive that patrol jeep with its peeling paint, looping back and forth along the winding mountain roads. At 9:10, Lu Zhao and Liu Qiang set out on mountain patrol in that beat-up old vehicle. At 10:30 the jeep stopped halfway up the mountain; Liu Qiang would hold position while Lu Zhao went on up. With no one holding him back, he was faster. Bolstered by a life force averaging thirty points, he ran like a bird of prey skimming low over the ground. On the rocks at the summit, Lu Zhao swept the surroundings with psychic power; the impressions flowed back into his mind and formed a rough outline. Then he bent down, worked his arm into a crevice between the rocks, and with a modest effort dragged out a single-strap backpack soaked with the smell of damp earth. His whole body was rock, so of course he liked stones. Inside the bag was a deep-blue jade stone, palm-sized, giving off a faint glow. Lu Zhao studied it for a while, and his expression slowly grew grave. "A Fate Bone?" The vast majority of Fate Bones were held by the state. Private possession was illegal. "So where did Greenwood steal this one from?" Lu Zhao weighed what to do with it. Keep it hidden—use it himself, or sell it. A Fate Bone could hold only one kind of divine power, but bones of the same kind could be merged, and merging yielded a more powerful divine power. By the Tiangang and Disha enumeration, every divine power could be sorted into its class. It was like trees in a forest: great divine powers were the trunk, powerful ones the branches, and the weak and feeble the leaves. But Lu Zhao's own divine power was not weak, nor had its development reached a bottleneck—and he couldn't confirm the Fate Bone's category anyway. At this stage he had no need of it. What he lacked was money. Selling the Fate Bone to the black market would fetch a large sum—possibly enough to cover ten years of his future expenses. The thought of selling had barely formed before Lu Zhao struck it down. A Fate Bone power loose in the world would, in the end, certainly be used to kill. A good person who could make use of a Fate Bone had no need to buy one—and most likely couldn't afford it anyway. Only villains needed Fate Bone powers, as weapons for defying the established order. That was his bottom line. If everyone could be perfectly selfless, then naturally so could he. And if everyone else sold justice and twisted the law, Lu Zhao would still keep his bottom line. His thoughts settled, Lu Zhao decided he would bring the thing out later, when a relevant mission came along, and trade it for merit. He found a spot and buried the shoulder bag, then hurried on toward the deeper reaches of the rear mountains. Ant Ridge was no solitary peak but a sprawling mountain region stretching thirty kilometers. What they patrolled daily was only its outermost fringe—a relatively safe little pocket amounting to less than a tenth of its area. Much of the time, all a forward outpost could do was give warning. Scattered demon beasts always broke through the blockade. Recently the forward outpost had found traces of demon beasts crossing the line; in such cases Lu Zhao would normally apply to rotate back and hunt them down. In the entire border defense station, only Lu Zhao could walk the whole planned patrol route without a single careless step and finish every task to the letter. Zhang Like griped about it constantly, complaining that Lu Zhao worked so hard he made everyone else look like they were coasting. As Lu Zhao pushed deeper, the trees grew taller and thicker, their crowns blotting out sky and sun. Sunlight could only sift down with difficulty through gaps between the branches and leaves, and even at noon the woods seemed dim. Not until the space beneath the trees was packed with ferns and shade-tolerant shrubs too dense to push through did Lu Zhao finally stop. He raised his head and scanned the four directions, checked for traces, set his markers and traps, and started back. By the time he returned to the outer zone, Liu Qiang had already climbed up to the summit. "Brother Lu, word from above—we're to search the mountain for what that fugitive from a few days back hid here." "It's getting late. Let's head back first." Lu Zhao shook his head and refused, then led Liu Qiang down the mountain. On the drive back to the border defense station, the phone calls inevitably brought a scolding from Lü Jinshan. Liu Qiang kept up a bitter face and placating smiles the whole way. With a life force of just seven or eight points, he didn't even count as a superhuman—face to face with the top brass, what could he do but nod and bow? For Lu Zhao it went in one ear and out the other. He didn't so much as answer. He had no intention of handing the thing over right away. Do that, and Lü Jinshan was sure to obstruct him again, just to make his life miserable. 'Lü Jinshan seems awfully anxious.' The thought surfaced suddenly. Suppose the search had been demanded by the special investigation team—or even by the prefecture's top leadership. If Lü Jinshan failed to recover so important a lost item within a reasonable time, it would count as dereliction of duty, and he could face disciplinary action. After Lü Jinshan hung up on Liu Qiang, Lu Zhao asked, "That report I had you write the other day—did you put in the information about what the fugitive might have hidden?" "I did. Only today did they think of searching the mountain—the traces were all washed away by the heavy rain." Liu Qiang's clerical work was always watertight. That left Lu Zhao very satisfied.