My name is Duanjiao — Broken Horn. The left one, that's the break.
I was the demon king's vanguard. What's a vanguard? When the king wants a mountain opened, I'm the yao who hits it first. These horns have broken through three zhang of rock. The king gave me first place in the arena; his soldiers made way for me.
Three months ago, my horn broke. The king snapped it off himself.
After snapping it, he demoted me from vanguard to sweeper of the arena ruins. Sweeping is sweeping — a king's rewards and punishments are heaven's law, and I don't complain. But there's one thing I still can't figure out.
The night he broke my horn, his hands were shaking.
You don't understand. Breaking a horn is like snapping a chopstick — routine discipline. The hand of discipline shouldn't shake. But that night he broke it with shaking hands, and afterward he stared at me a long time and said:
"Get out. It's better far away."
Better far away. Not "get out." "It's better far away."
Only later did I understand: he was saving me.
That day, he'd given me an order. Decades as vanguard — what order haven't I taken? Splitting mountains, breaking formations, razing villages. All of them. This order, I didn't take.
The king ordered me to deliver the smallest monkey cub in the pens to the Stone-Heart Pool.
I said: Great King, would a bigger one do? He said: no. I asked why. He didn't answer — and the candles in his tent dipped half an inch. Then I heard a voice — not the king's — from behind the curtain at his back, like a fingernail scraping the bottom of a pot:
"Small ones are tender."
On the spot I said: this order, I will not take.
And then I had no horn.
You call me a fool? A yao, taking the fall for a monkey cub, down to the last horn. But now I sweep the arena ruins, and sweeping, I think: if I'd taken that order, for the rest of my life I'd hear that word "tender" every time I closed my eyes.
A broken horn grows back. A broken heart doesn't.
The king broke my horn as a performance for the one behind the curtain. With me broken and demoted, the cub's errand got shelved — shelved to this day.
So the one giving orders in the king's tent is the guest. The king is only taking them.
When you face the king, learn his patterns: before he strikes, his left shoulder drops half a fen — the three-hundred-year-old wound pulls at him; after his seventh blow in a combo, he must change breath — that is your only opening.
Decades as his vanguard, watching his drills. It's all yours now.
One request: when it's over, if you win—
Spare the messenger who delivered the cub order. His name is Baosang. He only carries words.
The one who gives the orders is behind the curtain.